Will Wilkinson has a post up, The Caveman Roots of Liberal Democracy?, which riffed off some opinions in regards to the swing back toward “primal” values which I perceive to be the norm in modern liberal societies. Some of the comments on Will’s post objected to my contention that political orientation is heritable. First, I do not believe that liberalism or conservatism, as we understand it today in the United States, was selected for in the past. Rather, there are personality traits which seem to predispose one to being inclined toward liberal or conservative politics. For example, there is a strong correlation between “Openness to experience” and political liberalism. Depending on the personality traits in question one can expect heritabilities in the range of 0.2 to 0.8, with a rough working rule of thumb of 0.5. By heritability I simply refer to the amount of variation in the population that can be attributed to variation in genes.
So when I suggest that someone has different likelihoods of being liberal, I do not mean in any absolute sense where liberalism and conservatism are fixed. Rather, I mean in terms of disposition so that a liberal is one who is more open to change and disruption of established norms and values. In the 3rd century Europeans who converted to Christianity away from the pagan customs of their kith and kith would probably have a different personality profile than those who remained pagan. Today I suspect that Europeans who leave the Christian religion have a similar personality profile to those 3rd century Christians, as what is “new” and “novel” has changed. Conservative and liberal dispositions exist against a contemporary population reference.
Also, there was some objection to the idea of liberal and conservative insofar as are historically embedded terms. That is, the Left and Right only making sense after the French Revolution. I think at the end of the day this is semantics, and I am willing to substitute a new word for “liberal” and “conservative” dispositions if that will satisfy political philosophy nerds. Classicists are wont to note that identifying the Populares with the Left and the Optimates with the Right is bound to confuse more than clarify, as ancient polities did not have the same concerns and tensions as modern ones. Fair enough, but I think one can see a dispositional difference insofar as the Optimates were ostensibly defending proximate injustice with the ultimate aim of preserving the customs & traditions of the Republic which had within them embedded latent functions.
Finally on my point that history does not always move in one direction, it seems to me that collapse of the idea of absolute monarchy in the 18th century was simply a reversion to the more consensual politics dominant in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Barbarian northern Europe had for example a strong tradition of elective monarchy, and the power of local magnates in the face of almost ceremonial monarchs is well known. The English Civil War, or the chaos around the Fronde can be seen as conflicts which pitted the conservative decentralists against the forward thinking absolutists (by 1700 these two conflicts had set the stage for a radically different status quos which shaped the character of political discourse in France and England during the Enlightenment). Of course the terminology can confuse, and a thick knowledge of local historical conditions are necessary to understand in which direction history was moving.
I am not sure what you are trying to say about heritability here. The Wikipedia link you gave for “openness to experience” notes the following:
In other words, this looks in practice to be a socially determined trait, which is what I would expect if the mean value for heritability is 0.5 (leaving aside all the other reservations about twin studies). In any case, the relationship of such a trait (if it is real at all) to actual political disposition (liberal vs conservative) is surely a fairly complex matter.
In other words, this looks in practice to be a socially determined trait, which is what I would expect if the mean value for heritability is 0.5
not even wrong. so yes, your first sentence is correct.
anyone confused can this post. if my point isn’t clear after that, then so be it.
I wonder if Mr. Hume is perhaps expressing his genetic predisposition to seek explanations for all human behavior in terms of evolutionary psychology; after all, we must be quite incapable of acting as rational agents. So that when Ms. Mac Donald, for instance, said that “You have to think your way out of liberalism,” she was actually just giving phenotypic expression to her previously latent conservative genes. Got it!
The above link should point to this page: http://www.lukeford.net/profiles/profiles/heather_macdonald.htm.
Mike I, your comment is stupid. in any case, my arguments here are predicated on behavior genetics, not evolutionary psychology. but since you’re likely stupid that’s probably an irrelevant clarification.
and to make it clear for readers why i said johnc was not even wrong:
this looks in practice to be a socially determined trait, which is what I would expect if the mean value for heritability is 0.5
a trait can be 95% heritable with almost all of the between group trait variance being due to environment. i recommend the wikipedia entry for heritability to make sense of what i just said if it is confusing to you.
@David Hume Okay, this is what I really think 🙂
Behavioral genetics is bunk. Not because there are not genetic components to human behavior and personality (clearly there are), but because without some huge progress in neurophysiology and its precise genetic basis, we do not know what we are supposed to be measuring and have no way of controlling for the social matrix except by post hoc and logically circular statistical procedures. This applies not only to psychometric attributes (IQ and CANOE), but also things like sexuality and voter turnout.
This is a big topic, too big for one post, but I’m happy to munch on pieces of it if others are interested in the discussion.
I couldn’t find a good World Values Survey question, but I wonder if an orientation toward holding onto norms/customs is not particularly common among Americans (a real conservative tradition seems pretty thin), and if so, is that due to the fact that immigrants are a select group who are more open to experience.
we do not know what we are supposed to be measuring and have no way of controlling for the social matrix except by post hoc and logically circular statistical procedures. This applies not only to psychometric attributes (IQ and CANOE), but also things like sexuality and voter turnout.
no shit. at which point i assume that you reject all of social science? basically there’s physics, chemistry, biology and lab psychology, and then there’s the literary humanities in your universe? i think this is an intellectually coherent position to hold, though i don’t myself, but most people who reject behavior genetics don’t seem to hold to it. they refer to all sorts of findings from economics and sociology which have to make recourse to statistical techniques. although to be fair, different forms of in vitro fertilization offer up rather interesting ‘natural experiments.’
but because without some huge progress in neurophysiology and its precise genetic basis
what do you think of the dopamine related behavior genetic & economic studies out of curiosity? i know a lot of people are skeptical, but this is going to go further in the near future with association studies.
