Author: George Papaioannou

I tend to believe the problem with ideologies is that they are products of the social, political and economic conditions of their times.  As such they reflect the intellectual understanding of these conditions.  As conditions change, ideologies risk losing the resonance they originally had or even worse their relevance.  I am afraid this is the case of conservatism, and especially classical conservatism.   

I came to this topic after reading what traditional conservative thinkers have to say about the chasm that has opened between the conservatism exemplified by the populist base of the Republican Party and classical conservatism.  (Of course, there is also a critical appraisal of the new liberalism as exemplified by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.)

As a matter of historical interest, the term conservatism was first used by the French diplomat Francois-Auguste Rene vicomte de Chateaubriand in 1815 when the Bourbon monarchy was restored back to the French throne.  However, the intellectual father of conservatism is Edmund Burke, the 18^th century British-Irish statesman and intellectual.  Burke’s conservatism was premised on the ideas of David Hume and Adam Smith that sentiments, not reason, are the leading factors that explain human behavior.

According to Burke, humans, driven by passion and emotions, are unable to put reason to good and effective use when it comes to building social and political systems.  Therefore, the safest course of action is to rely on traditions and existing institutions, such as the family, community, organized religion, and the political order.  Practiced traditions and institutions in place reflect the wisdom of past generations and should be changed only gradually and cautiously.  This skepticism toward reason, or epistemological modesty (as David Brooks of the New York Times calls it) is behind the conservative resistance to state-led or top-down dictated reforms.  That is, any kind of social engineering is fated to fail since we do not understand human nature and, thus we cannot draw any predictable connection between planned reforms and ultimate results.

Classical conservatism does not consider society as a mere collection of individuals but rather as an organic whole whose common good is attained through the selfless contributions of all its members.  Because classical conservatism considers human nature to be fallible and fickle, individual discipline is assured by observing the norms of the social, religious, and political authorities.  Classical conservatism requires individuals to rely on and live by moral, social and political tradition and accept inequality and social ills as part of an imperfect world and imperfect institutions created as a matter of how nature works.  This explains the much wider acceptance of inequities among conservatives to this day.

So, what could go wrong in societies organized under conservative principles?  Here is what David Brooks has to say on this question.  In real life, conservative epistemological modesty can turn into anti-intellectualism and a contempt for learning and expertise; love of community can turn into xenophobia, parochialism and anti-pluralism; and social change can be regarded as evidence of moral decline.  Brett Stephens, the NYT columnist, fears that American conservatism has degenerated to mere anti-liberalism without any viable political message of its own.

There are, however, more fundamental drawbacks that prevent conservatism to stay relevant in an evolving world.  Edmund Burke himself believed that economic interests should be subordinated to the conservative social ethic and capitalism should be subordinated to the medieval social tradition.  His beliefs were justified.  Capitalism survives on constant innovation and creative destruction.  It requires societies to adapt demographically, institutionally and technologically in order to thrive.  Hence, the gradualist and tentative adaptation conservatism prescribes is unsustainable.  Furthermore, capitalism puts the individual’s interests, not society’s, at the center of decision making and optimization.  It is the individual’s utility or economic gain that must be maximized.  The spillover effects on the whole (community or country) are beyond the immediate concern of the decision rules of capitalist agents (individuals or firms).  

There is also tension between conservatism and the needs of modern world.  How can conservatism address the need to fight the dangers from climate change or life-threatening pandemics?  The response to such global threats requires we upend some traditions or rely on top-down planning and action.  Moreover, this approach demands collective action on a scale that only organized governments and science can mount.   Conservatism distrusts all these. 

Conservative ideals also have come to clash with conservative policies.  Conservatism requires that it supports policies that preserve the social fabric, which depends on the well-being of individuals, families, and their communities.  Heeding Burke’s concerns, conservatism ought to be first in the effort to offset the deleterious effects of capitalism on the stability of traditions and institutions.  Instead, modern-day conservatism is the primary defender of unfettered capitalism.  The fear of government inspired and led initiatives and solutions, renders conservatism incapable of fighting the corrosive effects of economic interests on the things it values the most: stability of traditions and social infrastructure. 

Finally, conservatism can stand in the way of social and political progress.  The traditions it finds defensible may be the result of ill-conceived ideas about equality of races, genders and people in general.  Or they may be the result of ill-gotten power concentrated in the hands of the few.  Such were the traditions and powers the French Revolution rallied against.  The pursuit of equality through radical than incremental means was the purpose of the American Civil War.  Conservative gradualism and respect for the old can often solidify the unacceptable than work toward social progress.

To remain relevant, conservatism has to accept that the established order of the day is not necessarily the best humanity can achieve.  And to guard against the deterioration of the human condition it has to refocus again on the common good of the society as we move on to future challenges.

This week is Davos week.  In normal times, presidents, prime ministers, politicians, big business shots, and “thought” leaders would gather at Davos, Switzerland in the annual meeting sponsored by the World Economic Forum.  Around the conference venues scores of mostly young people would demonstrate against this modern-day “Holly Alliance” that tries to shape the global order.  Due to covid-19, however, the in-person gathering has been postponed for the summer.  Still an online collection of papers and speeches are available in case you are interested.

The WEF was set up by a Swiss, Klaus Schwab, some 50 years ago.  The purpose was to bring together important figures to ponder about big world problems and propose solutions.  Over time, it became the Alpine substitute of sunny golf course hobnobbing.  As David Gelles of New York Times put it “Davos is a weeklong schmooze fest where billionaires and autocrats mingle; companies make climate pledges; and economists discuss inequality.” And of course, once the last good-byes are over, all goes back to square one.  The following year the same, more or less, participants come back, with renewed determination to meet the last year’s promises.   

Anand Diridharadas (author of Winners Take All) has a more damning opinion about Davos and similar congregations of the rich and powerful.  He writes if we expect the same people that have brought us all that ails the world to remedy our problems, then we are fooling ourselves.

