On Human Nature

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

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

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

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

Evolutionary sociology for Marxists

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

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

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

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

The Marxist ‘New Man’

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

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

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

A new way forward

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

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

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

Virtue and the aristocratic tendencies of liberalism

Liberalism, as a collection of philosophical, political and economic beliefs, is a universalising ideology that shares with the messianic religions a transcendental and utopian character. Like organised religions, liberal societies therefore must confront the fundamental challenge of a material existence that does not usually confirm to ideological expectations. Whereas for many Christians, the assumption of a Good God creates the Problem of Evil; for liberals, who value above all Liberty or Freedom, their perennial challenge has been and remains to explain the problem of Unfreedom: why is it that liberal societies fail to emerge spontaneously, why do so many prove to be unable or unwilling to deliver on their utopian promises, and why do even modern liberal subjects so often come to rebel against its most cherished values?

The God that failed

From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the elitist tendencies of early liberal philosophers seem obvious; the popular franchise - even for men - wasn’t established practice in the Anglo-Saxon world until the mid-nineteenth century. Locke was heavily invested in slavery, as were many of the US Founding Fathers; Locke famously had a hand in drafting a constitution for Carolina that would have entrenched serfdom and a hereditary aristocracy. In addition to his shockingly racist prejudice, Immanuel Kant was an elitist who believed the ‘unthinking masses’ could achieve enlightenment 'only slowly’. Adam Smith, Rousseau, Montesquieu - all the greats adhered more or less to a republican or ‘aristocratic’ form of liberalism, one I have previously called ‘Liberty for me but not for thee’.

“Liberals were not democrats in the nineteenth century. They were (by definition) against universal suffrage. They were neither reactionary nor politically radical. . . .[M]any types of liberalism had limited political demands when judged from a democratic perspective. . . .[T]he aristocratic liberals’ elitism was a trait widely shared by liberals [and so] liberal discourse, while preserving its democratic potential, tended to adhere to this elitist reality” [Hollinger]

Democracy and liberalism, therefore, have always had a tense relationship - the two are not nearly as joined at the hip as we like to think. Philosophers and politicians have responded to this tension in various ways. How can the apparent hypocrisy between the egalitarian promises of liberalism and the lived experience be resolved without engaging in wholesale critique of either limb? In moral philosophy, there are three main approaches one might take to the resolution of an ethical problem like this: virtue ethics, consequentialism (or utilitarianism), and deontological (or rule-based) ethics. Since liberal capitalism has tended to produce the strongest sustained increases in average standards of living, utilitarians such as Bentham and Mill (and also to some extent, Hayek, Marx and modern neoliberals) saw the trade-offs in terms of individual suffering and alienation as worth paying. This bargain comes under strongest threat when capitalism lurches into crisis and those gains are wiped away, as they are right now. On the other hand, deontological liberals such as John Rawls and Elizabeth Anderson argue that the liberal social contract, despite its elitist origins, can be purified and reformed - their liberalism is aspirational and utopia remains achievable. This is the version of liberalism that most people on the centre-left hold to be true.

But, as I will argue here, mainstream liberalism has not entirely broken with its aristocratic past, and this ‘brahmin liberalism’ (as Thomas Piketty calls it) dips into the well of virtue ethics of explain, and justify, the inherent tension between liberty and equality. In fact, in responding to the anti-democratic critique of the counter-enlightenment, many of liberalism’s greatest defenders in the early twentieth century - including Joseph Schumpeter and Hannah Arendt - held firmly elitist views often drawing explicitly on Kant. Arendt, for example, thought that regard for the masses - who could only ‘labour’ - constituted a betrayal of liberalism and it was only ‘men’ of ‘action’ who could defend a narrow, negative form of liberty from an overweening democracy. The preferences of some in society (the elites) are better ‘informed’ than those of others; their reason more dispassionate, their temper cooled by virtue. For neoliberals, elites know what is in everybody’s own best-interest, and democracies should just get out of the way.

Beyond Good and Evil

So for liberal elites, including those in the mainstream media, what justifies their own [unequal] position in society, as they simultaneously propagate an ideology of equity and equal dignity? I believe the most crude and unsophisticated justification of this equality is based in virtue ethics: the idea that some individuals have a superior character to others, and in they can be, in their actions, presumed to be good and noble even if they perpetuate a system of inequality, hierarchy and oppression. In general, liberal elites know that others are virtuous when they perform the social roles which signal virtue: including rote denunciations of racism, sexism and homophobia, the avoidance of taboo words and topics, the use of dispassioned, technocratic language and the disdain of working class or vulgar aesthetics. Since elites are liberals and liberals are elites, the aesthetic tastes and preferences of elites are presumed to also be liberal. Liberal elites could therefore never support an avowedly leftist political project, the tactics and purposes of which is anathema to their worldview, the cross-class solidarity building inconsistent with their purity of form. For the modern Democratic party in the US, ‘suburban, Facebook empathy moms’ are potentially virtuous, whereas Bernie Bros are not.

