As an Australian, I've been inculcated with a strong anti-elitist streak and an automatic preference for the underdog and the iconoclast. I instinctively dislike anyone who "talks themselves up," avoiding self-promotion where possible in preference for self-deprecation (this results in a fairly strongly ingrained bias against Americans, who often seem to have a boisterous self-confidence that is like fingernails down a blackboard).

Slightly OT

If you enjoyed the Civil War and battles of Yore, you should try and get a BBC Television series called "Battlefield Britain". They do a good job of making the strategy come alive.

Heres a clip
200,000 Brits Vs 10,000 Romans

(Yes it spans a LOT of british history).

I wonder if there isn't a teacher-Puritan thing going on too -- teachers, whatever their backgrounds, tending to be bluestocking types (well-meaning, interfering thought police). So maybe there's a tendency for teachers to present material in a way that's biased towards their own bluestocking type, in fact to conceive of and present history as the story of the good people (ie., bluestocking-Puritans) against everyone else.

I tend to think of the puritans/roundheads as being Britain's equivalent of the Taliban.

Australian and immigrant but like Razib I end up rooting for the Roundheads against the Cavaliers, for the Protestants against the Catholics too. This despite being a raving atheist.

And all things Latin including Latin American strike me cold. I don't like the culture, can't identify with it at all. My mind tends to associate 'Latin cultures', 'Catholicism' and royalism together.

For me it's a dislike of hierarchy, pomp, bluebloods, aristocracy, excessive manneredness, perhaps also partly influenced by my Confucian family heritage which I tend to regard as having more commonalities re the worldly but puritanical streak and delayed gratification with Protestanism.

Many of my biases seem to come from "whose side of the story I read first" - now I can rationalize my bias in favor of Rome, at least in some conflicts, in terms of my views on civilization; but why on earth should I favor Alexander over his opponents? Yet, when I don't think about it, I do (And it is unconscious bias you are asking about.)

When I read David Howarth's The Voyage of the Armada: The Spanish Story, I still didn't, on any level, want the Spanish to win - but I could muster far more sympathy for them than before, and found myself wanting shipwrecked Spaniards to escape back to Spain (but then, I had never read the hunt for them from the English point of view).

In reading novels, at least in my younger days, I noticed I had a hard time disliking the first person whose point of view I had...so if the first chapter was dedicated to the villain, he just didn't seem that villainous to me for the rest of the book; and if the character I met on the first page was misjudging someone, I tended to pick up that misjudgment, too.

Rooting for the Protestants vs the Catholics isn't just a Yankee thing; I think most people raised in a tradition of individual liberty would cast the Catholic Church of the middle ages as the villain in the conflict, given its attempt to suppress opposing religions (Cathars, Hussites and so on).
On the other hand I would tend to side with the cavaliers against the roundheads. But then, I dislike the Puritans.
One other gut choice of interest: do you side with the Romans or the barbarians when you read about those conflicts? I always root against the Romans despite the fact that their rule was almost always a net benefit (see e.g. the increase of population in Britain following the Roman conquest).

Rooting for the roundheads is a very "salafi" thing to do. Perhaps your appreciation for the modernizing pseudo-originalist religious fundamentalists against the corrupt theologically-flexible traditionalist authority is a demonstration of your latent Islamist sympathies!

I find the English civil war much like the South African war -- both the avaricious British and the racist Boers are crap, but one side is marginally more crap than the other.

I do tend to side against collectivism and for individualism at the level of social structure and cultural convention, I'd rather ultimately not be a drone, nor my descendants.

I side against the romans too, they erased much of the ancien cultural diversity of their conquests, and now those lands are left lifeless and inflexible in an information age where cultural novelty is so much an asset, where things change so fast that a bigger toolbox of cultural mechanisms can really affect fitness.

I also have a strong underdog bias, completely irrational maybe, but it's there nonetheless.

And then there is omnipresent self-interest, even in the biased depiction of history one can benefit. I take sides if I can make gain, certainly! Although if I think somebody else has a self-interest bias in something, it trends me to shut out their arguments and take the opposite, unless they are somebody I trust.

erhaps your appreciation for the modernizing pseudo-originalist religious fundamentalists against the corrupt theologically-flexible traditionalist authority is a demonstration of your latent Islamist sympathies!


i have always said if i was christian i'd likely be a calvinist and if i was a muslim i'd be a salafi. those are the only religions which make "sense" to a genuine atheist because of their quasi-reflective biases.

