Three virtual posts

Amazon link

I was going to review Richard Morgan's latest tech-thriller "Thin Air" which I enjoyed a lot. But Steven Poole of The Guardian expressed my thoughts so much more clearly. Really, it's easier just to point you to his review.

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Like everyone else I had plenty of thoughts about the alleged Gatwick Airport drone incursion. The problem seems to be in two parts: first to identify the team launching/retrieving the drone; second to deal with the drone itself. The first part seems harder.

My idea was to run a real time video-acquisition platform (a satellite, police drones or arrays of ground-based CCTV) covering the operational radius of the hostile drone around the airport - I believe this is 2-3 miles. This would generate a great deal of video which would need to be searched very rapidly for hostile drone-team activity. Precisely what Project Maven was designed to address. Google may have gone pacifist but no reason for Qinetiq not to do the project.

But I read so many interesting ideas that it seemed pointless and redundant to add any more.

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I was going to write about this paper with the unpromising title: "Mapping morality with a compass: Testing the theory of ‘morality-as cooperation’ with a new questionnaire" by Oliver Scott Curry, Matthew Jones Chesters and Caspar J. Van Lissa.

What they've done is rethink Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory on the basis of evolutionary plausibility. Instead of Haidt's five dimensions, they have seven and in their field trials it all seems to make sense. Here are their seven moral dimensions. Click on image to make readable.

This is what they say in their abstract.

"Morality-as-Cooperation (MAC) is the theory that morality is a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. MAC uses game theory to identify distinct types of cooperation, and predicts that each will be considered morally relevant, and each will give rise to a distinct moral domain.

Here we test MAC’s predictions by developing a new self-report measure of morality, the Morality-as-Cooperation Questionnaire (MAC-Q), and comparing its psychometric properties to those of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ). Over four studies, the results support the MAC-Q’s seven-factor model of morality, but not the MFQ’s five-factor model.

Thus MAC emerges as the best available compass with which to explore the moral landscape."

I have been quite enthused here by Moral Foundations Theory, while being aware that it, like the five-factor model of personality theory, floats unanchored, crying out for a deeper evolutionary embedding. So this latest work is potentially quite exciting.

Unfortunately, the paper itself is dry and technical and does not excite. I hope the research community builds on it to progress Jonathan Haidt's work - particularly on the psychological/moral differences between liberals, conservatives and libertarians. Then I will feel motivated to comment.

Why liberals hate Trump (cont.)

Note: if you're unfamiliar with Myers-Briggs Type Theory or Keirsey Temperament Theory you might want to review this.

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While researching yesterday's post on Donald Trump, I came across "Donald Trump ESTJ Personality?" by Ross Reinhold. Apparently quite a few students of personality type have been assessing Trump as an ESTJ.

It's quite an easy mistake to make: Trump can do a very good authoritative CEO impression when he feels like it. But there is more to it than that: his core (ST) authoritarianism hits a deeper nerve with the psychotherapeutic community, who are extremely liberal.

I equate liberal (in the Jonathan Haidt sense) with the Myers-Briggs/Keirsey category of Idealist.

Ross Reinhold writes:

"While we are supposed to respect and celebrate the values of all 16 personality types, deep in the hearts of many fans of personality typing ESTJ and ENTJ types are the bad guys in the type world.

The “types” of people most often reacting negatively to ESTJ/ENTJ (and to the kind of behavior Trump frequently exhibits) are what David Keirsey has labeled as having an Idealist temperament (see his seminal book “Please Understand Me”).

Keirsey also studied Myers work and identified four personality types who share the Idealist temperament: INFP, INFJ, ENFP, and ENFJ. All Intuitive Feeling types.

Since both ESTJ and ENTJ extravert their Thinking and are by nature “command and control” folks, by their very nature [they] are easily off-putting to all Feeling types.

Feeling types who also favor Intuition can be particularly sensitive. When they see some evidence of what they consider as improper behavior or attitudes they will tend to “intuit” there is more of the same, that what they observe is only the tip of the iceberg.

In a 1996 landmark study of Personality Type in the general population, researchers Allan Hammer and Wayne Mitchell found that 15.7% of the adult population fit into the four Idealist personality types. In a 2004 compilation of the type distribution of the membership of the Association for Psychological Type (at the time the largest worldwide association of type professionals) showed that these four Idealist personality types comprised 46.3 % of the membership.

While a minority in the general population, Idealists are easily the dominant temperament among professional users of and teachers of personality type. So when you understand that there is natural conflict between Extraverted Thinking types and Feeling-Intuitive types you can see how even among professional “experts,” the negatives associated with ESTJ and ENTJ can loom large.

Because Trump does exhibit some characteristics associated with ESTJ and he also offends a number of people (and a large number of Idealists I suspect) it is easy to conclude he must be an ESTJ because it is perceived as one of the two most offensive personality types.

... continue reading.

The author (who wrote the piece I linked to yesterday) suggests Trump is actually an ESTP.

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Dick Cheney is an ENTJ - a classical hate figure for liberals. Incidentally Cheney is the main villain in super-liberal Charles Stross's "Merchant Princes" trilogy I was reading over Christmas.

