I was asked this week…what is the Natural State of Man, and given that, what is our best society? (nationally and globally).

It’s a great question, because people’s attraction to ‘social visions’, and policies aimed towards them, depend upon their beliefs about the answer to this question. And few consider the Human ‘Nature, Nurture and Choice’ question fully, making their own policy beliefs lazy ‘value judgements’ instead of leaning more towards what we statisticians call ‘subjective judgements of fact’.

It is interesting to me how unconscious these beliefs about people can be – even in activists and political influencers. I believe it is important to dig down and see where we get our beliefs about social visions from, and whether our assumptions hold. Using untested or mostly false assumptions in social policy decision-making can be catastrophic, or even, as we shall see, murderous.

Utopian and Tragic (or Unconstrained and Constrained) Visions

The typical binary extremes are the Utopian Vision and the Tragic Vision, outlined really well (and pretty fairly) in the incredibly insightful book, A Conflict of Visions (Sowell, 1987).

The Utopian Vision holds an extreme optimist view of human (selfless) potential, meaning a Utopian, communistic, caring society can be attained after sustained ‘good’ education and environment.

On the other hand, the Tragic Vision takes an extreme skeptical view of the possibility of the grand-scale selflessness of people. Here people can be very ‘good’ but are highly diverse-of-view and individual/independent. Organising them happily from the outside is like herding cats unless they see good incentives for doing so. People are intrinsically self-interested and prone to cognitive error and negative emotion, irrespective of attempts to ‘improve’ or ‘service’ them. They respond more to incentives than to abstract ideas of social construction and good intention, despite claiming the latter (see Public Choice Theory where politics has its own incentive system, that is different to the claimed intention of service of the public). A Utopian society is impossible in this scenario, would always collapse unless held by tyranny, and would always prove a costly economic and humanitarian disaster to try.

In the Tragic Vision, since even Utopian leaders will be badly flawed (and worse, not realise it and believe they are doing good to others despite the contrary evidence which their ego ignores), it is better to respect this wonderful/flawed/evil human nature and make people free to pursue their self-interest, limited only by not harming others. A carrot-and-stick criminal legal system (murder is not allowed etc) can be nuanced by civil Common Law where disputes over claims of rights (freedom to vs freedom from) can be adjudicated. For example, is it fair on my neighbour in a free society for me to build an airport in my back garden? Judgements by an independent judiciary are made and then placed into non-binding but influential legal precedent.

Biblical analogies

There is also a Biblical-like difference to the two Visions.

The Tragic Vision is akin to recognising the Old Testament portrayal of humans. There is an intrinsic sinfulness and ego of humankind, while holding to the principle of universal human dignity and intrinsic human value that is highlighted more in the New Testament. These assumptions about human nature might lead to ‘live and let live’ classical liberal social policies, with care for the poor and vulnerable (more voluntary and cultural than mandated where possible). Policies on say, abortion or assisted dying would balance questions of human value and human dignity. Capital punishment may be unpopular (universal dignity – more New Testament) or popular (fair punishment – more Old Testament).

The Utopian Vision meanwhile is akin to re-attaining Prelapsarian Man – an ideal state of human nature before the Fall. While the Garden of Eden was a pre-sinful state, the Utopian Vision seeks to help us back to something like it – a recovery from the lapse, ‘creating’ or ‘reconnecting’ a ‘better’ New Socialist Man (Trotsky 1924, Guevara 1965). Man becomes progressively more ‘good’ and selfless as a result of his/her Utopia-promoting education and environment.

“The Nature of Human Nature”

So your simple belief about ‘the nature of human nature’ or the ‘educability of New Socialist Man’ on this Tragic/Utopian continuum drastically informs your likely Personal Social Vision and the policies you would advocate to get there and maintain it.

Not surprising then that there are passionate, loud and difficult arguments between advocates at opposite ends of the continuum.

The Natural State – Is the Tragic Vision or the Utopian Vision more valid?

In my opinion the empirical evidence for producing a realistic sustainable good society clearly sits far more in favour of operating from the assumptions of the Tragic Vision than the Utopian one. The Tragic Vision has provided and logically will continue to provide better, if uneven, societal improvements over the long arc of history where it continues to apply Enlightenment principles of evidence-based epistemology and individual liberty toward collective and sustainable success, for the following reasons:

