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Samuel George Gaze

Big Data versus the Great Idiot

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Edited by Samuel George Gaze, Sunday, 25 Feb 2024, 15:56

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 20th 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 19th 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.


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Samuel George Gaze

Is Peter Turchin right? – a Sri Lankan case study

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In my last blog, I gave a summary of the elite overproduction theory of political instability. Overall, I think it could be an important theoretical perspective on the cause of some of history’s worst conflagrations. But how much confidence can we have in it? What limitations does it have? Can it contribute to a political theory of a more harmonious and fair society?

It’s difficult to say how strongly the “structural demographic” theory is supported by the evidence. So far I’ve located only a scarce few papers that flesh out a potential mathematical model for analysing instability using demographics and analysing historical situations using the model. One of them was written by Turchin himself in 2013 and models the Antebellum US and the US in the 21st century. Another was written about Ukrainian politics around the Euro Maidan, a situation which Turchin also draws upon in his book, End Times.

Turchin’s paper “Modeling Social Pressures Toward Political Instability” is dense with formulae that aim to model the chances of political instability for a society based on data that he and other social scientists have gathered into the SESHAT project, a database of demographic information on historical societies. The math looks forbidding, but it is based on a few main assumptions. These are that the potential for instability is based on the mobilization potential of both elites and commoners; i.e. the number of politically and economically frustrated people exist in a society. This takes into account the number of young people (the most likely revolutionary foot soldiers), how many live in cities, and the relative wage, a measure of how wages levels track economic growth. Turchin assumes that when wages are depressed relative to growth, the elite are taking the surplus, and this contributes to an increase in their number. However, if this goes on too long, the elites start to feel pressure – there is neither enough surplus to go around, nor jobs in government capable of maintaining their ambitions for power. Thus, their mobilization potential goes up, and instability becomes more likely.

This is all very impressive, but despite some of its subtlety, it feels a bit like looking into the code for a strategy video game like Victoria 3, where the player has to provide the various castes of their chosen 19th century nation with enough of their needs to prevent rebellion while preparing for war and conquest with their rivals. That is to say, it actually feels really quite blunt. A lot more blunt than I was expecting. In End Times, Turchin defends the need for the models to be as simple as they can be without leaving anything important out, but this obviously leaves us with something that feels, not coincidentally, like a video game. However, I think Turchin would not mind this objection too much. It feels, especially in the heat of political action, that the human will is wild and free, and it is a bit disappointing to find out such expressions of freedom can be reduced to what looks like a game of Risk. However, all insight into human behaviour generates new possibilities, so perhaps oversimplification might focus attention on what is important in the political arena.

However, until there are more papers applying this model to different societies and crises, it’s difficult to say how strong the evidence is right now. Until then, a critique of it which involves criticizing its lack of depth or consideration of the hundreds of potential mitigating factors involved in political crises is more or less hot air. Of course, it misses out the rich detail of the factors involved in this or that war – it is supposed to focus on what makes up most of the variance; and in doing so, it will reduce the apparent importance of such factors as ideology or specific grievances.

The Sri Lankan Civil War

In an effort to see if it does make some sense, I decided to learn about the political instability in a country I previously had very little knowledge of: Sri Lanka. What little I did know about it is that it endured an almost thirty-year civil war fought on ethnic grounds, between the northern and eastern Tamils, and the majority Sinhalese. I remember the war ending in 2009, but beyond that, I had very little background in it. I seemed to me a good test case for the theory, because if it showed that ethnic tension was the root of the violence, this would act as a falsification of the importance of elite overproduction. Thankfully, I found a detailed, sensitive retelling of Sri Lanka’s history on YouTube, by travel journalist Alex Rothman here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhRLWBHRg9F2DlPmWNgeYR4pMlAOWi_dt&feature=shared

Watching it, it really was tragic to think that such a beautiful place had been subjected to a generation of bloody violence; and I think this is one reason why research like Turchin’s is compelling – perhaps truly understanding the causes of such violence is a key to preventing it.

Without going into too much detail, the Sri Lankan civil war officially began in 1983 when a group of militants known as the Tamil Tigers (the LTTE) attacked a government patrol, and the majority party retaliated by instigating a massacre of Tamil civilians. The war then continued off and on until 2009, with the LTTE making regular attacks on government forces, even carrying out suicide bombings, in the hopes of creating a breakaway Tamil state. Other nations were also involved, most notably India, resulting in the assassination of a former Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, by the LTTE. Eventually, the Chinese intervened and provided the government with weapons it used to eliminate the Tigers and end the war. The UN estimated that 100,000 people were killed in the war.

It's easy to assume that this conflict was motivated purely by “ethnic tensions”. Many Sri Lankan Tamils resented their minority status in Sri Lanka, and were fearful of Sinhala persecution, with plenty of justification – there had been anti-Tamil pogroms on several occasions after independence had been gained from Britain in 1948. However, I find this explanation just too easy, even lazy – it feels like a “western” stereotype of global south conflicts such as Rwanda, or even European ones, such as Yugoslavia. However, there are plenty of examples of minority groups in ethnically segregated areas living peacefully next to majority neighbours in the same country. There are even cases where the right to self-determination of that region was denied, and this still did not lead to long term violence. Think of Scotland and Wales, or the recent breakaway attempt of Catalonia from Spain. Though the anti-Tamil pogroms certainly fueled the militant imperative for Tamils to demand their own state, we must also ask what sparked these “ethnic tensions” in the first place?

More than ethnicity

As a small, post-colonial nation, Sri Lanka unsurprisingly struggled to develop economically during the 20th century. A hangover from British administration was that there were a disproportionate number of Tamils in the government service, and this rankled the Sinhalese majority who wanted the state to act in their interest first. Their first strike was to institute the language act of 1956, replacing English with Sinhala as the language of official documents – making many Tamils in government who were unable to speak Sinhala obsolete. As Rothman notes, to get elected, Sinhalese politicians only had to appeal to the majority sentiment on the basis of shared identity, and this gradually increased Sinhalese power vis a vis Tamils in mid-century Sri Lanka, which was also going through a huge population boom, doubling between 1946 and 1971.

Already in the Sri Lanka story, by the 1960s, we have some of the factors in Turchin’s model of instability – a country struggling financially, and experiencing a youth bulge in the form of a giant population boom that was to mature in the 1980s. Add to this the fall from elite status experienced by Tamils in the government service, and the increasing insecurity of Tamils in the face of a movement of Sinhala supremacy, and the causes of the civil war are starting to line up according to the model that Turchin proposes. On the way to the civil war, though, was another event that hints further at the power of the structural demographic theory, one that I wasn’t really expecting to find – the JVT rebellions.

A key piece of evidence supporting Turchin’s theory in relation to Sri Lankan political instability is that the population boom, and increasing higher education created a large population of educated young Sri Lankans without graduate job opportunities. Some of these educated youth turned to the JVP, a Maoist party that aimed to start a rural rebellion against what it saw as a corrupt government and an inconsequential left-wing. In his video, Rothman argues that it was anti-elite, indeed, that its leader, Rohana Wijeweera, was not a member of the elite. But he was certainly what Turchin would consider a counter-elite: he was a medical student, whose father had been a member of the Sri Lankan Communist Party, and who had studied in Moscow. Students formed the vanguard of the party, and in 1971, they instigated a rebellion. Ultimately, the rebellion was crushed and Wijeweera was imprisoned, but not after 5000 people had been killed by either the JVP or the government. Crucially, the insurrection had little to do with ethnic tensions – the JVP was made up mostly of Sinhalese and went on to be reborn as an ultra-nationalist party that offered a return to Buddhist traditionalism when it rebelled again during the 1980s.

