I’m pretty sure I wrote about this before, but maybe you missed it the first time:
You could be forgiven for not having browsed yet through the latest issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. If you care about politics, though, you’ll find a punchline therein that is pretty extraordinary.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences employs a rather unique practice called “Open Peer Commentary”: An article of major significance is published, a large number of fellow scholars comment on it, and then the original author responds to all of them. The approach has many virtues, one of which being that it lets you see where a community of scholars and thinkers stand with respect to a controversial or provocative scientific idea. And in the latest issue of the journal, this process reveals the following conclusion: A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.
That’s a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew about politics—upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic interests, and calling into question the notion that in politics, we can really change (most of us, anyway).
Propaganda is the device employed to sell ideas and emotions. Politicians are the purveyors of fear. The less educated function out of fear. The Republicans and some Democrats are quite happy to inject that fear into the body politic for a price. Neo-cons are masters at ginning up “fear of others.” And the oligarchy is willing to pay for the politicians who deliver that fear to the people. Because defense contracts and war profiteering are lucrative pursuits. Except to the war dead.
I’m a bit skeptical of the notion that it’s genetics.
When asked, I say that I’m a bit to the left of Bernie Sanders. I have an identical twin brother who seems to have bought into the whole Tea Party world view.
I’m going to pound the podium here because I’m a biologist and the way this sort of thing mushrooms in the mass media drives me crazy.
It’s been known for years that conservatives tend to have the physiological and neuroanatomical traits of the risk-averse. (Hello? They’re conservatives. What does the word mean?) And that liberals tend to be less risk averse.
That tells you exactly nothing about politics in real life. Human beings are the same in Sweden. Being conservative there means you think murderers should get 8 year prison terms instead of six. In Attila the Hun’s day, being conservative probably meant minding your hut and never opening your mouth.
Genetic predispositions are just that: predispositions. What we do with them out in the actual world still has a big — big! — component of what we choose to do with them. Of how we set up society to define what’s possible and what is not.
It is a *liberal idea* that people are malleable, and that among other things education can produce useful members of society including politically involed members; and that political systems can be devised which injure the least, suppress the least; offer the most opportunity. The idea that there is a fixed human nature, or a fixed population of human natures, and that politics must be a winner takes all game, such that that system which is best for all is if the best sort of people rule (as the winner is bound to anyway) over the others, is a profoundly conservative viewpoint.
The Middle East has a long, long history. That history has seen all manner of governmental systems. It seems that what they–the Iraqis, the Egyptians, the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Turkish, the Yemenis, the Jordanians, the Afghanis, etc.—-have settled on is a tribal system of governing. They like things done on a local level and they prefer a very weak central government. We, here in America, like a strong, unified central government. Trying to impose our brand of government on most people in this world is just plain stupid. Our support of the Zionists is also just plain stupid.