#sacralization

[knitting-noodle]

I’m so proud of me because I used a wheelchair for the first time ever when I went to the museum today! I was scared at first and impostor syndrome went crazy but I did it and it was amazing! I caught on to steering it really quickly and it was so fun! I still felt like I had control of myself and my actions but I wasn’t in pain while going around the exhibits!

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Jon Haidt: As I said, if you sacralize your political ideology's heroes, you cannot think straight, and this is where we are in the sciences.

It's obvious that if you're a social conservative, Evangelical, young Earther creationist, you probably shouldn't be going into a PhD program in biology or geology, okay. It's just going to be really hard for you to deal with reality if you deny evolution and the age of the Earth, okay. You shouldn't go into American history if you say America is the greatest country on Earth and it simply cannot have committed war crimes. We just don't do that. I mean that's-- that should be a disqualification.

But what about on the left? Suppose you had students coming in who deny that IQ matters. Not anymore, but for decades it's just very uncomfortable, because there are race differences in IQ, the general view is IQ is a bad test, it doesn't measure, it doesn't matter, we can't allow that IQ matters. Because IQ is heritable, we can't allow that heritability matters. Environment has to be everything. The left has always believed that environment can overcome everything else so, can you do social science if you deny heritability, you think everything is environment when it isn't?

The left is full of sex difference deniers. Hormones are fine for other animals, hormones affect behavior in other animals, but how sexist of you to suggest that male and female differences could in any way be due to the fact that they exposed to different hormones prenatally? That just is ruled out of bounds. Now it's not that the left denies evolution. That's fine for other animals. But evolutionary psychology? Well, that's almost sexist and racist. No, evolution didn't shape human beings.

And last, the biggest area in my field is the study of stereotypes and prejudice. And we're trying-- it's an important social problem but we try to solve it while not allowing anybody to even mention the largest cause of stereotypes and prejudice. There is a small research literature showing that the reason why people hold stereotypes is because they're accurate. Most stereotypes do correspond to some measurable, observable fact about the environment. Now, there are often misinterpretations, the stereotype often lingers long after the reality changes, so I'm not saying the stereotypes are perfectly accurate. But I'm saying a big part of the story is that people are really good at detecting differences between groups. We're intuitive Baysians. We pick up frequencies. You can't stop the brain from doing this. So, suppose you had a whole group of people coming into social psychology who were the equivalent of young Earth creationists, who say, "I'm going to study stereotyping and prejudice, but I'm going to just rule in advance that there are no differences between groups. And now I'm going to study what's left." That's where we are.

So, my point is that all groups value the truth, okay. Every ideological group believes it values the truth. All groups hold something sacred. And if you hold something sacred then, as I've said, no trade-offs, no nuance. That means that your sacred values are going to conflict with the truth. And when that happens, all groups are the same. They throw truth under the bus and they go with their sacred values. And that's where we are.

So, I hope I've shown you that political homogeneity, now that we no longer have conservatives in some academic Fields, it's a problem. It's bad for our science, we need to clean up our act. We talk a lot about the value of diversity; intellectual diversity is the most important kind of diversity there could be.

--

Full lecture: 2013 Boyarsky Lecture by Jonathan Haidt, PhD

==

What he's describing is faith. Beliefs based on faith. If you think everything is "a social construct" - such as that it's fine for monkeys to choose sex-typical toys and engage in sex-typical activities, but "I aIn'T nO mOnKeY!!1!" - even if you're an atheist, you're dealing in faith.

[q-is-a-letter]

So I volunteer at a place that helps feral cats these days. And the other day I was there with another volunteer and a training employee. The employee and I were talking about how, despite being 33 and 24 respectively, we had such bad knees and backs.

As I like to do, I mentioned that when the chiropractor I used to see heard about my issues and saw my xrays he said “you’ve got old people problems!” Cause it’s a nice funny spin on it all.

But the other volunteer, considerably older, looked a bit annoyed and asked how old I am again. When I answered, he responded flatly with “you don’t have old people problems.”

Now, I’m very open and casual about most of my physical health issues. But I don’t tend to just list all the diagnoses I have unless the situation calls for it.

Like, perhaps, this one.

