The politics of respectability

I try to stay out of discussions of trans-related issues, because it’s not my place, but also because most anti-trans or ‘gender critical’ arguments are shallow and bad faith – post-hoc rationalisations of bigotry. However, debates within the LGBT community are more interesting to me, because all the participants share an overlapping epistemic basis – they have experienced the same oppression, they share the same ‘lived experience’. So we come to a recent [unproductive] ‘debate’ on YouTube between, among others, Clara Sorrenti (a.k.a. keffals), a [controversial] transwoman and streamer, and Buck Angel, a [controversial] transman and well-known gender-critical conservative. In setting out his views (see below from 3:20), Angel essentially made two claims. Firstly, that social recognition of a non-cis gender identity should be contingent on putting in the effort to pass as a gender other than the one assigned at birth; to wit, Angel would use a male bathroom because over multiple decades he had extensively invested in ‘passing’ as a man. And secondly, that the thing that most alienated Angel and ‘ordinary people’ from the so-called trans movement was their authoritarian insistence on ‘compelling’ recognition of their gender identity.

Now, my first inclination was to dismiss all this out of hand. In the first instance, Angel is merely re-stating the well-trodden ‘transmedicalist’ position that what matters is ‘passing’ – that members of the trans community have to conform to stereotypes of the gender binary (to be more masculine than men, to be more feminine than women) in order to exist safely in mainstream society. And the accusation of leftist tyranny or illiberal progressivism is a veritably ancient right-wing canard at this point. But it occurs to me that in actuality these two arguments are the same argument. Moreover, this pattern of argumentation recurs over and over again throughout history – for example, among black communities in the US, among the indigenous community in Australia – and this recurrence of this divide among marginalised peoples reveals something interesting about how humans do politics. And perhaps in a contemporary Australian context, it might help illuminate why the indigenous community takes divergent views on a constitutional Voice, and why large chunks of potential voters find the prospect of a Voice referendum so off-putting.

Respectability Politics

To put it simply, Angel is arguing that recognition (of one’s gender identity) must be earned – mainly through compliance with social norms and expectations. And to put it somewhat uncharitably, progressives demand recognition of their identity, regardless of whether or not they comply with social expectations. It is fair and accurate to say that this dichotomy (spoiler alert, it’s false) is fundamental to the pursuit of social change. Even when progressive movements couch their demands in solid liberal terms of universal access to rights, much of the backlash against them comes from the centrist perception that to demand equality is somehow illegitimate. So, for example, large parts of the LGBT community believed that integrating into respectable society through adherence to monogamous models of marriage and family life were the key to acceptance; black conservatives think their community has to behave ‘respectably’ in order to cut down on police violence; and the modern welfare state makes recipients of state transfers demonstrate their ‘moral worthiness’ before providing them those critical economic supports necessary for their survival. In most cases, access to dignity is conceded upon performance of some ritual humiliation or submission – i.e. compliance with a social norm. For Angel, to demand equality on the other hand is to tacitly admit one has failed to earn it. Or to make an analogy, to ask for state support is to admit one has failed to earn a basic standard of living in the market; and to ask for cultural or linguistic diversity is to admit failure to integrate.

Now, one could argue that Angel’s argument – let’s call it the respectability position – is merely tactical. That members of oppressed minorities consider the most effective route to achieving political change and assess that social compliance is more likely to lead to the majority of the desired gains. And certainly, for trans individuals who can pass sufficiently well to go ‘stealth’, that may be true. But I don’t think that’s all that’s going on. The tactical explanation does not address why this is the dominant view of large swathes or non-minority populations – ranging from well-meaning cis liberals and centrists to right-wing libertarians and other persuadable groups with no stakes in reform. Respect for existing hierarchies is, after all, one of the foundational dimensions of human political personality. And individuals who lean more conservative on other issues are also more likely to adhere to the respectability position. In fact, the demand that liberal societies recognise the actual equal autonomy of all citizens to express themselves and be treated as full members of society regardless of their ethnic, religious, sexual or other status is in fact vanishingly rare.

I’m currently in the middle of researching my next project on the history of liberalism, so this pattern seems very familiar. There’s an inherent contradiction at the heart of liberalism, between it’s idealised expression of the universal equality of all mankind and the reality, which is that for almost the entirety of the liberal era some populations have been considered more equal than others. Thomas Jefferson, who famously wrote that ‘all men are created equal’, just as famously owned and abused slaves. But even beyond the individual hypocrites, just who is considered an ‘active citizen’, a member of the political community deserving of respect, and who forms part of the masses to be governed (‘passive citizens’) has long been contested. The history of progress is by-and-large a history of expanding the conception of what it means to be human. And a core part of that has been moving beyond mere legal or symbolic equality to ensure in Elizabeth Anderson’s phrase, equality of dignity. That includes, of course, the right to be heard and have one’s conception of self recognised as legitimate. By denying marginalised groups their own culture or individuals their right to self-actualisation, liberals require assimilation into the status quo prior to granting recognition of others as full citizens. This contradiction has been the motor driving social reform, while laying a seed of resentful instability that can germinate into fascism.

