Quadrant
I took the Michael Adams survey (thanks, Dave, for blogging about this). Somewhat to my surprise, my green dot came up autonomous-idealist. I ain't complaining: it's the most appealing of the four quadrants. Top right's a bit dull, top left paranoid, bottom left shallow. Who wouldn't prefer to call themselves flexible, open-minded and idealistic?
The survey got me thinking about the relationship between values and beliefs. Values are general and abstract; beliefs tend to be specific, concrete and bounded. The value of "progress", for instance, can cover some wildly divergent beliefs. Three Gorges Dam, neocon blueprint for the Middle East, peaceful transformation of capitalism -- take your pick.
Intuitively, I'd guess autonomous-idealists tend to be left-leaning. Yet I have acquaintances who clearly belong in Adams' lower-right quadrant, but whose political convictions are stubbornly, contrarily and idealistically conservative. My closest friend in college, a Kentuckyan named Julie, shared my values but not my politics. It was startling -- we clicked so well, disposition-wise, that I was sure the differences of ideology must have been due to a misunderstanding.
They weren't. Her dad was a businessman, a boll weevil Democrat-turned-Republican; she loved her dad. My social-democrat leanings were likewise inherited from my family. I gagged during Reagan speeches; she'd get misty-eyed. Over the years, the political divide blighted our friendship.
It's as though we form values first, as a product of sensibility and personality, and then sort among the information we receive in order to find representations of those values. And what guides the selection process? Received wisdom, maybe. Hand-me down knowledge from parents, peer groups. School, church, people we respect and place trust in.
What I'm trying to say, I guess, is that "values" tend to be too broad to have a political meaning. It's possible for autonomous-idealists to be liberal leftists, devout Catholics, war liberals, militarists, even Limbaugh ditto-heads, depending on what a given person defines as an ideal and as authority to measure one's autonomy against.
Lost in the quadrant...
