Rod Dreher on Viktor Orban's vision; Rob Henderson on the Light Triad; Allison Schrager on Yale Law School Economics; Yuval Levin talks his book on a constitutional republic
"Instability in childhood was negatively associated with Light Triad traits (r = -.21). In other words, the more unstable a person’s childhood, the lower their scores on the Light Triad."
Yes, and the more books in your childhood home, the more likely you are to become a reader. But the books have almost nothing to do with it! The people whose genes predispose them to become readers transmit those genes to their children who also become readers.
Parents with a paucity of Light Triad traits have unstable home lives. They transmit those traits to their children who also score lower on Light Triad traits.
I'm just going to throw out that a correlation of 0.21 (or -0.21) is pretty close to meaningless. I have in the past looked at scatter charts with different levels of correlation, and at this level you can't even see it.
Yes, it would be near impossible to see in a scatter chart. But it is there. Your argument seems a little like saying electricity, bacteria, or air isn't there because you can't see it.
>The people whose genes predispose them to become readers transmit those genes to their children who also become readers.
This is a pure assumption. My parents were avid readers, and so I am, but their parents were not. Their parents were mostly trying to not be extremely poor. My parents started higher on the Maslow pyramid.
Yes, it is an assumption, but I think a reasonable one. I strongly suspect that your grandparents had genes that predisposed them to be readers BUT THEY NEVER HAD THE OPPORTUNITY. As you say, they "were mostly trying to not be extremely poor."
When I say they probably had genes that predispose one to become a reader, I don't mean that there is some special "gene for reading". Rather, they have many, many genes that lead to things like intelligence which make for someone who enjoys reading.
hmmm. okay I guess when people have the money to buy big TVs and the free time to watch them several hours a day, that is evidence in favour of this. still it is hard to know how much genetic, how much environmental. my parents grew up in a Commie country where TV shows were shit. today, well, it is hard for books to compete with HBO. Game of Thrones caught even me, and I am strongly anti TV. but it was just so cool.
Your genetic inheritance interacts with your surroundings. No matter what your genes, you're not going to become a book reader before there are books. When reading is a major source of entertainment, information, escape, etc., you are much more likely. Now that there are many other easier sources of entertainment, information, escape--social media, the internet, streaming services--you are less likely to become a serious reader.
"The apple doesn't fall far from the tree." That's 200 years old - Emerson's English popularization of a medieval old-Germanic proverb. I'm going to mess this up, but "you qi fu, bi you qi zi" is my poor attempt at the Chinese for "like father, like son" and perhaps thousands of years old. But that was all just baseless superstition, now we have studies!
Paul Bloom told Russ Roberts people should read more novels rather than psychology studies. He also told Tyler Cowen that the Big 5 personality psychology is underrated:
COWEN: Big Five personality theory.
BLOOM: Underrated. Stood the test of time. Often, when people complain about the replication crisis, they throw away all of psychology, but personality psychology has proven surprisingly robust, and I think there’s a lot of sense in the idea. I know you actually were somewhat critical of this in your book Talent — the idea of the Big Five, the idea that you could characterize somebody in terms of five numbers, determining their openness and their conscientiousness and so on. What do you think on that?
COWEN: I think it’s overrated by people who use it in hiring, but I still think, in general, it’s somewhat underrated, so we’re maybe not far apart. People who don’t know about the categories at all would do well to learn them. That’s how I would put it.
BLOOM: Yes. Once you know about them, you should be flexible and not take them too, too seriously.
Thanks for the link. I agree with Orban that the attempt to push LGBTQ on the rest of the world is an example of the US hegemon shooting itself in the foot, and that Russia under Putin, which has adopted some kind of law against LGBTQ indoctrination of children, is a beneficiary of that 'own goal.' One of the many examples of ideology triumphing over pragmatism. I think Orban is correct that 'soft power,' rather than hard power, especially military power, was an important source of US/Western influence in the postwar period. In the Soviet period, although the Hollywood films shown in Soviet movie theaters were 'curated' to highlight the negative aspects of American capitalism (greed was an especially common theme), they often had the opposite effect of what Soviet censors intended. Now, however, the US film industry, including Disney, puts out mostly woke dreck that even most Americans don't want to see. Very sad.
