This originated as a more thoughtful take, but I've been ruminating over a quote doing the rounds on twitter: "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." The quote reportedly adorned the Facebook page of Heather Heyer, the 32-year old activist who was murdered this weekend in Charlottesville by a neo-Nazi. Sometimes outrage is a useful emotion to motivate us to action, and oppose that which must be opposed. So, here's take number two. 

Societies are learning systems. By maintaining a healthy diversity of opinions and behaviours, which almost every non-totalitarian society must, they’re capable of generating endogenous novelty and internal dynamism. Trial-and-error experimentation offers both adaptability to changes in environmental or strategic conditions, and a capacity for a long-term improvement in the material and social condition of the members of that society. Learning systems operate by establishing implicit and explicit norms and expectations about behaviour over time. A lazy fallacy that some anthropolists and sociologists fall into, however, is to assume that if a norm or behaviour exists it must be adaptive and beneficial. This is in fact the key hypothesis of conservatism: the extant rules and norms that govern a society must be preserved. 

Beyond 'naive adaptionism', we can recognise that evolution is a messy watchmaker, and that the Platonic ideal of a perfectly adapted organism is a myth. As the subjects of evolutionary selection and replication, social norms and practices may be adaptive or maladaptive.  But they could equally be adapted for a different context to the one in which a society presently finds itself (and thus vestigial); non-adaptive but nonharmful; or a ‘spandrel’, i.e. a practice which may evolved by chance that appears functional but whose origin is in fact coincidental. 

Evolution and conflict

Joshua Greene’s ‘Tragedy of Common Sense Morality’ (see here for an overview) posits that open societies are faced with the challenge of making decisions in a context in which different groups in a society operate according to different decision-making rules or ethics. My own book, Politics for the New Dark Age posits that conceptual differences are an inevitable feature of all societies due to genetic, cultural and developmental influences on individual neural development (in other words, that differences within groups are bigger than differences between them). Either way, we will certainly encounter over the courses of our lives beliefs, views and practices that appear alien or repulsive to our personal beliefs. 

The purpose of this blog is to ask when we, as political animals, encounter such challenges to our personal beliefs, how can we determine whether (in simple terms) the other behaviour or rules is adaptive or harmless and should be preserved or maladaptive and should be excised? In other words, when do we organise for activism within the context of a democratic society and when do we start punching Nazis in the face?

For starters, it’s certainly possible, and in fact likely, that a given ethic (including your own) may be maladaptive if it did ever take over the population entirely, but that in a mixed society and in lower proportion, it can and should continue to exist as part of an equilibrium balance. The only way to be certain is to put one’s finger on the scale and see what happens. So my advice is always to fight the hardest you can for what you believe in within the context of an ongoing social system and let the system sort it out. If you follow the rules and win, you get to shape the distribution of norms and behaviours of society according to your preferences. 

Not all ideological conflict, however, obeys the comparatively civilised norms of a democracy. As Chapter IV of my book argues, social separatism, revolutionary terror and “politicide” – the violent extermination of political enemies – have historically resulted when political actors  choose to act outside of democratic politics to resolve their inter-group aggression. Such acts inevitably arise from those with authoritarian personalities who desire total decision dominance over all other social actors. The wrong way to pursue change -  the revolutionary way - is to try to break the ongoing social system so as to achieve permanent decision dominance over others by excluding alternative world views. Such behaviours may be adaptive for their proponents, but are parasitic and destructive for the social organism as a whole. They are literally the social equivalent of cancer: selfish organs reproducing wildly and causing the body as a whole to die. 

Social Change and the Media

I suspect that a key historical contingency leading to such revolutionary and society-destroying attitudes is the spread of new forms of media and information technology. Major periods of political and social instability tend to correspond with the spread of new media technologies: the printing press was instrumental in the Wars of Religion, the radio to the World Wars and 20th century genocides, and now social media to the political disruption of the early 21st century. What these technologies share is a quantitative escalation in the amount of information available to leaders and citizens, and how quickly it can be delivered, in ways that appear to dramatically escalate the costs of maladaptions. I see it as inevitable that the initial period of any new period of media technology should see an uptick in ideological difference, with the concomitant risk of real, disruptive conflict.

Of course, one of the ways in which sudden access to new information leads to poor social outcome is by paralysing the decision-making capabilities of leaders and institutions who were socialised to operate in a lower-information environment. Uncertain about what or who to believe and how the new media will respond to their actions, politicians can become either unable to act, or driven to extremes as they overcorrect in response to the new signals they are received. 

The other way in which media incites conflict is by making citizens more aware of differences among themselves that were previously hidden. For example, different social classes become more likely to encounter ‘how the other half live’, religious systems are likely to be exposed to greater scrutiny and differing cultural practices which were previously geographically remote will seem very near indeed. Twitter and other social platforms have become such outrage machines (on both the right and left) because we are no longer able to discriminate between in-group and out-group behaviour. New media increases the likelihood that we have a dyadic encounter with ‘the other’, and without learned social norms to regulate such encounters both sides will likely "defect" from continued social interaction.

Drop out or plug in?

The wrong way to respond this New Dark Age is to try to erect walls between ideological groups and ideas, privileging existing prejudices and beliefs and hoping that we can go back to the good old days when we didn’t need to interact with those people. This parochial instinct for order fuels the right-wing nationalist’s ridiculous ideas on racial and religious separatism. But it also, I believe, lies behind some nanny state, authoritarian tendencies within the left. 

The instinct to retreat into comfortable ideological bubbles, where everyone agrees with one another, is  the very definition of conservatism. Ecological preservation of regressive ideas and ideologies, by creating an environment in which they are immune from exposure to critical or contrasting views, inhibits cultural progress. Mono-cultures that cannot withstand regular contact with mutant competitors are fragile; diversified cultures are adaptable and robust. Specialisation leads to extinction. Some conservatives on the right are always going to be comfortable with that. The left should not be.

In the long run, I am a firm believer that the same information technology that brings new awareness of difference also operates in the longer run to forge new, inclusive communities and identities. Cultural norms and practices that are genuinely maladaptive will die off in favour of strategies that deliver better payoffs. A mixed cultural equilibria will shift until a new stable arrangement is found. Through a process of repeated interaction, new community norms are forged that, even if they do not lead to agreement, create to a modus vivendi or agreed terms on which the debate is to be conducted. Some of those norms, particularly against ideological cancers such as fascism and nationalism, will have to enforced by speech and deeds that demonstrate they are not to be imitated. So long as brave people like Heather Heyer are willing to act in favour of their democracy, I have confidence it will prevail.