Tuesday, 9 June 2020

The Left-Right Divide and Some More Thoughts About Group Selection

A number of different ideas have occupied my mind the last few days; in tonight's post I want to share a few of them. I wish to say something about the Left-Right political continuum here in New Zealand as opposed to the Left-Right political divide in the United States. I wish to talk about the activist impulse in general. And finally I wish to say something about the debate between kin selectionists and group selectionists in evolutionary biology as it pertains to racism. Incredibly these disparate topics all segue neatly into each other, as hopefully you'll see.

A couple of posts ago, I wrote one partly talking about Jacinda Ardern's rise to the position of Prime Minister of New Zealand called "Concerning Jacinda and Julian". In that post, I said that there are five parties currently represented in the New Zealand Parliament and that, from Right to Left, they are the ACT Party, the National Party, New Zealand First, the Labour Party, and the Greens. This may have sowed confusion in the minds of my American readers who understand the terms Right and Left differently to New Zealanders. It may, perhaps, have suggested that the ACT party, being on the far Right end of the political spectrum here, is a bunch of neo-nazis. This would be completely untrue. The ACT Party is a libertarian party. There is potential for language confusion here – 'libertarians' are different from 'liberals' (although they have a lot in common with 'neoliberals') – so we need to be careful how we define our terms. According to Wikipedia, a distinction can be drawn between right-libertarianism and left-libertarianism, and if we do draw this distinction, we can say that the ACT Party is in the right-libertarian camp, as are most of the people in the US who call themselves libertarians. To be precise, libertarians in New Zealand and in the US support maximal individual freedom, insist on private property rights, and strongly advocate for laissez-faire capitalism. Libertarians both here and in America love Ayn Rand. They are likely to be secular, if not atheists. In New Zealand, the political spectrum charts a movement from a desire for the smallest possible government to a desire for much bigger government, from the ACT Party to the Greens; but just as the ACT Party, although at the far Right end of the idealogical continuum, can hardly be described as fascist, the Greens, even though they have since their inception been to the Left of the Labour Party, can hardly be called communist. I am not privy to the inner workings of the Green Party but I understand that there is occasionally consideration given within it to the idea of putting their social and economic policies on the back burner so that they can focus on environmental issues, the party's core concern, a move which might enable them to work with the National Party as well as the Labour Party. On a whole, the political parties in New Zealand have more commonalities than differences.

The debate between the political parties is a debate about the size of government and the scope of the welfare state. Every three years, it seems, the National Party campaigns on the promise of lowering taxes and slashing benefits. The Labour Party campaigns on issues such as raising the minimum wage. At the last election, the issue of particular concern for me was a promise by the Labour Party that they would mount an enquiry into the Mental Health System if they won. They won, the enquiry came and went and, as far as I can tell, nothing changed. Another issue they campaigned on was the possible introduction of a new tax, a capital gains tax, a tax existing in many other countries around the world including, I understand, the US. I agreed with introducing this new tax but a move so progressive was seen as a step too far for Labour's coalition partner, New Zealand First, who scuppered it. On a whole, New Zealand's political parties scrap about economic and social issues, rather than cultural issues. When legislation affecting culture comes up, it is usually dealt with by a 'conscience vote' – on such issues, MPs don't vote along party lines but according to their own personal convictions. For instance, at the final reading of the Marriage Amendment Bill in 2013, 30 of the 59 sitting National Party MPs voted for it (as well as 30 of the 33 Labour Party MPS and every other MP in Parliament except the 8 New Zealand First MPs). After the Christchurch mosque shootings last year, every MP except the solitary ACT MP voted to ban semiautomatic weapons and assault rifles. Last year, David Seymour, the ACT leader and MP, introduced a voluntary euthanasia bill that will go to referendum at the election later this year; once again it was a conscience vote. (I have been unable to find a breakdown of who voted for it on the Internet.) The difference between New Zealand and the United States couldn't be more stark. Since Nixon, US elections have all been fought about cultural issues rather than economic ones. The Republicans are pro-life; the Democrats are pro-choice. The Republicans want to protect the Second Amendment; the Democrats want to take your guns. The Republicans want to keep Terry Schiavo alive; the heartless Democrats want to kill her. Part of the reason for the difference between New Zealand and the US is that New Zealanders are overwhelmingly secular while religion in the US has become ever-increasingly politicised. Another difference is that New Zealand political parties, in American terms, are simply different shades of Democrat.

