Kyle Rittenhouse walks away from the courthouse while Ahmaud Arbery's killers were found guilty and "QAnon Shaman," Jacob Chansley, was received significant jail time. Our opinions on each of these cases are likely determined by our political affiliations, which in turn are a reflection of how we think about morality, crime, and punishment.Julian draws on scientific research into how genetics and the brain shape our politics, thought experiments in moral philosophy, and the work of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt.As he questions whether or not any of us have freely chosen to be the good ones, he wonders if a way out of our toxic polarization might be found through understanding the underlying moral values and emotional reactions that drive one another's political beliefs.
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality podcast team.
The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
You can support our work and have full access to bonus episodes and other premium content by subscribing for as little as $5 a month at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
Thanks for listening and your support, which keeps us ad free and editorially independent.
A 2014 study published in Behavior Genetics looked at a sample of over 12,000 twin pairs from five different countries over the course of four decades.
They found that political attitudes are roughly 40% genetic.
Genetic epidemiologist Peter Hatemi, the lead author of the study, said, We inherit part of how we process information, how we see the world, and how we perceive threats, and these are expressed in modern societies as political attitudes.
A different study in 2015 published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B showed that 62% of highly liberal women carried dopamine receptor genotypes that have been associated with extroversion and novelty seeking.
Only 37%, so slightly more than half, of women in this study with conservative attitudes carried those particular genes.
Molecular geneticist Richard Ebstein, who's the lead author of that study, speculated that perhaps high novelty seekers are more willing to entertain the idea of change, including in the political sphere.
These findings line up with other psychological research that shows how openness to new experience as a personality trait is predictive of liberal political beliefs, while trait conscientiousness tends to correlate with being more conservative.
A 2016 study explored the hypothesis that our political leanings may be rooted in very fundamental processes in the brain, ancient instincts that avoided danger and filth, which we experience as fear and disgust.
Published in the journal Cognitive Science, this was based on a computer simulation.
Using the premise that our ancestors would have had to choose between potential opportunities and potential risks when meeting new groups of strangers.
The opportunities might be for new trading and mating partners, while the risks might include unpredictable behavior or exposure to dangerous pathogens.
In areas with high infection rates, the model showed that the driving force of evolution would be impulses toward what we associate today with social conservatism—fear of outsiders, conformity, and ethnocentrism.
If we go further back to 2011, a study in Current Biology concluded that conservatives were more likely to have larger amygdalae, creating greater sensitivity to fear, and liberals were more likely to have larger anterior cingulate cortices, giving them more of an ability to tolerate uncertainty and conflict.
Now I know this is starting to sound a little bit like phrenology, right?
Like you can predict the person's personality by the bumps on their head, but stay with me.
Another 2011 study showed that sensitivity to disgust was also highly correlated with being socially conservative.
I should mention, of course, that both of these 2011 studies did note in their conclusions that causality was not established with certainty, and that it could be that just having liberal or conservative beliefs might exercise these brain regions more and strengthen these traits.
and then we'll see you next time.
In other words, the causality could go in the other direction.
This brief summary of some of the key studies in this area underlines something quite humbling, though.
It's this.
If your brain happens to come pre-wired with a genetic tendency to seek out novel experience, to find new people and cultures interesting, and because of where your ancestors are from to not react with fear or disgust to things outside of the norms of your society, then you are probably a liberal.
Not because of some virtue you've strived for, and not through careful, rational weighing of the facts, but because it just feels right.
Conversely, if because of where your ancestors came from, your brain is set up to react with fear and disgust to things outside of the norms of your society, and to be reflexively suspicious of strangers, and to just not be drawn to novel experiences, but instead feel protective of your own culture, you're probably politically conservative.
We like to think that our political attitudes are based on rational processes, on thinking things through and making value judgments for all the right reasons.
Our opponents, of course, whoever they are, are much more irrational, in denial of dangers we correctly perceive.
We may even see them as intellectually dishonest, why, they've obviously been brainwashed.
How else to explain it?
But what if a really significant component of how we form our political beliefs and decisions is automatic, instinctive, emotional, and even determined by genes that reflect the ancestral adaptations of generations back into the mists of time?
Are we really the good ones for having supposedly chosen the morally correct political stance?
And are our opponents really the degenerate or self-interested simpletons who have chosen their affiliations due to being out of touch with reality and convinced by the wrong ideology?
Don't misunderstand me here.
I'm not saying that moral judgments are entirely subjective.
Nor am I advocating for a world in which we try to make nice with fascists or Maoists or pretend that conspiracy theories and other forms of political misinformation are equally valid to worldviews consistent with the facts.
I am saying, though, that perhaps if we want to be effective in terms of any goals we have on the political and cultural stage, reflecting thoughtfully on the perhaps hard-wired moral reflexes of this spectrum could be one way out of the escalating culture-war polarization that everyone decries.
It's become commonplace in the last several years to decry the lack of civil discourse and the loss of good faith debate.
Perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of dehumanizing our opponents by ascribing to them the worst possible motivations and conflating any areas of disagreement with the most broad strokes, extreme and ugly caricatures.
If we think that anyone who in any way disagrees with us must secretly be dog-whistling implicit support for the great Satan, well, any hope of discussion and understanding is lost.
In this landscape, all progressives are secretly communist revolutionaries who want to destroy family values and enact a new cultural revolution that punishes thought crime.
All conservatives deep down are really white supremacist antisemitic transphobes who won't stop short of installing a fascist dictatorship with Trump as president until he dies and then Donnie Jr.
