The Structure and You! Privilege, Preference and #MeToo

The left-of-centre streamer Destiny has argued in a series of recent videos that the Left needs to do a better job at persuasion: that we've lost the capacity to argue effectively for our positions. This is a task I also identify and take up in my own book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder". One of Destiny's principle talking points has been that while the Left is often good at identifying structural injustice in society (as I put it: the Left is liberalism plus structural critique), we often critique it in a way that's perceived by the ordinary voter who participates in those structures as an attack on their personal identity. 

This is an important point worth engaging, because it recurs in a range of policy areas. Take, as an example, the recent back-and-forth between YouTubers Arielle Scarcella and Contra Points over personal sexual preference. The disagreement between the two sides is not whether racist or transphobic (or ableist or fat-shaming) preferences in one's choice of intimate partner are legitimate (both insist they accept this), but rather whether academic critique of the cause and consequences of those preferences at a social level undermines that principle of individual choice. This twitter spat, of course, is merely a pop culture manifestation of the TERF argument that trans lesbians seek to invalidate the identity of cis lesbians (defined in terms of attraction to female sex characteristics). And it also carries echoes of the lower profile but long-running debate over racism and transphobia in gay male pickup culture. 

Most people have little difficulty reconciling the idea that social cues play a role in the formation of their sexual preferences, even cues coded on problematic categories such as race or age (or gender roles or even dominance hierarchies). We all go about our dating lives, secure in the knowledge that our law and culture renders us sovereign over our choice of intimate partner and the pursuit of our own definition of happiness. Trans people are merely the latest in a long line of formerly marginalised minorities to go through the process of winning greater social visibility and respect; they are not the first step on a slippery slope to the erasure of gay identity or the erosion of the bedrock principle of sexual consent. Most of us are fine with being a little hypocritical now and then when it comes to getting laid. 

A bigger problem: Virtue and Vice

But trans acceptance is merely the tiny tip of a very large social iceberg. Perhaps the principle way in which most people experience this phenomenon is when it comes to feminism, or more precisely: the concept of the patriarchy. Most of us have very little exposure of academic feminism, and even those few men (and women!) that do often hesitate to label themselves as feminists. Why? Surely, we can all agree that sexual assault is a very bad thing and that women should not be harassed or intimidated or made subject of violence. But - they insist - #notallmen are like that, by which of course they mean *I* (or my husband, or my father, or my son) am (is) not like that. Rather than putting aside their own identity to listen to the subjective experience of women about how you (yes you!) have contributed to and likely benefitted from a hierarchy that inhibits women's careers and violates their personal autonomy, they complain that feminism has gone too far and threatens their identity as men. 

There are echoes of this too in the discussion of "working class whites", racial privilege and identity politics. The Left critique of structural racism and the way it privileges white identities is qualitatively and quantitatively rigorous. And yet the fact remains that due to widespread economic inequality, many white voters do not *feel* privileged - or indeed racist - at all! Despite the fact that Democratic Party policies would have done more to alleviate their material disadavantage than Republican ones, many conservative white voters chose to support an actual bigot over the candidate who put them in the "basket of deplorables". Most of Trump's supporters have no real attachment to white nationalism. But they will continue to be activated by a backlash bias against politicians who they perceive as attacking their sense of self as 'good people'.

The reality is that while formal philosophy largely focuses on deontological (or rule-based) and consequentialist ethics, most people continue to act as if their virtue was all that mattered. We all have a psychological need to see ourselves as good people, who do only good things for good reasons. We can recognise when bad things happen, but these bad things are done by bad people for bad reasons. In many ways, getting people to think this way about unjust structural categories is a victory. By the 21st century, most people agree that racist behaviour is bad and that people who perform racism are racists who deserve social ostracism. Social movements largely stop the act of persuasion at that point, because we've effectively won. But using categorical rhetoric to persuade people who think categorically limits our capacity to keep fighting when society moves on and new issues arise. We were so successful in convincing ordinary voters that legal racism or homophobia was bad that when we go back and ask them to recognise that ending legal discrimination left behind persistent structural inequalities (such as the treatment of trans people), they reject us on the same rhetorical grounds that we ourselves taught them to use. 

The whole point of intersectionality and solidarity as a practice is to get people to listen and consider their place in society in relation to others. The centre and the right do not reject 'identity politics' because marginalised groups label themselves as victims: they oppose 'identity politics' because it serves to place them in the role of oppressors, a role that is at odds with their own sense of self. Solidarity ultimately is a two-way street: we have to persuade people not only of the justice of a single cause, but to be part of a perpetual movement of interlocking causes. But by the same token, we on the Left must avoid using our own categories in ways which are politically detrimental to the construction of such a solidaristic movement. 

