The Left eats its children. The Right digs up its dead. (Good!)

There's been a bit of discussion lately on the podcasts I regularly listen to  about whether and how the Left 'eats it own'. The possibility of renewed radicalism on the millennial left, a radicalism with a real prospect of winning and holding political power within the lifetime of those alive today, is meeting with a predictable backlash. A whole generation of centre-leaning media and political personalities - Bill Maher, Dave Rubin, Sam Harris, Jon Haidt etc. - are promoting their belief that contemporary political polarisation is at least in part a reaction to the left's renewed radicalism. I have grave doubts about the sincerity of such people: blaming the left serves as an excuse to spout their own shitty beliefs, and "concern trolling" about the future of the progressive movement is as much about fighting for their own political power and prestige as it is about seeing the left as a whole succeed. 

Conservatives and reactionaries have never needed the left to excuse their existence. Yet centrists historically spend more time fretting about socialists provoking fascists than actually trying to achieve progress. While actual leftists battled Nazis on the streets of Weimar, Germany's centrist elite handed their country over to Hitler. Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" castigates white moderates more concerned with order than progress. Meanwhile, people friendly to marriage equality and gay rights - some gay themselves - are unfairly blaming the trans community for impugning the LGBT community as a whole. Everywhere, centrists are so concerned with respectibility and group consensus that they fail of offer effective defense of either individual rights or progressive social outcomes. 

The Left Devours Its Children. And That's a Good Thing. 

I address this phenonmenon in the Introduction to my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder". Belief in the possibility of capital-P "progress" is what makes socialists, well, socialists. We are inclined by both ideology and innate disposition to be open to new experiences and cultural innovation because we trust that they will enrich the life of our community. However, 

"If the left’s animating beliefs are [defined by] single issues alone, it will continue to lead to left-wing politicians, parties and their supporters becoming more and more conservative as they age. Progressivism can devour its own children. Because social advancement is the natural outcome of the human condition, if we have our vision fixed only on the road immediately in front of us, sooner or later we’ll run out of road."

There's a reason why many Gen-X centre leftists, who grew up in a cultural environment characterised by neoliberal economics and soft social liberalism are increasingly defining themselves as centre-right "classical liberals" as the civil rights struggles of their childhood are resolved and a harder edged socialist economics returns to prominence. There's a reason the Boomer neoconservatives abandoned the left during the Cold War struggle against communism. There's a reason why many TERFS use the language of second wave feminism and anti-capitalism to attack trans people right alongside the misogynistic and pro-capitalist right. These people are angry and frustrated; I believe them when they say their beliefs haven't changed. They feel like it's the 'Left' that's moved, not them. But there was never and will never be a Platonic ideal of the 'Left'. What these people are experiencing is the first hand flow of time and progress. This the fate of our kind: to see society carry on past us. 

The progressive Australian political Podcast "Boonta Vista Socialist Club" asked what issue would tip them over the line from progressive to conservative. One co-host replied "poly acceptance" - a regrettable answer, as that issue is coming and coming soon. Another said "furry acceptance", a funnier and better reply. We all face the slow dawning realisation that many of our favourite TV shows (and actors and comedians and directors) are 'problematic'. There are two possible responses to this realisation. One is to do as #GamerGate did and throw a political temper tantrum that drives you into the willing arms of the far right. Another is to accept the complexity of the relationship between past and future. We can laud those who opposed slavery, even if they also held troubling views of race. We can praise the suffragettes fights for legal equality, even some held authoritarian views, for example, on eugenics. Part of being a progressive is acknowledging the achievements of the past while recognising that they never go far enough. The struggle for liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a matter of continual myopic optimisation - we will never achieve utopia, but not for want of trying. 

Moreover, the inflexibility of the individual serves to some degree as a useful brake on the dreams of the radicals. The truth is, moving too far too fast does invite a backlash. Revolutionary fervor may speed up the pace of progress, but it willingly abandons the possibility of receiving meaningful feedback from the rest of the population and risks splitting a society in ways that can only be resolved through violence. When we have big, progressive generations like the millennials, we can and should use the opportunity to move things forward quite far. But the existence of the "classical liberals" is a reminder that we have to message toward those we leave behind as well. 

