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In this blog I want to compare two approaches to political crises from two people who’ve devoted a lot of time to the topic.

Peter Turchin has been the subject of the last few blog posts. He is a quantitative researcher who graduated from Duke with a PhD in Zoology and specialises in statistical analysis of historical data. He developed a structural demographic approach to understanding cycles of political crisis.

Mike Duncan is an author and podcaster who produced a series on the history of Rome, and from 2013, a history of 10 great revolutions, from the English Civil War to the Russian Revolution. Though Duncan is not a professor, there is no doubt that after 10 years of engagement with histories of political crisis, his viewpoint can act as a counterpoint to the quantitative, statistical view of Peter Turchin. This blog is an attempt to compare the views of both and see where common ground can be found between data analysis and traditional qualitative historiography.

What is a Revolution?

First, we must ask if Turchin and Duncan really are talking about the same thing. Duncan himself focused on events that are widely described as revolutions, and not on political crises in general. However, he chose to start his series with an event not widely known as a revolution at all, the English Civil War of 1643-1652. This highlights the difficulty in classifying different kinds of political crisis in general, and the answer for Duncan, perhaps for expediency’s sake, tends to opt for those events that have some pedigree being called revolutions, even if it leaves out events that could easily be considered such in hindsight. For instance, he spends no time at all on the American Civil War of 1861-1865 which has almost as much a right to be called a revolution as the American Revolutionary War. It was, after all, a huge, militarised rebellion. An apparent wrinkle here is that the rebellion was not an upswell of discontent against the old order, but a reaction to the new, Republican order on the part of the “ancien regime” of Southern semi-aristocrats.

Turchin doesn’t have to pay so much attention to what events are called, so has no trouble lumping the US Civil war, the Russian Revolution, and the Taiping Rebellion into one big “political crisis” category, or what he calls disintegrative phases. Largely, I think that this is justified. What we are interested in when we talk about revolutions is political and social unrest, and violence breaking out within one political unit. We are interested in how violent transfers of power occur, and why. However, there is merit to categorising different kinds of violent power struggles. Duncan argues uncontroversially that some crises avoid revolution by ending in limited palace coups d’etat. A revolution seems to imply the involvement of the mass of people; if the violence stops before it goes beyond the senate floor, it’s less likely to be taken as a revolution. On the other hand, civil wars seem to be named such when the violence leaves the capital city and goes on throughout the nation. It’s another obvious distinction to say that a civil war is any war that goes on within a nation’s borders, that is not an international war, but this is complicated by the fact that it could be between semi-autonomous regions that are attempting to break away.

Yet again, all of this can be going on during what is described as a revolutionary period; for instance, the Russian Revolution involved palace coups, a civil war, and attempts of autonomous regions to break away, as well as urban, peasant, and military uprisings, and reactionary insurgencies. What Duncan and Turchin agree on here is that there are non-revolutionary, non-crisis periods that Turchin calls integrative phases, and what Duncan calls periods of equilibrium; and that these regimes then ultimately fall into crisis. However, though Duncan calls these crises rare, Turchin argues that they happen regularly due to the underlying structural forces. This may be because Duncan is focusing on the grandly named, capital R, “Revolutions,” while Turchin is looking at all the moments of political crisis. In Turchin’s picture, the US has gone through several integrative and disintegrative phases; the first ended in the Civil War, the next in the Great Depression, in which revolution was short circuited by the collapse of private wealth, and the current one being likely to end soon. Duncan’s model of society is one more like a boiling pot which must be watched over in case it starts to bubble over – if the elites keep their eye on it and press the right buttons at the right time, it can be kept to a simmer rather than getting out of hand and scalding them in the process. This is a simplified view, but Turchin thinks in terms of cycles, while Duncan thinks in terms of a steady state interrupted.

Turchin is somewhat pessimistic about the ability of crises to be avoided. This is partly because it seems clear that polities tend to experience a recurrence of crises over their histories, and partly because he is somewhat optimistic about the social changes brought about by revolutions. For Turchin, moments of crisis can lead to a more equitable distribution of resources in society, however impermanent this distribution may be. Though Duncan sees progressive possibilities in revolutions, and here he specifically highlights the Haitian Revolution which freed the enslaved population, he also believes that in many cases, different choices could have resulted in progressive solutions without violence. Both agree that there are cases in which revolutions were avoided, such as in Britain during the 1830s, due to careful political management. However, Turchin thinks that the forces of unrest that build up through integrative phases can’t easily be turned back – avoiding disintegration is essentially impossible, avoiding a fight in these circumstances is a rare victory.

Who makes a revolution?

One thing that both Turchin and Duncan agree on is that national political crises begin largely as elite affairs. To put it in Turchin’s terms, escalating intra-elite competition is what causes a crisis in the legitimacy of the ruling regime. Duncan would say similarly that revolutions start when one elite faction finds itself politically marginalized and disenchanted with the current regime. Turchin argues that such people are elite aspirants, with the connections and resources to challenge power, but no legal or peaceful access to it. The more of these people there are, the more destabilized a regime will be, and the more likely it is to slip into crisis. Duncan is less interested in the raw numbers of would-be elites as he is in their ability to challenge power. The state can only continue to exist if it has an overwhelming preponderance of force, otherwise, ambitious aspirants may take a risk on taking over.

Let’s contrast this with the popular view that revolutions are revolts that come from “the people.” Both Duncan and Turchin are overwhelmingly pessimistic about the chances of a peasant revolt. That’s not to dismiss the fact that there are genuine peasant revolts, both refer to these in their work, however they hold that revolts fomented solely by the lower class never succeed. Firstly, as Duncan states, a united ruling class of elites is a difficult thing to beat. The army of a state is usually paid for by and loyal to the elites of a society first of all – well equipped professional soldiers will always hold the advantage against an unpractised and poorly armed peasant force. It’s also difficult for non-elites to keep fighting for long, as they have little in the way of reserved resources to sustain themselves in the field. They have to, at some point, go back to their fields or their job, since no-one is paying to put themselves in harm’s way.  This picture reinforces the theory of “scale economies of violence”, in which states are created and maintained by equilibrium of people specialised into productive roles, while others are specialised in maintaining the monopoly of violent force through the distribution of productive surplus. The productive class is at a structural disadvantage, and this presents a barrier to collective action, despite their larger number. Another problem is that the productive class of peasants or workers is rarely united in purpose or even politically active anyway. The default position of many is that “I just hope none of this affects me” and have no belief that politics can change their life very much for the better at all.

Before dismissing them entirely, though, I think it is important to recognize that a peasant or worker revolt IS a political crisis. The so-called “Peasant’s Revolt” in England during 1381 confronted the King in person and though it failed, influenced parliament’s willingness to enact poll taxes. Some have argued that the peasants revolt was a much more middle-class phenomenon than the name suggests, but still, it was a revolt of productive workers that had a significant political effect. Indeed, a truly significant political crisis does tend to require mass support to overcome the advantages of the incumbent regime, or at least lend legitimacy to the process.

