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Abstract
We continue the historical theme of Chap. 3. We note that despite the profound enhancement of (components of) human well-being that modernization has produced, there are serious problems associated with the modern condition, which may be quantitatively (but likely not qualitatively) unique in the broader context of human history. Salient among these problems are nihilism and psychopathology, which seem to share phenomenology at the individual level and to be statistically associated at the group level.
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Does ethnic diversity erode social trust? Continued immigration and corresponding growing ethnic diversity have prompted this essential question for modern societies, but few clear answers have been reached in the sprawling literature. This article reviews the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust through a narrative review and a meta-analysis of 1,001 estimates from 87 studies. The review clarifies the core concepts, highlights pertinent debates, and tests core claims from the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust. Several results stand out from the meta-analysis. We find a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies. The relationship is stronger for trust in neighbors and when ethnic diversity is measured more locally. Covariate conditioning generally changes the relationship only slightly. The review concludes by discussing avenues for future research.
Does ethnic diversity increase or reduce white threat perceptions? Meta-analyses help orient a field and communicate findings to policymakers. We report the results of a meta-analysis of studies measuring the relationship between ethnic context and both opposition to immigration and support for anti-immigration parties. Our analysis attempts to be exhaustive, and is based on 171 post-1995 studies averaging 25,000 observations each, a knowledge base of over 4 million data points. We find a linear association between ethnic change and elevated threat. However, for diversity levels, the relationship between ethnic context and threat is nonlinear. This takes the form of a 'wave', with higher diversity predicting threat responses at the smallest and largest scales, whereas in units of 5000–10,000 people (such as tracts or neighbourhoods), diversity is associated with reduced threat.
Moral foundations (MF) theory proposes six evolved, universal psychological systems (“foundations”) on which cultures construct diverse moralities, while further proposing individual differences (e.g., political differences) in reliance on various moral foundations. Life History (LH) theory suggests that slow LH individuals develop under stable socio-ecological conditions where displaying moral traits and behavioral restraints on selfishness may have been particularly adaptive for delayed social benefits. Human LH theory has been used to help explain individual differences in various moral intuitions, but these findings have not been entirely consistent. Across 2 studies, samples of undergraduate students completed selfreport questionnaires assessing their reliance on various moral foundations, their LH strategies, political attitudes, and early-life socioeconomic status. Psychometric measures of slow LH strategy were positively associated with each moral foundation, even after statistically controlling for respondent sex, social desirability, and early-life socioeconomic factors in study 2. The six moral foundations were positively intercorrelated. Neither self-perceived life expectancy nor self-reported age of first sexual intercourse predicted the moral foundations. These findings suggest that LH strategies (measured psychometrically) account for strength of moral foundations and the positive intercorrelations among the moral foundations.
This paper proposes a unifying evolutionary framework for understanding the genesis of a wide range of psychological disorders. Psychological disorders as a whole appear to develop at significant frequencies only under conditions of “evolutionary mismatch,” where people or animals live in environments, such as modern cities or industrialized cultures in general, that they are not evolutionarily or biologically adapted for. Evolutionarily mismatched environments appear to often cause disruptions in drive states that have evolved to maintain homeostasis. Based on several lines of evidence, I will suggest that painful, distressing emotional states can provide unconscious biochemical rewards in the brain and, under mismatched environmental conditions, can become reinforced, creating unconscious, compulsive “emotional addictions.” This core phenomenon may be the main driving force for the great majority of psychological disorders. The maladaptive drive or force that emotional addictions appear to generate, referred to here as the “non-homeostatic drive” or “addictive drive,” is suggested to dysfunctionally, unnecessarily, and repeatedly throw people out of homeostasis, creating systemic imbalances that can result in a variety of psychological dysfunctions.