I myself am a Lefty, a supporter of the Green Party. Although I have never been a demonstrative activist, I have for a long time felt very strongly about international issues. I opposed the Iraq invasion from the moment the American government first mooted it. (The New Zealand Herald gets a lot of its international news from The Guardian and so I was never swept up by jingoism of the American media.) I have believed in global warming for well over fifteen years. When I was young, I thought capitalism was unsustainable and dabbled in versions of Marxism. A part of my youthful passion for environmental and socialist causes was a reaction against the politics of my father, a kind of neoliberal who loves Ayn Rand and who has now been captured by the Republican Party. For the last fortnight, we have seen daily protests, in the US and around the world, sparked by the murder by a white policeman of the unarmed black man George Floyd. These protests are largely being carried our by young lefty activists, like I used to be (and perhaps still am to some extent). It is difficult to form a coherent picture of what is going on. Some, like Bret Weinstein, focus on the rioters and looting, on Antifa. Other media outlets present the demonstrations as almost universally peaceful. Some news sites present pictures of police brutality while others choose to broadcast scenes of police officers taking a knee or joining the protests. The George Floyd demonstrations show how easily the same world can be represented in multiple different ways depending on the preexisting prejudices of the people reporting on it, how the same data can be made to fit different narratives. Now more than ever we can see how every person seems to live in a different world.

All of this is happening while I am reading Steven Pinker's book Enlightenment Now. In this treatise, Pinker argues that, as the result of three centuries of progress, humankind is manifestly better off than it used to be, that the world is continuously improving. This raises the question: Why be an activist? To be an activist presupposes that the world is imperfect, that it has serious problems that need to be addressed. When I look back on my youth, I must admit that I was privileged. I never endured hunger, was never the victim of any kind of prejudice, never suffered any kind of injustice. When I was a kid I often enjoyed international travel with my family. What did I have to complain about personally? Not much. Many of the people who are protesting today, likewise, have little personal reason to complain. They have enough to eat, cell phones, access to the internet, and so on and so forth. This is not to say that some protestors have not experienced either overt or implicit racism. Nor is it to fully endorse Pinker's rosy view of the world – he might be wrong. But it seems to me that the activist impulse among young people has origins other than personal oppression. It may be partly an expression of youthful rebellion against the rules laid down by one's parents. It may be that young people project personal dissatisfaction onto 'the system' as a whole. I have more reason to be an activist now. I feel driven to expose the corruption and insanity of the psychiatric profession, a group which has always done more harm than good to people. But when I was young I had no need to gripe.

The George Floyd protests are about racism, about systemic racism and the racism of some police officers. Some protestors have been making the blanket statement that all cops are racist. An issue the protests raise, although hardly a new issue, is this: Is racism natural? Are human beings born hardwired to be racist? If we accept the ideas that underlie the kin selection or inclusive fitness model of evolution, we might be forced to answer 'yes'. This model presumes that we are designed by natural selection to favour close kin and to discriminate against people more distantly related to us. I am a Caucasian (this argument goes) and so I am more likely to cooperate with and behave altruistically towards other Caucasians and discriminate against people of African or Asian descent. We are hardwired to favour people who look like us, because they are more likely to be related to us. I discussed some problems with the inclusive fitness model in the post "Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong: Group Selection vs Inclusive Fitness". But there is another problem with it, one that I didn't mention in that post, which I'll outline now.

How do I know if someone is my part of my extended family? Is it simply because the other person resembles me? This would be ridiculous. I am myopic and wear glasses – but this does not mean that I go out of my way to help other short-sighted bespectacled people. A person with blue eyes does not make a rule of behaving altruistically towards other people with blue eyes and discriminating against people with hazel eyes. Gingas don't discriminate against blonds. It seems that when we form social groups slight cosmetic differences don't matter – what matters is proximity. The people we grow up with and make friends with later in life belong to our tribe, no matter the slight differences between us. Someone might have more melanin in his skin than me, and frizzier hair, but he can still be part of my tribe and I of his.