On paper, the aims of the WEF sound lofty.  In 2020, following the adoption of Stakeholder capitalism by the Business Roundtable, the WEF went all out for it in its annual meeting.  Stakeholder capitalism has been a dear topic to WEF founder K. Schwab.  A bit defensively, he has clarified that his intention is not to change the economic system but rather to turn it to responsible capitalism.  He should not worry.  Given the characters he invites to his big party not only the economic system is not in danger of being changed; responsible capitalism is hardly in the distant horizon.  As the New York Times has reported, the same big companies that make idealistic proclamations for social progress and climate sustainability are those making hefty contributions to the campaigns of politicians that fight both.

Twenty-twenty was not a good year for WEF.  Covid had turned into a pandemic and countries started to come down on their people with lockdowns and mandates.  There was also talk of fast-tracked vaccines to be administered on a global scale.  Unwittingly, WEF’s theme for 2020 was The Great Reset.  This did not go well with the nascent movement of vaccine conspiracists.  The Great Reset aimed at resetting the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models, and the management of global commons.  To conspiracists, this sounded like a Big Brother takeover of peoples’ lives.  The fact that Bill Gates, one of the high priests at Davos, is also the champion of global health projects, including vaccines and vaccination programs, didn’t go well either with conspiracists. 

Setting aside the fear and paranoia about The Great Reset, there is mainstream criticism of the WEF and its operations both from the right and the left.  Michael Rectenwald, Chief Academic Officer of the conservative group American Scholars, wrote a scathing piece in Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.  He decries WEF’s stakeholder capitalism as disguised corporate socialism or communist capitalism.  He claims the WEF-endorsed index of Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) principles is a tool to squeeze out nonconforming firms that score low.  To him the true goal of The Great Reset is to allow few big corporations to monopolize economic activity around the world.  He writes that whereas China moved to combine communism with capitalism, the West is moving (under the influence of WEF) toward a combination of democracy with economic socialism.

On the left, Ivan Wecke writes in the online forum Open Democracy that WEF sponsors a version of stakeholder capitalism in which governments are reduced to one of the multiple stakeholders to be managed and catered to by big corporations.  In other words, big business is willing to adopt stakeholder capitalism because it will place it at the driver’s seat.  To Wecke, the signing of a strategic agreement between the UN and WEF in 2019 is proof of how the closed club of WEF bosses intends to replace the world body in cross-national negotiations.  Wecke says: look at how Big Pharma succeeded to kill the WHO initiative to suspend the intellectual rights on vaccines that could speed up production for the benefit of poor countries.

Excoriated by fringe and mainstream critics, WEF chose for its 2022 meetings the theme The Year to Rebuilt Trust.  How can you build trust though when those writing the music score are unelected corporate bosses and the average Joe and Jane are not invited to the party.  There is a sprinkling of community and social entrepreneurship leaders invited but only to be charitably congratulated for the work they do to mitigate part of the social and environmental damage done by the corporate chieftains.  We keep failing to recognize that as we lengthen the distance between those at the top of decision making and those at the bottom, we help create swamps of distrust and fantastical scenarios.  Gatherings like that in Davos add insult to injury when they tell the rest of us “Here, see.  We care about the world and because we know your problems and concerns, we ‘ll find win-win solutions for everybody.”  It doesn’t work like that.

If the Davos gatherings serve anything is as a testing ground of ideas about governance models and the place of big business in them.  There seem to be three distinct models emerging.  One is Putin’s system in which big business (the oligarchs) pledge obedience to an autocratic head of state in exchange for political cover.  The second is the Chinese model, in which big business serves the Communist’s Party agenda.  And the third model is the Western one.  Here power is still more diffused between politicians, elites, business, and ordinary folks.  Big business buys influence through campaign contributions and funding “think” tanks.  To appease the people, big business engages in some popular causes that eventually are shaped by legislation under the influence of campaign money.  And so the world turns. 

Expect next year the Davos theme to be one that aims to reassure us that they are on the right track and, oh yes, they do feel our pain. 

Most often, crises do not come out of the blue.  Their causes may go back a long, long time.  Today, the US is in a political crisis concerning the identity and functioning of its political system.  Is the US a genuine democracy? Do political minorities have too much power? Is the right to vote secured and unabridged?  These questions pop up daily with frequency not seen before in our life-times.

Naturally, when such questions arise people look at the foundational law of the country, that is, the Constitution, and its Framers.  There is no denying that despite its endurance through time, judged by the moral and political standards of our times, the American Constitution was a flawed foundational document.  

The gravest of its flaws was that it sacrificed the abolition of slavery to the interests of founding the new Republic.  And consistent with the times, it denied women the voting right.  It took a bloody civil war and a long popular movement to cast these flaws away.  There are though other provisions which are still with us and very much at the center of our political crisis.  No direct vote to elect the President; equal State representation in the Senate regardless of population size; and granting the States the right to set voting laws and the selection of Electors in a manner of their choosing.

Collectively, these latter constitutional provisions compromise the principal feature of democratic governance: that in a democracy it is the majority that rules.  Of course, the drafters of the Constitution were aware of this principle.  So, why didn’t they incorporate it in the Constitution?  Mostly because they had to stich a country out of thirteen states with divergent interests.  But also because they were engaging in an innovative nation-building effort with no contemporary examples to guide them, and thus they were destined to commit errors.  To their credit, however, they tried hard to come up with a durable political system.  Actually, their effort in that regard stands in stark contrast to our own inability to address the current political crisis which threatens to jeopardize the future of the country as a democracy. 

A lot has been written about the motives, frames of mind, and the imperatives on the ground that went into the writing of the Constitution.  One book that tries to illuminate what informed the design of the Constitution is First Principles by Thomas Ricks.  It reviews the intellectual background of the major protagonists of the American Revolution and explains how that shaped their ideas that gave us the Declaration of Independence and more importantly the Constitution.  We do know that most of the Founding Fathers were intellectual products of the Enlightenment with its reliance on Reason as the guiding force of human behavior.  Less known is their study of and fascination with Greek and Roman history, and especially, with political figures of honor and courage and the political workings of Greek city-states and the Roman Republic.

