In Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us, author Avi Tuschman interprets political attitudes in terms of human evolutionary strategies. Conservatives have personalities that align with one set of strategies, and liberals have personalities that align with another. It is an intriguing analysis, but one to which I have a number of objections.
Tuschman’s thesis is that conservatism is fundamentally about marrying within the tribe (endogamy). Liberalism is fundamentally about exogamy.
In my own Three Languages book, I try not to demand and oversimplify ideological views. I talk about the three axes as languages that are used to achieve closure on issues and demonize those who disagree. However, I assume that people arrive at their views via reason.
Tuschman does not credit people with reason. However you rationalize your beliefs on immigration or gay marriage, if you are antagonistic it is because you are inclined toward endogamy and if you are favorable it is because you are inclined toward exogamy.
I have a hard time seeing GLAAD or La Raza, for instance, as being inclined toward exogamy because of their respective stances on gay marriage and immigration.
I misinterpreted your last paragraph. After reading your essay, I realized you were paraphrasing. Anyway, I agree 100% with your essay.
I’d wager you’ve never seen anyone more endogamous than a single young person in San Francisco faced with the notion of dating a Republican.
Humans like to rationalize their actions though there is less reason to them they prefer to believe. The oddity is interpreting this as a defect since both strategies can effective under different circumstances. All one can say is some circumstances favor one and others another and lead to differing results. It may put too much of culture on to genes and under estimate natural mixing, random variation, conscious adoption and mimicry, but is probably still valuable in putting it on an evolutionary basis.
Regarding a topic you address on in your review — “There is a pattern to the anecdotal illustrations that Tuschman uses. Somehow, conservatives always come across looking worse than liberals” — there’s a good debunking of the “conservatives vs. liberals” strain of research at http://radishmag.wordpress.com/2014/02/02/crazy-talk/
Deep-HBD alert: it’s not for everyone, and many readers will take offense (heck, I even took some offense), but the author makes some good points.
Yeah, I read that yesterday as well and found the end needlessly racist and offensive. Nonetheless, this part was amusing:
“People with strongly conservative views were three times more fearful than staunch liberals after the effects of gender, age, income and education were factored out….“Their research, published in the journal Science, indicates that people who are sensitive to fear or threat are likely to support a right wing agenda….”
“Having conservative leanings predicted stronger physiological reactions to the scary pictures, including a spider sitting on a person’s face, a bloodied face and a maggot-infested wound. People who leaned more politically left didn’t respond any differently to those images than they did to pictures of a bowl of fruit, a rabbit or a happy child.”
I don’t have a turntable on me so you’ll have to supply your own record scratch here: progressives “didn’t respond any differently”? Like… psychopaths?
The leftist perspective described by Mao imputes an egalitarian ideal to the solidarity between siblings and others against a dominant father… The desire of the far left to equally redistribute private property to “the people” recalls the socialized nature of childhood property among siblings. Conversely, the political right’s strong support for private property evokes respect for father’s possessions, which remain “off limits” to children.
This paragraph humanizes Mao, one of the world’s great murderers, while dismissing anyone who defends property rights as a rigid patriarch.
Hmm, maybe there is some context missing, but I read that paragraph and thought “distilling leftist egalitarianism down to a childhood fixation on which sibling got the bigger allowance, nicest toys at Christmas, etc, makes the whole school of thought sound very infantile and petty.” Could just be my right wing mental pathologies at work, though.
If he is right about the absence of reason and a “final cause” for man, any differences are morally irrelevant. That is, there is no “better” to be had between exogamy and endogamy, because “better” does not exist.
The intra tribe vs inter tribe dichotomy makes some sense, though please skip the political labels.
I’m skeptical that categorical political views make any sense within Natural Selection. Most obviously, individual behavioral variability is a significant trait that survived the harsh 100,000s of years over which we evolved; seen that way, the variability trait is realized today where an individual life has broadly apolitical, interventionist, and leave-me-alonist phases, with variable oscillations within each of those phases. That variability, not a single snap-shot in time is the real story.
Second, Tuschman’s logic doesn’t fit within Natural Selection. You’d have to believe that at some point (or several points) over the past 200,000 years one (or some) of my ancestors had non-tribal genes that mutated into tribal genes which then propagated into a sustainable pool of tribal genes that displaced the local pool of non-tribal genes. And these pools of genes have been competitively propagating since then.
It seems more likely that homo sapiens’ behavioral variability gene out produced other non-behavioral variability genes (probably carried by other hominids) and the diversity of individual personality traits are just irrelevant (to Natural Selection) expressions of that gene– spandrels if you will.
(I don’t actually know much on the topic, but there you have it)
This is a bit OT (and rambling), but I recently read (and enjoyed) your three languages book. However, although you seem perfectly capable of understanding libertarian and leftist arguments, and give examples of where their ‘axes’ might appropriate, you do not really do this for conservatism.
So I was thinking: where is the civilisation-barbarism axis appropriate? I was struggling for ideas, but then I realised: war. All too often leftists and libertarians treat war as something that should just be avoided, but don’t really engage with what should be done when it actually happens and we can’t get out of it. In this case, it strikes me that the conservative view is correct: you have to do what you can to cement power and win the war, and that’s all that matters. Considerations of coercion, oppression and so forth go out of the window, because they are essentially unaffordable luxuries.
Anyway, it’s just a thought. What do you reckon?
“Overall, the pattern is that for Tuschman, every evil of conservatives is essential, by which I mean that it follows directly from the conservative point of view. On the other hand, every evil of the left is accidental, meaning that it occurs in spite of what leftists believe.”
This is a quite brilliant observation Arnold – you’re now my official favourite blogger!
In fact, I’ve always found that this strand of reasoning runs throughout and within almost all reasonable, rational, thinking, “neutral”, leftist opinion.