 you operate or the way your in group operates provides incentives for other people in how they relate to you if the way you you conduct your life right is such that other people would be better off without you right you're incentivizing also negative behavior against you and if the way that your group conducts itself makes it so that other groups would be better off without your group in their midst right how long can you expect people to show this level of forbearance if if your group say is committing an astronomical amount of crime or is consuming say an astronomical amount of government social services without an equivalent level of contributing back through the tax base right we should be building lives both as individuals and as groups that are a blessing to the people around us otherwise you are incentivizing other people to pull the plug on you and there are many different ways to pull the plug on an individual or a group the same way he would be humiliated to see what he has become this is not what he would want it's not this is not the kind of life I mean he if he had his right sense he would say why didn't you just let me go three years ago why did you keep me a lot and I listened to your last caller and it breaks my heart the loss okay I think that's that's enough the chats getting depressed just absolutely horrific story I don't want to get back to talking about the Republican brain Chris Mooney is the author of this book from 11 years ago the Republican brain and use it to decode one of my favorite podcast decoding the gurus is that we could use our minds we could use the new institution of science from the 17th century we could use it to answer these difficult questions and to do social policy better in that sense I'm in enlightenment I'm a big fan of the enlightenment and I think this new work is part of the enlightenment project what it says paradoxically is that if you think that reason individual reason is the way forward well then you're wrong and so for 300 years the project has been barking up the wrong tree because we are all so crippled by the confirmation bias because we always individual confirmation biases basically we use our reason just to confirm what we already believe if that's true at all of us then I think we all have to get a little more humble as individuals recognize that as individuals we're not very good at finding the truth that we only can find the truth more put into relationships in which other people can question our confirmation bias and this is what has changed science works because each of us individually flawed scientists challenge each other and so so as Chris says over time the scientific committee does update whereas they really just right may not yeah so I agree with all of that reasons a weak read compared to the power of genetics and the power of imprinting and the power of incentives I also agree that we reason much better when we reason collectively rather than just you know in in our own heads so you're coding the gurus right couple of center left academics Chris Kavanaugh and Matt Brown have a podcast to coding the gurus think they're generally on pretty sound ground but they do have their own subjective partisan left-wing hero system right the condemns what they call racism bigotry xenophobia Islamophobia homophobia and the like and while they talk as though that these condemnations are just based on universal truths easily accessible by reason to all rather they are subjective hero systems just like the the orthodox Jewish way of looking at the world is a subjective hero system and the orthodox Christian way of looking at the world is a subjective hero system right secular liberals have their own subjective hero system so how do you play the game among elites among our elite institutions which are dominated by the left how do you play the game in academia right you play the game according to its rules right this is usually going to do more for your success than merit or groundbreaking scholarship and so what are the rules right but the rules are that you guard yourselves the liberal left enlightened ones as guardians of reason guardians of enlightenment that you're not really implementing a sectarian agenda based on a subjective hero system no you're fighting for universalist virtues like objectivity inclusivity diversity benevolence now conservatives charge that this is just an aura of superior virtue I'm borrowing here from the analysis of philosopher run a good man they conservatives will point out this is a sophisticated social illusion that it is a dishonest secular facade for a moralistic and quasi religious impulse right a hidden will to power that seeks only to uphold one parochial subjective hero system and social identity at the expense of its rivals so thinking about one friend of mine who had a tenured faculty position then he nonetheless lost his job when his pseudonymous and disturbing to most people social media comments about Jews right were revealed to his dean through an email so getting dubbed on to your community to your spouse to your family to your boss right it's going to be near the top of concerns for most people and getting dubbed on to your dean going to be about the top concern for most academics including Matt Brown and Chris Kavanaugh they admitted as much in a patreon video that I played on one of my shows in late December 2022 or early January 2023 so to have a nice life academics like Brown and Kavanaugh along with the rest of us we tend to shy away from saying things that could get us in hot water with the people who are most important to us unless we have a disabling level of narcissism that must receive attention at all costs which is something that I have frequently suffered from one thing I've learned from interviewing thousands of people is that everybody's vulnerable like everybody has their weak points we're all accountable to someone now decoding the gurus right they talk a great deal about epistemic considerations epistemology is the study of how do we know what we know and so they see themselves as coming primarily from a place of truth but a big part of the motivation for operating from this place of epistemic considerations resides in the words of philosopher Charles Taylor in the prestige and admiration surrounding the whole scientific stance itself for the sense of freedom power control