‘No, Really, Why Are So Many Christians In Colombia Converting To Orthodox Judaism?’

Scott Alexander writes:

* I enjoyed reading a recent Washington Post article, subtitled Why Are So Many Christians In [Colombia] Converting To Orthodox Judaism? It had good interviews and beautiful photos. The only thing it lacked was any explanation of why so many Christians in Colombia were converting to Orthodox Judaism…

* The best information I can find comes from this article, which tells the story of a group of Colombian converts in more depth. A megachurch pastor visited Israel, met some Jews for Jesus, liked it, and incorporated Jews for Jesus ideas into his megachurch. But the more he learned about it, the more he realized Jews for Jesus was incoherent, and wanted the real thing. So after a while, he asked his church to convert to Judaism en masse; most of them said no, but a few hundred stuck around and became Orthodox Jews.

* Orthodox Judaism is about the least-hip and least Latin-American-culture-compatible religion imaginable.

* And this reminds me of a friend’s review of The Reformation Of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion And Gender In Colombia. Its thesis: Colombian gender roles are terrible. The men are supposed to drink lots of alcohol and be macho and probably violent, the women are supposed to sit back and take it and do all the actual work. Nobody likes it much, but bowing out looks non-macho and is hard to do unilaterally. Some families solve this by converting to evangelical Christianity – the evangelicals have a goody-goody reputation, and if you avoid alcohol and violence out of pious Christian humility, that looks better than backing out because you’re not macho enough to handle it.

See for comparison this story about Brazilian narco-gangsters who convert to Christianity to escape retribution. If they just left their gangs, the gangs would view it as a betrayal and kill them; if they leave because they convert, that’s a known quantity and they’re okay. I’m not saying all the Latin Americans converting to weird religions are trying to get out of gangs, but some of them might be trying to get out of a society that’s gotten stuck in a bad equilibrium, and religion is an accepted way of doing that. The new Colombian Jews have already picked up the important Jewish skill of separating from the rest of their society…

* We’ve been talking here recently about charter cities in Latin America, where you escape a corrupt society by letting yourself be governed by the law code of a different polity. We’ve even talked about ZEDEs, the new and improved version, with a free-floating law code that binds non-continguous areas in a way only tangentially linked to the logic of space and territory. The idea seems as appropriate for Colombia as it is for Honduras. And the Jewish Diaspora was the world’s first ZEDE. It’s got all your favorite ZEDE features: complicated legal codes nobody voted on, frequently-reneged-upon guarantees of protection from local rulers, and newspaper articles complaining that they’re greedy rootless capitalists preying on their host country. Yet it works. Getting political independence is hard. But getting social independence is – well, hard but possible. It’s the secret secondary goal of every movement, religions do it better than most, and one religion in particular has had lots of practice.

COMMENTS:

* CS Lewis wrote about the shock some new Christians have when they attend church, and it’s at a shabby building full of local randos dressed in weird clothes. “So…this is Christianity, huh? I expected something a little more special.”

* The most popular and growing religions seem to be the ones with more restrictions that put practitioners farther out of the mainstream of their local culture. The economist in me says it is probably to keep out of the riffraff and ensure members of the club are serious and likely to contribute. Yet I expect the separation from the normal culture is itself a big draw in addition, as a dissatisfaction with the culture is exactly what one wants to remedy by joining a religious group. If you wanted to be just like the rest of the culture, you would just do more of that.

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The Scientific Method

Jessica Riskin writes:

* Here, then, is the answer to when, where, and how “the scientific method” originated: not in any field or practice of science, but in the popular, professional, industrial, and commercial exploitation of its authority. This exploitation crucially involved the insistence that science held an exclusive monopoly on truth, knowledge, and authority, a monopoly for which “the scientific method” was a guarantee.

* I would call it a feat of branding equal to “diamonds are forever” or “Coke is it”: “The scientific method” became science’s brand.

* Bohr reflected that any observation involves an interference with the thing observed. Our own acts of observation are a part of the world we see: we are “both onlookers and actors in the great drama of existence.” Heisenberg elaborated the idea by emphasizing that “what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning,” and that science was therefore “a part of the interplay between nature and ourselves.” Scientists in this period were recognizing the necessity of interpretation and putting that recognition to work in radical new ways that were neither humanistic nor scientific but integrally both. Meanwhile “the scientific method” continued in pursuit of its manifest destiny.

* David Starr Jordan—Stanford’s first president, an ichthyologist, and avid eugenicist—announced that the extended application of the scientific method had transformed education, calling it a “magic wand.” Among Stanford’s twenty-two founding faculty members was (the confusingly named) Fernando Sanford, a physicist specializing in electricity and its applications, and a partisan of the scientific method. Sanford gave the address at Stanford’s eighth commencement in 1899 where, with great simplicity and lucidity, he bestowed the scientific method upon the new graduates. First, collect facts; second, seek out causal relations among these; third, deduce conclusions; fourth, perform experiments to test these conclusions. Sanford also warned his audience to be on their guard against practitioners in fields such as history, philology, and even Latin who, “wish[ing] to appear especially progressive,” had “learned to use the language and to adopt the name of the scientific method.” These were mere pretenders; the scientific method bore no relation to language or literature, nor they to it, and Sanford closed by advising these scholars that if they didn’t want to be left in the dust, they could bloody well go out and find their own methods.

