Those “University radicals” are not nearly as widespread as you seem to think they are.
I’m another one. I was quite conservative in college, and became liberal. Why? Because it became apparent that my conservative positions didn’t match reality, so I changed my position and didn’t try to ignore reality.
Conservatives distrust science more because it is easier for them to dispute science than change their opinions. If you doubt this is a thing, feel free to listen to some creationists who have made an art of ignoring reality. If that isn’t a good enough example, try some flat earthers.
I’m sure being trained in science helped my change my opinions in the face of data.
I lived next door to some. I followed student politics and it was very far left, but those people in vast majority didn’t grow up to be actual socialists. I probably would have been a fan of Corbyn back then, and a lot of his support came from students and young people. Was your experience so very different?
Is this Ben Shapiro guy a creationist or flat earther? What does he believe?
I think a more accurate statement is that older people are more conservative than younger people.
What used to be considered radical back then is now considered pretty conservative.
Social values shift to the left faster than people do but they all shift left.
Just think about attitudes towards homosexuality by your generation when you were a boy and their attitudes today. But younger generations are probably significantly to the left of that.
He is one of those Creationists who realizes he can’t argue with the facts of evolution, so he just waves his hands and claims God works in mysterious ways and if you cannot reconcile the Bible’s creation story with evolution that’s a You problem, not a God problem.
I used to feel exactly the same way until I realized the sinking feeling in my stomach I got every time I tried to reconcile the two ideas in my own head was my way of telling myself I wasn’t buying my own BS.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but I get it. It’s not uncommon for people to become liberal later in life.
So how do you explain the liberal increased faith in science as science starts to support their ideology. How do you explain the liberal loss of faith in the judiciary as the judiciary becomes more conservative?
It sounds like you are conflating conservative with fundamentalist christian.
I think there are plenty of conservatives that do not deny reality.
I think a lot of that youthful idealism is really just naivete and ignorance.
My understanding of his position is that he believes in every scientific thing from the big bang theory to evolution. He reconciles his religious beliefs with the science using the “intelligent design” hypothesis. God is the source of the big bang, god guided evolution, etc.
Here are some famous scientists that believe in god.
One of these things is not like the other. Liberals lost faith in the judiciary because conservatives have made it a well known goal to turn the judiciary into a conservative weapon since Brown v. Board of Education. No matter how much you trusted an institution if you saw a relentless campaign to change its character and function into something you don’t agree with, you would probably change your opinion as well.
As for science, I think many people on both sides are not very good at critical thinking. I think the big difference right now, is science tends to favor liberal views, so liberals support science. But, many liberals will turn on science if it supports something they oppose, like nuclear power, GMO foods, vaccines, or the harm* of organic foods.
*And note, I am not claiming that organic food are harmful to your health. It appears they are no better or worse than convential foods made the same way. They are harmful in the ecological and societal sense.
I disagree. I think many liberals lost faith in the courts when for the first time in over half a century, they saw a majority on the supreme court that was not ideologically aligned with them. Their faith in institutions depends largely on whether or not they think that institution will support their agenda. And conservatives are no better. They blasted the “activist courts” for decades and are only now changing their tune, now that 6 out of 9 justices are likely to have opinions that support their agenda.
You think things are bad now, wait until abortion is up for grabs again.
You are proving their point. The only reason abortion might be “up for grabs” is because
I took a look at the literature on aging and conservatism. Much of it was behind paywalls, unfortunately. In general, there is found to be a positive correlational relationship between aging and conservatism; however, this is not commonly attributed to aging in and of itself. Rather, it is observed that there are generational differences that cause a shifting society that makes positions once “average” into conservative positions. This is particularly pronounced in the WW2 generation. There is such a pronounced cultural shift in the 60s and 70s, that (for a study done in the 90s) people in their 50s and beyond appear to be extremely conservative.
Truett, K. R. (1993). Age differences in conservatism. Personality and Individual Differences , 14 (3), 405-411.
