Does Life Experience Make Us Conservative?

A well-known - and obnoxious - quote (sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill) runs something like this:

"If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. And if you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain."

Is there any truth in this statement? Some people far beyond the age of 35, people who have held liberal beliefs throughout their lives, would say no. But many would say that being out in the "real world" teaches you what people are really like - and shows you why conservatives should be in charge of society.

For my part, not even being 25 yet, I can only speculate as to what has kept me liberal thus far - and what I anticipate will keep me liberal for many years to come.

I think a lot of it boils down to this: if you base your political outlook primarily on your personal experiences, life's difficulties will make you bitter - and conservative. And if you step back from your experiences and place them in perspective, you'll be more likely to stay (or become) liberal. In other words, what keeps me liberal is the fact that I know my limited personal experience is not the only source of information I can use when making political decisions.

POLITICS AND HUMAN NATURE

I think that ultimately, we base our political orientation on our view of human nature. That is, if you believe that people's behavior is largely determined by circumstances, you will likely support programs to combat poverty, believe that we should treat criminals as sick people rather than evildoers, and feel that our foreign policy should favor diplomacy, negotiation, and aid.

But if you believe that people's behavior is mostly the result of choices freely made, or natural tendencies toward good or evil, you will likely favor a de-regulated capitalist system, a harsh lock-em-up policy for criminals, and foreign policy that favors making frequent shows of force, maintaining a massive stock of weapons, and implicitly distrusting other countries and their leaders.

The experience of living in the "real world," I believe, pushes us toward the latter view. Three things in particular render us prone to embracing conservative viewpoints: having children, working, and becoming entrenched in our personal identities.

Having children, it often seems, is an experience fraught with fear and anxiety. We fear for our children in ways that we would never fear for ourselves personally. What threat do drug deals in school zones pose to a college student? Or violent movies and video games? But as parents, such threats become much more vivid and frightening for us. As parents, we are also re-invested in the community: schools, libraries, law enforcement, etc. But our anxiety for our children's well-being can shape our concerns such that every political issue is framed in terms of "how does this affect my family?" And when we become overly focused on protecting our nearest and dearest, we often lose our compassion for strangers, even ones that don't threaten our children.

Out in our professional lives, we experience inefficiency firsthand. Many organizations, companies, and institutions in our society are poorly run. Many people are rude, lazy, or incompetent. Faced with a hostile and disorganized world, it is easy to conclude that life is a struggle where survival of the fittest is the dominant principle. Following that line of reasoning, we come to believe that our achievements are due to our own strengths, and that others' failures are due to their lack of character, intelligence, or moral fiber. Another step lands us at a political perspective that favors tax breaks for the rich, shuns welfare programs, and rejects the idea of a national healthcare system.

Finally, there is the question of personal identity. When we are young, our identities are often flexible; we have made a relatively small investment in them. As we age, however, we become more attached to our identities, in part because we are afraid to abandon or modify them. Given that the world inevitably changes, sticking to our ideological guns will likely render us conservative in one fashion or another. As ideology hardens to dogma, we come to perceive the world - and make political choices - through the narrow lens of our personal identity.

(Of course, these experiences don't necessarily have to make us more conservative - if we keep a sense of humor, a sense of perspective, and refuse to surrender to our stress and anxiety. The experience of having children can teach us compassion, and remind us that no person truly stands alone. The experience of working can lead us to reflect on how many workers are exploited worldwide, and how many aspects of our economy directly or indirectly lead to suffering. The experience of re-evaluating our personal identities can make us more sympathetic to the opinions, demands, and experiences of other people and other groups. The key is to remember that our experience is only one way of looking at a situation.)

POLITICS, PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, AND ANECDOTES

Our personal horizon is limited, which is precisely the reason why it cannot be our only criterion for evaluating political decisions. If you've ever talked to someone who bases his or her stance on an issue on a personal experience, perhaps you understand what I mean - their experience is certainly "true," but their insistence on drawing definitive conclusions about "reality" from this experience can bring the conversation to a frustrating dead-end.

For example, if you talk to an individual who has used a gun to defend him or herself against a criminal, you probably won't make much headway trying to convince them that gun control is a positive thing for society. If you talk to many of the individuals who have served in the Iraq War, or many of their family members, you won't get a warm reception pushing an anti-war message. If you talk to many small business owners, you'll find hostility toward high taxes. Many cops will tell you that criminals need to be treated harshly. People who feel they lost a job opportunity or a university admittance because of reverse discrimination will likely be against affirmative action. Parents whose children go to school with illegal immigrants may often be against amnesty for immigrants. And the many foreign "experts" we hear on television or the radio, expats who have fled Iran, Iraq, or the Soviet Union because of persecution, claim the right to speak for a whole nation.

Do all these people's experiences have value? Of course they do. But to practice informed politics we need to absorb information not only from people who have spent time "on the ground," but also from statisticians, pollsters, historians, analysts, journalists, and anybody who has a worthy idea about a situation or a problem. Then we need to filter all that through our own common sense.

Basing our political outlook solely on our life experiences, then, is a mistake. Ironically, it is when we claim most fervently that we are grounded in "reality" that we may be the furthest from it. So as in all things, balance is needed. Step back from your life, places your experiences in context and remember that others' experiences may be radically different, but equally valid, and you may find your perspective begins to take a surprisingly liberal tinge.

WHAT'S NEXT?

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