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“The Republican Brain” has become a hot item among Democrats seeking to bash many Republicans for their climate change denialism, above all else. It's true that they do this, and that many Republicans do operate from a different mindset than many Democrats.
So, what's wrong with this book?
In
a word, “scientism.” Mooney’s not as bad or as blatant about it as a Sam Harris,
but, yes, the book does veer off into scientism.
And,
Chris is not a scientist, but he is a science journalist of several years
standing, and the author of previous books. He should know better.
And
I suspect he DOES know better. But, not applying his own writing about “motivated
reasoning,” or, as I have called it before on this blog, “pulling a Chris
Mooney,” he’s engaged in politically driven motivated reasoning himself. As a
left-liberal, albeit a skeptical one, I can say that without being a
conservative ax-grinder of the likes of whom he obsessively-compulsively writes
about to the degree of posting info about “bad” Amazon reviews of his book to
Facebook.
Anyway,
let’s look more at this scientism and motivated reasoning.
The
scientism starts in the title.
The
mind isn’t the brain, and no, I’m not saying that as an epistemological or
ontological dualist. The mind arises from the brain, but it arises in
interactions with other minds in social settings, perceptions of the world,
etc. The mind isn’t a reductionistic artifact in a vacuum.
More
below on other problems with the title, too.
Problem
No. 2? Mooney fails to grapple with issues of evolutionary psychology, as
properly done. I’m not talking about Pop Evolutionary Psychology. (That said,
Mooney might possibly be guilty of what I’ve labeled in the past as Pop
Evolutionary Sociology, what I consider Pop Ev Psych applied to particular
social groups as a “just-so” explanatory device.
Yes,
the personality issues on the five-type scale (more on that in a minute, in
several ways) that can well be used to separate liberals and conservatives, did
evolve hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years ago.
Others,
though? If they didn’t evolve more recently, at the least, the modern degree of
emphasis on them didn’t socially evolve until relatively modern times.
I
think in specific about “authoritarianism.” Until the start of civilizations
with the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, there was much less
call for authoritarian psychological issues than before, with small bands of
hunter-gatherers.
But,
major psychological changes don’t evolve that quickly, and Mooney knows that,
too. Rather, among many people in early civilizations, the emphasis on
authoritarianism socially evolved, and hence, authoritarian leaders gained in
popularity, plural wives, etc. Whether even that contributed toward evolutionary
growth in authoritarianism in a marginal way may be open to dispute, or at
least, strong discussion.
Problem
No. 3 is related to that, and back to the title.
“Republicans”
didn’t exist 10,000 years ago, let alone 100,000 years ago. And, today’s GOP is
not the party of Lincoln, or arguably even of Richard Nixon, recently named
second-best environmental president ever by a group of environmental
organizations.
Problem
No. 4 is related to that.
The
GOP is not the British Conservative Party, or Canada’s Conservatives, or the
Rally for the Republic party in France, or the Christian Democrats in Germany.
To think there’s a “Republican brain” that has specially come to exist in the
U.S. is scientism squared.
These
parties have a number of differences, between one another and even more, all of
them in general vs. the US Republican Party.
Details
in those differences include that most Conservatives (with the possibility of a
fair minority of Canadian Conservatives) accept the facts of global warming.
Ditto on evolutionary theory. And, other conservative parties accept the idea
of national (and usually, single-payer) health care. And, I don’t know, because
I’ve not read Chris’ book and won’t bother, if he allows for religiosity
differences as a factor between the US and elsewhere.
Related
to this, Chris executes a mainstream media error. Because he talks about
Republicans vs. Democrats, from the title on, rather than liberals vs.
conservatives, he plays the two-party game.
Left-liberals,
whether buttering their bread more with Green types or with Socialists, are
somewhat different from today’s Democrats. Libertarians, especially true
libertarians like Gary Johnson, unencumbered with Ron Paul religiosity (or
racism vestiges) are even more different from today’s Republicans. But, there’s
no room for them in Mooney’s dyadic world.
And,
here’s more thought on the five-type scale, and on using personality
assessments, whatever they are, to make political assessments.
The
five-type personality assessment scale,
while an improvement over the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
(which isn’t all bad, either, and may in some ways still be better than the
five-type scale), let alone Jungian type theory before that, isn’t perfect. Mooney
is putting his eggs in a pretty new, possibly somewhat weak, basket. (Sidebar:
Enneagram devotees have already tried to co-opt the five-type system.)
Beyond
that, not all conservatives fit neatly in one half of each of the five
personality traits, nor do all liberals.
For
example, many liberals, whether through heredity, child or adult trauma, or
other reasons, rank as high as the average U.S. conservative on neuroticism. I
know I do.
Summary?
This
is a decent three-star book, doing good work on collecting a lot of anecdotal
evidence for different thought patterns between typical US conservatives and
liberals. But, between scientism and all the omissions listed above, as well as
thin explanatory information, it’s no more than three stars. And, because of
all of these issues, on Goodreads, I classified it as a “politics/public policy”
book, NOT a “science” book.
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