In their romanticized and idealized understanding of classical antiquity, the first thing that impressed the Founding Fathers was virtue and commitment to the public good.  “There must be a positive Passion for the public good, and the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republic Government, nor any real Liberty.” is what John Adams wrote to a friend.

The second great concern of the Framers was the rise of an autocratic leader.  Cincinnatus, who withdrew to his farm after saving Rome in 458 BCE, was the role model of a patriotic disinterested public figure whereas Caesar was the dreaded role model of a would-be autocrat.  Cato and Cicero, two Romans who sacrificed their lives to save Roman Republicanism, were exactly the type of citizens Adams had envisioned in the above quote.

However, as soon as the arduous and challenging task of drafting the Constitution started, reliance on personal virtue gave way to the practicality of checks and balances.  One vexing issue was how to balance the interests of the national government with those of the States.  Madison believed that the interests of the States were less divided by size and more by other factors, like their stance toward slavery.  How prescient he was!  Today, large and small states coalesce under the Blue and Red banners, respectively.  

Nonetheless, other delegates to the Constitutional Convention had a different model in mind as they argued for equal representation in the Senate.  Their model was the Amphictyonic League, a loose Confederation of Greek city-states, which granted equal representation to all member cities.  Of course, one cannot help but suspect that those delegates were using that ancient system to mask their desire to protect the particular economic stakes of their States, especially the preservation of slavery in the South.  In the end, the argument for a stronger central government, espoused by Madison and Hamilton, gave way to more robust State rights.

We know that many of the Founding Fathers were distrustful of direct election of officials.  On that, they had no other contemporary democratic government to draw from.  The excesses of the French Revolution and Aristotle’s view that democracies can turn to tyrannies of the mob would not help them either in this connection.  The generally low education of their contemporary fellow Americans also contributed to the elitist bias that better-informed notables had to mediate the people’s choices.  The result of these apprehensions was a system of rules that have often frustrated the will of the majority.

In the end, the Constitution was a balancing act in the face of competing interests and above all a product of its time.  As such it served more as a treaty between States than a national charter.  Instead of fully enshrining power with the people, its many safeguards against abuse have often proved to be counterproductive.  Whether they knew it or not, the Framers of the Constitution had created a constitutional order that in the end relied more on personal virtue than institutional structure.  In 2020, it all came down to the honor of a limited number of citizens to uphold the constitutional order.

There is no guarantee though this will always save us.  We should rather heed Hamilton’s admonition that “Reliance on patriotism has been the source of many of our errors.”  Although good citizenship will always be the keystone of good governance, American democracy will survive only if the votes of the people count without disenfranchisement or partisan interference.

As the end of 2021 approaches, I decided to reflect on the bigger picture that lies in the background of this year’s blogposts.  The issues in these posts are, of course, written within their contemporary context, but they are the products of long historical processes and transformations.  I have often referenced the distant past to show how the present is different.  This help us understand that many institutions and practices of modern life were not always the norm for the human race.   

One way to grasp the bigger picture is to look at trends.  Trends connect points of the past to the present and help us to project into the future.  They help us discern whether we have made progress or not and where we are headed if we continue in the same way.   A huge advantage we humans have is a strong collective memory of our life on earth thanks to our ability to pass knowledge and information from one generation to the next.  This way we can study our history and discover the mega-trends and the tipping points that moved us from one historical phase to the next.  That can be very instructive, besides being fascinating.  That’s why we appreciate books like Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies,” Yuval Harari’s “Sapiens,” and the most recent “The Dawn of Everything” of David Graeber and David Wengrow.

For trends to take hold there need to be some underlying developments that change the flow of history as they push us toward a new direction.  As we enter a new path, we are compelled to design and adopt new ways to optimize our chances for survival and success.  The new ways may not necessarily be good for everybody.  Sometimes, they may not be good for anyone.  I am not sure we can judge the paths humanity has taken from a moral standpoint.  But we can see what they have spawned and whether we can do better the next time we face a new path.  So, here is my list of some of the powerful developments that took us into new paths.

The loss of egalitarian culture.  It came with the emergence of agriculture and the founding of cities.  It created hierarchies of power and the classification of people into rulers and ruled, upper-class and lower-class.  It also brought the division of labor that further segregated people by social and economic status.  Work was turned from a collaborative effort to a commodity item to be leased in the marketplace or even obtained through slavery.  We still see this in the authority and power employers exercise over workers.  And to claim a better place in the division of labor we strive for exclusive credentials, thus, creating a privileged meritocratic class.

Our elevation to God’s favorite creature.  This belief completes the loss of the egalitarian culture.  Not only we have various hierarchies within human societies; we also rationalize humans as the rulers of the planet.  To buttress this privilege, we come to believe we are unique in being endowed with minds and emotions.  Our survival and well-being take precedence over all other species. 

The move from basic needs to wants of choice.  This has been called the malady of infinite wants.  The constant multiplication of wants we feel we have to meet puts pressure on natural resources, taxes our environment and turns other species into expendable resources.  Satisfying as many wants as we can is another way to raise our profile and separate us from others, that is, it is another by-product of the loss of egalitarian culture.  To produce what it takes to satisfy an ever-growing number of needs and wants makes it imperative that we produce at neck-breaking speeds and quantities, thus, leading us to the tyranny of efficiency.

The loosening of family and social ties.  Over many centuries we have moved away from the institution of extended family to the nuclear family comprised of parents and children.  In past traditional family environments, we had a network of relatives living in close proximity to support us in times of economic, health or other kinds of crises.  Children would learn traditions and social and moral norms from a broader circle of people.  The need for labor mobility, the development of impersonal markets and the rise of individualism unfettered by family constraints ushered in the break-up of extended families.  Today’s digital technology brings people together online but it also facilitates distant communication.  The more we can come together technologically the more we can distance ourselves physically.  Our most immediate social ties used to be with people in our locale.  Now they are with people scattered around the globe. 