Way too much Fire and Fury

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I think it was David Keirsey in "Please Understand Me II" who observed that the feminism of the sixties and seventies was driven by female ENFJs.

Amazon link

The Keirsey/Myers-Briggs NF ('Idealist') temperament describes a combination of abstract-intuition and compassion which forms the essence of liberalism. The extraversion (E) and Judging (J) work to turn that abstracted-compassion loose on the world - let the campaign begin!

Rationals like myself (ineffectually inclined to Libertarianism) tend to value truth and logical coherence. We are prepared for our ideas to be refuted.

Idealists, by contrast, are driven by moral fervour, not intellectual rigour. When they meet opposition, their opponents get classed as heretics, their positions a value-atrocity.

It's no fun debating SJWs.

So when the liberals got their claws into Donald Trump for not being one of them (and for refusing to sign up to their agenda - as Obama and Clinton had done), it was very tempting to defend the current POTUS.

But the political enemy of my enemy can also be .. my enemy.

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Trump is most likely an ESTP. The lack of interest in ideas or coherent policy-making is not unusual for a self-indulging, prickly and egocentric Artisan.

The higher ranks of modern society tend to be overpopulated with intellectuals. Rationals do strategy and policy; the Idealists focus on the people stuff: the media and the campaigns. People who traffic in ideas usually write off concrete types (Guardians and Artisans) as stupid.

But Trump has made a successful business and television career and by all accounts has a mesmerising eye for detail. Stupid he is not.

Out of his depth, aggressive and unintellectual? - Well, we are where we are.

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I would advise to dial down the panic. Trump is not Hitler. There is no American fascist movement of any consequence. One person alone does not control what happens in any modern society. Trump is undoubtedly the boss from hell - Wolff can be relied upon in his numerous anecdotes of glazed eyes and childish petulance - but the managing of such people is a well-trodden path.

You give them options and ensure the right one is the most attractive. It does require a good chief of staff as butler-in-chief, supported by a solid team across the silos of government.

The military, however, excels at developing senior officers with that kind of talent. This last year has seen a Darwinian process operating in the White House to form a senior government leadership team which actually kind of works.

Selling capitalism to the feudal nobility

Steve Hsu is pessimistic about the terminal age of decadence in which we live:

"The empires Glubb studied had a lifespan of about ten human generations, or two hundred and fifty years, despite changing factors such as technology. Glubb describes a pattern of growth and decline, with six stages: the Ages of Pioneers, Conquest, Commerce, Affluence, Intellect and Decadence. He pointedly avoided writing about India or China, focusing rather on middle and western Eurasia, stating that his knowledge was inadequate to the task.

Note that six stages in 10 generations means that significant change can occur over one or two generations -- a nation can pass from one age to the next, as I believe we have in America during my lifetime.

... There does not appear to be any doubt that money is the agent which causes the decline of this strong, brave and self-confident people. The decline in courage, enterprise and a sense of duty is, however, gradual. The first direction in which wealth injures the nation is a moral one. Money replaces honour and adventure as the objective of the best young men. Moreover, men do not normally seek to make money for their country or their community, but for themselves.

Gradually, and almost imperceptibly, the Age of Affluence silences the voice of duty. The object of the young and the ambitious is no longer fame, honour or service, but cash. Education undergoes the same gradual transformation. No longer do schools aim at producing brave patriots ready to serve their country. [ Or to discover great things for all mankind! ] Parents and students alike seek the educational qualifications which will command the highest salaries. ...

Duty, Honor, Country:

The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

The 21st century American reality (the Age of Decadence):

"Yeah, I calculated the NPV, and, you know, it's just not worth it for me. I really believe in your project, though. And, I share your passion. Good luck."

The description is of the decline of asabiyyah, as complacency and selfish individualism possess the elites. Yet there is still something superficial about this account.

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It seems plausible that Duty, Honor, Country are the paramount virtues of a vigorous and rising polity. They are communitarian traits as in Jonathan Haidt's MFT, almost the opposite of the value set of liberalism. Undoubtedly they base themselves on evolutionarily-ancient components of the human psyche, selected for group cohesion.

Pre-capitalist formations, such as the empires of antiquity and those of feudalism, codified and celebrated duty, honour and country/empire. The elites knew they had to hang together or they'd hang separately, given their explicit social position as oppressors. When social solidarity failed, rebellions soon followed. Peter Turchin has written books about this.

In capitalism it's somewhat different. Economic exploitation is hidden behind the veil of equal formal rights for all. Most people sign up to the elite idea that capitalism is not a class society. The elites do not generally rely upon the threat of explicit oppression, but on the atomisation of labour, free to flow where fluid capital requires it (in terms of geography, roles and skills).*

Liberal individualism is the soul of modern capitalism but it doesn't really stir the heart .. and it doesn't glue society together.

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I'm reading Charles Stross's The Bloodline Feud: The Family Trade and The Hidden Family (Merchant Princes Omnibus Book 1) where the heroine (a feisty tech journalist who is also feudal royalty) attempts to kickstart capitalism in a parallel feudal world. Stross is the pre-eminent writer of economics science-fiction and his book has received plaudits from leading economists such as Paul Krugman.

