Chris Mooney has a new book out, The Republican Brain, which I haven’t read yet. But he has a long piece over on the right which says, basically, that conservatives are wrong about a lot of stuff, and they’re wrong because their brains are wired differently than liberal brains:
As I began to investigate the underlying causes for the conservative denial of reality that we see all around us, I found it impossible to ignore a mounting body of evidence—from political science, social psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics—that points to a key conclusion. Political conservatives seem to be very different from political
liberals at the level of psychology and personality. And inevitably, this influences the way the two groups argue and process information.
Broadly speaking, I don’t really have any issue with this. I’ve long been sold on the idea that liberalism and conservatism are at least partly temperaments, and it’s those temperaments that lead us to different political conclusions rather than any kind of rational thinking process.
But the problem I have with Chris’s piece is this: temperament is universal, but Republicans are Americans. And it’s Republicans who deny global warming and evolution. European conservatives don’t. In fact, as near as I can tell, European conservatives don’t generally hold anti-science views any more strongly than European progressives.
I’m going to keep this post short because, as I said, I haven’t read the book. Maybe Chris addresses this at greater length there. But in the MoJo piece, at least, he doesn’t really address the question of why differences in brain wiring have produced such extreme anti-science views in American conservatives but not in European conservatives. So consider this an invitation, Chris. Is your contention that American conservatives are unique in some way? Or that American brains are wired differently? Or am I wrong about European conservatives? One way or another, though, it strikes me that international comparisons are critical here. If we’re talking about brains, we’re talking about the human race, not just our little chunk of North America.