Recognition must be given – or taken

So here’s why the divide between earning and demanding rights is something of a false one. In both cases, recognition must ultimately be given by someone with power to someone without. I am not enough of a liberal to believe that rights have a transcendent quality that pre-exist social relationships – recognition and substantiation of rights requires collective, social action. Ultimately, respectability politics of the type advocated for by Buck Angel, or Thomas Sowell, or Noel Pearson, doesn’t work because the position of a plurality of opponents is driven by base disgust and fear of loss – particularly, an irrational fear of a relative loss of social position. Most gender-critical men and women will never tolerate trans people – not even within the prescribed margins tacitly conceded by the transmedicalists – because they view the existence of any trans person at all as a threat, driven by feelings of personal disgust, confusion and rejection. As keffals points out, throughout history minority groups have been met with both public and private violence, legal suppression and harassment. American conservatives have basically already conceded that bills banning trans healthcare for minors, or to ban trans individuals from sport etc., are the thin end of the wedge towards their complete removal from public existence. Out of sight, out of mind.  

But it’s not enough to merely demand recognition, either. And doing so, as we have seen, may alienate those liberals and centrists who resent any expectation that they have to act to improve society somewhat. The notion that they cannot be existentially secure in their [undeserved] social position until and unless marginalised people are also secure is a truth that threatens the very core of their immense self-regard. Until and unless minority groups have the power and organisation to take recognition by force – to seize influence over key institutions and win rights on their own terms – that recognition will continue to be withheld. And in all honesty, the trans community – and indigenous peoples here in Australia – probably lack the sheer numbers to prevail in that kind of political fight. I’m not saying don’t do it. Pressure needs to be exerted from all directions and coercion is an essential part of building any social norm. But galling as it may be, progress will probably be won when the vast body of self-satisfied liberals deign to grant recognition of minority rights ‘as a gift’. The act of charitable giving re-enforces the centrist’s own sense of moral superiority and generosity. So there must be a fine balance between bullying and cajoling; a battered liberal will just as easily become a fascist.

Politics as charity

Does this carry any relevance for the referendum campaign for a Voice for indigenous Australians? I’m on the record as supporting the Voice proposal as a route to political representation, but I’m afraid that the mood of the public is souring and the window to make a make a positive case for constitutional change is narrowing. But the motivation of the Voice’s non-indigenous but well-meaning supporters appears to be not constitutional re-design but recognition of colonised peoples as full citizens. For liberals, the symbolism of the Voice - including their ‘recognition’ in the constitution - is the point; it will cost the centre nothing in real terms. So I think the Prime Minister’s messaging about relying on Australians’ ‘best qualities’ is probably his best saving throw at this point. The referendum will get up if and only if the government is able to convince sufficient voters that they’re good enough people to make the most minor of symbolic concessions to a historically marginalised group of people, whose land and culture we stole. Some might think that’s an easy victory; for me, it appears to sit on a knife’s edge. The politics of this kind of political charity may be frustrating and insulting to genuine leftists - we don’t beg - but fortunately, it’s a skill at which most high-status liberals excel.

On Human Nature

Pandemic notwithstanding, my second book “Evolutionary Politics” will hopefully be published this year. Tackling the topic of sociobiology - in other words, the natural origins of social behaviour - from a leftist perspective seems likely to generate few sympathetic readings. For right-wing and centrist critics of the left, to talk about ‘human nature’ at all is to reveal the hopelessly naive, hopelessly wrong, or hopelessly authoritarian nature of the left. Perhaps as a response to this, to talk of ‘human nature’ on the left is to be seen as a hopeless cynic, an essentiallist or determinist.

Few interactions in which Marx and human nature are on the table can be productive, in my experience, because of the dominant practice in western thought is the categorization of the essential quality of things. How, after all, are we taught what a thing is? We might begin with anecdotal oberservations of an object, and use inductive reasoning to abstract some essential quality which is shared by all the objects of that category we have observed (most chairs have four legs, for example). Much of pre-modern philosophy was constructed this way. Scientific empiricism does not, in general, deviate much from this approach, supplanting imperfect anecdote with rigorous data collection, statistical methods and probabilistic inference. But the core metaphysical practice is the same - to construct an ideal category of thing (‘chairs’) which explains something useful about the members of that category.

What both many self-described Marxists and their critics fail to recognise is that Marx was first and foremost a philosopher - he only became an economist later in life - and that his work is actually embedded in a different kind of thought process. Marx never talks about a fixed ‘human nature’, but rather of ‘Gattungswesen’ or ‘species-being’. What is to be human therefore, is embedded in human life, activity and interaction: “The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity”. Or, as the sixth thesis on Feuerbach puts it, “The essence of man is . . .an ensemble of social relations’”. Like Hegel, Heraclitus and the process philosophers, Marx inverts the standard Western metaphysics. Rather than defining categories of things and studying the relations between those categories, we define the interactions and study things as the product of their interaction. A ‘chair’, in in other words, is anything used by humans for sitting.