Why is everybody focusing on the LGBTQ part? This is the truly important part:
"We are in a change, a change is coming, that has not been seen for five hundred years. This has not been apparent to us because in the last 150 years there have been great changes in and around us, but in these changes the dominant world power has always been in the West."
The gender ideology is creating mental illness in kids - with & without smartphones. Most parents & normal folk are against it, but The Powers That Be keep pushing it more.
Russia's contributions to 'high culture' -- literature, ballet, classical music -- are incredibly outstanding, but Russian culture by itself could never aspire to have the mass cross-cultural appeal of 'lowbrow' American culture during most the postwar period. Same thing for non-Western Chinese culture - their music sounds dissonant to Western ears. Pushing LGBTQ is a gift to Putin. It's incredible.
I don't think "gender ideology" is actually a thing. It is a bunch of facts - that gender roles are not essences cast in stone. Look at the painting of any 1700 French aristcrat - long hair (wig?), high heels, make-up, lace, colorful silks, gemstones etc.
This is a topic I like to talk about and could do for long. Briefly, in 1700 prettiness is not gendered. Pretty is just pretty, cool, that's it.
But then mass armies happened and smokeless powder, soldiers started wearing simple uniforms in earthen colors to not stand out as targets, simple durable textiles, short hair because lice, and so on, looking simple. French soldiers stopped wearing red pants only during WWI, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantalon_rouge although yes, by all other measures that soldier looked like our modern ideas of a masculine man. And this caught on and became the base of male fashion.
Seriously studying history is a good pill against any kind of conservatism. You find that all the "traditional" stuff were all changing all the time.
For example the idea that a woman's place is in the house came from 19th century adoption of coal heating. That required really a lot of cleaning. The walls were covered with greasy, stick soot.
The idea that cooking is something for women ignores several - actually excellent - traditions of hunter or cowboy or lumberjack cooking. (Or sailor, but that is not so good. Fresh game is better.)
"dodgy survey instruments"....well Yes I should say! Asking people (in effect) whether they are kind or selfish, honest or dishonest, nice or nasty etc ; surely the only possible use of such "survey instruments" is to study the degree to which different kinds of people are adept at manipulating them.
Anyway I always say that the most salient survey question is this: "Are you the kind of person who would respond to a survey?"
Myers-Briggs is far superior to Big 5 in one hugely important issue: abstract thinking (& feeling).
The N (iNtuitive / abstract) 25% vs the S Sensitive (/concrete) folk are quite different in their ability to have 'that vision thing' (Bush41 didn't follow thru on his good "no new taxes").
Neither of these systems are good for Dark & Light Triads.
And everybody has some level of all good & bad traits, so there are only spectrums.
For the clinically mentally ill, I'm sure Big 5 plus Triads plus maybe other impulse control issues are important, but for normal folk and even we not-normal blog commenters, MBTI is superior.
I'd guess Arnold is INTJ, as I'm an xNTP (I= E), and almost all commenter are NTs.
We need more conservative NFs.
Rod Dreher is right that Orban is doing a great job defending Western Civ: capitalist Christianity.
I am not terribly surprised a conservative-leaning libertarian is going to be low on agreeableness. Agreeableness looks like overlapping with empathy, and the left was always certain the issue is lack of empathy on the right. The difference is, while the textbook small-town conservative is at least going to be empathic within their community, libertarianism is probably the least empathic of the three main worldviews. It feels very transactional. Economics is like trying to understand human interactions as if they were some kind of a machine, lacking in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verstehen
Here's a little known fact. Viktor Orban studied at Oxford. His tuition was funded by George Soros' Open Society program.
Also, I'll be gobsmacked if any of those "triad" studies are ever replicated. There must be a psychological study that has been replicated but I'm not aware of it.
"Now we know that the individual can only be great and free as a member of a community."
True, but not deep. It's darkly amusing how conservatives somehow imagine that the failures of technocratic, centre-left administrative states are somehow due to an excess of individualism.
With respect to Alison Schrager’s characterization of Yale Law School’s economics, that may be true now, but it was not in the early 1970s. Back then, they had Robert Bork teaching what was wrong with the antitrust laws from a Chicago point of view. Even Guido Calabresi’s The Cost of Accidents looked at market solutions to torts (though he failed to include transactions costs in his calculations). From an economics point of view, and to the extent Yale Law can be blamed for the views of some of its more recent graduates, it is a different place today
Yale lawyers as our economic leaders, what could possibly go wrong? Based on my life experience, I suspect a skew towards philosophy and poli sci majors. Away from math and towards easy As, respectively, at least when I went to a fancy undergrad school.
