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birth and raised in different environments that found that about 40 percent of the variance in their religious attitudes was accounted for by their genes. These same studies also showed that about 40 percent of the variance in their political attitudes is due to inheritance.17 Of course, just like genes do not code for particular religious faiths, we don’t inherit political party affiliation directly. Instead, genes code for temperament and people tend to sort themselves into the left and right clusters of moral values based on their personality preferences, with liberals emphasizing the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity values and conservatives underscoring the in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity values. This would explain why people are so predictable in their beliefs on such a wide range of issues that are seemingly unconnected—why someone who believes that the government should stay out of the private bedroom nevertheless believes that the government should be deeply involved in private business; why someone who believes that taxes should be lowered nevertheless wants to spend heavily on military, police, and the judicial system.

In his book A Conflict of Visions, economist Thomas Sowell argued that these two clusters of moral values are intimately linked to the vision one holds about human nature, either as constrained (conservative) or unconstrained (liberal). He called these the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision. Sowell showed that controversies over a number of seemingly unrelated social issues such as taxes, welfare, Social Security, health care, criminal justice, and war repeatedly reveal a consistent ideological dividing line along these two conflicting visions. “If human options are not inherently constrained, then the presence of such repugnant and disastrous phenomena virtually cries out for explanation—and for solutions. But if the limitations and passions of man himself are at the heart of these painful phenomena, then what requires explanation are the ways in which they have been avoided or minimized.”

Which of these natures you believe is true will largely shape which solutions to social ills you think will be most effective. “In the unconstrained vision, there are no intractable reasons for social evils and therefore no reason why they cannot be solved, with sufficient moral commitment. But in the constrained vision, whatever artifices or strategies restrain or ameliorate inherent human evils will themselves have costs, some in the form of other social ills created by these civilizing institutions, so that all that is possible is a prudent trade-off.”

It’s not that conservatives think we’re evil and liberals believe we’re good. “Implicit in the unconstrained vision is the notion that the potential is very different from the actual, and that means exist to improve human nature toward its potential, or that such means can be evolved or discovered, so that man will do the right thing for the right reason, rather than for ulterior psychic or economic rewards,” Sowell elaborated. “Man is, in short, ‘perfectible’—meaning continually improvable rather than capable of actually reaching absolute perfection.”18

In his masterpiece analysis of human nature, The Blank Slate, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker relabeled these two visions the Tragic Vision and the Utopian Vision, and reconfigures them slightly:

The Utopian Vision seeks to articulate social goals and devise policies that target them directly: economic inequality is attacked in a war on poverty, pollution by environmental regulations, racial imbalances by preferences, carcinogens by bans on food additives. The Tragic Vision points to the self-interested motives of the people who would implement these policies—namely, the expansion of their bureaucratic fiefdoms—and to their ineptitude at anticipating the myriad consequences, especially when the social goals are pitted against millions of people pursuing their own interests.

The distinct left-right divide consistently cleaves the (respectively) Utopian Vision and