On Becoming Less Left-Wing (Part 1) (unpaywalled)

Evolution, economics, political psychology, social epistemology, and progress.

Note: I’m working on an objectionably long third and final instalment in this series. In the meantime, I’m releasing this first one to all subscribers. (Find the second one here.)

I was born to left-wing parents, raised within a left-wing family, grew up with mostly left-wing friends, and then studied at universities filled with left-wing students and academics. Today, I work at one of the most left-wing universities in the UK, I live in one of its most left-wing cities, and people with left-wing views dominate my professional and social networks.

I was also pretty left-wing throughout most of my life. As late as 2016, I was not just a proud member of the Labour Party, the UK’s main left-wing party, but a passionate supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s most left-wing leader in many years.

For all these reasons and more, one of the most dramatic changes in my intellectual outlook in recent years has been becoming less left-wing. Today’s essay and the others in this series will describe this process. This description is meant to be autobiographical, not persuasive. I am not trying to convince anyone of the views I have come to hold or even to present arguments for them, but to describe my intellectual evolution and its causes.

Of course, self-narratives like this are typically unconsciously biased by self-serving embellishments, exaggerations, and omissions. No doubt this one will be, too. For example, my description will be highly intellectualised, focusing on the role of new ideas and discoveries in changing my views rather than, say, incentives, emotions, or other non-rational factors, which—if my own published views about human psychology and belief are correct—have likely played a significant role. Nevertheless, describing this process might interest some readers, so here goes.

The “left”

The left-right political spectrum comes from the French Revolution, when supporters of the ancien régime sat on the right side of the chamber within the National Assembly, and supporters of the revolution sat on the left.

Since then, the packages of ideas associated with the left and right have changed substantially across time and place. Even something seemingly basic today in many Western countries—the idea that being “left-wing” combines social liberalism with a preference for substantial economic intervention and redistribution by the state—is not the typical pattern worldwide.

Given this, one might view talk of becoming less “left-wing” as incoherently assuming a single, consistent political spectrum when, in fact, such political labels name loose bundles of ideas constantly changing in response to shifting political alliances and events.

As I return to when I discuss political psychology in this series of essays, I agree with this. In saying I have become less left-wing, I do not mean I have become more “centrist” or “right-wing”. Instead, I have come to view a contemporary Western left-wing political outlook as a mostly arbitrary bundle of truths, falsehoods, simplistic narratives, exaggerations, and omissions, just like other popular ideologies. I have become less left-wing in coming to disagree with many ideas within this bundle, not in moving position on a single, well-defined ideological spectrum.

Although many things have driven this change, the five big ones are connected to studying and thinking about (1) evolution, (2) economics, (3) political psychology, (4) social epistemology, and (5) progress.

This essay will consider the first two of these.

1. Evolution

As a teenager, I read popular books about evolution and the mind by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker. They had an enormous impact on me. Since then, I have spent a lot of time studying and thinking about applying evolutionary ideas to human psychology and society, an approach I draw on in my published academic research.

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is humanity’s most important discovery, not just because of its parsimony, explanatory power, and solution to some of science’s deepest puzzles but because of its radicalism.

As Dennett argues, Darwinian evolution is a universal acid that “eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.”

I am unusual as a humanities academic in assuming that such revolutionary implications extend to our understanding of human psychology. For many and maybe most such academics and even many scientists, evolutionary psychology is, at best, a pseudo-science involving unfalsifiable story-telling about our ancestors’ past (“just-so stories”) and, at worst, a rationalisation of reactionary politics.

Many things drive this perception, including the undeniable reality that much evolutionary psychology is low-quality and most popular evolutionary psychology is egregious. However, it is also rooted in the fact that academics are typically very left-wing, and even a rigorous, high-quality application of evolutionary theory to human psychology is in tension with many left-wing orthodoxies.

Darwinian cynicism

Most fundamentally, although it is a misunderstanding to think that evolutionary theory implies that humans are fitness-maximising selfish psychopaths, it is also a misunderstanding to believe it has no cynical implications for our understanding of human nature.

