Conservatives and Liberals Assume Everyone Else is Like Themselves

Conservatives are well-known for their “pull yourself up by your bootlaces” ideology, and liberals have made whole careers out of claiming that conservatives are hypocrites who got a hand up  in their own lives, but want to deny that same help to everyone else. Conservatives, of course, claim that they got where they did by dint of sheer hard work and willpower.

So which is it? Are conservatives jut liars who want to keep all of the goodies for themselves? Or do they practice what they preach? And what about liberals? How hard are they trying to get ahead?

A recent article in the LA Times describes a study on willpower/self control:

“In a series of three studies with more than 300 participants, the authors found that people who identify as conservative perform better on tests of self-control than those who identify as liberal regardless of race, socioeconomic status and gender.”

What about age? (I suppose we can assume they probably controlled for age.)

They tested self control by asking volunteers to take the Stroop Test (reading words like “red” and “blue” printed in ink that’s a different color.) Accurately reading the cards without saying the color of the ink requires self-control and impulse-suppression, and conservatives tended to do better on the test than liberals.

They also found that conservatives are better at dieting.

In other words, people who themselves have a lot of self-control expect everyone else to have just as much self-control as they have.

In general, I find that people tend to assume that everyone else works the same way they do–for example, that criminals “know right from wrong,” in the same way as non-criminals, but for some reason chose to commit crimes.

Likewise, it appears that people who don’t have a lot of willpower assume that everyone else also doesn’t have a lot of willpower–and that conservatives are therefore lying when they say they hauled themselves up via bootstraps. (It must be some other, magical force at play.)

I am reminded here of a conversation I had with a liberal acquaintance over the Mike Brown case. (I feel compelled to note, here, that I don’t talk to this person anymore because I decided they have very bad judgment in the company they keep. That was a tough decision, because they did provide an interesting window into dysfunction.)

Anyway, it occurred to me as we were speaking that this person’s position on the case was shaped largely by their ability to imagine themselves in Mike Brown’s shoes: they had done a bit of “harmless shoplifting” as a teenager, and certainly didn’t see themselves as someone who ought to be shot, by the police or otherwise.

This person is, in many ways, mildly criminal. They get in fights, smoke pot, and probably j-walk. Their relationships start fast and end in flames. (In their defense, they’re basically a nice person who cares about others; I hope they’re having a happy life.) They aren’t someone who deserves to have their life destroyed by imprisonment, but they are a little bit criminal.

Looking at my own perspective, I’ve never shoplifted–as a kid, if a vending machine gave me too much change, I returned it to the store. I tend to be overly rule-oriented–which explains why I harp so much on society’s lies. Lying bothers me.

At any rate, this mild criminality clearly affected my acquaintance’s opinion on the proper police response to crime; had they been a person who couldn’t imagine themselves stealing cigarettes (or cigars, or whatever,) they would not have identified so strongly with the situation.

 

I feel like this post comes down a little hard on liberals; in the interest of fairness, I feel compelled to note that these are all basically biological traits that people don’t have a ton of control over, and there are plenty of people in this world who have something good to contribute even though they have the self-control of a golden retriever in a room full of squeaky toys.

Microaggressions and Isolation

The first time I heard the term, “micoaggression,” I thought it was brilliant. Here was a concept that succinctly encapsulated so much of my life.

Since then, the term has been worked to death in the salt mines of political whining.

I kinda hate it when particular terminology ceases to be useful because it has accreted layers of political and social signaling, such that just trying to use the term in a technical sense activates everyone’s “Oh now we’re talking about politics; let’s fight!” sub-routine.

I’m pretty sure a lot of dry, technical, long-winded language is really just an attempt to talk about stuff without triggering that sub-routine.

I seem to have said, “triggering.”

Anyway.

I understand what it is like to be one tiny person in a sea of humanity with whom you have little in common, with whom you struggle to connect on a basic level. People who make no damn sense; people who are too aggressive or too passive; people who might as well be speaking another language for all you can understand them.

