Over the years Ive given public talks. The last was on the 30th July 2017 at The Small Festival. Its a talk motivated by the election of Donald Trump and the desire to better understand whats happening to our political life. My focus is on the bigger picture and the underlying forces changing our lives and societies. The Audio recording is above. The transcript is below.
What’s left who’s right and what’s up?
Introduction
Those committed to progressive politics have grown used to disappointment, but the accession of Trump to the American presidency marked a new low in a succession of political defeats. Seen as a game changer, this latest reminder that anything is possible has brought with it an outpouring of disbelief and the urgent desire to better understand, not simply this latest upset, but the serial dislocations of our ‘new normal’. What follows is an attempt to explore the longer-term reasons and deeper currents beneath these re-occurring shocks, and to do so through the literature that has emerged as a response to them. In many ways it reads as a succession of book reviews, with reflections from each becoming building blocks in what I hope evolves into a recognisable argument. It takes time for this to emerge, meandering through the arguments of my selected authors before coalescing around the Psychological, historical and material circumstances of our age, which above all is an age of permanent dislocation. The texts used are The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, Sapiens and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari, The Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra, The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic. All of which are rich in scholarship, clear in argument, and written by thinkers of distinction. Inevitably, my approach is guided by deeply rooted subjective intuitions, though I hope I have subjected these to thoughtful revision in the light of the conversations I’ve had with books as well as people. Each has helped build an argument that has questioned as well as honoured my beliefs. It remains, partial and subjective, but hopefully when properly tempered, it might be a contribution to the conversation about our changing times.
Part 1: Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind
Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind was the perfect beginning to this project for three reasons: Firstly it’s a work of quality, secondly, it speaks directly to the division and hostility widely considered as the main characteristics of our new politics, and finally, because it posed a direct challenge to me personally. The challenge was to overcome the same tribal prejudice that Haidt identifies as both cause and symptom of our current malaise. In doing so it dared me to take seriously arguments opposed to my own beliefs. This was made all the more difficult because the resistance I felt towards the book was the perfect illustration of the very arguments he seeks to make. And there is no doubt his arguments are compelling, for at least two reasons. Firstly, Haidt knows his stuff and argues well, but secondly and more immediately, he is dealing with something we all recognise. Many of us have either witnessed or feel the anger he sees as the hallmark of political life. It’s a kind of visceral knowledge and it connects Haidt’s arguments to our concerns. More strikingly, his arguments about our ‘righteous minds’ are not confined to Trump. They are even more set against the potentially aloof and perhaps intellectually mistaken partisans of Remain Britain and Clintonian America.
This is a book that seeks to understand and move beyond division in general, but confronts the liberal left in particular, and in way that is effective and challenging. Its stated purpose is to drain the anger from our politics. And to do this we (or more precisely the liberal left) should recognise that we too are responsible for the tribalism that has taken hold of our politics. To overcome this, we should not only understand, but also give proper regard to the moral sensibilities of people for whom we too willingly dismiss. More seriously, we should recognise that the moral system that makes us disrespect what Hillary Clinton called “the deplorables” is comprehensively flawed. Haidt gives three reasons for this. Firstly, it is the morality of a small and fortunate part of the world, of the Western, Industrial, Rich, Educated and Democratic societies, of WIRED societies. Secondly, it gives pride of place to the separate and singular individual, privileging the sovereign self above everything else and certainly above any claims made by communities. Thirdly, reason, which is the foundation for all our morality, is flawed, rendering the morality built upon it as equally defective. We like to think of our reasoning mind as the controlling centre of gravity, but in reality it plays little if any part in the construction of moral judgement. Liberals worship reason as our luminous human essence when it’s really only the 1% of our moral world. If you want the real source of moral judgement, then you should go to the body, its senses, passions, and the primitive mind.
Reason is the rider on the elephant of our primitive mind, a realm of feverish sense perception, firing neurons and flashing processes. This reasoning rider does not direct the elephant but is there to serve it, to anticipate its next move and fabricate an account of what the body has just done. It is the spokesperson for the elephant, ensuring its story is always right, even if has to lie, cheat, and fabricate. And this is what our righteous minds do: they put reason to work as an instrument, not to discover truth, but to persuade others of what our primitive minds have already decided. And if we are to be serious about morality, we need a more convincing foundation than reason.
