The Yin and Yang of Politics

Have you noticed that almost every pundit and politician on the rise today is channelling machismo as some sort of answer to a huge problem, namely  _________________ ?

The interconnected Memes of this Machismo (Yang) Politics are

1. Lone Cowboy Individualism 
2. Military style Tribalism and Nationalism (zero sum competition)
3. Domination of Nature
4. A rugged outdoorsy manhood (rather than a cultured intellectualism)
5. The sense of being entitled not to have to edit one's own pronouncements or check one's own behaviours, or to receive more than to give care, regardless of effects on the wellbeing of others.

If you're Jordan Peterson or a supporter of his, the huge problem is Political Correctness and its extreme danger to freedom of speech. Any emphasis on equity evokes his fear that we are in a slide toward post-modern Marxist Maoist Totalitarianism. And he will threaten to sue you for using your freedom of speech to criticize him.

If you're a person who's lost his or her job, you might think that the huge problem is immigration and globalism. Or maybe you think government regulations that are meant to protect the environment and citizens are limiting local investments in new industry and reducing job growth. But did you consider that we are in an era of great technological change and that the mandate of corporations is to increase production efficiencies (where labour is considered another expense cutting into profits)?   In fact, more production is going on in the US now than in the past - but much of it is automated. The technology has changed so the economic system must adapt or leave people behind.

Meanwhile, economists believe that Free Trade improves the economy. It has also been shown that diversity improves outcomes for innovation. And without immigration, the average age of the citizenry will increase to the point that there are nearly as many retirees as working people (paying the taxes that pay for the old age benefits).  

The huge problem is that the technology has changed but the economic system has not changed. We produce more than we need, much of it disposable or wasted. We pollute the environment with producing it. Those that have jobs, many are what we know to be "bullsh*t" jobs that would not be necessary if large companies and governments were not piled high in unnecessary bureaucratic processes. All but a few jobs can be automated and will be in the future. What happens to wage labour and the relevance of "work ethic" then? 

And what of Yin politics?

The Memes of Feminine (Yin) Politics

1. Interconnectedness (individual human potential cannot be realized apart from society, culture, economics and technology)
2. Pluralism and Diversity (not a zero sum but a win-win)
3. Environmentalism, Sustainable Development
4. Resilience and the importance of ongoing learning

To be honest, I don't know if I'd really call the above Yin or feminine or feminist. The reason I did so is because they seem to be the memes disparaged or neglected by the resurgent patriarchy. 

I take it to be pretty self-evident that no one's potential can be realized apart from society, culture, economics and technology. Even so, neuro-palaeontology confirms it. We are immersed, regardless of whatever political system we live in.

Given the fact that we live in an ineluctably global economic system, we need to be more tolerant of diversity. Not so tolerant that we tolerate a lack of tolerance or abuse, though. 

We cannot continue to carry on producing in excess of what we need or that nature can give or absorb.

Exploratory curiosity and learning is what makes us human, gives us meaning and helps us to adapt. We are not adapting by insisting on a set idea of "human nature". Our flourishing and resilience, our strengths, lie in our creative responsiveness and adaptability. We change. Culture changes. Narrative that doesn't change becomes decrepit and toxic.

Two Misleading Intellectual Habits

Two misleading and persistent intellectual habits dominate thinking and much of politics:

1. The myth of the isolated mind and 
2. The legacy of the theological divide.

1. The myth of the isolated mind is the belief that human minds are purely private, locked within our skulls. Merlin Donald, neuro-paleontologist, demonstrates the flimsiness of the idea in his remarkable book, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. (Here's a review.) He makes it clear that no human beings can develop their human cognitive potential in the absence of culture. Cognition and culture are mutually dependent. Their dependence raises some questions about ethical responsibility, personal freedom, freedom of speech and of other areas in which people are ineluctably interdependent actors whose sense of meaning and justice has changed throughout history and varied across cultures.

