Writer's Update: Preparing For A New Perspective

Having enjoyed the time-out in 2020 for my awesome wedding, fabulous honeymoon and below average DIY projects, I’m back to editing the books. Focusing on just one book has been helpful. It’s not as much fun, as I love the variety of multiple forays, but present James thinks future James will be glad I was more singularly focused.

Recently, my wonderful wife gave me some sage advice regarding my writing (this is especially pertinent for writers of non-fiction). She said: "Prioritise the book that only you could write". Yes, how right she is. It's great advice for all writers, so we can protect our time and allocate those precious writing hours to the projects that we were born to write. This gentle nudge brought me back to a particular project I'd been dabbling in for years, about God's Genius. Although I'd had lots of fun writing about all kinds of subjects - because let me tell you, there are few things more liberating than the luxury of knowing you're free to write about absolutely anything you like, and that there are no artificial constraints on you - I figured that it was unlikely that anyone else would be writing exactly the kind of book I'm writing about God and Genius, so that was where I should return and focus for now. It's going well.

One of the perpetual joys about the Christian journey is that a relationship with God is forever invigorating the mind with fresh and exciting perspectives. In fact, one has about the same inevitability of discovering profound new truths every day as a man walking on a beach has of finding new grains of sand. There are so many conduits through which God can speak to us; through prayer and scripture, through direct revelation, through friendships and relationships, though our own inner thoughts and reasoning, through our life experiences, and through the multitude of great writers out there, that it's almost impossible for a devoted heart and a dedicated mind to fail to find new treasures every day.

If you want some good Christian philosophy, Kierkegaard is one of my favourite Christian thinkers – a rare brilliance not seen in many writers. Pascal had it in patches, so did Dante, and Milton, and Blake. Shakespeare had shadows of it in another, different, sense, as did Proust, and Tolstoy. Dostoevsky had it in a different way, still. But at his best, Kierkegaard takes us into some deep theological contemplations that are unequalled in any writer I've read. Yes, sure, Kierkegaard is flawed (aren’t we all?), with some inadequate expositions (especially around subjectivity's relationship with truth and morality), but in writings like Works Of Love, Fear and Trembling, Either/Or and Sickness Unto Death he tapped into a way of thinking that has, in my view, rarely been surpassed. 

Of course, in a fallen world, the flaws and the genius have an inextricable entangling - you can't have the latter without the former. For as Blake shows wonderfully in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell, for the genius, his flaws are very much a part of the brilliance, acting as a counterpoise. What is it he says: improvement makes the straight roads, but the crooked roads are roads of Genius – which, even in itself is a conflicting expression of brilliance and flaw. 

Finally, here's a piece of advice to end with. In life, I'd say there are only three necessary things we should be doing:

1) The things we are compelled to do.

2) The things we have to do.

3) The things we do for fulfilment.

The things we are compelled to do are things related to morality and ethics, like being good citizens and doing what is right. The things we have to do are things related to survival and proprietary, like eating, drinking and wearing clothes. And the things we do for fulfilment are things like being creative, learning, building relationships, distilling pleasure and finding purpose. Alas, so many people do things for reasons other than those three. They do things to court cheap status, or to follow a trend, or to beef up their public persona, or to appear more intelligent than they are. Spend your time doing the necessary things and not the expedient things and you'll give yourself the best chance of a blessed and authentic life.

Three Dimensional Left & Right Wing Politics

I've written before about a widespread misunderstanding of the complexity of left and right wing positions (like here). Today I want to try to visualise those complexities with a 3D graph representation. When people talk about left and right wing, they really shouldn't be making their statements without defining the type of left and right they mean, because there are (at least) three considerations that need to be made: economic left and right, social left and right, and collectivist vs. individualist left and right.

Consequently, I think a more accurate measurement of socio-political society would be a 3D graph like the one I have pasted below, with the Z axis determining a place on the spectrum of collectivism (top) vs. individualism (bottom), the Y axis determining a place on the spectrum of economic left and right wing, and the X axis determining a place on the spectrum of social left and right wing too.

As you can see, I've put a red dot to determine where I would stand, generally speaking: economically right wing (because markets are the primary driver of prosperity), individualist (because liberty and freedom are the primary drivers of progression), and socially left wing (because I believe in togetherness, kindness, tolerance, inclusion, and helping the most vulnerable).

(It's only supposed to be an illustrative model - it's obviously not a fine-detail representation).

Now even if you can get people that far so they think about different types of left and right wing, there's something interesting that plays out in people's perception of left and right wing politics - something I began to think about a bit in a little more depth after I heard Douglas Murray introduce the proposition (although Douglas Murray's consideration was fairly general as he didn't break down the categories of left and wing). The proposition is this. If you start from a fairly moderate position on the social left-to-right spectrum - say somewhere perceived as near the middle - you find that the shift to the extreme right (a fascist dictatorship) is a shorter journey than the shift to the extreme left (a communist dictatorship). It looks something this:

Social left and right spectrum:

Far Left -------------------------------------------------Moderate-------Far Right

In other words, once you veer away from the moderate position to the right, there aren't many perceived steps to take before you fall foul of a dangerous, totalitarian collectivist mentality. If you get brainwashed into Islamic fundamentalism or extreme ethno-centric nationalism and xenophobia, the walk from relatively intolerant moderate to a 'send all immigrants home' or 'Death to all kafirs' mentality isn't that far, because once you tap into a hateful collectivist mentality you are already in touching distance of the kind of extremism that dehumanises people and sends masses to their grave.

But things aren't the same with the walk to the far left: the journey is much slower, and much more Machiavellian. It ends with the gulag, but there are many more steps in between, because shifts to the left disguise their maladies in a more insidious way. They might start with virtue signalling, like endorsing redistributionist policies, bogus missions to save the planet, safe spaces and extremist rallies promoting what has recently been coined 'wokeness' and 'cancel culture', and end up mirroring the dystopian nightmares portended by Orwell, Huxley, Burgess and Bradbury - but they will take more time to be found out than those steps to the right.

A similar thing is true with the economic spectrum of left and right, it looks similar, as does the collectivist-individual spectrum, but perhaps more like this:

Economic left and right spectrum:

Far Left-----------------------------Moderate------------Far Right

Here the shift to the right involves mostly positive things like a freer market, more liberty, greater freedom of ideas, but you only have to champion those qualities a bit more passionately than the moderates and you're soon accused of being a heartless capitalist with no concern for the poor and needy. This is a misconception, of course - for as anyone well versed in economics will know, a freer market, more liberty and greater freedom of ideas are the primary qualities that benefit the poor and needy - they are the answers to most of the problems the economic left are trying to solve.