Where does that leave us?

One of the great advantages of evolution-centric thinking is that it conditions you to think in terms of the properties of populations, and not the properties of individuals. In this vein, racism, heteronormativity, homophobia and transphobia are measurable properties of the the social structure and thus should only be used to categorise society as a whole. Individuals, on the other hand, are not completely determined by categories: behaviour is probabilistic and therefore at least partially contradictory. People don't *feel* accurately defined by the labels like racist or transphobe because they often have subjectively good intentions and often blind to the negative consequences of their behaviour, which may be casual or incidental. As a result, they feel that critiques of structural categories are inherently personal.  

So I think our starting position has to be that structural categories can only properly describe populations and behaviours, and not individuals. We can and should talk about how our collective decision-making leads to adverse consequences that disproportionately help or hinder certain categories of person. We can and should talk about the behaviour sets that effectuate and perpetuate those decisions. But we should be extremely reluctant to attribute a category to individuals or sub-populations. Structural racism, for example, is an unequal relationship between constructed racialised categories and is not the defining identity of any one group, even if that group disproportionately benefits from that unequal relationship. Transphobia, too, is a systematic pattern of oppression of trans individuals that is sustained by recurring patterns of discriminatory behaviour and belief, not the malicious intent of any specific individual or sub-group. 

Of course, some people are just assholes. We can and should question how the individual chooses to relate to the structure. The vast majority of the time, they will be neutral or passive towards it. Sometimes, as with the patriarchy, they will actively benefit from it. Rarely, they will serve as active enforcers of structural inequality: punishers of deviance and propagators of supporting ideology. When people have power, and choose to use that power to sustain inequality, then it's fair to call them out for being bigots. But when people lack power and merely benefit passively from the structure, we need to be delicate in prying them from their attachment to the status quo. In particular, we need to find ways to break the identification between group identities and the self-appointed leaders of groups, so that our critiques of those with power aren't received as attacks on the powerless. 

It's OK to be a little uncool sometimes

Progressives, generally, are more comfortable with ambiguity than conservatives. We more readily accept that it's ok to be uncool and hypocritical sometimes. That passively benefitting from racial privilege or only wanting to be intimate with people with vaginas doesn't make us any less of an ally to our comrades-in-arms. Authoritarians have a harder time with this: they are compelled to reconcile their personal identity with social contructed categories. Ultimately, our long-term goal should be to bring about social conditions that make more people into progressives, rather than merely constructing new social structures that cause conservatives to follow our behaviourial lead. Because we're going to want things (now and in the future) that we haven't yet socialised conservatives into supporting. And if we move forward without a way of doing so, the backlash will continue to be strong and fierce. 

Three Duties

Liberalism does not primarily concern itself with duties. As an individual-centric philosophy, it's mostly interested in specifying the rights which individuals may claim from society. Other than respecting the rights and freedoms of others (which exhausts the psychological duties to prevent harm and respect others' equality), the liberal individual ordinarily owes no ethical duties to his or her fellow citizens other than as prescribed by law.

We possess rights claims by virtue of our social membership, regardless of whether those rights are currently adequately guaranteed. Rights claims provide legitimacy for actions seeking social reform: they set standards to aspire to and by which institutions can be judged. While philosophers have occasionally grappled with defining liberal duties, in a liberal society there are prima facie no obligations on the individual which provide legitimate cause for social activism. This distinguishes liberalism from more authoritarian-attuned philosophies such as Confucianism or Legalism, nationalism or most religions, which specify universal moral duties of individuals. 

Evolutionary thinking complicates this picture somwhat. Evolution is value-neutral but does establish the parameters by which ethical beliefs and culture change over time and thus limits the categories of variations that are possible (or stable) in a given environment. In this view, liberalism (as a cultural equilibrium) is simply the most widespread and flexible of possible solution sets to the problem or organising human societies at scale. While liberalism may contain cultural spandrels as a result of its particular evolutionary history (in Europe), it can be considered adaptive for a variety of social environments. Liberalism is much like the human species itself: behaviourially flexible, adaptive and relentlessly expansionist.