I understand immigrants, hoping for a better life but stuck in a community full of people who aren’t like them. I understand adoptees, removed from the families and communities that would have made intuitive sense to them–people who perhaps couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of them, more’s the hurt. I imagine this is what it feels like to be interracial, inter-cultural, or transnational–to feel like nowhere is exactly right for you.

I understand because this is my life, too.

When I feel like I fit in, it is such a relief. My people! My kind! It doesn’t happen often.

I was not raised around most of my family. I like them, but they are still alien to me. What is it like to be raised in one culture and then go back to the culture where you were born, where your family lives, and have no idea how to interact with it? What if you have been raised with prejudices (from your adopted family or society at large) against your birth culture? What if you yourself don’t like your birth culture? How would you know the difference? How do you deal with that?

I feel more comfortable around Asian immigrants than around members of my biological family’s culture.

I took the term microaggression seriously when people first started bandying it about. At the very least, I desire to be polite to people and not annoying.

But eventually I started to wonder, if people hate being around each other so much, if people are constantly hurting each other, annoying each other, or otherwise offending them, then why be around each other?

People should be with the people they like, people they feel comfortable with. People they trust and who make them feel normal and happy. That’s what I want for myself, anyway. I assume it’s what you want for yourself. So why don’t we just let people live, work, and associate among people who make them happy, instead of forcing people among groups of people who are radically different and then yell at them for not spontaneously all acting the same?

The source of most microaggressions, in my experience, is not a conscious desire to be a jerkface to the other person, but differences in personality that cause endless friction. For example, a shy, introverted person may have difficulty dealing with loud, friendly, aggressive extroverts. The shy person finds these interactions excessively antagonistic, overwhelming, and retreats from them. The shy person does not enjoy taking to these people. The shy person who lives among a great many introverts ends up lonely, anxious, and stressed.

By contrast, an extrovert in the land of introverts finds themself constantly shut out of social events and dumped by friends for being “too loud,” “too emotional,” just too intense. Even people they like get suddenly freaked out by them and stop returning their calls. To the extrovert, these people are unfriendly and rude. The extrovert surrounded by introverts is miserable, confused, and lonely.

People who have simply moved from one part of the country to another feel this all the time. It is quite easy to find someone who would be happy in type-A, aggressive NYC, but miserable in laid-back Seattle, or vice versa. It is easy to find people who hate homogeneity and would die of boredom in a rural town, and easy to find people who can’t stand heterogeneity and just want to have simple, familiar people and things in life.

These are fundamental differences in people that I doubt can really be changed. I don’t think a shy person (over the age of 22, anyway,) is likely to transform into a loud, aggressive one. Aggressive people I know have tried to make themselves less aggressive, but just can’t. Deep down, you can’t really change who you are.

And that’s without throwing major racial, ethnic, or gender differences into the mix. (Whites from different parts of the US are genetically/ethnically different from each other; the differences are just a little more subtle.)

The modern world seems bent on forcing people together whether it makes them happy or not. Then we complain about how unhappy we are.

We should all be with the people who make us happy.

Politics are Coming and they are Going to be Awful

Already I have relatives with their “I’m ready for Hillary” shirts and totes–relatives who blithely hated her during the Clinton years, because that’s what you were supposed to do during the Clinton years. On the other side, FB acquaintances (sadly, people I friended in the hopes of finding someone sane,) who have never breathed a word about opposing anything in particular about what Hillary’s been up to during her many years in gov’t are already posting vitriolically about her “history of lies” and deceptions. Pleez.

Look, if you’re voting for the Dems, you’re probably open to voting for Hillary. If you’re not voting for the Dems, you’re probably not voting for Hillary. No one is going against their tribal preferences anyway, so can’t we just leave it at that, and get back to saying dumb things about Climate Change or evolution or whatever?

Now that gay marriage is the law of the land, everyone wants to pretend they were in favor of it from the start

CONFORM

Thus proving that we have always been at war with Eurasia, pretty much every company you can think of–including the President Himself (who I guess is technically not a company)–has jumped on the Yay Gay Marriage bandwagon.

For the record, I was pro-gay marriage before it was cool; I’m so hip and indie, my best friend was trans back in middle school.

Now a bunch of companies that never gave a shit about gay people are proclaiming how happy they are about the SCOTUS decision.

