Those of you who follow me may know from my bio that I am writing a book on how and why value systems change in societies.  The book is called "The Genesis of Values", and I would like to set out some of its ideas in my blog, to get comments and reactions from readers.  I know that blog posts are usually very topical and meant to more or less stand alone, but I thought that readers might enjoy a chance to do something a bit different, which is grapple with some new theoretical ideas and help an aspiring author write his book.  So this is the first in what I hope will become a series of posts that lay out my theories on value systems, including political ones.

Posts on my book will have (GV) in the title, for Genesis of Values, so readers will be able to identify them, and will be numbered in the order they appear.  I will try to be diligent in responding quickly to comments, so that I can answer any reader questions, and discuss any issues that readers wish to raise.  I will also monitor the comments sections on GV posts after they drop off the listings, and respond to those as well, so that readers who wish to continue any discussions can do so.  Thank you all in advance for being my new editors!

Today I'd like to start by introducing a few basic ideas.  As a psychologist it's very natural for me to look to childhood influences as causes of psychological phenomena.  As a psychologist it's also very natural for me to think in terms of personality types that possess certain clusters of features, including personal values. 

Putting these two together, it would then be natural to think that values would be systematically influenced by personality, and personality systematically influenced by conditions during childhood, so the value systems of individuals would be influenced by conditions during their childhoods.  Psychologists routinely think in these terms concerning individuals, and I was very surprised when I found that other social scientists generally do not think in such terms concerning larger groups. 

The moment I started looking for correlations between changes in social and economic conditions and political changes a generation later, I found that they were everywhere.  The most obvious example is my own generation, which is the boomer generation born in the first two post-WWII decades.  This generation probably experienced one of the greatest improvements in conditions relative to its forebears that has ever been seen.  My generation grew up during a time of peace, prosperity, security, and optimism.  The prior generation, on the other hand, grew up during a terrible depression and a world war, a time of poverty, war, constant insecurity and fear of what the future might bring. 

The result of this, if childhood conditions influence personality and therefore values, should be a marked shift in value systems between these generations, and that is exactly what occurred.  As soon as members of my generation reached adulthood they began to challenge the norms that obtained in society, advocating for sexual freedom, resistance to authority, non-violence, rights for oppressed groups, and many other changes.  Also, this generational phenomenon was most definitely not confined to America, but occurred in the other advanced democracies at the same time as well. 

Of course this is not to say that everyone in the baby boom generation possessed this new value system, just as everyone in the prior generation did not possess the older one.  These phenomena are clearly statistical, which means that what changes is the likelihood and frequency of a particular value system under certain childhood conditions.  The baby boom generation had a distribution of value systems among its members that was noticeably different from its predecessor.

What this historical pattern clearly suggests is that hard times produce a more 'conservative' value system, while better times produce a more 'liberal' value system.  This is a reasonable first approximation.  Certainly, if we take a global-historical perspective, looking at societies around the world and throughout history, it is very obvious that affluence and prosperity are very highly correlated with more progressive value systems.  Before the Industrial Revolution most societies were hierarchical and authoritarian, organized around structures such as monarchy, aristocracy, serfdom, slavery, and the like.  Similarly, poorer societies around the world today are much less likely to be democratic, and more likely to violently oppress minorities, women, gays, and any other culturally disadvantaged group.

It is tempting to think of the pattern of history as being 'progressive', in the sense of things steadily getting better, or more 'progressive' over time, but this pattern also works in reverse.  Nazi Germany is an excellent example.  In 1933, when Hitler came to power to great popular acclaim, Germany went into a period of violence and hatred unrivalled among industrialized nations, with a regime far worse than similarly advanced countries.  What made Germany so different?  Many theories have been advanced, of course, but I would note that Germany had seen extremely hard times for almost a generation.  Since 1914, Germany had experienced the devastation of WWI, followed by the hyperinflation of the 1920s brought on by war reparations, and then the Great Depression.  In 1933, a 'hardened generation' began to come to maturity, that had only known very harsh times, pushing the polity toward violence and repression, and by 1939 this cohort that had only known hardship was large enough to push the country into war.  Of course other factors were at work as well, but I believe that the 'hardened generation' hypothesis at least partly accounts for Nazism and the Holocaust.  (I will discuss this particular example in much more detail in a later post.)