The greatest force behind all paths we have taken is, of course, our biological endowment with large and sophisticated brains.  Our brains also happen to be curious and innovative in order to overcome obstacles and challenges thrown at us by nature and our own self-interests.  Our brains seem though to always get overexcited about the new possibilities and frontiers they open for us and to ignore or miscalculate the potential dangers.  When the hunter/gatherers invented agriculture, they had, in all likelihood, no idea what a new world order they were entering.  The same way, as we are now at the cusp of mastering Artificial Intelligence, we may be ready to enter its world with the same ignorance or miscalculation. 

The question is whether we have any capacity to shape our future based on what we know about the past or we are fated to stumble from one path to another and then struggle to make things right and find a new meaning.  The good thing is the same curious and innovative brains that push us into new paths are also good in finding new meanings out of new realities.

From at least our school age, we learn who the enemies of our countries are, or which ethnic or racial groups threaten our own identity, or which other religions challenge our faith.  The history lessons we are taught are usually a series of dates that mark battles, wars, massacres.  We become so steeped in these large-scale types of violence to the point we become inured to their appalling nature and accept them as facts of life.

But if we sit back and think about this intra-species violence, we can ask questions, like “Is it natural? Have we always been that violent?  Are we getting any better? 

First, the role of nature.  The paradox we humans face is that we are the most cooperative and prosocial species when it comes to day-to-day interactions with others in our communities.  At the same time, we can be extremely violent to perceived enemy groups.  Not that our in-group cooperation has been free of violence against our own.  In that we share the violence of other primates, like chimpanzees and gorillas who are known to engage in infanticide in order to favor the survival of their offspring and thus the propagation of their genes.

But another primate species very close to us, the bonobos, are a lot more peaceful and masters of reconciliation.  How have they reached this evolutionary happy stage?  In bonobo troops the female members have the upper hand.  By settling conflicts and favoring less aggressive males, they have steered their species to a more peaceful coexistence.  In other words, bonobos have undergone a sort of domestication that has rooted out unusual violence.

Richard Wrangham, an evolutionary anthropologist, has come up with a similar human domestication theory to explain how humans developed less violent nature than chimps and gorillas.  According to Wrangham, the predecessors of homo sapiens engaged in deliberate extermination of the very violent members of their tribes and by doing so they reduced the genetic material that could propagate violence in future generations.  An alternative theory supports the idea that females avoided violent males and thus they achieved domestication through selective mating.

What about violence against out-group individuals?  Here the culprit seems to be an evolutionary trait that intended to favor our survival.  That is, to protect us against dangerous encounters, our brain (as well as that of other species) was wired to quickly recognize familiar faces and raise alarm against unfamiliar ones.  Over time, the Us vs Them dichotomy expanded to include race, ethnicity, religion, political ideas and ways of life.  While we are inclined to trust and excuse members of our group, we are less inclined to excuse or rationalize the transgressions of out-group members.  Take for example religious symbols.  A joke made in good-nature by a co-religionist may draw only a mild rebuke but a violent reaction if committed by someone of a different religion.  The Charlie Hebdo terrorist act in 2015 is a case in point.

Have we always been violent, especially to other groups?  There is considerable controversy whether our Hunter/Gatherer ancestors were as violent as we modern humans are.  Some researchers claim that adjusting for population size, H/Gs were more violent.  Archeologists beg to differ.  H/G and nomadic tribes had the advantage they were not tied to any specific location.  If challenged or attacked by another tribe they could always move to another place.  All that changed with the emergence of agriculture.  Real estate became important.  Tribes had to compete for the most fertile land.  City-states also prized defensible terrain.  Thus, the causes of friction and war multiplied.

Another important institution that emerged with agriculture and larger communities of people was the creation of powerful, moralizing Gods.  In more populous communities comprised of different clans, person-to person contacts and ties started to become looser and informal.  The usual disciplinary tools of shaming, shunning and ostracizing that worked in the small bands of H/Gs were now less effective.  The ruling class had to enlist powerful deities with moral commands to provide social cohesion and moral discipline.  These Gods also became sources of inspiration and courage in wars against other ethnic groups.  The result was another wedge between Us and Them.  The Crusades, the persecution of Jews, the wars of Catholics and Protestants, and Sunnis and Shiites, the modern tragedies of the Rohingya and Uighurs bear witness to the religious divide of Us vs Them.  That’s why religious leaders bear a heavy responsibility in building a more peaceful world.

And yet, despite the cruelty we witness in wars, we have evidence suggesting that humans are not blood-thirsty killers even when they are engaged in mortal combat.  We know, for example, that only a minority of soldiers shot their rifles in battles of the American Civil War and the WW II.  Facing the enemy, killing another human being is not an automatic response.  

The military conflicts and aggression, the oppression of ethnic and religious groups, the brutality against women still going on should make us sick and doubtful of how civilized contemporary humans are.  Nonetheless, and without turning a blind eye to all that, we have signs that we are getting better.  In the 1500’s there were 41 homicides per 100,000 in Europe.  Now they are down to 1.4.  They are 6.9 across the globe.

Unlike other species, we have the capacity to institutionalize reconciliation and we have the moral courage to extend apology, forgiveness and amnesty.  Sometimes it takes one individual to bridge the gap between Us and Them.  Nelson Mandela was such a person.  We also have established multilateral institutions to arbitrate differences and resolve national conflicts.  And despite a backwardation here and there, basic human rights are universally accepted and are being defended.  Despite its discontents, globalization through trade, the internet, and scientific collaboration has increased contacts across different people.  The more we understand each other the more difficult it gets to fight each other.

Finally, there is one thing that works the best in erasing the lines between Us and Them.  That is an overarching common goal.  It works in bringing factions together within nations.  It can work in bringing the world together.  We have one such goal right now.  To save the planet and along with it the human race. 

The price of being a liberal is a less happy life.  Before you fire back, let me hasten to say I do not share this idea.  It’s the argument made in an Opinion piece in the New York Times (Nov. 25, 2021) by Brad Wilcox, Hal Boyd and Wendy Wang.  It is not a new idea.  Claims that conservatives feel happier than liberals have been around for quite some time.

