Liberalism: New Arguments for the Original Position (part 3)

Politics for the New Dark Age offers a robust defense of a libertarian socialist approach to politics and governance, embedded in a liberal political and social framework. It explicitly makes use of social contract theory, a shared myth that all members of a society have an implicit agreement that establishes the ground rules for their future interaction. The social contract is of course only a thought experiment, but the fact that it's merely a convenient fiction is irrelevant if it is useful for ordering society. The 'veil of ignorance' is a particularly important element of Rawlsian liberalism. The veil provides a selective structure for social contract-based ideologies by specifying the process through which social rules can be considered just. 

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I showed that recent developments in both evolutionary psychology and evolutionary game theory offered new ways to justify the veil of ignorance story. Today's blog post will offer a third approach, borrowed from the related field of cultural evolution. 

The Imitation Game

In many evolutionary models, individual actors do not calculate their optimal strategies on the basis of observations about their surroundings, but instead employ heuristics by which they imitate the strategy of other agents. When individual learning is costly or error-prone, and the strategic environment is unpredictable, imitation offers an efficient, reliable way for individuals to do no worse than their contemporaries. Those interested in a fulsome (albeit lengthy) digression on the topic should read Richerson & Boyd's "Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution." While heuristically imitating others may not seem like it should lead to optimal social organisation, the discipline of cultural evolution argues that natural selection operates on strategies to increase the frequency of adaptive variants and decrease the prevalence of maladaptive ones, creating social equilibria which we call 'culture'.

But which heuristics do actual human beings employ? Game theory makes predictions about the general categories of decision-rule which produce cooperative equilibria, and fortunately we know from several decades of work in behaviourial economics and evolutionary psychology that humans do in fact possess biological biases which implement these rules. The simplest are kinship- and proximity- biases, through which an individual copies the behaviours of those genetically related to themselves or in close physical proximity. These rules are clearly important for animals and children, but aren't the whole story. If cultural evolution was restricted to tight kin-groups, behaviourial variation over time would be minimal: culture would be reliably replicated, but not very adaptive to changing circumstances or useful in organising large-scale societies.

Cultural transmission may also demonstrate two other biases: payoff-dependent bias (i.e: imitate the most successful strategy) and conformist bias (i.e: imitate the most frequent strategy). Frequency-dependent imitation, or "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" is a useful heuristic for most human societies: not only is conforming with the traditions of the majority likely to be adaptive in terms of environmental fitness, but non-conforming may signal belonging to an out-group and invite ostracism and punishment. Well known experiments by Stanley Milligram and Solomon Asch have demonstrated that we are a conformist species, although the conformist propensities of individuals of course vary and some of us are preferentially drawn to imitate less-frequent behaviour and desire non-conformity. 

Imitating more successful actors is also a useful learning heuristic, albeit a more complex one. On first blush, preferentially imitating strategies with the highest payoff is likely to lead those strategies to spread throughout a population, increasing the general welfare. But gathering information on payoffs is more difficult than one might think, particularly when it creates incentives for actors to provide false information about their payoffs. Do we imitate actors who were successful in the immediate past, or those whose ancestors have been succesful for generations?  Can we reliably remember and compare the reputations of thousands of people simultaneously (Dunbar's number suggest we can't), or should we rely on symbolic representations of success and status, such as ostentatious consumption or wealth? For this reason, payoff-biases are often conflated with prestige-biases: i.e. it's not objective measures of fitness which matter, but socially-constructed measures of prestige. 

Back to Rawls: The "Imitative Veil"

And that brings us back to our new formulation of Rawl's veil of ignorance: legitimate social rules, norms and institutions are those to which individuals would give their consent as if they did not know their own learning rule, or how possible learning rules are distributed in society once the veil is lifted. In other words, in designing the rules, norms and institutions of a liberal society, we must be blind to whether individuals preferentially copy the behaviours of their kin; or to what extent they demonstrate conformity with social rules; or the extent to which they prioritise individual learning over the instructions of those with a higher place in the social hierarchy. Social norms must be robust against the possibility of a population employing a different mixture of imitative rules, and should not privilege one set of rules over any other.

In Part 1 of this series, I argued that traits that were universally shared by all humans (such as the abhorrence of physical harm and the fairness bias) could be made subject to universal rules, but where individuals differ, Rawlsian rules must take those differences (such as regarding loyalty and respect for authority) into consideration. For for instance, if it turns out that we all preferentially copy the strategies of our close family, we might adopt universal norms that limit social intervention in early childhood but which counteract its potentially negative long-term effects, such as through universal public pre-school and primary education. 

Those who are familiar with Chapter I of my book, might now be able to see the shape of where I'm going with this. People may employ frequency-biases with varying levels of strength (either due to genetic, developmental of cultural variation): some might preferentially conform with the the prior behaviour of the majority (conservatives), others might be relatively more open to new cultural variants (progressives). People may also employ prestige biases in different ways: some will preferentially comply with the behaviours of high-status individuals (authoritarians), others will prefer self-discovery and individual learning (libertarians). Because the progressive-conservative and authoritarian-libertarian axes encompass normal individual variation in how individuals learn and adapt their behaviour, these axes are subject to political contestation in a democracy and not governed by universal philosophical principles. 

Built for speed, not for comfort

Boyd & Richerson make a further observation about the implications of imitative transmission for cultural evolution: there is a necessary trade-off between the efficiency of imitation and the vulnerability of a social system to exploitation by maladaptive or parasitic behaviourial variants. In other words, the less discerning we are about where we copy from, the more we are prone to error. The less information individuals collect about the relative fitness of potential strategies, the more likely it is that they will imitate a strategy that is not fitness-enhancing. Dawkins and the "new atheists" tend to see a great deal of culture, especially religion, as maladaptive variations that are parasites on our cultural capabilities. But this is an gross oversimplification. Firstly, it is extremely difficult to determine whether behaviour sets are actually adaptive or maladaptive. Secondly, the possibility of exploitation is a necessary trade-off for a cultural system that is capable of learning and adapting over human timescales. 

In Chapter IV of my book, I argue that there is a third important component of political personality: an individual's willingness to change and adapt their beliefs in light of changing circumstances. Although essentially speculative, I believe that an evolved capacity for cultural evolution might have created a psychological toolkit to make judgements about when to critically examine beliefs, and that that there is almost certainly likely to be (for biological, developmental and cultural reasons) a distribution of valid values that psychological trigger can be tuned to. To bring the discussion back to Rawls again, political systems (but especially democracies) should be blind to the possibility of variation in individual's willingness to compromise: they must be robust to the possibility of both centrist preferences and polarised politics. The corrollary of this, since I do so enjoy undermining centrists, is that techncratic centrism cannot be utilised as a universal principle of governance