invulnerability dignity that it radiates right all the virtues of the bothered autonomous strategic you rational identity that is encouraged by this modern transformation of what were Protestant impulses in in an entirely secular left-wing direction so the easiest way to approach the world for an academic today is to wrap yourself in the mantle of science right and get that sense of freedom power control invulnerability and dignity that it radiates as long as the decoding the gurus can wrap itself in science then they can feel relatively invulnerable to cancellation they can feel dignified in control and free now a problem with this is much of what is considered true much of what is considered expertise by our elite is a game right where you play the game of expertise which is getting hailed by your peers as an expert by jumping through a credentialing process much of education is learning be educated in the process of getting an education right becoming an expert means that you secure the approval of your peers and they sign off on your credentials as an expert so every professional in particular primarily wants the approval of his peers and this desire for social approval of his peers is far more incentivized in the pursuit of truth I can't expect anyone to understand something if their income their happiness and the social status depends upon not understanding some obvious truth such as group differences so when almost all of our institutions are dominated by the left particularly in academia and media and culture right when the left controls the cultural means of production it makes perfect sense for non leftist to have a knee jerk suspicion of the establishment right when the left controls the cultural means of production right there's going to be a knee jerk response that you know public discussion controlled by these institutions is a sham it's an illusion it is an instrument of authority not its basis as Stephen Turner noted in 1989 so when the left largely decides what are the real issues and who are the real experts it makes sense for those not on the left to rebel and to express considerable skepticism about university-appointed elites let me play a bit more here from Jonathan height talking with Chris Mooney Chris this one is a probably mostly at you but I'd like to know the take of both of you on this this idea of it they're being a conservative personality a few years ago I your your proposed it was on blogging heads I'm very interested in evolution I love biology and I've always wondered whether natural selection explained everything I do not believe in God I'm not interested in intelligent design but I read a book by Michael B. he that was saying that when it gets to how evolution creates large jumps and steps as opposed to small things it seems like there must be some other mechanism we don't know it is Michael B. he thought it was about God I was thinking I wonder what yeah the liberal left elite love evolution except the part of evolution ongoing over the past ten thousand years evolution producing different groups with different yes because different groups have evolved in very different circumstances and they don't like to talk about evolutionary effects on different group metrics with regard to things like cognitive powers and personality traits this other thing might be I found it fascinating I contacted him we did a blogging heads debate I had a new one several new ones torn out of me by the blogging heads community the liberal scientists thought that I was the worst thing people I've never seen someone so high fall so low so quickly and all of this was the kind of behavior that is associated with conservators there's a circle in the wagons not reason because I was trying to make sense I wasn't making a godly argument that happened it's over but it leads me to think that this is perhaps human behavior how do we fit in that even with evolution the facts are not always as clear completely as we're told and if you dare to question this that's intelligent design I mean the sign of the community is extraordinarily strongly rejected and if they get a little upset when you bring it up it's because it's a breakfast all to their side okay so let's go back to the garometer all right way of assessing the gurus as composed by these two center left academics Chris Kavanaugh and Matt Brown so it notes that a court would generally have more than a few bones to pick with supposedly nefarious forces in the outside world okay if institutions in the outside world are dominated by leftists and liberals it would make sense that people who are not on the left would have a few bones to pick with the powers that be fascist organizations would derive much energy from narratives of grievance focused on specific outgroups anyone with an in group identity is going to derive much energy from a narrative of grievance against outgroups it's nothing unique to fascist feelings of frustration and oppression in other words being human everyone has these feelings feelings of being excluded and disregarded right everyone has these feelings feelings of being deprived of one's manifest rights and recognitions everyone has these feelings right represent a potent set of negative emotions yeah everyone has these feelings every in group has these feelings and for good reasons too gurus will often rely on narratives of grievance pertaining to themselves and their potential followers to drive engagement a worldview which all is essentially fair and just is not one that will encourage people to search for alternative ways to view the world correct but if you have reasons for grievance right then you probably be incentivized to get the in group power and energy that comes from nurturing those grievances right group gurus often engage in personal grievance narratives they provide emotional connection sympathy for the guru they provide a convenient explanation for why someone their unique talents is not being well supported or given their recognition they deserve by the outside world right sometimes this is with good basis and sometimes it's with a fatuous basis as with Brett and Eric Weinstein gurus relate to conspiratorial ideation explaining why their special ideas and perspectives not being recognized and accepted by the outside world because their ideas have been suppressed by malevolent and powerful actors for