The left and body sanctity

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

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

The problem with sanctity

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

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

Not just conservatives

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

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

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

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

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

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

On "Globalists" and Nationalists

One result of the New Political "Dark Age" is that globalisation is once again much in the news. Yes, we are once again re-living the 30-year old, asinine debate over whether trade, openness and integration are good for us or not. My own answer to this is “yes, obviously”. The more important political question is how globalisation occurs, who manages it and who benefits from it. I think it would be hardly surprising for a progressive to answer that the answer to those questions are “undemocratically, by existing elites and largely for their own private benefit”. Both sides of the globalisation debate mistake a desirable end state [globalisation] with a particular set of policies [i.e. the neoliberal, free market consensus]. It suits globalisation's advocates on the right to argue that their policy prescriptions are the only way to reach that end goal [it isn't]. Equally, opponents of the neoliberal consensus often mistakenly make the argument that it is globalisation per se that is bad [it isn't].

In this context, a number of commentators, including reputable press outlets, have begun talking about political divides in contemporary democracy as a fight between “globalists” on one side and “nationalists” on the other. The former are characterised by a default pro-globalisation stance, the latter by the opposite. Let us put aside, for now, the fact that this language is often used as an anti-semitic dog-whistle by the alt-right and enthusiastically exploited by the Trump campaign. Is is a valid way of constructing a political spectrum?

On the intellectual front, my friend @AriSharp wrote a prescient piece on this in November of last year. Ari’s basic case is that the globalist/nationalist divide does away with the traditional differences between left and right, and creates a new alliance between the nationalist left and nationalist right opposed to globalisation. Ari argues that political parties must pick a side, since an internally-consistent policy platform cannot include both positions. Ari's position strikes me as a form of 'radical centrism': the type of politics that argues that cosmopolitan leaders like Turnbull, Clinton and Macron are always preferable to Sanders, Corbyn or Melenchon, regardless of their other policy positions or merits, merely because of their relative cosmopolitanism. 

A similar piece of work is currently being promoted by the Australian National University and the Fairfax papers in Australia: the Political Persona Project. Arguing that old political labels are rapidly changing, the researchers divide Australians into seven ‘new political tribes’ which they argue better model political preferences (complete with cutesy, Facebook-shareable cartoons). For example, my left-wing friends on Facebook generally fall into either the ‘activist egalitarian’ or ‘progressive cosmopolitan’ ‘tribes’. Let’s give the researchers the benefit of the doubt, and presume that these tribes are based on relevant research and describe real clusters of political personality in Australia. Is this a useful typology? Is it more salient than my own libertarian/authoritarian and progressive/conservative framework (See Chapter I of "Politics for the New Dark Age")?

First of all, let’s dispense with the trope of a left-right nationalist coalition as yet another instance of the tired political caricature that left and right are somehow similar and that the political spectrum ‘curves around’ at its extremes. I address the so-called ‘quadratic hypothesis’ or ‘horseshoe hypothesis’ and debunk it in Chapter I of my book.

Secondly, let’s also note that trying to split your political adversary’s coalition is a political strategy with a tried and true pedigree. Certainly, if I were running a left-wing political party at the moment I would be exploiting the divide between more neoliberal conservatives and anti-establishment nationalists for all it's worth. And let’s not forget that conservatives have been trying, often successfully, to wedge the left on trade for longer than I’ve been alive. This is old news.

Thirdly, it should also be acknowledged that the labels of globalist and nationalist are not, as far as I’m aware, seen perjoratively by the people to whom it is applied. Advocates for globalisation are proud of their elite status and the self-evident benefits that they are able to access as connected global citizens.  Indeed, being pro-globalisation is a mark of a tribal identity. Likewise, the new nationalists see their retreat intro "blood and soil" tribalisms denoted by narrow markers of race and religion as both rational and moral. The globalist-nationalist dichotomy is a useful tool for both sides to distinguish themselves from their opponents and shape the boundaries and content of their own political tribe.