Of course, companies just want to make money. But there was a time when companies endeavored not to take political stances, not wishing to alienate potential customers. Suddenly seeing all the companies simultaneously adopt the same logo is, well, creepy. Even if I want to bomb the shit out of Eurasia and am happy to see the troops head out, doesn’t mean I want everyone to suddenly start pretending like we’ve always been at war with Eurasia.

Part of what’s going on is that gay marriage has been recast by the left as “not a political issue.” These companies don’t see themselves as taking a political stance, but a moral stance, or a just plain celebratory stance. Of course, it is a political issue.

To be honest, conformity bugs me. When I hear people agreeing with each other, I start trying to figure out why they’re wrong. (It’s probably a bad habit.) I hate being expected to act a certain way just because everyone else is or perform certain emotions just because it’s a holiday or something. (This probably contributes to my dislike of holidays.) Groupthink annoys me; the “tyranny of the status quo” makes me rage against my keyboard.

This level of unanimity in just about anything post V-Day is further evidence of the radical speed of horizontal meme-transmission due to modern mass media like the internet.

It was not so many years ago, you may recall, that states were busy passing anti-gay marriage bills or amendments en mass. Not in the bad old days of the 1950s or 80s, but in 2004-2008.

I remember a friend freaking out about the bans somewhere around 2005. I tried to reassure them that the bans were good news: no one ever put that much effort into trying to ban something that people had no interest in doing. That much effort could only mean the conservatives were terrified of gay marriage triumphing–after all, back in 1950, when gay marriage wasn’t even a thing people were talking about, no one was bothering to try to pass amendments on the subject. “You’ve already won,” I told my friend. They did not believe me, but here’s the win.

Unfortunately, there are dozens–perhaps thousands–of issues I consider higher priority than gay marriage, which directly affects only a small % of the population. I’d rather we stopped Global Warming or cured cancer or helped the homeless, reformed the tax code or balanced the budget or got jobs and wages up for ordinary Americans, streamlined the legal and criminal justice system or even just increased Americans’ understanding of basic science. But most of these are boring things; it’s way more fun to argue about gay marriage or tabloid stars’ sex changes than to try to figure out the best way to run the country.

 

The “Other” is but a Foil for the Self

The “other”, somewhat by definition, is not someone you are particularly well-acquainted with. This is not generally a matter of malice–there are about 7.5 billion people in this world, and you’re only capable of really getting to know a couple hundred, at best. Even if you spent years of your life living in different countries, you’d still only manage to sample a small selection of the world’s people. For better or worse, most people out there are strangers.

People profess to care a lot about strangers. In a recent example, lots of people who aren’t gay and do not live in Indiana or run bakeries became very worried about laws affecting gay people and bakeries in Indiana. Your particular opinion on the subject is, I’m sure, absolutely the correct one, but that’s beside my point–the point is, it’s highly unlikely that you, the reader of this post, are actually affected by the legislation or even know anyone who is, just because the chances that you live in Indiana and are a baker or are gay are low. Your opinions are basically in support of (or against) someone else–total strangers.

There are three reasons to be skeptical of just about any conversation that hinges heavily on professed interest in the well-being of strangers:

1. Low information: We aren’t there; we aren’t on the ground; we don’t know these people and what they’re really going through. We’re getting our information second or third or more-hand. There is always a good chance that we are completely wrong.

2. No negative impact from being wrong: If I advocate for a water-conservation strategy for California that turns out to be totally wrong, Californians will suffer, not me. If I advocate a bad foreign policy position, foreigners will suffer, not me. If I advocate for laws that harm people or businesses in Indiana, I remain unharmed.

3. People don’t really care about strangers: Most people care deeply about their close friends and family, their pets, and some groups they identify with, like “Harley riders,” “Linux users,” or Muslims. They don’t actually care that much about strangers. The average American, for example, spends more money feeding cats than feeding starving children in Africa.

All of which means that even the best-intentioned people are often completely wrong, and factors other than rationally constructed, reasonably cautious, genuine concern for others tends to motivate us without us even noticing.

