The Left eats its children. The Right digs up its dead. (Good!)

There's been a bit of discussion lately on the podcasts I regularly listen to  about whether and how the Left 'eats it own'. The possibility of renewed radicalism on the millennial left, a radicalism with a real prospect of winning and holding political power within the lifetime of those alive today, is meeting with a predictable backlash. A whole generation of centre-leaning media and political personalities - Bill Maher, Dave Rubin, Sam Harris, Jon Haidt etc. - are promoting their belief that contemporary political polarisation is at least in part a reaction to the left's renewed radicalism. I have grave doubts about the sincerity of such people: blaming the left serves as an excuse to spout their own shitty beliefs, and "concern trolling" about the future of the progressive movement is as much about fighting for their own political power and prestige as it is about seeing the left as a whole succeed. 

Conservatives and reactionaries have never needed the left to excuse their existence. Yet centrists historically spend more time fretting about socialists provoking fascists than actually trying to achieve progress. While actual leftists battled Nazis on the streets of Weimar, Germany's centrist elite handed their country over to Hitler. Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" castigates white moderates more concerned with order than progress. Meanwhile, people friendly to marriage equality and gay rights - some gay themselves - are unfairly blaming the trans community for impugning the LGBT community as a whole. Everywhere, centrists are so concerned with respectibility and group consensus that they fail of offer effective defense of either individual rights or progressive social outcomes. 

The Left Devours Its Children. And That's a Good Thing. 

I address this phenonmenon in the Introduction to my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder". Belief in the possibility of capital-P "progress" is what makes socialists, well, socialists. We are inclined by both ideology and innate disposition to be open to new experiences and cultural innovation because we trust that they will enrich the life of our community. However, 

"If the left’s animating beliefs are [defined by] single issues alone, it will continue to lead to left-wing politicians, parties and their supporters becoming more and more conservative as they age. Progressivism can devour its own children. Because social advancement is the natural outcome of the human condition, if we have our vision fixed only on the road immediately in front of us, sooner or later we’ll run out of road."

There's a reason why many Gen-X centre leftists, who grew up in a cultural environment characterised by neoliberal economics and soft social liberalism are increasingly defining themselves as centre-right "classical liberals" as the civil rights struggles of their childhood are resolved and a harder edged socialist economics returns to prominence. There's a reason the Boomer neoconservatives abandoned the left during the Cold War struggle against communism. There's a reason why many TERFS use the language of second wave feminism and anti-capitalism to attack trans people right alongside the misogynistic and pro-capitalist right. These people are angry and frustrated; I believe them when they say their beliefs haven't changed. They feel like it's the 'Left' that's moved, not them. But there was never and will never be a Platonic ideal of the 'Left'. What these people are experiencing is the first hand flow of time and progress. This the fate of our kind: to see society carry on past us. 

The progressive Australian political Podcast "Boonta Vista Socialist Club" asked what issue would tip them over the line from progressive to conservative. One co-host replied "poly acceptance" - a regrettable answer, as that issue is coming and coming soon. Another said "furry acceptance", a funnier and better reply. We all face the slow dawning realisation that many of our favourite TV shows (and actors and comedians and directors) are 'problematic'. There are two possible responses to this realisation. One is to do as #GamerGate did and throw a political temper tantrum that drives you into the willing arms of the far right. Another is to accept the complexity of the relationship between past and future. We can laud those who opposed slavery, even if they also held troubling views of race. We can praise the suffragettes fights for legal equality, even some held authoritarian views, for example, on eugenics. Part of being a progressive is acknowledging the achievements of the past while recognising that they never go far enough. The struggle for liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a matter of continual myopic optimisation - we will never achieve utopia, but not for want of trying. 

Moreover, the inflexibility of the individual serves to some degree as a useful brake on the dreams of the radicals. The truth is, moving too far too fast does invite a backlash. Revolutionary fervor may speed up the pace of progress, but it willingly abandons the possibility of receiving meaningful feedback from the rest of the population and risks splitting a society in ways that can only be resolved through violence. When we have big, progressive generations like the millennials, we can and should use the opportunity to move things forward quite far. But the existence of the "classical liberals" is a reminder that we have to message toward those we leave behind as well. 

