Last year, I posted a video on how teaching people about genetics could potentially reduce political polarisation. I was referencing a study by the political scientist Alexander Severson titled: Homo Politicus Was Born This Way: How Understanding the Biology of Political Belief Promotes Depolarization.

Severson looked at data showing that the average person thinks political ideology is about 9% heritable. The real figure is at least 40% (Severson cites the studies if you want the sources). The question that came to him was rather obvious: would teaching people about the truth reduce negative affect for your political outgroup/enemy? The common sense analogy seems to be that telling people homosexuality is hardwired, that people are “Born This Way” to quote Lady Gaga, has advanced gay rights.

If you want to hear more about Severson’s experiment, the video is below:

Anyway, I ended up posting the video on the anarchism subreddit, whoring for views of course. But the video was taken down within minutes because I had dared to say that political beliefs were partly genetic in origin. Here is a snippet from an especially hilarious exchange:

I don’t usually waste any time arguing with weirdos on the internet, but I felt like the Louis Theroux of Reddit right here. A moral anthropologist excavating the subterranean layer of the dogmatic mind. Granted this is something of a small, self-selected sample, but the further one enters into the den of wokedom, it seems the higher the chances are of being called a eugenicist for conservatively quoting mainstream genetics. As a side note, I’ve always found the arrogance of such people rather breathtaking. They almost certainly couldn’t explain what a standard deviation is, or what mitochondria are, let alone what SNP stands for. And yet they feel no embarrassment professing that something they learned about 5 seconds ago is not only bullshit, but that they know the real explanation for political similarity among twins: the environment, silly! Note the response when I point out that these are twins-reared-apart studies: the default to Plato’s noble lie: this is dangerous, so shut up. Such lack of humility will never fail to stun me. It is ideology in action.

This brief exchange with a doyen of midwittery has lingered in the recesses of my mind. “Anarcho-anxiety” has been living there ‘rent free’, as they say. But it made me consider an interesting thought experiment. I recently posed it to the evolutionary psychologist Ed Dutton. You can watch the clip below, but in a sentence: would the people who typically quiver at the sheer mention of the words ‘biology’ or ‘genes’ support “CRISPR-ing” out racism? (If you know anything about basic genetics and psychology, you also know that such a proposal is absurd if we’re talking about “racist genes”).

Ed’s view was that such people would endorse the proposal, that cognitive dissonance would prevail. I’m not so sure. I wonder whether eugenics has been so tainted that most midwits would still reject any proposal to CRISPR out traits anathema to their ideology. After all, recall that I never even mentioned the word ‘eugenics’ in the video or comment. Yes, such people love studies that find left-wingers are smarter and racists are thicker, but speaking about genes — a key trigger word for the midwit — traverses on sacred land where landmines abound.

To adopt the language of Moral Foundations Theory, I wonder whether the typical radical left midwit would negotiate at all on any proposal that invoked the purity dimension. Of course, just because someone uses the language of purity/disgust, doesn’t mean their anterior insula is lighting up. It may simply be performative disgust. If anybody wants to run such a study, drop me a message — I’m sure it would be an interesting bellwether.

Of course, one can imagine attempts to end racism through CRISPR in a more realistic way: we all become one race. What’s intriguing about this sci-fi novel stimulus is that you can clearly go one of two ways: the standard, boring Nazi route of a dictator exterminating non-Aryan genes, or a more interesting woke dystopia where deranged white couples start having black children “in solidarity”. If you want to option this for a film, book, or video game, I will happily take your money.

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