ancestrally, if you had no coalition you were nakedly at the mercy of everyone else, so the instinct to belong to a coalition has urgency, preexisting and superseding any policy-driven basis for membership. This is why group beliefs are free to be so weird. Since coalitional programs evolved to promote the self-interest of the coalition’s membership (in dominance, status, legitimacy, resources, moral force, etc.), even coalitions whose organizing ideology originates (ostensibly) to promote human welfare often slide into the most extreme forms of oppression, in complete contradiction to the putative values of the group.
.. . .Forming coalitions around scientific or factual questions is disastrous, because it pits our urge for scientific truth-seeking against the nearly insuperable human appetite to be a good coalition member. Once scientific propositions are moralized, the scientific process is wounded, often fatally. No one is behaving either ethically or scientifically who does not make the best case possible for rival theories with which one disagrees.
My thoughts:
Suppose that we can be either politically combative or scientifically neutral. If we are political, our tactics are intended to discredit the other team. If we were scientifically neutral, we would try to give as much credit as possible to all sides.
One might hope that, given a set of issues, over time we would expand the subset that we approach from a scientifically neutral point of view. Instead, we seem to be expanding the subset about which we are politically combative (scientists against science). This seems particularly true in academia, and I agree with Tooby that it is “disastrous.”
Tooby and Leda Cosmides wrote,
Hate is (1) generated by cues that the existence and presence of individuals or groups stably imposes costs substantially greater than the benefits they generate, and (2) is upregulated or downregulated by cues of relative power (formidability), and by cues signaling the degree to which one’s social network is aligned in this valuation. (It is also worth investigating whether, as seems likely, there is a special emotion mode “rage” designed for combat, which orchestrates combat adaptations along with murderous motivational processes.)
. . .anger is an evolved regulatory program designed to orchestrate the deployment of these tools in order to cost-effectively bargain for better treatment and to resolve conflicts of interest in favor of the angry individual.
. . .Acts or signals of anger communicate that, unless the target sufficiently increases the weight it places on the angry individual’s welfare, the actor will inflict costs on, or withdraw benefits from, the target.
. . .stronger men feel more entitled, anger more easily, prevail more in conflicts of interest, and more strongly approve of war as a means of settling disputes
. . .Once alliances enter the social world, and individuals are no longer social atoms, individual formidability no longer necessarily generates outcomes, and linear dominance hierarchies are no longer necessarily the overriding social dinlension.
. . .For successful behavioral coordination to occur, agents must (1) converge on a common representation of a situation, (2) converge on similar (or compatible) regulatory variable weights relevant to the situation, (3) recognize the convergence, and (4) converge implicitly or explicitly on a cooperative response.
. . .the most reliable facilitator for higher-level coalitions is external conflict with a large competing coalition – something repeatedly found in the historical record. The prospect of large gains or huge losses through displacement, expropriation, subordination, or extermination is one of the few reliable signals that the formation of large-scale coalitions would be worthwhile.
. . .People like status increases for themselves and their friends and allies, and status reductions in their status rivals. They respond to the prospect of alternative courses of action in part by their status consequences. They engage in status operations, designed to increase status of themselves or their allies, or reduce status in others.
. . .the surface contents of moralities often function merely as coalitional coordinative signals rather than as doctrines selected for their intrinsic attractiveness (e.g., the doctrine of predestination). Often moral contents are selected in order to signal the emergence of a new coalition, or to morally legitimize attacks on rivals based on pretexts arising from the surface properties of the rivals’ moralities. Indeed, people often support moral projects not because they hold any intrinsic attraction but because of their downstream effects on rivals – for example, reducing the their status or weakening their social power.
To play the attribution game, one manufactures representations that promote mental coordination on the interpretation that one’s status rivals are at fault – are indeed fitness suppressors of the community at large. This serves as a triggering coordinative signal for those who want to take action against the blamed – that is, it triggers outrage (Toobv Cosinides, and Price 2006). The blameworthy are picked by an emerging power-based consensus. If an attack on rivals is framed as punishment for a moral transgression that injured the encompassing community, then it disarms defenders of the target of the attack.
My thoughts: “De-fund the police” is a slogan intended to morally disarm the police and those who would defend them.
A reader also recommends this John Tooby video. At some point I may watch the whole thing, but Tooby’s verbal mannerisms are quite annoying. But I did note his offhand remark that outrage plays a big role in justifying wars. If you want to motivate your coalition to go to war, then you need to stir up outrage. Remember the Maine!
Social media is particularly suited to stirring up outrage. Hence politics becomes more poisonous.
Multi-party proportional representation parliamentary systems of government rely upon coalition building and do not suffer as badly from “other team” Good vs Bad thinking as do un-evolved Manichean winner-take-all unrepresentative systems of government.
Executive councils are even more likely to produce thorough outrage-free policy analysis. Can 1 in 5 USA citizens name even two members of the Swiss Confederation’s Federal Council? That is how superior their system of government is to ours.
