Democracy and anthropology

Few Westerners would dispute that our ideas of democracy (Greek demokratia) and republic (Latin res publica) are part of our Greco-Roman heritage rather than originating in Christianity. Christendom developed primarily as a political order of kingdoms headed by divinely ordained royal dynasties—the very thing to which the Greeks and the Romans had opposed democracy and republic. During the Italian Renaissance, renewed engagement with Greek and Roman political thought stimulated republican and demo­cratic ideas; these developed further during the Enlightenment and contributed to the political revolutions that challenged and ultimately displaced monarchical rule in North America and France, provoking a global chain reaction.

But there is one essential difference between the ancient ideas developed in Athens and Rome, and the modern Western idea. In the ancient world, the family, rather than the individual, constituted the smallest unit of any society. For Aristotle the fact that “man is by nature a political animal” is demonstrated by the natural tendency of men and women to form households. The extended family (oikos) is a natural human society and, in Aristotle’s view, an inherently hierarchical one. Larger political communities are not strictly natural, but cultural: they arise through a process of social develop­ment. Households form villages, and villages form the polis, the complete and self-sufficient political community. The household is thus the cellular unit of any social organism: by reproducing itself from one generation to the next, it enables the community itself to endure and potentially to achieve a form of collective immortality.

By contrast, the democratic ideal that came to shape the modern West asserts the ontological primacy of the mortal individual, seen as a complete and autonomous political subject, regardless of his genetic origin or family situation. In the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, there is nothing between the individual and the nation. When its first article declares that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” “men” are understood as individuals, abstracted from their particular family or communal affiliations. Ernest Renan, that great admirer of classical Greece, once defined the Civil Code produced by the Revolution as “a code of laws that seems to have been made for an ideal citizen who was born a foundling and died unmarried.”[1]

The difference is anthropological: it pro­ceeds from the fundamental level of how human beings define themselves. Ancient Greeks and Romans, like most people in Antiquity, conceived of themselves as genealogical beings, participants in an unbroken chain of generations. An individual’s identity and social worth were inseparable from his lineage, from the blood that connected him/her to his/her ancestors and descendants. Man is mortal; what can endure beyond his death is the continuity of his lineage. The Greeks and Romans had several concepts of the afterlife, but individual survival beyond death was often subordinated to the family’s continuity through successive generations. A good afterlife begins with your ancestors welcoming you home. Such was the core message of King Radbod to Bishop Wulfram: rather hell with my people than heaven with strangers.

The classic work on the Greco-Roman genealogical concept of human life is The Ancient City, published in 1864 by French historian Numa Fustel de Coulanges. Fustel explains that the household was not only the smallest social unit but also the smallest religious community, presided over by the paterfamilias acting as its priest. Every Roman house had a lararium, an altar dedicated to the Lares, the spirits of the dead members of the family, who were not clearly distinguished from the Manes.

Genealogy is the bloodstream of Roman society at every level. The patrilineal clan, or gens, was a family of families, comprising several households united under a common nomen. Several gentes could, by alliance, form a curia. Because political life was centered on the city-state—the Greek polis, the Latin civitas—citizenship and the gods of the city took precedence over kinship and the gods of the family or clan. Yet the sense of familiarity that comes from shared ancestry—what the sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz called the “syngeneic feeling”—remained the essential bond among citizens.[2] That shared ancestry could itself be partly legendary. With Aeneas, Virgil gave the Romans a common heroic ancestor. The Aeneid, written as the Roman Republic was turning into an Empire, is a monumental expression of the sacredness of the genealogical principle. Fleeing the burning ruins of Troy, Aeneas carries his disabled father on his back, leads his son by the hand, and carries the household gods. The chief virtue he embodies is pietas: the subordination of the self to family and gods, even at the cost of self-sacrifice.

