About Rationally Speaking


Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license.

Monday, April 15, 2013

Understanding the conservative mind, without brain scans


by Massimo Pigliucci

Is Nietzsche to be found somewhere between Ayn Rand and Antonin Scalia? This is just one of a series of intriguing claims I am encountering while reading The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, by my CUNY colleague Corey Robin, a political theorist, journalist and associate professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center.

The context of that specific statement is Robin’s contention that there is a level of coherence among reactionaries across times and places, so that it is possible to draw parallels between the thoughts of people so apparently different from each other as the three mentioned above. But my goal here is not primarily to discuss the details of the book (which I’m still reading, and to which I will likely come back), but rather to use it as a vehicle for a broader discussion of what in philosophy are referred to as levels of analysis.

Let’s begin with something very different from the topic of how conservative minds work. Say that you are interested in the workings of a particular ecosystem, like the Arctic tundra. Pertinent topics of study will include the composition, distribution and abundance of the fauna and flora of the tundra, as well as of the nature of the various species-species interactions, i.e., you’ll be doing population biology and biogeography. It will also be relevant to know things about the local climate, its short term variability, and its long term changes (both past and future). So you’ll engage in a bit of climate science and paleoclimatology. Moreover, you’ll need to develop an understanding of nutrient cycling within the ecosystem, thereby bringing geology and geochemistry into the mix.

There are also a number of scientific disciplines that will likely not cross your mind to engage during your study of the Arctic tundra: quantum mechanics and cosmology, for instance. Why not? Isn’t the tundra a particular type of bio-physical system on a particular planet in a particular solar system in a particular galaxy? Shouldn’t cosmology, therefore, be relevant? And isn’t everything that makes up said ecosystem made of quarks and other subatomic entities, the understanding of which is obviously the province of fundamental physics?

The answer to the latter questions is that while yes, the tundra and everything in it is both made of particles and located in a certain corner of the cosmos, neither level of analysis is informative to the problem at hand, namely the description and understanding of the bio-dynamics characteristic of the Arctic tundra.

This, mind you, isn’t an argument against ontological reductionism (the claim that everything is made of the basic stuff identified by fundamental physics), nor is it a panegyric on behalf of emergent properties. Ontological reductionism may or may not be true, and conversely strong emergentism may not or may hold, and you’d still have no use for quantum mechanics and cosmology when it comes to ecosystem studies. The issue is epistemic, not ontological.

If the case I have just made for the tundra is relatively uncontroversial (as I certainly hope it is!), then we are ready to move to another one that is a bit more complicated and certainly more controversial: the issue of “the conservative mind” with which we began.

Let’s start easy: we can surely agree that conservatives (meaning human beings who expound one version or another of a range of political positions collectively referred to by political scientists and philosophers as conservative, as opposed to progressive) are also made of quarks and located in a particular corner of the Milky Way. And yet, just like in the case of the Arctic tundra, neither quantum mechanics nor cosmology will tell us anything relevant about the conservative mind, yes?

Now let’s zoom in a little. Coming from “above,” so to speak (i.e., zooming onto our problem while descending from a cosmic perspective), we may want to embark on a philosophical analysis of the ideas proposed by conservatives; or (not exclusive) we may be interested in the history and sociology of the conservative movement.

Coming in from “below” (i.e., adjusting our epistemic zoom while ascending from the quantum mechanical level), we could consider the psychology of the conservative mind, or its brain anatomy and physiology, or even inquire as to whether there are “conservative genes” that may help us explain, say, the Red/Blue state divide in the United States of America. Which, naturally, would then lead us to ask how and why such genes evolved in the first place.

I think all these perspectives (i.e., from philosophy, sociology, psychology, neurobiology, genetics, and evolutionary biology) are pertinent, but some much more than others. That is, I argue that some of these approaches will be epistemically significantly more informative than others in terms of the task at hand, to wit, understanding the conservative mind (hint: notice that I am using the term mind here, not brain).

At this point you may want to pause before reading any further, and perhaps place online bets with other Rationally Speaking readers as to which of the above fields I am going to up-play or down-play in what follows...

As you must have realized, we live in a brave new era of brain scans and genomics, so that every claim that comes with an fMRI attached to it (or, less sexy, a high throughput DNA scan), is ipso facto cool and scientifically interesting. [No, I’m not implying that neurobiology and genomics are not actually interesting. Then again, quantum mechanics and cosmology are also interesting, and yet irrelevant to understanding tundras...]

The problem, of course, is in assessing the usefulness of claims made on the basis of these new technologies. For instance, it may be interesting to see which areas of the brain are primarily involved in, say, reading as opposed to talking. But that some areas of the brain underly both activities is a truism: how else did you think you were capable of reading and talking?