Amazon link

From a feudal point of view, capitalism as an overarching system looks incredibly weird. The world is run by merchants, who have no interests apart from enlarging their capital again and again?

'What then is life for?' they would ask**.

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* This is at the root of the 'somewheres' vs. 'anywheres' distinction we saw with Brexit. The Remainers cannot conceive how anyone could be opposed to their vision of a uniform transnational community of right-thinkers embracing an enlightened globalised capitalism; Leavers conversely can't understand why our hard-built and largely pleasant British island community should be subordinated to more powerful European nation-states with their own somewhat inimical interests.


** A quote I once heard: "No-one ever gave their life for IBM."

A field manual for Theresa May

Amazon link

Here's a summary:

"Several decades of greater economic and cultural openness in the West have not benefited all our citizens. Among those who have been left behind, a populist politics of culture and identity has successfully challenged the traditional politics of Left and Right, creating a new division: between the mobile ‘achieved’ identity of the people from Anywhere, and the marginalised, roots-based identity of the people from Somewhere. This schism accounts for the Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump, the decline of the centre-left, and the rise of populism across Europe.

"David Goodhart’s compelling investigation of the new global politics reveals how the Somewhere backlash is a democratic response to the dominance of Anywhere interests, in everything from mass higher education to mass immigration."

and here's the author bio:

"David Goodhart is the founding editor of Prospect magazine and one of the most distinctive voices on British politics today. He is currently head of the Demography, Immigration and Integration Unit at the think tank Policy Exchange, and was previously director of the centre-left think tank Demos.

"His last book The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration (2013) was runner-up for the Orwell Prize in 2014 and was a finalist for ‘Political Book of the Year’ in the Paddy Power Political Book Awards. David voted remain in the EU referendum and has been a mainly inactive member of the Labour Party since he was a student."

I was afraid I was going to get a typical liberal hatchet-job on Brexiteers and oiks. The familiar stuff about that section of the population notorious for being stupid, reactionary, nostalgic for times-long-gone, and so forth.

I'm pleased to say that David Goodhart's book is considerably better than that: it's well-written and quite a page-turner, despite a fair degree of repetition and the occasional splash of necessary but dry statistics.

Goodhart is open-minded, understands Jonathan Haidt's work on the differing moral foundations of liberals and conservatives, and sees how much light this sheds into his 'Anywheres' and 'Somewheres'. And although he never leaves the outer boundaries of the liberal paradigm, he does acknowledge innate differences in cognitive, personality and gender attributes (normally denied by liberals) and sees atomised individualism for the fanciful illusion it is.

Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory: liberal vs. conservative values

Using an approach grounded in history, economics and sociology, his book details the damage that decades of neoliberalism has done to the fabric of non-elite life across the world. Goodhart's 'Anywheres' are deliberately myopic about this - they either do not care or think it's actually positive.

He makes a further very telling point: with the demise of the mass-unionised manufacturing sector, the elites are no longer afraid of the diminished and fragmented working class. They pursue their own agendas with impunity.

Those chickens finally came home to roost with Brexit, Trumpism and the generic rise of 'populism'.

Goodhart is keen to propose a political solution: essentially Blue Labour or Red Toryism .. which happens to be the position Theresa May has adopted in the current election campaign. He favours policies for strengthening technical education, controlling permanent immigration and improving integration, reinforcing the family and encouraging job/career opportunities for the 'non cognitive-elite'. You can already hear the condescending insults of the 'Anywheres' to such 'reactionary tosh'.

I don't want to get into his detailed policy prescriptions (which in any case seem to have mostly ended up in the Tory Manifesto). His general approach is what Tony Smith would probably call 'the social state', a recasting of 1950s social-democracy for the modern age.

It may well be the least bad option we currently have, even though I'm sure the British elite will put up the same contemptuous, disparaging resistance that the US elites are currently inflicting on the Trump Presidency. (It won't be so strident over here since things are not so polarised and May is a far less abrasive and aggressive politician).

Goodhart is detailed and descriptive, but with insufficient analysis as to why the extraordinarily silly ideas of the 'Anywheres' (expressed most clearly and absurdly in the 'political correctness' of 'social justice warriors') have become the entrenched ruling ideology of the age.

The answer is surely that they happen to express the entrenched interests and practices of the globalised elites themselves. With such powerful economic buttresses, coolly rational critical thinking from people like David Goodhart has hitherto found little purchase. Any influence he may yet develop will depend upon the 'populist' masses in motion - which do seem to be unsettling the elites, judging by their reactions. So although I read the book with much interest, I didn't feel in the end much of a wow-factor, as if I had suddenly understood the world in a new and more profound way.

It's more like David Goodhart, Ambassador to the 'Somewheres' from the 'Anywheres', returned to write down his considered thoughts, careful not to appear to have gone native.

"The Genome Factor" - Conley and Fletcher

Amazon link

For decades the Standard Social Science Model has dominated academic social science and mainstream elite thinking. Broadly speaking, the model states: (i) there are no innate precursors for cognitive traits such as personality, intelligence, character and interests - everything is environmental; and (ii) consequentially, there are no innate psychological differences between women and men - or between blacks, whites, east asians or the Ashkenazim.