On the other hand, when elites are dissatisfied with the political situation, their money and connections can cause all kinds of trouble for the ruling regime that a lower-class revolt can’t. They can write things in the newspapers, withdraw investments, pay to train and maintain militias and popular uprisings, and generally create rival centres of power that openly challenge the legitimacy of the current state. There’s also an informational advantage here – not only were elites far more likely to be literate, educated, and have the leisure to read the lessons of Machiavelli and other statesmen, they also have access to broader intelligence about the composition of the elite, their loyalties, the numbers and needs of their armies and subjects. They are in a better position to gauge the likelihood of success and strategize about how to achieve it.

It is this reality which prompted the development of the “elite theory” of politics. This theory can perhaps be summed up in a quote from Italian sociologist and civil servant Gaetano Mosca: “The dominion of an organized minority, obeying a single impulse, over the unorganized majority is inevitable.” Mosca was not a democrat, but he was a liberal who believed in personal freedoms; and self-identified as an anti-fascist. Turchin holds to this line, but his approach to elite theory makes room for the tension between the interests of the state, the elites, and the population. Elite groups cannot maintain power if the population is mobilized and turned against them, and so to a certain extent, it is in the interest of power elites to at least consider public opinion in order to maintain legitimacy.  This is one reason that Turchin is somewhat optimistic about the progressive potential of political crises, and as mentioned above, Duncan agrees that positive social consequences can emerge from periods of revolutionary destabilization.

The two tend to disagree about what causes elite dissatisfaction in the first place. Turchin’s theory is that increased competition for elite positions is caused by more and more of the nation’s wealth being pumped towards elites, so that there are many more people with the wealth and resources to challenge the current regime; it is a theory of population pressure destabilizing a once stable system. In fact, it is the very stability of the system that increases the likelihood of future instability. The stability of the system allows the elites to plan ahead and predict flows of wealth, through peaceful competition increase their own slice of the pie, until at some point, the competition results in popular suffering and elite infighting. This is why Turchin’s idea of instability features cycles.

Duncan nods in the direction that a stable regime can be destabilized by a change in the economic base, but he doesn’t make this the centre of his theory. Instead, Duncan argues that changes to the equilibrium can be managed if there is competent leadership; and in the cases of all the revolutions he considers, there is a lack of competent leadership. This is what leads to elite dissatisfaction and frustration: when the current order either stubbornly refuses to make changes, or decides it is going to fix something that isn’t broken. He calls this the “Great Idiot” theory of revolutions. This is a counterpart to the “Great Man” theory of history, which focuses on how the acts of one person can cause sweeping social events. Great Man theories are often derided because they can write out of history the efforts of the thousands of other people who were involved, as if Napoleon could have invaded Russia singlehandedly, or they ignore the technological, economic, or social changes that made these political choices possible. Duncan makes the case we can’t rule these out entirely – for instance, he argues that the October Revolution would not have happened without Lenin; a different person would not have pushed so hard against all the forces arrayed against the Bolsheviks in 1917, and if so, the story of Russia would have taken a very different route.

Just so, he argues, if Russia had been ruled by someone more competent and decisive than Tsar Nicholas – if he’d followed the path to a truly constitutional monarchy in 1905, there is every chance the Romanovs would have lasted as long as the Windsors. I think that the great man or great idiot theory need not be dismissive of the huge political undercurrents that create the circumstances for them – to recognize that no person is “great” however talented, unless the social forces their decisions can call upon are great. Some people have great power, and with great power comes… something. In any case, both Lenin and the Tsar had great power. One wielded it effectively, and the other did not. One was good at consolidating power, the other was not.

Taking a step back though, its this great upswell of social power that seems to need an explanation in the first place. Duncan’s theory is that disequilibrium happens, societies change, technology is developed, wars begin, there is a shock to the system, and this leads to an inciting incident when the guns start firing. Turchin seeks to explain the disequilibrium through demographics, in a theory that imagines every political crisis from Ancient Rome to Medieval England and 20^th century Russia could have a common underlying cause. This gives Turchin’s theory predictive power; but it must be modified, since not all disequilibrium results in crises, as in the 1930’s great depression in the US, or the Russian and English reforms of the mid 19^th century. Meanwhile, Duncan doesn’t offer us predictive power unless we’re a little more up close and personal with events at court. This might seem to be a strike against Duncan, but it’s worth noting that though Turchin’s theory gives us some predictive power in the long term, its predictions could still be out by a decade either side. In order to work out when a crisis is likely to break out, we would still need to be paying close attention to the political machinations going on at the centre.

Having said all that, the great idiot theory doesn’t stretch too far if we are including all kinds of political crisis. For instance, did weak leaders cause the American civil war? That particular disequilibrium seemed poised to collapse however individually diplomatically skilled the leaders were. And when it comes to the American revolutionary war, it seems to simplistic, too much like Monday morning sports analysis to say, well, this wouldn’t have happened with a better leader in charge. Could England really have kept its large, dynamic, economically independent US colonies on a leash forever? Structural forces seem much more relevant to US independence than individual personalities, as it seems certain that the US would have claimed its freedom one way or another. 

The synthesis of these approaches is that perhaps a data-based, Turchin approach might identify coming moments of crisis, but that leadership can, in theory, do something about it –and this is something that I think Turchin would agree with to some extent.

I’ve been here for 35 years. I don’t know about you, but this is the worst decade I’ve lived in (so far).

I didn’t see much of the 80’s of course, but thinking about the sense of security and prosperity I experienced as a child in a typical UK household in the 1990’s, is it any wonder I feel nostalgic for it? Despite the initial shock of 9/11 and terrible misadventures that followed, the 2000s in Britain felt so relaxed as to be almost boring.

I was just a small child when the political scientist Francis Fukuyama theorized that we were at the “end of history” in terms of political development. The social peace (though obviously not without some significant warmongering abroad) of the next 20 years seemed to prove him right. But it was just as I hit my 20s that this theory started to look a little too confident. In 2008, there was the major financial disaster that rippled across the US and Europe; the 2010’s was a decade where politics steadily became more and more angry.

I think it’s fair to say that some of us did not understand the depth of the anger; only realising that something had gone wrong when the UK voted for Brexit in 2015, quickly followed by the US election of Donald Trump in 2016. This has only been followed by waves of right-wing nationalist politicians growing in popularity and winning elections across Europe. This would have been impossible at any point in the previous two decades.

In the 2020s we are living in a world that is becoming increasingly politically hostile – even apart from the “meta-crisis” we are facing from climate breakdown, artificial intelligence, superbugs, bioweapons, and nuclear power competition. What happened?

Perhaps émigré Russian social scientist Peter Turchin has an answer for us?

Cliodynamics – it’s all happened before…

Perhaps it’s the effect of growing up in such a peaceful generation, but up until about 2015, I’d sort of forgotten that we are all part of history. As we all know, history can be a dark place. I used to think that we would never repeat the terrible mistakes of history, but that only shows my ignorance of it. Societies repeat the mistakes of history all the time. The histories of most nations are peppered with brutal, bloody civil wars and revolutions, international history is chronicle of pointless death in the service of some ambitious or greedy leader.

What tends to happen after such terrible events is that everyone involved seems to decide it was a bad thing, and that we hope it never happens again, but invariably – it does.  Sometimes, only a few decades later – see the first and second world wars. However, sometimes, peace can last much longer. After the period of the English civil war, there was a social peace for at least a century before things began to sour again.