Take, for instance, several recent studies showing particular patterns of brain activity during meditation or deep prayer. Skeptics of the more mystical claims made by practitioners of these techniques triumphantly say: “Ah! See? There is nothing transcendental about this stuff, it’s just your brain doing weird things.” True believers retort along the lines of: “I told you so! There really is a transcendental realm that the human brain is uniquely equipped to access!” In reality, of course, the fact that our brains behave in a particular manner when we engage in meditation or prayer says absolutely nothing about the reality, or lack thereof, of any supra-physical realm. That is because we expect to see those very patterns under either scenario, so that the high-tech demonstration of “your brain on prayer” tells us what we already knew: whatever behavior a human being engages in, it’s got to have something to do with his brain.

Back to conservatism. A few months ago, Julia Galef and I had a nice conversation with Chris Mooney during a Rationally Speaking podcast, focusing on his latest book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science - and Reality.  The first quibble I have with Chris’s book is the title [1]. While his previous volume, The Republican War on Science, was aptly titled (it was, after all, about the anti-science attitude of the G.W. Bush administration), this one is, I think, unnecessarily contentious: it’s not Republican brains in particular that are of interest, since Republicanism is a specific product of a given time and culture (indeed, modern day Republicans have very little to do with, say, Lincoln-type Republicans), but rather the conservative attitude of which contemporary Republicanism in the United States happens to be a particular instantiation.

Be that as it may, Chris’s book has received much attention because it promises to provide a scientific (as in natural science, particularly neurobiology and genetics) understanding of the problem at hand, rather than a “merely” philosophical, historical, sociological or psychological one. [Of course, if you happen to be a conservative, and in particular a Republican, you will not see what “the problem” is in the first place.]

While Chris is careful to dispel easy accusations of biological reductionism and determinism, he does paint a picture whereby the brain (not, more expansively, the mind) is the main locus of the conservative attitude, and where there is evidence of a genetic basis for conservatism, with a hint of (just-so) scenarios concerning how such attitude may have been engrained in some of us by natural selection in the distant past (say, the Pleistocene, far earlier than the onset of the Grand Old Party).

I do not wish to engage in a detailed critique of specific claims made in the studies that Chris used as the basis of his book. Some of that criticism has been done in thoughtful reviews of the volume (there were also a number of decidedly not thoughtful ones), and at any rate several of those studies are sound, as far as they go. The question I wish to raise is just how far do they, in fact, go in providing us with an understanding of the conservative mind.

Not much, and far less, I think, than the combination of psychological, sociological, historical and philosophical approaches do.

Let’s start with the evolutionary biology. Broadly speaking, there is little doubt that the repertoire of human behavior evolved over a long period of time, and that some of that evolution was adaptive in nature (i.e., the result of a process of natural selection). But readers of this blog should know that I put little stock into many specific evolutionary psychological explanations, for a variety of methodological problems that I do not need to repeat here.

As for the genetics, again, it should certainly be uncontroversial (pace some extreme postmodernists) to claim that genes affect human behavior, but even Chris points out that the amount of variation in the population explained by candidate genes for complex human behaviors (such as homosexuality, and probably even more so the somewhat fuzzy concept of conservatism) is a small fraction of the total. Significantly less appreciated is the point that if genes account for a small percentage of the variation in a given human behavior, then it must be that a large fraction of that variation is due either to the environment or to phenotypic plasticity (i.e., to gene-environment interactions). Which in turn means that evolutionary explanations become marginal at best.

It also means that much of the explanatory power to be found in brain activity is actually dependent on the environment and/or on its interactions with the basic structure of the brain itself. [And a further complication is that brains develop through time and maintain a degree of plasticity throughout one’s life. Yet, for obvious logistical reasons, we don’t have as yet any study using fMRI to track changes in brain activity in response to the bewildering variety of environmental stimuli we all experience from the pre-natal period until we die.]

Which is why the most informative loci of analysis to understand conservatism are the historical-sociological (the broader environment), the philosophical (the conceptual stuff of which conservative ideas are made of), and the psychological. This last one is, of course, connected to the lower level that is the target of neurobiology, but contra what appears to be an increasingly common misconception, psychology doesn’t reduce to neurobiology. Or, to put it another way, neurobiology isn’t psychology done with fMRI, and therefore more “scientific.” That’s because psychology deals with the mind, not just the brain. The mind (I actually prefer to use a verb, minding, because we are not talking about an object) is what the brain does when it interacts with the various layers of the external environment. And these layers are shaped by the history, sociology and philosophy of ideas.

That is why, for instance, it only took me a few pages to find the first interesting statement in Robin’s book: “conservatism is ... the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” One may agree or not with this way of conceptualizing conservatism (i.e., in terms of power struggles), but Robin proceeds to give a detailed political-sociological-historical-philosophical analysis to back it up, and one cannot reject his take on it without engaging in some detail with his analysis.

Along similar lines, Robin writes: “Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality and the right stands for freedom, this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left. Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality ... is not the threat to freedom but its extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom. ... If women and workers are provided with the economic resources to make independent choices, they will be free not to obey their husbands and employers.”

