What the Redskins Name Says About the Liberal Brain


Ed Hudgins

Recommended Posts

To continue with "the liberal brain," Rabbi Daniel Lapin hosted the Glenn Beck show yesterday. He gave a brilliant explanation of why city living leans liberal and rural living leans conservative. There is a breakdown and some videos from the show on TheBlaze:

RABBI LAPIN EXPLAINS WHY ‘YOU’RE INSTINCTIVELY PRE-PRIMED…TOWARDS LIBERALISM’ IN A CITY
by Erica Ritz
Oct. 25, 2013
TheBlaze

From the article:

Rabbi Daniel Lapin of the American Alliance of Jews and Christians filled in on The Glenn Beck Program Friday to explain why he believes cities tend to vote Democrat, and rural areas Republican – and what it all means for the country.

After showing a county-based map of election results, which is more indicative of rural vs. urban areas than a state-based map, Lapin asked three questions:

1) Why are cities so much more liberal than the rest of the country?

2) Do cities attract citizens with socialistic leanings, or do they tend to convert people who live in them from conservative to left-leaning liberals?

3) What can be done to change this?


The answer in the nutshell version is two-part:

1. Even though people are packed closer together in a city and spaced farther apart in the country, people know each other in the country and they communicate poorly in the city. To fill the gap, the city-dweller (and this probably include suburbs) communicates more with institutions. Instead of neighbors, he has institutions.

2. Conservatism is more reality based than liberalism, which is more theoretical. This is reflected in rural living, where a person is in touch with his means of survival, whereas in a city, everything is done and provided by the government and businesses. Sewage, water, food, shelter, everything.

(He didn't really give much of an answer for his third question, how to change it. Also, as an aside, Lapin was very stilted and nervous in his delivery. Normally he's relaxed and natural--true, it's in his own formal manner, but still at ease. I don't know what happened this time.)

I think this theory fits with my observation about "the liberal brain" being stuck at adolescence. A teenager has had everything provided for him all his life as his growth now leads him to want to break free. This results in an inner conflict.

A city is kind of like a big-ass parent. :smile:

I'm loving this. Enough elements are showing up to start to form a great default profile (the underlying stuff) for making liberal characters in the story wars. Not the complete persona, but a fundamental part. It's ringing true to me.

Hmmmm...

I may copy some of these posts over to the story wars thread for easier reference.

And another thing.

I tried, but I just don't know how to tie this particular post to the Redskins. :smile:

Michael

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 69
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

A lot of highly productive people moved to the suburbs leaving behind a lot of not so productive people. Since rural life, not suburban life, has been in a constantly declining state since the rise of industrialized farming became mega-farming, the comments on that miss the mark. I don't mind ignorance per se. I mind ignorance ignorant of itself.

--Brant

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Okay, given the Redskins' pathetic performance against Denver, I wouldn't be surprised if both Native Americans and Washingtonian no longer want their names associated with the team!

Yes, it would appear the mascot name is the least of the Native American Persons of Non-Pallor football team's problem.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A city is kind of like a big-ass parent. :smile:

Which is one reason why I've never agreed with Rand's gaga aesthetic responses to the skyline of New York, or her moral pronouncements and psychological diagnoses of people who prefer old villages, rural landscapes, muddy colors, etc.

I think that her personal, subjective preferences polluted her aesthetic interpretations, perhaps due, in part, to the Soviets having made farmers into romanticized heroes of their ideology. Rand seems to have uncritically bought into that aesthetic association, when actually, life in the city is about group activity, collective efforts and dependence, where rural living is about individual achievement, self-sufficiency, and responsibility.

A Jeffersonian aesthetic is more rational than Rand's.

J

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Editor out again. Actually it should read "inno ation", as a helpful Cloze exercise in spelling for those who have trouble with the placement of "v"'s.

As somebody who has felt a scalding feeling of embarrassment from your spelling taunts, I say: let she who avoids spellchecking cast the first ston.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Jonathan,

After I had my first experience with Rand, I did the whole city aesthetics trip. But then I had my moment of looking in wonder at a mountain range against a gorgeous sunset and realizing that I never felt anything like that for a city skyline. It was a great sense of awe, too. I do feel inspiration at a city skyline, even awe at times, but it comes from a different place within me than my nature feelings.

To be clear about Rabbi Lapin's division, he makes the point that cities do not arise out of rural areas becoming so successful and populated that a new social organization is needed for the overflow. He said it's the contrary. The rural areas are only successful when they have good cities nearby. In other words, the city makes the farm successful, not the other way around.

It's actually both in my view. One does not exist well without the other.

I believe intimate contact with both is the best of living and I suspect this perspective is the only way (or at least the major one) to arrive at a rational political view you choose yourself instead of being subconsciously nudged into one by your surroundings.

