Anne McElvoy
Who will be the next best prime minister we never had? Every generation has at least one: a figure who gathers more admirers the longer they fail to wear the crown. The less popular the actual leader, the more beguiling the idea of the one who might be. “If only we weren’t stuck with Gordon,” echoes the cry in new Labour. Any party bearing the burden of a recession and long incumbency would be ill-loved. No denying it though, Brown invites such passion from the ABG (anyone but Gordon) camp.
An “effing disaster,” as former defence secretary John Hutton daintily put it. Labour’s centre-left has a pantheon of leaders-manqué, from Hugh Gaitskell and Aneurin Bevan onwards. It is often far warmer to them than to those who have held power. Environment secretary Ed Miliband’s emotional commemoration of Tony Crosland last year reminded me how rising Tories tend to venerate ex-leaders, while Labour devotes its worship to those unsullied by top office. So Denis Healey is lauded as the man who could have averted the disaster of 1979, when a vote of no confidence triggered the election that put Margaret Thatcher in No 10—though as a political loner he could never construct a convincing case for his own bid. Pro-Europeans, electoral reformers and SDP veterans still worship at the shrine of Roy Jenkins.
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Brian Eno
Traditionally there’s only one unforgivable crime in British society: to rise above your station. The cynicism directed at pop stars who decide to “get involved” is fuelled by the usual combination of envy and small-mindedness—but is justified by the argument, “Well what could (s)he possibly know about it?”
This mindset assumes that there are experts who know, and then the rest of us who don’t. But it’s increasingly hard to support: as information flows more freely, expertise becomes commonplace. If we all have access to the information, then what matters is our ability to make use of it. Judgement becomes the key, not access.
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Elizabeth Kirkwood
Online following: @satan love thy neighbour
Jesus was born to tweet, or so it seems. He was after all something of a dab hand at pithy aphorisms. But just what would he tweet? Jesus: @thepeacemakers bless you! If you can think of any better ones, put them on twitter with #historytweets — we’ll give a free subscription to Prospect for the most original. Can’t say fairer than that.
But would you follow Jesus on Twitter? It seems you would according to our new Twitter poll of 2000+ people in the UK (carried out by YouGov). Jesus wasn’t, however, the most popular—we are, it seems, a far more nationalistic bunch than that: if British people could follow any figure from history on Twitter, they picked a national hero with a talent for speeches considerably longer than 140 characters—Sir Winston Churchill. How might that go? winston_c @adolf_h We will fight you on the beaches.
The poll tested a cross section of the 11% of British people who use Twitter—an estimated 5.5m people—and compared them to the rest of the country, revealing that while they have a strong liberal bias in their politics, their heroes are in fact conservative, by today’s standards at least. Churchill topped the list (34 per cent), with Jesus (30 per cent) and Darwin (28 per cent) second and third respectively.
Churchill was most popular among potential Conservative voters, men, the over-35s, and the English. Jesus, meanwhile, came first among Labour voters and Scots. But the two are a statistical dead-heat with Liberal Democrats, women and the under 35s.
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Anthony Seldon
Tony Blair’s “friends in Europe” did little to support his bid for the top job
President Kennedy once envisioned the void he would face when he stood down thus: “I will find myself at what might be called the awkward age, too old to begin a new career and too young to write my memoirs.” Kennedy never faced that dilemma. But Tony Blair did. And as he comes to terms with his failed bid to be EU president, he will have another chance to solve the problem of retirement.
The British are not usually impressed by their former prime ministers. Few have added to their stature in retirement. Several, like Thatcher, Heath and Churchill, detracted from it—the latter is lucky to have escaped opprobrium for the hospitality he enjoyed from the likes of Aristotle Onassis. Since 1945 most have gone quietly into their dotage, seeking little more than memoirs, self-justification and the money their political careers denied them.
But since 2007 Blair has been the exception. Unlike Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher he avoided commentary on his successor, and instead threw himself into a hectic series of projects—hoping to continue work unfinished from his premiership (from which he believed he had been prematurely rushed). And no former leader has been more criticised, especially by a media obsessed with his lucrative consultancies and speaking slots. Indeed, it is rare to come across praise for the charitable work on which he spends half his time, almost all of it unpaid, and through which he employs 80 staff.