Since everything is environmental (the 'blank slate' hypothesis) then any observed differences must be due to selective discrimination which can therefore be addressed by public policy. The consequence is a litany of discriminations with which we are all familiar: sexism, racism and various phobias.

Plainly there are differences in the physical realm. Some sports are gender-segregated, for example. But even acknowledging that makes people nervous. Physical differences are played down as inconsequential.

Less well-educated folk know that the blank-slate hypothesis is rubbish. A little experience of families, a little observation both of everyday life and of the world at large will convince most people that it is more likely that the moon truly is made of green cheese.

So what explains the astonishing durability of the SSSM?

Plainly it speaks to that powerful liberal sense of compassion and fairness highlighted in Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory.  Most western democracies are multiracial, patchwork 'internal-empires' - the legacy of centuries of immigration and in some cases slavery. Race- and gender-blind application of legislation and social norms is considerably enhanced by taking the view that formal social and legal equality is also biological equality. Once the argument for population-genetic differences is admissible, it seems to liberals that the floodgates of discrimination would be opened once again.

The ideology of the SSSM also makes it easy to justify generic immigration: high, low and zero-skilled ('everyone is the same'). This can be very convenient for company executives who suffer few of the frequently-negative social consequences of the latter.

Recent advances in genetic sequencing over very large populations pose a grave threat to the convenient untruths of the SSSM. It is already known that almost all psychological and behavioural traits of interest to social scientists are heritable at c. 50-60%. This means that about half the trait-variation in the population is attributable to genetic differences, the rest being due to differences in contemporary shared and personal environments.

Apart from hands-on confirmation of these heritability results, genomics also adds personalisation. Once we understand how to map a person's genome to such phenotypic attributes as IQ, personality, character and a myriad of narrower traits (such as political orientation) with high precision - and correlational accuracies of 0.7-0.9 seem potentially in reach - then it seems that genome truly is life-destiny. And most likely this is the case. The life-history similarities of twins, even when raised apart, tends to show the way.

Social scientists mostly ignore the incoming tsunami of new research. But the genomic telescope has been invented, it's not going to go away. A more sophisticated strategy is deployed in "The Genome Factor" by Conley and Fletcher. The authors are sociologists by profession but research the social science implications of genomic surveys. They had a choice - to go with the trend of such research to transcend the SSSM - or to find ever more intricate arguments to preserve it.

In choosing the latter approach, their strategy is to freely accept the theoretical results of population genetics and the empirical data of GWAS (genome-wide association studies) where this does not threaten blank-slatism. They then labour to find fault in every study which might cast it into doubt while feeding plenty of slack to the many purported environment-only explanations of race and gender differences. You will see plenty of uncritical space given to: continuing discrimination and poor institutions (pp. 107 ff.); subconscious bias, priming and stereotype threat (appendix 5).

In chapter 4, the authors address the claims of Herrnstein and Murray's seminal 1994 book, The Bell Curve. The three theses they wish to 'take seriously' are (to summarise): (i) increasing genetic stratification due to cognitive meritocracy; (ii) increasing assortative mating for intelligence; (iii) cognitive dysgenics via reduced fertility in the cognitive elite.

They announce, to their evident satisfaction, that none of these theses is born out by the evidence. But how convinced should we be by their arguments? The answer is, not very. There are many confounding variables - particular the massive changes in education and employment practices over the decades relevant to analysis - as Conley and Fletcher themselves spell out. In some cases the phenotypic attributes measured do, in fact, accord with Herrnstein and Murray's theses but the authors rapidly draw our attention to their underlying genetic correlates, as derived from GWAS.

Here they find no such trends. But unfortunately, we do not yet know the genetic markers for the relevant cognitive traits. Instead, the genomic indicator the authors use is the incredibly noisy 'polygenic score' (PGS). All we can really conclude is that the effects are small, and that as far as Herrnstein and Murray's proposed theses are concerned, it's too early to be sure.

Chapter 6, 'The Wealth of Nations', engages with Ashraf and Galor's 'Goldilocks' hypothesis of correlations between degrees of genetic diversity (too much in Africa?) and higher income and growth. Yet the correlations are poor (p. 124).  I wish they had engaged with work such as Garett Jones' 'Hive Mind', which focuses on ideas that country differences in IQ and size of the 'smart fraction' have something to do with it. Jones finds remarkably high correlations. But you can see the dangers.

So this is a book with an agenda although I think it's subconscious bias. The authors take too much pleasure in 'refuting' challenges to the core doctrines of the SSSM to make me think they're just doing so to protect their positions.

There are things to learn from this book. As critics they look for every conceivable flaw in twin and GWAS studies - this is socially useful. They also explain various techniques such as GWAS well, although the book is too technical and too dry for both the general public and mainstream social science academics.

In all, I regard this book as a missed opportunity.

The liberal colonisation of western elites: why?

The British Prime Minister, Theresa May, gave a defensive speech on Brexit today and was duly patronised on the talk shows by Remain liberals in their characteristic, languid upper-class drawl.