This is what Haidt seeks to provide with his Moral Foundations Theory, a re-framing of morality from the bottom up, working with new foundations to build a moral system more inclusive and respectful. He does this by moving away from reason towards evolutionary psychology. And away from western individualism to embrace non-Western, community sources of moral thinking. The first thing evolutionary psychology tells us is that all morality is an evolutionary adaptation driven by the imperative to survive. And Haidt identifies five kinds’ of behaviors, connected to five imperatives for survival, which become the five foundations for all morality. At first, these took the form of unconscious rules for survival, but as our evolutionary journey moved from individual to group level survival, these five moral foundations co-evolved with human culture into a wide variety of forms. However, the same five remain as the original foundations and Haidt labels each with a key principle listing these as, care (do no harm), fairness (co-operate with your group), loyalty (keep together), authority (recognise the need for leadership), and sanctity (avoid pathogens and parasites). Taking the last of these, sanctity, we can see how this is channelled through human culture to become a moral system in something like Hinduism. Here filth, the perfect environment for pathogens, is untouchable, while it’s opposite, purity, is divine. Or expressed in Christian sentiment: cleanliness is next to godliness. These then are the five roots to our righteous minds; they have evolved over millions of years, were developed for group competition, and are infused with culture and shaped into a kaleidoscope of different forms, but they always lead back to the five imperatives for survival.
On his journey, via evolutionary psychology to ‘Moral foundations theory’, Haidt loops his way back to politics and makes a number of claims: that the origin of the left, right, liberal and Republican mind can be traced back to the five survival imperatives and that there is a genetic basis to political persuasion and even positions taken on specific issues. And more crucially, that there is more to morality than the liberal prescription, a vision based on the values of caring and fairness. These are valuable grounds for moral distinction but they only count for two of the five foundations Haidt has identified. Therefore, if we are to be serious about morality, we must recognise that other moral foundations, such as loyalty, authority and sanctity, are held by communities of all kinds and make equally legitimate moral claims. “That many societies … develop concepts such as sanctity and sin, purity and pollution…and that in such societies, the personal liberty of the secular West looks like hedonism and a celebration of humanity’s baser instincts”. And that to overcome our righteous minds we must appreciate the arguments of the other side, as a complimentary Yin to our Yang and create a new synthesis from the best parts of the liberal and conservative traditions.
This then is a book brimming with all manner of argument from a great range of sources. For me, engaging with it was difficult but rewarding, and anyone reading it will learn a great deal about psychology. And in all this, it was an ideal first step in my attempt to better understand our situation, shaping my thinking in important ways. I’ll detail these in a moment, but first let me say where I disagree with Haidt. This is not easy without feeling implicated in his Righteous mind syndrome. It’s like, I disagree, therefore I’m tribal, but perhaps it’s really a question of tone and with this in mind it’s worth saying that my disagreement is not with the psychology which is excellent, but with the politics. Because for me this is a political book in two ways. Firstly, it’s a book about politics in an obvious and ordinary sense. So For instance, he tells us “I’m going take you on a tour of human nature and by the end I hope to have given you a new way to think about politics”. But it’s also a political book in a second sense, in that beneath his plea for diversity and openness, in terms of what’s included and what’s not, both argument and book are framed to support a particular political conclusion. This of course is true of all argument, and in this case Haidt seeks to use the liberal celebration of tolerant diversity, to include non-liberal moral preferences (for loyalty, authority and sanctity). And each of these brings with them new attitudes to the question of equality in our moral thinking. To cut to the chase, one of the things that Haidt seeks to achieve in his new moral system is to downgrade a preference for equality, with the recognition that hierarchy has for millions of people a moral foundation. Haidt states: “when I began at graduate school I subscribed to the common liberal belief that hierarchy = power = exploitation = evil, but… I discovered that I was wrong”. And later he says, “authority ranking relationships are based on perceptions of legitimate asymmetries of power, and they are not inherently exploitative”, or put more simply inequality isn’t all bad.