But what grabbed my attention in this Opinion piece was its title “How Liberals Can Be Happier.”  I thought I would read about the beneficial effects of goodness, kindness, and other virtuous practices on a person’s experience of happiness.  But it was not about virtue seeking.  The sources of happiness identified by the three authors (as well as others) are all related to a person’s experience of a more communal life usually related to family, religious attendance or community engagement.  Presumably, conservatives have a richer social life and this contributes to the happiness gap between them and liberals.  So, all liberals have to do is get up, go out there and mingle.

This recipe of how we attain happiness left me unsatisfied on several grounds.  So, I decided to pursue the issue a bit further.  I decided to pursue three questions.  What do we know from other studies on happiness and political orientation?  How do places with more conservatives or more liberals do with respect to the above ingredients of happiness?  And thirdly, what can we learn from the international evidence on country rankings in happiness?

A critical question is “do people really act as being happy as opposed to thinking they are happy?”  That is, “are the responses of surveyed people reliable proxies of happiness?”  On this issue, a study found that conservatives are more likely to perceive themselves as happy whereas liberals act as if they are indeed happy.  Another related question is “how is happiness measured?”  Results differ if happiness is defined differently from survey to survey.

Another study, utilizing an international sample, including Americans, found that the level of happiness conservatives and liberals feel depends on whether their respective political ideology prevailed in their socio-cultural environment at the time they were surveyed.  Therefore, the happiness gap is more dependent on environmental conditions than on personal life-style choices. 

If indeed social engagement matters for happiness, how do the socialization opportunities vary across conservatives and liberals?  One study argues that the happiness gap in favor of conservatives is explained in part by the fact that more conservatives than liberals enjoy a socio-economic status that privileges them to membership to more groups relative to liberals.  Another interesting finding is that religiosity adds more to the happiness of conservatives than to the happiness of liberals.  From this I surmise that faith and the experience of religious attendance leaves liberals less satisfied if they collide with their personal political and moral views.  Examples are the gap between personal and religious views on issues related to sexual/gender orientation and abortion.

Some studies have also proposed psychological explanations of why conservatives tend to feel happier.  According to researchers, conservatives are more inclined to rationalize, and thus accept, economic and social inequities as matters of how the world is.  As such inequities widen, so does the happiness gap since the liberals’ discomfort with inequity rises.   As I have written in an earlier blogpost, we also have biological evidence that post-emotional critical mental processing of political and ethical issues is associated more with liberals than conservatives.  An examined life may  not necessarily be a happy one.

If the institutions of family and community engagement matter for happiness, we would expect to see more of that in mostly conservative states.  Actually, we don’t.  The top ten states in rates of divorced women are all, except one, states with high concentrations of conservative Americans.  The same is true for out-of-wedlock births.  Also suicides and opioid abuse is higher in rural states with a predominance of conservative residents.  Civic engagement (a proxy of community involvement) is also low in Southern States and without significant differences between blue and red states outside the South.  Interestingly, many of the same states that score relatively low in family stability and traditional norms, social ills, and civic engagement happen to be those with higher degree of religiosity.  This tells me that a conservative ideology does not necessarily come with the social and economic conditions that enable people to lead happy lives.

Finally, the third question I wanted to answer is what we can learn from country rankings by happiness.  The World Happiness Report has been issued for several years and it ranks countries by how high their residents score in subjective well-being factors like how they evaluate their life and whether they had recently experienced positive or negative feelings. 

The 2021 report shows that nine of the top ten countries with the happiest people are in Western European liberal democracies with Finland, Denmark and Switzerland ranked first, second and third.  The US ranks number 19.  Western European democracies are overall as socially liberal as the US and also have similar degrees of civic engagement as the US.  They do differ though from the US in two important factors.  They have much lower religious attendance and they provide their citizens with more comprehensive safety nets than the US does for its own people.  They also have better indicators of well-being when it comes to suicide and opioid abuse rates as well as mortality and health.

The 2021 Report also found that the greater the trust people feel toward society and institutions the more positive the evaluation of their lives.  We know that the last two years Americans did not score well in either type of trust.

It is still possible that within a country happiness may vary by the political orientation of its people.  But what we learn from state-by-state comparisons and international rankings the ingredients may not exactly be those claimed in different studies.  Instead of asking, on the basis of dubious evidence, liberals to adopt the life styles of their conservative fellow citizens in order to feel happier, it is more constructive to create the social and economic conditions that enable all, conservatives and liberals, to live happier lives.   

One way we often go wrong is when we continue to believe in paradigms that no longer hold.  Take, for example, the way markets work in Adam Smith’s conception.  Individual entrepreneurs, none of them dominant, decide to produce different goods which are exchanged according to individual preferences and budgets.  Or take another paradigm, that of the corporation.  Here Smith’s single entrepreneur is replaced by a group of risk takers who commit capital in the production of some good.  Each shareholder has a voice in how the corporation is run by managers who are elected and monitored by the shareholders.

These were useful and liberating innovations.  Adam Smith showed that economies (and, hence, societies) could be liberated from the grip of monarchs on peoples’ economic lives, and by extension on how people could live.  Smith’s market system was in line with the spirit and mission of the Enlightenment to free societies from monarchical rule, religious dogma, and superstition.  The corporation also facilitated the spreading of risk over many participants and, thus, moderated the power of concentrated wealth in the pursuit of business opportunities.

In their original conception, markets and corporations were mechanism that allowed the decentralization of economic choices, business risk, and decision making so that societies could take control of their future through economic pluralism and diversity of ideas.  These paradigms are now shadows of their original version.  Markets still exist but in important areas of the economy they have been captured by powerful corporations which exert inordinate power over their workers, customers, and the creation of new consumer ideas and products.  And corporations have been seized by individuals who by virtue of their controlling stakes in the equity of their firms are in unique position to make decisions that reflect their own pursuits. 

This dual combination of market and personal equity ownership has cancelled out many of the emblematic and beneficial features of Smith’s markets and corporate form of business organization.  If Adam Smith were alive, he would be sad to see that some sort of monarchical order has been reestablished through the back door and in a new form.  The new dynasties don’t have names like Bourbon or Habsburg.  Their names now are Apple, Amazon, Facebook (Meta), Google, and Microsoft.