2. The theological divide separates heaven and earth. Here is how it looked before Nietzsche:

• Heaven | Earth
• Form | Matter
• Spirit | Nature
• Mind | Body
• Male ♂| Female ♀
• Order | Chaos
• Reason | Emotion
• Light | Dark
• Logos | Eros
• Transcendent | Immanent
• Active | Passive
• Eternal | Temporal (finite, changeable)
• Divine intellect | Randomness (unpredictability)

Here's how it looks now from the "secular" point of view: 

• Heaven | Earth
• Form | Matter
• Spirit | Nature
• Mind | Body
• Male ♂| Female ♀
• Order | Chaos
• Reason | Emotion
• Light | Dark
• Logos | Eros
• Transcendent | Immanent
• Active | Passive
• Eternal | Temporal (finite, changeable)
• Laws of (mechanical) Nature | Randomness (unpredictability)

Much of the ontological edifice of theology remains intact. It's basically a decapitated theology. 

But as thinkers such as Stuart Kauffman and Manuel DeLanda convincingly show (they each have many lectures, interviews and short talks on line if you're interested), there is now an approach that makes matter dynamic rather than a passive receptacle of form or logos or laws of nature and that reinstates the ontological status of virtual or potential. It looks more like this:

• Evolving Cosmos
• Self-organizing Matter
• Dynamic Nature
• Sentient, encultured Body
• Knowledge that reason cannot work without emotion
• Virtual and real complement each other 
• Chaos and complexity theories
• Intrinsic unpredictability in evolutionary biology (non-deterministic)

This new, emerging approach might help us feel at home in nature and on this planet in a more sustainable and responsible way.

What explains the popularity of "strong man" leaders?

If you look back over history at periods where there is huge social upheaval, you can see it is usually correlated with technological change. Technological changes cause social changes because they alter the way that people need to interact with each other to get and distribute what we need to live and make our livelihoods. This changes the power relationships in society. It looks like this:

Technological change leads to

Changes in ways people need to produce and distribute stuff, which lead to
Changes in social power relationships, which lead to
Changes in what is acceptable to believe is "natural" or "just" in social arrangements.

It's been happening since prehistory.

Here are a couple of relatively recent examples:

1. The power of Rome and the priestly class was undercut by the invention of the printing press.
2. "Women's liberation" occurred when new household technology and the invention of the pill freed them up from domestic work and allowed them more of an involvement in the public sphere. 

Unfortunately, there is usually some kind of backlash from the rulers that are being displaced by the changes:

1. The Inquisition (the witch burning times) followed the invention of the printing press.
2. Patriarchal backlashes in the form of religious or demagogic pronouncements or regressive legislation have dogged women's efforts to have more of a public voice .

After some horrific and largely unnecessary suffering - witch burnings, stonings, wars, civil wars, for example - things generally fall into place the for better (or worse).

But note that the upheaval is not caused by individual leaders of change movements (e.g., Luther) but by social conditions that created the possibility of their messages becoming "acceptable" to believe, rather than heretical, offensive or nonsensical. I believe this happens when rigid insistence on outdated status quo explanations leads to toxic social state.

OK, so if that's clear, we begin to understand where we're at now. MASSIVE technological change: Factory automation, instant global communication, high speed transportation, increasingly viable green technologies. In other words, a global economy that threatens to thoroughly disenfranchise an even greater number of people who will be without work in what remains a wage-based economy. Erosion of social supports in favour of tax cuts - where the benefits go to the already very well off - continues to shrink the middle class while the wage gap grows and grows.

So what are today's "heretics" shouting by way of a response to these changes and what has been the backlash to them? What is becoming acceptable to believe and how is it being resisted?

The heretics are shouting "environmental sustainability", "flatter organizations", "universal income / equity", "cultural diversity" while emphasizing the importance of developing responsiveness (rather than aggressiveness) for resilience.

The backlash is shouting "jobs before the environment", "hierarchy is natural", "no freeloaders",  "your culture threatens rather than enhances my culture", while gunning for aggressive individualism.

So there we have the rise to prominence of people like Trump or other "big, loud guy" leaders who hear and capitalize (very literally) on the backlash. The voices of the backlash come from the plutocracy, from men with an unearned sense of entitlement, and from the lower-middle class who fear loss of social position if those they consider below them (women, minorities) are on the rise. 

e.g., "Spencer and other alt-right leaders see Donald Trump’s rise as the first step towards a whites-only state. "Our lived experience is being a young, white person in 21st century America, [and] seeing your identity be demeaned,” Spencer said. “I’ve lived in this multicultural mess for years and I’m trying to get out of it." - The Atlantic, "Rebranding White Nationalism"  italics added

That's just human nature...?