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Lewis Page
ABOVE: A British arms industry exhibition in London
Britain’s next government will be forced to reduce spending. But given the wide agrement that these cuts should not affect the NHS or social security, the smallish departments, like the ministry of defence (responsible for about 5 per cent of spending) seem the likely targets. A 10 per cent cut at the MoD (some £4bn a year), is on the cards. At the same time, the main political parties agree that the 1998 strategic defence review (SDR), still the main guide to policy, also needs rewriting.
This worries many in the defence sector. The SDR promised that Britain would keep the ability to intervene militarily around the world. A secondary document, the defence industrial strategy (DIS) of 2005, guaranteed the continued existence of Britain’s arms industry. But with a new defence review and cuts in funding, one of those will have to go. And the arms industry is right to fear that the British people would prefer to keep their excellent armed forces, and jettison their economically insignificant, parasitical defence industry.
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Gavin Knight
ABOVE: policewoman Karyn McCluskey imported a US strategy to reduce gang violence in Strathclyde
When Karyn McCluskey took a job as an intelligence analyst with the Strathclyde police in 2002, she felt overwhelmed. She came from West Mercia Constabulary, a place of beautiful, sparsely populated countryside, some property crime and about two murders a year. Strathclyde had 71, most of them within Glasgow, making it the most violent city in Europe. When in 2005 the number fell to 55, her colleagues heralded it as a 13-year low. McCluskey was appalled. “We were very good at detecting murder.” The detection rate was 98 per cent. “We just couldn’t prevent it.”
The murders were driven by the gang culture on Glasgow’s vast, bleak 1950s housing estates such as Easterhouse. Gang members were local white youths. A typical murder might involve a 16-year-old having a drink to steady his nerves, walking less than half a mile from his flat, and being killed in a one-on-one arranged knife fight. Territory was marked with graffiti; those who strayed outside their area risked attack from a rival gang. Intelligence work revealed there were 170 gangs, with 3,500 gang members aged from around 11 to 23.
On Friday nights in Glasgow’s city centre, or on bridges over the River Clyde, battles were fought with machetes, swords and scaffolding poles. In August, McCluskey showed an example caught on CCTV to a crime conference in London. Senior policemen gasped as a wave of boys charged across Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow’s main street, slashing their rivals outside a busy shopping mall and running back. One victim disappeared behind a car as machete blows rained down on him. “We coined a term for it—recreational violence,” McCluskey said. “They were fighting because they wanted to. It was sensation-seeking.” That wasn’t the only unnerving thing about the footage. Throughout the fight, older shoppers wandered by, unperturbed, going home.
To deal with the problem, Strathclyde Police had used a mixture of crackdowns on knife crime and binge drinking, along with foot patrols and stop-and-searches. But these have only worked in the short term. Imprisoning a prominent gang member created a vacuum and aspiring younger members fought to take his place. A suggested ban on Buckfast—a cheap tonic wine popular among young Glaswegians—led to an increase in sales. One study found that Operation Blade, a knife amnesty that ran for four weeks in 1993, had no long-term success. Fear of reprisals in gang areas meant that 70 per cent of crimes went unreported. The real picture was only seen by doctors at Strathclyde’s A&E, which dealt with 300 attempted murders a year and a serious facial injury every six hours. These injuries were predominantly gang-related.
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Ed Howker
Behind the scenes: the sweet smell of success?
This morning I was woken up by an email from the Conservative Party, offering me an exclusive “behind the scenes footage” of David Cameron preparing for his conference speech, due to take place later on today. Presumably this is not recent preparation—it was all cut and edited much earlier. But since we’re on the subject of Mr Cameron’s speech, here are a few predictions of my own.
My strong suspicion is it will be almost, if not completely, policy free—Mr Osborne did all the “heavy lifting” (for which he is lavishly praised in this morning’s Economist) already. And although Mr Cameron may talk of “tough times” needing “strong leadership,” he will hardly offer us more economic policy.
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David Aaronovitch
Dear John
8th September 2009
Let’s not call this exchange “Can Labour win,” because we both know it won’t. Soon I will be liberated from the weary responsibility of treating a well-meaning but tired government fairly, and you from being disappointed by it. Unconstrained, we can make for the sunny uplands of opposition, where everything seems possible and nothing in fact is. Except thought.