There nothing wrong in this, or the recommendation that we, his readers, adhere to a different blend of possible moral positions. But I would argue that choosing between values is a political decision and I would choose differently. This is because I believe that the scale of global inequality is not only a major moral problem but is analytically important if we want to understand our world. More crucially as politics is one of the analytical tools we use to do this, I feel that Haidt’s conception of politics; which is essentially as a secondary expression of our psychological states, is partial and underdeveloped. In many ways, I feel he is offering a psychologists view of politics, insightful, informed, and interesting, but for me incomplete. What’s missing are the larger contexts of history and the material circumstances in which we live. Or put differently, a more convincing and wider conception of politics. Haidt does a great job explaining the divisions of our age, but in my view less well in identifying the larger forces activating our righteous minds. And this is what Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, does brilliantly. However, before turning to him I want to acknowledge Haidt for three things. Firstly, for his reminder about the limits of reason and the temptation to substitute emotion for thinking, secondly, for his injunction to understand more and condemn less - which is nothing less than a recommendation to think honestly and treat others with respect - and finally for the irrefutable case he makes for including psychology in our understanding of politics.
Part 2: Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari,
This said, for me, Harari’s history in his book Sapiens offers precisely the larger context missing from Haidt. And a very large context it is: nothing less than 2.5 million years and the totality of our history. In Harari’s hands, this becomes a story about storytelling, which for him is the secret of our power and our defining characteristic. He tells us it all began, (once upon a time), 70,000 years ago when an accidental genetic mutation changed the wiring of the Homo Sapien brain. The result was what he calls the Cognitive Revolution. This allowed our ancestors to think in completely new ways, and crucially to imagine and speak of things that did not exist. This in effect is the birth of imagination, and from it came a sequence, whereby imagination generated myths, myths converted into shared intentions, which finally translated into an unlimited capacity to cooperate. This capacity for storytelling is the mythical glue that holds us all together, the source of our power, and the real story of the so called ascent of man. It’s how we came to translate imagined orders into real societies, political institutions and cultures, and it’s the foundation for everything: for politics, cities, writing, money, religion, empires and the great revolutions, of agriculture, industry and science.
But for Harari, this is no parade of progress, and like Haidt, he is keenly aware of our limitations. The book has the flavour of a skilled therapist revealing a warts and all account of who we are, aware of our power and achievements, but also the anxiety and neurosis that comes with them. He tells us that we are an ingenious species, but also self-deceptive and prone to mistakes. Although our rise to top has been spectacular, unlike previous top predators - majestic and self-confident from millions of years of dominion - we are like banana republic dictators. Having so recently been underdogs, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position and this makes us cruel and dangerous. More than this, there are moments when it looks as if our species, without consciousness or understanding, has altered the material and spiritual basis of our existence with regrettable consequences. Surveying the totality of our history and its achievements he strikes a sombre tone. “Unfortunately, we on earth have so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and time again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual sapiens and usually caused immense misery to other animals. Moreover, despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals and … as disconnected as ever... Worse still, we seem to be more irresponsible than ever and are wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and…the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort … yet never finding satisfaction”.
So, far from a heroic ascent to higher civilisation, we are a species deluded by our own stories and sometimes self-enslaving. For Harari the supreme example, and the moment when we changed our existence forever, was the agricultural revolution. This, Harari tells us, has been history’s biggest fraud. Of course, it was proclaimed as a great leap for humanity, part of the tale of progress, fuelled by human brainpower, and allowing us to abandon the gruelling and dangerous life of hunter gathering. But for Harari, this tale is a fancy which gives the lie to the unprecedented reversal in fortunes it brought to the vast bulk of humanity. This is the essence of the agricultural revolution he says, ”the ability to keep more people alive in worse conditions”. Hunter gatherers led a more varied, stimulating, healthy and rewarding life, with less danger of starvation and disease and more in keeping with their own bodies. For Harari, they were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history, mastering not only the surrounding world of animals, plants and objects, but also the internal world of their bodies and senses. They moved with minimum effort and had a physical dexterity that people today are unable to achieve even after years of yoga. True, the agricultural revolution led to the production of extra food and enhanced the power of our species, but it offered nothing to people as individuals. The extra food did not translate into better diet or more leisure; rather it translated into population explosions, powerful hierarchies and pampered elites. Labouring from dawn to dusk, people were less economically secure, forced to settle permanently next to their fields and to live in disease-ridden settlements. And overall, the average farmer worked a great deal harder for a much harsher life.
