Of Course your Enemies are Organized

Organization is a spontaneous feature of all human societies. Heck, bees are organized.

There is a myth, routinely proposed by those who know no better, that other people are acting completely independently. Independent action, flowing spontaneously from one’s sense of morality or injustice, prompting sudden, wide-spread social change.

Then people discover that, contrary to this ignorant assumption, other humans actually put in a bunch of effort to organize, choosing carefully when and where they should act or at least helping each other out, and they are shocked, just shocked.

Somehow, spontaneous action is regarded as purely motivated, whereas organized action–the natural result of all human socializing–is impure, some kind of dastardly conspiracy.

Don’t be dumb. Of course your enemies are organized–whoever your enemies happen to be.

The Rosa Parks story comes immediately to mind, as analyzed by Herbert Kohl in Should we Burn Babar? Kohl, I should be clear, does not regard Mrs. Parks as an enemy–he wants her story to be told accurately. Kohl examines school textbook accounts of Mrs. Parks’s story, finding, IIRC, that most were inaccurate.

One of the most common inaccuracies Kohl found in the textbooks was the description of Mrs. Parks as a totally normal person, (just like you and me!) not involved in any political movements, who was just really tired one day and didn’t want to move.

This is wrong, of course. Rosa Parks was an active member of a civil rights organization. Her refusal to move was not the spontaneous result of being tired one day, but a planned protest against segregation. Mrs. Parks was not the first black person who refused to give up her seat on a bus, but civil rights leaders chose to publicize her case and not earlier cases because they thought the American public would find Mrs. Parks a more sympathetic character–you see, the other lady who did the exact same courageous act as Mrs. Parks but hasn’t received any credit for it was divorced.

If you find this surprising, please ask yourself Why? Do you really think the March on Washington or Montgomery Bus Boycott happened without organization? At the very least, people had to get to work.

Kohl offers unsatisfying explanations for the inaccuracies in textbook accounts of Mrs. Parks’s story, mostly because he doesn’t quite understand the writers’ motivations. Here’s what I think happened:

In Mrs. Parks’s time, liberals tended to be on the side of the Civil Rights movement, and conservatives tended to be against it. Both sides knew darn well that the Civil Rights movement was organized.

Today, even conservatives are generally in favor of Civil Rights–conservatives I know wax rhapsodically and frequently about how much they love Dr. King. I shit you not, I know white, southern conservatives who actually see themselves in solidarity with Blacks and Hispanics against evil white liberals.

But these rather conventional, mainstream conservatives do not believe in radical, organized protest against the state. That is a liberal thing. Mainstream conservatives like the status quo and generally seek to protect it (and supporting Civil Rights is now status quo, so they do,) but organized protest is anti-status quo, so they don’t like it.

To make Mrs. Parks an appropriate conservative hero, capable of appearing in children’s history texts without inspiring parental protest that the texts are teaching politics instead of history, Mrs. Parks’ associations with organized liberalism have been scrubbed. A conservative hero like Mrs. Parks couldn’t possibly do something so controversially liberal as join a social organization in favor of her own self-interest.

 

The recent riots in Baltimore and elsewhere are another example. People report, most conspiratorially, that these riots were organized. Of course they were organized! We call them campus organizations for a reason. Heck, I know people who can’t get together with their friends to play video games without setting up a treasury and by-laws, but people are surprised to learn that folks who’ve been in Social Justice organizations for years might donate money to help protesters with legal fees or organize transportation together.

It’s one thing for people to just spontaneously decide to protest. It’s a totally different matter to carpool.

 

Conservatives organize too, btw. Evangelical churches, talk radio, and various conservative think tanks have been organizing conservatives for decades. Conservatives are quite good at organizing, as they tend, even more than liberals, to like being part of an organized social hierarchy. These organizations have had a pretty big effect on the American political scene, because they are very effective at getting their members to vote in lock-step for whatever policies and politicians they support. Thus, four decades years after Roe V. Wade, conservatives still pose a real threat to legal abortion. (Evolutionist X believes abortion should be free and easily available.)

