Had a thought last night about the need for a “culturally-relevant right.”
Today I’m noodling it more.
The context for this is the long podcast conversation Kale Zelden and I had last week about You Can See Everything. We were blessed to pull in over 16,000 views and 330 comments on YouTube (and counting). Our audience was engaged, interested, and thoughtful about this topic — one even the two of us were initially worried might come across as a bit obscure.
It was really encouraging.
I haven’t seen many conservatives outside our sphere talking about this film and what it means, other than those who are proud of their disinterest in or outright hostility to it.
As a group, we have this weird tendency to trip over our own feet to countersignal or even take pride in the ignorance of deeply culturally-relevant phenomena like this. The itch to avoid or even boycott anything that smells the slightest bit off, or doesn’t comport perfectly with priors about morality as it applies to art is so strong that it seems to have largely sidelined us as a group in terms of clocking the zeitgeist, let alone influencing where things go.
A lot of this could be explained by personality types. People who are high in openness on big 5 tests are highly correlated with political liberalism -- but also with intellectual curiosity, interest in out of the box thinking, and general social nonconformity.
It also maps to creativity, artistic expression, a fascination with abstract ideas, psychology and human behavior, and cultural curiosity.
I took the Big 5 test 6 years ago, when I was still deep in the tradosphere and caught up in a lot of personal baggage that was negative and screaming to be dealt with. I have a feeling my results would be noticeably different today, as they have been for some of my friends who’ve re-taken it after years of personal development.
But even back then, I scored a 71 out of 100 on openness, and I guarantee that number would be higher now. I felt the shackles come off my thinking in an almost tangible way in the interim. A letting go of the idea that I was only “allowed” to think about certain things in certain ways.
Nevertheless, for lack of a better category, I still identify as a conservative in most ways, and I wonder how many of us have the capacity to break out of tribal thinking and actually develop that relevance-awareness and interest.
It seems like something we could use more of if we want to stop being left behind.
I’m opening up the comments today to all subscribers, free or paid, if you care to discuss. I think it’s an interesting and important topic, and I’d like to hear your thoughts.
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We can just do stuff. Make. Build. Create. We dont need permission. John Donne wrote some of the greatest poetry ever written. He only read it aloud to other poets. Never tried to publish. 400 years later i was taught him at Yale. The Bronte sisters wrote like 500,000 words for each other before they tried to publish.
Create artists collectives. Then we can just do stuff
I scored 85% in trait openness, but also 80% in trait orderliness. Fascinatingly, I usually classify myself politically as a centrist, in those issues that have not been clearly defined by the Church.