The word “nation,” derived from the Latin natio, “birth,” is itself a reminder that a certain degree of genealogical affinity has long been central to the idea of a “people,” even though language, culture, and cult have always been fundamental as well. A nation can be formed by the federation of several tribes, but what we call ethnogenesis generally entails a sufficient amount of intermarriage and cultural integration for those tribes to regard themselves as related—and eventually to construct or adopt a common ancestry. In this sense, a nation can be understood as an extended structure of kinship. A holistic people is a people

The “contractualist” redefinition of nations in the seven­teenth century—on the model of commercial contracts be­tween individuals—can be seen as the original sin of modernity. It was a brutal denial of the transgenerational fabric of organic societies. The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has aptly defined modernity as “an antigenealogical experiment”.[3] Yet what Sloterdijk fails to see, like most critics of modernity, is that modernity’s antigenealogical experiment is itself only the latest stage of a much older process set in motion by Christianization.

Contractualism is the overripe fruit of Christianity, a “covenant” religion theoretically functioning on the basis of voluntary individual membership. Alain de Benoist, co-founder of GRECE (Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne) in 1968 and the leading figure of the French Nouvelle Droite, has highlighted the Christian origin of the twin values of individualism and universalism—the individual and humanity, and nothing in between—that define modernity. He develops this argument in his Manifesto for a European Renaissance (1999), co-written with Charles Champetier:

[O]ne finds in Christianity the seeds of the great mutations that gave birth to the secular ideologies of the first postrevolution­ary era. Individual­ism was already present in the notion of individual salvation and of an intimate and privileged relation between an individual and God that surpasses any relation on Earth…[4]

Understanding the antigenealogical nature of Christianity goes a long way toward understanding the vulnerability of Western societies to the corrupting influence of what E. Michael Jones correctly identifies as “the Jewish revolutionary spirit.”

Before turning to the heart of the matter, let us first try to unravel the puzzle of why Christianity and Judaism occupy opposite ends of the individualism–holism spectrum.

The Judeo-Christian Question

Judaism is a religion that binds spirit and blood in a sacred alliance. Even for non-religious Jews, there is no higher command than endogamy. Intermarriage is, “from a biological point of view, an act of suicide,” wrote Benzion Netanyahu, father of the Israeli prime minister.[5] A Jew who converts to Christianity for opportunistic reasons will not cease to be a Jew, and will say, like Benjamin Disraeli, that “All is race—there is no other truth.”[6]

Christianity took the opposite path: it severed the bond between spirit and blood and rendered ancestry irrelevant. Here lies a mystery, if we think of Christianity as an offshoot of Judaism. How did a people whose every member, according to Martin Buber, makes blood “the deepest, most potent stratum of his being,” perceives “what confluence of blood has produced him,” and “senses in this immortality of the generations a community of blood,”[7] give birth to a religion that regards blood ties an obstacle to salvation? From this perspective, Christianity is the most un-Jewish of religions.

The solution to the paradox is straightforward: as an offshoot of Judaism, Christianity inherited the two comple­mentary postulates at the heart of the Jewish worldview: the infinite value of Israel in God’s eyes, and the null value of other nationalities in God’s eyes: “All the nations are as nothing before Him, for Him they count as nothingness and emptiness” (Isa 40:17). These are two sides of the same coin: the trust in God’s special love for Israel is proportional to the conviction of God’s enmity toward all other nations and their gods. In the biblical worldview, which is the foundation of Jewishness, nations are to be vampirized: “You will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the wealth of kings”; “the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish, and the nations will be utterly destroyed” (Isa 60:12-16).

That duality translates into Christianity in a special way, because the Church is now a new, supranational Israel; yet fundamen­tally, the Christian God despises non-Jewish nationalities—and therefore non-Jewish genealogies—as much as the Jewish God does.

Here lies the solution to the mystery of how Christianity, despite coming from a religion that foregrounds nationality and kinship, came to be hostile to both. Judaism is hostile to “the nations”, and so is Christi­anity. When Paul insists that nationalities do not count, he is thinking primarily of Gentile nationalities. Romans 11 makes it clear that, in his eyes, the Jewish nation remains the exception, the one nationality that Christianity will preserve rather than abolish: “Is it possible that God abandoned his people? Out of the question! I too am an Israelite, descended from Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin” (11:1). In the end, “Israel will be saved,” because “they are still well loved for the sake of their ancestors.” (11:26-28). Seen in this light, “There is neither Jew nor Greek” (Gal 3:28) is a message for the Greeks, not for the Jews.