This is something that the panpsychics and other big-brain wannabe physicists repeatedly fail to understand about themselves. One of the most common complaints about the Standard Model of physics is that it doesn’t tell us anything about what the fundamental particles ‘are’. We can describe their interactions in great deal, but for western metaphysicians the point particle is a singularity about which we still know knowing. Contemporary physics describes a gloriously complex universe made of overlapping fields and tensions, forces and probabilities criss-crossing physical space like waves on the ocean. Particles are merely objects defined by the interactions of these fields. Philosophically, or scientifically, there is nothing more we could or should want to know about them than that.

Evolutionary sociology for Marxists

I intensely dislike the work of the Australian philosopher Peter Singer. I am frequently apalled by by lack of restraint on his utilitiarianism; I disagree with the way that he cloaks himself in the banner of animal rights to claim himself a progressive; and believe the outcome of his views are deeply reactionary. Singer’s 1999 pamplet, “A Darwinian Left” is referenced in my forthcoming book, but it stands as a warning of the wrong way to approach sociobiology. Singer argues for an intrinsic human nature which is fundamentally at odds with most of progressive theory and practice. Like Dawkins, the best Singer can find in nature is kin selection, which he argues explains some parochial forms of altruism towards our friends and family while undermining any universalist liberal pretensions. “Evolutionary Politics”, if nothing else, will offer an extended rebuttal of this line of thinking.

Evolutionary biologists do not think, or write, like Peter Singer. Evolutionary systems are characterised by the three processes of generalised Darwinism: variation, selection and (self-)replication. A population displays variation when every otherwise equivalent agent in that population possesses some property (s) which causes measurably (or ‘phenotypically’) different interactions with the agent’s environment. Every fundamental particle, for example, has identical physical properties and will interact with physical forces in an identical manner. Even molecules as large as proteins have consistent and predictable chemical properties. However, complex polymers (including DNA) can have variable properties while remaining chemically similar enough to treat as a population of interacting agents of a single type .

Selection is any process by which an agent in a population with property (s) receives a second property (u() which we call fitness, as a result of an interaction. Fitness can represent any property or payoff, so long as it’s acted upon by the third process (replication). Fitness can be almost any measurable quantity, defined in any direction: it may represent abstract utility, attractiveness, repulsiveness, warmth, chilliness, income, wealth, poverty, proximity to the colour ‘blue’, or degree of aural distinguishability from the sound of a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner. In other words, the variability of the property (s) generates differential fitness (u). Lastly, replication is any process which relates the frequency of agents with the property (s) at time t + 1 to their fitness (u) at time t. While many chemical and nuclear reactions differentially produce output products, only a tiny subset of reactions maintain or increase the population of interacting agents. Auto-catalytic or self-replicating populations that also demonstrate variation constitute the complex system we label ‘life’.

The correct leftist understanding of sociobiology is therefore simple. ‘Human nature’ is simply any social behaviour which is generated from a natural, evolutionary process. Humans, as a species, evolved through natural (and cultural) selection, and therefore our ‘essence’ or species-being is as things adapted through that evolutionary process. As my second book will explain, that means both that the idea of a fixed human nature is untenable - what is adaptive in any given context will depend on the composition of a species’ population and its environment - but also that the potential for both cooperation and competition must be seen as part of what it means to be human. This is because both competitive and cooperative strategies can be evolutionary stable under the conditions of natural selection. Progressives are not, as Steven Pinker likes to claim, ‘blank slatists’. We merely reject the idea that empirical observation of human behaviour, no matter how rigorous, can tell us what it means to be human without an understanding of the complex causes (in Niko Tinbergen’s sense) that led to that behaviour.

The Marxist ‘New Man’

Over the decades following his death, Marx’s adage that human nature was determined by the totality of his [sic] social relations, morphed into the the ideal of the ‘New Soviet Man’, which continues to figure largely in the popular caricature of leftism. Many leftist thinkers, including most notably Gramsci, described convincingly how human social relations were produced by their need to support a society’s mode of economic production, and that the entirety of social relations were configured around the needs of capital. The leftist sociological critique of capitalism is perhaps, its greatest and most enduring intellectual contribution. But the idea that changing the mode of production by giving more control to workers would produce a ‘New Soviet Man’ of superior moral character is a bastardization of that theory. The ‘New Man’ is one consequence of changes in the social base, not the goal in and of itself.

Marxism is not a theory of individual morality. Leftists are not trying to produce better people; and any self-described communist who claims that as their aim is not a leftist. We do not believe that moral actions are a consequence of innate virtue, rather, moral actions are a consequence of moral social structures. The desire to discipline individuals is reactionary and conservative, not progressive. Confusing this distinction leads to Stalinist authoritarianism, and the critique of it from liberals. Human behaviour is a product of social relations and that as those relations change human behaviour will change without state interference. The desire to create of moral individuals is utopianism, and modern leftists should want no part in it.

