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The Righteous Mind
Chapter Twelve - Can’t We All Disagree More Constructively?
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p275 ...[Our recent political] shift to a more righteous and tribal mentality was bad enough in the 1990s, a time of peace, prosperity, and balanced budgets. But nowadays, when the fiscal and political situations are so much worse, many Americans feel that they’re on a ship that’s sinking, and the crew is too busy fighting with each other to bother plugging the leaks.
p276 ...America’s hyperpartisanship is now a threat to the world.
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A Note About Political Diversity
...understanding the psychology of liberalism and conservatism is vital for understanding a problem that threatens the entire world.
From Genes To Moral Matrices
p277 Here’s a simple definition of ideology: “A set of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be achieved.” And here’s the most basic of all ideological questions: Preserve the present order, or change it? At the French Assembly of 1789, the delegates who favored preservation sat on the right side of the chamber, while those who favored change sat on the left. The terms right and left have stood for conservatism and liberalism ever since.
Political theorists since Marx had long assumed that people chose ideologies to further their self-interest. The rich and powerful want to preserve and conserve; the peasants and workers want to change things (or at least they would if their consciousness could be raised and they could see their self-interest properly, said the Marxists). But even though social class may once have been a good predictor of ideology, [when? The Roman populares were as wealthy as the conservative optimates, and the British Whigs were also liberals of the wealthy class.] that link has been largely broken in modern times, when the rich go both ways (industrialists mostly right, tech billionaires mostly left) and so do the poor (rural poor mostly right, urban poor mostly left). And when political scientists looked into it, they found that self-interest does a remarkably poor job of predicting political attitudes.
So for most of the late twentieth century, political scientists embraced blank-slate theories in which people soaked up the ideology of their parents or the TV programs they watched. Some... even said that most people were so confused about political issues that they had no real ideology at all.
[A study of twins, both identical and fraternal,]
p278 ...Whether you end up on the right or the left... turns out to be just as heritable as most other traits: genetics explains between a third and a a half of the variability among people on their political attitudes. Being raised in a liberal or conservative household accounts for much less.
I love it when I accidentally run into something that supports what I've previously argued for. Remember my going on (and on) about the effects liberal migration away from Prussia and Germany most likely had on Germany in the 19th and even the 20th centuries? If these attitudes are really genetic, how could that migration not have created a German population that was more neophobic and less neophilic?
...Innate does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience. The genes guide the construction of the brain in the uterus, but that’s only the first draft... The draft gets revised by childhood experiences. To understand the origins of ideology you have to take a developmental perspective, starting with the genes and ending with an adult voting for a particular candidate...
Step 1: Genes Make Brains
After analyzing the DNA of 13,000 Australians, scientists recently found several genes that differed between liberals and conservatives. Most of them related to neurotransmitter functioning, particularly glutamate and serotonin, both of which are involved in the brain’s response to threat and fear... many studies... [show] that conservatives react more strongly than liberals to signs of danger, including the threat of germs and contamination, and even low-level threats such as sudden blasts of white noise. [Think what would have happened if there was such a thing as "black" noise] Other studies have implicated genes related to receptors for the neurotransmitter dopamine, which has long been tied to sensation-seeking and openness to experience, which are among the best-established correlates of liberalism. As the Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne said: “The only things I find rewarding . . . are variety and the enjoyment of diversity.”
p279 ... A major review paper by political psychologist John Jost found a few other traits, but nearly all of them are conceptually related to threat sensitivity (e.g., conservatives react more strongly to reminders of death) or openness to experience (e.g., liberals have less need for order, structure, and closure).
Step 2: Traits Guide Children Along Different Paths
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p281 Things didn’t have to work out this way. [In his imaginary example.] On the day they were born, the sister was not predestined to vote for Obama; the brother was not guaranteed to become a Republican. But their different sets of genes gave them different first drafts of their minds, which led them down different paths, through different life experiences, and into different moral subcultures. By the time they reach adulthood they have become very different people...
Step 3: People Construct Life Narratives
p281 ...These narratives are not necessarily true stories -- they are simplified and selective reconstructions of the past, often connected to an idealized vision of the future. But even though life narratives are to some degree post hoc fabrications, they still influence people’s behavior, relationships, and mental health.
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[Keith Richards tells a traumatic tale from his school days that he believes made him the rebel he became.]
The Grand Narratives of Liberalism and Conservatism
[The narratives are long and I’m skipping them. In yet another study, Haidt determines that liberals are particularly bad at understanding the narratives of the right since they are blind to three of the foundations.]
I'm going to break here and make this a short post, for a change. We are about to get into something interesting that will generate (my) tangents. I want to keep this all as close together as possible. Also, the next post should be the last for The Righteous Mind.
But, since my book club meets tomorrow, I'm going to post this entire chapter now.
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