The myth of the “Noble Savage” is a fine example. It is generally credited to Rousseau, though probably someone else thought of the idea before he did, but the idea didn’t really gain too much currency while Euros while still busy killing “savages.” Other or not, you’re unlikely to be inclined to romanticize people you’re killing, and some folks–headhunters, cannibals, the Aztecs, King Gezo of the Benin Empire–were actually pretty horrifying. The notion that life in the “state of nature” was “nasty, brutish, and short,” had a lot of merit.

Still, neither Hobbes nor Rousseau (nor Locke) was actually advocating policies meant to affect “savages”; they utilize notions of the primitive “other” to advocate policies for their own societies.

Between lurid tales of head-hunting cannibals and depictions of dire, third-world poverty, it is pretty easy to see how people used these ideas to boost notions of Euro-exceptionalism and justify slavery, colonialism, war, and other horrors.

After WWII, people were justly pretty horrified at Euros and stopped believing Euro culture was all that–noble, enlightened Europeans looked just as bad as everybody else on the planet, except that now some of us were armed with nukes instead of pointy sticks and rocks, which is a pretty worrying situation.

So the savages got re-written. Anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, even commercials urging people not to litter began pushing the new narrative that non-Euros were, to put it plainly, better than Euros. American Indians became spiritual curators of nature; stone-age people became peaceful matriarchists; ethnographies were written portraying hunter-gatherer tribes as bastions of non-violent cooperation.

Many of the new narratives were total, factual nonsense. Indians don’t have an exceptional environmental record (though they did historically lack the tech and density levels to do too much damage.) There was no universal stone-age matriarchy. And most hunter-gatherers actually have pretty high murder rates.

But that’s all beside the point; that was never the point. No one wrote ethnographies about the Bushmen with the intention of somehow affecting the Bushmen (who couldn’t read them, anyway.) The point of all these stories is to change the self; to influence one’s own society to rise to the level of these mythic, noble savages.

This is the purpose of most myths: to instruct people in proper morality and inspire them to behave well. Done well, myths probably aren’t particularly problematic.

There are some problems to watch out for, though:

1. The “other” isn’t actually mythic. They are real people, and claiming total nonsense about them can have real effects on them (good or bad).
2. A mythos of self-hate can do actual harm to yourself/the people you were trying to inspire to be better.
3. I have an irrational affection for honesty.

(I suppose, 4. Saying really incorrect things about other people can make you sound dumb, but this is a minor issue.)

A lot of our tribal signaling (ie, “politics”) is conducted via expressing opinions about the other. Homosexuality, as previously referenced, is a good example of this; gay folks are only about 3% of the population (and gay people who want to get married are an even smaller %,) so most people expressing opinions on the subject don’t actually know that many gay people. If they turn out to be wrong, well, it’s not them and it’s not their friends, so there’s not that much incentive to be correct. But if socially signalling group membership is of direct benefit to the individual (which it generally is,) then people will signal group membership by saying whatever is useful to say about others–and reality be damned.

If you’re not my enemy, then you’re my friend, right? The white misperception of racial crossing

Whites–especially whites of my generation or slightly older–were explicitly taught (as kids and sometimes as adults) that there are no differences between racial groups; that all racial groups are friends; that it’s a small world after all. Our celebrities held concerts encouraging us to donate money to starving children in Africa, because, “We are the world.” We were promised a future of inter-racial harmony, where racial differences meant nothing more than liking tacos or needing less sunscreen.

Whites often fail at being racially inclusive, but they generally believe that they should be.

So it is generally with some surprise that whites learn that other people do not think the same thing about them. That a white person who marries a black person, attends a black college, dresses/styles her hair like black people, and devotes her life to the advancement of black causes might actually get rejected by other black people just because she isn’t black. Whites who have an interest in American Indian things, particularly religion, have another fine line to walk. You may watch respectfully, but you cannot join.

Some religions are very open to converts; Christianity in particular. Christians have trouble understanding that other religions might not be open to converts; other people might not want them.

As I see it, there are two main reasons to police the boundaries of a group: either because there are some benefits associated with being part of the group, like getting a job because you graduated from a particular school; or because you really hate people not in your group, like feminists who hate men so much they won’t let trans* folk into their gatherings.