People have tried to account for how and why this tends to happen, but these attempts have been largely unscientific – that is, contends social scientist Peter Turchin, until now. He and others working in the field of cliodynamics or the study of “the forces of history”, believe they have enough data to understand why societies can’t sustain peace for long, and why they seem to go into cycles of political violence and sometimes, collapse. Reading about the collection of this database, relying on the work of numerous historians, social scientists, data analysts, etc – he makes it sound very impressive. He claims that cliodynamics has studied hundreds of cases of social crises and has found something in common with all of them.

The biggest factor involved in state crisis and collapse is what he calls “elite overproduction.” This stands out above all other factors, such as pressure from other states, or financial crises – though it often comes along with falling living standards for the poor and middle classes.

Too many kings?

The theory is actually fairly simple. Turchin argues that the key predictor of internal crises within nations is the overproduction of elites, and this leads to conflict between them. But who are they? Though it initially sounds like a conspiracy theory, there is a sociological definition of the elite. They are the people who hold the most power in society. Turchin outlines four kinds of power:

1.       Coercive power – the people in charge of the army, navy, air force, and police.

2.       Bureaucratic power – the civil servants, lawyers, politicians, employers who dictate the laws and rules of society.

3.       Financial power – central bankers, CEOs, billionaires – whoever can control money.

4.       Ideological power – media figures, government propagandists, PR agents.

The people who run these institutions that affect the lives of millions of people are the power elite. They usually get these jobs often by being either very wealthy (in the top 10% at least, having more than 1 million dollars) or having degrees from the most elite universities. However, there are only a fixed number of these elite jobs, and this is where the problems begin.

What if there are more wealthy, well-educated people than there are jobs? For some, this doesn’t matter. If they’re wealthy enough, they can just go yachting or golfing for the rest of their lives. But that doesn’t tend to cut it. People tend to want to “fulfil their potential”, “be ambitious”, or at least have a bit more cash to afford that big house or that second Porsche. So, competition for those jobs intensifies, and the more competitive things are, the more disappointed little rich folks there are. Some can accept their misfortune and slip into the middle class. But for some, that’s too much of a bitter pill, and that’s where things get dangerous.

It's just this oversupply of deadly ambition which sparked the events of the Wars of the Roses, argues Turchin – the series of medieval wars that form the basis of George Martin’s Game of Thrones. Shakespeare gave this murderous elite greed the face of Richard the Third, a key figure in the princely civil strife:

“Well, say there is no kingdom then for Richard; What other pleasure can the world afford?”
- Henry VI, Part 3: Act III, Scene 2

However, he also argues that similar elite frustrations were involved in the English Civil War, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, the Russian Revolution, the Taiping Rebellion, etc. etc. All of these examples make fascinating reading in his book “End Times.” But the frustrated elites couldn’t bring these events about alone. How would such “would-be-kings” do without an army to support them?

Desperate Men

Turchin imagines elite competition as a game of musical chairs, but instead of taking away a chair every time the music stops, you just add three times more people, and they can do anything to get a chair. In order to win the game in real life, you need an army of supporters, certainly, but quite often, a literal army. Who would put their lives on the line for such a game?

Clearly, only people who are desperate enough to risk death for you, meaning, of course, poor people. But not just any poor people. Turchin’s data pinpoints moments in time in which non-elites are especially poor, when wages and living standards are falling or have been held down for long periods of time. This is what contributed to the revolutionary period in Europe from 1790 to the mid 19^th century, but has also been a factor in most cases of social crisis. “Immiseration”, the general stagnation of wages and poor living standards, creates a population of potential foot-soldiers ready to try something new, and thus easily swayed by elites who didn’t quite become kings.

What is most interesting is that immiseration and elite overproduction tend to go together. This is because the entrenched elites find ways to pump wealth out of the poor over long periods of time. They do this by increasing rents, keeping wages low, taxation, forced labour, or even slavery. This extra wealth accumulates so much the wealthy can afford to keep all kinds of retainers, make heirs and bastards, and even though most people are getting poorer, the numbers of the very wealthy are actually increasing as this “wealth pump” becomes more efficient. In short, immiseration is often a correlate of elite overproduction.

Perhaps this doesn’t give the general population enough credit though. Maybe it isn’t merely a case of being swayed by frustrated elites, but more that when the time is right, people find leaders prepared to help them out. Turchin shows that full scale civil wars can be avoided if elites make efforts to redistribute wealth and make the social contract a little fairer. This, he argues, is what happened in the US and in parts of Europe during the 1930s – in part because the elites feared the spread of the Russian Revolution. The super-rich of 1920s America took a big hit, allowing the top rate of tax ultimately to go up to 90%, in order to stave off the pitchforks.

We don’t tend to appreciate the delicate state of the social peace of the interwar period. But there is a reason that John Steinback made this assessment of the American people’s mood in his 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath:

“… in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

In the end, the revolution never came – but Turchin argues that this was largely due to the attempts of the elites to compromise with the immiserated mass through President Roosevelt’s New Deal, perhaps for fear that a frustrated lawyer or socialist son of an oil baron would try to take his opportunity to be a great man of history and start a second US civil war. Just as important however, was the fact that the Wall Street Crash of 1929 had already wiped out the economic power of a swathe of potential counter-elites, meaning that competition for top jobs had been reduced. 

Yes – we’re back in history, and it’s not pretty

Strangely enough – or perhaps not so strangely, Turchin predicted the turbulent 2020s ten years ago, following the findings of cliodynamics. He argues that since the 1980s, wealth has yet again been pumped from the poor to the rich in the US, and this has funded a huge increase in the number of billionaires and elite aspirants; this state of affairs has reached a head only now, when competition for the top jobs has reached high levels, against the backdrop of popular discontent resulting from the financial crash, and now COVID, inflation, and the high cost of housing. Elite educated aspirants like Tucker Carlson and entitled old wealth like Donald Trump are using this discontent to gain power. But instead of attempting to turn off the wealth pump, so far, they are just directing anger away from wealth inequality and towards so called “cultural” issues. This means that unless something changes, the US is only going to get worse – and Turchin says that the predictions are bad. Even a huge reverse now will not save the US from a significant social crisis in the 2020s.

A similar story could be told about the UK – though I haven’t seen his data, it’s a demonstrable fact that wealth inequality has boomed, wages have been depressed for decades, and the two major political parties are struggling with a huge crisis of legitimacy. The wealth pump was turned on when Thatcher liberalized finance in the 1980s and declared “there is no alternative” to the free market. She also attacked trades unions that helped wages track inflation, and gave cheap public housing into private ownership, laying the groundwork for the current housing crisis, and fuelling the transfer of rent from poor to wealthy asset holders talked about by economist Gary Stevenson. We may be a few years behind the US, but I feel we are heading in the much the same direction. What’s the solution?

On the one hand, Turchin’s theory is hopeful. The right compromise can avoid disaster, but crucially it takes an elite who are ready to make that compromise for the good of the nation as a whole. The turn towards cultural politics, in which we argue vehemently about the morality of what we had all largely come to accept as personal choices, represents a massive dead end – the more that elites turn attention towards those things, the more likely a kind of religious civil war becomes, since this kind of culture war does absolutely nothing to stem the flow of money towards more and more wealthy aspirants looking for a way to power – the ultimate driver of social instability. For the good of our nations, we need to address wealth inequality, otherwise the future is the kind of plutocratic failed democracy we can see elsewhere.