As a general manager, I saw lawyers trained to advocate for a side, whether good or bad, and always settling somewhere in the middle. Contract review will have seen them working slowly picking nits. As outside counsel, able to nearly kill deals agreed to by the business people to show how much value they add. On a good day, Machiavellian.
But hey, one of KH's/the President's economic advisers has a PhD in Social Work, and couldn't articulate how the government borrows money, so maybe things are looking up! Sorry, it's been a long day and I'm tired of the spending frenzy.
"the decline in manufacturing jobs was a policy error that needs to be remedied rather than the result of an evolving economy."
It _was_ a policy error, of letting the US become a capital importing country rather than a capital exporting country, whihc coud be partially corrected by confining federal deficits to activities with NPV > 0 , adding incentives to save (disincentives to consume) to the "income" tax, and fully funding social insurance (at whatever level it is) with a VAT.
I don't know what your left-right position is but you remind me me that many people on both extremes believe more or less what you state. It makes sense coming from those on the left but now that I think about it, it seems really odd coming from small-government, free-market types on the right.
This is a topic that has perhaps been done to death, but much of the despair about the direction of the "West" derives from a faulty conception of what that is. Let's start with a cession to the left: the concept of the West is an artifice. It is inorganic. Since the early modern era, it's been shorthand for a contested term: who gets to claim to be the legitimate heir to Rome? The HRE had a strong claim for on legalistic, territorial, and religious grounds, the German Protestants claimed that what really matters was fidelity to the Word of God, the Anglicans claimed that they were the true heirs and not the pretender Spaniards, the Russians claimed to be the fourth Rome, and eventually the French enlightenment revolutionaries claimed that they were the true heirs to Greco-Roman culture, which had been disrupted and perverted by Christianity itself (in a sort of inverted Lutheranism).
Now, in the postmodern era, the French enlightenment progressed to a greater level of acidity: we inherit nothing, there is no god, there is no truth, there is only the eternal present of flashing images that signify nothing, and all that matters is the fist of power. But yet, there are still some that did not get the message, that still insist on the idea of grasping for our Western inheritances, which are again a shorthand for the ways, beliefs, inheriting peoples, and means of Rome (& co), Athens (& co), and Jerusalem (& co). This grasping is always subjective, based on what the people at the time believe those things to represent, and is rarely actually accurate as a scholar might want them to be, because graspers tend to care more about what they want to grasp than about being true and correct.
Returning to the first sentence of this comment, where Orban errs is in using the "West" as a shorthand for the American bloc. In the Geographic sense, yes, all of these states are protectorates of Washington D.C. and they are all West of the Hellespont. In a philosophical sense, there are a lot of buildings that look Western, some of the legal tradition is within that Western dialogue, many of the people worship Western gods, but in its self-conception those leaders do not believe that they are Western any longer. They are not seeking the same things. They believe themselves to be a new and better thing. They sometimes try to legitimate themselves in the terms of the Western tradition in a very garbled and almost nonsensical way not unlike barbarian kings after the fall of the WRE (e.g. by using Greek loan words like "democracy" in inappropriate ways), but they are not really seeking to fill those shoes or to use it as a legitimating myth. The culling of Classics departments in the last few years demonstrate this resolutely.
The use of this term "the West" puts out hope for restoration of the old ways, but really he should just be saying something like "the Washington government," because it doesn't connote a nostalgic and false idea about what they believe and what they desire. By even calling it the "West," it contributes to the false legitimation.
I doubt there is nearly so much ambiguity among In My Tribe readers but I appreciate your reminder to be careful using terms that a larger audience might not agree on the meaning. I never stopped to think "the west" could of be that varied in what it meant.
Thanks. My thoughts in this comment were informed by reading Paul Cartledge's recent "Democracy: A Life" and also John Milton's speech "Aereopagitica" (here with commentary https://milton.host.dartmouth.edu/reading_room/areopagitica/text.shtml) among other things. I wanted to read Areopagitica again because it is often credited as inspiring the First Amendment. It seemed like a good time to read it considering the current speech controversy in the UK.
