Climate Change broke the neoliberal consensus, too

We began my interview last week on the "Connected & Disaffected" podcast talking about political polarisation: what is it, where it's come from, and whether or not we should fear it. My contention in the interview was that the Global Financial Crisis, and to a lesser extent the Iraq War, broke the post- Cold War hegemony of the neoliberal ideological consensus. In other words, the cultural quasi-equilibria characterised by the dominance of neoliberal narratives about society and the economy proved to be no longer fit for its structural environment. As a result, formerly marginalised social narratives are (re-)emerging, an experience that is deeply disconcerting to a generation of people socialised to believe there is no alternative. 

One point from my notes that I didn't get to make in the interview was that climate change was the third and final nail in neoliberalism's coffin. I don't talk about environmental issues often on this blog: I'm not an environmentalist by nature and am generally content to let the experts come up with pragmatic fixes. As I write in Chapter XVII of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age", I'm interested in the natural environment primarily as a source of free public services that marginalised people (especially) rely on to survive. I'm interested in how the exploitation and privatisation of the environment fuels the unjust accumulation of wealth by the powerful, and how the distribution of environmental harms of that exploitation often falls hardest on those already disadvantaged (see: Naomi Klein). In other words, I'm not the sort of person who declares that climate change is the greatest moral challenge of our times. 

A perfect little problem

Once upon a time, climate change was the perfect problem for the socially-conscious neoliberal. A potentially existential external threat, it has several elements that appealed to the technocratic elite: expert scientific evidence was required to establish the case for action; cooperation between states necessitated vast and complex international negotiations; domestic solutions envisaged creating a new freely-traded market commodity without changing the economic status quo; and there were opportunities to 'educate' the masses about their consumption patterns and nudge them to make 'better choices'. I think it's fair to say all these methods failed one way or another. We're already blowing past the climate targets we set just four years ago; barely half of US adults believe human activity causes climate change; and most of the rise in consumer energy prices has been caused by price-gauging privatised monopolies, not investment in renewable power. 

These failures are the result of the neoliberal worldview, and they should demoralise and delegitimise those techniques for anyone serious about social policy. 

• Experts are not a magic bullet. And scientific facts are not social facts. As I write in the early chapters of my book, governance is about making value judgements. Despite what utilitarians believe, there's no technocratic formula that will calculate the most ethical way in which to distribute wins and losses. Scientists have established the inevitability of potentially irreversible climate change to a virtual certainty, yet that fact alone tells us nothing about what we should do about it. People intuit this: the best studies show that expert evidence has no effect on public opinion about climate change policy. In fact, relying on appeals to scientific authority has only led the powerful opponents of climate action to develop sophisticated techniques to muddy the waters, conduct personal attacks on scientists and discredit the very idea of expert knowledge. So, good job on that one, neoliberals. 
• And then there's the wonkiest of wonk ideas: carbon trading. Why impose a new tax on pollution when we can create a complex new form of private property traded on indecipherably complex financial markets? Oh, and because this property right will be an artificial creature of state regulation, the price and quantity of carbon permits will be easily manipulated by lobbying interests on behalf the very industries that emit the most carbon. Australia's carbon trading scheme - while effective - was so convoluted and unpopular that the conservatives managed to repeal it FIVE YEARS AGO. As Democrats in the US have discovered with healthcare policy, when voters don't understand a public programme it's absurdly easy for opponents of regulation to portray it as a paranoid right-wing fever dream. Better simpler, direct policies that are easy to understand - and harder to attack. 
• Finally, when all collective solutions fail, neoliberalism tells us that fighting climate change is ultimately a matter of individual responsibility. And since individuals have every incentive to free ride in a collective action problem they have no power over, why we simply need to educate people to make choices contrary to their own rational self interest! I've written before why this kind of 'education' strategy is counterproductive: it creates new hierarchies of knowledge and hides existing hierarchies of power in such a way to generate increased resentment and anxiety from the have-nots. People don't want cheap energy because they're bad people who don't understand climate change: they want cheap energy because they're resource constrained and want one fewer stressor on their daily lives. Middle class neoliberals aren't better or smarter people because of their 'green energy choices', they're using their existing wealth to invest in a social signifier of status. South Park had this one down in 2006.

