Fear and American Conservatism
by David Atkins
A new study confirms what we've known for a long time: irrational fear breeds political and social conservatism:
The research indicates a strong correlation between social fear and anti-immigration, pro-segregation attitudes. While those individuals with higher levels of social fear exhibited the strongest negative out-group attitudes, even the lowest amount of social phobia was related to substantially less positive out-group attitudes.
“It’s not that conservative people are more fearful, it’s that fearful people are more conservative. People who are scared of novelty, uncertainty, people they don’t know, and things they don’t understand, are more supportive of policies that provide them with a sense of surety and security,” McDermott said.
“In this way, the definition of unfamiliar may shift across time and location based on experience and education, and a genetically informed fear disposition is hardly permanent or fixed,” the researchers wrote.
But this is doubtless true of humanity worldwide. There is still something particularly virulent about American conservatism, as well as the sort of conservatism that manifests as Islamism across much of the world. As with the European Middle Ages and the wars of Reformation, there's something particularly nasty about the triple combination of fear, religion and state power. Throw in race resentment and it gets very bad indeed.
But there is something that can be done to mitigate genetic predisposition to irrational fear and conservatism:
The researchers make clear, however, that genetics plays only part of the role in influencing political preferences. Education, they found, had an equally large influence on out-group attitudes, with more highly educated people displaying more supportive attitudes toward out-groups and education having a substantial mediating influence on the correlation between parental fear and child out-group attitudes.
Education is the only way forward. It always has been.
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