The Right digs up its dead

OK, so far this blog has done a lot of naval gazing. But what about the equivalent phenonmenon on the Right? If we lose older progressives as the Overton Window moves left, what happens when the Overton Window moves right? I would argue that if the Left eats its children, then the Right raises its dead. As societies learn and grow, the reprehensible views, beliefs and behaviours they contained in the past seem dead and forgotten. They are not of course: the process of cultural evolution merely suppresses reprehensible practices, it does not eliminate them. They continue to exist at lower frequencies in the population, subject to punishment if expressed publicly but still capable of surving in forgotten cultural backwaters and re-invading the body politics if its defenses weaken. 

So when the Overton Window shifts in a more conservative direction, as it sometimes does in response to social and economic crisis? Well, guess what? Fascism's back! Racism's back! Homophobia's back! Religious fundamentalism's back! When they win ground, conservatives goes looking for ideas in the past. Fortunately for us, the past is full of terrible ideas. Ideas that many generations of people alive today have been socialised into having an intense and visceral moral revulsion towards. That's the conservative brake, that's what stops conservatives from running away with a society or splitting it in two: when they start resurrecting zombie ideas, most people think they've gone too far and pick up their shotguns. 

Yet there's a unique danger here. The most insidious tactic of the purveyors of bad ideas, the ones they have been forced to learn by becoming cultural rebels in order to survive is this: looking and appearing normal will lower the defenses of a society enough to let you infiltrate it. Look normal, speak normal, act normal. Appropriate the style and rhetoric of successful authority figures. Be polite, obey the laws and norms as best you can. Use the thin edge of the wedge of your ideas to appeal to diaffected 'centrists'. The far right have mastered these techniques because they had no other choice: without these techniques, their ideologies would have died our generations ago when they were abandoned by the mainstream. The far left are too new to have mastered the same tactics. 

The exuberance of youth

In the end, perhaps this is the true point og difference between left and right in a cultural evolutionary framework. New far left ideas are often divorced, deliberately so, from cultural constructs. Their practitioners are young and enthusiastic, but unblooded in techniques for attaining cultural dominance. The far right, on the other hand, are wiley survivors, adept at masking their presence and swimming upstream in a culture that despises them. Neither advantage is likely decisive, and the success of a given idea is likely to be primarily determined by structural factors given by the extant distribution of power and production in society. In the long run, we must admit that the future belongs to the young. 

The Omnivore's Dilemma Redux: Understanding Anti-Vaxxers

The 'Omnivore's Dilemma' is an extremely useful concept for understanding some of the paradoxes in human behaviour and psychology. Put simply, if a being can eat anything in order to obtain the energy and nutrients it needs to live, then it faces a dilemma not of survival but rather of choice. Rather than struggling just to achieve its goals (survival), the omnivore must answer questions such as how best to achieve that goal safely, efficiently and sustainably. Culture provides one way to find those answers - social learning increases decision-making effectiveness by offering proven solutions to questions about what's safe to eat, where the best stuff is found and how to prepare it efficiently. 

Everyone who's shopped in a modern supermarket has had direct experience of the omnivore's dilemma: the paradox of choice we feel when selecting one breakfast cereal out of hundreds causes acute anxiety akin to that felt by our ancestors deciding on the day's hunt. In our daily lives we resolve these feelings by relying on a combination of innate biological preferences and learned behaviours - some of which may be adaptive and some of which may not be. Our taste buds tell us to indulge in sweet and fatty foods; our psychological openness to experience tilts the scale between trying a new brand or sticking with what we've had before; our upbringing nudges us towards the brands our parents trusted; or we seek to imitate the choice of celebrities who appear on marketing material. If we're being very careful (perhaps because we're resource constrained) we might even engage our System 2 reasoning and perform a cost-benefit calculation: i.e. which cereal will feed a family of four for the least dollars?

The omnivore's dilemma is not just about food: humans are behaviourial omnivores. Every action we take is the path of least resistance between the competing biases and impulses coded in our brains by biology and culture - and those psychological and cultural impulses are shaped by thousands, if not millions, of years of natural selection. As a result, our impulses make certain assumptions about the physical environment related to the environmental structure in which they became 'fixed' as part of our psyche. The Santa Barbara-type evolutionary psychologists speculate at length about the "environment of evolutionary adaption" (EEA) - but in reality there's a different environment for every trait. For example, our preference for sugary and fatty foods is likely rooted deep in pre-agrarian history, at a time when such energy sources were rare. But your learned preference for cheap cereal may adaptive only in the developmental environment of your childhood, when your family pinched pennies.  

