The Outliers
Torn between two unattractive models of human civilization
One of the reasons that progressive social change is so difficult to achieve is that no one knows how society works. It’s like we’re tinkering around with a piece of alien technology whose internal mechanisms we do not understand – we can only observe the inputs and outputs. Indeed, one of the enduring attractions of Marx’s work was his claim to have articulated the basic laws of historical development, thereby putting socialism on a “scientific” footing. No more shooting in the dark, the way that previous “utopian” socialists had been doing. By providing a clear articulation of the constraints that we are subject to, his theory was supposed to allow us to know, in advance, which interventions were actually going to have emancipatory consequences and which were not.
The specific theory that he provided turned out to be false, but the promissory note that he wrote has remained the object of endless fascination. This is why academic critical theorists remain, to this day, so preoccupied with social theory. The fundamental promise of the Enlightenment was that the human condition could be improved through the systematic, disciplined exercise of human reason. Historically, most of the big improvements in human society were achieved through trial and error, and often propagated by war. The Enlightenment commitment was to understand society, so that we could intentionally craft changes, rather that just relying on dumb luck and cultural evolution.
Unfortunately, maintaining human society is one of those things that, like speaking grammatically, we know how to do, even though we cannot explain how we do it. Several aspects of it are quite mysterious. At the heart of the mystery is what Immanuel Kant referred to, in an evocative phrase, as our “unsocial sociability.” On the one hand, human beings are clearly adapted by nature for cooperative social living. We rely on others, not just for most aspects of our survival, but for our intellectual achievements as well. And yet humans also have a pronounced anti-social streak, which manifests itself most obviously in violence and crime, but finds everyday expression in simple contrarianism, or a refusal to play nice with others.
Kant went on to claim, somewhat provocatively, that the tension between these two aspects of our nature is responsible for the progress that can be observed in human society. Without the “unsociable” aspect of our nature, we would sink too easily into complacency and stasis, but without the “sociable” aspect we would be unable to realize any of the benefits that come from the occasional disruptive insight. (There is an analogous puzzle in epistemology, where if everyone was a perfect Bayesian reasoner, they would not bother to pursue outlandish theories that the scientific community rejects. And yet these outlandish theories sometimes prove to be correct, and therefore serve as one of the major sources of scientific progress. So progress, as a collective achievement, seems to require that a certain fraction of individuals behave irrationally.)
Kant’s observation can easily be translated into a modern scientific idiom. One of the most exciting recent breakthroughs in human evolutionary theory has been the self-domestication hypothesis. This takes as its point of departure the observation that human beings have many of the same physical traits that can be found in a domesticated species – normally the outcome of a selection process favoring reduced aggression. It is not difficult to see how humans might have imposed selection pressures that transformed wolves into dogs, but the idea that we might have done the same to ourselves presents an evolutionary puzzle. The most plausible explanatory hypothesis appeals to gene-culture coevolutionary theory, claiming that human culture, which is partially transmitted through conformist social learning, favored the development of pro-social behavioral norms in intergroup competition, which in turn operated as a social selection mechanism against aggressiveness. The result was that human beings, in effect, domesticated themselves, through a process that Richard Wrangham refers to as “offing the alphas.”
There is a great deal to be said for this hypothesis. However, because the anthropologists who formulated it mainly study small-scale societies, they tend to overstate how thorough the domestication process has been. It would be more accurate to describe humans as a semi-domesticated species. We have a set of evolved psychological adaptations that favor cooperation in dyadic relations and small-group settings, but the constraining force of these dispositions becomes increasingly tenuous when extended beyond those immediate circles of concern.
Because of this, further extensions of the scope of human sociality have been achieved by overlaying these dispositions with an institutional infrastructure that favors more extensive systems of cooperation. This produces the bifurcation of psychological life we are all familiar with, where the demands that are made upon us by our social environment are consistently more pro-social than our inner psychological impulses. This is why we must suppress so many of our thoughts and desires in order to get along with others, or to meet social expectations. Civilization – understood as a social structure that imposes more extensive cooperative relations than our innate psychology disposes us to accept – is constructed through a set of kluges, or workarounds to the limitations of human nature. It is, in a sense, a grab-bag of tricks, which have proven successful at getting large numbers of semi-domesticated primates to act as though they were more fully domesticated.
The oldest trick in the book involves supplementing whatever pro-social motivations individuals may have with the threat of organized punishment for anti-social behaviour. Every society has rules, but in a small-scale society these are enforced in an informal, decentralized manner. The development of law involves explicit articulation of these rules, accompanied by a credible threat of enforcement by a dedicated group of violence specialists. This provides the basic building-block for the emergence of hierarchical authority, an innovation that permitted the expansion of the scale of human societies that we associate with the neolithic revolution.