selfish reasons well often ideas and perspectives and individuals are suppressed by outside powerful actors for their own reasons right every form of in group identity leading every form of nationalism inculcates victimization right stronger you believe in Islam or Christianity or Judaism or the gay lifestyle right the stronger you believe that the world outside your in group is a nefarious place the stronger your in group identity the more likely you are to see the negative in our groups so you really can't enjoy a strong in group identity without taking on courty vibes or ties bind and blind that's Jonathan Hyde so this center left secular show decoding the gurus is inherently suspicious of strong in group identity but life for most people is better off with a strong in group identity so the grometer essentially says a high score on the grometer is bad it refers to potentially exploitive gurus who produce us that wisdom meaning a corrupt epistemic that creates the appearance of useful knowledge but has none of the substance well you know who can't be exploited this way someone who doesn't love someone who lacks ties someone who doesn't have in group loyalties right to love is to be vulnerable to be tied to other people is to be vulnerable most people don't want to live without love right a life without love is not a particularly high functioning one so the grometer notes a heightened sense of how the world is not right and how it ought to be fixed and the gurus the persons to do it is a common feature the broader public fails to recognize their genius and fails to heed their advice thus the world loaches from calamity to calamity so gurus often position themselves as a Cassandra warning of possible calamities that can be avoided if only their advice is heeded and the followers gain a role for themselves in supporting defending and promoting the guru they can help make the world a better place well those out of power are more likely to believe that something's wrong with the world that is only common sense if your group lacks power if your institutions in your society dominated by people with a hostile perspective on your in group right you have very rational and empirical reasons to believe that the world around you is not right given that most American institutions are dominated by the left why would non leftist be at ease with the current power structure guru the grometer says gurus are greatly attracted to claiming they have developed game changing and paradigm shifting intellectual products or given that the left largely controls the intellectual means of production why would someone not on the left not seek out game changing and paradigm shifting intellectual products right decoding the gurus wants us to engage primarily on the basis of epistemic how do we know what we know but this disengaged reflexive buffered rationalistic perspective on life is a modern secular liberal leftist one very different from how traditionalist experience life and we all have our subjective hero systems just that people on the left like the host of decoding the gurus seem to believe that they have transcended hero systems that they are just sharing objective truths scientific expertise I'm not sure that that's the same but I mean even if you say I don't believe that it's intelligent design it's not about God but is there something is there something I don't agree with him that there are big gaps in the theory essentially is putting God in the process or implying God's in the process of bringing Michael be he on and the evolutionary scientists are going to be extremely upset and that's because the mistake the mistake you made was to talk to the devil a principle in my book is follow the sacredness and around you'll find a ring of motivated ignorance and evolutions where the contested issue would seem place the front and center in Chris's book and there are some quacks out there who claim to be scientists and be you know he is not a respected scientist no so you you basically committed trees and by even just talking to him you have to know where the fault lines are where the third rails are and you touch one second but I want to ask you but I want to ask you a question no let's let's play this out in real time I have a rule on my show we don't have climate denialist on my show we just don't do it I'm interested in lots of exchange and a lot of issues as I think the show makes clear we have people with all sorts of perspectives we even have Maggie Gallagher on who's a strong opponent of marriage equality and there's some people who didn't like that but I draw the line for whatever reason I draw the climate denialism and if I was forced to articulate why I draw the line there I would say because it's extremely dangerous right because it's undermining this this this scientific consensus that I think is absolutely necessary to us avoiding massive widespread global immiseration and I don't want to have any role in implementing that now there's a certain degree to which that is antithetical to the spirit of free inquiry right if you if you caricaturize it as talking the devil but the thing I want to ask you on the one time during the break is like in order for you to have this whole conversation right you're putting yourself at this kind of remove right say well you people they have their sacredness but the whole point is that everybody's embedded in that same framework right to varying degrees so my whole life I was a partisan liberal and I got I switched over from studying culture variation morality to political variation in order to help the Democrats because they kept screwing up Gore and Kerry had no idea how to connect so I switched over I was the part of the team and in doing the research for the book I realized oh my god conservatives I'm sort of the Berkey and conservatives the not the authoritarians the Berkey that they're right about a lot of things about how to make a good society so once I stepped out of the team and I'm no longer a liberal I'm now a centrist I'm sure I'm part of something sure I can see I can think a lot more no but this is what drives me crazy this is what drives me crazy it's the claim to special enlightenment that sentence have the drive me crazy because well I'm sure I'm totally honest with you because the point is that we're all embedded so when you you will see the Washington Post