Leftism and Mutation Load

A polemic against memes

Written by Joseph Bronski and Matthew Archer.

Part One: The power of bad ideas

Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), Russia, February, 1917.

February is always freezing in Petrograd. Temperatures can drop to minus ten at night. Almost nobody has heating in their home — most ordinary workers are grateful if they can afford a few extra blankets. And this February the weather is even colder than usual. Normal families snuggle up in bed together for extra warmth. Meanwhile, Russia’s ruler, Tsar Nicholas II, has central heating in his dazzling Winter Palace (he had a separate one for summer, of course). The palace is so big that the dining table can seat a thousand guests and the other rooms have space for ten thousand. Whilst it’s sub-zero outside, beautiful exotic plants bloom inside and tropical birds fly around the heated courtyards. The lighting sometimes makes Nicholas think it’s a summer’s day. 

Outside, all is disorder and devastation. World War I has almost broken Russia. Food and fuel have been in short supply this winter, and the exceptionally cold weather is making things much worse. The supply trains have just stopped, people queue for bread, factories begin to close, and workers lose their jobs and what little money they have. But then the weather changes. 

On February 23rd, the thermometers in Petrograd record 8 degrees. Thousands of people come out to enjoy what could be only a brief break from the icy cold. They also celebrate International Women’s Day. By midday, there are tens of thousands marching in the streets, they are mainly women. A seven-and-a-half-year-old boy watches all of this unfold from his apartment window because his parents won’t let him out. He reads the bold demands from the women’s large banners as they flow by: Land and Liberty!, Down with the Tsar!, Down with War!

As the crowd grows larger, the mood in the air changes; people want to vent their frustration with the Tsar. Factory women are joined by their men, and the numbers swell to 100,000 by the end of the afternoon. The people chant, they demand bread and rations for those who have fought in the war. Ordered to stop the protesters arriving at Tsar Nicholas II’s palace, inexperienced soldiers march towards the crowd. But the crowd does not stop. The soldiers do. Both — crowd and soldiers — mingle, and hats are thrown in the air as everybody cheers the their rebellion. They serve the people now. 

Eventually, the young boy is allowed out with his governess, the lady who helps to look after him. His parents are cautious, but his aunt and uncle are completely absorbed by politics. They tell him something new every night at dinner — not that he understands much yet. As the seven-year-old strolls along he spots a man selling books on the snowy street. Bending down to inspect a tattered book he hears shouting to the side. 

A small group of men are storming down the road pushing a beaten and bloodied policeman. His uniform torn, his face dirty, this man is one of the last loyal servants to the Tsar. The policeman tries to twist away from the small group, but it’s pointless. They have him surrounded and he knows. The boy sees only a brief few seconds of the skirmish before they all disappear around the corner. He’s not sure where they’re taking the policeman, but the look of terror in his eyes tells the young boy one thing: he will not escape with his life. This moment marks him, scars him for life. From here on out, violence disgusts him.

The next day is even warmer. Yesterday’s victories encourage 150,000 people to take to the streets. They meet at an important public square home to a large ugly statue of a former monarch on horseback, the revolutionaries have nicknamed it The Hippopotamus. People clamber onto the statue and start making speeches calling for the end of the monarchy. They do so in full view of the police. It doesn’t matter that most of the crowd can’t hear the speeches, they know now that a revolution is inevitable. Bizarrely, the mild weather continues for weeks. Tsar Nicolas II’s rule does not. 

Some achievements are made after the February Revolution, but a later revolution in October paves the path to civil war. With many different groups trying to gain power, one called the Bolsheviks ultimately triumphs. In the years that follow, anybody deemed a threat — peasants, clergy, striking workers — is labelled a counter-revolutionary and either jailed or killed. A man called Joseph Stalin eventually seizes power and things become even worse. His dictatorship leads to more death and suffering than even Hitler will inflict. 

Over these years, the young boy’s family has many difficult choices to make, not least because they are Jewish. They must dodge both Stalin and Hitler. First, they flee to Latvia; eventually, however, they settle in London. The boy goes to study at Oxford, where he will remain for the rest of his life. He will often think back to those early years in Russia, trying to work out how everything unraveled, trying to answer the question of how an oppressed society first won a victory before losing everything. He will eventually extract several intriguing lessons from the nightmare that was the 20th century.

On the 31st of October 1958, the then middle-aged Russian refugee delivers his inaugural lecture. Little does he know that it will continue to be read by students of political philosophy long after he’s dead. He calls the lecture, Two Concepts of Liberty. The echoes of his formative years are heard on almost every page. The following lines are from the first:

When ideas are neglected by those who ought to attend to them — that is to say, those who have been trained to think critically about ideas — they sometimes acquire an unchecked momentum and an irresistible power over multitudes of men that may grow too violent to be affected by rational criticism.

Philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilisation.

In Isaiah Berlin’s view, it was just bad ideas that led to priests, monks, and nuns being crucified in the Red Terror of 1918, to being thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, to being strangled and scalped, to being given Communion not with wine but with melted lead.

Bad ideas also compound. Thick layers of institutional stupidity can grow from the seed of one or two bad ideas ‘nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study’. As Rousseau writes in the Second Discourse, whether private property will be accepted “depends on several prior ideas which could only spring up gradually one after another, it was not formed all at once in the human mind”.

This has become the go-to diagnosis for intellectuals opining about Western decline. Here’s Douglas Murray in The Strange Death of Europe:

Europe lost faith in its beliefs, traditions and legitimacy. Countless factors have contributed to this development, but one is the way in which Western Europeans have lost what the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno famously called the ‘tragic sense of life’. They have forgotten what Zweig and his generation so painfully learnt: that everything you love, even the greatest and most cultured civilisations in history, can be swept away by people who are unworthy of them. Other than simply ignoring it, one of the few ways to avoid this tragic sense of life is to push it away through a belief in the tide of human progress. That tactic remains for the time being the most popular approach.

Critics like Murray believe that the mass movement of millions of people into Europe in 2015 could not — by itself — have sounded our death knell. For that, we had to forget good ideas and believe bad ones.

If the idealist school is correct, the way out is obvious (though not necessarily easy): inculcate better ideas. Who is to do this? Berlin writes: “May it not be that only other professors, or, at least, other thinkers (and not governments or Congressional committees), can alone disarm them?”

If intellectuals are the only ones capable of clearing the fog, what happens when most intellectuals are at least somewhat favourable to wokeism?

In a brilliant essay, Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem, Nathan Cofnas critiques Richard Hanania’s and Christopher Rufo’s etiologies of wokeism. He concludes with the following injunction:

The priority for right-wing intellectuals should be disseminating accurate information about race and race differences and devising a new political philosophy that is intellectually and morally appealing to the current left-wing elites.

From Cofnas (2024).

For Cofnas, blank-slate equalitarianism is the most important dragon to slay:

We have never tried the strategy of refuting the belief that forms the true basis wokism, which is the equality thesis. There is every reason to think that undermining the equality thesis is the ultimate solution.

Cofnas obviously does not subscribe to the anti-hereditarian “They should just teach this in schools!” view. Indeed, his three-point plan endorses Rufo-like activism:

(1) Promote knowledge of the cause of race differences

(2) Change the population of decision makers on campus

(3) Leverage political power

But what if such a project is doomed from the start? What if ideas are merely the symptom of a deeper disease? Treating the symptoms may temporarily relieve the person who suffers from malady, but it will not cure him. 

Part Two: Ideas walk on legs

Intellectuals generally overestimate the power of ideas to influence behavior. Philosophers and historians say, “Christianity led to this” and “the Enlightenment led to that”. But often underlying factors, including the material development of the culture and the traits and proclivities of the people were equally important – perhaps more important. We’ll call this view that ideas are potent forces of social change, ‘idealism’ or ‘political idealism’. 

Weak evidence for political idealism

The fact this view is so widespread is not surprising – ideas seem to have obvious effects on believers. Thomas reads a book by Karl Marx, and he starts espousing Marxist ideas. But the deeper claim, the hypothesis that ideas cause important social and psychological changes, is less plausible. In fact, the evidence supporting it is relatively weak. 

A straightforward prediction of political idealism, for example, is that a person’s political views are mostly determined by exposure to beliefs and attitudes. If this were true, we might expect to find low heritabilities for political ideology and high effect sizes for variables measuring transmission of beliefs and attitudes within families. In other words, genetic effects would be small, whereas family and cultural effects would be large. 

Yet many studies have found that genes explain most of the variation in political beliefs among people. Random factors and measurement error appear to explain the rest. “Culture” and family environment explain practically none of the variation in political ideology.

Another straightforward prediction from political idealism is that people are relatively gullible; they’re often fooled by “propaganda.” But propaganda is less effective than commonly believed, especially in the domain of liberalism-conservatism.

The chart above, taken from a study by one of us (Bronski), shows the fraction of people who change their position on an issue after exposure to new ideas (“p_s”). The labels on the x-axis represent different issues.

As can be seen, the fraction of people susceptible to “viral infection” by ideas is generally small across domains, contrary to what “political idealism” predicts. Humans did not evolve to be easily propagandised; rather, we evolved to make ideas work for us. Our ancestors who were able to do this reproduced more than their counterparts who were plagued by viral ideas. In other words, we expect humans to have a strong ideological immune system. 

