Marriage Equality: A quick and dirty guide to arguing against religious exemptions

So, the results of Australia's non-binding and unnecessary post vote 'survey' on marriage equality are in, and it's an emphatic victory for "Yes". Finally! What happens next, hopefully, is that a flawed but largely fine bipartisan bill will be introduced to Parliament, voted on, and undo the terrible wrong that was committed in 2004 when marriage was restricted to only hetereosexual couples (a moment that led me to almost turn in my ALP membership in disgust). On a personal note, gay rights has been an animating issue for me politically since I was a teenager in the 90s and finally, if belatedly, seeing this moment arrive feels like a great national and personal catharthis. 

But. This isn't over; it isn't over in the United States, and you can be sure the religious right is going to import much of the same politics into Oz in coming months and years. The first battle is going to be to stop parliament's hardline conservatives from inserting broad-ranging exemptions into the  bill that allow religious groups and others who express a 'moral belief' in the exclusivity of traditional marriage broad licence to discriminate. Without a bill of rights of our own in Australia, local progressives aren't practiced at making these sorts of arguments. So here's my quick'n'dirty guide to arguing against them. 

Five Ways They're Wrong

Liberal rights make a distinction between the public and private. People are free to believe and act however they wish in private, but the public sphere is a neutral space where no belief is privileged over any other. By asking for an exemption to a law of general application, people with moral beliefs are asking the state to privilege those beliefs, and thus violate its obligation of secular neutrality. Why do we make this distinction? Because . . . .

Rights are not unlimited. They extend only so far as they don't infringe on the rights and freedoms of others. People are free to belief and act however they wish; however, we live an an interdependent social setting where our actions affect others and we must take the rights of others into account if we recognise their equal human dignity. So, sorry, you can't unilaterally infringe the right of others to marry and found a family, or (if you're a social service provider) deny them their right to education, healthcare, housing and social support.  But what essential rights are infringed by cake-shop owners or wedding venues? Well . . . .

Everyone is entitled to protection from arbitrary discrimination in public life, including access to general goods and services in the marketplace. It is fundamental to the mutual recognition of human dignitty and equality that everyone is entitled to equal treatment, regardless of any arbitrary personal characteristic, including race, biological sex, gender expression and family structure. Protection from discrimination is a human right, and is embodied in a series of positive Australian Acts. We accept without reflection that market participants must not discriminate against persons of particular races or religions; sex and gender are no different.

But wait, they say, we need an exemption from just those discrimination laws! And exemptions to laws of general application may be justified if their neutral application leads to adverse or discriminatory consequences in fact. However, this is a matter of consequentialist weighing of harms against rights. For example, ministers of religion are exempt from an obligation to perform religious ceremonies in violation of their rites because that would constitute a direct infringement of their right to practice their religion freely. I can eve see an argument that churches and religious buildings be exempt from being hired for religious ceremonies outside their doctrine. On the other hand, we must weigh up the manifest harm of the denial of equal treatment to members of the community against the psychic 'harm' to the 'true believer', who has freely chosen to engage in market activities fundamentally unrelated to their exercise of religious freedom. For example, religious groups that own public venues discriminate when they use their private beliefs to exclude certain people from accessing their services. 

But wait, they say, forcing us into a neutral public stance threatens the ongoing viability of our community of belief! However while some liberal philosophers accept that the survival of a religious community sometimes justify special treatment, not a single one accepts that this extends to imposing restrictions on individuals 'external' to the community. In other words, a religious group is free to expel a homosexual couple from membership of its congregation (an 'internal' regulation), but cannot claim to regulate the rights and responsibilities of other members of the community with different views (which would constitute regulation external to its community). 

So there you go, five quick and dirty arguments to win the argument and make sure the Smith bill passes speedily and unchanged. 

Myths of the Old Order: The automation illusion (part one)

This series of posts will continue to examine myths or tropes that I hear repeated by people trying to make sense of the "New Dark Age" that is our fragmented social reality. If you have an idea for a trope to address, contact me on Twitter @Askews2000.

We begin with two narratives of automation. 

