Marriage Equality: A quick and dirty guide to arguing against religious exemptions

So, the results of Australia's non-binding and unnecessary post vote 'survey' on marriage equality are in, and it's an emphatic victory for "Yes". Finally! What happens next, hopefully, is that a flawed but largely fine bipartisan bill will be introduced to Parliament, voted on, and undo the terrible wrong that was committed in 2004 when marriage was restricted to only hetereosexual couples (a moment that led me to almost turn in my ALP membership in disgust). On a personal note, gay rights has been an animating issue for me politically since I was a teenager in the 90s and finally, if belatedly, seeing this moment arrive feels like a great national and personal catharthis. 

But. This isn't over; it isn't over in the United States, and you can be sure the religious right is going to import much of the same politics into Oz in coming months and years. The first battle is going to be to stop parliament's hardline conservatives from inserting broad-ranging exemptions into the  bill that allow religious groups and others who express a 'moral belief' in the exclusivity of traditional marriage broad licence to discriminate. Without a bill of rights of our own in Australia, local progressives aren't practiced at making these sorts of arguments. So here's my quick'n'dirty guide to arguing against them. 

Five Ways They're Wrong

Liberal rights make a distinction between the public and private. People are free to believe and act however they wish in private, but the public sphere is a neutral space where no belief is privileged over any other. By asking for an exemption to a law of general application, people with moral beliefs are asking the state to privilege those beliefs, and thus violate its obligation of secular neutrality. Why do we make this distinction? Because . . . .

Rights are not unlimited. They extend only so far as they don't infringe on the rights and freedoms of others. People are free to belief and act however they wish; however, we live an an interdependent social setting where our actions affect others and we must take the rights of others into account if we recognise their equal human dignity. So, sorry, you can't unilaterally infringe the right of others to marry and found a family, or (if you're a social service provider) deny them their right to education, healthcare, housing and social support.  But what essential rights are infringed by cake-shop owners or wedding venues? Well . . . .

Everyone is entitled to protection from arbitrary discrimination in public life, including access to general goods and services in the marketplace. It is fundamental to the mutual recognition of human dignitty and equality that everyone is entitled to equal treatment, regardless of any arbitrary personal characteristic, including race, biological sex, gender expression and family structure. Protection from discrimination is a human right, and is embodied in a series of positive Australian Acts. We accept without reflection that market participants must not discriminate against persons of particular races or religions; sex and gender are no different.

But wait, they say, we need an exemption from just those discrimination laws! And exemptions to laws of general application may be justified if their neutral application leads to adverse or discriminatory consequences in fact. However, this is a matter of consequentialist weighing of harms against rights. For example, ministers of religion are exempt from an obligation to perform religious ceremonies in violation of their rites because that would constitute a direct infringement of their right to practice their religion freely. I can eve see an argument that churches and religious buildings be exempt from being hired for religious ceremonies outside their doctrine. On the other hand, we must weigh up the manifest harm of the denial of equal treatment to members of the community against the psychic 'harm' to the 'true believer', who has freely chosen to engage in market activities fundamentally unrelated to their exercise of religious freedom. For example, religious groups that own public venues discriminate when they use their private beliefs to exclude certain people from accessing their services. 

But wait, they say, forcing us into a neutral public stance threatens the ongoing viability of our community of belief! However while some liberal philosophers accept that the survival of a religious community sometimes justify special treatment, not a single one accepts that this extends to imposing restrictions on individuals 'external' to the community. In other words, a religious group is free to expel a homosexual couple from membership of its congregation (an 'internal' regulation), but cannot claim to regulate the rights and responsibilities of other members of the community with different views (which would constitute regulation external to its community). 

So there you go, five quick and dirty arguments to win the argument and make sure the Smith bill passes speedily and unchanged. 

Myths of the Old Order: The automation illusion (part one)

This series of posts will continue to examine myths or tropes that I hear repeated by people 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.

We begin with two narratives of automation. 

There’s a scene in “White People Renovating Houses”, the South Park Season 21 (!) premiere, in which a tiki-torch wielding mob of rednecks marches through the town, demanding the destruction of digital personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa. The episode was panned by critics, who thought the writers didn’t adequately skewer the presumed target of mockery (i.e. white nationalists). But what critics failed to understand is that white nationalists were not the intended target (that would have been too easy). They themselves were. Or rather, the narrative that fear of automation was driving the economic anxiety of Trump’s racist base. The incongruity between the recent facts (neo-Nazis in Charlottesville) and the explanation (fear of automation) is the point of the joke. 