Christianity and the satanic lineage

Paul is the origin of the theory of original sin. But Paul was a Pharisee who thought within the biblical paradigm shaped by Genesis 3: Adam and Eve were created physically immortal, but their disobedience brought death into the world. Within this framework, life after death can only be imagined as the resurrection of the physical body, which will happen in the last days, when the collective punishment imposed on Adam’s lineage will be reversed. Paul believed that Jesus, as the first resurrected dead, announced the future resurrection of all, which he expected within his lifetime.

The early Christian apologists were faithful to Paul, but under the influence of the Hellenistic body-soul dualism and because of the indefinite postponement of the resurrection, they reinterpreted original sin as a disease of the soul transmitted through generation.  According to Cyprian of Carthage, “being born after the flesh according to Adam, [every infant] has contracted the contagion of the ancient death at its earliest birth…”[8] Irenaeus of Lyon explained how Christ had to enter into Adam’s corrupted lineage through the Virgin Mary in order to purge it from within.[9] Augustine, who was so faithful to Paul that Martin Luther regarded him as the most reliable theologian on sin, grace and salvation, elaborated further the doctrine of original sin.

Augustine took a series of positions that all converged on the depreciation of genealogical bonds, which he regarded as irrelevant to individual salvation and, in some respect, even inimical to it. He affirmed that death separates absolutely the dead from the living, and that any attempt to show respect to the dead, including by burial rites, is pointless: “The faithful lose nothing by being deprived of burial, just like the unbelievers gain nothing by receiving it.”[10]

Augustine rejected Tertullian’s “traducianism”, the theory that human souls are produced by a genealogical process from the “seed” of the parents. Instead, he postulated that God creates a new soul for every new body—a theory known as “creationism.” A person’s soul therefore owes nothing to his ancestors. Yet Augustine also affirmed that generation is the medium of transmission of original sin, which has irreparably damaged human nature. We are all contaminated by the blood of our ancestors, which is why we need the cleansing waters of baptism and the sinless blood of Christ. Thus our souls do inherit something from our ancestors after all, but it is strictly negative. Original sin gets passed down to every newborn through the “sinful flesh” and the “carnal concupiscence” of his parents. “There was nothing of me in that boy but the sin,” Augustine wrote about his own son Adeodatus, who died at fifteen. Speaking to God about of his non-Christian father, he wrote: “My mother did everything she could to ensure that you would be my father—you, my God, rather than him.”[11] (A Freudian psychoanalyst might diagnose Augustine with an unresolved Oedipus.)

Augustine developed his doctrine of original sin in the course of his dispute with Pelagius, an ascetic theologian of British origin who, as Augustine complained, maintained that “the death of Adam is not a consequence of his sin, but a necessity of his nature,” and that “Adam’s sin injured himself alone, and not the human race.”[12] Augustine wrote fifteen treaties against Pelagius, insisting that “through the sin of the first man, which came from his free will, our nature became corrupted and ruined; and nothing but God’s grace alone, through Him who is the Mediator between God and men, and our Almighty Physician, succors it.”[13] If you know the story of Dr. Knock, written by Jules Romains in 1923 and filmed in 1951, you will agree that Augustine is the Dr. Knock of theology. He could have said, like Knock: “healthy people are simply people who don’t know they are sick.”

No one did more than Augustine to oppose the genealogical and the spiritual in the Christian imagination. He was not only anti-genealogical; he was also anti-political. Whereas Eusebius of Caesarea had taught Christians to regard the Roman Empire as an instrument of divine providence, Augustine returned to the outlook that had prevailed among the earlier Christian apologists. In The City of God, started as a response to the accusations leveled against Christians after the sack of Rome, Augustine did not deny that Christians couldn’t care less for the transient “cities of men,” not even for Rome, devoted as they are to the eternal City of God, which is a Heavenly Jerusalem. Pierre Manent summarizes the debate:

