"They do that because they were born that way."
If you say that about homosexuals, you are tolerant and
realistic. If you say it about blacks, you are racist (unless you're black
yourself). If you say it about women, you may or may not be sexist, depending
on who is manning (er, womanning) the feminist battle stations. If you say it
about men, you just might be a writer for Esquire. But if you say it about
conservatives, you're a scientist.
Over the past decade, a new fad has taken hold among
academics and liberal journalists: call it the new science of conservative
phrenology. No, it doesn't actually involve using calipers to determine
intelligence based on the size and shape of people's heads. The measuring
devices are better -- MRIs and gene sequencers -- but the conclusions are
worse. The gist is this: Conservatives and liberals don't just have different
world views or ideas, they have different brains; the right and left are just
hard-wired to think differently.
Author Chris Mooney compiles much of this research for
his new book The Republican Brain, which purports to show that conservatives
are, literally by nature, more closed-minded and resistant to change and facts.
His evidence includes the fact that conservatives are less likely to buy into
global warming, allegedly proving they are not only "anti-science"
but innately anti-fact, as well. "Politicized wrongness today," he
writes "is clustered among Republicans, conservatives and especially Tea
Partiers."
That's an entirely understandable view for Mooney to
hold. He's a soaked-to-the-bone liberal partisan. But he crosses the line into
pseudoscientific hogwash by trying to explain every political disagreement as a
symptom of bad brains. For instance, Mooney claims Republicans have trouble
processing reality because Republicans think "ObamaCare" will raise
the deficit. No really, stop laughing.
Of course, Mooney believes he's simply going where the
science leads. Consider that one of the more famous studies was conducted by
liberal researchers at University of California-Los Angeles and New York
University and published in Nature Neuroscience. Subjects were asked to spot
the letters M or W on a screen for a fraction of a second. It turns out that
self-described liberals did somewhat better on the test than the conservatives.
What does that mean? Well, according to the researchers,
it means: "Liberals are more responsive to informational complexity,
ambiguity and novelty." Liberals are also "more likely than are conservatives
to respond to cues signaling the need to change habitual responses," NYU
says.
Translation: Conservatives literally aren't smart enough
to be spell-checkers at an M&M factory because they won't be able to
understand quickly enough that the occasional W is just an upside down M.
The data might be correct, but as with Mooney, the
conclusions are beyond absurd. London's Guardian newspaper responded to the
study by declaring, "Scientists have found that the brains of people
calling themselves liberals are more able to handle conflicting and unexpected
information." The Los Angeles Times announced in an editorial that the
study "suggests that liberals are more adaptable than conservatives"
and "might be better judges of the facts."
Huh? The test didn't measure "informational
complexity." It measured informational simplicity. As Slate's science
columnist William Saletan notes, the study actually excludes complexity and
ambiguity. It measured response times to a rudimentary visual acuity test.
Almost by definition, conscious thought isn't part of the equation. My hunch is
that Socrates would do very poorly hunting and pecking for Ms and Ws on a
screen, too.
Now it's probably true that, on average, there are subtle
differences between conservatives and liberals when it comes to cognition. But
you don't have to be "anti-science" to see how the scientists are
wildly overreaching from the data. Indeed, there's a huge definitional problem.
Conservatives resist growth of the state, but that's not the same thing as
resisting change. After all, capitalism is among the most powerful agents of
change in human history, and conservatives are the ones defending it.
Meanwhile, liberals are downright reactionary about preserving the Great
Society and New Deal.
A famous study asserts that communist revolutionaries
Joseph Stalin and Fidel Castro were political conservatives because they
resisted change once in power. If your algorithmic whirligig spits out the
finding that Stalin, the global leader of communism for two decades, and
Castro, the global dashboard saint of recrudescent left-wing asininity, are
"politically conservative" it's time to take the gadget out to a
field and smash it with baseball bats like the printer in the movie
"Office Space."
Mooney, who recently explained in a speech that he has
given up on the Enlightenment view that we're all open to reason, doesn't seem
to realize where he's heading with this nonsense. Never mind that this approach
is inherently undemocratic and opens the door to "genetic"
explanations for everybody's political views -- blacks, women, gays, etc. -- it
is also self-serving bigotry that allows liberals to justify their own
closed-mindedness on the grounds that Republicans aren't even worth listening
to. After all, they're just born that way.
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