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Author Topic:   REMIX: Are You an Authoritarian?
dwise1
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Message 4 of 6 (839076)
09-02-2018 6:54 PM
Reply to: Message 2 by Phat
11-20-2017 9:23 PM


The Authoritarians by Altemeyer
In today's political and ideological climate, this book and topic are more relevant than ever.
I couldn't agree with you more on that. I recently read Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians from late May to early August (one of the benefits of a PDF reader on one's phone). Even though it was written in 2006 when the worst US President in memory was Dubya (anyone else seen the meme of Dubya waving and asking "Do you miss me yet?"?), everything Altemeyer describes is spot-on applicable to what we're slogging through now and his points are in line with the talking points of progressive radio talk shows (or rather, they are in line with Altemeyer).
This should be required reading for everybody, not just all Americans. BTW, he got started in his research in the 1960's in reaction to having gotten wrong a question in his oral exams. Since then, he has published books and articles on his research, all of which were heavily laden with mathematics and statistical analysis. He wrote and published this book specifically to describe his findings without all the heavy math. The result is very readable and vitally interesting. And it's free.
HINT: read the footnotes. He will make fun of you being a masochist for doing so, but that's where he puts the many examples and the results of various studies. The runs of the "Global Change Game" simulation are very revealing. Players for each run of the game were chosen at random, but when he stacked one game with high RWAs and billions died, the ecology collapses, and they killed everybody in a global thermo-nuclear war (they were given a second change with the clock set back two years, but they still ended up on the brink of nuclear annihilation). Then he stacked another game with low RWAs and ended up with the best outcome that game had ever seen. Because of the low RWAs' general attitude that "we're all in this together so we need to work together for our mutual survival", they were able to respond effectively to environmental crises (eg, the hole in the ozone layer), which the high RWAs with the attitude of getting theirs and to hell with everybody else were unable to do. But then later he learned of other researchers' Social Dominance Orientation scale, so he ran the game with high raters on that scale and the outcome was pure horror.
I am retaking the test. Looking back, I scored a 53 in 2009, shortly after Obama was elected to his first term. I am curious if my views have changed at all.
One of the things that Altemeyer did was diachronic studies in order to see how his subjects changed over time. He would test all his incoming freshman students at the beginning of their university experience as well as at the end and inbetween. He was also able to test them later in life (eg, when they were themselves parents). In addition, he got some of their parents to also take the test.
A basic correlation was that high RWAs tend to be raised that way by their parents. Part of the RWA mentality seems tied in with tribalism, the idea that you are part of the in-group and everybody else outside of your in-group is in the out-group which is antagonistic towards your in-group. One of the factors in lowering someone's RWA rating is to expose him to members of out-groups, which allows him to identify them as individuals no different from himself. That expands his concept of who's in his in-group, which in turn lowers his RWA rating.
Having mainly been involved with "creation science" since 1981 and seeing so many creationists end up leaving the faith (or very nearly do so), when I learned that many college students who had been raised fundamentalist (and hence also YEC) ended up leaving the faith, I naturally thought that it was because they had learned in science classes that YEC is completely false. But then a blog pointed out that the real culprit was the humanities, especially philosophy but English lit was also a major player. The blog described the students as having been raised to believe that the way they were raised was the only valid perspective, but then the humanities not only showed them many other ways of thinking but lit classes in particular are exercises in seeing things though the perspective of the characters in the story or play. All of which would affect a high RWA's perception of in-groups and out-groups and hence tend towards lowering his RWA rating.
Interestingly, a former high RWA whose rating got lowered in college will later see his RWA rating go back up (though perhaps not as high as it was before). This seems to correlate with having and raising his own children and might simply be a case of channeling one's own parents (ie, using how he was raised as the model for how to parent) or it could mean something more. I forget what tends to happen with one's rating after the kids leave the nest. Read the book and find out!
Also, the most rapidly growing religious demographic group is the "Nones" (as in "None of the Above"). They are primarily young adults who had been raised fundamentalist/evangelical/conservative * but who have left the faith with many leaving religion altogether. Christian pollsters (eg, Barna Group) and ministries (including Mr. Hovind's) give figures of 65% to 80% of young people raised in the faith ending up leaving the faith. Hovind blamed public schools as being "hostile to religion" (he cited Jeremiah Films, which is anti-public school, for his 75% figure) and we see where college will lower RWA ratings, but it seems that there are far too many defections for college alone to account for. The Internet is probably a strong factor, given the free and easy access to information and to a wide variety of perspectives and experiences that it provides.
A lot of Altemeyer's book reports on tests he had done to seek correlations between high and low RWA ratings. So this is not just somebody making assertions to express his opinion, but rather {paraphrase}"Here's the test/survey and the sample population (eg, the parents of his students). Here are the results and here is how those results correlate to the subjects' RWA ratings."{/paraphrase}
Altemeyer also gets into the Social Dominance Orientation scale, which measures seizing power by any means possible. They and high RWAs are a match made in Hell: High SDOs want to rule and high RWAs want to be ruled. While high SDOs and high RWAs are different, there are those SDOs who also test high on the RWA scale. Those Double Highs are especially dangerous.
He also looks at how fundamentalists rate on the RWA scale (high, of course). And since the combination of high RWA and a sense of self-righteousness tends to lead to authoritarian aggression, that can be a problem. The chapter on religious authoritarians also discusses the problem of "cheap grace" (page 139) wherein you are saved even if you commit the most heinous crime possible, especially of you can rationalize that you did it for your god. Cheap grace is a huge problem among fundamentalists.
The final chapter discusses Stanley Milgram's infamous experiments testing how far a subject will go to endanger someone else's life under the direction of an authority figure. Milgram is profiled in the independent film on Netflix, Experimenter.
Again, this should be required reading.

* FOOTNOTE:
What do we call these people? Fundamentalist Christians, evangelicals, conservative Christians, Calvinists, an-entire-bag-of-related-theologies? I'm an outsider, so they all look the same to me. I know someone who is a member of such a sect and she takes extreme exception to being confused with one of those others with almost identically same theology except for one particular theological point that completely escapes everybody else. So then anything we call them will undoubtedly insult them -- eg, I just simply mentioned a Calvinist belief to a fundamentalist YEC and he went ape-shit ballistic at the very thought that he'd be associated with Calvinism.
It's like a Bertrand Russell quote I once read four decades ago (reconstructed here entirely from memory): "If you are a freethinker and a Catholic, then you become an atheist, since any deviance from Catholicism is heresy. If you are a freethinker and a Protestant, then you simply form a new church."
So what theology-neutral term can we use to refer to this large mixed bag of cats?
Edited by dwise1, : Changed subtitle

This message is a reply to:
 Message 2 by Phat, posted 11-20-2017 9:23 PM Phat has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 5 by Phat, posted 09-03-2018 5:43 AM dwise1 has not replied

  
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