The problem with virtue politics is that it lacks a theory of change. How could we hope to change society when goodness is unequally distributed? The working class bogans of the American South, or Western Sydney in Australia, are seen as irredeemable - transgressive, reactionary, incapable of change. Their un-woke political views and xenophobia a sign of immorality, not a contingent response to the anxieties of alienated living under capitalism. The only way to rule is to form a centrist party of the dinner-party elites, fronted by a charismatic neoliberal-in-a-suit, and to hold on to power by any [undemocratic] means necessary. Such a politics also tends to support a mindset of developmental imperialism abroad and domestic fascism towards colonised and subaltern social groups. Pete Buttigieg, Justin Trudeau or Emmanuel Macron is their ideal avatar. There’s an almost Calvinist strain to this kind of liberalism, which sees the fates of vast swathes of the population as fixed and determined, poverty and social alienation their divine punishment.

“One of the ironies of this dark side of liberalism is that education was supposed to lift up the unwashed masses so that democracy could gradually be extended to all (but only in the limited sense of the vote). This [is called] ‘developmental democracy’. But as liberals became more pessimistic about the ability of people to become rational, even through education, the humanist values that education was to bring to the masses - high culture, rationality, self-control, respect for the value of diversity, the ability to make informed judgments - [became] values to which only a small minority could aspire. These would become the people qualified to be members of the cultural and political elite”. [Hollinger]

It turns out, people do not respond well to liberals castigating their moral failings from the bully pulpit. They tend to take on the fallen political identity that liberals ascribe to them - as deplorables, reactionaries and bigots. Liberals enable fascists to create an alternative moral universe in which ignorance and xenophobia are worn as badges of honour. Even those that might want to better themselves largely find that the price for entry into high society is too high, and disengage from social and cultural life altogether - withdrawing their tacit support for the liberal society whose high representatives hold them in such disdain. I have argued elsewhere that the only way liberalism can be defended is by expanding and perfecting the circle of equal dignity with which we treat our fellow human beings - any attempt to reify hierarchy and inequality under liberalism, in response to its manifest failure to deliver on its promises, ends up undermining the legitimacy of the whole liberal project which is essential to its long-term survival.

Don’t be an elitist jerk

So for my fellow progressives, including very many well-meaning members of the liberal intelligentsia, left-liberals and social democrats, my advice is as follows: be wary of either consciously or unconsciously, ascribing the political beliefs of others to either malice or ignorance. In game theoretical terms, an individual’s strategy is just their best available heuristic response to the strategies of others. By assuming that those who don’t support one particular vision of aristocratic liberalism must be either inherently illiberal, stupid or evil, liberal elites are walking an ever-shrinking tightrope towards disaster. As we think about how we’re going to get out yet another global economic recession, and as consequentialist defences of liberalism are weaker than they’ve ever been, we need to expand the liberal/progressive base more than ever. That means seeking and accepting the support of the virtuous and unvirtuous alike.

The new right is not what you think. It's worse.

I said in my interview with the Connect & Disaffected podcast last year that following the collapse of the neoliberal consensus both left and right were casting around for new or previously discarded ideologies to help us make sense of the world. The faultlines of modern politics are being shaped by familiar historical struggles as socialism and fascism modernise themselves in response to the manifest recent failures of liberalism. I wrote recently on the more mainstream right-wing liberalisms and recognised them as a sort of 'honourable enemy', noting their respectable philosophical roots and still significant political base.

Today's blog on the other hand concerns the new right. I am not here referring to the Trumpian 'new right' nexus as it's commonly used as a term in US-facing news media. The constellation of  alt-right, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim xenophobes, the traditionalists, neo-reactionaries and paleo-conservatives who have rallied around Trump's presidency reflect an easy-to-understand conservative impulse – the right rummaging through its graveyard of dead and discredited ideologies.  