Areopagitica is the type of statement I'm referring to: it's Milton stamping down and arguing about what the best of the Western tradition is. The poet portrayed his position as the proper and best interpretation, the one most in line with the best of the Western tradition. That's also the register in which the Federalist and anti-Federalist papers were written, but it is not how most of our political arguments go now (except in certain narrow legal matters).
While the second two triad questions seem extremely situation dependent to me, I'd lean heavily towards the light triad responses. And I'm near zero on agreeableness. So much for their correlation.
Does Dreher think he has a constituency in the US? Even among hardcore MAGA types, most of them are Barstool Sports people who would rather party with legal weed and shoot guns than listen to a judgy prude like him. People like Dreher only exist online at this point. And maybe in Central Europe if his take is to be believed?
I think it is fair to say most people, whether in western or central Europe, never think about what Dreher discusses. In that way you are correct. Not the typical MAGA.
I could be completely mistaken but I'm pretty sure Dreher's constituency is AK and a large number of his readers. Same goes for most or all conservative "thinkers." I'd expect liberal psychologists, psychiatrists, other counselors to mostly agree too.
Well obviously he has readers. By a constituency I mean a part of the population that might support anything resembling his ideas. There isn't even anyone in the American electorate who buys into a dumbed down version of the Dreher ideology.
What were you saying liberal psychologists would agree about? Didn't get that part.
Maybe we read something different. In short, what I read said family, religious, and national bonds are good. Helping others is good. Self-absorption is bad. You think there isn't a constituency that believes this? Really?
Reminds me of a recent email exchange with a Yale Law “economist” who has thus far not been willing to explain their inflation adjustment methodology despite it being the crux (i.e., driving the thesis) of the paper.
"Instability in childhood was negatively associated with Light Triad traits (r = -.21). In other words, the more unstable a person’s childhood, the lower their scores on the Light Triad."
Yes, and the more books in your childhood home, the more likely you are to become a reader. But the books have almost nothing to do with it! The people whose genes predispose them to become readers transmit those genes to their children who also become readers.
Parents with a paucity of Light Triad traits have unstable home lives. They transmit those traits to their children who also score lower on Light Triad traits.
I'm just going to throw out that a correlation of 0.21 (or -0.21) is pretty close to meaningless. I have in the past looked at scatter charts with different levels of correlation, and at this level you can't even see it.
Yes, it would be near impossible to see in a scatter chart. But it is there. Your argument seems a little like saying electricity, bacteria, or air isn't there because you can't see it.
It seems to me like reading too much into a small correlation. Similar to the problem of false precision.
I'd agree more if we were comparing correlations of .2 and .6 to make some conclusion. I think .2 vs -.2 tell us a bit more than the former.
Personally, I'd be far more worried that something else is causing both instability and dark triad.
>The people whose genes predispose them to become readers transmit those genes to their children who also become readers.
This is a pure assumption. My parents were avid readers, and so I am, but their parents were not. Their parents were mostly trying to not be extremely poor. My parents started higher on the Maslow pyramid.
Yes, it is an assumption, but I think a reasonable one. I strongly suspect that your grandparents had genes that predisposed them to be readers BUT THEY NEVER HAD THE OPPORTUNITY. As you say, they "were mostly trying to not be extremely poor."
When I say they probably had genes that predispose one to become a reader, I don't mean that there is some special "gene for reading". Rather, they have many, many genes that lead to things like intelligence which make for someone who enjoys reading.
hmmm. okay I guess when people have the money to buy big TVs and the free time to watch them several hours a day, that is evidence in favour of this. still it is hard to know how much genetic, how much environmental. my parents grew up in a Commie country where TV shows were shit. today, well, it is hard for books to compete with HBO. Game of Thrones caught even me, and I am strongly anti TV. but it was just so cool.
Your genetic inheritance interacts with your surroundings. No matter what your genes, you're not going to become a book reader before there are books. When reading is a major source of entertainment, information, escape, etc., you are much more likely. Now that there are many other easier sources of entertainment, information, escape--social media, the internet, streaming services--you are less likely to become a serious reader.
"The apple doesn't fall far from the tree." That's 200 years old - Emerson's English popularization of a medieval old-Germanic proverb. I'm going to mess this up, but "you qi fu, bi you qi zi" is my poor attempt at the Chinese for "like father, like son" and perhaps thousands of years old. But that was all just baseless superstition, now we have studies!