On the other side, the creep leftwards, if unchecked, will end up with the old Soviet Union or the modern day Venezuela, but along the way it will present itself as a benign, good-intentioned striving towards social justice and the narrowing of the so-called 'unfair inequality' gap. Like a Trojan-horse, the collectivist, authoritarian dogmas that produce murderous far left ideologies more easily creep into public discourse than the authoritarian dogmas that produce murderous far right ideologies. We appear to have a more acute radar to the dangers of extreme right wing politics, which seems to mean undue suspicion of right wing economic sentiments, which are really a synonym for increased growth, progression and a higher standard of living for all.

And with the collectivists versus the individualists, we find that collectivists on the social left and the right want to demarcate everyone into groups as the primary identifier and pit one group against each other through tribal factions based on power and class, and deny that competence and intelligence and hard work and creativity play the primary role in successes. Moreover, what's often unnoticed is that it's very difficult to align yourself with a group (race, ethnicity, political, regional, national) and not want to be in conflict with others, because tribalism is built on a 'them vs. us' mentality, and is hundreds of thousands of years old in our evolutionary legacy. And as those who've read it will know, Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, perhaps better than any book, explores how the totalitarianisms of both the left and the right are cut from the same cloth of impulse.

Luxury Government

 

You may have heard of a phenomenon called Wagner's Law (which I've blogged about before), which observes that with increasing economic growth we generally see a rise in state expenditure. Or to put it another way, the richer a country gets, the more it can afford to splash out on luxuries like government, and state-funded projects our forebears could have scarcely afforded.

What's driving Wagner's Law is that capitalism has made people rich enough to be able to afford more government and more public services - and with a more complex, more diverse range of competing forces, we can afford more state regulation and better public services, as long as they are not inefficient and not best left to consumer choice.

But there is also the phenomenon called Gammon's Law (after Max Gammon), which follows a predictable pattern whereby increase in expenditure will be matched by fall in production, where the more resources a system swallows up, the less efficient it becomes in terms of production per unit of investment. Pretty much any big centralised institution falls foul of this - schools, health, taxation, the EU, the church - when it gets so big it passes through the efficiencies of economies of scale and gets so inflated that it begins to suffers from diseconomies of scale (see also the Dunbar number), and will show a pattern whereby increased input produces decrease quality of output.

What muddies the waters even further is that there is much overlap between the social, political and economic landscapes, especially regarding human motivations. Humans are incentivised by a complex range of aspirations; material well-being, safety, self-preservation, community, purpose, status and tribal affiliation. So it's not always easy to say that economic freedom is an exclusively 'right wing' trait and redistribution is an exclusively 'left wing' trait, because all humans are motivated by a complex interaction between those and the other factors.

Moreover, we all have stronger ties in serving our closer family, and weaker ties with the wider community, and it is inevitable that human motivations, in large part, begin locally and extend outwards as we have more to spare. That's why, even in a country that sees continual economic growth and raised living standards, more parochial issues related to social standing, status and self-preservation can make people sound as they have missed some of the story. Similarly, those who proclaim that everything is ok and that the market and science can take care of all our problems are also living outside of truth.

Although bottom up driving forces are usually superior to top down central planning, they are not always, because local iterations in bottom up dynamics are not often sufficiently collectively ordered enough to deal with large scale problems or major changes in the status quo (like a war, a pandemic or a big natural disaster). However badly we may think the government has handled the problems created by Covid, there would have been many more problems and deaths if society tried to manage purely by the invisible hand of the market.

On the other hand, despite the raving left's dumb lament that Covid has handed more power to the capitalists, it has been evident that when people have had to live in restrictive times, it has taken businesses with enough scale and size to be able to quickly adapt to the changing needs and demands of the population (supermarkets, Amazon, Royal Mail, tech companies). The government has done a lot of harm to small business by forcing them to close while the big players hoover up the custom, but it takes big players with a capacious business model and prodigious infrastructure to be able to service a nation in crisis.

That's why in previous writings I have been keen to point out that the motivational factors in the left and right wing bifurcations extend far beyond principles of economics - they extend to qualities like motivations for togetherness, kindness, tolerance, inclusion, and helping the most vulnerable - and neither the comprehensive free market approach of the economic right nor the comprehensive socialist approach of the economic left satisfies the full gamut of human needs and motivations.

Once people rightly frame left and right wing into the three considerations that need to be made: economic left and right, social left and right, and collectivist vs. individualist left and right, they will begin to learn that the contributions of right and wing mentalities are both necessary to strike the right kind of balance in a thriving society. As always, we'll need the right balance of freedom and restriction, individualism and collectivism, risk and safety, self-determination and redistribution - you name it, there'll be a balance to be struck.

I suppose the socialists will never be very keen on markets, because they are primed to only see the concentrated faults and miss the more thinly spread benefits. And I suppose free marketers will always have a bit of a blind spot towards the community and solicitous-based nature of socialism because they rightly abhor the economic illiteracy and crass hypocrisy that underlies it. 

Is God 'Pulling' The Universe With His Genius?

Readers familiar with this blog are probably familiar with the genius Kurt Gödel, and his incompleteness theorem, which shows that any finite system of axioms is insufficient for proving every result in mathematics, and that any formally mechanised system in which a categorical set of axioms exists cannot be captured in one grand slam rationale without leaving a brute residue of incompleteness.

I mentioned this because I saw an interesting quote from Kurt Gödel that I hadn't seen before:

“I believe that mechanism in biology is a prejudice of our time which will be disproved. In this case, one disproof, in my opinion, will consist in a mathematical theorem to the effect that the formation within geological times of a human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of a similar nature), starting from a random distribution of the elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components.”

This caught my attention because it got me wondering if that's right in a similar way to how my biased random walk theory might be right. While Gödel isn't denying evolution happened, he seems to be friendly to a kind of Intelligent Design: that the evolution of intelligent life forms in the time since the big bang is not mathematically likely unless one assumes a vanishingly unlikely set of initial conditions with a cosmic mathematician as the source of it.

That is to say, in a 14 billion years old universe, biologists tell us that random genetic mutations plus natural selection explains the life we observe. So, the consideration taps into algorithmic information theory (like the notion of Kolmogorov complexity) and tools from complexity theory to study if the biologists’ explanation is consistent with the 14 billion year old age of the universe - and in terms of the timeframe a computational problem like biological life requires - whether this problem possibly even requires exponential time. If a problem requires exponential time, then any algorithm for the problem requires at least (roughly) 2^n time units where n is the number of bits describing the initial conditions of the problem.

So if Gödel is right, then this is the biased random walk I've been writing about for all those years, where the algorithm(s) in nature's blueprint were set up by God to give rise to evolution in a timeframe far more remarkably fecund than the mere 14 billon years of the age of the universe. If evolution requires an exponential amount of time to achieve the complexity of life we see after a few billion years of space expansion, then it required far more time than the ordinary polynomial time with which physics measures the cosmic story.

