The Ideological Brain
By
Leor Zmigrod
M. P. Ross 08-24-25
Whether you like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin, a political cast,
your eyes, a political slant.
Wislawa Szymborska, from “Children of Our Age”
“We are children of our age, it’s a political age.” Perhaps every age is a political age, and humans are, as Aristotle asserts, a political animal. Like other primates, humans are a social species, expressing traits which evolved over time, beginning well before there were modern humans. Forward to an arbitrary (if appropriate for present purposes) date, 1000 BCE. Our social animal had acquired spoken language, written language, and systems of political order that organized society in groups well beyond the family, band, and tribe of hunter-gatherers.
Like computer operating systems and applications, legacy “technology” has not been lost. It is still found embedded in humans and our societies today. The family, band, and tribe continue to function within modern states, to say nothing of the limbic systems in the reptilian brains of some of our fellow citizens.
Nonetheless, we have come a long, long way to the present. Darwinian evolution brought us to a socially hard-wired modern human, able to develop complex social and political structures which are the products of our efforts during the more recent past, a period of time insufficient for the physical and behavioral changes described by Darwin. Ants and bees do astonishingly well with what nature endowed them in their functioning societies. That is Darwin at work. We might further turn to Darwin to explain why dogs turn around three times before curling up for a nap. The greater mystery is how most people observe traffic laws, and come to a full stop at an intersection before making a right turn, let alone the phenomenon of the political state, democratic or otherwise.
From this website’s review of Philip Pettit’s The State:
Pettit’s state is the result of an evolution, a natural outgrowth, where members of a society observe conventions and norms found generally beneficial, to society as a whole if not to any one individual in any one instance, becoming the basis for positive law. Those residing in a state, citizens and otherwise, gain the benefit of knowing what actions and activities are permitted and protected, and which will expose them to punishment. The state of nature for man is society, where relationships of order and power form.
Philosophy and political theory overflow with accounts of getting from there to here, from the origins of consciousness to traffic laws for a great metropolis. We rely on abstractions as shortcuts to make sense of greater concepts. Philosophies, beliefs, systems, and world views all the way down to slogans and gut feelings of “this is how the world works.” And as Pettit describes, this is mostly how we manage to get along. Yet, still, we do not all share quite the same reality.
From this website’s review of Francis Fukuyama’s Liberalism and Its Discontents:
In a suburban Southern California neighborhood, where the weather is almost always sunny and pleasant, all the better to enjoy its many parks, golf courses, tennis courts, and ballfields, one nevertheless encounters signs of discord popping up on the odd lawn here and there. A flagpole, topped by the Gadsden flag: a coiled rattlesnake prepared to strike, warning, “Don’t Tread on Me.” All right, we have already allowed that the rich have their complaints, so why should the middle-class be any different? What is difficult to comprehend, from any rational perspective, including standing on the street and observing the neighborhood, is the degree to which some people in this neighborhood feel their liberties are threatened. What could they possibly want to do, own, or think that is at risk of being denied them?
This is an example of what Azar Gat calls Ideological Fixation in his book of the same name, when one’s normative expectations do not align with perceived reality. Like Maslow’s Hammer, “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail,” we have our own internal rule book of how things should be, and when reality does not comply, some of us impose an interpretation of reality that conforms to their expectations, even if wholly at odds with verifiable facts. Gat gives us an explanation of what is taking place. To find out how such thinking is possible, how different people can comprehend the same observable phenomenon fundamentally differently, we turn to another Oxbridge scholar—Gat took his degree at Oxford—Leor Zmigrod, a Cambridge PhD.
Zmigrod introduces us to The Ideological Brain quoting Szymborska’s poem. The relationship in political science between the science and the political is brought into focus. We might consider this another way of expressing that between nature and nurture. Nature is physical, nurture is social. In our contemporary context, hardware and software. It is both as simple as that, and not simple at all, but intricately complex, and dynamic over time frames spanning from Creation to any present moment. The relationship between nature and nurture, our physical and social/psychological/cognitive selves are not facets in polar tension, but deeply layered and interconnected.
