On the Evolution of the Heart Sutra

The evolution of the Heart Sutra has been largely obscured by the historically dominant narratives and by the reluctance of Buddhist Studies to go beyond description and seek explanations. Watanabe Shōgo (1990) and Jan Nattier (1992) showed that the historical narratives about the Heart Sutra are pious fictions and pointed to another, rather unexpected history: the Heart Sutra was composed in China in the mid-seventh century. Their insights were subsequently confirmed by Huifeng (2014), and then I started publishing on this topic in 2015, both confirming the existing observations and adding a few of my own. While the field of Buddhist Studies (and the Buddhist world) has yet to catch up, it is now certain that the Chinese origins theory is correct.

Part of my contribution has been to step outside the usual descriptive mode of Buddhist Studies and propose explanations for the origins and evolution of the Heart Sutra. To date, my main focus has been on origins since this seemed to be the most urgent problem. More recently, I have begun to look at how the text evolved once it appeared ca 656 CE. In particular, I published an article on the varieties and relationships between the extended versions (Attwood 2021a).

In this essay, I will present a first attempt at an overview of the origins and the evolution of the Heart Sutra. I will explain why the variant texts on the Heart Sutra were produced and why they took the form that they did. In particular, I will argue that all of the major variants were created to bolster the perceived authenticity of the Heart Sutra. That the Heart Sutra appeared to lack authenticity in some eyes is hardly surprising given what we now know about its origins.

The centre of this argument is a simplified version of the stemma (or genealogy) of the Heart Sutra that I published in 2021. This diagram shows the relationships between the main inputs to the Heart Sutra and the five main versions that subsequently appeared.

Here a solid arrow represents the lines of descent, and the dotted arrow reflects the fact that Chinese extended versions repeat the text of Xīn jīng (T 251) where they overlap. Vertical spacing reflects relative chronology.

There are two processes to consider: an initial convergence in the Xīn jīng and a subsequent divergence into numerous versions of the text.

As much as the Xīn jīng reflects a convergence of texts, it also reflects a convergence of Indian and Chinese Buddhism. This may not be obvious since writing about Indian Buddhism and Chinese Buddhism tends to happen in different academic contexts that don’t communicate very well. This is sometimes referred to as “the silo mentality”. Even when there is some crossover, such as when scholars of Pāli literature study Chinese translations of Āgama texts, they see the Chinese translations as reflecting Indian culture rather than Chinese culture. Little or no attempt is made to read translated Āgama texts as Chinese texts.

This may be understandable in the case of Āgama texts but it doesn't work in the case of the Heart Sutra. The text was created in a Chinese Buddhist milieu and this is important for understanding it. However, the principal ideas in the text—Avalokiteśvara bodhisatva, Prajñāpāramitā, and dhāraṇī—all come from, and must understood in terms of, Indian Buddhism as well. Understanding the Heart Sutra requires us to have a foot in both camps, which may explain why the text has been so neglected and many of the articles that appear in print are low quality.

Convergence

The late Stefano Zacchetti (2005: 32) says that Kumārajīva's translation of Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā (Pañc) occurred during the period 29 May 403–13 Jan 404 CE. The Móhē bānrě bōluómì jīng «摩訶般若波羅蜜經» (T 223; Móhē) was completed with the help of several expert assistants and was a significant improvement on previous translations. In parallel Kumārajīva and his team translated the *Mahāprajñāpāramitopadeśa an extensive commentary attributed to Nāgārjuna. The Dàzhìdù lùn «大智度論» was completed on 1 Feb 406 CE.

During the process of translating the commentary, it became clear that Móhē required some revisions. Zacchetti says that these were complete by 18 May 404, but also says in a footnote (128) that one of Kumārajīva's principal assistants, Sengrui (僧睿; 371–438 CE), in his preface to the sutra, mentions revisions continuing to be made throughout the process of producing the Dàzhìdù lùn. The commentary and its text have guided the Chinese understanding of Prajñāpāramitā from that time onwards.

