"By the end of lunch, my fingers were wrapping around the fruit knife in a patricidal grip."In his article "Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You're a Liberal," Nicholas Kristof echoes scientific findings that suggest conservatives and liberals not only think differently, but feel differently. For instance, Kristof takes the upshot of one study by Diana Mutz at UPenn to be that "liberals and conservatives often form judgments through flash intuitions that aren’t a result of a deliberative process." A stunning piece of investigative journalism. (For further incisive observation see Malcolm Gladwell's Blink.)
Apparently, some scientific research shows that there's a systematic correlation between people who register high disgust responses (feelings!) and those who identify as political conservatives, with the opposite holding for people identifying as liberals.
Studies suggest that conservatives are more often distressed by actions that seem disrespectful of authority, such as slapping Dad. Liberals don’t worry as long as Dad has given permission.
Likewise, conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.
Disgust responses are measured by psychologists—in the most boring of all ways—by getting people to fill out questionnaires (see the "disgust scale" one). The questionnaire cited by Kristof does have potentially sick-making questions*. But it also has this:
Please indicate how much you agree with each of the following statements, or how true it is about you.
I would rather eat a piece of fruit than a piece of paper [sic]**
I hope this is a control sentence because I don't feel anything between 0 and 4 in response. I do feel confused, but that's off-scale, strictly speaking.
Now, if you've read Kristof's columns or "follow" him (your verb, not mine) you'll have noticed that he's a really, really nice person who wants the world to be a better place. So here's his prescription for making things better:
So how do we discipline our brains to be more open-minded, more honest, more empirical? A start is to reach out to moderates on the other side — ideally eating meals with them, for that breaks down “us vs. them” battle lines that seem embedded in us.
Right, this could work if only for the fact that eating with other people is a really sure way to be grossed out by them, especially if you're bringing together people who are scoring 4s and 0s respectively on a disgust scale.
Anyway, these findings aren't very convincing. Proof by anecdote to follow.
In his new book, Losing Mum and Pup, Christopher Buckley (Yale, magna cum condescensio) delivers a posthumous bitch slap to his father (William F. Buckley, Jr.), causing a scandal in the conservative community his father helped to build. In one chapter he includes a series of "urine reports," which he emailed to family at the bedside of his dying father.
Urine-wise, until now I have endeavored to spare you details about this aspect. But the high volume of reader mail suggests that you will not be denied every detail. Have it your way.Until now, I had never imagined that my happiness could be contingent on the color of my father's urine. (My life used to be more exciting, really.)Today's is...how do I describe today's? I would describe it as the color of a fine Riesling: umber, full-bodied, with hints of creatinine and red blood cells with a nice finish. This is a vast improvement over the Coca-Cola hue of 48 hours ago. volume-wise, I repeat yesterday's med bulletin: He is a river to his people.
Later he even quotes Henry Kissinger (a urine report recipient) as saying:
I miss your urine reports.See. Conservatives love gross stuff. QED.
*Leave it to psychologists to fuck with your mind by calling a list of statements a questionnaire.
**This was the only statement without a period, which just confirms my suspicion that something is up.
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