Historical empiricism about human nature

• The history of mankind is largely Hobbesian – before the Industrial Revolution lives across the world were usually externally dominated, socially-limited, brutish, nasty and short.
• Tyrannical rule was the norm – the strong owned or killed the weak in Empires from Mongolia to Rome to Aztec. Rules and superstitions were arbitrary. Despite some localised indigenous successes in more isolated areas we find mainly institutional tyranny, murder, conquest, genocide, torture across almost all societies. Some were better protected but even then there was little medicine. Individuals mainly gathered in families and tribes for safety and comfort where possible. Love existed despite the conditions.
• Slavery was universal by almost all powers; global and diverse. Where it worked it was used. Look at the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Where it wasn’t economically viable, we just had murder by victors. Today it is easy to speak from the privilege of comfort and human rights and say slavery is an unalloyed evil, but if your choice on the losing side of battle is immediate torture and death, there is a logic to accepting slavery. Not much of a choice, but progress. Slow, uneven progress.
• Various religions and philosophies advocated some level of human rights around the world, but for ruling powers, the application of restraint was optional, and power was rewarded by providing safety and resources. Progress was still slow and uneven. Magna Carta, Spanish Inquisition, religious witch-burning. Equivalent efforts and horrors occurred often around the world.
• The Reformation, Renaissance and Enlightenment brought the basis for these modern constitutional liberal democracies. Over 17th to 20th centuries the three-legged combination of Greek philosophy; Roman law and property rights; and basic Christian ethics (love thy neighbour; judge ye not; put God/conscience above personal advantage; forgiveness, etc) gradually dragged selfish powers from genocide through monarchical tyranny, slavery and colonialism to a more restrained, democratic, but still very imperfect system, with a heavy footprint left behind – both bad and good in places and throughout. Undoubtedly it spawned economic and livelihood progress and relative wealth and health on a previously unimaginable scale. Despite the early Industrial Revolution workhouses, pollution and working conditions, and some colonial exceptions, economic growth was exponential for most.

The argument for and against the Utopian Vision

The Utopian Vision sounds far more lovely than the limitations accepted by the Tragic Vision. But is it realistic or more moral in practice?

Industrial capitalism and individualism was challenged by theories of Marx, Engels and others. Typically the modern route to the Utopian Vision invokes the Marxist claim that the self-interest incentive of capitalism artificially divides us and drives us against each other. We are bad to each other only because of the selfishness-inducing education and environment that capitalism and individualism has created. With collectivist/communistic education and environment we can remove the selfishness (which Engels called false consciousness), removing the lapse, work better together in a shared way, and attain a more wonderful, sustainable Garden of Eden once again. This set of assumptions about human nature might lead to social policies, for example, towards income and wealth redistribution and State-sponsored ‘collective’ social support.

However, the Socialist and pre-Communist Statist experiments of the Utopian Vision were repeatedly a genocidal civil and economic disaster – Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin in Russia; Hitler and Mussolini in Europe; Mao in China, Pohl Pot in Cambodia, etc.

But why? How does the seductive Utopian Vision of working together fail repeatedly or inevitably?

• Coercive by definition: Socialist principles are naturally more directly coercive. The State confiscates more of the means of production from private associations, as part of a transition to eventual local, communistic democratic ownership. This is not popular with most ‘Kulaks’, creating political opposition, and reduces work and innovation incentives.
• Working together: The Utopians believe ‘working together’ is superior, compared to each person following their own interest. But this a corruption of the concept of individualism. With individual rights naturally comes the right of ‘voluntary association’. Of course, individuals work together effectively! A ‘Company’ in a market economy (which includes both commercial and voluntary organisations) means a group of people coming together and working together in mutual interest. A voluntary activity like a team sports club of course means people work together! Some are world class. Individuals rarely achieve amazing things completely alone. Individualists work together, sometimes brilliantly. Ironically, the Utopian complaint about large-company capitalism implies complaining about people working together too much!
• Central Planning fallacy and the Illusion of Control: People are flawed. So arrogant activists and leaders over-value their ability to understand the world. They think they can plan a whole economy centrally and organise others – against their self-perceived interest – better than the voluntary activity of a distributed, locally-informed, self-interested population with all its dispersed knowledge (called ‘markets’). But the odds are stacked against them. It is far too complicated to manage. Free association can work miracles that central planners cannot see.
• Counter-Productive and Counter-Justice Effects: Acts of so-called Social Justice can be sadly self-deluding and badly misinformed, leading to counter-productive outcomes. The coin of Social Justice is more two-sided than people realise. The other side of Social Justice is Proximate Injustice. Trofim Lysenko’s politically-sponsored Soviet agricultural theories were officially sanctioned but terribly flawed. Those who felt the terrible effects of the State policies, over-reach and error rebelled after their complaints and explanations were frustrated. And were punished brutally for criticising the State narrative. State information control then distorted and stifled vital knowledge generation. People starved. Sound innovation slumped, filled with increasing error and injustice, without the self-correcting mechanism of the market.
• Self-reinforcing cognitive bias and motivated reasoning: Utopian leaders get caught in simplistic closed-loop oppressor/oppressed narratives, sliding quickly from ‘compassion from the vulnerable’ to ‘punching up’, to ‘punching at more and more, believing falsely they are always punching up’. The 20th century ‘collectivist’ experience shows they gradually become incentivised to the self-delusion of justifying direct action, illegal activity and political violence. Even when in power, they still see all opponents as the morally-flawed ones and worthy of destruction, by force if necessary. All criticism of their theories is taken not as honest dissent, but of moral failure of the dissenter, reinforcing the echo chamber.

Ends and Means – the fantasy of the Far Side

Marx never wrote that “the ends justify the means”, but given his willingness to overturn voluntary market activity by revolutionary force if necessary, he might well have done. The problem with this is severe. The Utopia always sits on the far side of the introduction of a coercive and controlling State. This renders the local democratic communist Vision unachievable by definition.

I was behind the Iron Curtain three times over five years before the Berlin Wall came down. It was a disaster relative to human and societal progress in the freer world.

