Conservatives Are Nicer People
This article from Saturday’s London Daily Mail somewhat confirmed something I have been pondering over the past few weeks.
George Orwell once wrote that politics was closely related to social identity. ‘One sometimes gets the impression,’ he wrote in The Road To Wigan Pier, ‘that the mere words socialism and communism draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, nature-cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England’.
It all started when I forwarded to a cousin a bit of minutiae regarding statistical differences between behaviors of peoples of various cultures. The data fascinated me because I have done many analyses of precinct-level voting behavior. Past behavior is a great tool for predicting future behavior. Generally, people within a precinct share a greater level of “sameness” than they do with those in neighboring precincts; people self-differentiate themselves from others when they select a place to call home. This information is pretty much confirmed by various sections of the General Social Survey (GSS) to which the Mail’s article pointed as a source.
My cousin, a dyed in the wool egalitarian leftist, apparently was upset that I had the audacity to even read statistics that explore differences between peoples’ cultural traditions and how they might affect behavior. To him, it appears I have committed some some sort of thought-crime in pondering that people from various cultures might be different in any way at all. To him, all people of every culture and every nation are not only “equal,” they’re “identical;” it is an article that underlies his humanist faith. If people actually are different, and that difference is in any way based upon folkways, traditions, or anything handed down through the generations, then his whole set of assumptions about the way the world works might crumble.
So he went on the attack:
“As I understand, your feeling of supremacy over other races is based upon a fortuitous event in history where one of your many ancestors happened to be at a particular place on this planet at a particular time, e.g. about 1776. And to accept this definition of superiority we must ignore the fact that this particular group of people committed genocide on one race and enslaved another and were in a position of great opportunity which allowed them to become a part of the world’s dominate (sic) culture as a result.”
The tone of his response took me off guard. Usually, we have some interesting intellectual give and take in our exchanges. I probably should have thought twice before sending the message. The first thing that jumped out at me was that while I had sent him information about cultural differences, he immediately equated it with racial differences. It is also very telling that he conflated my pointing out innate and learned differences between cultures with a “feeling of supremacy” that I supposedly was claiming. In my experience, that’s what immediately happens in the mind of the leftist when confronted with such information. So, in his mind a Conservative cannot make dispassionate analyses of statistical data; there must be some bad intent behind our considerations.
In thinking this through, it dawned on me that my dear cousin, in ranting about my purported feelings of supremacy over others, revealed something about leftists that I had not noticed before.
So, I replied:
“When a traditionalist points out that there exists a natural “otherness” or differentiation between peoples, nations or cultures, he is immediately cast by today’s liberals as a supremacist, which is just a slightly nicer term for “racist.” The epithet used is usually the latter. This is often followed by the expression of some variant of the Our Ancestors Were Evil™ meme by which we are expected to judge our forebears through our far superior, enlightened, progressive and contemporary lenses. We must not ever attempt to see the past through their eyes as they lived; we are so much better than they were! I wonder why the left isn’t amazed that our ancestors didn’t commit ritual mass-suicide to cleanse themselves of the guilt with which they must have lived! Talk about feelings of supremacy! If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard this argument, I’d be retired.
“Or am I mistaken in reading into your arguments that you consider yourself superior to our ancestors? Why? So you can stand in judgment of them? As I see it, when a nation turns the corner away from venerating its forebears and down the path toward denigrating them, there isn’t much time or use left for it. Yet this is what our public schools and universities teach these days: America is the spawn of evil people who owned slaves, killed Indians and subjugated women. Folks like me – who merely desire to be stewards for traditions, the very fiber of the threads that connect us to the past, inform us of who we are and provide bearings for the future – are prohibited by the social Marxism that is political correctness from pointing out any such liberal absurdity; we’re evil too.”
It bothers me a lot that my relative is so attached to the purist egalitarian belief that all people are always equal all of the time that he would throw his (and my) heritage under the bus for the sake of holding on to his politically correct premises. It has been more than a week, and he has not replied to my points. I doubt that he will. And that’s a shame. Unless leftists are willing to explore the traditionalist conservative way of thinking, and vice versa, then we are not going to have “progress” that is useful to all peoples, which is supposedly what leftist progressivism is all about. I guess to the leftists, the “all people” they consider as always being equal somehow does not include those who are dead and those who are conservative.
Pardon me for pointing this out: It might actually make them happy to try exploring what makes us traditionalists tick.
Tags: Conservatism, general social survey, london daily mail, Political Correctness, progressivism, sameness, traditionalism
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