"If I were Christian I'd likely be a Calvinist and if I were a Muslim i'd be a Salafi. Those are the only religions which make 'sense' to a genuine atheist because of their quasi-reflective biases."

Interesting...when I play that game, I usually end up with, "If I were Christian, I'd probably be a Quaker" - because (given the way Christians describe God), it would probably take a divine Revelation of some kind to convince me, and Quakerism emphasizes the importance of personal revelation (and doesn't require acceptance of particular arguments, or bits of Scripture, which I might then be argued out of). I know Fox taught that anyone could receive Revelation, so that I wouldn't be stuck having to credit someone else's, let alone follow the idea that some other human had "authority" to tell me what God wanted.

I don't know of any substrain of Islam (even among the Sufis) that quite meets this (though I would be grateful to learn if there is one). I understand that, to most, if I said God or His Angels were talking to me directly, I'd be calling myself a prophet after Mohammed and would be a blasphemer.

I'm biased in favor of democracies everywhere against dictatorships. It always surprises me that most people (even Americans) don't seem to share my bias.

democracies everywhere against dictatorships

there are more than two categories.

there are more than two categories

Not many monarchies left (that aren't de facto democracies). I don't like them much either.

Not many monarchies left (that aren't de facto democracies). I don't like them much either.

theocracy, oligarchy, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, republican democracy, federal republics, etc. various syntheses and flavors. these aren't all pure semantics. very few polities are pure democracies or pure dictatorships.

Mesk,

We're not all like that...you all got robbed vs. Italy in the World Cup on that bogus penalty, too. I was rooting for the underdogs!

Signed, self-deprecating American (even though we do sort of rock)

What you say resonates - I have the same whig biases, due in some part to a year spent in the UK as a small child in 1982. This was my first exposure to history - I remember reading several illustrated booklets each devoted to British national heroes (Drake, Clive, Wolfe, Nelson, Wellington, Nightingale, etc. - I don't remember if there was one on Cromwell - maybe they only included those who fought foreigners). Anyway the literature, or my interpretation of it, was British nationalist and anti-Catholic. The sinking of the General Belgrano that year seemed of a piece with the Spanish Armada.

Oddly enough I also have a pro-French bias - I suppose I prefer Protestantism over Catholicism, but Secularism over both!

There's a not incorrect assumption that the west is the best, and that within the west the Anglo-American strand is superior, and that therefore all of Anglo-American history happened for the best, and that we should root for the winners.

On a related note, an interesting post in Crooked Timber that manages to see a silver lining even in Irish History.

Oxygen,

Heh, thanks - for a country that was never previously interested in football, that penalty seems to have left a bizarrely large scar on the national psyche.

Someone had to mention this:

1066 and All That describes the English Civil War as

the utterly memorable war between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive).

Charles I was a Cavalier King and therefore had a small pointed beard, long flowing curls, and a large, flat, flowing hat and *gay attire*. The Roundheads, on the other hand, were clean-shaven and wore tall, conical hats, and *sombre garments*. Under these circumstances a Civil War was inevitable.

I've long been something of an Anglophile, regarding the dominant culture of England and the American colonies (especially the northern compared to southern ones, as documented by Thomas Sowell) to be superior to others. I'm a Minnesotan raised as a conservative Protestant (though I was baptized Catholic), so that might be one reason. It also just seemed apparent to me that the English way WORKED. Why support ideas or ways of life that get beat by the English, whether in war or economically? The immigration of non-Westerners to Western countries (especially the US) really cements in my mind the superiority of those countries. I've moved a bit away from that due to my exposure to mises.org and lewrockwell.com. I don't agree with Hans Herman Hoppe on the superiority of monarchy in preserving liberty (and especially not that democracy is worse than any other form of government). I still prefer the English and Northern US way, but I don't approve as much of the English behavior toward the Scottish and Irish (or the Catholic minority in England) or the invasion of the South by the North, and I've also moved away from considering the Allied Powers in World War 1 to be the "Good Guys" while the Central Powers were the "Bad Guys". Superiority of one culture just doesn't seem to justify imposing it on or warring with others to me.

theocracy, oligarchy, authoritarianism, totalitarianism... these aren't all pure semantics.