Yet it is a vast oversimplification to reduce the Marxist contribution to a question of economic determinism. There is more to being human than mode of production - Marx and Engels were deeply, if passingly, also interested in the question of social reproduction. In this way, we can see how leftism and sociobiology are fundamentally compatible, rather than antagonistic, social theories. Social behaviour is in part the product of a species which has been subject to the forces of evolution. And it is also the product of economic relations, which vary from place to place and time to time but which share some transhistorial and transcultural commonalities. These two sets of relations define the broad contours of human nature. The force that bridges the gap between nature and economics is culture, which evolves in its own right and as a superstructure on top of a society’s economic base.

A new way forward

The same perspectice can be applied to any aspect of human behaviour. Thinking in terms of processes, and not categories, we recognise that it would be wrong to define ‘man’ or ‘woman’ in terms of some essential category, or catalogue those traits - good or bad - which we imagine to be possessed by some ethnic groups and not others. Instead, gender can only be understood as a relationship - an interaction which defines genders in terms of relations of oppression and subordination - which we label patriarchy. By the same token, we cannot understand ‘whiteness’ until we realise that it is defined in terms of its relationship with the ‘Other’. Ollie from Philosophy Tube has recently addressed precisely this point.

Similarly, we cannot and should not imagine that ‘rascism’, ‘misogyny’, ‘homophobia’ or ‘transphobia’ are innate, fixed traits. Generally, every member in good standing of a liberal society possesses a mental model of a person who is a ‘rascist’ or ‘sexist’ etc. We construct these categories on the basis of the observation of common traits - often traits that are communicated via the media rather than through direct observation. So a rascist is a person who uses certain taboo words or phrases, for examples, or a sexist is a person who sexually harassess and belittles women, and a homophobe is a person who engages in violence against sexual minorities. But when progressives talk about rascism, misogyny or homophobia we are talking about systems of interaction - no person ‘is’ a rascist, essentially; rather, we note that their behaviour reproduces a pattern of interaction between dominant and subaltern groups that affirms and reproduces those relations. The good news, as with evolutionary sociology and historial materialism, is that none of these traits are fixed and will adapt themselves to changing patterns of social relations, which we can influence through other means.

Finally, we would be remiss if we did not apply the same way of thinking to ourselves. No activist, no politician, ‘is’ a progressive merely by some feature of their essential identity (I’m looking at you Elizabeth Warren, Anthony Albanese etc). Rather, progressive is as progressive does - a left-wing activist or politician challenges, critiques and reforms systems of power. Any politician who does not behave in this way - who through their actons reifies inequality and unjustified hierarchies, is not a progressive, regardless of how they may think of themselves, or be measured in academic journals. In the all-too-common reduction of progressive politics to the collection of essential identity categories - a gay mayor! a black president! a female CEO! - we witness the end of the left as a dynamic historical force.

The Culture War is about Liberalism

One of the frames I employ in my first book, “Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder” is the [not original] hypothesis that there’s a statistical correlation between progressive economic values and libertarian social views, and a corresponding correlation between conservatism and authoritarianism. So, at least in the modern Anglo-Saxon social equilibrium, an economic progressive is more likely than not to also be socially liberal, and a laissez-faire capitalist is more likely than not to be socially conservative. I suggest that this correlation is driven by the question of interpersonal trust: progressives believe that other people will look out for both their own best interests and the those of others.

But correlation is not deterministic, so there’ll be a significant minority of voters on the Left who are economically progressive but socially conservative, and a significant minority of voters on the Right who are ‘fiscally conservative’ but socially liberal. In order to win a majority, each side’s base (i.e. the economic and social progressives vs the economic and social conservatives) must cobble together a coalition from the minority factions - so both the Left and Right aim to sway a mix of working-class conservatives and socially liberal capitalists. Since the 1980s, the global Right has won this battle overall - in my view, largely because parties of the centre Left gave up on offering genuine economic alternative. We’ll return to the question of who really ‘won’ the neoliberal era later.

The Stupidpol Nexus

I’ve been reading [the late] Mark Fisher lately, as well as a little bit of Zizek. Both are cynical philosophers, deeply critical of capitalism. Their work represents the kind of writing that could inspire a movement like “Occupy Wall Street” but not offer a blueprint for the future. Today’s Left is a lot more optimistic about the potential for transformative economic change. Both Fisher and Zizek, though, sometimes let their critique of neoliberal capitalism seague into a critique of the liberal project more broadly. Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle” is one of the seminal texts of what later became the anti-Identity Politics Left and Zizek has been such an effective foil against the Intellectual Dark Web-types largely because he’s a quasi-Marxist who agrees with their some of their criticisms of feminism, queer theory and immigration.

As I’ve written before, the correct Left take on identity politics is that we like it, but recognise that it doesn’t offer a blueprint for meaningful structural change. It’s a tool for perfecting liberalism, not transforming it.

