The Left has been fighting human nature for more than 200 years. Human nature keeps winning. You would think by now somebody might have noticed.

I was reminded of this while reading Roni Fouks, who writes Human Nature, where she looks at politics and society through psychology, philosophy, biology, and evolution.

Fouks makes a point that deserves far more attention than it gets.

The great divide between Left and Right isn’t really about tax rates, welfare payments, or who happens to occupy the White House. Those are the arguments we have because of a much deeper disagreement about what human beings actually are.

The conservative starts with people as he finds them. The Left starts with people as it would like them to be.

Human beings are generous and selfish, kind and cruel, hardworking and bone idle. We compete, cooperate, envy, love, hate, accumulate, and squander. We care more about our children than somebody else’s children. We form families, tribes, and nations. We seek status. We respond to incentives. We don’t particularly like being told what to do, while being rather fond of telling other people what to do. None of this is conservative ideology. It is what humans have been doing since we climbed down from the trees.

Thomas Sowell gave this divide a more respectable name in A Conflict of Visions. He described the ‘constrained’ and ‘unconstrained’ visions of humanity.

The constrained view accepts that human beings have characteristics and limitations politics cannot eliminate. The unconstrained view places far greater faith in our ability to improve people by changing the society around them.

Sowell obviously put it more elegantly, but I prefer the simpler version.

Conservatives don’t expect politicians to fix human nature. The Left does.

And that explains why so much modern progressive thinking requires somebody else to be responsible when human beings behave badly or produce outcomes the Left doesn’t like.

Greed becomes capitalism. Crime becomes disadvantage. Differences between men and women become social conditioning. Educational failure becomes systemic inequality. Racial disparities become systemic racism. Almost anything will do except the deeply unfashionable suggestion that individuals have agency, make choices, possess different abilities and sometimes bugger things up all by themselves.

There is a reason the word ‘systemic’ has become so popular. Once you make the system responsible for human behaviour, you give yourself permission to redesign the system. And once you decide the system must be redesigned, you need somebody powerful enough to do the redesigning.

Strangely enough, that somebody is nearly always government, advised by the very people who discovered the systemic problem in the first place.

The 20th Century showed us where the extreme version can lead. Marxism wasn’t merely an economic theory about who owned the factory. It rested on the belief that changing material conditions could ultimately change humanity itself.

The Soviets had a go. Mao had a go. Pol Pot took the idea to its murderous conclusion.

Unfortunately, the new human being stubbornly refused to arrive. People didn’t stop wanting wealth when private property disappeared. Ambition didn’t disappear; it moved into the Communist Party. Hierarchy wasn’t abolished; the people who promised to abolish it moved to the top of a new one. Somehow the classless society always managed to find a ruling class.

Capitalism, by contrast, commits what the Left regards as the unforgivable sin of taking people roughly as they are. It doesn’t require the butcher to love me before he sells me a steak. He wants my money and I want his steak, and somehow civilisation struggles on.

Adam Smith understood this centuries ago. Markets don’t abolish self-interest; they harness it.

Constitutional government works on much the same principle. Checks and balances exist because politicians cannot be trusted indefinitely with unlimited power. Free speech exists because nobody should be trusted to decide what everybody else may say. The rule of law exists because powerful people need restraining. These institutions aren’t based on a sunny view of humanity. They survived because experience taught us what happens without them.

The modern Left has, thankfully, stopped promising Soviet Man, but the instinct to remake society hasn’t disappeared. It has simply moved from the factory floor into the culture.

Much of what previous generations regarded as ordinary human nature is now explained as a social construct. Sex differences, gender roles, family structures, national identity, standards of behaviour, even merit itself can be presented as products of systems that need dismantling. If society constructed all these things, society can presumably construct something else. And suddenly we require school curricula to correct children’s attitudes, corporate programs to correct employees’ unconscious biases, government departments to correct language, and universities to protect adults from ideas they might find upsetting.

We have reached the extraordinary point where biological reality itself can be expected to make concessions to political fashion. Apparently reality hasn’t kept up with the times.

