This seems like a ploy to give bragging rights to people who already have unhealthily elevated levels of self-esteem, and don't need any additional encouragement.
To begin with, "Liberal" and "Conservative" have little meaning in the current political climate. I would observe that conservatives, small 'c,' are generally pragmatic, i.e. oriented toward reality, and liberals, small 'l,' are generally idealistic, i.e. dreamers. Further, many, maybe most, people labeled as "conservative" are actually classical liberals in the manner of Edmund Burke. At the same time, many people who would call themselves "liberal" believe in things that are clearly not true, and are suckers for every faddish idea that comes along.
There is an evolutionary case to be made for conservatism, also known as "caution," because the prudent creature survives, while the carefree creature gets eaten. In our long pre-history, in which humans largely lived in small isolated groups for centuries at a time, contact with outsiders was often fatal, one way or another. So avoiding the "other," a form a of conservatism, became a survival strategy.
To further screw with your narrative: Engineers, physical scientists, and heart surgeons trend Republican. HR types, social scientists, and Somalians, the latter having an average IQ around 70, vote pretty much 100 percent Democrat.
Among my cohort, mostly professionals in their 50s 60s and 70s, the brightest, most innovative thinkers generally voted for Trump, while the midwits and conformists went mostly the other way. Make of that what you will.
"None of this is new. Elites have always had more open-minded sexual norms than peasants."
Not true. For example, Victorian elites were far more anti-homosexual than most plebs and in fact introduced anti-homosexuality as an actual conscious ideology to both western masses and also the Islamic world.
This is the problem when political scientists who generally know very little history try to generalise.
Of the big four or five personality traits, the one most correlated with intelligence is openness to experience. Why? No one knows. But the phenomenon here could be openness having a causal effect on social liberalism and also a non-causal correlation with intelligence
If I had to guess, I'd say that it's likely an evolutionary adaptation. The more intelligent you are, the better the rewards for forging out on your own. You're more likely to stumble into better ways of doing things, better techniques, better technologies. You have a credible shot at gaining some advantage by trying new things.
If you're unintelligent, then you'll tend to make worse decisions, gain less knowledge, and do a lot more stupid and risky stuff. The rewards for ignoring group consensus are lower, and the risks far higher. It's optimal to just follow tradition.
A free thinking idiot will be a conspiracy theorist. A free thinking erudite might be a conspiracy theorist (see Steve Jobs and his cancer treatments), but they've also got a decent shot at changing paradigms.
Have you thought about bias vs heuristic angles on this? You can imagine that social liberalism benefits smart people but harms dumb people, as a number of conservative commentators have argued.
For example maybe open relationships can allow smart people to navigate different relationship preferences well and keep marriages together, but it'd be harmful to the social fabric of dumber people.
Similarly (though I think the case here is weaker), you can imagine ethnic and cultural pluralism to enrich the lives for people like me in Berkeley, where I have access to diverse cuisines, deeper and more varied intellectual engagement, and non-Han romantic prospects, but visible non-homogeneity can be actively harmful for say villagers in Rwanda.
In both cases smarter people are more capable of navigating the greater social complexities of the more "socially liberal" positions. We know from animal studies that greater social organization is correlated with larger brain sizes (relative to body mass) and more complex behavior overall.
Note that this is a different claim than "luxury beliefs" -- it's not that smart social liberals are shielded from the poor consequences of their bad choices; actually the smart social liberals have good consequences from their own good choices, but it just fails to generalize.
You reposted this article recently, thought I’d comment on it. Numerous problems with this piece.
1. The study that inspired your piece explicitly shows religiosity is not correlated or causally related to IQ, making the part about EHC rejecting god seem more like your own personal reasons for rejecting religion.