So let’s call this, “Thoughts about the future of the left” and here are some of mine. But first let me try and cut through a predictable misreading of recent history, so that we aren’t basing our discussion on false premises. The government just departing was not in thrall to some evil thing called neoliberalism. The idea that Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, with their overwhelming emphasis on state-funded services and the role of government, were mad neoliberals was always a leftist (or occasionally a rightist) fantasy. Many of the things they tried to do are still the objectives of any good progressive.
But this is 2009, not 1997. In a recent issue of the New Statesman, political theorist Stuart White set out a useful taxonomy of progressives. He discerned four strains of reform thinking: left communitarianism, left republicanism, centre republicanism and right communitarianism. The latter consists of Phillip Blond-type “red Tories.” I see you as suspended between the first two—epitomised by the increasingly eccentric Neal Lawson and the more staid David Marquand. I’m sure you’ll put me right.
I found myself mostly defined by White’s description of centre republicanism, with its emphasis on dispersal of power, enhancing fairness and maintaining freedom, while embracing modernity. I mean by that a position which doesn’t regret (as communitarians do) the revolutions in technology, communication and mobility that have brought the world together, but understands that the consequences have to be managed.
The better world does require that we abolish unjustifiable inequalities, gross unfairness and barriers to human fulfilment. We can agree that progress cannot be measured entirely or even mostly by GDP. Of the alternative ways of gauging the just society I am most convinced by Amartya Sen’s idea of capability (see James Purnell’s article, p42)—a less restrictive concept either than equality of income or happiness, since it takes account of the different ways in which people want to lead their lives.
In the Sen tradition, German political scientist Wolfgang Merkel lays out five priorities for a just society: preventing poverty; enhancing education and training; labour market inclusion; maintaining social security, and more just distribution of wealth and incomes. Measures to address climate change and gender justice would fit into this last principle.
What is critical here is that justice crosses national borders. The new world must be open. We must ask ourselves what is fair or just about exporting unemployment to poorer countries, or denying any right to improvement to people because they are foreign born.
Where Labour (and everyone else) has failed most spectacularly is in political engagement. This situation deserves the description of “crisis” and it partly emerges from a failure to notice how democracy has been transformed. In The Life and Death of Democracy (Simon & Schuster) John Keane argues that representative democracy has evolved into what he calls “monitory” democracy (in which hundreds, if not thousands, of formal and informal bodies and procedures monitor, restrict, comment on and affect the operation of power). This should be the beginning of a new discussion. Reforms aimed at lowering the barrier between citizen and participation are only a part of how we need to change. A complete revolution in the everyday language of politics is also required, so politicians can be honest with voters, instead of feeling they have to dissemble and hide.
A word now about the snares and delusions that can abet our debate. The communitarian assault on individualism and consumerism (and, often, on internationalism) leads nowhere, except to the right. A hankering for downshifted, make-your-own-entertainment communities, served by 1950s-style public services, is pointless. It is as absurd as imagining that you can have social justice without economic growth. I am not saying that we couldn’t seek to emphasise the values of kindness and caring over egotism—we could. But village life circa 1932? Nope.
If this sounds abstract, let me explain. It means agreeing that demographic shifts and wide dispersal of money and knowledge are fundamental realities, not trends to be resisted. It rejects as right-wing (or unjust and unprogressive) policies such as cutting inheritance tax, the Liberal Democrat pledge to save money by reducing planned participation in higher education (the polar opposite of what we should be doing), the abolition of property tax (which would favour the old and wealthy over the young) or Frank Field’s increasingly troubling anti-immigrant campaign.
People from other parties might sign up for much of this prospectus. But it is in the Labour party where the next struggle over such ideas will take place. Or so we hope.
Yours
David
***
Dear David
10th September 2009
First, a word about our apparently departing government being in thrall to neoliberalism. Things have been more complicated than that—but if people on my side complain about new Labour’s kowtowing to the free-market right, we have good reason. One of the articles of faith for the centre-left was the apparently reasonable idea—partly rooted in Tony Crosland’s model of social democracy—that the stoking of economic growth would provide the resources for transformative social programmes. But this was turned into a mish-mash of beliefs that only entrenched the changes wrought by Margaret Thatcher. High finance was left alone, Britain became something close to a tax haven, and there was no arguing with “flexible” labour markets. Among the upshots is a sobering fact: that a Labour government leaves office with the inequality gap wider than when it took power.