I wonder yet again why western capitalist elites seem dominated by liberals. The phenomenon is too widespread to be explained by purely national histories. From the Clintons to the Camerons to the Merkels the caste is pervasive.

I turn again to Jonathan Haidt and Moral Foundations Theory, quoting him from this previous post.

"Think of it like this: Evolution gave all human beings the same taste receptors — for sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami (or MSG) — but cultures then create unique cuisines, constrained by the fact that the cuisine must please those taste receptors. Moral foundations work much the same way. The six main moral taste receptors, according to MFT, are:

Care/harm: We feel compassion for those who are vulnerable or suffering.

Fairness/cheating: We constantly monitor whether people are getting what they deserve, whether things are balanced. We shun or punish cheaters.

Liberty/oppression: We resent restrictions on our choices and actions; we band together to resist bullies.

Loyalty/betrayal: We keep track of who is "us" and who is not; we enjoy tribal rituals, and we hate traitors.

Authority/subversion: We value order and hierarchy; we dislike those who undermine legitimate authority and sow chaos.

Sanctity/degradation: We have a sense that some things are elevated and pure and must be kept protected from the degradation and profanity of everyday life. (This foundation is best seen among religious conservatives, but you can find it on the left as well, particularly on issues related to environmentalism.)

"As with cuisines, societies vary a great deal in the moralities they construct out of these universal predispositions. Many traditional agricultural and herding societies rely heavily on the loyalty, authority, and sanctity  foundations to create rituals, myths, and religious institutions that bind groups together with a strong tribal consciousness.

"That can be highly effective for groups that are often attacked by neighboring rivals, but commercial societies (such as Amsterdam in the 17th century or New York City today) are far less in need of these foundations, and so make much less use of them.

Jonathan Haidt and his co-workers found that modern political tribes project differently onto these six dimensions.

Source: Wikipedia

Liberals are motivated almost entirely by the Caring dimension and Fairness, which they tend to interpret as equality of outcome. We might also observe that liberals tend to value self-control and eschew displays of physical aggression. Playing by the formal rules demands both.

Conservatives score less on Caring, stronger on Fairness which they tend to interpret as equality of opportunity, and are supportive of their own institutions via Groupishness.

Libertarians are like Mr Spock in Star Trek: cool and unemotional, detached and strongly autonomous as shown by their focus on Liberty - freedom from interference.

Modern capitalism in its full, globalist, multi-ethnic majesty is a kind of ecosystem-filter for these different moral types.

As I mentioned in the previous post about the current state of Russia, capitalism works best - as a network of anonymous economic relationships distributed over time and space - with a system of rules in place to enforce property rights and ensure transaction-integrity.

The point about rules is that they should be impersonal, not unduly biased by power and stable. In turn this requires an enforcing state which upholds associated values. These, however, can easily conflict with common psychological drives.

• Universal abstract rights can undermine particularist family, kin and ethnic interests
• Formal process requires the replacement of arbitrary force to resolve disputes
• A safety net is needed to keep the masses from toppling the elites.

In MFT terms, this prioritises Fairness and Caring, and undermines the kinds of particularism expressed in the three Groupish dimensions. In theory Libertarian Freedom might suit an idealised capitalism but in reality its disengaged state-model is just ineffective and dangerously uncaring.

If these points carry a ring of truth then it's no surprise that liberals are so strongly selected for when populating elite positions, particularly within the state apparatus and organs of elite ideology like the media and social sciences.

When Groupish, 'populist' conservatives come to power, propelled by disgruntled in-groups, liberals react with fear and loathing seeing the threat to their carefully-crafted model of atomised society composed of formally-equal individuals.

They are right to do so: as discussed in the previous post, authoritarian leaders privilege their supporters while demonising others as out-groups. This can end in tears.

But .. the tenets of liberal ideology are so tendentious, so self-serving, and often so plainly delusional and damaging to the social fabric that sometimes, something just has to be done.

I think Theresa May clearly understands this, which makes her deference to the liberal establishment besieging her so depressing.

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Is it possible to run a free, productive, dynamic, inclusive capitalist society without its natural ideology of social atomisation, blank-slate equality and hyper-individualism?

You might want to read this.

Human Dodos

Before reading on, you should take a look at this introductory post first.

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In the beginning, all human groups were necessarily clannish.

"We are social creatures surviving only in groups, but there is no celestial police force guarding each one of us. If we don't stick with our kin, some other group will make us toast (in the baleful meaning of that phrase)."

Trouble is, a society based on xenophobic clans doesn't scale. As Dr Fukuyama wrote:

"... state-building requires overcoming the strong bonds of kin. States were recurrently prone to being colonized by their officials’ nepotism (favouring their relations), dynasticism (seeking to have their offspring inherit their office), tribalism, and clannishness."

Typically it was a combination of war and religion which broke the power of the clans. Given gene-culture coevolution, the people who got to run countries and empires evolved different moral and psychological characteristics than those of a Genghis Khan style warlord - or of the smallfolk.

Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory gives us the clue, as Wikipedia explains.

