Myths of the Old Order: The Kirk/Spock Dialectic and Toxic Rationality

Nerd culture is ascendant: video games are mainstream entertainment; bland superhero movies top the box office with depressing regularity; and everyone binge-watches TV in order to earn social capital and remain part of the cultural elite. But nerd culture is also fundamentally broken: an ageing generation reacts with rage to almost every attempt to modernise their childhood myths, and yet can't but help but reproduce them through its social behaviour. As I've written before, the counter-culture of yesterday is becoming the hegemonic conservative culture of tomorrow, and that transition is fraught with danger for women and other minorities that were historically marginalised within that culture. The modern white, male 30- or 40-something sees their cultural ascendency as a triumph over the stultifying, Cold War environment of their childhood, and has difficulty seeing themself as subjects of critique. 

The Kirk/Spock Dialectic

To my mind, the Kirk/Spock dialectic is one of the foundational archetypes of nerd culture and at the root of one of its most toxic aspects. In the original Star Trek, the hot-headed cowboy Captain Kirk is defined by his humanity: confident, suave and capable of violence at a moment's notice, he represents the archetypal masculine hero of the mid-20th century. But for the nerds his First Officer, the half-Vulcan Spock, is the protagonist of the narrative: an outsider in the human-dominated Federation, he struggles to suppress his own emotions and solves problems using logic, reason and utilitarian calculus. Speaking as a member the nerd demographic, I can attest that the Spock archetype came to embody the ideal of masculinity for multiple generations of scientists, engineers, wonks and other social outcasts. And it was by-and-large a successful ideal: Gates, Jobs and Musk are the protagonists of the popular age, the Iowa farmboys of the American mid-west relics of a by-gone era. 

The Kirk/Spock archetype dates from the sixties, but became culturally fixed because it suited the times. When the world poised on the edge of an irrational nuclear holocaust, the logical cool of the negotiator offered hope for the future of humanity. The "Next Generation" doubled down on the Kirk/Spock structure, with the erudite Captain Picard working in partnership with the android Data, whose literal incapacity to experience emotion made him the vital point-of-view character for many people with autism and autism-like personalities. As the Soviet Union disintegrated in the 1990s, and with seemingly incomprehensible ethnic and religious rivalries tearing societies apart, Data and Spock were role models of emotionless and disinterested technocratic expertise. The last of the original Star Trek films, the excellent "Undiscovered Country" makes this explicit with Spock the peace-maker convincing the Cold Warrior Kirk (who at one points literally shakes with grief and vengeance over the death of his son) to give peace a chance and save the Klingons from extinction.  

Toxic Rationality

Nerd culture, or 'wonk culture' if we're describing the variant that actually holds power, is not unemotional: in fact, it is often hyper-emotional when activated by a backlash bias towards those that challenge their social position. But it does prize rationality above perhaps all other values. We are a generation of critics, who can't simply say that we like or dislike a cultural product (or policy or social outcome) but must articulate the reasons why. Statistics and data are valued; subjective experiences and empathy are devalued. We can blame the technocratic utilitarianism of neoliberalism for this, in part, and we can also blame the values of the patriarchy - which teaches men, and particularly men in positions of authority, to distrust and suppress their emotions. But the Spock (and/or Data) character provides the role archetype that I believe a culturally significant group of smart, perhaps well-meaning men, are subconciously performing and reproducing because at the time they grew up the rationalist hero was the man they desired to be. 

My book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder" is in part a critique of the privileging of supposedly neutral logical of utilitarianism in the public sphere. The policy wonks and elites of my generation - the Obama-types, the centrists and neoliberals - do certainly offer an improved quality of governance over some of the alternatives and the world is certainly a better place because of it. But their instinctual distrust of emotion, including the dismissal of the rage and loss felt by those that have been made worse off by their policies and their inability to offer a positive, hopeful vision of the future of society, has led them to a political cul-de-sac and is arguably contributing to the fraying of liberal democratic societies. There are many (many!) good reasons to oppose Trump, but the way he makes his supporters *feel* positive and energised must be acknowledged as potent political technique.