What's left unsaid

Y'know what's not on this list? The classical sort of central government action traditionally used to solve environmental problems. The same sorts of programs that actually have been implemented and are making the biggest difference in saving us from potential climate catastrophe. Where's China's central planning body setting national targets for solar energy expansion that have made it the world's largest manufacturer of solar cells? The public investment in basic science that led to Australian universities developing modern photovoltaics in the first place? The unilateral government decisions, like Angela Merkel's to close Germany's nuclear power plants, that leads to the market embracing renewables virtually overnight? The basic role of national industry policy in directing subsidies away from the fossil fuel industry and towards more environmentally friendly forms of power generation? The answer is that neoliberalism made these sorts of policy responses literally unthinkable. 

Solving collective action problems requires collective decision-making through national institutions (i.e. governments). As is true of social and economic dilemmas, so too of environmental ones. Nations that are on track to meet their targets under the Paris Agreement are going to do so on the back of their existing competence with industrial management and economic planning. Laissez-faire states without a tradition of government intervention in the economy, like Australia, are least likely to meet them. If you want to save the environment, you're first going to have to take a deeper look at how our societies and economies are structured. Ultimately, I'm with Naomi Klein on this one: our economic system and our relationship with the natural environment are so intrinsically linked that hoping for meaningful action on climate change under neoliberalism is self-defeating. 

Consider that my message for the voters in Batman. 

I was on a podcast!

This week, I was interviewed on the "Connected & Disaffected" politics podcast about my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder", my current work on cultural evolution and the role of social media in feeding political polarisation. If you want to here me talk a little more about the origins of the book, I highly recommend checking it out.!

In other news, for non-Australians looking to obtain a paperback copy of the book, I'm pleased to announce that "Politics for the New Dark Age" is available from the Book Depository - who will ship it to anywhere in the world! No excuses now!

Follow the link here and buy "Politics for the New Dakr Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder"!

The Structure and You! Privilege, Preference and #MeToo

The left-of-centre streamer Destiny has argued in a series of recent videos that the Left needs to do a better job at persuasion: that we've lost the capacity to argue effectively for our positions. This is a task I also identify and take up in my own book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder". One of Destiny's principle talking points has been that while the Left is often good at identifying structural injustice in society (as I put it: the Left is liberalism plus structural critique), we often critique it in a way that's perceived by the ordinary voter who participates in those structures as an attack on their personal identity. 

This is an important point worth engaging, because it recurs in a range of policy areas. Take, as an example, the recent back-and-forth between YouTubers Arielle Scarcella and Contra Points over personal sexual preference. The disagreement between the two sides is not whether racist or transphobic (or ableist or fat-shaming) preferences in one's choice of intimate partner are legitimate (both insist they accept this), but rather whether academic critique of the cause and consequences of those preferences at a social level undermines that principle of individual choice. This twitter spat, of course, is merely a pop culture manifestation of the TERF argument that trans lesbians seek to invalidate the identity of cis lesbians (defined in terms of attraction to female sex characteristics). And it also carries echoes of the lower profile but long-running debate over racism and transphobia in gay male pickup culture. 

Most people have little difficulty reconciling the idea that social cues play a role in the formation of their sexual preferences, even cues coded on problematic categories such as race or age (or gender roles or even dominance hierarchies). We all go about our dating lives, secure in the knowledge that our law and culture renders us sovereign over our choice of intimate partner and the pursuit of our own definition of happiness. Trans people are merely the latest in a long line of formerly marginalised minorities to go through the process of winning greater social visibility and respect; they are not the first step on a slippery slope to the erasure of gay identity or the erosion of the bedrock principle of sexual consent. Most of us are fine with being a little hypocritical now and then when it comes to getting laid. 

A bigger problem: Virtue and Vice

But trans acceptance is merely the tiny tip of a very large social iceberg. Perhaps the principle way in which most people experience this phenomenon is when it comes to feminism, or more precisely: the concept of the patriarchy. Most of us have very little exposure of academic feminism, and even those few men (and women!) that do often hesitate to label themselves as feminists. Why? Surely, we can all agree that sexual assault is a very bad thing and that women should not be harassed or intimidated or made subject of violence. But - they insist - #notallmen are like that, by which of course they mean *I* (or my husband, or my father, or my son) am (is) not like that. Rather than putting aside their own identity to listen to the subjective experience of women about how you (yes you!) have contributed to and likely benefitted from a hierarchy that inhibits women's careers and violates their personal autonomy, they complain that feminism has gone too far and threatens their identity as men. 

