THE PHENOTYPE WAR

PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY AND CYCLIC HISTORY

The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Of course, the fact that Emerson, or anyone else, says something doesn’t make the statement true. However, as I’m about to suggest to you: there may be considerably more to his claim than you might have been disposed to grant upon first reading it.

In a post a while back I elaborated on the distinction between what I’m calling temporals and spatials. I’m using this nomenclature to capture a dynamic between phenotypes which in recent decades has been characterized as left and right, or liberal and conservative. Such terms though have specific roots in the French Revolution (see here and here), and furthermore, due to the sweeping victory of the left by the mid-20^th century a revisionist history, writing the actual right out of the story, has confused the meaning of such terms for most people, as demonstrated by the contribution of Michéa (here and here), in exploring the historical role of right-wing socialism. So, leaning on the work of Harold Innis, I have taken to using temporal and spatial as terms to describe these phenotypes stretching back through human history, long predating the French Revolution and those terms arising from it.

In that post, I ventured the prospect that the root explanation for these conflicting phenotypes may be best explained by personality psychology – specifically the big five. I won’t elaborate on the categories and characteristics of those five personality traits (nor their sub-traits). This is a topic that has received considerable attention recently and there’s a huge literature on it, both scholarly and popular. Anyone who wants to understand it better can easily access such resources. I’d like to keep this post on the shorter side (if I can).

As I’d mentioned in that previous post, I believe that the conflict at the heart of the ancient battle between these phenotypes, referenced by the Emerson quotation, is a battle between those with high trait openness and those with high trait conscientiousness. Succinctly (if somewhat cursorily): high openness tends toward novelty-seeking and border-transgression; high conscientiousness tends toward risk-aversion and rule-following. According to some commentators, such as Jordan Peterson, who played a major role in popularizing awareness of the big five, these two personality phenotypes can and should complement each other. In a successful business, you need the R&D and marketing departments; but you also need the regulatory compliance and budgeting departments.

Indeed, it may be that there could be a golden age, even at the social level, when there’s a mutually beneficial complementarity between these phenotypes. However, as I’ll argue at greater length in my forthcoming book, and Innis’ scholarship illustrates, historically one or the other phenotype tends to predominate and the other becomes a discriminated against and often oppressed minority. In any event, when there’s any significant conflict over resources (cultural as much as economic) the relationship between these phenotypes tends to resemble less Peterson’s kumbaya compromise than Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction. The world that suits these two personality profiles are dramatically different. And we have the research to show that conflicting phenotypes do, as Dawkins’ extended phenotype theory would predict, use political means to attempt to mold society in ways that complement their values and preferences.¹

This predictable outcome is reflected in the fact that the personality psychology literature has long and overwhelmingly found the primary divide between those political/ideological divisions directly derived from the French Revolution (left v right; liberal v conservative) to be predicted along the seismic line of this openness-conscientiousness tension.² Before providing the final fleshing out of this observation’s full implications, a few words of qualification are in order. The problems with research associating politics and personality are many. Not least is the long history, going back at minimum to the iconic authoritarian personality studies of Adorno, of crass efforts by spatials to pathologize “conservatives” or “the right” (see here). But even if we put aside such egregious ideologically driven weaponization of science, there are loads of other complications.

First of course is, for the reasons mentioned above, terms such as liberal, conservative, right and left have a wide range of historical and geographical meanings. (Of course, they in fact have precise historical meanings, but the winners write the history and with its virtually complete victory the left has written the right out of public consciousness.) However, even where researchers are unambiguous in their definitions, it’s never immediately obvious how readily conclusions in one context can be generalized to others. For instance, if one research team says X about liberals, and another research says X about liberals, even though X is the same, the studies are not mutually replicatory if the two teams don’t mean the same thing by “liberal.”

Plus, there are other problems, such as treating political parties as proxies for such designations. In the US for example the Republican leadership has long been almost all spatials: e.g., endorsing military expansion and globalized commerce. To use GOP affiliation as a proxy for being conservative in the sense of being a temporal would corrupt the results as historically few are (though, there’s some signs of this changing.) This of course points to what is the central problem for our purposes: to repeat, what I’m calling right wing or temporalist has been written out of the history books. So even those with a temperament conducive to such an orientation don’t conceive political reality in such terms. Nor are researchers disposed to design instruments calibrated to capture such dispositions, since the social or political option is invisible to them. Findings from such research then need to be absorbed carefully.