So, chill and friendly as ever, I informed him that parts of my spine are fused, I have degenerated discs and arthritis, chronic nerve problems, and a mild heart condition.

His response was a moment of heavy silence and embarrassment before the topic was dropped.

[knitting-noodle]

getting sick as a spoonie is actually scary, like what do you mean I'm not just put out bc I have a cold but I'm actually worried about how much more pain it's going to cause me??

[knitting-noodle]

went to the chiropractor at 1:30pm and got everything popped and physiotherapy (ultrasound) on my lower back- felt a lot better!, by four I was exhausted, by six my arm muscles, hips, and back were in pain, by seven it was in my knees, fingers, and ankles, by ten I was so stiff it hurt to be laying down or standing or sitting

GIVE ME A DAMN BREAK

[burningladywitch]

Sacralization of L5 - Definition, Symptoms, Treatment

Sacralization of L5 – Definition, Symptoms, Treatment

Learn all about sacralization of lumbar 5 vertebra associated symptoms and treatments used to get rid of it. Sacralized lumbar vertebra can affect spinal movement and put excess stress on the lumbar vertebrae and in-between disc. Times have changed, and scientists have studied this phenomenon more thoroughly. It turned out that there is nothing “Holy” or “otherworldly” in the sacralization.

The…

View On WordPress

[penraeth]

Sacredness and the Liberal Moral Viewpoint

Bill Moyers is back, though in a modified form, conducting an interview with my favorite moral psychologist: Jonathan Haidt. It is an excellent interview.

Here’s the deal. As far as I can tell, Haidt et al's moral foundation theory still doesn’t include any of the things that those of the liberal moral viewpoint tend to sacralize. The definition for the sanctity/degradation moral foundation currently online:

Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions). (From http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/mft/index.php/the-theory/)

Purity: piety, pious, purity, pure, clean, steril*, sacred, chast*, holy, holiness, saint, wholesome, celiba*, abstention, virgin, virgins, virginity, virginal, austerity, integrity, modesty, abstinen*, abstemiousness, upright, limpid, unadulterated, maiden, virtuous, refined, intemperate, decen*, immaculate, innocent, pristine, humble, disgust, deprav*, disease, unclean, contagio*, indecen*, sin, sinful, sinner, sins, sinned, sinning, slut, whore, dirt, impiety, impious, profan*, gross, repuls*, sick, promiscu*, lewd, adulter*, debauche, defile, tramp, prostitut*, unchaste, wanton, profligate, filth*, trashy, obscen*, lax, taint, stain, tarnish, debase, desecrat*, wicked, blemish, exploitat*, pervert, wretched (from Appendix D of Graham, Haidt, Nosek “Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations”)

This "definition" tilts towards the conservative moral viewpoint on sacredness, but could be used to recognize some of what the liberal moral viewpoint holds sacred. Moral belief results in moral behavior—or the belief that one should try to behave in that moral way. The conservative moral viewpoint holds with modesty, integrity, holiness, and wholesomeness and not with sexual behaviors deemed immoral. This "definition" would capture the sacralization of nature, but as far as I can tell, Haidt et al do not ask the sorts of questions that would capture what the liberal moral viewpoint holds sacred in their surveys about morality. It seems pretty clear to me, for instance, that the liberal moral viewpoint holds that we exploit, tarnish, taint, trash, and defile pure, pristine, humble, holy ground when we pollute the environment. Sounds like a good fit. But Moral Foundation Theory does not (yet) capture that.

I read this interview and it is clear he understands sacralization as a human trait, and one those of the liberal viewpoint engage. He talks about the left sacralizing victims’ groups—and uses it as an example of how violating the “group think” on those issues gets one tossed “out of the tribe.” 

BILL MOYERS: What's the Democratic liberal left equivalent of the tax pledge, no new taxes, the group think on one issue that, if you violate it gets you thrown out of the tribe?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Right, well, it's touchy to talk about, but basically I think the new left, the commitment that was made in the '60s, was toward victim groups. So it was civil rights, women's rights, gay rights. Now these were all incredibly important battles that had to be fought. And again, follow the sacredness. If you sacralize these groups, it makes you, it binds you together to fight for them.