editorial page where Thomas Friedman or all sorts of bien-pensant you know thinkers of of centrism the fact the matter is that is as ideologically binding and as sort of no oriented as as no it's a matter of degree you're right that nobody is fully objective it's a matter of degree and if you are on the floor if you're a congressman I mean you are now you're fighting every day you cannot be clearly right if you're an academic who is less liberal than before sure I'm not objective but I'm more objective than I was five years ago there's an impulse among centrist a lot of them are psychologically liberal they want to be different they want to get noticed there's oh hey over here and so then I'll attack my own and so there's actually a lot of that going on these people are actually probably the kind of people who would naturally be liberal but they also want a distinction I'm not saying that about you but I'm saying that there's a lot of it's true best you can do the best you can find it's very hard to find well get flies are valuable up to a point but then at some point it becomes its own well here's my question here's my question for you a lot of that out there for you and for John as people because then the question is the big question and the huge question that that pertains to both the work that we do here and whether we're going to solve a global climate change and the possibility of moral transformation and moral revolution which is something that Kwame Anthony Appiah has written about very I think very well is how can people change right I mean what is the process and John you're someone who I think has had real changes will evolution your thoughts particularly I think even just institutionally in the okay so let's try to go beyond this enlightenment perspective let's look back to philosopher running goodman's work in progress conservative claims of cultural oppression and the nature and origins of conservatism so people like those in this TV discussion on MSNBC part of the liberal elite they believe they stand above a retrograde conservatism they believe that their enlightenment ideals liberate them from the various here are systems to which conservatives remain beholden but they don't understand that their own liberal left enlightened perspective is just another hero system right hero systems systems of social meaning right liberal see conservatives as compromised by some kind of primitive attraction to the relics of benighted pre-modernity now the conservative perspective is that liberalism is itself a hero system in disguise a subjective hero system that stays concealed behind this secular facade of enlightenment pragmatism and utilitarianism so liberal see themselves as just promoting flourishing right promoting ordinary human fulfillment shorn of any higher metaphysical aspirations but conservatives see that liberalism is itself a religious impulse right stemming from Protestantism and a spiritual ideal now plays itself out through the medium of these ostensibly secular goals so liberalism is a hero system that fills itself and disguises itself as the transcendence of all hero systems so what was the enlightenment all about part of it was a great belief in the power of reason and as i keep saying i see reason is a weak read compared to the power of genetics and the power of incentives and the power of imprinting another key part of the enlightenment is a belief that people are basically good right all right wing perspectives on the world begin with the assumption that people are not basically good pretty much all left-wing perspectives on the world begin with the assumption that people are basically good teams you were associated with you were identified as a conservative you have you know we're at a conservative think tank and now i don't think identifying those terms anymore or not institutionally affiliated with that team and my question is what what hope is there for the process of that kind of change if the kind of psychological mechanisms you're writing about are there you have to approach it indirectly you're not going to reason people uh into agreement or even into discussion who's a part about Dale Carnegie i think this is very important i can't reason people if you push their what you can do what you have to do is you have to try to foster relationship so as you know as beach said you know we relationship's open our minds and open our hearts this is the reverend we just talked to jasmine before i was making so for example there's a group called living room conversations dot org and they try to get a liberal and conservative who are friends who know each other there are still some out there pairs you get them to have a dinner party bring people together and it's important to share food so if you do indirect methods you take advantage of our the social judgments come first then the reasoning comes after if we want to reach agreement it's going to be by bringing people together in good circumstances and the chat says didn't Freud usher in the idea to moderns that man still does not act rationally i think that was an argument the Freud made isn't Freud the basis of all modern market research no i don't know a lot of things about modern market research i can assure you that Freudian theorizing is not the basis of all modern market research so let me go back here to run it good ones decoding on conservative claims of cultural oppression so liberals understand modernity a separator from pre-modernity by the enlightenment which launched in the 17th and 18th century that we've moved through different civilizations so the pre-modern pre-enlightment Europeans are not just ignorant and superstitious right they were much more animal like according to this perspective they were given to a kind of spontaneity and a motion that would be considered abnormal today right they believed in sacred and profane spiritual forces all around them so they didn't believe in the buffered identity they believe in the porous identity meaning that these spiritual forces either for good or for ill you know angels and demons all around them could have a profound effect on their life so from a modern perspective these pre-moderns were ignorant and unruly they lacked the inhibitions that we now associate with civilization and they didn't have a clear sense of boundaries between the mind and the body and the