 

Whoever your enemies are, of course they are organized. Organization is a basic feature of all human societies. Stop acting surprised.

Nature Observations

Just some observations, attempts at making sense of the world. I may be wrong. I admit that these are opinions, based on my experiences.

 

Liberals tend to believe that people are inherently good. Conservatives tend to believe that people are inherently bad. Liberals believe that evil is a result of negative environmental conditions that cause people to deviate from their inner badness. Conservatives believe that goodness is a result of negative environmental conditions that cause people to repress their inner badness.

Compare, for example, “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” to, say, any liberal parent you’ve ever met.

Or compare the conservative reaction to ISIS (“Bomb them until they convert to Christianity or all die,”) to the liberal, “To defeat ISIS, we need more jobs for people in the Middle East.”

Liberals are generally more pleasant to be around, even if they are occasionally delusional.

In general, both sides tend to act like there exists one single, agreed-upon definition of what “good” is, even though a conversation with virtually any other human being on the face of this planet will quickly reveal that this is entirely untrue, as that other person holds forth that all sorts of horribly dumb ideas are good and that all of your best traits are really really bad.

Conservatives claim they know what “good” is because “God said so,” and anyone who doesn’t agree with them about what God says is Obviously Evil. It’s not much of a position, but at least you can defend it if you accept the initial premise.

Liberals think that everyone else sees “good” and “bad” the same way they do just because to do otherwise would meant that other people are doing things that liberals see as “bad” even without negative environmental effects, which blows the whole shebang out of the water. Which is really kind of annoying when someone really and truly doesn’t get that you actually do see XYZ as good rather than the result of some horrible trauma that made you do bad, though that’s still not as bad as conservatives dropping bombs on you.

Of course, in reality, most people try to do “good” as they themselves see it, moderated somewhat by their genetic inclinations and culture. The guys in ISIS really and truly do see themselves as good guys, while homeless people fret over the sin of stealing a shopping cart so they have a place to put their stuff.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all morality is relative, you can’t judge anyone else, etc. etc. I would say that our basic understanding of “good” and “evil” people/actions/behaviors is very specific to our own particular culture/subculture/immediate group of friends & family, and probably just isn’t a very meaningful way of understanding the actions of people outside of those groups.

A complicating wrinkle of uncomplicating insight via two images:

So I happened to be browsing Stanford Magazine, and happened across two articles immediately in a row on religious issues. Each had a picture:

  
The contrast between the level of respect for the religion/religious believers in question really couldn’t be starker.

The respectable lady is Jane Shaw, Stanford’s new Dean of Religious life, notable for being both the first woman to hold the position and the first gay person. A few quotes from her article:

“Q. At Grace Cathedral and at Oxford, you led programs far afield from what might be considered religious: Hosting forums with politicians, activists and authors; bringing in atheists and believers; and commissioning artists-in-residence to create plays and installations. What’s your guiding light?

A. I don’t think I am a very churchy person, if that makes sense. I have always been interested in how you engage people in discussing questions of ultimate meaning, really—values, ethics, spirituality, all that stuff.
…

Q. But do you also value the “churchy” side of faith?

A. Ritual and liturgy? I love it.

Q. What new directions will you bring to Stanford?

A. …It is certainly my desire to make sure that Memorial Church is a place for extremely lively intellectual engagement, a place where possibly difficult issues can be discussed, a place where ethical and spiritual issues can be discussed. I am hoping we’ll have different sorts of people preaching here as guest preachers, not just clergy.”

The second photo is most likely a van owned by an unmedicated schizophrenic. You’d be forgiven if you therefore assumed the second article had something to do with mental illness.

It’s actually an interview with Stanford alum Kathryn Gin Lum about her new book, “Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction.”

Right. So whoever put the picture on this article equates the faith of the Founding Fathers (and many Americans today) with literal mental illness.

To be clear, Lum herself does not appear to be condescending toward the people/beliefs she studied, but her interview reveals that respect for the views of 60% of Americans is not common in our nation’s most respected centers of academic thought:

“Separate from any personal considerations, hell seemed to offer the best intellectual grist. ‘People in the academy,’ says Lum, tend to dismiss the notion that any consideration of hell could drive ‘how rational people think.'”

