A matter of taste

Fictional recreation of a topical event: With the pandemic hitting a school's staffing, a relief teacher is brought in to teach a class of year ten students. It turns out to be a hard gig and some students are not responding to his instructions and displaying insolence, two particular ones are at the back listening to music sharing a pair of earbuds and are drumming away on their desks. It becomes an unbearable focus of his attention and he cannot keep teaching the few keen students with the distraction. He brings it to a confrontation asking for the phone and when this request is ignored. He reaches toward the students, grabs the cord for the earbuds and yanks, removing them from their ears. A verbal altercation ensues. 

Any teacher can imagine this, and most can fantasize the act of "taking the law into their own hands" in the face of students who just don't care and don't mind letting you know it. In the case this is based on, the 72 year old reliever was disciplined, and fought in the Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal to clear his name, and failed. This triggers a mini-tussle of the liberal/conservative culture war in the New Zealand media. 

The case passed me by at the time and it was only related to me by an ex-teacher  in Hamilton who was angry about the whole thing and after his tip, I noticed many more references to it on Twitter. On the way back to Auckland I listened to Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, and it is a rather good lens to look at people's attitudes to the case.

Haidt is a social psychologist whose name had been mentioned often in the podcasts and books, so I audioread my way through Happiness Theory (also good) but The Righteous Mind raised the idea of moral tastebuds. His TEDtalk is a good overview: Jonathan Haidt: The moral roots of liberals and conservatives | TED Talk. My understanding is that research into moral rules across all the world cultures could be grouped into five different focusses: care/harm, fairness/cheating, group loyalty and betrayal, authority and subversion, sanctity and degradation. He relates them to tastes because just like the cuisines of the world which use or emphasise certain tastes (sweet, sour, bitter, salty, umami) to different degrees, so do different societies and groups have moral systems which sometimes weigh certain areas more. The five moral tastes he suggests is not rooted in the rationalising of philosophy, but quite likely to be linked to human evolution.

Where this gets interesting and relevant is when he, as a self-identifying liberal, notes that normal liberal values focus heavily on care/harm, fairness/cheating, but barely consider the other three which are present in most moral codes from all around the world. He attributes this to enlightenment thinkers such as John Stuart Mill who focus on liberty and equality. Objective sanctity didn't have a place in a secular society; "authority" too especially in modern times has taken a bit of a beating, subversion being encouraged in many realms or a place seen in it to challenge authority; group loyalty was also not a priority because there was primacy of the individual.

Conservatives, he points out, are much more similar to most other societies in history. Authority, whether it be the patriarch, the president, the church leader or the general is important; groups are important. And there are things that should be collectively sacred, like marriage, virginity, the family, religion and sometimes pure ethnic blood. Not only are sanctity and authority features but they also are often more important in a conservative moral setting. Sanctity of the fetus trumps the unfairness on women who have an unintended conception. Authority is more important than harm and fairness - you can rally around a church leader even when they have wreaked the lives of some of their congregants.  

Which brings us back to those cursed headphones. From my liberal point of view, I can feel the violation of someone else forcefully stripping something from me. Teacher or not, you shouldn't be able to do this. A conservative also rightfully feels the moral outrage and the gross unfairness of an authority figure disrespected, who acted against those who were subverting his authority, and whom the authorities punished. 

The point is not that conservatives have a superior system for having all the moral flavours - most conservative values like the above don't work for diverse societies. (Feel free to argue they don't even work well in homogenous societies.) But his greater point is not to demonise or to think the other side is intellectually challenged. You might as well argue about whether it is acceptable not to like tomatoes, that apple pie is the supreme dessert or that minor controversy of pineapple on pizza.