Respectability Politics and the Great Free Speech Panic of 2017

So, it’s 2017, and we’re going through a moral panic about freedom of speech. For cynics, the peril in which the right to freedom of speech finds itself is yet more evidence that we’re entering a new political dark age. This culture war is mainly being fought over the issue of protest and no-platforming right-wing speakers on US university campuses, and thanks to Anglo-Saxon borrowing Australian and British conservatives are also getting in on the act. Many smart, liberal(-ish) writers who should know better – Andrew Sullivan, Jon Haidt, Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher - and papers of record like The Atlantic, Guardian and Boston Globe are piling on. The latest skirmish involves lefty West Coast radio station KPFA cancelling a launch event for Richard Dawkins' new book on account of his excessive and discriminatory singling out of Islam as part of his New Atheist polemics against all religion. 

Don't Panic . . . .

Moral panics are ridiculous in general, relying as they do on the cherry-picking of highly-emotive anecdotes, and this one in particular galls me. Do people wringing their hands about free speech in student politics not remember what being a teenager/twentysomething was like? Universities are always going to be full of young people who take their beliefs too seriously and have poor impulse control. Part of becoming an adult is learning how not to engage with people who hold different views: which strategies are effective (mainly ignoring the trolls) and which aren't. The moralists want to take away young idealists’ capacity to make  mistakes and have these kinds of confrontations for themselves. Talk about coddling! 

Moreover, there’s no practical solution here that doesn’t involve a serious violation of student rights to protest and assembly. Aware of the power of student movements to have a real impact on social debates, conservatives have always sought to shut down campus democracy and turn tertiary institutions into degree factories. By protraying the inconveniences of a handful of (overpaid) loudmouths as a threat to Western civilization and democracy, the boosters of this narrative play into the hands of those whose own committment to personal liberty and the free contest of ideas is conditional and limited. 

Moreover, there’s things about the people pushing this panic that I find repellent. Such men, and they are almost exclusively middle-aged white men, frequently combine their punching down at young progressives with deeply misguided views of their own about feminism and Islam. Dawkins is in many respects the poster boy for this kind of public "intellectual". As much as they profess to care about freedom of speech, they mainly seem interested in their own freedom as powerful men to express bigotry unchallenged. In the end, the so-called ‘liberals’ and centrists who spread the myth that freedom of speech is under assault are at best being useful idiots for conservatives who want to shut down (progressive) student political activism.

 . . .but there is a discussion to be had

And yet on the particular issue of freedom of speech, I agree there is an debate here. Of course there is: when the rights of individuals rub up against one another, politics is required to resolve the issue of where the boundaries lie. Readers of Politics for the New Dark Age will recognise that I take a strong stance on individual rights and I don’t believe that no-platforming and boycotts are a particularly effective form of protest. Odious people should air their odious views, if only to demonstrate how genuinely ridiculous they are to and to prevent them from claiming martyrdom. Using social power to censor offending speech does in fact reveal authoritarian tendencies among those progressives that pursue it. I would prefer that intellectual strife be embraced as a generative and creative process for social learning.

But, unlike the Haidts, Dawkins, Sullivans and Mahers of the world, I just don’t care very much about the freedom of speech of conservatives. Culture war skirmishes at universities are not in the top ten issues affecting the ordinary voter, and probably wouldn’t break the top one hundred. The Dawkins issue is particular no-brainer: by sponsoring a book launch, KPFA was associating their brand with Dawkins' and they are well within their rights to protect their reputation by disassociating themselves from him. For both sides on this one, the question of delineating the correct boundaries of rights appears to be less important than the tribal affiliation of the speaker. In other words, this is a political issue that can only be resolved through power, not an issue of principle that can be resolved through argument. 

Respectability Politics

The moral panic over free spech is a classic example of how social position shapes political personality, and issue about which I have written previously. For affluent white (liberal) men (including myself), there are very few ways in which they [we] do not benefit from the status quo. Libertarian views are overwhelmingly more likely to be held by privileged men (nb: this relationship does not go the other way: men are not necessarily all libertarians), and as a result freedom of speech has much higher salience to them. This is particularly the case when either a) otherwise progressive individuals worry that immature student protesters might make them embarrassed  around their other elite friends, or b) if they suspect (on the basis of their own more crypto-conservative views) that one day they might find themselves subject to protests.

Centrist elites hold firmly to the belief that society is already sufficiently meritocratic (of course it is, they're at the top!) and that steps by the left to address racial, gendered or economic inequalities will only get in the way of action on the yuppie social issues they care most about. When inter-sectionalists ask them to empathise with how their preferred policy stances can affect other identities and interests in unforseen ways, they perceive that as an ask to diminish their own power and perspective rather than expanding it. My own book, Politics, does not employ identity politics as an ideological framework. But as a tactic, coalition-building amongst groups facing multi-dimensional oppression, and building linkages across issues, is the only way that progressives can and must win. Even (especially) if it causes existing elites within the left some discomfort in adjusting to new realities. 

In this regard, the moral panic over freedom of speech suggests itself to me as a manifestation of respectability politics. There’s a quote from Martin Luther King Jr that seems apt for discussion:

“I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the [greatest] stumbling block in [the] stride toward freedom is. . . the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; . . . Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

So as often through progressive history, we have a bunch of middle-aged affluent, centrist men dictating to a group of young people (with a high proportion of women and minorities) how they should behave in their pursuit of political ends. If they are genuine about wanting what’s best for the left, they need to get out of the way, and stop punching down in the name of their own self-serving aggrandisement. 