The Right digs up its dead

OK, so far this blog has done a lot of naval gazing. But what about the equivalent phenonmenon on the Right? If we lose older progressives as the Overton Window moves left, what happens when the Overton Window moves right? I would argue that if the Left eats its children, then the Right raises its dead. As societies learn and grow, the reprehensible views, beliefs and behaviours they contained in the past seem dead and forgotten. They are not of course: the process of cultural evolution merely suppresses reprehensible practices, it does not eliminate them. They continue to exist at lower frequencies in the population, subject to punishment if expressed publicly but still capable of surving in forgotten cultural backwaters and re-invading the body politics if its defenses weaken. 

So when the Overton Window shifts in a more conservative direction, as it sometimes does in response to social and economic crisis? Well, guess what? Fascism's back! Racism's back! Homophobia's back! Religious fundamentalism's back! When they win ground, conservatives goes looking for ideas in the past. Fortunately for us, the past is full of terrible ideas. Ideas that many generations of people alive today have been socialised into having an intense and visceral moral revulsion towards. That's the conservative brake, that's what stops conservatives from running away with a society or splitting it in two: when they start resurrecting zombie ideas, most people think they've gone too far and pick up their shotguns. 

Yet there's a unique danger here. The most insidious tactic of the purveyors of bad ideas, the ones they have been forced to learn by becoming cultural rebels in order to survive is this: looking and appearing normal will lower the defenses of a society enough to let you infiltrate it. Look normal, speak normal, act normal. Appropriate the style and rhetoric of successful authority figures. Be polite, obey the laws and norms as best you can. Use the thin edge of the wedge of your ideas to appeal to diaffected 'centrists'. The far right have mastered these techniques because they had no other choice: without these techniques, their ideologies would have died our generations ago when they were abandoned by the mainstream. The far left are too new to have mastered the same tactics. 

The exuberance of youth

In the end, perhaps this is the true point og difference between left and right in a cultural evolutionary framework. New far left ideas are often divorced, deliberately so, from cultural constructs. Their practitioners are young and enthusiastic, but unblooded in techniques for attaining cultural dominance. The far right, on the other hand, are wiley survivors, adept at masking their presence and swimming upstream in a culture that despises them. Neither advantage is likely decisive, and the success of a given idea is likely to be primarily determined by structural factors given by the extant distribution of power and production in society. In the long run, we must admit that the future belongs to the young. 

The Omnivore's Dilemma Redux: Understanding Anti-Vaxxers

The 'Omnivore's Dilemma' is an extremely useful concept for understanding some of the paradoxes in human behaviour and psychology. Put simply, if a being can eat anything in order to obtain the energy and nutrients it needs to live, then it faces a dilemma not of survival but rather of choice. Rather than struggling just to achieve its goals (survival), the omnivore must answer questions such as how best to achieve that goal safely, efficiently and sustainably. Culture provides one way to find those answers - social learning increases decision-making effectiveness by offering proven solutions to questions about what's safe to eat, where the best stuff is found and how to prepare it efficiently. 

Everyone who's shopped in a modern supermarket has had direct experience of the omnivore's dilemma: the paradox of choice we feel when selecting one breakfast cereal out of hundreds causes acute anxiety akin to that felt by our ancestors deciding on the day's hunt. In our daily lives we resolve these feelings by relying on a combination of innate biological preferences and learned behaviours - some of which may be adaptive and some of which may not be. Our taste buds tell us to indulge in sweet and fatty foods; our psychological openness to experience tilts the scale between trying a new brand or sticking with what we've had before; our upbringing nudges us towards the brands our parents trusted; or we seek to imitate the choice of celebrities who appear on marketing material. If we're being very careful (perhaps because we're resource constrained) we might even engage our System 2 reasoning and perform a cost-benefit calculation: i.e. which cereal will feed a family of four for the least dollars?

The omnivore's dilemma is not just about food: humans are behaviourial omnivores. Every action we take is the path of least resistance between the competing biases and impulses coded in our brains by biology and culture - and those psychological and cultural impulses are shaped by thousands, if not millions, of years of natural selection. As a result, our impulses make certain assumptions about the physical environment related to the environmental structure in which they became 'fixed' as part of our psyche. The Santa Barbara-type evolutionary psychologists speculate at length about the "environment of evolutionary adaption" (EEA) - but in reality there's a different environment for every trait. For example, our preference for sugary and fatty foods is likely rooted deep in pre-agrarian history, at a time when such energy sources were rare. But your learned preference for cheap cereal may adaptive only in the developmental environment of your childhood, when your family pinched pennies.  

