Equality Matters. Period.

Politics for the New Dark Age covers a wide variety of topics in my quest to provide a comprehensive approach to modern progressivism. Some chapters look at areas of traditional strength for parties of the left (health, education), others look at areas of traditional weakness (individual rights, foreign policy). But no issue is arguably more important to left identity than inequality, which I tackle at length in Chapter IX. My central thesis, that socialists’ focus on equality and fraternity represents a necessary return to the core values of the liberal enlightenment, is a philosophical call to arms.

In some ways, I wish I’d been bolder. Tackling inequality was an unsexy concept in the 90s and early 2000s when I was educated, and it’s rarely taken seriously as an ethical or policy position in Canberra. Classical liberals, including many in the centre-left, argue at length that what matters most is inequality of opportunity. Beyond pointing out the importance of inequality of risk as well, in the book I argue that material inequality is bad for society largely in terms of its negative effect on material outcomes: lower, shorter, riskier economic growth. In other words, I am fighting for equality on the enemy’s [technocratic] territory. It’s an argument I think the left can win on the evidence, but it’s not our best frame.

The bottom line

So let me be clear: equality of outcomes matters for every single metric of a good society the left should hold dear. Whether it’s individual or group performance; economic or productivity growth; citizens’ trust in and the resilience of social institutions; or individual health and well-being. Material and social inequality is universally and uniquely harmful. It is harmful to the social contract, inasmuch as it creates markers of hierarchy and difference that corrode the mutual trust necessary for people to act cooperatively. And it is deeply corrosive for individuals, as we are all biologically conditioned by evolution to react to markers of hierarchy and difference with psychological responses and behaviour sets that are socially and personally harmful. There is no single policy the left could pursue that could have better results on every metric of social health and resilience than to advance equality at every turn.

Which brings to an article in Evonomics (which I highly recommend) by the power duo of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. Wilkinson & Pickett’s 2011 book, “The Spirit Level: Why Equality Makes Societies Stronger”, lays out the fundamental evidence for inequality’s pernicious effect(s) on social outcomes; the piece is a useful and timely reminder of the book’s key arguments. Wilkinson & Pikett are epidemiologists first and foremost, and what biology tells us is that citizens of more equal societies life longer, healthier lives than citizens of unequal countries regardless of their absolute level of income. The harms of inequality are:

“not caused by the society not being rich enough (or even being too rich), but by the material differences between people within each society being too big. What matters is where we stand in relation to others in our own society.”

Inequality doesn’t only affect the worst-off in society (that’s poverty, a denial of basic rights), but worsens social and individual outcomes for everyone. If you consider how rising middle-incomes in Australia and other developed countries have been coupled with massive increases in social fear and anxiety, you can start to see how the effect operates. Beyond the physiological impacts, the effects of inequality on cognition and individual behaviour are even more concerning. Multiple recent studies have shown that priming children with an awareness of their place in social hierarchies dramatically lowers test performance. 

Once this realisation is made, policy interventions to address social harms rapidly simplify:

“[Traditionally, e]very problem is seen as needing its own solution—unrelated to others. People are encouraged to exercise, not to have unprotected sex, to say no to drugs, to try to relax, to sort out their work-life balance, and to give their children “quality” time. The only thing that many of these policies do have in common is that they often seem to be based on the belief that the poor need to be taught to be more sensible. The glaringly obvious fact that these problems have common roots in inequality and relative deprivation disappears from view. However, it is now clear that income distribution provides policymakers with a way of improving the psychosocial well-being of whole populations.”

As I have written elsewhere, we don’t need to merely educate people to eat right, exercise and avoid self-destructive behaviours. We need to address the root cause of why they perform those behaviours in the first place. In fact, telling people how to behave without addressing the underlying material and social inequalities that affect them will likely only exacerbate such behaviour. When people are economically and socially secure, when they believe that risk and opportunity are socialised, then I suspect we’ll find that many of their anxieties about novelty – for example, doing something in energy policy to prevent climate change, or to help refugees fleeing conflict ­– will similarly melt away.

In the final analysis therefore, when someone on the left equivocates about whether or not striving equality should be our goal, look them in the face and tell them it must be.