2. You say, “If intelligence didn’t predict getting the right answer….then it wouldn’t be that useful of a trait” but that assumes IQ is geared towards objectivity and truth. It’s not, IQ has evolved to further individual/tribal victories, see here: https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/smart-people-are-especially-prone
3. “Stankov (2009) found similar relationships among foreigners who took the TOEFL exam, and also American community college students based on their SAT scores”. This does not seem to be the case based on recent data on all high school grads that are college bound (see link below). This is probably because stankov used definitions of conservatism that were developed by psychologists that don’t match what Americans or westerners see as conservatism, in other words they let the people place themselves on the political spectrum. Think John Jost, the king of small sample sizes and p-hacking. https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/09/working-paper-professor-bias-may-deflate-conservative-college-students-grades/
4. You gloss over the history of the Republican Party since the 1960s, you are right about the republicans being the party of businessmen, but up until 2008 and maybe 2012 according to gss wordsum data republicans still had a major edge on democrats, see seb Jensen for more info. This was when socially conservative views like anti gay marriage and abortion was still quite prominent, not to mention that for decades since the 1980s republicans were still more religious. The only things that have really changed since then that could have promoted the anti-elite realignment was the “great awokening” and all the racial fads since, which had to do with elites being manipulated by sympathy and a desire to be on “the right side of history” combined with the concept of luxury beliefs. The other is anti immigration rhetoric and policies, but even here republicans have not necessarily decreased their anti immigration or naturalization views in decades, remember the daca battles in early 2010s. One could say that trumps rhetoric about economic populism changed this, but as you said there is or was (within the last decade) not a strong correlation between them in the US. In other words much of the elites and smart people being repulsed by social conservatism (at least enough to join the other party or to being a liberal) seems to be recent and caused by the proliferation of media to manipulate the sympathies of elites such as the great awokening and attempting to associate todays perceived societal ills (racism, inequality, intolerance, violence etc) with broad aspects of social conservatism even if historically people have had just and morally decent reasons to support it.
Pro-life might have a unique opportunity to disrupt EHC consensus if something can be presented that a critical mass of elites will accept as dispositive evidence that life begins at conception. What sort of evidence that might entail I don't know, that's their problem.
I get that this isn't the point of the post, but your passing assertion that "intelligent people are much more likely to reject religion because it is fundamentally irrational" demonstrates a cringily shallow engagement with a massive topic.
I also think Hanania is conflating intelligence with educational attainment. I had a friend in high school who slept during APUSH and smoked all of us on the SAT. She had a different set of priorities. It was a humbling lesson for someone who had prided themselves on “intelligence” when “doing school” was the task I was actually doing - being compliant, taking the “right” courses, etc. . Academics don’t understand that their kind of intelligence is narrow and in the humanities being burnt down by despair and identity politics. It’s why I went to languages from English 35 years and left grad school. It was clear then that truth-seeking and shared reality was being replaced by tribal allegiance 😓 and ultimately the will to power through intimidation.
Men are leaving academia because it’s becoming “doing school” instead of allowing debate and argument. Women, we need to acknowledge our role in this and work to combat it in young women - saying “sorry” constantly while shutting down people you disagree with and weaponizing fragility and weakness will not serve us well in the long term - throwing paint or food on van goghs is the height of fruitless activism - it’s literally a temper tantrum - the ways men have to control their violence we have to control our crazy - that’s being a functional adult
As a minority in Iran, I have learned a lot from your essay and it astonishes me how accurate you know the situation here in tandem with increasing the desperate feeling of an underdog against the tyrannical theocratic ruler of iran.
The issue with the first paper, "Are Cultural and Economic Conservatism Positively Correlated? A Large-Scale Cross-National Test", is that it pools the nations that are either under Western cultural or economic hegemony , or that have elites who are, with the rest of the world, so with regards to the high income anti-correlation with social conservatism, the WVS wave plots 5 and 6 are inconclusive. The paper did not publish a separate correlation wave for attitudes and household income for non-Western nations only, and, given that OnlyFans subscribers are usually those having hard time to find sex, one might provide a similar analogy and suggest that pro-business attitude is not equal to being in the highest income.
