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The differences between Right and Left can seem arbitrary. What, exactly, is the correlation between, for instance, believing in the right to bear arms, and opposing affirmative action? In his book A Conflict of Visions, Thomas Sowell explains that the seemingly random alignment of issues actually reflects two different views of human nature. Steven Pinker, in The Blank Slate, cogently summarizes the conservative "Tragic Vision" and the liberal "Utopian Vision" as follows:

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 quote is often attributed to the icon of 1960s liberalism, Robert F. Kennedy, but it was originally penned by the Fabian socialist George 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"). ...

In the Tragic Vision, our moral sentiments, no matter how beneficent, overlie a deeper bedrock of selfishness. That selfishness is not the cruelty or aggression of the psychopath, but a concern for our well-being that is so much a part of our makeup that we seldom reflect on it and would waste our time lamenting it or trying to erase it.

From this fundamental difference in how humans are viewed arises the entire panoply of policy choices that separate liberals from conservatives. Conservatives are inherently distrustful of human nature, and so they seek to limit, check, and balance power. They believe that humans are self-interested, and therefore applaud systems like the free market that rely on self-interest to achieve a common good. They believe that humans are limited in their wisdom and rationality, so they avoid systems that rely on "philosopher kings", such as command economies. They see war as a fundamental part of human history, and prepare for it.

Liberals, believing in the possibility of human perfection, seek to put those in place who are most perfect. They believe that enlightened men and women can put aside self-interest to achieve the common good, and disdain as vulgar systems like the free market, favoring command economies built to promote the common good. They see war as a problem that can be fixed through enlightenment, and seek to fix the problem.

What Sowell fails to argue, and that Steven Pinker begins to make the case for, is that these philosophical points of view are not on equal footing. That is to say: Whether the Tragic or Utopian view is correct is not a question of ethics, but a question of fact. To what extent does human nature exist, and to what extent can it be altered by culture?

The evidence at both the macro and micro level seems increasingly to point to the Tragic view as being empirically correct. At the macro level, societies that have strongly embraced the Utopian vision, including Revolutionary France, Communist Russia, and Maoist China, have ultimately yielded exactly the results that a Tragic conservative would argue - i.e. the revolutions have been seized by evildoers, and man has inflicted terrible violence upon other men. The utopia proves to be a dystopia. On the other hand, societies that have embraced the Tragic vision, such as 18th - 19th century Great Britain and the United States, have largely enjoyed growth and prosperity.

At the micro level, there is a growing body of evidence, most convincingly presented by Pinker but now appearing in other books, that human nature is real - that we are not "blank slates" - and that the quest to "perfect" man by changing his nature is doomed to failure. This latter discussion is anathema to the Left because to the extent human nature is real and invariant, it destroys the underpinnings of progressive philosophy. We thus see a hero of the Left, like Larry Summers, destroyed by merely bringing up the issue of whether there may be innate differences between men and women in the area of variance of mathematical intelligence. Likewise, theories of human biodiversity, genetic variance in IQ, natural differences in gender roles, and similar topics are politically untouchable, again because they are incompatible with the Utopian vision.

For those who would like to embrace the Utopian vision, the Tragic vision is depressing - it is, after all, Tragic. It would surely be a better world if humans were better than we are... but we are not. Margaret Thatcher once said, "the facts of life are conservative." How right she was.