Norm failure

I have previously posted about how similar the failures in indigenous policy and development (particularly foreign aid) policy have been. Remarkably similar, indeed. They also show some distinct similarities to the more unfortunate effects of welfare provision. (By 'welfare provision' I do not mean the aged pension or health or education services; I am talking about income and other transfers to working-age-but-not-working people.)

Policy lowlights
That indigenous policy has a remarkably consistent dismal story of failure is its most striking feature. Whether it is Australian aborigines, Amerindians or Lapps, the record of broken communities mired in violence and sexual, drug, alcohol and child abuse, entrenched poverty and lower life expectancies is dismally similar. [Though comparison between Australian aborigines and Amerindians is complicated by the much greater range of the latter in their pre-conquest ways of life--from foragers through horse-peoples to agrarians--and that some Amerindian communities have parlayed treaty rights into profitable assets, such as casinos, which gets them "out from under" the more problematic features of indigenous policy.] No matter how much money is thrown at the issue, the problems never seem to get much better [within communities primarily dependant on indigenous policy]. Indeed, in Australia, outback Aboriginal communities were often more dysfunctional by the time of the Commonwealth Intervention than they were in the 1960s and early 1970s.  The difficulties for indigenous peoples tend to be notably worse for former foragers (i.e. hunter-gatherer cultures) than farming peoples, but the latter are not exactly shining beacons of success.


Development policy--specifically foreign aid--has much the same record of failure as indigenous policy for farming peoples. Not the level of disaster that indigenous policy has been for former foragers, but still remarkably little return for huge expenditures (in total sumsover time).

Welfare recipients also show patterns of entrenched problems--broken homes, violence and crime, entrenched poverty. There is a cause-or-effect problem here, in that social dysfunction makes one more likely to qualify for welfare assistance. Still, being on welfare does not seem to do much to improve such patterns and there is some evidence it makes them worse. Though, in all this, one has to be careful to not to mis-characterise behaviour which may turn out to be rational responses to the constraints of poverty (pdf) that have little to do with the above forms of public policy.

Saints, knaves and moralisers
I was reading a typically excellent paper (pdf) by the late Elinor Ostrom (a fine appreciation is here) when I came across a passage that generated an "a ha!" moment:

Finally, the worst of all worlds may be one where external authorities impose rules but are only able to achieve weak monitoring and sanctioning, cooperation is enforced without any need for internal norms to develop. In a world of no external rules or monitoring, norms can evolve to support cooperation. But, in an in-between case, the mild degree of external monitoring discourages the formation of social norms, while also making it attractive for some players to deceive and defect and take the relatively low risk of being caught (Pp 147-8; Pp 12-3 in the pdf).

Clearly, welfarism, indigenous policy and foreign aid involve "weak monitoring and sanctioning" and a "mild degree of external monitoring". But the epiphany went deeper than that.

Ostrom starts her paper by putting the problem of collective action in context. The problem being that, on the assumption that folk are rational egoists, then there is a massive free riding problem for collective action which should make cooperative action effectively impossible. Yet, both in the wider world and in experimental economics, we observe a wide range of cooperative behaviour.

From the experimental and empirical evidence, Ostrom distills three basic types of human agents--rational egoists, conditional cooperators (presume cooperation and then respond to others actions) and willing punishers (keen on sanctioning those who free ride). This is a similar framing as founder of cliodynamics Peter Turchin's division of people into knaves (always self-interested), saints (always cooperate) and moralists (moral with punishment). Turchin characterisers his moralists as conditional cooperators, but he draws out folk at the high end of cooperation spectrum to form his saints category and puts those more willing to withdraw if cooperation is not forthcoming in with Ostrom's willing punishers: these are different ways of cutting up the same underlying patterns, they are inferring from the same general body of evidence. (I discuss Turchin's book War and Peace and War here; he also has a useful website.)

Norms evolve
We homo sapiens did the key part of our evolving in small foraging bands. So, results from game theory experiments that:

Only the trustworthy type would survive in an evolutionary process with complete information. ... Where a player's type is common knowledge, rational egoists would not survive. Full and accurate information about all players' types, however, is a very strong assumption and unlikely to be met in most real world settings (p.145; p.10 of the pdf)

suggest that there might have been strong evolutionary pressure for cooperators (saints and moralisers) and against rational egoists (knaves). More worrying for more complex social settings is that:

If there is no information about player types for a relatively large population, preferences will evolve so that only rational egoists survive (p.145; p.10 of the pdf).
This implies that, in a game where people know only their own payoffs and not the payoffs of others, they are more likely to behave like rational egoists. McCabe and Smith (1999) show that players tend to evolve towards the predicted, subgame perfect outcomes in experiments where they only have private information of their own payoffs and to cooperative outcomes when they have information about payoffs and the moves made by other players (n8, p.145; p.10 of the pdf).

Different social settings affect which norms evolve and some may favour rational egoism. While most people start off as cooperators (saints and moralisers):

... preferences based on these norms can be altered by bad experiences. ... In this setting, the norms supporting cooperation and reciprocity were diminished, but not eliminated, by experience (p.146; p.11 of pdf).

Somewhat more reassuringly:

... if there is a noisy signal about a player's type that is at least more accurate than random, trustworthy types will survive as a substantial proportion of the population. Noisy signals may result from seeing one another, face-to-face communication, and various mechanisms that humans have designed to monitor each other's behaviour (p.145; p.10 of the pdf).

So talking is good.[1]

The big, take-away point here is that social settings affect which norms evolve and public policy can create or influence social settings.

Pay-off delayed
If we consider the evolution of norms, it is not surprising that people from foraging cultures do worse than people from farming cultures in modern industrial (and post-industrial) society. Foragers do not develop norms encouraging long time-horizons since there is little time-lapse between acquisition of food and its consumption. Farmers have to develop such norms, or they starve, since they live off delayed consumption. This is particularly so for farmers in colder climates (like, say, Northern Europe, Northern China and Japan) where surviving winter takes extra preparation.


In societies where asset accumulation is crucial (starting with one's own human capital), a failure to develop longer time-horizons, and the associated and reinforcing norms, is going to be a bit of a problem. A recipe for social failure, indeed.

Nice middle class folk from farming-cum-industrial-cum-post-industrial societies may not "get" what a big deal this is, as they have so internalised longer time-horizons--and their supporting norms--that they do not "see" them, and so do not seriously consider their possible lack and the implications thereof. Consider yours, mine andours. In a foraging culture, food storage is not much of an option. All food is fresh food and has to be consumed pretty rapidly. So sharing is simply what you do (within your not-very-big band). Particularly with "big" items such as meat. There is an awful lot of ours, not so much yours and mine.


This does not work with farming. You have to engage in an annual cycle of effort for considerably delayed payoffs where food is stored to get you through the year and production of sufficient seed grain is crucial. If one is expected to share everything, the free rider problems become enormous. A farming community based on continuation of forager sharing typically collapses in starvation. (This experiment has been run repeatedly; notably in the very early North American colonies who attempted Christian sharing of all food: this was a complete disaster until the new governor re-imposed the evolved farming norm of your land, your effort, your food.  It also makes me wonder about the very high violence level of non-state farming communities, which might represent difficult transitions from foraging to farming norms.)


Forager sharing also does not work with, say, housing. Asset-use massively disconnected from asset-care is not good for asset preservation. And housing paid for by others does not encourage the development of asset-care norms. Are the notorious problems of indigenous public housing making more sense now?

But it gets worse. How do prospects for "human capital formation" (i.e. doing well at school) look if everything has to be shared, so quiet space to do homework rarely or never happens? Or anything which evolves delayed pay-offs in cultures which have never had much cause to evolve such norms? Now add in free, no-effort-required, "sit down money" to the free, no-effort-required, housing. Not only are the evolution of norms appropriate to an industrial/post-industrial society frustrated, it is worse than that. The original pay-off-for-effort norms of foraging society are undermined too.

What would one predict from that? Massive social dysfunction, tending to get worse as time marches on. A tendency for norms to (probably rapidly) evolve to rational egoism with short-time horizons since income and housing comes without cooperation or effort.

What we have is massive norm failure. Public policy creating social settings where the evolution of norms appropriate to modern society is blocked and existing effort-and-cooperation norms are undermined or directed to profoundly parasitical behaviour.

