(08-30-2016, 01:30 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(08-30-2016, 05:58 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(08-29-2016, 02:06 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(08-29-2016, 01:17 PM)ob Butler 54 Wrote:(08-29-2016, 09:38 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Values lock -- one cannot legitimately understand why others hold the views that they have, and probably can't legitimately express the views of others.
So how can someone be wrong?
1. Intellectual inadequacy, a/k/a stupidity or ignorance.
2. Insanity and delusion.
3. Gross inadequacy of moral standards, as with sociopaths and sadists.
4. Selling out to the highest bidder.
5. Myopic class interest.
6. Brainwashing.
7. Fear -- fear the tyrant who can do anything to one or the God that can have one burn in Hell for the slightest deviation.
8. Revenge-seeking against old enemies.
I would start looking in other places, though my list contains rewords of yours.
Self Interest: If one is living day to day, having trouble finding a good job, living on Main Street day to day, one is apt to sympathize with Demand Side economics, approve of government assisted health care and otherwise lean blue. If one has a large stock portfolio, is secure in one's job, has a large inheritance, then tax breaks to the wealthy, reduced capitol gains taxes, and paying one's own way rather than sharing burdens through tax and spend seem like good ideas.
Cultural Difference: One inherits a lot of one's parent's beliefs. What worked for them gets preached to the new generation. Churches and schools are a similar sources for explanations of how things work and ought to work. For many, it is hard to let go of one's upbringing.
Situation Difference: If one is living in wide open spaces, self reliance and independence can be productive, prudent and wise. There is just more travel involved to get together and play team games. If one lives in an urban area, the opposite can be true.
These are three common, broad and bland examples, but there are a lot more reasons for sincere disagreement. If one is in the habit of solving a given problem in a given way, and it generally works, there is going to be sincere resistance to giving up the tried and true for an untried scheme.
Now, I'm not saying the things on your list never happen. I just prefer to assume that someone I disagree with is intelligent, sane, and acting reasonably based on the world as he sees it. I will try to maintain a benefit of the doubt as long as reasonably possible. Someone might come from a different environment, a different culture, and thus have different world views and values. However, I assume that the culture evolved to suit the place he came from. Common cultures come to exist for a reason. Understanding said reasons is a vital part of the process of political discussion. If one hasn't made a sincere attempt to understand where the other guy is coming from, one shouldn't knee jerk instantly assume that he is evil, stupid, insane, brainwashed, etc...
That is the biggest difference between us. I am ready to assume sincere differences between cultures, world views and values. You are far more apt to assume that anyone who disagrees with you has major league mental or moral problems. I consider the assumption that any disagreement in world views and values must be due to some sort of moral or mental deficiency to be a major and most problematic symptom of values lock. Anyone who assumes that your list of reasons for disagreement above are common reasons for political disagreement is apt to be having values lock problems.
I was looking for some reasons for someone being absolutely wrong so that we could rule out others. Ethnicity, religion, region, and class cannot make one wrong as can idiocy, superstition, malice, perversion*, lunacy, or cowardice. Using such a technique as brainwashing to convince those on the wrong side of an ethnic, religious, regional, or class divide of some revolutionary way of thought will itself be wrong should it be tried. If one can develop some high ethical standard based on one's core beliefs then one has some justification worthy of recognition.
Someone can be terribly wrong for any of the reasons that I mentioned. Seeing the world differently because one has lived in the Ozarks all one's life and is a Protestant of Scots-Irish origin instead of mid-town Manhattan and being a Catholic of Puerto Rican origin is not wrong or right -- either way. One's environment can be a very pervasive and indelible truth. If one likes where one is, then one may have a good cause to defend the assumptions that go with the environment. We are going to accept environmental differences or we are going to have horrible strife, perhaps as in Spain in the 1930s or in the dissolution of Yugoslavia. We will need solutions that make ethnicity, religion, region, and class irrelevant to the solution. Yes, I know how nasty history can be. History is a violent, obscene tale written to no small extent in the blood of innocent people.
Don't fool yourself: this Crisis could end in the rifting of America into multiple new entities. and not even along state lines. Such would be an ugly mess. People on the wrong side of some demarcation line because of their religion or ethnicity could be in big trouble. Getting the dubious privilege to stay where one is might depend on acquiescence in second-class citizenship (I am thinking of the large black minority in the South which could face Jim Crow policies again). Remember that in such rifting, majority rule could be the choices that a local lynch mob makes. Yes, lynch mobs make their decisions by majority vote -- very reliably. That's why we have constitutional protections that ensure that certain decisions that majorities can impose upon a helpless minority not be made.