On the other hand, Turchin’s theory is a little disappointing for people with a more progressive (maybe utopian) vision of a possible society. Turchin doesn’t question the existence of states. States must exist, because polities that don’t organize into states get crushed out of history – they can’t defend themselves. And where states exist, so must elites. It is naiveté to believe that a leader will take you to full political equality – where power is concentrated, an elite will hold it. What matters to him is not whether such institutions exist or not, but who they work for – everyone, or just a wealthy few? If elites fail to manage this, then history tends to catch up to them, sooner or later.

Does this mean history is just doomed to repeat itself? Over the next few months, I’m going to be trying to get my head around how this theory relates to other topics I’ve been looking at in this blog – and trying to work out what this says about any possible future turmoil. 

In 1928, public relations counsel Edward Bernays believed so. And his book, Propaganda, is just as relevant today... 

A few months ago, I was forced to become aware of PRIME. Astonishingly, primary school children in the UK are obsessed with a coconut water energy drink that can cost up to £12.00 per bottle. Their parents and teachers are bemused and frustrated, how can children be using a whole week’s pocket money on a drink? It kind of took my breath away to be reminded how defenceless kids can be in the face of the simplest marketing ploy. But though we might feel confident we would never part with so much money for such a fleeting pleasure, or even the status boost that comes from owning one of the “rare” flavours, if we’re honest, are we any different?

“In making up its mind, [the people’s] first impulse is usually to follow the example of a trusted leader… [and if one] is not at hand, it does so by means of clichés…”

It's no secret that kids are unaware of the value of money – but when it comes to establishing what they want, their brains are simply following a pattern they will continue to follow into adulthood, the same path our brains make for us. They are just following their leaders; streamers that the TikTok algorithm presents them with. And when we want answers to make up our mind, we turn similarly to people and media sources we like and trust. We like to think that we are better at recognizing who to trust, but the reality according to Edward Bernays is that our minds have been made up by the forces of propaganda for so long, we do not even recognise it.

Bernays’ Propaganda was written in 1928, but even so, it feels absolutely fresh. Though he describes pre-war American society and its cast of characters from hyped-up businessmen, dishonest politicos, media moguls, and herds of voter/consumers, desperate for new products and fashions, it feels like its our world. This is because the forces of mediatized mass culture and hyper-productive capitalism that he recognized, and helped to develop, form our world in the same way as his.

“In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions… in practice, if everyone had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved… they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data… so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions.”

In Bernays’ view, allowing propaganda to mould our minds is no bad thing. He makes a psychological argument; the modern world is just too complex, too chaotic for anyone to truly understand it, so we let trusted people make sense of it for us and make our choices simpler. Apple or Android. Coke or Pepsi. Left wing or right. In fact, he argues that propaganda is essential to preserving the social order in democracies.

I found the fact he is so outspoken about this “invisible government” shaping our societies both refreshing aland uncomfortable, especially since he apparently thought about himself as one of those invisible governors. But is it really true?

Perhaps an example might be useful. Back in about 2010, I remember reading an article in some newspaper glossy magazine by a technology editor about how much better Apple operating systems and computers were than Microsoft. Microsoft had been the biggest tech company for more than a decade at the time; Windows was on everyone’s computer. However, by the end of 2010, Apple had released the iPad and taken the title.

How did so many people, so quickly, become aware of Apple’s products, take a positive view of them, and start using them? The answer is of course propaganda; not just the classic advertising campaigns comparing Mac and PC users, but also puff pieces by “independent” technology editors in glossy magazines, and whoever sold iPads and their apps to businesses and state organizations. That is to say, the invisible governors.

“Only through the wise use of propaganda will our government… be able to maintain that intimate relationship with the public which is necessary in a democracy. The function of the propagandist is… [to] interpret the people to the government, and the government to the people.”

Few people would argue that the rebirth of Apple was a truly bad thing. And that is Bernays’ main argument – the invisible governors are, for the most part, benign. This is because in Bernays’ mind, the practice of propaganda is not a one-way street. When it comes to products and politics, the public relations experts are looking out for the good of the greater number, because that’s what butters their bread. They are useful to business and politics only if the PR expert can keep the customers buying and the voters on their side. The job of PR experts is essentially to make people feel good, or at least provide the hope of something better.

Even Bernays admits this is a patronising picture. But is there any other option? People will not willingly return to the days before mass media and mass politics, limiting the scope of their information diet to a few local friends, the parish priest, and whatever the stall owners say is in fashion. And in the century leading up to Bernays, ordinary people had just fought a battle to gain some say in national political affairs, even if it was just a binary choice of parties. They weren’t going to give up that sense of control.

If our world comes to us through media, through newspapers, radio, television, and now the internet, then our beliefs and opinions about it also conform to how these sources present it. And we may have good instincts about who to trust – but we shouldn’t fool ourselves that what we believe is our “personal” or “authentic” opinion.

“…today, because ideas can be transmitted instantly to any distance or number of people, persons having the same ideas and interests may be associated and regimented for common action even though they live thousands of miles apart.”

In fact, I think one of Bernays’ most important arguments is that propaganda allows co-operation. If we all had unique, individual opinions on what must be done, then we would all inevitably be at odds with each other, a battle royale of decision making in which no-one is happy. Co-operation means having some kind of consensus, and that means ignoring a great deal of minority opinions.  This image of propaganda is not one of a shouting loudspeaker, or even a slimy salesman, but a magnet that attracts us towards a common social order.

If indeed, propaganda is inevitable, then question to ask about any statement of fact or opinion is, whose interests does it serve? In this Bernays continues to argue that the interests of business, politics, and the people can align; in fact, a good propagandist is someone who attempts to align them.

The most obvious critique of this is that propaganda isn’t cheap. If you want to buy campaign ads, run a profitable media outlet, or promote your products, you are going to need cash – and since money is a competitive resource, there will always be someone with more cash to reach more people, and employ better PR experts to run their publicity. In short, money talks; and if 1% of people in the country have 50% of the wealth, then that is a lot more free speech than the average person is entitled to. The interests of the less-than-wealthy are then likely to be ignored.

“Furthermore… the utilities are always fair game for public discontent… these and other corporations of semi-public character will always face demands for government or municipal ownership. The public relations counsel should anticipate such trends of public opinion and advise on how to avert them…”

Bernays doesn’t really admit this. He is actually bemused by how politicians seem to miss easy opportunities to gain mass support by adopting and then delivering on popular policies. Whether he is naïve to this or not is difficult to tell, but he never seems to question why a politician might make a promise and then not deliver it because it did not align with the interests of his richest and most charitable constituents.

Reading Propaganda in its historic context gives us the most troubling perspective. He lived in a confident new America that was pushing the boundaries of human luxury and comfort on a mass scale. But just the year after its publication, it went through the worst economic crisis in our historical memory, the Great Depression. After that, the new masters of propaganda and mass psychology, the Fascists and Nazis, rose to power and led the world into the abyss. With Goebbels, the term propaganda could not have had a worse public relations representative, and now the term is associated with the most abhorrent kind of dishonest, hateful rhetoric; completely undermining Bernays' claim that propaganda was in service of a mostly benign authority.