In the eyes of the [Roman] citizen, what value is there to the mortification of the Christian, when what matters is not to fall on one’s knees but to mount one’s horse, and the sins one ought to expiate or rather correct are not the sins one commits against chastity and truth, but military and political errors? In the eyes of the Christian, what value is there to the political and military endeavors of the citizen, when he believes that, victory or defeat, what­ever the regime, this world is a vale of tears ravaged by sin and that states are nothing more and better than vast bands of robbers?[14]

The Christian assault on kinship

Christianity has undermined the organic, blood-centered or kin-based system of solidarity in order to replace it with  a new social body, and bring men together in a higher fraternity through the blood and flesh of Christ. Social anthropologist Jack Goody has documented the impact of this antigenealogical Christian policy in The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (1983), and in The European Family: An Historico-Anthropological Essay (2000). “By insinuating itself into the very fabric of domestic life, of heirship and marriage, the Church gained great control over the grass roots of the society itself.”[15] With the new rules, the authority of parents and close kins over the marriage of younger persons was reduced. Divorce and remarriage were made nearly impossible, leaving no solution of heirship for infertile marriages. Marriage could be contracted by mutual consent alone, but could not be broken even by mutual consent. Strict monogamy was enforced, and the taking of concubines condemned. (In the Roman world, monogamy was in the service of the genealogical principle: concubines were tolerated, but their children were not legitimate offspring.) Marriage to in-laws after the death of a spouse was declared incestuous: in canon law, your husband’s brother became like your real brother. Marriage to spiritual kins (godfather or godmother) was also tabooed, whether they were blood relatives or not. The prohibition of marriage to blood relatives was gradually extended up to the seventh degree. This tabooed marriage between those who shared one or more of their 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, making marriage virtually impossible in your own village, in theory at least, and in practice providing the Church with a means of leverage on every member of the ruling class.

Adoption, widely practiced in the Roman world as a strategy of heirship, became severely limited. Canon law effectively bound all forms of inheritance directly to the genealogical line of descent. Last but not least, the Church was authorized to receive gifts and legacies without possibility for the cheated heirs to object. It so abused this privilege that in 370, the emperor Valentinian decided to “prohibit clergy from visiting widows and pupillae (female minors) under the pretext of religion, with the aim of extorting donations from them or securing bequests in their wills.”[16]

Joseph Henrich, who extended Goody’s research in The WEIRDest People on the World, writes: “By undermining intensive kinship, the Church’s marriage and family policies gradually released individuals from the responsibilities, obligations, and benefits of their clans and houses.”[17] In this sense, the Roman Church is responsible for the creation of that WEIRD (“White, European, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic”) individual that Henrich contrasts with the rest of the world:

Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, we WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, noncon­formist, and analytical. We focus on ourselves — our attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations — over our relationships and social roles. We aim to be “ourselves” across contexts and see inconsistencies in others as hypocrisy rather than flexibility. … We see ourselves as unique beings, not as nodes in a social network that stretches out through space and back in time.[18]

In conclusion, Christianity is the matrix that gave birth to modern individualism—the ideology of the supremacy of the individual. The modern individual is a Christian who has lost faith in his own salvation, but has not recovered the ancestral soul that Christianity took away from him.

If we subscribe to the theory that human nature is genealogical in a very essential way, and if therefore we assert the natural right of men and women to organize society around that natural principle, then, regardless of the Church’s recent lip service to the concept of “natural law”—the moral law inscribed by God in the heart and conscience of every human being[19]—the Church has, in effect, worked against it. It is natural for men and women to feel a stronger attachment to their kin than to strangers; they therefore have a natural right to live in societies organized around kinship. Christian­ity has given them a higher moral duty to love the stranger as a brother. That may be fine if the stranger returns the favor. But what if the stranger is a natural man who sticks to natural law? Our failed multicultural societies are the ultimate result of the kin-blind and race-blind morality inherited from Christianity.