I think it's imperative that my colleagues at the Cultural Evolution Society give due attention to the consequences of their research for political and ethical philosophy. While almost all members I've met are genuine humanists and progressives, there are some truly nasty right-wingers who follow this material (and related subfields such as sociobiology) closely and are employing it to refine and strengthen their own ideas. As a socialist, I see it as my role to make cultural evolution and progressivism mutually intelligible: we can both agree that Foucault is full of shit without rejecting, as the right does, the critical insights of Marxism and feminism. 

A late-arriving idea

The remainder of this blog is a first draft of an effort to discern if an evolutionary approach implies any ethical duties on individuals prior to liberalism, which is an adaptive product of that approach. This is an idea that crystallized for me very late in the drafting process of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder". In Chapter XVIII, discussing foreign policy, I write:

"The sole concern of the international relations policy-maker . . . is to maximise the outcomes (security) for their own state while minimising the risks arising from systemic instability. This is analogous to the task of the domestic political actor: seeking to maximise social change (or resist it, if conservative) without creating a systemic risk of revolution."

As this was a late addition to the text, I had not in fact discussed this alleged duty in a domestic context earlier in the book, although the section in Chapter IV on the undesirability of revolution is a natural precursor to it. To understand this persective, we have to think about cultures in terms of equilibria (or quasi-equilibria): every society consists of a mix of permitted behaviourial strategies. Cultural variants that stray too far from this adaptive equilibrium will be removed  by natural selection, in the same way as a genetic mutation that confers no biological advanatage will be selected out of a species. As social environments (given by economic development, population and natural constraints) change, cultures change too - in much the same way that selection permits a species to adapt to natural environments. 

Variation is allowed by this view of life and culture: in fact it is required to explain why cultures change and adapt over time. But structural forces act as selectors, reducing the frequency of maladaptive behaviour and encouraging the spread of adaptive innovations. In political and economic terms, ideologies and policies that increase the general welfare are more likely to spread and be widely employed than policies that are rigid, unstable or destructive. Of course, we have no way of knowing in advance whether a policy idea that we favour is adaptive or maladaptive: we can only try them out and see if evolution favours then. So far, so good. 

Three Duties

Evolution is blind. Species and cultures both can go extinct if their environment changes faster than they can adapt, or if their behaviour sets are too inflexible, or if destructive mutations spread through their population unchecked. Cultural evolution is a marvellous system for generating social and economic progress: it has made humanity the dominant species at a planetary scale. Democracy, which permits and channels this variation with astonishing flexibillity and resilience, is the best system yet devised to harness this process for the common good. But there is no guarantee that cultural evolution will continue indefinitely: it's a minor miracle (only truly cosmic time scales) that our species possesses this capability at all, and a historical accident that we've evolved a political belief system suited to managing it. 

Given the existence of human agency, however, I argue that cultural evolution imposes three ethical duties on individual behaviour. These ethical duties necessarily limit the range of legitimate political action and belief; nevertheless, they ensure that human societies remains dynamic and adaptive. Moreover, these duties override whatever cultural considerations have evolved in particular contexts and are ontologically prior to particular philosophical systems. In other words, they impose duties on individuals regardless of their own or their culture's belief system. These are not 'conservative' duties to respect existing institutions: they are duties which ensure that the evolution of cultural institutions is possible at all. These duties arise from the requirement that 'creative destruction' occurs in the context of a physical and cultural ecosystem which is sustainable. In that sense, they could be considered intergenerational duties, or measures to counteract short-term time discounting of political payoffs.

1) Firstly, individuals have a duty to pursue political and economic change only in those ways which guarantees the ongoing viability of the social environment for future generations. If one were so inclined, one could read into this duties to utilise the natural environment sustainably. I'm more of a humanist than an environmentalist, however, so for me this means that the pursuit of change must occur through actions which preserve the ongoing fabric of democratic society. In other words, even if we were in a position to do so, political actors must not undermine democratic norms and institutions, and must not seek to divide or separate themselves from the rest of society in the pursuit of their preferred political goals. Sorry kids, but revolution is out (regardless of its consequences), and so is dictatorship and separatism. Social systems must allow for the peaceful transfer of power between competing value sets. 

2) Secondly, individuals have a duty to defend liberal democratic society against other actors that would seek to undermine or overthrow it. Guess what? Some actors are always going to cheat on their ethical duties for selfish advantage. Social cancers like fascism must be fought by society's 'immune system', or they will grow and consume the social organism until it dies. In game-theoretic terms, cooperative social behaviour is sustained by the potential punishment of deviance. Not everyone has to be a punisher, but enough people have to be willing to bear the costs of doing so in order to maintain equilibrium. This also applies internationally: the left cannot sit idly by while authoritarians states rip up international norms and must be willing to use coercion to ostracise and punish deviance. 

