The data are in. The science has spoken. The proof is conclusive: Conservatives are cowards.
No, really. We learned this fact from Prof. Geraint Rees of the University College London, who says that after studying the brain scans of two politicians and 90 students, he stands confident in declaring that in conservative minds the brain’s amygdala, which is associated with anxiety and emotion, tends to be larger, whereas the anterior cingulate, which is associated with courage and optimism, tends to be smaller.
So conservatives are — bwock-bwock-bwock! — chicken. Wussies. Namby pambies and nervous Nellies, every one of us.
Well said, Prof. Rees! I’m not going to look at the details of this definitive study — there aren’t any, because it hasn’t been published yet — which was commissioned by the actor Colin Firth, who was serving as the guest host of a radio program. I’m not going to ask whether 92 people is an adequate sample size (90 students and post-docs in London? How many were conservative by American standards? Six?) or how you account for the fact that people’s political views change, sometimes from one election cycle to the next. (When I was a student and ardent Democrat, was my amygdala slimmer? Did America’s centrist voters reconstruct their brains in the last couple of years?)
I’m just relieved to finally have a real, honest, scientific answer to something that’s been nagging at me.
Rees has the answer to why, in my Army career, I kept running into so many conceptual performance artists from San Francisco and Chelsea. Seldom did I do a push-up or clean my M16 without finding myself amid heated debate from the officer class about whether Walter Mondale or Eugene McCarthy was the most inspiring American political leader of our era. And those drill sergeants! You know what gave them that indomitable sense of authority? Their Boston accents.
John Wayne? The military can’t stand the guy. Leave him for the liberals, those avatars of “courage and optimism.”
This week’s headline — “Conservatives Are Scaredy Cats, Science Says” — sounded similar to those generated earlier this fall when a UCSD scientist discovered what he believed was a “liberal gene.” Linking it to popularity in adolescence, he extrapolated what he admitted was a hypothesis that liberals were pre-disposed to open-mindedness.
The scientific equation of liberalism and tolerance seemed to fit a little too neatly with pre-existing views of liberals held by liberals. Ask Ward Connerly or David Horowitz about the openness of their reception when they tried to present alternative views at liberal college campuses.
Anyway, don’t liberals have fears too? Consider the meta-implications of this recent headline in the New York Times: “Climate Fears Turn to Doubts Among Britons.” Translation: Britons are getting less scared — how terrifying!
Yet fear need not be irrational. That’s why evolution hasn’t stomped the fear out of our brains. Almost everyone fears getting fired, and that’s a good thing: We do our jobs better than if, say, we had tenure in a teachers union and could only be fired for having a garage full of stacked human bodies. (And even then, only after due process with a series of warning letters, review panels and appeals.)
Mainstream conservatives tend to fear things that have happened or are actually happening: Islamist terror strikes, increasing government regulation, the effects of massive illegal immigration.
Mainstream liberals fear theoretical things that are always just about to happen, e.g., catastrophic results from global warming, widespread anti-Muslim bias and the Christian right’s slow-developing scheme to replace the Constitution with the Bible.
Prof. Rees’ views — sorry, scientific results! — dovetail with those of his fellow professor Barack Obama, who memorably informed us in October, “The reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared.”
Fear leads to shoddy thinking. Conservatives are scared, hence stupid. This is the polite way of telling those who disagree with you that they are bonkers, and calling someone bonkers is a shortcut to dodging the facts, the science and the argument. Who argues with a nutjob?
Prof. Obama’s shellacking at the polls this fall was largely due to a sense that he was governing too far from the left, that his administration was hostile to business and slowing down the recovery, that the deficit was too big and that he wanted to raise taxes.
The day after the election, Obama grudgingly hinted that he was prepared to reverse course on all of these matters. So either these points aren’t outside the realm of rationality or Obama, too, has gone nuts with fear. If the latter: Did his amygdala just burst?