Not saying its semantics, but I class them all under the sub-heading of dictatorship. But it's true, some dictatorships are much worse than others. Some managed to transition (relatively) peacefully into democracies. Those are the best.

But it's true, some dictatorships are much worse than others.

some would say the same of some democracies, after all, the mob can dictate as well as the king.

"And all things Latin including Latin American strike me cold. I don't like the culture, can't identify with it at all. My mind tends to associate 'Latin cultures', 'Catholicism' and royalism together."

Interesting and perhaps true, at least for past few hundred years. The aristocracy has always been supported by the Catholic Church. In Latin American, clergy, even Cardinals and Bishops, have been murdered (usually never truly solved) if they came out on behalf of the "common people."
However, the Church's history, architecture, music and art, has had its attractions for denizens of Protestant domains.

If you read biographies or social commentary history about or from the 19th and early 20th centuries, there is a sort of bias--in spite of everything--towards the "romantic" cavaliers, on the part of a great many Protestant readers. Don't underestimate the role of "romanticism" in molding social history.
The first famous Siamese twins came to America from, where else, Siam, and did the circus circuit, then ditched show business for farming, and married two white American Protestant sisters in North Carolina. They produced a bunch of kids during the 1840s-1860s and appear to have lived remarkably normally considering the siutation. When a couple of their offspring visited Great Britain during young adulthood, the girls recorded going to the mountain where Mary Queen of Scots' infant son, future James I or II (forget which) was lowered in a basket over the cliff, for his escape/abduction to France. This site of pilgrimage appears to have been an emotional moment for these American Protestant Siamese Scottish Confederate North Carolingian girls.
The Stuarts were figures of tragedy and glamor, and for several centuries, girls all over Europe would imagine themselves Stuart princesses, romantic and tragic. Adolescent agnst manifested with more class in those days, at least if you read books.
btw, ex-Princess of Wales Diana was a Stuart descendent, and had Catholic leanings, yet another reason she less than popular among certain members the Windsor family.

I am also something of an Anglophile when it comes to culture and in particular governmental institutions. However, I favor practical law and order over perfect idealism, so I find myself rooting the most for Singapore.

This latter preference is strong enough that I don't actually think Saddam Hussein was _that_ bad of a guy. I still supported the principle of having a second Iraq war, but only for game-theoretic reasons.

If you want to find what unconcious bias we all share, read something from really long ago. The early 19th century is long enough. Read social commentry from say... Captain Maryatt: It contains some basic assumptions that just stagger a modern reader, particularly as he sounds so normal otherwise.

I'm freaking out imagining a 19th Century Siamese twin/American Protestant sister foursome.

Maybe that's my unconscious Anglo-Puritan bias - just the thought of it freaks me out.

Count in the minority here. I've got a Latin last name, and if you count Filipino as a type of Latin, I'm almost 1/2 Latin. I like to drink, sing and dance, wear flashy clothes, have a hot and violent temper, fatalistic outlook on life, am fascinated by old school Catholicism, etc.

Of course some of this is genetic, no doubt, but I doubt the predisposition towards Port Wine, Fado, and red silk is genetic in orientation.

On a serious note, my upbringing in Hawaii has given me a nurture based clannishness and xenophobia. I reflexively don't trust those who aren't raised here and tend to automatically discount or be offended by their outsider opinion.This tendancy became hardened when I lived in the mainland for a bit and felt a huge amount of culture shock when I got screwed over and over again because I didn't have the right method of sussing out and dealing with jerks. Now, even though I work in an environment where my colleages are mostly recent transplants from the mainland, when they talk about how some local gave them trouble, I tend to side with the local, even if the local tends to be the sort of person that repulses me. "He's a bastard, but he's from here."