Signals and Behaviour

In terms of game theory, a behaviour is produced by a strategy which in turn relies on a stable set of expectations about the state of the world. As behaviourial omnivores, we are open to new information ('signals') about the state of the world and can adjust our strategies accordingly. In fact, humans as a species are remarkably adept at signal recognition: from birth, we are natural mimics with a preternatural talent for both pattern recognition and imputing causation. The canonical example of this is movement in tall grass: not only will we notice a sign of change in the state of the world, our first instinct is to attribute an agent or cause to that change. It's very likely in fact, that these abilities are somewhat overtuned: agency bias may be one of the psychological underpinnings of belief in the supernatural as well as social, political and economic conspiracy-mongering: we see patterns that just aren't there. 

But signals about the state of the world may or may not be accurate, indeed, they may be intentionally falsified by other actors. How then do we select between them, particularly when trusting one signal over another (i.e. changing our expectations about the world) may result in vastly different behaviour? Let's connect this back to real-world politics: the information age provides every individual with almost unlimited opinions on every conceivable topic. We face a paradox of information: given that we can find information supporting any conceivable state of the world, how do we choose between them? The answer is the same as when we choose our breakfast cereal: we let our biological and learned biases and preferences take over and go for the option that causes the least anxiety. Everyone is likely to prefer information that re-enforces their pre-existing beliefs about the state of the world (confirmation bias); conservatives are likely to prefer information from sources they are already familiar with; authoritarians will preferentially imitate the bahviour of high-status individuals etc. Only rarely do we engage our rational mind and make a costly, independent assessment of the facts. 

Social media makes all of this harder, of course. It strips away much of the context of information signals, removing information about the reputation and status of the sender that we might rely on to make such judgements. Bad faith actors can intentionally manipulate our biases to spread 'fake news'. Some of these techniques are quite insidious: propagandists and marketeers delight in abusing our learned biases towards the scientific method by deliberating misinterpreting research or associating themselves with high-status scientific professions. They attack the character or reputation of opposing sources (in areas unrelated to the quality of the information they are providing), knowing that this reduces the odds the experts will be listened to. They mimic the affectations and talking points of thought leaders: privileging 'open dialogue', the rhetorical style of varsity debate, and the cultural signifiers of wealth. 

The anti-vaxxers' dilemma

Let's see how this might all work in practice. Imagine you're a skeptical cattle herder in a quasi-agrarian society. You have a short lifespan, in no small part because there's a one in three chance of dying from smallpox. One day, someone from a neighbouring village comes through and describes a behaviour in which people in his village take pustules from infected cows and rub them on the faces or wounds of their children. He or she swears they haven't had a smallpox outbreak in years. Do you imitate this behaviour, knowing that a sick cow will sometimes also make a child sick? Of course you wouldn't! You'd think the stranger and his village were mad. And you might be right: another village nearby sacrifices the elderly to the sky-god and claims the same results, and that's obviously just superstititous nonsense. 

And yet the village that practices variolation is correct. Over millennia, they will live longer, healthier lives: have more children, herd more successfully and eventually come to dominate the local economy. Your village of skeptics (and the nearby village of religious fundamentalists) can't compete. You either imitate their behaviour or go extinct. Those who are most comfortable with novelty adapt the quickest. Over time, the behaviour becomes fixed in the population: scientists investigate and confirm the germ theory of disease; institutions are establish to subsidise the practice and punish those that don't comply. Ritualisation may even set in, such that compliance with the norm becomes a reliable signifier of group identity, 

Now flip the script. You're a parent who lives in a society that practices widespread vaccination and regularly signals to you that vaccination is safe and effective. But one day, you encounter a signal that tells you the opposite: somehow a crank theory or conspiracy, a bad scientific study or new religious belief has penetrated through the cultural fog and established an information paradox. What is the omnivore to do? Here's the thing: were the new information stating that vaccines are dangerous correct (it's not, for the record) the fitness-increasing decision would be to accept the new signal, refuse to vaccinate your children despite the risks and spread the new signal as widely as possible. Over a lifetime, your child would be statistically fitter and healthier and may achieve a higher social status. But of course, the opposite is true. The same openness to novelty which is adaptive in one set of conditions is maladaptive in the other. 