Evolution by natural selection is an inherently competitive process. Very roughly, it favours traits (like motives, instincts, and abilities) that help organisms spread their genes more successfully than rivals do. This can happen directly through having offspring or indirectly by helping relatives who carry copies of the same genes.

Importantly, the best strategy for out-competing rivals often involves cooperation, which is why cooperation is ubiquitous throughout nature. Nevertheless, when combined with several other assumptions about human evolution, our origins in Darwinian competition have implications for understanding human nature and society that sit uneasily with many left-wing political views.

A tragic vision of human nature

First, competition and conflicts of interest are endemic to human social life. They are not the product of capitalism, objectionable institutions, or power structures. They are unavoidable. The only question is what form social competition takes and whether it is channelled into desirable or undesirable outcomes.

Second, nepotism (i.e., favouritism directed towards genetic relatives) is extremely deep-rooted in human psychology. Contrary to the hopes and claims of many left-wing revolutionaries, it is not a contingent aspect of specific societies.

Third, altruism toward anyone beyond genetic relatives is highly limited. Moreover, most of what looks like altruism and genuinely feels like it at the psychological level is rooted in mutualism, the tendency to cooperate when doing so is mutually beneficial and so promotes the self-interest of cooperators.

Much excellent work has been done exploring how mutualistic cooperation works in our species, focusing specifically on interdependence and reciprocity. Although the story here is complex and nuanced, involving subtle interactions between social norms, reputations, gossip, punishment, partner choice, and status competition, there is an unavoidable lesson in this work: humans are conditional and selective cooperators, cooperating only when doing so is expected—even if only implicitly—to promote fitness-relevant goals or outcomes individuals have learned to associate with such goals.

Challenging left-wing utopianism

There is much more to say about such ideas, but it should be clear how they already diverge from many prominent left-wing views.

Most obviously, they support what Thomas Sowell has called a “constrained” or “tragic” vision of human nature in which self-interest, nepotism, and social competition are rooted in powerful and ineradicable innate instincts.

This has numerous implications.

First, because conflicts of interest and competition are unavoidable facts of human social life, the best that social institutions can achieve is to suppress some negative consequences of these traits or channel them to desirable social ends. It is a fundamental mistake to think, as Marx and many other left-wing thinkers and activists have thought, that a radical transformation of the social order can eradicate such features of human nature.

As Darwin observed,

“Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness. These latter qualities seem to be his natural and unfortunate birthright.”

Second, the deep puzzles of social science are not to explain things like violence, exploitation, conflict, domination, or hierarchy. From an evolutionary perspective, these things are fundamentally unsurprising. This is why they are ubiquitous throughout history. The challenge is to explain how people sometimes achieve complex systems of social cooperation that overcome such likely outcomes of human nature.

Third, exploitative, aggressive, and antisocial behaviours are not rooted in material hardship or ignorance, such that these things would disappear if only we could rid the world of poverty and “educate" people. The only way of addressing such tendencies is by developing and enforcing collective norms, monitoring, rewards, and punishments that make them less profitable.

Fourth, we should be sceptical of activists and revolutionaries who claim to be motivated entirely by high ideals like justice, liberty, or equality. It is very unlikely they have escaped the grubby motives that drive ordinary human behaviour or that their utopian projects will pan out well.

Of course, as with all these things, one could learn this lesson without an evolutionary approach. One could simply observe how political movements led by zealous revolutionaries depicting themselves as heroic justice seekers have historically turned out, including in the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Chinese Communist Revolution. One could even observe the not-so-subtle evidence of self-interest and social competition in the much less dramatic Great Awokening that has swept Western institutions in recent years.

Nevertheless, an evolutionary approach is useful because it leads one to expect such recurrent patterns, explains them in deeper terms, and guards against the litany of ad hoc excuses and rationalisations people on the left often concoct to explain them away.

Clarifications

This tragic vision of human nature does not mean that all progressive activists are motivated by cartoonish forms of selfishness or that left-wing projects will inevitably fail. Humans have genuine prosocial instincts and an intuitive sense of fairness, ultimately rooted in the reputational benefits of appearing kind and fair-minded to others. We are morally limited but not amoral.