enlightened modern liberal right sees that we can make our own way through the power of religion and through the power of reason that reasons become the new religion and so we can even change our sex we're not limited to the biology of the sex that we were born into so from a liberal perspective we can use reason to gain self-possession self-control and self-transparency we can liberate ourselves from the illusions of the past but this self-congratulatory enlightenment narrative conceals a darker story where liberals use molding and coercion and bullying and power to force their their system on everybody else so liberals believe they're holding up autonomous self-possession but really this is just the internalizing of the new restraints and inhibitions of this new secular religion right liberals see reason as something that we can just choose as something predominantly conscious and disembodied right operating effectively without respect to our body and this leaves them insensible to the layer of human experience that resides in the body that resides in our ways of being that occur prior to us developing reasoning so liberals are dramatically overconfident of their ability to recognize and overcome oppression and inequality where they can actually open their minds and also realizing that people are not convinced when they feel attached and Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People sounds a little corny now but actually it's very useful today if you get past the slightly archaic language in that you talk to people you try to figure out what's going on in their minds imagine do I find talking to most women boring I mean no more than I find talking to most men I mean I really enjoy my opportunities just to be around only men but I enjoy most of my interactions with women in my life as well Luke needs to sail the Chris Hayes zone latest do you sail a personal narrative collision is it too hot for YouTube yeah let's go to the latest Steve Saylor post was excellent I put it on my list of things to talk about right we've got a Muslim arrested in Brooklyn for murdering a gay black man how three different news outlets covered the story so we've got this trend middle east immigrants to the US mostly Muslims but also Armenians objecting to the establishment pushing the gay and trans agenda sometimes these immigrants do this admirably through the parents rights movement sometimes they do it despicably through street violence so for the mainstream media pushing the Democratic Party line is immigrant versus LGBTQ stuff is tricky because it raises questions about the inherent tensions in the Democratic Coalition of the fringes grand strategy so on the other hand a gay was murdered in a hate crime a black gay so the story is too unnarrative to not push it heavily but the stabber is a Muslim teen whose friends objected to the gay display as offensive to Islam so that is off narrative now the usual media hope is that the stabber must be some kind of Archie Bunker character and you hope the public doesn't pry too much into the facts so we've got the Daily Mail a frequent purveyor of facts and we've got the New York Times and the Washington Post and how do they handle the story so the Daily Mail says dancer O'Shea Sibley shown voguing at a Brooklyn gas station before being stabbed to death by a 17-year-old Muslim suspect in anti-gay hate crime so that's how the Daily Mail begins it all right they put the fact that stabber is a Muslim in the headline in the New York Times they tried to bury the role of Islam down into the 11th paragraph and then immediately wish it away by saying this is nothing to do with you know true Islam and in the Washington Post today 19 paragraph article on the arrest of the Muslim youth that goes on and on about anti-gay hate crimes yet never mentions a single thing about the killer being a Muslim right this is Chris Mooney talking about the republican three months now there is no serious scientific criticism of anything that I've said okay it's just politically controversial but scientifically it's actually not and in it I cite a large body of scientific research and I've tweeted twice today using the hashtag because you should be able to find it a link to a bunch of papers from my blog where you can go and start to read some of the science yourself I mean if you're interested in this stuff you're free thinking critically thinking people I know you are you don't have to take my word for it you can go read the published peer-reviewed research on the differences between liberals and conservatives yourself and I only listed 11 genetic studies and eight brain in physiological studies it's just a tiny bit of what's actually out there because the most studies are in psychology not in genetics not in not in neuroscience they're in psychology I even list those but anyway I can just get you started reading this stuff so you can know it's real it's not made up the sciences did it it's not my fault it's their fault all right the upshot is that I used to really really misunderstand the people who disagree with me I did not get what makes them tick and in fact as a liberal I'm a moderate liberal I'm not as liberal as some but as a liberal I used to think what a lot of liberals think about their opponents I thought that the reason they were coming at it differently than I was was that either they were driven by religion on the one hand or they were driven by money and self-interest on the other hand so if you wanted to understand why conservatives are acting the way they do you'd either do this old journalistic trick called follow the money in other words figure out who's funding them is it Exxon Mobil is it the Koch brothers what have you or follow the religion which is kind of the same thing figure out what the religious rights role in this is and there's often big money actually supporting the religious right as well and that was sort of the approach taken in my 2005 my first book it was called the republican war on science and it played a kind of central role in defining this whole idea there's a unique right wing problem with science with with fact all right so I want to start the story there because I've learned a lot since then it's not the republican war on science was wrong but its analysis was sort of incomplete okay so we'll go back to 2005 okay so Ronny Goodwin takes a