The sceptical culture of the internet has birthed multiple manifestations of this cult of rationality, including the New Atheism movement, the so-called rationalist/effective altruist community and the Intellectual Dark Web. But all too often this is rationality without a moral compass: it's no coincidence that the same communities have become a treadmill pushing people towards Islamophobia, opposition to trans rights (muh chromosomes!), outright racism (the "human biodiversity" crowd) and the privileging of pseudo-scientism as an explanation of inequality rather than the real culprit (y'know: the capitalist order). The Kirk/Spock dialectic has produced a generation of wannabe Spocks who don't know how to govern real people and on a deep level don't want to. Ironically, this is because it was the underdog Spock they most empathised with as children, rather than the bullying Captain Kirk. But they've got it wrong. Spock is not the hero of the Original Series: the Federation is - a society that creates room for both Spock and Kirk to co-exist in leadership. 

Re-Discovering the Social Emotions

What fans tend to forget is that the Original Series is based around a leadership triad, not a duo: Doctor McCoy is the emotional and empathetic heart of the system, the balance to the hyper-rationality of Spock and the dominance drive of Captain Kirk. The Original Series makes it clear that heroic actions result when all three perspectives are taken into account; it's to the Abrams reboot's great discredit that this dynamic is wholly absent. Hell, multiple Star Trek films were devoted to the lesson that the needs of the one can outweigh the needs of the many, yet this lesson is anathema to the modern Spock archetype. The Southern gentleman McCoy represents the other-regarding outlook of traditional societies, and this might explain why it's a perspective that is devalued by an increasingly elite community that sees empathy (and demands for empathy) as a archaic characteristic of alien 'others'. The New Generation didn't help in this regard by making the McCoy archetype a female alien whose empathy was a literal superpower; Counsellor Troi was a neat concept whose character development and depth was sacrificed to focus on the Picard/Data dyad. 

What the cult of rationality misses, in its blanket dismissal of emotion, is that many emotions are a positive force in people's lives and that other-regarding preferences are actually necessary to make cooperative societies sustainable. One of the key insights of evolutionary game theory is that self-regarding rationality alone is insufficient to sustain large scale societies: emotions are not vestigial organs that lead to adverse results in modern conditions, as the Santa Barbara-style evolutionary psychologists believe, but refined tools that make it easier for humans to act in ways that maintain the integrity of their communities. Daniel Kahnemann and Johnathan Haidt are right in at least this sense: rationality is a better tool for post hoc justification of our actions than an a priori generator of moral behaviour.  So today we see rationality offered up as an exculpatory excuse for abhorrent opinions and social policies. 

It's ironic, then, that the most recent Star Trek Series ("Discovery") has received a fan backlash because to my mind it actually gets this right. In a fascinating reversal of the situation in "Undiscovered Country", the season one finale of Discovery has the Vulcans (in fact, Spock's father) and Starfleet willing to commit genocide against the Klingons in order to contain them as a threat, and it's up to the human character, who was raised by Vulcans, to reject that sort of utilitarian calculus and advocate the heroic position of hope and trust in the future. It's probably indicative of the times that the protagonist (Burnham) is both female and non-white, but the message would be and should be the same regardless of the character's identity. The writers of Discovery recognise, in a way that perhaps the writers of the Next Generation didn't appreciate, that emotion and empathy can have both positive and negative aspects, and that the privileging of rationality as paramount value lead to a society that can be morally monstrous. As a society, we need irrational optimism to survive and thrive. 

The colour analogy

In this 'dark age' of intense political and ideological contestation, it's inevitable that some people should express (again) a strong desire for universal ’truth’ in social and political life. Genuine ideologues are immune to such concerns: for us, discourses create narratives for our moral instincts and power is the explanatory variable which mediates between ideas and reality.

Centrists also have moral intuitions but often appear to lack confidence that the narrative justifications for their instincts provide sufficient epistemological certainty. Such 'skeptics' dismiss ideology as a social contruct unsuitable for ethical inquiry, but often end up replacing it with appeals to authority and nature in the form of scientism or 'realism'. Not all centrists are skeptics in this definition: many are ideological utilitarians who believe they can calculate optimum social outcomes. But in philosophical terms, the so-called skeptics argue that certain kinds of intuitions (i.e. their own) have ethical consequences because they can be demonstrated scientifically. 

This appeal to the empirical comes at a potentially dangerous time for the infant sciences of evolutionary sociology and psychology. For the first time, the social and biological sciences can offer coherent accounts of the origins and evolution of human culture. While the default philosophical position is that natural facts do not create moral ones, this distinction may be break down when culture is (correctly) understood as part of, rather than distinct from, the natural world. And it should worry the left that right-leaning centrists have noticed and begun to mis-apply cultural evolution to discredit and devalue other positions. To my mind, such people oversimplify the complex implications of cultural evolutionary theory, and in particular the idea of gene-culture co-evolution. This blog attempts to correct those misconceptions, and it does so using a device I'm rather fond of: the colour analogy. 