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Matthew Taylor
As a schoolboy socialist in a 1970s grammar school, the first political arguments I had were about human nature. My idea of the good society rested on a view of people as collaborative and benign, qualities hidden by the depredations of “the system.”
Working-class Tory mates mocked my naivety. To them we were self-interested. Some succeeded by their efforts, others failed or cheated and would change only if incentivised or compelled.
Yet for most of the 20 years that I have been involved in politics—as a Labour party activist, think-tank director and government adviser under Tony Blair—debates about human nature have been restricted to criminality and other social pathologies, as if only bad people failed to conform to the behavioural model of modern economics. I have never fully bought the idea that people are merely self-interested, rational actors. But during my time in Downing Street, whether we were addressing business regulation or competition in the NHS, the model of Homo economicus seemed to serve well enough: offer people choice and they will act in their own interest and in so doing will make the system work better for everyone. It is not a complete view of human action but it was a useful shortcut, and it had become the prevailing view of most policymakers in the US and Britain.
Today, human nature is back. Political debate is questioning again what shapes and motivates us, who we are as social animals and what we could be. Lying behind this is not just a faltering neoliberal project, but also 30 years of research on human behaviour and the neurological processes that shape it. It can be politically unsettling: some findings seems to undermine important assumptions on both right and left. But while David Cameron has claimed aspects of behavioural economics and neuroscience for his modernising project, these insights can inspire progressives on both sides of politics, producing a new synthesis more nuanced and more solidly based than previous attempts to move beyond left and right.
In truth, virtually no one who studies the brain or behaviour, or philosophises about the mind, accepts the idea of a disembodied rational self inside our heads making all our decisions on the basis of self-interest. But whatever its problems, its advocates could until recently argue that it was the best available model. Their assumptions underpinned the free-market philosophy that brought decades of growth. But, as we struggle slowly out of a global recession, it has been behavioural economists such as Yale professor Robert Shiller who have shed light on our predicament. Shiller argues that our brains are susceptible to undue optimism and risk-taking when things are going well, and excessive pessimism and caution when they are not. Seemingly self-interested calculations—to jump into a booming housing market, for instance—are too often driven by emotion and a hard-wired tendency towards mimicry: we see others doing well, it makes us anxious that we are missing out and we copy them. The reverse happens during recessions, when we become overly cautious.
Such arguments draw on the work of Nobel prize-winning economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In the late 1970s they developed “prospect theory” to explain how people behave when dealing with risk and uncertainty. Of particular interest were findings about what economists call our “discount rate”—the fact that we value owning something today much more than a larger quantity of the same thing in the future. Developed in academia over the past three decades, such ideas went public with the publication of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s 2008 book Nudge. Compared with mainstream, mathematically-based economics, behavioural economics is accessible, drawing on social and evolutionary psychology, sociology and anthropology as well as neuroscience. All of this has helped neuroscience take the place of theoretical physics as the field of science most fascinating to the amateur—books such as Malcolm Gladwell’s breezy summary Blink are bestsellers. Such research has practical applications too, for instance in the “positive psychology” movement. Begun about a decade ago by psychologist Martin Seligman, this asked why clinical psychology concentrated on mental illness rather than happiness. Flowing from Seligman’s work, experiments using methods similar to those used in cognitive behavioural therapy are now trying to “teach” happiness in schools in the northeast of England. Meanwhile, brain-imaging research showing that those who meditate have enlargement in brain areas associated with feelings of wellbeing, has helped meditation shed its associations with mysticism.
Why some people care more than others
Brain and behaviour research is reframing political debates, too. Behavioural economics has been embraced by the British right in particular. Margaret Thatcher famously backed the neoclassical model, yet it seems that David Cameron wants to refashion the Tories’ whole approach to regulation based on the insights of Nudge. On the left, the same is true for what can be called “pro-social” behaviour: caring about the welfare of others. In government, Labour has become increasingly preoccupied with the way people behave. This reflects public concern over greater social diversity and the decline of deference. It also relates to the cost to public services of our unhealthy and environmentally damaging habits. A decade of policy disappointments has taught politicians that initiatives will fail if people are unwilling to engage responsibly. But why are some people more inclined to be pro-social than others?