My family origins and attitudes are sober Scots and contentious Irish, but somehow when I came to the Blackfeet reservation in Montana in 1961, I felt as though I'd come home. I don't know why. Something to do with relationship to the land and the self- organization of people into affinity groups of about a hundred. I had little sympathy for the white people (conformity and prosperity focussed), though they were good to me. My ex-husband (Scots and German) felt the same way I did, though he was twice my age and had grown up there. He was a bit more of a Royalist than I was, but in opposite ways. He cared nothing for luxury but wanted status. I wanted luxury (books) but didn't much care about status. We both resisted as hard as we could if anyone tried to tell us what to do -- even each other.

Prairie Mary

Omer K, that is a great clip, thanks for that.

Anyway, in my defence, I'm Australian of largely Protestant Scots (not sure how sober) and Irish descent, heaps of childhood 'nurturing' that the Catholics are the bad guys etc, plus no doubt the usual 'racial' biases that get dumped on most kids, but my Chinese Catholic wife and I are still married after 27 years, so it looks like I've been able to de-nurture myself reasonably successfully.

I have the same inculcations as Mesk - strong anti-elitist bias and usually side with the underdog, but they don't seem like bad traits, so I kept them. Which means I hope Rafa Nadal (well known Latin) will win the Australian Open, but I don't want to start an argument about it.

Scots 'sober'? No no no. Check out the alcohol-fuelled violent crime stats in Scotland, most violent country in the developed world.

The scotch-irish who make up a goodly portion of my kin are, as a group, widely and some say rightly scorned by the waspy jewsy ivy-educated sets hold sway over much of the northeast corador (sp?). We are seen as dumb, ignorant, gross in our habits, and morally obtuse to the point of being haters of those who are not like us. Every charicature has its kernel of truth I suppose, but sometimes it is the ones looking down on us who present the more interesting portrait in human foibles. There are precious few racists and practically no anti-Semitew in the south anymore, and havent been for two generations now. This cannot be said of those blue state bastions of self-claimed enlightenment, who found immense humor in Borax's exposing all those common, vulgar Alabamians trying to show some hospitality and toleration towards their despisers disguised as yokels from another land. And the northern audiences just ate it up, the way that clever Jew from Cambridge was able to flummux and expose all them middlemericans for what deep down he, you, we, always knew they were. Yes, ignorance and pride run deep, and on both sides of the isle.

"I'm freaking out imagining a 19th Century Siamese twin/American Protestant sister foursome"

Truth is stranger than fiction any day. http://phreeque.tripod.com/chang.../ chang_eng.html
There are biographies written about Chang and Eng Bunker (they took the family name of the two sisters they married) and their families. They did settle in the South, had Confederate sympthies during the Civil War (they owned slaves); they had two houses and 22 or 21 children. One of their descendants appears on "Antiques Roadshow" recently, showing a chair used by the twins.

The story of the English Civil war is much more interesting than our own modern biases and identifications as English, Australian, American Scottish, etc. Neither side thought of themselves as tribunes of the plebs, or rooting for underdogs, except perhaps for the radical Diggers, a marginal group, and the English establishment and landed gentry was split down the middle. For most of the war the Royalists were in fact the underdogs, confined to the north and west and excluded from London and the populous south-east, and they eventually and inevitably lost. If I has been alive at the time, and free to choose sides - a doubtful privilege - I would probably have been a Parliamentarian, but I certainly wouldn't have got on with a lot of people on my side.

and the English establishment and landed gentry was split down the middle.

doesn't this simplify a bit? the gentry were split, but the titled nobility certainly leaned toward the cavaliers. the urban 'middle class' was certainly for the roundheads.

Luke Lea, I'm sure the Inductivist would be happy to confirm your suspicions if you asked him. Or he might dispel them, in which case confirmation bias might indicate that you should do no such thing.

"Chang and Eng Bunker (they took the family name of the two sisters they married) and their families."

correction: Bunker was the name of a man who befriended them, Fred Bunker. Yates was the family name of the two sisters.

Even the Levellers only gave franchise down to the level of self-employed skilled craftsmen. Landless laborers and the urban proletariat were still excluded.