Power corrupts public officials as much as anyone else. Ego blinds public intellectuals to their own flawed mental gymnastics, which cost others heavily, while the Utopians are insulated from the consequences of their policies. Few who have such power bestowed upon them then see themselves as part of the system failure, self-correct or give the power away. They think they are doing good. So good that they can never see their own contributions to failure, or let you have your freedom back. Those controlled rebel, or withhold their discretionary effort, meaning that the mantra “from each according to his abilities, to each according to their needs” descends into, “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us!”. Productivity sinks, then plummets. A failure of the Marxist experiments to understand human nature means that compassion inevitably turns to tyranny, and Man’s inhumanity to man arises again and again.

The peaceful, selfless Utopia can never arrive. Given human nature, we always get stuck in the coercion-and-control transition which creates ever-greater economic and social disaster. Social issues from poverty to climate change get progressively worse, not better.

Scapegoating ‘Capitalism’

The vital observation of the Tragic (or Constrained) Vision is that man’s inhumanity to man is almost ubiquitous throughout history, given power, and across all systems. People can be good and loving, but are at best imperfect and are biased to self-interest. Those who attained power were caught in horrible zero-sum battles, even Marcus Aurelius. Basic Christian and other religious principles and atheist humanism principles dampened and restrained many people’s excesses, but hearts are not always turned completely and consistently. And Marx wanted to destroy even religion, in favour of atheistic State worship (as did Hitler, Mussolini, Mao etc). While Marx saw capitalism and iniquity, and connected the two, capitalism didn’t invent iniquity. Humanity did not need capitalism in order to create oppression – poverty, violence and unfairness had always been always an empirical norm. Enlightenment principles of individual rights and capitalism improved people’s circumstances greatly. Marxism made circumstances worse not better. Economic and even environmental outcomes and inequality prove far worse under socialism than capitalism.

The inescapable conclusion of history is that we need to limit State power, while protecting the genuinely vulnerable. Strong democratic classical liberal institutions (eg independent Legislative, Executive and Judiciary) limit economic power in private hands. There is a key difference between private and public power. While both feel potentially oppressive, in the private sector, in a modern liberal constitution, dominant types are at least distracted from applying arbitrary coercive power on others by these institutions and by continually needing to provide goods and services that people want. This includes environmentally helpful goods and services as citizens care for their children’s and grandchildren’s future.

The Tragic or Constrained analysis doesn’t solve everything, but constantly gives us a set of trade-offs to make the best decisions we can, individually and collectively, in the circumstances we find ourselves.

Finally now in the West we have amazing, if uneven, civil progress since 1964 held together by a subliminal cultural knowledge of all the above. We must not let this go. Individual rights that the State or Monarch may not contravene. Constitutional democratic politics. The peaceful transfer of democratic power after free and fair elections. Equal rights for all under the law. Care for the genuinely vulnerable without creating greater need. Imperfect and uneven? Yes. Hence identity politics. Improvable? Vitally, yes. Are international affairs fraught and arguable, and military action necessary at times to defend our way of life? Yes. But is it all dismantlable in favour of the Utopian vision? Is it all removable, without a return to totalitarianism? No.

And so we need to defend the gains for all our sakes. Those who are seduced by the Utopian Vision or fail to grasp the impact of the permanent fallibility of human nature often become the instruments of failure, while thinking they are making things better and thinking that their virtue signalling is a credit to them. It’s the Rescuer identity in Steven Karpman’s Drama Triangle model.

A Middle Social Vision?

Having dispensed with the Utopian Vision, the question arises – do we need to be completely Tragic? Is there a middle ground? I see two possibilities.

Nordic countries are often cited as realistic hybrids of the two extremes. They are clearly pro-capitalist and pro-business while having high personal taxes and welfare states. I trained in Sweden and studied their world class performance plans and efforts. They were very impressive. High support and high challenge. Those in receipt of welfare are clearly expected to work hard to get back, or to contribute how they can. It’s not handouts, and not open-ended. I believe the conditionality helps. A small, high trust, homogeneous population also helped taxpayers to voluntarily support the system. I would argue they are indeed a hybrid, but more Tragic than Utopian. Realists. More possible in an already high trust society.

The other middle ground is to look to the few provably successful indigenous societies. These can be more collective/Utopian than Tragic. The question is whether these models are as genuinely wholesome as some like to think in terms of individual rights and benefits, whether they can be replicated or resurrected as models, and whether they can scale wealth, or at least be left alone to thrive and connect as they wish without being dominated, because of the small scale requirement. A key potential weakness of the Utopian activist is thinking that something that works at a small scale (eg. family cohesion and sharing of resources – which is already a communist society within Western society) would scale society-wide. Like some businesses, small societies often work well at small scale but not at large scale.

Conclusion

The fact we are having this discussion in a relatively established liberal constitutional democracy, and inviting challenge to it, shows something important. There are currently around 30 such democracies out of 195 countries. 93% of the world’s population live in the 165 countries that don’t offer that privilege. While we do not live in Utopia, by a long way, we must not take this freedom for granted and be architects of our own destruction. In most of the world, such philosophical and political discussions as this, with the established freedom to criticise our own Government and politicians in power, are illegal or are otherwise inhibited by the State. They impose censorship and achieve public self-censoring, but then lack the self-correction mechanisms of honest feedback as a result. This leads to a distorted and limping or negative societal progression with reduced problem-solving abilities which lead to relative disaster.

