Kisin Is Wrong

And by extension Thomas Sowell as well. Today in a piece at The Free Press Konstantin Kisin declaims:

A friend of mine joked that she woke up on October 7 as a liberal and went to bed that evening as a 65-year-old conservative. But it wasn’t really a joke and she wasn’t the only one. What changed?

The best way to answer that question is with the help of Thomas Sowell, one of the most brilliant public intellectuals alive today. In 1987, Sowell published A Conflict of Visions. In this now-classic, he offers a simple and powerful explanation of why people disagree about politics. We disagree about politics, Sowell argues, because we disagree about human nature. We see the world through one of two competing visions, each of which tells a radically different story about human nature.

Those with “unconstrained vision” think that humans are malleable and can be perfected. They believe that social ills and evils can be overcome through collective action that encourages humans to behave better. To subscribers of this view, poverty, crime, inequality, and war are not inevitable. Rather, they are puzzles that can be solved. We need only to say the right things, enact the right policies, and spend enough money, and we will suffer these social ills no more. This worldview is the foundation of the progressive mindset.

By contrast, those who see the world through a “constrained vision” lens believe that human nature is a universal constant. No amount of social engineering can change the sober reality of human self-interest, or the fact that human empathy and social resources are necessarily scarce. People who see things this way believe that most political and social problems will never be “solved”; they can only be managed. This approach is the bedrock of the conservative worldview.

Hamas’s barbarism—and the explanations and celebrations throughout the West that followed their orgy of violence—have forced an overnight exodus from the “unconstrained” camp into the “constrained” one.

While I agree with Dr. Sowell that the dichotomy with respect to the perfectability of human nature is real and one thing that distinguishes progressives from conservatives, I don’t believe it is the only thing. For one thing, there is no universally accepted definition of what human nature is. Indeed, that’s part of the argument.

I would go on to observe that those dichotomous options, “unconstrained” vs. “constrained” are non-verifiable. Consider it this way: can human beings be perfected and how do you know?

Alternatively, I would assert that there are at least three axes in which people diverge: belief, preference, and gain. Mr. Kisin’s piece largely deals with belief. But there are other differences which cannot be explained easily by whether you accept the “unconstrained” or “constrained” vision. Preference is one of them. Some people want to be taken care of; others want to be left alone. Both of those preferences exist on a gradient—most people want to be taken care of in some circumstances but not in others (that preference is called “succorance”). Other are nurturance (whether you want to take care of others), interoception (how important understanding yourself) is, and many others.

The last distinction on my list, I am sorry to say, is gain: whether you benefit personally from what you advocate.

In short I think the distinction between those who adopt the “progressive mindset” and those who adopt the “conservative mindset” is much more complicated than Mr. Kisin supposes. That very complexity explains how one might go to bed believing one is a progressive and wake up believing one is a conservative. Or vice versa.