So, it definitely seems to be the case that there are some kinds of correlations between circumstances during early life and the resulting value systems of different age cohorts.  But how can these be investigated systematically?  There is a big problem with just saying 'more liberal' or 'more conservative' as a way of describing value systems, because these words cover very many types of issues and also mean very different things in different times and places.  When people say 'more liberal' for example, in the modern American political context, they would generally mean a value system that is more tolerant of sexual freedom, less tolerant of violence, less sympathetic to authority and more sympathetic to those who are subject to authority, more inclined to want government to help the poor, and so on.  When people say 'more conservative' in the same context, they would usually mean the opposite. 

My approach has been to take a few of these major components of different value systems and to track them both independently and as parts of value systems.  For instance, I take attitudes toward pleasure, including sexual, as one major component.  I take violence and authoritarianism together as a second component.  (I originally tracked these separately because I felt that they were distinct from each other, but I found that they are very tightly bound together, enough so to consider them jointly).

I consider attitudes toward economic issues to be another distinct component.  How the economic component fits in, however, will have to be deferred until later, because attitudes on economic issues are so strongly affected by self-interest, not just by personal feelings of rightness and wrongness.  Economic issues are a hugely important part of political value systems, but they are very complex to analyze and I'll have to deal with them in a later post.  

With that in mind, I'll provisionally define Liberal (with a capital L) as meaning a value system that has relatively tolerant attitudes toward pleasure while being relatively intolerant of violence and authoritarianism.  Conservative, in this essay, means the opposite.  When I use these words, capitalized, that's all I mean by them at this point.  Thus Liberals would favor gay rights and gun control, Conservatives the opposite.  Liberals would be less likely to spank and more likely to allow children to call them by their first names (less authoritarian), Conservatives would be the reverse.  Liberals would be more likely to be pro-peace, Conservatives more likely to be pro-war.  Many other political issues could also be easily classified as Liberal or Conservative by referring to the dimensions of attitudes toward pleasure and toward violence/authoritarianism. 

So Liberals and Conservatives are polar opposites on the dimensions of pleasure/sex and violence/authoritarianism, with each being relatively permissive on one dimension while being relatively restrictive on the other.  Are there other value systems besides these?  Of course there are, because many people do not neatly fit the definitions of Liberal or Conservative used here.  More importantly, if we again take a global-historical perspective, it can be seen pretty quickly there are and have been societies that have value systems that cannot be classified as Liberal or Conservative.  What about these?

Using the analysis of different dimensions of value systems shows that there is actually a third major value system of global and historical significance, one that has never been precisely defined and named.  I call this value system Preconservative.  Preconservatives are relatively permissive and tolerant toward both pleasure/sex and violence/authoritarianism.  This is a value system that crops up in many different places, including many undeveloped authoritarian societies, including feudal aristocracies in earlier centuries.  It also occurs among privileged elites in wealthy societies today. 

In my book I try to explain the idea of Preconservatism by discussing a range of cultural practices from such societies, but in this post I'd like to do something different that I hope readers won't find frivolous.  A really perfect example of the Preconservative value system is actually the title character from the movie Borat, by Sascha Baron Cohen.  In this movie, Cohen pretends to be Borat, a man from a very poor village in Kazakhstan, who has come to America to meet people and interview them.  Borat introduces himself to unsuspecting Americans and films his interactions with them, which are hilarious. 

The humor in the movie comes from Borat's behavior, which is absolutely outrageous.  He attends a genteel Southern dinner party and blithely invites a prostitute, takes drivers ed and starts drinking hard liquor behind the wheel, offering some to the instructor, makes unbelievably sexist remarks to feminists, talks about the importance of killing Uzbeks to liberals, and so on.  Borat is an equal-opportunity offender, possessed of a value system guaranteed to astonish and insult both liberals and conservatives alike.  (Of course, the biggest insult was to poor, Preconservative Kazakhstan, which did not find the movie funny at all.)

In structural terms, what makes the movie work is that a Preconservative can offend Conservatives by his acceptance of sexuality and Liberals by his acceptance of violence, because Preconservatives are fine with both.  What makes the movie even funnier is that Cohen plays Borat as an earnest, sincere, guy who is completely unaware of his offensiveness and just wants to be friends with Americans. 