Perhaps that freedom alone (to have this conversation) tells us something about the importance of individual liberty and evidence-based epistemology in achieving a realistic optimal society in a fallen but wonderful world.

Allowing robust public debate with free expression is therefore unavoidably key, accepting the unfortunate effects of the inevitability of hearing offensive speech, which some may hear more than others. But we deal with these with a ‘dignity mindset and culture’ – ignoring idiots or responding with dignity, proportion and resilience. If enough people do this consistently over time, the population – and our politicians – will learn that offensive behaviour is counter-productive and hurts their cause. In the long run we get the politicians – and the society – we deserve.

That is my explanation of the Natural State of Man, and the realistic optimal society we can hope to achieve as a result of it.

In terms of war deaths, poverty reduction, health outcomes, liberty etc we have been close to our personal best (but still far from our potential) between the fall of Berlin Wall in 1991 and the global financial crash in 2008. The Housing Boom and Bust (Thomas Sowell, 2009) shows how the crash was inadvertently government-created by policy incentives and poor regulatory oversight far more than is sold to us now.

The question I am now asking is whether our current societal benefits and freedoms will last and grow, or prove to be just a very temporary positive blip in a tyrannical and difficult human history. I see a lot of civilisational self-harm currently and do not take my freedoms for granted. I choose to remain Tragically realistically optimistic.

Subscribe to Social Philosophy Analysis – Substack

Like fire, the horse, the car, plane, computer, microwave, manufacturing robot, mobile phone… new tech comes. And it always comes with fear and opportunity.

Fear always went like, “Yeh, but this one is bigger, more swallowing of humans, affecting everyone and everything…”.

This encourages a totalising reaction – all bad, all one-way – accompanied by the desire to ban and control – which has both moral and practical downsides.

But these changes all also come with huge opportunity – if we keep reason and freedom, with sensible governance, and engage positively.

Because human culture on the ground goes at the speed of people (and their inertia – their ability to digest change and resist what they feel is bad change) as well as at the speed of new info, new tech takes years to go from emergent to ubiquity.

What we currently know as AI will do the same – and it will also grow generatively and lead to further new, unimagined, amazing opportunity and fears in a further wave.

But people on average are inherently social – people buy people – and new service industries will grow as some job tasks are done by AI.

Did fire end up killing the economy or growing it? The horse? The car? Etc. We are not finished with each other, and the economy will grow, not shrink.

As ever, we just need to look and think, to offer and provide value to others. Using AI or not.

Life is an adventure. There is no real alternative to that.

Subscribe to Social Philosophy Analysis – Substack

The term Global Majority came up again last week. It was used quite glowingly, and it’s another of those terms that gets easy acceptance, promotion and defence without definition or examination of any serious kind. So let’s have a little go at its strengths and weaknesses.

Today I’ll propose a brief empathy for the receivers of the term, a purpose for inventing the term, an analysis, and a conclusion to help us all.

Empathy

I speak from a majority white country. People have become more race-aware, with truths and falsities abounding – about facts, implications, and attributions about global history and contemporary social impacts.

For some black, brown and indigenous people here, it is undoubtedly a comfort to consider the term Global Majority positively, and ally themselves to it. When you have been, and felt yourself to be, a visible minority, and have experienced poor treatment and/or heard about poor treatment of many others of your ‘look’, then it is natural to feel comfort, safety and kinship in a group of people with similar experiences. For this group to recognise that they are in a majority (globally) when they were previously told by the dominant discourse that they were minorities (because they were in a minority in their country, or the ‘West’) – the thought and feeling of being reminded of ‘I am part of the majority’ feels cool and refreshing. It confers strength, optimism.

For the group to have a name is also natural; for many the term Global Majority is an attractive name that conveys well a sense of being full partners in a society, even if it is a bit of a generality.

All good so far.

Purpose

However, we then come up against the etymology of the term, and it proves to be another child of Applied Critical Theory. It shows the same pattern as several other ‘Critical’ terms and concepts. Now, I love much of what Critical Theory has raised. It heightened awareness of genuine voids in the consciousness of the West with respect to ‘minorities’ particularly, and their experiences, with some sensible (liberal) and less sensible (illiberal, absurd) concepts and recommendations.

I added the word ‘Applied’ to Critical Theory above, to correct what I consider to be a deliberate falsehood. It’s my own term, used over a long period. I know enough of the literature to know that Critical Theory was never invented to stay on a bookshelf; it was ‘activist’ by nature. It was invented to shift, change, transform society – behaviorally and structurally. It’s never just ‘Theory’. I also understand enough to know that the movement uses and builds on postmodern concepts of dissolution to gain entry and power – a key one being the use of malleable language. A Trojan Horse. ‘Critical Theory’ sounds less threatening to prior power bases – ‘Critical Theory for Action’ would have been more accurate, but this is hidden. I get it, but it’s deliberately Machiavellian, not honest. But then, Critical Theory justifies accumulating power to itself, referencing Marx, and including eg Marcuse, 1965, Repressive Tolerance etc invoking power over ‘objective truth’. Beware!