Which brings us to the inspiration for this week’s blog, the 100th episode of the “Red Scare” podcast, guest starring Angela Nagle. I don’t normally listen to Red Scare for reasons I’ll explain shortly, but horrifying prospect of Sailor Socialism and Nagle offering an unfiltered look into the minds of anti-IdPol Left was too fascinating to pass up. Red Scare is a dirtbag left-adjacent podcast whose co-hosts flirt openly with the ‘Strasserite’ label. Nagle, who rose to fame as one of the foremost experts on the online extreme right, has in recent years raised questions about how must sympathy she has for her subjects, and provoked firestorms with takes such as “The Left Case Against Open Borders” which openly employed right-wing anti-immigration narratives [Zizek loved it]. Both are rapidly pro-Bernie, but largely for the same reasons the liberal-Left hate him: his understatement of race and gender issues, scepticism about open borders and opposition to US foreign policy.

Even knowing what I was getting myself into, I was appalled. Egging each other on, the episode was shockingly reactionary. Flirting ironically [or not so ironically?] with ‘national socialism’, openly contemptuous of both political correctness and cosmopolitanism, Nagle and the hosts openly praised communitarian philosophy (and leaders such as Brazil’s Bolsonaro) in opposition to an ethic of individual freedom. Red Scare’s central thesis is not just that liberal identity politics is philosophically and political weak, but that it is actually harmful [to the left]. One could make the argument they mean this tactically (as in: “we need to win back white working-class men”) - but I suspect Nagle at least sees liberalism as actualy corrosive to her idea of society, which may be socialist but is definitely communitarian and exclusionary. In this, the progressivism that Nagle represents is far closer to the European Left as embodied by people like Melenchon, who combine radical politics with a hefty dose of cultural chauvinism.

It’s for this this reason that the r/stupidpol crowd often find itself agreeing with the ‘anti-SJW’ Right. The centre-Right are so incapable of agreeing to any socialist policies that Nagle and the views she represents seem like a revelation. But to the smarter neo-Nazis, such as Richard Spencer and Matthew Heimbach, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson, they represent an opportunity. True fascists have no compunction against economic resdistribution, so long as it favours their chosen in-group. What matters to fascists is destroying liberalism - with its emphasis on personal freedoms, its open and multicultural societies and social experimentation. And in the communitarian Left, they see willing accomplicies in achieving this goal.

The New Right crumbles

Coincidentally, I’ve also become aware of an emerging culture war split on the American Right, as embodied by the David French v Sohrab Ahmari debate. I don’t pretend to even remotely follow right-wing discourse and everything I know about the situation comes from summaries by other writers. In essence, there seems to be a sense that William Buckley’s New Right coalition of the pro-capitalist and socially conservative wings of the Right is coming under strain [we saw some analogies to this in Australia under the recent troubled Prime Ministerships of Tony Abbot and Malcolm Turnbull]. Despite the manifest success of this electoral strategy, there seems to be a growing view from the Right’s socially and economically conservative base that they no longer need the neoliberal/libertarian technocrats in suits - that, coupled with the populist [Trumpian] outreach to the socially conservative working class, a permanent socially reactionary majority is attainable.

In this, the hard Right has the same complaint about their alliance with right-wing liberals that the anti-IdPol Left has about their alliance with left-wing liberals. For social conservatives, pro-market liberalism is not just a philosophically and politically weak movement, but is actually harmful [to the right] and their desired society. And they have a point. “Woke Capitalism” may be dysfunctional and inegalitarian, but it‘s proved more than willing to accommodate movements for social change that don’t challenge capitalism, to integrate and even cater to minority populations, and to prioritise the interests of capital when it comes to migration over any communitarian concerns about social and cultural cohesion. Rather than seeing the last forty years as a history of unparalleled right-wing political dominance, the far right sees a series of cultural setbacks (particularly on gay rights and women’s reproductive freedom). Liberal political values of secularism and cultural pluralism are a meaningful roadblock to the communitarian kind of societies they want to build. Of course, they’re deluded - abortion is on the chopping bloc in the US and not as secure elsewhere as we might like, and the backlash against feminism and queer movements remains vicious and culturally powerful. But that’s their theory.

Liberal Socialism

Here then, is my central thesis. As I began at the top of this bog, dominant political coalitions tend to bring in at least some of the minority perspective of the other side. For the hard Right, the bipartisan coalition between laissez-faire economics, social progressivism and social conservatism incudes too many social progressives for their liking. For the Left, the coalition between social progressives of all stripes, economic justice and neoliberalism has included far too much accommodation of the neoliberal perspective. The very coalitions each side needs to win power include sufficient moderating forces to prevent them from becoming entirely hegemonic.

In other words, the Culture War that is consuming the intra-factional politics of both Left and Right is about how each side should adopt and incorporate elements of the liberal political and social programme, which at least in the modern era is the hegemonic, centrist status quo against which other ideologies contend. My own position on this is clear: socialism is the natural heir and development of classical liberalism and the libertarian Marxist tradition’s emphasis on both political and economic freedom and self-development is the obvious next step in human cultural evolution. Stripped of its commitment to bourgeois liberal values, socialism has historically become extremely communitarian, rigid and dare I say Stalinist. In other words, I am a firm proponent of the alliance between social progressives and egalitarians of all stripes.