The colour analogy

The electromagetic spectrum is continuous and infinite; light can possess almost any wavelength and no wavelength is particularly differentiated from any other. Out of this infinite variety, we can think of the visible spectrum as those wavelengths which convery potentially useful information on a planet like Earth, which is composed of certain elements at certain temperatures. What this implies is that it's useful for agents to know, for example, that most plants are 'green'; but linguistic colour categories ike red, blue and green are arbitrary linguistic constructs with no basis in physics. Firstly, since wavelengths are continuous, where we draw dividing lines between categories is completely random (or so it seems). And secondly, we have no way of guaranteeing that two agents see a colour distinction in the same place. We can agree that a plant is the same colour, but experience that colour in relation to others completely differently.

For the sake of the further analogy, consider light's wavelength a natural, scientific fact and subjective categorisation of that colour (a cultural construct) as their social construction of its meaning. 

For a long time in the twentieth century, this insight was the central underpinning of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the idea that language categories were essentially arbitrary, and moreover these arbitrary categorical differences altered how individuals perceived the world. Anthropologists showed how different cultures described and experience colour in vastly different ways, and historians also noted the relatively paucity of words and concepts describing colour in the ancient world. This was a view of culture and language at home with the then-dominant 'blank slate' thesis of human psychology and the strict separation enforced between biology and culture in the aftermath of the discrediting of Social Darwinism. 

Yet in 1969 (and in continuing work since), Berlin & Kay showed that there was an underlying pattern to all this diversity. Colour terms did not emerge randomly, but appeared to follow patterns that the researchers believed corresponded with economic and social development. First, a society distinguished between light and dark, then red, then yellow and green, then blue, then brown, and finally orange, purple and grey. There were exceptions within this pattern, of course: some variation caused by randomness, others by specific adaption to particular ecologies. But on the whole, Berlin & Key had discovered that colour terms evolved in a common way amongst humans, suggesting an underlying structural pattern. The following explainer from Vox does the topic some justice:

In fact, this universality amongst the human experience of colour may be hard-wired into our biology. Like all Old World primates, but unlike most mammals, humans are trichomats - with three types of colour receptors in our visual system attuned to short- (blue), medium (green), and long- (yellow-red) wavelengths. It would uncontroversial to assert that the particular combination of visual receptors found in our biology are the product of adaption to the natural environment through natural selection: being a trichromat at these wavelengths conveys an evolutionary advantage (in the form of electromagnetic data) at acceptable cost. Similarly, it should be uncontroversial to state that the way we use and analyse that data socially is subject to selection effects based on whether our categorisations of colour convey socially and environmentally useful information at acceptable cost. 

Gene-culture coevolution contains both these premises, but also something extra: the types of colour category that can emerge culturally are constrained by our common biological inheritance (and vice-versa). In other words, cultural variation and adaption is not infinite, but shaped by genetic factors common to all homo sapiens - cultural evolution is path dependent and part of that path is a universal biological inheritance. Any human society, pre-loaded with red, green and blue colour visual receptors and operating in an Earth-like natural environment will develop colour terms in a (relatively) predictable fashion depending on its level of social complexity. The same is true of all culture: tolerable variations in behaviour must be suited to a bipedal, social animal with consistent biological needs such as food, water and shelter.

Sex and Gender

Let's consider what these insights mean for social policy, choosing an example with clear biological and cultural elements. Opponents of so-called 'gender ideology', a.k.a. the completely obvious conclusion that sex and gender are different things and gender is socially constructed, argue that biological categoriesof sex create an inarguable moral case against culturally recognising non-binary genders. Yet sex, like light wavelength, is not a strictly binominal category: biological sex is made up of a number of different indicators (i.e. reproductive role, secondary sexual characteristics etc) each of which in turn encloses some degree of variation. When these variances are given weights and summed for a species like humans that reproduces sexually, we would likely see two clusters of sexual characteristics with distinct statistical peaks but some variation and potential for overlap. Not a binary, but bimodal. 

