Reddit mentions of A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation

> Scott uses this a lot. And I can't think of anyone else who does.


I like you speak as a hereditarian leftist. An admirable model for how to talk about biology without being a monster or science denier is Peter Singer.

Or Charles Murray.

Like, the guy is the go-to hereditarian for most people. And I think Murray has been very scrupulous about how he talks, and I don't think it's a matter of him being careful. These are his beliefs: elites pursue self-serving policies and are hurting those under them, while spouting pieties about how everyone can succeed in a knowledge economy by learning to code. And in terms of social practices, they've dismantled old structures, adopted new practices that in bast-case-land work better. But they've paid no attention to whether everyone can adopt the new norms, or what it would take to propagate them effectively, and lack even the mere backbone to preach what they practice.

I buy some of that, but I'd say it's fairly clear he isn't coming from "the stupid are less morally valuable." He wants to build a society where the less gifted can also thrive. He's been pushing UBI for a long time, for example. But he doesn't get treated fairly for in fact being scrupulous in the manner I describe. (Not that this should stay him; being ethical is its own reward if there's no other)

I am one who gets conspicuously annoyed when people casually deny expert opinion (likewise when that expert community is itself biased.) You'll hear me getting angry about climate science denial, nuclear fearmongering, the GMO bullshit, anti vax and such like. And generally I feel pretty good (link, link) that the left bends in the long term toward non denying or tabooing solid fact claims.

This kind of thing really bothers me, because AFAICT there's no question whatever that what this poster actually concludes (see text I quoted above) is entirely within the scientific mainstream.

To begin, a great quote from an article by David Graeber on revolutions (the whole thing is well worth a read):

>Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone’s blueprint? It’s not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called “capitalism,” figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin.

>This is not to say there’s anything wrong with utopian visions. Or even blueprints. They just need to be kept in their place. The theorist Michael Albert has worked out a detailed plan for how a modern economy could run without money on a democratic, participatory basis. I think this is an important achievement—not because I think that exact model could ever be instituted, in exactly the form in which he describes it, but because it makes it impossible to say that such a thing is inconceivable. Still, such models can be only thought experiments. We cannot really conceive of the problems that will arise when we start trying to build a free society. What now seem likely to be the thorniest problems might not be problems at all; others that never even occurred to us might prove devilishly difficult. There are innumerable X-factors.

>The most obvious is technology. This is the reason it’s so absurd to imagine activists in Renaissance Italy coming up with a model for a stock exchange and factories—what happened was based on all sorts of technologies that they couldn’t have anticipated, but which in part only emerged because society began to move in the direction that it did.

> Also, I disagree with the notion that socialism could get rid of the greed problem.

I didn't mean to say that socialism would get rid of greed.

Firstly, I think its better to think in more general terms than greed- competitiveness. Greed is really monetary competitiveness, but competitiveness takes other forms too. Peter Singer explores the competitive/cooperative dynamic and how socialism ought to confront this issue in the book A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation The socialists that ignored competitiveness among humans failed, like the farm collectivization under Mao and Lenin-Stalin.

Anyways, the problem with capitalism is not that it causes people to become competitive. Every human has the inborn capacity to be both competitive and cooperative. The problem with capitalism is that profit is the institutional foundation, and humans can only use their competitive abilities to survive under capitalism so that many people's competitive urges become exaggerated, to the detriment of everyone else. On the other hand, we are denied our ability to be cooperative in capitalism. For example, your doctor uncle might have a nice personal relationship with other doctors in his field, but the capitalist market means that ultimately he and similar doctors are competing for survival on the market, that they're enemies. If they're all doing well financially, they might be able to ignore that fact, but that won't be the case if one or another begins losing customers and his business collapses to the gain of the other.

Also, socialism wouldn't necessarily mean perfectly equal incomes for everyone. Some socialists might want that, but myself and many others, including Michael Albert (a libertarian-socialist, or council-communist) don't think that should be the case. Albert's idea of Parecon would involve direct-democratic councils to determine if there should be income differentials for people with especially difficult jobs. Everything would be done to avoid differentials in labor difficulty by sharing menial and rewarding labor more equally. For example, maybe some people work as doctors for 6 out of 8 hours a day, and hospital janitors the other 2 hours. This would require more people trained as doctors, but would eliminate people whose only job is to be janitor.

If it seems unlikely that we could train so many more people as doctors, remember that 100 years ago there were no female doctors. That's because females weren't given the opportunities, material (like higher education) and social (encouragement from an early age, etc.), to be doctors. Likewise, people who are stuck in janitorial jobs today likely weren't given the opportunities, beginning at birth, to become doctors, but instead of gender, their class or families' income is what prevented them from receiving such opportunities. In a socialist society, we could bring families out of poverty and more fairly distribute wealth and therefore opportunity.

Albert also believes that it would be fair to reward people per hour, so if someone works longer because they enjoy working, or if the nature of the job necessitates longer hours (24-hour surgery, or whatever), then it would make sense to remunerate them for the time (in addition to the above mentioned differential for difficulty).

Under capitalism, and indeed under any decentralized market system, wealth isn't redistrubuted and therefore familial and class wealth differentials increase over time. This family and class wealth then perpetuates onward, providing opportunity to the children of privileged parents and depriving children of underprivileged parents. That is the foundation of how income differentials emerge in capitalism. That isn't even a meritocracy in the usual sense, because most merit is granted at birth.

I could go on longer, but this is probably my longest comment in 5 years on Reddit, so I'll leave the rest to others.

Thanks for your very sincere questions, you obviously are a thoughtful person and you certainly don't deserve any downvotes!

EDIT:

Just some information I came across today, "College-Educated Americans Less Engaged in Jobs". So maybe the old idea of the happy educated worker (doctor) versus the miserable manual worker is outdated or changing.

Also, Michael Albert talks about human nature, freedom, and the market, which I think addresses the idea that starting your own business is the meaning of freedom.

EDIT2: A really long but excellent discussion of liberty, freedom, capitalism, and socialism by Noam Chomsky, probably the best explanation I've ever heard. At the root of these questions about what is the best society and economy is the question of what is human nature, and what is human desire.