The Ideological Brain

Politics and Social Issues
1

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.

2

By way of example, this is Tyson showing Shapiro how to engage in a scientific discussion without being tainted by the politics. Shapiro ignores the past problems of using science to suppress expressions of a gender spectrum while trying to make a case that he has science on his side now.

Tyson explains how science should operate on this issue.

It’s click bait, and I’m still looking for the raw video, without the commentary. So ignore that part.

3

Part IV of the book gets into brain science and sometimes gets hard to follow. It’s a good attempt at bringing many studies to the public and she delivers them with a bit of humor and plenty of caveats. One chapter begins poetically,

“It is in the faintest of gestures—the imperceptible stirring or uncontrolled twitch—that we disclose the grandest emotions. Within our bodies, under our skins, there is relentless, jazzy motion. Muscles tense and relax in spasmodic melodies. The brain, gut, and lungs chatter in breathless conversation. Blood is pushed and pulled through webbed arteries, capillaries, and veins. Nerve cells fire in synchrony, forming steady cyclical beats with every brainwave that swells and collapses and rises again. Surprises and prediction errors provoke series of tangoed syncopations.”

She goes on to discuss parts of the brain and how people with different beliefs have different sizes of and activity in those parts. She doesn’t hold back on a conclusion about something like the ERN error-related negativity, which acts like a ‘bell’ in your head alerting to when we might be wrong. People with lower religious zeal tend to have greater ERN (the ‘bell’ that goes off ). Conversely Mormon students were told to think about God’s love and their ERN diminished. She often notes how the cause and effect are still unknown, is there proclivity to belief, or can it be created through indoctrination?

A few pages later, when discussing the more complex pre-frontal cortex, she makes one of her asides,

“(All leftists who yearn for neuroscience to validate the rationality of their belief systems: applaud and rejoice!) Not so fast.”

It’s a little scary reading how much we do know and thinking about this information falling into the classic “wrong hands”. But really, those hands already know how to take advantage of human weaknesses based on centuries of trial and error. My hope is, greater understanding of how our beliefs are related to brain function, and that includes the biology mentioned at that quote above, will result in greater compassion for how people show up for us everyday.

4

Some other notes to come, but the Epilogue looks like it’s going to be the best part, where she speaks more from her own perspective, with the science as a foundation. She grapples with the question of how this research can help us good from bad for us, and for future humans. She says,

I believe there is a sense in which this science provokes us to reassess our preferences, our habits, the criteria by which we judge whether a worldview is oppressive or liberating. If our ideologies are interconnected with our biological realities, then the stakes of our ideological commitments and choices are much greater than we previously thought.