The whole episode demonstrates that Sri Lanka during the 1970s and 1980s was just such a politically unstable tinder box as Turchin describes – large numbers of educated youth, embittered Tamil elites shut out of politics, a growing population of economically immiserated workers and peasants, and a struggling state, all contributed to a generation of political violence. The LTTE Tigers were formed in 1972, a year after the JVP insurrection, by Velupillai Prabhakaran, the youngest son of a government official from a wealthy family in the Hindu religious elite. He’d become radicalized when the government had made it more difficult for Tamil students to enter university – further raising barriers to government service and elite status. The Tamil Tigers were thus also raised by a counter-elite, not one which wanted to replace the government, like Wijeweera, but to gain independence from it.

Is this evidence?

This appears to me plenty of evidence that elite competition for economic and political control of Sri Lanka was a major, if not the major driver of instability leading to the civil war and insurrections. It appears that there was an overabundance of Sinhalese elite aspirants who took aim at Tamils in order to get a seat in government. Indeed, there were apparently so many Sinhalese aspirants that some of them took aim at other Sinhalese through the JVP. This ultimately led to Tamil elites organizing a brutal fightback and undertaking a thirty-year civil war.

I’d expected to find some confounds to Turchin while bingeing the history of Sri Lanka, but I actually found plenty of evidence to show the strength of this mode of analysis – it would really be interesting to use Turchin’s formulae to model post-colonial Sri Lanka and see if this period of instability would be predicted even without reference to ethnicity. Unfortunately, I think that might be beyond my current scope – given that it would be difficult to get the data to examine the demographics of post-colonial Sri Lanka in that kind of detail. If so, it would show that Turchin might be right that ideology seems to come after demographics – a justification of the often-brutal things counter-elites feel they must do to further their interests.

Still, it is hard to deny that identity was a huge factor in deciding who were the elites, and who were the counter-elites; but Turchin wouldn’t disagree. Instead, it could be argued that when there is demographic pressure, the fractures will form most readily along ethnic lines, given that identity is a key motivator for the collective action necessary to govern or to rebel. It somewhat blurs the elite/commoner distinction, though, when the interests of both elite and commoner align in this way. And this is the question that Turchin’s theory seems to pose for politics more broadly: how well do the interests of elites and commoners align? Hopefully I will write about the relationship between Turchin and political science in another blog.

Whereas in scientific terms, the story of Sri Lanka is nothing like conclusive evidence for Turchin’s theory, learning about it certainly persuaded me that a structural demographic theory of history is pointing in the right direction – and worthy of more exploration.


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Samuel George Gaze

Why the world has gone wrong in the 2020s – Peter Turchin’s theory of history

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Edited by Samuel George Gaze, Saturday, 9 Sep 2023, 07:50

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 19th 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. 


Bibliography

Peter Turchin (2023) End Times, Penguin

Peter Turchin (2023) Cliodynamica, available at: https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/

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Samuel George Gaze

Would Barbie Drop the Bomb? - Why Barbenheimer Works

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Edited by Samuel George Gaze, Wednesday, 26 Jul 2023, 16:46

It’s July 2023.

Schools have broken up for the summer and people are turning up at the cinema for Barbenheimer; a portmanteau of two films that the internet has decided must be viewed back-to-back in a 5+ hour extravaganza of bombshells both blonde and nuclear. Why has the world decided that Barbie and Oppenheimer were separated at birth?

I can’t speak for everyone, but what attracted me to Barbenheimer first were the directors. Christopher Nolan’s films (Inception, Interstellar, The Dark Knight, etc.) are known for their complex narratives that present the viewer with a maze of mind-bending twists. They often embrace science fiction and the fantastical but embed those elements in a gravelly realism that allow the audience to see themselves in the character’s position. This makes the moral dilemmas his characters face feel profound and immediate, they must make great personal sacrifices or utilitarian calculations affecting countless lives. These features seemed to make him the perfect director for a film about J Robert Oppenheimer, developer of the first atomic bomb. After Dunkirk, it was clear that Nolan could also do history; and it made even more sense to let someone like him tell the story of the most profound moral dilemma of our time.

Greta Gerwig has directed only three films including Barbie, but I was impressed by her new version of Little Women, which was made with equal measures of romance and realism and explored the dilemmas of womanhood in the 19th century that continue to resonate now. However, it was her acting role in partner Noah Baumbach’s strange, nostalgic film White Noise, that made my ears prick up when I heard she was directing Barbie. In it, she plays a 90s suburban Mom who is deeply troubled by her mortality and the meaning of life. The film presents her and us without easy answers, an existential quandary that we must answer ourselves. In the Barbie trailer, when Margot Robbie wonders out loud “if anyone has ever thought about dying?” this made an instant connection for me, and I knew I would have to see how Gerwig managed to combine the story of a carefree consumerist toy with unfiltered existential dread.

At first it seems like the connections between these two films is entirely arbitrary, perhaps all that they share is their July 21st release date. Others have pointed out that, behind the scenes, there are actually several similarities, but I’m not really concerned with what joins them in the tangled web of Hollywood politics 1. Further, what I find truly unconvincing is the idea that Barbenheimer has taken hold of movie-goers because they are fundamentally unalike and incommensurable films. After all, Nolan’s The Dark Knight released on the same day as Mamma Mia in 2008, but no-one suggested Batma-Mia. There’s definitely something psychologically or aesthetically compelling about Barbenheimer. And though I can’t tell you what that is for everyone, I will try to say what it is for me.

Cold War Connections

YouTube is now replete with fan-made Barbenheimer trailers; and what seems to connect them is just the bizarre postmodern imagery of Barbie and Ken developing and dropping the atomic bomb 2,3. Perhaps among Barbie’s many careers, nuclear physicist at the Manhattan Project in 1945 could have been one. However, Barbie was brought to life 14 years later in 1959, making this canonically impossible. Still, this makes both her and the bomb products of a similar age. Their creators also had similar backgrounds, born within 12 years of each other, children of European Jewish migrants to the USA, their careers deeply impacted by the second world war – while Oppenheimer was sucked into the bomb project, Barbie creator Ruth Handler’s husband’s firm, Mattel, transitioned from producing furniture to toys because of war shortages 4,5. Coincidentally, both the toy and the bomb derived from work initially undertaken by Germans; it was German physicists that first demonstrated the splitting of the atom that spurred the US government to action, and the German doll ‘Bild Lilli’ that provided the model for Handler’s Barbie6. If there is a connection between Barbie and the Bomb, it’s here – they are both iconic Cold War products that stand as symbols of US cultural and military power.

As the second world war began to wind down, with Hitler dead and the USSR about to join the war against Japan, there has long been a debate about whether it was necessary or even appropriate to drop the two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing up to 200,000 casualties7. YouTube video essayist Shaun has produced an excellent critical history of the decision worth hearing 8. What is certain is that no other country at the time was in a position to use such a weapon. Nazi Germany had failed to produce a bomb, and it turned out, was nowhere close; the USSR was several years behind, conducting its first successful test in 1949 after significant input from spies in the US program 9,10. From the beginning, nukes were powerful tools of propaganda. Emerging unscathed from World War 2, in possession of bombs and rocketry capable of razing entire cities, the US was positioned to dominate world politics, and the development of nuclear treaties reflected the American interest in monopolising their proliferation as much as possible. But the US never laboured under the impression it was better to be feared than loved. It combined military propaganda with cultural shock and awe.