few shots at this book and the dominant enlightenment liberal perspective so to be on the bottom left all right you don't recognize meaning is something that primarily exists outside of yourself such as in religion or in community or in nation right you believe that meaning is something that we can create just in our own heads right so people in a traditional perspective or a conservative perspective we see meaning is something that primarily occurs through our interactions with people outside of ourselves that there is meaning in the world outside of us the liberal left perspective is that meaning is something we just create in our heads right so you've got the dominant modern perspective could be called enlightenment naturalism right moral legitimacy just refers to empirical evidence about the human condition now conservatives assign a much deeper meaning to human anatomy and so from a liberal left perspective they are engaging in an ancient temptation they are surrendering to the power of biology and they are attributing to sexual anatomy a significance that it does not truly have whatever anatomy people are born with they can transcend through the power of their reason and their choice all right so people on the liberal left have a much greater ability in a belief in the ability of individuals through the power of reason to create strategic autonomous lives where they can transcend their biology or any other shortcoming and so liberals see the prejudice against trans by conservatives as a failure of enlightenment and a symptom of some kind of irrational hatred and a symbol of prejudice that people on the right have failed to transcend their ordinary embodied perceptions they haven't reached that high a state of spiritual purity and freedom haven't adopted the sort of emotional asceticism that enables this kind of transcendence so liberals believe that there should be this kind of transcendence of the body as well in history historian rick polstein argues liberalism is rooted in this notion of the enlightenment that we can use our reason and we can use the facts that our reason accumulates and we can sort out what is true and we can use the scientific method to arrive at a consensus view of what is true right while the right wing view of truth is based on tribal identification and myths and hero systems well the conservative critique of this is that the liberal perspective is also a subjective hero system so people on the left love the galileo story that galileo was persecuted by the church but in reality the galileo story is far less dramatic than the liberal myth right it's much more in accord with what is happening today right galileo's suffering was because of rivalry jealousy and vindictiveness from other scientists and philosophers which is frequently the lot of people in modern times so anyone who believes that inquisitions went out with the triumph of secularism over religion not paid attention to the records of foundations research agencies professional societies and academic institutions and departments so people on the right and the left they want to make cognitive and ideological culture wars but they are really a clash of conflicting subjective hero systems right and we develop a hero system usually from our community right it's it's largely unstructured it's usually not articulated explicitly but it just shows up in our lives it's it's the background against which we act it's the meaning outside of ourselves against which we measure ourselves so people on the liberal left they want to adjudicate between liberalism and conservatism on the basis of ideas on the basis of epistemics in terms of agreements and disagreements about what is true and what makes sense but the clash is really one that goes much deeper to our very bodies and to the way that we approach the world which from a traditional conservative perspective is we encounter the world primarily not as individuals not as strategic autonomous buffered reflexive individuals but as members of tribes as members of communities and that we receive cues about the subjective hero systems that we subscribe to from the people around us from our tribe and community so conservatives have not internalized this buffered distant reflexive you know reason-based autonomous understanding of the human being all right people on the right see humans not primarily as individuals but as members of tribes and that we get meaning from our connection with our tribe so for those who control the cultural means of production conservatives have effectively been judged unfit for life off the reservation unable to function in a truly human environment because they have not internalized the inner ordering impulses of the liberal autonomous strategic buffered identity which is now considered what it means to be properly civilized so from a liberal left perspective conservatives are seen as coarse and squalid animals and peasants they are outsiders who must be denied entry the courtly halls of liberalism with all its false heirs and empty refinements here's the book and at the outset I like to disclose to all my audiences we're not trying to echo the cover image of another popular book it was out at the same time so we you know we only notice that later the argument of my book was more complex and in it what I what I claim was that under the administration of George W. Bush our last president scientific knowledge was under attack on global warming on stem cell research on evolution on and on and on I think if you want to kind of capture the ethos of the George W. Bush era then I think it's pretty well captured in a quotation that he gave actually to a reporter following the 2004 devastating tsunami killed so many people in Pacific Rim countries and the Indian Ocean area everybody remembers the Christmas tsunami of 2004 and the just terrible disaster and Bush was giving a press conference and a journalist asked him a sort of scientific question and the question was Mr. President does the United States have a warning system in place to protect us from tsunamis here at home and Bush had no earthly idea whether we did or not he was completely clueless but he tried to answer he sort of hammed and hawed and he finally started to say something scientific in response he started to say well you know I think we might be less vulnerable than other parts of the world