Paul Bloom told Russ Roberts people should read more novels rather than psychology studies. He also told Tyler Cowen that the Big 5 personality psychology is underrated:
COWEN: Big Five personality theory.
BLOOM: Underrated. Stood the test of time. Often, when people complain about the replication crisis, they throw away all of psychology, but personality psychology has proven surprisingly robust, and I think there’s a lot of sense in the idea. I know you actually were somewhat critical of this in your book Talent — the idea of the Big Five, the idea that you could characterize somebody in terms of five numbers, determining their openness and their conscientiousness and so on. What do you think on that?
COWEN: I think it’s overrated by people who use it in hiring, but I still think, in general, it’s somewhat underrated, so we’re maybe not far apart. People who don’t know about the categories at all would do well to learn them. That’s how I would put it.
BLOOM: Yes. Once you know about them, you should be flexible and not take them too, too seriously.
Here is the link to the full Victor Orban speech discussed by Rod Dreher:
https://miniszterelnok.hu/en/speech-by-prime-minister-viktor-orban-at-the-33rd-balvanyos-summer-free-university-and-student-camp/
Highly recommended.
Thanks for the link. I agree with Orban that the attempt to push LGBTQ on the rest of the world is an example of the US hegemon shooting itself in the foot, and that Russia under Putin, which has adopted some kind of law against LGBTQ indoctrination of children, is a beneficiary of that 'own goal.' One of the many examples of ideology triumphing over pragmatism. I think Orban is correct that 'soft power,' rather than hard power, especially military power, was an important source of US/Western influence in the postwar period. In the Soviet period, although the Hollywood films shown in Soviet movie theaters were 'curated' to highlight the negative aspects of American capitalism (greed was an especially common theme), they often had the opposite effect of what Soviet censors intended. Now, however, the US film industry, including Disney, puts out mostly woke dreck that even most Americans don't want to see. Very sad.
Why is everybody focusing on the LGBTQ part? This is the truly important part:
"We are in a change, a change is coming, that has not been seen for five hundred years. This has not been apparent to us because in the last 150 years there have been great changes in and around us, but in these changes the dominant world power has always been in the West."
The gender ideology is creating mental illness in kids - with & without smartphones. Most parents & normal folk are against it, but The Powers That Be keep pushing it more.
Russia's contributions to 'high culture' -- literature, ballet, classical music -- are incredibly outstanding, but Russian culture by itself could never aspire to have the mass cross-cultural appeal of 'lowbrow' American culture during most the postwar period. Same thing for non-Western Chinese culture - their music sounds dissonant to Western ears. Pushing LGBTQ is a gift to Putin. It's incredible.
I don't think "gender ideology" is actually a thing. It is a bunch of facts - that gender roles are not essences cast in stone. Look at the painting of any 1700 French aristcrat - long hair (wig?), high heels, make-up, lace, colorful silks, gemstones etc.
This is a topic I like to talk about and could do for long. Briefly, in 1700 prettiness is not gendered. Pretty is just pretty, cool, that's it.
But then mass armies happened and smokeless powder, soldiers started wearing simple uniforms in earthen colors to not stand out as targets, simple durable textiles, short hair because lice, and so on, looking simple. French soldiers stopped wearing red pants only during WWI, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantalon_rouge although yes, by all other measures that soldier looked like our modern ideas of a masculine man. And this caught on and became the base of male fashion.
So I wear stuff like this https://www.mondomens.com/collections/long-sleeve-shirts/products/royal-blue-leopard-velvet-shirt and I don't care if people think it is gay. In my mind it is more like looking like Voltaire than looking like cannon fodder.
Seriously studying history is a good pill against any kind of conservatism. You find that all the "traditional" stuff were all changing all the time.
For example the idea that a woman's place is in the house came from 19th century adoption of coal heating. That required really a lot of cleaning. The walls were covered with greasy, stick soot.
The idea that cooking is something for women ignores several - actually excellent - traditions of hunter or cowboy or lumberjack cooking. (Or sailor, but that is not so good. Fresh game is better.)
And so on.
"dodgy survey instruments"....well Yes I should say! Asking people (in effect) whether they are kind or selfish, honest or dishonest, nice or nasty etc ; surely the only possible use of such "survey instruments" is to study the degree to which different kinds of people are adept at manipulating them.
