One of the long-standing claims of pro-religionists is that without religion, there is no morality. It’s a startling claim, for a couple of reasons. The first is that they’re essentially saying that you must lie to people about a god watching in order to get them to behave, which already puts the moral system on the shaky ground of being immoral in and of itself. It’s a claim that strikes atheists and liberal religious types as unlikely, because we experience morality as coming primarily from the inside. You don’t strike other people when angry, even when you could get away with it, because hitting is wrong and disturbs you.
But maybe they’re telling the truth. Maybe many conservative types would have a hard time being moral without a series of endless rules to teach them not to be dangerous and evil. With all the discussion over torture lately, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that conservatives who defend the torture regime are assuming that it was right because the Republicans had power, i.e. they had might, which of course makes right. There’s a fundamental break in how liberals and conservatives see the world in this case. Sara Robinson traces it back, in many cases, to upbringing. She contrasts liberal upbringing, which is about cultivating a person’s personality and sense of self, versus conservative parenting, which is about establishing authority and rules to limit a child and shape them into another authoritarian adult. Now, obviously most households have some mix of the two, so what she’s saying here needs to be understood as archetypes, not absolutes. (And not all liberals, no matter how they were raised, trust the cops. Only the middle class white people who’ve never had to tangle with them—-everyone else wisely sees them as authoritarian creeps that are best avoided, just like you avoid dating guys who are interested in getting in physical confrontations with other men.) What I found really interesting was that she describes the authoritarian upbringing as stifling the internal moral compass, so it can be replaced with an authoritarian worldview:
First, as a kid in this kind of household, you learn that your thoughts and feelings are untrustworthy—and furthermore, that people in authority are not the least bit interested in your internal life, only in your external behavior. Stop crying. Don’t give me any excuses. I don’t want to hear any more from you. Just do what I tell you—now. Or else. The message is that you can trust the rules, tradition, The Good Book, the boss, the preacher, or Daddy to tell you what’s right; but you should never ever trust your own instincts or thought processes. This pretty effectively inhibits the development of your own internal authority.