Reflecting on this, Harari asks why any sane person would lower their standard of living just to multiply the number of sapiens. Answering his own question, he tells us that change proceeded by stages, each bringing just a small alteration to daily life. Temporary settlements gradually became permanent villages; increases in population quickly absorbed the extra food, requiring still more food and a cycle of “compulsory expansion” of food and people became established. It took generations of small changes to transform society and nobody realised what was happening, and once agriculture was established, nobody remembered they had ever lived differently.
This account is but one of the many stages in human evolution Harari observes, and he does so with wry recognition of our follies, but with deep compassion for the countless victims of larger forces, shaping our existence in ways we barely know. And it is this recognition, that the way we think and feel is bounded by the particular circumstances in which we live, that I think is crucial in trying to understand our situation today. So now, Haidt’s welcome challenge to question our assumptions and take seriously the irrational can be supplemented by Harari’s account of how larger contexts and impersonal forces shape our bodies and minds. And for me, his account offers a powerful template to understand the profound changes taking hold of our existence today. Because like those ancient hunter-gatherers soon to be farmers, we too are subject to forces bearing down on our bodies and minds.
Part 3: The Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra
And this is the subject of my third text The Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra. In many ways Mishra combines Haidt’s concern with psychology with Harari’s grasp of the big picture, to arrive at his own account of why ours is an age of anger. His focus is the equally profound change in the conditions of our existence brought about by the coming of modernity. Now, modernity is an ugly, vague and contested term, but the way I shall use it and the way I believe Mishra understands it, is as a catch-all for that combination of science, capitalism, and ideology, that has been transforming the conditions of our being for the last 500 years. It is the second great transformation in the human condition and the way Mishra talks about this is very similar to Harari. Like the agricultural revolution, the coming of modernity has “brought massive increases in human power”, but Mishra would agree with Harari that “this has not necessarily improved the well-being of individual sapiens, and we continue to wreak havoc, seeking our own comfort, yet finding no satisfaction”. And it is this sense of chronic dissatisfaction that Mishra wants to understand. Because ours - he tells us - is a condition of affluent anger, where the world is “more literate, interconnected and prosperous than ever.” Yet anger festers beneath the surface, exploding into teenage gun massacres, terrorist atrocities and the rise of demagogues tapping into simmering reservoirs of cynicism and discontent. For Mishra, part of the problem is that the promise of modernity has been oversold. Unlike the agricultural revolution, our second revolution in human power was not silent or surreptitious. On the contrary, it was declared as the dawn of a new era, a promise to all humanity for a universal civilisation, founded on liberty, fraternity and equality. And it is the chasm between this promise and the lived reality of many modern lives that Mishra maintains is behind our age of anger.
For Mishra then, the pervasive ill will of our times is the product of the failed and broken promise of modernity. This was a promise first made in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, but which found its ultimate political expression in liberalism. And if there is a common thread that binds Haidt, Harari, and Mishra, it is the crisis of liberalism, which alongside anger, is the second defining feature of our new politics. At this point I need to say a little more about liberalism. As Haidt reminds us, the individual is at the centre of liberalism. This is an individual whose faculties of reason and moral judgement are considered so profound they are the very foundation for our claim to human rights. And we can do all sorts of things with these faculties: we can distinguish between right and wrong, we can know and therefore act upon the world, and we can organise our own affairs. And liberals believe that if left alone in a condition of freedom, we will flourish. And the sum total of many flourishing individuals is the liberal promise for progress. The twin enemies of this promise are the chains of tradition and the abuse of political power. And therefore, the task of Liberalism is to liberate us from tradition, limit the power of government and in so doing, create optimum conditions for maximum freedom and self-flourishing. It is the power and optimism of this vision that has made liberalism one of the great instruments for change, working in harmony with the other transformational forces of science and capitalism to forge the modern world. In doing this, liberalism has had a long and intimate relationship with capitalism, both speaking the same language and viewing the world through the same lens. What today we call Neo-Liberalism began as a marriage between liberal philosophy and classical economics, now extended as an ideal for the whole of social existence. And animating all of this are the same prescriptions of minimal government, market superiority, and the belief that the rational, self-interested and self-knowing individual should be free to master the world.