There’s a scene in “White People Renovating Houses”, the South Park Season 21 (!) premiere, in which a tiki-torch wielding mob of rednecks marches through the town, demanding the destruction of digital personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa. The episode was panned by critics, who thought the writers didn’t adequately skewer the presumed target of mockery (i.e. white nationalists). But what critics failed to understand is that white nationalists were not the intended target (that would have been too easy). They themselves were. Or rather, the narrative that fear of automation was driving the economic anxiety of Trump’s racist base. The incongruity between the recent facts (neo-Nazis in Charlottesville) and the explanation (fear of automation) is the point of the joke. 

As a historical counterpoint, there's a moment a third of the way into Sven Beckert’s magisterial history of capitalism, “Empire of Cotton: A Global History”, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in Britain when a few hundred ‘spinning jennys’ (machines for cotton weaving) begin to displace the work of hundreds of thousands of  artisans in the manufacture of cotton fabrics. Within a generation, automation had destroyed a global industry which had remained largely unchanged for a thousand years, and begun the “Great Divergence” by which the wealth of Western Europe eclipsed that of the rest of the world. Beckert describes the opposition and mob violence which was often visited upon the mills but which failed to ultimately prevent the radical transformation of land and labour relations they represented. 

Everybody’s talking about automation

Discussing automation, and its effect on social, political and economic relations, is a recurrent feature of 2017’s “New Political Dark Age”. There are new books, conferences, speeches, and essays on the topic almost daily; we must tackle the subject, we are told, to be taken seriously as a political and economic thinker. Automation, in this telling, is a miracle bestowed upon us by Silicon Valley, but which demands unemployment and political resentment as its price. It is both a moral good to be embraced and a governance challenge to be managed: the perfect talking point for a certain kind of forward-thinking technocrat. 

The automation narrative came [back] to the forefront of progressive politics during the Obama administration, by some accounts. And indeed, the topic reeks of Very Serious People  justifying their own failure to achieve lasting economic change while grappling for control of the narrative with radicals (i.e. the Sanders crowd) who see further compromises with the status quo as the problem. When you look into the issue, you find that almost every article, think piece or editorial  on the subject cites back to a famous 2013 Oxford paper, which found that 47 per cent of job categories defined the researchers were ‘at risk’ from automation. 

I don’t find that paper’s methodology particularly convincing, but smarter people than me have looked into it and come to two sorts of conclusions. Firstly, stating that automation will eliminate half the jobs in the economy is probably a wild over-estimate: the OECD have estimated that the true figure is closer to 9 per cent. Even so, those job losses won’t occur all at once, leaving plenty of time for workers to adjust, and are likely to be compensated for by new jobs created by automation. The automation problem is not, therefore, the total number of jobs in an economy but to whom those jobs are going to be distributed. Because if technological change is too quick, the prophets of automation say, then there’s no guarantee that particular people that lose their income will find a replacement.

Automation and inequality

When you boil it down, the automation narrative is similar to a moral panic: highly anecdote driven and largely divorced from any sense of historical perspective. It’s easy to talk about the installation of touchscreens at McDonalds, speculate about driverless trucks, and mourn the loss of analogue film to Snapchat. But we’ve been here before, and recently: people worried once upon a time that ATMs would replace banks, TVs would render cinema irrelevant, or that vacuum cleaners would lead to idle house-wives [sic]. McDonald's isn't even innovating: 'automats' were a thing as far as as 1895! Jason Furman, President Obama’s final Chief Economic Advisor, made this point quite well in a December 2016 presentation that still available online. The process of creative destruction is so inherent to material progress (see Chapter XII of my book) that, with the benefit of hindsight, we look back with bemusement at  luddites who feared steam-powered cotton spinning.

What really controls employment levels is the supply and demand for goods and services in the economy; the suppressed consumer demand caused by contemporary levels of inequality is what’s standing in the way of full employment, not technological churn. Increasing the productivity of labour and/or capital increases social output if and only if that output can be consumed. So technological progress doesn’t change the number of jobs in an economy, but it does change the skills those jobs require. Labour’s capacity to capture a share of the increased output and consume is dependent, in a wage-economy, on whether or not workers have the skills to work higher productivity jobs. If not, the share of profit capture by capital and high-knowledge workers increases while the labour share of income for already marginalised workers does the opposite, making inequality worse and dragging the economy. 

