Authoritarians, Hierarchy and Morality

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

That old canard: the immoral poor

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

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

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

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

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

It’s the structure, stupid

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

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

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

Resentful elites

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

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

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

Reading Kymlicka for fun and profit

One of the benefits of returning to university as what we term in Australia a "mature-age student" is having the time and opportunity to read work that was either unavailable back when I was an undergraduate or which a working person just doesn't have the time or energy to get through. In that context, I'd like to share some choice quotes I recently came across in Will Kymlicka'a "Contemporary Political Philosophy". In a section entitled "The Politics of Liberal Equality", Kymlicka unloads against the political failures of (non-socialist and non-Marxist) liberal left in terms that are both accurate and devastating. 

Kymlicka begins by positing the underlying radicalism of the egalitarians:

"The link between the philosophy of liberal equality and the politics of the welfare state is so strong that many people call liberal egalitarianism 'welfare state liberalism'. [But] Rawls argues that a [socialist*] democracy would be superior to the welfare state, not only in reducing the need for ex post redistribution, but also in preventing relations of domination and degradation within the division of labour. . . . Liberal egalitarians, therefore, should be concerned not only to redistribute income from the advantaged to the disadvantaged, but also to ensure that the advantaged do not have the power to define relations of dominance and servility in the workplace."

*The original term used by Rawls was 'property-owning democracy', but this is Orwellian. In A Theory of Justice, he defines a 'property-owning democracy' as aiming to "sharply reduce inequality in the underlying distribution of property and wealth". It's clear Rawls is describing something much closer to democratic socialism. 

"In short, liberal egalitarianism's [political] commitments have not kept pace with its theoretical commitments. [T]his has led to a 'bifurcation of liberalism', One stream clings to the traditional institutions of liberal practice, and exhorts people to lower their expectations of justice and freedom. The other stream reaffirms its principles, but [this]  . . .is increasingly matched by [its] disengagement from practical issues.. . . .This may help explain the 'surprisingly conservative' tenor of many of Rawls' and Dworkin's work. Faced with the New Right, liberal egalitarians have indeed been concerned to preserve what is left of the welfare state." 

Former Greek finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis (somewhat conspiratorially) also advances this view in a recent Jacobin interview. But, Kymlicka continues, this approach is ultimately counterproductive:

"Partly as a response to New Right critiques that the welfare state penalizes the hard-working and rewards indolence and irresponsibility, [liberals have] tried to emphasize that the welfare state can be made more choice-sensitive. [But] the liberal egalitarian emphasis on ambition-sensitivity, may have unintentionally reinforced the popular perception that the main problem with the welfare state that it coddles the irresponsible."

As a result, we get what is derogatively referred to by critics as the "oppression Olympics":

"[I]n order to overcome this distrust, the disavantaged must enage in . . . 'shameful revelation', - i.e. they have to prove they do indeed suffer from some involuntary disadvantage, whether in their natural talents or childhood upbringing. The inevitable result . . . is to erode, rather than strengthen, the bonds of solidarity and mutual concern between citizens. Elizabeth Anderson . . . argues that liberal egalitarianism's emphasis on distinguishing voluntary from involuntary inequality leads to a disrespectful pity towards the 'deserving poor', and paternalistic hectoring of the 'undeserving poor'."

Kymlicka advocates the same perspective as I do:

"So it might be part of the 'ethos' of a good citizen that we do not pry into the (ir)responsibility of others, but rather trust that they are trying to be as responsible for their own choices and demands as we are in ours.  Of course, this means we may be taken advantage of by some of our less scrupulous citizens. . . .[but] a scheme of justice that encourages everyone to view their co-citizens as putative cheats is not a promising basis for developing trust and solidarity."

Bingo. How much do you trust fellow citizens to make their own decisions? How much can you tolerate uncertainty about the behaviour of others? From these essentially psychological metrics, we find the core of the difference between right and left. 

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

This series of posts will continue to examine myths or tropes that I hear repeated by those trying to make sense of the "New Dark Age" that is our fragmented social reality. If you have an idea for a trope to address, contact me on Twitter @Askews2000.

