A Unifying Theory of the Culture Wars

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Publius understands the political and social preferences of white social conservatives on a host of issues in terms of a fundamental cognitive or cultural difference from their opponents:

“I suppose this will sound snotty, but I think the source of this fundamental difference is parochialism. I don’t mean that in a pejorative or a religious sense, but only a descriptive one – i.e, I mean it in the sense of “having little exposure to that which is different from you.” Parochial isn’t the best word because it’s loaded, but hopefully you understand what I’m getting at. (Maybe “insularity” is a better word.)

Anyway, the fundamental problem with parochialism is that it tends to make people equate the contingent with the universal. The contingent social norms of your part of the world become elevated into universal moral codes. The contingent social practices of your community become the baseline for “the good.”” (Legal Fiction via unfutz)

Coincidentally enough, an FmH reader just posted a comment to my item on the National Reviews rock’n’roll list wondering about the seemingly fundamental Republican trait of “insisting that everything and everyone is really just like they are but won’t admit it.” How would I diagnose that, the commenter asked. Parochialism frames the answer succinctly, as Publius typified it.

Actually, this strikes me as similar to something I have been saying for awhile now about the essential Republican appeal to tribalism, which I find is an ingrained or, one might even say, innate human predilection. Here is what I said in August, 2005:

“Most group hatred seems based on a tribal mentality in which core identity is maintained by desperate measures to distinguish insiders from outsiders, like from unlike, by construing the foreign as dangerous. This may be hardwired into human neurobiology and is inherently at odds with a world in which we commune with those who are heterogeneous. Those who appeal to our tribal instincts — which, by the way, is the unconscious message upon which the American Republican party’s appeal is built, I am convinced — are appealing to our basest, most reptilian perversion of the yearning for community which functions as little more than a justification for continuing violence and victimization.”

In other words, progressives rise against their base, reptilian, parochial tribal insticts, while conservatives indulge in them… and cannot conceive of the possibility of not doing so.