A synopsis of Jordan Peterson on human nature:

There is an inescapable human nature which means that we have no choice but to be organized hierarchically. We have evolved but we are no different from lobsters in our predilection for hierarchy and that is our fate as a species in spite of evidence to the contrary (which is all bogus). Our only choice is to find ways of ameliorating the worst effects (but JP seems to say little about that and in fact condemns outright people's efforts to do so). Women tend to be more agreeable by nature than men because they have to accommodate infants (1), while men are more competitive. Liberal philosophies that flout inescapable human nature, advance political correctness, and blame Western patriarchy for gender inequality are out to lunch and very dangerous - especially "post-modern Marxism" (PMM) which is actually a position of totalitarian Maoism in that proponents group people under banners of identity politics. Proponents of PMM and political correctness are dangerous not only because they harbour insidious authoritarian and totalitarian tendencies but because their actions will cause a backlash among men and give rise to cultural manifestations of the dark side of masculinity (2). It's best that we stick to what nature intended for us in order to prevent or minimize this impending catastrophe.

Nature and culture are of course inextricable. As Merlin Donald points out, no human would be able to achieve anything like human cognitive potential without being imbedded in culture, which is where both the ancestry of our ideas and abilities, and the seeds of our potential, repose. Human cognition evolves with culture, and cultural evolution since prehistoric times is largely driven by technological advancements, especially in communicating through stories, writing, and other modes of external memory storage.

It turns out that technological advancements also influence the organization of human societies and the focus of institutions.  It shouldn't be controversial. Any socio-political arrangement is how people organize themselves to produce and distribute what they need and want given a certain level of technology.  Ian Morris explores the prehistory and history of social organization and power relations between nations in his book, Why the West Rules for Now, and the relationship between technology and human values in Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels.

Consider, then, the social role of women in relation to the work they do either in or out of the home in relation to technology. Women used to produce manually much of what was used in the household. With modern manufacturing, mass production, the availability and continuous improvement of the efficiency of household appliances and the invention of the pill, much of women's work in the home became unnecessary. Over time, the nature of work and our political and legal institutions have changed to reflect the fact that most of women's traditional work is not now needed in the home. There's usually an awkward or very uncomfortable (i.e., violent) lag between technical change and the reconfiguration of society that follows it.

The story of what a woman or man is in society has changed over millennia, is changing and will continue to change. During the last few centuries, the narrative that human beings have used to explain gender roles has been articulated and sustained by those who dominated in the public sphere - i.e., men of power and influence. We are currently in a lag period between the changed technology and the story that is going to make sense of it (and still finding out who will most benefit from that story).

What's thrown us for a loop is that the technology is changing so fast that automation threatens to undermine our entire system of economic arrangements based on wage labour. Most jobs will become unnecessary, so ask yourself, how is the wealth going to be redistributed? Meanwhile the underclass of unemployable people is becoming larger and feeling their loss of power ever more acutely. This is especially so for men, who at least had enjoyed an advantage of higher social status than women in the same economic bracket. There is a backlash and the darkness looms, but it is not due to "Post-Modern Marxism". The backlash comes from people who are facing vast social changes without being able to predict the future.  These are the people who I expect tend to vote in strong man politicians and fall victim to false nostalgia. Feeling marginalized, some men might experience a sense of threat and humiliation that women and minorities, who were formerly accorded lower social status, are now making gains in social status by becoming more represented in the public sphere. (In some societies, women are not even supposed to have a public face.) Things are changing too fast for the narrative to catch up and people are stressed out. During uncertain or fearful times, people's views tend to become more conservative. People retrench. They scapegoat.

Chimamanda Adichie says that we do girls a great disservice by raising them to accommodate men's egos. This unpleasant obligation is embedded in the narrative that all of us have inherited in one variant or another. In some societies women are still blamed for men's inability to master their sexual impulses. The tendency for women to be agreeable and accommodating is an effect of inequality, not a cause. Being agreeable and accommodating is different from being loving and kind, caring and considerate. It is a defence. It becomes a defence that fosters resentment of their own capacity for caring and it makes those without the "right balance" of agreeableness and commitedness into scapegoats. "The beast" of the masculine feared by Peterson is one that he generously sustains with circular rationalizations.