In another study, Bronski carried out an online survey in which he asked people if they could imagine any information that would make them change their minds on various issues. He suspected that people would be more willing to change their minds on some issues than on others. 

Using this method, Bronski found that participants could not imagine any information that would change their mind on whether women should be able to vote (a key leftist belief). In contrast, many participants said they could imagine information that would change their mind on apolitical issues like banning coffee. This suggests the decline of smoking was likely caused by (true) propaganda, while the rise of feminism had little to do with the transfer of information, contradicting the claims of political idealists.

The ultimate cause of leftism

Leftism correlates with paternal age (the age of someone’s father at birth). This finding is robust to controlling for the father’s politics, participant age, and birth order. Which means the correlation is not due to older fathers having more-leftist genes, the homes of older fathers being in more leftist environments, older people (who could be more conservative for some other reason) having younger fathers, or people with older fathers having lower quality womb environments. 

This is important because mutational load correlates with paternal age. Here’s a simulated plot showing the relationship between the value of a hypothetical trait and the average mutational load.

The slope of that red line is the mutational pressure. Based on a general factor of leftism extracted from 18 items, Bronski has estimated that the mutational pressure on leftism is about 0.20 SDs per generation. Meanwhile, the selection pressure, the strength of genetic change due to conservatives outbreeding liberals, is about 0.07 SDs. Consequently, the overall evolutionary pressure, the change in leftism due to changes in genetics, is about 0.13 SDs. This is almost exactly the observed shift per generation.

It thus seems possible that a non-trivial part of the rise of leftism since 1960 is due to mutational pressure – that is, the accumulation of harmful mutations in the gene pool.

However, there is more supporting evidence. Leftism can be modelled as a mental illness, which is defined as a behavioral trait that decreases fertility. Indeed leftists report higher rates of many widely recognised mental illnesses – illness which are also known to be associated with paternal age.

Above is a chart that shows how the hazard of various mental illnesses changes with paternal age. The different coloured lines correspond to different models: the blue line represents an unconditional model, while the red line represents a model that fully controls for birth order and pre-existing parental traits. Comparing the blue and red lines, it would seem that mentally ill people tend to breed younger, which is why controlling for this increased the effect of paternal age on the hazard of mental illness. According to the authors of the study:

These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that new genetic mutations occurring during spermatogenesis are causally related to offspring morbidity.

Likewise, mental illness rates have increased in the last 60 years. Which may be partly due to mutational pressure. Other indicators of mutational load are increasing too, such as rates of childhood cancer. Cancer is a genetic disease directly caused by mutations in the DNA, and it’s unlikely that exposure to carcinogens is increasing monotonically.

Crohn’s disease is strongly linked to industrialization and its prevalence is also increasing.

Homosexuality was once listed as a mental illness in the DSM, and homosexuals report higher rates of widely accepted mental illnesses. They also tend to have more leftist political views. In addition, homosexuality is positively related to paternal age. It is therefore noteworthy that homosexuality appears to be on the rise.

Back to Berlin

If the mutational load hypothesis is at least partially correct, it necessitates a radical historical revisionism. We do not know if the rise of communism was related to mutational load, but we do know that Berlin’s explanation (bad ideas) is not the whole story. Leftism defined more broadly rises and falls in cycles throughout history. 

Peter Turchin, a biologist-turned-historian who mathematically models human historical trends, has noticed a pattern like this in all the empires he has studied. While he does not know the precise mechanism for the rise and fall of empires, he believes that there is one. Mutational load research may be relevant here. It is clear from the equation for evolutionary pressure that easy living will relax selection pressures while increasing mutational pressure, leading to genetic degradation. This, in turn, will make living hard which decreases mutational pressure and increases selection pressure. 

Of course in some domains, ideas may indeed be a large part of what explains variation in behavior. But leftism is unlikely to be one of those domains. 

Conclusion

Intellectuals often overemphasize the importance of ideas in the evolution of beliefs, attitudes and behaviours throughout history. Some even claim that history is little more than a clash of competing ideas. This is implausible. Ideas need brains. And brains have predispositions. 

If the thesis of this essay is correct, high mutational load may lead to a brain that is particularly vulnerable to leftism. One might compare this brain to fertile soil. If we want to explain why strawberries grow in a field, we might say that somebody planted seeds there. But that’s not the whole story. Seeds need the right soil. Strawberries flourish in some soils and not in others. A brain with high mutational load is a fertile soil for leftist ideas. They grow well in it. Those who advocate destroying wokeism by battling progressive ideas (and lies) may be fighting a futile war against millions of seeds. We can’t stop all of them from taking root.

Joseph Bronski is is a sociobiologist who researches the rise of leftism, memetics and social power. You can find him on Substack and Twitter. Matthew Archer is the Editor-in-Chief of Aporia.

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