Skip to main content

The Science of Conservatism

By



This article is from last year but it popped up on my facebook page this morning.  Scientists have been trying to figure out if there is a biological imperative to conservatism and it seems they found one from the Pleistocene period 12,000 years ago.  Basically, it seems conservatism is a recessive gene that is a throwback to earlier years as hunters and gatherers.  It allows us to to sense danger and react quickly, which would help explain the gun cult that has arisen in America, if nothing else.

John Hibbing calls it a "negativity bias," which makes some persons more attuned to threatening or disgusting stimuli in their environment.  These persons respond more rapidly to aversive stimuli like spiders than apparently do more liberal respondents, who probably just say, "oh spider."  This experiment would definitely put me in the second group as I've learned to live with spiders and feel no threat at all.

However, my daughter is particularly adverse to spiders, so it seems this recessive gene is something we all are born with and over time become conditioned to be less scared of spiders.  Conservatives don't seem to fully overcome such fears.  Their reaction is probably to crush the spider where my reaction is to put a cup over it and slide a piece of paper under it and take it outside, where it can live in its more natural habitat.  But, spiders like the warmer climate of the house in winter just like humans, so inevitably they find their way back into her room again.

Hibbing did other experiments as well, tracking eye movements and other sensory movements to determine if there was a deeper pattern here.  What emerged is that conservatives tend to prefer a more primal form of society, which Julian Jaynes referred to as a bicameral mind.  This is a mind that likes clear distinctions, structure and order, normally associated with primitive societies that have a very clearly defined societal order.  These persons are driven largely by strong emotive responses such as disgust.  Typically, they don't like change.

Basically, we are talking about persons who retain a child-like view of the world.  More specifically toddlers who react with disgust to things they don't like and become defiant when you persist on making them try it, often sealing their mouths tightly shut, folding their arms across their chest and digging their heels into the ground.  Most of us tend to grow beyond this early, seemingly innate "negativity bias," but some apparently do not.  You can read that four-year old intractability in Donald Trump's face.

Consciousness was the big breakthrough, and Julian Jaynes believed it occurred around the time of the Greeks.  Not to say other civilizations didn't possess it, but it wasn't valued like it was during Greek times when ambiguity came to be more generally accepted and used to create a greater variety of arts, drama and political thought.  Bicameral societies tended to be totalitarian by comparison.

The Greek ideal is at the core of modern democratic society, but conservatives generally try to avoid the ambiguities, preferring a Manichean construct, which grew up about the same time as Christ and spread through the same region.  Manicheans were probably more complex than we give the credit for but their notion of moral dualism is much easier to come to terms with than is say the works of Aristophanes.

Conservatives generally have an us v. them view of the world, whereas liberals tend to have a more all-inclusive view.  In the conservative world, spiders elicit disgust whereas the liberal is more likely to see the spider in a more positive light.  For instance, E.B. White would have to be regarded as a liberal.

It seems Hibbing has hit on something, linking conservative thought back to our much earlier primal fears.  I don't think you necessarily have to be a scientist to figure this out, but it helps in trying to find genes that might attribute to this kind of behavior.  This may allow us to one day excise this gene once and for all, since it really no longer serves much purpose in our society except to hold us back.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more