In addition, there are other factors, like source of income, that might influence the respondents' opinions. An employee of Microsoft Research Asia probably would have a slightly more pro-Western attitude than someone who works in one of the National Key Laboratories. Education abroad, and many, many, many other factors might play a role as well.
The authors themselves warn us against making the conclusions that Richard makes:
"The present results do not, of course, provide evidence of causal influences, such as influences of development, societal progressivism or political engagement on attitude structuring, or influences of social class and needs for security and certainty on political attitudes. With regard to nation-level relationships, development and culturally progressive values are associated with other cultural, structural and institutional characteristics that could be the driving influence..."
Richard's conclusions might or might not be true, but without the separate analysis done for non-Western nations that takes into account at the very least the location of one's educational institution and their source of income, as well as whether Western media were widely accessible to the children within their social strata during their formative period, in conjunction with their current age, he goes too far with his conclusions.
With regards to the second paper, "China’s Ideological Spectrum", the correlation between social liberalism and market values, which even Richard acknowledges as incidental, leads to another hypothesis: in our global age, everyone has access to the workings of the elite minds of the dominant civilization, which is the Western one, and smarter people, as smart as they are, are still subject to the herd mentality, except that their herd is "smarter people". Its worth acknowledging that the polls in China that this paper cites took place not so long ago, and the current business elite was brought up in Deng Xiaoping's climate of openness to Western influence. It would be interesting to hold the same survey about 10 years from now, when the entrepreneurs brought up during Xi's time will take over.
Overall, in order to remove confounding variables with a sufficient degree of certainty, one might need to hold a survey in a country that is totally isolated from Western influence, like DPRK, but at the same time has a relatively free inner discussion on the matters of social conservatism, which might not exist today. Even in places like Burkina-Faso, the elite is attracted to what they perceive as the best, so they send their children in places like if not France and USA, then Russia, where they get the attitudes of Western elites from their peers -- children of Russian elite who were educated in the West.
In conclusion, I'd like to add that most likely Richard's assessment that the US conservatives oppose homosexuality and abortion for all the wrong reasons is likely to be true, however, extrapolating this to the entire humanity seems like a very big stretch.
The issue with the USA has always been that its two party political system has conflated two usually orthogonal value scales into one, thereby masking any meaningful correlations.
>If you only knew about American politics, you might think that support for say lower taxes, restricting abortion, and having a tough immigration policy are a natural combination, but it’s quite rare.
Of course. How the hell did Americans came up with one ideology that is permissive of personal behaviour and restrictive of economic behaviour, and another that is restrictive of personal behaviour and permissive of economic behaviour? This is such an unlikely combination. Why not be generally permissive or generally restrictive as a basic mood, vibe and mindset?
Well I do have an answer to that. What matters is whether capital is domestic or foreign. If it is domestic, nationalists like it, if it is foreign, nationalists dislike it.
Imagine a version of America where all large businesses are Mexican owned, have Spanish names, you have to learn Spanish to get a white collar job, it is fashionable at work to call meetings reunións etc. I think Republicans would very quickly find their inner dirty Commie lol.
Re the 2023 Pew study I don't think there is a relationship between finishing higher education and intelligence; these days the universities in the West are like madrassa's or indoctrination factories for memorizing left-wing pieties. The outcome that the majority of all graduates lean left or even hard-left is not surprising but not an indication of their intelligence, rather the opposite. The really independent and creative thinkers (in particular the highly and profoundly gifted segment with IQ's well over 140) will finish their courses but feel soiled and disgusted by the process. Also, the fact that the elites in certain countries are able to force legislation on the citizenry that the latter opposes, which the author seems to approve of, shows that the democratic systems in those countries are not functioning and that they resemble oligarchies instead. Hence the populist revolts all over the West.
This seems like a ploy to give bragging rights to people who already have unhealthily elevated levels of self-esteem, and don't need any additional encouragement.