One could recognize the legitimacy of other people's viewpoints because of some environmental factor from ethnicity to age to the rural/urban/suburban divide.
Class differences? There could be successor polities that accept the principle that maximal inequality is the best way to get the economic growth necessary to escape post-Crisis poverty. If one is a worker in such a place, then the surest way to the improvement of one's situation will be to emigrate -- no matter how over-heated the local economy is. Some could even adopt Karl Marx as a Founding Father. Such will fail.
I could easily see myself fitting in in some foreign countries than in some of the post-Crisis polities of America. Maybe in such a Crisis I will be fortunate to find that my polity has shown its intention to join Canada after some shaky period of independence.
We may be in such deep trouble that the United States of America as we know it may be irrelevant by the end of the Crisis. The United States will not be the first great entity to splinter as its political order becomes unsustainable. We messed up badly when a bare majority chose to realign the basis of political representation to the permanent advantage of that temporary majority. Democracy can die that way.
*Homosexuality is OK.
I don't know. Ethnicity as in the KKK of a century or so back, religion when a fundamentalist is examining evolutionary biology, politics effecting the understanding of global warming... Some quite understandable culturally driven factors can make you pretty (expletive deleted) wrong. The different and quite firm opinions on the effectiveness of large government social programs and the usefulness of supply vs demand side stimulus are of a like nature. It is possible to see how the cultural divides came to occur, why people believe as they do, but resolving the conflict is very problematic.
I'm not so worried about enough people being brainwashed to start a revolution, nor a social upheaval led by the stupid and insane. I worry more about the intensely sincere normal.
I do watch the spirals of violence. I don't disregard major upheaval as impossible. I just don't see things starting to go critical yet. There was a bump of blacks killed followed by cops killed earlier in the summer, but the response was 'this has got to stop' not 'they got one of ours, we must get two of theirs.' The long hot summer wasn't nearly as long or hot as the summers I recall from my youth.
We'll see.
One of my favorite general books on American history, Albion's Seed, suggests that patterns in American life were set early by the first British and Dutch settlers. The Dutch colony of New Netherland failed to develop a Dutch identity because it allowed the immigration of so many people not of Dutch origin. If you think New York City is cosmopolitan today, then it was cosmopolitan when it was New Amsterdam. It attracted almost anyone who fled religious persecution, especially the Huguenots who were practically identical in religion to the Dutch Reformed Church. It hired German soldiers and plenty of Scandinavian sailors who remained. It invited religious dissidents from New England. It had people with Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian surnames -- but those were Jews fleeing the Inquisition. The pattern of New York City was set when it was New Amsterdam. All that changed from New Amsterdam to New York was the flag and the language. If one lives among people of diverse origins as peers, then one had better tolerate differences of origin.
New England was settled largely by the cosmopolitan population of southeastern England, by people who had familiarity with the sea and with using it as a means of trade and a source of food (fishing). Settlers from southeastern England were largely Protestant Dissenters of the Congregational variety. English settlers of New England were largely from what passed for the middle class -- many merchants and ship-builders. New England attracted few people for the wrong reason; there were few First Peoples to exploit, there were no minerals (like gold, silver, or gemstones) to extract; the winters were too severe and the soil too rocky for plantation-style agriculture. People had to work hard and smart for modest rewards to make the hardest colony to make profitable work for those there. New England would be a land of shopkeepers and yeoman farmers, and it would be swift to get a university -- Harvard in 1636. Massachusetts' General Court would quickly establish itself as the first freely-elected legislature in the world still in existence. New Englanders took their disputes to a court of law and not to the street. Taking a dispute to a street for a fistfight or a duel was good for being taken to a criminal court no matter how valid one's claim. New England would quickly establish a democratic heritage, something possible where few people are spectacularly rich or spectacularly poor. New England would take over New Metherland and expand west to the Pacific Coast as a cultural zone, establishing such cities as Cleveland, Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Salt Lake City, and Seattle. It would overpower the Spanish-Mexican mission-and-garrison San Francisco de Asis and the French mission-and-garrison city Détroit. With good business practices, rational economics, respect for formal learning, little respect for traditional hierarchies in economics, and reliance upon formal law, places settled by New Englanders and their descendants could proper. Except for Mormon country, which gets liberal results with conservative government (and heavily reflects the one great world religion founded in New England and Upstate New York) and the High Plains is very liberal this region generally along and north of what is now Interstate 80 could prosper and attract immigrants who liked things as they were in New England. It is worth remembering that even if New England is no longer predominantly Protestant due to mass immigration of Roman Catholics, the Catholics (beginning with the Irish) took over New England institutions intact. Most of these areas now lean Democratic.