Signals and Behaviour

In terms of game theory, a behaviour is produced by a strategy which in turn relies on a stable set of expectations about the state of the world. As behaviourial omnivores, we are open to new information ('signals') about the state of the world and can adjust our strategies accordingly. In fact, humans as a species are remarkably adept at signal recognition: from birth, we are natural mimics with a preternatural talent for both pattern recognition and imputing causation. The canonical example of this is movement in tall grass: not only will we notice a sign of change in the state of the world, our first instinct is to attribute an agent or cause to that change. It's very likely in fact, that these abilities are somewhat overtuned: agency bias may be one of the psychological underpinnings of belief in the supernatural as well as social, political and economic conspiracy-mongering: we see patterns that just aren't there. 

But signals about the state of the world may or may not be accurate, indeed, they may be intentionally falsified by other actors. How then do we select between them, particularly when trusting one signal over another (i.e. changing our expectations about the world) may result in vastly different behaviour? Let's connect this back to real-world politics: the information age provides every individual with almost unlimited opinions on every conceivable topic. We face a paradox of information: given that we can find information supporting any conceivable state of the world, how do we choose between them? The answer is the same as when we choose our breakfast cereal: we let our biological and learned biases and preferences take over and go for the option that causes the least anxiety. Everyone is likely to prefer information that re-enforces their pre-existing beliefs about the state of the world (confirmation bias); conservatives are likely to prefer information from sources they are already familiar with; authoritarians will preferentially imitate the bahviour of high-status individuals etc. Only rarely do we engage our rational mind and make a costly, independent assessment of the facts. 

Social media makes all of this harder, of course. It strips away much of the context of information signals, removing information about the reputation and status of the sender that we might rely on to make such judgements. Bad faith actors can intentionally manipulate our biases to spread 'fake news'. Some of these techniques are quite insidious: propagandists and marketeers delight in abusing our learned biases towards the scientific method by deliberating misinterpreting research or associating themselves with high-status scientific professions. They attack the character or reputation of opposing sources (in areas unrelated to the quality of the information they are providing), knowing that this reduces the odds the experts will be listened to. They mimic the affectations and talking points of thought leaders: privileging 'open dialogue', the rhetorical style of varsity debate, and the cultural signifiers of wealth. 

The anti-vaxxers' dilemma

Let's see how this might all work in practice. Imagine you're a skeptical cattle herder in a quasi-agrarian society. You have a short lifespan, in no small part because there's a one in three chance of dying from smallpox. One day, someone from a neighbouring village comes through and describes a behaviour in which people in his village take pustules from infected cows and rub them on the faces or wounds of their children. He or she swears they haven't had a smallpox outbreak in years. Do you imitate this behaviour, knowing that a sick cow will sometimes also make a child sick? Of course you wouldn't! You'd think the stranger and his village were mad. And you might be right: another village nearby sacrifices the elderly to the sky-god and claims the same results, and that's obviously just superstititous nonsense. 

And yet the village that practices variolation is correct. Over millennia, they will live longer, healthier lives: have more children, herd more successfully and eventually come to dominate the local economy. Your village of skeptics (and the nearby village of religious fundamentalists) can't compete. You either imitate their behaviour or go extinct. Those who are most comfortable with novelty adapt the quickest. Over time, the behaviour becomes fixed in the population: scientists investigate and confirm the germ theory of disease; institutions are establish to subsidise the practice and punish those that don't comply. Ritualisation may even set in, such that compliance with the norm becomes a reliable signifier of group identity, 

Now flip the script. You're a parent who lives in a society that practices widespread vaccination and regularly signals to you that vaccination is safe and effective. But one day, you encounter a signal that tells you the opposite: somehow a crank theory or conspiracy, a bad scientific study or new religious belief has penetrated through the cultural fog and established an information paradox. What is the omnivore to do? Here's the thing: were the new information stating that vaccines are dangerous correct (it's not, for the record) the fitness-increasing decision would be to accept the new signal, refuse to vaccinate your children despite the risks and spread the new signal as widely as possible. Over a lifetime, your child would be statistically fitter and healthier and may achieve a higher social status. But of course, the opposite is true. The same openness to novelty which is adaptive in one set of conditions is maladaptive in the other. 