Barbie, one among hundreds of US consumer products, emerged under the nuclear umbrella in regions of US hegemony (she did not appear in the USSR until the perestroika of the 1980s.11) The fashion model doll who encouraged girls to buy her new outfits was well oriented to succeed in the blooming consumerism of the 1960s, in which people began to experiment with expressing individualist identities, standing out from the crowd in a way that was not possible in the more dutiful 1940s and 50s. How strong was Barbie as a tool of socialisation for girls growing up in the market economy? It’s hard to say, but she definitely played her part. She made it possible for girls in the ‘free world’ to imagine life in the American dream, living in a spacious modern home, driving a big car, owning a perfectly coiffed man, and wearing something new every day. She presented the consumerist, American way of life as the most fulfilling and enjoyable for women and was part of the charm offensive that made the US such an attractive global hegemon in contrast to the moralizing, secret policing USSR.

The advent of Barbenheimer reminds us that the US ultimately won the Cold War, leaving a Russian rump of the USSR, still armed to the teeth but without the heart to keep fighting (at least for a few decades). And it continues the tradition of essentially pro-US propaganda that such products constitute. The propaganda of Barbie is that although the US is flawed as a democracy and as an egalitarian society, it still provides a foothold for the possibility of feminism and liberation – freedom is possible under the Washington Consensus, if women had equal access to power and employment. The propaganda of Oppenheimer is essentially, thank God that the ‘free world’ got to the bomb first. But the films are more than just victory laps for the continued supremacy of the US, Hollywood, and capitalism.

People don’t have ideas, ideas have people

There is some genuine unease that this is all somewhat precarious. Barbie is almost obsessively self-critical, by the second half of the film it begins to feel like a gender studies lecture. In the theatre I felt a big divide in the audience between people who had and had not been to university yet – many jokes and references just didn’t land with the part of the audience who were just too young to be even first year undergrads. Millennials were laughing, Gen Z shrugged. It’s kind of amazing that Robbie and Gerwig got away with so much, and it’s not clear by the end that Barbie the brand actually redeems itself – but apparently Mattel are still expecting the movie to boost Barbie doll sales for the next decade. The aesthetic of female empowerment has been an effective marketing tool since at least Bernay's feminist cigarette campaign.

Oppenheimer is not a feminist film – it takes 30 minutes before one line is spoken by a woman, and there are no Bechdel test-passing conversations in the whole three hours. This is likely more reflective of the world of mid-century STEM research than a choice by Nolan, but worth mentioning given their odd juxtaposition; in Barbie, it is Ken who has to wait for his delayed introduction. However, Oppenheimer is just as conflicted about its hero and his creation. The final scene shows Cillian Murphy again gazing into the near distance, imagining the trails of rocket powered nukes raining a fiery death upon the world – maybe not now, but someday. The movie makes much of his fate to be the man who made our self-annihilation possible, leaving us to wonder if one day, Oppenheimer’s name will not be used as a curse by post-apocalyptic cavemen. Given it was Cristopher Nolan, I was surprised to see that a time-travelling Leonardo Di Caprio did not at some point appear from the distant future to assassinate Oppenheimer on his way to Los Alamos. It might have been a bit more entertaining than the dry third act.

The point that both films make about their products is that they are first of all ideas, and that ideas have the power to change the world. Barbie appears like the Monolith from Space Odyssey in her film’s first scene, changing history for little girls everywhere and allowing them to dream big and reach for their destiny. In Oppenheimer, the possibility of an atomic bomb simultaneously confronts all of the pre-war eggheads smart enough to recognise it as a revelation. It doesn’t have one inventor, but many – in this sense, Oppenheimer himself is just a conduit for the idea to find a physical form, without him, sooner or later, there would have been a bomb. Though I hate to quote Carl Jung: “People don’t have ideas, ideas have people.” As far as I know, the Barbie movie doesn’t reference Bild Lilli, but in identifying the gap in the market for an adult doll, it can be argued that Ruth Handler too was a person overtaken by an idea, rather than the reverse. Apparently, the Barbie movie was also an idea in search of a person – first mooted in 2009, it was only taken up by Margot Robbie in 2018.

However, such idealism means that focus of Oppenheimer is confusing. Making a movie about the leader of the Manhattan Project positions him, the man, with his unique qualities, talents, and foibles as a genius, a “great man of history,” but the story suggests the opposite. Instead, he puts himself in the way of the bomb, seizing upon his unique position in the mid-century physics world to be the man to lead the project. He doesn’t demure, leaving it say, to Teller (who went on the produce the H-Bomb). He thrusts himself upon greatness, and we end up agreeing with his wife that it’s hard to feel sorry for him. Yet, if such breakthroughs as nuclear weapons or plastic dolls are inevitable, this makes it look like we as people are just being swept along by forces much greater than our own wills.

Power and Plastic Waste

Spoliers ahead – at the end of Barbie, she abandons the perfect immortality of plastic Platonic idealism to embrace real humanity with its ageing, gynaecologist visits, and eventual death. She chooses to be a person, make meaningful choices, and make a life for herself. Somehow, Gerwig did manage to sneak in some trademark existentialism into a feature length toy commercial. But Oppenheimer suggests that such a sense of agency is an illusion – for all of your intentions, plans, and goals, you will be attracted and repulsed, fissioned and fused, by forces both determinate and indeterminate, like a single atom in a rippling cascade of forces which transfer energy through spacetime; and on all levels, nuclear, chemical, psychological and social.

It's Oppenheimer’s wife, played by Emily Blunt, that most severely criticizes our ability to resist the flow of history. She explains to the panel investigating her husband as a potential threat to national security, that she had once been a communist in the 1920s handing out “The Daily Worker” to people at the factory gates; but became disillusioned with the party after coming to believe it was operating as an agent of a foreign power, the USSR. She had been well-intentioned but felt that her efforts to bring class equality would be overshadowed by the national struggle between America and Russia. That both Barbie and Oppenheimer were conscripted into this struggle demonstrates that perhaps Kitty Oppenheimer had a point, and it made little sense to her to taunt the power that had the most immediate influence on her life.

Power, where it can be harnessed and concentrated, can shape people’s lives whether they have moral scruples about it or not. Barbie’s feminism flies in the face of the brutal reality of business – her dolls are being built by underpaid women in terrible conditions, a doll that costs three times her body weight in carbon emissions, and whose plastic waste will not disappear in our lifetimes12,13. This film, thoughtful though it is, is broadly uncritical of this reality, and ultimately pivots from politics to focus on making the most of your own limited lifespan. Oppenheimer’s bombs have loomed over every war zone in the past 80 years, with Russia embroiled in Ukraine and the US squaring up to China, we reignite the fuse on nuclear obliteration. What can someone troubled by this reality do after watching Nolan’s film? Groups against the bomb have been active since its inception, but they have never been close to having the influence to actually have them disarmed, and Nolan’s film absolutely does not advocate for CND. He just leaves us hoping we are in capable hands.

Finally, I think that though Barbie is funny, entertaining, and visually spectacular and Oppenheimer is an incredible piece of acting and cinematography, they aren’t really going to be remembered as their director’s greatest films. Barbie suffers from “telling” rather than “showing”- perhaps because its internal contradictions make it a case of “do as I say not as I do.” Oppenheimer is at least an hour too long; it lacks the snappy pacing of Inception, Tenet, even Dunkirk. If I was giving out Oscars for 2023, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City would be my current top choice; it deals with similar themes, being simultaneously more profound and entertaining. If you do Barbenheimer, I recommend watching Barbie first, because after Oppenheimer’s 3 hours I did not want to spend anymore time in a cinema seat, and you would be entering Barbie in an introspective melancholy only to be greeted by blasting bubblegum pop songs and expected to laugh at an unyielding barrage of self-aware in-jokes (not to say any of this is a bad thing.)

As for the question, would Barbie drop the bomb, well… It’s hard to imagine President Barbie doing anything less than what her country expects.     

