Liberals think they’re more intelligent than wingnuts because they are
by Satoshi Kanazawa
Speaker One: I don’t even know what the sides are in the culture wars.
Speaker Two: Well, your side hates my side because you think we think you
are stupid, and my side hates your side because we know you are
stupid.
It
is difficult to define a whole school of political ideology precisely,
but one may reasonably define liberalism (as opposed to conservatism) in
the contemporary United States as
the genuine concern for the
welfare of genetically unrelated others and the willingness to
contribute larger proportions of private resources for the welfare of
such others. In the modern political and economic context, this
willingness usually translates into paying higher proportions of
individual incomes in taxes toward the government
and its social welfare programs. Liberals usually support such social
welfare programs and higher taxes to finance them, and conservatives
usually oppose them.
Defined as such, liberalism is evolutionarily novel. Humans (like other species) are evolutionarily designed to be altruistic
toward their genetic kin, their friends and allies, and members of
their deme (a group of intermarrying individuals) or ethnic group. They
are not designed to be altruistic toward an indefinite number of
complete strangers whom they are not likely ever to meet or interact
with. This is largely because our ancestors lived in a small band of
50-150 genetically related individuals, and large cities and nations
with thousands and millions of people are themselves evolutionarily
novel.
The examination of the 10-volume compendium
The Encyclopedia of World Cultures, which describes
all
human cultures known to anthropology (more than 1,500) in great detail,
as well as extensive primary ethnographies of traditional societies,
reveals that liberalism as defined above is absent in these traditional
cultures. While sharing of resources, especially food, is quite common
and often mandatory among hunter-gatherer tribes, and while trade with
neighboring tribes often takes place, there is no evidence that people
in contemporary hunter-gatherer bands
freely share resources with
members of other tribes.
Because
all members of a hunter-gatherer tribe are genetic kin or at the very
least friends and allies for life, sharing resources among them does not
qualify as an expression of liberalism as defined above. Given its
absence in the contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, which are often used
as modern-day analogs of our ancestral life, it may be reasonable to
infer that sharing of resources with total strangers that one has never
met or is not likely ever to meet – that is, liberalism – was not part
of our ancestral life. Liberalism may therefore be evolutionarily
novel, and the Hypothesis
would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely than
less intelligent individuals to espouse liberalism as a value.
Analyzes
of large representative samples, from both the United States and the
United Kingdom, confirm this prediction. In both countries, more
intelligent children are more likely to grow up to be liberals than less
intelligent children. For example, among the American sample, those
who identify themselves as “very liberal” in early adulthood have a mean
childhood IQ of 106.4, whereas those who identify themselves as “very conservative” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 94.8.
Even
though past studies show that women are more liberal than men, and
blacks are more liberal than whites, the effect of childhood intelligence on adult political ideology is twice as large as the effect of either sex or race. So it appears that, as the Hypothesis
predicts, more intelligent individuals are more likely to espouse the
value of liberalism than less intelligent individuals, possibly because
liberalism is evolutionarily novel and conservatism is evolutionarily
familiar.
The primary means that citizens of capitalist
democracies contribute their private resources for the welfare of the
genetically unrelated others is paying taxes to the government for its
social welfare programs. The fact that conservatives have been shown to
give more money to charities than liberals is
not inconsistent with the prediction from the Hypothesis;
in fact, it supports the prediction. Individuals can normally choose
and select the beneficiaries of their charity donations. For example,
they can choose to give money to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti,
because they want to help them, but not to give money to the victims of
the earthquake in Chile, because they don’t want to help them. In
contrast, citizens do not have any control over whom the money they pay
in taxes benefit. They cannot individually choose to pay taxes to fund
Medicare, because they want to help elderly white people, but not AFDC,
because they don’t want to help poor black single mothers. This may
precisely be why conservatives choose to give more money to individual
charities of their choice while opposing higher taxes.
Incidentally,
this finding substantiates one of the persistent complaints among
conservatives. Wingnutss often complain that liberals control the
media or the show business or the academia or some other social
institutions. Liberals
do
control the media, or the show business, or the academia, among other
institutions, because, apart from a few areas in life (such as business)
where countervailing circumstances may prevail,
liberals control all institutions.
They control the institutions because liberals are on average more
intelligent than wingnutss and thus they are more likely to attain
the highest status in any area of (evolutionarily novel) modern life.
In some countries, if you win a bronze medal at the Olympics, you become a national hero -forever!
People
usually get excited when Santa comes to visit, but not Disney "Bah
Humbug" World! 
