Who's weirder?

Caledonian-Record, Nov. 18, 2024, p. 1.

In all the hand-wringing over the results of the recent election, I haven’t seen any comments yet on the voter’s answer to this all-important question posed by the campaign:

which Americans are the weird ones?

By pinning that label on the opposing party, Tim Walz got himself nominated for VP. Unfortunately for the Democrats, a majority of voters don’t seem to have agreed with him.

The weird question has also been the subtext of a debate raging this month in the letters-to-the-editor section of the local newspaper about a drag story hour planned for a library in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, just over the river from here.

Opponents of the event saw it as part of a broader conspiracy to undermine gender norms, the nuclear family, and Western civilization itself—to “break taboos” and “implant a measure of confusion in children,” according to one letter-writer.

On the other side, a defender of the event said protests against drag queens are a threat “to the core values and the very bedrock of our nation.”

According to reports of the event at the Atheneum last Saturday, opponents of drag stories were decisively outnumbered by supporters, but Vermont is a deep blue (deeply weird?) state that went 64% for Harris and Walz.

In the excitement this summer after the Democrats’ seeming resurrection, I thought Walz’s weird comment would help the Democrats. Upon reflection, though, it seems odd that the liberal party would position themselves in opposition to weirdness. As the pro-drag writer said, the “bedrock” principle at stake in supporting the Athenaeum event was “the freedom to be an individual.” Isn’t that the whole point of liberalism, after all?

Gender non-conformity is just one more offshoot of the liberal uber-project of tolerance of difference and the right to think and behave outside social norms—to be “very strange” or “bizarre” if you want to go by Webster’s take on weird.

Maybe a better way of understanding the nation’s answer to Tim Walz’s question is to consider a different definition. In 2010, a group of researchers led by Joseph Henrich, discovered that most of the findings of social science didn’t apply to the majority of humans on Earth. It turns out that the undergraduates psychologists and sociologists mostly used for their experiments are not typical people.

Henrich wasn’t making a value judgement, but just noting they are outside the norm and their values and behaviors can’t be used as examples of “human nature.” He coined the acronym WEIRD—Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. To some degree everyone in Europe and North America, is WEIRD compared to folks in less developed countries, but there’s a continuum—more education and urban living makes you WEIRDer.

WEIRDer people tend to be more individualistic, analytical, cosmopolitan, progressive, secular, and left brain oriented. Less WEIRD folks are more communal, holistic, rooted, traditional, religious, and better at right-brain thinking.

(I wrote about Henrich's 2020 book, "The WEIRDest People in the World.")

It’s tempting to think that with all that education, WEIRD people are smarter, but judging by the reactions to the election, one gap in their intelligence is the ability to understand the non-WEIRD.

If Democrats want to make a comeback, though, it’s crucial that they develop this right-brain capacity.

Democrats did really well with the eggheads who have advanced degrees—about 60 percent of the doctors, lawyers and college professors who make up the professional-managerial class who make up only 19% of the electorate. But they lost decisively among the majority of voters without a four-year college degree.

The future of the Democratic party will rest on their ability to win back some of those voters, the people who don't take their kids to drag queen story hours. But can they do it without abandoning the liberal value of tolerance and losing both their weird and WEIRD voters?

And in the longer run, what can educators like me, who teach some of the WEIRDest people on the planet, do to fill the empathy gap in their intelligence, which I’ve argued elsewhere on this blog is perhaps the most important element of good citizenship.