SURVIVAL VERSE QUALITY OF LIFE

This morning +Chuck Todd (MSNBC) discussed the results of a political survey published in Esquire Magazine. Surprise of all surprises, the political middle of America is expanding.  According to the pollsters, their survey revealed 21% of the population can now be classed as the political left and 28% as the political right leaving 51% in the middle. That was interesting but the most interesting thing was in the description of the people who were shifting allegiances.  They were moving from the right to the middle on social issues that are traditionally conservatives; they are were becoming more liberal—not enough to put hem in the liberal 21% but liberal enough to move them to the political center.  

I am in the process of reading a great book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Danial Kahneman.  One of the many things the author talks about is the accuracy of estimates made by intuition alone. I have written a number of times and published in a number of places that my estimates had been 20% liberal, 20% conservatives with 60% in the middle. I made my estimate in the face of a barrage of declarations by conservatives that the Nation is a conservative nation. When I listen to news programs and watch the way things are going politically, my intuition told me that we are not a “mainly” conservative nation. As someone said the other day, Americans are working to conserve the New Deal. Most people like Social Security and Medicare, they favor civil rights legislation, and they are concerned about health care and look forward to Obamacare. They are not racist; they favor integration. There is a desire to decrease violence in society. They like Obama. These people are the 60% or as the survey show the 51% of our population.

I look at the knot of people clustered around their Fox channel on TV or Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh on talk radio and ask, “Who are these people that are  clustered around them?” Kahneman address that issue in his book. He is saying, if rare events are given enough coverage the perception is that they are common events. If the news media writes headlines every time a bunch of punks makes a home invasion, soon the public begins to feel that every ones home is threatened. If outlandish racist remarks are made by a Republican politician in Washington, soon “most” people believe that all Republicans are racists. The people who believe these things, believe them because that is all they hear.   If you step back at look at this phenomenon, it really means a small but vocal minority controls our impression of ourselves as a society—we look into a mirror and see a stranger looking back. In one sense, this is bad but it also means that most of us are more sensitive to social differences even if it makes us feel we are in the minority. By hearing people disparage a person for being a racist, it reminds me that I am not alone in not being a racist, which is why I really appreciated what the Esquire article points out.

American is moving from conservatism to altruism. To me this is to be expected. It is evidence of an ever-increasing trend from bestiality of 150,000 years ago toward humanization or from 2.5 million years ago to make it to coincide with the enlargement of the human brain. However, if this marks a shift from raw survival of the individual to enhancement of quality of life, it could mean trouble for our survival as specie. If we deplete world resources, so everyone can live in air conditions home, is that good for human survival?   

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