Identity Politics, a Second Look

Since the 2016 US presidential election, if not before, a fierce debate has raged on the left in Australia and elsewhere as to the relative weight that should be placed on what is often called ‘identity politics’ as opposed to the politics of class or economics. The former is the progressivism that fights for gay rights, racial justice and gender equality; the latter’s defining interest is ending poverty and all forms of inequality. At its best, identity politics builds election-winning coalitions across diverse groups; at socialism’s best, it articulates a coherent platform that appeals to all. The best people on both sides recognise that this is not an either/or proposition: one can and should advocate for both. But, unfortunately partisans accuse one another of imposing a ‘litmus test’ of ideological purity, of giving one set of interests priority over the other. Much of the debate turns on the political role of ‘working class [white] men’: are they oppressed or oppressor?

My own default position on all this is clear, and my book, “Politics for the New Dark Age” is honest in the “Introduction” that the progressive politics I espouse is not rooted in identity alone. The citizens you’ll encounter across the book's twenty chapters are Rawlsian ciphers, stripped of their differences in order to focus on their shared interests. I also share the observation made in Best of the Left episode #1109 that many political leaders who talk first and foremost about identity-based forms of justice are also the least comfortable discussing real economic change. That said, I am not hostile towards identity politics as a philosophy, and consider Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional approach essentially correct. Chapter IV of my book discusses the inherent tension between the ideological self and the need for compromises to build dominant coalitions. The question is never one (economic justice) or the other (racial and sexual justice) but “both and”. 

A Second Look

This blog post is an effort to take a second look at the issue. My book avoids the topic of “identity politics” – but what would I say about it if asked to give a more fulsome appreciation? Note that this entry will be about the political philosophy of identity, because as a political practice (to which I'll return at the end), coalition-building amongst groups facing multi-dimensional oppression and building linkages across issues is the best and perhaps only way for progressives to win power.

First of all, let’s talk about what (almost) everyone agrees identity politics is not: identarianism. Identarianism (in all its various manifestations) argues that individuals are defined by their group identity, and that this identity grants them an essential and unchanging set of interests shared with everyone else in their group and no one outside the group. The critique often made by conservatives and anti-democrats about identity politics is that democracy is more or less a competition for payoffs between fixed groups with defined interests. Far-right and particularist groups that are strongly distrustful of others advance this sort of politics, and in a sort of mirror-imaging, imagine that their progressive opponents are doing the same. 

But there’s a kernel of truth to their critique. For example, a mistake that many well-meaning pollsters and social scientists make is to reduce individuals to members of a group category and thereby persuadable in terms of group interests. This allows them to ignore economic and other forms of difference within each category. While such approaches may seem like cost-effective campaigning, it discourages coalition-building across group lines and in my experience had led to some very nasty electoral surprises for its proponents. And in some countries, intra-state violence has broken out when politics has been reduced to precisely this form: when social entrepreneurs activate the salience of group identities and portray politics as a “winner-takes-all” battle for political patronage and the spoils of state power.

Communism makes the same mistake, by treating classes as fixed and historically-invariant social groups. Classes, like other types of groups, may have defined interests and even stories that members of the group tell one another about those interests. What distinguishes group-centric stories from true, universal ideologies is that the satisfaction of group or class interests do not prescribe how to regulate a society that includes other groups. Absent a story about inter-group cooperation, class or group pride becomes the politics of dominance by default when power is obtained over other groups The major step that all democrats and liberals, on both right and left, take to distance themselves from this narrow sort of politics is to see every citizen as a member of a single society, with diverse and complex interests that must be taken into account.

A better sort of politics

The second type of identity politics is one that is unique to progressives, and is rooted in our innate distaste for hierarchy and authority. It is to recognise that some categories of people are structurally advantaged (or ‘privileged’) by society and others are structurally disadvantaged (or ‘oppressed’). Many conservatives will be psychologically incapable of recognising this aspect of identity, since they are pre-disposed to see hierarchial social relations and traditional authority as legitimate. But when socially-constructed categories (including race and gender) are used to systematically and structurally discriminate against identity groups, even classical liberals must admit that the much-vaunted principle of equality of opportunity becomes violated in practice even if not in law.

It’s for these reasons that "straight pride" is not semantically the opposite of "gay pride"; nor "mens rights" a response to feminism; and why “All Lives Matter” is not a valid critique of “Black Lives Matter”. One identity serves as a marker of the need for liberation, the other as a rallying cry for the continuation of the supremacy of the status quo. Identity politics in this sense regards some identities as being structurally empowered over others in ways that are measurable in terms of social outcomes that are universally valid. The debate is over what to do about these differential outcomes. Clearly, some kind of reparative justice is necessary. 