The anthropological chasm

Returning to the starting point of this article: democracy and republic today mean something radically different from what those words meant to the Greeks and the Romans, because they rest on a different definition of human beings. Modern democracy presents itself as deriving from Greek democracy by the extension of the right to vote from male household heads to every adult citizen, male or female. But this perspective is misleading. In traditional societies, patriarchs are not individuals enjoying the privilege of voting: they are the representatives of their households in the political sphere. By granting the vote—by secret ballot—to every individual, modern democracy did not simply add to Greek democracy, nor did it make democracy more democratic. Rather, it transformed the nature of the demos itself, replacing the household with the individual as political subject. The founders of modern democracy did this almost inadvertently, because they had already been estranged from the Greco-Roman anthropo­cultural paradigm by Christianity, and viewed the individual as more real than the household.

Because it is centered on family and genealogy, Greco-Roman anthropology begins with the distinction between man and woman. By Greco-Roman standards, the family is constituted by the union of a man and a woman. Eros is the force that draws two incomplete beings into one complete being, according to Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium. Modern liberalism, by contrast, adopted the Christian premise that individuals are autonomous moral subjects, detached from inherited social or even biological identities. Celibacy is the higher life, while marriage is for losers who can’t control their libido (1 Cor 7:8–9). Souls are essentially gender-free, for in Christ “there is neither man nor woman” (Gal. 3–28). One can therefore argue that contemporary Gender Ideology is a radical extension of Christian individualism, and that transgenderism is the terminal stage of the Christian exalta­tion of the individual.

Isn’t it interesting that, as Christianity was beginning its steep decline in the nineteenth century, it was being challenged by a theory that precisely redefines human beings as the exclusive product of their ancestry, namely Darwinism? What a dialectical backlash! The Christian man had a soul that was zero percent genetic—each individual soul was a new creation of God. The new Darwinian man, by contrast, has no immortal soul but is entirely determined by genetic heredity. Either a bloodless soul or a soulless blood.

For anyone concerned with the preservation or restoration of European ethnic identity, there is an important lesson to draw from the above considerations: Christianity offers little support for such a project—not only because it has ceased to function as a European religion, but because its universalist and anti-genealogical principles have historically weakened the importance of ancestry and ethnic solidarity.

In a holistic, generation-centered culture, the individual understands his own life as part of something larger and may therefore be willing to devote his whole life and even sacrifice himself for the group. The individualist, by contrast, tends to regard his own survival as the supreme value, potentially placing the preservation of the individual above the continuity of the group. That is why a holistic society will inevitably defeat an individualistic one in the long run.

We are at war against the most genealogy-centered people—imagine Israel’s current president tracing his ancestry to King David—and Christianity has not prepared us for it. Admittedly, this is not the major problem with Christianity. The main problem is that Christianity is turning into an Israeli fifth column. In my view, this is an unstoppable process, because this is what Christianity is by nature. The Hebrew Bible makes three quarters of the Christian Bible. The last quarter, the New Testament, is also Jewish literature. The Church claimed to be a “new Israel” founded on the “New Covenant of Jesus’s Blood” (Lk 22:20)—a direct reference to the Mosaic covenant (Ex 24:8). Christians agree with Jews that the Creator of the Universe had spoken personally to Moses—while all other civilizations were devil-worshippers. Both agree that God planned to send the Messiah to Israel. They only disagree on his identity. Can a Gentile religion be more Jewish than that? As Hyam Maccoby wrote: “To be Jewish and yet not to be Jewish, this is the essential dilemma of Christianity.”[20] There is no way out of this dilemma. No matter how Christians dislike Jews, they are metaphysically indebted to them. By design, Christianity is attached to Jewish supremacism as by a rubber band: the more it tries to distance itself from it, the harder it comes back to it.

That is why ultra-Zionist genocidal Jews worry about the decline of Christianity in the West.  Ben Shapiro wrote: “Everybody who grew up in a Christian household and whose grandparents were Christian needs to go to church. Everyone.” Yoram Hazony, author of Zionist hasbara, laments that Gentiles don’t know their Old Testament anymore. Zionist stooge Mike Huckabee wants Americans to go back to Church to overcome their “biblical illiteracy.” France has no more fervent defender of the Catholic faith than the (secretly Orthodox) Jew and presidential candidate Eric Zemmour: he too wrote a book calling the French to get in touch with their inner Jew by going back to Church. A good amount of conservative Catholics will vote for him. I mentioned these in a previous article, in which I argued that Jewish hatred is neither religious nor racial, but fundamentally civilizational. As Netanyahu himself tells us, Israel is in the business of taking vengeance against Rome, who destroyed their Temple in 70 AD.

