What Our Society Needs
The case for an inclusive, nuanced politics
In our society, like in every society before it, there’s a culture war between conservatives and revolutionaries. How this manifests changes from society to society but the core remains: those who want change fight those who resist it. In our era, it’s the ‘Big C’ Conservatives fighting the Culture Wars against Liberals, fuelled by the Internet and Social Media algorithms. Five centuries ago Martin Luther used the newly-invented printing press to foment revolution against the Catholic Church. During the decline of the Roman Republic, a succession of populist reformers took on the entrenched powers in the Senate, paying with their lives. Each struggle is just history in a new guise.
This push and pull between revolution and conservatism are necessary for a healthy, dynamic society¹. Revolutionaries push the boundaries of convention and tradition to improve society and conservatives constrain their wilder impulses. Without revolutionaries, societies are frozen in stasis. Without conservatives, society itself is unstable. There is no Good and Evil in this fight, but rather a Ying and Yang. Black and White, as always, is a false dichotomy. The reality lies in shades of grey.
The political philosophy of Karl Popper
This more nuanced political philosophy is inspired by Karl Popper, who articulated that the most important aspect of any political system is to allow error correction. Popper based this on a pragmatic understanding of our flaws. We humans are imperfect, impulsive, biased primates who often make mistakes. This is as true at the group level as it is at the individual². We will inevitably elect the wrong people and institute bad policies and make a real mess of things. Therefore, we need a system and a way of enacting societal change that lets us undo those mistakes.
The inescapable conclusion of such a philosophy is that we should change things incrementally. A small error can be corrected. Deciding society is irredeemably broken, dousing it in gasoline, lighting a match, and happily watching everything burn to ashes can’t be. Irreversible changes are dangerous because they assume an unwarranted level of certainty that the decision is correct.
The problem here, of course, is that when our passions are inflamed by injustice we don’t want incremental change. The plodding march of progress is far too slow for us. It’s human to respond to injustice by trying to do something — anything — to address it, even if the response is ineffective, because it comes with a sense of agency. Waiting a few decades for the small changes to accumulate is painfully slow and out of our control. Taking such a long-termist perspective runs counter to our intuitions. We struggle to see past the injustice in front of us, even if we must accept it to maximize progress in the potentially vast expanse of humanity’s future.
A long-termist political philosophy contradicts our innate, tribal instincts to favour kin and clan and the tangible. It’s a logical but deeply counter-intuitive worldview and, I think, insufficiently persuasive alone. It assumes drastic, top-down social change is likely negative in the long run. It’s sceptical a society designed on Utopian ideals would be a good society, irrespective of the good intentions that birthed them. But why is that the case? Why can’t we replace tradition and ageing institutions with something new and better?
The case for tradition
Each generation chafes under the traditions of their parents. It’s part of being young, idealistic, and questioning. It endows a society with dynamism and vibrancy. Traditions can seem pointless and stultifying, simply the accumulated deadwood of generations that impede progress. But again, this Black and White thinking misses the nuance.
Tradition is embodied knowledge. It consists of cultural memes that persist because they are ‘fitter’ than the countless traditions lost to history. Some survive because they exploit quirks of human nature to lodge themselves in our collective consciousness, but others survive because they are effective solutions to ubiquitous human problems³. Improving society then is theoretically simple — we want to discard the former whilst retaining the latter. Of course, centuries of fractious democratic politics tell us it isn’t so simple. We can’t tell the difference.
“Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems” — Donald Kingsbury
Human societies are a patchwork of these bottom-up evolved solutions to the human condition. The vital and the detrimental interact in a labyrinthine web too complicated to comprehend or untangle. And because it can’t be understood it can’t be replicated top-down. Society is a monstrously complex system, replete with unintended, unpredictable 2nd and 3rd order effects. This is the context in which gradual change shines.
It starts with our proven, imperfect system and tries to improve it. It moves slowly, bit by bit, humbly accepting any change could be wrong so never doing anything irreversible. It follows a circuitous path, with missteps and wrong turns and dead ends. It’s revolutionary in its ambitions for a better society and conservative in its uncertainty about how to get there.
Why we need revolutionaries
On the surface, this appears to be a conservative philosophy, but it’s actually deeply progressive and revolutionaries play a crucial role. At its core lies a foundation of Optimism. It assumes the problems we face are soluble and progress is possible as long as we maintain systems of error correction to rectify the mistakes we’ll inevitably make. The strange bedfellows of optimism and pragmatism differentiate it from the current flavour of progressivism, which sidelines true progress to pursue an idealized political good.
Distilled to a platitude, it is really just a politics of solving problems. And problem-solving needs those who can think beyond the straight-jacket of their culture and context. Revolutionaries often play that role. They are the idea generators and problem solvers. Most solutions, like most ideas immaculately conceived in the human mind, will be terrible. At best they won’t solve the problem and at worst they exacerbate it or create new ones. But, occasionally, they’ll right a dire wrong. They are the engine of progress.
If history tells us anything it’s that most of our moral intuitions are wrong, and our descendants will see us as the monsters we judge our ancestors to be. We will all, eventually, be on the wrong side of history despite how ‘right’ our beliefs feel. The only response to this realization is to be intellectually humble and to admit that despite everything just said about tradition, it inevitably harbours monstrous injustice we are blind to. To the pessimists this is discouraging; the world is full of injustice we can’t even see. But to the Optimist problems are not cause for discouragement because they’re soluble. The revolutionaries and activists agitating for change can solve them, as long as they’re constrained by institutions or traditions that allow the inevitable errors they make along the way to be corrected.
This point of view can be distilled into three words: continual, reversible progress. It is a more nuanced approach orthogonal to the current, stark political divide. It puts aside ideology and concretizes the only worthwhile political aim — maximizing societal progress — then pursues it in the most effective way. It is Optimistic and inclusive; Optimistic because it believes progress is possible and inclusive because it needs the tension of opposing intuitions to function at its best.
Humanity’s diversity is wondrous and we should protect it and uphold it. Alongside diversity of skin colour and culture comes diversity of thought and political opinion. A vibrant, diverse society needs a political philosophy that welcomes the entire spectrum of political inclinations, from die-hard revolutionaries to the most committed traditionalists. This is that philosophy.
[1] My definition of a ‘dynamic’ society comes from David Deutsch, whose book The Beginning of Infinity has been a significant influence on my thinking. See this article for the Deutschian explanation of ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ societies.
[2] This might actually be more true at the group level. Psychological research on groupthink has found that groups often make more extreme, more biased decisions than individuals, likely due to social pressure to conform.
[3] Differentiating memes in this way comes again from David Deutsch. In The Beginning of Infinity, he splits memes into ‘rational’ and ‘anti-rational’, directly analogous to the distinction I’ve made.