The answer is that people who feel supported are more likely to be socially benign. This was demonstrated in a recent study by anthropologist David Sloan Wilson, which examined the citizens of Binghamton in upstate New York. Addressed envelopes were dropped in random streets. Those areas in which people were most active in delivering them to the right door were deemed the most “pro-social.”
These neighbourhoods were distinguished not by their income or physical environment but by whether residents themselves felt they were benefitting from multiple sources of social support. Our brains pick up subconscious signals from those places where receiving and giving social support is the norm. Evolutionary psychologists have explained our capacity for altruism to strangers by claiming it must play a role in helping humans compete. But this view was recently challenged by anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who argues that human survival and evolution owe much to the fact that, unlike most other species, adults can bond with and nurture infants who are not their own. Whatever its origins, our evolutionary predisposition for altruism needs to be reinforced by the right social clues.
Surely none of this is surprising? We don’t need evolutionary psychology, game theory and neuroscience to tell us that secure people are more generous, or that groups develop their own norms. At the same time, there seems to be a tension between behavioural economists endlessly pointing out the inadequacy of our irrational habits, and neuroscience research lauding our finely-tuned social brains. But this apparent contradiction is partly explained by the difference between biological time, which is slow and incremental, and historical time, which accelerates in leaps. The brains that evolved to perform hunter-gatherer tasks for the first 180,000 years of Homo sapiens’ existence have, in the last few hundred, been confronted with a world that is changing ever more quickly. Our brains have not always adapted well to modern society. Consider two fast-growing social problems: obesity and loneliness. Obesity levels show how hard we find it to adjust to abundance, while reports of loneliness reveal how humans, as animals who intrinsically crave connectedness, struggle with the atomism of modern life.
Moreover, many of our most common behaviours are more automatic than we assume and emerge from the non-conscious brain. Psychologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1970s that our awareness of a decision to act—for example to reach out and pick up a glass—takes place later than an observable electrical change in the brain associated with that act. In other words, the unconscious brain “decides” to act before our conscious mind confirms the action. One way to understand this is that the brain carries messages from the highly sophisticated and long-evolved hard wiring of our non-conscious brain (interacting automatically with the rest of our body and the external world) to the much less powerful and much more recently evolved neocortex, the part where conscious thought happens. Even social interaction is largely dependent on non-verbal communication, as our brains automatically process social signals from those around us. As a result, the intuition that what we call the “self” polices the boundary between us and the world is brought into question.
This has big implications. For example, if we want to live an ethical life we do not have to pore over self-help books, but instead choose the social context that is most likely to prompt us to automatic altruism. Blinkered by the idea of humans as entirely driven by self-interest, we believe that altruistic acts must require conscious effort, perhaps as a result of exhortation from leaders. But if we are living balanced lives and enjoy mutual trust with people, behaving well comes naturally.
The social democratic brain
Much of this research makes good reading for social democrats. By highlighting our psychological frailties and the way these contribute to market epidemics, behavioural economics makes a powerful case for regulation, paternalism and measures to promote feelings of security. Nor is this the only encouragement for the traditional left. Although taking social exclusion seriously, Tony Blair’s new Labour distanced itself from the image of “do-gooder” progressives willing to excuse bad conduct on the grounds of social background. But much of this new research indicates that the environment has a much more direct impact on our mental functioning than was previously thought. The neuroscientist Elizabeth Gould overturned much conventional wisdom by showing that brains can generate new neurons, a process called neurogenesis. Her research with monkeys showed those who had suffered stress or a lack of stimulation had lower levels of neurogenesis. The impact of nurturing in early years is not simply on our attitudes—which we might be expected to overcome—but on the physical capacity of our brains to develop. Gould’s work has been used to make a case for early intervention in deprived and dysfunctional families. Psychologist Walter Mischel tested four year olds on their ability to resist eating a marshmallow, and showed that childhood inability to defer gratification predicted low achievement and antisocial behaviour well into adult life.