But the individual doesn't have the benefit of seeing life as a multi-generational evolutionary simulation in which statistically significant statistical differences in average outcomes are meaningful. They have to make a decision to reduce their individual anxiety in the moment. So their biases go to work. Most of us trust the information we learned as children about vaccinnes being safe; we attribute elite status to the medical profession and the advice it offers; we are at least partly responsive to the directives of government so long as it doesn't directly affect our individual rights and interests. A tiny minority of individuals will react differently and accept the new signal: maybe their psychological sanctity trigger is more sensitive; maybe they're more libertarian than average, and are skeptical about 'received wisdom'; maybe their openness to new information is set a little looser than average. Overall, it's plausible that there's a correlation between 'progressive' traits and anti-vaxxer idiocy: because the same set of underlying biases cause both sets of behaviour.

Openness to new information and skepticism of authority are politically adaptive behaviours for many people, but mental toolkits that may be adaptive in many scenarios are not guaranteed to be adaptive in all of them. We never know the state of the world with any certainty, and the adaptiveness or otherwise of our behaviour can only be known over extremely long timescales. Population-level behaviours, norms and institutions may help us resolve the paradox of information in many circumstances, but not all. We therefore remain behaviourial omnivores - capable of considerable strategic flexibility both on an individual and social level. That flexibility is central to what makes progress possible, but doesn't guarantee it for either the individual or society as a whole. 

Three Duties

Liberalism does not primarily concern itself with duties. As an individual-centric philosophy, it's mostly interested in specifying the rights which individuals may claim from society. Other than respecting the rights and freedoms of others (which exhausts the psychological duties to prevent harm and respect others' equality), the liberal individual ordinarily owes no ethical duties to his or her fellow citizens other than as prescribed by law.

We possess rights claims by virtue of our social membership, regardless of whether those rights are currently adequately guaranteed. Rights claims provide legitimacy for actions seeking social reform: they set standards to aspire to and by which institutions can be judged. While philosophers have occasionally grappled with defining liberal duties, in a liberal society there are prima facie no obligations on the individual which provide legitimate cause for social activism. This distinguishes liberalism from more authoritarian-attuned philosophies such as Confucianism or Legalism, nationalism or most religions, which specify universal moral duties of individuals. 

Evolutionary thinking complicates this picture somwhat. Evolution is value-neutral but does establish the parameters by which ethical beliefs and culture change over time and thus limits the categories of variations that are possible (or stable) in a given environment. In this view, liberalism (as a cultural equilibrium) is simply the most widespread and flexible of possible solution sets to the problem or organising human societies at scale. While liberalism may contain cultural spandrels as a result of its particular evolutionary history (in Europe), it can be considered adaptive for a variety of social environments. Liberalism is much like the human species itself: behaviourially flexible, adaptive and relentlessly expansionist.

I think it's imperative that my colleagues at the Cultural Evolution Society give due attention to the consequences of their research for political and ethical philosophy. While almost all members I've met are genuine humanists and progressives, there are some truly nasty right-wingers who follow this material (and related subfields such as sociobiology) closely and are employing it to refine and strengthen their own ideas. As a socialist, I see it as my role to make cultural evolution and progressivism mutually intelligible: we can both agree that Foucault is full of shit without rejecting, as the right does, the critical insights of Marxism and feminism. 

A late-arriving idea

The remainder of this blog is a first draft of an effort to discern if an evolutionary approach implies any ethical duties on individuals prior to liberalism, which is an adaptive product of that approach. This is an idea that crystallized for me very late in the drafting process of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder". In Chapter XVIII, discussing foreign policy, I write:

"The sole concern of the international relations policy-maker . . . is to maximise the outcomes (security) for their own state while minimising the risks arising from systemic instability. This is analogous to the task of the domestic political actor: seeking to maximise social change (or resist it, if conservative) without creating a systemic risk of revolution."

