Jonathan Iwry | ISIS! Ebola! Obama!

The Faithless Quaker | Conservatives are breaking fearmongering down to a science — and science is breaking them down, too

By Jonathan Iwry 11/09/14 10:27pm

W e ll, t his is it. The Republicans have officially taken the Senate. Who knows what happens next? Best case scenario: a great deal of nothing.

You’ve got to hand it to them — they’ve spent considerable time and effort convincing the public to be afraid of nearly everything. Republican advertisements over the last few months have focused heavily on foreign threats, featuring images of ISIS militants and trying to connect Obama’s name with Ebola.

The conservative message is simple: Be quite afraid.

This might seem, at first, like little more than an arbitrary observation. After all, Democrats have doubtlessly appealed to powerful emotions for campaign purposes, too. Could there really be anything concrete that ties conservatives — or conservative thinking — to this kind of propaganda?

Scientists are beginning to think there might be. An increasing body of literature has come to suspect that political views are deeply influenced by psychological factors. One study published about a week ago claims that differences in party affiliation correlated with different neural responses to alarming stimuli, particularly regarding fear and disgust. When shown threatening or revolting images, conservatives responded with greater activity than did liberals in areas of the brain responsible for intensely negative emotions, such as the amygdala.

Another study claims that liberals demonstrate greater neural activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, which plays an active role in complex thought (science said it, not me). Brief but disturbing film clips were even enough to inspire short-term shifts of political attitude.

These findings require closer analysis, but they aren’t entirely surprising. In a world of disease, starvation and competition, a healthy dose of fear would have gone a long way in helping our ancestors survive. Driven by negative emotion and an intense sense of loss aversion, they would have banded together in small but powerful in-groups, stayed close to the village shrine and shunned whoever was alien enough to come across as threatening. In times of the past, conservative politics and social structures would have constituted a powerful and reliable survival strategy.

As the Red Woman from “Game of Thrones” put it, “the night is dark and full of terrors,” and the conservative perspective reflects a worldview suited for something like the Seven Kingdoms, with unwavering emphasis on hierarchy, communal identity and mystical belief. But we don’t rely on horse-drawn carts or swords and shields anymore; it will take more than fire to burn the terrors all away.

The challenges we face today are of a different sort. Famine and infectious disease are obviously still around, but traffic accidents pose a far greater risk to most of us than does Ebola. We used to worry about how to keep our tribes from going hungry; now we strive to prevent ourselves from overeating and provide adequate resources for the impoverished. We used to worry about protecting ourselves from other tribes; now we strive to ensure that individuals of all backgrounds and physical features enjoy equal protection and legal representation.

Indeed, our world is larger and more complex than ever before. We live with large populations, abundant resources and efficient technology. We’ve traded tribalism for a social contract. No longer is life poor, nasty, brutish and short.

If anything, adherence to archaic social norms and superstition now stand in the way of the sorts of progress that we hope to attain. Conservative behavior might have yielded an advantage in more primitive times, but today, it lends itself too easily to xenophobia, negotiation through brute force and the persecution of religious minorities.

It’s easy to give in to scary stimuli, but if we fail to think carefully and rationally about what really matters, we fail to take true responsibility for our political process — not to mention putting ourselves at risk of reaching harmful outcomes. The point is not to ignore our fear, but to evaluate it sensibly and with restraint.

The challenges of modern life are too complex to solve through mere emotion; we must be willing to think carefully and not be distracted by our own psyches.

Not everyone needs to be a liberal. We just need more people to think lik e one.

Jonathan Iwry is a 2014 College graduate from Potomac, Md., who studied philosophy and history. His email address is jon.iwry@gmail.com. “The Faithless Quaker” appears every Monday.

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