Scientists can treat these clusters of biological averages as distinct 'sexes', and we can think of our day-to-day ability to distinguish between them our 'sex receptors'. While gender roles are a social construct, evidence that even very young children are sensitive to sex differences in adults suggests that there is at least some part of our developmental biology that is tuned to probabilistically distinguish sex categories. Thus, most (but far from all) human societies have developed binary gender roles because the cultural evolution of gender is influenced (but not dictated) by sexual dimorphism. But what's important is that there is clearly no barrier to recognising additional gender(role)s or different ones or none altogether - plenty of cultures have done so.  As societies become more open and tolerant of individual self-expression and definition, we can and should re-examine our existing social categories of gender and be more tolerant of categorical innovation. This really isn't that hard! 

Moral Colours

So let's bring this back to moral philosophy. I've mentioned Jon Haidt, his Moral Foundations Theory, and my problems with both him and it before. Haidt is becoming something of a guru to centre-rightists and 'classical liberals', but I feel this is because he has drawn the wrong ethical conclusions from his own research (a risk for any scientist). To summarize briefly, Haidt and his collaborators posit that humans are equipped with modular cognitive capabilities relating to ethical and social reasoning. The most well-studied of which are our aversion to physical harm (i.e. 'care'); our biases towards fair outcomes (or 'proportionality'); mechanisms for resolving stresses caused by social hierarchy (i.e. 'loyalty'); a slider for resolving the Omninove's Dilemma (i.e. 'openness to experience'); and a sensor to avoid potentially harmful substances (disgust or 'sanctity'). All of these biological modules make sense for a social species operating in a potentially hostile environment, and can be demonstrated in human populations of all levels of social organisation. 

Where Santa Barbara-style evolutionary psychologists, Haidt and their respective followers go wrong, however, is to leap immediately from these universal biological constraints to ethical rules, without considering culture or evolutionary history as intermediary variables. They believe, like sex-essentialists, that science has provided them with universal and objective 'truths' that can and should form the basis for universal ethical philosophy. Because Popperian science provides standards of falsifiability and objectivity, they believe their ethical conclusions are superior to conventional philosophy and ideologies. But all they have done is cloak their naive intuitionism with a naturalist fallacy.

The correct response to such claims is not to keep human culture and ethics separate from biology, but to understand that biological and cultural evolution both partially (and validly) contribute to social norms and practices. In other words, we can accept Haidt's claim that certain moral instincts (with both genetic and environment-driven variability) are universal to the human species. But we must also recognise that these merely weight the sorts of cultural systems humans can develop and do not determine them. In philosophical terms, our evolved intuitions may provide a useful short-hand way of resolving simple ethical questions, but complex societies require more complex and nuanced rules. Cultural rules and norms must always contend with these intuitions and biases (as the behaviourial economists believe), but they work together as often as against one another. Whether genes and culture are complementary or antagonistic depends on the types of social problem a society is trying to solve. 

As is common with sorts of enquiry, it turns out that complex philosophical and ethical problems don't actually have simple solutions. Reasonable people can and will disagree about what the categories of 'right' and 'wrong' include, in much the same way as we might disagree on distinguishing 'purple', 'magenta' and 'mauve'. While evolutionary science may be putting the intuitive case on firmer foundations, a full appreciation of cultural evolution must also recognise and knowledge that ideologies and culture are no less adapted to solving the sorts of social problems we face as a society.

The left and body sanctity

The central conceit of Politics for the New Dark Age is its rejection of a universal understanding of human nature. I posit that societies exist in evolutionary stable equilibria consisting of a mix of different personality types and that politics can largely be understood as a mechanism to generate dynamism and progress from the conflict between them. The rejection of universal rationality makes some uncomfortable; nowadays, I tend to point people with concerns towards Joshua Greene’s “Moral Tribes”, and Johnathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind”, both of which do a great job of introducing this concept to a general audience from positions of expertise in psychology. 

I have responded to Greene elsewhere; today’s blog will speculatively tackle one aspect of Haidt’s Moral Foundation theory. To re-summarise, Haidt posits that individuals have multiple moral system, some of which progressives and conservatives share (care/prevention of harm and fairness), and some of which they don’t (loyalty and respect for authority). I have argued elsewhere that politically salient personality cleavages (authoritarianism v libertarianism, progressive v conservative) can be understood as reflecting where these moral systems disagree, and that universal liberal social contract norms can be understood as reflecting where they converge.