As this was a late addition to the text, I had not in fact discussed this alleged duty in a domestic context earlier in the book, although the section in Chapter IV on the undesirability of revolution is a natural precursor to it. To understand this persective, we have to think about cultures in terms of equilibria (or quasi-equilibria): every society consists of a mix of permitted behaviourial strategies. Cultural variants that stray too far from this adaptive equilibrium will be removed  by natural selection, in the same way as a genetic mutation that confers no biological advanatage will be selected out of a species. As social environments (given by economic development, population and natural constraints) change, cultures change too - in much the same way that selection permits a species to adapt to natural environments. 

Variation is allowed by this view of life and culture: in fact it is required to explain why cultures change and adapt over time. But structural forces act as selectors, reducing the frequency of maladaptive behaviour and encouraging the spread of adaptive innovations. In political and economic terms, ideologies and policies that increase the general welfare are more likely to spread and be widely employed than policies that are rigid, unstable or destructive. Of course, we have no way of knowing in advance whether a policy idea that we favour is adaptive or maladaptive: we can only try them out and see if evolution favours then. So far, so good. 

Three Duties

Evolution is blind. Species and cultures both can go extinct if their environment changes faster than they can adapt, or if their behaviour sets are too inflexible, or if destructive mutations spread through their population unchecked. Cultural evolution is a marvellous system for generating social and economic progress: it has made humanity the dominant species at a planetary scale. Democracy, which permits and channels this variation with astonishing flexibillity and resilience, is the best system yet devised to harness this process for the common good. But there is no guarantee that cultural evolution will continue indefinitely: it's a minor miracle (only truly cosmic time scales) that our species possesses this capability at all, and a historical accident that we've evolved a political belief system suited to managing it. 

Given the existence of human agency, however, I argue that cultural evolution imposes three ethical duties on individual behaviour. These ethical duties necessarily limit the range of legitimate political action and belief; nevertheless, they ensure that human societies remains dynamic and adaptive. Moreover, these duties override whatever cultural considerations have evolved in particular contexts and are ontologically prior to particular philosophical systems. In other words, they impose duties on individuals regardless of their own or their culture's belief system. These are not 'conservative' duties to respect existing institutions: they are duties which ensure that the evolution of cultural institutions is possible at all. These duties arise from the requirement that 'creative destruction' occurs in the context of a physical and cultural ecosystem which is sustainable. In that sense, they could be considered intergenerational duties, or measures to counteract short-term time discounting of political payoffs.

1) Firstly, individuals have a duty to pursue political and economic change only in those ways which guarantees the ongoing viability of the social environment for future generations. If one were so inclined, one could read into this duties to utilise the natural environment sustainably. I'm more of a humanist than an environmentalist, however, so for me this means that the pursuit of change must occur through actions which preserve the ongoing fabric of democratic society. In other words, even if we were in a position to do so, political actors must not undermine democratic norms and institutions, and must not seek to divide or separate themselves from the rest of society in the pursuit of their preferred political goals. Sorry kids, but revolution is out (regardless of its consequences), and so is dictatorship and separatism. Social systems must allow for the peaceful transfer of power between competing value sets. 

2) Secondly, individuals have a duty to defend liberal democratic society against other actors that would seek to undermine or overthrow it. Guess what? Some actors are always going to cheat on their ethical duties for selfish advantage. Social cancers like fascism must be fought by society's 'immune system', or they will grow and consume the social organism until it dies. In game-theoretic terms, cooperative social behaviour is sustained by the potential punishment of deviance. Not everyone has to be a punisher, but enough people have to be willing to bear the costs of doing so in order to maintain equilibrium. This also applies internationally: the left cannot sit idly by while authoritarians states rip up international norms and must be willing to use coercion to ostracise and punish deviance. 

3) Finally: in the event that a cohesive democratic society is destroyed, split or ceases to exist, individuals have a duty to fight to restore democratic society. Say there's been a  revolution or civil war in your country, and a cohesive society has ceased to exist. Does victory (or partial victory) in that conflict mean that one is entitled to impose permanent decision-dominance over the parts of society one controls? Of course not. Revolt by one class over another, or conquest by one ethnic group over another, does not permit the extermination of the culture of the defeated. Autocracies can survive for a time of course - the Soviet Union was famously successful in rapidly industrialising and defeating Nazi Germany (at tremendous cost). But they are far less likely to be able to adapt to changing social and environmental circumstances, and will fall in time to societies that are more flexible. Only by restoring democracy as rapidly as possible can we ensure that ongoing viability of a society. 