For over 150 years liberal optimism has dominated theories of war and violence. It has been repeatedly argued that war and violence either are declining or will shortly decline. There have been exceptions, especially in Germany and more generally in the first half of the twentieth century, but there has been a recent revival of such optimism, especially in the work of Azar Gat, John Mueller, Joshua Goldstein, and Steven Pinker who all perceive a long-term decline in war and violence through history, speeding up in the post-1945 period. Critiquing Pinker’s statistics on war fatalities, I show that the overall pattern is not a decline in war, but substantial variation between periods and places. War has not declined and current trends are slightly in the opposite direction. The conventional view is that civil wars in the global South have largely replaced inter-state wars in the North, but this is misleading since there is major involvement in most civil wars by outside powers, including those of the North. There is more support for their view that homicide has declined in the long-term, at least in the North of the world (with the United States lagging somewhat). This is reinforced by technological improvements in long-distance weaponry and the two transformations have shifted war, especially in the North, from being “ferocious” to “callous” in character. This renders war less visible and less central to Northern culture, which has the deceptive appearance of being rather pacific. Viewed from the South the view has been bleaker both in the colonial period and today. Globally war and violence are not declining, but they are being transformed. © 2018 Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature
Anti-Flynn effects (i.e., secular declines in IQ) have been noted in a few countries. Much speculation exists about the causes of these trends; however, little progress has been made toward comprehensively testing these. A synthetic literature search yielded a total of 66 observations of secular IQ decline from 13 countries, with a combined sample size of 302,234 and study midyears spanning 87 years, from 1920.5 to 2007.5. Multilevel modeling (MLM) was used to examine the effect of study midyear, and (after controlling for this and other factors) hierarchical general linear modeling (GLM) was used to examine the following sequence of predictors: domain "g-ness" (a rank-order measure of g saturation) Index of Biological State (IBS; a measure of relaxed/reversed selection operating on g), per capita immigration, and the 2-way interactions IBS × g-ness and Immigration × g-ness. The MLM revealed that the anti-Flynn effect has strengthened in more recent years. Net of this, the GLM found that g-ness was a positive predictor; that is, less aggregately g-loaded measures exhibited bigger IQ declines; IBS was not a significant predictor; however immigration predicted the decline, indicating that high levels of immigration promote the anti-Flynn effect. Among the interactions there was a negative effect of the Immigration × g-ness interaction, indicating that immigration promotes IQ decline the most when the measure is higher in g-ness. The model accounted for 37.1% of the variance among the observations. (PsycINFO Database Record
Hayek’s social theory of evolution suggests that market liberal morality is adaptive for social groups. He justified the evolutionary superiority of market liberalism by asserting that groups operating under a market liberal morality would have a higher capacity to expand and reproduce than groups with alternative tribal moralities. Thus, market liberal groups would be favoured through cultural and genetic group selection. But in fact, market liberal morality reveals maladaptive tendencies and remains insufficiently powerful to create adaptive social groups. Hayek’s dismissal of moral tribalism in favour of market liberal morality is found to underestimate the importance of tribal goals in the evolutionary system.
Deleterious mutations are typically understood exclusively in terms of their harmful effects on carrier organisms. But there are convincing reasons to think that such adverse effects are not confined to the individual level. We argue that in social species, interorganismal gene-gene interactions, which in previous literatures have been termed social epistasis, allow genomes carrying deleterious mutations to reduce via group-level pleiotropy the fitness of others, including noncarriers. This fitness reduction occurs by way of degradation of group-level processes that optimize the reproductive ecology of a population for intergroup competition through, among other mechanisms, suppression of free-riding. Such damage to group regulatory processes suggests a hidden role for the accumulation of behavior-altering "spiteful" mutations in the dynamics of the demographic transition—these mutations may have contributed to the maladaptive outcomes of this process, such as widespread subreplacement fertility. A structured population model is presented describing aspects of this social epistasis amplification model. This phenomenon is also considered as a potential explanation for the results of Calhoun’s mouse utopia experiments, which provide an opportunity to directly test a major prediction stemming from the model.
