[Buddha-l] Political views of Buddhists

[Richard Hayes]

On Sunday 17 December 2006 00:25, Chris Stanford wrote about the notorious 
http:\\www.politicalcompass.org questionnaire:

> Richard, are you or anyone else in our community keeping tract of these
> test responses and 'cranking' any numbers or, at least, developing a plot?

The number of people who reported their scores: 29
		econ	 	social	
average	-5.49	-5.08		
median  	-6.25	-5.23	
stdev	3.01		2.33
max		1.38		1.49
min		-9.5		-8.56

If we look at the median scores, it would appear that people who reported are 
fairly far to the left economically (-6.25) and pretty strongly inclined 
toward libertarian social views (-5.23). Only a couple of people reported 
positive scores on the authoritarian scale, and the highest of them was a 
modest 1.49. Interestingly enough, the person who reported the most 
communistic economic score (-9.5) is a Caucasian Buddhist nun from 
California. (She put my miserable -8.63 to shame!)

None of these results surprise me for buddha-l readers. (After all, the last 
time we took a questionnaire together, most of us ended up getting rather 
high scores on the Unitarian index. (Do you recall that annoying website at 
http://beliefnet.com/story/76/story_7665_1.html where you answer 20 questions 
and discover with what percent of various religious persuasions you agree? 
That's how I discovered I am 100% in agreement with Unitarians, 95% in 
agreement with liberal Quakers, 89% in agreement with Theravada, 74% with 
Mahayana and hardly in any agreement at all with Orthodox Judaism, Islam, 
Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism.)

My guess is that on these social and political matters  buddha-l readers are 
not awfully typical of Buddhists in the world as a whole, but are probably 
fairly typical of Buddhist converts (and sympathizers) from Europe and North 
America. (I don't know enough about Buddhists from the antipodes or from 
South America to have any idea of how typical the buddha-l scores might be 
for them.)

Like many of you, I found many of the questions on the Political Compass 
questionnaire poorly worded and potentially misleading, and I had a difficult 
time answering several of them, but questionnaires always seem inadequate to 
me. I find most questionnaires just barely more useful than astrology, which 
I find slightly more than  100% useless and frivolous; I instantaneously 
refuse to include people who believe in astrology in the circle of all 
sentient beings toward whom I cultivate unconditional metta. That's probably 
because I'm an off-the-charts introvert and an unrepentant asshole.

Does anyone happen to know of a good website that has a Naricissism 
Personality Disorder Index questionnaire? My guess is that many of us on 
buddha-l would get pretty high scores on that one. In fact, I think a 
Westerner with a strong interest in Buddhism is almost a Disorderly 
Narcissist by definition.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes