Posted on 10/21/2004 12:51:49 AM PDT by neverdem
Is it an unfortunate evolutionary holdover, or the product of bad upbringing?
At the recent conference in Chicago of the Association of Politics and Life Sciences, a panel on "Biobehaviorial Approaches to Politics" addressed the important question: What is wrong with people who disagree with the mainstream of American academic social scientists? Nancy Meyer-Emerick, an assistant professor of public administration at Cleveland State University, made a presentation on "Evolutionary Perspectives on the Authoritarian Personality."
Professor Meyer-Emerick wants to know if there are genetic tendencies that promote what she dubs "authoritarianism." She defines this distasteful quality through the work of University of Manitoba associate professor of psychology Robert Altemeyer. He's developed a helpful questionnaire, the Right Wing Authoritarian (RWA) Scale, to identify those harboring authoritarian tendencies.
According to Professor Altemeyer, right-wing authoritarians are cognitively rigid, aggressive, and intolerant. They are characterized by steadfast conformity to group norms, submission to higher status individuals, and aggression toward out-groups and unconventional group members. On the RWA Scale, subjects are asked to agree or disagree with statements like: "Some of the worst people in our country nowadays are those who do not respect our flag, our leaders and the normal way things are supposed to be done" and "There is absolutely nothing wrong with nudist camps." Guess which one RWAs tend to agree with?
Meyer-Emerick notes that high RWAs perceive the world as a significantly more dangerous place than those who score low. High RWAs are more submissive to government authority and indifferent to human rights. They also tend to be more hostile and more highly punitive toward criminals, and more racially and ethnically prejudiced—and religious!—to boot. In the United States, guess what? Republicans cluster at the high end of the RWA Scale whereas Democrats range across the scale.
Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley essentially confirmed this view with an meta-analysis of scores of academic studies on conservative political attitudes last year. In the study, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," the Berkeley researchers found common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include: fear and aggression, dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, uncertainty avoidance, need for cognitive closure, and terror management that causes conservatives to shun and even punish outsiders and those who threaten the status of their cherished world views. The researchers did half-heartedly assure readers that their findings do not mean that "conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false, irrational, or unprincipled."
Altemeyer, inventor of the RWA Scale, believes that there is no such thing as a Left Wing Authoritarian. "I do not think 'an authoritarian impressively like the authoritarian on the right' reposes on the left end of the RWA scale. Rather the contrary," Altemeyer declared. In fact, Altemeyer finds that low RWAs are "fair-minded, even-handed, tolerant, nonaggressive persons...They score low on my prejudice scale. They are not self-righteous; they do not feel superior to persons with opposing opinions."
Another panelist, Charles Anthony Smith, a lawyer and Ph.D candidate in political science at the University of California at San Diego, explored evolutionary biology explanations for how these unsavory RWAs arose in our midst. In his talk, "Law, Leadership, and Lords: Machiavellian Intelligence and the Role of Obedience in Collective Action," Smith suggested that the propensity to obey would be adaptive in either attacking or defending groups. Those groups which could more quickly be organized to defend themselves would be more likely to survive. A deliberative outlook under such circumstances would be an evolutionary disadvantage. Smith believes that this evolutionary tendency toward obedience can explain a host of behaviors, including the initial rise of theocracies in which leaders manipulated the propensity to obey by claiming that the gods had given them the divine right to rule.
Smith believes this tendency also explains the "rallying around" effect that occurs during attacks and wartime. Smith noted that polls taken on September 7-10, 2001, gave President Bush only a 51 percent approval rating, whereas his approval rating had jumped to 81 percent on September 15. The same phenomenon occurred after the Oklahoma City bombing under President Clinton and after the Marine barracks were blown up in Lebanon under President Reagan. He asked the not-unreasonable question, "Why do we rally around [them] when our leaders fail?" Smith evidently believes that evolution has hardwired humans to react that way.
In contrast to Smith's suggestion that certain tendencies might be hardwired into human beings, Altemeyer believes that children learn right-wing tendencies through harsh discipline from their parents. However, studies looking at identical twins reared apart back up the notion that political attitudes are heritable. They find that on average, about 60 percent of the individual differences that we observe in scores on a version of the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale (WPC) are attributable to genetic individual differences. The WPC is a catch phrase test in which subjects are asked to indicate whether they approve of various topics, such as the death penalty, X-rated movies, women's liberation, foreign aid, abortion and so forth by circling YES or NO. Obviously, such tests have no ability to handle nuances, or grapple with the reasons someone might have for harboring attitudes that the researcher dubs "conservative," or even "authoritarian." (One suspects the researchers don't think there could be such reasons, at least not intellectually serious ones.)
Whether it be an unfortunate evolutionary holdover or a mental disease transmitted by our parents—the science is apparently still up in the air—academic researchers have surely amassed enough evidence of psychopathology that conservatism can be listed in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Reasonable people, such as the distinguished academic researchers cited here, will no doubt agree that until effective treatments can be developed, we should reconsider whether sufferers of conservatism, like other mental defectives, should be allowed freely to exercise the franchise.
Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His new book, Liberation Biology: A Moral and Scientific Defense of the Biotech Revolution will be published in early 2005.
If I didn't know any better, I'd swear this guy made all of this up.
a first step towards re-education camps....
...good exposure of Libertarian/libertarian intent.
They can't be serious. This has to be a spoof of modern academia right? Please tell me it is?