Drawing on an extensive amount of work by other researchers, as well as some literary sources from the time, Göran Adamson discusses the widespread view that Nazism was anti-sex. Indeed, during Nazi rule homosexuality and street prostitution were persecuted, and Jews and “degenerates” were prevented from having sex (not merely by law, but by elimination). However, reported circumstances such as cheap access to condoms, a high number of pregnancies during party rallies, and quasi-religious cultivation of “the Germanic sexual instinct” would suggest that matters may have been much less restrictive for the majority of Germans. The idea of an overall Nazi anti-sex attitude may well have been constructed by intellectuals from the Freudian Left/Frankfurt School, especially their theories of an intimate connection between sexual repression and authoritarianism. Such views gained widespread popularity with the 68′ generation, and they were an essential reason why sexuality came to be considered the cure for all social evils. This overestimation of the significance of sexual liberation, and recent conservative reactions to it, constitute an important part of today’s political landscape.
Political ideology represents an imperfect yet important indicator of a host of personality traits and cognitive preferences. These preferences, in turn, seemingly propel liberals and conservatives towards divergent life-course experiences. Criminal behavior represents one particular domain of conduct where differences rooted in political ideology may exist. Using a national dataset, we test whether and to what extent political ideology is predictive of self-reported criminal behavior. Our results show that self-identified political ideology is mono-tonically related to criminal conduct cross-sectionally and prospectively and that liberals self-report more criminal conduct than do conservatives. We discuss potential causal mechanisms relating political ideology to individual conduct.
This article argues the following points. The Hobbesian hypothesis, which we define as the claim that all people are better off under state authority than they would be outside of it, is an empirical claim about all stateless societies. It is an essential premise in most contractarian justifications of government sovereignty. Many small- scale societies are stateless. Anthropological evidence from them provides sufficient reason to doubt the truth of the hypothesis, if not to reject it entirely. Therefore, contractarian theory has not done what it claims to do: it has not justified state sovereignty to each person subject to it by demonstrating that they benefit from that authority. To be justified in contractarian terms, states have to do something to improve the living standards of disadvantaged people under their rule.
National differences in subjective well-being (SWB) have been attributed to socioeconomic, climatic, and genetic factors. We focus on one particular facet of SWB—happiness or positive affect—measured by the nationally representative World Values Survey (WVS). We find that national percentages of very happy people across the three latest WVS waves (2000–2004, 2005–2009, 2010–2014) are consistently and highly correlated with national prevalence of the rs324420 A allele in the FAAH gene, involved in the hydrolysis of anandamide, a substance that reportedly enhances sensory pleasure and helps reduce pain. Climatic differences are also significantly associated with national differences in happiness, whereas economic wealth, recent economic growth, rule of law, pathogen prevalence, and the distribution of short versus long alleles in the serotonin transporter gene SLC6A4 are not significant predictors of national happiness.
In the eighteenth century ‘Enlightened’ thinkers challenged the belief that happiness exists only in Heaven. They claimed that happiness is possible in earthly life and foresaw that greater happiness would be achieved using reason. Did this promise of greater happiness come true? Several scholars doubt that we have become any happier and some claim that happiness has declined. These critical claims are tested using the time trend data available in the World Database of Happiness, which cover the period 1950–2010 and involve 1531 data points in 67 nations yielding 199 time-series ranging for 10 to more than 40 years. The analysis reveals that happiness has risen in most nations. The average yearly rise in the 67 nations was +0.012 on scale 0–10, which equals a rise of one full point every 83 years. At this rate happiness must have improved by more than two points over the past two centuries and, together with increasing longevity, this denotes an unprecedented rise in happy life years.