These corporate dynasties have not only amassed market power and market capitalization (i.e., value of equity), they have also privatized and monetized an enormous amount of personal information that can be used to affect market and even political outcomes.  In his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Friedrich Hayek, the libertarian economist, had argued that central planning could not aggregate the quantity of information the market can.  He spoke too soon.  Amazon, Google and Facebook are certainly close to reaching this point as aggregators of information.

So, it is time to consider the consequences the concentration of market power, corporate control, and information in the hands of a few persons can have on our future.  And we need to ask “Who is going to decide our future?”  That is, how we live, how we socialize, and what we consume.  The free development of life styles and cultures is at stake.

Consider the Amazon empire.  You can read The Washington Post and any book on your Kindle, have your groceries delivered from Whole Food Markets, order all kinds of consumer goods from Amazon, and then relax by streaming a show on Prime.  Oh, I forgot that you can even fly to the space on a Bezos spacecraft.  In other words, a big part of our lives can be lived within the ecosystem created and controlled by one firm.  Facebook will even transfer you to virtual worlds with its metaverse technology.  These firms do not just produce goods, they produce whole ways and styles of life.  In the words of former Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff, “they write the music and we dance.”

As I have written in other posts, central to the evolution of human life and civilization is the creation of new wants.  New products and life styles come about through the creative or greedy minds of many different inventors, artistic creators, and visionary entrepreneurs.  What happens, however, when this decentralized process collapses to a centralized system controlled by a few players?  Even worse, what happens when these players are just single individuals who control corporate empires and vast wealth?

This is already happening.  It’s happening through the appropriation of personal data and their manipulation for the purpose of modifying and shaping consumer preferences and controlling the exchange of information among billions of people.  It’s happening through predatory acquisitions that capture technologies and talent from startup firms or by killing the competition from them.  Advances in Artificial Intelligence will make these corporate empires even more potent in charting our future.   So, the question is “how do we decide on these matters?”   

As of now democracies have proved to be relatively impotent in preventing people and their personal data from becoming a commodity in the hands of the big tech firms.  So, what does it mean to have representative government if it fails to ensure that our future way of life remains the outcome of a pluralistic process?  How democracies answer the challenge raised by the rise and hegemony of corporate information empires will have profound consequences for the future of humanity.  It will also set the tone for the rest of the world.

A recent survey on the health of democracy around the world showed that the US has exerted a rather negative influence on other democratic states during the last decade.  If the US fails to curb the practices of its own players, then the allure of democratic governance will further dim at the expense of pluralism and liberalism in the shape of our future.  Doing nothing means that the future of the world is bound to be shaped by profit-seeking private corporate empires in the West and by China’s fast growing technological prowess serving the interests of the Party.

That means our future could very well take shape under the auspices of one or another kind of illiberalism.

The political history of America shows that progressive agendas are born out and passed in periods of crisis.  Roosevelt’s progressive agenda was the response to the economic devastation the Great Depression had wreaked on Americans.  Johnson’s Great Society was the response to the accumulated racial injustices and the abuses of the voting rights of Black Americans.  Today’s progressive agenda comes at a time when despite enormous wealth creation the country fails to provide many of its citizens acceptable living standards or the opportunities to gain control of their lives and enjoy basic economic security and quality of life.    

Past progressive agendas aiming at economic security and social justice have been met with loud denouncements from conservative or rich politicians and economic elites.  Roosevelt was accused of introducing socialism, if not communism, and wealthy Democrats and Republicans ganged up against him.  The powerful Morgans were so incensed by FDR’s programs that they would be happy, if they could, to set up the Morgan financial empire anywhere else but the US.*  But Roosevelt, like Johnson after him, was tough enough and willing to give back as much and more as he took from his detractors.  In the end, both prevailed over their opponents.

Interestingly, neither FDR’s New Deal or Johnson’s Great Society had to include the progressive initiatives, like Social Security and Medicare, respectively.  The pressing issue for FDR was to extricate the US from the thralls of a declining economy and high unemployment.  He could have done that by merely relying on monetary and fiscal policies to boost purchasing power and energize the business sector.  Johnson also created Medicare and Medicaid while the US economy was experiencing robust economic performance.  Nonetheless, both FDR and Johnson realized that saving democracy (in FDR’s case) and creating a more equitable and healthier society (in Johnson’s case) justified institutions and government programs that provided essential benefits that were beyond the reach of many individual citizens.  This is actually what we find at the core of progressivism: civic and state initiatives that lift up the individual in order to create a stronger whole.

So, one point to make is that progressive agendas have been met with opposition from counter interests that reside with both parties and the business elites of the country.  Therefore, we should not be surprised by the opposition we now see against the progressive agenda in the Build Back Better plan despite the popularity of its components.  Notwithstanding this popularity, there is though something the present debate lacks but both FDR and Johnson had going for them.  What they had was an intellectual or moral voice that would make the case for their progressive agendas. 

Roosevelt’s intellectual mentor and influencer (to use a modern term) was none other than John Maynard Keynes, arguably the greatest economist of the last century.  Keynes had come to see economics as the means to secure the good life for everybody.  And the power to do that rest in the hands of the government.  Johnson’s powerful moral voice was that of Martin Luther King, Jr.   Although King’s message was for racial harmony, the moral force it projected was so inspiring as to extend into a call against poverty and for improving the well-being of the common man, Black and White.

Despite the promises of the Great Society, the subsequent direction of the economy in America has been toward a “winner takes all” mentality that leaves too many people on the wayside of economic progress and security.  This in turn has had significant and dire consequences for individual lives and the social fabric of the country.  Thus, today’s imperative for a progressive agenda gathers force from the present state of inequity across the educated and less educated, the wealthy and poor, the urban and rural Americans.  The unprecedent concentration of wealth and the differences in incomes are not mere statistics.  They signify entirely different levels in the quality of life between the well-to-do and those (a sizable portion of the population) that find themselves at the lower rungs of the ladder. 