But the individual doesn't have the benefit of seeing life as a multi-generational evolutionary simulation in which statistically significant statistical differences in average outcomes are meaningful. They have to make a decision to reduce their individual anxiety in the moment. So their biases go to work. Most of us trust the information we learned as children about vaccinnes being safe; we attribute elite status to the medical profession and the advice it offers; we are at least partly responsive to the directives of government so long as it doesn't directly affect our individual rights and interests. A tiny minority of individuals will react differently and accept the new signal: maybe their psychological sanctity trigger is more sensitive; maybe they're more libertarian than average, and are skeptical about 'received wisdom'; maybe their openness to new information is set a little looser than average. Overall, it's plausible that there's a correlation between 'progressive' traits and anti-vaxxer idiocy: because the same set of underlying biases cause both sets of behaviour.

Openness to new information and skepticism of authority are politically adaptive behaviours for many people, but mental toolkits that may be adaptive in many scenarios are not guaranteed to be adaptive in all of them. We never know the state of the world with any certainty, and the adaptiveness or otherwise of our behaviour can only be known over extremely long timescales. Population-level behaviours, norms and institutions may help us resolve the paradox of information in many circumstances, but not all. We therefore remain behaviourial omnivores - capable of considerable strategic flexibility both on an individual and social level. That flexibility is central to what makes progress possible, but doesn't guarantee it for either the individual or society as a whole. 

The colour analogy

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

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

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

The colour analogy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sex and Gender

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

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

Moral Colours

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

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

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

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

Authoritarians, Hierarchy and Morality

Why is it that the right so often treats questions of public policy as matters of private morality? Even though as citizens of democratic nations we govern on the basis of the equal rights of all, conservatives often appear to be motivated by overwhelming moral impulses when it comes to the treatment of those less powerful and numerous than themselves. Whether it's poverty, sexuality or gender, these moral instincts override their willingness to participate in group decisions using shared liberal language. 

That old canard: the immoral poor

The lie that poverty is a result of moral failing is pervasive. Margaret Thatcher once said that poverty was a ‘personality defect’; in the US, former Presidential candidate and now cabinet Secretary Ben Carson has described poverty as a mindset. The Victorian notion of deserving and undeserving poor is so universal today that even supposed progressives who critique Thatcherism, and whatever it is Ben Carson believes, embrace paternalism as a matter of both political philosophy (see: Dworkin) and public policy.

My book, “Politics for the New Dark Age”, and this blog, have discussed how paternalistic (read: authoritarian) approaches to poverty and welfare often systematically strip decision agency from the subjects of government policy. Examples include, but are not limited to: limited-duration unemployment benefits; conditional-welfare programs (that require recipients to seek work or training or be subject to forced labour); to “cashless” welfare delivery; and the latest “straight-from-the-Onion” headline requiring government authorisation before getting a pet. Even social democrats love their own ‘nudge’ policies, and in foreign policy will argue the necessity of imposing conditionality on foreign aid.

The reason this belief set is shared by both right and left because it’s not a progressive-conservative issue (do we trust that social decisions make us better off?) but an authoritarian-libertarian one (do we trust others to make decisions to make themselves better off?). Although conservatives are on average more authoritarian than progressives, there’s plenty of would-be authoritarians on the left. Centre-left parties may believe in cooperative solutions to alleviate poverty, but do so from a position of presumed superiority over those they seek to help. I support the view of the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, who argues that "The proper aim of egalitarian justice is not to ensure that everyone gets what they morally deserve, but to create a community in which people stand in relations of equality to others."

She goes on to criticise what she terms the 'luck egalitarianism' of the centre-left:

"First, it excludes some citizens from enjoying the social conditions of freedom on the spurious ground that it’s their fault for losing them. It escapes this problem only at the cost of paternalism. Second, equality of fortune makes the basis for citizens’ claims on one another the fact that some are inferior to others in the worth of their lives, talents, and personal qualities. Thus, its principles express contemptuous pity for those the state stamps as sadly inferior and uphold envy as a basis for distributing goods from the lucky to the unfortunate. . . . Third, equality of fortune, in attempting to ensure that people take responsibility for their  choices, makes demeaning and intrusive judgments of people’s capacities to exercise responsibility and effectively dictates to them the appropriate uses of their freedom."

It’s the structure, stupid

A moral understanding of difference is merely one answer to the question of why there is difference in the first place. Broadly speaking, moral culpability is a feature of agent-based explanations of difference; structure-based explanations do not feature direct responsibility in the same way. This can be shown with reference to two popular explanations of poverty, which come in both group- and individual-centred variants: the biological (‘race’ or genes) and the ‘motivational’ (culture or the individual).

