Are You Crazy?
By Alan Pell Crawford
Two new academic studies profess to explain something about our political attitudes. The first, to be published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, argues that conservatism may “have a self-esteem enhancing function,” but it might also “relate to a contingent type of self-esteem, which, in turn, relates to ill-being.”
‘The Physiological and the Political’
The second, from Great Britain’s esteemed Royal Society, finds that “greater orientation to adverse stimuli tends to be associated with right-of-centre and greater orientation to appetitive (pleasing) stimuli with left-of-centre political inclinations.” These conclusions, if you can figure out what they are, “are consistent with recent evidence that political views are connected to physiological predispositions.” They make it possible, moreover, “to understand additional aspects of the link between the physiological and the political.”
They might also make any genuine understanding of peoples’ political attitudes more difficult than they already are. Conservatives, after all, have been trying to figure out what conservatism means for two centuries. Liberals have been debating the substance of their own body of beliefs for at least as long. And as long as we continue to conduct these discussions—forever, I hope—simply defining “conservatism” and “liberalism” with sufficient precision to conduct the kind of research these academics are doing is impossible. This makes their efforts foolhardy, if not arrogant.
Deep-Seated Neurosis
Studies linking our political attitudes to the “physiological,” furthermore, are both too easy and too easily abused. It was one thing to say that someone is grumpy and snappish because he suffers from indigestion; it is another to argue that because he suffers from indigestion, he votes for a grumpy and snappish political candidate. It is yet another to decide whole groups of people’s political opinions are manifestations of bodily disturbances or, worse yet, deep-seated neurosis.
If that sounds far-fetched, think again. Hardly a week passes that another columnist does not attempt to explain and in that way dismiss the behavior of today’s Republicans by invoking Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style.”
Hofstadter, for what it’s worth, was not a psychiatrist or a psychologist. He was a historian. The snark-artists who imply that people they disagree with are crazy aren’t even historians. Where they get off psychoanalyzing everyone else requires some explanation, but don’t hold your breath.
# # #
No comment to "Are You Crazy?"