Now that I’m reading it, I thought I’d start a thread on this book.
It takes a few chapters to develop her thoughts on evolution, biology, and religion.
The first part of the book deals with defining ideological thinking, and how that is not directly correlated to political ideologies. Then, she comments on how studying the connection can be problematic
P74 Ideological brain is an absolute doctrine and an inflexible social identity
P76 “unless we can describe the phenomenon of ideological thinking in a way that is agnostic to the content of the beliefs, we will struggle to critique and identify oppression or call out extremism in public life.”
P87 when we assess the political mind, we are getting a snapshot in time. What caused the current thinking? What came first?
P119/120 self reports of political affiliation are biased
P122 <what type of liberal do you mean?> “They can become leftist extremists: passionately obsessed by their rigid doctrine and rigid identity. But if we define liberalism as openness to evidence and debate, it is oxymoronic to label a person a “liberal extremist”—pluralistic evidence-based thinking is antithetical to extremist thinking.”
The chapter on dopamine is the longest stretch of scientific language in the book, showing how the body and brain create the mind and nature/nurture.
Then the stuff on religion gets interesting.
P147 A quote from Darwin that his wife had removed from his Autobiography that was published after he died.
[We must not] overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong & perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear & hatred of a snake.
This leads her into chapters on how we can test this idea of religion’s effect on our thinking. She says,
P151 “Religion is one of the strongest and most memorable forms of an ideological upbringing.”
And that self-reports of a person’s history with religion, like when beliefs changed or the types of religious experiences, are more reliable than political histories.
In a longer Darwin quote, that was not cut, Darwin talks of the feeling of grandeur in a Brazilian forest and how those were once evidence to him of the existence of God, but no longer are. The “sense of sublimity” remains, but it is not an argument for something else. Leor sees this as a move toward seeing the world more flexibly, honestly, and freely.
This 100 or so pages got me thinking about my personal belief, call it a bias if want, that liberal thinking is flexible thinking. There are prejudices that are labeled Liberal in today’s use of the word, but if I don’t hold those prejudices, then I am using the word in the Classical sense, from the 19th-century reforms of church and state and movements away from control over people to greater freedoms. There can be a discussion that individual freedom has limits, like not including the freedom to take away freedoms of others, but I don’t know how Classical liberalism could be called extreme or rigid.