Many liberals are extremely intolerant of world views, values, cultures and customs that do not mesh with theirs. It is the animal rights activist (ELF, ALF, PETA,) that blows things up and burns things up. It is the environmental activist (Earth First! Ruckus Society) that monkeywrenches equipment, destroys property and engages in confrontational tree sits and protests. It is the political anarchist that engages in the destruction of private property in violent protest over international trade, the war, etc.
One of our local environmentalists threw a bottle of beer at a County Supervisor and physically handled (poked the chest of a female) another participant at a watershed council meeting.
These liberal social scientists are so steeped in their own denial and so myopic, they don't even see their prejudice, intolerance and failure to allow diversity of opinion, culture and lifestyle.
Absurd.
I've been thinking that the differences between right and left are spiritual rather than psychological, though there may indeed be psychological implications. I think what you're describing is a certain alignment of right-minded thinkers toward Truth---a concept which the left abhors.
To my way of thinking intellectual rigidity is characteristic of the left. Conservative types are seekers, who trust the evidence of their senses and their God-given intuition. This gives them greater capacity to tolerate ambiguity and to endure suffering. Liberals reject common sense and intuition.
I took it as a spoof on liberals, especially those in Academic Psychology with those arbitrary scales, although the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale(WPC) has a certain amount of consistency based on genetic endowment, not the environment in which they were raised.
I have fewer problems with libertarians than I have with liberals. Liberty is more important to the former. I'm not an anarchist, but as far as I'm concerned, the fewer laws the better.
"Those who proclaim that the noble is despicable end up by proclaiming that the despicable is noble."
"The genuine coherence of our ideas does not come from the reasoning that ties them together, but from the spiritual impulse that gives rise to them." - Nicolás Gómez Dávila
"So long as we have nothing to say to God, nothing to do with Him, save in the sunshine of the mind when we feel Him near us, we are poor creatures, willed upon, not willing...And how in such a condition do we generally act? Do we sit mourning the loss of feeling? Or worse, make frantic efforts to try to rouse them?" - George MacDonald
"I know you have been misled--as others have been--into thinking you can be 'anti-Zionist' and yet remain true to these heartfelt principles that you and I share." - Martin Luther King Jr.
Maybe too many people confuse "modern" to mean technologically and or progressively modern, and what is modern in that sense is often used as a weapon of moral values. The media uses this trick alot.
So the poor slaves of nature, libs, fat with their self-centered material gains, bored drunk, lash out. They do not see the value of the family, so they deconstruct truths, because they are hollowmen. And like the socialist slogan of "social justice" driven by economic ignorance and perversion, today's raving pagan cry is "change."
These impatient "progressives" have long been demonaically selfish. Christianity and Judaism has been their obstacles; i.e. the rise of the Hitler's National Socialist German Workers Party and the precious U.S.S.R. (The leftist Nation in 1934 approvingly wrote that the Russian "revolution"; the rise of Italian anti-capitalist fascism; the rise of Hitler's Nazi party reflected people who "demand a larger measure of security than can be provided by a system of free enterprise." What these authoritiarians share with eachother is a vitriolic paganism and nihilistic selfishness, not a basic resistance to mindless "change" (today's equivalent of "social justice"). So you naturally get more outrageous acts from people that are conditioned that way. The trap is that Satan persuades man to demean himself; to do with man as It does with nature.
As David Horowitz has written, in my view, describing the degenerate effects of the lib mentality, "Academic standards have been junked and far leftist faculty members hired and promoted as acts of solidarity by other leftists within the university system." This fifth column in the U.S. is naturally aggressively immmoral and as we have seen from their aiding of terrorists and undermining America's security in the middle of war they will do and say anything because they feel like it.
Some books which may help turn around the crisis of educational fraud and corruption is to learn about what really makes America possible. So I recommend the following two and 1/12th books which will help in this effort: "John Dewey and the Decline of American Education: How the Patron Saint of Schools has Corrupted Teaching and Learning" by Henry T. Edmondson III and "Faith & Freedom" by Ben Hart. There is also a good amount of data and analysis in chapter 11 of David Limbaugh's "Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity" that is very useful.
As Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman and others successfully worked against the economic ignorance of their time and provided the Reagan Revolution with intellectual ammo, we can serve the cause of eternal vigilance for life and liberty by confronting an even more fundamental moral malaise: the deliberate and systematic destruction of America's Judeo-Christian moral compass that is epistemologically traceable people ! Get to it and spread the word!
Guess he missed the 20th century, or at least the Lenin-Stalin-Hitler-Mao-Pol Pot-et.al. part.
Good gravy, I am none of the above save for 'agressive.' I'm a nonconformist, certainly not submissive to higher status (in fact, I have been consistently criticized for my lack or respect for authority figures), and am too selfish to be agressive towards unconventional types - I just don't care enough about them either way.
These whackjobs must have made all this stuff up!
bttttt
All words true if you apply this to the real culprits, the left. They've shut down Stolen Valor, the anti Kerry film.
Didn't the Soviet Union consider anti-State thoughts to be signs of mental illness?
Sorry, this sounds just like left-wing Democrats who walk in lock-step, who spout a party line with which disagreement is strictly forbidden, who suck up to the Hollywood elites and those in positions of power who 'matter' and who have remained steadfastly silent regarding the violence perpetrated against Republican headquarters and personnel across the country.
I'm thinking this is more a projection thing, psychologically speaking! (We're the monsters we accuse you of being, so you must be removed so we feel better.)
ping
Fortunately for this person we have an economy so strong that it can support such silly lotus eating. During the Great Depression, clowns like this ended up selling pencils or digging ditches.
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