Even more basically, prosperous lives in functioning communities with stable families and good life expectancies in decent polities are not the result of material things. They are results of patterns of behaviour, and the underlying cognitive framings, that produce the behaviours which create those things. Said behaviours, and supporting norms, do not just "happen" if income-and-material-things are provided. Dropping the physical consequences of such patterns of behaviour on people do not induce the patterns of behaviour. Worse, since provision of such things creates incentives, the resulting incentives can actively militate against beneficial norms and behaviours; they can actively undermine their development. This has been expressed as Reynolds' Law:

Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them

from a comment by überblogger Glenn Reynolds aka Instapundit:

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

Referring to the matter as a problem of "character traits" may be great for conservative, middle class righteousness but it lacks social science support. Not to mention any sense of historical change or cultural evolution. Looking at the issue as one of which norms are likely to evolve, or not, and why, is much more productive and does have good social science behind it.

Ironically, talking in terms of "character traits" rather than norms actually tends to underestimate the damage that can be done by badly structured public policy. If it is a matter of character traits, then, at worse, poor public policy is subsidising poor traits and weakening the return from good ones. If, however, it is matter of norms, then the potential exists for public policy to both block things getting better and make things worse through its effect on cognitive framings and the behaviour that flow therefrom. Hence some calls from African economists to stop foreign aid to Africa.

Conspicuous signals
Welfare, indigenous and foreign aid are rather bedevilled by the politics of righteousness, largely due to being high-signalling-but-devalued-consequence policy areas. That is, in these areas good intentions have high salience but the policies are typically directed towards people with low participation in public debate. (Public policy generally has a problem with signalling--which is clear and simple--having greater public debate salience than consequences--which are often indirect and complex--but the imbalance is particularly intense in these issues; as it is in public policy areas affecting groups with diminished or no moral standing.) This makes welfare, indigenous and foreign aid excellent policies for signalling righteousness (or moral vanity, or conspicuous compassion) since the intentions of the policies are very public but their effects much less so. This creates an attractive simplicity: if you are in favour of (preferably) more spending on welfare, indigenous policy and foreign aid, you are a good (that is, righteous) person. If you criticise such policies as ineffectual or counterproductive you are a bad (that is unrighteous) person. After all, you are threatening to take the conspicuously compassionate's signalling toys away from them.


Or else, if you are playing to a different righteousness game, it is just subsidising laziness and other "bad character traits" and, as the late Jesse Helms' famously dismissed foreign aid, pouring money "down a rat hole".
But if we proceed on the basis that people actually matter, so the actual consequences matter, then we can ignore the squeals of conspicuous outrage (or other posturing) and move on.

A further complication is that welfare, indigenous policy and aid bureaucracies have little incentive to explore options that make them redundant. Worse, politicians can have an incentive to keep people welfare-dependent or otherwise limited in opportunities if improved circumstances would increase the likelihood they would vote for their opponents. Or, in the case of indigenous political entrepreneurs, lessen their appeal. Part of the so-called Curley effect (pdf), using taxes and redistributive policies to shape the electorate. The ALP and other centre-left political parties, for example, have an incentive to expand public housing that concentrates their voters, and put them in marginal seats, as a way of increasing their chances in such electorates.[2]

Foreign aid is in even a worse situation than welfare or indigenous policy, given that the recipients are not even potential voters in the donating polities. So, one would expect fairly low (share of total) expenditures with little effective benefit to the alleged recipients, since the main political benefit domestically is the signalling one gets from the intentions, which actively militates against paying serious attention to any negative consequences. Any policy area where there is active pressure against facing failure is going to tend to produce a lot of it.
In other words, these are areas where there are sadly good grounds to have low expectations about policy effectiveness (defined as good for the recipients).

Including not even asking the right questions.

Evolved norms or imposed constraints
Cooperative behaviour (both active--doing things together--and passive--not blocking others) is crucial to achieving positive social outcomes. A society of rational egoists would be poor and nasty. (Postively Hobbesian indeed.)

In the paper on collective action and the evolution of social norms (pdf) first cited above, Elinor Ostrom pointed out that imposing outside rules turns out to be somewhat fraught in encouraging cooperation:

... experimental (as well as field) evidence has accumulated that externally imposed rules tend to "crowd out" endogenous cooperative behaviour ... To the surprise of experimenters, a higher level of cooperation occurred occurred in the control groups [that had not experienced imposed rules], especially for those who communicated on a face-to-face basis. The greater cooperation that had occurred due to the exogenously created incentive-compatible mechanism appeared to be transient. As the authors put it ... the removal of the external mechanism "seemed to undermine subsequent cooperation and leave the control group worse off than in the control group who had played a regular ... prisoner's dilemma."
Several other recent experimental studies have confirmed the notion that external rules and monitoring can crowd out cooperative behaviour. These studies typically find that a social norm, especially in a setting where there is communication between the parties, can work as well or nearly as well at generating cooperative behaviour as an externally imposed set of rules and system of monitoring and sanctioning. Moreover, norms seem to have a certain staying power in encouraging a growth of the desire for cooperative behaviour over time, while cooperation enforced be externally imposed rules can disappear very quickly (p.147; p.12 of the pdf).

Public policy, it's difficult. Particularly when it is effectively attempting to shift people in a single generation through processes of social evolution that took millennia elsewhere. Europeans and East Asians are the fortunate heirs of said millennia of evolution, so are not in a great position to sneer at those who are not.

Even in the case of industrialisation in farming society, we are still talking taking a generation to traverse what the originators took a couple of centuries to work through. Rather more centuries if we mean developing rule of law and responsible government. A point, btw, which also applies to migrants. So policies which undermine the development of productive norms by migrants and their children are particularly problematic, for both them and the host society.

Regarding indigenous policies, one of the more tragic stories I have been told is of a group of indigenous kids from Arnhem Land who were taken to Singapore; apparently the take-away point the organisers were after was that you did not have to be white to be successful. The kids came back to their broken communities and got straight into the glue-sniffing etc, because they were not white and so had no excuse. Realising how very different things can look to the person standing next to you is one of the hardest things in life, let alone public policy. Lots of folk pontificate about cultural difference; rather fewer seriously consider their implications.

Morality, custom and law
A point Ostrom makes in the above paper and elsewhere, supported by lots of field research (particularly in irrigation systems, were locally generated rules tend to manage water resources much more sustainably than those with externally imposed rules), is that the government advantage in rule provision and enforcement is much more limited than is generally realised. Particularly for common resources used by longstanding inter-actors. Worse, attempts to manage common resources--such as fisheries--have been sabotaged by central governments refusing to recognise the local rules and property rights that have evolved to manage the common resource. This has been particularly true of forests, local streams, grazing areas and inshore fisheries in the developing world, often out of a misplaced environmental concern and an inability to recognise the difference between open-access and common-property regimes. Ironically:

When resources that were previously controlled by local participants have been nationalized, state control has usually proved to be less effective and efficient than control by those directly affected, if not disastrous in its consequences (...). The harmful effects of nationalizing forests that had earlier been governed by local user groups have been well documented for Thailand (...), Niger (...), Nepal (...) and India (...). Similar results have occurred in regard to inshore fisheries taken over by the state or national agencies from local control by the inshore fishermen themselves (...).

In looking at norms, how they work, how they arise, what factors effect their evolution, we are in the area where morality shades into custom shades into law. Indeed, in much of the medieval period--particularly early in the medieval period--law basically meant the custom of the area (or "what we remember doing last time this came up"). Nor were laws simply territorial; If a matter came to trial, a traveller might well be asked which set of laws applied to them. We are so used to thinking of law as something that emanates from a central authority, we now longer recognise it when it emerges out of custom, such as local use regimes. (Alternatively, states are determined to defend their monopoly privileges.) Though, in the mid-C19th, the California Supreme Court had the sense to legally recognise what the gold miners themselves had worked out. Native title is also legal recognition of existing custom.

Both of which were the common law returning to its roots. Henry II's attempt to provide royal judges for a kingdom that had Anglo-Saxon law, Danelaw and Norman law, and regional variations thereof, is what led to the development of the common law. Send us all your local laws was the royal request, and his chancery distilled the common bits--hence the commonlaw. Henry's royal justice was competing with both the ecclesiastical courts enforcing canon law (which led to some Beckett unpleasantness) and local manorial and baronial courts. His travelling judges were such a success that the only part of Magna Carta which called for more royal government was the clause insisting on more frequent visits by royal judges.