The problem is not that some make too much money.  The real problem is that a lot of people make too little.  Worse even is the uneven distribution of opportunities.  Supporting an earlier start in education, or a more affordable access to it, or having a more secured and healthier childhood is not granting privileges but making sensible investments in the well-being of the entire country.  Likewise, enabling mothers to go to work thanks to affordable child care is a boon to the economy.  The scourge of opioids, the suicides of despair, poor health indicators, high mortality rates, and child poverty, all together, paint the picture of a society that fails to live up to the expectations justified by its unprecedent national wealth.

Is there a moral dimension in how we appraise a progressive agenda?  An austere, conservative view advocates that individuals compelled to make choices under financial constraints become better citizens.  The progressive view is that freedom from having to make choices among essential goods due to financial constraints is the superior organizing principle a society ought to adopt.  Roosevelt had called this “freedom from want.”  What about a political dimension?  When a system does not produce equitable outcomes, it risks losing its legitimacy.  Between the two world wars, Keynes advocated policies that would protect the legitimacy of democracy and capitalism.  To his dismay, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic went the opposite way and the result was the rise of populism and authoritarian strongmen, like Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. 

Successful economies without progressive institutions and standards betray their mission.  When private enterprise, society, and the state working together reach a point where scarcity is no longer justified by aggregate wealth, all citizens should enjoy a decent living standard.  Keynes, the visionary of a good life for all, had envisioned the decent life to extend from meeting basic human needs to enabling the common citizen to partake of culture and the arts.

Setting such a progressive vision and priorities is possible only in societies in which economic performance is the handmaid of society, not the other way around.

* Parts of this post drew information from The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes of Zachary Carter.

We usually say “the elephant in the room” but I chose elephants in the planet to signify two things: first, we still live in separate rooms (countries) on this planet; and second, in each of these rooms there is a different elephant (sometimes more) that we like to ignore.  And, of course, the future of real elephants depends on how we handle our metaphorical elephants.

World leaders have met 26 times since 1995 to agree on how to protect the climate.   This week’s meetings in Glasgow are the most critical thus far as all the evidence points that unless serious action is taken earth’s climate will warm more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above its pre-industrial level by the end of the century. 

Climate, however, is not our only concern.  We also have to protect biodiversity which has declined at alarming rates.  The protection of climate and biodiversity is essential to a healthier and livable planet.  Pursuing both, it will come down to passing from one world to another.  On one side, we have millennia of human life that has prioritized human gratification regardless of its harmful effects on the rest of natural life and the earth’s climate that sustains it.  To abandon this path will take a radical technological and cultural transformation on part of the human race.  On the other side, there is the promise of a safer world in which, however, daily life can be only imagined in all its aspects and wrinkles.

We know what we need to do from a technological standpoint to move from one to the other world.  We need to drastically reduce the emission of carbon dioxide, methane and other harmful substances.  We also need to raise our sense of responsibility to the rest of the natural world.  For these things to happen we have to reduce the human footprint on the earth.  Our footprint includes where we live, how we travel, and what and how much we produce and consume.  That’s where I believe the greatest challenges lie.  These challenges are the elephants in our rooms we need to consider.

The first challenge we face in reducing the human footprint on the planet is population growth.  Thankfully, two factors are helping in this regard.  The first is the dramatic decline in infant mortality across the globe so that we no longer need to have many offspring as insurance against premature death.  The second factor is control of birth rates thanks to more education and the use of contraceptives.  But while lower birth rates have brought better living standards to overcrowded poorer countries, they have raised anxieties in developed nations with below replacement birth rates.  Since our global population is way past what experts consider to be its sustainable level (no more than 3 billion) we need to turn our attention away from population growth to its distribution by adopting more open immigration policies.  This, of course, is a red flag to nationalists, meaning it’s one of our elephants in the room

The second elephant is over-consumption fed by the culture of consumerism.  It has two dimensions.  One is our desire to over-satisfy existing needs (Veblen’s “conspicuous consumption”).  Bigger houses, bigger and more cars, more clothes, more extravagant recreation activities.  The other dimension is the creation of new needs.  To satisfy new needs we often utilize new technologies that further expand the human footprint.  Consumer demand is the bulk of the GDP of all countries and economic policies rely on boosting consumer demand to grow the national income.  The consumption problem will not abate in the future as billions of people from second and third world countries ascend toward a middle-class income level and are influenced by the global reach of consumerism projected by affluent countries.  And over-consumption has an attendant problem: wealth seeking, which itself generates activity that increases the human footprint. 

The third elephant is the need for global collaboration.  To this end, we need to move from the concept of the national common good to the concept of the global common good.  But as difficult it is for individual citizens to prioritize the national good over their personal good it is equally difficult for countries to temper their nationalist interests in the interest of the global common good.  Maintaining the great forests of the earth and reducing pollutants and planet-warming chemicals requires a global response because environmental degradation does not respect national borders.  The developed countries which were the early climate abusers have to shoulder more of the cost of climate protection so that less developed countries can improve their wellbeing.  There is no guaranty that all major countries will attain this enlightened spirit of cooperation.  Domestic political rivalries often trip the most ambitious and determined efforts to serve climate-related priorities.  The US is a case in point.  Here the profit interests of the fossil fuel industry and its political collaborators have stymied Congress from ratifying international climate treaties.  In China, the preoccupation with ensuring the ability of the Communist Party to deliver prosperity to the Chinese people is their domestic obstacle.  In Russia, the huge dependence of its economy on fossil fuels makes the country less eager to contribute to climate efforts.