The question, therefore, is whether a spiritual doctrine capable of affirming genealogical continuity can be developed outside the Christian framework. What we need is something comparable to the Confucian tradition that has sustained Chinese civilization for thousands of years. “In China,” writes sinologist François Jullien, “religion is mainly organized around ancestral worship, and is therefore principally family-based: it is structured entirely around kinship.”[21]

I believe we do have, in the West, a comparable tradition: it is called Greco-Roman philosophy. If Constantine had not become emperor, or if his nephew Julian hadn’t died prematurely, Socrates, the philosopher hero, might have been to us what Confucius is to the Chinese—they were born 8,000 miles apart, but only 80 years apart. Stoicism, in particular, which had the greatest ethical influence in imperial Rome, teaches that the individual finds purpose in his life by contributing to a larger social purpose, which starts at the family level and reaches the civilization level. There are, of course, important differences between Confucianism and Stoicism or Platonism. Chinese thought is processual rather than ontological: where we tend to see “human beings,” Roger Ames argues, the Chinese tradition sees “human becomings.”[22] But both Confucianism and Stoicism embrace an organic and holistic conception of human life, situated within an all-encompassing cosmic and divine order: Heaven or Tian for the Chinese, Kosmos for the Stoics.

In my new book, What the Christians did to the Romans, I suggest that

it is important to study the Christianization of the Roman Empire precisely because we are now experiencing the final stage of the dechris­tianization of our civilization. What we need in order to survive the dechristianization is to discover, with an open mind, what Christianity took away from us. For if the dechristianization leaves us spiritually naked and starving, it is not only because Christianity is dead; it is also because it had created a desert around itself long before dying.

I also emphasize that “I’m not writing for Christians. Even though I don’t believe in Christian dogmas, I have no wish to disturb anyone in his ancestral faith. What matters to me is to understand the civilization I belong to, how it came to the present stage of decay, and what can be done about it. I’m writing for—and engaging with—people who are aware of our desperate civilizational predica­ment, and who already understand that Jesus will not save us.” I cannot help it, however, if Christians take offense at my prose and get angry. The truth hurts, and in the final analysis, the truth is that Christianity come to Rome from the Jewish matrix of lies.

[1] Ernest Renan, “Préface,” Questions contemporaines, 1868.

[2] Ludwig Gumplowicz, La Lutte des races. Recherches sociologiques, Guillaumin, 1893.

[3] Peter Sloterdijk, The Terrible Children of Modernity: An Antigenealogical Experiment, Columbia UP, 2025.

[4] Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, Manifesto for a European Renaissance, Arktos, 2012.

[5] Benzion Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism (1938), Balfour Books, 2012, kindle l. 2203–7.

[6] Sidonia, Disraeli’s alter ego, in Coningsby (1844).

[7] Quoted in Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz, Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism, University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 142.

[8] Cyprian, Epistle 58.5.

[9] Irenaeus, Against Heresies III.22.

[10] Augustine, The City of God I.12.

[11] Augustine, Confessions IX.6.14; I.10.17.

[12] Augustine, On Merit and the Forgiveness of Sins III.1.

[13] Augustine, On the Grace of Christ and on Original Sin I.55.

[14] Pierre Manent, The City of Man, Princeton UP, 1998, p. 27.

[15] Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, Cambridge UP, 1983, p. 45.

[16] Theodosian Code XVI.2.20.

[17] Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People on the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2020, p. 161.

[18] Ibid., p. 21.

[19] Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor (“The Splendor of Truth,” 1993).

[20] Hyam Maccoby, The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, Barnes & Nobles, 1986, p. 18

[21] François Jullien, Moïse ou la Chine. Quand ne se déploie pas l’idée de Dieu, Folio/Essais, 2022, p. 113.

[22] Roger T. Ames, Human Becomings: Theorizing Persons for Confucian Role Ethics, SUNY Press, 2020.