This then was the promise of modernity: a promise of power, prosperity and progress. It proclaimed us equal and free and looked to a universal civilisation of capitalism, human rights, and what Kant called perpetual peace. However, following Harari, Mishra sees this as one more of history’s great frauds. And he tells us that the first person to recognise this was Rousseau, who denounced commercial society as built on endless competition, unfulfilled desire, hollow vanity and soul destroying hypocrisy. What Mishra finds in Rousseau’s work is the first outline of a particular psychological condition that he feels offers insight into our own age of anger. It is a condition produced by a culture declaring universal equality, freedom, and empowerment, but organised into massive disparities of power and status. He calls this Ressentiment, which he says is not simply the French word for resentment, but rather a specific state of envious comparison and neurotic vanity. This stems from the psychological need to secure recognition from others in a culture that declares you can be anything you want while blocking all available routes to make this happen. At its base is a sense of powerless victimhood felt by those who perceive themselves left behind by a selfish minority and who channel their psychic energies into rage against the elites and hostility to outsiders.
Ultimately, Ressentiment manifests as violence and Mishra argues that beneath the sanitised story of modernity - AKA the march of progress - “its real history is largely one of carnage & bedlam”. For example in the last decades of the 19thcentury, he tells us that anarchists murdered the presidents of France and America, the King of Italy, the Empress of Austria and the Prime Minister of Spain. At the international level, centuries of civil war, imperial conquest, genocide and slavery, gives the lie to Western modernity as the pinnacle of civilisation and individual empowerment. And today, as the golden age of social democracy fades into globalised neoliberalism, the traumas and pathologies of modernity are resumed, accelerated, intensified and become universal. For Mishra, once again, but on a far larger scale, the broken promise of progress translates into rage against elites, hostility to outsiders, authoritarian populism, and terrorism.
In this, Mishra’s account of modernity might be seen as a companion piece to Harari’s deconstruction of the agricultural revolution. Like Harari, his focus is on the interplay between the human psyche and the circumstances which contain and shape it. In this Mishra has brought the argument to our present circumstances, and I hope developed my own, which began with the psychological insights of Haidt, moved to an appreciation of context with Harari, to become focused on modernity by Mishra. In the last text, Ellen Meiksins Wood concentrates the focus still further to explore the capitalist dimension of modernity.
Part 4: The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood
Earlier I talked of the difficult relationship I had with Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. Like an unwelcome Socrates or demented Jiminy Cricket, he’s never far from my conscience whispering “are you really seeking truth”. Before moving to this final section, I’ll make a last concession to Haidt. Although Harari states that “capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference” and Mishra speaks of “individuals herded by capitalism into grossly unequal distributions of wealth and humiliating new hierarchies”, neither make capitalism central to their arguments. And this final section is driven, not by new insight, but rather by an older conviction and one held with a suspicious degree of emotion, that capitalism, at least in its pure form, is an engine of human enslavement. From Haidt’s perspective, this confession inescapably questions all I’m about to say. More than this, the pessimism of my earlier commentary sits awkwardly with a social mobility that has taken me from council house to landlord. There is something perhaps fishy here, cognitive dissonance perhaps or even hypocrisy. Maybe, and I’ll try to address these in my conclusion, but for now with these cards on the table, I’ll complete my survey of literature with The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood.
Written in 1999, this might seem a strange place to consider present politics; however, what Meiksins Wood does is to identify the original DNA of the capitalist system, which, like morality, has been channelled through human culture to take many different forms. Today there is no one single form of capitalism but many varieties from Anglo-American neo-liberalism to ”capitalism with Chinese characteristics”. Each of these are supported by different institutional arrangements and expressed through different cultures. But if Meiksins Wood is correct, like Haidt’s five foundations for morality, there are similar foundational principles to capitalism. And for me, it is here where the final piece in the puzzle of our current predicament can be found. In approach, Meiksins Wood follows Haidt by critiquing existing ideas and then offering an alternative. In her case, the flawed orthodoxies and accounts to be challenged are the conventional explanations of how capitalism came into existence. All of these, she tells us, have presumed that capitalism had somehow always been with us, “at least in embryo, from the dawn of history, if not in the very core of human nature”. The instinct to truck and barter, buy cheap and sell dear, and above all pursue profit, these were assumed, from very first to be part of our nature. Far from a revolutionary innovation, capitalism was always there, just waiting to be released from its chains, from feudalism, or the wrong religion. For some, capitalism was the ultimate destination of history, as the final perfection of age-old commercial practices. Accordingly she tells us that the lineage of capitalism, “passes naturally from the earliest Babylonian or Roman merchant, through the mediaeval burger, to the early modern bourgeois, and finally to the industrial capitalist.”