Furman was therefore correct to state that the problem with automation is not a risk of mass unemployment but of growing inequality. The Industrial Revolution made Britain’s merchant class fabulously wealthy, while impoverishing both peasants in India and smallhold farmers at home. When an industry goes extinct, there’s likely to be a mismatch between the demand for skills and those possessed by the existing labour force. Normally, the mismatch is resolved over time through retraining, the retirement of older workers and the entry into the market of new cohorts. This is the laissez-faire ‘attrition’ model of development and social equality; in the alternative, society can play an active role in controlling the pace of change through industrial policy, providing active support to retraining into new industries, or increasing redistribution in favour of those who can’t or won’t adapt to new patterns of work. This is how progressives deal with problems of inequality in all its forms. 

That concludes Part One, looking at the contours of the debate. Return next week for Part Two where we dive deeper into the economic and policy consequences.

What is Socialism? (or “Science Proves Einstein Right Again!”)

This blog is a companion piece to one I posted in September, “Why ‘Libertarian’ Socialism”. That title of course begged the question: what then is socialism? No small amount of ink has been spilled over the “s-word”’s return to acceptable political discourse. My own book, “Politics for the New Dark Age” sits in this tradition but is largely descriptive, rather than normative. It identifies a policy programme grounded in first principles, and loosely describes the result as democratic and socialist. What follows is a first attempt to describe the normative and theoretical core of the ‘new’ socialism.

God dammit, Einstein

When you write anything, one of the first things you learn is that there are few original ideas, and someone smarter once said exactly what you want to say decades before you were even born. As I read Albert Einstein’s 1949 essay “Why Socialism” in preparation for this blog, I realised that the greatest physicist of the 20th century was already way ahead of me. Einstein’s core insight is as follows:

“Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. . . . . The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he [sic] depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is “society” which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word “society.””

While all Marxists are socialists, the idea of social politics is older and grander than Marx. Einstein goes on, in the same paragraph, to describe the origins and diversity of political personality:

“[T]he existence of these varied, frequently conflicting, strivings accounts for the special character of a man [sic] . . . . It is quite possible that the relative strength of these two [solitary and social] drives is, in the main, fixed by inheritance. But the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior.”

Here's how I make the same argument in Chapter II of “Politics for the New Dark Age”:

“Socialism as an ideology says that cooperative solutions to social problems tend to lead to better outcomes. Capitalism, as an ideology or set of ideologies, is simply the belief that purely competitive [strategies] lead to better solutions than cooperative solutions or mixed cooperative and competitive solutions. Both capitalism and socialism, in their democratic variants, place the liberal individual at the centre of decision-making. But they come to radically different policy programs because the personality types that underlie their world views see problem solving (and the possibility of trusting others) in fundamentally different ways.”

When I speak, therefore, of ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ I am referring to them as elemental positions – distinct from any specific economic system, set of norms and institutions, class interests or political programmes. They are strategy sets to solve the core social dilemma at the heart of civilization. But socialism and capitalism in this sense also possess conflicting beliefs about the nature of existence and ‘the good life’. We in the modern world have lost any other names for these variations of social contract liberalism, but on some level the same conflict must surely have existed throughout history because the same dilemmas mathematically recur in every society comprised of autonomous individuals. 

Re-stating the case

The following three points, for me, are the core beliefs of any socialist system or programme, whether Marxist or non-Marxist. Firstly, that humanity is first and foremost a social species. Secondly, that the nature of social life creates decision dilemmas for which there are cooperative (i.e. trusting) strategies. And finally, that cooperative solutions to social problems are mathematically, practically and normatively superior to the alternative. Because of these three things, humanity has evolved (biologically, culturally, and technologically) to possess unrivalled potential to achieve whatever social end we desire. Socialists are humanist because we hold that we as a species may use our powers thus acquired for “good”; and that possessing such powers  does not normatively impair any other (i.e. spiritual or environmental) value.