From the Wikipedia article

According to Haidt and his co-workers, there are six moral foundations which underlie human moral behaviour:

1. Care: cherishing and protecting others; opposite of harm.
2. Fairness or proportionality: rendering justice according to shared rules; opposite of cheating.
3. Liberty: the loathing of tyranny; opposite of oppression.
4. Loyalty or ingroup: standing with your group, family, nation; opposite of betrayal.
5. Authority or respect: obeying tradition and legitimate authority; opposite of subversion.
6. Sanctity or purity: abhorrence for disgusting things, foods, actions; opposite of degradation.

Not everyone exhibits moral feelings equally along all six axes. The differences are most stark in political terms: conservatives do indeed seem to feel all six moral emotions; liberals by contrast tend to feel primarily the moral senses of care and fairness, while libertarians tend to be motivated by fairness and liberty (and not to be much bothered by the other four dimensions).

Why is this? Wikipedia explains:

"Researchers postulate that the six moral foundations arose as solutions to problems common in the ancestral hunter-gatherer environment, in particular inter-tribal and intra-tribal conflict. The three foundations unique to conservatives (Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity) bind groups together for greater strength in inter-tribal competition; the other three foundations balance those tendencies with concern for individuals within the group.

"With reduced sensitivity to the groupish moral foundations, progressives tend to promote a more universalist morality. In attempting to show which moral matrix is "correct", progressives and libertarians may argue that the six moral foundations arose in a now non-existent tribal environment, and their evolution lags behind modern conditions, with larger-scale cities, countries, and supranational unions.

"Conservatives may counter that human beings remain cognitively designed for life in groups whose size does not exceed Dunbar's number, and that it is wishful thinking to expect group competition and conflict to disappear in the foreseeable future ... ."

As I observed in the introductory post,

"In the west we are so socialised into an atomised mode of life, mediated only by the nuclear family, that we see kin-groups (clans and gangs) as profoundly primitive and 'other'. But our way of life depends upon the integrity of a strong state exerting 'just power' through depersonalised laws. And a lot of conscious inhibition of retributive impulses.

"Erode that state, or let it collapse, and the only individualists left will be dead individualists."

Liberal thinking is the ideology of the privileged individualist, autonomous lifestyle choices guaranteed by the abstract power of the state. The Social Justice Warriors (the vanguard of liberalism) are the shock troops of the war for ever more benign laws, equalising people and outcomes alike.

Who could disagree? What could possibly go wrong?

In its own terms, liberalism is the progressive destination of all mankind - in this it has the same cultural dynamic as Marxism.

By definition, to be a less liberal polity is to be a more benighted one with a moral duty to be superseded.

But ...

The premise of liberalism is that, in all essentials, everyone is the same. There are no systemic human differences of personality, intelligence, motivation or even moral sense. In the liberal target-environment we never have any serious differences of opinion because everyone is so prosocial; all apparent conflicts can and will be settled by discussion in a spirit of goodwill.

Good luck with that!

A moment's cursory reflection upon the world and life experience will render you, the reader, open-mouthed in astonishment that anyone could ever believe such naive nonsense.

Because of this profoundly wrong theory of human nature, liberal thinking (so useful for running complex multi-ethnic empires when times are good) lets you down so badly when the problems start to multiply.

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Things were really good for the dodos for a while: they grew fat in an environment of plenty with no natural predators.

The dodo is a variant of the dove. Game theory tells us that when a society composed purely of doves meets a predator, the doves are toast.

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Human Dodos FAQs

Matthew Parris, Brexit and MFT

For the background on Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) (Jonathan Haidt) start here.

The Conservative Right of the Tories

Matthew Parris writes a passionate opinion piece in The Times today, denouncing the Brexiteers in his own party as destroyers of the Tory Party and wreckers of Europe.

"My hunch is that there is a powerful correlation between those Tory MPs who want us to leave the EU, and those whom most people would describe as “right wing” more generally. There is no tick-box way of categorising a rightwinger: you have to look at a range of behaviours:

• a strong and persistent interest in military matters; 


• a marked admiration for Republican US presidents; 


• social illiberalism (look at attitudes towards gay marriage, for example; or some of the church-fuelled reaction to what the rest of us might call progressive social policy); 


• a certain lack of interest in the state’s role in protecting workers or the active promotion of healthy living; 


• ... state intervention that such MPs would call “wishy-washy liberalism”. 

"All I can say is that in the Tory party you know a rightwinger when you meet one."

Compare that list of moral values with the standard conservative set I discussed yesterday.

Traditional conservatism - all boxes ticked, but moderately

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The Liberal-Left of the Tories

I recall reading - I think in the Alan Clark Diaries - the consensus of the Thatcherite high command that for Matthew Parris, it was always going to be about Gay Rights.

And yesterday I also gave you the chart for the classic bien-pensant liberal, to which group Mr Parris is such an adornment.

This is broadly where Matthew Parris sits in the moral spectrum

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I already wrote about Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and Brexit here (scroll to the bottom).

Let me add that the Brexit camp combines three moral camps. As well as the traditional conservatives already mentioned - those well-represented in the conservative party - we also have:

The Libertarians

Matt Ridley, Mr Gove and the sole UKIP MP, Douglas Carswell. Here is their chart:

Libertarian Brexiteers dislike the dead hand of European oversight

The Authoritarians

The Nigel Farage wing of UKIP, and continental authoritarian nationalists like Marine Le Pen.