“Does hell have contemporary relevance, despite its lousy reputation in higher education?

“Strongly, thinks Lum. Much of her analysis highlights the connection between ‘people who believe in hell’ and their impulse ‘to damn other people to it.’ It’s that sensibility about calling out the world’s evils, says Lum, that suffuses today’s hot-button issues, including abortion and same-sex marriage.”

(Note that whatever insights she may have about rational people who believe in hell, or any potential good sides to the belief, the article does not mention them. It only mentions the ways in which people who believe in hell are problematic for the rest of the country. Those darn hell-believers, mucking things up for everyone else.)

“Writing about hell’s pertinence, Lum notes in her epilogue, ‘is to invite raised eyebrows.’ Her interest in the subject, she adds, has stirred reactions like ‘But you look so well-adjusted!'”

All right, so let’s review:

According to Stanford, a gay woman who isn’t very “churchy” but likes discussing ethics is one of the country’s best religious leaders, and the 60% of Americans who believe in Hell are literally insane and make trouble for everyone else.

One set of religious views is respected. The other is not.

Now, let’s try to imagine a contemporary article from any sort of respectable college or university (not one of the ones that make you mutter and stare at your feet while admitting that one of your relations was interested in the school,) that conveys the inverse: respect for people who believe in hell; disrespect for gays, women, and people whose faith isn’t based on Biblical inerrancy.

Can you? Maybe Harvard? Yale? Oberlin? CalTech? Reed? Fine, how about BYU? No, probably not even them.

I can’t imagine it. A hundred years ago, maybe. Today, no. Such notions are completely incompatible with the beliefs of modern, upper-class people.

I know many perfectly decent folks who believe in hell, and think they should be respected, but “be decent to people who hold denigrated religious beliefs” is not actually my point. My point is that the American upper class, academia, and the people with a great deal of power and influence over the beliefs of others clearly agrees with Pastor Shaw’s religious beliefs (when it is not outright atheist). Upper-class liberals in America are their own ethnic group with their own religion, culture, morality, and endogamous breeding habits. Conservatives are the out-group, their religious views openly mocked by the upper class and banned from the halls of academic thought.

Thing is, we happen to live, more or less, in a democracy.

One of the intended effects of democracy is that even groups with no real power can still express themselves via voting. If you have the numbers and bother to go to the polls, you can get someone in who more or less kinda sorta might represent your views.

As a result, even though conservatives are low-class and not cultural or intellectual movers and shakers, they can still influence who gets to be president or in Congress, and thus pass laws on things like abortion and stem cell research.

As a result, a group that has very little power in real life may end up with a fair amount via elections.

Think of it as a for of political power redistribution.

The Other Side Believes it is Moral, Too

I’ve gotten to the point where I just tune out people’s criticisms of the president. Not necessarily because I think those particular people are annoying, nor because I have any affection for the president, but because “politics” has involved ceaseless presidential criticizing for about as long as I can remember. By now, it’s just buzzing white noise. After all, the internet is full of people just blowing off steam and signalling social membership, not making rational arguments.

But when confronted with an actual, live human being, seemingly rational, who insists that “liberals”–by which he means “Obama and maybe some guys in Congress/the Senate”–are  motivated 100% by lust for power and 0% by morals, I admit that even I stared in shock.

No, I responded, liberals really believe their rhetoric. They actually think the things they are doing are moral. They think they are good.

He did not believe me. I think he also did not believe me that there are “liberals” outside of elected politicians. Ordinary mortal humans just vote for these totally evil guys because they have been deceived, I guess.

No, I said, ordinary humans vote for these guys because they actually agree with them. They agree on moral issues. Liberals have morals, they are just different from conservative morals.
Conservatives aren’t the only people with this issue. I know plenty of liberals who also believe that “anyone who believes X is a deeply immoral and horrible human being.” Feminists who insist that anyone who disagrees with them “hates women” come immediately to mind.

 

Honestly, people, how hard is it to just listen to each other?

Liberals and Conservatives have Stopped Talking to Each Other

They aren’t talking to each other; they aren’t even talking about the same stuff anymore.