As a historical counterpoint, there's a moment a third of the way into Sven Beckert’s magisterial history of capitalism, “Empire of Cotton: A Global History”, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in Britain when a few hundred ‘spinning jennys’ (machines for cotton weaving) begin to displace the work of hundreds of thousands of  artisans in the manufacture of cotton fabrics. Within a generation, automation had destroyed a global industry which had remained largely unchanged for a thousand years, and begun the “Great Divergence” by which the wealth of Western Europe eclipsed that of the rest of the world. Beckert describes the opposition and mob violence which was often visited upon the mills but which failed to ultimately prevent the radical transformation of land and labour relations they represented. 

Everybody’s talking about automation

Discussing automation, and its effect on social, political and economic relations, is a recurrent feature of 2017’s “New Political Dark Age”. There are new books, conferences, speeches, and essays on the topic almost daily; we must tackle the subject, we are told, to be taken seriously as a political and economic thinker. Automation, in this telling, is a miracle bestowed upon us by Silicon Valley, but which demands unemployment and political resentment as its price. It is both a moral good to be embraced and a governance challenge to be managed: the perfect talking point for a certain kind of forward-thinking technocrat. 

The automation narrative came [back] to the forefront of progressive politics during the Obama administration, by some accounts. And indeed, the topic reeks of Very Serious People  justifying their own failure to achieve lasting economic change while grappling for control of the narrative with radicals (i.e. the Sanders crowd) who see further compromises with the status quo as the problem. When you look into the issue, you find that almost every article, think piece or editorial  on the subject cites back to a famous 2013 Oxford paper, which found that 47 per cent of job categories defined the researchers were ‘at risk’ from automation. 

I don’t find that paper’s methodology particularly convincing, but smarter people than me have looked into it and come to two sorts of conclusions. Firstly, stating that automation will eliminate half the jobs in the economy is probably a wild over-estimate: the OECD have estimated that the true figure is closer to 9 per cent. Even so, those job losses won’t occur all at once, leaving plenty of time for workers to adjust, and are likely to be compensated for by new jobs created by automation. The automation problem is not, therefore, the total number of jobs in an economy but to whom those jobs are going to be distributed. Because if technological change is too quick, the prophets of automation say, then there’s no guarantee that particular people that lose their income will find a replacement.

Automation and inequality

When you boil it down, the automation narrative is similar to a moral panic: highly anecdote driven and largely divorced from any sense of historical perspective. It’s easy to talk about the installation of touchscreens at McDonalds, speculate about driverless trucks, and mourn the loss of analogue film to Snapchat. But we’ve been here before, and recently: people worried once upon a time that ATMs would replace banks, TVs would render cinema irrelevant, or that vacuum cleaners would lead to idle house-wives [sic]. McDonald's isn't even innovating: 'automats' were a thing as far as as 1895! Jason Furman, President Obama’s final Chief Economic Advisor, made this point quite well in a December 2016 presentation that still available online. The process of creative destruction is so inherent to material progress (see Chapter XII of my book) that, with the benefit of hindsight, we look back with bemusement at  luddites who feared steam-powered cotton spinning.

What really controls employment levels is the supply and demand for goods and services in the economy; the suppressed consumer demand caused by contemporary levels of inequality is what’s standing in the way of full employment, not technological churn. Increasing the productivity of labour and/or capital increases social output if and only if that output can be consumed. So technological progress doesn’t change the number of jobs in an economy, but it does change the skills those jobs require. Labour’s capacity to capture a share of the increased output and consume is dependent, in a wage-economy, on whether or not workers have the skills to work higher productivity jobs. If not, the share of profit capture by capital and high-knowledge workers increases while the labour share of income for already marginalised workers does the opposite, making inequality worse and dragging the economy. 

Furman was therefore correct to state that the problem with automation is not a risk of mass unemployment but of growing inequality. The Industrial Revolution made Britain’s merchant class fabulously wealthy, while impoverishing both peasants in India and smallhold farmers at home. When an industry goes extinct, there’s likely to be a mismatch between the demand for skills and those possessed by the existing labour force. Normally, the mismatch is resolved over time through retraining, the retirement of older workers and the entry into the market of new cohorts. This is the laissez-faire ‘attrition’ model of development and social equality; in the alternative, society can play an active role in controlling the pace of change through industrial policy, providing active support to retraining into new industries, or increasing redistribution in favour of those who can’t or won’t adapt to new patterns of work. This is how progressives deal with problems of inequality in all its forms. 

That concludes Part One, looking at the contours of the debate. Return next week for Part Two where we dive deeper into the economic and policy consequences.

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.