Liberalism: New Arguments for the Original Position (Part 2)

Politics for the New Dark Age offers a robust defense of a libertarian socialist approach to politics and governance, embedded in a liberal political and social framework. It explicitly makes use of social contract theory, a shared myth that the members of a society have an implicit agreement that establishes the ground rules for their future interaction. The social contract is of course only a thought experiment, but the fact that it is merely a convenient fiction is irrelevant if it is useful. The veil of ignorance is a particularly important element of Rawlsian liberalism. The veil provides a selective structure to social contract-based ideologies by providing a metric by which social rules can be considered just. 

In Part 1 of this series, I argued that recent discoveries suggesting different modes of moral reasoning in the human brain offered one justification for the veil of ignorance story. If people have different ways of reasoning about moral decisions, then foundational, universal rules can only be constructed from those rules we all share in common, namely care (the prevention of harm) and fairness (legal equality). Today's blog post will tackle this problem from a different angle, namely game theory, mathematics and cultural evolution. 

The Darwinian Veil

Readers will have noticed passing references in both my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age", on this blog to evolutionary game theory. Evolutionary game theory originated in the 1970s from the work of John Maynard Smith and George Price and has been extensively developed in the field of mathematical biology. It provides a way of understanding the dynamics of complex systems (including cultural systems) divorced from the need to explain the behaviour of all the individual participants in those systems. 

Most readers should be familiar with the basic conceits of game theory, or at least have heard of some of the basic games such as the "Prisoners' Dilemma" and "Chicken". Unlike simpler utilitarian rational-choice models, game theory incorporates the interdependence of actors' choices into its thinking. In other words, the consequences of my decisions are not simply a function of my pursuit of goal-optimising strategies, but also the strategies employed by other actors. More relevantly for modern political and economic policy, my success as an individual is not merely the result of my skill, luck or effort, but also the assistance and/or hindrance generated by everyone else. 

In the classic Prisoners' Dilemma, for example, I cannot reduce the prison sentence I receive because my sentence also depends on whether the other player chooses to cooperate with the police or not. My best strategy is therefore to 'cheat' and colloborate with authorities, leading to a sub-optimal outcome with hefty punishments for both players. In iterated [repeated] versions of game theory, players can learn from past behaviour and do more or less well depending on the strategies they adopt in response to the strategies of the other players. They can adapt and improve their strategies over time. 

Evolutionary Game Theory is distinct from traditional game theory by recognising that individual rationality is not strictly necessary for complex biological and cultural rules and behaviours to evolve. Thanks to the generalised processes of Darwinian mutation, selection and replication, behaviour rules can be functional without being designed. Rules and behaviours that reduce fitness will be selected out of the system and rules and behaviours that enhance fitness will come to dominate the social ecosystem. And because strategies can be changed by learning, imitation and innovation, cultural evolution occurs much, much faster than biological evolution.

The key insight of evolutionary game theory has been to divorce the strategy from the player. What we must look for is not the success or failure of individual players, but the success or failure [measued as frequency in the population] of strategies or families of strategies. In this way, evolutionary game theory applies the same concepts to cultural evolution that biologists apply to the evolution of species. The survival of carrier of a gene matters not at all if the gene survives and is passed on to the next generation. Both genes and memes code for strategies: they generate behaviour by processing external information into motivated action.

Perhaps the best introduction to evolutionary game theory in a social science context is Brian Skyrms ‘Evolution of the Social Contract’, a concise (110 page!) work of quiet genius. In that book, Skyrms labels this core assumption of evolutionary game theory in passing as the Darwinian Veil of Ignorance. Because it is strategies (i.e. social rules and norms) that show consistency and stability over time, not individuals, then when we’re looking for evolutionary stable social rules and behaviours the personal characteristics of the individual who performs those behaviours are irrelevant. In other words, a successful ideology can be judged by its capacity do dominate a social 'ecosystem', and not by the payoffs it generates for a given individual. 

Beyond the concepts, Skyrms demonstrates that while a pure utilitarian decision rules lead to an infinite number of possible strategies in many common games, an equilibrium strategy of fairness (which Skyrms terms approximate justice) is highly likely to be stable when those strategies compete with one another over many generations. In other words, the reason why humans value fairness and equality is not because fairness and equality have moral value in their own right, but because those are adaptive strategies necessary for a social species such as ours to be successful in the long term. 

In the ultimatum game, for example, players can offer a division of money to another player, who in turn can either accept the amount offered or reject it (denying the funds to both). Utilitarianism predicts that the strategy ‘offer [any] amount [if Dictator]’ will be stable. But game theory can demonstrate that in a population of game players, only strategies that approximate fairness will survive multiple interactions. By refusing to accept small offers, the weaker player punishes the dictator by withholding their consent from an unfair distirbution of resources. 

Given the impact of our species’ sociality on our recent evolutionary history, it’s unsurprising that we should be biologically hardwired with an instinct for fairness (an issue address in page 38 of my book), an instinct that most [but not all] cultures have rules and rituals to reinforce. By working with, rather than against, these instincts, social contract-based ideologies have an adaptive advantage in deriving rules that benefit society as a whole. 

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.