Anyway I always say that the most salient survey question is this: "Are you the kind of person who would respond to a survey?"
Agreed about personally traits. Also, personally I give r-values below 0.5 zero importance.
Myers-Briggs is far superior to Big 5 in one hugely important issue: abstract thinking (& feeling).
The N (iNtuitive / abstract) 25% vs the S Sensitive (/concrete) folk are quite different in their ability to have 'that vision thing' (Bush41 didn't follow thru on his good "no new taxes").
Neither of these systems are good for Dark & Light Triads.
And everybody has some level of all good & bad traits, so there are only spectrums.
For the clinically mentally ill, I'm sure Big 5 plus Triads plus maybe other impulse control issues are important, but for normal folk and even we not-normal blog commenters, MBTI is superior.
I'd guess Arnold is INTJ, as I'm an xNTP (I= E), and almost all commenter are NTs.
We need more conservative NFs.
Rod Dreher is right that Orban is doing a great job defending Western Civ: capitalist Christianity.
I am not terribly surprised a conservative-leaning libertarian is going to be low on agreeableness. Agreeableness looks like overlapping with empathy, and the left was always certain the issue is lack of empathy on the right. The difference is, while the textbook small-town conservative is at least going to be empathic within their community, libertarianism is probably the least empathic of the three main worldviews. It feels very transactional. Economics is like trying to understand human interactions as if they were some kind of a machine, lacking in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verstehen
Here's a little known fact. Viktor Orban studied at Oxford. His tuition was funded by George Soros' Open Society program.
Also, I'll be gobsmacked if any of those "triad" studies are ever replicated. There must be a psychological study that has been replicated but I'm not aware of it.
"Now we know that the individual can only be great and free as a member of a community."
True, but not deep. It's darkly amusing how conservatives somehow imagine that the failures of technocratic, centre-left administrative states are somehow due to an excess of individualism.
With respect to Alison Schrager’s characterization of Yale Law School’s economics, that may be true now, but it was not in the early 1970s. Back then, they had Robert Bork teaching what was wrong with the antitrust laws from a Chicago point of view. Even Guido Calabresi’s The Cost of Accidents looked at market solutions to torts (though he failed to include transactions costs in his calculations). From an economics point of view, and to the extent Yale Law can be blamed for the views of some of its more recent graduates, it is a different place today
Yale lawyers as our economic leaders, what could possibly go wrong? Based on my life experience, I suspect a skew towards philosophy and poli sci majors. Away from math and towards easy As, respectively, at least when I went to a fancy undergrad school.
As a general manager, I saw lawyers trained to advocate for a side, whether good or bad, and always settling somewhere in the middle. Contract review will have seen them working slowly picking nits. As outside counsel, able to nearly kill deals agreed to by the business people to show how much value they add. On a good day, Machiavellian.
But hey, one of KH's/the President's economic advisers has a PhD in Social Work, and couldn't articulate how the government borrows money, so maybe things are looking up! Sorry, it's been a long day and I'm tired of the spending frenzy.
Orban: I know conservatives love to whine abut liberals lack of patriotism and family bonds, but it does not really make a lot of sense.
What doesn't make sense?
"the decline in manufacturing jobs was a policy error that needs to be remedied rather than the result of an evolving economy."
It _was_ a policy error, of letting the US become a capital importing country rather than a capital exporting country, whihc coud be partially corrected by confining federal deficits to activities with NPV > 0 , adding incentives to save (disincentives to consume) to the "income" tax, and fully funding social insurance (at whatever level it is) with a VAT.
Lol.
I don't know what your left-right position is but you remind me me that many people on both extremes believe more or less what you state. It makes sense coming from those on the left but now that I think about it, it seems really odd coming from small-government, free-market types on the right.
Re: Orban/Dreher:
This is a topic that has perhaps been done to death, but much of the despair about the direction of the "West" derives from a faulty conception of what that is. Let's start with a cession to the left: the concept of the West is an artifice. It is inorganic. Since the early modern era, it's been shorthand for a contested term: who gets to claim to be the legitimate heir to Rome? The HRE had a strong claim for on legalistic, territorial, and religious grounds, the German Protestants claimed that what really matters was fidelity to the Word of God, the Anglicans claimed that they were the true heirs and not the pretender Spaniards, the Russians claimed to be the fourth Rome, and eventually the French enlightenment revolutionaries claimed that they were the true heirs to Greco-Roman culture, which had been disrupted and perverted by Christianity itself (in a sort of inverted Lutheranism).