I normally hang out with liberals, but this past weekend I spent around some of the more traditionally conservative members of my extended family. Since I spend a fair amount of time critiquing liberal ideas, you might think we’d have a ton to discuss, but no. The things I’m concerned about and the things they’re concerned about are totally different things.

Think about it: how often do you hear liberals make an impassioned defense of Obama’s actions in Benghazi?

Personally, never. I’ve never heard liberals discuss Benghazi at all. The only time I’ve heard the word cross their lips, (or keyboards,) is in the context of, “Oh god, my conservative relatives ae going to rattle on endlessly about Benghazi at Thanksgiving dinner.” It might as well be a hemorrhoid treatment for all liberals want to talk about it.

Now take the conservative side. When’s the last time you heard your conservative relatives talking about “white privilege”?

Probably never.

Some stuff makes it into both communities–riots, for example–but a ton of political debate, discussion, philosophy, development, etc., is going on in total isolation from the other side.

The reason, quite simply, is the internet.

Once upon a time, there was no internet. Everyone watched TV and/or read newspapers, and even if you hated Fox News or MSNBC, you probably still encountered it occasionally or knew people who watched it. In other words, there were only a few news sources, and chances were good that you were watching/reading them.

Then came the internet. Many young people today get most of their news/political discussion from internet sources like Tumblr and Facebook. Many of them do not take a newspaper or watch the evening news, and neither do the majority of people they know.

Older people still get their news primarily from TV and newspapers. (One older relative claimed to spend $190 a month just so he could watch Fox News–a news source he very adamantly vowed to never give up.)

So young people progress ever leftward, largely oblivious to what old people are thinking and talking about. And old people, in their own information-bubble, have no idea what young people are thinking and talking about.

Conservatism tends to be pretty bad at making coherent counter-arguments to liberalism, (mostly, I think, because conservatives tend to operate on an emotional basis of “I like it like this because I’m used to it,” rather than on rational arguments,) but if the two sides aren’t even talking, the chances of getting the two sides to agree on anything or debate their way to a rational consensus seems even less likely than usual.

I think it likely that some new form of conservatism may spawn from the depths of the internet.

X will be more like Y if X just acts more like Y

Due to some basically random and kinda funny only to me things that the modern internet does to people’s information networks, I stumbled across this article:

Why white evangelicals rule the midterms

I can’t speak for the factual accuracy of the article, or whether you’d find its aims desirable. But I found it amusing that it basically boils down to recommending that if Liberals want the same outcomes as conservatives, they should act more like conservatives.

If liberals act like conservatives, then do they become conservatives? (Questions of acting and being, I suppose.)

It is tempting to see religion as an organizing principle within people’s lives, but the causality may go the other way–people who are prone to organized community life tend to join/form religious organizations.

As for the article’s general recommendation that liberals build more community from the ground up–well, I like community, or at least the idea of it. But I also think there are some strong impediments to liberals actually building community. Liberals are more likely to be young people, who simply haven’t lived in one place long enough to form communities. Liberals are more likely to be folks from small, diasporic ethnic groups, who don’t have a big group of people to join with. They are more likely to come from communities where factors like crime and poverty have large negative effects on people’s ability to have nice public spaces where they can hang out. Etc.

Beyond their ethnic enclaves, the far left seems to be having trouble with effective organization. Someone has said that trying to get liberals to do anything is like herding cats; much mention is also made of the circular liberal firing squad, and of course the metaphor of everyone jockying for position on a doomed, sinking ship.

Still, despite it all, communities that care about each other and provide basic social support and friendship for their members, without falling prey to some of the violent excesses of certain communities I could mention, seem like a good thing.

Morality is what other people want you to do

This is morality from a game theory perspective.

Let’s say Person B and Person C are playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma. We ask B, “What is the moral thing for C to do?” A of course responds, “Cooperate! If C cooperates, we get highest net utility!”

Now we ask Ayn Rand, “What should C do?”
“Defect,” she answers. “Defection gets C more money than cooperation, and C doesn’t have any obligation to care about B.”