Stated in this way, we on the left can begin to claw back nature from being the rhetorical preserve of the right. For the last 150 years, the right has claimed the mantle of ‘human nature’ for itself, based on a (mis-)reading of Darwinian evolution. Their core critique of socialism has been that it misunderstands what it is to be human. But “survival of the fittest” does not state that every animal is a utility-maximising egoist, or that cooperation is impossible. Quite the contrary. Selfish animals are not innately better adapted than altruistic ones; and social species are often the fittest in their ecologies. If you look for Homo economicus in nature, at best you find the chimpanzee. And social, altruistic humanity is doing a great deal better than chimps.

Here’s what nature really tells us: human nature is both selfish and selfless, competitive and cooperative. We mix survival strategies in proportion to their success: a society structed along either purely socialist or capitalist lines is likely to prove extremely rigid and susceptible to shocks (I’m looking at you 1989 and 2008). “Nature”, at most, justifies a democratic, liberal society where those ideologies can exist in a state of creative tension that allows cultural evolution to continue. 

Thinking like the other side

If we flip the mirror, and look at the other side of politics, what would their argument for capitalist institutions and policies look like? I posit, by analogy, that it would follow the same structure: First, humanity is comprised of egoist, utility-maximising individuals. Secondly, that there are competitive [yet still non-violent] strategies to resolve decision dilemmas between individuals. And thirdly, that competitive self-help strategies are superior, mathematically, practically and normatively to cooperative strategies (viz. neoclassical economics).

While there is a normative case against capitalism as an economic system and political programme, there is also increasing pragmatic and theoretical evidence that the ideology’s core propositions are flawed. The assumption of egotistical, utility-maximising individuals (“homo economicus”) is not only abstract and ahistorical, but totally irrelevant to the way humans actually make decisions. While we are capable of abstract reasoning, humans operate very effectively day-to-day using biologically- and culturally-imprinted decision-rules that often produce more efficient and practical decision outcomes than rational-choice models would suggest they should. When those (irrational) decision rules and social biases are examined, it often turns out that they are efficient when the existence of social life and structures are taken into account (although sometimes they aren't).

And while we can admit that sometimes there are self-help solutions to social dilemmas that are efficient, we should push back against the fundamentalist belief that capitalist competition is the solution to every social problem. Put simply, the market is terrible at providing essential public goods are prices that are accessible to all. Without cooperative institutions to provide those goods (or regulate their provision), a social contract society ceases to exist because it is unable to satisfy everyone's basic human rights. Capitalism's third precept, that competitive solutions to social dilemmas are generally superior, is contestable on mathematical, practical and moral grounds. That’s the case socialists have to make to win the argument.

Seriously, go read Einstein

It’s great. I’ll leave you with one final quote, as a warning against the technocrats (see Chapter IV of my book):

“[W]e should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society.”

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

Why ‘Libertarian’ Socialism

The introduction and promotional materials of Politics for the New Dark Age are fairly upfront about the ideological perspective I’m arguing from:

“[I]t articulates a holistic progressive ideology located at the nexus of two broad themes: first, the practical superiority of cooperative solutions in social problem-solving, and second, a liberal, rights-based understanding of the social contract predicated on the equal inherent dignity of all human beings.”

Throughout the book, I employ the common term ‘socialism’ to describe the first such theme, and likewise ‘libertarian’ for the second. Although the book shies away from debates about ‘-isms’ – because all such things have been written before and better – it’s fair to locate the book within the libertarian socialist tradition. Now, I could just as easily have employed ‘democratic socialism’ or ‘liberal socialism’; I don’t see sufficient difference to warrant splitting hairs. Regardless of terminology, at the core of my argument is the necessity of progressives putting the liberal democratic social contract back at the centre of our political and economic program, particularly in these times in which democracy is under conscious attack by those on the right who would prefer to see it fail.

