Persuant to bringing this up in another post, I just can't help taking this for a spin around the block. Its just to historically textbook. This is one reason why, in the end, liberty and human flousishing are doomed, and why the Second Coming will eventually be required, on a global scale, to clear the chessboard.
I won't go over this classic foray into science as the handmaiden of ideology in too much detail, but do wish to focus beirfly on a few choice claims made by the author.
It is difficult to define a whole school of political ideology precisely, but one may reasonably define liberalism (as opposed to conservatism) in the contemporary United States as the genuine concern for the welfare of genetically unrelated others and the willingness to contribute larger proportions of private resources for the welfare of such others.
1. In the first instance, this statement above, as a general definition, does not attempt to elucidate the doctrinal, philosophical, and policy differences between leftists (I will avoid the misnomer "liberal' from this point on) but presents itself as little than a smug exercise in moral self congratulation. It appears to be, not so much a definition of a political ideology as a psychological self reference - an idealized view of the author herself.
2. The welfare state and redistribution of wealth are core aspects of leftism, but not the only central ideas. "Liberalism," if a clear, core definition were forthcoming, would include the worship of centralized, state power, and a collective, herd view of human beings and human society.
3. The legal plundering of the property of others, to whom it belongs, and the forcible transfer of it to others to whom it does not belong is not, in any concievable sense, a "genuine concern for the welfare of genetically unrelated others" unless one has come to believe that theft in the name of the welfare of others is a morally acceptable activity and that, in essense, the cause of the poverty of some is the wealth of some others. In that case, forcible confiscation of the wealth of others and the transference of it to poor people is only an act of "righting wrongs" that have already taken place. In this view, the poor person is only poor because some of the wealth that would have gone to him (from the great common pile of money out there that we all take from until there is none left for the "disenfranchised") has gone, unfarily, to the guy in the gated community.
Notice the next part of this sentence, in which we see that leftism involves "willingness to contribute larger proportions of private resources for the welfare of such others." Notice that she does not say that she and other liberals are willing to contribute more of their own resources to the welfare of others (though this is implied), but that she and other liberals are willing to create a preemtive claim upon any share of other's private resources (considered "fair" by the political class at any given time) deemed appropriate to fund government welfare programs. She is more than willing to indemnify all of her fellow citizens to the state as a matter of preemtive state claim upon any amount of earned property considered necessary.
If it was only "genuine concern" for the poor in play here, she herself could write checks all year long to the IRS beyond her normal tax burden for the use of "the poor." But that is not her concern. Her concern is the forcible confiscation of the money of others to be used for government welfare programs, which, at least from a Judeo-Christian perspective, cannot be termed "charity" at all. Mandatory charity on pain of fines or incarceration turn the principles of Jesus on their head (if not obviate them altogether), far from being anything approaching a "genuine concern" for the welfare of others.
It is the desire to force compliance by corercive force to her own ideological view of the world, using the "moral" power of the state to confiscate (morally, of course) of the resources of others (for purly moral purposes) that animates with worldview. The willingness of moral paragons such as this to earmark lage quantities of the property of others for transfer to politically approved citizens is touching, but its actual moral veracity is deeply questionable.
She continues:
In the modern political and economic context, this willingness usually translates into paying higher proportions of individual incomes in taxes toward the government and its social welfare programs. Liberals usually support such social welfare programs and higher taxes to finance them, and conservatives usually oppose them.
Yes, this is true, but unhelpful. But now she warms to her subject:
Defined as such, liberalism is evolutionarily novel. Humans (like other species) are evolutionarily designed to be altruistic toward their genetic kin, their friends and allies, and members of their deme (a group of intermarrying individuals) or ethnic group. They are not designed to be altruistic toward an indefinite number of complete strangers whom they are not likely ever to meet or interact with. This is largely because our ancestors lived in a small band of 50-150 genetically related individuals, and large cities and nations with thousands and millions of people are themselves evolutionarily novel.
The examination of the 10-volume compendium The Encyclopedia of World Cultures, which describes all human cultures known to anthropology (more than 1,500) in great detail, as well as extensive primary ethnographies of traditional societies, reveals that liberalism as defined above is absent in these traditional cultures. While sharing of resources, especially food, is quite common and often mandatory among hunter-gatherer tribes, and while trade with neighboring tribes often takes place, there is no evidence that people in contemporary hunter-gatherer bands freely share resources with members of other tribes.
Bringing purly speculative, theoretical conjectures from evolutionary biology into the discussion is a prime indication that the arguer is in deep Comtean (or Marxist) territory, trying to wrap her ideology in the folds of natural science and trying to ground ideological perspectives and psychological perceptions in positivist certainties.
Analyses of large representative samples, from both the United States and the United Kingdom, confirm this prediction. In both countries, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to be liberals than less intelligent children. For example, among the American sample, those who identify themselves as “very liberal” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 106.4, whereas those who identify themselves as “very conservative” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 94.8.
1. She provides not a single source for her claims here, nor for the graph she posts.
2. IQ, while it may tell us some things about certain core cognitive attribues, may or may not tell us anything about the kind of intelligence required to negotiate complex philosophical issues and matters of moral, ethical, and philosophical judgement, which is really what is at stake in the world of politics (not the kinds of skills needed to be an engineer, architect, mathematician, software designer, or heart surgeon).
3. Without the slightest doubt, the great bulk of philosophers of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries who turned philosophy (especially continential) into an intellectual ghetto and the twentieth century into a charnal house had high IQs. Karl Marx, the master and fountainhead of most twentieth century mayhem and human degradation, was most certainly a very smart guy.
Even though past studies show that women are more liberal than men, and blacks are more liberal than whites, the effect of childhood intelligence on adult political ideology is twice as large as the effect of either sex or race. So it appears that, as the Hypothesis predicts, more intelligent individuals are more likely to espouse the value of liberalism than less intelligent individuals, possibly because liberalism is evolutionarily novel and conservatism is evolutionarily familiar.
No source, no reference, nothing.
Conservatives often complain that liberals control the media or the show business or the academia or some other social institutions. The Hypothesis explains why conservatives are correct in their complaints. Liberals do control the media, or the show business, or the academia, among other institutions, because, apart from a few areas in life (such as business) where countervailing circumstances may prevail, liberals control all institutions. They control the institutions because liberals are on average more intelligent than conservatives and thus they are more likely to attain the highest status in any area of (evolutionarily novel) modern life.
Or, once a snobbish, intolerant High School clique gains control of an institution, they make good and sure that institution becomes ever more monolithicially like them over time. The author here is, in great detail, a rather perfect example of one of the self sanctified Annointed for whom righteousness resides, not in authentic personal morality, but in a public, political morality that involves others in grand collective expressions of that public morality either willingly or against their will and contrary to their most deeply held convictions.