Shouldn’t we take into account the degree of state coercion when considering “openness to change”. Indeed the countries that “welcome radical change” such as France or China often experienced radical change in circumstances where speaking against it brought severe penalties (suc as during the French Revolution, or the Cultural Revolution). Could conservatism be a function of democracy, in that sense? I mean in some cases the “holding onto norms” or having a national conversation about change, rather than suddenly abandoning tradition in a coerced process, is actually representative of a more open and democratic political system.
and if so, is that due to the fact that immigrants are a select group who are more open to experience.
hm. compare drd4 profiles between CEU and northwest european samples. that’s what you’d expect. i believe there have been books written on this topic, though the behavior genomics wasn’t in at that point.
on topic:
http://clivecrook.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/05/the_evolution_of_progress.php
One of the participants in the symposium was Anna Dreber, who has been researching among other things the links between testosterone and risk-taking in financial markets, and the connection between a certain genetic trait, DRD4, and economic behaviour. DRD4 appears to be linked to migration–a highly entrepreneurial activity–and again to financial risk-taking. One wonders whether bank regulators, in the aftermath of some future financial meltdown, will want banks to monitor the incidence of DRD4 among their employees, and perhaps set higher capital requirements for institutions with too high a reading. (Explicit genetic discrimination in hiring will be illegal, of course, so the issue will have to be dealt with after the fact. Alternatively, they could just hire more women.)
@David Hume In my epistemology, the disciplines that study human behaviour are empirical but not scientific, in any useful sense of the word, and they are characterised by perpetually competing paradigms rather than a succession of (more or less) universally agreed theories which at any one time provide a (again, more of less) binding framework for hypothesis-formation and experimentation. So while they generate much useful information, this is not knowledge, following the dictum: data is not information, information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom.
Where things get interesting are in those disciplines, such as evolutionary psychology and behavioural genetics, which are trying to cross the boundary, without success to date. Antecedents would be Marx’s insistence on the scientific nature of his economics and Azimov’s fictional Hari Seldon in the Foundation trilogy, with his handheld sociology calculator.
The dopamine studies and “reward deficiency syndrome” are a case in point. Extending the science to solid conclusions about alcoholism or attention deficit disorder is clearly much more fraught than working out how to land a spaceship on the Moon from Newton’s laws of motion.
In a less obscure field, the various attempts to pin down an etiology of sexual orientation are as clear an indication of the problem as you will find. People looking for a “gay gene” or a “gay brain” are clearly totally blind to the fact that “gay” is a socially constructed category of recent provenance, and that historical and anthropological investigation shows same-sex behaviour varies from ubiquitous to rare in different societies.
n my epistemology, the disciplines that study human behaviour are empirical but not scientific, in any useful sense of the word, and they are characterised by perpetually competing paradigms rather than a succession of (more or less) universally agreed theories which at any one time provide a (again, more of less) binding framework for hypothesis-formation and experimentation. So while they generate much useful information, this is not knowledge, following the dictum: data is not information, information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom.
i think this is a perfectly coherent position. i just happen to disagree. though a lot of the argument is probably going to be revolving around what qualifies as testable, etc.
@JohnC
This may be true today, but progress in biology and neuroscience will make this less true in the future.
kurt9, I think that’s what I said earlier on in this comment @JohnC.
Two points, though. I think that many people greatly underestimate how much progress is required, and I don’t think this will be much help in social disciplines such as economics.
What a bunch of crap.
What we see today as “Left” or “Right” is the manifestation of evolutionary derived gender roles from tribal life. For most of human history humans have lived within the tribal structure. Men and women had different roles within this structure. Men’s lives were concerned with out-group activities which included trade, forming alliances, war, route selection, and hunting. Today, men tend to oppose immigration and social welfare benefits and are more likely to support war and capital punishment.
Women’s lives were concerned with activities within the group such as child rearing, gathering, and cooking. Today women tend to oppose war, while favoring social welfare. Women also tend not to be as “racist” as men. Women evolved to “accept” people more so than men becuase they were less likey to be faced with situations with people from outside the group. Because of this women have a difficult time not including other people. The major evolutionary political difference between men and women can summed up as follows:
Men see nations while women see family.
Anyone who’s taken a 100 level psychology class probably remembers being taught the difference between male and female relationships. Females tend to have less total friends but seem to be more intimate. Men have more friends overall and these friendships tend to be more alliance-like.
The optimal political system of a society would maximize male and female strengths. Men should have more influence over immigration, military action/security, and trade, while women would be best suited to run and oversee the social welfare system. The educational system is best gender segregated, or least until high school.
Men would be conscripted to do time within the security forces while women would serve the nation via the social welfare service. This could include working in retirement homes, medical establishments, and schools.
It should be understood that women wouldn’t be totally separated from immigration or security just as men wouldn’t be segregated from social welfare. It just means society works much better when the genders have a dominant role within their natural evolutionary gender roles.
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So here is my personal conumdrum. I am a Jew descended from a long line of liberals (my mom is a life long left democrat, attended anti war rallies, etc., my father disliked Reagan and hated Bush) with a large number of relatives (including my sister) who are basically communists. On the other hand I gave up on American style liberalism early on and I am pretty conservative (or at best a liberal in the European sense). None of my family understands this.
Recently, I was arguing with my sister about nuclear power and said if global warming is a problem then the only realistic solution is conversion to nuclear (which I favor for national security reasons anyway). My sister was aghast and said that nuclear power was dangerous. When I said the technology has changed significantly and is much less dangerous, she replied “No, it hasn’t” and then I lost my temper and said “Have you had a new thought in the last 30 years?” which she did not respond to. Obviously she has not.
My question now is, am I a conservative because I am more liberal?