To call Henry II a law-giver is to underestimate his achievement. He oversaw the creation of a system for generating law; for taking custom, precedent and current experience and producing law. Appropriately, for centuries, the end of his reign was the beginning of time immemorial. About one-third of humanity now lives under full or part common law systems; a system which began operating in a knightly society now copes fine with the space age.

The barons were not so keen on the royal competition with their own courts, but they became quite keen on being able to sue other folk; provided, of course, that no royal judge could do anything to them unless they were found guilty by their peers. Possibly the most famous of the trade-offs in Magna Carta. (The list of trials of peers before the House of Lords makes for racy reading. A highlight being Earl Ferrers who pleaded his own defence on grounds of insanity; a paradoxical approach--he conducted his defence with sufficient ability as to fatally undermine it--that did not save him from the gallows for murder of his steward. Allegedly, he was hung with a silken rope, out of deference for his rank.)

That, in English law, only the holder of the title was noble--so all the rest of their family were legally commoners--affected both the laws and norms of England, since it gave the peerage a strong vested interest in how the law treated commoners. Not the case in, for example, France were all members of a noble house were nobles so lacked incentives to attend to the legal (or other) treatment of commoners. They did, however have strong incentives to insist on their status and privileges, these being increasingly unanchored in genuine responsibilities. So a significant number of the peers of France ended up guillotined while the House of Lords is still with us. (It is even still inspiring emulators; it is a pity that those responsible for post-invasion Iraq and Afghanisgtan did not consider something similar to the Somaliland House of Elders, thereby anchoring their new governments in existing social structures.)

Norms matter
Norms matter; so the incentives that affect their evolution matter. Aid, indigenous and other welfare transfers typically do not generate productive norms. Worse, unearned transfers encourage rational egoism with short-time horizons since they provide payoffs without cooperation or effort. The failures of indigenous policy, of foreign aid, are typically norm failures. They will continue to be failures until they are structured to encourage the evolution of norms that encourage healthy and productive lives, families and communities. Successful lives, families, communities and economies are built on patterns of behaviour and supporting norms; so failure to attend to what does, or does not, encourage the evolution of such norms simply leads to failure. Including making things worse.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer and at Critical Thinking Applied.]

Notes

---

[1] Speaking from personal experience, a narcissist--rational egoists with added self-delusion--can be very much more revealing in email; presumably because they are only channelling themselves, they are not getting any audience feedback, so their-convenience-as-reality-principle gets freer reign. Companies may also want to consider whether private payment structures are such a good idea.

[2] There have also been suggestions that centre-left parties may be using immigration policy to boost the number of supporting voters; in effect, importing voters.

Attitudes of voters and candidates: examining the political class

Given the recent political upset in the Massachusetts Senate election, the problematic connection between voter attitudes and those of what is sometimes called ‘the political class’ has particular resonance.

Katharine Betts’ 2004 article People and Parliamentarians: The Great Divide in People and Place looked at data for the 2001 Australian federal election from the surveys of voters and candidates. Using that data, she examines attitude differences between candidates and voters. She found, amongst other things, that:

Coalition candidates are quite close to their voters while Labor candidates are quite distant from theirs (p.73).

And that, overall:

… many people who run for federal parliament have strong opinions on economic and social questions and that these opinions are not shared by a high proportion of voters (p.74).

I found the piece useful and informative. There was, however, a persistent problem in it which is common to so much academic analysis of contemporary events, even those well-above the academic ruck such as Katharine Betts and Judith Brett.

This is the persistent mischaracterisation and misconstrual of the nature of the economic reforms that have so marked the last 25 years across the developed world (and beyond).

Getting economic reform wrong
The first is the use of that peculiarly Australian term of art ‘economic rationalism’. This is strictly an Australian term whose usage is very unhelpful, since it encourages the (completely erroneous) implication that we are dealing with an Australian-specific tendency in public policy. It has also become associated with a lot of abusive and misleading baggage.

Like most academic commentators, Betts also displays no understanding of the fiscal pressure of an expanding welfare state (in 1965, 3.5% of working-age Australians were on government income support; by 2001 16% were) in motivating economic reform by increasing the premium on economic efficiency.

Then there is the use of that unfortunate academic term ‘neoliberal’ and its cognates. ‘Neoliberalism’ is just economic liberalism applied in the context of large welfare states. There is nothing ‘neo’ about it. It is not an ideology – governments right across the political spectrum have engaged in economic liberalisation. There has been no break in the liberal tradition, particularly not economic liberalism. (For example, Ludwig Erhard’s ‘bonfire of the regulations’ in postwar West Germany belongs firmly in this policy tradition, and is indistinguishable from policies since labelled ‘neoliberal’, but doesn’t ‘make the cut’ in the normal usage of the term because it happened before 1973 even though the term ‘neoliberal’ was sometimes used in Gernany to describe such views.) Furthermore, to the extent that economic liberalisation has been applied (as it frequently has) by social democratic governments, it simply represents a very long-term process in social democracy.

Patterns of social democracy
Social democracy is the merging of liberalism with socialism. The long-term tendency has been for the liberal element to increase and the socialist element to decrease because of the fundamental problem: socialism doesn’t work.

Stage one was the adoption of liberal politics (electoral politics, parliamentary government, etc.) Since the only ‘socialist’ politics were either mass agitation in the hope that something would turn up (Kautsky), revolutionary vanguardism (Lenin) or catalytic violence (Bakunin – even if he was an anarchist), this was hardly a surprising development in constitutional states, though it did generate huge and bitter ideological debates. Bernstein gave this adoption a Marxian gloss, but it was the choice adopted by mass socialist (and labour) parties everywhere that votes mattered.

Stage two was the abandonment of nationalisation as an active policy (the first stage in the acceptance of economic liberalism) when it became clear that public ownership didn’t create more efficient and effective economic units. This was the stage reached by Anglosphere Labour Parties in the late 1940s, the SPD in the late 1950s and the French Socialists in the mid-1980s under Mitterand.

Stage three was the adoption of privatisation and de-regulation (the second stage in the acceptance of economic liberalism) when the huge expansion in the welfare state increased the premium on economic efficiency to the extent that governments were faced with little choice. Antipodean Labor Governments (Hawke-Keating in Australia from 1983-1996, Lange-Douglas in NZ from 1984-89) were at the forefront of this because they also suffered export squeezes at the same time, greatly increasing the relative premium on economic efficiency. Betts notes the change (p.65), but the lack of understanding of the domestic fiscal pressure element means she misses the full significance – which would actually reinforce her point that the change was not made for ideological reasons. Similarly, that economic reform has allowed an expanded welfare state to be funded makes much more explicable the apparent antimony she finds between economic reform policies and candidates’ preferences for increased redistribution (pp69-70).

Stage four is the abandonment of the nationalisation of the household, as ‘passive welfare’ is equally discovered not to be the path to social improvement. Latham has been at the forefront of advocacy this but the most dramatic example of this is the welfare reform under Clinton in the US, under pressure from a Republican Congress. (Which, by the way, is yet another way the US has greatly improved its long-term position vis-a-vis Europe.)

The use of ‘neoliberal’ cuts events off from their history, both that of economic liberalism generally and trends in social democracy more particularly.
Read More...
Economic reform as electoral benefit
Betts also claims that the adoption of ‘neo-liberalism’ (sic) ‘almost certainly’ lost Labor votes (p.70). Huh? The incumbent Government with the best vote-retention performance since Federal politics became evenly competitive after the 1966 election until the Howard Government was the Hawke-Keating Government of 1983-1993. The average two-Party-preferred swing against the incumbent Government in the period 1969 to 2001 is -2.6%pts. The Hawke-Keating Government managed -1.5%pts, -0.9%pts, -0.9%pts, +1.5%pts for an average of -0.4%pts, by far the best performance. Even including the 1996 debacle (after Keating had adopted a very unpopular cultural program, had taken back the L-A-W tax cuts and could be punished for the 1992 recession without immediately getting a GST), the average was -1.4%pts. (Howard’s average 1996-2007 was 1.6%pts.) (For a more detailed discussion up to the 2001 federal election, see Incumbency as Wasting Asset: Structural shifts in federal politics, Australasian Parliamentary Review Autumn 2002 17(1), 17-25.)