So, what of the Purpose of the precise term, Global Majority? The invention of the term is credited to Rosemary Campbell-Stephens MBE in 2003. Her Applied Critical leadership development work in London looked to reject “Vanilla Meritocracy”; decolonize mindsets like BAME or ‘ethnic minority’; promote a sense of global authority in non-white populations; and decolonize Western values through ‘equity’.

For decent people this leads to two sides. One is to recognise Rosemary’s righteous calls for change of clear unfair perceptions and practices. The other is to recognise the sensible limits of system change, beyond which things get counter-productive for us all – black, brown and white. Too anti-Western and we are in the same mould as pre-Soviet, Nazi or Maoist calls to action, where the sympaths unwittingly enabled authoritarian power ‘for compassion and equality’. Those in power then jettisoned the enablers and this led to tens of millions of their own people killed – again and again through the 20th century.

Play with communistic ideals at your peril.

So, as per Critical Theory (which always = Applied Critical Theory!), the term Global Majority was coined to achieve practical, systemic, power-shifting ends, not just help a deserving group of people to feel good and improve things locally.

Analysis

We need to find the helpful middle ground.

Unfortunately for the vast majority of the world’s population, there are only 31 Liberal Democracies with functioning individual liberty and democracy for all, in a world of 195 nations (V-Dem; Economist Intelligence Unit). This is often called the ‘West’ with all its strengths and flaws.

The remaining 93% of the global population live in partial or full totalitarian states. Is that what the 7% should want for themselves? An inevitable question is, if we take the Global Majority founder’s words at face value and promote ‘a sense of global authority in non-white populations’, does that imply we in the West will almost immediately become totalitarian, as ‘authority’ and understandings of constitutional politics and power play out and average out internationally? What then enshrines, protects and promotes the freedoms that ‘ethnic minorities’ have and prefer in the West, alongside the difficulties? Yet following Critical Theory takes us to that place, whether we like to think so or not.

Now, if one argues there is no real liberty for ‘minorities’ in the West, then yes, let’s pull it down and average ourselves out in constitutional terms, globally. But I don’t think the majority of whites, blacks, browns or indigenous people in the West believe that or want that. There is indeed a choice to be made and to stand against Critical approaches where they lead to Marxism, while discovering and applying ways to improve.

Then if we strip back and spotlight the actual term Global Majority, what does it actually mean? I see the following issues:

1. Unfortunately, and ironically, it only makes sense if it defines itself in terms of whiteness. If we split peoples’ melanin any further we end up with many groups of people defined by various shades of melanin. So it clearly means ‘those who are non-white, all together’. Once again, someone trying to de-centre whiteness creates a term that is based on whiteness, and it is also easily appropriated politically as anti-white rather than pro-anything.
2. Once we split melanin or cultural types any further, these sub-groups often have little in common. Apart from being non-white, What does a Peruvian have in common with a Japanese? Are Kazakh women and Kenyan men closer in any cultural or kinship sense than my black mates and I? What is this Global Majority in any other sense than non-white? There is no common ground other than humanity itself, in which case you can then either include whites, or exclude and separate them under some criteria. I would not recommend the morals of that generalisation. We know how tribal people can be and should not encourage such splits.The Berlin Wall showed that people want plenty of individualism and freedom, not the disaster of forced-equality collectivism or tribal conflict. I saw behind the Iron Curtain three times and it was no joke – even or especially for the people it claimed to help the most. This direction would be a disaster for the West to choose.

Conclusion:

We should improve the West, yes, but not tear it down.

The term Global Majority was a signal to two groups of people at the same time:

a) well-meaning, empathetic folk for whom this feels obviously an exciting, affirming, helpful term; and at times indeed it can be;

b) committed activists who understand from Marx and some postmodernist-informed critical leaders that such concepts and terms provide ability (and cover) to gain more authoritarian power for themselves than group (a) or the rest of the population realise – by stealth, and with just enough truth in its words to gain acceptance and support.

Unfortunately, some empathetic folk and Applied Critical Theorists then add to the power game by applying ‘cancel culture’ power. Anyone opposing or even questioning any Critical approaches is a bad person, right? Such is the ‘totalising’, self-reinforcing, excluding element of Critical Theory. It’s a serious shadow side.

At the same time, some people of colour can say they lived a life of cancel culture or self-censoring! We want to improve that, and in some decades we really did. But it seems now we may be risking facing the worst of both worlds.

So, do good, empathise, support more vulnerable people, improve systems, but be vigilant to those who would co-opt you for more authoritarian, ambitious purposes.

What’s in a name, eh?

Subscribe to Social Philosophy Analysis – Substack

Yesterday I was asked for my views on Proportional Representation for the UK.

I’ve been thinking about this question and observing the world through this question for decades since back when I studied The British Constitution in A-level Economics & Social Affairs.

PR seems only fair, right? Well, no. There is a short answer (“it’s a very bad idea”), but it depends of course on one’s premises. Here is my premise and analysis.