Liberalism: New Arguments for the Original Position (part 3)

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

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I showed that recent developments in both evolutionary psychology and evolutionary game theory offered new ways to justify the veil of ignorance story. Today's blog post will offer a third approach, borrowed from the related field of cultural evolution. 

The Imitation Game

In many evolutionary models, individual actors do not calculate their optimal strategies on the basis of observations about their surroundings, but instead employ heuristics by which they imitate the strategy of other agents. When individual learning is costly or error-prone, and the strategic environment is unpredictable, imitation offers an efficient, reliable way for individuals to do no worse than their contemporaries. Those interested in a fulsome (albeit lengthy) digression on the topic should read Richerson & Boyd's "Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution." While heuristically imitating others may not seem like it should lead to optimal social organisation, the discipline of cultural evolution argues that natural selection operates on strategies to increase the frequency of adaptive variants and decrease the prevalence of maladaptive ones, creating social equilibria which we call 'culture'.

But which heuristics do actual human beings employ? Game theory makes predictions about the general categories of decision-rule which produce cooperative equilibria, and fortunately we know from several decades of work in behaviourial economics and evolutionary psychology that humans do in fact possess biological biases which implement these rules. The simplest are kinship- and proximity- biases, through which an individual copies the behaviours of those genetically related to themselves or in close physical proximity. These rules are clearly important for animals and children, but aren't the whole story. If cultural evolution was restricted to tight kin-groups, behaviourial variation over time would be minimal: culture would be reliably replicated, but not very adaptive to changing circumstances or useful in organising large-scale societies.

Cultural transmission may also demonstrate two other biases: payoff-dependent bias (i.e: imitate the most successful strategy) and conformist bias (i.e: imitate the most frequent strategy). Frequency-dependent imitation, or "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" is a useful heuristic for most human societies: not only is conforming with the traditions of the majority likely to be adaptive in terms of environmental fitness, but non-conforming may signal belonging to an out-group and invite ostracism and punishment. Well known experiments by Stanley Milligram and Solomon Asch have demonstrated that we are a conformist species, although the conformist propensities of individuals of course vary and some of us are preferentially drawn to imitate less-frequent behaviour and desire non-conformity. 

Imitating more successful actors is also a useful learning heuristic, albeit a more complex one. On first blush, preferentially imitating strategies with the highest payoff is likely to lead those strategies to spread throughout a population, increasing the general welfare. But gathering information on payoffs is more difficult than one might think, particularly when it creates incentives for actors to provide false information about their payoffs. Do we imitate actors who were successful in the immediate past, or those whose ancestors have been succesful for generations?  Can we reliably remember and compare the reputations of thousands of people simultaneously (Dunbar's number suggest we can't), or should we rely on symbolic representations of success and status, such as ostentatious consumption or wealth? For this reason, payoff-biases are often conflated with prestige-biases: i.e. it's not objective measures of fitness which matter, but socially-constructed measures of prestige. 

Back to Rawls: The "Imitative Veil"

And that brings us back to our new formulation of Rawl's veil of ignorance: legitimate social rules, norms and institutions are those to which individuals would give their consent as if they did not know their own learning rule, or how possible learning rules are distributed in society once the veil is lifted. In other words, in designing the rules, norms and institutions of a liberal society, we must be blind to whether individuals preferentially copy the behaviours of their kin; or to what extent they demonstrate conformity with social rules; or the extent to which they prioritise individual learning over the instructions of those with a higher place in the social hierarchy. Social norms must be robust against the possibility of a population employing a different mixture of imitative rules, and should not privilege one set of rules over any other.

In Part 1 of this series, I argued that traits that were universally shared by all humans (such as the abhorrence of physical harm and the fairness bias) could be made subject to universal rules, but where individuals differ, Rawlsian rules must take those differences (such as regarding loyalty and respect for authority) into consideration. For for instance, if it turns out that we all preferentially copy the strategies of our close family, we might adopt universal norms that limit social intervention in early childhood but which counteract its potentially negative long-term effects, such as through universal public pre-school and primary education. 

