"Naïve" is something like French for "childlike" and in this series where I ponder the unanswerable question: "what are people?" I'm employing the prefix in the sense of being a default psychological disposition.
Intro over, let's get into part one - Chauvinism.
Naïve Chauvinism
In the prefix sense, I know "naïve" mostly from its use in "naive dualism" dualism basically is the belief in the soul. Slightly longer is to say dualism is a belief that self and body are separate, hence you can watch those movies like 'Freaky Friday' with suspended disbelief.
Generally it takes education to become a monist, people don't really default to that.
"Chauvinism" I'm going to be guessing, most English speakers would know as the suffix from "Male Chauvinism" and often "Male" can be dropped and people can just refer to "Chauvinism" as a synonym for "sexism" like in the title of the book "Female Chauvinist Pigs" which is about the rise of sex/porn culture and women participating in their own oppression.
At this juncture, I should say, that I am not a pedant who believes dictionaries to be sacrosanct and that people can get language wrong. I think dictionaries do not define words but document usage, and that the standard of communication is understanding. So long as you are understood, frankly anything goes.
I just hope you understand that I don't mean that people are born sexist, though they may be. I mean people are born chauvinist in the older, and now less used sense of the word :
The unreasonable belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people.
So let's get into that.
Your Grandma's Chocolate Cake
There's likely a generational divide here. I know chocolate cake still exists, but it was probably also a fairly 20th century thing. Reality show Master Chef came out when I was an adult already, and here in Australia (and I presume everywhere) at the height of its popularity, it produced a spin-off "Masterchef Kids" which was my introduction to a new world where even children can be fucking pretentious.
So maybe, shortly after publication and for so long as the internet endures, you will be reading this being someone whose family tree is white as alabaster but for some fucking reason you took "bento boxes" to school with a dozen compartments of crap prepared anxiously by your mother who you just euthanised because the pressures to keep up status in an economy that transfers wealth from the young to the old increasingly has rewarded her agreeability with MS or ALS, and you don't know what I'm talking about when I say "you're grandma's Chocolate Cake" because Grandma's of your era don't bake chocolate cake they bake shoe pastry and temper chocolate to make sure you have a pistachio croquembouche for your birthday or something.
But, as recently as last century naive chauvinism could manifest by a widespread belief that your Grandma made the best chocolate cake in the world!
Naive chauvinism is no more complicated than that. Most of us, prefer to be us even though this is largely irrational.
A relationship will struggle, if you ask your mum for a recipe that is the epitome of comfort food for you and you serve it up to your partner and they are like 'it's not my favourite thing.'
If you travel, hosts will take you to some local spot and give you the local treat and if you are unlucky the local treat will be a) shit, b) offensive or worst of all, c) a pale comparison of something you find readily available at home.
To boot, naive chauvinism I feel is likely universal enough, that we all intuit that the polite thing to do is not disillusion others of their naive chauvinism. We eat the horse penis, the salmon sperm, the ox eye or the vegemite sandwich, smile and say 'mmmmm...' to their expectant faces.
Only actual children come home from a sleep over and share their confusion with their parents that "The Grosbys make grilled cheese sandwiches with Kraft singles in the microwave and they seemed to think it was a treat..."
George Carlin
-said "have you ever noticed when you're driving that anybody who goes faster than you is a maniac and anybody who drives slower than you doesn't know what they're doing?"
I'm asserting this phenomena is both real and can be described as an example of naive chauvinism. If you think about it, it makes sense, you have to pick a point on the speed continuum to prefer driving at, and because you can't be wrong about your preferences you go on to assume that your preference is universal.
After that, everyone who doesn't share your preference is explained away by some sort of cognitive deficiency, either gross incompetence - they want to drive at your speed they just lack the know how, or some form of reckless disregard for the sanctity of life - this person knows driving faster than you is too dangerous but they just don't care.
Carlin's insight was that this worked as a bit because it is true of everyone no matter how fast they drive.
Even I, a cyclist who rides a single speed and thus never caps 30km an hour, experience this psychological phenomena. I despise 'safety Petes' who are cyclists that wont run a red light even in the absence of all traffic and who ring their bells for everybody they pass on a shared path regardless of whether the path is obstructed by peds or not. But I also disapprove of those riders who bike salmon and ride out into a busy intersection expecting other cars to stop or who ride up to lights and position themselves in front of me even though the last set of lights determined empirically that I have the faster take-off, acceleration and top speed.
The thing is, if you asked me why I break the exact right amount of road laws that effect cyclists, I would be tempted to confabulate an answer. And there are reasons, like the laws I break have never resulted in a collision or accident or any other kind of penalty, whereas the laws I observe when I haven't observed them have gotten me at least a talking to by the police.
But in my sobriety I understand that just because I observe a rule (generally) that you only wear a bike helmet if you are touching a bicycle, it doesn't really bother me that much if a friend of mine dorks it up and puts their bike helmet on before they reach their bicycle.