Sources

1 BARBENHEIMER is More Than a Meme - Pentex Productions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTT-q_wVyz8

2 BARBENHEIMER — THE TRAILER (4K) - Silver Screen Edits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA6l2d_Z2v8

3 Barbenheimer | Movie Trailer - Curious Refuge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrpPMsD6sCE

4https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Handler

5https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer

6https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild_Lilli_doll

7 The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/med/med_chp10.html

8 Dropping the Bomb: Hiroshima & Nagasaki - Shaun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go

9 How Close Did the Nazis Actually Come to Building an Atomic Bomb? - Today I Found Out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcJSBy5m-0s

10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project

11 When Barbie Conquered the Soviet Union
https://www.rferl.org/a/When_Barbie_Conquered_The_Soviet_Union/1506690.html

12 The Plastic Feminism of Barbie - verilybitchie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RToUZJ0l7Pk

13 Commentary: Barbie movie could spark doll sales and all that plastic is not fantastic
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/barbie-movie-ken-doll-toys-plastic-waste-3636391


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Samuel George Gaze

Do we live in a propaganda society?

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Edited by Samuel George Gaze, Monday, 19 Jun 2023, 08:08

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? 


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Samuel George Gaze

What is work ethic? – My psychology degree project

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Edited by Samuel George Gaze, Wednesday, 7 Jun 2023, 22:31

‘Get Britain back to work: The pandemic drove a big rise in inactivity and we must restore our work ethic, says RUTH SUNDERLAND,’ Mail on Sunday, 21 November 2022.

‘Sunny days off? Britain's work ethic has turned into a 'me' ethic,’ Scottish Daily Mail, 15 July, 2022

Since February 2019, I’ve been studying psychology here with the Open University. On Monday the 5th of June, I submitted my last two essays, and my degree course is now over. I’m eagerly awaiting my results, but I feel an incredible sense of relief after all the energy and time I’ve devoted to this work. Compared to those who have completed it while raising kids or looking after sick relatives though, I feel I’ve taken it at a pretty leisurely pace. It’s absolutely right that we praise such incredible people for their tenacious efforts to do something hard and worthwhile. Despite this, I think it’s still important to think critically about the way we praise hard work, because I don’t believe that the celebration of effort always works in our favour. This is exactly what my degree project on “work ethic” was designed to investigate; because while we rightly applaud those who do something good for themselves and others, the moralization of effort can have a dark side.

What is work ethic?

It’s a phrase that is constantly in the headlines. In 2020s so far it is consistently brought up in media discussions about the state of the UK economy. As far as I can tell, it has been a major Conservative party talking point since the publication of “Britannia Unchained” in 2012, which included contributions from former prime minister Liz Truss, and former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng. Truss later publicly blamed Britain’s economic stagnation in part on the British worker’s lack of ‘graft’. In short, the British lack work ethic, and that is making the nation poorer.

This might not be immediately obvious, but “work ethic” is a psychological construct. Psychological constructs are forces, resources or objects that we imagine are contained in people’s minds, such things as motivations, beliefs, fears, intelligence, creativity or personality factors.  Work ethic is a psychological construct that is used to explain why some people show incredible devotion and commitment to work, while others do not; the theory is that these people are motivated by a hard-wired belief about the value of hard work for its own sake. It’s important to remember though that psychological constructs are not “real” in the same way that trees and bricks, or even the brain is real. You can’t look into someone’s head and find their work ethic. This doesn’t stop psychologists from trying though.

The main way of measuring someone’s work ethic is to use an attitude survey, one famous work ethic survey is called the MWEP (Miller, Woehr and Hudspeth, 2002) and asks people to rate how much they agree with such statements as:

“Even if I had a great deal of money, I would still work somewhere.”

“Hard work makes one a better person.”

According to the authors, if you score highly on the MWEP, you likely have a strong work ethic. This sounds great, but the results of these studies are very boring. Measuring different countries, different cultures, and even different generations shows that wherever you come from, whatever generation you come from, you are likely to share very similar attitudes towards work as others. Most people see the value of work; but on the other hand, they also see the value of leisure and relaxation.

But isn’t there a massive difference between the working norms of different countries? It’s true that the average Mexican worker does over 2000 hours of work a year, (that’s still only ~38 hours a week on average), while the average Dane does just under 1400 (~27 hours a week). Many Chinese workers apparently do a “996,” 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. That’s 72 hours a week, 3700 hours a year, and if that sounds a little unrealistic, then the statistics agree: on average, the Chinese work a bit more than 2000 hours. Putting the data together, we could ask why if work ethic doesn’t seem to vary much between Mexico and Denmark, but their working hours do, what’s causing the difference? The predictable answer is that this is almost certainly about global inequality. Our World in Data argues that as a nation gets wealthier, that is, as the average income for people in a country rises, people tend to work fewer hours (https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours). It just takes more hours to put food on the table when your wages are low.

Where does that leave work ethic? We can all think of people who are absolutely devoted to the “grind,” and others that are proudly and openly lazy, and that gives us the intuition that there must be some internal, psychological difference, but there are likely many more factors at work: different bodies, different circumstances, different incentives. On the level of a population, we’d expect these individual differences to average out anyway – it’s hardly likely that different nations, even ethnicities, actually have significant bio-psychological differences in work ethic. This kind of “science” invites racism. What the economic numbers show us is that psychologically, work makes sense up to a point. If you can meet your family’s needs and ambitions, on less hours of toil, then that is far more appealing than trading off your work-life balance for moderately better stuff.

If that is the case, why is work ethic such a hot topic in the media? Instead of trying to measure work ethic, my research asked the question, what do people like Liz Truss and the Daily Mail mean when they use the phrase work ethic? This kind of question is not something you can use surveys or social experiments to answer. Instead, I used critical discursive psychology, which is a type of psychological analysis that looks at how language works to create the world we live in. I hope to write more about how discursive psychology works in another post, but I want to share what I found in a way that will be easily accessible without too much knowledge of the method. In order to answer the question, I looked at seven news articles from the past two years on the subject of work ethic from across the political spectrum and asked what talking about work ethic did for their arguments. This is what I found:

“We should work for the sake of our companies, or indeed our public services, and not expect them to work for us.” – The Daily Telegraph, 17 December, 2022.

First, I found that work ethic talk was part of a larger “discourse” or pattern of talk that I called “work-centrism” after the work centrality construct used elsewhere. Work-centrism is the idea that we are morally obligated to prioritize work above everything else. It is good and right to work long hours and put in lots of effort at our job, not for our own benefit, but specifically for the benefit of the company. Employers, in fact, have the right to expect this from their workers. This means, in the context of contemporary Britain, that working from home, period leave, well-being interventions, and work closures on particularly hot days should be considered out of the question. These work practices are framed by work-centrism to be dangerous to the work ethic and must be stopped. The articles presented themselves as defenders of an employer’s rights against the lazy British worker who just wants to take advantage of these progressive policies.

“…there is something rather serious happening in our workplaces which risks not just undermining the economy but destroying the spirit of hard work for which Britain has always been renowned.” - The Daily Telegraph, 17 December, 2022

However, the articles faced a problem, which is that such policies are pretty widely regarded as positive by large sections of the working public. I know quite a few people who have been able to work from home, and not only has this provided them benefits, but they haven’t seen a drop in productivity or value for the company. To counteract this, the articles had another strategy: Nationalism. It might be good for YOU to work from home, but it isn’t good for the country! This follows the argument that Truss and other Conservatives made in Britannia Unchained. The nationalist argument does more than just encourage self-sacrificial work behaviour though; it is in effect saying that bad workers (those who don’t put the company first) are bad citizens, and that means that groups like trades unions and protestors that disrupt work schedules can be painted as unpatriotic, and possibly seditious. It also puts the reader themselves into the category of the morally righteous patriot, working hard, sneering at unions, and not complaining about the falling wages and living standards Britain is currently experiencing. Articles like this do political work; they argue that in the face of such economic difficulties, the answer is not solidarity between working people, but more individual graft and grind, even as prospects for a comfortable life decline.