Proceeding from this way of framing the issue, Robin immediately arrives at an interesting analysis of the otherwise highly puzzling fact that libertarians tend to be associated with conservatives, rather than with progressives (or rather than distancing themselves from both): “When the libertarian looks out upon society, he does not see isolated individuals; he sees private, often hierarchical, groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees. ... This vision of the connection between excellence and rule is what brings together in postwar America that unlikely alliance of the libertarian, with his vision of the employer’s untrammeled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father’s rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth.”

I am not suggesting that Robin’s analysis is necessarily correct. I am still near the beginning of the book, and I will need time to process his framework and the historical and sociological evidence he brings to the book. But my brain (!) sure started working at a much higher rate than usual even while reading the introduction to The Reactionary Mind, while the same brain seems to have by now developed a dulled response to yet another fMRI scan or just-so story about the very distant evolutionary past of Homo sapiens. And that’s because I think evolution, genetics, and neurobiology are far less explanatory of the conservative (or, for that matter, the progressive) mind than the disciplines that Robin’s book calls upon as resources. This is no slight to the natural sciences in question, no more than the one delivered by the ecosystem ecologist who wisely ignores cosmology and quantum mechanics.

———

[1] Unless he objected to it and the publisher overruled him, which happened to me with Answers for Aristotle...

47 comments:

  1. A very interesting read as always. I feel some things need to be pointed out to you nevertheless, or perhaps you can clarify.

    "Significantly less appreciated is the point that if genes account for a small percentage of the variation in a given human behavior, then it must be that a large fraction of that variation is due either to the environment or to phenotypic plasticity (i.e., to gene-environment interactions). Which in turn means that evolutionary explanations become marginal at best."

    I think you are missing three key points which would (hopefully) alter your conclusion in the end of this paragraph. The first is that any gene reported to be associated with any condition does so by a combination of explanatory and statistical power. Gene associations are normally done with the use of snp's or single nucleotide polymorphisms. These hold very limited explanatory power for the behaviour of that gene. Thus when a gene is reported to be associated with a trait it should be seen as a piece in the puzzle of that genes function as well as give information regarding the specifics of the trait (here conservatism). secondly, since what you are measuring is a marker, even if the snp accounts for less than 1% of the variation it could still be the case that 100% of the variation is explained by the gene. The same two arguments could be used for fMRI data. My third and final comment relates to epigenetics. It has been known for some time that traits can be passed from parent to child in a Lamarckian way. When the environment interacts with a gene it can modulate its behaviour and in the end affect the survivability of that gene family (see Dutch hunger syndrome).

    In summary I think you are making a false conclusion ("evolutionary explanations become marginal at best") based on wrong assumptions regarding what 1; Snp and fMRI analysis is and what it attempts to achieve, and 2; the process of epigenetic imprinting.

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    1. I'd argue, contra the end of your third paragraph, that epigenetics further undercuts Mooney's position, rather that further supporting it. I've said the same elsewhere about epigenetics and evolutionary psychology (even more so Pop Ev Psych) in general.

      I also find it ironic that in flirting with Pop Ev Psych "framing" of these issues, Mooney is actually playing ball on the conservatives' own field.

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  2. Many good points. Once a new methodology is considered cool, everybody rushes to use it, sometimes without stopping to think if it is really useful for answering the question at hand.

    However, what annoys me most about these "conservative vs liberal brain" stories is how parochially early 21st century US American they are. Calling it conservative instead of Republican does not help - these political ideologies would have been unintelligible to most people on the planet at most times. Even over the last few decades and considering only the industrialized "Western civilization", the political divide in most societies was socialist vs liberal-conservative, ie about the distribution of wealth, with everything else, including authoritarianism, a second fiddle. Israel with the divide predominantly (and understandably) around foreign policy and the USA with their divide predominantly (and bizarrely) around culture war issues and are the odd ones, the outliers.

    Any evo-psych story about conservatism that does not take the fact into account that US conservatism and so-called "liberalism" (the word is just a synonym for libertarianism in every country outside of North America) are rather exceptional creatures falls flat right from the start.

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    1. Yes, excellent point Alex. US "conservatism" in its current form of a forced marriage of social conservatives and economic libertarians doesn't lend itself well to a simple analysis of a "right" vs. "left" mind.

      The dissonance of that marriage is what the GOP is currently struggling with as well.

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    2. Well, Edmund Burke (the first conservative "mind" Corey Robin talks about in his book) was an 18th century Whig, so your point doesn't really apply here. While you are right that much of the generic discussion is parochial, Robin's book is an interesting read even though most of the "characters" are American - it's not hard to make the transfer to our own politicians of similar mindset. (Germany in my case).

      Cheers
      Chris

      P.S. Looking forward to your general view on the book, Massimo.

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    3. Well put, Alex. And, I along with others am looking forward to Massimo's full take on Robin's book.

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  3. The conservative mind is hierarchic, foundationalist, and tends towards closedness. The liberal mind is rhizomic, nonfoundationalist, and tends towards openness.

    ('Brain orientation' is a better term than 'mind'.)