to tsunamis but then as he quickly added I am not a geologist as you know and I think that sort of is the Bush administration on science instead of a nutshell so things okay so people on the liberal left they want to contest things on the basis essentially of epistemology and they will look at right-wing claims as epistemologically deficient right but these claims constitute a counter-cultural assault against the liberal lens it's an effort to articulate what lies underneath this epistemological fragment of man reveal later as a derivation upon something much more primordial which cannot be primarily understood in epistemological terms this is the subjective hero system that we all have the cosmological orientation is a fancier word for hero system so liberals cannot understand conservative claims of cultural oppression because the very structure of their liberal identity endures them this human constant and the conservatives are defending one hero system against another resisting the disciplines and repressions of the liberal buffett identity favor of an earlier more pre-modern form of consciousness that sees the world as a more magical and enchanted place now the key part of the conservative world view is much more ease with a homogeneous culture right pre-modern cultures were homogeneous traditionalists are much more at ease with the ideas of homogeneous cultures modern people tend to prefer pluralism so in ancient culture right the moral and the spiritual was seen as just as real as stones rivers and mountains right people didn't lead abstract intellectualized lives all right so that the fetus was a living baby all right was just seen as obviously true so conservatives reject the kind of edited speech the expressive moderation the intellectualizing of life by liberals right liberals see themselves as neutral they see their prescriptions as coming logically from the perspective of the strategic autonomous reflexive identity right they see themselves purged of anthropocentric contamination they see themselves as purged from traditional religious contamination so enlightenment believes people are basically good the people can transform themselves to become autonomous through the power of reason and so liberals tend to attack those parts of human nature that don't sit easily with this preferred basket of liberal values that stands in the way of this ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity meaning constantly monitoring yourself so liberalism has the agenda to transform people into good universalist discipline to uproot every last trace of aggression and insensitivity replace this with enlightenment awareness and altruism so there was an incident at vassar college where the assistant dean of students mentioned that several male students had just been exonerated of false accusations of rape not the worst offer their ideal because the ideal had offered them an opportunity for self exploration that they would otherwise not have had so the false accusations were redeemed by the self exploration they facilitated so you see a feminism here that stands in opposition not just to rape but everything in human nature that might possibly precipitate rape such as human beings not being basically good that men have higher testosterone levels than women that men are much more aggressive feeling sexually aggressive than women they want to reject that so this dean thought it would have been great if these students would have taken this opportunity to expose and extirpate any last impulse they had towards natural primeval ape-like behavior so liberals don't believe in the code of the gentleman they don't generally believe in getting out moral code from religion or tradition they think it's something that we should be after reason toward taking direction from best and brightest those who went to harvard and the like they believe that we can elevate ourselves through this transformative power of reason the non-liberal believes that we are embedded in bodies that lust that have a will for power and aggression that people are not basically good and cannot be transformed for the good just by the power of reason things under bush were bad when it comes to science and this is what I was writing about and it was a best seller and it drew a lot of attention sent me out on the road to talk about it and I was explaining why I was explaining why science was so messed up under bush and the kind of story I was telling was a story that I would describe as being political in nature and being environmental in nature in other words I was doing what a political journalist often does all right and political just means I was following the money you know the money trail environmental I don't okay so this is how Ronnie Goodman describes Chris Mooney's book The Republic of Brain an intriguing physiological explanation for why conservatives are less disposed than liberals towards this kind of buffered expressive moderation so he says MRI studies reveal that conservatives tend to have a larger right amygdala which is the evolutionarily more ancient part of the brain that tends to generate immediate fight or flight responses to threatening stimuli and that liberals tend to possess more gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex the ACC which is a newer part of our evolutionary system that suspends automatic responses to assess facts and to detect errors so he argues that conservatives tend to be more instinctive and given to immediate reflex actions that liberals are more reflective and cognitive that they are better able to suspend automatic fear responses to undertake more careful evaluation of facts so the ideology of conservatives comes from their physiology every human like every animal possesses a fear system capable of rapid fire defensive reactions but that system appears to be stronger more predominant among conservatives so when people are offered alcohol for example alcohol shifts us to the right politically right it correlates with more expression of right wing views even among self-described liberals the people's cognitive architecture perhaps more consistent with conservative ideology that is the way our brains are built so conservatism may well represent the more natural human and animal state which tends to get more suppressed among liberals so the disinhibiting effects of alcohol temporarily