B then responds, looking a bit nervous, “I think C really should cooperate. Caring about others is moral.”

Rand: You’re just making a deontological argument with no backing. Morality, hah! You just want C to do what’s in your interest instead of his interest.

B: But obviously this kind of thinking leads to everyone defecting, and then utility is crap! Trustworthiness makes society function!

Ayn Rand: Look, what if C just lost his job? He has a dozen children to feed, and cooperating will not get him enough money to survive. If he doesn’t defect, he and all of his children will die.

B: Well… I guess then it’d be okay…

Ayn Rand: In that case, by your own reasoning, you ought to encourage his defection, because that saves lives!

B. Well… Um… But wait a minute! What if I also have 12 children to feed and no job? My first obligation is to my kids, not C’s kids. C should cooperate so that I can defect!

And, in fact, in extreme cases like famines, people sacrifice their own lives–go without food–to save the lives of others. And people have been known to literally kill and eat other people. It’s gruesome, but it is generally agreed that saving lives trumps most other concerns. (See previous post on morality for why.) People in wartime will also go to extremes, though this may be less justified.

But most of the time, we are not in a famine. B and C aren’t facing death if they cooperate–C’s life will just be marginally better if he defects, (and vice-versa).

B wants C to always cooperate–this is the best possible thing for B, even if B has secret plans to defect. So publicly, at least, B will always insist that the most moral thing is for C to cooperate–even if it harms C.

Some people actually care about the greatest possible good. Many just care about encouraging people not to defect on them. The net effect, of course, is a general message that the “Most moral thing possible” is to completely sacrifice oneself for others. People who, say, run into burning building to rescue people, or give up their lives for their children, or donate kidneys to strangers, or spend all of their time helping disabled orphans, are generally hailed as heroes, the epitome of morality.

We might shorthand this to “Morality = the greatest good to society.” (The cost to you be damned).

Obviously a society that manages to convince people to cooperate in no-famine situations will be better off than a society that fails to do so. In fact, this is the kind of society you want to live in–the alternative would be kind of awful.

The downside to this kind of morality is that people who take it too far tend to weed themselves out of the gene pool, leaving society less moral in their wakes. We might laud people who give up their fortunes to help the poor, but try announcing your plan to give all of your excess money to starving third worlders and begin sleeping in a cardboard box to your parents at [holiday of your choice] dinner, and see how it goes over.

We might even argue that there are two kinds of morality at play, one mitochondrial, the other viral. Mitochondrial cares about the survival of your genes, and people who don’t share your genes be damned. Viral morality cares about the well-being of society, and your particular genes be damned. The connections to liberals and conservatives should be obvious.

If a conservative says, “X is moral,” and it makes no sense to you, they likely mean, “X is in my genes’ interests.” If a liberal says, “X is moral,” and that makes no sense to you, they likely mean, “X is in society’s interests.”

The correlation is not absolute, though, as the vast majority of people employ both sets of morals, and not just hypocritically.

If you want to live in a nice society, you need both approaches. You need people to basically cooperate most of the time, so that you can do business with strangers or live remotely near them. You also need to exert a little interest in your own self-interest, so you don’t die.

Some people lean too far in the self-interested direction, and need to be reminded to cooperate.

This is one of religion’s good points–almost all religions generally try to encourage people to cooperate and make sacrifice for the common good, and religion tends to be effective at doing this because it can say, “Do it because GOD SAYS SO,” which has historically been pretty effective. So in a religious ceremony, we vow, “Until death do us part,”–promising, before god, not to defect on each other, which probably makes people actually less likely to break their marriage contracts than merely promising before a gov’t bureaucrat. Likewise, in many of the most destitute parts of the world, (like the DRC or your local homeless shelter,) the only people doing anything to help are mostly religious folks.

Even many of the world’s most successful “communist” ventures were religious, because “god says so” is an effective motivator to get people to share–but more about that later.

By contrast, some people lean too far in the societally-interested direction, and need to be reminded that it is okay for them to look after their own interests, too. Women who’ve become the primary caregivers for elderly relatives, for example, often end up sacrifice excessively, nearly killing themselves in the process. They may need to be reminded that it is okay to value their own lives, too.