The ALP is currently in power in five States and both Territories, in all cases on a promise of not screwing up the finances. Betts’ own data shows that certain key elements of economic liberalism are more accepted by voters (including Labor voters) than candidates (especially Labor candidates: compared to Labor candidates, Labor voters are more keen on tax cuts, less keen on more social services spending, less keen on income redistribution and more likely to believe high taxes have negative effects). How can adopting economic reform be said to have ‘almost certainly’ cost Labor votes?

Candidates as ‘cosmopolitans’
Where Betts is actually relying on her own analytical skills rather than following unfortunate academic fashion (for why academic fashion might tend to be unreliable, see this post), the content is much better. Betts’ thesis is that the ‘new class’ has developed a ‘cosmopolitan’ ideology that has become strongly attached to the ALP. In talking about the move of the ‘cosmopolitans’ of ‘new class’ to being firm Labor supporters, Betts stresses, citing the work of Brett, the effect of Whitlam and his 1975 dismissal. That may well have been an aggravating factor that may well help explain some of the intensity of intelligentsia conformity in Australia. Surely, however, there are similar patterns of adherence to left-of-centre parties by this group elsewhere in Western democracies.

Since Betts has provided full tables, one can examine the data oneself. It is notable, for example, that candidates tend to keener on redistribution than voters. Not so surprising, gives a bigger role for people like them. Candidates are much less impressed with capital punishment than the general electorate – capital punishment means a more horrifying role for people like them.

By far the largest and quickest shift in voter sentiment was the collapse of hostility to the present level of migrant intake between 1996 and 2001. In 1996, 63% of voters thought too many migrants were being allowed in. In 2001, 34% did. This suggests that Howard had significant success in defusing immigration as an issue. (I noted the strong evidence from Robert Fogel of how negative the effects of mass immigration were for resident workers in the US in the C19th.)

The general trend of opinion is moving in favour of the views of the ‘cosmopolitans’. Given that their views dominate the universities, the school system, the national broadcaster, the ‘quality’ media and is a strong presence in much of the popular media, it is hard to know whether to be impressed by their success in moving opinion in their direction or by their failures to convince a majority. (The political saliency of some of these issues has also shifted somewhat.)

In 1987, 80% of voters thought high taxes reduce work effort.
In 2001, 68% did.

In 1987, 45% of voters thought income and wealth should be redistributed to ordinary working people.
In 2001, 55% did.

In 1987, 65% of voters preferred reducing taxes to increasing social services.
In 2001, 42% did.
(As Betts notes, more recent figures that specify more spending on education and health get stronger results. Such spending is more clearly of general benefit than transfers to more marginal sections of society.)

In 1987, 19% of voters thought equal opportunities for women hadn’t gone far enough.
In 2001, 38% did.

In 1987, 60% of voters thought that the dealth penalty should be re-introduced for murder.
In 2001, 56% did.

In 1990 (the question wasn’t asked in 1987), 58% of voters thought too many migrants were coming in.
In 2001, 34% did.

In 1990 (the question wasn’t asked in 1987), 21% of voters thought equal opportunities for migrants had gone too far.
In 2001, 34% did.

In 1987, 70% of voters thought that govt. assistance for Aborigines had gone too far.
In 2001, 47% did.

In 1987, 69% of voters thought that Aboriginal land rights had gone too far.
In 2001, 50% did.

As an aside, who thinks that coverage and commentary on the ‘national broadcaster’ comes even remotely close to reflecting the spread of opinions among those whose taxes pay for it? This is, of course, a general problem for public broadcasting.

Voters and candidates
But the ‘headliner’ data is the gap between Labor candidates and Labor voters. With the exception of their ranking of environmental issues, Labor, Democrat and Green candidates are essentially a homogeneous group, all very distant from working-class voters. As Betts says:

The most marked division within Australian politics is not between different groups of voters (working versus middle class) but between a majority of voters, including the traditional working class, and candidates for the Labor, Green and Democrat parties (p.79).

Not only are there smaller average differences between Coalition and Labor voters than between Labor voters and Labor candidates, the average differences are smaller between Labor voters and Coalition candidates. On economic issues (effect of taxes, redistribution, tax cuts or social service expansion) the average differences over the 14 years from 1987 to 2001 were:
ALP candidates and voters: 35%pts
Coalition candidates and ALP voters, 29%pts
ALP voters and Coalition voters, 16%pts
Coalition voters and Coalition candidates, 13%pts.

The pattern of ALP candidate differences from their voters being greater than Coalition candidate differences from ALP voters is even starker on cultural questions (govt. help for women, death penalty, immigration intake, govt. help for migrants, govt. help for Aborigines, Aboriginal land rights). There the average differences were:
ALP candidates and voters: 38%pts
Coalition candidates and ALP voters, 14%pts
Coalition voters and Coalition candidates, 12%pts
ALP voters and Coalition voters, 11%pts.

(Calculations by me from the data supplied in the article.)

If democracy is about representing the preferences of voters, then the ‘new class’ has stolen the working-class’s Party from it. And the Coalition is more ‘democratic’ in that sense than the ALP.

An even more stark example is the average differences in 2001 between ALP candidates and:
Democrat candidates, 6%pts
Greens candidates, 7%pts
Greens voters, 19%pts
Social professionals, 26%pts
Democrat voters, 28%pts
Labor voters, 37%pts
Working class voters, 48%pts.

ALP candidates are closer to Green and Democrat voters than they are to Labor voters and a long way from the views of working-class voters. Hence, the rarity of Labor politicians sticking up for working-class values, and the denunciation of Martin Ferguson, on the last significant occasion that happened.

As Betts’ says:

But the old meanings of left and right have changed to such a degree that the clearest way for these [Labor] politicians to see their constituents is not as old comrades whom they are proud to lead and protect, but as narrow-minded strangers tending towards the racist right (p.80).

Betts makes the point that the gap between the private views of ALP candidates and their voters is not necessarily disabling, provided Leader and policies can bridge the gap. Where, however, such bridging is not seen as sincere (as over border control in 2001, despite identical policies), there may be a price. (Betts points out the biggest gap between Coalition voters and candidates is over immigration – One Nation provides an obvious cautionary tale there. One that the recent success of the BNP in Britain suggests the British political class has not learned.)

Betts wondered whether Latham’s attempt to strike a more independent notion over the American alliance will be all that successful. In 2001, those prepared to put ‘not very much’ or ‘none at all’ trust in the US helping Australia if our security was threatened were:
Coalition candidates, 5%
Coalition voters, 8%
All voters, 16%
ALP voters, 18%
Labor candidates, 44%

Latham’s stand may have accorded with Labor candidates, but was more likely to have ended up just accentuating the difference between them and the bulk of the electorate.

The data makes quite clear how rational the adoption of anti-democratic politics by the ‘cosmopolitans’ is: their attempts to acts as opinion ‘gatekeepers’ excluding alternative views from legitimacy (thus, bipartisanship in immigration is praised when it excludes popular preferences and denounced when it reflects them), their preference for increased judicial activism, for increased internationalisation (reference of decisions to unelected international bodies and use of such decisions to delegitimise dissenting local preferences) and so on.

Betts stresses the conflict between the internationalist views of the ‘cosmopolitans’ and the national loyalties of most voters. You can read this as a sign of the 'cosmopolitans' more elevated moral sense. Alternatively, it is a product of status-seeking against the society around them by asserting themselves as superior to it and most of their fellow citizens. Typical reactions to international events suggest strongly that the latter is more important. Consider the case of the Falklands War, where a military junta which had conducted a ‘dirty war’ which involved killed thousands of people like those same cosmopolitans militarily seized a territory to which it had no valid claim and whose residents did not want them there. Yet the effort to military retrieve the Falklands was widely denounced within ‘cosmopolitan’ circles: apparently being anti-Western was enough, nothing was so evil as defending the West with military force against a murderous military junta. (Whose defeat, we note, has resulted in Argentina being a democracy ever since.)