It turns out that messages which cause emotional disturbance impair our reasoning ability; this provides a physiological basis for the negative effects of labelling and stereotyping. Claude Steele, a professor of psychology, gave a group of his students a test that he said would measure their innate intellectual ability. White students performed better than black students. But when Steele gave a different group the same test, but stressed that it was a meaningless practice exam, the scores of white and black students were virtually identical. Similarly, women will do less well in a maths test if they are told it measures “cognitive differences between the genders.”
More examples of how our abilities are affected by subtle, subconscious changes in our emotional state are turning up all the time. A recent study from the University of Florida showed students had only to observe their teacher behaving rudely for this to make them not only less creative in answers to a subsequent hypothetical dilemma, but also more likely to suggest violent solutions. This research provides support for the “situationist” conclusion of psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment, in which students immersed in a sadistic culture became sadistic themselves within days. Zimbardo subsequently gave evidence in defence of soldiers accused of cruelty in Abu Ghraib, summarising his argument neatly as “it’s not the rotten apple it’s the rotten barrel.”
This is not to deny the importance of choosing to act responsibly, nor to argue that moral exhortation is futile. But susceptibility to social influence is hard-wired in us and not simply a characteristic of those lacking willpower. It may not be as catchy as the original slogan, but “tough on crime, even tougher on the causes of crime”is where the evidence points.
One further finding strengthens traditional centre-left arguments for a paternalistic state pursuing social equality. Critics of unbridled consumerism such as Amitai Etzioni (see Prospect, September 2009) are supported by social psychologists showing how bad we are at predicting what will make us happy—or even recalling accurately what has done so in the past. This in turn is linked to the breakdown in rich societies between affluence and happiness and our problem with coping with abundance. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s book The Spirit Level (Allen Lane) has been praised by politicians of both left and right for demonstrating the link between social pathologies, such as mental illness and substance abuse, and social inequality. One cause may lie in more acute levels of status anxiety in unequal societies; Elizabeth Gould found threats to group status impaired neurogenesis in monkeys, which in turn reduced mental capacity and resilience. Inequality, it seems, really does do your head in.
The conservative brain
But new insights into how our brains work also offer support to Conservative thought. In a recent essay (Prospect, May 2009) David Willetts admitted that the Tories had been wrong to dismiss the importance of inequality on social cohesion and individual wellbeing. Willetts has also praised the work of economic historian Avner Offer. In his book The Challenge of Affluence (OUP), Offer sums up his thesis in the first line: “Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines wellbeing.” He uses concepts from behavioural economics to explain why we fail to make the right decisions for the long term. The idea of Offer’s which has proven most attractive to Conservatives is the concept of “commitment devices.”
These are the social institutions that have developed to protect us from our psychological frailties, encouraging us to act long term and be socially responsible. These devices include the family, the church and civic organisations. As we become richer, we mistakenly think we do not need them.
This idea that we dismantle long-established ways of doing things at our peril reinforces a belief central to pre-Thatcherite conservatism: that society has evolved to reflect a natural order, which we should protect from social engineers. Progressive Conservative thinker Phillip Blond describes how social institutions and cultural taboos are ways in which “generations hand down… vital tacit knowledge about human nature.”
The balancing act for the Cameron project is wanting to appear modern in social attitudes and know-how, while reasserting a Conservative concern for civic virtue and the traditions and institutions which underpin it. Some of the ideas in Nudge offer ways out of this conundrum, such as “save tomorrow.” People know they should save for retirement but, due to inertia and an aversion to loss, often do not. The idea of “save tomorrow” is to ask them to sign up now to make bigger pension contributions next year. The fact that the financial sacrifice is in the future means people will sign up; inertia prevents them changing it later. The modernising part of this policy is that people are free to make choices; the paternalism is justified on the grounds that without being “nudged,” our mental predispositions will stop us doing what is in our own interests. But while this pragmatic approach to regulation is to be welcomed, the wider tension between modernisation and social conservatism has not disappeared. It can be seen in the muddled populism of the “broken Britain” critique; the long list of things that are allegedly broken is as yet unmatched by an account of what can be fixed and how.