Now, in the postmodern era, the French enlightenment progressed to a greater level of acidity: we inherit nothing, there is no god, there is no truth, there is only the eternal present of flashing images that signify nothing, and all that matters is the fist of power. But yet, there are still some that did not get the message, that still insist on the idea of grasping for our Western inheritances, which are again a shorthand for the ways, beliefs, inheriting peoples, and means of Rome (& co), Athens (& co), and Jerusalem (& co). This grasping is always subjective, based on what the people at the time believe those things to represent, and is rarely actually accurate as a scholar might want them to be, because graspers tend to care more about what they want to grasp than about being true and correct.
Returning to the first sentence of this comment, where Orban errs is in using the "West" as a shorthand for the American bloc. In the Geographic sense, yes, all of these states are protectorates of Washington D.C. and they are all West of the Hellespont. In a philosophical sense, there are a lot of buildings that look Western, some of the legal tradition is within that Western dialogue, many of the people worship Western gods, but in its self-conception those leaders do not believe that they are Western any longer. They are not seeking the same things. They believe themselves to be a new and better thing. They sometimes try to legitimate themselves in the terms of the Western tradition in a very garbled and almost nonsensical way not unlike barbarian kings after the fall of the WRE (e.g. by using Greek loan words like "democracy" in inappropriate ways), but they are not really seeking to fill those shoes or to use it as a legitimating myth. The culling of Classics departments in the last few years demonstrate this resolutely.
The use of this term "the West" puts out hope for restoration of the old ways, but really he should just be saying something like "the Washington government," because it doesn't connote a nostalgic and false idea about what they believe and what they desire. By even calling it the "West," it contributes to the false legitimation.
I doubt there is nearly so much ambiguity among In My Tribe readers but I appreciate your reminder to be careful using terms that a larger audience might not agree on the meaning. I never stopped to think "the west" could of be that varied in what it meant.
Thanks. My thoughts in this comment were informed by reading Paul Cartledge's recent "Democracy: A Life" and also John Milton's speech "Aereopagitica" (here with commentary https://milton.host.dartmouth.edu/reading_room/areopagitica/text.shtml) among other things. I wanted to read Areopagitica again because it is often credited as inspiring the First Amendment. It seemed like a good time to read it considering the current speech controversy in the UK.
Areopagitica is the type of statement I'm referring to: it's Milton stamping down and arguing about what the best of the Western tradition is. The poet portrayed his position as the proper and best interpretation, the one most in line with the best of the Western tradition. That's also the register in which the Federalist and anti-Federalist papers were written, but it is not how most of our political arguments go now (except in certain narrow legal matters).
While the second two triad questions seem extremely situation dependent to me, I'd lean heavily towards the light triad responses. And I'm near zero on agreeableness. So much for their correlation.
Does Dreher think he has a constituency in the US? Even among hardcore MAGA types, most of them are Barstool Sports people who would rather party with legal weed and shoot guns than listen to a judgy prude like him. People like Dreher only exist online at this point. And maybe in Central Europe if his take is to be believed?
I think it is fair to say most people, whether in western or central Europe, never think about what Dreher discusses. In that way you are correct. Not the typical MAGA.
I could be completely mistaken but I'm pretty sure Dreher's constituency is AK and a large number of his readers. Same goes for most or all conservative "thinkers." I'd expect liberal psychologists, psychiatrists, other counselors to mostly agree too.
Well obviously he has readers. By a constituency I mean a part of the population that might support anything resembling his ideas. There isn't even anyone in the American electorate who buys into a dumbed down version of the Dreher ideology.
What were you saying liberal psychologists would agree about? Didn't get that part.
Maybe we read something different. In short, what I read said family, religious, and national bonds are good. Helping others is good. Self-absorption is bad. You think there isn't a constituency that believes this? Really?
What did you read?
Reminds me of a recent email exchange with a Yale Law “economist” who has thus far not been willing to explain their inflation adjustment methodology despite it being the crux (i.e., driving the thesis) of the paper.