Guaranteed vs Universal Basic Income

Politics for the New Dark Age explicitly disavows a revolutionary approach to political activism. It requires us to engage with our societies, our democracies and our natures as-they-are rather than how we would have them be. As a result I expect to cop some flak from comrades for being insufficiently bold, or even legitimising and defending the liberal (read: mixed capitalist) status quo. Yet I think what I have been successful at showing is that even using only a handful of very basic, shared premises the left can achieve policy progress that is downright radical. Today’s blog will look at one of those bold prescriptions: Guaranteed Minimum Incomes. 

The Welfare Principle

For those yet to read it, the central connection I make between rights-based individualism and the need for social cooperation is what I term the ‘welfare principle’. The welfare principle requires that, when competitive institutions or self-help cannot guarantee citizens’ fundamental rights, cooperative institutions must be and are created to do so. Although I will freely admit to borrowing the principle from human rights law, I’ve not seen it used much in political philosophy, much less in socialist discourse. Since society and social institutions exist to guarantee individual’s civil, political, economic and social rights, and self-help through market mechanisms is very often unable or unwilling to procure them, institutions – including the state itself – arise in order to secure the positive enjoyment of those rights for all.

Which brings us to the topic of poverty. In a liberal, rights-based framework, poverty must be understood as the denial of an individual’s fundamental economic and social rights. It is a failure to secure the income and resources needed to acquire an adequate standard of living (given the surrounding society’s level of economic development). In a monetised society, a person’s standard of living can be approximated by their income – which is a measure of their power to obtain ("purchase") goods and services. Since the value of money is essentially arbitrary, we define poverty as falling before minimum income without which a person can no longer be said to enjoy adequate access to essential human goods and services. As Martin Luther King Jr once said, "the solution to poverty is to abolish it."

As I write in Chapter VII of the book:

“[I]f markets operate efficiently to produce full employment, the state would have only minimal cause to intervene to provide incomes directly to citizens. . . . Everyone could obtain a job that provided for their fundamental needs and wants, and upon retirement, workers would have access to either sufficient savings or a workplace pension to see them through their retirement. Such a society would likely see lower levels of taxation and redistribution, but a lower profit outlook for private economic actors; it is a rough approximation of societies like Japan and South Korea.”

But of course, pure self-help does not generate full employment. In additional to the well-known economic literature on market failures, social interdependence means that economic equilibria may very well not be optimal. And even if they were, vast numbers of people, including children, students, the elderly, the disabled and carers would likely not have access to an adequate standard of living. To that end, I propose the guaranteed minimum income as a way of satisfying the right to an adequate standard of living: a way of simplifying and unifying existing benefits schemes so as to ensure that no one lives in poverty if they do not earn a minimum standard of living by market mechanisms. 

One of the these things is not like the other

Since I wrote those words, the related idea of a universal basic income (or UBI) has gained a certain amount of popularity (or at least, curiousity) in policy wonk circles. This is perhaps exemplified on the left by the overrated books “Post-capitalism: A Guide to Our Future” by Paul Mason and “Utopia for Realists” by Rutger Bremen. But UBIs are not merely a socialist "fairy-tale": they’re also modestly popular on the right and even in the centre. UBI schemes have been rolled out on a trial basis in several localities in the US and EU. In Alaska, every citizen receives a royalty cheque from the state’s oil production each year, and certain native American groups have had great success addressing poverty and inequality by directly distributing the proceeds from tribal businesses. 

The debate on universal or minimum incomes is becoming rapidly complex, so I thought I should clarify my own stance. I tend not to endorse the most common, universalist models of UBI.  This recent article in Evonomics provides a useful way of categorising different approaches to basic social incomes. The author, Charles Young, proposes a typology of UBIs which either:

·       Recalibrate existing tax and benefit systems (more common on the left); or

·       Replace the Welfare State (more common on the right); or

·       Communalise the profits from common assets. 

Thumbs Up: Universal incomes that satisfy basic needs

In the first category are proposals that

“restructure[e] the existing ‘inefficient’ and ‘unfair’ benefit systems. Advocates tend to offer what is referred to as a ‘no-frills’ UBI: subsistence or sub-subsistence levels of income . . . . . .[Such p]roposals . . . often set out to combat inequality and poverty, including through the dismantling of poverty traps such as the sudden removal of benefits as low-earner's incomes rise.”

