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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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I, in turn, reject your framing. I, too, have read a lot of history, including plenty of contemporary historiography. I agree with you that

It seems obvious to me that there are two distinct intellectual traditions/schools of thought that arose in the aftermath of the 30 years war, with the followers of guys like Calvin, Hobbes, and Montesquieu forming one and the followers of Locke, Kant, and Rousseau the other.

And that works for upper class educated white Christian men during those times in those relevant places. A hypothetical neutrally situated free man who reads Hobbes and reads Locke and decides which he likes better, that might well predict

... which side someone finds themselves on during the French Revolution, or English Civil war.

But of course, most people aren't neutrally situated, most people find themselves on one side or the other of the Revolution because their family or their friends or the other men in their town joined that side and they followed along. You might later take up the ideology associated with that side, but you were a Cavalier or a Roundhead before you knew why. I'm going to cite some historical fiction, because it's a fun scene in a classic movie. In Master and Commander where Jack Aubrey is getting his crew hyped up for battle against the French ship.

Capt. Jack Aubrey: Do you want to see a guillotine in Piccadilly? NO! Want to call that raggedy-ass Napoleon your king? NO! You want your children to sing the "La Marseillaise?" NO!

It is blindingly obvious that nobody on that ship besides Aubrey and the Doctor has serious opinions on Rousseau and Calvin. Maybe some of the other officers are aware, at a sixth grade level, of the ideology involved but it is highly doubtful they'd have seriously read about it. But there all the men are, shouting about the guillotine and Napoleon, as though it all means something to them. Their position on those questions is more tribal than intellectual.

So on a spectrum between our hypothetical neutral educated man, and the illiterate cheering crew on Jack Aubrey's ship, where do we put everyone else?

If we're going to argue that political ideology has any kind of genetic or heritable aspect, which I'm not sure I agree on, it can only work when examined fully in context. It makes zero sense to say that one has an inherent genetic predisposition towards Marxism, or an inherent genetic predisposition towards Milton Friedman, without considering how those economic ideologies are going to impact your actual life. A rich man who is a Marxist would probably be exercising a different genetic pathway than a working man who is a Marxist. That's the point, if we're going to talk about a gene or a set of genes that impacts both your facial/physical structure and your ideology, it's a different set of genes depending how you are situated.

Consider this quote from a South African radical:

He seemed to relish having chosen a side, to have a politics to fall back on when complicated moments like this arose. And he had relished talking about Andile Mngxitama, an adversary who had chosen a side just as he had, and who spoke plainly about making whites bow down in the face of a black power that Roche was convinced was swelling and would soon engulf the country. “If that’s how Andile sees it, then I respect it a great deal,” he said. “To that I only say we must fight it out, and let’s die like men.”

As you say, the alt-right and the woke left have a lot in common, they know their side. But more than that, your white Proud Boy and your Black NFAC have a lot in common. And your white guilt wokies and your Republican Stepin Fetchits have a lot in common. If there's anything genetic to politics, I'd look at that similarity before I'd look at how people read Hobbes and Rousseau.

Which, to come back to the question of the Finnish MPs, is the point: you can't translate "Oh, dudes who become leftists will be like ____" to other countries and other contexts without thinking about race, religion, class, history, regionality. Those all determine whether High T or low sociability men will be rightists or leftists.