To rebut these briefly: the social construct of race is junk science, and while individual genes do affect lifetime outcomes, they are arbitrarily distributed amongst the population at birth and carry no ethical culpability. With regard to motivational explanations, and as I wrote in my review of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”, while cultural technology may contribute to individual success, culture-level explanations are often little better than de-racialised chauvinism until we recognise that cultures are products of structures and not the way around. Differences in individual 'ambition' is the more common “liberal” explanation of poverty, which of course is disprovable by tracking systemic inter-generational and geographic patterns of deprivation.

Both biological and motivational stories about poverty implicitly construct hierarchies – the hierarchy is caused by difference. Structural explanations point to the existence of unequal social and economic hierarchies as the cause of poverty – difference is constructed by hierarchy. As Rutger Bremen said in a TED talk in June, the root cause of poverty is a lack of money and people lack money because how social and economic systems distribute available resources. A structualist (and this includes Marxists) sees the target of social reform as society itself. The socialist 'New Man' is a result of structural change, not a precondition for it. 

Resentful elites

For those that have stuck it out this far, I am now going to state the central contention of this piece: authoritarian personalities do not treat the poor and other minorities differentially because of their prior moral belief [systems]. Rather, they have and express moral beliefs in order to justify the existence of hierarchical difference. Moral emotions are an effect of biological status/hierarchy preferences, not a cause; moral systems of belief serve to legitimise and authorise hierarchical instincts and authoritarian societies. In an example of gene-culture co-evolution, belief systems work with and activate emotional responses, which in turn are legitimised and socially licensed by social norms, practices and institutions.

Those at the top of social hierarchies (be they economic, sexual or gendered) are more likely to believe thanks to rational calculus, elite socialisation or developmental history that those hierarchies are necessary. Social policies that would assist the least well off, even if articulated in the soft discourse of classical liberalism (“everyone should have the right to marry whomever they please”) or social democracy (“inequality of opportunity is unfair and unjust”), upset that hierarchy. Any possibility of social advancement for those perceived to sit at the lower reaches of the social heap (whether due to feminism, LGBT+ pride, or economic welfare) challenges the natural order and provokes an emotional response, be it anger, hostility or fear. And from their cultural toolkit, elites call up or manufacture moral belief systems that legitimise and justify their anger and the steps they take to act upon it.

If there is one lesson I want readers to take away from “Politics for the New Dark Age”, it's this: be sceptical of anyone, politician or otherwise, that wants to engage a comparative analysis of the worth of individual lives, or of different social groups. They are, by definition, potential autocrats and they cannot be convinced by liberal reasoning alone that they are wrong.

Myths of the Old Order: Who’s afraid of “populism” anyway?

This series of posts will continue to examine myths or tropes that I hear repeated by those 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.

The neoliberal consensus is dead. What will arise from its ashes, however, remains open for debate. Centrists, lacking the vision discipline historically imposed by a strong left, are being storm-tossed by electorates from Washington to Vienna.  We are told that the charismatic elitism of Macron or Obama is the only thing protecting democracy from a rising tide of populist nationalism. In this narrative, the far right and ‘far’ left (if you can call democratic socialism far left) are riding a wave of anger and disillusionment into political power, and tearing up cultural norms and evidence-based policies along the way.

This blog will attempt to understand and thereby partially allay these fears. Off the bat, let me say that right-wing populism is in fact dangerous -  but because it’s right-wing, not because it’s 'populist'. Right-wing values of hierarchy and social stasis are inimical to individual rights when left unchecked. Stalinists are a political joke in a democracy; modern-day Nazis are not. 

Clutch the pearls

To label someone a populist in elite political discourse is to employ a slur. To argue that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are somehow the same is to impugn one with the perceived flaws of the other. Australian political commentators love this kind of lazy rhetorical shorthand: when Labour Party policy on trade or immigration, for instance, is described as ‘populist’, it is to imply that such policies are somehow illegitimate, inconsistent or poorly justified. Back in the day, “protectionist” would have sufficed but that epithet has lost much of its power with the demise of the neoliberal consensus. Better now to infer a parallel with the xenophobia and chauvinism of a Bernardi, Hanson or Abbott.