Research on the history of crime from the thirteenth century until the end of the twentieth has burgeoned and has greatly increased understanding of historical trends in crime and crime control. Serious interpersonal violence decreased remarkably in Europe between the mid-sixteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Different long-term trajectories in the decline of homicide can be distinguished between various European regions. Age and sex patterns in serious violent offending, however, have changed very little over several centuries. The long-term decline in homicide rates seems to go along with a disproportionate decline in elite homicide and a drop in male-to-male conflicts in public space. A range of theoretical explanations for the long-term decline have been offered, including the effects of the civilizing process, strengthening state powers, the Protestant Reformation, and modem individualism, but most theorizing has been post hoe.
This book demonstrates that people’s basic values and beliefs are changing, in ways that affect their political, sexual, economic, and religious behaviour. These changes are roughly predictable: to a large extent, they can be interpreted on the basis of a revised version of modernisation theory presented here. Drawing on a massive body of evidence from societies containing 85 percent of the world’s population, the authors demonstrate that modernisation is a process of human development, in which economic development gives rise to cultural changes that make individual autonomy, gender equality, and democracy increasingly likely.
In this paradigm-shifting volume, Allan C. Carlson identifies and examines four distinct cycles of strength or weakness of American family systems. This distinctly American family model includes early and nearly universal marriage, high fertility, close attention to parental responsibilities, complementary gender roles, meaningful intergenerational bonds, and relative stability. Notably, such traits distinguish the "strong" American family system from the "weak" European model (evident since 1700), which involves late marriage, a high proportion of the adult population never married, significantly lower fertility, and more divorces. The author shows that these cycles of strength and weakness have occurred, until recently, in remarkably consistent fifty-year swings in the United States since colonial times. The book's chapters are organized around these 50-year time frames. There have been four family cycles of strength and decline since 1630, each one lasting about one hundred years. The author argues that fluctuations within this cyclical model derive from intellectual, economic, cultural, and religious influences, which he explores in detail, and supports with considerable evidence.
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This book deconstructs the story of liberalism that John Rawls, author of Political Liberalism, and many others have put forward. Peter L.P. Simpson argues that political liberalism is despotic because it denies to politics a concern with the comprehensive human good; political illiberalism overcomes this despotism and restores genuine freedom. In Political Illiberalism, Simpson provides a detailed account of these political phenomena and presents a political theory opposed to that of Rawls and other proponents of modern liberalism. Simpson analyses and confronts the assumptions of this liberalism by challenging its view of liberty and especially its cornerstone that politics should not be about the comprehensive good. He presents the fundamentals of the idea of a truer liberalism as derived from human nature, with particular attention to the role and power of religion, using the political thought of Aristotle, the founding fathers of the United States, thinkers of the Roman Empire, and contemporary practice. Political Illiberalism concludes with reflections on morals in the political context of the comprehensive good. Simpson views the modern state as despotically authoritarian; consequently, seeking liberty within it is illusory. Human politics requires devolution of authority to local communities, on the one hand, and a proper distinction between spiritual and temporal powers, on the other. This thought-provoking work is essential for all political scientists and philosophy scholars.
The purpose of this study is to conduct a systematic review of the literature on the relationship between general cognitive ability and fertility among modern humans. Our goals were to (a) evaluate the state of the extant literature, and (b) provide a quantitative summary of effect sizes to the extent possible (given the limitations of the literature). A thorough search identified 17 unique datasets that passed the inclusion criteria. Using a Random Effects Model to evaluate the data, the overall weighted effect was r = −0.11, although the data also indicated a sex effect (stronger correlations among females than males), and a race effect (stronger correlations among Black and Hispanic populations compared to Whites). Importantly, the data suggest the correlation has been increasing in strength throughout the 20th century (and early 21st). Finally, we discovered several notable limitations of the extant literature; limitations that currently prohibit a psychometric meta-analysis. We discuss these issues with emphasis on improving future primary studies to allow for more effective meta-analytic investigations.