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‘I Am A Pleb!’

Chaim says: I was looking on Facebook at people I went to school with or were year older, year younger etc. Almost to a person, the ones in elite positions have pictures promoting Biden/Harris or some anti trump thing to publicly affiliate as trump voter signals low status and non inclusion in elite circles. Might as well say ‘I AM A PLEB 2020!

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Symbols of Class Status

Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote in 1951:

* Co-operative activity based on a differentiation and integration of statuses is a universal characteristic of social life. This kind of harmony requires that the occupant of each status act toward others in a manner which conveys the impression that his conception of himself and of them is the same as their conception of themselves and him.

* Status symbols visibly divide the social world into categories of persons, thereby helping to maintain solidarity within a category and hostility between different categories.4 Status symbols must be distinguished from collective symbols which serve to deny the difference between categories in order that members of all categories may be drawn together in affirmation of a single
moral community.

* Persons in the same social position tend to possess a similar pattern of behaviour. Any item of a person’s behaviour is, therefore, a sign of his social position. a A sign of position can be a status symbol only if it is used with some regularity as a means of ” placing” socially the person who makes it. Any sign which provides reliable evidence of its maker’s position whether or not laymen or sociologists use it for evidence about position-may be called a test of status.

* By definition, then, a status symbol carries categorical significance, that is, it serves to identify the social status of the person who makes it. But it may also carry expressive significance, that is, it may express the point of new, the style of life, and the cultural values of the person who makes it, or may satisfy needs created by the imbalance of activity in his particular social position. For example, in Europe the practice of fighting a duel of honour was for three centuries a symbol of gentlemanly status. The categorical significance of the practice was so well known that the right of taking or giving the kind of offence which led to a duel was rarely extended to the lower classes. The duel also carried an important expressive significance, however; it vividly portrayed the conception that a true man was an object of danger, a being with limited patience who did not allow a love of life to check his devotion to his principles and to his self-respect.

* Status symbols are used because they are better suited to the requirements of communication than are the rights and duties which they signify.

* We tend to be impressed by the over-all character of a person’s manner so that, in fact, we can rarely specify and itemize the particular acts which have impressed us.

* Furthermore the manner prescribed for the members of a class tends to be an expression in miniature of their style of life, of their self-conception, and of the psychological needs generated by their daily activity. In other words, social style carries deep expressive significance. The style and manners of a class are, therefore, psychologically ill-suited to those whose life experiences took place in another class…

* (5) Cultivation Restrictions. In many societies, avocational pursuits involving the cultivation of arts, ” tastes “, sports, and handicrafts have been used as symbols of class status. Prestige is accorded the experts, and expertness is based upon, and requires, concentrated attention over a long period of time. A command of foreign languages, for example, has provided an
effective source of this sort of symbol.

It is a truism to say that anything which proves that a long span of past time has been spent in non-remunerative pursuits is likely to be used as a class symbol. Time-cost is not, however, the only mechanism of restriction which stands in the way of cultivation. Cultivation also requires discipline and perseverance, that is, it requires of a person that he exclude from
the line of his attention all the distractions, deflections, and competing interests which come to plague an intention carried over an extended period of time.

An interesting example of cultivation is found in the quality of ” restraint ” upon which classes in many different societies have placed high value. Here social use is made of the discipline required to set aside and hold in check the insistent stimuli of daily life so that attention may be free to tarry upon distinctions and discriminations which would otherwise be overlooked. In a sense, restraint is a form of negative cultivation, for it involves a studied withdrawal of attention from many areas of experience. An example is seen in Japanese tea ceremonies during the Zen period of Buddhism. In Western society the negative and positive aspects of cultivation are typically combined in what is called sophistication concerning food, drink, clothes, and furnishings.

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‘Why Me?’ The Role of Perceived Victimhood in American Politics

From a new academic paper by Miles T. Armaly and Adam M. Enders:

* Despite growing recognition among journalists and political pundits, the concept of victimhood has been largely ignored in empirical social science research.

* Perceiving oneself to be a victim is ubiquitous in American politics. As Horwitz (2018) remarks, “The victim has become among the most important identity positions in American politics” (553). This is no accident. Victimhood is a central theme of modern political messaging. For instance, a Republican strategist observed, “At a Trump rally, central to the show is the idea of shared victimization…Trump revels in it, has consistently portrayed himself as a victim of the media and of his political opponents…” (in Rucker 2019). However, if you consider Trump’s demographic characteristics (white and male) and his successes (in terms of wealth and being president), he is not a victim by any serious societal standard. While Trump’s supporters may, to varying degrees, be victims of certain social and political circumstances, the rallies at which the president is reveling in their shared victimhood are direct consequences of at least their recent political successes.