For Meiksins Wood, this too is a tale of fancy, presuming the existence of the very thing that needs to be explained. As if nothing more is required to account for capitalism then a story of how the obstacles to its per-ordained destiny were removed. Meiksins Wood is not convinced by this, and argues that to discover its real origin and character, we need to move beyond assumed human nature and look instead to the place and circumstances of its birth. And for her, it begins in the particular circumstances of late medieval England. This is not a story of new opportunities or the releasing of our inner capitalist. Rather it’s a story of how English lords and peasants (turned tenant farmers), found themselves locked into the same system and equally depended on it for survival. And it’s from these unprecedented circumstances that capitalism, the economic system that would conquer the world, was produced.
There are two things that made England exceptional: firstly, the concentration of political power in the hands of the king, and secondly, the concentration of land in the hands of the aristocratic ruling class. In the first of these (power to the king), England was unlike any other feudal state. The typical feudal order was one of shared power and overlapping authority between kings and a host of other agencies, most notably the Aristocracy. This was not the case in England because political power, especially violent power, had become more and more concentrated into the hands of the King. Increasingly, English monarchs secured a monopoly over legitimate violence, and in so doing deprived the aristocratic class of their means to earn income. Across feudal Europe, title holders could still depend on the forced extraction of revenues from the peasantry. But since the English aristocracy no longer has access to violence, this was not an option, and they were forced to find a new source of income. Fortunately -- and here again England was unlike any other feudal society --this loss of coercive power was offset by fact that most land was in their hands. This was worked not by peasants but increasingly by tenant farmers. What the aristocratic landlords were able to do was to switch their source of income away from the direct appropriation of peasant surplus to one based on the appropriation of maximum rents from tenants. The way they did this was to gauge the level of rent by the best-estimated profit expected from the use of the land. Land would only go to tenants who could make the best use of it, and to stay in the game, a game of survival where the stakes were high, tenant farmers were compelled to enhance productivity in direct competition with each other.
It is in these parochial circumstances of pre-modern England that the animating power within capitalism was originally established and why its foundation marks a fundamental rupture in the course of history. For this was the genesis of a wholly new system, many times more powerful than its predecessors because at its heart was a framework of discipline and compulsion as both landlords and tenants came to depend on the market for survival. This translated into an imperative to continuously improve land and maximise its production. The result was astonishingly productive agriculture, the foundations of the industrial revolution and the birth of capitalism.
It is in this detail, gleaned at the moment of its birth that the DNA of capitalism can be discerned as a system of imperatives and requirements worked into a paradigm of compulsive expansion unique in history. Then as now, its very survival requires it to harness every available resource and technology, apply every innovation and lower every cost. All of these sub-imperatives are themselves put to work for the singular and unrelenting objective to expand and accumulate, exponentially and without end in every place and area of life. Virtually everything in capitalist society, including the whole of nature, is a potential commodity, and today all of technology and science are harnessed to its ends. From the first, it was premised on unequal access to the means of life, translated into unequal power, and used to sustain an unequal society.
From this small beginning in the English countryside it never stopped growing, conquering the world, and subjecting all to its rules of conduct. And today in a process economists call creative destruction, its imperatives rapidly replace old technologies and jobs. Exchanging people with artificial intelligence and moving manufacturing to the low coast east. At the same time, financial capital has harnessed the best brains and technology to create colossal pyramid Meta-Markets where structured investment vehicles bundle mortgages for resale, leverage buyouts and work hedge funds. Together, their total value amounts to promises, to pay to pay promises, to pay promises; on a scale so astronomical that cashing them out is literally impossible. In consequence, systemic risk, structural unemployment and growing inequality are as hardwired into the system as the imperatives that created them. And in this latest capitalist phase, neo-liberalism now conceived as the objective mind of society continues to erode the social structures and welfare systems which had offered some protection from its substantial and rising risks. In this, capitalism is not only destroying the conditions on which it depends, its unbending imperatives threaten to destroy our very existence.