Highlighting the “mass” nature of interwar European fascism has long become commonplace. Throughout the years, numerous critics have construed fascism as a phenomenon of mass society, perhaps the ultimate expression of mass politics. This study deconstructs this long-standing perception. It argues that the entwining of fascism with the masses is a remarkable transubstantiation of a movement which understood and presented itself as a militant rejection of the ideal of mass politics, and indeed of mass society and mass culture more broadly conceived. Thus, rather than “massifying” society, fascism was the culmination of a long effort on the part of the élites and the middle classes to de-massify it. The perennially menacing mass-seen as plebeian and insubordinate-was to be drilled into submission, replaced by supposedly superior collective entities, such as the nation, the race, or the people. Focusing on Italian fascism and German National Socialism, but consulting fascist movements and individuals elsewhere in interwar Europe, the book incisively shows how fascism is best understood as ferociously resisting what Elias referred to as “the civilizing process” and what Marx termed “the social individual.” Fascism, notably, was a revolt against what Nietzsche described as the peaceful, middling and egalitarian “Last Humans.”.
Cambridge Core - Comparative Politics - Cultural Evolution - by Ronald F. Inglehart
Combining aspects of Marxist theory, the Frankfurt School, French social theory, and American social science, Marcuse outlines a theory of advanced industrial society in which changes in production, consumption, and culture combine to create a technological society in which thought and labor is restructured in such a way that perpetuates domination and dehumanization. Marcuse argues that this leads to an oversimiplified culture that he refers to as a "one-dimensional society." Reason is used as a method of control in this society. Marcuse outlines simultaneous tensions in society: 1) advanced industrial society is capable of containing qualitative change and 2) forces exist which can break this containment and explode the society.
Cambridge Core - Cognition - Cognitive Capitalism - by Heiner Rindermann
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt extends Paul Gottfried's examination of Western managerial government's growth in the last third of the twentieth century. Linking multiculturalism to a distinctive political and religious context, the book argues that welfare-state democracy, unlike bourgeois liberalism, has rejected the once conventional distinction between government and civil society. Gottfried argues that the West's relentless celebrations of diversity have resulted in the downgrading of the once dominant Western culture. The moral rationale of government has become the consciousness-raising of a presumed majority population. While welfare states continue to provide entitlements and fulfill the other material programs of older welfare regimes, they have ceased to make qualitative leaps in the direction of social democracy. For the new political elite, nationalization and income redistributions have become less significant than controlling the speech and thought of democratic citizens. An escalating hostility toward the bourgeois Christian past, explicit or at least implicit in the policies undertaken by the West and urged by the media, is characteristic of what Gottfried labels an emerging "therapeutic" state. For Gottfried, acceptance of an intrusive political correctness has transformed the religious consciousness of Western, particularly Protestant, society. The casting of "true" Christianity as a religion of sensitivity only toward victims has created a precondition for extensive social engineering. Gottfried examines late-twentieth-century liberal Christianity as the promoter of the politics of guilt. Metaphysical guilt has been transformed into self-abasement in relation to the "suffering just" identified with racial, cultural, and lifestyle minorities. Unlike earlier proponents of religious liberalism, the therapeutic statists oppose anything, including empirical knowledge, that impedes the expression of social and cultural guilt in an effort to raise the self-esteem of designated victims. Equally troubling to Gottfried is the growth of an American empire that is influencing European values and fashions. Europeans have begun, he says, to embrace the multicultural movement that originated with American liberal Protestantism's emphasis on diversity as essential for democracy. He sees Europeans bringing authoritarian zeal to enforcing ideas and behavior imported from the United States. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt extends the arguments of the author's earlier After Liberalism. Whether one challenges or supports Gottfried's conclusions, all will profit from a careful reading of this latest diagnosis of the American condition.