The concern I (and others) have about giving this "identarian liberalism" too much emphasis is that securing mere greater recognition or representation of minorities in a statistical sense is not enough to make a full political program, and can result at worst in tokenism and the strengthening of the existing social order. For example, improving equality of opportunity to ensure greater female representation on corporate boards or having more gay or trans CEOs will not change the fact that authoritarian corporate structures will always disadvantage workers regardless of colour, gender or sexual orientation. Having different viewpoints in power is important, but will forever be limited in impact if the inherent hierarchies of the system which intersect with identity are unchanged.  

Identity Politics as Practice

To my mind, the only way to use “identity politics” productively is as a practice which recognises that everyone has multiple identities, some of which may be oppressed and some privileged, depending on context. Amartya Sen has written that we all wear different hats depending on our current social and cultural environment: we don’t have a single identity but rather a complex matrix of social roles. Rather than focusing exclusively on the sources of our own oppression, we should recognise in solidarity that the alienation of anyone from less than full citizenship affects everyone. We should admit when we are lucky, and recognise that expecting help from others requires offering what support we can for their cause in return.

The purpose of this sort of self-examination is not, as right-wing fantasists insist, to conduct an ‘oppression olympics’ and thereby select the individual or group most deserving of political or economic support. Creating that kind of moral hierarchy is precisely the opposite road to take to reach true equality. Instead, we must all begin to empathise with the sources of oppression and alienation in everyone else’s life and recognise that we all share an interest in the elimination of all forms of hierarchy and discrimination. Thus we (including cis white males such as myself) must recognise that the categorical identity to which we belong is complex. We both benefit and suffer from existing patterns of power simultaneously and that our privileges and suffering interact in complex ways. 

This, I believe, is the foundation of good ‘ally-ship’: to approach others’ claims of alienation from a position of empathy and as an opportunity to learn and improve society as a whole. Rather than strive for the Platonic ideal of oppression and privilege as immanent and transcendent forms, we should start from the position of seeing every individual’s subjective experience as authentic and true. Greater equality for some is no equality at all if others are systematically excluded: only solidarity between races, gender and all other categories of difference can result in truly transformative social liberation.

Maladaptive Ethics and the Media

This originated as a more thoughtful take, but I've been ruminating over a quote doing the rounds on twitter: "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." The quote reportedly adorned the Facebook page of Heather Heyer, the 32-year old activist who was murdered this weekend in Charlottesville by a neo-Nazi. Sometimes outrage is a useful emotion to motivate us to action, and oppose that which must be opposed. So, here's take number two. 

Societies are learning systems. By maintaining a healthy diversity of opinions and behaviours, which almost every non-totalitarian society must, they’re capable of generating endogenous novelty and internal dynamism. Trial-and-error experimentation offers both adaptability to changes in environmental or strategic conditions, and a capacity for a long-term improvement in the material and social condition of the members of that society. Learning systems operate by establishing implicit and explicit norms and expectations about behaviour over time. A lazy fallacy that some anthropolists and sociologists fall into, however, is to assume that if a norm or behaviour exists it must be adaptive and beneficial. This is in fact the key hypothesis of conservatism: the extant rules and norms that govern a society must be preserved. 

Beyond 'naive adaptionism', we can recognise that evolution is a messy watchmaker, and that the Platonic ideal of a perfectly adapted organism is a myth. As the subjects of evolutionary selection and replication, social norms and practices may be adaptive or maladaptive.  But they could equally be adapted for a different context to the one in which a society presently finds itself (and thus vestigial); non-adaptive but nonharmful; or a ‘spandrel’, i.e. a practice which may evolved by chance that appears functional but whose origin is in fact coincidental. 

Evolution and conflict

Joshua Greene’s ‘Tragedy of Common Sense Morality’ (see here for an overview) posits that open societies are faced with the challenge of making decisions in a context in which different groups in a society operate according to different decision-making rules or ethics. My own book, Politics for the New Dark Age posits that conceptual differences are an inevitable feature of all societies due to genetic, cultural and developmental influences on individual neural development (in other words, that differences within groups are bigger than differences between them). Either way, we will certainly encounter over the courses of our lives beliefs, views and practices that appear alien or repulsive to our personal beliefs. 

The purpose of this blog is to ask when we, as political animals, encounter such challenges to our personal beliefs, how can we determine whether (in simple terms) the other behaviour or rules is adaptive or harmless and should be preserved or maladaptive and should be excised? In other words, when do we organise for activism within the context of a democratic society and when do we start punching Nazis in the face?

For starters, it’s certainly possible, and in fact likely, that a given ethic (including your own) may be maladaptive if it did ever take over the population entirely, but that in a mixed society and in lower proportion, it can and should continue to exist as part of an equilibrium balance. The only way to be certain is to put one’s finger on the scale and see what happens. So my advice is always to fight the hardest you can for what you believe in within the context of an ongoing social system and let the system sort it out. If you follow the rules and win, you get to shape the distribution of norms and behaviours of society according to your preferences. 