Ultimately I elected to use the word ‘libertarian’ consciously, which connects best with the psychological roots of political behaviour that underlie my model. We are a social species: we achieve our greatest potential when part of an interdependent whole. Yet our individual attitudes towards freedom and authority are prior to the social constructs in which we operate. Libertarianism is “not anarchism, which seeks the destruction of all cooperative social institutions,", but a recognition that the objective of social cooperation is to maximise the freedom of the individuals that comprise that society to seek their own happiness. 

Five Reasons to be Left-Libertarian

So if we presume that our choice of particular words has value, what does ‘libertarianism’ as a concept do for us on the left? Here are some (interrelated) ideas:

1)      It correctly identifies our opposition as authoritarians – on both right and left.

First and foremost, libertarian self-identification makes it clear that those, on both the right and left, who would replace dynamic social interaction with hierarchy [and violence] are the primary opponents of social and economic progress. Hierarchy can be socially useful in some circumstances as a mode of organisation - otherwise we as a species wouldn't have a capacity for it. But decision tyranny is anti-thetical to democracy, equality and liberty; we don't accept it in our politics and we shouldn't accept it in our economics either. 

2)      Putting the individual first inhibits recourse to utilitarian and centrist arguments.

Secondly, and as I write in Chapter IV, liberal individualism prevents us from falling into the trap of utilitarian thinking (which is often closely related to, but distinct from, authoritarianism) which would put the needs of the many ahead of the needs of the one. In the same way, it ensures that technocrats and centrists, who would impose public policy out of their own sense of the greater good, are prevented from doing so against the consent of individuals directly affected by their decisions.

3)      It disavows revolutionary instincts which put the social contract at risk

Equally importantly, a liberal or democratic socialism disavows the revolutionary, anarchist and/or separatist instincts of some political actors (including on the left). In chapter IV, I describe how the desire for social and conceptual cohesiveness can drive those with a low tolerance for compromise to seek to impose revolutionary change on others (through authoritarian and violent means), or separate themselves from society altogether. I note that this revolutionary tendency is an explicit part of traditional Marxism; and the same tendency for utopian thinking remains a problem on the left (and right) to this day.

Although Politics argues that the Manichean conflict between left and right is not to be feared, there is a limit to how far that conflict can be taken while maintaining a viable society. Fighting to advance social progress is one thing, ripping apart the social contract altogether in the name of one’s ideology is quite the other. Preserving the corrective and selective properties of the political ecosystem is key to ensuring that social equilibria are adaptive. So this tension, between fighting political battle  and the preservation of society as a whole is, I believe, the central challenge of all democratic politics. How hard can we seek to reshape social equilibria without destroying it?

4)      Focusing on choice and freedom allows a critical perspective on all forms of power, both political and economic, that oppress the individual

Libertarian, or democratic socialism, recognises the fundamental equivalency of all forms of power. The adoption of individualism renders choice and freedom the key determinants of a just society. While a classical liberal will recognise the essential need of all individuals to have the equal right to self-determination, the liberal socialist recognises that inequalities of wealth and power will make some individuals more free than others. What the libertarian socialist seeks is decision freedom and the end of decision slavery: the state wherein no individual is forced to choose between two undesirable outcomes purely as a result of material necessity. The ‘democratisation of the means of the production’ means precisely that: expecting the same standards of democratic accountability, transparency and participation in economic life as we routinely expect in political life.

5)      It requires permanent scepticism towards traditional forms of hierarchy and power, challenging social adaptations that can no long justify their usefulness

Lastly, from an evolutionary perspective, a critical or libertarian approach institutionalises a position of permanent intellectual scepticism towards all forms of traditional power. As argued elsewhere, one of the key challenges of a political activist with an evolutionary perspective on social and cultural institutions, is to question whether social norms and rules are functional and adaptive or maladaptive and harmful. While the conservative instinct is to see traditional or “common sense” rules as adaptive by default, a libertarian mindset does not accept the legitimacy of any source of authority that cannot continue to justify its ongoing existence. In this way, it acts as a permanent check against the ossification of social structures and a key driver of sustainable progress in the social status quo.