Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani!

-- The suicidally naive "Eloi" from The Time Machine (1960), based on the novel by H.G. Wells

As I was reading The Moral Landscape (2010) by liberal atheist Sam Harris, I almost breezed by a passage of startling implications.  Harris himself only adverts to it parenthetically, pausing briefly to note it while preoccupied with other larger issues.

After spending some time discussing how and why conservatives tend to be closed-minded and "dogmatic", Sam Harris then briefly tries to be even-handed and cites a study which, in fact, shows that it is liberals, not conservatives, who are the irrationally closed-minded.  Here's the quote:

This is not to say that liberalism isn't also occluded by certain biases.  In a recent study of moral reasoning, subjects were asked to judge whether it was morally correct to sacrifice the life of one person to save one hundred, while being given subtle cues as to the races of the people involved.  Conservatives proved less biased by race than liberals and, therefore, more even-handed.  Liberals, as it turns out, were very eager to sacrifice a white person to save one hundred nonwhites, but not the other way around -- all the while maintaining that considerations of race had not entered into their thinking.

These results reveal a deep-seated mental disorder in so-called "liberalism".  And unprecedented in the history of human culture.  I don't know if there has ever been a society or culture whose members (or a large portion thereof) so eagerly and massively place the mortal welfare of members of another society or culture above their own.

I would only add that it's a shame that this study Harris cites (Pizarro and Uhlmann, "The motivated use of moral principles", 2008) did not fine-tune its definition of "liberals" in order to granularize the subtle, but important, distinctions between Leftists and Politically Correct Multi-Culturalists -- two categories which together constitute more scientific descriptors of what is groped after with the vague term "liberals".  The latter category, as I have pointed out umpteen times on this blog, include many (if not a majority of) conservatives, centrists, and the comfortably apolitical -- all of whom may be labelled non-liberal according to criteria other than those relevant to the problem of Muslims and the reverse racism that is the main motivator for our persistent defense of Muslims long past rationality.

While the "conservatives" surveyed in the study cited above demonstrated rationality with regard to that pivotal question, perhaps the questioning process itself could have been fine-tuned to offer an alternative pairing:  

"Would you sacrifice the life of one non-Muslim Westerner to save one hundred Muslims?"

and:

"Would you sacrifice the life of one Muslim to save one hundred non-Muslim Westerners?"

I wonder if the "conservatives" would have maintained their rationality in this regard?   Considering how consistently remiss most conservatives have been throughout the West in our time with regard to the problem of Islam, I wouldn't be surprised if the specification of Muslims would suddenly short out their rational processes, causing them to spasm in the direction of PC MC.