Although people do talk about taste as though we can order it from good to bad, it is hard to produce good reasons for those judgements.
Upon reflection they may concede that tastes boil down to prejudice. After all, is there something wrong with liking, or not liking, peanut butter? We do inherit different amounts of various taste buds so food tastes different to each of us but our food preferences – like our religion – are nevertheless usually those with which we were raised. Similarly, our preferences are conditioned by subcultures plus individual associations.
If we simply inherit our tastes via a combination of our genes and childhood culture, does that mean they are beyond comparative judgement? Politically correct opinion asserts it is prejudiced to say one culture is superior to another. That is a bit short-sighted. Variations in particular aspects of culture can obviously be superior to others.
For example, the Arabian number system we use today is a big improvement on the Roman number system; writing was an improvement on relying on memory; a system of error correction – in scientific method or legal procedure – improved human life immensely; lower levels of senseless cruelty in more humane cultures are better in that respect, and so on.
Therefore, in principle, we can make unprejudiced judgements on aspects of culture. We might say that a taste is smarter than another. But is it? The person’s preference may be objectively better than the alternatives, but he may prefer it simply because he was born into it and thinks “my culture is the best”. That is hardly intelligent. We need more solid evidence.
For example, we know men like action movies more than women and women like romance movies more than men. What we want to know is, do intelligent men and women like action or romance movies more or less than the average man or woman. At the same time, we need to rule out competing explanatory factors related to either intelligence or taste. For example, socio-economic class, education (indoctrination), gender, age or race.
Class is related to intelligence so if there is a relationship between intelligence and a cultural preference it could be due to class prejudice instead of intelligence. We need to rule out these possibilities. Fortunately, a statistical technique called multiple regression can do that if we have the right data. The American General Social Survey (GSS) has the right data for musical tastes.
Music preferences
Class, education, race, sex and generation each represent an obvious sub-culture with respect to music preferences. Who has not heard it said that classical music is pretentious, that show tunes are for women or gays, that blacks like rap and jazz and whites like country, or an old person say the music of today’s youth is just noise? I ran a multiple regression analysis on the degree of liking of several types of music using intelligence, years of education, class, race (white and black only), sex and age as independent predictors.
Well-known results, and the occasional surprise, popped out. Black people are more likely than whites to like blues, jazz, gospel, Latin, opera, rap and reggae. They were less likely to like bluegrass, country or folk music. (The opera preference was a surprise to me.)
Older people were more likely to like older, and dislike newer, genres than younger people. Women did like musicals, and dislike heavy metal, more than men. Classical music does live up to its pretentious reputation but surprisingly rap is an upper-class preference too. Educational differences in taste do track intelligence differences in taste but the effects of intelligence are still evident when I controlled for education.
Intelligence proved to be very strongly related to music tastes. Even after accounting for class, sex and so on, preferences for thirteen of the eighteen musical genres are still related to intelligence and the effect is about equal to that of all the other factors combined.
Clearly, differences in musical taste are partially due to differences in intelligence, and the connection is not explicable in terms of arbitrary connections between IQ and culture. Higher intelligence increases liking for classical, opera, blues, jazz, folk, big band, Latin, reggae and oldies rock music. It reduces liking for country, rap and gospel music.
Typically coincide
But what is it about the music that appeals to intelligence, and potentially points to ‘better’ cultures? One way to shed light on this is to look at musical tastes that typically coincide – in the sense that if you like one kind of music you are likely to like the others. If one preference correlates with intelligence and others do not, we can use that to isolate the intellectually relevant appeal of the music.
For example, the same people like or dislike rap, reggae, jazz and blues but reggae, jazz and blues are positively, and rap negatively, related to intelligence. We are interested in what reggae, jazz and blues have in common that is missing from rap. Similarly, we are interested in the differences in folk music on one side and country and gospel on the other, or oldies rock versus contemporary rock and heavy metal. The answers are not immediately apparent and the GSS does not have anything more to add. My speculation is that it has something to do with organised complexity, as does civilisation. Readers may have fun speculating.
I know that intelligence markedly influences preferences for various religious denominations, which are significant cultural entities, similarly. If we had data on other arts – paintings, architecture, clothing, car design, jewellery – we would find more evidence that preferences can be as a result of wise reflection.
We can say that there are real differences in value within aspects of American culture, but we cannot say it applies to all aspects of it. I would bet it does, though. It is a long shot to claim from this that we can rank whole cultures by ‘worth’.
Cultures usually evolve to help people adapt to their physical environment. In that sense no culture is more ‘evolved’ than another but suddenly put them all in a similar environment and they will not fit equally well. So, the term ‘better’ has no universal application. In truth it depends.
[Image: Jopopz Tallorin on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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