    This is my takeaway from Chris Mooney's The Republican Brain, which I enjoyed very much, and his subsequent posts on this subject at Mother Jones and other places. With these two descriptions, much can be understood. It explains why conservatives end up in the Republican Party, which is the home to people with strongly held Christian and "patriotic" beliefs, and liberals in the Democratic Party. Libertarians now end up as Republicans given their religion-like devotion to the "free"-market.

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  4. Emil,

    thanks for the clarifications, though I assure you that I’m aware of how statistics are used in estimating gene-phenotypes covariances (I used to do that sort of work as a population geneticist).

    > when a gene is reported to be associated with a trait it should be seen as a piece in the puzzle of that genes function as well as give information regarding the specifics of the trait <

    Indeed, my point was simply that a lot of the unaccounted for variance is either environmental or gene-environment, those are the other pieces of the puzzle.

    > even if the snp accounts for less than 1% of the variation it could still be the case that 100% of the variation is explained by the gene. <

    Then the snp is a very poor marker. I think we know by now that — with very few exceptions — most genes have very small individual effects, which means that searching for “the” gene for X is a fool’s errand. Of course, many genes can affect a given trait, but they always do so in complex interactions, not just among themselves, but with the environment.

    > My third and final comment relates to epigenetics. It has been known for some time that traits can be passed from parent to child in a Lamarckian way. When the environment interacts with a gene it can modulate its behaviour and in the end affect the survivability of that gene family <

    I’m not sure what your point is. Yes, that is correct, and in fact — again — I’ve actually done research on this. But that simply reinforces my point that the environment (with effects mediated epigenetically) plays a major role.

    > I think you are making a false conclusion ("evolutionary explanations become marginal at best") based on wrong assumptions <

    I don’t see how this follows from anything you wrote, but perhaps I’m missing something...

    Alex,

    > Calling it conservative instead of Republican does not help - these political ideologies would have been unintelligible to most people on the planet at most times. <

    I agree that there is quite a bit parochialism at play here, which only reinforces my contention that it is political-cultural analyses that are most relevant, not biological ones. However, Robin argues (convincingly, I think) that there are also cross-cultural and cross-temporal similarities, at least since the French Revolution in Western countries, and that’s what he focuses his analysis on.

    > Any evo-psych story about conservatism that does not take the fact into account that US conservatism and so-called "liberalism" (the word is just a synonym for libertarianism in every country outside of North America) are rather exceptional creatures falls flat right from the start. <

    Yup.

    Philip,

    > With these two descriptions, much can be understood. <

    Not really. First, because they are descriptions, not explanations. Second, because they are located at the psychological and sociological levels of analysis, as I contend here. The genetic-brain level do not really add much (and the evolutionary even less so).

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    1. I think it does help when you replace the terms 'conservative' and 'liberal' (which have political baggage associated with them) with those descriptors (which are politics-free and have to do with how one perceives the world).

      One can predict to a fair degree of accuracy one's politics (and today, Party) based on them.

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    2. describe |diˈskrīb|
      verb [ with obj. ]
      give an account in words of (someone or something), including all the relevant characteristics, qualities, or events

      It seems to me that Philip's description was a better explanation than whatever Massimo has come up with so far. But perhaps when you describe someone as closed minded, it's an explanation of mental processing that hits a little too close to his home.

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    3. Massimo

      I was not aware that due to you extensive background there was no need to point these concepts out to you. But I do think you are overreaching yourself. At this moment in time, it is definitely so that our current knowledge of the environment is much better at explaining both the Arctic tundra and complex human behaviour. But it does not follow that this will always be the case. I am simply trying to assert that we have little or no idea how much evolution (driven by gene enviroment interactions, epigenetic imprinting, pure chance) can explain these complex behaviours. But as I was trying to say, we do know that there are mechanisms that could allow for it to play a major role.

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    4. @ Baron P

      I tried to choose the six descriptors I did carefully. I used "tends towards closedness" rather than "is closed minded", but "need for cognitive closure" might have been better, to use Chris Mooney's words:

      "We know, from decades of psychological research, that conservatives are less open to new ideas and experiences, and have a higher need for cognitive closure—the desire to have fixed beliefs and certainties that are unchanging."

      motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/theres-no-such-thing-liberal-war-science

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    5. "However, Robin argues (convincingly, I think) that there are also cross-cultural and cross-temporal similarities, at least since the French Revolution in Western countries, and that’s what he focuses his analysis on."

      I have not read the book, and so do not know the details of this argument, but the cross-cultural similarities put the countries of Western Europe and probably Australia closer together (as these had a strong labour parties that governed), and the US and Canada somewhat different (there being no governing parties of labour, the NDP in Canada in power only on a local basis). This is a key difference, as the divide in most Western European countries was between social democracy and conservatism, not liberalism and conservatism.

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    6. I haven't read the book, so I don't know the precise argument for the claim above, but I would contest it.

