Right wingers "more afraid of death"

[danny la rouge]

But it's not true, is it? It is simplistic nonsense.

No, it isn't true.

So, nobody want to play? Fair enough. <sighs>

 

[Barking_Mad]

Or perhaps it is rich men, camels and the eye of a needle.

 

[smmudge]

No, it isn't true.

So, nobody want to play? Fair enough. <sighs>

Ok let's pretend for a minute it is true...that it is your genetics that make up your personality and therefore how conservative or liberal you are.

What would this mean? Well...perhaps that given a certain time in a society, you would find it difficult to convince a conservative to vote liberal and vice versa. But, outside of this specific time, I don't think it would have much effect at all. What we consider 'conservative' views and what we consider 'liberal' views change greatly over different cultures and societies. For instance smoking cannibis is seen as something nowadays in western society only liberals would do, but it has in the past been seen as 'normal' and therefore conservatives would quite happily partake in it too.

So even if genes do play a part in determining one's political stance, it is the culture that determines where different views lie in the political spectrum anyway.

 

[CJohn]

Well, of course the studies are flawed. What I was interested in was the kernal: what if political leanings aren't - as I had always imagined - nurture, but nature?

Yeah I mean these studies really are flawed - besides other things they’re just correlative, and there is a massive issue regarding cause and effect.

Anyhow - Political leanings only make sense with a social space, where these views have meaning and can be contrasted with different and competing perspectives. Meaning is intersubjective, not tied to biology, so in that sense even if political orientation had a biological component - which is of course something many of us would contest - it doesn't make sense abstracted from the world of political discourse. That is, the biological aspect is symbolised within a social space, at which point it becomes more than crude biology, it is something beyond it. Human essence is not reducible to biology - though of course it has a physiological substrate - and there is an element of choosing who and what we become, often acting in ways that go against, or are in conflict with the biological basis of our species. Political leaning should be a matter of choice, a commitment. Thus even if I was biological predisposed to be right-wing (and again I do not really accept this as being possible, but still...) an engagement with social and political change should impel me to find my own position, irrespective of any innate tendencies I have. In an age of political apathy political persuasion and engagement has particularly important role to play, and surely this view would in fact be supported by any suggestion of a biological component to political orientation.