Peter Simpson's Political Illiberalism defends a Hobbesian view of the dominant liberal political regimes of the West. In practice, the theoretical liberalism animating these regimes has not and cannot sustain any limits on government power. Simpson articulates a Roman Catholic alternative for limited sovereignty, animated by the complementary principles of subsidiarity and solidarity. Two reservations: (1) War and "national security" have driven and justified the unlimited centralization and expansion of political power in liberal regimes. Simpson's Hobbesian view of the internal life of liberalism invites the question of whether this centralized expansion is necessary for survival in an equally Hobbesian external world. War and international affairs play little role in Simpson's analysis. (2) The Roman Catholic notion of solidarity in the last half-century may not in practice complement subsidiarity and limited sovereignty so much as supplant it, an issue I illustrate with Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
What does it mean to label someone a fascist? Today, it is equated with denouncing him or her as a Nazi. But as intellectual historian Paul E. Gottfried writes in this provocative yet even-handed study, the term’s meaning has evolved over the years. Gottfried examines the semantic twists and turns the term has endured since the 1930s and traces the word’s polemical function within the context of present ideological struggles. Like “conservatism," “liberalism," and other words whose meanings have changed with time, “fascism” has been used arbitrarily over the years and now stands for a host of iniquities that progressives, multiculturalists, and libertarians oppose, even if they offer no single, coherent account of the historic evil they condemn. Certain factors have contributed to the term’s imprecise usage, Gottfried writes, including the equation of all fascisms with Nazism and Hitler, as well as the rise of a post-Marxist left that expresses predominantly cultural opposition to bourgeois society and its Christian and/or national components. Those who stand in the way of social change are dismissed as “fascist," he contends, an epithet that is no longer associated with state corporatism and other features of fascism that were once essential but are now widely ignored. Gottfried outlines the specific historical meaning of the term and argues that it should not be used indiscriminately to describe those who hold unpopular opinions. His important study will appeal to political scientists, intellectual historians, and general readers interested in politics and history. © 2016 by Northern Illinois University Press. All rights reserved.
The American conservative movement as we know it faces an existential crisis as the nation's demographics shift away from its core constituents—older white middle-class Christians. It is the American conservatism that we don’t know that concerns George Hawley in this book. During its ascendancy, leaders within the conservative establishment have energetically policed the movement's boundaries, effectively keeping alternative versions of conservatism out of view. Returning those neglected voices to the story, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism offers a more complete, complex, and nuanced account of the American right in all its dissonance in history and in our day.
The right-wing intellectual movements considered here differ both from mainstream conservatism and from each other when it comes to fundamental premises, such as the value of equality, the proper role of the state, the importance of free markets, the place of religion in politics, and attitudes toward race. In clear and dispassionate terms, Hawley examines localists who exhibit equal skepticism toward big business and big government, paleoconservatives who look to the distant past for guidance and wish to turn back the clock, radical libertarians who are not content to be junior partners in the conservative movement, and various strains of white supremacy and the radical right in America.
In the Internet age, where access is no longer determined by the select few, the independent right has far greater opportunities to make its many voices heard. This timely work puts those voices into context and historical perspective, clarifying our understanding of the American right—past, present, and future.
This article studies a famous unsolved puzzle in quantitative social science. Why do some nations report such high levels of mental well-being? Denmark, for instance, regularly tops the league table of rich countries’ happiness; Britain and the US enter further down; some nations do unexpectedly poorly. The explanation for the long-observed ranking – one that holds after adjustment for GDP and other socioeconomic variables – is currently unknown. Using data on 131 countries, the article cautiously explores a new approach. It documents three forms of evidence consistent with the hypothesis that some nations may have a genetic advantage in well-being.