This illustrates the dark side of moralizing effort. Though it is right to congratulate one another for a job well done, especially after years of exertion, our own tendency to validate effort can also be used against us in the distribution of work and wealth. If you never even attempt to say no, then you can always be pushed to do more, for less. Other studies have shown that most people instinctually moralize effort (Celniker, 2022). All of us know the value of a job well done, but crucially, we are also able to recognise when our work is under-valued and we are earning less than we are putting in. Work ethic does little to explain why some countries work longer hours than others; and so work ethic exists as a kind of phantom haunting discussions about economic woe. Using work ethic in this way creates a world in which working people as a whole are blamed for the difficulties they face, and the unequal distribution of work and wealth goes unquestioned.

Given the rise of AI and the future of automation, we have to think critically about these kinds of taken-for-granted, common sense ideas, so they don’t hold us back from the benefits of the increased productivity that technology has granted us. For this reason, I’m going to come back to this study and ask, can AI do discursive psychology?

References

Celniker, J.B. et al. (2022) ‘The moralization of effort’, Journal of experimental psychology. General [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001259.

Miller, M.J., Woehr, D.J. and Hudspeth, N. (2002) ‘The Meaning and Measurement of Work Ethic: Construction and Initial Validation of a Multidimensional Inventory’, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 60(3), pp. 451–489. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1006/jvbe.2001.1838.


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Samuel George Gaze

The Social Instinct - Are we humans, or are we ants?

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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

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Samuel George Gaze

The "Science" of Willpower

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Edited by Samuel George Gaze, Friday, 6 Jan 2023, 17:08

David Robson, journalist and "science author" has written a piece of prime pop psychology for BBC Worklife on the subject of willpower, arguing that 'mindset' can give you access to greater motivation, determination and ultimately, career success. 

This one: "The mindset that brings unlimited willpower."

The main argument is based on Veronika Job's 2010 study, 'Is It All in Your Head? Implicit Theories About Willpower Affect Self-Regulation'. In this study, and in her subsequent research, she found that people's beliefs about willpower affect how well they perform on moderately demanding cognitive tasks. In short, believing that willpower is a depletable resource that you run out of if you try too hard makes you less likely to focus on a tough task. However, believing that willpower is a kind of muscle you can strengthen makes you more likely to focus, even when a task is tough. It also apparently correlates to less procrastination on revision, more avoiding sugary or fatty food, etc. Mindset gives you power. 

Like most of this self-help stuff, Robson's article left me a bit prickly. This is partly because, as a final year psychologist, I'm doing a study on the moralization of work and am well aware that it has a dark side, and partly because his conclusion clashes with my own experience of motivation. Surely there are times when "with all the will in the world," we just can't seem to make the better choice? I can't help but feeling that the mindset thing is just empty marketing talk that simply contributes to good book sales. But how can it even be argued against?

I looked into the Job's original 2010 study, (rather industriously I think you'll agree, at about 5 AM in the morning) to see if it had any glaring weaknesses. However, in general it seems to have been a very well conducted set of studies that provides support for the hypothesis. Taking just the first study, it's possible to argue that the causal arrow is wrong, that it is personality that informs belief, and eventually causes different results on ego-depletion tests. However the next study 'primes' the attitude in a random sample and still finds a result, showing that attitude is likely a causal factor. 

If I had to quibble, we could say that the ego-depletion tests used by Job are themselves unreliable measures (debatable) or maybe that the studied task itself is not spectacularly effortful. But more importantly what is the effect size? Job uses an 'odds ratio' to indicate the effect size of attitude on task performance, and in study 1 the 'OR' is 1.32. According to Chen, Cohen and Chen (2010) this is equivalent to a small effect size. And if we look at the descriptive statistics, we see that the actual difference in mistakes on the ego depletion task is at most a 6% extra probability, so yeah. In ironic capitals, SMALL. 

This might be enough to put grand claims about attitude's ability to increase willpower to one side. Yes, attitude towards willpower might contribute to people's level of effort on tasks, but it is a small constituent of such motivated attention - there are likely to be much more important factors: actual tiredness, calorie intake, level of stress, or of course, ADHD etc. I think that David Robson from the BBC has somewhat overstated our ability to think our way to motivation, but it is not good enough for me. I'm suspicious that something else is going on.

Willpower is a screwy concept. I'm not the first to say this. Brain and behaviour scientists Gross and Duckworth (2021) have also criticised the concept as having no useful meaning. Just the idea of 'will' alone is debatable, and has been debated by philosophers for centuries. Also implicit in the construction of the word is 'power' - a metaphor of a depletable resource that motivates activity just as long as it remains. The connected ideas of replenishing and re-energising follow directly from this. 

But where in the brain can we find the will? Where is willpower stored? What kind of energy is 'willpower' exactly? Is it a chemical? Electricity? Rising gas? G & D are correct that the concept leaves much to be desired. It is a biochemical model with no biochemical signature - like chakras or chi. Willpower is what we call a folk psychological concept; it is a theory about a mysterious substance inhabiting a person that describes their likelihood of getting a job done or not, relapsing into addiction, or washing behind their ears. 

It is likely for this reason that Veronika Job is studying not willpower itself, but beliefs about willpower. And it is also likely the reason that such beliefs do seem to have a causal effect on focus (albeit a small one). In Job's study, people use the folk psychological concept of willpower and apply it to themselves. Those who think it is depletable are also those who procrastinate studying for their finals, those who think it is a strengthening muscle apparently just rep through the pain. And this is the important point. In study 3 of the paper, the research shows that both believers in depletion theory and non-depletion theory got tired from the (admittedly minimal) task they were set by the experimenters and answered so on a survey. 

What I think we are seeing here is that the two groups have different discursive approaches to feelings of exhaustion, and this does show up in their levels of focus. When feeling task exhaustion, discursive resources could be coming into play at what Gross & Duckworth call the 'appraisal' stage. The appraisal of one group seems to be: "I'm tired, so I won't put too much energy into this," while the others is "I'm tired but I can push through." This has worrying implications: perhaps when 'pushing through' we are dealing with a theory of willpower in which people are failing to listen to their body, and further, accepting the governmentality of work schedules, deadlines, examinations and so forth, contributing to burnout and later medical issues, all in the service of capital accumulation.  However, it seems these implications have been missed. 

Perhaps this can be explained by our implicit moralization of effort, as studied by Celniker et al., (2022). According to this research, all effort is viewed in positive moral terms, so the suggestion that effort generates improving results plays to our ingrained cultural biases and is thus eagerly welcomed. Not only that, but given the pervasive discourses of choice and responsibility within liberalism, the idea that there is a secret trove of energy within us we can unlock to scale the ladder of success, taking control of our bodies and minds to advance our social goals, is a cause for the kind of celebration given to it in plaudit-winning popular psychology self-help books such as David Robson's Expectation Effect. 

His BBC article begins:

 "Many people believe willpower is fixed and finite. Yet powerful strategies exist that can help us increase it."

The main problem with this, as we've seen, is that willpower does not exist. According to Gross and Duckworth, on the road to controlling behaviours, there are many steps, and willpower is not one of them. Everything following from this first mistake is bad science. The risk is that people who genuinely struggle with self-control for various reasons are continually being told that their difficulties are a YOU problem, which, if efforts to overcome it through positive thinking don't work, might contribute to a further loss of self-esteem and depression. Gross and Duckworth argue that we should look at broader ways to aid self-control, like social support, medication for conditions like ADHD, and even legal changes. 

