“Bright, creative, educated people tend to be liberals.”

No, I’m not trying to start a fight, just echoing Bowser’s opening remark in his “You ever noticed” comment in the advertising thread below.

Still, even when allowing for the many obvious exceptions on both sides, you must admit there is much truth to Bowser’s Observation (B.O.), I’m sure you’ve noticed it too.

I’ve been aware of it ever since I was in school myself, and I was most definitely a “numbers man”. Even within the technical fields, the scientists are most likely to be political and cultural liberals, and the engineers conservative, even though the curriculum they pursue is practically identical and they spend a lot of time together in the lab and in class. The Humanities and fine arts and the social/behavioral sciences are dominated by liberals, while conservatives tend to gravitate to the technical fields, business, and athletics. Of course, there are always exceptions, but the pattern is unmistakeable.

Conservatives have noticed it too. They are always complaining about how the press, academia, the arts/entertainment industries and the intelligensia are controlled by their ideological opponents, the “intellectual elite” and how intellectuals in general are inherently subversive. And you must admit, they are probably right on all counts.

Without getting into any value judgements here, (I’ll stay away from loaded words like “creative” or “authoritarian”), why should this be so? If the big B.O. does indeed hold true, it suggests that political opinions and beliefs and their cultural corollaries have a strong psychological, perhaps even genetic component, that they owe a lot more to how our brains are wired than to any moral or rational decisions we make as adults.

In other words, liberals and conservatives tend to be attracted to certain professions (and ideologies) because their brains are predisposed that way, not due to any freedom of choice on their part. So much for the “free will vs predestination” argument. As usual, the truth is somewhere in between.

It further suggests that political preferences have little to do with any objectively verifiable facts or demonstrable fundamental truths about reality. They are merely internal models, maps, interpretations of the universe that tell us more about ourselves than they do about the world outside.