Alfons López Tena: Genetic predispositions in politics

Karen Stenner points out the innate predisposition in humans, prevalent in around one third of them, to prize oneness and sameness whilst fearing diversity and complexity “manifests most powerfully under conditions of perceived threat… especially when losing a sense of shared identity and beliefs… When they’re induced to fear that [their valued ends], and the social arrangements that serve them, might be at risk.” That is the right time for authoritarians to thrive and impose their will over the third of people “who seek out diversity, complexity, novelty, new and exciting experiences”, another innate human predisposition. Both make evolutionary sense to ensure survival of a human group: if too many within a group refuse novelties, such as a new source of food or individuals met for the first time, the group may starve or the gene pool may dry up. Too many people striving for novelty and the group risks poisoning itself trough inedible food or hidden infection from deadly pathogens which people who are met for the first time may carry. “For group selection to work,” Steven Phelps explains, “the decisions made by the individuals, which behavioral ecologists regard as ultimately selfish, must somehow align with the differential success or survival of groups.” It looks like a kind of Adam Smith’s trade and market, where billions of exchanges and refusals, of trials and errors, automatically channel self-interested decisions toward group gains, “and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society.”

Kathryn Paige Harden pithily and rightly expresses that “Insisting that DNA matters is scientifically accurate; insisting that it is the only thing that matters is scientifically outlandish.” Nevertheless, the ages-old  theological dichotomy of determination versus free will, which permeates the Abrahamic religions, raises the predestination head once again to dismiss human agency, to reduce it to the mere outworking of god’s decision (or genes’ decision, in its modern incarnation). The more individuals are told by both religious and secular determinists that they are no more than puppets whose strings are manned by a higher, hidden master, the more the fear of the Mad Scientist skyrockets, and any linkage between genetics and human agency is threatened to be rocked by both the Scylla of determinism and the Charybdis of the Doctors Frankenstein and Moreau.

It is a secularized religious view that demeans the ingenuity of animals and humans in order to submit them to anything to be conceived as mightier than themselves, provider of meaning and purpose, be it god or her modern avatars, nature or genes, often defined by loose metaphors; a residual internalization from religious concepts which must be spotted and torn down to free the human reasoning from the hard-wired preconceptions of a past that is not even past; and an immanent obstacle to scientific thought badly needing a Bachelard’s epistemological rupture from the very aforementioned dichotomy itself, because in a structure, a system, a George Eliot’s “web [where] one cannot disentangle a strand without touching all the others,” that causality-naive dichotomy has the same place than god in Laplace’s description of the universe: “I had no need of that hypothesis.”

The prevalence of authoritarians, as those basic but malleable orientations are constantly in motion whitin the individual, tips the societal balance toward stagnation, decay, and, ultimately, death. In a threat-filled society, though, they gain the upper hand, making things even worse than they actually are, because, as Linda K. Skitka et al. have pointed out, scarcity of resources coupled with the higher cognitive load posed by an increasing awareness of deadly hazards is a powerful incentive to turn the liberal-minded into authoritarians, upending Karen Stenner’s equilibrium: “Communities with a good balance of people who seek out diversity, complexity, novelty, new and exciting experiences etc., and those who are disgusted by and averse to such things, avoid them, and tell the others to do likewise, tend to thrive and prosper in human evolution.” A delicate, invisible equilibrium between xenophobia and xenophilia that permeates all social arrangements, like dust in the air that only a beam of sun makes suddenly visible, and all-pervading as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Private Willis sings:

Nature always does contrive

That every boy and every gal

That’s born into the world alive

Is either a little Liberal

Or else a little Conservative