Nonetheless these are the best indicators we have. And such personalities are going to still exist. So, while we can’t expect the research to be very precisely calibrated to our focus, if we restrict ourselves to painting in broad strokes, this research does allow us to create a picture of the situation which is consistent with empirical data and helpful for casting an explanatory social theoretical framework. Therefore, I still consider it significant that for decades now a major research field has repeatedly discovered the pattern of, what we’ll call, openness-spatials v conscientiousness-temporals. Some scholars in the field have written books about how this personality conflict at the social level has driven politics and history.³

Such researchers usually make the valid and important distinction that we are talking about statistical distributions here, not universals. This is undoubtedly true. And the degree of other personality traits any individual possesses, such as agreeableness or neuroticism, can have a regulatory impact on how one’s openness or conscientiousness manifests socially and politically. Interestingly, though, what I haven’t found yet is a study – and if anyone reading this knows of such a study, please bring it to my attention – that distinguishes between those with high openness and low conscientiousness, on the one hand, and those with high conscientiousness and low openness, on the other. In people who are high in both traits, they are likely to balance each other out, more like an intrapsychic version of Peterson’s kumbaya compromise. It’s in the tension between those phenotypes high in one trait, but low in the other (so less able to see the world through the other’s eyes) which I’d expect the Schmittian friend-enemy dynamic to be most aggravated.    

And, for those who don’t know the literature, a few valuable considerations. The big five personality traits correlate with enduring psychological orientations, influencing individuals’ actions and decisions.⁴ They have been reliably validated across national and cultural contexts.⁵ They develop early in life⁶ and remain relatively stable throughout adulthood.⁷ Unsurprisingly, then, they contribute to almost any attitudinal or behavioral outcome.⁸ And, as might be expected, therefore, appear to be significantly heritable.⁹

All this suggests that these big five traits, particularly the spatial phenotype of high openness and low conscientiousness, as well as the temporal phenotype of high conscientiousness and low openness, may well be transhistorical: playing out in various ways and degrees across the full range of human history. As I’ve suggested elsewhere (though, as I conceded last post, in a less theoretically and historically informed way) selective pressures (at least phenotype selection, if not epigenetic selection) may go a long way toward explaining the long history of empire/civilization cyclic rise and fall.

As harsh Darwinian conditions select for temporals (with their risk-aversion, suspicion of novelty, and concern for rules and borders), the resulting high trust and culturally cohesive societies create the opportunity to prosper. That prosperity, though, over enough time, relaxes Darwinian conditions, and creates an increasingly valuable role and socially accepting place for spatials (with their novelty-seeking, transgressive, suspicion of borders and rules). The spatials push both artistic and scientific innovation, increasing prosperity and experiences of individual fulfilment. Eventually, though, space biased societies fall victim to Weber’s crisis of rationality. Increasingly insulated from nature’s corrective negative feedback loop, a positive feedback loop drives space biases too far from reality and the society eventually collapses.¹⁰

This explanation of society or civilizational cycles likely reveals much about what is unfolding in our topsy-turvy world of today. We may in fact, as Emerson suggests, be living through the most recent battle in a phenotype war ranging back to the dawn of human history. While there are surely too many variables at play to predict precisely what will happen, if my assessment is correct, we can anticipate in broad strokes what lies ahead.

The only issue may be whether we face a full-on collapse, with all the misery and hardship that entails, or whether the turn from a space biased to a time biased society might be provided a softer landing. My argument, repeatedly submitted on this substack, is that a populism which recovers its historical mission as the natural expression of temporalist values, promoting and building the intermediary institutions, which can insulate the person from the all-consuming power of the Janus-faced symbionts bureaucratem/market, may yet have an important role to play in contributing to such a softer landing.