I also wish I could wait for tram doors to shut before advancing up to the lights, instead of simply waiting for all the passengers to get on and off but I can't because tram drivers seem to have a habit/be instructed to leave their doors open until the light changes to green, after which they shut their doors and then slowly accelerate and if one fucking straggler runs up to the tram in a place like Melbourne's CBD you can potentially get stuck behind a fucking tram with open doors forever. So I just ignore the law and watch for people. Other people, including car drivers, don't stop and I'm sure they are both maniacs and don't know what they are doing.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Effect
Just upfront, I rate MBTI as just above Horoscopes. I'm not a big believer, though unlike horoscopes mapping personality traits arbitrarily onto people based on birth dates, MBTI contains personality traits that are in robust personality models like OCEAN or 'Big 5' like extroversion-introversion spectrum of ambiverts, and one of the 4 axis from memory maps pretty well onto some combination of openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism such that I would be surprised if people with MBTI 'high S' is somewhat predictive of low openness to experience etc.
But even if not scientifically robust, nor particularly predictive of anything useful like career or relationship success, the MBTI is out there, it is popular and as far as I know career guidance counsellors and recruiters may still employ it.
I think you could probably sub in as an exercise a "know your horoscope" activity, but in terms of naive chauvinism MBTI and also the more common and more useful 2 factor personality models (where you might be told you are a "Type A" or "Driver/Dominance" personality etc.) are a potential invitation out of naive chauvinism.
Think about it, you are sitting in a room of 40 people, and you learn that only a quarter of that room (or a sixteenth for MBTI) care about and value the same shit you do. What an opportunity for people on the job who are 'not there to make friends' and 'get results' to learn that many of their coworkers, don't give much of a shit about getting results at all especially if they and their friends hate the process of getting those results.
Simultaneously, an equal opportunity for somebody who cares about their coworkers weekends, relationships, children and pets to realise that they share a workspace with people that find such discussions tedious, boring, intrusive and annoying. That there's people outside the HR department that find 'mandatory fun' a gross infringement on their human rights and dignity.
But it has been my experience, that naive chauvinism overrides the empathic utility of such exercises, dubious or not. People more readily learn about their personality, than learn about the existence of personalities. The results come back for them as something akin to a disabled parking permit and a pro-forma rider for a rock star. They learn more about their own preferences and immediately begin explaining to others how to best accommodate them.
Remembering that chauvinism is "unreasonable belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people" similar to how Jane Elliot's Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes produces results that are way less powerful than what we might intuit; most people on balance can't imagine having preferences other than their own.
Helen Fisher a researcher into relationships that created a 2-factor model of relationship styles similar to MBTI but based on primary hormone drivers - dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins something else... relates assuming that some types would want to be 'cured' into another type and had the personal revelation that people's personalities tend to be aligned with what they already value and desire.
So there's two ways to react to discovering different people value and desire different things:
1. You take a chill pill, recognizing that there are many people and one planet and that life is going to be a series of negotiations.
2. You circle the wagons, inside the circle is "us" and outside the circle is "them", you remain sceptical that people actually desire and value different things, there's just people who "get it" and are good at it like you, and people who are dumb and ignorant and getting things wrong like "them" and realise that life is going to be a battle for your rightful dominance.
Why I think naive chauvinism is a thing, is that I have literally had a guy explain in excruciating detail, with diagrams his understanding of the theory of personality and how it effected his own life and what he learned from it, who rode his preferences roughshod over everyone and everything every time including in that very meeting where he explained personality to us.
Naive Chauvinism in the 21st Century
Our education system isn't that good. I suspect I am simply lucky to have come of age prior to Malcolm Gladwell's publication of "Outliers" which changed the paradigm from all-rounder to specialist.
I remember in my late 20s meeting a guy who played in indie bands and identified largely as a muso who didn't want anybody knowing that he was into footy (AFL) for fear of being shunned. Being only slightly older than him I was incredulous, having gone to a school where one was expected by parents to land the lead role in the high-school musical production and be a member of the rowing first's crew.
A few years later and I met an increasing number of people in the arts scene who used terms like 'sportsball' unironically (though I'm sure they were trying to be ironic) and reinforced this arbitrary divide.
A few more years and Brexit and Trump's first term happens and well, we've been living it so you and I know everybody went nuts. Crucially though, polarisation caused political identities to collapse onto a sounder foundation of naive chauvinism.
I had the privileged vantage of being a white heteronormative male to observe becoming homeless on the left. Despite prominent leftist media figures being white men like Jon Oliver and for new media David Pakman etc. but these tend to operate a kind of "turn-and-point" progressive identity politics, if you know what I mean, which you probably don't but its where you turn and point to another white guy and sort of say "hey everyone look, that's a white guy over there! Do better white guy!" so you can still be host of the show and it seems a sufficient fiction to quash any questions of diversity and representation being applied to you.
But if you weren't already at the top when the right thing to do was pull the ladder up, the subjective experience of naive chauvinism on the left was one where there just was no place for you in the promised neverland.
Historically marginalised groups went straight from being underrepresented, silenced and erased, to chauvinism. Tragically, many people on the left, faced with this surging chauvinism were not so much recruited by, as assigned to an increasingly chauvinistic conservative circle because few people can cope psychologically with being homeless tribe wise.