      In Western Europe (and also Australia) the key divide throughout the twentieth century at least was between social democracy and conservatism, not between liberalism and conservatism. The liberal mind is very different from the social democratic mind. I think here the US and probably also Canada is quite different. In these countries, mass labour parties either never really got off the ground, or only governed locally (the NDP - only recently have they become the opposition for the first time). I know liberalism in the US is a little different to liberalism as understood in Europe (and very different to how it is understood in Australia), but not as significantly different as some Americans seem to believe.

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    7. @Philip, indeed, and more.

      Recent research by Pew has shown that even on such allegedly liberal anti-science issues as the anti-vaccination movement, **more conservatives than liberals are anti-vaxxer.**

      Sorry, Baron.

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    8. shortarguments,

      > In Western Europe (and also Australia) the key divide throughout the twentieth century at least was between social democracy and conservatism, not between liberalism and conservatism. The liberal mind is very different from the social democratic mind.

      In what way? I've always equated the two (US liberalism and European social democracy) because I couldn't see a meaningful difference. I'd actually say there is a larger difference in the conservative views, at least as far as denial of reality goes (Angela Merkel is a trained scientist and it generally shows) - but that might be more a result of the fact that a different kind of person goes into politics in the U.S. than e.g. in Germany.

      Cheers
      Chris

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    9. Anti-vax is allegedly liberal? Sorry indeed. I thought conservatives saw vaccination as a liberal conspiracy.

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    10. Actually, that is correct, Baron. But, the stereotype trotted out by many conservatives in making claims of a "liberal war on science" has been that anti-vaxxers are primarily liberals, especially of the New Age woo stripe. Reality is different. Anti-vaxxers are predominantly conservative, suspecting big gummint.

      In a sense, this shouldn't be surprising. Conservatives led the anti-fluoridation movement during the Cold War. (And, generally still do today, except in the anomalous Portland, Ore.)

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  5. Massimo,

    I take your thesis to be that history, sociology, psychology, and a philosophy, are better than brain science for the task understanding the conservative mind. Your general reason appears to be that the former fields are on the proper level of description (or analysis) for the task while brain science isn't.

    But why not see brain science as studying its own aspect of the conservative mind as opposed competing with history, sociology, etc., to understand it? It seems you're assuming that the conservative mind has a single nature; that understanding it is a single thing; and that relevant fields vary in their suitedness to disclose this single nature.

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  6. Massimo, you wrote that the biological approaches are unsatisfying because they are unexplanatory. That is fair enough. However, when you went on to talk about Robin's book, you very curiously switched the focus to interestingness (eg. Robin's book exercises your brain more). I'm glad that you enjoy the book but surely being interesting is not the same as being more explanatory, insightful, or helpful. What is the point of this post, if it does not explain why Robin's book is actually more explanatory? From the paragraphs that you cited, the analyses sound like just-so stories to me.

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  7. Would I be wrong to say that Corey Robin is a leftist? This is the problem with discussing politics. Everyone has a bias.

    As to why libertarians have aligned themselves with conservatives (in America), is easy to understand. There are only two major parties and only one of them is even remotely in line with libertarian philosophy. That sucks. Republican party isn't libertarian at all but that's the closest it gets.

    Libertarianism is about the role of the government. Although libertarianism has something to say about everything in politics, at its core it's a critique about the role of the government. Libertarians distrust humans even when they have reasonable sounding plans. So they distrust governments even when they have reasonable sounding solutions to problems. There are plenty of occasions in human history where those reasonable sounding plans ended up screwing up everything.

    Democrats believe that the government can provide solutions to problem. Republicans act like that but they at least pretend otherwise.

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    1. Also, economic libertarians and conservative Christians are on the same page when it comes to the the belief in the supremacy of the "free"-market: The conservative Christian believes it is God-ordained. (The Southern Baptist Convention calls it "Biblical Capitalism" and has Bible verses to back it up.) This shared belief is how they will stay together in the GOP. Rand Paul is called a "libertarian" by the media, though he has a "life begins at conception" bill that would outlaw just about all abortions. (He says this is the true "libertarian" position.)

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    2. Depends on what the focus of your libertarianism is. If it's on financial issues, then yes, the GOP is closer. If it's on social issues, then, no, Dems are closer.

      And, per your post below, as Massimo noted, no, Dems have not moved further left recently. In fact, they've moved further right, for decades. Jimmy Carter, not Bill Clinton, was quite arguably the first neolib president.

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  8. Paul,

    > why not see brain science as studying its own aspect of the conservative mind as opposed competing with history, sociology, etc., to understand it? It seems you're assuming that the conservative mind has a single nature <

    Not at all. Brain science is relevant, I think, for the whole picture. Possibly, so are genetics and evolutionary biology. But my argument is that what they provide is much more limited than the significantly more informative levels of analyses I identify in the post.

    scitation,

    > I'm glad that you enjoy the book but surely being interesting is not the same as being more explanatory, insightful, or helpful. What is the point of this post, if it does not explain why Robin's book is actually more explanatory? <

    I’m not sure I understand your point. I find the book interesting *because* I think it has more explanatory power and more pertinent insights than, say, Mooney’s book.