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

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

Clutch the pearls

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

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

A better view

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

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

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

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

Getting back in touch with our roots

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

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

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

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

Liberalism: Pluralism and Rights

Books are never finished, so much as released into the wild. To that end, I have a confession to make: Chapter VII of my book “Politics for the New Dark Age”,  titled “On Liberty”, is my least favourite. The purpose Chapter VII is to make an argument for the importance of so-called “First Generation” civil and political rights, which in Australia are much more poorly secured than people might think. It was (one of) the first bits I wrote, and I relied less on recent research than the Chapters that came after it. The final text is perfectly serviceable, but carries a number of weaknesses that I’d prefer to redress.

Oops, I accidently a positivist

In seeking to justify both the existence and specific content of human rights, I fell back on my legal training to offer a largely positivist account of rights. In other words, these are the rights that all people possess because there exist legal texts from a political authority stating that to be the case. Worse, because I was writing primarily for an Australian audience (who lack a domestic bill of rights of their own) and my own background is in international law, I fell back on treaties or agreements between states such as the twin Covenants and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This ‘legal universalism’ is an extremely weak, politically-contingent variant of positivism: we have these rights and not others because a certain subset of states negotiated these specific wordings in a particular historical and international context.

The problem with a positivist account of rights, of course, is that laws change when political circumstances change. National laws should be adaptions derived from universal ethics, not the other way around. While my account addresses historical preludes to the twentieth century legislative rights 'boom', these forerunners were themselves historically and culturally contingent. While I have no issue with belief systems that stake a claim to universality outside their original cultural context (I’m looking at you, Christianity and Buddhism), a positivist account can be challenged on the basis that the rights it promotes are culturally and temporally contingent and depend on the strength of the institutions that enforce them.

The best articulation I’ve seen of this political version of human rights is from Pablo Gilabert, who has posited that the political content of rights may perhaps be specified by the types of claims that are necessary in the context of the [threats and opportunities posed by] modern state, which is universal enough in 2017 to warrant philosophical consideration. But personally, I’m not convinced of the causality: modern states emerged subsequent to liberal, rights-centred philosophies, not the other way around. Rights and institutions co-evolved. 

Rights, natural or social?

So what grounding should I have used? Whether they admit to it or not, most non-lawyers who think about their individual rights would see those rights arising from ‘natural law’. Naturalist conceptions of rights encompass two broad, but largely contradictory sets of philosophies. On the one hand, the original liberal philosophers such as Rousseau and Locke (and modern religious conservatives) would see rights as the gifts of a supernatural being: we are “endowed with rights” by the “Creator”. Later liberals (including many modern humanists and libertarians) see rights arising from “human” status per se: existence as a conscious individual with biological needs requires certain necessities to be met to prevent harm and suffering.

While it’s attractive to appeal to the abstract concept of ‘human dignity’ (certainly, I’ve leaned on it myself), it’s hard to be clear on precisely where the boundaries of “humanity”, “dignity” or “necessity” lie. While I am sympathetic to the Great Ape Personhood Project and support legal protections for the comatose and permanently impaired, such sympathies are the result of an aesthetic choice (see Chapter 17) rather than naturalistic imperative. The sad truth is that in an anarchist state of nature, individuals have no rights: the only interests they could achieve would be those they had the power to achieve through self-help. An individual alone would have no claim on ‘nature’ or the supernatural for the satisfaction of their rights, moral or otherwise; such claims arise only through interaction with other social individuals.

In other words, rights necessarily arise when an individual enters into social relations with others, and not before. "Politics for the New Dark Age” is underwritten by this type of Rawlsian social contract liberalism, which provides the best (i.e. authoritative and persuasive) account of how individuals might join together as a society, using the thought experiment of the “veil of ignorance”. Rights, in this view, are the minimum conditions under which an individual would freely elect to join a society with others. As Seyla Benhabib (who is rapidly becoming one of my favourite political philosophers) puts it:

“A community of interdependence becomes a moral community only [when] it resolves to settle those issues of common concern to all via dialogical procedures in which all. . . . all those whose interests are actually or potentially affected by the courses of action and decisions [of that community] . . .are participants.”