Not all ideological conflict, however, obeys the comparatively civilised norms of a democracy. As Chapter IV of my book argues, social separatism, revolutionary terror and “politicide” – the violent extermination of political enemies – have historically resulted when political actors  choose to act outside of democratic politics to resolve their inter-group aggression. Such acts inevitably arise from those with authoritarian personalities who desire total decision dominance over all other social actors. The wrong way to pursue change -  the revolutionary way - is to try to break the ongoing social system so as to achieve permanent decision dominance over others by excluding alternative world views. Such behaviours may be adaptive for their proponents, but are parasitic and destructive for the social organism as a whole. They are literally the social equivalent of cancer: selfish organs reproducing wildly and causing the body as a whole to die. 

Social Change and the Media

I suspect that a key historical contingency leading to such revolutionary and society-destroying attitudes is the spread of new forms of media and information technology. Major periods of political and social instability tend to correspond with the spread of new media technologies: the printing press was instrumental in the Wars of Religion, the radio to the World Wars and 20th century genocides, and now social media to the political disruption of the early 21st century. What these technologies share is a quantitative escalation in the amount of information available to leaders and citizens, and how quickly it can be delivered, in ways that appear to dramatically escalate the costs of maladaptions. I see it as inevitable that the initial period of any new period of media technology should see an uptick in ideological difference, with the concomitant risk of real, disruptive conflict.

Of course, one of the ways in which sudden access to new information leads to poor social outcome is by paralysing the decision-making capabilities of leaders and institutions who were socialised to operate in a lower-information environment. Uncertain about what or who to believe and how the new media will respond to their actions, politicians can become either unable to act, or driven to extremes as they overcorrect in response to the new signals they are received. 

The other way in which media incites conflict is by making citizens more aware of differences among themselves that were previously hidden. For example, different social classes become more likely to encounter ‘how the other half live’, religious systems are likely to be exposed to greater scrutiny and differing cultural practices which were previously geographically remote will seem very near indeed. Twitter and other social platforms have become such outrage machines (on both the right and left) because we are no longer able to discriminate between in-group and out-group behaviour. New media increases the likelihood that we have a dyadic encounter with ‘the other’, and without learned social norms to regulate such encounters both sides will likely "defect" from continued social interaction.

Drop out or plug in?

The wrong way to respond this New Dark Age is to try to erect walls between ideological groups and ideas, privileging existing prejudices and beliefs and hoping that we can go back to the good old days when we didn’t need to interact with those people. This parochial instinct for order fuels the right-wing nationalist’s ridiculous ideas on racial and religious separatism. But it also, I believe, lies behind some nanny state, authoritarian tendencies within the left. 

The instinct to retreat into comfortable ideological bubbles, where everyone agrees with one another, is  the very definition of conservatism. Ecological preservation of regressive ideas and ideologies, by creating an environment in which they are immune from exposure to critical or contrasting views, inhibits cultural progress. Mono-cultures that cannot withstand regular contact with mutant competitors are fragile; diversified cultures are adaptable and robust. Specialisation leads to extinction. Some conservatives on the right are always going to be comfortable with that. The left should not be.

In the long run, I am a firm believer that the same information technology that brings new awareness of difference also operates in the longer run to forge new, inclusive communities and identities. Cultural norms and practices that are genuinely maladaptive will die off in favour of strategies that deliver better payoffs. A mixed cultural equilibria will shift until a new stable arrangement is found. Through a process of repeated interaction, new community norms are forged that, even if they do not lead to agreement, create to a modus vivendi or agreed terms on which the debate is to be conducted. Some of those norms, particularly against ideological cancers such as fascism and nationalism, will have to enforced by speech and deeds that demonstrate they are not to be imitated. So long as brave people like Heather Heyer are willing to act in favour of their democracy, I have confidence it will prevail.

Universalism(s) and Particularism(s)

Politics for the New Dark Age contends that the liberal social contract framework is universally applicable, even if it is not universally accepted. This goes for all variants of social contract liberalism, including socialism and capitalism. This is a controversial claim. The pretensions of an essentially Western philosophy to universality may seem paradoxical, given its roots in a particular historical and cultural context (Enlightenment Europe). Of course, no belief system is so ‘pure’: Western philosophy sojourned for a millennium in the Arab and Muslim world, and Christianity itself was an exotic import from the fringes of the Roman Empire which co-mingled its cultural teachings with a variety of other religious and political traditions along the way to dominating Europe.