Alternatively, we could think of reducing the 'expectation effect' and making the barriers to a good life a little lower and more accessible by simply not demanding so much effort in the first place. In liberalism we are supposed to work hard and play hard, but where is the space for some quiet contemplation far from the madding crowd? We are supposed to supplement our hard work with protective amounts of exercise, avoid but also consume economy-boosting levels of junk food and media, all this while assiduously squirrelling away enough cash for retirement just above the poverty line. Even meditation has become a site for the moralization of effort. Instead of thinking about how we can put in more hours to get the life of our dreams, maybe we should listen to our body and just let a few harmless hours slip. 

In writing this, I expended a lot of effort. I was tired, and pushed through - largely because the idea of finishing it was far more attractive than going to bed. However, this had nothing to do with willpower, it had to do with attention. I simply can't turn my attention away from something as compelling as a nicely written article. The very thing you have read is a failure of self-regulation on a school night. And for this reason alone, I submit, the world of motivational psychobabble must move (as Duckworth and Gross say) beyond willpower. 


Celniker, J.B. et al. (2022) ‘The moralization of effort’, Journal of experimental psychology. General [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001259.

Chen, H., Cohen, P. and Chen, S. (2010) ‘How Big is a Big Odds Ratio? Interpreting the Magnitudes of Odds Ratios in Epidemiological Studies’, Communications in statistics. Simulation and computation, 39(4), pp. 860–864. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03610911003650383.

Gross, J.J. and Duckworth, A.L. (2021) ‘Beyond willpower’, The Behavioral and brain sciences, 44, pp. e37–e37. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X20000722.

Job, V., Dweck, C.S. and Walton, G.M. (2010) ‘Ego Depletion—Is It All in Your Head? Implicit Theories About Willpower Affect Self-Regulation’, Psychological science, 21(11), pp. 1686–1693. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610384745.


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Samuel George Gaze

She's With Him - Discourse versus Moral Foundations of Politics

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Edited by Samuel George Gaze, Thursday, 22 Dec 2022, 19:16

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. 


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Samuel George Gaze

Moral Foundations Theory as a Theory of Ethics

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Edited by Samuel George Gaze, Thursday, 22 Dec 2022, 18:50

In the last part of this blog, I look whether moral foundations theory makes any contributions to actual questions of morality and ethics, and if it is a valuable lens to examine ethical questions. Haidt himself is at pains to point out that MFT is a descriptive theory, not a normative one, that is we can't conclude anything about what is morally relevant from the description of what people's intuitions are about what is right or wrong. And this unwillingness to advance his theory as a moral philosophy is directly connected by Haidt to the realisation that taking moral discourses of sanctity, authority and loyalty (perhaps also tradition) as seriously as care and fairness seems to vindicate, if not the Nazis, but fascism as a moral system specially adapted for humanity. Perhaps this is why Haidt also developed a 'liberty/oppression' dimension that would counter the structuralist tendencies of his theory. 

However I think there are normative consequences implied in Moral Foundations Theory, just from the definition of morality as something that developed to help humans live in large social groups. Such a groupish sense of morality is necessary for us to be able to survive together, and so we should be wary of moral philosophies that downplay the foundations of sanctity, authority and loyalty, such as the utilitarian philosophies of Bentham and Mill. These theories tend to try to reduce morality to concern for harms to individuals, when the whole of morality is meant to protect the group from harms, even if it means the individual suffers in some cases. Following these more individualist moralities as 'liberals' wish to would result in the disintegration of society. 

I've tried to answer the question of whether or not this is a realistic fear or not in the section on the sociological theory - but to recap, it isn't that liberals have abandoned their moral foundations, or simply ignore questions of proportional fairness, sacred symbolism, loyalty or functional hierarchy, it is just that these discourses have different content, or are approached in a different way that gives a little more weight to the question of harm. The differences between the groups could very well be artefacts of the survey, social identity or of the groups different positions in the larger social system. There is no evidence that the particular content of liberal moral discourse is dangerous for society, because Haidt does not analyse the discourse. 

Instead, the psychologist Joshua Green has argued in his book Moral Tribes, that we are actually confronted with quite different moral questions than those answered by our hunter gatherer ancestors, and even different questions to those that were posed in 19th century democracies. We now have to consider not just how to co-operate with other individuals or families in a tribe or nation, but how to co-ordinate co-operation between different national groups or 'moral tribes.' We are faced with moral questions that result from globalisation, having the cheap labour of the global south produce our comfortable standard of living here, what and if anything can be done about it. Haidt's MFT is somewhat locked into groupishness, which doesn't give us much hope for future co-operation on peace and climate action. 

Even the core of moral intuitions theory leaves us with reasons to be pessimistic; if we cannot adjust our behaviour as a result of the information we have rationally gathered from our experience of the environment because we have intransigent intuitions, then we cannot alter the seemingly disastrous course we are taking towards ecological breakdown or nuclear war. It may be correct, as Haidt argues from Hume and cognitive psychology, that decisions become impossible if we do not feel any emotions behind them, but that does not take any force away from the necessity to rationally consider if the emotions we feel are serving us or not. It may be that to adapt to the moral challenges of our time, rationality is the tool we need to develop to correctly understand the threats and opportunities ahead. 

One way rationality can help I heard outlined briefly by social psychologist John Jost; which is that it helps us to weigh up which of our emotions are more important to us. Haidt's theory implies that each of the foundations could be equally important, however there is neither reason or evidence to show that this is the case. It may be that theories that reduce morality to preventing harm go a little too far, but it also may be the case that in order to overcome collective action problems like building human societies, members need to feel like they will be cared for more than being safe from moral disgust. The ability to care for those beyond the group maybe the moral foundation for a more cohesive global response to the challenges of climate breakdown and nuclear war. 

Jost also points to the arbitrariness of Haidt's moral foundations, something I understand as the lack of a necessary connection between a foundation and any particular form of behaviour. This presents a more philosophical problem with the concept of separate moral foundations; just pointing out the different flavours of morality doesn't give us examples for any of them of what right moral conduct would be. For example, in Judaism and Islam, it is unholy (not sacred) to eat pork, yet in China pork is seen as a cleaner meat than other kinds, while in the west, where eating pork has not been traditionally considered a moral issue, vegetarianism is now a moral debate about fairness and cruelty to animals. 

Consider the different ways that social distancing was talked about in public discourse during the COVID pandemic. On the one hand, failure to social distance could be constructed as uncaring, disloyal to the nation or community, dirty and deadly, unfair to others, disobedient or even oppressive (depriving someone's right to life). On the other hand, social distancing could be construed as uncaring (anti-social for families and friends), disloyal (to the church or the national character), unfair, weak, oppressive, and perhaps even disobedient to god or morally degrading to the human spirit. Moral discourse is tricky and certainly deserving of further study. 

My conclusion, to this section and the general argument of Moral Foundations Theory, is that social science cannot be complacent about human nature. Yes, undoubtedly we are animals on the inside, and much more of our life and behaviour is controlled by automatic processes that we barely understand. Further our social systems have their own logic which is often slippery and difficult to theorise about, if only because doing so can lead to changes in those very systems. As animals that are conscious of our surroundings, capable of integrating information to make changes to our world, we are a dynamic system that relies on our reason to at least shine a light on the way we are headed. We are now, as writer Yuval Harari argues, due to advances in biotechnology and AI, heading towards a moment in which we may even be able to ask the question "what should we want to want?" Undoubtedly the moral questions we are confronted with cannot be answered just with the blind instincts that evolution has equipped us with. 