Examples have multiplied since. ‘Cosmopolitan’ ideology expresses a sneering superiority to the society around it, it does not engender it. There is no requirement from simple global humanitarianism to see the most democratic, free, prosperous, societies in history only in terms of moral failing. (To the extent that they are denounced because other societies are poor yet also denounced for being rich – thus being guilty of both being rich and because other people aren't – while any suggestion that less successful societies may seek to use the societies who successfully achieved mass prosperity as positive models was long regarded as risible.) Particularly not for the emotional heat so often involved.

If the 'cosmopolitan' outlook is a matter of status-seeking through assertion against the societies around them, clearly hostility to right-of-centre politics, and culturally assertive and confident right-of-centre figures (and the most powerful Western society), are going to be inherent parts of the package. There is still much to be learnt from Katharine Betts’s analysis.

Clearly there is also an issue in gaps between the ‘political class’ and the general electorate. And not only in Australia: a recent Washington Post poll found (question 40) that 58% want smaller government with fewer services, 38% what larger government with more services. Perhaps not quite what the Washington Democrats are currently delivering or the Republicans previously delivered.

ADDENDA: A wonderfully cynical view of the politics are big-spending, big-regulating government produces:

Any government that annually spends $3-plus trillions of dollars, and regulates trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of other resources, will inevitably be targeted by special interests and their lobbyists. And any government manned by persons capable of the duplicity, pandering, and cheap theatrics required to win elections will inevitably and without shame put itself at the service of these special interests.

Theological Incorrectness

The growth of cognitive science has been one of the major intellectual advances of the last few decades. Largely kicked off by Noam Chomsky’s rethinking of the human aptitude for language, and attracting noted popularisers (such as Steven Pinker), it has been spreading across intellectual life. That humans have finally created something that is vaguely analogous to human cognition in its operation (computers)—something, moreover which we can “see” inside of—may have had something to do with this. (Chomsky works at MIT, after all.)

D. Jason Slone’s Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t presents the application of the findings of cognitive science to the study of religion. One of the strengths of the book is its presentation and synthesis of the work of a wide range of scholars.

Slone starts with two observations which are striking, given that religion is supposed to provide absolute truth: there is more than one religion in the world and religion contains all sorts of things people have to guess at (since most of us do not get to chat with the various superhuman beings religion postulates) (p.vii). But it is the difference between what people say they believe when “formally” asked and what they believe and do when making more rapid or personal decisions—the reality that received ideas from one’s culture (including theological ones) play only a partial role in what people say and do (p.4)—which is the starting place of the book’s analysis.
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The book has great chapter titles. Chapter One (Religion Is For Dummies and Romantics) notes, building on the work of psychologist Justin Barrett, how common it is, across religions and cultures, for people to believe what they are not supposed to, given the tenets of the religion they adhere to. A fact that, Slone points out, much analysis of religion neither pays attention to, nor can cope with.

When people engage in “online” (rapid, tacitly informed, cognitively constrained, prereflective) representations they often engage in abductive reasoning—constructing general principles to explain particular events (p.10). “God willed it” is a form of abductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning is efficient, in the sense that it provides answers without the effort of logical deduction (or, for that matter, empirical checking). Slone’s argument is that we use familiar cognitive processes that have evolved in ways that encourage religious belief, but often not theologically correct religious belief.

Before proceeding with his analysis, Slone argues for the scientific study of religion—noting both religion and science display differences between folk representations and reflective theories (p.12)—and critiques various traditional approaches to the study of religion. The first attempts at serious study he divides into naturalists (religion has a natural origin) and nonnaturalists (it does not), the latter further divided into socioculturalists (religion was generated by society or culture) and transcendentalists (religion comes from the interaction with supernatural reality). All of them were subject to postmodernist critique, not least because it became obvious that reliance on texts and “official” doctrine produced idealised, and thus inaccurate, pictures of religion as it actually was in the world (p.27).

Chapter Two, Religion Is What Your Parents Say is an extended critique of cultural explanations of religion. Slone brings out just how porous the concept of ‘culture’ is and how dubious use of it as an explanation (particularly for behaviour that is both variant with cultures and common across them). Included is both a nice description of postmodernist critiques and a useful critique of them. As he says:

Philosophically speaking, postmodernists have not explained anything. They have merely restated the question and affirmed the consequent (p.40).

The collection of data has been very useful, but its use has been greatly restricted by inadequate analytical approaches (p.45)

Chapter Three Religion Is Perfectly Natural, Not Naturally Perfect examines the use of cognitive sciences to study religion. The point is to concentrate on the ‘representations’ (what and how people think about religion) not on the content-claims of religious systems (much of which refer to imagined beings and forces not amenable to direct observation). Slone notes that Chomsky’s work is foundational for modern cognitive science because it gave confidence to the claim that culture is how it is because of the way our brains work, not the other way round (p.48).

The research has found that people use available conceptual schemes, but different ones in different circumstances (p.53). But certain features of the human cognition are more general (distinguishing between objects and agents, for example).

So, what makes a conceptual scheme religious?

A religious representation is representation that postulates the existence of superhuman agents (p.55).

As agents, they can act. Hence humans doing things to gods and gods doing things to humans (e.g. ordination, which apparently occurs in some form or other across religions) are both basic features of religion. And we have a natural tendency to over-attribute agency, since to under-attribute it tends to be more dangerous (p58).

We have an intuitive ontology, a sense of what is in the world, typically covering five categories—natural objects, artificial things, plants, animals, humans (p.60). Objects that people typically categories prototypically, not according to rigorous classical definitions (p.70). Religious representations violate that intuitive ontology, but do in a way that is surprising and thus memorable (i.e. “cognitively optimal”).

Such representations can be transferred doctrinally or “imagistically” but how counterintuitive they are will affect how easily they can be transferred. God being formless but omnipresent is harder to transfer than recently deceased ancestors can hear your prayers (p.63).

Chapter Four, Buddha Nature sets out how powerful and pervasive the notion of superhuman agents is in religion. Even in Theravada Buddhism, which allegedly is nontheistic. In reality, the notion that Buddhism is nontheistic is, Slone argues, a rather modernistic version of Buddhism transmitted to the West in response to the impact of modernist Protestantism and not reflected in folk Buddhism. So, Theravada Buddhism has a nun problem because it took a monk and a nun in lineage (ordination) succession to make another nun: the nun lineages all died, out so it is no longer possible to make another Theravada Buddha nun (Pp81-3).

Chapter Five (W.D.G.D.: What Does God Do?) looks at how people actually think about God (rather than as they are theologically supposed to). In particular, the persistence of the notion that we are a “locus of control” even in the face of theological notions of (for example) Predestination.

We are intuitively inclined to see causes, even when evidence is ambiguous. Add our tendency to abductively attribute agency, and religious reasoning clearly operates with natural human cognitive tendencies and is greatly advantaged in transmission if it does so:

… human beings are more likely to believe and employ a religious idea if it is (fairly) consistent with the accords of everyday cognitive concepts and inferences (p.91).

A nice example is how Calvinism was the dominant original theological position among the Puritans but Arminianism has come to dominate American Protestantism (Pp93-6). Effective preaching (and effective ritual) works with the natural processes of human cognition (p.98), particularly the tendency to attribute agency and cause (p.99).

The hypothesis that effective rituals need to:

… balance the special agent rituals (those rituals in which humans are recipients of actions from gods via priests) and special patient rituals (those in which gods are the recipients of actions from humans (p.99)

is applied to the rise of Baptism in American Protestantism, as the Puritan (now Congregationalist) and Presbyterian downgrading of baptism (to deal with children of members who had not experienced a common conversion event) led to a lot of conversions to Baptism, which used adult baptism as a central ritual event (p.100).

The central thesis Slone draws from the work of scholars engaged in the cognitive study of religion is:

Rituals and other religious activities … seem to follow from religious concepts. Yet the religious concepts do not determine, per se, what follows. Rather, it appears that cognitive processes drive the thoughts and actions of religious believers at both the individual and cultural levels (p.100).

The decline in Calvinism, which its deprecation of human agency, is a case in point.

