[Avi Tuschman (Washington, DC) is the author of Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us. He began his career in politics as the youngest advisor in the government palace in Lima, Peru, at the age of 23. Tuschman holds a doctoral degree in evolutionary anthropology from Stanford University.  Forbes.com Contributor Cedric Muhammad interviewed him regarding his new book.]

Cedric Muhammad: Are Conservatism and Liberalism Morally Equivalent?

Avi Tuschman: The purpose of Our Political Nature is to look at the puzzle of political orientation through the dispassionate lens of science. The central question here is why our populations have great variations in personality traits that predispose people to have particular political leanings. The book concludes that our ancestors’ political personalities helped them survive and reproduce successfully over thousands of generations. These personalities traits, in their variations, were instrumental in the regulation of inbreeding and outbreeding. These dispositions helped them mediate biological conflicts between parents, offspring, and siblings. And their moral emotions also balanced various types of altruism against self-interest in countless social interactions. In some types of social or ecological environments, more extreme personality traits were adaptive. In most cases, moderate personality solutions proved fit.

Today we live in increasingly interconnected and globalized societies, and we have to find policy solutions to extremely complex issues. And yet many people’s political biases, which have ancient roots, cause them to have knee-jerk reactions to complex issues. Some people think that conservative solutions are always better, while others think that liberal solutions are the only ones that make sense. In reality, each policy problem is complex and unique. We should try to be as precise and scientific as possible in studying the effects and implications of different policy solutions. We must guard against being driven primarily by ideology. And when we have arrived at solid conclusions, we may nonetheless have to have a civilized dialog about how to make priorities.

In a healthy society and economy, there is a greater degree of consensus about what policies work, and this dialogue is driven more by practicality. When a society faces greater economic or political stress, people become more ideologically polarized and divided. But in any scenario, the underlying variation in political personalities is here to stay. So we should be realistic about these differences and try to be more accepting and understanding of one another, rather than assuming that decent people who we disagree with are ignorant or naïve or ill-willed. I hope that Our Political Nature can play a small role in advancing this process. Beyond that, we should focus on technical solutions to our problems. And we should focus on problems that do have solutions rather than wasting too much energy on wedge issues.

Cedric Muhammad: What do you think of this quote from Rousseau, “Those who distinguish civil from theological intolerance are, to my mind, mistaken.  The two forms are inseparable.”

Avi Tuschman: Chapter 7 argues that religion is inseparable from politics. By measuring people’s levels of religiosity we can predict left-right political behavior. This holds true almost everywhere, even in the world’s most secular countries, and even in those with a strong separation between church and state. So in this sense, numerous findings from Chapter 7 would seem to lend some support to this statement.

Cedric Muhammad: Juxtaposed to your book’s thesis what are your thoughts on the Esquire-NBC News definition of the center of American politics?  And how does their poll compare with the RWA survey?

Avi Tuschman: The distribution of left-right political attitudes in a population forms a bell-shaped curve, which means that most people are in the middle. However, there is also another spectrum that runs through public opinion, which is a spectrum of ideological coherence (which I discuss in Appendix B). On one end, there are political elites, politicians, political media, and people who are simply very interested in politics. These groups have the most stable and ideologically coherent views. They are also more polarized and less likely to be centrists. On the other end of the spectrum are people who don’t know the name of the vice president, don’t care about politics, and don’t show up to vote. Many of these folks are in the middle.

If you look at political groups on Facebook, of which there are dozens, the vast majority are formed by people who are politically active. Almost all of them are affiliated with the left or the right, to varying degrees of extremism. There are hardly any groups at all for moderates or centrists. In other words, the moderate majority is vastly underrepresented and lacks a proportionate influence.

Having said all of this, there’s one other thing to consider: when there is a lot of dissatisfaction with the political status quo, there are also people who will reject both (or all) conventional political parties. Some of these “independents” could have been lumped into the “center,” as described by this article.

Cedric Muhammad: Where do you fall on the RWA scale?

Avi Tuschman: I haven’t taken the RWA scale since I’ve been working with it so long. Even though I’m a human being with political sentiments, when I work on this research it’s a search for truth. I get into a mindset as though I’m a biologist visiting from another planet, trying to measure and understand the key variations in personality found in Homo sapiens that are linked to political behavior, why they occur, and what the other moving parts of this puzzle are. And the longer I’ve been doing this, the more I feel I’ve developed deeper understandings, greater political moderation, and greater peace of mind.

Cedric Muhammad: What is your reaction to Carrie Sheffield’s commentary on your book?

Avi Tuschman: I was disappointed to read Carrie Sheffield’s article “Are Political Conservatives Inherently Fearful and Angry?”  Ms. Sheffield’s piece was a response to an excerpt from my new book, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us, an excerpt that was selected by and recently published in Salon.com. In her piece, Ms. Sheffield acknowledged that she hadn’t read the book, but she nonetheless felt perfectly free to comment on it. I find this lamentable. I spent ten years carefully reading through hundreds of scientific studies in order to share these important findings with the public; it’s a shame that Ms. Sheffield couldn’t take even an hour or two to flip through the pages and understand the content and the arguments.

If she had done that, instead of deriving her views from a cherry-picked excerpt, she would have quickly seen how deeply off base she was. For example, she criticized me for ignoring the topic of religion. But Chapter 7, titled “Religiosity vs. Secularism,” provides a thorough examination of how religion influences political orientation. Likewise, Sheffield claims that I “conveniently” omitted an analysis of the far left of the political spectrum, when in fact it comes in the paragraph that directly follows the excerpt she cited, and I analyze the far left in many other passages throughout the book.