Before returning to Preconservatism, I have to make a general point about value systems, which is that they have things that they value, such as specific virtues.  The primary virtues valued by Liberals, I would argue, are things like compassion, empathy, nurturance and other qualities related to loving and caring for others.  The primary virtues valued by Conservatives, on the other hand, would be things like self-discipline, self-denial, self-sacrifice, and other virtues related to control of one's desires and impulses.  (Of course, both groups would also value each other's primary virtues as well, but the emphasis and degree would differ.) 

Preconservatism also has primary virtues, and these are in the area of power, strength, and dominance for those in the elite, and obedience and submission for those who are not.  This is shown in Borat as well, when he enters a room and goes into an elaborate kissing ritual with the men in the room, while completely ignoring the women.  Here he is demonstrating deference to people of higher status and disregard for those of lower status, which is also typical of Preconservatism (remember that violence and authoritarianism go together).

Moving away from Borat, this Preconservative trinity of pleasure, violence, and authoritarianism can be seen quite often.  The Roman Empire was of course famous for it, with its orgies, and its circuses in which people were torn to shreds.  Aristocracies throughout history have often been this way.  Feudal lords had sexual rights with their serfs, were the ones who were expected to do battle in war, and of course had complete authority in their domains. 

Preconservatism is ultimately a product of the psychology of dominance and submission.  The psychology of dominance is that dominant individuals do as they please and should be admired for their dominance and obeyed.  The psychology of submission is that voluntary submissiveness is honorable and should be rewarded.  (By the way, the word 'islam' is Arabic for 'submission'.) 

Preconservatism will be most prevalent under conditions of scarcity and poverty, for reasons determined by evolutionary psychology, which will be explained in a later post.  Its most fundamental characteristic, however, is its association with attitudes of dominance and submission.  It exists, therefore, wherever people lead lives of dominance, which includes both primitive societies and also includes the elites of modern-day societies.  Many economic conservatives in America today are Elite Preconservatives in my classification of value systems, because they are tolerant of both sex/pleasure and violence/authoritarianism and operate according to attitudes of dominance, with its resulting reduction of empathy.

In the philosophy of science theories are classified in a hierarchy according to whether they are descriptive, explanatory, or predictive.  My theory of value systems is all three, but we are still in the descriptive part, because objects of study need to be precisely described and classified before they can be explained and then predicted.  Having described and classified value systems according to certain of their components, the next step is to describe when and where they occur. 

In Western societies the historical pattern has been to move from a Preconservative stage, to a Conservative stage, and ultimately to a Liberal stage (I call this the Western Trajectory).  These transitions, however, are not automatic, but depend on continued economic progress.  It is very important to note that this means quite different patterns of progress regarding violence/authoritarianism versus pleasure/sex.  Violence/authoritarianism goes (roughly) from high to medium to low as societies move from Preconservative to Conservative to Liberal, while restrictions on pleasure/sex go (again, roughly) from medium to high to low.  Restrictions on pleasure/sex actually increase during the early stages of social/economic progress. 

The most obvious example of this pattern is Great Britain.  In its Preconservative stage it was a monarchy, its transformation to Conservatism began with the Protestant Reformation and culminated in the Victorian era, and it eventually became a Liberal society during the 20^th century. I'll save the details for a later post. 

Readers at tpmcafe are most interested in American politics, and America has shown this historical pattern also, with some differences.  Colonial America began, of course, as a transplant society from Great Britain, and the northern and southern colonies were quite different.  The northern colonies were quite clearly Conservative in their value system, in fact extremely so, with the Puritans actually classified as Early Conservative in my system.  (Early Conservative societies are impoverished, very repressive and, well, puritanical.  Iran and the Taliban would also be in this category.)  The south, however, was just as clearly Preconservative.  It was hierarchical, authoritarian, and violent, but not Puritanical.  (In fact, a gracious, genteel, aristocratic-type lifestyle was the ideal.)  Slavery, of course, like serfdom, is a mark of Preconservatism. 

As America progressed economically, the north progressed socially from Early Conservative to Late Conservative. Late Conservatives tend to be political activists, as first demonstrated in Great Britain, where Late Conservatives abolished the slave trade and worked to help the poor while at the same time crusading against vice.  The Late Conservative period in the American north is what we now call the Progressive Era.  We tend to think of this as an early form of present-day liberal values, but the Progressives actually had more in common with present-day religious Conservatives.  They wanted to abolish Preconservative injustices such as slavery, but also favored Prohibition and strict laws against pornography, prostitution, and vice in general.  As the north continued to make economic progress during the 20^th century, it eventually moved from Late Conservative to Liberal in that century's latter decades. 