Yet despite the conceptual flaws, there may be real ideological differences here, and the question we have to answer is whether these are ideological differences, or something else pretending to be ideology. There are valid reasons one might hypothesise a motivational basis to these tribes. Cosmopolitan elites are much more likely to be satisfied with the current status quo in highly developed nations, and thus resistant to impulses towards either progressive or conservative change. And cosmopolitans may be more open to new experiences and more comfortable with uncertainty than either right-conservatives or left-centrists. 

Looking again at the Political Persona Project, the obvious non-ideological difference between "activist egalitarians" and "progressive cosmopolitans" is class. Progressive cosmopolitans are far more likely to have a tertiary income and live in the cities; a person earning more than AU$90,000 is twice as likely to identify as part of this tribe than someone earning $50,000 (which is still well above the median wage). Ari similarly argues that nationalists are more likely to be manufacturing workers, those on low-incomes and self-funded retirees. A developmental and contextual understanding of political personality could certainly suppose that environmental differences between social-economic classes have an influence on political preferences. The process of globalisation has created winners and losers, and the latter have greater claims to be frustrated by the status quo. 

So I would argue that we’re actually seeing a frame being placed around class differences in political outlook, and calling that an ideological divide. In other words, an argument that class preferences trump a more comprehensive ideology - an argument from identity.  But the divergence in political behaviour between elites and non-elites is not a novel observation. Class membership is only one factor shaping political alignment, which otherwise shows significant individual and cultural variation. Thus, it's not clear to me that the globalist/nationalist divide really is highly salient to understanding modern politics, as Ari suggests. Rather, it seems that those issues 'explained' by the divide are the ones that tribalist elite political commentators (on both the 'globalist' and 'nationalist' sides) are most preoccupied by (such as trade, migration and climate change), but which affect the daily lived experience of relatively few people in the short-term.  

In the end, I don't think the globalist/nationalist divide is a framing with any utility. It goes without saying that political strategies, for either side of politics, that are not predicated first and foremost on the construction of broad ideological coalitions across class identity lines are doomed to failure. For their part, the peddlers of the globalists/nationalist framing have no interest in or capability to get us out of the New Political Dark Age: rather they appear intent, either by accident or design, on keeping us there.

Myths of the Old Order: Education as the Solution

This series of posts will examine myths or tropes that I hear progressives repeat in order to make sense of the "New Dark Age" that is our fragmented social reality. Conservatives likely have their equivalents but I don’t feel as qualified to offer critiques. If you have an idea for a trope to address, contact me at anthony.skews@gmail.com or on Twitter @Askews2000.

One of the classic paradoxes parties of the left seeks to understand is why so many economically- and socially-disadvantaged voters, who would have the most to gain from challenging the status quo, ‘vote against their own interests’ in supporting conservative parties. The quixotic quest by politicians to reach out to ‘working class whites’ (in the US) or ‘Western Sydney’ (in Australia) reflects profound, and justified, confusion by progressive leaders about why such a large pool of potential votes is so politically unreliable. The technocratic instinct in response to right-wing policy proposals is often therefore to try and demonstrate why those specific proposals would be bad for the hip pockets of certain categories of voter.  

"Politics for the New Dark Age" offers an alternative analysis: those with the least opportunities and facing the most day-to-day risk are pre-disposed to rely on coping strategies which lend support to leaders who offer to ease their anxieties and (re-)impose a sense of certainty and order. The right is extremely adept at exploiting fear and insecurity (often of ‘the other’) for their own ends, a solution progressives cannot (and should not) credibly employ. Instead, I argue, we should tackle the root causes of voter anxiety by levelling inequality, socialising risk and opportunity, and guaranteeing a decent quality of life for all.  

But what I often hear from well-meaning progressives in response to this paradox is that ‘educating voters is the solution’. It’s the catch-cry of Vox.com wonk types, former Obama administration officials, and the West Wing generation. Since policy-making should be done on the basis of the best available evidence and our own policy positions are so obviously correct, the reason people disagree with us is they lack the evidence or the training in critical thinking necessary to make rational political decisions. It is a strategic outlook that orthodox Marxists have criticised as educational dictatorship, and it is shared by “communist authoritarians, philanthropic do-gooders and bourgeois liberals” alike.