Well my own ethnic background is a combination of New England derived stock (which really isn’t all or - surprise, surprise even mostly - Puritan religious by any means but is largely ultimately from East Anglia and environs), and some Scots and some southern Cavaliers. Probably some Midlands as well. However culturally my parents were both distinctly and devotedly New Englanders, even though my mother grew up in Colorado and my father (before college at Harvard) in Texas. (This although not the norm was also not so uncommon in those locales.) Both of their parents were also devotes of New England cultural values and virtues, and I’m told their grandparents as well. (But I do have some relatives who fought on the Southern side in the US Civil War and that side goes back to Francis Marion – the “Swamp Fox” guerilla fighter of the Revolution.)

My prejudices in areas you talked about Razib are pretty much the same as yours.

Unlike many commenters I do nearly always side with the Romans – as well as with the Greeks. I don’t always side with underdogs. It seems to me often underdogs deserve to be underdogs (and often they don’t). I tend to side with high civilization measured by achievements in science, engineering and arts, as compared to “barbarians”. I agree generally with Thomas Sowell’s conclusion that imperial domination by Rome and others was usually a net positive. I’m highly skeptical of “noble savage” portrayals and assumptions, and have found them to be false anytime I’ve looked for details.

In general the more a society promotes and achieves high scientific and artistic achievement, and the more it allows or encourages it’s most talented to rise from whatever social or ethnic stratum the more I like it. That’s definitely distinct from any attempt at leveling, or from endlessly attempting to raise the educational levels of the least promising even a little, while relatively neglecting many with far more talent.

In addition to a fondness for Britain, I also have developed one for Holland. To some extent the Holland of today, and definitely the Netherlands of it’s golden age throughout the 17th century. There was a place of enormous opportunity, economic dynamism (at least as much the birthplace of modern capitalism as Britain), pragmatism, tolerance, and possibilities for the talented to rapidly rise.

Before that Brussels (aka Flanders) was where it was at. (Well northern Italy as well but everyone knows about that.) Actually, when the Spanish Hapsburgs started to clamp down on their freewheeling northern possessions many of the capitalist urban talented of Flanders moved to the more northern (and wetter) territory of Holland, which were harder for the Hapsburgs to effectively control. Lots of Jews among this migrating group, but certainly not dominated by them.

I should also say that I grew up in N. Westchester, N. of NYC. The place basically thought of itself as part of Connecticut - New England. Looked like it too.

dougjnn,
I have a family line from Connecticut Yankee stock also, which I just recently discovered. They came to the New Haven area, circa 1635 and include Harriett Beecher Stowe, and her charismatic, evangelical father and siblings, among their descendents. Many came from the Rinstead area of England. Have no idea where that is.
The easy thing about researching New England roots is that they were fastidious record keepers from the very beginning, and unlike the South, had no wars fought on their soil. Therefore, no records were burned. In research southern roots, you often have to depend on Church records.

Also, literacy was general in New Englnad. Well, women were taught to read but not to write, which doesn't make sense to me since I taught myself how to write before I was in the first grade. But apparently it can happen that one can read and not write.

correction: "Many came from the RinGstead area of England."
and
"In researchING southern roots"

"they spent alternating nights with their wives in their own houses and together fathered 22 children"

Sounds like I have been fretting needlessly about the 'foursome'. Now I'm worried about an alternating threesome.

The Romans were great engineers and administrators but they took their science from the Greeks. Not great innovators, but excellent in practical application. They didn't even invent crucifixion. They started out as underdogs of course, then kicked some Carthaginian butt. Yeah, I don't buy the 'noble savage' concept too much either, it is usually based on false notions. I don't see anything wrong with trying to raise everyone's educational level, not trying to would worry me sick, as long as the system enables high achievers to excel.

And while we're on the subject, the Normans were the good guys, the Anglo-Saxons were a bunch of drunks, and Robin Hood was a black hearted scoundrel.

Razib,

(1) What is the recently-comprehended "true nature of the 'Lost Cause'" that makes you think that the U.S. civil war was morally ambiguous? From what point of view is perpetuating and spreading race slavery justifiable?

(2) Have you ever asked: What kind of constitutional solution might have allowed Cromwell to avoid becoming a tryant? The Cavaliers had a definite political model - Divine Right of Kings. The Puritans had only a Utopian goal of putting England somehow under God's rule.