Hello everybody.
I'm here tonight to share with you
two of the most fundamental insights of my research,
of which I truly believe many more people should know about.
First, humanity as a whole
has over the last couple of decades experienced
a massive and actually unprecedented transformation of moral values.
Second, and even more importantly, this transformation is a good thing,
because it brings to the surface the better moral qualities of our species.
Well, hearing that, you might think,
"This person must live in a different reality."
Haven't I heard about Brexit, Trump,
rising populism, right-wing extremism,
global terrorism, religious fundamentalism,
and all the other indications of our moral decline?
Indeed, influential critics tried to convince us since the ages
that our undeniable technological progress
is counteracted by a moral digression,
which opens a growing discrepancy
between our technological capacities and our moral qualities.
The problem of the critics, however,
is they never proved their point by systematic evidence through hard facts.
What they usually do is cherry-picking examples
that fit their claims, but leaving out others that don't.
Let's try a different approach.
Let's have a look at a collection of systematic data
of what people from all corners around the world
think is morally right or wrong.
That data collection exists for several decades,
so what we can do, as well, is look at change over time,
if there is any, and then if, in what direction is it going.
The data collection I'm referring to is knows as the World Values Survey.
If you're interested in the details and how this study is conducted,
you can go at their website, which is on display here.
In blue colors, we see the countries in the world
that have been surveyed at least once by the World Values Survey.
This is more than 100 countries.
But more importantly,
we cover in each global region the biggest national population.
We have China, and Japan, in East Asia.
We have India, Indonesia, in South Asia.
We have Nigeria and South Africa, in Sub-Saharan Africa.
We have Egypt, Iran, Turkey in the Middle East.
We have the US in North America, of course.
We have Brazil and Argentina covered in South America, and so on and so forth.
So we can claim that our data represent
more than 90% of the world population,
which is significant.
We find in this data a whole host of moral differences
between people and between entire nations.
But, we sifted through this data for many years, and it turns out
that most of these differences boil down to just two,
just two key domains of cultural variation.
One of them you see on the horizontal axis,
where it spans a continuum from sacred to secular values.
Populations on the left end emphasize
the sacred sources of authority, especially religion,
but also the nation, the state, the family.
Populations on the right have a secular distance
to these sources of authority, especially, again, religion.
The second dimension is on the vertical axis,
and it spans a polarity
between patriarchal and emancipative values.
At the lower end, at the patriarchal end,
populations emphasize male superiority over women
in the areas of education, in the areas of access to jobs,
and in the areas of political power.
They also emphasize strict authority of parents over their children
and such things as strict discipline, law and order, and related things.
Populations at the upper end, at the emancipative end,
emphasize women's equality to men.
Child autonomy, self-determination, and democratic voice
is part of what they emphasize.
You see, there is a lot of countries covered here,
but another interesting point is that these many nations cluster
into a much smaller number of what we call "culture zones,"
which map on these cultural differences, as well,
as you have seen before.
We colored blue the Western cultural zones,
and it's apparent that they differ from the non-Western culture zones,
especially on the dimension of patriarchal versus emancipative values,
where the Western culture is actually defined, in a sense,
by an emphasis on emancipation much more than other cultural zones in the world,
and even the Protestant West sticks even more out here,
and the biggest cultural distance that we find
is between the Protestant West and the Islamic world,
with many people in the Islamic world
emphasizing sacred values and patriarchal values,
and most of the people in the Protestant West
emphasizing secular values, and especially emancipative values.
Scholars usually consider such cultural distances, or differences,
as a constant, as enduring traits of national mentalities.
This overlooks, however, how much dynamics there was over recent decades
in these moral values.
Surprisingly, all cultural zones of the world have uniformly moved
in the same direction.
Even the Islamic world, even in Sub-Saharan Africa,
we see a movement towards more secular,
and especially towards more emancipative values.
On the other hand, it is also clear that the Western cultures
made a much farther space in that direction,
so their move is even more pronounced,
which means that the emancipatory outlook of Western culture is nowadays
even more pronounced than it already has been decades ago.
So, the fact that all cultural zones are moving in the same direction
does not lead to convergence.
Cultural differences have actually become bigger,
which is an issue of conflict.
Looking at the forces that might be driving this change
towards emancipative values, we get a hint here.
We see knowledge economies, which are those countries
that obtain their wealth from high-end products and services.
We have industrial economies, which are those countries
that obtain their wealth from cheap workbench production.
So, those ones into which we outsource our labor a lot.