Both of these notions go against white expectations. The anti-racist ideology teaches that there aren’t benefits associated with being non-white (that’s why it’s called white privilege, not black privilege,) and our generally cheerful assumption that we are all supposed to be friends, regardless of race.

“Politics” is just Gossip

(Except when it’s just social status whoring. Then it’s even worse than gossip. But I’ll talk about that later.)

When Sweden is having the same issues with immigration as France and the US, I find it hard to believe the problem is Obama.

It’s probably the Hajnal Line.

All my life (or at least since I was 12,) I have been surrounded by people claiming that it is immoral not to closely follow politics. So as a middle schooler I dutifully memorized the Supreme Court Justices, my Congressmen and Senators, all of the candidates for President and Vice President, members of the state government, even our ambassador to the UN (even though that guy probably has zero independent decision-making authority.)

I went on to major in political science, which has to be one of the most trying to prove you follow politics majors out there. But I realized rather quickly that I was more interested in what makes countries (and people) tick than in the exact names of the guys in charge. I would rather read about hunter gatherers, neurology, or genetics than about what Congress did yesterday. The Supreme Court changed and I forgot the names. I moved, Bakunin in hand, and failed to learn my new Senators. Political economy and philosophy were my constant companions, not the news.

Throughout, I felt guilty. Yes, I followed all of the latest online trends, yes, I participated in daily, often quite vociferous political discussion with literally almost everyone I knew, but I couldn’t be bothered to learn my Senator’s name and so I must be failing my duty to be an informed citizen. Sooner or later, I was bound to be uncovered for the politically ignorant immoral bum I am.

And yet, somehow, so much seemed not to really matter. Primaries came and went, and what was the point of learning all of the names when I was just going to vote for one of the two guys at the end? I remember my friends who loved Dean, only to have their hopes crushed when he didn’t get the Democratic nomination. So why bother?

So the other day, an older conservative relative sent me Ben Carson’s book, “One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America’s Future,” which I began reading out of politeness. I find Dr. Carson an affable writer–he seems like a well-intentioned guy.

The book calls (among many things) for people to pay more attention to politics.

Since almost 100% of people I know are already quite vociferously following politics, to the point where “outrage fatigue” is a real thing, what is the bloody point of asking us to follow it more?

Of course, the exhortation isn’t meant for people like me; it’s meant for people who don’t follow politics. Saying you should know the names of the people in charge is trying to translate politics into a form that will be recognizable to people who watch TV or read magazines in order to learn more about Kim Kardashian’s ass. It’s politics as gossip: OMG did you hear what Senator so-and-so wore to the Senator’s event? OMG  did you know that the President had sex with someone? Hey did you hear what Congressman so-and-so said about stuff?

Unfortunately, this is a terrible model for understanding politics. Politics is not socialite gossip. It’s fine if you want to memorize all of the names and personalities–whatever floats your boat–but this is not the same as understanding the political system. Why do the US and Sweden have very similar political movements, with very similar effects? Do we have the same president? The same Supreme Court? No. And people who try to understand politics as gossip aren’t going to figure this out.

And since all of the smart people are already following politics so much that you can’t goddamn escape it, we’re talking about trying to get a bunch of dumb people to vote more based on the assumption that somehow thinking about interest rates in the same way they think about celebrity butts will lead to good public policy.

Jesus effin’ Christ, no it won’t.

I am through with feeling guilty.

The Spoils

Someone else’s theory, with my own reflections:

Let’s assume most of politics is actually people arguing over political spoils–who gets to eat the gov’t pie.

When Gov’t is small, there’s not a lot of pie to argue over. It might be corrupt pie, with all of the pieces going to the family of whoever’s in charge, but there’s just not much to fight over.

When gov’t is big, there’s a lot more pie to fight over. The bigger the pie, the more fighting we should get.

With gov’t spending somewhere around 40% of GDP, that’s a fucking HUGE pie. No wonder people fight so much over politics. It doesn’t really matter if you think “privilege” is a dumb or brilliant word; it does matter if you get free healthcare, a job building drones, or food stamps, and as a result, you will probably fight pretty hard to keep whatever part of the gov’t pie you are and fight pretty hard against people you don’t like getting more of the pie.