Aristotle posits his virtues as the middle between two extremes–Bravery between Cowardliness and Rashness, for example. I suggest an optimum morality as taking the middle path between these two extremes of social and genetically-interested morality, so that you can have a nice society without all of the nice people dying out and being replaced by jerks.

Peter Frost and Amygdalas

(I promised I’d get to this.)

Amusingly, Peter Frost, over on Evo and Proud, just recently posted, “Are liberals and conservatives differently wired?“, which describes some of the recent studies on the subject and draws conclusions broadly counter to my own. I thought you should know.

Actually, I suspect that most of the reason for or ‘disagreement’ is that we are using a different organizing schema to class people as “liberal” or “conservative.” Frost is starting with people’s self-reported affiliation, noting the differences found in the experiments, and then noting the (rather large) ethnic differences between the two groups and speculating that much of the observed difference may be primarily ethnic, rather than some grand approach to principles.

I started by first controlling for race, because otherwise (IMO) we end up smushing most of the non-whites into incorrect categories by assuming that they are voting for candidates and policies for the same reasons as whites. IE, “attitude towards blacks” and “attitude toward people who are ethnically different from yourself” might be roughly synonymous if you happen to be a white person who lives near black people, but they’re not at all synonymous if you happen to be a black person. Of course black people tend to vote for candidates who seem most likely to not be racist against black people, but that’s not the same as being liberal. (That’s just common sense.) However, since we live in a country where the majority of people are white, we tend to default toward the white POV when talking about political affiliation, and so many people who are not actually liberal at all may call themselves liberal just because they vote for the Democrats (and possibly, though I suspect less likely, vice versa.)

Any study looking for neurological differences between “liberals” and “conservatives” that just uses self-reported political orientation and doesn’t control for ethnicity seems rather dubious. If it turns out that all of my understanding of neuroprocessing is compromised, I’m going to be sad and will have to re-research everything.

Once you factor out the wonky racial dynamics, I think there is actually such thing as more or less liberal people. In the case of the British study Frost cites, I strongly suspect that the Muslims who vote Labour are actually quite conservative. Likewise, African Americans have very high rates of church attendance and strike me as fairly conservative overall, though not as conservative as most Muslims. The same is more or less also true of American Hispanics and Asians, while most white Europeans strike me as more liberal than American whites.

The Genetics of Altruism

As I touched on earlier, there is probably something genetic underlying people’s attitudes toward altruism, or at least a genetics-environment interaction.

To be clear, we are looking at the pattern of “conservatives have a small network of people whom they would sacrifice a great deal for, and a large # of people whom they don’t really care about, with a fairly sharp distinction between them” vs. “liberals have a large number of people about whom they care a moderate amount, with no sharp distinction between levels of caring,” aka “high tribalness” vs. “low tribalness”.

Lots of other people who are not me have done a TON of work on this subject, so I am not even going to attempt to summarize all they have said and done. For now, I’m just going to try to keep this short, and limit it to my own best suspicions:

Conservatives probably are, or were socialized by, people who are genetically more closely to their communities (or ancestral communities) than liberals.

In technical terms, we are talking about levels of consanguinity. In slightly more popular terms, we’d call it levels of in- or out-breeding. Unfortunately, the term “inbred” is an insult in American (western) society, because we have strong cultural norms (memes) on the subject (memes not shared with many other parts of the world, which have very different opinions on the subject of optimal marriage partners.)

To be clear: I am NOT saying, “Hur hur hur, conservatives is dums becuz they marry their cuzins.” This is a discussion of *comparative* levels of consanguinity in one’s ancestors and in one’s community, not whether or not one married one’s cousin or raped one’s sibling.

Now, a bit of necessary background: Different people (and regions of people) have different levels of consanguinity. For example, the descendants of a group of one hundred people who got stranded on a tiny island in the Pacific with no outside contact with the outside world for a thousand years, even if they have scrupulously followed the no-cousin-marriage rule, will obviously all be very closely related to each other, and genetically distinct from outsiders. Two individuals chosen at random from this island will be very genetically similar, sharing many (if not most) traits, and sharply different from outsiders.