The real 'new' right, the ones who represent a genuinely innovative response to the crisis of liberalism, are the so-called 'intellectual dark web' (IDW). Although IDW like to label themselves 'classical liberals', it's not accurate to see them as a simple resurrection of some form of Victorian British liberalism [although there are certainly superficial similarities, which we’ll return to]. Nor is it sufficient to understand the IDW purely in terms of what motivates them – their [white] [male] Gen X grievance and fear of loss of relative status. There are features of the IDW – most notably their hostility to universalist liberalisms, their deep commitment to Santa Barbara-style evolutionary psychology, general support for UBI schemes and flirtations with race realism – which they share in common with the alt-lite and which suggest a different perspective on archetypal liberal universalism. If the IDW are neo-Victorians, then they believe in social Darwinism on steroids. 

Michael Brooks is right on this. The IDW are laying the seeds of a new political narrative – a narrative that seeks to supplant the discredited rule of the neoliberals and co-opt the resentment of the alt-right, while outliving them both. The left is building its own counter-narrative, quite successfully so. But we need to know our opponents, and pay attention to what they're saying, because if the popularity of the Petersons and Harrises of the world is any guide, IDW-like ideas are finding an audience on YouTube and Twitch and spreading into a mass consciousness.

 A thesis statement

Which brings us to the motivation for today. The race realist Winegard science bros have a new piece on Quillette "The Twilight of Liberalism?", laying out the clearest thesis statement for the IDW I've yet encountered. To be clear, the Winegards are trash. So is Quillette - which is essentially the house rag of the IDW. The Winegards latest piece hits all their usual tropes – cultural Marxism, the authoritarian left, IQ fetishism and the cult of automation. But buried in the piece are hints of something honest about the IDW.

“[I]t is not the abstract logic of liberalism that is flawed,” they write, “but rather the attempt to apply it to fallible humans. Like communism, liberalism conflicts with immutable human characteristics.” Immediately, we encounter a pessimism that is at odds with the liberalism tradition, which is fundamentally optimistic about human nature and grounds its conception of natural rights on axiomatic suppositions about the universal human experience. The Winegard bros dismiss this outright in terms that are familiar to critics of capitalism on both the right and left: classical liberalism as an ideology was adapted to a social world still rooted in a traditional social order, which provided the social reproduction necessary for the capitalist mode of production to take off. Their critique - shared by many communitarians - is that as it matured, capitalism eroded the social foundations on which it relied and what it offered in exchange (universal equality, unlimited freedom, and ‘hedonism’) was a poor substitute.

The Winegards propose an ‘evolutionary mismatch’ between the ideology of capitalism and features of the human mind - or at least the minds of most people - that is as a severe as the supposed mismatch between utopian socialism and human nature. Determining whether a cultural technology is in fact maladapted is notoriously difficult. And it ignores the fact that biology and culture co-evolve. But as a thesis statement, the idea that [some] people cannot adapt to modern social life unites the misogyny of Jordan Peterson to the racial pontificating of Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris, to the elitism of Steven Pinker, and the cultural conservatism of Ben Shapiro and Christina Hoff Summers. It dichotomises the ‘cognitive elite’ - the genteel folk of the IDW who can calmly philosophise and make a living from Patreon - and the masses who engage in manual labour and require a firmer hand. The ‘cognitively inferior’ include women, of course, but also non-whites, cultural Muslims, trans men and women, the poor, the young, the religious and the irreligious alike. Some people simply aren’t morally equipped to be ‘free’.

There are precedents for these beliefs, of course. The Winegards are barely disguising their re-purposing of the Bell Curve, and Murray has long argued that his argument in that book is all about meritocracy and its totally not his fault at all that cognitive differences happen to be racialised. Sure buddy. But this worldview is also implicit in much of behavioural economics and the ‘authoritarian libertarianism’ of Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein’s ‘nudge’ approach to public policy. Neoliberals, drawing on mid-twentieth century views of the Mont Pelerin society, have long believed that society needs to be governed with a firm hand to deliver outcomes that are optimised for the greater good. The wrinkle that the IDW add is that some [Westernised men] can govern themselves free from the state, but that others [largely women and non-Westerners] are categorically incapable of doing so.

The IDW are therefore critics of liberalism, but critics who think we cannot possibly improve upon it. The theory is not wrong, it just has the wrong subject. Classical liberalism is therefore an ideology by and for the ruling elite - and not for everyone else. Liberty for me but not for thee. The various members of the IDW have different emotional reactions to the burdens of rule - the Weinsteins and more centrist-leaning adherents look upon the ‘cognitive inferiority’ of humanity with regret, but treat benevolent rule as the white man’s burden [recall Brett Weinstein’s incredibly patronising response to the Evergreen controversy]. Those of a more conservative inclination, including Shapiro, Peterson and the Winegard bros, believe strongly in the need for order and discipline of the masses, lest they ‘slump into an empty and unsatisfying hedonism that is ruinous to communities and to society more broadly.’