If you ever go to vote in England, you will often see three people with clipboards sitting outside the polling station, each wearing different coloured rosettes. They are representatives of the three main parties – Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat – and they are known as “tellers.” On the day of the British General Election in 2015, I happened to be in London so I offered my services to the local Conservative Party as a “teller.” This means that you sit in front of the polling station and as people come to vote you ask for their polling card. You eventually have a record of which of your party’s supporters, according to your own canvassing, have voted such that, before the close of poll, you can chase up those who haven’t.

I first did this in 1998 and it was very good natured and the three of us chatted in a friendly way the entire time, despite our political differences. By 2015, Britain was far more polarised and making conversation with the old woman representing the Labour Party was rather more strained. Somehow, I cannot remember how, I steered the conversation onto the subject of intelligence; this being the area I researched. She wondered out loud how I could possibly research this when IQ tests and the whole notion of intelligence have, in fact, been debunked and everybody knows that there are multiple intelligences.

This woman exemplified a particular type that has emerged in a new study entitled “Does medium matter? Political orientation and variability in scientific self-perceptions” in the journal The Public Understanding of Science. The study drew upon General Social Survey (GSS) data accrued between 2006 and 2018, with surveys of various kinds administered to about 7000 people. These surveys included questions on whether they got their scientific knowledge online or offline, questions on their scientific knowledge (true and false statements and questions on probability and experimental design) and an instrument which allowed them to rate how confident they were in the correctness of their scientific knowledge.

The only clear finding in the study was the emergence of someone rather like the Labour Party activist to whom I chatted for a few hours in 2015, as I imagine this woman got most of her information from reading The Guardian newspaper. However, reports on this study have somehow failed to understand the importance of one of its findings.

Firstly, those who mainly got their information from the internet scored higher in scientific knowledge than those who obtained their information from “traditional sources” such as physical newspapers, these being far more popular in 2006. This, presumably, reflects the way in which all such sources have, to varying degrees, been captured by some kind of ideology, such as Multiculturalism, and, therefore, provide a slanted and inaccurate view of science in a way that the more democratic and diverse internet is less able to.

Secondly, 53% extreme liberals who got their information from newspapers claimed to have a “clear understanding” of a “scientific experiment” compared to only 30% who obtained their information online. Indeed, comparing their scores on scientific understanding with their degree of self-confidence in their correct understanding of science it was found that extreme liberals who obtained their information from newspapers were the most over-confident of any group, with 39% of them over-estimating their understanding of science.

This is likely because liberals have far more confidence in traditional institutions, including newspapers, than conservatives, with liberals having captured most of these institutions. Scepticism is fundamental to science and, in a Woke-influenced society, scepticism on anything from big government to the causes of climate change or the merits of immigration is coded as “conservative.” The liberals have taken over the culture and have thoroughly marched their way through the institutions. It follows that the extreme liberal who obtains his knowledge from a traditional newspaper will be strongly trusting of that biased newspaper and, so, over-confident in his understanding of science.

Most importantly, in my view, was the finding that those who described themselves as “moderate,” rather than “liberal” or “conservative,” over-estimated their scientific knowledge or understanding regardless of whether they obtain most of their information from newspapers or online. I suspect a key reason for this is that people who regard themselves as “moderate” probably regard themselves as highly intelligent and even as superior. “Ordinary people,” they say to themselves, “are black and white. They are conformists who are either Republican or Democrat, but I am better than them. I am very sceptical and thoughtful; I do not fit into these simplistic categories and my opinions shift depending  on the context.” Research has found that moderates tend to see themselves as objective arbiters and some of them are even driven by a need to justify the system in which they find themselves.

The idea that people can rate themselves on a scale from extreme conservative to extreme liberal is an inherent problem with the GSS. Many people who might be regarded as “extreme” liberals or conservatives might not regard themselves as such and so wouldn’t rate themselves as such. I can imagine that a lot of “liberals” would rate themselves as “moderate,” at least in a society of liberal hegemony. It follows that what this study has probably found is that liberals over-estimate their scientific understanding compared to conservatives, which is much as we might expect.