https://twitter.com/psychoschmitt/status/1249908383580389377
https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1364496601197273088
In Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us,1 author Avi Tuschman interprets political attitudes in terms of human evolutionary strategies. Conservatives have personalities that align with one set of strategies, and liberals have personalities that align with another. It is an intriguing analysis, but one to which I have a number of objections.
Tuschman writes,
Human political orientation across space and time has an underlying logic defined by three clusters of measurable personality traits. These three clusters consist of varying attitudes toward tribalism, inequality, and different perceptions of human nature.
He elaborates,
Tribalism breaks down into ethnocentrism… religiosity… and different levels of tolerance toward nonreproductive sexuality?
There are two opposing moral worldviews toward inequality; one is based on the principle of egalitarianism, and the other is based on hierarchy?
Some people see human nature as more cooperative, while others see it as more competitive.
Tuschman notes that liberals and conservatives differ in terms of the Big Five personality theory, which measures people on scales related to Openness, Conscientiousness, Agreeability, Extroversion, and Neuroticism. Relative to conservatives, liberals score higher on Openness and lower on Conscientiousness.
Within the tribalism cluster, Tuschman says that conservatives tend to be more ethnocentric, more religious, and less tolerant of nonreproductive sexuality. He says that these attitudes serve to reinforce an endogamous reproductive strategy. Cultures in which close relatives marry tend to have more children but lower survival rates because of the narrower gene pool. Liberals tend to hold the opposite attitudes, which reinforce an exogamous reproductive strategy. Cultures that do not discourage marriage outside of the tribe tend to have fewer children but a more robust gene pool. In short, “conservatives insist on endogamy, liberals are comfortable with exogamy.”
Tuschman believes that religiosity can be interpreted in these evolutionary terms.
… the key issues at stake, where politics intersects with religion, revolve around the relatedness of “the tribe”—that is, how successfully an ethnic group is reproducing, how much it mixes with other groups, and which resources accrue to which gene pools.
In particular, he says that greater religiosity is associated with more tribalism.
The more conservative and religious a Christian becomes, however, the force of tribalism often grows as well, just as it would within any other human being.
