Because it turns out that there’s a sweet, important message in: not everyone needs the same things out of life. And maybe especially in the pressures of small-town-ish closely-interlinked tribal existence are very bad for some people, and the greater individual atomized freedom of contemporary urbanity is exactly what they need. And, for that matter, let’s throw in the big city has a magic all its own and that can come in a cheery goodwill-towards-men holiday flavor, because city folk can actually be good people too. All that sounds like a good thematic backbone for a cute and cheesy holiday movie.
But, nope, the important reason to get out of your small town is…politics. That’s definitely what we want more of in our cultural narratives right at this moment.
Isn’t all that stuff political? It’s definitely often politicized. What does the “pressures of small town tribal existed are very bad for some people” me a in practice except “support LGBT rights?”
It can mean that all your aunts and uncles and neighbors and teachers and parents’-friends think that they get a say in what should be important to you and what you should be doing with your time, and everyone agrees that everyone gets a say, and probably also everyone agrees on the object level, and it’s incredibly stifling.
It can mean that even your nearest and dearest are largely driven by the desire to have you serve as a respectable component of their social unit, because otherwise it would lower their social standing in this tight-knit community where everything matters to everyone, and so there’s constant strife with them.
It can mean that there’s some thing that desperately matters to you, and you can’t find anyone else who cares about it in the slightest, because the small town is small and the people take their cues from each other.
…and, yes, that thing could be “being gay,” that’s a popular one. It could also be poetry or Warhammer or moral philosophy or French film or hermetic magic.
All this stuff at least correlates with politics, some, on some level. There’s a reason that the connection between urban terrain and liberal politics seems to be so very widespread. But mostly it’s not about the Issues You Vote On, it’s just about how you live your life day-to-day, in a way that isn’t really subject to policy change even in theory. It’s not even really about the shit that gets made into rallying cries in the culture war. And, well, why would you go out of your way to say “what we really need more of in chintzy Hallmark movies are blows struck for our side of the culture war?”
I mean, it’s not like I don’t know the answer to that question. But.
I meant gay rights to be inclusive, not exclusive. Gay rights is one of the ways this manifests. Of course, as you say, there are many ways in which it can manifest nonpolitically. Except that I wouldn’t characterize it as nonpolitical so much as prepolitical. These are the building blocks from which one’s moral intuition and political orientation are constructed, much like how strong one’s disgust reaction is and how openness to experience is and where one stands on the survive-thrive axis is. The way you describe preference for social atomization, it definitely sounds like the Venn diagram overlap of authority and loyalty in Haidt’s moral foundations model.
I am starting to become convinced that actual politics is just shadows on a wall, and these personality and moral traits are standing in front of the fire. In any case, if politics is determined or at least strongly correlated with these fundamental traits, it shouldn’t be surprising that people use it as a proxy for those things.
I am starting to become convinced that actual politics is just shadows
on a wall, and these personality and moral traits are standing in front
of the fire.
Some. Politics is also, prosaically-but-importantly, about alliances of material benefit – and the weird doublethink in which people engage in order to better live with those alliances. It’s important to remember just how contingent some of the ideological “commitments” of present-day urban leftists are, and how easy it would be for them to feel very very differently about certain issues and certain groups of people.
But, more to the point:
Yes, it’s possible to get some analytic headway out of merging “politics = the difference between our underlying personality modules” with “politics = the important concrete issues of governance about which we have bitter fights for high stakes.” If you want to live in anything remotely resembling a pluralistic society, it is crucial not to do that thing, or (rather) not to let that thing leak from your abstract discourse into the cultural artifacts that underlie your values. It is really, really important that different kinds of people be able to tolerate each other’s existence, at least at arm’s length; the alternative is that we all tear each other apart. Which is what we’ve been doing, for the last little while. Largely because “those people look and talk different from you, and care about unsettlingly alien things” has been spliced with “THOSE PEOPLE ARE DESTROYING ALL THAT IS GOOD IN THE WORLD AND MUST BE STOPPED.”