The problem with sanctity

But where does Haidt's fifth category (‘sanctity’) fit into this scheme? Haidt himself often seems unsure, despite the central role it comes to assume for him in explaining the differences between progressives and conservatives. What is sanctity? From a biological perspective, sanctity simply reflects our innate avoidance of disgusting things, primarily as it relates to food, sex, and hygiene. The existence of such a mechanism makes evolutionary sense, as does its repurposing as part of a cultural mechanism. Rotten food tastes bad and you probably shouldn’t eat it. But beyond that, many cultures have complex food laws and rituals which embody local knowledge and expertise about food sources where the danger or opportunity is not intuitively obvious to individuals. Because moral systems create motivated action, the adaptive salience of such a mechanism is intuitively obvious.

Haidt claims that sanctity is of higher importance to conservatives than progressives. Conservatives tend to be obsessed with [sexual] purity, and a desire for cleanliness and order are important components of the conscientiousness trait which underlies political authoritarianism. And because the purpose of disgust is to motivate action, disgust and excitement are often strongly interlinked in human behaviour. Thus, it’s a cliché that many conservative figures who decry certain sexual practices in public find them exciting in private. We are aroused by moral violations, and that arousal sometimes finds expression in paradoxical ways.

Not just conservatives

What interests me, however, are manifestations of the sanctity trigger on the left. Unlike what Haidt believes, when you scratch the surface even just a little you find they’re widespread. Anti-vaccination paranoia is not merely a result of lack of education by fringe right-wingers, it’s also widespread amongst highly educated and socially-conscious people who are genuinely disgusted by the thought of injecting 'diseases' or 'chemicals' into their or their children’s body. Whether its concerns about ‘toxins’ in food, anti-GMO hysteria,  helicopter parenting, or a desire to consume only free-range eggs, some progressive stereotypes do in fact seem highly concerned with body sanctity. So what causes this? Is it yet more evidence for the so-called ‘quadratic hypothesis’, the mistaken theory that the far-left and far-right are fundamentally similar?

There was an interesting piece in the Atlantic in February which examined the issue. Concern about food sanctity, dietician Michelle Allison argues, is a manifestation of the existential fear of death (which also strongly motivates much political behaviour). Biologically, we are torn between “our desire to try new foods (neophilia) paired with our inherited fear of unknown foods (neophobia) that could turn out to be toxic.” Allison roots this in the so-called ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’: as generalists, humans are presented with a potentially overwhelming variety of potential behaviours (Haidt uses the same metaphor).This contradiction between novelty-seeking and safety-seeking has obvious political parallels: some of us find freedom exciting, others find psychological comfort in traditional social and cultural rules that limit those choices, providing a sense of order and control. 

The 'Omnivore's dilemma' is thus functionally identical to the political divide between progressives (who believe that novelty makes society better off) and conservatives (who believe that novelty makes society worse off). My own hypothesis is that sanctity comprises both an 'internal' and 'external' vectors. The internal vector concerns the way in which the sanctity trigger motivates individual action; the external vector concerns the projection of those behaviours and standards on to others through the use of enforcement mechanisms such as punishment, gossip and shaming. Externally, the psychological links between sanctity, the desire to enforce order and conscientiousness seem rather obvious.

Therefore, the external, enforcement component of Haidt’s sanctity mechanism forms a part of the set of authoritarian personal and political behaviour traits – which, as you’ll know from Chapter I of Politics for the New Dark Age can manifest on both right and left. The political consequences of authoritarian sanctity are also common to both left and right: proponents of clean-living and clean-eating establish their superiority over those (economically less-advantaged) who cannot afford to do so, creating taboo words, behaviours and beliefs that become markers of social status. 

What I’d be interested in finding out is why the authoritarian left (with some notable exceptions) seems less interested in the sexual purity aspect of Haidt’s sanctity trigger. While the Soviet Union and communist China were/are far from embracing LGBT rights and sexual liberation, concerns about sexual behaviour have never formed a core proselytizing component of their political systems in the same way it has for right-wing regimes. Personally, I know plenty of sexually puritanical progressives, but they tend to keep it to themselves. The obvious exception to this are sex-negative and sex worker-exclusionary 'radical' feminists. What seems to be crucial is that they combine more conservative personal beliefs with strong authoritarian tendencies. Some have tried to claim Chomsky for this view, on the basis of this interview; although to me that doesn’t look like a well-formed intellectual position.

It would also be interesting to find out how those on the left with particular anxieties about body sanctity (i.e. anti-vaxxers, anti-GMO types) scored on other metrics of political authoritarianism. Does sanctity correlate with other metrics of conservativism and authoritarism as I posit, or is is independent? Research for another day!

