Genopolitics: Are political beliefs predetermined?

In specifying what “absolutist” or “traditionalist” or “contextualist” attitudes are, the advocates of genopolitics offer definitions that are far from unambiguous politically. For instance, the researchers say that the conservative phenotype includes a “yearning for in-group unity.” But for this formulation to work, this group can’t be a union, and must be something like a church congregation. But the church congregation can’t be that of black Pentecostal church whose members are loyal Democrats, but a white evangelical megachurch. Similarly, if the “suspicion of outgroups” is to define a conservative phenotype, it must apply to suspicions of immigrants, but not of corporate CEOs, rightwing thinktanks, or billionaire oil barons.

To get around these objections, Hibbing, Smith, and Alford have recently introduced a new underlying essence that distinguishes the conservative from the liberal mindset, which they call a “negativity bias,” which characterizes conservatives, and which they claim goes back at least to “Sparta and Athens.” A negativity bias, they write, “is the principle that negative events are more alien, potent, dominant in combinations, and generally efficacious than positive events.” They speculate that this negativity bias could have arisen in the Pleistocene epoch—evidence, perhaps, that many conservatives are really cavemen in modern garb. But as Evan Charney points out, what is perceived as negative depends on the eye of the beholder. Liberals regard conceal and carry gun laws as a threat; conservatives do not. Liberals regard global warming as a threat; conservatives do not. “Some of the most contentious debate in political life,” Charney writes, “are over whether the very same things are negative or positive.”

One could, of course, make a case that certain kinds of attitudes such as a fear of death or of the unknown can be found across cultures, and one could argue, as I have, that these kind of attitudes can have an unconscious influence over peoples’ political opinions. But that is a different point from saying that there are specific attitudes or mindsets that are genetic or that yield, depending upon their predominance, liberal or conservative (or for that matter socialist, anarchist, libertarian, fascist, and monarchist) political outlooks and judgments. How attitudes, fears, and hopes play out in politics depends on the objects of fears or hope; and the objects themselves are given by the environment not by genetic inheritance.