So the sacralization had to happen, the sacralization of victim groups had to happen to bring the left together to fight what was a truly altruistic and heroic battle. And they won, and things are now better in this country because of that. But, follow the sacredness. Once you've sacralized something, you become blind to evidence.

So evidence about, let's say, how welfare was working, or any other social policy that many of these social policies would backfire. But you can't see it because you've sacralized a group. Anything that seems to be helping that group, anything our group says is going to help them, you go with. So both sides are blind to evidence around their sacred commitments.

I love what he has to say about “follow the sacredness:”

JONATHAN HAIDT: The idea of sacredness, the idea of sacralizing something. What I see as an academic, and as a philosophy major as an undergrad, is there are a lot of people in the academic world that sac- they think, oh, you know, no sacred cows. We shouldn't sacralize anything.

But they sacralize reason itself, as though reason is this noble attribute, reason is our highest nature. And if we could just reason, we will solve our problems. All right, that sounds good on paper. But given all the stuff I just told you about what psychologists have discovered about reason, reasoning is not good at finding the truth. Conscious verbal reasoning is really good at confirming.

We’re really good lawyers. So what this means is that if you sacralize reason itself, you are first of all wrong about it. And as I say in the book, follow the sacredness. Wherever people sacralize something, there you will find ignorance, blindness to the truth, and resistance to evidence.

And yet, I see no evidence that his moral foundation theory captures these actual moral attitudes—or the resulting moral behaviors. He calls these ideas sacralized, and they are clearly liberal moral viewpoint sacralizations, but his theory actually has them coming out as not holding much with the sanctity/degradation foundation, not because of the way it is defined, necessarily, but what questions are asked to "capture" that foundation. Limited to conservative moral viewpoint offenses surrounding religion and sexuality.

It just seems so problematic to talk about liberals not “scoring” high on the sanctity/degradation scale and all these studies on how they don’t feel disgust the way conservatives do. It gives them a pass on a basic expression of human morality for no good reason—they clearly engage that foundation, they clearly experience the human emotion of disgust, they just engage it all in a different way than conservatives. I think the theory tries to place this, as those of the liberal moral viewpoint do, under care/harm, but notice he doesn’t talk about “follow the care/harm foundation.” It just isn’t sufficient to capture the real level of dogmatism and blindness these sorts of sacralized beliefs create.

Failing to capture the reality here means it is hard to talk about what those of the liberal moral viewpoint do sacralize. It is hard to point out that things like the sacralization of the environment, which conservatives are completely aware of, is a fundamental piece of the popular resistance to climate change theory. As a narrative, climate change just fits too neatly in with the liberal moral viewpoint, and conservatives are suspicious: it justifies regulations on behavior that fit with the liberal sacralization of nature.

Other than oil industry executives and other financially interested parties, what matters at a moral level for those of the conservative moral viewpoint isn’t whether or not climate change is true, though they are deeply suspicious of liberal-moral-viewpoint scientists. What matters is to deny that nature is sacred, the need at a fundamental level to deny the sacralization of nature they sense, and to avoid the over-reach they perceive coming if that new "victim" is successfully sacralized. But to try to engage someone with the liberal moral viewpoint on this probably won’t hit the mark: they are unlikely to recognize the way they sacralize nature, since most don’t use that language to describe what they are doing. They use language that engages the care/harm moral foundation, but what they have done functionally is sacralize. Conservatives get that at an intuitive level. Liberals stick to their plausible deniability.

The story of moral systems is the story of unintended consequences: we “bind and blind,” as Haidt says repeatedly, and if we can’t at least unblind we can’t recognize when real harm is being done. The frustrating thing about these things not being captured by this moral foundation theory is that I can talk until I’m blue in the face, even quote Haidt some, about what the liberal moral viewpoint sacralizes and the consequences of that, but at the end of the day, anyone with a liberal moral viewpoint could just point to this theory and say, look, we don’t sacralize anything. We’re pure. And believe it. Somehow it feel so much worse that the liberal moral viewpoint is so blinkered by their own liberal bind and blind that they deny its very structure and function. Give me the straight-forward conservative moral language tied to clearly moral judgments. I may not agree with them, but at least I know where they stand.