While a social view of rights can underwrite a positivist or particularist understanding of rights (the conditions I would enter this society are different from the conditions I would enter that society), Rawls’ thought experiment is an abstract representation of all societies founded on a minimal conception of individualism and human equality.

A pluralist conception of rights

Thus, rights are social in nature, innate to social structures, not individuals.  We can plausibly claim that any liberal democratic society constituted on the basis of Rawlsian liberalism will share a common conception of individual rights. That’s a pretty powerful claim philosophically and politically, and gets us a long way towards human rights universalism. But not all actual, existing societies are founded on this basis. While liberalism is a pretty powerful cultural technology, other cultural adaptions may be successful in their environment or survive because of path dependencies in their particular evolutionary histories.

In order to make the final leap to a truly universal application of rights, we have to see rights in a pluralist way. What this means is that even if two societies hold radically different beliefs about the basis on which their societies are organised (which may be neither individualist, humanist nor egalitarian), we should in theory be able to find at least some pramatic rules they share about the treatment of individuals. This is due to material constraints imposed by human biological needs and common environmental problems, which restrict the possible space of viable cultural variation. In other words, the possible range of human cultural and social organisation is not unlimited and cultural differences are not inherently untranslateable. Environment and social structure mediates between biological necessities and cultural variation. 

In his later work, Political Liberalism, Rawls called this version of rights the ‘overlapping consensus’. It brings back into our conception of universal rights something like positivism (because the consensus is established by mutual agreement and recognition amongst societies) and naturalism (because of the scope of observed variation is limited by materialist constraints). Because a pluralist conception of rights is mutually constitutive (i.e. it depends on mutual recognition of the ongoing validity of respective social arrangements), it may also be conditional in the sense that a society that fails to meet certain standards is not longer recognised and treated as a member in good standing of the community of societies.

If there's ever a second edition of "Politics for the New Dark Age", expect to see Chapter VII improved along these lines. Until then. . . . 

What is Socialism? (or “Science Proves Einstein Right Again!”)

This blog is a companion piece to one I posted in September, “Why ‘Libertarian’ Socialism”. That title of course begged the question: what then is socialism? No small amount of ink has been spilled over the “s-word”’s return to acceptable political discourse. My own book, “Politics for the New Dark Age” sits in this tradition but is largely descriptive, rather than normative. It identifies a policy programme grounded in first principles, and loosely describes the result as democratic and socialist. What follows is a first attempt to describe the normative and theoretical core of the ‘new’ socialism.

God dammit, Einstein

When you write anything, one of the first things you learn is that there are few original ideas, and someone smarter once said exactly what you want to say decades before you were even born. As I read Albert Einstein’s 1949 essay “Why Socialism” in preparation for this blog, I realised that the greatest physicist of the 20th century was already way ahead of me. Einstein’s core insight is as follows:

“Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. . . . . The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he [sic] depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is “society” which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word “society.””

While all Marxists are socialists, the idea of social politics is older and grander than Marx. Einstein goes on, in the same paragraph, to describe the origins and diversity of political personality:

“[T]he existence of these varied, frequently conflicting, strivings accounts for the special character of a man [sic] . . . . It is quite possible that the relative strength of these two [solitary and social] drives is, in the main, fixed by inheritance. But the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior.”

Here's how I make the same argument in Chapter II of “Politics for the New Dark Age”:

“Socialism as an ideology says that cooperative solutions to social problems tend to lead to better outcomes. Capitalism, as an ideology or set of ideologies, is simply the belief that purely competitive [strategies] lead to better solutions than cooperative solutions or mixed cooperative and competitive solutions. Both capitalism and socialism, in their democratic variants, place the liberal individual at the centre of decision-making. But they come to radically different policy programs because the personality types that underlie their world views see problem solving (and the possibility of trusting others) in fundamentally different ways.”

