Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Friday, November 27, 2020

An interesting thought

We see a lot of musing about the reason for the urban/rural divide in U.S. politics. Yes, those depopulous rural states have disproportionate political power thanks to the undemocratic constitution; and within states liberals and Democrats are concentrated in urban centers while exurban and rural areas tend to be Republican, which gives Republicans the ability to win majorities in state legislatures and congressional delegations with a minority of the vote. It's true that people vote, and dirt doesn't, but the way our system is structured, having a lot of dirt does give you an advantage.

The challenging question is why rural areas are more conservative. Will Wilkinson attempts to answer that, and he might just have a good point. People have been heading from the countryside to the city for a while now, but the people who make that move tend to be different from the people who stay behind. 


[U]rbanization is a relentless, glacial social force that transforms entire societies and, in the process, generates cultural and political polarization by segregating populations along the lines of the traits that make individuals more or less responsive to the incentives that draw people to the city. I explore three such traits — ethnicity, ideology-correlated aspects of personality, and level of educational achievement — and their intricate web of relationships. The upshot is that, over the course of millions of moves over many decades, high density areas have become economically thriving multicultural havens while whiter, lower density places are facing stagnation and decline as their populations have become increasingly uniform in terms of socially conservative personality, aversion to diversity, and lower levels of education.

This would also explain the rejection of expertise and the demonization of the university. Education and expertise are markers of a geographically based socio-cultural divide.  Rural people think of the metropolis and its cosmopolitan, educated population as a weird, exotic world with outre values (there I go with the French), that looks down on them. I actually don't think the last item is true -- it's partly a myth propagated by conservative politicians, and partly a projection of shame. People who secretly feel inferior because they lack status enhancing credentials presume that others look down on them. 

Liberals don't look down on people personally because of their rural culture or limited formal education, but they are offended by elements of rural culture, notably racism, the tendency to deny inconvenient facts that are asserted by experts, oppressive gender norms. That's what Hillary meant when she referred to "deplorables," a most unfortunate choice of words and yes, it does indicate a lack of empathy on her part. What she should have said, what I will say, is that some people are committed to ideas and world views that I think are incorrect, and inimical to their own interests in the long run. Sometimes it's not enough to call them incorrect, it's necessary to condemn them in solidarity with the people who are hurt by them. But we need to find better ways of talking with people.



5 comments:

Don Quixote said...

Well said ... I was just reading an interview with the trumpeter Rolf Smedvig (now deceased) from 1995. I haven't enjoyed listening much to the Empire Brass recordings he made over the years because I saw them as too "gimmicky" and trendy. But he made the point that the quintet played in a lot of places where people in smaller towns didn't listen to classical music, and they were perhaps introduced to a "new" kind of music by the EBQ.

In the same way, people in more remote areas aren't introduced to as large a variety of information and experiences as people in more urban areas. Perhaps if they were, they would be open to ideas and policies that aren't inimical to their own interests.

We have to find a way to reach out to people so that they get the word ... that abortion is nowhere in the Bible ... that people of different colors are just people ...

My Uncle Bill, also now deceased, decided to be an orthodox Jew when he was in his 20s, after he got out of the service. But before that, he worked on a farm one summer. The people there had never met anyone Jewish. He was a good worker and got along well there.

At the end of the summer, the farmer said to him, basically, "Before we met you, we didn't like niggers, furreners, or Jews. But now that we've met you, we just don't like niggers and furreners."

Although this is a story that is simultaneously painful and funny, you get the point: people need to be exposed to other people and ideas to understand their worth.

Cervantes said...

Yeah well Rolf also believed that women were constitutionally unsuited to play brass instruments. Maybe he shouldn't have spent so much time in those small towns.

Don Quixote said...

Well, since Michelle Perry played french horn in the Empire Brass Quintet from 2000 to 2011, I assume Rolf got over that mistaken idea :-)

Cervantes said...

Yeah, he got schooled big time when he said it. But I think he was making exception for the fh.

Don Quixote said...

Y'know, I recall similar attitudes among other brass players as well, such as Rex Martin, who taught tuba (probably still does) at Northwestern University and subbed for his teacher, Arnold Jacobs, in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. But at some point, all those people get disabused of their notions ... I'm sure he did when, a dozen years ago, a nineteen-year-old Carol Jantsch, fresh out of the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, became principal tuba of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

It's what you're talking about in your posts, but it doesn't just apply to "small town" people! Send an idiot like Shitler around the globe--you think he sees or learns anything? Our taxpayers' money is utterly wasted on a zhlub who is absolutely reprehensible as a person.

Get people in private and they start talking to you about what they really think. So many millions of Americans are misogynist, racist, and mentally ill. And they aren't just in small towns! Some of them are people you know--but you haven't discovered that side of them yet! It's a bigger battle than just the tribalism of inland areas.