Response to The Big Wide World

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Big Wide World)

While reading this, I was ready to jump in and remind those people who insist that all these recent Hispanic immigrants -- unlike those previous immigrants from Europe, the ones who inspired us to place the Statue of Liberty out in New York harbor -- are not learning to speak English, that in fact, experts say it's no more true about today's immigrants than it was about all those "tired" and "poor" immigrants from olden times -- that while the parents can't learn our language, the kids can, and they do, just as they did back then.

But John McWhorter beat me to it, with his excellent analysis, especially with this slam-dunk summation:

...humans aren’t as good at learning languages after their early teens. One will expect an accent, problems with idioms, little mistakes, and so on. However, their children will speak just like the rest of us.

But while his piece was excellent in most respects, I did find something to disagree with, that being his agreement with you, Alan, on what you said about Sarah Palin arguing that people should learn to speak "American", and just after that, her saying they need to learn "English":

She did correct her mistake. American isn’t a language. English is. She actually may see no difference, but she is easily confused...

Okay, but to be fair, it wasn't really a mistake in the first place.

Sarah Palin being a natural-born idiot, we'd love to fault her for this sort of thing, but I think that's really being too picky, since when we discuss immigrants needing to learn "English", we do mean "American English", we don't mean "British English". We could just as accurately say, "If you move to Mexico, you need to learn Mexican", since people in that country speak a different version of Spanish than is spoken in Chile, Cuba, or even in Spain.

And here's another something that Trump and his supporters should look up before they continue with that English language stuff, this from Andres Oppenheimer:

While older Hispanic immigrants may still not be fluent in English, almost eight in 10 of young Hispanics under 18 are fluent in both languages, according to the U.S. Census American Community Survey.

But the operative phrase here is "should look up", since the Trump contingent is united in its commonly-held aversion to taking seriously any truth that can be verified by "looking it up" somewhere. It's just a conservative trait.

But why get so hot and bothered about Spanish, rather than, say, Hebrew, the common tongue of present-day Jesus Land? McWhorter hints at the answer, yet doesn't quite nail it:

The issue is not merely that some people get itchy worrying that someone speaking a foreign language might be talking about them. Notice, almost no one says that about Indian immigrants speaking Bengali or Koreans talking among themselves. No, this worry seems to come up mainly when it is people speaking Spanish, and one can’t help detecting a reason. ... 

The conditions we are actually under include a degree of xenophobia against Latinos. “Speak American” is code for “Don’t be talking like those people.” Just as Barack Obama has to keep it quiet that he once spoke Indonesian to avoid seeming “Muslim,” Jeb Bush is supposed to hold off on the Spanish thing in public, regardless of his wife being a native Spanish speaker, to respect the hegemony of “American” in our great land – in what once was billed admiringly as an immigrant nation.

The hint is in that word "hegemony".

Nobody fears that Hebrew or Bengali, or even Quebecois, will replace English as the "American" language, but there are many on the far right who harbor a strange fear, exemplified in what some Anglo troll put into words, down in the comment section on this page:

KNOW THIS, Mexicans have full intentions of taking over North America via demographics and changing the language to Spanish. Gringos are just useful idiots who pay the way to their own demise. When USA has a Mexican majority make no mistake it will become like Mexico complete with a corrupt government, corrupt police, cartels, hacked up and headless bodies found everywhere, poverty, gangs, violence, overpopulation, low IQ uneducated masses. It will spell the end of USA as a 1st world nation. Gringos will pack up and leave which will speed up the transformation of USA to the 3rd world.

Another Anglo's comment just below that one, at that same site:

Many illegals were of the notion they would come here, become the majority, and our laws and culture in the USA would eventually become Mexican laws and culture.

(I think that guy is a bit confused, but you probably can still catch his drift.)

I heard someone ask recently, "Why do people like bullies so much?", and then added, "Answer that and American politics and foreign policy become clear." (Hint: that someone was you, Alan.)

Okay, I'll bite. The answer is that they don't just like bullies, the people who like Trump for saying this are bullies. They demonstrate it by backing him.

Second of all, "bullyism" (which I suppose could be an actual ideology on its own) seems to be a necessary and inherent element of conservatism.