3) Finally: in the event that a cohesive democratic society is destroyed, split or ceases to exist, individuals have a duty to fight to restore democratic society. Say there's been a  revolution or civil war in your country, and a cohesive society has ceased to exist. Does victory (or partial victory) in that conflict mean that one is entitled to impose permanent decision-dominance over the parts of society one controls? Of course not. Revolt by one class over another, or conquest by one ethnic group over another, does not permit the extermination of the culture of the defeated. Autocracies can survive for a time of course - the Soviet Union was famously successful in rapidly industrialising and defeating Nazi Germany (at tremendous cost). But they are far less likely to be able to adapt to changing social and environmental circumstances, and will fall in time to societies that are more flexible. Only by restoring democracy as rapidly as possible can we ensure that ongoing viability of a society. 

The Politics of Solidarity

This blog is a follow-up to my earlier rumination on "Identity Politics". In that piece, I expressed comfort with identity politics as a progressive practice, but some dissatisfaction with its theoretical underpinnings (putting me squarely in line with most of the socialist left). This piece offers a deeper dive into the underpinnings of the politics of solidarity, coming to stronger and firmer conclusions. 

Radicalism, then and now

My book, "Politics for the New Dark Age" presents in its early chapters an overview of liberalism using as a device the slogan of (parts of) the French Revolution (and later the French Republic): liberty, equality, and fraternity. Although right-libertarians may disagree, it is wholly uncontroversial amongst serious liberal philosphers (and many Marxist ones) than equality and liberty are twinned objectives. We cannot rigorously justify liberty without accepting an original position of equality, and we (non-authoritarian socialists) also accept that the ethical purpose of equality is to maximise individual liberty. The core blindspot of right-libertarianism is failing to recognise that under conditions of inequality some will always be more free than others. 

Fraternity, then as now, is a trickier propostion. In Chapter III, I argue for the need for the left to reclaim fraternity, and since the word and some of the concepts underlying it are potentially problematic, I will instead substitute "solidarity" in this blog to refer to the progressive version of the concept. In the book, I write that solidarity is "the sense of belonging we can find in sharing values with and trust in our fellow citizens", and argue that this trust finds expression through the laws, norms and institutions which bind a society together. Trust, as readers will know, is an important resource to solve collective action problems and we will return to it later.

Liberal philosophy, in attempting to reconcile the twin goals of liberty and equality, has on the main settled on equality of opportunity as its guiding principle. The egalitarianism of even left-liberals is what Elisabeth Anderson calls "luck egalitarianism": it attempts to correct for some forms of inequality, but only arbitrary differences in personal circumstance and not differences cause by 'choice'. If original conditions are equal and equality of opportunity exists, then social outcomes, even if unequal, are to be considered 'just'. What all liberals, from both the 'egalitarian' and 'libertarian' ends of the spectrum, share is an emphasis on methodological individualism and agency. In other words, once just rules, norms and institutions are in place, society should be blind in practice as well as theory to the consequences of individual choice. 

Needless to say, this is an incomplete theory of justice: the fairness of outcomes matters to individual liberty and happiness, and some material needs (housing, healthcare, food, clean air & water) are so important to our wellbeing that they have the status of fundamental right. Even liberals like Will Kymlicka have been forced to admit that the current approach is counterproductive, forcing the disadvantaged to engage in what he calls 'shameful revelation' in order to qualify for social sympathy (which contributes to the construction of a hierarchy of moral worth).  Yet Kymlicka's own support for multiculturalism is justified similarly: if a social group can demonstrate that the impartial application of law leads to an injustice in fact, then the law should craft special assistance or exemptions for members of that group.

Charles Taylor famously labels this 'the politics of difference' and the resulting hybridity between liberalism and identarian claims of culture leads to what I have called in the past the 'second form' of identity politics: adapting laws and institutions so that arbitrary differences such as race, gender and sexuality no longer systematically disadvantage individuals. It is dialectical middle ground between communitarians who hold that groups and cultures are ontologically prior to the individual; and liberals who seek to merely 'correct' for arbitrary differences in individual characteristics. The liberal fantasy is that everyone regardless of group membershio or disadvantaged status has a formal opportunity to 'rise to the top'; failing to question why we have a top or why people would want to be there in the first place. 