At 40%, it’s not even meaningful anymore to talk about the benefits of socialism vs. libertarianism; our system is socialist and it’s going to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Most likely, it will only become more socialist (and btw, it’s the Republicans who actually do the most to push us in the socialist direction by increasing the % of GDP that’s gov’t spending–they just like to spend it all on bombs.)

At its most extreme, the problem with socialist systems is that if one group of people effectively captures the political system, they can just decide that they don’t want to give any resources anymore to those guys they don’t like, and the result us Holodomor, because 0% of 100% is death.

At its most extreme, the problem with libertarian systems is also death, though in a much less organized way–see the Great Depression, or whatever example you’d like to supply.

We might for amusement try to calculate which kind of system kills more people, fail, and argue endlessly. (I charge you with doing this for me, so I can skip straight to discussion.) We’re not at a point where we really need to worry about the extremes of either system, but I do think we are at a point where we should worry that the size of the gov’t pie is simply too big for a peaceful society.

Should we, as a society, attempt to scale back the size of the gov’t pie simply for the sake of a more peaceful society where growth is driven more by innovation and economic activity? Or should we embrace the robot economy and head even further down the socialist path, just keeping in mind the importance of getting everything comfortably divided now, rather than later, when it will be much harder?

Your thoughts and opinions?

Nature Observations

Just some observations, attempts at making sense of the world. I may be wrong. I admit that these are opinions, based on my experiences.

 

Liberals tend to believe that people are inherently good. Conservatives tend to believe that people are inherently bad. Liberals believe that evil is a result of negative environmental conditions that cause people to deviate from their inner badness. Conservatives believe that goodness is a result of negative environmental conditions that cause people to repress their inner badness.

Compare, for example, “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” to, say, any liberal parent you’ve ever met.

Or compare the conservative reaction to ISIS (“Bomb them until they convert to Christianity or all die,”) to the liberal, “To defeat ISIS, we need more jobs for people in the Middle East.”

Liberals are generally more pleasant to be around, even if they are occasionally delusional.

In general, both sides tend to act like there exists one single, agreed-upon definition of what “good” is, even though a conversation with virtually any other human being on the face of this planet will quickly reveal that this is entirely untrue, as that other person holds forth that all sorts of horribly dumb ideas are good and that all of your best traits are really really bad.

Conservatives claim they know what “good” is because “God said so,” and anyone who doesn’t agree with them about what God says is Obviously Evil. It’s not much of a position, but at least you can defend it if you accept the initial premise.

Liberals think that everyone else sees “good” and “bad” the same way they do just because to do otherwise would meant that other people are doing things that liberals see as “bad” even without negative environmental effects, which blows the whole shebang out of the water. Which is really kind of annoying when someone really and truly doesn’t get that you actually do see XYZ as good rather than the result of some horrible trauma that made you do bad, though that’s still not as bad as conservatives dropping bombs on you.

Of course, in reality, most people try to do “good” as they themselves see it, moderated somewhat by their genetic inclinations and culture. The guys in ISIS really and truly do see themselves as good guys, while homeless people fret over the sin of stealing a shopping cart so they have a place to put their stuff.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all morality is relative, you can’t judge anyone else, etc. etc. I would say that our basic understanding of “good” and “evil” people/actions/behaviors is very specific to our own particular culture/subculture/immediate group of friends & family, and probably just isn’t a very meaningful way of understanding the actions of people outside of those groups.

A complicating wrinkle of uncomplicating insight via two images:

So I happened to be browsing Stanford Magazine, and happened across two articles immediately in a row on religious issues. Each had a picture:

  
The contrast between the level of respect for the religion/religious believers in question really couldn’t be starker.

The respectable lady is Jane Shaw, Stanford’s new Dean of Religious life, notable for being both the first woman to hold the position and the first gay person. A few quotes from her article:

“Q. At Grace Cathedral and at Oxford, you led programs far afield from what might be considered religious: Hosting forums with politicians, activists and authors; bringing in atheists and believers; and commissioning artists-in-residence to create plays and installations. What’s your guiding light?