I'm quite a visual thinker, and I keep picturing an idea of the cosmos being pulled rather than being pushed, and that perhaps that's true of everything significant about Christianity. If we consider that biased random walk, where the algorithm(s) in nature's blueprint were set up by God to give rise to evolution in a timeframe far more remarkably fecund than the mere 14 billon years of the age of the universe - you could say the universe is being pulled by the mathematical structure that exists in the configurational search space of the universe's mechanisms, and was already implicit in God's creative blueprint.

In addition, now consider the narrative structure in the Old and New Testaments. We can't think of the Old Testament except through the lens of how it culminates in the New Testament. In fact, by Genesis 3:15 we have already seen the whole summary of the story, from creation, to the fall, to salvation through Christ. Rather than the Old Testament pushing towards the New Testament - as Christ is the Creator of the universe, then the New Testament superseding the Old is not like a development towards improvement, it is more akin to the notion that the improved state is already implicit in God's mind, because it is older than creation. Hence the New Testament is not just pulling the Old Testament forward - it is, in a sense, also pulling everything that follows it forward to the culmination of God's grand plan. To that end, God's created word has the same model as God's created universe. 

The foundation of my hypothesis can be found here:

The Mathematical Bias Theory Redux: Why There Probably ‘IS’ a God – in 20 Steps

Dense Populations

I’ve seen several articles recently in the mainstream media, including one from the BBC and one from Sky News, questioning which countries have had the best and worst Covid-19 policies thus far, where this information is being distilled by considering things like number of deaths, population density and herd immunity. But both articles neglect to consider this properly, because they talk about population density as if it's the same thing everywhere you go. It isn't.

Interaction rates differ from place to place once you stop thinking of population density as merely population divided by area, and herd immunity differs from place to once you consider the different dynamics of interaction and exposure. Herd immunity must, by its very nature, bring about different percentages of immunity in different areas of the land.

Frequency of interaction depends somewhat on population density, but not comprehensively. It's an error to merely calculate density by dividing the population by area. Adding 50,000 square miles of uninhabited fields is not going to have a radical effect on the Covid mixing effect in terms of population divided by area, despite causing a reduction in overall population density. And at the same time it has no tangible effect on the average density from the perspective of any one individual.

 

Further Reading: The Absudity Of The 'UK Overcrowdedness' Myth

 

 

 

 

The Absurdity Of 'Hate Crimes'

I have faith that most people in the UK can see how ridiculous, foolish and damaging the SNP’s prospective ‘hate crime bill’ is – it deserves repudiation at every level. There are actually a lot of interesting elements to consider on the complex subject of ‘hate’, but nothing in the bill gets close to engaging with them.

 

Consequently, this is a post-it note summary of what I think is the general problem. There’s a lot of hate in the world; and hate is unpleasant, and should be challenged and corrected whenever it is reasonable to do so. But once you start trying to criminalise it, things get problematic, because of two principal reasons:

 

1) It isn’t illegal to hate

2) It’s nigh-on impossible to define hate as a legal entity

 

There are no rigorous ways to define justifiable or unjustifiable hate, because people are complex, so are our feelings, so are our ideas, and so is the world that surrounds us. What about if you hate Donald Trump, or Extinction Rebellion, or Islam – are those expressions of hatred candidates for hate crimes?

 

Some people use the term ‘inciting hatred’, but what does that mean exactly? The UK Law defines the offence of incitement to hatred as “when someone acts in a way that is threatening and intended to stir up hatred” But that doesn’t help much, as different people feel threatened by different things. And ‘stirring up hatred’ is, as we’ve discussed, equally ambiguous. If it is not illegal to hate, then why is it illegal to stir up hatred? If someone feels threatened by a negative Tweet or by an abusive rant against Communism on their blog, who decides when a negative Tweet or rant is too much? The mechanics behind ‘hate crime’ logic are built on folly.

 

Moreover, it hasn’t slipped my attention that quite often the people shouting loudest against so-called hate crimes are the people who appear to me to be more hateful than most. Nor has it escaped my attention that the people shouting loudest against intolerance are quite often far more intolerant than the average citizen. It's difficult to take these people seriously: they are like butchers holding up signs against the evil of eating meat.

 

More generally, I think we should be very careful about the way we are suppressing opinions, no-platforming people, and pandering to the snowflakes and the supine easily offended reactionaries. Here's the thing - and this is a variation on Carl Jung's "Fool is the precursor to the Saviour" epigram - in order to say things of importance you have to take risks, you have to be courageous, you have to risk offending, and you have to make challenges to ensure that there is no false security or complacency in consensual opinion. In other words, to be profoundly right, you have to be prepared to be profoundly wrong, a fool, an outcast, even a disgrace sometimes. You have to be free enough to be able to say what others might also be thinking but haven't yet said.

 

Finally, as I said in a previous blog post:

 

"A society that puts people in gilded cages and encourages them to lock the door from the inside is not only fostering an environment that suppresses speech, it is fostering an environment that suppresses thought as well, because we do lots of our best thinking from talking and sharing ideas and hearing feedback. A society that makes people craven about speech makes people craven about ideas, because it keeps a lot of our best stuff locked away in the safe space of our cranium - unexpressed, and therefore unfulfilled.

 

Seek the truth and you will never be afraid to hear anything, because you can't lose: if something offensive or heterodoxical comes along, it is going to be evaluated through your robust truthseeking lens - and if it adds any value by way of a corrective you will modify your view to an am improved state, and if it merely reinforces your view stronger, you will have an even more robust opinion, and a better defense of it. You have to be free to explore ideas and express them, because it’s only by expressing ideas and talking about them that we have a full capacity for learning. You have to be free to offend, and free to speculate in bold ways, and your children will pay a big price for attempts to stultify that."

Humans Are Fairly Competent Risk Assessors: And This Was One Of The Worst Policy Decisions I’ve Ever Seen

I see last week that Boris has deigned to allow socially distant wedding receptions to go ahead again after spending the previous 2 weeks spoiling people’s Big Day, and throwing the wedding, restaurant, flower and beauty industries into needless uncertainty. I have to say that, in terms of short-sighted stupidity, the initial decision to prevent wedding receptions with no notice was one of the worst small domestic policy decisions I’ve ever seen a government make. It was disgraceful that the government senselessly spoiled everyone's wedding plans for 14 days with Boris's ridiculous metaphor about squeezing the brake pedal.

Of course it's possibly sensible to show some caution to avoid another spike, and it's probably reasonable to squeeze that brake pedal when it comes to casinos, bowling alleys and skating rinks. But weddings are different for a number of reasons, and without writing a long missive expounding on what most of you surely also concluded, let's just say that this decision was a needless, callous, unsympathetic assault on thousands of people's special occasions - not to mention the detrimental effects on small businesses, on people's mental well-being, and on the ushering in of pointless uncertainty for future wedding dates. Weddings of up to 30 people, where properly conducted social distance measures are adhere to, are relatively low risk occasions - whereas the government-mandated short notice decimation of thousands of people's precious celebrations was guaranteed to cause much more unreasonable pain and disappointment than any politicians should have the power to cause.