I also think it’s in the Left’s best interest to encourage and widen the split between cultural conservatives and economic liberals. We already see the foundations of this in Europe and Australia, when the pro-business Greens and pro-gay marriage Liberals constitute a genuine political threat to the conservative heartland - which in turn in moving in an ever-more populist direction. The worst possible thing the broader left could do in response to these trends is to jump exclusively on the cultural bandwagon, and become committed to urban, white-collar liberalism. Our commitment to social justice is secondary to our commitment to structural economic change and we have to make sure we win back the working class vote. In doing so, the Left’s base has to be bridge-builders not mere followers - convincing working class conservatives that social liberalism poses no threat to them if it also secures the material basis of their their way of life, and urban liberals that higher taxes and economic redistribution is the only route to action on climate change and true personal freedom.

Utilitarianism, Intersectionality and Epistemic Injustice

I’ll be talking about my first book, “Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder” at the New International Book Store (NIBS) at Trade’s Hall in Melbourne at 7pm on Tuesday 2 April 2019. If you’d like to come and hear me speak about how we got here and where we go next, check out NIBS’ Facebook page here. Hope to see people there!

In Chapter IV of my book, “Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder”, I diagnose the inherent authoritarianism of the technocratic, utilitarian mindset thus:

“Authoritarians believe their actions are for the good of all, as they see it. Anyone who [believes] that people should behave in certain ways or that their answer to a social problem is the right answer for all people is acting in an authoritarian mode; as is anyone that attempts to limit personal choice – even ‘wrong’ choices. Authoritarians are motivated by a desire to prevent unfavourable outcomes, including (or especially) outcomes that will primarily affect others. . . . An authoritarian world view is often synonymous with . . . .[u]tilitarianism, [which] as a philosophy or system of ethics, reduces politics to the actions of an idealised dictator who weighs up the balance of interests of society and makes decisions as if those interests were his own.”

Utilitarian calculus inherently relies on a universal accounting of interests and preferences - or more realistically, a process of deciding which interests and preferences are really important and those that aren’t. Oddly enough, it often turns out that the interests that utilitarians value serve the purposes of the powerful and the wealthy, and the link between technocratic impulses and authoritarianism and hierarchy has been a consistent theme of my writing.

I’ve also tried, over the last eighteen months on this blog, to come to an understanding of the politics of identity, solidarity and recognition - a topic I explicitly avoid in the book. In that self-examination, the strongest endorsement I could offer to Kimberle Crenshaw’s concept of ‘intersectionality’ is that it represents good progressive tactics. Useful, in other words, but temporary. Necessary, but not sufficient. As I write in the “Introduction” to the book, “[O]nce victories have been secured . . .there’s no guarantee that every minority voter will remain a leftist. Indeed, there is a very good reason to assume the exact opposite: that minority communities contain approximately the same distribution of political beliefs as the rest of society.”

This blog is yet another effort to correct and improve upon that record. I’ve come to the conclusion that my dismissal of utilitarianism already includes within it the philosophical case for intersectionality and the equalisation of subjective epistemology (i.e. personal ways of knowing). This conclusion is of vital importance to the modern left, because pretensions of utilitarian universalism and the rejection of the subjective experience and axieties of the working class, women, racial minorities and especially trans individuals are the sina qua non of the modern ‘classical liberal’, i.e. devotees of the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW).

Epistemic Injustice

Steven Pinker has been at it again this week, this time [where else?] on the pages of Quillette offering a defence of his most recent book, “Enlightenment Now”. Pinker’s descent into to “house wonk” status amongst the IDW has been inevitable for sometime now, and in this article his prejudices are in full force - alongside his otherwise excellent prose. Between essentially conceding the point that his book is not actually about the real historical enlightenment (but rather Pinker’s idealised notion of it), and repeated bizarre Rousseau bashing (which he seems to have possibly picked up via Hannah Arendt), Pinker devotes most of the article, and I presume his book [full disclosure: I haven’t read it] to proving that the subjective experience of poor or declining quality of life is untrue, and that empirically human life is improving. To the extent that people disagree, it’s either because of their irrational biases, ignorance, or the unequal distribution of knowledge.

Pinker’s data project has obvious strengths and weaknesses, and I’m not here to challenge it on those terms. Rather I take aim at the technocratic epistemological worldview of which he is a part: that happiness can be measured, that experts and think tanks agree on how to measure it, and that this elite consensus on the meaning of happiness is the only basis on which we could, or should, make public policy. Pinker’s style of thinking is typical of right-wing liberalism in all its positive and negative manifestations. It’s good to believe, as Enlightenment thinkers largely did, that we can improve the world through reason. But reason also serves to justify privilege. Why not support the slave trade (like Locke and Jefferson) since it objectively improved welfare, as least as far as it could be measured in the 18th century? And why believe women’s experiences about #metoo when, objectively speaking, women have never had it better in the workplace? Why believe African-Americans who tell us they experience systematic harassment and discrimination in their everyday lives, when the data shows they’ve never been better off? And perhaps most tellingly of all, why believe trans people about their experience of gender dysphoria when science says there are only two sexes and transgenderism is a mental disorder?