When I speak, therefore, of ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ I am referring to them as elemental positions – distinct from any specific economic system, set of norms and institutions, class interests or political programmes. They are strategy sets to solve the core social dilemma at the heart of civilization. But socialism and capitalism in this sense also possess conflicting beliefs about the nature of existence and ‘the good life’. We in the modern world have lost any other names for these variations of social contract liberalism, but on some level the same conflict must surely have existed throughout history because the same dilemmas mathematically recur in every society comprised of autonomous individuals. 

Re-stating the case

The following three points, for me, are the core beliefs of any socialist system or programme, whether Marxist or non-Marxist. Firstly, that humanity is first and foremost a social species. Secondly, that the nature of social life creates decision dilemmas for which there are cooperative (i.e. trusting) strategies. And finally, that cooperative solutions to social problems are mathematically, practically and normatively superior to the alternative. Because of these three things, humanity has evolved (biologically, culturally, and technologically) to possess unrivalled potential to achieve whatever social end we desire. Socialists are humanist because we hold that we as a species may use our powers thus acquired for “good”; and that possessing such powers  does not normatively impair any other (i.e. spiritual or environmental) value.

Stated in this way, we on the left can begin to claw back nature from being the rhetorical preserve of the right. For the last 150 years, the right has claimed the mantle of ‘human nature’ for itself, based on a (mis-)reading of Darwinian evolution. Their core critique of socialism has been that it misunderstands what it is to be human. But “survival of the fittest” does not state that every animal is a utility-maximising egoist, or that cooperation is impossible. Quite the contrary. Selfish animals are not innately better adapted than altruistic ones; and social species are often the fittest in their ecologies. If you look for Homo economicus in nature, at best you find the chimpanzee. And social, altruistic humanity is doing a great deal better than chimps.

Here’s what nature really tells us: human nature is both selfish and selfless, competitive and cooperative. We mix survival strategies in proportion to their success: a society structed along either purely socialist or capitalist lines is likely to prove extremely rigid and susceptible to shocks (I’m looking at you 1989 and 2008). “Nature”, at most, justifies a democratic, liberal society where those ideologies can exist in a state of creative tension that allows cultural evolution to continue. 

Thinking like the other side

If we flip the mirror, and look at the other side of politics, what would their argument for capitalist institutions and policies look like? I posit, by analogy, that it would follow the same structure: First, humanity is comprised of egoist, utility-maximising individuals. Secondly, that there are competitive [yet still non-violent] strategies to resolve decision dilemmas between individuals. And thirdly, that competitive self-help strategies are superior, mathematically, practically and normatively to cooperative strategies (viz. neoclassical economics).

While there is a normative case against capitalism as an economic system and political programme, there is also increasing pragmatic and theoretical evidence that the ideology’s core propositions are flawed. The assumption of egotistical, utility-maximising individuals (“homo economicus”) is not only abstract and ahistorical, but totally irrelevant to the way humans actually make decisions. While we are capable of abstract reasoning, humans operate very effectively day-to-day using biologically- and culturally-imprinted decision-rules that often produce more efficient and practical decision outcomes than rational-choice models would suggest they should. When those (irrational) decision rules and social biases are examined, it often turns out that they are efficient when the existence of social life and structures are taken into account (although sometimes they aren't).

And while we can admit that sometimes there are self-help solutions to social dilemmas that are efficient, we should push back against the fundamentalist belief that capitalist competition is the solution to every social problem. Put simply, the market is terrible at providing essential public goods are prices that are accessible to all. Without cooperative institutions to provide those goods (or regulate their provision), a social contract society ceases to exist because it is unable to satisfy everyone's basic human rights. Capitalism's third precept, that competitive solutions to social dilemmas are generally superior, is contestable on mathematical, practical and moral grounds. That’s the case socialists have to make to win the argument.

Seriously, go read Einstein

It’s great. I’ll leave you with one final quote, as a warning against the technocrats (see Chapter IV of my book):

“[W]e should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society.”

Couldn’t have put it better myself.