My own prescription of a guaranteed minimum income fits solidly in this category. If we want a minimum income scheme to be achievable, we should be iterative and target our interventions where they will deliver the most benefit. While others on the left may see the revolutionary appeal of more grandiose schemes, as you’ll see below, I think such a revolution would be potentially catastrophic for the goals we're trying to achieve.

Thumbs Down: Voucherisation

The second category of UBI is supported by “[e]conomists and political theorists on the right, especially those identifying as libertarian, [who] see UBI as a vehicle through which to reduce government intervention in public and private life at large.” Right-wing support for UBI schemes essentially represent the ‘voucherisation’ of the tax-and-transfer system. Rather than benefits targeted at specific inequalities, conservatives argue that everyone is entitled to the same ‘payout’ from the state’s taxation system regardless of their socio-economic status. Schemes of this type include negative income tax proposals and it should come as no surprise that Milton Friedman is one of the intellectual originators of such ideas. 

Essentially, right-libertarians seek to remove any role for collective decisions in the allocation of social resources. The seek to privatise the benefits that accrue from the tax-and-transfer system, hoping that people won't realise that all the power and risks of that system are simultaneously being privatised. As Chapter XI of Politics for the New Dark Age argues, many social costs are distributed probabilitically, and if your basic income doesn't cover the cost of a car accident or cancer treatment, well then you're just unluckly. The privatization of social benefits also (deliberately) restricts the capacity of individuals to band together and bargain collectively; to share risks and costs and arrive at  solutions to collective problems that are sustainable at lower cost.

Means testing (i.e. restricting benefits only to those in need) has its flaws, certainly: it imposes administrative costs and tapering effects must be carefully accounted for. But the idea of government cash grants to already wealthy citizens is not only perverse, but unnecessarily costly and inefficient when the wealthy already possess the power and resources to meet their own need. I have doubts that a basic income that was truly universal would have much of effect on alleviating poverty and inequality at all: price inflation would be a huge risk and likely wipe out most of the gains in purchasing power of the least well-off.

A UBI of this model would also put downwards pressure on wages and thus reduce the labour share of surplus value produced by enterprises. Concerns are widely expressed about the ongoing automation of an increasingly large proportion of the economy, which is set to increase the profit share of capital owners at the expense of workers. But despite what UBI proponents like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musks would have you believe, a UBI is like the exact opposite of what we would need to do to actually fight inequality. While big business would happily pension off the working class if it allowed them to keep their monopolistic economic and political power, democratic socialists should look for ways to increase democratic control of the means of production and reverse the alienation of workers from the products of their labour. 

Probable Also Thumbs Down: Common Resource Rents

The third and final category of UBI consists of proposals that would:

“communalis[e] common assets  . . . [such as] the carrying capacity of the biosphere, atmospheric carbon, fisheries and forests, unearned income, or even the productive capacity of automation and technological change. The fundamental assumption here is that such assets – be they physical, biological or cultural – should be respected as the common property of all, rather than be the source of exploitative disparities from unequal access and power.”

I’ve seen such proposals from my own Australian Labor Party (ALP) brethren: often suggested somewhat cynically as way to generate public support for new taxes by promising voters that all the proceeds will go directly into their pocket (so then, I wonder, why bother?).

Certainly, in small, specialised economies with few, but highly productive common assets, such proposals might make sense (although a better approach might be a managed sovereign savings fund to prevent inflation and Dutch Disease). But in a modern diversified economy, such payments are likely to be complex to manage and insufficient to cover the cost of a guaranteed minimum income for all. I also see risks in aligning the interests of voters with particular, already highly profitable, extractive industries. If everyone is receiving a cheque direct from the profits of extractive, gambling or polluting companies, it would create disincentives to properly regulate them (an argument currently made on both right and left about Venezuela). In other words, although the profits would be socialised, the risks of social and environmental harms from those industries couldn’t be. It would align the interests of the majority against those of affected minorities.

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.