We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons (A Smart and Funny Essay Collection)

by Tim Kreider

What exactly these two kinds of people are is a question that’s been the subject of a lot of dubious ideation over the last decade or so. One study at the University of California at Berkeley collated the results of fifty years’ worth of psychological research literature and correlated conservatism to a constellation of personality traits like authoritarianism, dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity, the need for cognitive closure, and something called “terror management.” It concluded: “the core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality,”3 which even I can’t help but notice is a pretty judgmentally loaded way of putting it. (You could also say “ensuring social stability and rewarding merit.”) These findings seem to be corroborated by neuroscience: a recent study of brain scans4 reveals that in conservatives the amygdala, a structure associated with fear, is enlarged, while in liberals, the anterior cingulate cortex, which is concerned with detecting errors, monitoring conflict and uncertainty, and empathy, is more highly developed—all of which is presumably why Republicans like electrocuting criminals and bombing foreigners and we lefties are such dithery, ineffectual do-gooders.