Michael Anderson’s The
Conservative Gene: A Review
September 30, 2021 9:19 PMViews: 26
Alexander Janet, 1858, Signing of the Declaration of Independence, copy of Trumbull painting (image in public domain)
By
P. F. Sommerfeldt –
Admittedly, I’m a tough nut to crack in terms of political
theory – my castle has a hard and high wall and I’m difficult to impress – but
Michael Anderson has done it yet again. His newest book THE CONSERVATIVE GENE:
How Genetics Shape the Complex Morality of Conservatives (Simms Publishing 2021) is another bellwether, deftly
assimilating new genetic theory around a potentially complex morality that may
somehow be connected if pronounced tendencies can be inherited like genetic
behavior. Anderson’s application of an overarching thesis appears to be
becoming more accepted, especially in epigenetic parlance although nurture
apparently still supersedes nature in training. My lament is that Anderson’s
newest study may not receive sufficient attention as it’s from a small press
without obvious marketing or wider distribution. To understand from where this
raised eyebrow encomium is coming, I’m a Jewish liberal and very progressive,
but am hyper curious nonetheless to process and understand political history.
I begin my personal political history in the Classical World
somewhere close to Aristotle and, if a confessional is at all useful for
treating modern political theory, I still have a limited guarded fondness for
Marx only because his thunderbolt about modern Christianity is still relevant:
Marx suggested Christianity’s greatest failure was to not follow the social
imperative of Jesus to take care of people at the most basic level and to
offset base instincts like greed. Had Jesus’ exhortations truly been heeded,
what we perceive as ‘Communism’ to combat economic inequality would have
possibly never existed in the post-Roman world and what became Communism as an
antithesis to greed would have been superfluous in the perception of “capital”
as one dynamic to shape policy. There are many institutions now embedded in
American society that would have puzzled our founding fathers. The Electoral
College was partly originally created to integrate the rural and often racist
southern states – what would sadly become the traitorous Confederacy – with the
more populous northern states. As Pulitzer-prize winning historian J. J. Ellis
has said, “I’m virtually certain the Founders would nod their approval if we
dispensed with electoral votes and chose our presidents in a popular election.”
[1] True conservatives believe in the power of democracy without tinkering. A
more justice-oriented higher morality in a post-Marxist yet more and more
relativistic modern world should also lament the undermining of trust in
elections and the undermining of the press, the latter of which has always been
needed to stem the tide and balance and expose Executive excesses. These should
be high moral priorities of the true conservatives Anderson so capably
explicates. Seeing the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia should fill every
conservative with pride in maintaining the vision of the highest moral liberty
from elitism and entitlement. When I first saw it years ago with its
inscription exhorting to “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the
inhabitants thereof”, I was also filled with humility that true freedom also
calls for responsibility to maintain liberty unselfishly. This does not mean
liberty from vaccinations or liberty from wearing masks, clearly needed to
protect ourselves and others. But this liberty has to be inclusive to all
regardless of color, creed or identity.
Conservatism is much more than the old familiarity of “if
it’s not broken, why fix it” mentation. Reduced to the most common denominators
that Anderson has already posited in prior books, where compassion is one of
the basic instincts undergirding progressive thinking, Anderson elucidates
loyalty as the larger trait of conservatives. Yet loyalty and a concomitant
resistance to change – the old comfort of familiarity – is only part of what
makes conservatism tick, as Anderson brilliantly develops.
With compelling historical insight Anderson succinctly
describes how “morality’ is not only a generic part of our inherent cultural
baggage but is in some (still vague for now) way also possibly generated from a
tenuous place of deeper instinctive personhood. Of course, some will find it
simplistic or even frightening that genetics might shape our political
inclinations, but Anderson documents millennia of human identification with
just such deeper impulses. As mentioned, one of the impulses he identifies and
elucidates as a primary conservative hallmark is loyalty, a fondness for
reciprocity and fairness in a tendency to embrace what makes us feel
comfortable about our past in a mostly undocumented experience. This
conservative propensity to loyalty can be in balance with the progressive trait
of compassion. Both of these “instincts” are generally good in themselves with
both emotional and intellectual commitments to impact social causality in the
right ways and yet each has inherent weakness as Anderson understands. For
example, in this study Anderson is all too aware that blind loyalty can look
the other way when it is directed to unworthy persons. This last insight leads
directly to Gingrich and Trump: Anderson’s criticism of both includes
perceptions that polarization, rude tactics and other blunt negative
instruments like bullying contribute to extreme partisanship that plagues the
Republican Party (e.g., pp.148, 166, 167), which now seems to have lost its way
in upholding Conservative virtues and future prospects unless it practices what
it preaches about morality with tempered responses to beleaguered value systems
and hot button issues like abortion and sexual identity that are not
necessarily part of the traditional Conservatism practiced for centuries but
have been steamrolled by religious extremism in the past century. Anderson
makes valid conclusions about how “21st century elections have damaged
Conservative ideology”, and “how Trump’s election threatens the future
prospects for the Republican party,” (both 166-7). A true conservative could
never support Trump’s authoritarian fascism and disregard for law.
In all, Anderson’s thoughtful book is a must read for anyone
who wishes to see the evolution of the American political system as well as its
devolution into factionalism and tribalism, partly driven by petty differences
as well as major contrasts in being motivated by either loyalty for
conservatives or compassion for progressives. If Anderson can make me – a dyed
in the wool liberal – think in different ways, this is both refreshing and
impressive.
Notes:
[1] Joseph J. Ellis, “What would founding fathers think of
Donald J. Trump”, CNN Opinion, May 6, 2016
