| Of course, as we learn more about the structure and function of the brain, perhaps we will learn that liberals and conservatives are indeed born and not made, but I have a gut feeling the odds are against it.
Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions and The Vision of the Anointed do a good job of reducing "liberal" and "conservative" views to a very small set of fundamental assumptions about how the world works. Sowell explains, for example, why if you find someone opposed to nuclear power, that person is probably also pro-abortion, in favor of affirmative action, and so on, right down the liberal line. These issues don't seem related, but Sowell shows how they are. One of my fundamental assumptions about how the world works is that Nature likes systems that wobble around a mean. The world is full of them. Such systems don't seek the mean and stay there; the wobbling is part of the system, designed to shake things up and foment continuous change and experimentation. My hunch is that Sowell's "constrained" and "unconstrained" visions will someday be shown to be inherent, and like sex, distributed roughly 50-50 in the population. This creates the system that we see: one where neither liberals nor conservatives ever "win the final battle." It's a system that continuously battles around a mean, with no finality to any of it. Nature doesn't want finality. It wants to keep the game going. |
My gut feeling is that the odds are for it. Leftists have predominated in education for a very long time, and yet half the population ends up 'conservative' anyway.