And we have agrarian/oil economies,
obtaining their wealth from natural products and raw materials.
A criterion distinguishing these economies is what I call the enlightenment forces,
which is: education, knowledge, and science.
These enlightenment forces are the most pronounced,
most powerful, in the knowledge economies, more so than in the industrial economies,
which, in turn, have them more powerful than agrarian and oil economies.
And here we can see that it is worthwhile to send our children into school
and to universities and to college, and let them enjoy education.
It is a transformative force.
In all three types of economies,
we see that people who have obtained more education
emphasize emancipative values more strongly.
Again, this is more pronounced in knowledge economies,
where the enlightenment forces are most powerful.
If you ask yourself the question:
is that move towards stronger emancipative values,
is this something good, is this positive?
From the viewpoint of democracy, it certainly is.
Because here we can see that over the decades, from 1950 to 2010,
culture zones have made a shift
from more autocratic to more democratic circumstances,
to about the extent to which their populations
have shifted from patriarchal to emancipative values.
You can actually see that oftentimes, a move to the right -
that means, towards more emancipative values -
precedes a move upward,
which suggests that the value change is causal
for the subsequent change in institutions,
and not the other way around.
An even more fundamental reason why we can consider
the rise of emancipative values as a force of enlightenment,
is these values tendency
to produce what I call "moral universalism."
That is, the widening of our circles of solidarity
to an extent to an outer rim planet in humanity,
where the concerns about these things defy group divisions,
because everyone is included.
Patriarchal values, by contrast,
favor the opposite moral tendency towards moral parochialism.
What is that?
That means the narrowing down of the solidarity circle.
"My nation first", "America first" -
these are the slogans that depict that moral tendency.
Here we can see the shift from patriarchal to emancipative values
is indeed related to a shift from moral parochialism
to moral universalism,
through the expansion of our circles of solidarity,
of our empathy for others.
This is measured here, for example,
by environmental concern about global change
and by fighting poverty in the world.
So, the concern for the planet and for humanity is covered here.
But there are also problems.
The rise of emancipative values has also created cultural conflict
over moral universalism versus parochialism.
This applies to a particular segment of Western electorates.
There is a segment of the population
that has been left behind by the emancipatory mainstream,
that does not get a lot of education,
and accordingly is working in low-skilled manual jobs
that are threatened to be outsourced to other countries.
The working class, to simplify it.
This working class in the economic conflict
between social security and market competition,
it's located on the left.
Also, ideologically on the left, they are in favor of social security,
and this is where usually leftist parties, social democratic parties,
the Democratic Party in the US contacts, picks these voters up.
However, on the moral conflict between universalism and parochialism,
they're on the parochial end.
This is a moral conflict; this is not an economic conflict.
These people want to narrow the circle of solidarity.
Again, "My nation first," "Make America great again."
And let no immigrants in anymore, build a wall.
This is parochialism, and these people are located there for reasons.
This is where now the rising forces of populism,
Vlaams Blok and Front national in France,
the Liberal Party in Austria, where they,
including Trump in the United States, pick these people up as their voters.
The other area of emerging cultural conflict
over issues of emancipation is immigration.
Especially immigration from non-Western populations
into Western countries.
I exemplify this here at the case of Germany,
which is a very typical post-industrial Western society.
The left bar shows that the native, host population
born in Germany, German citizens,
they score very high on emancipative values.
Sixty-two percent of this population
emphasizes this type of values strongly.
First-generation immigrants, which is the lower bar on the right side,
are very, very different.
They emphasize these values not even to 20% of this group,
and these are immigrants from non-Western cultures.
Of course, it creates a cultural gap over these issues,
and these are important lifestyle issues.
Gender equality, tolerance of homosexuality,
all these issues are related to that.
Given the centrality that emancipative values have
for a healthy democracy,
this is not trivial.
This is a challenge, and we need to face it in order to tackle it.
The good news, however, is we can master the challenge,
because it's also obvious from the data
- and these are the three bars in the middle -
that second-generation immigrants already are very close
in their emphasis on emancipative values where the host population is.
So obviously, socialization in this country does work.
Which relates us to the point:
can we strengthen
the effectiveness and the pace of that socialization process?
Can we do that?
And this relates me to my final point, which is actually a call for action.
I believe what we need to do
is to thoroughly rethink our civic education programs
and to target them particularly to the immigrant population.
Most importantly, what we also need to do while doing this,
is to place the psychology of emancipative values center stage
in the curriculum of these programs.
(Applause)