Feather, N. T. (1977). Generational and sex differences in conservatism. Australian Psychologist , 12 (1), 76-82.
Feather, N. T. (1977). Value importance, conservatism, and age. European Journal of Social Psychology .
Cornelis, I., Van Hiel, A., Roets, A., & Kossowska, M. (2009). Age differences in conservatism: Evidence on the mediating effects of personality and cognitive style. Journal of personality , 77 (1), 51-88.
I looked at a couple of other papers, but I’ve closed the tabs for them so here’s the search I used. You can (if you wish) look at whatever comes up.
https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&qsp=2&q=age+differences+in+conservatism&qst=br
This makes sense. It’s not that people become conservative, it’s that society evolves past them, leaving them relatively conservative over time.
Yeah, I used to think liberals were better at critical thinking, until I saw so many reject science when it didn’t confirm their views. It may still be true that people who are better at critical thinking are more likely to be liberal, though.
The alt-right isn’t religious, AFAIK. And most conservatives in the UK are not religious, it’s just less popular all around.
Exactly. But it seems no one else here had the same experience as me, perhaps because most happen to have been conservatives themselves back then.
Heh, I was never a boy. But attitudes did change pretty drastically while I was growing up. From something you’d be bullied for, to teens claiming to be bi because it was trendy.
So people don’t change, society changes around them. Something to remember though, is that while the trend for decades has been towards a more liberal society, historically it hasn’t always been that way. Think of Victorian morality or Cromwell abolishing Christmas. So I wonder if society will continue to get more liberal, or if it’s about to start going the other way. Perhaps when we’re old we’ll be complaining about how boring and straight-laced young people are?
How long did it take you to change your mind?
It seems very likely that this will be the case, with periodic pendulum shifts of course. The old adage is liberals create progress, and conservatives keep it from going too fast (whether this is true or not, I really don’t know). Whether it is entirely true or not, I think there is at least a kernel of truth to it with respect to social conservativism. I think it does help to explain the current shift in the right-wing to the more extreme right. There has been a radical shift in attitudes in the past 40 years or so, and so conservativism (as an ideology) feel the need to resist these changes and slow things down. Where it gets dangerous is if this shifts into fascism (a reactionary anti-liberal movement).
I was really hoping to find a longitudinal study on aging and conservative attitude, but I was only able to find one from 1968 and I’m hesitant to draw any conclusions from something nearly 50 years old. So, keep in mind that these studies I looked at were snapshots in time, so there might be an expected bias towards seeing a generational shift. Also, people are diverse so while that might be the average, individuals will vary. The main thing that I found interesting is something more recent that was longitudinal. It seems like a great research question especially given the supposed common knowledge that people become more conservative as they age.
Years and years.
Spoilered because in hindsight this is a bit of a tangent:
I still remember the first time I was confronted with this dichotomy, probably around 1st grade. I, like most young boys, was SUPER into dinosaurs. And so one year for my birthday I got a book on natural history. It had drawings of ancient fish, dimetrodons, dinosaurs, ice age mammals, and finally, early man. One drawing at the end of the book showed a group of mammoth hunters setting up camp, putting up tents made from mammoth tusks and hides. I thought that was the coolest thing in the world, and I tried to tell my dad about it; he brought up Adam and Eve, I said “well this book disagrees”, and then my parents went off to the other room to have some kind of discussion - in hindsight, it probably had to do with what they would be telling me about the topic. They ended up taking a hands off approach.
I grew up. I learned about the big bang and black holes (around that time my parents got me a book about “101 science questions for kids”, one of which dealt with black holes and the death of the sun and gave me an existential crisis) but also about Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel. I didn’t really have a problem yet.