Bernays had already tried to rehabilitate the term after its questionable use in fomenting the first world war. It certainly couldn’t survive a second. However, that does not mean propaganda has gone away – appropriately, it simply became called something else. As Bernays called it, public relations – or as it is academically known, under the stale euphemism: “mass communication.”

No-one would argue that we don’t live in a mass communication society, now, would they? 

A few weeks ago, I started thinking about which animal society humans are most like. This isn't such an odd mode of thinking, I tell myself. There are many animal metaphors in language to describe human behaviour. 

"Birds of a feather flock together." 

"Breeding like rabbits."

"What's good for the hive is good for the bee."

Zoologists are taught to be careful not to anthropomorphise their subjects, but perhaps there is just as much danger of doing the reverse; to zoo-ologise the human in the quest to understand what our nature really is. As I'm not a zoologist or a biologist, my musings on this could only go so far. But browsing my local library I stumbled upon Nichola Raihani's new book The Social Instinct. It turns out that Raihani is a biologist who has actually thought a lot about our similarities with animals. 

To use an animal metaphor to explain human society might be to found an argument on a naturalistic fallacy, saying that any particular organisation of things is 'natural' because it already exists in nature, and we have little choice but to accept the way things are. However, Raihani manages to talk about the similarities between us without falling into this trap. There are many such similarities, and this is not surprising, given we share our genes with so many other animals, our traits, development and behaviours all find cognates in the natural world. 

Cleaner wrasse, for instance, are fish that make a living by cleaning the dead matter from other fish passing by on the reef. They apparently just as paranoid about bad customer reviews as the average small business manager, and will punish each other in order to make sure their partners don't nibble the client's flesh instead of the dead matter, you know, just once, as a treat. There are so many of these great animal anecdotes in this book, including some especially weird ones about the reproductive behaviour of spiders.  

Raihani is also concerned to point out the differences between us and animals. Firstly that we are so sexually egalitarian. Our closest cousins, the great apes, are in general much more polygynous (one male to several females) in their relationships; a much smaller proportion of males get to mate and father young than we do. This puts us much closer to bird couples when it comes to rearing young, but even that would be a misleading metaphor. Bird couples are often solely responsible for the survival of their young, while human children can rely on the support of the extended family and grandparents especially. It can also widen to include the whole community, and this is one reason that parents are so unperturbed by the concept of sending underdeveloped children to school to be cared for by near-strangers. 

It's important to point out these differences, seeing as the online 'manosphere' seems to be currently obsessed by the idea that 'women only want wealthy alpha males.' This kind of argument illustrates the point that animal metaphors are not just speculative, but real life discourses with political and social effects. Raihani treads very carefully in her section on the family but doesn't pull punches - at some level, our reproductive behaviour can be described as a conflict between genes. However, this conflict leads to co-operative behaviour as our genes act as if they seek to derive mutual survival benefits by playing nice. When it comes to everyday social relations, what the biology uncovers is actually a fairly banal fact-of-life: we want other people to like us, so we work to maintain our reputation as good co-operators, and we apparently relish the chance to punish the uncooperative, or bring down the boastful. Insisting on your alpha-hood among humans is thus more likely to earn a person haters than followers. 

Human societies are large and complex, unlike our closest cousins, and this has led some to compare us with social insects like ants and bees. Raihani explores the differences between us and hive-minded creatures as a recurring theme over the whole book. Like us, these insects form large social groups with a hierarchy and a division of labour, they are at times, fiercely territorial and are some species are in a state of constant war between colonies. Sometimes this metaphor is invoked when we have to get together and work on a common project, or defeat a common enemy. Whereas nation-states do have a very hivish vibe about them (something not lost on the makers of the film Antz), humans are importantly different from eusocial species.

A central idea of the book is the tension between individuals and their social groups. In eusocial species, Raihani makes the case that the individual ant or bee has become somewhat de-individualised. Much of the time, they are acting as if their individual genes don't matter, and that what they are reproducing is the hive itself. What makes this possible is a strong vertical solidarity; ants and bees are typically all sisters, and all the progeny of the queen. By being a 'worker' they are helping their genes through their sister's other offspring. Human societies are a much looser federation. Our ability to produce and care for our own offspring has been preserved, and thus the goal of our genes is more closely aligned with our individual bodies. Though hard work and sacrifice is often demanded of us by modern, industrialised, national societies, we operate on the basis that there must be something in it for us or our kids. 

Raihani devotes the last section of her book to explaining how such societies arose among humans, a species that evolved to live in much smaller bands of foragers, loosely dependent on each other, and fiercely egalitarian. Indeed, she makes a great defence of what others have called our 'egalitarian syndrome,' our sense that there is something unfair about others having more, whether praise, position or resources (Gavrilets, 2012). In this explanation, she doesn't tread much new ground and follows the argument that agriculture makes state society possible. Her own understanding of this is that agricultural families produce many more children and this ultimately leads to the domination of the fertile land by farmers. This leaves people with nowhere to run if the social conditions tip towards tyranny, meaning that despots can essentially domesticate the population and reap the surplus they produce. 

However, her model for deducing this leaves out some critical detail - why are resources not shared equally in agricultural societies? She assumes the existence of a leader of the community holding on to more, but this is a bit unsatisfying. Why do the others let him hang on to more, if they would not allow that in a forager band? I would add the conjecture of economist Paul Collier that this tipping towards hierarchy is hard to resist due to the potential for 'scale economies of violence' to emerge, in which a minority unproductive class, specialising in violence, can cream off the agricultural surplus to support their lifestyle.  Early Kings, argues Collier, were little more than thugs. 

One important question she does address is, why don't the workers rise up and use their superior numbers to overthrow the elite? While others have attempted to understand this with reference to culture, (which certainly does play a part), Raihani sees it mostly as a simple numbers game. Action against tyrants is an act of co-operation; it relies on people ready to come together for a common cause. But while we can often do that on a small scale, it often becomes quite difficult as the number of people required for action grows. This is because the more people involved in an endeavour, the less your individual contribution seems to matter, and possibly, the less you have to gain. If the punishments for rebellion are harsh enough, then often the disincentives outweigh the incentives on an individual level.

This is certainly the case when it comes to action on climate change, as Raihani goes on to discuss. We've all felt the futility of separating the paper and plastic for recycling in the knowledge that many people continue to contribute daily to carbon emissions on an industrial scale. She has no easy solutions, but follows the 'think global act local' school of thought that argues for building smaller local co-operative institutions and processes with an understanding of the systemic and global effects that action could have. There is more than a shade of pessimism in this, but Raihani is not a doomer. It's not too late to act. But failure is a relatively strong possibility. 

Ultimately, the book did not answer my question about the best animal metaphor for human society, because it showed quite clearly that humans behave in quite unique ways that make most such metaphors deceiving. We do share recognisable behaviours with animals, but we have taken sociality to vertiginously complex new forms. Consequently we face incredibly complex new challenges in which our individual motivations and social obligations are often at odds. Understanding what is happening to us demands probing beyond these neat comparisons to assess what is particular about humans, and this book serves as a great introduction to this endeavour. 

