Bunker morality relies on hard-hearted emotions of toughness and anger. These are opposite to emotions like gratitude or compassion (which lead to a different kind of morality, we'll see later). The point I want to emphasize now is that the daily culture in which one is immersed plays a large role in which emotions stay active (and which type of morality follows).
So, the second thing at the base of Stephen Colbert's bunker morality is a cultural airspace that keeps his reactive, self-protective emotions on high alert. The cultural airspace includes the stories and beliefs he uses to understand the world and himself.
Stories that emphasize "us" versus "them" keep fear circuits active: "those people" are ‘taking our jobs,' ‘invading our neighborhoods,' ‘threatening the American way of life.' CNN's Lou Dobbs has these kinds of stories on the menu every night. Fox News' business model seems to be based on keeping threat salient. Fear is also kept active by "Social Darwinism" (Spencerism), the belief that it's a dog-eat-dog world, so you'd better "get yours," promoting competition among everyone for status, dominance and control. Hmm, does Wall Street ring a bell?
One of Stephen's favorite beliefs is that the less fortunate deserve their fate and that it is their fault they have the misfortune. Similarly, if you are fortunate (like Stephen), this too is deserved. The belief that whatever happens to you is deserved is part of what is often called "immanent justice" (Piaget, 1932/1965). We all can have this cognitive bias in evaluating others. We think that the person who happened to find a $10 bill is a better, more admirable, person than the one who did not find any money. And we think that the person who was robbed is a worse, less admirable, person than the one who was not robbed (Olson et al., 2008). Talk about "truthiness!" Bunker morality encourages us to follow "truthy" cognitive biases that make us look better than others.
Colbert's beliefs also include the delusion of individualism (Worster, 1994), that each human is an island and can function independently of others and should be left alone to "pull himself up by his bootstraps." Traditional societies, religions and now even science are showing this to be a false and destructive view.
The American philosopher, John Dewey, wrote that individualism leads to "aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone-an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remediable suffering of the world" (DE, Middle Works 9:49).
Stephen has a choice about whether to foster the mistrusting, fearful, aggressive side of himself. He can choose his environments, the stories he hears, the types of understanding he develops.
We know in moral development research that if you want to become more adaptive (e.g., more perceptive, more complex thinker, better problem solver) you immerse yourself to diverse experiences (Rest, 1986). You consider opinions that are opposite your own. This increases your ability to take multiple viewpoints-worthwhile if you are trying to solve complex social problems.
For example, if you are a congressional representative and know only your congressional subsidized healthcare, how are you going to understand the peril that millions of Americans face on a daily basis-the peril of being one accident or illness away from bankruptcy or losing your job? You've got to get out and hear and feel the stories of real people to shake up your self-oriented understanding. Again, as we said in blog 2, it matters how your intuitions are trained.
Now I'm saying too that the cultural airspace in which you hang out also matters for what intuitions and understanding you maintain. Listening to, talking with, or reading the work of people who agree with your keeps your views narrow and your problem solving capabilities limited (Sunstein, 2009). Relating to and exposing yourself to diverse people and experiences helps expand your moral viewpoint-your framework for how to solve a problem. Your understanding of "we" expands beyond a narrow, familiar group.
Bunker morality is intended for those moments when life truly is threatened, and has been important for individual and group survival. But in a multicultural world, it is dangerous. When you use Bunker morality to maintain the familiar, the routine, the comfortable-even though those things are destructive to others-that's a problem.
Some say a self-preservation orientation is not morality at all but self-centered egoism. But from the perspective of the person, it is moral, so I call it a type of morality. For example, in the early 20th century, white people felt moral ("right," "good") when they lynched an unsuspecting Negro for walking down the wrong side of the street. They felt justified in asserting the appropriate social rules to uphold the status quo of white superiority. When one feels desperate to preserve one's identity or status, what seems drastic in other situations does not seem so drastic. The underlying motive for self preservation is perceived as a moral imperative.
Bunker morality represents a dangerous and destructive "negative" morality. Because we are born with survival instincts, Bunker morality is the default when the development of the other moralities goes awry. There are better* ways to get along with others on a day to day basis. (Read on, Stephen!) We discuss them ahead.
*"Better" means ways of getting along that result in more positive consequences to more people, ways that are considered more virtuous by most traditions, and ways that are more aligned with the golden rule.
Previous Next
References
Dewey, J. (1916/1980). Democracy and Education (Middle Works 9). New York: Free Press.
Olson, K.R., Dunham, Y., Banaji, M. R., Spelke, E.S.,& Dweck, C. S.(2008). Judging the unlucky and contagion of those judgments.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 757-776.
Piaget, J. (1932/1965). The moral judgment of the child. New York: Free Press.
Rest, J.R. (1986). Moral Development: Advances in research and theory. New York: Praeger.
Schore, A. (2003a). Affect regulation and the repair of the self. New York: Norton.
Schore, A. (2003b). Affect dysregulation and disorders of the self. New York: Norton.
Schore, A.N. (2001). The effects of early relational trauma on right brain development, affect regulation, and infant mental health. Infant Mental Health Journal, 22, 201-269.
Sunstein, C.R. (2009). Going to extremes; How like minds unite and divide. New York: Oxford University Press.
Worster, D. (1994). Nature's economy: A history of ecological ideas. New York: Cambridge University Press.
