Modernization and Postmodernization

"Yes, and he’s been expanding the countries over time. What he has found in his work is something really quite remarkable, which is that there is a predictable pattern of values change as countries develop economically and get richer. As people move out of poverty and have discretionary income and some sort of insulation between them and want, as their lives become more complex and abstract by moving off the farm and out of the village and into the big city and into the white-collar world of knowledge work, as they become more autonomous in this complex, rich world – choosing where they live, who their friends are, who they marry and what job they have – their values change in predictable ways. In particular, they get a lot more focused on personal fulfilment, self-realisation, quality of life – and they get a lot more sceptical about any kind of authority that stands between them and personal fulfilment and self-realisation and quality of life. They do. They get more secular, they get more spiritual and less religious, they get more sceptical of authority figures and government, and media elsewhere. They get more cosmopolitan, less nationalistic; in short, they get more liberal. Those three traditionalist kinds of moral foundation that Haidt talks about get weaker and weaker. The authority dimension just fades away. As we saw in the 60s, one of the buttons that everybody wore was ‘Question Authority’. That mindset has taken over American society. Our trust in government is way down from what it was in the 50s. It bounces up and down with the economy but it will never be what it was before. Our sense of national identity has become much more polyglot and cosmopolitan than the ol’ white bread WASP view of what it meant to be an American and what we still hear when we hear people talking about ‘real America’ on the right. It suggests that our values and European values, and values of developing countries that are getting richer, are all moving in a common direction. Economic policy, I think, is a different matter. But in terms of social values, yes. In a whole host of dimensions if you compare attitudes today to attitudes when you and I were little kids – on matters of race, the role of women, on sex and sexual orientation, on the role of religion in public life, on the nature of American cultural identity, Americans today – conservative, right-wing Americans – are way to the left of where their dad and granddad were. Yes. It is, I’m afraid, their fate often to be decrying cultural trends that they see as leading to chaos, when a generation later those warnings look like the most benighted obscurantism. So we had Bill Buckley in the late 50s warning that enfranchisement of blacks would lead to catastrophic political consequences… Yes. He said that the white race is the more advanced race and if it doesn’t have the votes, it should maintain its authority any way it can. There’s a devastatingly frank passage in a National Review editorial in the late 50s along those lines. Of course, that just looks horrible now and, later in life, Buckley admitted that was a terrible error. You had people thinking that a woman working outside the home in traditional male professions was the end of the world – and it wasn’t."