Brexit Authoritarians rally to a nationalist, communalist flag

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Despite their preponderance in the media and the governing elite, there are only so many left-liberals. How to win over the others? Only fear of the unknown will do it. So Matthew Parris's column is full of fear and foreboding:

"It’s Project Fear that has turned us, and I don’t mind admitting it. Fear of the economic consequences of leaving. Distaste at many of the crew who want us out. Anxiety about the impact on our allies in Europe and worldwide if we kick this huge enterprise in European co-operation in the guts. Alarm at the rise of anger in the world. Shame that we British might come to be judged by history as vandals."

Fear has often been enough, when moral buttons are not being pushed too hard. But heaven help the 'Remain' camp if something bad (morally-speaking) happens EU-wise later this spring.

Jonathan Haidt in pictures (MFT)

This is my third post on Jonathan Haidt's book, 'The Righteous Mind' and his Moral Foundations Theory (MFT).

If you just arrived here you should read my introductory post first.

The first five foundations of morality are described in this table on page 146 of Haidt's book.

You can click on any of the images in this post to make them larger.

The sixth foundation, Liberty/oppression, which generates emotions such as righteous anger when faced with illegitimate authority was introduced later in chapter 8.

The six moral foundations are best understood as evolved psychological adaptations which make scalable, stable societies possible - getting you past the limits of small kin-groups.

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One of Haidt's major proposals is that different groups in the political spectrum inhabit very different moral universes, ones in which their own 'tribes' seem good and virtuous, while others seem strange and evil. In the book he discusses the liberal left (which includes social-justice warriors), the conservative right and libertarians; authoritarians are analysed in the context of Donald Trump in this article.

See this previous post for more details.

Here are some charts I put together to illustrate the different moral foundations of contemporary political positions.

The six foundations to get us started (refer to the table above)

Liberal-leftists: it's 'caring', 'oppression' and 'equality - not much else

Conservatives care about all the foundations - equality of opportunity not outcome

Libertarians: 'Don't tread on me!' with a side-order of tough-fairness

Authoritarians: Loyalty, Obedience to Authority, Sanctity: No Free Riders!

Authoritarians would include Donald Trump, the UK Independence Party's Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen in France. Oh, and Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Jacob Zuma amongst many, many more.

These charts are hand-wavy and suggestive, not at all definitive. For example, I've not said enough about Sanctity which is, of course, big in the States. Haidt links Sanctity with Contamination as polar opposites on an awe-disgust spectrum.

I'm not a big fan of how he treats Fairness, which seems to include in a muddled way:

• strong elements of compassion on the political left (equality of outcome)
• reciprocal-altruism on the right (duty) and amongst libertarians (transactional integrity)
• a tendency towards strong retribution amongst authoritarians.

Incidentally, I observed in a post a while back that the attitude of most societies, traditional societies, towards male homosexuals is not fear ('homophobia' - a piece of politically-correct misdirection), but disgust. Educated liberals have carefully averted their minds from what male gay sexual practices actually involve, but acceptance is a lot easier if you deprecate the 'Contamination' moral foundation - as liberals and libertarians typically do.

If you want to see quantitative details on all the above, read the book and check Haidt's blog and the article I linked to in this previous post.

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In case these charts are of any use to you - you might want to improve them - here's a link to the PowerPoint.

Jonathan Haidt and Moral Foundations Theory

It's not often that you happen upon a book which reframes the entire way you think about humanity and large complex societies; a book with new paradigms for thinking about religion, politics and psychology.

When that book is beautifully-written and a real page turner you have this:

'The Righteous Mind' by Jonathan Haidt introduces Moral Foundations Theory - six dimensions on which our relationships with our fellow human beings and our environment can be classified. Emily Ekins and Jonathan Haidt explain the basics.

"We'd like to add another psychological tool to the toolbox: Moral Foundations Theory. One of us (Haidt) developed the theory in the early 2000s, with several other social psychologists, in order to study moral differences across cultures. Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) draws on anthropology and on evolutionary biology to identify the universal "taste buds" of the moral sense, while at the same time explaining how every society creates its own unique morality.

"Think of it like this: Evolution gave all human beings the same taste receptors — for sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami (or MSG) — but cultures then create unique cuisines, constrained by the fact that the cuisine must please those taste receptors. Moral foundations work much the same way. The six main moral taste receptors, according to MFT, are:

1. Care/harm: We feel compassion for those who are vulnerable or suffering.


2. Fairness/cheating: We constantly monitor whether people are getting what they deserve, whether things are balanced. We shun or punish cheaters.


3. Liberty/oppression: We resent restrictions on our choices and actions; we band together to resist bullies.


4. Loyalty/betrayal: We keep track of who is "us" and who is not; we enjoy tribal rituals, and we hate traitors.


5. Authority/subversion: We value order and hierarchy; we dislike those who undermine legitimate authority and sow chaos.