Socialism is liberalism plus structure

In a broad sense, the left (which I prefer to call socialist but which others may label differently) is liberalism plus structure. What I mean by that is we share with liberals a common foundation in humanism and much of the philosophy of the social contract. And to a point, we can also share their methodological individualism. Where we part ways, however, is by positing social structure as an intervening variable between individual choice and outcomes. To us, difference neutrality looks alot like taking sides in favour of the status quo. Feminists label the structure 'patriarchy', because it systematically differentiates between genders; I call it social and economic interdependence, because my focus is on how the nature of games creates collective action problems; anti-rascism activists similarly use the concept of systematic rascism. 

Iris Young provides a useful definition of structure: 

"Basic social structures consist [of] determinate social positions that people occupy which condition their opportunities and life chances. These life chances are constituted by the ways [social] positions are related to one another to create systemic constraints or opportunities that relate to one another . . . Structure[s] are constituted through the social organisation of labour and production, the organisation of desire and sexuality, the institutionalized rules of authority and subordination and the constitution of prestige. Structural social groups are relationally constituted, in the sense that one position in the social structure does not exist apart from differentiated relation to other positions."

Thus, as I write in Chapter VIII of my book, poverty only exists in relation to the standard of living of the rest of society (i.e. 'absolute' poverty is an arbitrary, albeit sometimes useful, category). Similarly, gender[s] does not exist objectively outside the social relations defined between them; and race is junk science but conveys powerful social advantages and disadvantages. Any individual's access to social goods in the context of these structures is distributed probabilistically, and so it is therefore analytically relevant to define groups by their collective advantage or disadvantage and to conduct activism on that basis - even if some individuals from a disadvantaged class have the opportunity to rise to the top. 

Laws, rules and institutions cannot be value-neutral because they are imbedded in deeper cultural and economic patterns. Laws, rules and institutions cannot produce just outcomes on their own because they are blind to these patterns or explicitly take them for granted (see: Gramsci). And as I have written before, people often experience a powerful backlash bias when these social relations are threatened. If individuals or groups need to claim disadvantage (or perjoratively: 'victimhood') in order to receive compensation for that disadvantage, the act of both claim-making and claim-granting merely re-enforces existing social patterns and fails to challenge the underlying base structure.

Critics of "identity politics" often fail to differentiate between the two sets of arguments. Challenging structural racism, the patriarchy, or the class structure of the economy is not a claim of victimhood and for special treatment: quite the opposite. It is an empowered attempt to change society so that structural inequality no longer exists. This is precisely why Marxists, who critique the class structure of society as being bad for the individual worker, were so often accused during the Cold War of being collectivists. And why critics of multiculturalism or feminism misinterpret claims for equality as attempts to secure special treatment: they are operating under complete different philosophical understandings. If structural inequality magically ceased to exist, we could all be some type of liberal. But it does, so we aren't. 

The Politics of Solidarity

As I write in Chapter IX, in a totally different context, "If the state is thought of only as a redistribution machine, we can blind ourselves to ways cooperative social institutions can prevent inequality from occurring in the first place. Better to stop inequality from growing than seek to cure it after it occurred." In that chapter I'm talking about the economy, but the principle applies equally to all forms of social hierarchy and structural difference. Redistribution does not generate social trust; in fact, it may be corrosive of it. Much better if we address our activism at the root causes of difference, recognising that formal equality of opportunity does not in and of itself generate egalitarian outcomes. So if right-wingers really don't like paying taxes or the recognising special group rights, then the only logical solution should be to join a union or cooperative, support feminism and the movement for black lives. 

And here we return at last to the concept of solidarity. If unequal and hierarchical structure is the problem, then the solution is solidarity that transcends that structure and undermines it. That's why sexism, rascism and other forms of discrimination, especially paternalistic versions thereof, have no place in any progressive movement. Solidarity means pursuing cooperative solutions to the problem of generating social trust, without which we cannot transform and prevent inegalitarian structural structures.  

Solidarity means trusting others in at least three important ways. First of all, it  requires working across group boundaries to build ties between social classes, rather than seeing politics as a battle for the scarce control of social resources (i.e. identarianism). Importantly, this acknowledges that deconstructing hierarchies will also be of benefit to those currently privileged by them. Secondly, it means trusting others' claims about the sources of their own disadvantage, and not expressing skeptical or paternalistic beliefs about the moral value of their claims. If an individual is unable to access their fundamental rights, the course of events leading them there are not relevant to the inquiry. Lastly, and most radically, it means trusting that if our fellow human beings are in need, that we should offer help, and not make judgements about their own capacity for or skill at autonomous decision-making.