Centrist elites have convinced themselves that policy-making is a matter of rational calculus: assessing costs and benefits and employing policy tools to deliver the most efficient outcome for the largest number of people. Invariably, elite interests are taken to represent the interests of the whole community. Such a worldview must appear natural for individuals unburdened by ideological aesthetics and for whom bargaining and compromise are the [sole] essence of politics. By contrast, when presented with policies they don’t understand in these terms, the centrist’s first instinct is to attribute to those advancing them traits of stupidity, self-interest or malice. Populists, in their reading, are merely selfish entrepreneurs who exploit irrational public grievances for private gain; in Trump’s case, as idiot-savant.

A better view

This, of course, is not true. Populists voters, and their leaders, articulate political vision[s] centered around perspectives and interests that are not part of elite discourse but rational all the same. Those visions simply aren’t intelligible from the perspective of those socialised with a different set of norms. The elite are like the aristocrats who cry “let them eat cake” at a mob of torch-wielding revolutionaries shouting about democracy and liberty. For the establishment, there are both correct ways to articulate political causes (“tone”) and only a narrow range of acceptable claims. To articulate an ‘unacceptable’ political argument or an acceptable one in the ‘wrong way’ is to violate norms. Moreover, to be ignorant of those norms is display unsuitability as part of the 'ruling' class. 

Backlash bias is one of the most important tools in the human psychological toolkit, but its social role is poorly appreciated. Confirmation bias is better appreciated: we tend to weight more highly information and behaviour that agrees with our expectations, and reward those who act in expected ways. Backlash bias is the inverse of this: we experience something akin to shock when confronted with information or behaviour we didn’t expect, and are often willing to call out or punish those who express such behaviours. The backlash we feel is our cognitive way of coding and implementing ‘meta-norms’ – a built-in programme for punishing deviance that ensures the ongoing cohesiveness of a shared set of social expectations or ‘culture’. 

Within both right and left, those who have risen to political and economic influence are socialised with just such a set of political expectations either prior to or as part of the process of acquiring power. The longer they’ve been in power, the less likely it is that those beliefs will tolerate perceived variation. So when the establishment reacts to populist leaders and policies, they are exhibiting a [genuinely felt] moral belief that those leaders and policies are disruptive for the cohesiveness of the community (or in the case of politics, ‘their side’) of which they are of course the self-appointed representatives.

This is made more potent by elites’ presumption of authority over their own ‘team’: elites don’t just embody political norms, but set, control and enforce them through the use of both hard and soft influence. Their understanding of their own community is stratified in such a way as to place them at the top. US Republicans, for example, long presumed that they could set a free-market agenda for an electoral coalition comprised of a lower class of Christian conservatives nd racialized nationalists. Their contemporary hand-wringing isn’t only an emotional reaction to ideological arguments they don’t understand, but a genuine anger and fear at losing control of the political destiny of their own political team to a group of people they see as lesser. 

Getting back in touch with our roots

The return of populism, for that is what it truly is, does not need to cause us such anxieties.

By necessity, political movements specialise as they increase in complexity: delegating authority higher and higher as power becomes centralised and remote from supporters; creating self-perpetuating institutions to manage and exercise that power on their behalf. Every organisation, including political parties and states, must balance the effectiveness of its governance (attaining and exercising power) against its responsiveness to those whose tacit consent it relies on to legitimise its own authority. There may be real limits about how big a democratic state can get, and states are uniquely powerful institutions. Political parties and movements are orders of magnitude weaker than states, with limited resources, poor institutions, and low levels of individual loyalty and commitment.

When an existing group of elites has been in power for too long, they necessarily lose touch with their base, unless active measures are employed to keep the party leaders responsive and accountable. That is the reason why political victories come in alternating waves: each wave brings in fresh blood and fresh ideas. But if complacent enough, elites often try to rig their own institutions to limit the very accountability they need to continue doing their job effectively. So if neoliberalism (on both left and right) had been challenged effectively over the last forty years, perhaps it could have evolved into something acceptable to the voting public. Instead, it assumed a position of ideological hegemony and closed itself to all criticism; now it is overthrown amidst crisis and disorder.

So when a politician becomes a 'populist' in the elite imagination, what he or she is really doing is speaking to marginalised voters about issues they care about in language they understand. I take comfort from the fact the left-wing populists speak of noble concerns: fair work, a decent standard of living, and universal access to health and education. That is the progressive core. Those on the centre-right might want to reconsider which side they’re really on, when their populist id exploits the lowest forms of bigotry and fear.