Bigots
Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World
No, we don’t quite know what this map means either, but any geographical representation that manages to place Israel in the middle of “Catholic Europe”, puts India next to Poland and sets Jordan in “South Asia” together with the Philippines and next to Morocco is potentially of interest to us.
As far as we can tell, this is a graphical expression of part of the data contained in a huge international investigation called the “Human Beliefs and Values Survey” – see (here) – which was, ”...designed to provide a comprehensive measurement of all major areas of human concern, from religion to politics to economic and social life and two dimensions dominate the picture: (1) Traditional/ Secular-rational and (2) Survival/Self-expression values. These two dimensions explain more than 70 percent of the cross-national variance in a factor analysis of ten indicators-and each of these dimensions is strongly correlated with scores of other important orientations.”
Now you know at least as much as we do about the whole thing. What is of interest to us today is that data from this survey have now been used to generate something that the researchers Vani Borooah, of the University of Ulster (Northern Ireland) and John Mangan, of the University of Queensland (Australia) call the “Bigotry Gap Ratio.” Depending on how you read this – we have cleverly attached their paper (here) so you can see yourself – Italy would appear to be the “most bigoted” country in the West, closely followed by Greece and Northern Ireland.
Though the necessary data are available in the underlying survey, the authors of this paper preferred not to examine bigotry in non-western nations, perhaps on the theory that it does not exist elsewhere.
“Upper Italy” has gone over their study with some care and our considered technical/academic judgement is that it “sucks” – but it sucks in an interesting way, so we’re going to look at it here anyhow.
First, what are they measuring as “bigotry”? Though dictionaries generally define this as something like “intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself,” the key survey questions appear to be based on who you would least like to have as a new neighbor, where “a negative answer is taken to mean that the respondent is prejudiced.” The five groups you might or might not want to find asking to borrow a cup of sugar at your door are: “people from other races, immigrants or foreign workers, Muslims, Jews or homosexuals.”
Since this idea is in itself pretty simple-minded, the authors spend a great deal of effort creating an elaborate mathematical model to analyse the answers to questions that functionally, for the respondents, take the form of “Would you prefer to have as a new neighbor a Muslim terrorist, an Albanian pimp or a drag queen?”
Anyway, “The highest proportion of bigoted persons” (the “bigotry count ratio” – subtly different from the “bigotry gap ratio” previously cited) was in Northern Ireland, Greece and Italy – where, respectively, 44 and 43.2 and 37.6 percent of respondents did not want persons from at least one of the five groups as their neighbours – and “the lowest proportion of bigoted persons was in Sweden (13 percent), Iceland (18 percent), Canada (22 percent) and Denmark (22 percent).”
This is interesting. We aren’t actually very well informed about Northern Ireland or Greece; they are no doubt terrible places; but we do know a great deal about Italy. The country has many interesting flaws. In fact, to most observers it is tolerant to a degree that in much of the West would be considered a “flaw” in itself. Italy is nearly famous for its, ahm, “severely relaxed” public morals for one – see (here) – and these are mirrored in the considerable flexibility permitted in the private sphere as well.
What the Italians are not though is “politically correct.” To the degree they even understand what is meant by the term, that is something they leave to the politicians and priests, who even if they are not otherwise particularly competent at least relieve the nation itself of the need to personally practice the broader forms of hypocrisy.
“So, as a new neighbor, which would you most prefer? “People from other races, immigrants or foreign workers, Muslims, Jews or homosexuals?”
“Ah, not particularly thanks. I prefer the neighbors I’ve got, though there are some kids on the third floor who play loud music all night.”
When we look at the results of Messers Borooah’s and Mangan’s manipulation of their data – and most especially the finding that Sweden, Iceland, Canada and Denmark are the “least bigoted” countries in the West because they apparently don’t care who lives next door – we have to ask ourselves: Have these gentlemen in fact measured social intolerance? Their index would also appear to function quite nicely as a measure of political correctness in answering survey questions – and of course in writing about the results.