Those who are familiar with Chapter I of my book, might now be able to see the shape of where I'm going with this. People may employ frequency-biases with varying levels of strength (either due to genetic, developmental of cultural variation): some might preferentially conform with the the prior behaviour of the majority (conservatives), others might be relatively more open to new cultural variants (progressives). People may also employ prestige biases in different ways: some will preferentially comply with the behaviours of high-status individuals (authoritarians), others will prefer self-discovery and individual learning (libertarians). Because the progressive-conservative and authoritarian-libertarian axes encompass normal individual variation in how individuals learn and adapt their behaviour, these axes are subject to political contestation in a democracy and not governed by universal philosophical principles. 

Built for speed, not for comfort

Boyd & Richerson make a further observation about the implications of imitative transmission for cultural evolution: there is a necessary trade-off between the efficiency of imitation and the vulnerability of a social system to exploitation by maladaptive or parasitic behaviourial variants. In other words, the less discerning we are about where we copy from, the more we are prone to error. The less information individuals collect about the relative fitness of potential strategies, the more likely it is that they will imitate a strategy that is not fitness-enhancing. Dawkins and the "new atheists" tend to see a great deal of culture, especially religion, as maladaptive variations that are parasites on our cultural capabilities. But this is an gross oversimplification. Firstly, it is extremely difficult to determine whether behaviour sets are actually adaptive or maladaptive. Secondly, the possibility of exploitation is a necessary trade-off for a cultural system that is capable of learning and adapting over human timescales. 

In Chapter IV of my book, I argue that there is a third important component of political personality: an individual's willingness to change and adapt their beliefs in light of changing circumstances. Although essentially speculative, I believe that an evolved capacity for cultural evolution might have created a psychological toolkit to make judgements about when to critically examine beliefs, and that that there is almost certainly likely to be (for biological, developmental and cultural reasons) a distribution of valid values that psychological trigger can be tuned to. To bring the discussion back to Rawls again, political systems (but especially democracies) should be blind to the possibility of variation in individual's willingness to compromise: they must be robust to the possibility of both centrist preferences and polarised politics. The corrollary of this, since I do so enjoy undermining centrists, is that techncratic centrism cannot be utilised as a universal principle of governance. 

Cryptocurrencies: It's a bubble, dummies

Chapter XIII of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder" defines an economic bubble like this:

"Bubbles are deviations from the long-term trend in the value of particular assets where their rate of return exceeds the underlying productivity growth of the capital."

From a policy perspective, bubbles are undesirable and difficult to manage, but they're also a useful diagnostic tool: the presence of a bubble indicates that an economy is unbalanced, and that there's an excess of either supply or demand for capital or labour going unused. 

Crypto-currencies are currently experiencing a bubble. Take a look at the price chart for bitcoin, the founder and standard-bearer of this new type of digital currency:

That's a more than 17-fold increase of value of bitcoin assets in a year, creating a total market valued at about US$280 billion. Other digital currencies are performing similarly. Ethereum, the third most significant cryptocurrency by both value and volume traded increased by more than ninety fold. Perhaps better capturing the irrational exuberance of the bubble, companies are doubling or quadrupling their share value overnight by adding 'blockchain' to their company name, and new currencies are being created and attracting venture capital at an staggering rate. More annoyingly, semi-informed elites are kvetching non-stop about way blockchain technology is going to save the world: honest-to-god, I attended a public lecture recently on how blockchains could be employed to monitor human rights abuses. 

We've seen this scale of bubble before: the best fit is the .com bubble of the late-1990s, during which tech companies posted similarly insane gains before crashing back to earth. I'm not saying the value of bitcoin has always been illusionary (all currencies are illusions, one way or another). Bitcoin has been around for a while now and found genuine niche uses in online (and black-market) transactions. It has developed a reputation as a meaningful unit of exchange, and attracted financial infrastructure investments to improve the efficiency of its operations. In the same way that the .com bubble didn't mean the internet was a failed technology, a cryptocurrency bubble doesn't mean that bitcoin and its peers are useless: merely that their current valuations grossly exceed the underlying productivity of the asset class. 

Why now?