Social conservatives may also draw comfort from evidence that morality itself has a neurological basis. The work of evolutionary psychologist Marc Hauser appears to show that humans, whatever their background, are hard-wired to develop certain moral distinctions. It seems we don’t have to rely on political philosophers to tell us what is fair; we have an innate ethical framework ready to be applied to dilemmas. While Hauser’s work suggests that we have a strongly developed instinct for fairness, it also implies that trying to change people’s deep-seated ideas of what is just and to whom they owe loyalty—for example, by teaching multiculturalism—is futile. As Hauser puts it: “Policy wonks and politicians should listen more closely to our intuitions and write policy that effectively takes into account the moral voice of our species.”
An obvious problem with this is that our norms can change dramatically. Thirty years ago, most people in Britain thought that homosexuality was a sign of sickness or depravity. Not so today. If emotions such as moral disgust are hard-wired, then how are we capable of such big shifts in attitudes? Evidence from social-capital theorist Robert Putnam suggests that ethnically diverse places often have lower levels of trust and co-operation. The explanation for this may lie less in base prejudice and more in a deeper evolutionary predisposition to be cautious of outsiders. But, just as the revolution in attitudes to sexuality occurred when gays and lesbians came out to their loved ones, bonds of kinship and processes of reciprocity can break through barriers of neighbourhood segregation. Such examples argue against neurological determinism, but they also suggest that it is sensible for politicians to work with the constraints of our mental predispositions.
Research on brains and behaviour doesn’t tell us what we should do, but by revealing how social arrangements have been moulded by human nature, it encourages us to respect the tacit wisdom of established norms and be sensitive to the damage that can be done in the name of modernisation.
Thinking beyond left and right
New ideas about human nature can contribute to a more substantive meeting of minds between left and right. Thoughtful Conservatives are once again recognising the importance of social context, inequality and the limits to market rationality. Labour thinkers can use the research to make the case for collective action and social justice, but they may also become more cautious about the capacity of the central state to empower communities, and more interested in the role of social norms and civic institutions. At the heart of a previous attempt to transcend the left-right divide, Anthony Giddens’s third way, lay the concept of reflexivity. This is the idea that modern citizens do not see themselves as objects of impersonal religious, national or class forces, but as the authors of their own lives. Giddens talked about moving from class politics to a “life politics,”concerned with individual self-actualisation. This would help citizens reconcile their life stories with the social forces around them. But in the absence of the binds of tradition and deference, Giddens thought that we needed a new democratic discourse and new institutions and forms of solidarity to replace those which have been lost.
But despite constitutional reform, the expensive renewal of public services and even experiments such as citizens’ juries, Labour has failed to build such a new democratic ethos in 12 years of government. New Labour claimed to have jettisoned the old collectivism of class and tradition, but it has in turn failed to build new forms of collective action, or even to make a case for them. Lacking a substantive critique of individualism, Labour’s appeal to people to engage in collective decision-making seemed pious and hollow. While listening to the neoliberal critics of collective action, new Labour portrayed localist and social conservative concerns about top-down modernisation as irrelevant or reactionary. Yet the new research validates the emphasis in these accounts on the need to respect the practices and meanings through which people have come to live their lives, and to recognise how difficult it may be to adapt to aspects of modernity. A symbol of Labour’s confusion is that it has been uncomfortable with the collectivist idea of a public-service ethos, yet willing to believe the central state can successfully guide human affairs.
Co-operation and engagement are not things we merely ought to do. They are necessary for us to find our way in the modern world using brains that evolved before the invention of the wheel. We became social animals by living in closed homogenous communities, with deeply respected and slowly evolving bodies of knowledge and culture. Today we are living in more diverse communities, in a fast-changing, globalised knowledge economy. This moment has been characterised as the teenage years of the enlightenment project: a period of creativity, change, self indulgence and some danger. But we can move beyond this with the help of a “progressive humanism,” which accepts the flaws in ourselves, understands our mental frailties and acknowledges the social nature of the brain. Such an approach would recognise that the way norms and social institutions have evolved is often a guide to the limits and possibilities of human nature. It would be a politics intolerant of the injustices and deprivations that sap our capability, but modest about the ability of any agency to impose solutions that don’t combine the push of reform with the pull of social meanings and connections. Its adherents would be enthusiastic collectivists but sceptical statists.