To begin with, "Liberal" and "Conservative" have little meaning in the current political climate. I would observe that conservatives, small 'c,' are generally pragmatic, i.e. oriented toward reality, and liberals, small 'l,' are generally idealistic, i.e. dreamers. Further, many, maybe most, people labeled as "conservative" are actually classical liberals in the manner of Edmund Burke. At the same time, many people who would call themselves "liberal" believe in things that are clearly not true, and are suckers for every faddish idea that comes along.
There is an evolutionary case to be made for conservatism, also known as "caution," because the prudent creature survives, while the carefree creature gets eaten. In our long pre-history, in which humans largely lived in small isolated groups for centuries at a time, contact with outsiders was often fatal, one way or another. So avoiding the "other," a form a of conservatism, became a survival strategy.
To further screw with your narrative: Engineers, physical scientists, and heart surgeons trend Republican. HR types, social scientists, and Somalians, the latter having an average IQ around 70, vote pretty much 100 percent Democrat.
Among my cohort, mostly professionals in their 50s 60s and 70s, the brightest, most innovative thinkers generally voted for Trump, while the midwits and conformists went mostly the other way. Make of that what you will.
"None of this is new. Elites have always had more open-minded sexual norms than peasants."
Not true. For example, Victorian elites were far more anti-homosexual than most plebs and in fact introduced anti-homosexuality as an actual conscious ideology to both western masses and also the Islamic world.
This is the problem when political scientists who generally know very little history try to generalise.
Of the big four or five personality traits, the one most correlated with intelligence is openness to experience. Why? No one knows. But the phenomenon here could be openness having a causal effect on social liberalism and also a non-causal correlation with intelligence
If I had to guess, I'd say that it's likely an evolutionary adaptation. The more intelligent you are, the better the rewards for forging out on your own. You're more likely to stumble into better ways of doing things, better techniques, better technologies. You have a credible shot at gaining some advantage by trying new things.
If you're unintelligent, then you'll tend to make worse decisions, gain less knowledge, and do a lot more stupid and risky stuff. The rewards for ignoring group consensus are lower, and the risks far higher. It's optimal to just follow tradition.
A free thinking idiot will be a conspiracy theorist. A free thinking erudite might be a conspiracy theorist (see Steve Jobs and his cancer treatments), but they've also got a decent shot at changing paradigms.
Have you thought about bias vs heuristic angles on this? You can imagine that social liberalism benefits smart people but harms dumb people, as a number of conservative commentators have argued.
For example maybe open relationships can allow smart people to navigate different relationship preferences well and keep marriages together, but it'd be harmful to the social fabric of dumber people.
Similarly (though I think the case here is weaker), you can imagine ethnic and cultural pluralism to enrich the lives for people like me in Berkeley, where I have access to diverse cuisines, deeper and more varied intellectual engagement, and non-Han romantic prospects, but visible non-homogeneity can be actively harmful for say villagers in Rwanda.
In both cases smarter people are more capable of navigating the greater social complexities of the more "socially liberal" positions. We know from animal studies that greater social organization is correlated with larger brain sizes (relative to body mass) and more complex behavior overall.
Note that this is a different claim than "luxury beliefs" -- it's not that smart social liberals are shielded from the poor consequences of their bad choices; actually the smart social liberals have good consequences from their own good choices, but it just fails to generalize.
Maybe conservative behavior and positions is benefitial for low IQ people but not fof high IQ ones?
You reposted this article recently, thought I’d comment on it. Numerous problems with this piece.
1. The study that inspired your piece explicitly shows religiosity is not correlated or causally related to IQ, making the part about EHC rejecting god seem more like your own personal reasons for rejecting religion.