By contrast, take a city founded at the confluence of several major trade routes, in the midst of relatively hospitable territory. People from different ethnic groups come and go in the city, marrying and leaving descendants. Any two randomly chosen citizens could easily be more closely related to and share more genetic traits with people from hundreds or thousands of miles away than with each other. So long as no one imposes segregation, a few thousand years of mixing (or a couple of generations, take your pick,) will produce a community of descendants who are distantly related to lots and lots of people, but less closely related than the islanders to their own immediate families. Where the islanders are sharply distinct from the rest of the world, the citizens blend gradually into the world.

This implies that islanders actually share more genes with their children than the citizens. Island-altruism toward one’s family or virtually anyone on the island will therefore propagate the individual’s genes. The citizens, who share fewer genes with their own children and immediate family and only a few with their neighbors, do not benefit as much genetically from altruism. The citizen who dies for their fellow citizen is closer to an evolutionary dead end, eliminating most of their altruism from the gene pool, while an islander who dies for their fellow islander has saved a much larger proportion of their genes. However, it is not in the citizen’s interest to do nothing for their fellows. After all, those guys do share some of their genes. The citizen, then, will display low-levels of altruism toward lots of people, without much ability to distinguish “us” from “them” (because there is no sharp “us” or “them”), but not massive sacrifices beyond the small level of genetic sharing. The islander will sacrifice readily for their fellows, but has no reason to sacrifice for outsiders.

Now, truely isolated islanders are a rare exception, as they are unlikely to have much of an adaptation for dealing with outsiders due to it never coming up. With no notion of “outsiders”, such communities can be quite nice–socialistic to the point of being indistinguishable from liberal communities, even. Japan comes immediately to mind. Yes, the Japanese have had a bad history of trying to conquer the outside world and I would characterize the people as generally conservative, but Japan itself is a socialisty state with far more equality and social cooperation than the US.

American conservatives, by contrast, interact with and are affected by the outside world far more. They consequently have a much more active hostility toward outsiders.

Implication: the idea that conservatives don’t support socialism is simply a side effect of living in a multi-ethnic society. Conservatives support socialism for themselves, but not for people whom they see as outsiders. (Which is, of course, genetically sensible.) Liberals support socialism for a much broader group of people, which is sensible for their genetics. The difference between these two groups in this discussion lies not so much in their treatment of their own, but in the nature of the distinction between “their own” and “not their own”, and their willingness to extend altruism beyond their own.

Disclaimer: I have followed a genetic train of reasoning here. As I noted, memes and genes go together; it’s entirely possible that we could get identical results just by raising people in tightly-knit culturally united communities or loosely-knit culturally diverse communities, with the results being entirely environmental. In reality, I suspect there exists a semi-complicated interaction between peoples’ natural inclinations and the environment they’re raised in and/or live in, where some people are well-adapted to certain environments and will thrive in them, and others are mal-adapted to those environments and become stressed out (perhaps pathologically so,) and would probably be better off elsewhere.

Sociopaths within, sociopaths without

A few posts back, I made a comment to the effect that liberals tend to be “good people” (or at least well-intentioned people) who are concerned about sociopaths.

I feel like this comment deserves some explanation, because it comes across as harsher than intended toward conservatives.

Conservatives would kill themselves to save the people they love. My mother would literally give me her good kidney if I needed it; she has stated on many occasions that she would die for her grandchildren.

Conservatives are disproportionately employed in the riskiest fields that require risking their lives to save or protect others, like fire fighters, police, and military. They also take on shitty, dangerous jobs simply to feed their families, like crab fishing and coal mining.

The flipside to that extreme level of altruism is that you simply cannot extend it to everyone. You cannot die for just anyone.

Suicidal altruism can only exist if it makes the individual’s genes more likely to persist into the future.

If I die to save my childrens’ lives, then my genes will continue to exist, because they (each) carry half of my genes, and in their genes they carry some altruistic sentiment. Not sacrificing myself to save my children means that my genetic line ends with me, and with them dies my lack of altruism.