As should be clear by now, the worldview which Pinker and the IDW represent is one which systematically devalues the knowledge and experience of those not in positions of power and authority. Not only is the testimony of minority groups systematically discounted, but those groups do not have access to the same tools of influence and persuasion to make their case even if they were potentially going to be listened to. The English philosopher Miranda Fricker has in recent years termed the phrase “epistemic injustice” to describe this phenomenon, and it’s certainly a framework that was being made growing use of in academia during my recent studies in Switzerland. Epistemic injustice is simply the observation that knowledge - and perhaps more importantly, ways of knowing - are not equally distributed in society and that some viewpoints, such as Pinker’s, are systematically privileged by the current structure of power.

Utiliarianism is Epistemic Injustice

Intersectionality, then, in the sense of listening to and taking as authoritative others’ subjective experience of their own social position and resisting the temptation to impose our own knowledge and narratives on their lives, is the first step towards remedying epistemic injustice. It’s not a total solution of course - no permanent social change can be effected solely at the level of the individual and insisting that it can be serves only to demoralise people who can’t perform perfectly (i.e. everyone). Just as individual awareness of our impact on the environment will hopefully form the basis for structural economic change to fight climate change, so to can intersectional personal interactions lay the groundwork for structural political change that ends the unequal distribution of knowledge.

My book offers a robust defense of the democratic form of socialism in particular because I am firmly of the view that democracy is deeply under threat from the liberal technocrats who claim to be it’s champion. I’ve written before that right-wing liberals have a long history of distrust of popular democracy, and if democracy [in the abstract] is to mean anything at all, it is that the people most affected by group decisions should participate in the making of that decision. Liberal technocrats distrust real democracy because at their core they do not believe that real groups of people possess sufficient knowledge to make decisions in their own self-interest. Sure, an idealised Republic of white, male philosophers might all be able to deliberate together and agree on the ‘right’ thing to do, but the degree of social inclusion or material redistribution required to extend the right of democratic deliberation to everyone is unworkable, undesirable - and consensus may be impossible even on those terms.

Utilitarian public policy making, therefore, is inherently unjust from an epistemic viewpoint. Who gets access to knowledge about the world, whose experiences matter, and who possess the social capital to make their case most persuasively - these are questions whose answers are not distributed fairly. The only solution to this unfair epistemology, as with all things, is socialised democracy. Real democracy - in which everyone regardless of their socio-economic status, gender identity, ethnic or religious background gets to meaningfully participate in the public decisions that affect their interests as they themselves define those interests. The first step is always going to be getting recognised as a group of individual that has a stake. Now, I’m no utopian. No society is ever going to deliver on a perfectly equally distribution of knowledge. But like all aspects of the socialist project, I’m confident in saying that we can do better than we are right now, and we know what direction to start the journey in.

The Politics of Recognition, a Second Look

In anticipation of this blog's imminent one year anniversary, I've been looking over my older posts to see what, if anything, I might do differently twelve months later. In particular, the piece "Identity Politics, a Second Look", which was conceived at the height of the Bernie Bro v Hillarycrat post-election acrimony, caught my eye. It's one of the more popular and controversial older posts (with >100 views), and I stand by its conclusions: intersectionality, as a practice, is vital and necessary but pure identarianism is both illiberal and undemocratic and is correctly disavowed by everyone to the right of "dictatorship of the proletariat" communists and to the left of ethnic supremacists. However, today's I'm going to offer a refinement of part of my earlier analysis that I now feel was undercooked. 

The Politics of Difference

In short, I was too dismissive and imprecise in the central part of the analysis regarding the liberal version of identity politics. By this I meant redistribution policies predicated on the demonstration of significant statistical differences in outcomes for socially defined groups of people, for example: the underrepresentation of women and other minorities in positions of political and corporate authority. In this form, identity politics or the politics of difference is  consistent with both the liberal universalist tradition and limited redistributionary policy aims. To summarise: if all citizens are equal in formal opportunity, then measurable group-level differences in outcome must have a hidden or informal cause. We can argue about what those causes are, and what mix of redistribution or prevention is best to prevent those differences from recurring, but the acknowledgement of structural-level privilege and oppression, whether it's called the patriarchy, structural racism or the capitalist mode of production, is the sine qua non of left-of-centre politics (and its denial the sina qua non of right-of-centre politics).

The struggle for LGBT rights is the most salient example, here, because it's so fresh in the memory of most people. The lifting of legal prohibitions on homosexuality and the granting of marriage equality sees LGBT people treated equality before the law, but outcomes for LGBT people remain challenging in many areas: LGBT individuals are more likely to be living in poverty, to be victims of violence, and to self-harm. The job of activists, at least in the West, will likely change from a fight for recognition to fighting for policies to remedy these persistent economic, cultural and historical patterns of disadvantage, so long as they persist. In much the same way as legal equality for women left the greater work of challenging the second-class status of women undone, and the dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the United States kept the economic structure of African-American disadvantage intact, all movements transition eventually from fighting for equal recognition to fighting for equal distribution. 