As examples, the left appeals to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to marshal the world’s most sophisticated  evidence in response to widespread climate denialism. We commission social research, hire think tanks and consultants to accumulate data and package it for the masses. We also go to great lengths to expand access to tertiary education, at least in part so that the next generation behaves more like us: the urban-dwelling recipients of a liberal arts education. We are less consistent on supporting other, non-university based forms of tertiary education because elites struggle to relate to the graduates of trade schools.

My argument is that, though education is a good in its own right, as a political strategy this approach is not only objectively wrong, but also actively counterproductive. The net response of most voters to contrarian facts is to ignore them. Exposure to inconvenient facts and evidence only hardens prejudices. Humans (including progressive intellectuals) use our reasoning capabilities to build arguments that support and rationalise our pre-existing biases and positions: we’re not endlessly flexible utilitarians, who change our minds based on the best available evidence. We are complex moral animals, whose behaviour and prejudices are shaped by our genes and our social circumstances in ways over which we have very little daily control.

The reason why the ‘education-centric’ approach is actively counter-productive is because it establishes a hierarchy of knowledge which emphasises the inequality of social position between those setting policy directions (with ‘education’) and those we are asking to support it (without). Since education thus becomes a marker of virtue, those without it stigmatised as morally flawed and unfit to take part in the decision-making process. Often progressives can be condescending and undemocratic elitists - and voters know it. Not only does reinforcement of social hierarchies tend to increase authoritarian and conservative sympathies amongst voters, but it has incited the backlash against elites that has so roiled Western democracies. Expert opinion against Trump or Brexit failed to convince voters to support the status quo, and a silent majority also actively rebelled against those (in London and Washington) who set themselves up as their social and educational betters.

To be fair, when pressed on this point, most progressives I know will concede that when they say ‘education’ what they really mean is ‘diversity of experience’. This is a better approach. Tertiary education (in whatever form) has value because it exposes us to diverse viewpoints on our societies and economic, and on race, gender, class and sexuality. Exposure to contextual diversity leads to greater tolerance of complexity in social identity, and more tolerance of out-groups. Such exposure calms anxieties about difference and reduces uncertainty (although it occasionally also has the opposite effect), creating positive effects for political and economic behaviour. Thus fears of immigration, famously, are not correlated with the number of immigrants in a community, but rather the exact inverse.

LGBT+ rights have advanced similarly: the war for marriage equality (still unfortunately stalemated in Australia) is not going to be won by converting educated people in cities. Social change occured in the hearts and minds of rural and suburban voters who discovered that (contrary to their expectations) LGBT+ individuals were just regular people who wanted the same things – home, family, relationships – as straight or cis- couples. 

So next time you hear a politician or activist say ‘educating people is the solution’ or that voters just ‘need educating’ or 'more information' about a particular social or political problem, stop them and ask how, precisely, they envisage that happening. We don't need to offer better facts, we need to offer better stories. And rather dismissing and devaluing the concerns of those who haven't been socialised to instinctively agree with us, we should instead listen to what they have to say.

Book Response: “Sapiens”, by Yuval Noah Harari (the takeaways)

I typically find @EzraKlein and the merry band of policy wonks at The Weeds to be insufferably smug. But listening to Ezra’s interview with historian Yuval Noah Harari (it’s the March 27 episode, for those interested), something tweaked my interest. Harari’s book, “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” has been on my to-read list for a while, but when I skimmed the first few pages in the bookstore, its out-of-date account of human evolutionary history put me off for a book supposedly about the history of our species. 

Having finally read the book a few weeks back, I have to say I misjudged it. Harari has hit on some very powerful insights, insights shared with my own work, “Politics for the New Dark Age”. Now I also echo the critiques made by some of Harari’s reviewers that his treatment of topics outside his field of expertise is flippant and sometimes wrong; some of his sources seem about ten years out of date; and the second half of the book runs off the rails to become an unfortunate exercise in futurism. Based on Klein’s interview, Harari seems a genuinely weird dude, but (like the similarly strange Nassim Nicholas Taleb) madness seems to be required in project like this. So here are my takeaways: what’s worth knowing from “Sapiens”, by Yuval Noah Harari.

