What’s at the Core of Conservatism and Liberalism?
Conservatives and liberals are pessimistic about human nature when designing the foundations of a country or constitution. However, conservatives would be more likely to favor institutional checks on human nature because we recognize its evils. But notice that this response accepts human nature, rather than trying to fundamentally alter it. The liberal response to human nature is to also recognize its evil or greedy proclivities, but it then seeks to force humanity into a “better” mold. This is the pernicious and noxious foundation of socialism/communism, which is an extreme incarnation of American liberal views, but still runs in its vein. It is the underlying and often unspoken thesis behind American, even more moderate, liberal policy.
This is a major topic of Steven Pinker’s latest book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Video of his book lecture). Liberals tend to see the mind more like a blank slate, it is something they can mold into a higher form with good policies. What’s ironic is that Pinker compares that sentiment with the religious right, but not with what I would consider true conservatism or classical liberalism (he has confirmed this via email). Pinker and conservatives like me agree that human nature is mostly immutable and that institutions should be erected that check it, rather than try to change it. This liberal view of human nature is beyond pessimism toward human nature, it is disdain for it. I feel that the most humanitarian way to develop societies, for both rich and poor, is to allow the natural human greed for wealth to expand…Meanwhile liberals see this greed as something to be expunged, or at the least discouraged.
How does the difference in understanding of human nature manifest itself in policy? Liberal policy recommends ever higher taxes. Why? Their implicit belief is that the innate human desire to earn more wealth for yourself is morally wrong. Their recommended solution is to forcibly take the wealth from him (taxation) and redistribute it in a way that more closely comports with their view of a moral human society, or rather, the way society would look if human nature were good. Rather than accepting the human greed instinct, they dissuade it and reject it, thereby creating disincentives to work, thereby creating unemployment and stagnant growth (i.e.
This distinction most obviously exists when it regards how free markets should be. The problem is that when you try to get humans to stop acting like humans they inevitably will, but it won’t ever produce the results desired by the central planners. Humans will change their behavior, but not in a way that is less greedy. No, it’s the opposite. They will continue to act in their self-interest, except the institutions of society will not be setup to direct that self-interest into production and wealth for society, but rather into unmotivated human capital.
It makes sense that policies should be designed with a firm grasp of the immutable realities of human nature. As Pinker and Chomsky (in linguistics) have argued, we are not blank slates. We have mental proclivities for language, good and evil, greed, and a plethora of other things.
Comment by John Bambenek on 8 September 2006 at 11:00 am:
I’m not sure which brand of conservatives you think you are talking about here…
At least my brand does think human nature can be changed, but it tends to be rare and slow.
People can be changed or redeemed, the law, in part, is to help that process… the Church in a much larger part is a driver… family life is another.
Comment by Billy Joe Mills on 8 September 2006 at 12:05 pm:
…Actually…that is one thing I forgot to address. You are correct about what you say. In fact, Pinker discusses this in his lecture and in his book. This is one underlying assumption that liberals and religious conservatives do agree on. That is why they are both averse to concluding that human nature is essentially immutable. That perverse alliance maintains this belief even while science has continually shown that the human mind is not a blank slate. Rather, they view it as being sort of like a computer with certain pre-installed and un-deletable software. The conservative/democracy/capitalism trick then is to work within the parameters set by that software, rather than trying to erase it.
Comment by Billy Joe Mills on 8 September 2006 at 3:57 pm:
Doran,
In 1957 Chomsky wrote the most influential linguistics book in history, Syntactic Structures. If you go to Chomsky’s Wiki entry you’ll see the following quote which sums up why this book was so important to both linguistics and human nature generally:
“Children are hypothesized to have an innate knowledge of the basic grammatical structure common to all human languages (i.e. they assume that any language which they encounter is of a certain restricted kind). This innate knowledge is often referred to as universal grammar. It is argued that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the “productivity” of language: with a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms, humans are able to produce an infinite number of sentences, including sentences no one has previously said.”
In 1994 Pinker wrote a book called The Language Instinct, in which he essentially backed up Chomsky’s original work. Many other linguists have accepted this theory, and it is currently the dominant way to explain how humans acquire language relatively easily and why there are shared traits between seemingly disparate languages.
Feral children have been explained by them with relative ease. Simply, after a human has reached a certain age without access to hearing language they are no longer able to do so. It is true that there is an age threshold, after which it is extremely difficult or impossible to instill human language. But that evidence is does not controvert the “language instinct” theory, it simply provides evidence as to the details of that instinct.
Comment by JayBandit on 8 September 2006 at 6:43 pm:
Really interesting post, Billy Joe. The thing I find most interesting is that the conservatives and liberals both get it wrong in the end. The liberals stiffle human nature, but then the conservatives stiffle creativity.
As you say, liberals are always trying to change the way humans operate, just as in the case of “rehabilitating” prison immates. Conservatives consistently try and hamper social freedoms.
I just think if we allowed more freedoms in all aspects of society, it would probably be a better, happier place.