This narrative of victimization transcends Trump and other political elites. Regular Americans have broadly been considered, or considered themselves to be, victims—of China (Erickson 2018), immigrants (Politi 2015), income inequality (Ye Hee Lee 2015), and much more. It is in the interest of political candidates to cue victimhood, to make their potential supporters feel as though they have been wronged and that she is the best candidate to rectify things. If would-be constituents can be made to feel victimized, regardless of any “truth” of the matter, it may also be possible to demonstrate the relevance of such feelings to immediate political choices, such as voting or issue positions.

* Actually being a victim is, of course, undesirable. Why, then, might someone fail to eschew the status, or even accept it? We do not argue that one must consciously identify with or project any sort of label—i.e., “victim”—in order to feel victimized. We provide supporting evidence for this below. Generally, selfperceptions of many sorts provide psychological or social benefts to the individual, like a sense of belonging (Huddy et al. 2015) or social connectedness (Wann 2006). Campbell and Manning (2018) argue that in “the contemporary moral hierarchy” victims are seen as morally and socially superior. Horwitz (2018) suggests that victimhood must be established before “political claims can be advanced.” Thus, contemporary norms dictate that victims deserve some amount of social deference that non-victims do not.
In a sense, then, one can achieve greater social or political status by selfdefning as a victim (Zitek et al. 2010). Such a goal is sensible; achieving status has long been recognized as an important behavioral motivation (Harsanyi 1980; Zink et al. 2008). Thus, there is some incentive to portray oneself as a victim, even if that label is not “earned” or explicitly used (i.e., feeling like victim constitutes self-portrayal). If one wishes to assert social or political authority, society may be more willing to listen to a victim (Campbell and Manning 2018; Horwitz 2018). Of course, society may rebuke the victimhood claim and
fail to provide status, but the potential for status should still motivate feelings of victimhood.
Importantly, the contemporary moral hierarchy also allows individuals who feel victimized—but who fail to outwardly identify as such or assert that status—to feel a sense of superiority. By perceiving oneself to be a victim, one is able to mitigate the
negative emotions associated with failure, hard times, or other elements of life—it’s not really their fault! Or, they may fnd someone or something else to blame; they are getting less than they truly deserve of no fault of their own (Fast and Tiedens
2010). Just as partisan motivated reasoning can reduce the cognitive dissonance produced by exposure to counter-partisan information or diminish the anxiety of navigating a daunting information environment (see Redlawsk et al. 2010), we expect
perceived victimhood can make one feel better about their political or social status and guide the formation of attitudes about political objects that might exacerbate or ameliorate feelings of victimhood (e.g., particular policies that asymmetrically
impact citizens, political candidates).

Because victimhood profers social and psychological benefits, some individuals are prone to feel this way—an individual difference in the vein of any psychological trait. But, this is only one element of victimhood. Victims, as individuals or members of groups who have “suffered wrongs that must be requited” (Horwitz 2018,553), require somebody to blame, an oppressor or victimizer…

* All politicians, to some extent, utilize victimhood-cueing rhetoric in making their case to would-be constituents. They portray the masses as victims of all manner of policies and circumstances from the specific (e.g., high taxes, income inequality, rising healthcare costs) to the abstract (e.g., globalization, the media, the establishment). These are the problems that candidates claim they are best equipped to address. In making victim-centered pleas, politicians are able to foster a sense of victimhood in their supporters and potentially gain new supporters by portraying themselves as uniquely capable of identifying and treating that which causes victimhood.

* People who perceive themselves as a victim—in either sense—should hold a generally antagonistic orientation toward political elites and the “establishment.” These are people who – by the vary nature of being “elites” and members of the political “establishment”—have proven successful in their careers, perhaps by unfair advantage or mere luck. Victims should, then, be less trustful of government, exhibit more anti-elitist attitudes, and perceive greater degrees of governmental corruption than non-victims. They should also exhibit less political efficacy—if people listened to them they would not find themselves in the position of victim. We also expect people who perceive themselves to be victims to be more prone to conspiratorial thinking. Conspiratorial thinking is, itself, related to a host of psychological motivations that stem from victimhood, including feelings of powerlessness and a lack of control (Douglas et al. 2017). In other words, those who feel like victims employ conspiracy theories to explain their status, why they cannot seem to get ahead.

Finally, we consider the relationship between victimhood and two of the “Big Five” personality traits: agreeableness and emotional stability. We expect those high in perceived victimhood to be less agreeable and less emotionally stable. Disagreeable people are more self-interested and more suspicious of others (e.g., John et al. 2008), both of which we expect to characterize those high in perceived victimhood. Those low in emotional stability (or high in neuroticism) are more prone to exhibit the same negative emotions—such as anger and anxiety—that we would expect of (perceived) victims…

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