Myths and Stories

Chapter 3 of “Politics for the New Dark Age” constructs an argument that institutions allow large-scale human societies to overcome collective action problems. Institutions, norms, rules and laws allow individuals to trust in the predictability of the behaviour of strangers, provided their fellow citizens are also bound by the names rules and norms. Harari’s argument is fundamentally the same: he believes the ‘cognitive revolution’ which separated us from our Neanderthal and Denisovan cousins was our capacity to tell stories and myths which construct an imagined order. Harari goes on to argue that myths and stories are expressed not only in art and culture, but in norms and institutions. Philosophy, religion, and secular law emerge and evolve because they are more or less effective in generating and sustaining large-scale human cooperation.

Harari’s discussion of money (Chapter 10, in his book) makes this point powerfully. My own book discusses the essentially arbitrary value of money but does not connect that to the earlier discussion of trust in abstract rules and norms. That is an oversight. For as Harari points out, trust in the value of money (an essentially worthless commodity in its own right) is the quintessential example of how social institutions unlock human cooperation. Exchange based on money replaced the need for everyone to know the reputation of everyone else. Notably, this revolution took place thousands of years before Adam Smith and the Bank of England. Rather than an individual having to know the value of hundreds of potential exchange goods, and trust in their trading partner doing the same, they only need to know the value of a shared, arbitrary medium of exchange whose value is consistent across society and ultimately backed by the power of the state. Socialists and neoliberals can argue about whether the value of money reflects fair exchange or underlying social power, but the fact that the value of money is at its core abstract should inform both perspectives.

And how are these myths created and maintained? Harari is close to a description of cultural evolution: he identifies the mechanisms and the academic fields that are informing the emerging evolutionary paradigm in the social sciences, but I think his sources didn’t bring it all together for him. He correctly points out that cultures are never fixed, and he shares with Machiavelli, Heraclitus and myself the view that the ‘contradictions’ in a given culture are the engines of its progress (at pgs 181-184). He notes that the evolution of cultural norms does not necessarily have to lead to increases in human happiness, but is circumspect about what does drive it. He leaves the question hanging: one could argue, as some of his reviewers have, that Harari believes that our symbolic culture is unmoored from structural constraints and evolves arbitrarily in the drift of history or at the whims of the powerful. But near the end, he correctly identifies the elements of a wholistic theory: cultural evolution, social constructivism (anachronistically labelled post-modernism), and game theory.

Harari espouses Dawkins-esque views that cultural beliefs are merely parasites on our cognitive capabilities and that both modernism and post-modernism are a scourge on civilization. But a writer who was less pessimistic about the benefits of progress (like myself), could just as easily argue that stories and myths are what makes advanced, cooperative societies possible.

Evolutionary Philosophy

Harari describes modern liberalism as being functionally similar to a religion, in terms of its capacity to organise large-scale societies. This is controversial point, but one I agree with. He goes on to provide a typology of humanist (Western) philosophies: liberal, socialist and ‘evolutionary’. Harari is a little obsessed with the contradictions between liberty and equality, so it’s understandable that he would see liberalism and socialism as distinct. Whether one accepts that view, or as I do in “Politics for the New Dark Age”, argue that they are merely different strands of a shared Western liberal philosophical tradition, it matters little. What’s interesting to me is Harari’s identification of a distinct ‘evolutionary’ school of Western philosophy. His own treatment of the subject is unfortunately very poor. He essentially treats evolutionary philosophy as undifferentiated from social Darwinism and therefore Nazism.

