Old and New Thinking about Politics and Human Nature

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A Review of
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
(Author: Steven Pinker)

There is much to love in this book. Pinker helps us understand the state of our current scientific knowledge about human nature, and suggests that our politics should be reevaluated based upon that knowledge.

…Traditional political alignments ought to change as we learn more about human beings. The ideologies of the left and the right took shape before Darwin, before Mendel, before anyone knew what a gene or a neuron or a hormone was. Every student of political science is taught that political ideologies are based on theories of human nature. Why must they be based on theories that are three hundred years out of date?

In his main chapter about politics, he points out that liberals and conservatives each have combinations of views that, on their face, do not seem to be necessarily connected.

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Do We Even Need a Solution?

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There is a lot of anxiety today about the failings of our democracy—the polarization, the inability to solve national problems.   Shouldn’t we do something about it?

But two assumptions are often made which work against any action:

All that we as citizens can do is choose political leaders. Specialists in government are responsible for taking action and making decisions for which citizens have no expertise.  That’s democracy.

Things aren’t really as dire as the media presents. Sure, we can and should make improvements.  But we’ve got a good system, and we’re the most prosperous nation on earth.  The media is incentivized to be alarming because it sells.

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Is Democracy as Bad as Achen and Bartels Say It Is?

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A Review of Democracy for Realists:
Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
(Authors: Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels)

We all know already that our democratic system today has its flaws. To hear the political scientists Achen and Bartels talk, though, you might think it’s a giant farce.

(It’s not that A&B don’t bring out big, important problems, and their research and scholarship is really impressive. Their goal, it should be admitted, is less about suggesting fixes to our democracy and more about how the research in their field ought to change. In a nutshell, here is the academic side of it: their methodological proposal is to focus the research more on group identity, and to move away from the rational individual assumption that was borrowed from 20th century economics thought.)

The centerpiece of their analysis is what they call the “folk theory” of democracy:

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