Politics for the New Dark Age contends that the liberal social contract framework is universally applicable, even if it is not universally accepted. This goes for all variants of social contract liberalism, including socialism and capitalism. This is a controversial claim. The pretensions of an essentially Western philosophy to universality may seem paradoxical, given its roots in a particular historical and cultural context (Enlightenment Europe). Of course, no belief system is so ‘pure’: Western philosophy sojourned for a millennium in the Arab and Muslim world, and Christianity itself was an exotic import from the fringes of the Roman Empire which co-mingled its cultural teachings with a variety of other religious and political traditions along the way to dominating Europe.

The modern mind has a well-justified sense of scepticism towards utopias. The human quest for universal ethical systems has more often than not resulted in the widespread murder and enslavement of non-believers. But while universalist and utopian philosophies often overlap, they are not one and the same (utopias are subsets of universalisms). Whereas utopias rest on the enforcement of conformity, universalisms require only the promise of equal citizenship for all members of a community, regardless of race, sex, class or group identity. They carry a belief that other peoples and cultures regardless of their superficial differences can be brought together into the whole to form a society greater than the sum of its [diverse] parts.

Liberalism and Religion

Liberalism and the world’s great messianic religions are all universalist ideologies. They demand an absence of discrimination by adherents towards other adherents, and [in principle] reject hierarchial social norms that create differences between believers. They create systems of signals, rituals and trust that override the natural human tendency to be biased against out-groups on the basis of superficial differences such as skin colour or language. No ideology is perfect, of course. Universalisms have all been guilty of perpetuating racial caste, social-economic oppression, patriarchy and homophobia. Biases inherent in human nature are at best imperfectly suppressed by universal cultural constructs, not excised altogether.

As this Guardian piece articulates, liberalism has been responsible for great crimes against ‘other’ peoples and cultures, but also gave those peoples the tools to resist and claim equal rights. One could argue that the missionary religions (including Christianity and Islam) have experienced much the same. Universalist ideologies have become globally dominant because they offer everyone the possibility of enjoying full membership of a society, even if the practitioners of that ideology are often hypocritcal about to whom and how much equality is granted. And by allowing the creation of greater societies, they facilitate the large-scale social and economic organisation necessary to improve material standards of living.

Kiss it better

Universalist ideologies prosper the simpler they are. The easier it is for an ideology to incorporate cultural, linguistic and differences, and the fewer demands it makes of genetically pre-set behaviours, the easier it will enter new ecosystems or add new cultural groups to its base. Religions and ideologies mutate and adapt as they travel; the ideology that prospers the most is the easiest to understand in the widest variety of existing social contexts. Islam is considerably conceptually easier to understand and join than Christianity, which in turn is easier to understand and join than the exclusivist religions and cults that preceded it. Culturally exclusive beliefs and practices serve to bind groups together, creating markers of correlation that enabled group survival. But as the world shrinks and progress brings different societies in regular contact with one another new, more-relaxed norms are necessary to exploit the new possibilities of larger, richer and more diverse populations. The ethics that governs best are the ethics that governs least.

The advantage secular liberalism has over the world’s major religions is rooted in the fact that the social contract does not proscribe a universal common good but rather a process through which individuals with disagreements can argue yet remain bound by shared bonds of trust. Because religions concern themselves with ‘truth’, when people (inevitably) disagree on the nature of that truth or how it should be interpreted, they also create social divides and religious schisms that tear communities apart. Since liberal individualism makes the least demands upon its members, it has the easiest time incorporating individuals and groups that show considerable divergence from one another in belief and practices. Liberal institutions make together dynamic, learning societies where people can believe and act as they wish and yet still cooperate with other members of the community on the basis of mutual trust. 

Such an outcome was not inevitable. In the same way that evolution does not require that the strongest, smartest or best adapted species survive, it is not necessarily the case that the most universalist belief systems always prevails. India, for example, developed an easy-to-understand universalist belief system (Buddhism) during the Axial Age pre-BCE, but then reverted to a more complex and culturally contingent religion (Hinduism). Chinese philosophy, which shares many common themes with Western philosophy, has been able to spread widely in Asia but has not proved especially easy to translate beyond the Chinese cultural and linguistic world.

The Particularist Challenge

Human beings were successful because we are social generalists. Other hominids, including our Neanderthal and Denisovan cousins, were likely bigger, smarter or better adapted to their particular ecological niches. It was our capacity to be flexible, social and to adjust our behaviour as we learned that made us the dominant species on the planet, even as others prospered in their own narrower niche. The same sort of selection mechanism underlies the philosophical disagreement between universalisms and their opposite number: particularisms such as nationalism, racial and religious intolerance, cultural relativism, and Randian separatism. What particularisms have in common is the desire to preserve localised particularities with smaller but clearly defined memberships. In other words, smaller but more specialised societies with higher levels of in-group trust and much lower trust of out-groups.

Particularist strategies can never be as successful on as large as scale as universalisms which invite the membership of all. But that doesn’t mean they can’t survive, or even prosper, for a time. Isolated enclaves of repression and conformity, which strong in-group cooperation and strong out-group hostility, can do well if their specialised mode of organisation is effective for its local context. States like Sparta may have been strong, and respected, for their time. But in the end it was the League of Athens and the Roman and Persian Empires represented the future of humanity. Very few exclusivist social and religious communities survive over historic timescales, no matter how strong their warriors, how smart their scientists or how wise their leaders. Flexibility and dynamism will always do better in the long run, because change in the physical and social environment of a society is impossible to resist without increasingly totalitarian methods.