Comment by Billy Joe Mills on 8 September 2006 at 7:17 pm:
Jaybandit,
Incidentally, I do agree with your statement. Again, do not confuse me with the social conservatives. Also, when I use the word conservative in my post, don’t assume I mean all conservatives or just ther Religious Right. The true intellectual core of the conservatives would, in short, advocate for the greatest amount of human freedom while allowing only the amount of state interference necessary for our freedoms and our instincts to be channeled into general societal good, rather than general societal anarchy. The liberal position is that human freedoms, particularly greed, are evil and ought to be substantively modified at their root.
Comment by Brian on 8 September 2006 at 8:24 pm:
When you say liberals want to make people not be greedy, what are you basing that on? What sorts of policies do liberals advocate that leads you to conclude this? I can understand saying conservatives want to change human nature, and Bambenek has confirmed this. The drive for sex, for example, is a natural and immutable force in human beings. Conservatives think if we sit our kids down in school and at home and urge them not to have sex, that none of them will. That is clearly trying to alter human nature. I’m not entirely against that, by the way–I think the encouragement of marriage and stable families is vitally important and would absolutely second Bambenek when he says the law and religion and family and schools can be excellent ways to enlighten and educate and improve people. I’m a better person, morally and intellectually, because I got an education and had a family filled with good role models and all the rest. I still think conservatives who advocate things like abstinence-only education are naive, but the general idea of believing that the government can play a role in improving people’s outlooks and their lives in general is not at all naive or unrealistic; we see it happen every day when we attend classes at this university.
But as for your statements about liberals wanting to change people’s greediness, I simply don’t know what you’re talking about.
Are you talking about a progressive tax policy that takes more money from the wealthy than from the poor? Because the wealthy still end up pretty good after those taxes are taken from them, and there’s still plenty of an incentive to get a highpaying job. I don’t know about you, but nobody’s ever come up to me and said, “So I got into Harvard Business School and could get my MBA there and make hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, but then I realized I’d have to pay so much more in taxes than all those lucky people out there making $40,000 a year.”
Or are you talking about social welfare programs that benefit the poor and unemployed? If that’s the case, I’d point out that the beneficiaries of welfare are among the poorest in our society. They have an incentive to get jobs even if they’re collecting welfare checks. People don’t want to stay on welfare. They want to get jobs because of the very greed you say liberals try to eliminate. They want to make more than they are getting from welfare because welfare gives them barely enough to sustain themselves. Welfare is means of helping people through the lean times. Where is the desire to change human nature in that?
Or are you simply talking about socialism? Because if this post is read as a criticism of socialism, I’m totally behind you. If you replaced every reference to liberalism with a reference to socialism, it’d make perfect sense. I agree. Socialism doesn’t work. Good job slaying that beast. But it seemed a lot like you were talking about liberals in this country, in which case, where did you get the idea that being a liberal in this country meant being a socialist? That makes as much sense as saying being a conservative in this country means being a fascist. If you’d like to make a genuine critique of liberal thought in America, I’d love to hear it, but please stop with the biggest straw man argument of all time that liberals don’t believe in capitalism. It’s tired and it’s cheap and it’s beneath you.
Comment by Anonymous on 9 September 2006 at 12:30 am:
as embraced by the left in America, liberalism == socialism
speaking as a libertarian and classical liberal, please give us our adjective back.
Comment by Gordon the Gnome on 11 September 2006 at 4:54 pm:
As a former pure Liberarian (in the Ayn Rand model), I’ve joined my fair share of human nature debates, often concluding that human beings are, more than anything, driven by something that transcends both good and evil: selfishness.
Selfishness is why a man ignores a beggar on the street, and why he spends his Sundays watching football instead of doing volunteer work. Selfishness is also why our most capable people go to medical school, and why Bill Gates has accumulated enough wealth to create the world’s largest charity.
Our task as a society should always be to put up legal barriers only to block those selfish behaviors that directly damage the lives of others, while encouraging selfish behaviors that improve the whole. Selfishness, after all, is neither good nor evil, but inherent to all human beings, and is essential to our survival and progress.
America has risen to become the most powerful nation in the history of the world exactly because it best tapped the selfish nature of man—while other nations tried to ignore or even suppress it—and used it advance the lives of all.
Comment by illinikc33 on 11 September 2006 at 10:54 pm:
I ignore beggars on the street because I do not want to help him buy the bottle of alcohol I see him drinking a few hours later.
I don’t know why I felt I had to make this comment.
Comment by kevin's id on 12 September 2006 at 2:24 pm:
Maybe because you hate bums? And you hate bums because they are usually minorities? Subconscious racism? I think so.
Kevin, I am your id. I am your Tyler Durden. I say what you are afraid to say.
Comment by illinikc33 on 12 September 2006 at 4:10 pm:
HAHAHA Actually, as one who lived in the ghetto (aka John and Locust), I had close contact with most bums on campus. I can tell you of one bum on campus that is not white. The majority of bums I have had close contact with (I know of 4 that frequented my old apartment complex) have all been white, with varying degrees of facial hair. Don’t you have work to do?