Slone argues that long-running religious controversies make sense in terms of the patterns of human cognition:

The conceptual tension between divine sovereignty and free will, which has preoccupied some of the greatest minds in history, is a natural tension in Christianity that results from how the mind works. Since humans rely so heavily on notions of self-/human agency, it is difficult to believe that superhuman agents control everything. Yet, if they don’t, what exactly is the nature of their power? (p.101)

A tension which preliminary research suggests occurs across cultures.

One can see how human cognition might find any particular solution problematic. Not sure that that means human cognition is causing the inherent intellectual difficulty, however.

Chapter Six (I Would Rather Be Lucky Than Good) looks at luck beliefs (which show similar patterns across human cultures) and how the mind deals with probability. There is considerable research that humans tend to imbue things with purpose (grist to the natural law philosophy mill, of course) and have often very poor probability intuitions (e.g. ask a class how likely they feel it would be for two of them to have a birthday on the same day: their estimates will be much lower than the actual likelihood—in a class of at least 23, over 50%) (p.116).

The brute fact that Slone bases his analysis on, and explores in Theological Incorrectness is that religious people believe all sorts of things that, in terms of the doctrines of their religion, they should not. That is, religion as a cognitive and cultural experience is not defined by the doctrines of theologians.

But nor is it defined by “culture”. As Slone points out in his conclusion:

… cultural theories of religion are impoverished by lack of understanding of how the mind works and thus of why humans think what they and do what they do. Sociocultural theories of religion assume that the mind is a blank slate that learns what to think from culture. Not only is this mind-blind assumption inaccurate but it is illogical … Were humans merely cultural sponges we would find that each culture would be autonomous, confined and homogeneous … This paradigmatic assumption does not fit the facts.
A better explanation for why people believe what they “shouldn’t” is that people have active minds that are continuously engaged in the construction of novel thoughts and the transformation of culturally transmitted ideas (p.121).

If we look to the human mind we find that:

Three very important aspects of cognition that constrain religion are intuitive ontology (what kinds of things are in the world), intuitive causality (how do these things work), and intuitive probability (how things are likely to work). These basic cognitive capacities not only allow us to perform important functions required for survival, like analysis and prediction of environmental activity, but also produce postulations and presumptions that might be, on reflection, systematically incoherent. In this sense, theological incorrectness is a natural by-product of the cognitive tools in our mind-brains. (p.122)

And it is to evolution that we need to look to understand where those cognitive capacities come from, and why they are like they are. Not that that is a counsel of despair, moral or otherwise:

Religions preach ethics because people are prone to “ethical” behaviour, not the other way around (p.123).

Slone then makes a claim that strikes me as being too strong:

One can say, therefore, that religion is not a cause of behaviour per se. It does not determine how we think or act.

It is not the only determinant, but to suggest that belief does not have logics, and that people do not act on those logics, is just silly. Leninism, Nazism, liberalism: the doctrinal differences between these political ideologies really do matter. I take his point that cognitive habits act upon doctrines, but it is also true that people can (and do) adopt particular doctrines and act upon them. Consider this rather nice TED talk on how basic religious beliefs affect business (and other) practices.

A point Slone then immediately appeals to himself, as he concludes his book arguing strongly that religion can only be studied properly in the light of our understanding of how human cognition works: it must be scientifically grounded. Slone notes that such scientific “reductionism” no more abolishes other ways of comprehending things than knowledge of how light and sight works abolishes appreciation of the beauty of a Monet painting (p.124).

Theological Incorrectness is a fascinating excursion through religion as it ‘is’, its distance from religion as it ‘ought’ and the use of cognitive science to explicate that distance.

First they came for the … : Of pink triangles and yellow stars, a reply to Shimon Cowen

In the October 2009 issue of Quadrant, Rabbi Dr Shimon Cowen, Director, Institute for Judaism and Civilization—which advocates basing civilisation on the Noahide laws—has an article entitled “Rights” as a Weapon in Culture War. The article argues for the basing of law and public morality on religious values and not a hedonistic, materialistic secularism that he sees as becoming, in effect, the “official religion” in modern democracies. Dr Cowen uses abortion, incest, bestiality and homosexuality as examples of improper use of rights language and of secularist attack on religious foundations of a moral society.

Religious exclusion
What struck me when I first read the article was that, if one added “and Jews” to his attacks on equal protection of the law for homosexuals, the article could have, with minor adjustments, been written by any Catholic conservative denouncing equal rights for Jews prior to about 1945. If one added “and Papists”, it could have been written by any Anglican or Presbyterian attacking giving equal rights to Catholics prior to Catholic emancipation. If one added “Jews and Christians”, it could have been written by a contemporary Iranian mullah or Saudi cleric.

Just as Shimon Cowen takes legal equality for homosexuals as a reductio ad absurdem of liberal modernity, so Christian conservatives (particularly Catholics) in decades past took legal equality for Jews—the “God killers”, the “Messiah deniers”—as a reductio ad absurdem of liberal modernity. Similarly, “decent Muslims” in the Ottoman Empire bitterly rejected the pressure from Western powers to have legal equality for dhimmis—the deniers of the Mission of the Prophet, in the empire of the Caliph.

The historical arguments for the persecution of the Jews have—prior to the development of racial theory in the C19th—overwhelmingly been religious ones. By denying Jews (or Catholics, or Protestants, or Christians, as the case may be) equal rights, one was showing respect to God and the religious basis of society. The argument that “God does not want X group to have equal rights” has proved to be enduring, a moveable feast and regularly aimed against Jews. In the Islamic world, it still is.

Having agreed that…
Such an argument has far more power if it has a “lift off” example. Some case that “everyone agrees” with so, having established acceptance of the idea that there is some group out there for whom it is an offence against God—against basic religious values—to give equal rights to, one can just add in extra examples as convenient. And the extra group that has most commonly been “added in” are Jews.

But they are not the “lift off” group. The “lift off” group has been “sodomites”, the same-sex oriented and active—the form of the human that the Noahide laws specifically exclude from human society. They are a group that the otherwise very divided Abrahamic religions of Jerusalem can agree to hate, for example.
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They are the “lift off” group not only in terms of moral and religious exclusion but, even more grimly, in terms of virtuous extermination. The group God not only excludes from decent society, but specifically wants exterminated. This notion, this adaptation of Genesis 19 so it became a tale of God’s Wrath as virtuous extermination of “that group over there” (a nicely differentiable group, since most people are not interested in sex with members of their own sex; as well as a nicely vulnerable group, since they grow up as isolated individuals in families and social milieus overwhelmingly dominated by the other-sex oriented) was originally developed by Philo of Alexandria but was enthusiastically taken up by the Catholic Church.

Having accepted Philo’s marriage of natural law with Scriptural Revelation, and having defined the same-sex active out of being our moral neighbours, so the fundamental tenements of Christ’s teaching:

Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

did not apply to those who committed “treason” against the purposes of the Creator, the Author of Nature, by committing acts of “unnatural sex”, this denial of being moral neighbours was immediately extended to the Jews, notably by St John Chrysostom, who both accepted Philo’s reasoning, to the extent of adapting his metaphors, and was a notorious preacher against Jews and Judaising. For had the Jews not committed “treason” against the purposes of God by killing Christ? By refusing to heed His message?

So gays and Jews have both held to be “in Rebellion against God”, which made their exclusion from moral and religious decency their fault, and their fault very grave indeed.

Indeed, it is by considering how “arguments against homosexuality” (which, given the centrality of sexual orientation to human nature, are arguments against people’s natures) are still acceptable in many quarters when “arguments against blacks”, “arguments against Jews” or “arguments against women” are not, that we can enter into the mindset of Jew-hatred in particular. The still contested case within the Western world for the exclusion of some group of humans is an excellent one to look at the dynamics, the logic, of bigotry.

Denial of ordinary humanity
Arguments against homosexuality are, of course, typically mounted against homosexual activity—Dr Cowen does this, for instance. But that is a spurious distinction. As noted, sexual orientation is sufficiently central to our nature, that it is an attack on the nature of particular individuals, on them as not being proper manifestations of the human.

In his article, Dr Cowen writes:

No one will deny that homosexual impulses are part of the polymorphous perversity of the human being, and the impulse may be physically an extremely powerful one in certain individuals. But the boundaries established by morality, the concept of Divine purpose and function established by revealed morality, require its containment and inhibition in actual practice.

In other words, same-sex orientation does not count as a legitimate manifestation of the human and so any claims the same-sex oriented may have, have to be radically discounted.