Moreover, many left-wing policies are sensible, do not depend on utopian views of human nature, and have beneficial consequences.

The point is rather that we should be highly suspicious of people and movements that depict themselves as escaping human nature's self-serving and competitive instincts or propose societal transformations that rely on our collective ability to escape them. And more generally, we should be sceptical of any narrative endorsed by those on the left or right that depicts a political movement’s motivations as rooted in a purely altruistic concern with justice or virtue.

For this reason, a tragic vision of human nature does not support a conventionally conservative outlook on politics either. Although it is in tension with influential left-wing ideas that either deny the existence of human nature or treat it as fundamentally benevolent, it is equally at odds with the excessive deference towards established institutions and traditions found within much conservative thought.

As Robert Trivers has pointed out, an evolutionary perspective on human nature should attune us to the many ways in which such institutions and traditions often serve the interests of extractive elites—and the many ways in which elites attempt to misrepresent and obfuscate that fact.

Nevertheless, from my perspective as someone who used to endorse many radical left-wing political views, the clash between those ideas and what Robert Wright (and David Pinsof) call “Darwinian cynicism” has had the most significant impact on my intellectual thought.

Summary

There is obviously much more to say about this topic. I will be elaborating on related ideas in much more depth and with much more supporting argumentation and evidence in my forthcoming book, “Why it’s OK to be cynical”. I have also explored this topic in other related articles on this blog.

Moreover, Darwinian cynicism is not the only way an evolutionary understanding of human nature pushes against conventional left-wing views.

For example, many on the left are very uncomfortable with the idea of biological sex differences. Although evolutionary theory does not logically imply the existence of such differences, it should make one take their possibility seriously. Further, there are plausible evolutionary explanations for some such differences, including why—on average—human males have a greater desire for sexual promiscuity than females, are more aggressive, risk-taking, and status-seeking, and are less instinctively nurturing towards children.

Of course, even if these differences are partly rooted in human evolution, they are also heavily influenced by culture and circumstances. Moreover, they are not in tension with the fundamental ideals of feminism. Nevertheless, many on the left are uncomfortable even with the possibility of such differences, which in some cases put pressure on popular left-wing assumptions, such as that the only conceivable factor driving differential outcomes between men and women in certain areas (e.g., the greater prevalence of men in some high-status professions) is patriarchal oppression.

2. Economics

Another major influence on me has been learning economics.

Until I started a PhD at 22, I endorsed the popular left-wing view that mainstream economics is a sinister “neoliberal” project designed to paint capitalism, an inherently exploitative economic system, in a positive light. I got this view from reading figures like Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Ha-Joon Chang, and David Harvey.

At some point, it occurred to me that although I had read many popular left-wing criticisms of economics by self-described “heterodox” thinkers, I had never really studied the thing being criticised. So, I set out to correct that, reading a mix of popular books and textbooks to try to learn the basics of mainstream (“neoclassical”) economics, as well as books on economic history and arguments by free-market economists outside the neoclassical tradition (e.g., Hayek).

I have learned many things from this, which have caused me to change my views about economics, society, and history in ways that have made them much less conventionally left-wing.

Basic lessons from economics

First, standard left-wing critiques of mainstream economics are biased and low-quality.

Although there are genuine problems with the insularity of the field and its over-reliance on idealised mathematical models, it is one of the most rigorous, well-developed areas of modern social science.

Learning to see human behaviour and the social world through the lens of incentives, constraints, opportunity costs, marginal thinking, trade-offs, strategies, equilibria, and so on is genuinely transformative.

Second, incentives really matter.

When people benefit from acting in certain ways, they tend to act in those ways. For this reason, rules and ideals are not magically self-enforcing (people engage in “strategic noncompliance” when doing so promotes their interests), and people routinely push the costs of their activities onto others if they can get away with it. Given this, good institutions “economise on virtue” by aligning individuals’ private interests with desirable collective outcomes.

Such facts sit uneasily with most people’s self-image and the self-deceptive fairytales most of us would like to believe about human cooperation. Still, they cohere with Darwinian cynicism and the facts of human societies and history. As Machiavelli observed of political rulers, “He who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation.”