But if I die to save the life of a stranger, orphaning my own children, someone else’s genetic line is more likely to continue, while mine is more likely to end as my orphans starve. If a stranger cannot reciprocate my altruism, then being altruistic to them lessens the chance of altruistic genes in the future population.

The amount of charity (altruism, help,) people are willing to extend to each other therefore has a lot to do with how much they can afford to risk the other person not reciprocating. If you can guarantee that the other person will reciprocate (“cooperate”, in the Prisoner’s Dilemma,) your kindness, then you will be likely to be kind to them. If the other person can defect without consequences, then you would be a fool to help them.

Liberals and conservatives show different patterns of altruism, suggesting that they perceive different patterns of cooperation/defection and are possibly genetically distinct from each other.

Conservatives display very high levels of altruism toward their kin, friends, groups they identify with. They display comparatively low levels of altruism toward strangers, whom they will readily kill in order to save their loved ones.

Liberals display low levels of altruism to a much wider range of people. They are much less willing to risk their lives to save anyone (few liberal firefighters or marines,) but they are also less willing to kill random Iraqis on the off chance that one of them might be a potential terrorist.

The two groups perceive threat differently–conservatives see strangers as basically threatening, while liberals assume that strangers have no particular reason to cause them any harm. Conservatives would rather kill ’em all and let god sort ’em out, whereas liberals do not believe in god and would rather just make friends.

I recently posed a moral dilemma to several of my relatives: A man’s wife is dying of cancer. A doctor has invented a miracle drug that will cure the cancer, but he’s charging a million dollars a bottle and the man simply cannot afford it. Without the medicine, his wife will die.

Should he steal the medicine?

Now, my sample size is very small, (N=6), but the pattern has been amusingly consistent. The conservatives answer automatically–of course they would steal the medication. (One person launched into a discussion of the importance of properly casing the joint, so that you don’t get caught and go to jail, but I’m counting that as “would steal.” Another person objected that I must have the question wrong, because there was absolutely no way anyone would ever answer “no”.) The liberals, by contrast, equivocated. The question made them uncomfortable. I got responses like, “He should work/appeal to charities to save up/raise enough money,” and general refusals to fully answer the question.

To the liberal, conservative behavior toward the strangers looks sociopathic. To conservatives, liberal behavior toward their loved ones looks sociopathic. (Liberals see themselves as merely trying to be nice to everyone, of course, whereas conservatives see no real point in being nice to people who might try to kill them.)

Now, I feel I should stop for a moment and note that there are plenty of strangers toward whom conservatives are not openly hostile. Conservatives do a lot of charity work. There are many parts of the world where religious groups are pretty much the only people trying to help people and make their lives less desperately poor. They also adopt more kids than liberals. But the flipside of that greater willingness to cooperate is coming down much harder on defectors.

Liberal and conservative philosophical approaches to the world and political positions make a lot of sense in this light. Conservatives emphasize the importance of personal sacrifice and duty, that is, reciprocating to those who have shown you kindness in the past. For example, a conservative would argue that you should make personal sacrifices to help a parent in need, even if that parent is kind of an ass, because they are your parent and they used to wipe shit off your butt. For the conservative, group memberships and strong relationships with others are of prime importance, and trying to change all that is not tolerated.

Liberals tend toward anomie. They believe that relationships between people should be voluntary and mutually beneficial (fun, a virus-value,) and that you don’t “owe” people for past kindnesses that you didn’t necessarily want or even ask for, or that may have been delivered under some form of duress that made you unable to say no (being a child who can’t wipe their own behind counts as a form of duress.) Liberals believe that it is acceptable to sever relationships that do not benefit the individual, and are more likely to see others as individuals, rather than as members of some group.

To the conservative, a mother has a duty to her unborn child (and the child, a future duty to their mother.) To the liberal, there is no such duty.

I hope it is obvious that both views, if taken to extremes, cause problems. Society functions best when people have some flexibility to determine their duties and obligations, rather than having everything dictated to them at birth, and it also requires that people have some confidence that others will reciprocate altruism, otherwise everything falls apart.