It is for this reason that the IDW are properly categorised as a right-wing movement. Their reverence for order and hierarchy puts them in good company amongst conservatives. The alt-right, neoliberals and libertarians all serve the interests of power and hierarchy in different ways. Fascists do so consciously, libertarians by neglect and neoliberals behind a veneer of technocratic governance. The IDW are the apologists of domestic empire. If fascism can be thought of as the application of the tools of colonial rule to the metropolitan population, then the IDW narrative is the justification of imperialism and the ‘tutelage’ of ‘inferior’ peoples brought home to justify dominion over the majority of the population.

Unlike their neoliberal colleagues like Pinker, who tend to believe that with the right combination of education and public policy, the masses can [eventually] mature to enjoy the full right and privileges of liberal citizenship, the IDW are pessimists who are prepared to write off the vast bulk of humanity as a burden upon the white man’s pursuit of a glorious future. As best, the masses are to be pensioned off with a UBI so they no longer disturb the peace - at worst, as Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House fears, they are rhetorically preparing for a future in which their ‘cognitive inferiors’ are either permanently enslaved or fenced off and left to die on the doorsteps on the enclaves of the elite as climate change burns the world down around them.

It is for this reason, also, that the IDW serve as such a gateway to the actual alt-right. It’s not fair to call a fan of the IDW a fascist. But they are certainly travelling on the same road, because their diagnosis of the crisis of liberalism is the same [including their complete and utter aversion to any consideration of a socialist solution]. An IDW-rationalist looks at the cognitive divide and thinks they’re going to come out on top; a supporter of fascism probably recognises they aren’t going to. At the leadership level, the two movements probably share 99 per cent of their beliefs, but unlike the Richard Spencers of the word, the writers at Quillette are unwilling to lower themselves to engage with the MAGA cultural wasteland. It remains to be seen which is the more effective political strategy.

What is to be done?

I’ve said many times that the first step of any socialist movement is to defend and uphold liberal democracy. Without upholding the basic principle that every citizen is entitled to equal dignity and equal say over the decisions that affect their interests, we cannot argue that a materially unequal society is one that does not uphold the social contract. Mere rejection of the IDW is not enough however. The IDW are very, very good at propaganda and are learning how to package misogyny, racism and transphobia under a veneer of scientific and philosophical legitimacy that is superficially persuasive to many people.

The left is getting better at countering these narratives - but there’s a disconnect between the very online progressive movements who are the ground troops of this war of stories and the movement activists who are seeking and contesting power. It doesn’t help that many of the [white, male] writers and academics who naturally support this movement enjoy socially privileged positions and access to expert knowledge. For many serious politicians, the IDW may be beneath their notice. But its cultural influence should concern us. We won’t be able to enact our agendas if the narrative ground has been disappeared beneath us.

Utilitarianism, Intersectionality and Epistemic Injustice

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epistemic Injustice

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

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

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

Utiliarianism is Epistemic Injustice

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

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

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

The Establishment Right - Not Dead Yet

I've written several times before on the tensions within the liberal democratic consensus, and how the Great Recession (and Iraq War that preceded it) exposed and aggravated them. Both in my first book (“Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder") and in my writings on my blog, I’ve argued that only democratic socialism offers the possibility of both more 'freedom' and more democracy – while also delivering on the left's other social goals included fairer, more resilient progress. There is, in other words, left-wing populism and it is good.

I've always been interested in the anatomy of right-wing political philosophy, because we on the left have to understand our opponents if we are to defeat them. The purpose of today's blog is to look briefly at the two 'establishment' right-wing liberal philosophies that are still in contention – neoliberalism and right-libertarianism – and see how they're responding to this moment of crisis. My interest in writing about this topic was sparked by a recent episode of Jacobin's "The Dig" Podcast with Daniel Denvir, discussing the history of neoliberalism. Like most leftists of a certain age, I find it both hilarious and gratifying that some people nowadays self-consciously identify as neoliberal (including my old friend @EconoMeager) rather than taking it as the invisible aether in which we all swim.