The less frequent, but more focused posts coming in this post-book-announcement era of the current substack will increasingly be focusing tightly in on the key issues at play in the book’s argument. If you’d like to keep abreast of these discussions, and haven’t yet, please…

And if you know anyone who you think might be interested in these matters, please…

1. For a great introduction to these dynamics, see Jason Weeden and Robert Kurzban, The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won’t Admit It (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

2. Dana R. Carney et al., “The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives: Personality Profiles, Interaction Styles, and the Things They Leave Behind,” Political Psychology 29, no. 6 (2008): 807–40, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2008.00668.x; Jacob B. Hirsh et al., “Compassionate Liberals and Polite Conservatives: Associations of Agreeableness With Political Ideology and Moral Values,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36, no. 5 (May 1, 2010): 655–64, https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167210366854; Christopher A. Cooper, Lauren Golden, and Alan Socha, “The Big Five Personality Factors and Mass Politics,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 43, no. 1 (2013): 68–82, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2012.00982.x; Xiaowen Xu, Jason E. Plaks, and Jordan B. Peterson, “From Dispositions to Goals to Ideology: Toward a Synthesis of Personality and Social Psychological Approaches to Political Orientation,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 10, no. 5 (2016): 267–80, https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12248.

3. John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith, and John R. Alford, Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences, 1st edition (New York: Routledge, 2013); Christopher D. Johnston, Howard G. Lavine, and Christopher M. Federico, Open versus Closed: Personality, Identity, and the Politics of Redistribution (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Another interesting approach in this area of scholarship has been Edward Dutton and J. O. A Rayner-Hilles, The Past Is a Future Country: The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution (Exeter, UK: Societas, 2022). Though, their use of the personality psychology findings, privileging agreeableness ratings, don’t strike me as on the mark. Another source worth looking at, though they tend to emphasize a life-history frame (but life-history is likely a downstream effect of personality structure), is Steven C. Hertler et al., Life History Evolution: A Biological Meta-Theory for the Social Sciences, 1st ed. 2018 edition (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

4. Matthew V. Hibbing, Melinda Ritchie, and Mary R. Anderson, “Personality and Political Discussion,” Political Behavior 33, no. 4 (December 1, 2011): 601–24, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9147-4; David G. Winter, “Personality and Political Behavior,” in Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology (New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press, 2003), 110–45.

5. Jüri Allik and Robert R. McCrae, “Toward a Geography of Personality Traits: Patterns of Profiles across 36 Cultures,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 35, no. 1 (January 1, 2004): 13–28, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022103260382; Steven J. Heine and Emma E. Buchtel, “Personality: The Universal and the Culturally Specific,” Annual Review of Psychology 60, no. 1 (2009): 369–94, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.60.110707.163655; David P. Schmitt et al., “The Geographic Distribution of Big Five Personality Traits: Patterns and Profiles of Human Self-Description Across 56 Nations,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 38, no. 2 (March 1, 2007): 173–212, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022106297299.

6. Carolyn L. Funk et al., “Genetic and Environmental Transmission of Political Orientations,” Political Psychology 34, no. 6 (2013): 805–19, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2012.00915.x.

7. Jack Block and Jeanne H. Block, “Nursery School Personality and Political Orientation Two Decades Later,” Journal of Research in Personality 40, no. 5 (October 1, 2006): 734–49, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2005.09.005; Andrew J. Bloeser et al., “The Temporal Consistency of Personality Effects: Evidence from the British Household Panel Survey,” Political Psychology 36, no. 3 (2015): 331–40, https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12067; Antonio Terracciano, Robert R. McCrae, and Paul T. Costa, “Intra-Individual Change in Personality Stability and Age,” Journal of Research in Personality 44, no. 1 (February 1, 2010): 31–37, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2009.09.006.

8. Jeffery J. Mondak et al., “Personality and Civic Engagement: An Integrative Framework for the Study of Trait Effects on Political Behavior,” American Political Science Review 104, no. 1 (February 2010): 85–110, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055409990359.

9. Funk et al., “Genetic and Environmental Transmission of Political Orientations.” Robert Plomin, Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2018).

10. Again, though I think they’ve missed the most important variable in the story – this reaction norm dynamic between temporals and spatials – I’ve profited from the broad theoretical framing, of societies oscillating between harsh and relaxed Darwin conditions, and how this could drive civilizational cycles, provided by Edward Dutton, At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for the Future, 1st edition (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2018); Matthew Alexandar Sarraf, Michael Anthony Woodley of Menie, and Colin Feltham, Modernity and Cultural Decline: A Biobehavioral Perspective, 1st ed. 2019 edition (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Dutton and Rayner-Hilles, The Past Is a Future Country.