While traditional liberalisms and democtratic socialisms are predicated on methodological individualism, an emerging evolutionary paradigm instead argues that both liberalism and socialism could be alternatively constructed in an evolutionary framework which treats society as a whole as the primary unit of analysis. Instead of the (imaginary) social contract, Darwinian evolution predicated on mutation, selection and reproduction would constitute society’s explanatory myth or story. But Harari’s caricature of evolution as ‘survival of the fittest’ (the idea that evolution rewards selfishness and punishes selfless altruists) is out of date with  current developments. During the 20th century, right-wing ideas permeated and legitimised such cynical arguments in the biological sciences just as biological analogies were in turn abused to justify right-wing claims in the social sphere. Fortunately, what we now know from mathematical biology and multilevel selection that altruism and cooperation can be evolutionarily successful strategies and even come to dominate cultural ecosystems. Harari’s own history of humanity's expanding circle of cooperation proves this point, even if he does not make the connection himself.

For those interested, the Evolution Institute has a series of papers available online which seeks to provide “Truth and Reconciliation” for Darwinism in the social sciences: they’re an interesting read even if some of the authors sometimes skirt a little too close to dangerous views for my tastes. But the point is not that evolutionary philosophy is immune to racism and sexism, but that neither are liberalism or socialism. Regardless of the types of stories we construct about our societies, we have to deal with those other aspects of our species’ mental toolkit that uses minor and superficial differences to legitimise social hierarchies.

Myths of the Old Order: The Fact-Based Social World

This series of posts will examine myths or tropes that I hear progressives repeat in order to make sense of the "New Dark Age" that is our fragmented social reality. Conservatives likely have their equivalents but I don’t feel as qualified to offer critiques. If you have an idea for a trope to address, contact me at anthony.skews@gmail.com or on Twitter @Askews2000.

 “Truthiness”, satirist Stephen Colbert once declared, is the assertion of fact on the basis of intuition without recourse to evidence, logic or reason. It is a concept that seems to define the political times we live in better than any other single concept. In response to Brexit and Trump, if not before, left-leaning intellectuals have lamented the growth of this type of evidence-free discourse, in which facts don’t matter and the truth is subjective. To whit: all the protestations of Hillary Clinton’s competence were irrelevant because only the intuitive sense that she was corrupt mattered to voters. And in an ironic turn, see  how easily the Trump administration has turned around the Clintons’ claim they were the victim of ‘fake news’ to justify its own failures.

To discuss why this is such a pointless thing to worry about (on both left and right), we should first be able to distinguish between scientific facts (things falsifiable according to the scientific method) and social facts or ‘common sense’. The latter are widely shared rules, norms or taboos that are effectively unchallenged in a given social or group equilibrium. Of course, the idea that the scientific method grants some beliefs evidentiary weight it itself a social fact, but let's not dive too deeply down the epistemological rabbit-hole. Using this classification, we can distinguish between the existence of human-induced global warming (a scientific fact) and the political responsibility to do something to prevent it (a social fact).

When arguing with right-wingers, we often mistake a small, obvious lie (about the validity scientific facts) for the more subtle ‘big lie’ (about the validity of social facts). As the US sociologist Everett Hughes, a critic of 1930s Germany, wrote in the middle of last century:

“Each of these [right-wing] rationalizations brought up in defense of racial and ethnic injustices is part of a syllogism. The minor premise, stating an alleged fact, is expressed; the major premise, a principle, is left out. Instead of driving our opponent and ourselves back to the major premise, we [liberals] are content to question and disprove the minor premise, the allegation of fact.”

So too today the left ends up answering climate change denialists’ and racists’ ridiculous claims with [accurate] scientific data, but miss the right’s real agenda of signalling, to both their followers and the public at large, the weakness or irrelevance of social norms we would otherwise take for granted. For the same reason, the right can easily dismiss progressives' mustering of evidence because they see, better than we do, that such a rhetorical exercise has as its purpose challenging social power, not just winning the argument.

Cheaters and Liars

What makes the Trumps of the world so dangerous is that they are natural cheaters: individuals or institutions willing and able to defect from established social consensus. By doing so they obtain a selfish advantage, while damaging the shared social norms that normally make mutually beneficial cooperation amongst everyone else possible. A purveyor of ‘fake news’ may be a mere commercial or political opportunist: seeking ad revenue or votes. But they may also be a propagandist seeking to deliberately alter cultural reference points to advantage their agenda. A danger arises because for the average member of the public, the false social reality the propagandist or cheater signals is difficult to distinguish from the real thing. 

