Goldberg: Political leanings can’t be reduced to genetic programming

Saying you can't condemn views if they're part of our evolutionary programming is a good example of the naturalistic fallacy that ascribes morality to nature. I'm also deeply skeptical that today's culture war combatants will suddenly lay down their weapons in an outpouring of acceptance if we can only convince them that their opponents were just born that way. Many atheists believe religion is an atavistic impulse rooted in our genes. That insight hasn't always made them more tolerant of religion.

Another problem with this sort of argument is that it rolls right over important context by reducing complex political arrangements to mere gene expression among subpopulations.

Mr. Junger says, defensibly: “Every human society must do two things: It must be strong enough to protect itself from outside groups, and it must be fair enough to avoid internal conflict.” He assigns the former task to conservatives, who want to protect the nation, and the latter to liberals, who are dedicated to equality and “social justice.” Other versions of this argument often reduce conservatives and liberals to “hardwired” opponents of change or champions of it.

Obviously, there's something here. But the reality is that such divides run straight through the human heart. Our genetic programming may tell some of us to obsess over social justice and others to fixate on external threats, but most of us care about both.

Most conservatives worry about social cohesion and equality, and most liberals care about external dangers, but each side works from different definitions and assumptions over how to define the problems — and how to solve them.

And then there's the definitional thicket. During the Cold War, the most dedicated and doctrinaire communists in the Soviet Politburo were often referred to as "conservatives." This vexed many American right-wingers. In America, anti-communism was at the heart of being a conservative, so could the hardest-line Soviets also be conservatives?

Well, yeah. In 1957, political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote a brilliant essay, "Conservatism as an Ideology." In it, he observed that "Conservatism differs from all other ideologies except radicalism: it lacks what might be termed a substantive ideal." In other words, what a conservative believes depends on where he or she lives, and what, exactly, he or she wishes to conserve. What Saudi Arabia's or North Korea's conservatives want to conserve is very different than what conservatives in the United States want to conserve.

More broadly, there’s a vast amount of small "c" or “genetic” conservatism in contemporary progressivism and a great deal of radicalism in conservatism. That’s because — for now at least — the right supports the market and the “creative destruction” it brings, while the left defends the regulatory state and the protections it provides. I’m called a conservative because I want to dismantle much of the New Deal, and Nancy Pelosi is called a progressive because she wants to defend it. But which of us is acting on some “conservative” genetic imperative to resist change?

It’s becoming clear that our genetic programming makes persuasion more difficult than we once thought. But at the end of the day, it’s all we’ve got. And persuasion becomes more difficult when we turn philosophical arguments into a mere appendage of a new form of identity politics.

Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review. His latest book is “The Suicide of the West.” Email: goldbergcolumn@gmail.com; Twitter: @JonahNRO.