Dramatis personae: what the US election looks like from the other side of the world

A lot of Australians get their news through American and international media. This is still a minority, however; most of us don’t go further than the government run ABC or one of the local free to air television networks. Without further ado: the key characters in the US election, as presented by our local media.

• Barack Obama. He’s good looking, and has a very nice speaking voice. His policy is getting troops out of Iraq; if he has other policies they are unimportant but probably all quite nice. Obama most definitely grew up in Indonesia and has a very nice speaking voice. He is black, and we pretend to understand the significance of this to Americans although we really don’t get it. He seems to be genuinely friendly towards Hillary who he defeated in a baroque contest called ‘The Primaries’ which none of us bothers to even pretend to understand. Did I mention he has a very nice speaking voice? My grandmother says he looks like Nelson Mandela, but she says that about anyone of African descent. He is not George Bush.
• Joe Biden. That dude standing next to Obama. They mentioned who he was a few days ago but only because they had to. He seems cool. He is not George Bush.
• Hillary Clinton. She’s a women. Bill, who is also cool, is her husband but it doesn’t seem to have rubbed off. We have no idea what she thinks about Iraq, but assume she’s opposed to it, whatever that means. She is being a good sport about the whole losing to Obama thing but everybody knows she really wishes she’d won. Hillary looks old. She is not George Bush.
• John McCain. McCain is a Republican. Those are the ones who like guns, invading places, and George Bush. He is old and white and looks like every other evil American politician we have seen in the movies. We don’t know what his police are but undoubtedly they involve guns, Iraq and bashing up gays. McCain has no chance of winning and is probably only running to fulfill some legal technicality. Every now and then, somebody will mention that he is actually doing well in the polls. The purpose of these results is to emphasise how crazy Americans are; they have no relation to the actual election. He is probably George Bush.
• Sarah Palin. Hey, who’s that hot librarian? What a weird accent! Is she that lady from Fargo? Her teenaged daughter is pregnant. Meh. She’s not George Bush. Hey, is she a politician or something?
• Joe Lieberman, Rush Limbaugh, Freddie Mac, Nancy Pelosi: These are probably all old white southern senators or something. They are frequently mentioned and seem to be important in some way. George Bush status unknown.

Nothing is natural

Daniel Florin ridicules the easily-ridiculed notion that the world can be divided into the “natural” and “unnatural”:

It used to be the counterculture that was confused about this, but now it has seeped into consumer culture. Thus almost every bag of food now says “all natural ingredients,” which means nothing.

I don’t entirely agree. Consumer culture has always cared about what is “natural” and what is not. It’s just the categories themselves which have changed. As Daniel and countless other have noted, things which are considered natural have no inherently unique properties; they are imbued with “naturalness” by our own minds. The natural has connotations of both the expected and the familiar, as well as the untainted and the pure. Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory attempts to explain why these matter so much to us, and why we often go as far as to make moral judgments based on perceived naturalness. He proposes that our moral judgements differ depending on the value we place on the following “foundations”: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity.

The purity aspect of naturalness slots easily into the purity/sanctity foundation. Haight links this directly to the primal disgust response, which possibly explains why we seem so concerned with naturalness in substances which come in close contact with our bodies: food, cosmetics etc. Mobile phone companies do not bother to hide the fact that their phones are made of “unnatural” ingredients, but shampoo advertisements constantly tout the “natural” credentials of their products.

The aspect of the expected and familiar – “the natural course of action” – falls under the ingroup\loyalty and authority\respect categories. Things feel natural and familiar because we are used to doing them, and this is usually because we have been told to do them or seen everyone else do them.

Here’s where things get interesting. According to Haidt’s empirical research (pdf), liberals (that’s the left for my Australian readers, not the Liberals) tend to value harm/care and fairness/reciprocity much higher, while conservatives value all five foundations, placing more emphasis than liberals on the last three. According to popular stereotype, left-liberals are organic legume munching, all-natural soap rubbing greenies, while conservatives are happy to eat whatever crap they can get their hands on and would bathe in crude oil if it wasn’t so expensive. Apart from fair trade and similar niche movements, the liberal image seems to have little to do with harm/care or fairness/reciprocity, while the conservitives’ concern for purity/sanctity doesn’t quite make it through to, say, environmental policy. Is the stereotype, Haight’s model or my association of “naturalness” with the last three foundations of it wrong?

For what it’s worth, I scored low on all axes when I took Haight’s test. I’m not sure that this would be a universal result though. A lot of libertarians are social conservatives with religiously derived notions of purity; they just believe in not forcing this morality on others.