Growing openness or creeping intolerance? Cultural taste orientations and tolerant social attitudes in Finland, 2007–2018

The paper aims to determine how cultural taste and social tolerance coincide and which symbolic boundaries they relate to. The empirical analyses scrutinise three taste orientations – omnivorousness, univorousness and ‘categorical tolerance’ (Lizardo & Skiles 2016) – to answer the following questions using two nationally representative surveys on cultural taste in Finland: (1) How did the cultural taste orientations change between 2007 and 2018 when considering musical like, dislike and ambivalence? (2) How do socio-political attitudes associate with cultural taste orientations and socio-economic factors, and can we observe change in these dynamics between 2007 and 2018? A longitudinal research design is used to explore whether there are changes in taste that tap to symbolic exclusion, inclusion or ambivalence. The results show that the omnivores and the univores are on many accounts situated on the opposite ends of the liberal-conservative axis. Their views deviate from each other, although the polarization in this sense has diminished in a decade. In addition to their wide-ranging taste and advantageous social position, we found the omnivores’ social attitudes to be very liberal, postmaterialist and more tolerant than the average. The absence of ambivalence among the univores suggests very rigid symbolic boundary-drawing by them. The social indistinctiveness of the categorical tolerants was quite visible, and it indeed increased over time. However, the categorical tolerants’ responses, particularly in 2018, were in most part inflated by their inability to neither agree nor disagree with the socio-political statements. Through a systematic analysis of various taste orientations over time, the study contributes to the understanding of cultural taste and symbolic boundaries by way of providing a gauge of the social, political and moral ambience in the society. The findings suggest growing tolerance in general, and decreasing polarization between the extreme taste orientations, omnivorism and univorism. However, the increased symbolic inclusion and ambivalence (of the categorical tolerants especially) are perhaps engendered by the features of modern social (media) reality, whose ubiquitous presence potentially affects how willingly people make judgements, whether social or cultural, and how much of personal values and tastes are communicated publicly in general.