A. I don’t think I am a very churchy person, if that makes sense. I have always been interested in how you engage people in discussing questions of ultimate meaning, really—values, ethics, spirituality, all that stuff.
…

Q. But do you also value the “churchy” side of faith?

A. Ritual and liturgy? I love it.

Q. What new directions will you bring to Stanford?

A. …It is certainly my desire to make sure that Memorial Church is a place for extremely lively intellectual engagement, a place where possibly difficult issues can be discussed, a place where ethical and spiritual issues can be discussed. I am hoping we’ll have different sorts of people preaching here as guest preachers, not just clergy.”

The second photo is most likely a van owned by an unmedicated schizophrenic. You’d be forgiven if you therefore assumed the second article had something to do with mental illness.

It’s actually an interview with Stanford alum Kathryn Gin Lum about her new book, “Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction.”

Right. So whoever put the picture on this article equates the faith of the Founding Fathers (and many Americans today) with literal mental illness.

To be clear, Lum herself does not appear to be condescending toward the people/beliefs she studied, but her interview reveals that respect for the views of 60% of Americans is not common in our nation’s most respected centers of academic thought:

“Separate from any personal considerations, hell seemed to offer the best intellectual grist. ‘People in the academy,’ says Lum, tend to dismiss the notion that any consideration of hell could drive ‘how rational people think.'”

“Does hell have contemporary relevance, despite its lousy reputation in higher education?

“Strongly, thinks Lum. Much of her analysis highlights the connection between ‘people who believe in hell’ and their impulse ‘to damn other people to it.’ It’s that sensibility about calling out the world’s evils, says Lum, that suffuses today’s hot-button issues, including abortion and same-sex marriage.”

(Note that whatever insights she may have about rational people who believe in hell, or any potential good sides to the belief, the article does not mention them. It only mentions the ways in which people who believe in hell are problematic for the rest of the country. Those darn hell-believers, mucking things up for everyone else.)

“Writing about hell’s pertinence, Lum notes in her epilogue, ‘is to invite raised eyebrows.’ Her interest in the subject, she adds, has stirred reactions like ‘But you look so well-adjusted!'”

All right, so let’s review:

According to Stanford, a gay woman who isn’t very “churchy” but likes discussing ethics is one of the country’s best religious leaders, and the 60% of Americans who believe in Hell are literally insane and make trouble for everyone else.

One set of religious views is respected. The other is not.

Now, let’s try to imagine a contemporary article from any sort of respectable college or university (not one of the ones that make you mutter and stare at your feet while admitting that one of your relations was interested in the school,) that conveys the inverse: respect for people who believe in hell; disrespect for gays, women, and people whose faith isn’t based on Biblical inerrancy.

Can you? Maybe Harvard? Yale? Oberlin? CalTech? Reed? Fine, how about BYU? No, probably not even them.

I can’t imagine it. A hundred years ago, maybe. Today, no. Such notions are completely incompatible with the beliefs of modern, upper-class people.

I know many perfectly decent folks who believe in hell, and think they should be respected, but “be decent to people who hold denigrated religious beliefs” is not actually my point. My point is that the American upper class, academia, and the people with a great deal of power and influence over the beliefs of others clearly agrees with Pastor Shaw’s religious beliefs (when it is not outright atheist). Upper-class liberals in America are their own ethnic group with their own religion, culture, morality, and endogamous breeding habits. Conservatives are the out-group, their religious views openly mocked by the upper class and banned from the halls of academic thought.

Thing is, we happen to live, more or less, in a democracy.

One of the intended effects of democracy is that even groups with no real power can still express themselves via voting. If you have the numbers and bother to go to the polls, you can get someone in who more or less kinda sorta might represent your views.

As a result, even though conservatives are low-class and not cultural or intellectual movers and shakers, they can still influence who gets to be president or in Congress, and thus pass laws on things like abortion and stem cell research.

As a result, a group that has very little power in real life may end up with a fair amount via elections.

Think of it as a for of political power redistribution.