Needless to say, social taboos can often serve evolutionarily useful functions. For example: over the course of the twentieth century, we learned at great cost that institutional (public) racism caused immense, destructive harms. Casual (private) racism has proved more difficult to control, because it plays on elemental in-group/out-group prejudices in individual human nature, but most people are at least socialised to feel shame at the public expression of prejudice, and that shame enforces a norm that allows more diverse and creative societies to flourish in public spaces. What marks an entrepreneur of chaos is their inability or unwillingness to feel this shame about their actions, a mindset that encapsulates Trump and Farage, as well as Putin. In facing such individuals, social elites are simply flummoxed by their failure to abide by norms that would have limited a more neurotypical individual.

Looking in the mirror

It’s both correct and useful to point out Trump’s blatant disregard for both scientific and social facts, his casual racism, misogyny and outright falsehoods. But problems can also occur when intellectuals and leaders themselves mistake the two categories of fact, and fail to recognise that social or political taboos they in turn regard as mere common sense are just widely shared expectations and not scientific truths. The right knows this, but the left is typically more reluctant to admit it. When we discover that our opponents don’t share our reality, it’s convenient to believe they are simply liars, charlatans or idiots. But the liberal social contract norms that advanced democracies enjoy are fragile and need a vigorous and purposeful defense against the illiberal ideologues that would purposively seek to undermine them.

A social fact is true only insofar as it is useful. We can, for example, distinguish between important social taboos of universal application (i.e. “Don’t be racist”), and political or intellectual taboos shared by members of the political and intellectual class. Such ‘common sense’ political norms are easy to enumerate off hand: don’t be a socialist, free trade is always a positive, markets promote freedom, regulation is always inefficient, ‘something’ must be done about climate change, don’t show sympathy to those on welfare, or criminals, or refugees. Such decision rules look like political wisdom: elites have been taught – perhaps through observation of a highly salient political case studies – to believe that violation of these norms routinely carries negative consequences.

Elites genuinely believe that these are objective facts which it is personally shameful to reject. Much of so-called high politics consists of partisan attempts to induce ‘gotcha’ traps in which a politician can be shown to violate such taboos, and thus demonstrate their unfitness for leadership. There is an expectation that individuals will feel shame for violating norms, and a strong backlash bias exists to punish those that fail to quickly comply. The political and intellectual establishment is and remains outraged by Bernie Sanders’ (and Jeremy Corbyn’s) refusals to play by their rules of political discourse: to question free trade, to criticise cozy relationships between big business and government, to advocate for socialised healthcare and a living wage for all.

But such elite norms are often wrong. The usefulness of a social fact bears only a cursory relationship to its scientific objectivity. In evolutionary terms, social facts may be maladaptive: useful and correct in one context (socialism during the Cold War = bad), while being less relevant or harmful in the next (socialism during the Great Recession = maybe good?). They may also be like a male peacock’s feathers: costly, and only relevant in an arms race where everyone else is also a peacock.

Moreover, social facts need not be established rationally. ‘Prestige imitation’ is one of our species’ primary mechanisms for transmitting and learning cultural information; unfortunately, that means we are more likely to imitate the social norms signalled by high-status or successful individuals. We may rationally believe that discrimination is bad, but when discriminatory policies win elections, the political and intellectual elite can’t help but adjust their behaviour to incorporate a new reality in which maybe it isn’t. Our societies therefore often seem to change dramatically in response to electoral victories (and defeats); the Overton window of political acceptability is adjusted with each new data point.

So when people lament post-truth political debate, always consider: what sort of truth do they mean? And whose? Ultimately, winning and holding political power is critical not just because of the legal powers it grants, but because of the social influence it grants the wielder to shape social and cultural norms and taboos by exploiting the majority of our species' natural predilection towards compliance with the prevailing social reality.