To endorse the group selection hypothesis over the inclusive fitness hypothesis is to suggest that humans are evolutionarily predisposed to forming and working together in groups even if members of a particular group are not closely related. A great example that demonstrates how groups police their boundaries is the way the word  'shibboleth' came to take on its current meaning. 'Shibboleth' in Hebrew literally meant 'ear of corn'; different pronunciations of this word enabled the ancient Jews to distinguish between the Gileadites and the Ephraimites. (A fuller account of the word 'shibboleth' can be found in Wikipedia.) There are other examples. In his essay "What Bret Weinstein Gets Wrong About Group Selection" (which can be found on the Internet under this title), David Sloan Wilson argues that very early Christian communities crystallised around different Gospels. During the Troubles and since, the Northern Irish have discriminated between Protestants and Catholics, Us and Them, often on the basis of accent. A contemporary shibboleth during the Covid 19 Pandemic is mask wearing: Democrats wear them and Republicans don't. It seems that conscious or unconscious adherence to specific rules determines which group or groups a person belongs to, rather than blood relation.

I can draw on examples from my own life. At High School, the teachers often attempted to impart a sense of pride in the institution to the students, in my case unsuccessfully. This pride was a kind of group allegiance. In 1998 and 1999, I lived at a Hall of Residence in Dunedin, Knox College; at the beginning of each year the second year students would subject the first year students to a series of demeaning initiatory rituals, simultaneously fun and humiliating, such as waking the new students at five in the morning, crowding them into the dining hall and forcing them there to drink cheap champagne. These initiation rites served to foster a strong bond between Knox College residents. It was a little atavistic (initiation rites have always been a part of primitive cultures). In 2006 and 2007 I lived at the Big House, as I've said before. Among my twenty flatmates were two Maori, a Dutch girl, a French girl, several Germans. and a Chinese girl. The only thing we all had in common was the House itself. (For some idea of what it was like to live there, I recommend a story I have published in this blog, "Starlight".) The Big House's address is 42 St George's Bay Road and I have often wondered if some kind of karma or destiny brought me there because 42, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is the Answer to the Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

I strongly believe racism is a learned behaviour, that it not natural. After what happened in Charlottesville in 2017, Barack Obama tweeted a quote from Nelson Mandela: "No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin or his background or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love. For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite." A similar sentiment is expressed in the song "You've got to be carefully taught." from the 1949 musical South Pacific, viewable on Youtube. Actually, there is some scientific research that supports this idea, that racism is learnt. If a person has people of other races in her immediate circle when she is growing up and when she has become an adult, she is much less likely to become racist. Although I am unable to provide a link, some years go I came across some research indicating that rural Americans, growing up in overwhelmingly white communities, were more likely to be racist than white urbanites who were exposed daily to people of other ethnicities. It seems that it is harder to become racist if you see black, brown, and Asian people everyday. This strongly militates against the idea that racism is something natural or genetic.

Having said all this, however, here is an aspect of the debate about racism that I cannot avoid mentioning. In this blog, I have a couple of times suggested that the only difference between whites and blacks is some small cosmetic differences, such as skin colour. Many people disagree. If there is this superficial difference, they say, there must also be other differences. One possible difference is in terms of IQ, a hugely controversial idea. Personally, I don't believe that intelligence is genetic, that one race is smarter than another. But I have to mention this possibility because it would be wrong not to – good liberals need to come up with good arguments to refute people like Charles Murray, who advanced this view, rather than simply asserting without evidence that he is wrong or ignoring his argument altogether. One possible argument would be to point out that there is far more intelligence variation within a race than between races. I believe there are other arguments, such as the hypothesis that intelligence is the result of nurture, not nature, but I won't go into them here. Suffice it to say that I want to assert that it is wrong to divide the world up into racial categories but, just because I want to believe something true, doesn't make it true.

I began this post by talking about the difference between New Zealand and America with respect to politics. I'll finish the post by talking about another significant difference. I don't own a gun and don't know a single person who does. Guns aren't illegal here in New Zealand but the only people who own them are rural folk who use them for hunting or shooting rabbits. New Zealand doesn't have the American disease of people keeping guns by their beds because they are terrified of a home invasion. Not only is the citizenry in New Zealand mostly unarmed, the police are mostly unarmed. The only exception is the Armed Offenders Squad. In the wake of the Christchurch mosque attack, the Government trialled arming ordinary police in some locations, but in the last few days, they have decided not to make arming the police a policy in the future. The proposed move was deemed antithetical to New Zealand's culture. I would like to make the following modest recommendation: if New Zealand can survive and prosper without significant possession of guns by the citizenry and police, perhaps American could reconsider their blind devotion to the Second Amendment? Just saying.

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