I'm afraid that decision, like so many others is indicative of two principal things: that politicians have too much control over our lives, and that they are poor judges of the individual risk calculus under which humans operate. They are allowed to get away with it because for years the meagre bandwidth of political discourse on which this country has been fed has made us believe we are incapable of taking responsibility for our own lives.

Reality check

The world is risky, and society is complex as people try to negotiate numerous trade-offs every day of their lives. Should I park on a single yellow line for 10 minutes while I pop into the bank? Shall I go cycling tonight or write an essay? Should I order the Belgian chocolate cheesecake or go without for the sake of my waistline? Should I break the speed limit if I’m late for a friend's barbecue? People make these trade-offs every day; they trade-off the slight risk of a heart attack for a slice of cheesecake, and the slightly increased risk of a speeding fine to get to their friend’s barbecue. Moreover, as cars become better, people take more risks. The introduction of seatbelts meant drivers were prepared to drive less safely with seatbelts on for a faster ride*. The introduction of a more diverse range of tasty food meant people were prepared to increase their chances of atherosclerosis to enjoy a richer cuisine. The list is near-endless.

Many of those calculations take place within the subconscious, and don’t become a very active part of our active conscious negotiations. We are ultra-fast risk assessors, and generally pretty good at doing a better job than anyone else at optimising our own utility. Covid-19 has, of course, altered the landscape of our ordinary day to day risk calculus, where we now have to factor in questions like whether we should wear a mask, go on holiday, visit our relatives, and shop in the supermarket. And politicians now have to make more difficult policy decisions regarding whether to impose a lockdown, whether schools can open, and how to prioritise PPE provisions.

 

The problem politicians have (and ditto biologists, epidemiologist, and chemists) is that society is too complex and too locally bottom-up oriented for any authority figures to know the ratio of Covid to freedom and value that we’d prefer, or the optimal trade-off between more safety and fewer economic transactions. Imagine a lockdown policy that’s expected to save 20,000 British lives (let's say random lives for simplicity). How do we determine if that policy is worth adopting? As a percentage of the UK population, 20,000 lives is about 0.03% of the population. That means that, all things being equal, the policy has a 0.03% probability of saving your life (that's a 1 in 3350 chance of you dying). What are you personally willing to pay for a policy that has a 0.03% of saving your life? Let's say everyone in the UK would be willing to pay £1500 to avoid a 1 in 3350 chance of death, then a policy that cost each citizen £1500 would cost the UK over £100 billion. Consequently, such a policy would only be beneficial for the UK if it reduced the national income by less than £100 billion.

The trouble is, it's nigh-on impossible to know how much we'd pay to avoid a 1 in n chance of death, especially as everyone in the UK does not have an equal chance of dying. And this equation is made more difficult still, of course, by the fact that every individual has their own personal calculi regarding how they negotiate life's trade-offs. Some people are more risk-averse than others. Some are in a higher fatality risk category than others. Some people need more social interaction than others. Some are eager to get married in the next month, whereas others are more willing to wait until next year. Only we as individuals have the composite knowledge to evaluate our personal package of costs and benefits, and negotiate our own risk calculus to make decisions consistent with what we value.

A politician might protest that we are alright looking after ourselves, but others need protecting to ensure we don’t impose unwanted costs on them. But while that’s occasionally true, it’s mostly false. If everyone is allowed to make their own policy decisions, then the revealed preferences should start to play out in a fashion that best serves society as a whole. Some businesses will operate with more risk tolerance, some with more risk aversion; some prices will rise, some will fall; some people will change their behaviour a lot, some only a little; some will opt for a slightly smaller chance of Covid-19 for more social distance, and some will opt for a slightly greater chance of Covid-19 to save their business, or to stay in close contact with friends, or to pursue the burgeoning romance they had just begun. There isn’t much a government can do to make things more optimal than society’s collective can manage themselves.

Therefore, it's not self-evident that we shouldn't have just accepted that Covid-19 was going to be a problem we have to live alongside for a while, and that only elderly people and younger vulnerable people needed to shield, while the rest of the country carried on in a thriving economy as usual, and simply self-isolated if they showed Covid-19 symptoms (which is what most were doing anyway, whether they had symptoms or not). I'm not sure that's right, but I'm not sure it's wrong either. It’s almost impossible to measure how well everyone has done so far during this Covid-19 crisis, because we don’t know how much the Covid-19 policies have cost, how many present lives have been saved, how many future lives have been lost, how much future damage has been done, and what the near infinite alternative permutations might have yielded.

But just to get a sense of things - economists have fairly consensually measured on the basis of how we’ll behave probabilistically to avoid death that a human life is valued at approximately $10 million dollars. In other words, empirically people are willing to pay about $1 to avoid a one-in-ten-million chance of death. If we suppose the Covid policies have cost us at least half of this year's economic activity, that's the pound sterling equivalent of about $1.4 trillion, which at $10 million per life is about 140,000 lives. Only if the Covid-19 policies have saved at least that many UK lives, and there was no better alternative, can we say that they have been the right policies. And remember, when recording Covid-19 deaths, we must only record here those who wouldn't have died anyway during the same period, which makes the total number of Covid-19 deaths significantly lower than the 41,000 the ONS stats tell us

And that is the upshot of the past few months of Covid-19. Some people wanted the economy shut down and for everyone to keep an ultra-safe distance until Covid-19 diminished; some people wanted to protect the economy and live on through it until Covid-19 diminished and come out the other side stronger; some who initially demanded months of lockdown are now telling us how worried they are about the economy - and no one is probably ever going to know with certainty what the absolute optimum approach was.

 

* If you doubt this, you only need consider the statement when said this way - "If a driver has no seat belt he or she will drive more carefully" - a statement that is very obviously true, and one that no one has any issue with.  Saying "People drive less safely with seatbelts on" is just another way of saying "People drive more safely with seatbelts off". Both are equally true, they are just different words to say the same thing.

Is The Government Stupid Or Does It Just Think We Are?

Aaargh….I've just noticed this latest brainwave from our dear leaders:

Policy headline: From April 2020, the government will introduce a new 2% tax on the revenues of search engines, social media platforms and online marketplaces which derive value from UK users.

Policy objective: The application of the current corporate tax rules to businesses operating in the digital economy has led to a misalignment between the place where profits are taxed and the place where value is created.

There's no question this is a bad policy, because any taxes on corporations are a bad idea. But it's what the government says next that really beggars belief:

Impact on individuals, households and families: This measure has no direct impact on individuals as it only affects businesses.