For almost all of human history, life was for most, as Hobbes would say, “nasty, brutish and short”. This is true across almost all civilisations. Some civilisations managed to do a little better, but still contained terrible processes and outcomes. Even in good pockets without constant civil war or boundary wars, medicine was unavailable in any sense we now know it, slavery and butchery were not uncommon, and freedom to think and act were very limited.

Over a long timeline, human history has largely dragged itself from tyrannical despotism and murder, to slavery, to colonialism, to communism, and to liberal democracy (at least in 31 of the 195 countries – often called “The West”).

Now that’s called progress – but you have to admit it has been very slow, and with long periods (often centuries) of downs as well as ups. In terms of current lifespans there is no reason to be complacent and say that we will make further progress in terms of prosperity, security and freedom. Communism descended within a decade in several places. And I see many signs that we could easily go backwards quickly. We have to understand societal ‘freedom’ and nurture it, in order to survive without a return to authoritarian or even totalitarian society. That would be a blind tragedy.

The answers as to whether the West will maintain and improve in prosperity, security and freedom lie in the field of Constitutional Politics. And the PR question resides within this. In the UK there is a British Constitution, but it is not written in one document. It is inferred, existing in several places and documents, understood by Parliament and the wider culture in an implied way and across a social contract.

British culture is currently often sold by Government as a combination of, and balance between Individual Liberty, Rule of Law, Mutual Respect and Tolerance, and Democracy. In the US, the Declaration of Independence set the scene for the US Constitution, which I regard as inspired, giving human beings inalienable rights from God that the State cannot take away. The sentiment is “God before State”, so that people cannot gather into tribes and dominate individuals as this would override God’s provision of human life and human agency. We could discuss this separately.

This is where Constitutional Politics is important – it is ‘how we agree the rules of the political game’, not the ‘partisan policy’ part of politics, though these overlap over time.

Now, if the social contract falls apart, then we have civil war, but before then we have a collapse of the Constitutional element of politics, replaced by raw power politics itself after respect for the Constitution is lost. This can happen even in a democracy if voters support anti-Constitutional policies. I could put a case that the current British Constitution perpetuates unfair privilege to a top 1%; I could also argue conversely that the purpose of the Fabian Society (look it up, and see its historical policies – members include every Labour Prime Minister in history, plus Reeves, Cooper, Miliband, Lammy, plus George Bernard Shaw and others) is to redefine British Values in such a collectivist way and through such a left-wing lens as to destroy the Values in a way millions of moderates would be surprised about, despite Orwell’s writings highlighting his opposition to Fabian philosophy.

So…to our voting system. It’s ‘First-Past-The-Post’. In each local Parliamentary Constituency, the prospective MP with most votes is elected to the House of Commons, and the leader of the Party with most seats becomes Prime Minister. A majority (currently 326 of a 650-seat chamber) of MPs’ votes is enough to create new Laws, with the House of Lords a temporarily tempering entity.

The effect of our local Constituency voting system has traditionally led to a “Two-Party System”. We see it often that in by-elections there are calls for mergers or non-competition between similar parties to gain a seat. Small parties cannot win enough seats in the House of Commons, so they gang together before elections. The two parties therefore become ‘broader churches’ containing left-and-right within each party, to the extent it can without splitting again.

This is good. The reason is that it keeps out extremes (by which I mean far from the average) parties of both right and left – they cannot win enough seats without merging with a more moderate party, who dominate and curtail them. It also creates acceptable compromises and allyships – “Jaw-Jaw is better than War-War” for the greater prize of moderated power. And parties need to stay moderate enough to attract the marginal voter. Then the next election within five years means the governing party has to listen enough to the voters to win power again next time. In a way, it is genius.

It doesn’t work perfectly, Devolution has weakened it, and it means there are a lot of voters in local ‘safe seat’ areas which means their vote is ex-ante very unlikely to get them what they want, but this is more fluid over time than people realise. Safe is proven not to be safe forever. A further cost of this system for those who dislike confrontation or unfair criticism is the unpalatable end of ‘free speech’, where people can say whatever they like in the public square, provided it does not incite violence (details in Brandenburg principles in USA – and greater limitations in UK related to offensive language, some of which I reluctantly disagree with). Racism will inevitably be an issue in any society and we can discuss separately how to deal with ‘free speech vs harm speech’.

We do not live in Utopia, so to have achieved politics as ‘war without the fighting’ in the above way is actually a tremendous achievement which has evolved over hundreds of years, and exported throughout the democratic West.

So why not PR? Every vote counts, and the House of Commons then comprises a representative sample of votes. Nice? Fair? But this will be a multi-party chamber with lots of small parties represented. Not only will some be extremists, possibly on both/many wings, and with a more equal voice to others despite their relative unpopularity, but somehow Laws need to be proposed and passed, and that requires a majority coalition – either temporary or permanent. The horse-trading required to achieve a majority coalition is heavily bureaucratic, with concessions made everywhere. With apologies to those who know the value of camels, they say, “A camel is a horse built by a committee”. And with justification. We end up with camel-shaped laws, incoherent sets of laws based on different coalitions at different moments, and often no agreement, and hence no new law where one is needed. Worse, the extremists often hold the ‘balance of power’ in coalition-building, giving them outsize influence over the large majority of moderates.