There are echoes of this too in the discussion of "working class whites", racial privilege and identity politics. The Left critique of structural racism and the way it privileges white identities is qualitatively and quantitatively rigorous. And yet the fact remains that due to widespread economic inequality, many white voters do not *feel* privileged - or indeed racist - at all! Despite the fact that Democratic Party policies would have done more to alleviate their material disadavantage than Republican ones, many conservative white voters chose to support an actual bigot over the candidate who put them in the "basket of deplorables". Most of Trump's supporters have no real attachment to white nationalism. But they will continue to be activated by a backlash bias against politicians who they perceive as attacking their sense of self as 'good people'.

The reality is that while formal philosophy largely focuses on deontological (or rule-based) and consequentialist ethics, most people continue to act as if their virtue was all that mattered. We all have a psychological need to see ourselves as good people, who do only good things for good reasons. We can recognise when bad things happen, but these bad things are done by bad people for bad reasons. In many ways, getting people to think this way about unjust structural categories is a victory. By the 21st century, most people agree that racist behaviour is bad and that people who perform racism are racists who deserve social ostracism. Social movements largely stop the act of persuasion at that point, because we've effectively won. But using categorical rhetoric to persuade people who think categorically limits our capacity to keep fighting when society moves on and new issues arise. We were so successful in convincing ordinary voters that legal racism or homophobia was bad that when we go back and ask them to recognise that ending legal discrimination left behind persistent structural inequalities (such as the treatment of trans people), they reject us on the same rhetorical grounds that we ourselves taught them to use. 

The whole point of intersectionality and solidarity as a practice is to get people to listen and consider their place in society in relation to others. The centre and the right do not reject 'identity politics' because marginalised groups label themselves as victims: they oppose 'identity politics' because it serves to place them in the role of oppressors, a role that is at odds with their own sense of self. Solidarity ultimately is a two-way street: we have to persuade people not only of the justice of a single cause, but to be part of a perpetual movement of interlocking causes. But by the same token, we on the Left must avoid using our own categories in ways which are politically detrimental to the construction of such a solidaristic movement. 

Where does that leave us?

One of the great advantages of evolution-centric thinking is that it conditions you to think in terms of the properties of populations, and not the properties of individuals. In this vein, racism, heteronormativity, homophobia and transphobia are measurable properties of the the social structure and thus should only be used to categorise society as a whole. Individuals, on the other hand, are not completely determined by categories: behaviour is probabilistic and therefore at least partially contradictory. People don't *feel* accurately defined by the labels like racist or transphobe because they often have subjectively good intentions and often blind to the negative consequences of their behaviour, which may be casual or incidental. As a result, they feel that critiques of structural categories are inherently personal.  

So I think our starting position has to be that structural categories can only properly describe populations and behaviours, and not individuals. We can and should talk about how our collective decision-making leads to adverse consequences that disproportionately help or hinder certain categories of person. We can and should talk about the behaviour sets that effectuate and perpetuate those decisions. But we should be extremely reluctant to attribute a category to individuals or sub-populations. Structural racism, for example, is an unequal relationship between constructed racialised categories and is not the defining identity of any one group, even if that group disproportionately benefits from that unequal relationship. Transphobia, too, is a systematic pattern of oppression of trans individuals that is sustained by recurring patterns of discriminatory behaviour and belief, not the malicious intent of any specific individual or sub-group. 

Of course, some people are just assholes. We can and should question how the individual chooses to relate to the structure. The vast majority of the time, they will be neutral or passive towards it. Sometimes, as with the patriarchy, they will actively benefit from it. Rarely, they will serve as active enforcers of structural inequality: punishers of deviance and propagators of supporting ideology. When people have power, and choose to use that power to sustain inequality, then it's fair to call them out for being bigots. But when people lack power and merely benefit passively from the structure, we need to be delicate in prying them from their attachment to the status quo. In particular, we need to find ways to break the identification between group identities and the self-appointed leaders of groups, so that our critiques of those with power aren't received as attacks on the powerless. 

It's OK to be a little uncool sometimes

Progressives, generally, are more comfortable with ambiguity than conservatives. We more readily accept that it's ok to be uncool and hypocritical sometimes. That passively benefitting from racial privilege or only wanting to be intimate with people with vaginas doesn't make us any less of an ally to our comrades-in-arms. Authoritarians have a harder time with this: they are compelled to reconcile their personal identity with social contructed categories. Ultimately, our long-term goal should be to bring about social conditions that make more people into progressives, rather than merely constructing new social structures that cause conservatives to follow our behaviourial lead. Because we're going to want things (now and in the future) that we haven't yet socialised conservatives into supporting. And if we move forward without a way of doing so, the backlash will continue to be strong and fierce. 

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.