It's this kind of combination of ignorance and slipperiness that politicians really should be held accountable for - because of course this measure is going to have a direct impact on individuals, as it will be individuals who pick up the bill in the form of the higher prices, when the digital companies merely pass on the cost of this tax to their customers. Tut tut!!

Writer's Update: On Atonement

This is the quietest I've ever been in terms of writing output - but be assured, I haven't lost interest, and I still feel like I have a million things left to say. At the moment I'm preoccupied with exciting outside projects to do with wedding planning and house ventures, so this is definitely the season for putting the pen down.

However, a friend asked me for my thoughts on atonement, so I jotted down brief response, which some readers may find of interest. Reprinted here:

Atonement means reparation for wrongs we have committed. We are all riddled with faults, mistakes and regrets, but most times they get suppressed into the emotional sub-ducts of the unconscious, where they never get dealt with properly. We have all done a lot wrong, so guilt is an appropriate emotion, but not an absolutely compelling one, because we need more, which I’ll try to flesh out. Now of course it’s always good to acknowledge past mistakes, and seek forgiveness when appropriate, but in a profound way, those sentiments, if left as that stage, will actually make us worse in the long run, not better, because we’ll be relying on our own steam, and that is not what we were created for.

In the Old Testament, the Hebrews atoned for their sins by sacrificing the blood of their livestock. But in the New Testament, Christ has made a perfectly sufficient atonement for our sins, on our behalf, with His own blood for all those who will trust in Him (which is why He is called the Lamb of God). That is why self-atonement will never ultimately work – because we can never pay for ourselves what has already been paid for us by God. If we could, Christ wouldn’t have taken up His cross; and if we try to pay for it ourselves, we deny Christ in the process, and that will not help us either, as the book of Hebrews says:

"For the Law, since it has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the very form of things, can never, by the same sacrifices which they offer continually year by year, make perfect those who draw near.”

Yes, on the one hand it’s true that it’s essential for human well-being and contentment that we understand our sins, amend our behaviour to correct them, and seek forgiveness from God and from others. There is just no other way one can be a fulfilled human being without it, despite the ways we deceive ourselves to the contrary. But underpinning this truth is an even more primary one: that we are all equally forgiven sinners, and all equally loved by God, and Christ died on the cross to buy us the free gift of salvation through grace. Therefore, we are to improve ourselves and seek goodness, but under the strength of Christ’s love and guidance, knowing the prize has already been won for us. As Philip Yancey says in his excellent book What's So Amazing About Grace?:

“There is nothing we can do to make God love us more; and there is nothing we can do to make God love us less”.

What a profound statement that is we could spend literally months unpacking it, and still only skim the surface. Under Christ’s headship, we have an interesting but complex phenomenon: we have to seek the truth in a way that recognises our own wrongdoings, but equally we are compelled to love ourselves and be kind and generous to ourselves in order to reflect the love Christ has for us, and the grace He showed us on the cross. At the surface level, this seems like a bipolarity of tension, where we are asked to be harder on ourselves than we are used to (in terms of recognising our sin) but kinder to ourselves than we are used to because of Christ’s love and grace towards us (see 1 John 1:7 – “The blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin).

That’s also true at a psychological level: holding on to anger, resentment and guilt is worse for our well-being than owning those things through repentance. The better we want to become, the harder we want to try to eradicate even those small faults that wouldn’t have bothered us so much when we weren’t trying so hard. Striving to be excellent human beings makes it easier to atone (because we have more humility) but also easier to frame our atonement within the power of God’s grace. Knowing we will never be good enough by ourselves is, in fact, one of the most liberating self-discoveries we will ever make. It is the doorway to seeing grace for the first time, knowing God in Christ - and it is like discovering a little bit of Heaven on earth.

 

 

 

 

Why It’s Time To Bring An End To Terms Like ‘White Privilege’, ‘Male Privilege’ & ‘The Patriarchy’

London is caught up in fractious Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations, and social media is awash with people targeting what they call 'white privilege', 'male privilege' and the 'patriarchy'. It's almost impossible to turn on the TV or have an account on social media and to not have encountered some hysterical assertion that if you're white and male you somehow have an advantage to laud over minorities. Just this week, in the midst of BLM taking to the streets in mob-like fashion, I've had 3 white friends message me privately and tell me that right now they are feeling judged for the colour of their skin even though they have always tried to be kind, tolerant and opposed to all forms of racial hatred.

Instead of using terms like 'white privilege', 'male privilege' and the 'patriarchy', here, I think, is a better way to look at this situation. I hate racism as much as the next person, so I hope you'll hear my good intentions when I tell you that I don't think looking at individuals through the lens of the particular group identity you perceive them to be part of (white, black, male, female, straight, gay) over and above their identity as an individual is the best way to treat humans. I don't think we are at our best when we engage in identity politics. In a world of 7.5 billion unique people, the primary consideration of any person has to be at the individual level above all else. Groups of people of any category are a diverse set of individuals far more than they are a group, and people who see the world through the hostile lens of identity politics can't easily love people as individuals, because they see the individuals through the lens of the perceived in-group or out-group, not the group as being comprised of individuals worthy of love and self-determination.

Even if you're right that someone has 'privilege' because they are white or male, or even if it's true that they are part of an ethnic group that historically committed acts that contemporary folk rightly find abhorrent, there is still, I think, a better way to treat them than to lump them into an artificially constructed 'out-group' where their individuality gets diluted in the collective wash. The idea of using the term 'privilege' as a weapon against someone being white or male or part of a patriarchy is actually deluded and reprehensible - it comes right up from the bowels of critical incompetence, and it will turn us into rogues if we are not careful.

Instead of 'privilege', I think using the term 'advantage' is better - it's less emotionally connotative. It is an advantage being born in London, comparatively to Mogadishu. It is a disadvantage being born severely disabled in England comparatively to able-bodied in England. If you are born in Mogadishu and born severely disabled, that's a double disadvantage. But the upshot is, there are actually countless (literally countless) ways to measure advantage in the human species, because everyone perceives the world differently enough for those differences to matter, and similarly enough for the similarities to matter - and there are an infinite number of ways to perceive reality and all its complexity. The differences between women and men are such that both males and females will have advantages over the other - but the intra-differentials between the set of all women, or all men, or all white people, or all black people, or all gay people, or all straight people, or all bisexual people is going to be far greater than any kind of group identity differential. It’s time we saw the cessation of toxic terms like ‘White Privilege’, ‘Male Privilege’ & ‘The Patriarchy’, and I will now take each one in turn, and show why I think it is an unhelpful term.