A more recent trick involves the manipulation of the self-interested motives of individuals, pitting them against one another in such a way that their interactions produce outcomes that approximate the achievements of cooperative action, despite that not corresponding to anyone’s intention. These are known as adversarial institutions, the most celebrated of which is the market. When properly structured, they have a variety of advantages, including the fact that they reduce the motivational burden that individuals would otherwise experience when participating in complex cooperative systems. These institutions harness our anti-social impulses, neutralizing their ill effects and channeling them toward the attainment of collectively beneficial outcomes.
As one would expect with any evolved set of traits, there is variation among individuals in the intensity of the dispositions associated with the domestication syndrome (dominance, aggression, conformity, retributiveness, etc.). Similarly, there is variation in the degree to which different societies encourage or discourage these dispositions, along with the specific configuration of tricks that they employ to extend human sociality. One of the great discoveries of liberal societies, in the past few hundred years, has been that clever deployment of adversarial institutions (most importantly the market, but also competitive multiparty democracy) makes it possible to get by with a great deal less direct social control of individual behaviour.
Again, Kant stated the basic ambition of this project with consummate clarity:
The problem of organizing a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent. The problem is: “Given a multitude of rational beings requiring universal laws for their preservation, but each of whom is secretly inclined to exempt himself from them, to establish a constitution in such a way that, although their private intentions conflict, they check each other, with the result that their public conduct is the same as if they had no such intentions.”
This understanding of civilization provides, I believe, the most appropriate framework for understanding the two countries that are currently at the leading edge of human collective action: China and the United States. Dan Wang recently published a book suggesting that the contrast between them is due to China being run by engineers, while the U.S. is run by lawyers. With all deference to Wang, this seems to me superficial. It makes more sense to see these two countries as pushing the boundaries of these two poles of human social order: with China seeking to maximize the level of pro-social behavior, and begrudgingly accepting adversarial institutions when it must; while the U.S. is exploring the boundary of tolerance of anti-social behavior, begrudgingly accepting the occasional need for cooperation. Both experiments are, in their own way, dystopian.
The contrast between the two countries was put on dramatic display in their response to the Covid pandemic, which revealed the underlying model of society that informed their decision-making. Authorities in China see society as a giant machine, with individuals as the component parts. This is the old and familiar ideal of the bee hive, in which each individual does precisely what they are supposed to do, to bring about the best outcome for the whole. With Covid, it seemed possible to defeat the virus by breaking the chains of transmission, so long as everyone did their part. And so the Chinese state imposed an unprecedented level of behavioural control over its citizens (symbolized in time by the ubiquity of “big white” – public health workers in their recognizable hazmat suits).
It is unfortunate that the Chinese state still pays lip-service to communism, because the Western ideology that most clearly sums up their commitments is not Marxism, but rather utilitarianism. More than any other country, the Chinese state ruthlessly promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and is willing to sacrifice the interests of any particular individual to achieve it. One could see this clearly in their Covid policy, which also brought to the fore the greatest flaw in utilitarianism – that it fails to recognize the distinctness of persons, treating the hopes and dreams of individuals as essentially interchangeable, looking only at the aggregate outcome.
The response to Covid in the United States, by contrast, was completely anarchic. As someone who went back and forth between Canada and the U.S. several times during the pandemic, the difference between the two countries was shocking. Even the simplest collective accomplishment, such as standing in line to enter a store, in order to maintain social distancing, proved beyond the level of cooperativeness that most Americans were willing to exhibit. Vaccination, when it became available, was promoted as a way of protecting oneself from disease, not as a contribution to any sort of collective project. Years later, a substantial fraction of Americans seem to be still traumatized by the extremely minor demands that were made of them.
America is sometimes described as the “land of liberty,” and yet a great deal of the “liberty” in question arises, not from a principled commitment to individual freedom as a political value, but merely from heightened tolerance for anti-social behaviour. Based on the belief that their institutions are capable of constraining a race of devils, they proceed to act like devils. I’ve always thought the most emblematic example of this is “rolling coal,” where the drivers of diesel trucks intentionally bypass the anti-pollution devices on their emissions system, in order to emit gigantic clouds of black exhaust upon demand. That way, when you pass a Prius (or perhaps now any EV), you can emit a cloud of pollution, helping to undo any beneficial effects of the other driver’s environmentally conscious driving habits.