Michael

Link to comment
Share on other sites

RABBI LAPIN EXPLAINS WHY ‘YOU’RE INSTINCTIVELY PRE-PRIMED…TOWARDS LIBERALISM’ IN A CITY

by Erica Ritz

Oct. 25, 2013

TheBlaze

From the article:

Rabbi Daniel Lapin of the American Alliance of Jews and Christians filled in on The Glenn Beck Program Friday to explain why he believes cities tend to vote Democrat, and rural areas Republican – and what it all means for the country.

After showing a county-based map of election results, which is more indicative of rural vs. urban areas than a state-based map, Lapin asked three questions:

1) Why are cities so much more liberal than the rest of the country?

2) Do cities attract citizens with socialistic leanings, or do they tend to convert people who live in them from conservative to left-leaning liberals?

3) What can be done to change this?

I was fascinated by the county-by-county electoral breakdown from the 2012 Presidential election you all suffered through down there. I found a site that takes a more 'nuanced' (read 'progressive' if you like) analysis and presents colour maps that show a different way to picture the breakdown of red-county/blue-county stats. Indeed we can say "statistics don't lie" but the presentation of statistics can be tweaked or fitted to support different stories.

As an aside, I haven't seen any compelling work that shows there is something like "The Conservative Brain" or its counterpart. It is a rough approximation at best of observed psychology, to my eyes.

That said, here's a couple of images derived from the county-by-county breakdown of votes. These images are from "Outside the Beltway" blog.

-- this is the standard county-by-county depiction, with saturation of colour standing for margin of victory.

2012-election-county-by-county-standard.

-- here's a more 'pointilist' depiction of the same election data:

2012-election-county-by-county.jpg

Here's one more, from Chris Howard's Facebook page (very large image that lets you zoom in):

WhatAmericaLooksLike-2012Election-ChrisH

-- and one more county-by-county map that let's you dig right in to the vote totals for each county (from the Los Angeles Times):

http://graphics.latimes.com/2012-election-results-national-map/#county

Edited by william.scherk
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I had my moment of looking in wonder at a mountain range against a gorgeous sunset and realizing that I never felt anything like that for a city skyline.

Here's a showstopper from my metropolitan region. It combines both, but gives off a distinct 'liberal brain' buzz to me.

http://i.imm.io/1jlft.jpeg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As an aside, I haven't seen any compelling work that shows there is something like "The Conservative Brain" or its counterpart. It is a rough approximation at best of observed psychology, to my eyes.

William,

Are you talking about something like this?

Inside the conservative brain: What explains their wiring?

Neuroscience can help us understand the strangest of birds: The modern conservative. They really do think different

by AVI TUSCHMAN

Sept. 15, 2013

Salon

The book this references is Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us by Avi Tuschman.

I don't have this yet, but from what I have read of it, I'm not placing it high on my list. I've seen some exaggerated framing posing as fact in the Salon article.

The liberal brain, however, tends to love this guy.

:)

Michael

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This business about a moral-intellectual (academic) elite taking care of downtrodden polloi is the liberal impulse to power. They be as know-it-all gods and the more power they have they more godly they can be over thee unless thee be with them in an ass-kissing contest.

--Brant

I love to go all out ad hominem, just love it!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A city is kind of like a big-ass parent. :smile:

Which is one reason why I've never agreed with Rand's gaga aesthetic responses to the skyline of New York, or her moral pronouncements and psychological diagnoses of people who prefer old villages, rural landscapes, muddy colors, etc.

I think that her personal, subjective preferences polluted her aesthetic interpretations, perhaps due, in part, to the Soviets having made farmers into romanticized heroes of their ideology. Rand seems to have uncritically bought into that aesthetic association, when actually, life in the city is about group activity, collective efforts and dependence, where rural living is about individual achievement, self-sufficiency, and responsibility.

A Jeffersonian aesthetic is more rational than Rand's.

J

I was 16 when I flew into NYC at night in 1960 on a four-engined prop airliner from Tucson by way of Chicago. Out of my window I suddenly saw lower Manhattan ablaze with its artificial light just below us. To this day it's the most magnificent sight I've ever seen.

--Brant

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I am an urbanist. Civilization is literally in and of the city. Before that, we had a million years of hunting and gathering. Since then, in less than 10,000 years we set foot on the Moon. We live three times longer than our hunter-gatherer ancestors could have in the best of circumstances. The entire spoken range of English is perhaps one million words, as it includes wigwam and bungalow, succotash and mulligatawny, pemmican and chow. Cities bring people together, indeed.