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Samuel George Gaze

Moral Foundations Theory as a Theory of Political Science

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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. 


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Samuel George Gaze

Moral Foundations Theory as a Sociological Theory

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Edited by Samuel George Gaze, Monday, 21 Nov 2022, 23:07

In reading the Righteous Mind beyond its account of Haidt's development of the theory of moral intuitions, he begins to drift more into a polemic about the current state of US politics and what he believes can be done to improve it. Namely, he is talking about the polarisation of US politics into groups of liberals and conservatives, something he blames partly on the particular blindness and tone-deaf messaging of liberals to the moral values of conservatives. He believes that present day America, and some other western nations, are fundamentally divided by their moral attitudes and headed for disaster - perhaps civil war, certainly decline relative to other nations like China or Russia.  

The MFT sociological theory goes like this. There are six moral intuitions. They are innately evolved to provide large groups of humans with the social trust or cohesiveness to sustain the group itself. While the care/harm foundation underpins such social institutions as the family, the foundation of fairness discourages cheating individuals from ruining collective action, the foundation of authority allows us to work together in hierarchies, the foundation of loyalty encourages us to prioritise our group above others, and the foundation of sacredness helps us to maintain the institutions of religion that create bonding social capital, the boundaries of the group and the internal hygiene of the group. 

Without these, societies begin to lose trust and 'turn bad', Haidt argues. In so arguing he invokes the sociocentric view of humanity taken by sociologist Emile Durkheim; people do not exist as individuals, in order to survive, they must act for the good of the whole colony, and this sometimes means submitting to collective attitudes and expectations without being critical or individually pursuing a different course that may seem right to us. It is almost certainly true that social trust is necessary for the smooth functioning of social institutions, from the family, to the workplace, to hospitals and government. What we call loyalty and reciprocity are undoubtedly implicated in this trust, on some occasions deference or equality will be implicated. The foundation of sacredness might be implicated through whatever moral, religious or aesthetic resources are used to create the myth of a singular 'society' that is to be defended, and whose members one can trust as having the same ultimate co-operative interests. However, if we examine what Haidt might mean by societies becoming maladaptive, this sociological theory struggles to hold up. 

Of course, it is time to again invoke the Nazis, who are always referred to when we imagine what a 'bad society' might be. However, looking at the Nazis through the lens of Moral Foundations Theory, we see quite a different picture. Instead of being bad, the Nazis seem to have much that a so-called "morally developed society" might wish to emulate. White Christian Germans were told they could enjoy high levels of social trust through loyalty and reciprocal relationships between themselves, with a strong religious community that cared for in-group members united around sacred symbols of the race and fatherland. But this is clearly a morally repugnant conclusion - the Nazis are the embodiment of evil; the cause of the most deadly conflict in human history, murderers, torturers, capable of arbitrary cruelty on an industrial scale. It does not escape Haidt's notice that taken as a normative theory, MFT would likely vindicate Fascism, which is why he squeezes in a sixth moral foundation, liberty/oppression, and is so careful to point out it is not a normative theory, 

Not a normative theory, except of course, when it comes to assessing the plight of the contemporary USA. What Haidt seems to be concerned most about is the potential for violence between the liberal and conservative extremes of US politics. This would be bad, presumably because it would result in so much bodily harm to people; an ironically liberal foundation for concern. Haidt is essentially arguing that liberals are simply not able to understand conservative moral intuitions, and are thus dragging society left when it refuses to budge any further, and he infers, would likely be worse for doing so because it would undermine US social cohesion, its future as a nation, and its defence against threats. This could be categorised by Haidt's own lights as a conservative concern. Being too focused on preventing harm or providing equality, he argues, means that a society becomes too individualist, and will thus fail to reproduce itself. However, there is no historic evidence presented for this claim. This picture is almost pure rhetoric. 

Haidt takes the research that shows differences in the stated and implicit attitudes of current US liberals and conservatives and comes to the conclusion that liberals alone could not maintain a cohesive society because they do not care enough about proportional fairness, the sanctity of the group, or even long-term loyalty. If we think about this for more than two minutes, it stops making sense. Do liberals actually not care about proportional fairness? For instance, do they think that universities should give everyone first class honours no matter what work they do? When it comes to loyalty, are liberals more likely to cheat on their spouse, abandon their children, or sell state secrets to foreign powers? When it comes to sacredness, are liberals any less clean than conservatives, any less committed to the 'purity' of soul or virtue? Any less respectful of the buildings and symbols of what they believe to be good in society? It's worth noting that in Haidt's own research he found that it isn't that Liberals lack the other moral foundations, but that they are able to critique their value in specific cases. 

And of course it must be this way. It seems to escape Haidt that if he believes that liberals and conservatives are two different social groups, then it stands to reason that they would use the same mechanisms of policing loyalty, sacred boundaries, advocating for their respective authorities and caring for other members of their group. Anyone who has been on twitter knows that liberals are just as passionate about this as conservatives. Both groups draw on these different discourses of morality to maintain their sense of group identity, and thus it is unlikely that liberals actually care less about sanctity and loyalty. It is just that the two groups differ in the content of what they think is morally relevant.

What we are left with is the possibility that the so-called WEIRD moral imagination of liberals, so distinct from conservatives, maybe an artefact of the surveys and experiments used to measure those foundations in the first place. Let's take an example. One question that assesses the dimension of sanctity is this: "How relevant to morality is it whether or not someone acted in a way that God would approve of?" The question assumes that belief in God is a necessary condition for the moral emotion of sanctity, and thus weights the whole dimension away from atheists and towards (Christian) believers. This would clearly impact on measurements of liberal populations in the US, who are far more likely to identify as atheist or agnostics. The questionnaire also hinges on the definition of what is "moral" - and not simply sociable; again in the case of sanctity, a liberal definition of what is moral might not include handwashing after the toilet, but it would almost certainly be understood as a sociable behaviour, and a generally good thing to do, underpinned by the same emotion (disgust) as the proposed sanctity foundation. 

This is one criticism that can easily be levelled at MFT as a sociological theory, that it simply reifies the concerns and divisions of contemporary US society and makes them appear universal - the questionnaire itself seems particularly primed to find differences between supporters of the different US political factions, instead of trying to work out what they may have in common. In so doing, it lays the blame squarely at the feet of liberals and their inability to compromise, ironic, given a similar inability to compromise on the part of US conservatives. I'll discuss the implications of this when it comes to Haidt's proposed use of MFT in political messaging and action in the next instalment of the blog. Then I'll move on to what, if anything, the theory has to contribute to moral philosophy. 


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Samuel George Gaze

Moral Foundations Theory as an Evolutionary Psychological Theory

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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. 


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Samuel George Gaze

Moral Foundations as a Cognitive Psychological Theory

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Edited by Samuel George Gaze, Saturday, 12 Nov 2022, 13:20

Firstly, Haidt presents Moral Foundations Theory as a cognitive theory of moral attitudes. It proposes that there are brain modules attuned to different 'flavours' of morality. These spark automatic, intuitive and emotional responses to certain scenarios that we can express as attitudes. For example, if we think about the scenario of a person engaging in animal cruelty, this activates our care/harm module and we feel a wave of negative emotion. When asked for our attitude to a case of animal cruelty, the care/harm module prompts us to answer that we believe it is wrong, because it is associated with a negative emotion. 