References

Gavrilets, S. (2012) ‘On the evolutionary origins of the egalitarian syndrome’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS, 109(35), pp. 14069–14074. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1201718109.

Raihani, N. (2021) The Social Instinct: How co-operation shaped the world, Penguin: London, UK

https://www.sheswithhim.com/

Jayne Riew is a photographer and the wife of the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose Moral Foundation Theory I've written about in a series on this blog. It's almost certainly no coincidence that one of her recent photography projects, sheswithhim.com, deals with similar themes as Haidt. In this project she presents interviews with women who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 US election. Trump faced Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and the interview's focus seems to have been how these women, some self-described as feminists, justified voting against the first female candidate for a major US party in favour of Trump, who was caught bragging about his sexual misconduct with women to a journalist leading up to the election. 

Riew's work is an interesting case study for the application of moral foundations theory to politics, and also provides an opportunity to analyse the data with a more critical lens and concepts from discourse analysis. Do conservative moral foundations underlie the women's justifications, or can discourse analysis tell us more about how language is used to construct these political arguments? 

The first thing to notice about these interviews is that the answers come from a defensive position. The women seem to have been asked why 'as women' they voted against Clinton and for Trump. This fact frames their argument as a defence of their status as 'good women,' whatever society takes that to be. Posed this way, the question appears more like a challenge. How can a good woman have voted for Donald Trump (and against Hillary Clinton)? This implicates both their identity and their moral justifications. Since this is an oppositional question, it is also more easily understood as coming from a Democratic world-view. The women were not responding to a neutral, but to an imagined hostile Clinton voter - perhaps another woman. This somewhat informs the language and arguments they used in response. 

There are two main arguments the women draw on to justify their choice. The first is that Clinton was not a good candidate to vote for, and further, that the Democratic party was not a good choice either. They argue this in two ways. One is that Clinton and the Democrats were not competent and therefore not a 'rational' choice, and the second that they were morally wrong, and therefore no a 'moral' choice. Grievances include: Clinton's approach to Benghazi, her somewhat hypocritical feminism, the Democrats treatment of car manufacturers, the mishandling of the Flint water crisis, the lack of jobs, the apparent lack of immigration controls, and unfair taxation. These were presented both in moral and rational terms as reasons against the Democrats. 

The second argument used is quite different. They argue against what some of them call 'the left' or 'liberals' - the wider cultural movement associated with the Democratic party and Clinton voters. The women object to the power that these people have in the media and in academia, and to the way they treat the political opposition. It is this group that the women seem to be responding to in their question. They talk about the left as rigid, self-obsessed, lazy, belligerent and rude. Some of the women apparently cast their vote as a kind of protest against this phenomenon. Trump himself does not appear so much in the arguments of these women; they seem to be giving arguments to vote against Clinton, rather than arguments in favour of Trump. None of the women seem happy to defend his character, but it is excused. 

Can moral foundations theory make sense of these arguments? I tried to code some of their responses for moral foundations, but the process is actually quite difficult. Sometimes it is obvious when a person is using a moral argument: 

"The big corporations get away with everything. But small businesses are the backbone of this country!" 

This clearly falls into Haidt's 'fairness' foundation. The Democrats are being criticised for their support of monopoly capitalism which is impacting the interviewee's small business. She argues against this on the grounds that the economy should be fairer. 

On the other hand, sometimes it is far from obvious when a moral argument is being used:

"Just look at the Middle East. We take out flawed yet stable dictators, and then we’re surprised that someone worse fills the void? I am very critical of the way Hillary handled Libya." 

What kind of argument is this? Is it an argument from rationality, that Clinton was not good at handling the Libyan civil war? Or is it an argument from the moral foundation of care, that Democrats do not care about the Libyan people? Given the ambiguity of many passages in the interviews, it seems possible to imagine a moral foundation for much of what was said, and even then it is not clear when a statement falls into one foundation or another:

"A true feminist would not stand for such degrading behavior."

Is this a statement about the sanctity of womanhood, or an appeal for equal treatment on the basis of fairness? There is no reason it could not be both, but it serves to illustrate that there is a lot of room for interpretation in moral discourses. They do not always fit in neat boxes. 

Looking across all six interviews and trying to code for moral foundations, there is another interesting feature that provides a sticking point for Haidt's theory. The women drew variably from each of the foundations, but the overall picture was that there was an almost equal reliance on each of the foundations. Three women drew from fairness discourse, three from care, three from sanctity, three from loyalty, and three from liberty. Two drew from the fairness related 'proportionality' discourse (that you get what you deserve, not equality). It is somewhat predicted by Haidt's theory that conservative voters will draw from these categories equally - but for one problem. None of the women drew from the foundation of authority and subordination. There was no talk about the disobedience of children, the insubordination of employees, or lack of willingness to submit to military discipline. 

Perhaps this is because these women were drawing on arguments they thought the average 'liberal' would relate to. Perhaps this was because, as Haidt tries to show, independent voters lying somewhere between the parties have more mixed moral feelings than the extremes, and need not have drawn on the discourse of authority to make their case. Whatever the case, I think the broadness of the moral foundations and the variability of their use suggests that moral discourses are best understood as functional tools for doing things with words, rather than natural categories with defined parameters. 

Looking from the perspective of discourse, we can see that the women construct their arguments to defend themselves from accusations of being 'bad women.' They are reacting to a moralisation of their position which draws from a discourse of loyalty, or solidarity as a sisterhood. This in itself is interesting, since Haidt argues that liberals are less concerned about loyalty to the group. Yet here the argument is that female Trump voters are engaging in betrayal. To reject this subject position they try to construct themselves as good women within the prevailing discourses of womanhood.

" ...my husband and I do everything. We work hard."

"I’m also a feminist. My generation went through women’s lib together."

"My husband and I enjoy a nice life. We've raised five amazing children to adulthood."

  "As a legal immigrant who came for graduate school, then worked for free to get experience, struggled for years..."

A good woman is constructed as a hard worker, a law-abiding person, a wife, a mother, selfless, but also capable of advocating for herself according to her identity. These statements function to inoculate the women against this positioning on the basis of their vote. They present a counter-narrative arguing that 'good women can vote against Clinton.' These accounts also present a counter-narrative to the prevailing one about Trump's hostility to immigrants - some of these women highlight their migrant status, arguing that immigrants do not need to credit these claims of hostility. 

The women also draw on the moral discourse of care to explain their vote. Whereas Haidt characterises Democratic voters as more motivated by care, these Republican voters also draw on care discourses, and in this way critique the Democrats for showing a lack of care:

"...when Governor Snyder went to Washington to ask for help. I read the court proceedings. They made him beg for assistance and cross examined him. Families in Flint needed help."

"...we know a lot of small business owners who can't make ends meet and it's a direct result of Obamacare and taxation."

Certainly, care discourse can be variable and situational - it is a moralisation that all understand, and it can be appealed to in the interests of all kinds of social groups, from car manufacturers to migrant families. What is more important in discourse analysis is the function that care discourse is used for. Here it is used to communicate contempt for the Democratic party, while the record of the Republican party is not analysed, from which cases can surely also be taken . Moralisation is here acting simply as a stake inoculation for the speaker who does not necessarily have to show moral care in a consistent way. The vote could easily have been for unspoken reasons, or even for no particular reason at all. This problematizes Haidt's insistence that people have different moral personalities; the differences drawn upon might be artefacts of the discourses of each party in relation to each other. 

