Amerika

Woe to all from abroad who think Hollywood “equals” America… or reality, in any form.

A majority of Americans say Hollywood doesn’t share their moral values, according to a poll commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League.

— 61% of respondents agree that “religious values are under attack in this country,” while 36% disagree with that statement.

— 43% said that Hollywood and the national media are waging an organized campaign to “weaken the influence of religious values in this country.”

— 63% disagree with the statement that “the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews,” while only 22% agree with that point. When ADL conducted its first survey on anti-Semitic attitudes, in 1964, nearly half of the respondents believed that the television and film industries were run by Jews.

— Nearly 40% support the notion that “dangerous ideas should be banned from public school libraries,” and nearly the same number disagree with the statement that “censoring books is an old-fashioned idea.”

— Nearly half of those surveyed — 49% — believe that the United States is becoming “too tolerant in its acceptance of different ideas and lifestyles; 47% disagree with that statement.

HWRP

They’ve sold you on a pluralism, and only now are you realizing what that means: no central culture or values, only different flavors. Want to try being evangelical today? How about anal bondage? Mere sanity is not an option. Get freaky or get reactionary.

The anti-Semitism data is interesting.

At the heart of my research and theory is the “Social Intuitionist Model,” which lays out an account of how moral reasoning and moral emotions work together to produce moral judgments. In brief, the model says that moral judgments are like aesthetic judgments — we make them quickly and intuitively. We know what is right and wrong in much the same way we know what is beautiful. When called on to explain ourselves we make up reasons after the fact. Moral reasoning does affect judgment, but this happens primarily in between people, as they talk, gossip, and argue (hence the “social” part of the model). The model lays out the beginning of a theory in which five innate psychological systems form the foundation of “intuitive ethics,” but each culture constructs its own sets of virtues on top of these foundations. The current American culture war can be seen as arising from the fact that Liberals try to create a morality using only the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity modules; conservatives, especially religious conservatives, use all five modules, including Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. (See publications marked [MP] below). I strive for a complete explanation of morality, including its evolutionary origins, brain basis, development within cultural context, and cognitive mechanisms. I have been particularly interested in moral judgments about harmless yet offensive situations, often involving sexuality or food taboos, for these topics allow us to see moral judgments that cannot be said to be about protecting innocent victims.

Jonathan Haidt

Haidt tracks moral diversity and posits that when a society is more than 20% of a differing morality — whatever the majority morality and minority moralities are does not matter — it runs the risk of disintegrating.

This is apropos because if the most powerful media regime in history differs from its people on morality, it becomes an effort to dominate and control them with its morality — some would say that’s the counterculture.

Tags: anti-semitism, hollywood, jonathan haidt, morality