Parochialism

Description

Jonathan Haidt:

"Burke and Smith are each offering a moral justification for parochialism—for caring more about those close to you than those far away. Burke and Smith doubted that people freed from local commitments and parochial identities would work as hard or care as much about distant others. Indeed, the repeated finding that conservatives in the United States give a larger percentage of their money and time to charity than do more cosmopolitan progressives seems to support their speculation. Most of the charity effect seems to be due to the greater religiosity of conservatives, rather than to conservative ideology per se; nonetheless, the fact that the active ingredient is involvement in local religious communities (whether right-leaning or left-leaning) seems to bear out Burke’s conjecture that “little platoons,” whatever their other effects, pull us out of ourselves and toward others."

(https://www.humansandnature.org/the-ethics-of-globalism-nationalism-and-patriotism)

Discussion

Jonathan Haidt:

"Globalists see nationalists as hopelessly parochial. The word “parochial” means, literally, concerned with matters of the local parish, rather than the larger world. But as it is commonly used, the word is an insult. OxfordDictionaries.com offers these synonyms: narrow-minded, illiberal, intolerant, conservative. Indeed, English voters who favored Brexit were often mocked as “Little Englanders”—racist xenophobes who wanted to raise the drawbridge and turn their backs on the world, even if that would lead to breaking up Great Britain by losing Scotland and Northern Ireland. I do not think that most nationalists, or most people who favored Brexit, can be fairly called “racist.” I think that term is thrown around far too casually and used too superficially to describe anyone who disagrees with globalist policies on immigration. It is true, however, that neo-Nazis and others who focus on preserving the genes, blood, or race of the host country, rather than its culture and values, are always nationalists, never globalists. There is an ugly fringe on the far right of most nationalist parties, and the Internet has let them become much more visible in recent years.

But this does not mean that parochialism itself is bad, and some philosophers who hold the constrained view of human nature have offered a principled defense of it. Burke, also in his Reflections, noted the moral benefits of local attachments and the moral depravity of those who shun them:

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage.

Burke noted that “turbulent, discontented men of quality” who are “puffed up with personal pride and arrogance, generally despise their own order.”

Adam Smith offered a similar argument that parochialism and local commitments more generally are good things because they cause people to apply themselves in ways that can do the most good:

- That wisdom which contrived the system of human affections . . . seems to have judged that the interest of the great society of mankind would be best promoted by directing the principal attention of each individual to that particular portion of it, which was most within the sphere both of his abilities and of his understanding.

(https://www.humansandnature.org/the-ethics-of-globalism-nationalism-and-patriotism)