It starts out bland and unoriginal. He lays blame on confirmation bias, citing Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionist model and Bryan Caplan’s research on political irrationality,
Haidt shows that a lot of our moral and political reasoning is post-hoc rationalisation. Its primary purpose is not to arrive at a conclusion, but to justify a conclusion after we have reached it. We often arrive at a broad conclusion quickly and intuitively, and then selectively look for arguments to back it up retrospectively.
But why would people reflexively want to defend communism? Here he offers the explanation, borrowed from Friedrich Hayek and Peter Foster, that anti-capitalist thinking is natural. Intellectuals naturally gravitate towards any system that advertises itself as anti-capitalist, in a desperate hope that an effective alternative to the status quo has finally been found.
This still leaves an elephant in the room: why are our gut feelings so anti-capitalist? Why do we not start off with the hunch that capitalism might be a good thing? [...]
Hayek believed that anti-capitalist impulses were a legacy from a prehistoric age. Drawing on more recent insights from evolutionary psychology, Peter Foster (2014) has recently elaborated further on this idea. Foster’s argument could be summarised as follows.
Our minds, and especially our moral intuitions, have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, during which our ancestors lived in small tribes of hunter-gatherers. Our minds are therefore, in many ways, poorly adapted to a modern environment, and this is particularly true in the economic sphere. They are adapted to the economic life of a tribal society – not to an economy based on the division of labour and coordinated by anonymous mechanisms.
In a hunter-gatherer tribe, all economic activity is purposeful and consciously directed. It is a group effort. The members of the tribe share common aims and means. There is not much of a division of labour, and certainly not between strangers.
In this setting, intentions matter a great deal. Individuals who want to promote the welfare of the group end up promoting the welfare of the group; individuals who want to enrich themselves end up enriching themselves at the expense of the group. There is no ‘invisible hand’, which makes selfish individuals inadvertently promote the welfare of others. It therefore makes perfect sense for group members to police each other’s motives, to be highly sensitive to signs of selfish behaviour, and to punish the individuals who engage in it.
In a hunter-gatherer society, economic activity is mostly a zero-sum game. The sharing of the spoils is an inherently political act, and the way the spoils are divided reflects power dynamics within the group, as well as moral judgements and notions of desert. The group must work out who ‘deserves’ how much.
If Foster is right, our economic intuitions are a legacy of the tribal age. Most anti-capitalist arguments, then, no matter how much complex-sounding sociological jargon they may use, are really just sophisticated rationalisations of primitive urges.
Of course, nobody would literally argue that we should organise a modern society in the same way as a hunter-gatherer tribe. We all know that a modern economy is infinitely more complex than a mammoth hunt. But, in essence, that is what socialism is: it is an attempt to turn economic life, once again, into a consciously directed group effort. The tribe gathers around the camp fire, its members work out what their common needs and priorities are, they agree on a way to fulfil them, and put it into action. The drafting of a Five-Year Plan, then, is just a more sophisticated version of the camp fire gathering.
All of this is, of course, informed speculation, not hard science. Evolutionary psychology is not (yet) that far advanced. But whether anti-capitalism really is hardwired into us, or whether it has other origins, it is safe to say that anti-capitalism comes easily, effortlessly and naturally to us. It is a default opinion, which we can arrive at long before we give the issue much thought. We do not have to read the collected works of Marx and Engels first. Appreciation of the market economy, in contrast, is an acquired taste.
Interesting. One question is why people were attracted by non-capitalist economic systems. Another is why they were attracted by Marxism or by the Soviet Union.
The conceptual reason why anti-capitalists are attracted to Marxism or the Soviet Union is probably fairly simple. Marx provided a cogent critique of the capitalist economic system, disseminating one of the most widely-read political documents of the 19th and early 20th century. The broader socialist tradition was happy to adopt his philosophy, as they believed it provided a solid scientific foundation for socialism more generally, and a reason for optimism. The Soviet Union was the first major socialist experiment. There had previously been attempts, such as the Paris Commune, but these were short-lived and had minor effects.
Therefore, it’s no surprise why intellectuals favorable to socialism would have plenty to be excited about regarding the Soviet Union. That’s when they finally got to see their philosophy in action.
A third question is why they were disenchanted with capitalism. But it’s not difficult to answer. … there was the General Strike and the Great Depression.
Someone was bulverising their rejection of capitalism as self-serving, but the cracks in capitalism were obvious.
I’d be very interested in a quick summary of the explanation.
It starts out bland and unoriginal. He lays blame on confirmation bias, citing Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionist model and Bryan Caplan’s research on political irrationality,
But why would people reflexively want to defend communism? Here he offers the explanation, borrowed from Friedrich Hayek and Peter Foster, that anti-capitalist thinking is natural. Intellectuals naturally gravitate towards any system that advertises itself as anti-capitalist, in a desperate hope that an effective alternative to the status quo has finally been found.
Interesting. One question is why people were attracted by non-capitalist economic systems. Another is why they were attracted by Marxism or by the Soviet Union.
The conceptual reason why anti-capitalists are attracted to Marxism or the Soviet Union is probably fairly simple. Marx provided a cogent critique of the capitalist economic system, disseminating one of the most widely-read political documents of the 19th and early 20th century. The broader socialist tradition was happy to adopt his philosophy, as they believed it provided a solid scientific foundation for socialism more generally, and a reason for optimism. The Soviet Union was the first major socialist experiment. There had previously been attempts, such as the Paris Commune, but these were short-lived and had minor effects.
Therefore, it’s no surprise why intellectuals favorable to socialism would have plenty to be excited about regarding the Soviet Union. That’s when they finally got to see their philosophy in action.
A third question is why they were disenchanted with capitalism. But it’s not difficult to answer. … there was the General Strike and the Great Depression.
Someone was bulverising their rejection of capitalism as self-serving, but the cracks in capitalism were obvious.