Note 1: 

"... the demand for for inclusiveness 

and unity and care and the demand for high-level performance in a hierarchical structure - they're very different orientations in the world and so it's complicated for people who are agreeable and conscientious -  and actually I think often that large corporations and large institutions of any sort run on the unheralded labor of people who are high in agreeableness and high in conscientiousness and they're disproportionately women. In my experience in large institutions has been that if you want to hire someone to exploit appropriately - no,  not appropriately -  if you want to hire someone to exploit productively you hire middle-aged women who are hyper-conscientious and who are agreeable because they'll do everything they won't take credit for it and they won't complain and that's nasty and I think that happens all the time and so one of the things you have to be careful of if you're agreeable is not to be exploited because you'll line up to be exploited and I think the reason for that is because you're wired to be exploited by infants and so that just doesn't work so well in that actual world."  Transcribed from an online lecture by Jordan Peterson.

Note 2: . “If men are pushed too hard to feminize,” he warns, “they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/jordan-petersons-gospel-of-masculinity (More likely, men are being marginalized by increasingly flat wages or unemployment, and when humiliated they scapegoat, as explained above.) 

Imagining Reality

I saw a talk on TED a couple of years ago by cognitive scientist, Donald Hoffman. He presented his view that our perceptual faculties have evolved for our survival and not so much to preserve a likeness to whatever it is that is causing our perception. To some extent, this is an unremarkable hypothesis since we already know that the range of colours and sounds extends beyond that we can see and hear. What are sounds to us and other living things are basically air vibrations, and there is no sound in the void of outer space. We also know our perceptual systems are tricked by optical illusions.

But Hoffman's idea is more radical - he thinks that the world we perceive might bear no more resemblance to whatever causes our perceptions than a computer screen interface bears to the actual inner workings of the computer, i.e., none. Further, he believes that even scientific activity remains at the perceptual "user interface" and, for all intents and purposes, we remain within the matrix of our perceptual systems, with no perceptual access to reality. Even brains and neurons, as we study them, reside in the interface. This is not to say we are lost in a sea of perceptual illusion, however. He retains hope that mathematics and reason will guide us to scientific truths.

Variations on the idea that we cannot get beyond our modes of perception to experience reality directly have been advanced throughout the history of ideas.  For the most part, these positions have been thought to entail that we simply do not know what is beyond the perceptual horizon and must leave aside any hopes of metaphysical insight; or that are grounds to believe that we are somehow trapped inside our heads, or that the world we see is a hallucination or a delusion; or that the world there is is really nothing other than the world we perceive - esse est percipi.

We end up with this set of positions only because our idea of reality is one that assumes a gulf between Mind and Nature.

The world is real (or it is nothing). I'm not saying that we perceive things as they would be without us. Why have we have assumed that's what reality is - the world as it is without us? The world we inhabit is a dynamic environment that includes us and within which we have considerable influence, for better or worse. A world without us is clearly an imaginary one. Without perceiving beings, the world wouldn't really look like anything.  It has existed and could exist without us, and it will again one day, but as of now, here we are.

It's a simple truism. The world we perceive is the world in which we live. Our perceptions occur in nature, and they are more or less relevant to our purposes, whether those purposes be the pursuit of scientific knowledge, manipulating others, or obscuring something painful from our past.  Perceptual veridicality is not true representation of a non-perceived world but has to do with with the horizon of our intentions.

Our idea of objectivity (our current one - the concept of objectivity has a history) is the idea of the world  without us, a world imagined without involvement (taint) from any human intention or purpose. This has led us to frame reality as a principally spatial world of catalogued things whose interactions can be described in terms of the operation of forces acting according to laws of nature.

Our habit of conceptually freeze-framing phenomena in space and time in a way that favours spatial and mathematical representation is likely cognitively energy-saving but ontologically misleading. Perception is an active response to our present environment and we cannot remove ourselves from the world to understand it - why would we think we could? Does anyone know what the world would look like sub specie aeternitatis (from the POV of eternity)?

The conceptual freeze-frame is only a shorthand that we have somehow managed to reify because we see ourselves as so different from nature. Our own nature has been considered an impediment to objectivity. Nevertheless, we live in a dynamic symbiotic universe, not a world of disconnected things attracted by forces and governed by laws. We reify our conceptual models and assume tangible experience falls short.

The question of how the world is without our witnessing it is not possible to answer. That doesn't mean there is "some mysterious unknowable world" about which we have no direct or indirect information or that the existence of the world depends upon us perceiving it. The question is an error. The world we know more or less well is the world in which we came to be.