    Emil,

    > I am simply trying to assert that we have little or no idea how much evolution (driven by gene enviroment interactions, epigenetic imprinting, pure chance) can explain these complex behaviours <

    Well, the proof is in the pudding: at this point in time, I just don’t see those levels of explanation as particularly powerful or insightful. This could change in the future, and we can talk again about it then. But my worry is that many in the skeptic community see an fMRI scan, cry “science!” and think they are done. Not so, as it can readily be understood by reading books like Robin’s.

    brainoil,

    > Everyone has a bias. <

    Indeed, but I’d like to think that we can examine arguments regardless of the bias of the author. Besides, my comparison was with Mooney, who is equally biased, in the same direction.

    > Republican party isn't libertarian at all but that's the closest it gets. <

    Well, but the question Robin addresses is *why* libertarians feel closer to conservatives than to liberals, a question about which fMRI scans are entirely silent...

    > they distrust governments even when they have reasonable sounding solutions to problems. <

    And that’s why the align themselves with the party that wishes to regulate people’s sexual behavior, or that finances and mobilizes huge resources to maintain a semi-permanent state of war across the world? Hmm...

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    1. @Massimo,

      Most of the disagreement between hardcore libertarians and conservatives arise when religion is involved. Gay marriage for example is completely a religious thing. Foreign policy is perhaps the only major non-religious issue that conservatives and propertarian libertarians disagree about. Libertarians and conservatives share the view that they need to shrink the government. Conservatives just don't know how (perhaps due to the fact that they don't have a proper philosophy).

      Now over time, it seems that the democratic party has moved more to the left, while the republican party to the right (far more than democrats went to left). Republican party has become more and more conservative. I think it's fair to use the words conservative and republican interchangeably.

      As such, I think it's obvious why libertarians would align themselves with conservatives who make up the republican party. There's no way the democrats would elect a libertarian to the senate. On the other hand, republicans will elect you if you just change your position on few things just enough. Take Ron Paul for example. He thinks the federal government should get involved in the gay marriage issue, and yet thinks its okay if the state governments would want to ban gay marriage. This is not libertarian at all. But still he's able to speak against government welfare, aggressive foreign policy etc. This might seem despicable. But he's just being practical.

      I mean, it's just that simple. Democrats will never vote for a libertarian.

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    2. Massimo,

      >But my argument is that what they provide is much more limited than the significantly more informative levels of analyses I identify in the post.<

      But isn't what is "more informative" completely relative to what one wants to know? It's your *unqualified* references to greater informativeness and explanatory value that is puzzling to me, and makes me suspect a problem. History, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and brain science all learn exactly what they want to know given that they are successful, so from where does the unqualified "more informative" come?

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  9. I just happen to have watched this Ted Talk the other day by psychologist David Pizarro in which he claims a "correlation between sensitivity to disgusting cues... and moral and political conservatism." It's amusing, but to go hunting for a "disgust" gene would be ridiculous. The reasons why there are twice as many conservatives as progressives is fascinating, and I look forward to the next installment of your book review.

    Here's a link to that Ted Talk if anyone's interested. http://www.ted.com/talks/david_pizarro_the_strange_politics_of_disgust.html

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  10. "...if genes account for a small percentage of the variation in a given human behavior, then it must be that a large fraction of that variation is due either to the environment or to phenotypic plasticity (i.e., to gene-environment interactions). Which in turn means that evolutionary explanations become marginal at best."

    This is false, and it hints at resurrecting the outmoded "nature/nurture" dichotomy. Just because one gene accounts for very little variation in a given behavior does not rule out the possibility that a suite of naturally-selected genes do account for the behavior. And even if it turned out that the behavior had low heritability, this would not rule out the possibility of the behavior being a facultative adaptation that operates contingently on inputs from the environment. In trying to determine whether or not the behavior is a facultative adaptation, evolutionary explanations are not "marginal at best"; they are indispensable. Genes don't have some built-in tendency to adaptively interact with in environments by default. Genes interact with environments adaptively because genes that don't tend to be weeded out by selection. Hence "gene-environment interactions" or "phenotypic plasticity" are not alternatives to evolutionary explanations, as you seem to imply.

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  11. The "libertarianism" issue is another reason why the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of Republicans and Democrats oppose anything that even slightly bolsters third parties, let alone would approach something like parliamentary government.

    And, that's ramped up in the past couple of decades. At the state level, more and more states have banned "fusion" candidates or slates, for example.

