WYSIWYG

Periodically, stories appear in the press about some study or other confirming the notion that Liberals are, as a group, smarter than Conservatives.  (Where Libertarians stand in comparison is rarely studied, perhaps because it is harder for reporters to succinctly pin down their politics using the typical 8th grade level vocabulary they prefer.)  An example showed up last week.  Here is the report from a noted "moderate" news magazine:

 Study: Are Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives?

The notion that liberals are smarter than conservatives is familiar to anyone who has spent time on a college campus. The College Democrats are said to be ugly, smug and intellectual; the College Republicans, pretty, belligerent and dumb. There's enough truth in both stereotypes that the vast majority of college students opt not to join either club.

But are liberals actually smarter? A libertarian (and, as such, nonpartisan) researcher, Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Political Science, has just written a paper that is set to be published in March by the journal Social Psychology Quarterly. The paper investigates not only whether conservatives are dumber than liberals but also why that might be so.

The short answer: Kanazawa's paper shows that more-intelligent people are more likely to say they are liberal. They are also less likely to say they go to religious services. These aren't entirely new findings; last year, for example, a British team found that kids with higher intelligence scoreswere more likely to grow into adults who vote for Liberal Democrats, even after the researchers controlled for socioeconomics. What's new in Kanazawa's paper is a provocative theory about why intelligence might correlate with liberalism. He argues that smarter people are more willing to espouse "evolutionarily novel" values — that is, values that did not exist in our ancestral environment, including weird ideas about, say, helping genetically unrelated strangers (liberalism, as Kanazawa defines it), which never would have occurred to us back when we had to hunt to feed our own clan and our only real technology was fire.

Without getting into the details of this story (for some good perspective, take a look at Jason Richwine's take at The American, Are Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives?  Statistics are interesting phenomena.)  I would simply point out that liberals are often smart people who convince themselves of often highly counter-intuitive ideas.  Sometimes counter-intuitive ideas reveal subtleties that illuminate; other times, counter-intuitive ideas are merely nonsense dressed up in intellectual accouterments.  As the prime example today, consider the liberal conventional wisdom about the Middle east, a CW that is controlling our foreign policy in that very volatile part of the world, and compare our policy to what people in the Middle East, ie those most affected by our policies, have to say:

The Region: The real Arab stuff

What are the most realistic and moderate Arabic-speaking rulers thinking?

And here’s the bottom line: “The comparison between Iran and Obama’s America is simple. While Teheran never let down an ally, offering them consistent financial and political support, Washington’s support of its allies around the world has always been intermittent, due to changes with administrations and an ever swinging mood among American voters, pundits and analysts.

“So while Iran has created a mini-Islamic republic in Lebanon, and is on its way to doing the same in Iraq, America has failed in keeping friends or maintaining influence both in Lebanon and in Iraq.

“And while Teheran brutally suppressed a growing peaceful revolution for change inside Iran, Washington’s pacifism did not win any favors with the Iranian regime, or with its opponents in the Green Revolution.

“While Iran knows how to make friends, Obama’s America has become an expert in losing them.”

Yes! That’s what it’s all about. You know, it’s an interesting point. Obama and company says we should listen to Muslim and Arab voices.

Okay, but which ones? Not, as they are doing, to the apologists for radicalism and the purveyors of conventional nonsense (all that matters is the Arab-Israeli conflict, America should just make concessions, you need to understand how Islamism isn’t a threat, etc.). If you want to know what a dozen Arab governments think and fear – and Israelis, too – this is the real stuff.

Read all of Barry Rubin's article.  Apparently, to the brilliant minds in our government, the nuances of the conflicts in the Middle East are so deeply buried in the noise that only they can discern the reality.  To a less intelligent person like myself, I am left wondering how I could have missed the nuances.  The question is timely since today is Purim, a Jewish holiday celebrating the Jews triumph over genocidal anti-Semitism in ancient Persia.  Today, the modern day Persians and their allies regularly proclaim their refusal to tolerate a Jewish state in the Middle east and proudly boast of their genocidal intentions.  I suppose it takes a much smarter person than me to discern the nuance within their proclamations which leads our government to insist upon engagement.  Sometimes I am thankful I am not that smart.