The south has followed this classic trajectory also, but with an enormous delay.  It began with a Preconservative system and regressed instead of making progress during the 19^th century because of the Civil War and Reconstruction.  In fact, it didn't start to move out of its Preconservative value system until after WWII.  People of my generation and older remember the tremendous resistance to equal civil rights for blacks, which is indication of thinking conditioned by attitudes of dominance, the hallmark of Preconservatism.  The south has progressed greatly since then on those issues, and is now in a Late Conservative stage.  (Societies can and often do skip an Early Conservative stage if economic growth is very rapid, going directly from Preconservative to Late Conservative.  This is happening throughout Asia.)  The south now is religious, patriotic, fairly repressive sexually, and very activist in its politics, just as the Progressives were a century before.  The difference is that the southern Late Conservatives of today find themselves resisting social change instead of initiating it, as the Progressives did, because they are at the trailing edge rather than the leading edge of the changes. 

The western regions of the country are more complicated.  Today's Republican party really has three geographic regions in which it is still very strong.  They are the south, the great plains states, and the Mormon belt.  The plains states have probably remained Conservative due to constant out-migration of more Liberal members to urban areas, and now have small populations.  The Mormon region shows the same pattern as the south, going from Preconservative to Late Conservative.  Mormonism began as an authoritarian polygamous sect with a significant history of violence.  Polygamy is, pure and simple, sexual privilege for elite males, and is another clear marker of Preconservatism, like slavery.   Mormonism today, however, is no longer polygamous, less violent and authoritarian, sexually repressive, and politically activist. 

Other areas of the west show that an activist Late Conservative stage usually occurs just before the onset of Liberalism.  California is a good example: previously Republican, elected Ronald Reagan governor twice, now reliably Democratic.  Colorado and Nevada are just now undergoing the same transition.  Both used to be reliably Republican, and Colorado in particular was known as a center for evangelical Christianity, now both are trending Democratic. 

Other areas demonstrate this also.  Virginia was, like Colorado, known as a hotbed of religious activism, and has recently trended Democratic also.  North Carolina and Florida are showing similar trends.  In my own New York metro region the Long Island suburbs used to be very solidly Republican and now vote Democratic and are clearly Liberal. 

This pattern makes it possible to see the political trends in America over the past fifty years and, more important, to make predictions.  America has mostly moved in a Liberal direction over the past half century, with the exception of the south and the Mormon belt, which have moved toward Conservatism, but from a Preconservative base.  The turn toward political conservatism in the 1980s was a result of the south moving firmly into Conservatism, combined with a reaction to the poor economy of the 1970s.  Since there are very few remaining areas in America that are Preconservative, the movement toward Conservatism cannot continue, while the movement from Conservatism to Liberalism will continue.  This means that if reasonably good economic conditions persist, then an American transition to European-style Liberalism is inevitable. 

This is not guaranteed, however, because we now face a potential Depression.  The Great Depression of the 1930s caused a temporary reversal of the political transformations that accompany economic progress, and this could happen again.  (Remember that the effects of economic conditions on social values are time-lagged, because conditions during childhood affect values during adulthood.  The Great Depression caused America to adopt more liberal economic policies while it was going on, but also resulted in social Conservatism in subsequent decades.)

Of course, this prediction about American politics is not yet based on an explanatory mechanism for these values system changes, but only on the observation of patterns and the assumption that they will continue to hold true.  In subsequent posts I will detail the underlying psychological processes that cause values to shift as they do in response to changing conditions.  I will also bring economic issues into the discussion.  After that, I will show how this theory also explains values shifts in non-Western societies (there are actually several trajectories that societies can follow). 

I hope all you readers find this interesting enough to read and comment on.  Any time it becomes boring, please tell me.  I have been working on this, on and off, for many years, and recently I find myself in an odd situation.  For the past few years I have been making predictions based on my theory and watching them come true.  This has made me try to push myself to articulate my ideas, but I need some feedback about how to do it.  Thanks for reading.