Why 'male privilege' is an unhelpful term

Humanness is a ravine of interconnected complexity, about which 'privilege' comes in unisexual, multi-dimensional aspects of personhood: everything from intelligence, attractiveness, temperament, health, athleticism, genes, region of birth and many more factors - and those are just the attributes that are not based on the decisions we make. Both males and females have comparative and absolute advantages in each of these categories, and the further differentiations in the diverse and assorted ways to perceive the world only add to the complexity. Furthermore, in terms of the slog against natural forces, males and females have astronomically more similarities than they do differences - and by and large, despite being a highly flawed species, have worked on the same side symbiotically in pair-bonding relationships to look after one another to climb out of the quagmire together into a relatively stable and peaceable co-existence. Men have suffered, women have suffered; women have helped create a better world, and men have helped create a better world. Both are evolutionarily primed to make different decisions, have different priorities, and play different roles in support of the family unit. For most of our 200,000 year history, life has been 'Nasty, brutish and short' for both men and women - disease-ridden, in poverty, in war, in hardship, in laborious working conditions - and we have almost always got through it together; men and women by and large pulling in the same direction.

The concept of 'male privilege' comes from agenda-driven minds that don't really care much about men or women. It's just not a term that an intelligent, balanced person who understands history and science would ever utter. Those who believe in 'male privilege' believe that males have most of the advantages when it comes to social, economic, and political situations or rights - that this advantage is afforded to them solely on the basis of their sex. It's an absurd idea, and factually wrong. It's a philosophically intractable proposition because maleness is a narrow category of determination - far less important than the traits I mentioned based on the individual over and above the group. Males have some advantages, so do females, so do tall people, intelligent people, hard-working people, educated people, good looking people, healthy people, people born in geographically favourable areas - there are just too many factors to this equation for success or advantage to be solely or even primarily about maleness. No group identity is representative of its constituent parts - there is a wide-ranging diversity in every group identity we could list, and therefore no individual in that group is ever going to be wholly representative of the group, because there are too many ways for a group with one shared trait to be different in so many other ways. Where there are instances of unfair discrimination against women or men, we should, of course, do all we can to address them.

Why 'white privilege' is an unhelpful term

A similar thing can be said about 'white privilege' - it may be tempting to say that history has shown a demonstrable advantage of being a white person from a Western nation - and there's no denying that in several important senses that is true. But I don't believe the human race will progress on the basis of love and kindness and empathy while people insist on playing identity politics with people's 'whiteness' and try to make them feel morally ashamed of their ancestral associations. Not only does that rob them of the most important element of their selfhood - their individuality and autonomous agency - it seeks to divide people by trying to make them morally culpable for the terrible things their ancestors of hundreds of years ago did.

The human race is complex, and because there are all sorts of advantages and disadvantages based on countless criteria - intelligence, sex, geography, personality, size, looks, genes, age, and several more - I think humans do each other a grave disservice when they talk of 'white privilege' and try to make white people feel uneasy about their whiteness on the basis that racism exists. Tell the white boy who is currently under 25, lives with his parents, anxious, unemployed, depressed, addicted to porn and in an abject state of inertia that he has white privilege - I'm sure he can feel it really acutely right now. Tell the thousands of white Christians being persecuted in Muslim countries that they enjoy white privilege. The truth is, when any tribalistic force gravitates together, the humans involved have been pretty dreadful to each other - white on white, white on black, black on black and black on white - there have been European atrocities, American atrocities, Mongol atrocities, Ottoman atrocities, Persian atrocities, Arab atrocities, Ancient Egyptian atrocities, the list goes on. The biggest truth here is that, except for certain biological limitations, there are no good or bad qualities that are uniquely attributable to any group identity - be they male, female, black, white, European, African, Asian, or any other - and it is ignoble to try to tar any group with any kind of collective guilt.

It is shameful to pick on people because they have, say, male genitalia (or indeed female genitalia) or white skin (or indeed black skin), and to try to get white people to apologise by renouncing their whiteness, as several videos have shown happening recently. The Black Lives Matter folk that are demanding this are acting in a way that mirrors the racism they are trying to stamp out. Because the reality is, around the globe, every category of person is full of members having a hard time of it somewhere in the world. And even in places like the UK where it seems that a great majority of people have it easy compared to the minority of 'disadvantaged' people, I don't think 'them vs. us' is ever the best way to look at things. I think it's far more accurate (and enlightened) to think of us all as being involved in many struggles that are shared by just about all fellow humans, and realise that we all have our problems and our hardships, however well we seem to be doing on the outside.

As I've said for years, the big impediments to sound reasoning and honest truthseeking in a complex world are over-simplicity, lazy thinking and perverse incentives. To get anywhere in any complex subject, you have to start with the humility to say "I don't understand this as well as I need to", and if you're on really good form, "I don't even know some of the ways that I don't understand this". When you do this, two important things happen. The first is that you begin to act with more humility as you adopt a more circumspect attitude towards 'doing something' - realising that many of your suggestions are contributing more to the problems than the solutions. You get to see that almost all the suggested solutions to the world's problems, and the low-resolution beliefs about high-resolution scenarios, are woefully inadequate to the reality of the situation. And from that level of humility - both humility about how inadequate your understanding about complex reality is and how little you know in the grand scheme of things (epistemic humility), and humility towards others (empathy) - you get to the see world more like it actually is. You get to see that if you really want to understand a situation competently you are going to have to expend a lot of cognitive effort in focusing on a diverse range of considerations

The problem with over-simplistic responses to complex problems is that to the beholder those responses look like they offer a sufficient analysis of the problem and the obvious solution: a young black man tragically loses his life under the knee of a racist cop and there is racist behaviour showing up on social media so we should take to the streets and demand that there is a systematic redress; there is inequality, therefore the rich must be hoarding the lion's share of the wealth conspiratorially against the rest; women earn less than men on average so there must be systematic unfair discrimination against women; some negative things are happening to the climate, therefore what the world needs is the decimation of the market system; there are lots more men in CEO roles than women so we must therefore be living under a patriarchal system; there are a lot of people on low-paid jobs so we need a socialist revolution to topple the greedy bosses at the top; people seem a lot more sensitive to offence themselves, so we should silence people we don't like, rewrite history, retard debate, and censor and retard free expression - the list goes on. 

The trouble is, once you dig deeper into these things, you find layer upon layer of causal complexity, and the deeper you dig, the less information you can compute in one hit, and the greater your margin for error. There are dozens of reasons why black people show up as statistically disadvantaged, there are dozens of reasons why men earn more than women on average, there are dozens of factors to consider when we talk about trade-offs between economic growth and sustainability, there are dozens of reasons why some people are poorer than others. And then if you combine any of those factors and start to engage in multi-factorial analyses, you hit a nexus of complexity, with every single element requiring careful thought and competence-based, time-consuming assimilation of facts and reasoning.