2. You say, “If intelligence didn’t predict getting the right answer….then it wouldn’t be that useful of a trait” but that assumes IQ is geared towards objectivity and truth. It’s not, IQ has evolved to further individual/tribal victories, see here: https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/smart-people-are-especially-prone
3. “Stankov (2009) found similar relationships among foreigners who took the TOEFL exam, and also American community college students based on their SAT scores”. This does not seem to be the case based on recent data on all high school grads that are college bound (see link below). This is probably because stankov used definitions of conservatism that were developed by psychologists that don’t match what Americans or westerners see as conservatism, in other words they let the people place themselves on the political spectrum. Think John Jost, the king of small sample sizes and p-hacking. https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/09/working-paper-professor-bias-may-deflate-conservative-college-students-grades/
4. You gloss over the history of the Republican Party since the 1960s, you are right about the republicans being the party of businessmen, but up until 2008 and maybe 2012 according to gss wordsum data republicans still had a major edge on democrats, see seb Jensen for more info. This was when socially conservative views like anti gay marriage and abortion was still quite prominent, not to mention that for decades since the 1980s republicans were still more religious. The only things that have really changed since then that could have promoted the anti-elite realignment was the “great awokening” and all the racial fads since, which had to do with elites being manipulated by sympathy and a desire to be on “the right side of history” combined with the concept of luxury beliefs. The other is anti immigration rhetoric and policies, but even here republicans have not necessarily decreased their anti immigration or naturalization views in decades, remember the daca battles in early 2010s. One could say that trumps rhetoric about economic populism changed this, but as you said there is or was (within the last decade) not a strong correlation between them in the US. In other words much of the elites and smart people being repulsed by social conservatism (at least enough to join the other party or to being a liberal) seems to be recent and caused by the proliferation of media to manipulate the sympathies of elites such as the great awokening and attempting to associate todays perceived societal ills (racism, inequality, intolerance, violence etc) with broad aspects of social conservatism even if historically people have had just and morally decent reasons to support it.
Pro-life might have a unique opportunity to disrupt EHC consensus if something can be presented that a critical mass of elites will accept as dispositive evidence that life begins at conception. What sort of evidence that might entail I don't know, that's their problem.
I get that this isn't the point of the post, but your passing assertion that "intelligent people are much more likely to reject religion because it is fundamentally irrational" demonstrates a cringily shallow engagement with a massive topic.
I also think Hanania is conflating intelligence with educational attainment. I had a friend in high school who slept during APUSH and smoked all of us on the SAT. She had a different set of priorities. It was a humbling lesson for someone who had prided themselves on “intelligence” when “doing school” was the task I was actually doing - being compliant, taking the “right” courses, etc. . Academics don’t understand that their kind of intelligence is narrow and in the humanities being burnt down by despair and identity politics. It’s why I went to languages from English 35 years and left grad school. It was clear then that truth-seeking and shared reality was being replaced by tribal allegiance 😓 and ultimately the will to power through intimidation.
“i had a friend” stop right there, anecdote police!
Men are leaving academia because it’s becoming “doing school” instead of allowing debate and argument. Women, we need to acknowledge our role in this and work to combat it in young women - saying “sorry” constantly while shutting down people you disagree with and weaponizing fragility and weakness will not serve us well in the long term - throwing paint or food on van goghs is the height of fruitless activism - it’s literally a temper tantrum - the ways men have to control their violence we have to control our crazy - that’s being a functional adult
As a minority in Iran, I have learned a lot from your essay and it astonishes me how accurate you know the situation here in tandem with increasing the desperate feeling of an underdog against the tyrannical theocratic ruler of iran.
So thank you.
Thank you! Good luck in your struggle.
The issue with the first paper, "Are Cultural and Economic Conservatism Positively Correlated? A Large-Scale Cross-National Test", is that it pools the nations that are either under Western cultural or economic hegemony , or that have elites who are, with the rest of the world, so with regards to the high income anti-correlation with social conservatism, the WVS wave plots 5 and 6 are inconclusive. The paper did not publish a separate correlation wave for attitudes and household income for non-Western nations only, and, given that OnlyFans subscribers are usually those having hard time to find sex, one might provide a similar analogy and suggest that pro-business attitude is not equal to being in the highest income.