Fifteen years ago, revelations about the political misdeeds of Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man sent shock waves throughout European and North American intellectual circles. Ever since, postmodernism has been haunted by the specter of a compromised past. In this intellectual genealogy of the postmodern spirit, Richard Wolin shows that postmodernism's infatuation with fascism has been widespread and not incidental. He calls into question postmodernism's claim to have inherited the mantle of the left--and suggests that postmodern thought has long been smitten with the opposite end of the political spectrum. In probing chapters on C. G. Jung, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot, Wolin discovers an unsettling commonality: during the 1930s, these thinkers leaned to the right and were tainted by a proverbial "fascination with fascism." Frustrated by democracy's shortcomings, they were seduced by fascism's grandiose promises of political regeneration. The dictatorships in Italy and Germany promised redemption from the uncertainties of political liberalism. But, from the beginning, there could be no doubting their brutal methods of racism, violence, and imperial conquest. Postmodernism's origins among the profascist literati of the 1930s reveal a dark political patrimony. The unspoken affinities between Counter-Enlightenment and postmodernism constitute the guiding thread of Wolin's suggestive narrative. In their mutual hostility toward reason and democracy, postmodernists and the advocates of Counter-Enlightenment betray a telltale strategic alliance--they cohabit the fraught terrain where far left and far right intersect. Those who take Wolin's conclusions to heart will never view the history of modern thought in quite the same way.
This prize-winning account of the pre-Reformation church recreates lay people's experience of religion in fifteenth-century England. Eamon Duffy shows that late medieval Catholicism was neither decadent nor decayed, but was a strong and vigorous tradition, and that the Reformation represented a violent rupture from a popular and theologically respectable religious system. For this edition, Duffy has written a new Preface reflecting on recent developments in our understanding of the period.
Philosophical liberalism and liberal order There is a philosophical critique of liberalism that hangs together, can properly be said to be conservative, has a considerable tradition behind it, and is interesting and important. But it takes some effort, historical and philosophical, to locate it. A first task is to dispel some terminological haze. “Liberalism” has come to mean many, often incompatible, things. American critics of “liberalism” and French critics of “(neo-)liberalism,” for example, have quite different things in mind. Critics of “liberalism” in one sense may themselves be “liberals” in another. Likewise with the word “conservatism.” It can denote (1) a tough-minded version of liberalism that places emphasis on free exchange, a small but strong state, private initiative, and individual responsibility. This, or something in this area, is what people mean by “neo-liberalism.” Then (2) there is a practical, down-to-earth attitude which we can call practical conservatism. Practical conservatives see virtue in keeping the show on the road – conserving and when necessary refreshing institutions and habits that work, whatever they are. They know that sometimes “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” But they may well take pride in having no philosophical view, unless it be an anti-abstract one. Importantly, they make no universal claims; what works is what works here. Finally (3) there is conservatism in the sense of an attitude that sees continuity, community, tradition, and hierarchy as organic elements of a good society and gives broad philosophical grounds for doing so. In this chapter we shall be interested mainly in (3), but also in (2) insofar as it incorporates an anti-universalistic attitude.
In this innovative and important work, Gerald Gaus advances a revised, and more realistic, account of public reason liberalism, showing how, in the midst of fundamental disagreement about values and moral beliefs, we can achieve a moral and political order that treats all as free and equal moral persons. The first part of this work analyzes social morality as a system of authoritative moral rules. Drawing on an earlier generation of moral philosophers such as Kurt Baier and Peter Strawson as well as current work in the social sciences, Gaus argues that our social morality is an evolved social fact, which is the necessary foundation of a mutually beneficial social order. The second part considers how this system of social moral authority can be justified to all moral persons. Drawing on the tools of game theory, social choice theory, experimental psychology, and evolutionary theory, Gaus shows how a free society can secure a moral equilibrium that is endorsed by all, and how a just state respects, and develops, such an equilibrium.
Written by James R. Flynn of the "Flynn effect" (the sustained and substantial increase in intelligence test scores across the world over many decades), Intelligence and Human Progress examines genes and human achievement in all aspects, including what genes allow and forbid in terms of personal life history, the cognitive progress of humanity, the moral progress of humanity, and the cross-fertilization of the two. This book presents a new method for weighing family influences versus genes in the cognitive abilities of individuals, and counters the arguments of those who dismiss gains in IQ as true cognitive gains. It ranges over topics including: how family can handicap those taking the SAT; new IQ thresholds for occupations that show elite occupations are within reach of the average American; what Pol Pot did to the genetic potential of Cambodia; why dysgenics (the deterioration of human genes over the generations) is important, but no menace for the foreseeable future; and what might derail human intellectual progress. Researchers in developmental and cognitive psychology, educators, and professionals involved in intelligence testing or psychometrics will benefit from the perspectives offered here. But beyond that, anyone interested in the potential of the human mind will be engaged and challenged by one of the most important contemporary thinkers on the subject.