The notion of homosexuality as the “silent sin”, the crimen nefandum or peccatum mutum makes perfect sense, because allowing the same-sex active to speak grants them status as legitimate persons: for if they can speak in their own defense, it becomes effectively impossible to deny them the legitimacy of their desires. Hence the radical discounting of their claims has to become a radical discounting of them. Hence also the endless, and often bitter, fight by religious conservatives against any public space for homosexuals-as-homosexuals: the denouncing and boycotting of books, films, TV series, whatever. The entire point is to deny them the status of “just folk”, to deny them ordinary humanity.

For there has been nowhere near the same campaigning against portraying thieves and murderers as ordinary folk (as distinct from concerns over direct portrayal of violence), for no matter how ordinary they are portrayed, the reality of theft and murder remains. Portray being homosexual as ordinary and the moral case against it [and thus them] begins to collapse.

Such dismissal or denial of their ordinary humanity was exactly what was done against Jews. Dr Cowen writes of:

… for example an overtly practicing homosexual maths teacher may have to be taken by the school, even though this contradicts its ethic. The school may not model its ethic through its staffing.

Just as an anti-Semite could complain that a school might be required to take an overtly practicing Jewish maths teacher, thus denying its “Christian” or “Aryan” ethic (as the case may be).

Dr Cowen writes:

The public square belongs as much to its religious constituents as to its non-religious constituents and it has to be livable for everyone.

Except, apparently, its homosexual constituents, who are to be excluded. The inherently non-reciprocating nature of bigotry (making claims for itself and/or against others which it will not tolerate by them) is here well displayed.

[It really is about respecting, or not, the personhood of the same-sex attracted. This is what has changed in the wider society. In the words of philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah:

over the last 30 years or so, instead of thinking about the private activity of gay sex, many Americans and Europeans started thinking about the public category of gay people.

The division is between those who get that attacking same-sex activity is attacking the personhood of the same-sex attracted and those who think the activity is so wrong their personhood needs to be attacked/constrained.]

Dr Cowen treats homosexuality as being of the same category as incest, abortion and bestiality. But that is precisely what it is not. Incest is wrong because it breaches necessary boundaries in family life, opposition to abortion is all about defending the vulnerable (hence turns on the moral status of the foetus) while bestiality breaches species boundaries: all three issues are about vulnerability and radical imbalance in ability to give consent. Same-sex attraction is about adults building lives together. Hence the need to deny them any right to speak in their own defence, because there is no vulnerable party, except in cases which equally apply to other-sex attraction. [On the contrary, anathematising same-sex attraction and activity greatly expands vulnerability.]

To give the same-sex active their humanity is to give the game away. Just as to give Jews their humanity was to give the Jew-hating game away. What, was, after all the power of the case of Ann Frank but that her story, her words, her tragedy shrieked the ordinary humanity of Jews.

The constant battle of religious conservatives to deny the same-sex active their ordinary humanity is, indeed, their necessary battleground. But that tells you all you really need to know about what they are advocating. Any commitment to one’s faith that is based on making other people miserable, in a blatant denial of moral reciprocation, is not worth a scintilla of respect.

The secular peace
When Dr Cowen writes of:

the concept of Divine purpose and function established by revealed morality

that could equally be taken—and has—to operate against Jews who fail to accept Christ as the Son of God and Jews and Christians for failing to accept Muhammad as the Seal of the Prophets. Or one flavour of Christians against another.

Despite what Dr Cowen implies, secularism did not develop as some conspiracy against God or religious belief. It developed as a way of dealing with radical differences in what revealed morality meant. Now that significant proportions of society do not accept any revealed morality, it is even more necessary. Dr Cowen notes that:

… personal religious identification is acknowledged by 70 per cent of the Australian and more of the American public—that is, that religious identification is the salient fact of the “public” …

But that means 30 per cent do not so identify, and they are citizens too. Moreover, religious identification does not mean accepting any particular characterisation of revealed morality. Only 35% of Australians, in a recent poll, agreed that homosexuality is immoral. Among Christian denominations, the proportion so agreeing ranged from 34% of Catholics to 68% of Baptists. Basing public policy on the notion that homosexuality is immoral—particularly that they be denied any right to be sexually active according to their natures—in fact goes against majority views.

This is the problem of authority from which secular states grew. God’s authority is not contestable, it is not examinable, it is not able to be definitively established. Faced with its absoluteness and indeterminacy, using God’s authority as the basis of public policy always ends up in an exercise of exclusion, coercion and violence. As we can see in our time in Wahbabist Saudi Arabi, in the Islamic Republics of Iran and Sudan and in the past of Western civilisation.

Dr Cowen attacks the Enlightenment heritage as inadequate, writing:

The very term “rights”, with its Enlightenment lineage, has to do with a concept of the autonomy and the sovereignty of the human being. Religion, whilst acknowledging human free will, looks at the Sovereignty of God and the role of human agency in the fulfilment of Divine purpose.

Such as Islam’s claim that we should submit to the Sovereignty of Allah and the purpose of universal submission to His Sovereignty, perhaps?

Or perhaps not. (That is, after all, the basis of the Islamist assault on Israel.) The notion of rights in Western civilisation is rather older than the Enlightenment, as we can see from the 1537 Papal Encyclical Sublimus Dei and its statement that:

that the Indians are truly men and that … the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.

If Sublimus Dei shows what being within the protection of moral universalism means, the Golden Legend's presentation of the Nativity shows the extreme of being outside it.

Also outside the protections of moral universalism were Jews herded into ghettos and subject to various legal exclusions (not to mention periodic pogroms and expulsions). It was not the strength of religious belief that saw the emancipation of the Jews in Western societies, but the Enlightenment’s attack on priestly authority and religious exclusion, its pursuit of a basis for social order not subject to the violence, exclusion and strife of religion. For a genuinely human and humane moral universalism. What Dr Cowen refers to as:

… anchored in the common tradition of the world religions, which holds to objective, universal and enduring values

availed Jews little in deeply religious pre-Enlightenment Europe. Indeed, typically the more deeply religion was tied into the policy of the state, the worse the situation for Jews. With the most religious state of all (the Vatican) being much the worst offender.

There are countries where concern for what God wants pervade public policy: but Iran and Saudi Arabia are places far worse than any Western secular society. Not least for their rampant misogyny: a common feature of monotheism-based public policy, with its masculine religious authority both human (no female rabbis, clerics or priests, until very recently) and divine (God-the-Father, the ultimate authority, being conceived in highly masculinized form).

Dr Cowen wants to rehabilitate claims based on tradition. But exclusion of Jews from public life was highly traditional. It was only the overturning of long-established tradition that gave Jews legal equality. Dr Cowen wants to base public morality on values, but the exclusion of Jews was most emphatically based on values: deeply religious values. We may well say that any commitment to one’s faith that is based on making other people miserable is not worth a scintilla of respect, but that hardly stops with treating Jews decently.

Dr Cowen argues against hate speech laws making “homophobia” a crime. Hate speech laws are noxious, but if he is committed to the Noahide laws, he would appear to be therefore committed to laws against blasphemy. Any position of “my laws against hate speech are good, but yours are bad” is just another case of the lack of any genuine reciprocating universalism in many religious claims. God is so useful for bigotry, since His trumping authority means embarrassing lacks of reciprocation can be defended as fulfilling the Highest Purpose of all.

Secular ascents
Dr Cowen claims that “Hedonistic Materialism”—what he calls Hedonomat—encourages greed and theft. Yet the reality is that life and property are much safer in modern Western secular societies than they were in medieval religion-based polities, for example. The claim of religious conservatives that we are in an age of moral decline hardly fits the long-term drop in violence and cruelty. But his claim is much larger than that:

Hedonomat … can also promote a culture of greed and theft, not only on the count of its materialistic culture, but also for the simple reason that the child or adult can ride a train without paying because “no one” (not the conductor and not God) is watching.

The implication that there was no morality before monotheism, or without monotheism, is just nonsense. That Aristotle, Buddha, Confucius were not moral or did not live in societies where morality was alive and vital.

Moral universalism is prone to two pathologies. One is using the rhetoric of abomination, and the language of moral degradation and exclusion, to tell a moral story against some group so as to exclude them from the protections of moral universalism. That was notoriously done against the Jews, just as Rabbi Cowen wants to do so as to exclude homosexuals.