As for the communists and the farmers, that is just wrong. The Bolsheviks sacrificed the farmers to save the cities. Communism was in and of the urban proletariate, which is why Dennis L. May considers Ayn Rand a Marxist for her adoration of the city. That was not her reaction against Marxism-Leninism, but her absorption of it, according to him. In a limited sense, I agree: capitalism and communism were both expressions of the Enlightenment. I wonder if an alternate world exists where the USSR and USA cooperated in Afghanistan to wipe out the last stronghold of medieval religion.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ed Hudgins also posted his essay to RoR and as I said above, I responded at length there. That link to the left is to my statement that denigrating people for their skin color has caused so much suffering on Earth that in the Star Trek universe, we never ever do it. Although the Andorran Commander Shran calls Jonathan Archer "pinkskin" at first an insult, then as endearment, Archer never replies in kind. In the Original Series, when Kirk calls Spock a "greenskinned traitor" Spock understands that the Captain is sending him an order to disobey orders because the Captain would never (in his right mind) be reduced to racial prejudice.

It has been noted that statistically, those who self-identify as "liberals" are personally unhappier than those who call themselves "conservatives." Obviously, conservatives are happy with the way things are. Ayn Rand said that the frown was the first touch of God on the forehead of man.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Michael,

Nobody supports denigrating the color of human skin as a moral good.

The problem comes from trying to attach that meaning to the name of the football team.

Nobody I know or know of uses the term Redskins to denigrate the skin color of American Indians.

Football is feel-good stuff. When Grundy comes around to spoil the party, the reception is rarely ever good.

I know what I think when people get wound up about this. I think they are trying to manufacture guilt where there is none, doing the busybody PC language control freak routine, and trying to inject bad vibes where there is almost universal enjoyment. From the reactions I see, most people think the same or similar.

There are real problems in the world. I think we should address those, but you have your own bliss to follow.

:smile:

Michael

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ed Hudgins also posted his essay to RoR and as I said above, I responded at length there. That link to the left is to my statement that denigrating people for their skin color has caused so much suffering on Earth that in the Star Trek universe, we never ever do it.

As I said on another thread, the term "Redskin" originates as a description of the color of war paint, not skin. It was only later misunderstood to be a description of skin color.

colormainp8.jpg

It would be like if Objectivists were to become known for dressing like the Blue Man Group during certain events to attract attention. If they were to become known as "blueskins," and, as time passed, they stopped painting themselves blue, and people forgot that they had ever done so, and therefore they mistakenly began to believe that the term "blueskin" referred to the color of Objectivists' actual skin, it would be really stupid for people to scream that the term was a means of denigrating people for the color of their skin. When identifying and comparing colors, shouldn't people believe their own eyes rather than their misunderstanding of a term like "blueskin"? Before claiming that Objectivists are being denigrated for the color of their skin, shouldn't people pause and take a moment to observe whether or not Objectivists actually have blue skin?

Native Americans do not have red skin. Their being believed to have red skin is nothing but a case of people who had never seen a Native American being misled to believe that they had red skin based on their misunderstanding of the term "redskin." If Native Americans had chosen to adorn themselves with green paint, these same people would be claiming today that Native Americans have green skin. If Native Americans had chosen purple with orange stripes, these people would believe that Native Americans have purple with orange striped skin.

J

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As for the communists and the farmers, that is just wrong. The Bolsheviks sacrificed the farmers to save the cities.

It's being wrong doesn't change the fact that the commies promoted the romanticized aesthetic vision of the farmer as an ideal representative of their ideology. Familiarize yourself with Soviet art. The farmer was one of the primary heroes in Soviet art. That doesn't mean that the Soviets actually admired farmers, or anything else that they glorified in their art. They were just using the image of the farmer as propaganda. Manipulative politicians often make heroes of those they're going to victimize. People who are about to be sacrificed tend to be more compliant about it if they can be convinced that it's for a good cause.

J

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Jonathan,

After I had my first experience with Rand, I did the whole city aesthetics trip. But then I had my moment of looking in wonder at a mountain range against a gorgeous sunset and realizing that I never felt anything like that for a city skyline. It was a great sense of awe, too. I do feel inspiration at a city skyline, even awe at times, but it comes from a different place within me than my nature feelings.

To be clear about Rabbi Lapin's division, he makes the point that cities do not arise out of rural areas becoming so successful and populated that a new social organization is needed for the overflow. He said it's the contrary. The rural areas are only successful when they have good cities nearby. In other words, the city makes the farm successful, not the other way around.

It's actually both in my view. One does not exist well without the other.

I believe intimate contact with both is the best of living and I suspect this perspective is the only way (or at least the major one) to arrive at a rational political view you choose yourself instead of being subconsciously nudged into one by your surroundings.

Michael

I agree with you if the goal is "success." Both farms and cities are needed for widespread economic success.

But the issue is, does one of the two lifestyles promote or lead to collectivism and dependency more than the other, and does one promote or lead to individualism and self-reliance more than the other? I think the answer is yes, city living promotes or leads to collectivism and dependency, and rural living promotes or leads to individualism and self-reliance.

J

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now