And now we see it, though if you've been indulging your naive chauvinism, algorithms may have assisted your blindness, in election results where people naively feel that anyone outside the chauvinistic political in-group can legitimately govern, so when the election outcome is announced no matter who wins or who is defeated roughly 50% of people who live in democracies around the world experience a kind of existential terror.
This is not to say that election results are arbitrary. Regarding the things that are broken everywhere like campaign financing, there is a degree of arbitrariness. With 2+ years now of weekly protests against the Israeli military offensive on the Palestinian Gaza strip (in which Palestine became recognized as a state by more nations) many people find in their own country no actual choice come voting time on foreign policy regarding Israel-Palestine foreign policy. But there's plenty of non-arbitrary meaningful differences.
Chris Rock once described George W Bush as "the first cable president" with previous US Presidents being I guess "network presidents" where even civil war president Abraham Lincoln, and post-war reconstruction presidents like Ulysses S Grant who accepted the surrender of General Lee, understood that they were the president in service to both the people who cast their vote for them, and all those that didn't, and even tried (and in Abe's case succeeded) to kill them. Bush, according to Chris Rock was basically like "Fuck everyone who doesn't watch Fox News" and while Bush was the first, I think we are observing now an even more extreme chauvinist administration as evidenced by where the national guard is deployed versus where crime is actually really bad.
Conclusion
Naive chauvinism is really really bad, because democracy is really quite good. Demonstrably so. It is so much better to live in a democracy and it is especially nice to not have constant civil wars.
In the 20th century, or pre-internet age, the benefits of democracy could be imposed upon us without us needing to understand what strapped all that democracy together.
It kind of worked with zero-understanding among the general public because without the internet and smart phones it was so much harder to book ourselves a one-way ticket to chauvinistic crazy town. Globalization was hard, so people bought local newspapers because news had to be printed and shipped daily.
Yes in the 1990s it was possible for Saddam Hussein to get all the major newspapers of the world delivered daily to Baghdad, Iraq, but most people in wealthy free democracies simply couldn't be fucked going the extra steps necessary to get a copy of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Asahi Shinbun and Neinkampf!
Then we built the confirmation-bias superexpressway and globalised the competition for media such that your local paper has to compete with all the resources of The New York Times and a much more dramatic and higher stakes political scene, as opposed to your local broadsheet's in-depth analysis on the debate in parliament about the proposed changes to the sheep tax.
Such that when I log onto my local broadsheet, it is full of clickbait headlines behind paywalls - global competition has dragged it to headlines like this: "Time and again, the men in my life fail me when it comes to this simple task" just shy of finishing with "You'll be shocked by what it is!"
Basically the attention economy is a petri-dish for growing the influence and impact of naive chauvinism and naive chauvinism basically makes bloody conflict inevitable because children create visions of the future that have no place for outsiders. If politics is beholden to naive chauvinism, then unless the superior values of the in group suit you - be that being a tradwife married to a white Christian nationalist husband, or passing as a pansexual to maintain your place in a polycule of fours, someone is going to resist.
It's not even the diminished rights of individuals, but the suppression of whole communities through sheer neglect, thanks to the personal incredulity of why anybody wouldn't want to live beachside wearing athleisure to the local cafe when it's just a 2 minute drive in your german SUV/anybody wouldn't want to live in a gentrifying former industrial slagheap where you can deliver your genderless short-adults to a Steiner school on a dutch e-bike via the reclaimed rail-trail where the community got together to replace the graffiti piece by "Cuntzcrew '98" of King Neptune as a pimp paying his Mermaid hos, with a mural of a genderbent Paolo Freire, where what was really working for democracy 20 years ago was that there was space for all these subcultures to do their own thing, while sharing a common media and the real issues between progressive suburbs vs materialist narcissist suburbs being wealth inequality was less bad than it is now.
Democracy is good, and it can only be sustained where the electoral cycle doesn't begin with telling the people who voted the other way that they can go fuck off and die.
You've probably heard the legend of the inventor of chess in India having the Sultan promise him anything he wants for inventing such a marvellous game and the dude is like "a grain of rice doubled for each square of the chessboard" and the Sultan is like "how modest" and claps his hands or whatever, and then the treasurer comes back and says that he calculated it and to fulfil the request would more than empty all the granaries in India? Well naive chauvinism is kind of the same maths but opposite - that priests poem about "first they came for the communists and I said nothing, then they came for the jews..."
In-groups are relative. No group can actually "win" which is why there's a general consensus that totalitarian regimes are inherently unstable. Intersectionality basically tells us this is the case. So if in a scenario of actual female chauvinism, Patriarchy was "smashed" and replaced with an equally chauvinistic matriarchy (as opposed to a new feminist egalitarian world), that victory would be cashed in for a further schism.
Often enough, narcissism of small-differences takes effect faster than chauvinist attacks on the outgroups.
So I'm just bringing a notional concept to your attention. I'm asserting that chauvinism a) has to be unlearned as a default, and b) is worth unlearning.
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