This is the crucial difference between the MFT and other theories of moral development that stress the importance of being able to give reasons for moral attitudes. Instead, Haidt sides with the philosopher David Hume and holds that moral judgements come first of all from the emotions that scenarios elicit. He uses the idea of a moral dilemma to illustrate this; for instance, there is no harm we can reason involved in the case of a man who (disgust ahead) privately has intercourse with a chicken carcass before cooking it and eating it alone - yet it feels very, very wrong. This becomes a moral question because there are moral intuitions beyond the prevention of harm to sentient creatures - namely disgust, which Haidt links to the moral foundation of "sacredness." We can't explain why something is wrong, it just is. He calls this moral dumbfounding. 

The research that Haidt and others have done gives a very reasonable account of moral judgements, the key findings show that emotions are strongly implicated in such judgements. However, we are far from able to say that it is watertight as a cognitive theory. One objection is that Haidt's initial five modular foundations are arbitrary; further research led to Haidt's proposal of another foundation and a six-module theory. It is quite possible to imagine multiple different foundations, perhaps 'tradition/progress' or 'strength/weakness'. There is also the question of whether the modules can be defined in terms of how they are produced as emotions by the brain - the neuroscience of emotion is still being researched. Further, can we tell the difference between a moral emotion and an aesthetic one? Or even a regular emotion?

It is also not clear that MFT completely rules out the effect of moral reasoning from moral judgements. Haidt himself states that some students presented with the chicken dilemma above eventually conceded that there was nothing socially wrong with the actions of the man; his actions were not morally relevant. This might still be an unpalatable conclusion, and I agree, but it does show that reason can lead judgements to different conclusions, and produce a different social reality in which the man is not condemned for his actions. It might be enough to say, "that's disgusting, don't do that, it makes me feel sick." Joshua Green, an opposing moral psychologist gives another example: the famous nineteenth century utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham struggled to produce reasons to condemn homosexuality, even though he "felt" that it must be wrong. Instead of continuing to do so in his discourses, he concluded that homosexuality was actually morally not relevant, and should be a private matter. This kind of reasoning, starting from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, eventually resulted in our contemporary sexually liberated society. 

Haidt's response would likely be to say: "not so fast." Emotions do not just change, they are genetically innate; though some of us can reason around our unreasoned objections to certain scenarios, there are just as many who will not, and who will insist that their emotions reveal moral truths. Indeed, Haidt argues that Bentham was a particularly unusual character because his moral compass was almost completely oriented around questions of avoiding harm and increasing happiness. Because Betham did not experience a full range of moral emotions, he was blind to the moral sentiments of others. In so arguing, Haidt expands MFT into the world of personality and individual differences, which he feels he can support given the wide individual differences of his survey respondents. People have different attitudes, and underlying these we can theorise a variable mix of moral emotions felt in different strengths. 

The data he provides do indeed show that across people and societies, moral attitudes can differ considerably. But does a modular cognitive theory explain the variation? Between people, we understand that genetics and environment both play a role in the way that people view the world and experience emotions. But are distinct modules necessary to explain why people experience emotions differently? One theory is that we can understand emotions as fixed action patterns evoked by certain stimuli. Early behaviourist research (on poor 'Little Albert') shows us that fear can become attached to almost any object given the correct conditions of development. I'm not sure that it is necessary to imagine a specific module for moral emotions, in the same way there is likely no specific module for being afraid of balloons (globophobia), the colour yellow (xanthophobia), or the fear of long words (Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia). 

The cognitive psychological theory of moral intuitions (that emotions spur moral reasoning) seems to be a genuinely useful contribution to understanding why we react so strongly to certain moral scenarios. However the modular cognitive theory of moral foundations is far from stable, if you'll pardon the pun. It could be argued that it is not a parsimonious theory, but multiplies entities unnecessarily; instead of modules, what we are perhaps left with are patterns of agreement and disagreement between people's moral attitudes, which I'd argue is intriguing enough to start with. In the next instalment, I'm going to look at MFT as an evolutionary psychological theory, and then go on to look at Haidt's extrapolation of the theory into the political, sociological and philosophical realms. 


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Samuel George Gaze

What is Moral Foundations Theory? - A Blog Series

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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. 

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Samuel George Gaze

How does social science differ from natural science?

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Edited by Samuel George Gaze, Saturday, 12 Nov 2022, 13:17

Thoughts from the Limitations of Social Research

By Marten Shipman, Professor of Education, Warwick University, 1981

"Science had once been seen as the progressive completion of the jigsaw puzzle that was to become a complete picture of the natural world... but in the twentieth century, science has come to be seen as interpretive, involving human explanation as well as collected facts."

Shipman's book is mostly talking to people who read about science rather than do science. But personally, I think we are all still influenced by the social representation of science as progress towards a "theory of everything." The problem with this approach becomes more acute as we turn the lens of science on ourselves.

"Social scientists have consistently opposed  the attempt to use [natural science methods] for looking at human action... The natural world is not made by humans. The social world is by contrast made and remade as people interact with each other."

Part of this remaking is the interaction of people with the discourses of science. Science is part of the construction of our social world, and it is necessary for us to be able to critique the way we use science to talk about it. Obviously in such a system, there can never be a closing point where all the meanings are fixed;  for a start, social science can't anticipate how it will affect the world it studies. 

"Social scientists cannot merely observe behaviour, they have to find out how individuals give meaning to and organise their interaction with others ."

This is why Rom Harre (2010) argued that the social sciences must use a different 'grammar' than the one used in natural sciences. Important detail is missed if a description does not involve the construction of goal-directed behaviour in people and the social construction of their interactions. 

"Theories are often explanations of the "if X, then Y, kind. In the natural sciences these usually take the form of laws. In social science there are no laws that hold across varied circumstances. But theories still aid explanation. It is likely that any relation will be stated in terms of probability: "if X then it is likely that Y.

The above points notwithstanding, it's not like the fact that social science theories cannot be treated as laws (though sometimes they are, especially in economics!) means that theories are of no value. At the very least, a theory is a simplification that shifts the conversation about a topic. Social constructionism itself is a theory that has prompted a lot of vigorous conversation and argument about identity that has changed society.

"Reliability in social science can often only be achieved at the cost of validity. Interpretation can be excluded by the rigid design of the investigation, but in doing so any relevance to everyday life is likely to be lost.

I must admit that I've never heard it put quite like this. The more attempts are made to control variables and produce generalisable results, the further away from reality it takes the conclusion. He puts it well: "The tension between generalising to approach the rigour of the natural sciences and trying to preserve natural human activity while observing them is inevitable in social science." 

"Many social scientists reject this approach [of objectivity.] For them, objectivity is apparent, not real. The social scientist imposes their own preconceptions, and these may bear little resemblance to the situation as conceived by those actually involved."

Is objectivity possible in social science? Based on my very limited three year study, I'm not convinced this question has been addressed properly. There are at least two ways of doing it: one, aim to be as objective as possible by not allowing commitments to theories to shape your interpretation of the data, (an approach that is easily criticised as performing objectivity rather than being objective,) or two, identify and admit your position on a topic and biases make up part of the research (easy to do in theory, but in practice leaves a lot of space for unreflexivity, or even dishonesty). 

Personally, I wonder if the point should be more about application than the abstract truth - saying from the outset what consumers of the study can expect to do with the information within.  For instance, in natural sciences, the results of a paper on friction mean you can expect what has been observed to affect every applied instance of friction. Whereas a paper on the construction of male identity in fitness spaces means you can expect to see these discourses in the gym, and perhaps we can critique it and imagine different ways to be. 

Thanks for reading! As an easter egg, I leave you with the most savage burn in the book:

"However much social scientists object to being categorised by the methods of the natural sciences, that is usually the basis of their claim when viewed by those who provide the money for research." 

Shipman, M.D. (1981) The limitations of social research. 2nd ed. London: Longman


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