The modern mind has a well-justified sense of scepticism towards utopias. The human quest for universal ethical systems has more often than not resulted in the widespread murder and enslavement of non-believers. But while universalist and utopian philosophies often overlap, they are not one and the same (utopias are subsets of universalisms). Whereas utopias rest on the enforcement of conformity, universalisms require only the promise of equal citizenship for all members of a community, regardless of race, sex, class or group identity. They carry a belief that other peoples and cultures regardless of their superficial differences can be brought together into the whole to form a society greater than the sum of its [diverse] parts.

Liberalism and Religion

Liberalism and the world’s great messianic religions are all universalist ideologies. They demand an absence of discrimination by adherents towards other adherents, and [in principle] reject hierarchial social norms that create differences between believers. They create systems of signals, rituals and trust that override the natural human tendency to be biased against out-groups on the basis of superficial differences such as skin colour or language. No ideology is perfect, of course. Universalisms have all been guilty of perpetuating racial caste, social-economic oppression, patriarchy and homophobia. Biases inherent in human nature are at best imperfectly suppressed by universal cultural constructs, not excised altogether.

As this Guardian piece articulates, liberalism has been responsible for great crimes against ‘other’ peoples and cultures, but also gave those peoples the tools to resist and claim equal rights. One could argue that the missionary religions (including Christianity and Islam) have experienced much the same. Universalist ideologies have become globally dominant because they offer everyone the possibility of enjoying full membership of a society, even if the practitioners of that ideology are often hypocritcal about to whom and how much equality is granted. And by allowing the creation of greater societies, they facilitate the large-scale social and economic organisation necessary to improve material standards of living.

Kiss it better

Universalist ideologies prosper the simpler they are. The easier it is for an ideology to incorporate cultural, linguistic and differences, and the fewer demands it makes of genetically pre-set behaviours, the easier it will enter new ecosystems or add new cultural groups to its base. Religions and ideologies mutate and adapt as they travel; the ideology that prospers the most is the easiest to understand in the widest variety of existing social contexts. Islam is considerably conceptually easier to understand and join than Christianity, which in turn is easier to understand and join than the exclusivist religions and cults that preceded it. Culturally exclusive beliefs and practices serve to bind groups together, creating markers of correlation that enabled group survival. But as the world shrinks and progress brings different societies in regular contact with one another new, more-relaxed norms are necessary to exploit the new possibilities of larger, richer and more diverse populations. The ethics that governs best are the ethics that governs least.

The advantage secular liberalism has over the world’s major religions is rooted in the fact that the social contract does not proscribe a universal common good but rather a process through which individuals with disagreements can argue yet remain bound by shared bonds of trust. Because religions concern themselves with ‘truth’, when people (inevitably) disagree on the nature of that truth or how it should be interpreted, they also create social divides and religious schisms that tear communities apart. Since liberal individualism makes the least demands upon its members, it has the easiest time incorporating individuals and groups that show considerable divergence from one another in belief and practices. Liberal institutions make together dynamic, learning societies where people can believe and act as they wish and yet still cooperate with other members of the community on the basis of mutual trust. 

Such an outcome was not inevitable. In the same way that evolution does not require that the strongest, smartest or best adapted species survive, it is not necessarily the case that the most universalist belief systems always prevails. India, for example, developed an easy-to-understand universalist belief system (Buddhism) during the Axial Age pre-BCE, but then reverted to a more complex and culturally contingent religion (Hinduism). Chinese philosophy, which shares many common themes with Western philosophy, has been able to spread widely in Asia but has not proved especially easy to translate beyond the Chinese cultural and linguistic world.

The Particularist Challenge

Human beings were successful because we are social generalists. Other hominids, including our Neanderthal and Denisovan cousins, were likely bigger, smarter or better adapted to their particular ecological niches. It was our capacity to be flexible, social and to adjust our behaviour as we learned that made us the dominant species on the planet, even as others prospered in their own narrower niche. The same sort of selection mechanism underlies the philosophical disagreement between universalisms and their opposite number: particularisms such as nationalism, racial and religious intolerance, cultural relativism, and Randian separatism. What particularisms have in common is the desire to preserve localised particularities with smaller but clearly defined memberships. In other words, smaller but more specialised societies with higher levels of in-group trust and much lower trust of out-groups.

Particularist strategies can never be as successful on as large as scale as universalisms which invite the membership of all. But that doesn’t mean they can’t survive, or even prosper, for a time. Isolated enclaves of repression and conformity, which strong in-group cooperation and strong out-group hostility, can do well if their specialised mode of organisation is effective for its local context. States like Sparta may have been strong, and respected, for their time. But in the end it was the League of Athens and the Roman and Persian Empires represented the future of humanity. Very few exclusivist social and religious communities survive over historic timescales, no matter how strong their warriors, how smart their scientists or how wise their leaders. Flexibility and dynamism will always do better in the long run, because change in the physical and social environment of a society is impossible to resist without increasingly totalitarian methods. 

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.