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  12. Does it make sense to talk of "conservativism" for periods and societies before the idea of wide-spread, collective social change? You can be a reactionary against the French Revolution. I can't think of any pre-modern philosopher who gave a damn about what the masses thought. Plato siding with the oligarchs ... is that reactionary? Peisistratus was a tyrant with populist appeal. Were his supporters "liberals" or "reactionaries"? Is Plato a radical for advocating revision of Attic political culture, since he is not calling for a restoration of anything from before Peisistratus' reforms, although he favours elite rule? Ibn Khaldun talks about the importance of religious virtue in the rulers in the rule of good caliphs, but such virtue works because it brings the rulers close to the ruled, not because it keeps the restive rabble in line. A discussion of social networks and power holders in those networks might be less tendentious and of greater applicability to different time periods and societies than glomming onto a very pariochial (as mentioned above) set of political stances. Political science has a lot to say about why people stick with or defect from coalitions. More good social science and less speculative psychology is my prescription.

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  13. Some would say that there are more liberals that can determine when it's right to stay conservative than there are conservatives that can see when it's correct to be progressive.

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  14. David,

    > This is false, and it hints at resurrecting the outmoded "nature/nurture" dichotomy. ... Hence "gene-environment interactions" or "phenotypic plasticity" are not alternatives to evolutionary explanations, as you seem to imply. <

    Well, you may not be aware of this, but I wrote the book on phenotypic plasticity (literally: http://goo.gl/9hNRM), so I think I do know what I’m talking about. Indeed, my point was precisely that because nature/nurture is not a dichotomy, and because there is good reason to believe that the majority of the variance in human behavior is either due to the environment or to GxE interactions, the kind of gene-only explanations so popular among skeptics make a very small dent into the problem.

    epweissengruber,

    > Does it make sense to talk of "conservativism" for periods and societies before the idea of wide-spread, collective social change? <

    It does within the context of Western history since at least the French Revolution, which is what Robin’s book addresses. He doesn’t attempt to come up with a universal theory that applies to all places and times. Unlike, I must stress, the evolutionary psychological explanations favored by Mooney and others.

    brainoil,

    > Libertarians and conservatives share the view that they need to shrink the government. <

    But they don’t. Conservatives, contra their own propagated myth, are not at all in the business of shrinking the government. They only want to cut those parts of the government that have to do with the social net, or that would regulate banks and multinationals. They can be relied upon always favoring large increases in the military, in support for faith-based organizations, and in anything that helps controlling behaviors they dislike.

    > over time, it seems that the democratic party has moved more to the left, while the republican party to the right <

    I would dispute that, and so do a number of political scientists. While there is no question that Republicans have been moving radically to the right since Reagan, Democrats also have become more conservative. Contra Republican myth, Obama would be considered a moderate centrist in Europe, not a “socialist.”

    > it's just that simple. Democrats will never vote for a libertarian. <

    You are probably correct, but the question that Robin is exploring is why? And I think his analysis is more enlightening than comparing the genomes of Michelle Bachman and Ron Paul.

    Paul,

    > But isn't what is "more informative" completely relative to what one wants to know? <

    Of course. My argument is that IF what you want to understand is the reactionary mindset, as Robin describes it, THEN psychology, sociology, political science and philosophy are more informative than neuroscience, genetics or evolutionary biology. That’s all.

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    1. >My argument is that IF what you want to understand is the reactionary mindset, as Robin describes it,<

      IF you want to understand it, as Robin describes it, in what way? What if what I want to understand is the neuroscience of the reactionary mindset as Robin describes it? Is history, etc., still more informative?

      I'm as wary as anyone of natural science treatments of philosophical/historical concepts but to me your argument seems either tautological (e.g., IF you want to understand the reactionary mindset historically, THEN history is better than neuroscience) or based on problematic assumptions about the relation between language and reality (e.g. that the nature of something is independent of the mode of study applied to it, as opposed to relative to it; that is, the assumption that we can talk about the nature of something without a qualification of perspective, e.g. physical nature).

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    2. @Massimo

      I didn't say conservatives shrink the government. I said they and libertarians share the view that they need to shrink the government. Of course that's not what they do. But as long as conservatives believe their own rhetoric, there's the room for a libertarian to get a nomination from the conservative Republican party and win. You cannot do that in the Democratic party. They have a completely different view of government.

      As for Democratic party becoming more conservative, you are probably right. But I'd say that on certain issues they have clearly gone left. There's now a democratic president who openly supports gay marriage. Clinton wouldn't have done that when he was president.

      ***

      Anyway, this link is interesting

      http://www.people-press.org/2011/05/04/section-3-demographics-and-news-sources/

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  15. Thanks for the clarification. Empirically based psychology and anthropology do have a lot to say about even the particular period Robin carves out. Contra some humanist arguments, to do justice to historically particular phenomena does not mean keeping up a wall against the contributions empirical sciences can make.

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    1. Well put. As long as the scientific work is legit, and not something like Pop Ev Psych, let's use it!

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  16. epweissengruber,

    > Empirically based psychology and anthropology do have a lot to say about even the particular period Robin carves out. Contra some humanist arguments, to do justice to historically particular phenomena does not mean keeping up a wall against the contributions empirical sciences can make. <

    But if anyone is trying to build a wall is the natural scientists, who insist that the humanities have nothing to say about these issues, and that everything can be resolved by fMRI scans and genetic analyses. And note that psychology is one of the disciplines I invoked as most informative about the issue at hand.