There is nothing about us that isn’t physical. Even what we perceive as thoughts are rooted in a physical process. As a political scientist, not a practitioner of the hard sciences, this is on my part only a supposition. Reading Zmigrod, it is gratifying to find it an observation she supports.
The term ideology originated with the 18th century French philosopher Destutt de Tracy. Ideology, the science of ideas, was Enlightenment’s attempt at making political science a real science. Its meaning has devolved to have a far more negative connotation. As for the ancient Greeks, terming tyranny as the corrupt form of monarchy, for us ideology is the less savory version of a philosophy or system of belief, and its proponent, the ideologue, a would-be tyrant not a statesman. It is characterized by rigid adherence to beliefs held as inviolable orthodoxy by the faithful, at whatever cost, regardless of outcome. It is not that people have not gone off the deep end before now, but social media has so far amplified this wunderliche—to use Clausewitz’s word—phenomenon that it seems to spread so much faster, deeper, and widely than in previous times. This is the Why of this phenomenon; the What, has been explored as Ideological Fixation. The How of The Ideological Brain is Zmigrod’s contribution.
Professor Zmigrod is a political psychologist and neuroscientist, which is to say a scientist, skilled in the scientific method. Not a political scientist (“not that there’s anything wrong with that”), neither a theorist nor a philosopher. One might disagree with her conclusions. I do not, being quite persuaded by her observations. However one might interpret them, her research results can speak for themselves.
The substance and extent of her research and experience over the course of the past ten years, like a well-crafted survey that asks the right questions in the right sequence, yields a deep and multidimensional understanding of how an ideologue thinks. Writing this review, I gave myself a test, for reading comprehension and analysis, based on a single reading of the book. My answer is Zmigrod’s research, which included study of others’ and her own primary research, begins with psychological testing, subjects responding to questions revealing what they think about something, about things which they have been able to from opinions over time. Then, testing which the subjects cannot have had a previous opinion, testing their innate responses. We then begin to form a picture of how the subjects think, not just what they think. Add in brain imaging, where researchers can monitor in real time what is taking place in a subject’s brain, the physiological workings that result in thoughts and feelings. Mix in neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and dopamine, and their role in shaping our moods and thoughts. Now, enter genetics. It turns out that a couple of specific DNA variations, in those who possess them, regulate how the brain uses dopamine. If I got anything wrong…you can let me know. That is enough hard science to send a political scientist running to Hobbes and Rousseau for the results of their research on creation as documented in Genesis.
There is, then, a physiological basis for ideological thinking. The ideologue’s binary, even rigid, thinking can be correlated to diagnostic testing. As both Zmigrod and Gat take pains to make clear, nature, or physiology, is not determinative. Two individuals with like physical and neurological make-up can present entirely divergent thinking from one another. Nature is not the only component of personality. There is nurture, the software, exerting influence on individuals and whole societies, over the course of civilization through to any present moment, a period insufficient for Darwinian evolution.
My longtime assumption was that people operated on a continuum between ignorance and dishonesty. This was a way to make sense of actions injurious to others. How could a person do such a thing? Surely they must know better, and if not, they are being willfully deceptive. “But…there was a third possibility that we hadn’t even counted upon.” So pervasive was the kind of thinking described in Gat’s Ideological Fixation that this other possibility occurred to me. Does a significant minority of our species have a neurological variation that causes them to experience an alternate reality not supported by verifiable facts?
Does a significant minority of our species have a neurological variation that causes them to experience an alternate reality not supported by verifiable facts? This is worth repeating and given more than a second thought. We know that all manner of things can cause faulty cognition: too much or too little sleep; too much or too little to eat; traumatic stress; a great variety of natural and manufactured substances, medications, and drugs; and medical conditions such as a UTI. The similarity, dispersion, and frequency of symptomatic cases, though, suggests a common cause. It is not new, nor is it confined any one society.
Leor Zmigrod apparently gives us our answer. Yes, there is a neurological variation that causes ideological thinking. I say apparently, rather than definitively, to express my openness to new developments in the field. An individual susceptible to ideological thinking would be vulnerable to picking up Zmigrod’s banner and proclaiming her book as revealed truth, with logos and slogans and memes to follow.