In addition, there are other factors, like source of income, that might influence the respondents' opinions. An employee of Microsoft Research Asia probably would have a slightly more pro-Western attitude than someone who works in one of the National Key Laboratories. Education abroad, and many, many, many other factors might play a role as well.
The authors themselves warn us against making the conclusions that Richard makes:
"The present results do not, of course, provide evidence of causal influences, such as influences of development, societal progressivism or political engagement on attitude structuring, or influences of social class and needs for security and certainty on political attitudes. With regard to nation-level relationships, development and culturally progressive values are associated with other cultural, structural and institutional characteristics that could be the driving influence..."
Richard's conclusions might or might not be true, but without the separate analysis done for non-Western nations that takes into account at the very least the location of one's educational institution and their source of income, as well as whether Western media were widely accessible to the children within their social strata during their formative period, in conjunction with their current age, he goes too far with his conclusions.
With regards to the second paper, "China’s Ideological Spectrum", the correlation between social liberalism and market values, which even Richard acknowledges as incidental, leads to another hypothesis: in our global age, everyone has access to the workings of the elite minds of the dominant civilization, which is the Western one, and smarter people, as smart as they are, are still subject to the herd mentality, except that their herd is "smarter people". Its worth acknowledging that the polls in China that this paper cites took place not so long ago, and the current business elite was brought up in Deng Xiaoping's climate of openness to Western influence. It would be interesting to hold the same survey about 10 years from now, when the entrepreneurs brought up during Xi's time will take over.
Overall, in order to remove confounding variables with a sufficient degree of certainty, one might need to hold a survey in a country that is totally isolated from Western influence, like DPRK, but at the same time has a relatively free inner discussion on the matters of social conservatism, which might not exist today. Even in places like Burkina-Faso, the elite is attracted to what they perceive as the best, so they send their children in places like if not France and USA, then Russia, where they get the attitudes of Western elites from their peers -- children of Russian elite who were educated in the West.
In conclusion, I'd like to add that most likely Richard's assessment that the US conservatives oppose homosexuality and abortion for all the wrong reasons is likely to be true, however, extrapolating this to the entire humanity seems like a very big stretch.
My gosh. Hilarious
Classic democrat move. Belittle those who disagree with you as bigoted or stupid. Classy!
The issue with the USA has always been that its two party political system has conflated two usually orthogonal value scales into one, thereby masking any meaningful correlations.
And you believe this paper to be unbiased imperial evidence . Prove it.
>If you only knew about American politics, you might think that support for say lower taxes, restricting abortion, and having a tough immigration policy are a natural combination, but it’s quite rare.
Of course. How the hell did Americans came up with one ideology that is permissive of personal behaviour and restrictive of economic behaviour, and another that is restrictive of personal behaviour and permissive of economic behaviour? This is such an unlikely combination. Why not be generally permissive or generally restrictive as a basic mood, vibe and mindset?
Well I do have an answer to that. What matters is whether capital is domestic or foreign. If it is domestic, nationalists like it, if it is foreign, nationalists dislike it.
Imagine a version of America where all large businesses are Mexican owned, have Spanish names, you have to learn Spanish to get a white collar job, it is fashionable at work to call meetings reunións etc. I think Republicans would very quickly find their inner dirty Commie lol.
Re the 2023 Pew study I don't think there is a relationship between finishing higher education and intelligence; these days the universities in the West are like madrassa's or indoctrination factories for memorizing left-wing pieties. The outcome that the majority of all graduates lean left or even hard-left is not surprising but not an indication of their intelligence, rather the opposite. The really independent and creative thinkers (in particular the highly and profoundly gifted segment with IQ's well over 140) will finish their courses but feel soiled and disgusted by the process. Also, the fact that the elites in certain countries are able to force legislation on the citizenry that the latter opposes, which the author seems to approve of, shows that the democratic systems in those countries are not functioning and that they resemble oligarchies instead. Hence the populist revolts all over the West.