Major innovations in the arts and sciences can be largely attributed to the output of creative geniuses. But how do such great innovators emerge? And how does their creativity manifest itself? The first question shall be addressed by examining the early experiences that contribute to the development of extraordinary creative potential. The factors include family background, education, and professional training. The response to the second question concentrates on the typical career trajectory of illustrious creators. Features of this trajectory include the ages at which geniuses tend to produce their ?rst great work, their best work, and their last great work.
The relationship between IQ and political orientation is an active and controversial area of research. In Dutton's 2013 criticism of one mechanism proposed to account for this relationship (the Cultural Mediation Hypothesis; CMH), it was argued that Openness to Experience and Agreeableness might better account for the positive association between political leftism and IQ than effortful control and cultural mediators. Various predictions derived from both Dutton's model and the CMH are here tested using the Block and Block dataset. Consistent with Dutton's predictions, Openness to Experience mostly mediates the relationship between IQ and leftism (measured using Block and Block's LIB/CON indicator), however problems with Openness to Experience substantially weaken the degree to which this supports his model. Support for the CMH is found in the form of significantly rising correlations between leftism measured in adulthood and IQ with increasing age, suggesting a role for childhood environment in shaping this association. Ultimately neither model is consistently supported by the data. It is suggested that personality and more broadly life history strategy may be an important determinant of whether a political orientation is extreme or moderately oriented. A modified CMH posits that the left/right axis may however be a largely cognitive dimension, with ideologies serving to signal intelligence and to encourage social and sexual selection, and with the basic elements of their content being largely bounded by prevailing cultural norms.
This article compares, thematically, two prominent but problematical twentiethcentury critics of nihilism: Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. Both spoke of the spread of a global space, tied to tendencies towards the reduction of everything to a reserve of resources, a development both connected to a pursuit of intense but ultimately insignificant experiences. For Schmitt, nihilism stems from the disconnection of the global order from its European, Christian origins. For Heidegger, nihilism represents, rather, the culmination of a European, metaphysical tradition. Furthermore, while Schmitt appears to see a counterpoint to nihilism in the sacred sites of Christianity, representing the ultimate metaphysical exception of Christian revelation, Heidegger proposes a view of sacred sites as tied to the appearance of a god as something strange and enigmatic, which has often been reduced within Christian, theological thought. In conclusion, I situate the two critiques in relation to Karl Jasper's notion of an Axial Age and the developments of a contemporary global space. This way of situating the two critiques will show how Heidegger actively attempted to handle two fundamental developments which Schmitt sought to elude: the increasingly intense relativisation of Christianity in relation to other major religious traditions, and the relativisation of claims concerning religious revelations and theophanies in relation to the scientific and technological spatiality and temporality of the global space.
Julius Evola’s writing covered a vast range of subjects, from a distinctive and categorical ideological outlook and has been extremely influential on a significant number of extreme right thinkers, activists and organisations. This book is the first full length study in English to present his political thought to a wider audience, beyond that of his followers and sympathisers, and to bring into the open the study of a neglected strand of contemporary Western thought, that of traditionalism.
Consider the frequently cited quotation by the French philosopher Alain: “When I am asked if the division between parties of the Right and parties of the Left, between leftists and rightists still has any meaning, the first thing which occurs to me is that whoever is asking the question is certainly not on the Left.” Alain would be surprised to learn that today this question, which he thought could only have been posed by someone from the Right, is on everyone's lips — at least in France.
During the past few years, all the Sofres opinion polls have shown that for most of the French people the Left-Right split is becoming increasingly meaningless.