Finally, there is the elephant of how we want to treat and interact with the rest of natural life.  In this regard, there is a dark possibility we have to account for.  What if after we attain a net-zero state we feel more empowered to expand the human presence and activity beyond the current boundaries.  Our history shows we use technological advances for both good and evil.  What would that do to other species?  What if we manage to counter the negative climate effects of deforestation by other means, ignoring biodiversity concerns?   Along with other species this will further contribute to the demise of those of our fellow humans that still choose to live in their tribal and indigenous customs and ways of life.  They have already suffered a lot in the name of explorations, conquests, and economic exploitation of their lands.  And yet they are the sole source we have to find how we lived in the distant past and our sole way to learn how humans cope and live in harmony with nature.  We make every effort to preserve antiquities and artifacts and we build museums to house our Picassos and Cezannes.  Don’t we owe the same and more to our human past life surviving in the Tribes and Indigenous People of our Planet?*

 * With our typical overconfidence in the universality of our values, modern humans have all along assumed that indigenous people wish to be brought up to our way of life.  That’s a falsehood.  To this day, indigenous people around the world remain indifferent to the comforts of modern life and refuse to be assimilated and change their ways of living.

You are in a restaurant with people you don’t know very well and you propose to split a salad with one of them.  You recommend a salad with arugula (a bitter-tasting green) which your co-diner politely declines.  Have you learned anything about this person?  Well, a whole bunch of research would predict that your co-diner most likely has conservative leanings. *

If you are surprised, so was I when I came across the article “The Yuck Factor” in the March 2019 issue of The Atlantic.  By that time, I had read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and how our moral foundations matrix (based on evolutionary factors) explains our political orientation.  Then I read BEHAVE by Robert Sapolsky and again I encountered a whole section on the relationship of politics to psychological and biological factors.

Sapolsky asks three questions: (a) Do political orientations tend to be internally consistent for each one of us, that is, do they come as a package?  If you are for domestic law and order, do you also support foreign intervention to keep international order? His answer is: Usually.  (b) Do such consistent orientations arise from deep, implicit factors with remarkably little to do with specific political issues?  He replies: Yup.  And (c) Can one begin to detect the bits of biology underlying these factors?  He writes: Of course.

The internal consistency of our political orientations is in full display in surveys about various issues and party affiliation.  Democrats tend to be pro-choice, recognize climate change, favor safety net programs, and pro-immigrant.  Republicans tend toward the opposite direction.  According to Sapolsky, there are underlying factors that explain these differences.  Conservatives are more uncomfortable with ambiguity and more likely to perceive threats (e.g., from immigrants or Muslims).  Conservatives also dislike novelty, are more comforted by structure and hierarchy, and are more parochial in their empathy.  As a result, conservatives like loyalty, conformity, and authority.  (Consider for example the greater party solidarity among Republicans than Democrats.)  Conservatives’ dislike of change and novelty also makes them nostalgic of the past.  (That can explain why Make America Great Again resonates so intensely with Republicans).

On the other end of the political orientation spectrum stand the liberals who place more emphasis on caring and fairness.  Because liberals are more comfortable with novelty and change, they are more inclined to do away with established social and religious norms in order to serve their priorities, like reducing poverty and inequality, and promoting LBGTQ and women’s rights.  Conservatives on their part are more inclined to resort to power of authority in order to preserve their own priorities, safety and conformity. 

What about the biological origins of political orientation?  This takes us back to the emotional pair of disgust and fear of threat.  Studies have shown that conservatives have lower thresholds of disgust than liberals.  Thus, in experiments, conservatives are found to experience greater activation of the amygdala (the brain area that perceives threats and controls anxiety) when presented with disgusting images.  So, if you puke you rebuke.  If you associate migrants with diseases, find some sexual relationship distasteful, and your taste receptors are more sensitive, to bitter and other unfamiliar tastes, you are more likely to have conservative leanings.  After all the emotion of disgust is one of the mechanisms of detecting threats and as such it plays an evolutionary role in survival.   

There is also evidence that brains with more gray matter in the cingulate cortex, which regulates empathy, are more linked to liberalism whereas brains with bigger amygdala are more linked to conservatism.  According to Sapolsky, the brains of conservatives are more likely to process threats and disdainful stimuli at the visceral level whereas the brains of liberals are more likely to temper visceral reaction with some rationalization that takes place in the frontal cortex.

These differences in biological factors do not bestow superiority or inferiority to liberalism or conservatism.  Each leaning aims toward survival but by different means.  Their coexistence in a society can protect both liberals and conservatives from their most extreme predilections.  Thus, the liberal tendency to break with the past, embrace the new, and charge forward can benefit from the conservative hesitancy toward novel and untested experiences and the higher sensitivity to threats.  So, this is one practical consequence of liberalism and conservatism operating within a society.

Another thing to keep in mind is that genetic predilections are just the first draft of one’s personality.  As Jonathan Haidt suggests individuals follow different life paths in which they encounter different experiences and undergo adaptation processes which further shape their personalities.  Sapolsky always emphasizes that attention to genetics without accounting for the environment leads down to wrong conclusions.  For example, experiments have shown that under certain conditions liberals and conservatives become, respectively, more conservative or more liberal.

Personality and political orientation are also affected by the personal narratives each one of us constructs to make our actions and decisions meaningful and part of a bigger purpose.  For better or worse, personal narratives are often influenced by outside narratives, mostly associated with religious beliefs and political ideologies.  Do these outside narratives push us toward a more calibrated and thoughtful processing of our visceral feelings or do they play on our innate fears and resentments?

How do we explain, for example, the growing polarization of the American public over the last twenty or so years?  It cannot be that all of the sudden the genetic predilections for liberalism and conservatism grew more extreme.  Nature does not work with such abrupt jolts.  What has happened is that the environment we find ourselves has changed dramatically over this period.  Immigration, social and job displacement, and inequality have grown into bigger problems.  And within this environment, political, news media, and religious players have propagated narratives that have hardened our acceptance of the Other.   

It would be easy to blame polarization on biology and genes.  But it would be wrong.  The solution is to motivate ourselves (as Sapolsky’s evidence would imply) to engage our brains more in the practice of critical reassessment of our visceral reflexes.  

* Don’t expect every conservative friend of yours to reject your salad with arugula.  The experiment among 64,000 Americans found that twice as many conservatives rejected arugula relative to liberals.  This does not mean all conservatives in the sample rejected arugula.  Statistical results based on samples only tell us what is likelier not what is absolutely certain.