Whenever you think you’re trying to solve one big problem, you’re probably actually dealing with hundreds of other elements sitting under the surface. The very first question you should ask yourself, before you start anything else, is “What the heck makes me think I have the first clue about what I’m doing here?” To construct the framework of a worldview to encapsulate that many complex factors is not just a difficult task that requires lots of effort, it's actually a task that few can manage. So instead, people tend to default to a simplistic heuristic - an ideology, an in-group mentality, a tribal affiliation - to shelter them from the storm of chaos that comes with multivariate analyses, where it's easy to get overwhelmed with how ignorant we are and how much effort it's going to take to get to even a reasonable level of competence on just one of those elements of consideration, let alone many of them. Social justice warriors think that if only they come together as one tribal group - black, female, gay, straight, feminist, socialist, working class, or whatever - that it's the only way we can see change, by teaming up to fight our oppressors. But not only does that seem to be false, it actually seems to be backwards - the real changes for the good almost always happen organically, by focusing more on individuals, on liberty, on kindness, on love, on encouraging people to reach their potential - that's how you get genuine advancement, that's how you get a more realistic equality of opportunity.

For that reason, I'd encourage us to refer to someone's group identity as infrequently as it is possible to do. BLM do the opposite - they make a big thing of skin colour, when the vast majority of people who are the side of progress are simply seeking to love them as individuals for who they are. By wedding themselves to a tribe that increases focus on group identity they are accentuating the division and making a big thing out of the very categorisations that love for individuals seeks to deracinate. Look at the results of taking to the streets - the hostility, the volatility, the shouting through each other - you can see the 'them vs. us' effects with your own eyes every day. 

Here's something important that you might have missed. When people in the quagmire of racism, bigotry and intolerance are fighting for rights, tolerance, respect and opportunity, think about what they are actually fighting for: they are fighting to be treated as an individual worthy of love because they are a unique person of value. They are fighting (rightly) to get that job based on merit, to be able to vote, sit where they like, marry whomever they choose - they are fighting so the group identity part of their identity is given a secondary place behind their talents, personality, character, competence and numerous other qualities as an individual.Of course, BLM folk will say something like. "It's alright for privileged white men to be saying this, but our black causes need to be fought for, and how else but coming together in solidarity and unity are we going to do that?" It's a popular response, but like many popular responses, it neglects not just all the important points we’ve covered thus far, but also perhaps the most important point of all: by perpetuating the desire to categorise themselves according to group identity (however noble they think the cause, or however right about the anti-racism sentiments they clearly are) they are artificially fostering a climate in which they are being asked to be seen through their group identity first, and their individual self second. 

The best way to advance and progress is to view everyone through the lens of their individuality, judge each other according to our beliefs, views, actions and attitudes, relate to each other through our kindness and grace, employ each other through our competencies, and regard each other on our merits, allowing room to give a helping hand to the poor and vulnerable in society whenever it is needed. That is the kind of society Christ teaches us to aspire to. Where there are instances of racism and bigotry, we should, of course, do all we can to combat them.

Why the 'patriarchy' is an unhelpful term

As with ‘male privilege’ and ‘white privilege’, this is why we also need to repudiate the widespread and hasty assumption so many people make that we live in some kind of oppressive patriarchy. As in the above cases, people who peddle the patriarchy-narrative are confused about how complex the world is, how multifaceted and diverse human behaviour is, and how to properly analyse an epistemologically intractable social environment. To cherry pick a few isolated examples of where men have the edge in society, and ignore all the contra-evidence and declare 'patriarchy', is a bit like surveying people in their 40s inside a job centre and claiming that most of the people in their 40s in the UK are unemployed. Most people in their 40s in the UK are not unemployed, but if you cherry pick that sample group from only inside a job centre, it's going to look like they are unemployed. The UK may look like a patriarchy if you only look at the Catholic and Anglican churches, or if you only look at male CEOs, or if you only sample garage mechanics, or if you fall for the bogus 'gender pay gap' canard (see my side bar for articles on the ‘unfair gender pay gap’ myth). But it doesn't look very much like a patriarchy if you only sample primary school teachers, or if you look at the number of male suicides compared to females, or if you look at the ratio of men to women who have died fighting in wars or doing risky jobs. The world can be a far more kind and loving and unifying place when we treat each other as valuable individuals over and above our group identity.

Society as a whole is not accurately represented when seen through cherry-picked data analyses that are sought to corroborate the bogus arguments of people trying to score points with their identity political. Society is much more complex than that, and the reality is, there are many ways in which men have the comparative advantage over women, many ways in which women have the comparative advantage over men, but where in most cases of human living, men and women cooperate together to work, to survive, to love, have friendships, to pay their taxes, to bring up families, to fight against nature's hardships, and to make each other's lives better (either directly or indirectly). The church probably is, in several ways, too patriarchal in its ethos - failing to capitalise on the immense benefits and diverse duality of perspective within the two sexes, as are most religions and institutions that are built on status-driven hierarchies. But to claim the whole of society is an oppressive patriarchy is to be guilty of misrepresenting the reality of how men and women really operate in a relationship symbiosis, in mutually beneficial synergies, and in reciprocal encouragement against the vicissitudes of nature's hardships and challenges.

Final word

I've said all this not to perpetuate further division, but to explain that I think anyone who sees the world narrowly in terms of group identity and seeks to pit one against the other or foster resentment towards other groups is missing the most rewarding element of being human - the sovereignty and worth of the individual as an agent of value. When I think about all the elements that make up my self-identity, I find that I am numerous things all at once: I'm a man, a son, a Christian, a manager, an employee, a writer, a weight trainer, a cousin, a libertarian, a Darwinian, a Humean, a Jungian, an egalitarian, a white person, a tall person, the list goes on. Unless we treat each other as though our individuality, our feelings and our unique personhood take primacy over any shared characteristics we share with others, we are not being fully appreciated for the whole essence of our distinct self, and we can't thrive as well as uniquely created people with a distinct purpose and an exceptional individuality.

All Humans Probably *Are* Racist, But It Doesn't Mean We Have To *Be* Racist

I think if we really could access windows into souls, we'd find that most perceived racism isn't really racism as per the dictionary definition. It will be one of two things:

1) Dislike of the person - not their skin colour or ethnicity - but of their views, beliefs, attitudes or what they represent (this will have both proximal effects and distal effects, by association). If you think of contrasting two black people like the execrable Afua Hirsch and the excellent Thomas Sowell, you'll probably sense an idea of what I'm getting at here.