Israel has had proportional representation in its Knesset for its entire history, and — speaking only of the relationships between the various factions of the Jewish majority — has as much tribal, hate-driven politics as any country on earth.
I’m not sure what your point is about Americans not knowing who’s on the Swiss Confederation Council. 1 in 5 Americans probably could not name the president of France, the chancellor of Germany, the PM of Great Britain, or the heads of government of China, Japan or India. (Thanks to the Democrats over the last four years, the President of Russia is much better known here.)
Yet in Israel all are represented. I fear you discredit to our fellow citizens. My intention was to convey the sense that a system in which fame and notoriety are minimized is superior to one in which the governance of a nation turns upon one man’s personality. Nearly every one on the planet must know Trump’s name and temperament. Is this all that an election should be about? In a parliamentary system in which the executive function is held by a council, there is less of the cult of personality and much more ROI for those exercising coalition building skills, respect, and civility.
True, in Israel, all factions are represented in the Knesset (although usually not in the government), but, notwithstanding the proportional parliamentary system, Israel still suffers badly from (to use your words) “‘other team’ Good vs Bad thinking,” just as badly as any “un-evolved Manichean winner-take-all unrepresentative systems of government.” Thus, the example of Israel does not support your contention that a proportional representation system leads to political harmony. My view is that the harmony has to exist in the underlying society to avoid the sort of “Manichean” politics you refer to. “Localism” or federalism is not a panacea, either, because a federal system can only remain that way if there is an underlying broad-based consensus in favor of federalism.
Parliamentary systems in major countries tend to have a prime minister who functions as a chief executive, often with more freedom of action than the US president (whose party does not necessarily control Congress). Switzerland is, to say the least, atypical among modern democracies, both politically and socially. And you overlook that proportional representation systems reduce government accountability (who do you vote against if all parties have had a hand in producing a policy you don’t like?). You may not care about accountability, but popular frustration over the lack of it may lead to unpleasant reactions, as recent events show.
I have no idea what this sentence means: “I fear you discredit to our fellow citizens.”
You cannot create social harmony that does not exist in the underlying society by tweaking the political system. That’s my view, FWIW.
While I think there are some potential differences with parliamentary systems, it’s not clear that the track record is that different than winner take all. The Weimar republic, famously, had a parliamentary system.
One of the biggest problems in the USA is a lack of localism. It’s just harder to have a unique local way of doing things that is left alone. This isn’t all changes in government, the world is just connected enough now that someone living in New York can get upset about someone tweeting something in south dakota.
He’s contrasting proportional systems of representation (where parties get seats based on their proportion of the over-all vote) with first-past-the-post systems of representation (where the party coming in first in each electoral district is elected, and nobody else in the district is represented). As in the UK, you can have a parliamentary system with first-past-the-post, winner-take-all representation.
Arguably, first-past-the-post encourages consensus. To have a chance to win, differing factions must coalesce into “big tent” coalition parties, resulting in the two party system the US has had for most of its history, in which neither party can afford to veer too far to either extreme, as “extreme” is perceived at the time (Goldwater and McGovern illustrating what happens when a party does veer toward a perceived “extreme”). Further, once one party establishes long-term dominance in a state or electoral district, the other party withers there or turns into a pastel-colored version of the other party (e.g. the nominally “Republican” governors who occasionally get elected in “blue” states).
I tend to think the decisive factor in determining whether a country does or does not have polarized, Us-versus-Them politics is the nature of the underlying society (i.e., whether or not there is broad consensus on political and cultural issues), not the mechanics of the political system.
–“I tend to think the decisive factor in determining whether a country does or does not have polarized, Us-versus-Them politics is the nature of the underlying society.”–
Right. The U.S. was remarkably less polarized for much of the 20th century than it is today. If we gave the U.S. a proportional representation system in 2005, I think we’d still be more polarized today than during, say, 1960.
We had a much more unified culture then, no social media, regular media wasn’t trying to generate outrage like it does today, etc.
I strongly concur that localism is important. The countries with strong histories of consensualism tend to be smaller: the Nordic countries, Netherlands, Switzerland, etc. But the risk of malignant associations as described by Dr Kling can be readily seen in one-party rule in nominally democratic city-states like Singapore and most USA urban areas. I’m guessing the absence of viable alternative parties at a larger level can lead to political stagnation at local levels.
Many accounts attribute the failure of the Weimar Constitution was the lack of popular political support and the emergency authority under Article 48. I think no Article 48 is an important lesson there. One would hope that an Article V constitutional convention would engender broader support.
Some might see the Nazi versus Communist struggle in Weimar Germany as similar to the Republicans and Democrats today. Regardless if that is true or not, there is, surveys suggest, a large enough undecided/independent/ticket splitting population in the USA that other political parties, say Liberal, Labor, or Christain Democrat parties could gain popular support sufficient to neutralize the extremists who have disproportionate influence in the current two major parties in the USA.