reset liberals closer to the default setting which evolutionarily order rapid fire reactions overwhelm the ACC the interior cingulate cortex so tough on crime strongly pro-military conservatives have a more pronounced startle reflex they exhibit greater skin conductance right nervous system arousal when shown threatening images say of maggots or a large spider people with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noise and threatening visible images were more likely to support left wing policies I don't mean you know in the sense of writing about clean air and clean water I mean I was attributing what republicans were doing with science not to something inherent about who they are in other words their nature their core being their you know their identity I was rather attributing it to the political environment in which all of this happens in which they have to get ahead or get or fall behind their political opponents in other words the bad behavior with respect to science I was claiming was emerging from the political ecosystem that existed in the way politics existed and so I would say you know this is a conservative movement that's grown up over the past several decades it grew up for particular historical reasons it came to encompass the religious right but also corporate interests and once that became what the movement was and how it was constituted politicians in order to get elected had to appeal to those interests they had to appeal to the religious right they had to appeal to the big axon nobles of the world okay and those groups didn't like science so of course republican politicians said what those groups wanted them to say and voila you have the bush administration and all of its anti-science behavior this storm of science abuse and denial that was the argument then all right okay so Chris mooney makes the case that republican or conservative reactions are much more instinctual while those of people on the left are much more considered and so because conservatives are incentivized to follow their followers motivated cognition all right it's rarer among conservatives who have pro-authority biases to pick on their own the conservatives tend to be more unified and supportive of their political team conservatives are less willing to pick a fight with their friends less likely to issue a corrective when they need to issue one less motivated to step out of rank and call out bogus assertions by contrast he argues liberals care little for obedience and group solidarity because they are children of the enlightenment they don't bow to authority or pledge allegiance to the team so this is why liberals remain allied with scientists we aren't just going to put up with any nonsense in their fields of expertise the liberals and scientists are usually on the same side of the issues because liberals have an open personality with its curiosity tolerance and flexibility and that naturally disposes them toward the scientific method compelling a respect for scientists that is less common among conservatives conservatives routinely dismiss science and expertise but it's hard physiologically for liberals to buck what scientists say and to withstand the intellectual beating that are sure to follow if they do conservatives have comparatively closed personalities and so that lands them in overwhelming conflict with the conclusions of modern science on a wide range of issues this is why there's a wide expertise gap between liberals and conservatives in the modern world and to try to close this gap conservatives now foster their own counter expertise the thwart mainstream knowledge the conservatives have seceded from the common reality occupied by liberals and independence they now have their own truth their own experts to spout at their own communication channels their own newspapers cable networks talk radio shows blogs and cyclopedias think tanks even universities and they all operate in the service of the belief affirmation ideological activation that drives conservatives which is all about essentially legitimating the promptings of their amygdalas as rational responses to bedrock truth liberals have their own neurologically driven physiological needs to satisfy but these include the need for cognition the need for accuracy need to distinguish oneself from others and to stand out to be unique rather than part of the herd so liberals are attached to their core values emotionally these values just happen to include the enlightenment belief that if you can't get the facts right you can't solve the problem and make the world better enlightenment convictions have also kept liberals from truly understanding conservatives was that account wrong? my answer is incomplete the basic story has clearly got something going for it because this is a recent study that came out in the american sociological review in which a guy named gordon gauchat actually tried to test the republican war on science hypothesis scientifically and it was it's really great as a journalist to see someone say you know we set out to test the hypothesis of mooney 2005 it's like oh I'm in the literature and what he found was that if you look at people's trust in institutions in america one of the institutions is science all right and the trust in institutions has been declining across the board but trust in science has been declining much more among conservatives the red line than it has been declining among liberals or among moderates the other two lines so gauchat said mooney was right this is a unique conservative phenomenon and then he went on to give an environmental account just of the sort that I've described but he did this even as I was starting to question whether that was really the right reason I mean definitely conservatives have a problem with science but is it just this historical political story or is it something deeper than that the problem is that the environmental story ignores the psychology of politics what we know about the psychology of people who are conservative versus liberal and we know a lot about it and over time I began to suspect as I was watching more and more attacks on science coming from the right and how conservatives behave that we needed to pull in that component of the story so let me tell you how I started to realize that this was important I became okay that's gonna do it for now take care bye bye