Sometimes now it seems that your choice of political party is kind of like your choice of football teams – just pick one and start cheering.  It seems that scoring points against the other team can be more important than actually accomplishing anything.  It really shouldn’t be that way – our political parties are imperfect reflections of a timeless moral divide.  Across time and across cultures, you can find the same moral divide between liberals and conservatives.  The divide is so ingrained in us that our brains are actually shaped differently – the amygdyla in conservatives is larger.

Something that seems to be so much a part of being human must serve some greater purpose but it really doesn’t seem to be helping us too much now.  Why do we have this difference?

Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist that did some interesting work in understanding the moral roots of liberals and conservatives.  I learned about his work from a TED talk here: The moral roots of liberals and conservatives.  I have watched this video over and over – I found it enlightening.  After watching it the first time and thinking about it a little I started to understand some things that had confused me before.  For example, why are the military and the police mostly conservative?  Why are artists and scientists mostly liberal?  Lots of pieces fell into place.

What I am going to say is based on the ideas in that video, so you may want to watch it. I think what I have written will make sense if you don’t, but you will get a fuller picture if you do.

Liberalism and conservatism are not groups you join.  I think we think of them that way because our politics have turned tribal.  But none of us are purely either one or the other.  I think it is more accurate to think of a scale between the two.  People shift along the scale based on need, and because of that, so do societies.  If we were unable to feel the pull of one or the other more strongly during different circumstances, then we wouldn’t be able to use them to adapt to changing conditions.  Evolution wouldn’t have preserved two basic outlooks – we would just have one like every other animal on the planet.

Conservatism is really good at protecting existing good things.  Carried to extremes it leads to fascism, which is a good way of dealing with some kind of crisis but is a horrible way to live.  In addition, progress is stifled which limits your ability to compete with other groups in the future.

Liberalism is really good at discovering new good things.  Carried to extremes it becomes anarchy.  New things can be discovered, but without the checking influence of conservatism people tend over time to promote their own self interest.  The ability to function as a group degrades, and the group becomes less able to respond to problems in an effective way.  Society essentially comes apart.

So in a crisis it is helpful to be guided by conservative moral philosophy so we should slide towards the conservative end of the scale, but once the crisis ends we need to slide back some to the liberal end.  Not too far though, or we will start to come apart as a society.  What we end up with is a self correcting balance between progress and preservation.  So neither liberalism or conservatism is better.  We need both.

So let’s look at our history to see how this has worked for us.

Humans existed as hunter-gatherers for at least 90% of our history.  This is how we lived from before we were even fully human up until the agricultural revolution, which was about 12,500 years ago.  So we probably evolved our moral code during those two hundred thousand years (1.8 million years if you count our time as Homo erectus).

At that point in our history we were living in tribes.  So we would have had to compete with other tribes for resources.  What if we were living in an area that experienced a drought and food became scarce?  If everyone in your tribe was at risk of starving to death wouldn’t you do just about anything to keep that from happening?  Wouldn’t you consider killing neighboring tribes for their food or packing up everything and moving in search of a better area?

We must have faced situations like that, and conservatism would have helped us deal with them.  We would have rallied around our leaders, closed ranks, and done what had to be done.  Differences wouldn’t have been tolerated.  It would have been critically important that the group act together.  If war was the chosen answer, our ancestors would have needed to field as many warriors as possible.  If moving was the chosen answer, then the more people moving together into unknown territory the safer they would have been from other tribes.  So obviously our ancestors did exactly that or we wouldn’t be here.  The genes that got passed down to us were the genes of the survivors that acted together.

We still feel the effects of those genes today.  I remember after 9/11 when we decided to go to war that criticizing the President became unpatriotic.  We were rallying around our leader.  On our personal morality scale – because we were in crisis – most of us slid more towards the conservative end than we were naturally inclined.

Great.  So conservatism kept us alive.  Why have liberalism then?

Because without it our society would have stopped changing.  When we were in survival mode, we wouldn’t have had time for art or discovering new foods or any kind of technological progress.  We would have been able to protect our way of life – maybe not actually practice it in times of crisis but protect it until the crisis was over.  But we wouldn’t have been able to improve it.

When we weren’t in crisis we could allow more differences.  Allowing people to think and act however they chose resulted in the discovery of new things.  The quality of life for everyone improved.  Because some of those discoveries were technological in nature they allowed the tribes that were better at these things to dominate their surroundings and better pass their genes down.  For example, the tribe that first invented the idea of using a club would have been invincible on the battlefield.  Tribes that were better at discovering new food would have more options of things to eat and could better survive changes to their environment.

Those genes too are a part of who we are today.  Liberals would be more likely than conservatives to want to go out to eat and try new food, but if anyone is ever going to feel like trying something new it is going to be when their life is on track and they feel pretty good about things.  Their liberal side can come out some, and they can try something new.  If they feel stressed or angry or sad, they are going to want comfort food instead.

So we have a sliding scale between liberalism and conservatism.  As we feel threatened we all become more conservative, and as we feel less threatened we become more liberal.  Incidentally, I think this is why the amygdyla in conservatives is enlarged – that is the region of the brain that detects and reacts to threats.  So maybe their natural instinct to detect and react to threats is stronger.

We have a lot of problems in the world now.  A lot.  Which is triggering many people to slide to the conservative end of the morality scale.  Those already at the end of the scale have intensified feelings.   So the good news is that the instincts we have evolved to handle threats are being triggered – our genes are working.  The bad news is that our genes are working – we are no longer hunter-gatherers, so the natural responses that are being triggered are exactly the wrong ones to solve the problems we have.  We become tribal.  At it’s most basic, our genes are wired in times of stress to close ranks and kill anything that is not us until life returns to normal.  When that doesn’t work, move.

We are living that response today.   We are already violent.  Our conversations are violent – many of us seem more focused on shutting down the other side than actually having a discussion.  In some cases, we have become physically violent too but most of us tend to ignore that.  Our genes are telling us to escalate the intensity until the problem is solved – is that really what we want?  Taken to extremes, let’s say one side managed to completely annihilate the other – would that solve our problems?  Would that really make job loss due to the rise of automation and AI any better?  It’s a difficult problem, but name calling won’t solve it and violence won’t solve it.

We need to discuss the facts about our problems and respect that even though our viewpoints may be different, they are both valid and necessary if we want to come up with the best, lasting solution.

We need to rise above our genes.