Reasons to vote against the Democrats are certainly not reasons to vote for the Republicans, but within the interpretative repertoire of these women, there really is no other alternative. The interviews indicate that Trump was successful in presenting himself as the anti-establishment candidate who represented the promise of a new and different politics. He was also able to act as a lightening rod for the women who felt threatened what they constructed as the hegemony of liberal discourses in the media and academia. 

"I also resented that when I opened the October issues of my fashion magazines, the editors all endorsed Clinton for president."

"Yale is the place where you go to have intellectual discussions, right? Where there's diversity and dynamism? Not really. Everyone is on the left..."

"In almost every social setting I find myself in I am insulted by arrogant people who assume that everyone agrees with their politics..."

The women construct their social world as filled with liberals, and they define themselves in opposition to this. The left is constructed as a threatening monolithic entity which supported Hillary Clinton and has no space for a critique of her, or the Democratic party. The interviewees insisted that they were being stereotyped, but also engaged in some stereotyping of their own, characterising the left as lazy, naive, and weak, all tinged with the language of moralisation. In doing so, they constructed themselves as the opposite, and their vote as proof of their character as 'good women'. They talk about themselves as independently minded, pro-women, courageous and hard-working, claiming the discursive high ground against the hordes of Democrat voters. From this we see the way that political and moral language is involved in the discursive construction of the self; their political stance defines their difference and uniqueness. Perhaps this is slightly ironic, given that defining the self in political terms is something of a critique of the left, to find a similar process occuring in Trump voters. 

The existence of this corpus of interviews itself should raise some questions. Riew herself voted Democrat, but it seems that this selection of interviews does contain an argument against certain aspects of the US culture war. Taken all together, these interviews seem to present the narrative that voters were responding to the country swinging "too far left" during the Obama years, whatever this is understood to mean. This is something that Haidt himself has made a particular point of arguing in interviews about the state of academia and politics. It has also become a common position for right-wing media to take in the years since the Trump vote, characterising itself as an insurgent movement to reinstall the 'moral majority' as cultural hegemons in the USA and beyond. What function this argument serves could be the subject of a different post.

A look at the moral discourses of politics in this blog shows they can be thoroughly relative. They are quite flexible enough to be used in many and various sites where power is contested; what terms such as care and fairness mean look very different through the eyes of people inhabiting different social identities, and are used variably to argue for diverse political outcomes. 

Given the reservations I have about Moral Foundations Theory, perhaps it might be too much to expect that I think it has anything interesting to say about political science. However, even though I believe Haidt is wrong about moral politics, I think it is wrong in an interesting way that sheds some light on what we do and don't know about the topic. 

Haidt's approach in Moral Foundations Theory implies that each foundation is a personality dimension on which individuals will find themselves, and further, that the strength of this feeling between individuals is likely normally distributed across the population. There is an average or median level of concern about care and harm, or sanctity, or liberty, and that is where most of the voters are. It seems logical to conclude from this that a political party wishing to gain power and a mandate has simply to strike at the median voter's strength of moral prejudices to take the biggest share of the vote and govern in the most democratic way. This, Haidt insists, is the problem with the US Democrats. They are just too left wing. Too liberal. They don't appeal to the median voter. The Republicans on the other hand, draw on all the moral foundations, and therefore appeal to the median voter more easily. 

The practical application of this theory is decidedly mixed at best. In the case of trying to take the whole population along by appealing to the middle voter, one recent example is the UK based "Independent Group for Change", members coming from each side of the political aisle, who decided the best way was straight down the middle - got ignored by voters. In the case of reaching across the aisle and grabbing swing voters, results are more encouraging, for instance the UK Labour Party's victory in the 1997 general election after following a more neoliberal line of messaging than the traditional pro-union platform. It remains to be seen whether this works in times of polarisation. Keir Starmer is certainly trying to reach across the aisle to people with 'concerns about immigration' and 'eco-terrorists,' however he seems to be alienating many Labour activists with his language. 

As I've argued in the section on MFT as a cognitive theory, we likely don't need a theory of distinct modules to understand the association between moral language and emotions. That doesn't mean Haidt hasn't discovered something interesting though, which is that different political factions draw on different discourses of morality to gain political support. Haidt argues this reflects a genetic personality difference in voters (amplified by their social environment and identity), but I think we should also consider the social context within which these different discourses work. The question is whether Haidt has discovered a 'universal' distinction (being true for all places and times) or a 'particular' distinction (referring to a particular place and time). For example, Haidt focuses on two extremes of a spectrum (later broadening to three distinct groups) - but it's almost certainly no coincidence that he does this in the context of the two-party system of US politics. Is this the result of there being essentially two extremes of political personality or is something else happening?

It's been argued by others (Ian Shapiro has an interesting series on modern politics on this) that a first-past-the-post political system almost inevitably results in a two party system, and of course, US politics is FPTP. Other systems can support larger alternative parties (such as the proportional representational system used in countries such as Germany and Spain). This means that in the US there are two main political identities; there are also people who have chosen one of them, and people who have not. Much of the research on social identity shows us that once we start identifying as part of a group, we are locked into the norms (including moral norms) of the group and this makes us sort of blind to the norms of the other. Research does show (Cohen, I think?) that people who identify as Democrats are less likely to endorse policies which are presented as Republican, and vice versa, but if those same policies are presented as Democratic, then they do support them. This leaves us with a dilemma. Do people hold moral and political beliefs because of their brains or identities? Haidt argues that, in this case, identity follows personality; our personalities suit us for different kinds of life and interests, and ultimately make one identity more appealing than another. 

However transferring this theory to UK politics we might see a different picture. In the UK the system is nominally FPTP but we only vote on local representatives, not for the presidency. Can we really say there are two extremes in British politics? If so what is different about the personalities of the Scottish voters who keep re-electing the Scottish National Party? Are they more progressive and liberal, or more nationalist and conservative? We could certainly test their attitudes, but likely the most important factor is going to be Scottish national identity, expressed in whatever moral terms necessary. There are also Green voters, who draw on discourses of care, but also of sanctity (in a completely different way than the northern Irish DUP). The point here is just that identity often does not follow personality, but can be made up of all kinds of competing factors such as geography, social class, parenthood, etc. 

This leads back to the more general critique I have of the theory, which is that the themes of the moral discourses don't have necessary connections with any particular political issues. It is easy to rationalise why liberals might care more about the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy than conservatives in terms of a personality theory; but there doesn't necessarily need to be a debate about the topic in the first place. This is not something that is a huge conservative concern in Britain, for example; and attitudes in the US were not always so polarised. It is not an argument between the eternal foundations of care and sanctity of life; it is merely an argument about abortion between two socially opposing forces that draws on the concepts of care and sanctity to make a case for each side. Focus on the issue has defined it and separated the sides, turning it into a political weapon to beat the others with. 