At one level, I totally get this. I personally react very negatively to certain forms of moral suasion. For example, I absolutely hate campaigns where people try to get everyone to wear a pin, or a certain colour of clothing, to signal their solidarity with some cause. Even being told to wear a poppy in November triggers my inner Zack de la Rocha:
In my defence, the thing I hate about these campaigns is the attempt to compel speech, or to force a symbolic display. But if someone can give me a good reason why I should conform, then that’s totally different. If following the rules is actually required for some cooperative project, which will make me and everyone around me better off, then I’m all in. I don’t have a problem getting vaccinated, stopping for pedestrians at crosswalks, clearing the snow from my sidewalk, or separating my recycling from the trash. Many Americans, however, seem to get the same intense “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” reaction to almost any demand for cooperative behaviour.
This is a huge part of the American psyche – shared, as de la Rocha amply demonstrated, by both right and left. The best way to understand the Trump administration is to see the major actors as rolling coal at a national level (their climate change policy – subsidizing coal, while blocking renewable energy projects – self-evidently so). Trump channels this ethos more clearly and profoundly than any other American politician. Whether it’s wearing a blue suit to the Pope’s funeral, staring straight at an eclipse, taking his mask off during Covid, or assassinating foreign leaders, the same underlying “fuck you” impulse is at work. For a lot of Americans, telling them that they are not allowed to do something just really, really makes them want to do it.
This is why it made sense for the Libertarian Party of America to have invited Trump to address their convention. Philosophically, of course, it may have seemed like a strange move. If libertarians cannot be counted on to correctly identify and oppose naked authoritarianism, then seriously, what good are they? On the other hand, if rank-and-file American libertarianism is basically just a rationalization of anti-social behaviour, then it is much easier to understand the sympathy for Trump.
For the average non-American, non-Chinese person, it’s easy to look at these two societies, these polar extremes, and conclude that the happy medium lies somewhere in between. And yet it is important to avoid the sense of self-satisfaction or complacency that the aurea mediocritas can induce. The rest of the world derives substantial benefits from the willingness of citizens in these two countries to go along with these extremist projects. The American economy, for various reasons, remains the only consistent source of innovation. Meanwhile, China seems to be the only society in the world capable of collective action on a scale adequate to addressing climate change. Both disruption and order have their uses.
Both countries, unfortunately, provide deeply unappealing models for the future of human civilization. The Chinese model, if generalized, poses the genuine threat of locking all of humanity into a perpetual dictatorship. As the example of North Korea shows, such a dictatorship might easily lose interest in promoting the happiness of the people, and yet there may not be much that can be done about it. The Chinese have rather self-evidently failed to resolve the central flaw of hierarchical systems, which is the inability to prevent dominant individuals from using the state apparatus to entrench themselves at the apex of power. As Xi Jinpeng has shown, merely writing restrictions into the constitution is clearly ineffective. The only known solution is to introduce a measure of adversarialism into the political system (e.g. multiparty contestation), which they seem unwilling to do.
The U.S. has problems that are in many ways the opposite. The society harbours extraordinary centrifugal forces, which it seems barely able to contain. To the outside observer, it seems always to be on the verge of falling apart. More perniciously, Americans have shown themselves incapable of summoning the level of cooperative action required to reform their own political institutions, with the result that everything becomes more and more shambolic over time. (For example, Trump has basically made a laughing-stock out of the U.S. constitution, and yet there is still no serious initiative to amend it.) Rather than fixing their problems, Americans find increasingly complex and tenuous workarounds. The result is steady, seemingly irreversible degradation. Until America shows some capacity for institutional renewal, it seems fated to unleash its devils upon the world.
Kant’s provocative suggestion was that, in order to ensure human progress, what we need is not a stable compromise between the pro-social and anti-social impulses of human nature, but an ongoing, dynamic tension between them. This has the interesting implication that if, for example, pharmacological innovation led to the development of a pill we could take that would give us each perfect moral self-control — so that we always acted in precisely the way that we thought it was right to act — then it would be bad for humanity if too many people took it. In the same way that scientific progress requires some people to be bad Bayesians, civilizational progress requires some people to be free riders. What we should aim for is a system capable of ensuring that neither side of human nature is able to prevail too completely. A multi-polar world, in which China and the U.S. compete with one another, without either side gaining a decisive advantage, does offer one model of this, although it poses obvious risks as well. A more optimistic scenario would be one in which we find a way to expand the repertoire of tricks that are effective at promoting large-scale sociality, so that the choice is not limited to the currently dismal options of hierarchical power and runaway adversarialism.