[Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political Axis

[Premise Checker]

You're missing my whole point, Steve, and that is that equality-inequality 
is no longer the major left-right political axis. Besides, the 
concentration of income is not as important as the concentration of 
opportunity. But that demands greatly on innate intelligence, in fact more 
and more so. It gets worse as businessmen and (20th) century leftists bawl 
for more low IQ immigrants.

But that's NOT the big issue. Much bigger is pluralism and its largest 
flashpoint: will the state leave the Evangelicals alone? If you are a 
typical secularist or liberal Christian who believes in a Bible full of 
holes rather than the whole Bible, you probably think the issue is whether 
the Evangelicals will leave YOU alone. You probably never think that the 
public schools propagandize secular humanism and will not leave the 
Evangelicals alone. This is because you do not question the merits of 
public education. Libertarians do, since they do not believe in taxes, but 
even they think that, if there are to be schools, they should indoctrinate 
kids in secular humanism.

P.S. I am a devout atheist. I perform the Rite of Insubstantiation five 
times a day and give thanks to no-god when god fails to be conjured.

On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]:

> With half of the personal income in the US going to
> the top 20%, one supposes that distribution of income
> will be an important cause of polarization.
>
> Steve Hovland
> www.stevehovland.net
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com]
> Sent:	Monday, October 18, 2004 10:04 AM
> To:	paleopsych at paleopsych.org; WTA-Politics
> Subject:	[Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political Axis
>
> Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political
> Axis
> sent 4.10.18
>
> The principal left-right political axis is going to change from central
> planning vs. free market in the earlier part of the twentieth century and
> equality vs. inequality in the later part to pluralism vs. universalism in
> the current century. There are several minor axes, to wit, secular vs.
> sacred, self-expression vs. self-restraint, change vs. tradition,
> cooperation vs. competition, tender-minded vs. tough-minded, relativism
> vs. absolutism, and many more, some perhaps subsumed by others. (The left
> tends to be less interested in virtue and moral education generally than
> the right, and we should reconceptualize how children should be brought up
> in a world of mass unemployment, how moral education will instill other
> habits besides those of being a productive member of society. Here's
> hoping that his next book will address the matter.)
>
> There is a general clustering, not at the level of any high theory that
> reduces political preferences to a single dimension, but a clustering in
> fact. Left-wingers tend, albeit often quite incompletely, to be on the
> left side of each axis, not always because they have thought out each
> opinion, but because their co-left-wing friends also have them.
> Right-wingers do likewise. For myself, I am a left-wing secularist,
> moderately to the right as far as self-restraint goes, much to the left in
> favoring change, mixed on cooperation, tough-minded more in rhetoric than
> in practice, and fairly much an absolutist (evolution limits the feasible
> *pace of change* quite a bit). For the major axes, I am a
> twentieth-century rightist for both the free market and inequality. What's
> more important is that I am decidedly a *twenty-first* century leftist in
> favor of pluralism. Indeed let us hope that there has been so much
> culture-gene coevolution, even along racial lines, that there will be
> major *internal* resistance to a universal culture, thus keeping the world
> safe for pluralism.
>
> To recapitulate, and I leave it to each one of you to say where you lie
> on the left-right continuum. Again, we badly need a factor analysis study
> to group these dimensions and, better still, a grounding in evolutionary
> psychology, such as Steve Reiss has done with his 16 Basic Desires.
>
> Major Axes
>
> pluralism vs. universalism (emerging)
> equality vs. inequality (dying)
> central planning vs. free market (dead)
>
> Minor Axes (several others added)
>
> secular vs. sacred
> international vs. national (left was nationalistic during the first
> half of the 19th century, though)
> self-expression vs. self-restraint
> relativists vs. absolutists in morals
> tender-minded vs. tough-minded
>
> great vs. small concern over the physical environment (each with its own
> studies to support his view)
> state vs. individual
> change vs. tradition
> centralized state vs. decentralized state
> dependence vs. self-reliance
>
> small vs. great concern over character and virtue
> small vs. great concern over chastity, divorce, family
> outs vs. ins
> cooperation vs. competition
> regulation vs. freedom
>
> labor vs. capital
> populist vs. elitist
> rural vs. urban
> essentialism vs. nominalism
>
> [I am sending forth these memes, not because I agree wholeheartedly with
> all of them, but to impregnate females of both sexes. Ponder them and
> spread them.]