The second pathology is universalising the parochial: taking something specific to particular cultures, times, social milieus and claiming that it is some moral universal. Across the breadth of human cultures, homosexuality is not remotely a universal sin or crime. Human cultures have varied in their attitudes from homicidal anathematisation to making it compulsory or near compulsory (typically, as processes of passage to adulthood).

That monotheisms have been so virulent in their anathematisation is just a manifestation of the sexual obsessions monotheism is so prone too. As is monotheism’s typical fearfulness about female sexuality. It is standard justification of such obsessiveness with sex-roles and sex-forms to claim that it reflects the natural world and is necessary for proper social order. Dr Cowen runs the two claims together:

… so the liberation of the essential (the pristinely animal) human being must give expression to morphing across boundaries. Indeed the human is here accorded a freedom which the animal does not possess: whilst generally the animal does not cross boundaries, human freedom is to be expressed in the social facilities of “polymorphous perversity”, the crossing of boundaries.

Which is false both in its characterisation of nature as existing in neat sex and gender boxes and in its claim of rigidity or chaos as the only options.

Dr Cowen puts the battles as being between two alternatives:

We live in a time of powerful contrast between two philosophies: one which believes in God and in a transcendent, an objective and an enduring morality; the other which does not believe (or suppresses its belief) in God, and allows the morphing of values and moral institutions in accordance with mere desire.

Buddhists might feel to be in the excluded middle here. As might many folk. But Dr Cowen’s characterisation of some religious unity is patent nonsense.

Nor are all secularisms the same. The prevailing notions of secularism in the Anglosphere are rather different than that prevailing in France, for example. It is always useful to trot out Peter Singer, as Dr Cowen does, since he can be guaranteed to provide a wonderful reductio whipping boy. But the good philosopher’s pronouncements are widely contested and not merely by religious folk.

Indeed, many of Dr Cowen’s more cogent criticisms of Hedonomat are precisely in the areas where it is most like religion in its exclusiveness and trumping claims.

Dr Cowen’s tendency to conceive matters in apocalyptic divides is also on display when he writes:

Hedonomat is the deregulation of sexual activity: including not just the normalisation (and thereby in the educational system, also the cultivation) of homosexual practice …

This notion that equality-means-hegemony is precisely the sort of claim that was made against Jews. Just as anti-gay activists nowadays talk of equal protection of the law for homosexuals meaning the “homosexualising” of society, so equal protection of the law for Jews was taken to represent the “Judaizing” of society. Treating the same-sex attracted as “just folks” is the cultivation of nothing except ordinary human decency. Just as treating Jews as “just folks” is and was also.

That same accusations, the same claims of threat and justified exclusion, are used against the same-sex attracted now has were used against Jews previously does not show that there is something wrong with Jews after all, but that what we are dealing with is the common logic of bigotry, with its purloining [of] the language of morality. For bigotry denies the objects of bigotry the reciprocal protections of morality, a denial which is itself a moral claim and so is cast in moral language. But it may purloin the language of morality, that does not remotely make it moral.

Even given the feeding on the wish of parents for grandchildren, and rulership for the breeding of workers and warriors, exacerbated by monotheism’s problems with eros, the central dynamic in the anathematisation of same-sex activity has always been priests, clerics (and, indeed, rabbis) parading their role as “gatekeepers of righteousness” by selling effortless virtue to a huge majority at the expense of a small, easily isolated, and vulnerable minority.

Rabbi Cowen might see “God-defying, decency-destroying, immoral homosexuals”, corrupting all they touch. I see generation after generation of vulnerable young men and women, growing up in utterly unnecessary emotional misery: self-fearful, self-loathing, told they are rebels against God, against the natural order, against the very moral order itself.

Wars against people as they are
Enough, already: the notion of One True Sexuality is every bit as tyrannical and oppressive as the notion of One True Race, One True Class or One True Religion. They are all wars against people-as-they-are in the name of people as-they-are-allegedly-supposed-to-be. Nor is the trumpeting of their evil any stronger than that of the Holocaust: the pink triangles of the death camps are, every bit as much as the yellow stars of those same death camps, a warning against that deadly and brutal delusion in all its forms. It a grotesque betrayal of the lessons of appalling human misery to hold that some of the suffering in those death camps is a warning and others are not. If it is monstrous, as it is, to take that warning and burden away from Jew-hatred, it is no less monstrous to take that warning and burden away from queer-hatred.

It is a tribute to the power, and appeal, of effortless virtue, and the human capacity to fail to see others except as stick figures in one’s own internal or collective enthusiasms; to not see the simple human consequences of what one preaches, to not even consider such; that even the common experience of the death camps apparently conveys no message, no warning. No shred of human empathy.

Tammy Faye Bakker is no doubt few people’s idea of a great moral paragon. But her comment on such matters:

We’re all just people made out of the same old dirt and God didn’t make any junk

denying any notion of “proper” and “improper” forms of the human, showed an elementary capacity for human empathy that apparently eludes so many of the “gatekeepers of righteousness”. If there is something more pathetic that members of a huge majority railing against a small, and inherently vulnerable, minority it is a member, a community leader, of a small minority who has suffered appalling levels of persecution, keeping alive that same dynamic.

We know that rhetoric of abomination, and the language of moral degradation and exclusion, can turn back against their source, because they have been. Just as Christians held Jews to be rebels against God’s purpose by rejecting the Messiah they brought forth, so Muslims held Christians and Jews both to be rebels against God’s purpose for rejecting His Prophet. Orthodox priests who had railed against those rebels against the purposes immanent in creation found themselves crushed as rebels against the purposes immanent in History. And the notion of God the Virtuous Exterminator also recoiled back on its source.

According to the chroniclers, the first case of members of Jewish community being massacred by a Christian mob occurred in 414 in Alexandria. The city and community of Philo, from whose pen the notion of God the Virtuous Exterminator of the different had flowed into Christian thought. The massacre was the culmination of decades of violence and horror against the Jews stirred up by the greatest names in Christendom, notably St Augustine’s mentor St Ambrose and St John Chrysostom, the “patron saint of preachers” and an avid propagator of Philo’s ideas: of God as the Virtuous Exterminator of the morally set apart.

Why did that Christian mob act with such murderousness? Because those they slaughtered were Jews and, as such, “obviously” hateful to God: “obviously” separated from decent God-fearing folk by an enormous moral divide, for had they not denied and killed His Son?

It is way past time for rejecting the deeming of categories of people, who are otherwise just folk, as hateful to God. To use God as a weapon against one’s fellow humans, to deny them the reciprocation which is at the heart of morality. It is certainly way past time to suggest that public policy should reflect or echo such views. It is way past time to put Philo’s homicidal intolerance, and its continuing echoes, finally to rest. Ideas have consequences. A leader of the Jewish community should understand that better than most.

For is it not one of the great warnings of our time: “first, they come for the Jews”? But it is not true. For first, they come for the queers.

And if your response is “but throughout the history of Western civilisation they have always been coming for the queers”, the answer is yes, precisely. Once it has been established that there is a small, vulnerable minority who God hates, who God wants dead, who are a pathological betrayal of humanity, who corrupt anything they touch, who are a profound threat to moral decency, who absolutely cannot be treated as equals, then moving on to the next group is so much easier.

After all, if you can convince yourself that moral decency requires that young, isolated, same-sex attracted teenagers represent some great moral threat; that making their lives miserable, full of deception and self-loathing, is some great moral necessity; that they are un-persons whose suffering is entirely their fault and their burden; then doing the same to the Jews (or whoever) is easy.

You can even use exactly the same accusations. Just ask the Catholic Church.

Shimon Cowen is not protecting his people, he is keeping alive the states of mind that are their greatest threat and danger. His embrace of the un-personhood of homosexuals is doing his bit to keep alive that same logic of belief on which Jews have been crucified.

That does not show moral commitment, it shows enormous moral blindness.

The pink triangles of the death camps give exactly the same warning as the yellow stars of those same death camps, exactly the same warning of the dangers of denying our common humanity and all that goes with it. No more, no less.

ADDENDA The post has been updated to fix a spelling error and to add in the words in [ ].