As a socialist, I see the politics of difference as necessary but insufficient. Discovering LGBT individuals or ethnic minorities have a greater than expected chance of living in poverty is important, but it doesn't answer the question of why *anyone* is living in poverty. Any measurement of structural disadvantage for particular sub-populations takes as an implicit reference point the status quo division of resources. The politics of difference is relational, not absolute: we can say that the relative deprivation of minorities is unjust, but liberal identity politics lack a framework to critique the justice of the entire social order. Without linking these individual struggles together to see the bigger picture, we risk leaving an otherwise unjust system intact or, worse, setting it as our explicit goal! 

From Distribution to Recognition

Already, however, I have made a distinction between struggles for equal recognition and struggles for equal opportunity. Logically, the former must precede the latter. A person must be recognised by others as a social subject, entitled to equal regard by both the law and other citizens, before the conditions of equal opportunity laid out in the liberal social contract can be tested and remedied. This excellent explainer video by Ollie at PhilosophyTube sets out the argument and its origin in Hegel. Achieving recognition as a social subject is not only a feature of liberal societies: expansionary empires with religious characteristics typically regard their 'heathen' colonial subjects as less than human. It's only after colonial subjects convert to the faith of their colonizer that they win some level of minimal social status. 

Liberalism played this role for the European colonial empires, at least in their later stage. It justified, for the conquerors, the overthrow of "pre-modern" societies but it in turn provided tools for colonised people to re-claim recognition from their oppressors. By fighting for acknowledgement of their dignity as equal human subjects, Gandhi, Nkrumah and the other products of a colonial education re-established the sovereignty of their peoples in terms recognised, albeit begrudgingly, by the imperial centers (It goes without saying that colonialism and the denial of their common humanity was unjust from the outset). But the winning of recognition, of sovereignty, did not redress the vast material inequality of social outcomes between newly liberated states and the metropolitan powers. 

Charles Taylor, the communitarian philosopher, coined this version of the politics of recognition in a 1994 article. I'm not a fan of Taylor or his work in general, but this aspect of it is so widely referenced that it deserves discussion. Taylor recognised that an individual's identity is not somehow intrinsic to themselves but rather worked out through dialogue with others, and that therefore our sense of ourselves is defined relationally. The denial of this mutual recognition generates harm to oneself and one's sense of identity, which for a social species like humans leads to a wide variety of destructive behaviours and outcomes. Kant, Rawls and the other social-contract liberals have transformed this philosophical or psychological need into a universal principle: dignity under liberalism means that, prior to any other consideration, we enter into a society on the basis of the mutual recognition of each other's shared humanity. 

Not Just One or the Other

Prior to any engagement as political subjects of a liberal democracy on matters of distributional justice a marginalised group must therefore fight for recognition of its dignity: it must win legal equality for its members and the right to have rights, free of discrimination. But while equal recognition and material equality are distinct components of justice, they are not entirely separate ones. Denial of recognition generates material inequality, and sufficiently severe levels of substantive inequality may constitute an de facto denial of equal dignity. Dignity is not an absolute category, but rather relative to the dignity afforded to other members of society. 

In Chapters VIII and IX of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder", I argue that a similar distinction lies at the explanatory heart of the difference between poverty and inequality. Poverty, like dignity, is often articulated in terms of the absolute denial of an individual's rights, whereas equality is relative to a society's overall level of affluence. But, as I argue in the book, poverty is also relative. What constitutes the denial of an adequate education, housing or standard of medical care can only be defined with reference to what is broadly possible in a given social and economic context. Poverty can exist by chance in even relatively egalitarian societies, but poverty becomes structural under conditions of high inequality. I wish I could claim credit for this argument about the twin bases of injustice, but I've learned subsequently that it's also the view of American feminist and philosopher Nancy Fraser. 

So too with dignity and recognition: if the material conditions under which a group is disadvantaged are so severe that their deprivation is not even acknowledged to be unjust by society as a whole, then they are not being afforded equal dignity. For example, while indigenous groups mostly enjoy equal citizenship in settler states, their social and material conditions are often so poor that it's easy to argue that the colonial society does not recognise them as equal human subjects. So too when the West granted women the right to vote, but continued to control and limit their sexuality and to grant spouses violent dominion over the household: it's straightforward to argue that under those conditions society had not fully acknowledged the status of women to be equal with that of men. Dismantling slavery was a win for African-Americans, but Black Lives Matter argues that disproportional state violence demonstrates that their community is still not being treated as equal social subjects. 

To wrap up, if I was re-writing my earlier piece on identity politics today, I'd hold on to my critique of the politics of difference as providing an insufficient critique of structural inequality. However, where inequality of outcomes is so severe as to represent a de facto denial of a group's equal citizenship, or where that denial of equal dignity is established by law and norms, I think both affected groups and supportive allies have a responsibility to put higher priority on redressing their alienation from the social contract.