Liberalism: New Arguments for the Original Position (Part 1)

As readers will find out, "Politics for the New Dark Age" is a robust defense of a socialist approach to politics and governance, embedded in a liberal political and social framework. It explicitly makes use of social contract theory, which posits the shared myth that the members of a society have an implicit agreement that establishes the ground rules for their interaction. In particular, I reference liberalism in its modern form, attributable to philosopher John Rawl’s 1971 opus, ‘A Theory of Justice’. Rawls made two important refinements to the social contract theory of Locke: first, that the state of nature (the no-society state) consists of a (hypothetical) original position of equality, from whence individuals give their consent to enter into a society; and secondly, the veil of ignorance, the argument that for social rules to be universally just, the (hypothetical) designers of those rules would need to be blind to their own social status, capabilities and preferences in the new society.

The social contract is of course only a thought experiment, but the fact that it is merely a convenient fiction is irrelevant if it is useful. Every other social and religious systems is based on similar fictions, but that does not stop them from serving valuable public purposes. What matters in evolutionary game theory for the success or failure of a given strategy is whether it is effective, not whether it is strictly speaking true. In case there is any doubt, the position I take is that liberal social contract story is the most effective political framework for the organisation of human societies yet devised.

The veil of ignorance is particularly important to Rawlsian liberalism. Without it, it is much more difficult to justify universal democracy, much less material egalitarianism. Although human equality is implicit in Kant, Locke and Rousseau, Rawls himself is remarkably cavalier in justifying his particular innovation. He states outright in Theory of Justice that the purpose of the principle is to get the desired solution, to correct for the ‘arbitrariness of the world’. Given discoveries in game theory and psychology over the last fifty years, I think we can do better. This series of blogs will thus present my best defences of the veil of ignorance.

The Psychological Veil

Rawls recognised that just as important to constructing the veil as an individual's ignorance of their place in the social and economic hierarchy was their ignorance of their own conception of ‘the good’ and other psychological preferences. As I argue in Chapter I of Politics, because individual preferences make ‘the good’ fundamentally subjective, it is impossible to justify universal rules based on them. So Rawls' insight is correct. But this blog will further ask whether we can justify this approach using recent discoveries in cognitive psychology about the types or families of human moral thinking. In this, I draw upon Johnathan Haidt’s Theory of Moral Foundations, which he lays out for a lay audience in his book, ‘The Righteous Mind’. Haidt is increasingly conservative, and I differ with both the specifics of his psychological model and his philosophical conclusions, but his Theory is a useful device with which to discuss the issues.

Haidt posits that individuals have multiple moral system, some of which progressives and conservatives share (care, or the prevention of harm, and fairness), and some of which they don’t (loyalty, sanctity and respect for authority). Haidt argues that progressives’ weak preferences for loyalty and authority are the result of the corrosive influence of modernity, what he and other researchers have called ‘WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic)’ culture. But what Haidt sees as a growing moral crisis, I see as just another pendulum swing of normal human cognitive diversity. And inasmuch as our culture is shaping human minds to be less hierarchical and authoritarian, that's a win for progressives.

For his part, Joshua Greene (see my previous post, on his book "Moral Tribes") argues that when it comes to ‘meta-morality’, or the quest for universal moral principles for a diverse society, less may be more. If small-l liberalism really is blind or less sensitive to certain moral problems, as Haidt argues, then that makes it more, not less, suited as a rule system applicable for everyone. Or to put it another way, since progressives and conservatives share values of care and fairness, then care and fairness alone are a proper basis on which to construct a universal meta-morality. My own model of political personality contains only two relevant degrees of freedom, not four or five, but if everyone largely agrees on some foundations (care and fairness) then those foundations are thus not politically contested. Authoritarianism and conservatism are politically relevant precisely because they are values systems that are not universally shared.

So let’s put this in Rawlsian terms. Rawls insists that the (hypothetical) designers of the social contract be blind to their own psychological preferences, but perhaps what he should have said is that they are blind to their psychological differences. A person with no innate morality would be a pure utility-maximising rationalist – but real human beings aren’t like that and nor should they be. We come pre-equipped by genes, culture and upbringing with certain in-built systems for ethical decision-making in groups, and to the degree that those systems are universal across the species, they should be used to derive universal moral rules. Brian Skyrms lays out the game theory argument for the universal evolution of fairness in our species in his opus, ‘The Evolution of the Social Contract’, which we’ll get into next time. But for now, it suffices to conclude that inasmuch as political opinions show a range of preferences, such diversity should consequently be ignored in the formulation of foundational social norms that are equally binding on all.