It's not just seen in picking on Mexicans, but also in picking on people on government assistance and blacks and women and the unemployed and under-employed, and you see it in that Kentucky County Clerk, who goes out of her way to show that her belief in her own bully of a God trumps the rights of gay couples to get married. You also see it every time you hear some Republican candidate threatening to use America's military might to beat up on some country or other. Just like not believing in "looking things up", both being a bully and being impressed with bullies, is yet another conservative trait.

Okay, but that still doesn't answer the question of why some folks (which is to say, conservatives) are so impressed with the exercise of brute force, and the answer is, mostly because they were born that way! After all, we're pretty much born with our politics, or at least the propensity to be this rather than that.

I'm not embarrassed to admit that I looked that up, and the best explanation I found all starts with Thomas Jefferson. (Please forgive me if you've seen me cite this link in the past):

"The same political parties which now agitate the United States, have existed through all time," wrote Jefferson [to John Adams, in 1813.] "The terms of Whig and Tory belong to natural, as well as to civil history," he later added. "They denote the temper and constitution of mind of different individuals." 

Tories were the British conservatives of Jefferson's day, and Whigs were the British liberals. What Jefferson was saying, then, was that whether you call yourself a Whig or a Tory has as much to do with your psychology or disposition as it has to do with your ideas. At the same time, Jefferson was also suggesting that there's something pretty fundamental and basic about Whigs (liberals) and Tories (conservatives), such that the two basic political factions seem to appear again and again in the world, and have for "all time."

But it wasn't until centuries later that scientists, working in biology, psychology and politics, and using scientific tools such as eye-tracking devices and "skin conductance sensors", were able to quantify and identify the differences. One such scientist is John Hibbing, a political scientist who runs the "Political Physiology Laboratory" at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln:

"We know that liberals and conservatives are really deeply different on a variety of things," Hibbing explains ... "It runs from their tastes, to their cognitive patterns — how they think about things, what they pay attention to — to their physical reactions. We can measure their sympathetic nervous systems, which is the fight-or-flight system. And liberals and conservatives tend to respond very differently."

So the major difference between the two?

Fear!

Specifically, how one responds to fear, and other stimuli perceived as threatening, or even just negative!

For example, startle reflexes after hearing a loud noise were stronger in conservatives. And after being shown a variety of threatening images ("a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it," according to the study), conservatives also exhibited greater skin conductance — a moistening of the sweat glands that indicates arousal of the sympathetic nervous system, which manages the body's fight-or-flight response. 

It all adds up, according to Hibbing, to what he calls a "negativity bias" on the right. Conservatives, Hibbing's research suggests, go through the world more attentive to negative, threatening, and disgusting stimuli — and then they adopt tough, defensive, and aversive ideologies to match that perceived reality.

Yes, they also saw it in a sensitivity to "disgust".

In one study, Hibbing and his colleagues showed that a higher level of disgust sensitivity is predictive not only of political conservatism but also disapproval of gay marriage. It is important to underscore that your disgust sensitivity is involuntary; it is not something under your control. It is a primal, gut emotion. 

That word, "primal," helps us begin to understand what Hibbing and his colleagues now think ideology actually is. They think that humans have core preferences for how societies ought to be structured: Some of us are more hierarchical, as opposed to egalitarian; some of us prefer harsher punishments for rule breakers, whereas some of us would be more inclined to forgive; some of us find outsiders or out-groups intriguing and enticing, whereas others find them threatening. Hibbing and his team have even found that preferences on such matters appear to have a genetic basis. 

Thus, the idea seems to be that our physiology, who we are in our bodies, may lead us to experience the world in such a way that basic preferences about how to run society emerge naturally from more basic dispositions and habits of perception. So, if you have a negativity bias, and you focus more on the aversive and disgusting, then the world seems more threatening to you. And thus, policies like supporting a stronger military, or being tougher on immigration, might feel very natural.

So does this not explain the different approaches to, for example, what to do about Iranian nukes? Should we try to negotiate with our adversaries, or should we just wait for an opportunity to kick the shit out of them? And are those who prefer talking with Iran just being "naive" about the real threats that all right-thinking people see out there in the world?

But after all of that, the next question remains:

Despite the fact that there seem to be inborn differences between those on the right and on the left on how the world ought to be perceived, could it still be that one of them is right, while the other is wrong?