Instead of reflecting an underlying quality of human nature, it seems that these moral issues in political messaging are actually acting as forms of brand marketing; each party in the system must have a unique selling point that activates the emotions of the consumers (er, the voters). It feeds a social division more acute than that of the iPhone v Android, which people in the middle don't care about and unfortunately cannot seem to avoid. Going for the middle also doesn't work, because the middle is now apathetic and sees no hope of resolving the issue. On the other hand, this moral divide is likely also driven by media narratives. Moral messaging about political issues is universally filtered through some kind of mass media. Haidt could argue that different personalities are activated by different kinds of headlines, but perhaps there are more prosaic reasons that media outlets are able to define the terms of moral debate - "the medium is the message". It's perhaps a cliché argument, but getting your political news from newspapers, Facebook, news channels, YouTube or Twitter results in a completely different view of the world due to the material factors in the production of the news. 

As to what this all means, I can't go much further into detail, as I didn't study political science; however it seems quite an intractable problem of democracy that it can easily be dragged towards factionalism and away from the goal of utilitarian policy making. In terms of Moral Foundations Theory, it is far from settled that personality is the only, or even main factor in the structural problems of democracy. However, at least in raising the question MFT gives us reasons to further examine the moral discourses of politics. 

One of Haidt's early concerns in the development of Moral Foundations Theory is to explain how the moral intuitions evolved. He argues that moral intuitions are innate, and in so doing feels the need to provide an evolutionary story for their existence. For instance in regards to the care/harm foundation, he argues that the emotions involved in looking after infant children through their development are the basis for the evolution of a cognitive module programmed to react to perceived sources of harm that is passed genetically through the population. These emotions provide an advantage through preserving offspring and thus the future of the species. A mother who feels no emotion to spur care for her child will not likely be a successful mother given the long development of human children. 

If we ignore the critique of the modular theory above, the evolution of caring for infants must be one of the least controversial evolutionary psychological theories. Mammals have quite vulnerable young, and in order to be a successful mammal species, parents must be motivated to care for them. In social mammals, where caring for others is expanded to kin and clan members, that is an arguably helpful adaptation for a species in terms of keeping more breeding pairs and children alive. Humans have been very successful as a species in comparison with related species like Neanderthals or Homo Florensis; Haidt and others believe this is because humans are capable of large scale-cooperation. This co-operation is theorised to have been supported by our ability to maintain trust through pro-social behaviour. I feel that I am in no way well-read enough on the topic to be able to say whether this is correct or not, and I am not going to critique this aspect of the theory. 

Instead, I want to focus on what Haidt says about moral matrices and group selection. Group selection has been furiously debated in evolutionary biology. Briefly, it is the hypothesis that some traits are selected for at the level of the group, and that groups which can more successfully fill the world with their offspring than other groups will eventually come to dominate other groups. Whether this is true or not is not really my concern; my concern is that Haidt implicates moral foundations in the success or failure of a social group to reproduce. He does this not only to explain the survival of Homo Sapiens over Homo Neandethalensis, but also to explain the dominance of different cultural groups over others. Perhaps if you are strong on Haidt's liberal foundations, you begin to see the problematic implications of such a theory that "more morally developed cultures" are destined to dominate others. However, I think the real problem with this is that there is very little evidence provided for such a claim. 

The one concrete example Haidt gives in The Righteous Mind is that of the cohesion of the Greek warriors under the command of Macedonian king Alexander the Great, who were able to defeat the much larger forces of the Persian Empire. This is the one human v human example of group selection that he references in the book, however he does not cite any historian to back up his implied claim that the Macedonian armies had a more developed innate moral sense that led to cohesiveness in battle. A simple Google search turns up an article that cites Alexander's own tactical genius as the key difference between the Greeks and Persians. There is no suggestion that the Persian "immortals" were a less cohesive fighting force. Furthermore, the defeat of the Persian army did not result in the selection of "Greek people" over the Persians. They were a small occupying army that eventually splintered into rival factions; Alexander took a Persian bride, we can safely imagine that the genes of "the Persians" survived the occupation.

In case it could be argued that this was actually an illustration of the necessity of moral emotions (the Greeks could not have succeeded without them); let's take a look at another case, the colonization of America, for an example of how they are neither sufficient or necessary. This is a clear case in which one group comes to dominate another group, but it is far from clear that "developed moral intuitions" were the cause, or even that the oppressed group has been selected against. The brutal colonisation by Europeans of the Americas occurred over centuries and resulted in a massive depopulation of the indigenous occupants of the land.  But when we think of the cause of such domination, do we think of it as the destiny of moral development? Instead it seems an insult to morality; the conquest by a more numerous people with an abundance of technological and material advantages of another people hardly makes a good case study for the potency of moral emotions. In reality, the Europeans could do this because settled agriculture had been developed in Europe for millennia and intensified to produce a huge population. When they arrived in the Americas with guns and smallpox, they simply overran indigenous communities who subsisted on broadly less "land-efficient" methods.  It could be argued that their moral sense had to be aligned with co-operation on their mode of production, but which came first? Furthermore, indigenous communities and their genes survived this deadly exchange, making up the broader moral community of the present day Americas. 

However, we could move evolutionary thinking from the level of biological to cultural formations such as certain regimes or empires, and ask whether their moral foundations make them adaptive and likely to survive in a population or not. One example might be the Nazi regime, whose ethics of obedience, sacrifice, purity and 'strength' led them to attempt colonization of the east. It could be argued that they had drifted too far into the conservative side of moral foundations, becoming blind to the others. For instance, the Nazis undervalued the importance of the ability to critique authority or ideas of the sanctity of the nation, and so didn't properly evaluate the risks of invading the USSR. This ultimately led the regime to its downfall (though the population of Germany itself was preserved). 

Perhaps this is making the mistake of treating a qualitative difference like a quantitative difference. Saying something like "the Nazis made errors because they were twenty points higher in authority orientation, leading to group think at the level of a society," rather than focusing on the actual content of the moral discourse: "the Nazis made errors because the criticism of Hitler was made discursively impossible in the moral discourse of Nazism." This starts to drift into the more general critique of MFT as an ethical theory; it is not enough to say we have certain moral foundations without specifying the content of the moral discourse. Can we really say whether a particular foundation is 'adaptive' without looking at the actual instances and behaviours that are considered morally relevant in that particular time and place? 

It's clear from these short examples that proposing "developed innate moral intuitions" as the cause for the victories and defeats of history is not well thought out. However, Haidt's real concern is that without a full suite of moral emotions his own present day US society will decline and fall. This is something I will examine more in depth in the next blog post about MFT as a sociological theory. 

In preparation for my independent project, I've been reading US psychologist Jonathan Haidt's book, The Righteous Mind. The book is a popular science explanation of his theory of moral intuitions, often known as Moral Foundations Theory, which was also discussed in the developmental psychology section of DE200. In these blog posts, I'm not going to try to give an explanation of the MFT, but try to "critically examine" what it claims to explain, and what implications it has in broader social science. 

In these blog posts I'm also not going to do citations, but I will try to give credit to people for ideas I'm drawing from. And as an undergraduate writing this, I'm obviously going to be lacking specialist knowledge from certain areas. These are just musings I've had that I want to share. 

I'll post the blog in separate chapters over the next week or so.