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Friday
December 29, 2006

Anti-Individualism, Conservative Style by Tibor R. Machan

Just to keep matters in balance, let me point out that although it is mostly the Left that hates individualism—remember, socialism means that we, humanity, are all just one organism—the Right’s hostility toward it is no less virulent. Just recall that both Hitler and Stalin hated individualism, in any of its varieties. American individualism, one that stresses the independent judgment of human beings—not their alleged and, not surprisingly, ridiculous, fictional independent or self-sufficient existence—does not suit either the Left or the Right, including some fairly powerful voices among American conservatives. Just consider the blurb peddling one currently rising conservative’s recent book, Peter Augustine Lawler’s Stuck With Virtue, The American Individual and Our Biotechnological Future. “These insightful, provocative essays critique what the author sees as America’s ever-increasing individualistic habits and attitudes, centered on a view of the individual as self-sufficient and unencumbered.” As if that is what American individualism were about. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (24 messages)

Monday, October 21, 2013 - 7:27am

Thanks, Ed! I stand corrected. In fact, we all can!
Conservatives tend to be less knowledgeable in science than liberals. However, self-identified Tea Party conservatives tend to be more science-literate than other conservatives. I found the author's website (see below) Daniel Kahan "Cultural Cognition" project.

In this dataset, I found that there is a small correlation (r = -0.05, p = 0.03) between the science comprehension measure and a left-right political outlook measure, Conservrepub, which aggregates liberal-conservative ideology and party self-identification. The sign of the correlation indicates that science comprehension decreases as political outlooks move in the rightward direction--i.e., the more "liberal" and "Democrat," the more science comprehending.

But if you do, then maybe you'll find this interesting. The dataset happened to have an item in it that asked respondents if they considered themselves "part of the Tea Party movement." Nineteen percent said yes.

It turns out that there is about as strong a correlation between scores on the science comprehension scale and identifying with the Tea Party as there is between scores on the science comprehension scale and Conservrepub.

Except that it has the opposite sign: that is, identifying with the Tea Party correlates positively (r = 0.05, p = 0.05) with scores on the science comprehension measure:

http://www.culturalcognition.net/kahan

The sign of the correlation indicates that science comprehension decreases as political outlooks move in the rightward direction--i.e., the more "liberal" and "Democrat," the more science comprehending.

Yes, the tea party is just like everyone else -- which is to say, highly vulnerable to the reason-effacing consequences of our polluted science communication environment.
http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/10/15/some-data-on-education-religiosity-ideology-and-science-comp.html

Monday, October 21, 2013 - 7:39am

Just to point out the small range of numbers: no one looks good here. On the National Science Foundation awareness test, the outcomes range from about 10% to about 13%. Liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, no one knows much. However...

The same figures show that Americans generally are more science-literate than adults in other industrialized ("western") nations -- but, again, not but much:
"... according to Michigan State University's Jon Miller, Americans are slightly ahead of their European and Japanese colleagues in general scientific knowledge, though everyone has room for improvement. "

“A slightly higher proportion of American adults qualify as scientifically literate than European or Japanese adults, but the truth is that no major industrial nation in the world today has a sufficient number of scientifically literate adults,” he said. “We should take no pride in a finding that 70 percent of Americans cannot read and understand the science section of the New York Times.”
Approximately 28 percent of American adults currently qualify as scientifically literate, an increase from around 10 percent in the late 1980s and early 1990s, according to Miller's research.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070218134322.htm

Monday, October 21, 2013 - 6:19pm

Thanks for posting all of that evidence, Mike. Good stuff.

Ed

Monday, October 21, 2013 - 7:48pm

MEM,

I don't like that data. Democratic and conservative are divided into two groups at the middlepoint of a multidimensional political spectrum, only due to our voting method where people can only vote for their single preference, and because government seats are filled by winning party instead of by proportion for each party. For each kind of question "should the government do X?" there is another dimension. We Objectivists and Libertatians commonly like to put people into two dimensions: social freedom and financial freedom. and then sometimes we debate about how aggressive/pre-emptive the military and the justice system should be. So that's a third dimension.

I'd rather people were asked specific moral/policy questions, and then I could do the classifying of people into political groups. I'm also concerned about the bias of the "scientific comprehension" evaluation.