Third, poverty is the default state of humanity.

Throughout almost all of history until very recently, everyone languished in brutal Malthusian poverty. The main thing that changed this situation was the emergence of modern capitalism. For all its genuine faults, capitalism involves an astonishingly impressive decentralised system of signals (prices) and incentives (profits and losses) that channels self-interest and social competition into the efficient production of socially-valued goods and services. It is not an accident that alternative economic systems have exclusively been complete disasters.

Fourth, you cannot solve poverty or create wealth by redistribution alone.

Redistribution requires wealth, which must be created by consistent increases in productivity. Such increases depend on complex and fragile institutions that coordinate large-scale economic activity and reward innovation and efficiency.

Moreover, not only is there no fixed “pie” (i.e., resources in society), but there is often a genuine trade-off between growing the pie and dividing it up in ways that satisfy our moral intuitions. And given the importance and countless benefits of compounding economic growth over time, the "just” course of action is frequently to prioritise the former over the latter.

Fifth, although free markets are subject to well-known market failures, governments are run by people, not angels, who are subject to the same kinds of incentives and constraints as those in the private sector.

Given this, the fact that a benevolent, omniscient government could address market failures does not mean actual governments can or will.

Sixth, there are no solutions, only trade-offs, and unintended consequences are inevitable in political decision-making.

Almost every choice is associated with costs, including opportunity costs, and there are rarely pure wins without any downsides. For example, raising the minimum wage might help some low-wage workers but reduce employment and consign the least productive members of society to permanent unemployment. Stronger environmental regulations might help to reduce some of the costs of climate change but keep people in poverty for longer and reduce our ability to adapt to climate change. And so on.

Seven, even win-win cooperation is inherently challenging.

Common sense tells us that when people share a common goal or interest, they will automatically work together to bring it about. Common sense is mistaken. In many cases, rational agents who would benefit from cooperating with others benefit even more from free-riding on the hard work of others. As a result, free riding spreads throughout the group in ways that leave everyone worse off than if they had worked together.

In other words, whereas an evolutionary understanding of human nature should lead us to believe that self-interest and social competition are ineradicable, a fundamental insight of game theory is that even win-win cooperation is far more challenging than most people—especially on the left—instinctively realise. Successful cooperation is rarely just about good intentions, shared interests, or appeals to solidarity; it typically depends on subtle incentives and mechanisms of monitoring and enforcement.

Implications

None of these insights are strictly inconsistent with many aspects of modern left-wing politics. Moreover, they do not support libertarianism. The best societies today combine free, competitive, and open markets with things like judicious regulation, extensive state provision of public goods, and considerable economic redistribution.

This is unsurprising: successful free markets are impossible without a strong state, the rule of law, and some degree of democratic accountability of political and economic elites. However, once a society has achieved such things, there is no reason to restrict the state's power to the protection of free markets alone.

Nevertheless, learning and thinking about such insights from economics have slowly disabused me of many naive left-wing opinions I used to have and that I still encounter almost daily from left-wing friends, colleagues, or pundits.

Most obviously, I am far more positive about capitalism and far more suspicious about actual and proposed alternatives to it. I also think the left tends to systematically underestimate the importance of wealth creation, innovation, and economic growth relative to issues of redistribution.

More subtly but just as significantly, I have come to see many of the things people on the left blame on capitalism (e.g. self-interest and social competition) as fundamental features of all social institutions. If capitalism is unique, it is unique in the fact that it makes such features of human behaviour undeniable and exploits them to produce beneficial collective outcomes.

Perhaps most fundamentally, I have realised that economies and societies are highly complex and depend on forms of large-scale cooperation that are shockingly difficult to understand, let alone achieve.

Noble intentions and lofty rhetoric about justice and equality are not enough. The kinds of policies and interventions that benefit people often sound bad. Those that hurt people often sound good.

Successful economic policy requires a deep and intellectually humble engagement with incentives, constraints, trade-offs, and unintended consequences, not the emotive moralising and wishful thinking often characteristic of left-wing politics.