Conclusion
So, what’s left, who’s right and what’s up? This was my rhetorical question and let me now answer it in reverse order. In this ‘what’s up’ account, I’ve tried make a case that frames the serial dislocations and shocks of today’s politics as surface echoes of deeper dislocations in the conditions of our existence. To do this I’ve attempted to trace how our righteous minds are being activated by the continuing revolutions of modernity, understood as that combination of science, ideology and capitalism, which continues to change our lives with unprecedented depth and speed. I have argued that Harari’s account of the agricultural revolution offers a useful template to understand this, and his declaration “that time and time again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual sapiens”, serves as a guiding theme. Finally, I have sought to focus particular attention to modernity in general and on capitalism as the dominant feature of modernity in particular, and that in its pure form, it is an engine of human enslavement and currently central to the creation of our age of anger and its associated crisis of liberalism.
Who’s right, is of course a different question, though in one sense, Haidt’s psychology, Harari’s context, and the respective explorations of modernity and capitalism offered by Mishra’ and Meiksins Wood, are in my opinion all -‘right’. This is because I found their arguments convincing, though in a selective way. But that’s just my view, and Haidt has offered sound reasons why this might not be trustworthy, especially my hostility to the very capitalism that has demonstrably improved my life, as well as the 400 million Chinese recently released from poverty. A few final comments to speak to these objections are in order. Firstly, there is no getting out of the subjectivity trap, and the most I can say is that I’m hoping these arguments represent at least an informed subjectivity, expressed with a degree of openness. Secondly, I recognise myself as privileged and I’m deeply grateful for the opportunities I’ve had. My thinking on this, however, is that these opportunities were part of what I called earlier the golden age of social democracy. This is a tradition in socialist thought, sometimes expressed in practice, which accepts the existence of capitalism but argues it should be tamed, regulated, and humanised. Set to serve the interests of people, rather than an arrangement where society is subservient to its non-human imperatives for compulsive expansion. I have been a beneficiary of such a system and I’m no revolutionary. In my view, such managed capitalism is entirely possible, because the institutional frameworks on which it depends are subject to political choice, and can, if chosen, be consciously designed to better serve human ends. For me, the key priority is the end of neoliberalism because this is the form of capitalism closest to its pure form of compulsive and unmediated expansion. And it is this which increasingly threatens our well-being. In contrast, a capitalism shaped to human purpose is infinitely preferable and why its Chinese variant has been able to raise 400 million of its people from poverty.
For many, this shows that not only can capitalism do good things but that inequality between countries is receding. For instance, some of you may have seen Branko Milanovic’s well-known elephant curve. This shows who gained most from the growth in global income from 1988 – 2008. This illustrative graph looks like an elephant, with a resurgent Asia as its rising back, a declining western middle class looping down the elephant’s trunk and a sharp upturn for superrich at end. Intuitively, this seems to support the idea that the world is becoming more equal, as a resurgent Asia creates its own middle-class and begins to move towards western levels of income. Fourteen pages later however, the same data is reconfigured to represent those who gained most in absolute terms. And here we witness a different story and a different statistical shape. This time we see a low climbing incline, gently rising over most of its range, until suddenly at the very end, three shooting columns rise up towering over the rest. These represent the 10%, 5%, and 1%, richest people in world. The 1%, Milanovic tells us, received 44% of absolute gain over the 20 year period, and currently own 46% of global wealth. Gains made by world’s poor are extremely significant, but in absolute terms very modest. While those of the superrich are astronomical and the chasm between them grows daily. And it is this chasm between the rich and poor, this profound inexorable inequality in absolute terms, which is why in my view the distinction between left and right is still important. The political spectrum has been conceived in many ways and I know some think it’s time to move beyond what they feel are tired ways of thinking. But for me, the most coherent and recognised understanding of the difference between left and right is precisely here in the reality of inequality and their respective attitudes to it.
Equality has always been the organising principle of socialism. To answer the final question, what’s left, well, what’s left is inequality and that’s a huge part of what it’s all about, and impending climate disaster alongside the continued hope that we can live in a more rewarding and sane system. We live in interesting times, more and more of us are dislocated by the compulsions of capitalism and the permanent revolution of modernity. This is the route to our age of anger, and it seems to me replete with danger, but also with possibilities for something better.