Technically the choice can be seen as whether the horse-trading and coalition-building happens before the election (so at least you know what you are voting for), or after (when you have little idea how all the political dynamics will work and flip and keep flipping). I know which of these two imperfect options I would prefer.

So no, I think PR would be a disaster.

It is natural to complain and want a perfect system, and a conservative response would be to say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, plus “Who knows what you unleash if you change it?”. Left-leaners are typically more emotionally open to change, but sometimes do not think through, or want to think through, the potential unforeseen negative consequences. Lots of bad things can happen when you pull down Chesterton’s fence (the seemingly old, unowned, unnecessary one).

Assuming our Judeo-Christian underpinnings survive, and we survive as a nation, we see the positives of how it works currently, and we see the peaceful and orderly handover of power at election time. I am every time in awe of seeing a political party lose a general election and the Prime Minister put their chattels into a removals van, making space and way for their opponent leader with more Commons seats to take over within hours, having seen the Constitutional Monarch for permission (which is always granted). We know who is now in charge, with the most seats (usually but even if not always quite the most votes relatively) and we can vote again next time, unless the Party transgresses Constitutional Politics and tears at wider long-term democracy itself.

But if our social contract tears, and a belief in peaceful argument tears, people cease to believe in old documents, unwritten constitutions or each others’ goodwill, and the game shifts from ‘war without the physical force’ to political violence. That is the end of what we have enjoyed, black, white, rich, poor, disabled and all. And then we are back to Hobbes and civil war, where vulnerable groups really do worse on a much more fundamental scale. I want to avoid that for everyone’s sake.

Moving from intense verbal argument (good, given an imperfect world of passionate differences and visions) to political violence (bad) is the much greater and real risk than playing with voting systems. And no, PR does not help and it would make things far worse. That is why the electorate voted 2 to 1 against Alternative Vote in 2011, and all this is why a new Government of the day would be immoral to force it past the existing Constitution with a Parliamentary majority in coming years.

A lot has been said in the last week about the tragic, deadly confrontation between protestors and ICE in Minnesota.

For ‘liberal democracy’ to survive, democratically-elected Governments must be able to carry out law enforcement unobstructed. The social contract is not pacifist. Citizens do not always realise that the potential for righteous violence is something we agree on. It’s just that we agree citizens may not use violence to enforce the law, only to act in self-defence (minimum, reasonable, necessary). We agree to contract that physical enforcement/violence out to our democratically-elected Government as a ‘monopoly of violence’ over us – the State providing the necessary minimum violence or physical force to enforce law and order. In most cases such disputes end in zero violence, but yes, the threat is there (eg prison for not paying fines; injury during rioting etc).

The other part of the social contract is that we can protest against bad laws or bad implementation of laws. We can do this within the law, or illegally if we are willing to be arrested, tried and put in prison if necessary, ie to face the physical force of the law. We do it to get noticed, and voter awareness is increased in time for the next election, at least.

If co-ordinated obstruction efforts prevent ICE’s ability to operate, for example, we can simply expect the penalties for obstruction to be exponentially increased to reassert formal authority. This would be a sad loss of individual freedoms across society and therefore unwise, despite the urge to do so. The obstructors would be strategically responsible for this narrowing of individual freedoms on us all.

Barack Obama deported 3 million illegal immigrants.

But a problem remains that is linked to racism.

Law enforcement in liberal democracies is historically racially asymmetric despite the actual and theoretical freedoms of ‘classical liberalism’, and some marginalised groups still trust the law less. Recent anti-racism efforts may have reduced this, at the cost of ‘two-tier’ or ‘reverse racism’, leading to a reduction – but nowhere near elimination – of racism in the traditional directions, but now with more discrimination and unfairness to individuals happening in more directions.

This is a problem solved only by two things together.

a) ‘Freedom’: a widely-held cultural belief in ‘freedom’ that leads to the establishment and maintenance of a constitutional democracy; and

b) ‘Responsibility’: a cultural belief in using that freedom wisely, ie with a constant downward pressure on unfairness including conscious racism. Majority rule is not enough – the vulnerable need protections.

Without both of these together, we may not deserve – or get or keep – our desired constitutional, liberal, open democracy.

So a continuation of racism is not acceptable. However, as a cultural phenomenon, a State cannot achieve non-racism quickly even with formal power, and it takes long effort to keep reducing it. Anti-racism initiatives (with Kendi’s ‘discrimination in the present’) can create other injustices and induce some new and greater divides in other directions. We just have to keep calling racism out so that the unfairness is recognised and the cost is reputational to the speaker. This largely works, even if we are frustrated and impatient. Statistically, very few people even want to use particular racial words in the UK. That shows something significant at least.

Even here we need to be careful – if we exaggerate accusations of racism, then there will rightly be a loss of reputation to the accuser. So the only way is to stay proportionate and steadfast, however annoying this temperance may feel.

And here below is an example from a commentator with a lot of followers. Even with sympathy for ICE to do its job; even with sympathy for deporting illegal immigrants; even with an attitude of ‘family’ before ‘criminal strangers’; even then there is this reference to such people being ‘brown’. So what if they are white, brown or other descriptor? 42% of Americans are non-white. The point is whether immigrants follow the country’s laws, and support a free society with personal responsibility, not what level of melanin they possess.