It is on equality, though, that the collision with human nature becomes impossible to hide. Equality before the law was one of the great achievements of Western Civilisation. Then equality before the law became equality of opportunity, also a worthy ambition.

But equal opportunity produced an inconvenient result: unequal outcomes.

People given freedom didn’t all make the same choices. Some worked longer hours. Some took bigger risks. Some were more talented. Some wanted money, others wanted time. Some started businesses and became rich. Others preferred a secure job and a quiet life. Some studied engineering while others studied subjects that mysteriously failed to produce engineering salaries. This should surprise nobody who has ever met more than two people.

Yet the modern progressive Left increasingly treats unequal outcomes themselves as evidence that something is wrong.

If men and women are represented differently in an occupation, discrimination is suspected. If ethnic groups achieve different academic results, the education system comes under suspicion. If one demographic earns more than another, the gap becomes proof of injustice.

It rarely seems to occur to our social engineers that different people, given freedom, will make different choices and therefore end up in different places.

And here is the bit we don’t talk about nearly enough: you cannot have both complete freedom and equal outcomes. Free people inevitably produce inequality because free people are not identical. If government insists on equalising the result, eventually it must interfere with the freedom that produced it.

Equality of outcome ultimately requires coercion.

Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral psychology helps explain why arguing about this has become so difficult. His work found that liberals tended to put particularly heavy emphasis on care and fairness, while conservatives drew more evenly on those concerns alongside loyalty, authority, and sanctity. That distinction is useful because compassion has increasingly become the trump card of progressive politics.

Question unrestricted immigration and you don’t care about refugees. Question welfare dependency and you don’t care about the poor. Suggest criminals might bear some responsibility for committing crimes and you lack empathy. Question whether every racial disparity proves racism and, well, we know where that conversation usually ends.

This is also where feelings have started to trump facts.

Not everyone on the Left has lost their senses, obviously, but the direction is unmistakable. We increasingly hear that somebody’s ‘lived experience’ carries a truth of its own. Words can constitute violence. Disagreement can make spaces unsafe. Objective facts can be treated as offensive if they conflict with identity or emotional wellbeing.

Somewhere we moved from the perfectly decent proposition that people’s feelings matter to the much more dangerous proposition that feelings determine what is true.

They don’t.

Facts can be unpleasant, unfair, insensitive, and downright inconvenient. They remain facts. Gravity doesn’t care how I identify, and my bathroom scales have proved remarkably resistant to my lived experience.

This is why I find the conservative view of humanity not pessimistic but sensible.

Conservatism doesn’t require perfect people. It doesn’t even expect particularly good ones. It asks how we build a society in which ordinary, flawed, occasionally selfish people can rub along without killing each other.

Families matter because governments cannot manufacture love and obligation.

Communities matter because belonging is part of human nature.

Borders matter because a nation that owes exactly the same obligation to everyone owes a particular obligation to no one.

Markets matter because incentives work whether economists approve of them or not.

Free speech matters because nobody remains permanently in charge of the censor’s pencil.

Tradition matters because sometimes the irritating custom inherited from our grandparents exists for a reason we discover only after throwing it away.

None of this means nothing should change. That is the caricature the Left likes to make of conservatism because it saves having to engage with it. Western societies abolished slavery, extended the franchise, dismantled racial laws and corrected all manner of injustices. A civilisation can change enormously without pretending it can reinvent the people living in it. There is a profound difference between removing an injustice and declaring war on reality. The first is civilisation doing what civilisation should do. The second is utopia, and utopia has an appalling historical record.

That is ultimately why Fouks’s argument about human nature matters. Beneath so many of today’s battles over race, sex, crime, inequality, immigration, and identity lies the same old disagreement. The modern Left still seems convinced that when human behaviour produces the wrong result, the structures around humanity must be changed until the correct result appears. Conservatives have learned a rather different lesson from history. Change laws when they are unjust. Change institutions when they fail. Change governments when they become useless. But be very careful of anybody promising to change human beings.

The Left has been trying that for a very long time.

It has changed the vocabulary, changed the villains and changed the banners. What it hasn’t managed to change is us.

My money remains on the humans.