But I kept growing up, and my understanding of the way the world formed and the evolution of life and the rise of man kept changing. So did my understanding of history. Actually, the pyramids weren’t built by Hebrew slaves, they were built by farmers working during the off season as a way of maintaining control over the populace (of course, despite that being the popular culture interpretation, the Bible doesn’t claim the Hebrews were forced to build pyramids - they built the cities of Pitom and Rameses - but there’s no evidence of that, either). Languages and nations evolved from one another gradually over time and space; no massive flood wiped out the world. And at first, I shrugged and carried on: “well, maybe those parts aren’t literally true, but that doesn’t mean God isn’t real, or that He didn’t still create the world”.
My rationalization was, if I wrote a book, and a character in my book is 40 on page 1, then I created the character at the age of 40, and I created him fully formed with 40 years of history. So God could have created a world that was billions of years old! And besides, how can I not believe in something more? If consciousness doesn’t come from a soul but is an illusion created by the brain, who is experiencing the illusion? I thought that bit was especially clever.
But I learned more about how the mind actually works. I learned about experiments that were done on people whose brains were split in two as an early treatment for severe seizure disorders, and how it seemed very likely that this procedure in fact split their consciousness. And more crucially, I forced myself to consider a question I’d been ducking all this time: if the historical stories in the Bible aren’t true, why do I give the metaphysical reality described therein any more credence than the worldview of Christians or Muslims or Buddhists or followers of Quetzalcoatl? Aside from an accident of birth, what reason do I have to think I am right?
These were questions that made me very uncomfortable, and they started popping up when I went to college. For a long time, I shoved them down and ignored them. My religion was a huge part of my identity, especially living in a country where I was the minority. I was terrified of actually allowing myself to follow these thoughts to their logical conclusion.
But finally I realized that I was lying to no one but myself, and if I couldn’t be honest with myself, who could I be honest with? I forced myself to tackle these questions head on, and realized that I hadn’t REALLY believed in God in years; I was just too scared to admit it.
Yup, especially if you throw into the mix some of the supposed-common-knowledge corollaries to that. For example, I remember hearing some decades ago that men are more likely to get more conservative over time (because as they age men gain influence and social approval, and thus a higher stake in the social status quo), whereas women are more likely to get more liberal (because women lose social approval as they age out of their young-and-pretty and mother-of-the-nation life stages, and thus become more aware of problems with the social status quo).
Is that true? Was it ever true? Who suggested it? A quick internet search doesn’t seem to provide any confirmation of the existence of this hypothesis, but I’m pretty sure it was indeed A Thing in discussions of social and political attitudes a few decades ago.
That would be interesting, it’s surprising it’s not been done. And 1968 is over 50 years ago now.
I’ve never heard that. But I see plenty of women saying they thought that feminism had succeeded and wasn’t needed any more - until they had kids. That’s an example of people changing their minds due to life experience.
That’s similar to other stories I’ve heard. And shows how foolish it is to expect anyone to change their mind overnight on beliefs that are important to them.
Abortion has never been well settled law. It has been in the political realm almost constantly since 1973.
Roe v Wade is a particularly weak opinion.
If, for the sake of the argument, I grant you GMO, nuclear power, and organic food woo, what science are many liberals rejecting?
I would add to this list vaccine therapy, along with scientific critiques of many claims about “alternative medicine” and various “spiritual practices”.
Anti-science views on those subjects may not be exclusively or even mostly promoted by liberals, but I think it’s fair to say that the number of liberals who hold such anti-science views is non-negligible.
However, I’m not sure I agree with putting nuclear power on that list, in that AFAICT liberal opponents of nuclear power generation are primarily objecting to the potential dangers of nuclear waste and reactor malfunction, rather than making science-contradicting claims about nuclear power itself.
The liberal Union of Concerned Scientists, for example, IIRC was more anti-nuke in the past than it is currently, having judged that the importance of low-carbon energy sources outweighs the risks associated with nuclear reactors. But that’s not to say that they don’t acknowledge that those risks exist.
A lot of feminists are very reluctant to accept studies showing differences between male and female brains, for example.