    Paul,

    > IF you want to understand it, as Robin describes it, in what way? What if what I want to understand is the neuroscience of the reactionary mindset as Robin describes it? Is history, etc., still more informative? <

    No, of course not. But I’m a bit surprised by your commentary here, frankly. What I am suggesting is that there is a phenomenon — the functioning of the conservative mind — that needs to be understood. On this, both Robin and Mooney agree. The difference is that Robin locates the most informative approaches in political science, history, etc.; while Mooney locates them in neuroscience, genetics and evolutionary biology. Mooney is *not* interested in the neuroscience per se; he is interested in the neuroscience because he thinks that that’s the best place to look to understand the broad issue. I think he’s wrong. No need to invoke assumptions about the relation between language and reality, problematic or not.

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    1. I certainly agree about the priority of those higher levels of analysis, when speaking of higher-level phenomena like conservative politics.

      Still, the neuroscience interests me insofar as it brings something new to the table - viz. a lower-level look at how conservative brains/bodies function differently than liberal ones - not that that info is likely to tip the scale in a political debate.

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    2. epweissengruber: > Contra some humanist arguments, to do justice to historically particular phenomena does not mean keeping up a wall against the contributions empirical sciences can make. <

      Massimo: >But if anyone is trying to build a wall is the natural scientists, who insist that the humanities have nothing to say about these issues<

      Well there is the long-standing dread of anything smacking of "positivism" on the humanistic side. What that means is some who grant special properties to thought, feeling are language, are in the grip of older sciences and not opening themselves to more recent discoveries.

      Roman Jakobson looked at the consequences of aphasias and proposed that linguists look at metaphorical similarities and metonymic connections as important poles in the organization of language. A lot has been done with the study of language and the brain since then, but I don't find many who invoke structual linguistics in their cultural analysis at all interested.

      Lacan's psychoanalytic theory gives a privileged place to language in the formation of the subject. His ideas of language acquisition depends on outmoded theories of language aquisition, and unsupportable distinctions between animal communication and human. And somehow, the psychoanalysis of discourse, and analytically inflected writing, can bring about transformations of human experience undreamt of by "mere" empirical research.

      Scott Atran once asked the structural anthropologist Levi-Strauss if the development of mythical categories, language, and thought could all be elaborated from the binary schemas at the core of Saussure's linguistics. His reply was: when we started, all we had were Freud, Mauss, Marx, and Saussure. Now, finally, psychology has something to say about these matters.

      If only cultural studies would listen.

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  17. Massimo, Yes, I'm not usually one to defend the relevance of neuroscience ;)

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  18. Massimo Pigliucci,

    Let me start by saying that I enjoyed your piece. I found it well written and carefully thought out. Let me finish by saying that you are epically patient, and generous with your time.

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  19. Does "ad hominem" ring a bell?

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    1. Uhm, no, not really. Especially without any context whatsoever.

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  20. Interesting post. I started reading Corey Robin's book, but I confess I am not thrilled so far as it seems like Robin, for all his erudition, is failing to give a definition of conservativism that an actual conservative would be willing to sign onto.

    "The felt experience of having power that is under threat" seems like a piece of psychoanalysis that might be done *after* having successfully criticized the various ways that conservatives see themselves... but no, it's assumed right from the start as the prime mover of conservative ideology. Oh well, it's an interesting book, I'll give it a bit longer.

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    1. I'm not convinced that a conservative's willingness to embrace Robin's definition is really relevant to its accuracy. In fact, given that his characterization of conservatism is less than flattering, it's unlikely that most would embrace it. However, that doesn't mean he hasn't identified the unifying thread running through conservatism.

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    2. True, but as I said, it would make more sense for me rhetorically for that claim to come *after* a debunking of what conservatives actually say for themselves (as self-contradictory, untrue, self-serving etc.)

      If I have to draw an analogy, it reminds me of anti-atheist tracts that begin by talking about how "atheism is an attempt to deny god in order to justify the atheist's debauched, hedonistic lifestyle" or some variant on that theme.

      This comment is partly motivated by the fact that I myself, though no species of conservative, am moderately capable of occupying a conservative headspace - I can usually see how they would argue on a given issue.

      And I guess Robin's critique kind of falls flat for Simulated Conservative Ian in the same way the "atheist orgies" critique does.

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  21. Fair enough. I can hardly argue against the formatting you would consider most persuasive, but I believe he does rebut a number of conservative self-descriptions. It's been long enough since I read the book that I don't remember when they appear, but I think they're spread throughout the book - as is his discussions of the different manifestations of conservatism.

    In a short post about the book, John Quiggin describes the sort of reasoning Robin uses to dismiss conservatives own claims about what conservatism is.

    http://crookedtimber.org/2012/01/01/conservatives-and-reactionaries/

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