This kind of commentary below, with its casual racism inserted into the narrative, should be called out louder by moderate conservatives who want to retain their liberal democracy. Research shows moderate conservatives tend to be quieter than left-wing voices on social media, but need to speak up to be seen as decent and not ‘far right’ but just ‘right of centre’. If not, we end up with democratic power in the hands of those who have given up on ‘classical liberals’ and ‘liberal democrats’ in favour of illiberal societal organisation – and we know where that leads

Subscribe to Social Philosophy Analysis – Substack

Marcus Watkins at Substack’s Free Black Thought comments well on the large number of casual racist comments among US Young Conservatives chat groups. He’s right, and Vice-President Vance’s brushing it off is insufficient.

Well said, Marcus. Also…despite the terms used, free speech does its job here. If the Conservative/Republican movement fail to grasp the two-fold nature of freedom –

1. Freedom of expression as the only way to ensure freedom of conscience (and create ideological error correction over time through the debris of hot debate), and

2. Self-restraint to show trustworthiness and a desire for common humanity,

– then they will lose the next election once again, and deserve to. In my opinion both Dems and Cons have repeatedly failed to do these two things for some time. Discipline imposed without freedom is State tyranny. Freedom without demonstrable self-restraint is Private tyranny. There is no perfect politics, perfect people, or perfect systems, but either party can prevail electorally simply by bringing out a support for individual freedom along with demonstrable self-restraint that shows humanity for the whole electorate.

After a long period of polarization, “Love thy neighbour” might be a simple and effective mantra for 2028.

Read Marcus here…

https://substack.com/home/post/p-176770768?source=queue

Subscribe to Social Philosophy Analysis – Substack

Each country needs a national constitution that protects a) democracy, so one side can’t monopolise forever, and b) you, when the other side is in power.

This constitution outlives us and our egos.

Because so many laws and delegated powers have grown up since the 90s that have shifted power away from the voters, I sense the UK needs the populous (a large enough body that is representative of the British and Northern Irish people and therefore vastly outnumbers the extremists of left and right) to re-clarify our Constitution.

Think through then…what should it therefore contain, and what’s your own role in maintaining this ethos culturally over centuries, beyond the flimsy initial paper it is written on?

In the UK the group most likely to face hate crimes are Jews, by a factor of 3 per capita over the next group.

They are also only 0.5% of the British population.

We need robust free speech (not incitement to immediate or direct material harm) to avoid a) government censoring opposition voices (your government of your choice may be out of power next year so it needs to apply above party politics by consistent demand of the public), and b) because truth emerges from the debris of contested narratives, eventually.

Therefore this commitment to free speech (and hence learning) is the true progressivism. Government censorship or two-tier approaches are regressive as it restricts societal learning, not just speech.

There is no place for political or terrorist violence in UK democracy.

So I support the right of protestors to protest today in London and Manchester (subject to incitement as above), but condemn their lack of decency and respect at this particular moment. They do their cause no favours.

To maintain liberal democracy…

The question before us is not “What do you or I think is intolerant, and let’s apply laws to that?” – as we will all have our individual subjective views. The question is “Who decides what is tolerant or intolerant?”

And the answer must be Parliament. And specific laws. The Public Order Act 1986 and its further interpretations are far too vague. Vague law gives power to proximate political activists and their narrow-context ideas influencing the judiciary. This means free speech is already lost as no-one knows how they will be judged for anything – especially as we have made potentially criminal ‘anything that someone said that might cause a theoretical third party offence and distress’. What cannot meet this criterion?

So, a liberal society needs to be intolerant to the point that it needs to protect its liberalism from vague law and from importing illiberalism; equally it must, by resolve and vigilance in us all, maintain a constant battle to support itself through democratic means and insistence. We need to educate each other about the importance of free speech (within explicit defined legal limits eg defamation, harassment, fraud, libel/slander, genuine incitement etc) and ensure political parties that do not hold to this never get elected by popular vote.

The battle for freedom in society is a vital but never-ending one, as both left and right will only see the intolerance in the other; never in themselves – and then either side may enact laws and cultures of oppression of the other, not recognising they’ve destroyed freedom in general, in so doing.

Be a radical moderate!

That’s why its essential to seek out the views of your opponents”.

Yes. In the social sciences truth often emerges gradually and unevenly over time from the rough contact of opposition.

Passion and certainty usually sit on false assumptions and false morality.

And it’s why we need Voltaire’s attitude of, “I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” – limited by our traditions of proscribing harassment, fraud, slander, libel, defamation, incitement, of demanding mutual respect in the workplace, and of respecting the partial truth of the risk of ‘epistemic violence’ that perpetuates dominant power narratives at the expense of the more vulnerable.

It’s a mix, which won’t get me a lot of likes from the partisan politics of either side, but is how a lot of progress occurs in the end while pendulums swing around.

However without free speech (with its limits as above), the pendulum will inevitably stop at a totalitarian extreme.

So defend free speech and do as Gurwinder suggests even though it’s effortful and painful.