The origin of conservatism

National Review, Dec 22, 1997 by John O. McGinnis

The Origin of Conservatism Evolutionary theories suggest that conservative politics are necessary to govern a fallen man.

TODAY a revolution is remaking the social sciences. For the last two decades, theorists in psychology, economics, anthropology, and linguistics have begun to discard the traditional social-science model in which man creates the social world through his culture. They have instead turned to evolutionary biology to draw an ever more precise and powerful description of the human nature that generates all cultures. The results of their discoveries are now seeping into the popular consciousness as the media report through a biological prism such fundamental topics as the relations between the sexes. Because evolutionary biology provides an informative picture of man and because citizens are rapidly assimilating that image, any political movement that hopes to be successful must come to terms with the second rise of Darwinism.

Conservatism will certainly be easier than liberalism to integrate with evolutionary biology. The constraints of our biological nature explode the most persistent delusion of the Left: that man is so malleable that he can be reshaped or transformed through political actions. In contrast, the depiction of our species that is emerging from Darwinism -- as composed of individuals who are basically self-interested yet capable of altruism toward family and friends; who are unequal in their abilities yet remarkably similar in their aspirations -- comports with fundamental premises of conservative thought.

Thus the new biological learning holds the potential for providing stronger support for conservatism than any other new body of knowledge has done. Yet it may also raise questions about some intellectual traditions of the Right, such as pure libertarianism, and its methodology may disturb religious conservatives. These tensions must be resolved if the conservative coalition is to thrive in the intellectual soil of the coming century.

There are seven concepts that are essential to understanding the Darwinian picture of man. The logic of each concept applied to human affairs turns out to bolster major tenets of mainstream conservatism.

1. Self-Interest and Politics. Like all other animals, our species has been shaped by millions of years of natural selection. Natural selection works through genetic inheritance and variation. Genes for many physical and behavioral traits are inheritable; such genes may also be variable within the population of animals of the same species. Because of recombination and mutation, animals within the same species differ in their genetic makeup. Some inherited traits will enable some individual animals to leave more offspring than others. Genes for such traits then increase in the population of the species.

Thus, as Robert Wright has nicely observed, it follows directly from natural selection that any individual animal will have behavioral adaptations designed to favor its own interests over those of others. The single exception is that they may favor other animals who can aid in disseminating their distinctive genes. Thus each human individual has strong innate behavioral tendencies to favor his own interests, those of the comparatively few relatives who share a large proportion of his genes, and the potential mates who are necessary to reproduce his genes. We are not closely and equally related to many other individuals of our species, like ants and some other social insects, who routinely sacrifice themselves for their colony.

One interest all human beings share is seeking resources and status. In all past societies surveyed, those who had more relative status and resources left more progeny than those who had less status and fewer resources. (It is possible that this finding would not be true of some present-day societies, but evolution in humans works so slowly that any such counter-trend would take thousands of years to be reflected in our genetic make-up). Thus human beings are emotionally and cognitively wired to be resource and status seekers. We also confirm from studies of other primates that we innately view exchange and hierarchy as alternative strategies for gaining resources. For instance, chimpanzees exchange food, but they also make coalitions among themselves to simply take food and sexual access.

The universal affinity for property and status has serious political implications. In any society large or heterogeneous enough for members to sense that they are unrelated, they will seek to turn resources held in common to their own personal advantage. To a biological anthropologist it was thus wholly predictable that individuals under Communism would spend less of their time in productive exchange and more of their time manipulating the state so as to become more equal than others. Similarly, in social democracies individuals will organize themselves into coalitions for the purpose of gaining access to the state treasury. Such political systems lead to a lack of productivity, social conflict, and instability because there is simply a mismatch between collectivism on any large and enduring scale and our evolved nature. As Edward O. Wilson, the world's foremost expert on ants, remarked about Marxism: "Wonderful theory. Wrong species."