Steven Pinker schreibt in seinem Buch zu den politischen Richtungen
The most sweeping attempt to survey the underlying dimension is Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions. Not every ideological struggle fits his scheme, but as we say in social science, he has identified a factor that can account for a large proportion of the variance. Sowell explains two “visions” of the nature of human beings that were expressed in their purest forms by Edmund Burke (1729–1797), the patron of secular conservatism, and William Godwin (1756– 1836), the British counterpart to Rousseau. In earlier times they might have been referred to as different visions of the perfectibility of man. Sowell calls them the Constrained Vision and the Unconstrained Vision; I will refer to them as the Tragic Vision (a term he uses in a later book) and the Utopian Vision.
In the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, and all social arrangements must acknowledge those limits. “Mortal things suit mortals best,” wrote Pindar; “from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made,” wrote Kant. The Tragic Vision is associated with Hobbes, Burke, Smith, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, and the legal scholar Richard Posner.
In the Utopian Vision, psychological limitations are artifacts that come from our social arrangements, and we should not allow them to restrict our gaze from what is possible in a better world. Its creed might be “Some people see things as they are and ask ‘why?‘; I dream things that never were and ask ‘why not?’” The quotation is often attributed to the icon of 1960s liberalism, Robert F. Kennedy, but it was originally penned by the Fabian socialist George {288} Bernard Shaw (who also wrote, “There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough”).10 The Utopian Vision is also associated with Rousseau, Godwin, Condorcet, Thomas Paine, the jurist Earl Warren, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and to a lesser extent the political philosopher Ronald Dworkin.
Bei der einen Einstellung, der eher konservativen, muss man also die Grenzen beachten, die einem nun einmal nach dieser Ansicht gesetzt sind, nach der anderen hingegen muss man die von der Gesellschaft errichteten Limits überwinden.
Die erste Auffassung wäre damit eher das bürgerliche Lager, die zweite eher das linke Lager.
Die eine Seite wird der anderen vorwerfen am Status Quo festhalten zu wollen, die anderen utopische Pläne aufzusetzen, die sich niemals umsetzen lassen.
Pinker verweist darauf, dass die politische Einstellung eine gewisse Vererbbarkeit aufzuweisen scheint und auch bei Zwillingen häufig gleich ist, auch wenn diese nicht zusammen aufwachsen. Die Grundeinstellung könnte dabei auf biologischen Grundlagen beruhen, die eben eine Bevorzugung dieser Sichtweisen bewirken.
Alles Evolution 