Southeastern Pennsylvania, literally "Penn's Wood" began as a haven for Quakers largely from the British industrial Midlands. The Quaker institutions of humaneness, support for widespread education for the masses (if little use for elite education), faith in the manual laborer and his skills, disdain for violence, and rejection of ostentation could make life seem plain -- if comfortable. The Quakers invited their closest analogues in religion -- Swiss and German Pietists and practically made Pennsylvania a German colony in all but language. Their world expanded westward as far as about Kansas, only to peter out as the land went from verdant prairie to precarious steppe. The Quakers rejected slavery on principle even if southeastern Pennsylvania is much more like northern Virginia than like New England. This is a true swing region of America with such large cities as Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Kansas City being very Democratic.
From Baltimore southward to almost Jacksonville, the aristocratic Cavaliers from southwestern England -- often second sons of aristocratic families -- tried to impose their hierarchical ways upon the land. They wanted the peasants to come along and be peasants in the New World, but few would take the costly and dangerous sea journey for much of the same. The Cavaliers offered indentured servants a chance to come to the New World, toil under harsh exploitation, and earn some land if they survived the term and met the terms of the agreement. Few survived. Then they brought in the slaves, perfectly fitting the aristocratic, semi-feudal ideal. White descendants of the Cavaliers are generally reactionary now; black descendants of African unfree toilers (and Cavalier descendants who raped the slave women) have just about the opposite world view on politics as their white counterparts. The Cavaliers moved their plantation world as far west as Texas, and tried to establish it Arizona and New Mexico. Their order of unconstrained freedom for themselves but none for anyone else survived Abolition.
Moving quickly to the Appalachians from Pennsylvania and Virginia (they could get along with neither the Quakers nor the Cavaliers) were the xenophobic Backwoods settlers who found their little parcels of valley bottom lands to plant a few crops and raise some livestock while getting little interference from authorities of any kind. Coming from among the lowland Scots and the Scots-Irish, they had much respect for their own traditions and little for any others. Often herdsmen, they had to be ready to use force to stop theft of their four-legged assets. They were low in learning and swift to anger. People not of them may think such stereotypes of them in Li'l Abner, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Dukes of Hazzard offensive -- but they love the characters. During the Civil War they were for the Union side because they disapproved strongly of the Cavaliers putting their slave system in their midst. It's not that they had humane attitudes toward the black slaves; they hated them. They preferred firearms to intellectual contests.
As it turns out, Puritan and Quaker settlers accepted immigrants gladly so long as they had good work ethics and a respect for law and order. The Cavaliers imported Africans as slaves but destroyed whatever African culture the slaves had. They forced themselves into areas with large Cajun and Hispanic populations from Louisiana to Arizona, and treated them as white.
The bulk of European immigration from the Irish Potato Famine to the early 20th century went to the Puritan- Dutch settlement zones and Quaker lands where the opportunities were. Such explains why a small town in the American Midwest can have significant numbers of Scandinavian, Polish, and Irish surnames.
America has had regional distinctions in culture from when it was the Thirteen seaboard Colonies. The sections of America settled by the Puritans and their successors are at least socially, if not always politically liberal. Quaker America is a genuine swing area. Cavalier country spli9ts largely on racial lines in politics. Backwoods America (the Mountain South) for now is quite reactionary -- just look at the voting percentages that Barack Obama got in those states in 2008 and 2012. While Obama was winning by levels that one associates with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s in 2008, he was also losing the Mountain South by margins one associates with Walter Mondale if not George McGovern. Nothing says that such will hold true in the homogenizing culture of a 1T.
Nice summary!
Probably in the top 10 of favorite non-fictions of the "reading class" that's on this forum.
I think before the Scot-Irish are homogenize, they'll be defeated as a national political power. They're being out produced in reproduction and they a high incident of health concerns including addiction problems. They have to be defeated before they can be helped.
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Just to add - I believe Southern Scot-Irish, the poor Whites of the South, fought and died for the South. There were nowhere near enough plantation owner elites or even small salve owners to fight the war. The elites got them to fight for the Confederacy, against the Scot-Irish's own economic self interest, by appealing to their tribal nature ("the Southern Way") and the need to be higher up the ladder than at least someone else, i.e. the slaves. Not much has changed; that's one of their characteristics.