Let's be clear. The value of cryptocurrencies isn't miraculously increasing because blockchain is the future of money. Cryptocurrencies cannot repace fiat money because they operate on the same principle as gold or other precious materials: they are resource-constrained prestige assets privileged by some consumers but unsuitable as a universal medium of exchange. Why are cryptocurrencies resource constrained? Well, the fact that bitcoin mining currently consumes more electricity than the Republic of Ireland gives a clue. While digital currencies themselves may be unlimited, the computing power required to cryptographically process blockchains consumes a scarce common good (electricity) and produces waste (heat and carbon dioxide). When the prices of these inputs and outputs are taken into consideration, cryptocurrencies will face natural limits to growth, much as the value of gold is constrained by the accessiblity of the mineral in the Earth's crust. Fiat money is not limited in the same way: assuming trust in public institutions, it's a more efficient solution for creating an unlimited medium of exchange.  

So why is the cryptocurrency bubble happening now? Let's take the productivity of bitcoin as a given and look at why more capital might be flowing into the market. First, most digital currencies have in-built inflationary drivers: there is a mathematical limit of 21 million bitcoins that will ever be created, and even currencies that are unlimited in the same way exponentially slow the creation of new units of currency over time. In other words, the longer cryptocurrencies exist, the more stable and predictable the supply of coins becomes. Secondly, several events in 2016/17 significantly improved the regulatory certainty of the major digital currencies. Ethereum famously split into multiple versions in 2016 as a result of attacks on its value, whereas the bitcoin market changed some of its internal rules in 2017 without splitting. A stable asset pool with regulatory certainty is a good de facto target for market speculators. 

But the core reason for the timing of the cryptocurrency bubble is that there is just too much capital sloshing around the financial system right now without anything productive to invest in. The same factors that are pushing the US stock market higher are creating, at miniature scale, the digital currency bubble. That is: obscence rates of corporate profit, the promise of debt-funded tax cuts by irresponsible conservative governments, stagnant wage growth and rampant inequality. Supply-side economics when there is a glut of capital supply does not work. Capital availability does not make capitalists invest in low-productivity, low-return activities: it increases their tolerance of high-risk, high-reward assets. In other words, it drives speculation and bubbles. Whereas the Bush tax cuts were invested in speculation driving up the price of housing and food (which was bad enough), the Trump cuts are being invested in bitcoin, share-buy-backs and an increasing concentration of corporate monopolies. 

Three Futures

Overall, I'm not very concerned by the cryptocurrency bubble. It's a warning sign that things are seriously wrong elsewhere in the economy, but not a problem for public policy-makers per se. Unlike housing, food and superannuation, cryptocurrencies are not (yet) essential to the provision of essential public goods and services, and so there's little reason for governments to be concerned about their prices (by analogy: why bother controlling the price of expensive art?). To that end, I see the cryptocurrency bubble ending one of three ways:

1) In the first (and most likely) scenario, the market for cryptocurrencies crashes without significant consequence for the broader economy. Lots of people take a haircut, and a bunch of financial instrastructure investment is effectively wasted, but cryptocurrencies continue to be used and develop at their underlying growth rate - as happened to tech companies after the .com bubble. The bitcoin crash may come about either on its own, or as a consequence of a broader systemic financial crisis: either way, no one will really take notice except the speculators who were playing the bitcoin game. 

2) The second scenario is that the bitcoin bubble crashes and creates negative feedback for the real economy because of the overexposure of key financial institutions (including pension funds and banks) to cryptocurrency risk. This is far less likely. US$280 billion may seem like a large asset pool, but it's a drop in the ocean in terms of global financial markets. While I have little faith in the market's ability to handle systemic risk, I'm marginally more confident that institutional investors will be warier of cryptocurrencies than they were of mortgage swaps. 

3) The third, and least likely scenario in my mind, is that there is in fact a positive feedback between the cryptocurrency market and the broader financial world. In this scenario, amidst a broader systemic market crash, in which the faith of investors and consumers in national currencies is shaken, trust and confidence in crypocurrencies actually leads to their increased use in market transactions, such that cryptocurrencies ultimately help stabilise the real economy. Think of people hoarding gold during the Great Depression to get an idea of how this would look. I refer to this as a the "Mr Robot" scenario (spoilers for season 3), and it's the preferred vision of the techno-libertarians who have the most faith in bitcoin. It's an extremely unlikely outcome for the forseeable future, but an interesting possibility nonetheless.