An anatomy of fools

Neoliberalism and right-libertarianism share common DNA. Philosophically, they are distinct from the various flavours of conservatism: idealist and utopian – neither especially empirical nor pragmatic – right-wing liberalism permits a degree of social and personal freedom that is anathema to the hard right. They are too 'centrist' for reactionaries in the same way that liberal democrats are too 'centrist' for us on the left. Both neoliberalism and libertarianism are committed to the Hayekian consensus of modern economics: that individual autonomy is the only just way to satisfy individual preferences, and that it is also economically efficient if every social actor engages in autonomous self-help in pursuit of those preferences. At a stretch, both may even argue that autonomous free contracting provides the social glue that binds society together and enables peace and prosperity amongst societies. It posits a harmony between individual and collective ends that is, of course, empirically false (because of collective action problems, market failures and a half dozen other factors).

Of the two, libertarianism gives ontological primacy to the autonomous individual. The boundaries of the private – including and especially private property – are sacred in a very literal way. Upholding the negative rights of the individual – the absence of violence or coercion – is the sine qua non of a just society and no violation of that principle can be tolerated. Right-libertarians distrust the democratic state (as do left-libertarians) because of the significant potential threat it poses to those rights. However, because of the primacy of principle, they are blind to the way in which unequal structures of wealth and power are just as much of a threat to individual freedom as the state. Right-libertarianism justifies authoritarianism by neglect – if it's not the state, then it's not exploitation. And it’s for this reason that right-libertarians tend to have the Trump-iest populist politics.  

Neoliberals take a different tack, and here I am relying explicitly on Dan's interview with the economic historian Quinn Slobodian. Neoliberals give primacy to the market as whole. They value the collective ends of efficiency and growth, and therefore are attracted towards the technocratic and utilitarian. For neoliberals, democratic impulses threaten the efficient operation of the market, so the legal institutions of the state must be made immune from popular accountability. Neoliberals are very comfortable exercising state power, but are deeply ambivalent about its democratic form and are prone to actual honest-to-goodness authoritarian behaviour. Neoliberals are less committed to the principle of individual autonomy – although it’s a valuable aesthetic ornament – and as a result may be more sceptical towards private concentrations of power that corrupt market efficiency (for example, they are often committed to breaking up monopolies in the interest of preserving competition). Neoliberals are anti-populists - and are preserving their elite status by standing with the Never Trumpers.

Different narratives, different faults

The Great Recession, therefore, posed a different challenges to neoliberals and right-libertarians. Like the Iraq War before it, the Great Recession showed that the idealistic utopianism of right-wing liberals was no better at economic management and securing international peace than the utopianism of the left-wing communists. But because of the affective weights they place on different elements of their political and economic model, each diagnoses the political threat from populism differently. These different viewpoints will determine their response to the populist moment and affect their short- and long-term political trajectories.

The neoliberals have the same response as always. The cause of the Great Recession was clearly too much state intervention in favour of housing loans, driven by populist visions of expanding home ownership. Put in charge of their own destiny, people vote for idiots like Trump who blindly rip up decades worth of international law and institutions. The state just needs to be run by smarter people, and if the masses cannot be educated, then they can at least have their biases studied and manipulated so they no longer get in the way. Neoliberals are most content with moving in the direction of further liberal undemocracy: while they can tolerate Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, they’d much rather live in Xi Jinping’s China than Trump’s America.

The libertarians, too, identify the state as the problem but their response to the current moment of crises has been less coldly calculating and more emotive. For libertarians, the cure for economic inquality and sluggish growth is worse than the disease. Blind to the threat posed to their liberties by private concentrations of capital, libertarians have been eclipsed by the populist right. The true believers remaining are those wealthy or privileged enough to be immune from the consequences of their own ideology. Other [let’s suppose white, working-class] men and women who have been materially affected by the Great Recession are those most likely to follow the siren song of illiberal democracy and right-wing identity politics, trading away the rights and freedoms of others (migrants, women, LGBT communities) so long as they preserve their own slice of the economic pie. It’s only self-interest after all.

What is to be done

I think the left writes off neoliberals at our own peril. Right wing libertarians have always been a fringe movement: well-funded, yes, but incapable of gathering lasting popular appeal outside small groups of narcissists. The defection of most of its voting base into nationalist reaction has shown libertarianism for the paper tiger it always was. But the neoliberals are playing a longer game. When Trump is gone, and the populist moment has passed, they’ll [deservedly] get credit for opposing his free-spending, institution-smashing policies. Moreover, the more they discredit Trumpism, the more they’ll delegitimise the very idea of populist democracy itself. The WTO may be saved by the very people now trying to destroy it. Neoliberals, in other words, retain their considerable social capital amongst elites, and that social capital is going to given them a great deal of political and ideological power in the long-term. If and when right-wing populism fails, it will be up to the left to resurrect the cause of popular democracy.