This may all sound very abstract but emerging insights into human behaviour can offer pointers for the redesign of public institutions. Take schools policy: students spend about 20 per cent of their waking hours in school. Research tells us that what students achieve will be heavily influenced by their emotional propensity to achieve, which is in turn a reflection of the messages they pick up in the other 80 per cent of their lives. Teachers working in communities that lack confidence about learning are like factory workers who control a fifth of the production line but are expected to churn out a quality product. Schools end up teaching to the test (a process that is both boring and stressful) while having to develop strategies to engage unreceptive pupils. What they should do is seek to inculcate a culture of learning in the wider community. It is a slower, messier, more collaborative business than simply intensifying what happens in the classroom. But there are many examples of schools addressing deep-seated barriers to learning among their pupils by engaging with parents and community leaders. This idea takes social context and disadvantage seriously but, in an echo of Tory plans to make it easier for parents to control schools, recognises that schools should feel part of the community rather than a tentacle of the state. As the public sector enters a period of austerity, we need to remodel services around the goal of building individual and collective capacity. This means drawing on what we now understand about the best circumstances for the emergence of feelings of connectivity, self control and altruism.
Altruism makes us happy. Supportive communities create better people. Inequality and stigma rob us of potential. Good guidance helps us make wise decisions for the long term. All these seem commonsense conclusions, all are now based on evidence. They break the oppressive grip of Homo economicus on the right and the alluring but dangerous myth of human perfectibility on the left. Instead, we are left with the mission of progressive humanism; to develop practical utopias based on the good enough people we really are.
THE NEURONS THAT HELP MAKE US NICE
Every human has billions of neurons: brain cells that help transmit information through electrochemical signals. But a specific type, known as “mirror” neurons, are thought to play an important part in encouraging good behaviour. If, for example, you smile at someone in the street, certain neurons will fire off in your brain as a result. But if I see you smiling at me, the same neurons fire in my brain too, even though I’m not smiling at anyone. These mirror neurons, so the theory goes, help our brains understand the actions of other people and mean that certain neural pathways in our brains are gradually strengthened by seeing acts of kindness. Neuroscientist VS Ramachandran calls them “empathy” neurons, breaking down barriers in the brain between ourselves and others.
Julian Glover
“If you believe,” Peter Pan cries, towards the end of JM Barrie’s novel, “clap your hands; don’t let Tink die.” Barrie observes: “Many clapped. Some didn’t. A few beasts hissed.”
David Cameron is no Peter Pan, but he too is facing snorts, silence and unexpectedly sparse applause this autumn as he invites Britain to place its trust in him. He wants people to believe—but what he offers seems hardly more solid than fairy dust, carried on the wings of hopes, ambitions and untested confidence. It will take power to make it real, and then the effort may founder amid the hellish tasks of cutting the budget and ending a war.
At the core of the Cameron project stands a small group of people who all say the same thing, believe the same thing and want to achieve the same thing. None of them knows if it will work. All admit to being filled with gloom and optimism.
This bid for power is full of paradoxes: revolutionary and modest; intensely centralised and profoundly devolutionist; traditional yet potentially transformative; open and yet run by a tiny group of a few dozen true believers. More striking still is that Cameron has become Britain’s likely next prime minister without conveying to his fellow citizens, except in the sketchiest of terms, the least idea of what he intends to do. Some say this lack of clarity is an asset. If so, the asset will diminish fast as opposition yields to government.
The Tory leader has been a genius at the mechanics of politics. The well-timed, eye-catching speech and the adroitly handled reshuffle come naturally to him: in early September he dropped Alan Duncan from the shadow cabinet without a murmur of protest one day and beat the chancellor in a race to the headlines on spending cuts the next. To say that Cameron has transformed the way his party is seen has become a truism only because it is true. His reinvention began with apparent trivialities, such as tie-less suits and unabashed stunts involving photos with sled dogs, symbols shrewdly selected not for their intrinsic importance but for their potency as markers of change.
Even the smallest things have been cleverly done. While Labour wallowed in dismay this summer after the parliamentary expenses scandal, the Conservatives turned the embarrassment of one of their own MPs being forced out over expenses into a publicity coup: they engineered a postal ballot for Anthony Steen’s successor in Totnes that was open to anyone. Local voters selected a GP who had only joined the party because of Cameron. Pleasant and non-ideological, Sarah Wollaston was representative of both the way the party had changed and its seeming lack of doctrinal roots.
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