6. Sanctity/degradation: We have a sense that some things are elevated and pure and must be kept protected from the degradation and profanity of everyday life. (This foundation is best seen among religious conservatives, but you can find it on the left as well, particularly on issues related to environmentalism.)

"As with cuisines, societies vary a great deal in the moralities they construct out of these universal predispositions. Many traditional agricultural and herding societies rely heavily on the loyalty, authority, and sanctity  foundations to create rituals, myths, and religious institutions that bind groups together with a strong tribal consciousness.

"That can be highly effective for groups that are often attacked by neighboring rivals, but commercial societies (such as Amsterdam in the 17th century or New York City today) are far less in need of these foundations, and so make much less use of them.

"Their moral values, stories, and political institutions flow more directly from the liberty and fairness foundations — well suited to a culture based on exchange and production — and are therefore much more tolerant and open to ethnic diversity.

"In recent years, MFT has been used to study political differences between the American left and right. Republicans and Democrats in the United States are now in some ways like citizens of different countries, with different beliefs about American history, the Constitution, economics, and climate science.

"Using questionnaires, text analyses, and other methods, psychologists have found that progressives put more emphasis on the care foundation than do other groups, while social conservatives see more value in loyalty, authority, and sanctity than do other groups. Libertarians, meanwhile, put liberty far above all other moral concerns.

"Fairness, important to all groups, nonetheless has subtypes: The left values fairness more when it is presented as equality, particularly equality of outcomes between groups (which is at the heart of social justice). The right values fairness more than the left when it is presented as proportionality — a focus on merit, which includes a desire to let people fail when they are perceived to have been lazy or otherwise undeserving."

...

"Here's a graph showing how how each candidate's supporters prioritize each of the moral foundations compared with the average American.

"Bars above zero indicate that the candidate's supporters place more emphasis on that particular moral foundation compared with the average voter.

"Bars that dip down below zero do not mean those supporters do not care about the moral concern, only that they gave relatively lower ratings to it compared with the rest of our nationally representative survey sample."

Diagram edited to remove Mike Huckabee and Ben Carson

An explanation of this chart can be found at the article. Suffice it to say that it conforms to a much-replicated finding that:

• Liberals (ie left-wingers) are motivated almost entirely by the Caring dimension (blue - concern for 'victims of oppression') and Liberty (yellow -  "everyone should be free to do as they choose, so long as they don't infringe on upon the freedom of others.")


• Conservatives (ie right-wingers) are less 'caring', stronger on no freeloading (green - Proportionality is the desire for people to reap what they sow — for good deeds to be rewarded and bad deeds punished.") and supportive of institutions (red).


• Libertarians, represented by no-hope candidate Rand Paul, are like Mr Spock in Star Trek: cool and unemotional, detached and strongly autonomous - as shown by the large response on yellow (Liberty - freedom from interference). 

Full disclosure: in tests, I score as Libertarian - even though I know that no such political movement can (or should) ever attain power.

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In the UK, I think these political results would map smoothly across for the left.

Bernie Sanders presses just the same moral buttons as Jeremy Corbyn; Hillary Clinton could be any mainstream Labour Party machine politician.

Finding UK analogues for the right of the political spectrum is harder.

Trump's moral score makes him a traditional authoritarian, described in the article thus:

"Voters who still score high on authority/loyalty/sanctity and low on care — even after accounting for all the demographic variables — are significantly more likely to vote for Donald Trump. These are the true authoritarians — they value obedience while scoring low on compassion."

In the UK the only similar politician who comes to mind is Nigel Farage, who is not a serious contender for power. David Cameron is most like Jeb Bush, who scored pretty much where the average American was .. and got booted out of a highly-partisan contest for his pains.

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Moral Foundations Theory also has something to say about Brexit.

Caring

The inflated 'Caring' universality of the left makes staying in the EU a liberal-elite reflex. The usual suspects include the BBC and The Guardian. The Bubble does indeed have a pan-European span. But the more parochial 'Caring' of the masses tends to stop at the Channel.

Fairness/Proportionality

If you're for Brexit it pays to emphasise that our natural loyalty is to the institutions of the British nation state which represents 'our tribe'. The EU violates Fairness/ Proportionality when using our resources in favour of free-riders.

There are plenty of examples, starting with Club Med.

Liberty

Here there are two narratives. The Brexit camp sees EU institutions as oppressive and pushes the Liberty button for freedom from them; the left sees the EU infrastructure (dominated by liberals) as a bastion of support in the battle against the truly oppressive elites (companies, English right-wing politicians).

Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity

Europe is not a demos for the masses: there is no sense of a 'moral us' between the English and the French, Germans, Italians and all the rest. This means that 'Remain' exerts little positive leverage on Loyalty, Authority or Sanctity although it can negatively leverage Authority, pointing out that leaving might lead to chaotically-worse institutional outcomes. Here lies Operation Fear.

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I hope I've shown you the power of Moral Foundations Theory and I strongly recommend you read Jonathan Haidt's book. He has a blog, too.

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Further posts on Jonathan Haidt's work:

• "Why do they hate us?"
• Jonathan Haidt in pictures (MFT)
• Matthew Parris, Brexit and MFT