2) Outward manifestation of the inner gamut of insecurity, frustration, self-regret, self-loathing, pain and hurt that lives within human beings. A lot of what seems like racist behaviour is actually fear, pain and longing from within the bowels of the perpetrators. They feel marginalised, and without much hope, and suffer from the 'malice of the underdog' that Evelyn Waugh wrote about (which actually has its provenance in Proverbs 26:26 -"Their malice may be concealed by deception")  

To that end, Black Lives Matter and the SJW virtue signallers are fighting the wrong battle from the off, because these battles are more about planting fruit-bearing seeds into our own minds than about trying to chop down weeds in other people's. Only truth, facts, love and kindness can solve human problems - and every individual stands accountable to first get their own house in order before they try to change things on the outside. If the attention-seeking Black Lives Matter and SJWs could understand this they wouldn't be partaking in misjudged demonstrations with bogus opposition to illusory enemies - they'd take some time out in solitude - you know, the place in which Byron rightly said we are least alone - and fight the enemies within that are stopping them see the power of the truthseeking individual who knows how to love.

I won't ignore the enemy they think they are fighting, though. I'll just try to expound on it on my terms, which hopefully explains why I think love and words are better than noisy protests. The best explanation I have for racism is that it is an exaptation (as per Stephen Jay Gould) - it's a trait that evolved because it served an in-group function to aid survival by helping us to be tribally connected, but has subsequently hung around in vestiges of our personality. Social development and greater cultural integration means it is frowned upon in relatively advanced places like the Western world, but it is still nested in our behavioural mechanisms, especially when we are not conspicuously exposed.

This seems to be backed up by what Carlos Navarrete found in his "Prejudice at the Nexus of Race and Gender", that there is evidence for biases against out-group males that were markedly distinct from those in the in-group. Men's biases were motivated by social dominance, presumably to increase the probability of passing on their genes, and women's biases were motivated by fear of sexual coercion, presumably because they don't want to get impregnated by males that are not going to stick around and help rear a child. Both of these findings tie in with what we know about differential selective pressures on men and women and the necessity of in-groups for survival stability.

Consider this interesting social experiment from Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘Blink’:

“Consider, for example, a remarkable social experiment conducted in the 1990s by a law professor in Chicago named Ian Ayres. Ayres put together a team of thirty-eight people—eighteen white men, seven white women, eight black women, and five black men. Ayres took great pains to make them appear as similar as possible. All were in their mid-twenties. All were of average attractiveness. All were instructed to dress in conservative causal wear: the women in blouses, straight skirts, and flat shoes; the men in polo shirts or button-downs, slacks, and loafers. All were given the same cover story. They were instructed to go to a total of 242 car dealerships in the Chicago area and present themselves as college-educated young professionals (sample job: systems analyst at a bank) living in the tony Chicago neighborhood of Streeterville. Their instructions for what to do were even more specific. They should walk in. They should wait to be approached by a salesperson. “I’m interested in buying this car,” they were supposed to say, pointing to the lowest-priced car in the showroom. Then, after they heard the salesman’s initial offer, they were instructed to bargain back and forth until the salesman either accepted an offer or refused to bargain any further—a process that in almost all cases took about forty minutes. What Ayres was trying to do was zero in on a very specific question: All other things being absolutely equal, how does skin color or gender affect the price that a salesman in a car dealership offers?

The results were stunning. The white men received initial offers from the salesmen that were $725 above the dealer’s invoice (that is, what the dealer paid for the car from the manufacturer). White women got initial offers of $935 above invoice. Black women were quoted a price, on average, of $1,195 above invoice. And black men? Their initial offer was $1,687 above invoice. Even after forty minutes of bargaining, the black men could get the price, on average, down to only $1,551 above invoice. After lengthy negotiations, Ayres’s black men still ended up with a price that was nearly $800 higher than Ayres’s white men were offered without having to say a word.”

This experiment probably indicates that Carlos Navarrete was onto something about having the congenital structure for racism, and this probably applies to xenophobia too, and maybe even homophobia. But it’s not so straightforward. Our evolution has endowed us with traits from numerous historical legacies, and there are most likely degrees of racism, xenophobia, homophobia in most of us, as well as cognitive characteristics that manifest themselves as tribal and familial and territorial biases. To me, this is perfectly understandable – it doesn’t mean we are all nasty bigots – it means our mental endowments have template-based foundations based on survival mechanisms and competitive instincts that alert us of potentially dangerous situations. Perhaps we could classify these traits with ‘sub’ and ‘supra’ prefixes – they can be called sub-tendencies and supra-tendencies. It doesn’t mean we should all walk around seeing each other as racists. It’s better to think of us as creatures who have the handicap of an evolutionary legacy that once facilitated a form of racism in group rivalry but that now is suppressed with advanced cultural and social development. 

The present gives testimony to our evolutionary past. Those with a group-territorial mindset that we see by the photocopier machine at work, and in politics, and in football stadiums, and in gangs on sink estates - they closely resemble our distant evolution as much as our being vicars, charity workers and Samaritans does. It is this patchwork of elements that demonstrate our history and our mechanisms for survival, and it is this kind of personhood that we have taken into the world. That is why it isn’t surprising to realise that racism, homophobia and xenophobia are still a part of our sub-tendencies. As indicated above, it is easy to imagine why they are there; once upon a time natural selection would have favoured the genes that enabled us to identify a rival, have an acute radar against anomalous and potentially threatening behaviour, harbour a fear of the unknown, and be mindful of radically unnerving breaks from normalcy that could be seen to threaten the status quo. 

Our evolutionary legacies are seen broadly across our behaviour, because they are vestiges of our past. The evolution of the eye has left us with a large blind area in the middle of the retina. Our prurience is the result of our sexual past. Our long spine and susceptibility to back pains and injuries are the result of our quadruped ancestry. Our wisdom teeth are a result of our once having bigger jaws. Plus our fear of the dark, our blushing, our sneezing, our hairs standing up, our goose bumps, our reactions to moving objects, our trepidation at wild animals, and our behavioural similarities with other primates closest to us in origin, all of these show that we are a medley of inherited ineptitudes, built for the Savannah. 

Now here’s the key thing, I think, that keeps us civil and stops most of us becoming brutes (at last outwardly). As well as being integrated into a culture and society of other personalities, we cultivate the ability to suppress these sub-tendencies and we subvert them with what we might call our supra-tendencies. The reason the car-salesman exhibited an underlying prejudice is because it was manifesting itself in a subtle way – it bore the resemblance of a sub-conscious racism – and if he were shown the results afterwards he probably would have been quite perturbed.

Such is the necessity to suppress our vestigial racism, homophobia and xenophobia, we find most of us suppress it rather well. Our supra-tendencies are those more positive aspects of our personality (love, grace, kindness, generosity, acceptance, tolerance, charity, empathy) that we know we must cultivate if we are to avoid being complicit in a kind of Hobbesian collapse of our society. Instead of pulling out the weeds, we have grown trees to tower over them – and in the majority of cases it’s only when we scrape beneath the surface of the roots that we find the roots of the weeds too.