While we still don't know for sure who composed the Xīn jīng, it seems increasingly likely to have been Xuanzang. His name is associated with the earliest mention of the text, he is named in the oldest artefacts, and the earliest commentaries were by some of his close associates. My thorough exploration of this evidence has been submitted for peer review and with luck will be published in 2024. In this essay, after long and detailed consideration of the evidence, I assume that Xuanzang was the author. This is a provisional conclusion that may be subject to revision if some plausible refutation appears (implausible refutations already exist, but can be safely ignored).

Sometime between 654 CE and 26 December 656 CE, Xuanzang composed the Bānrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng «般若波羅蜜多心經» (T 251; Xīn). The earlier date reflects when the dhāraṇī was translated in the Tuóluóní jí jīng «陀羅尼集經» (T 901) by Atikūṭa. Since dhāraṇī transcription in China was never standardised, where we see an identical transcription in two different texts it is highly likely that one copied from the other. Given the nature of Xīn, which is mainly copied passages, I provisionally assume that Xuanzang copied the dhāraṇī from the Tuóluóní jí jīng. This means that Xīn could not have existed before this date. Note that Watanabe Shōgo (1990) definitively refuted the idea of Heart Sutra texts existing prior to the composition of the Xīn.

The later date is when the text is first mentioned in Buddhist literature, i.e. in the Biography of Xuanzang, Dà Táng dà Cí’ēnsì sānzàng fǎshī chuán xù «大唐大慈恩寺三藏法師傳序» (T 2053), composed by Yàncóng 彥悰 in 688 CE. The best translation of the Biography is Li (1995), but see also remarks on its historicity in Kotyk (2019).

There is no evidence of the Heart Sutra, of any kind, from any place, before 654 CE. From that date onwards, evidence in the form of inscriptions, manuscripts, catalogue entries, and commentaries proliferated and began to spread to neighbouring polities in Tibet, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. There is no evidence of any kind from India and it now seems extremely unlikely the Heart Sutra was ever known there. The so-called Indo-Tibetan commentaries are better thought of as Tibetan commentaries attributed to Indian authors (a legitimising strategy).

Xin consists of some copied passages from Móhē, to which Xuanzang added some touches of his own (notably some novel "spellings" and the figure of Guanyin) and the dhāraṇī. Xīn became the standard Heart Sutra from that time onwards in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. It is Xīn that people refer to when they say "The Heart Sutra is the most popular Mahāyāna text".

This part of the stemma also emphasises that passages from Pañc found in Hṛd did not arrive there directly. Contra the historically dominant narrative, the copied passages arrived via a Chinese intermediary, i.e. Móhē. That is, the passages copied from Pañc were not copied directly in Sanskrit from a Sanskrit source. Rather they were selected from Móhē, and only later were they (inexpertly) translated back into Sanskrit.

As Jan Nattier (1992: 170) pointed out, Hṛd bears all the hallmarks of a "back-translation". These include “unmatched but synonymous equivalents” for some Sanskrit terms and “incorrect word order, grammatical errors that can be traced to the structure of the intermediary language, and incorrect readings (due to visual confusion of certain letters or characters in the intermediary language)”.

Thus the Heart Sutra can be explained as the the result of a series of convergent processes and reflects also a convergence of Indian and Chinese Buddhist cultures. However, the text soon began to diverge into numerous versions and it is to these that that we now turn.

Divergence

From the Xīn we see three main lines of development that, as yet, cannot be precisely dated.

1. The creation of the Dàmíngzhòu jīng (T 250) and its attribution to Kumārajīva
2. The creation of the Sanskrit text titled Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya.
3. The creation of two extended texts.

Note that the dotted line from Xīn to the Chinese extended sutras (T 253, 254, 257) reflects the retention of the Chinese text of Xīn where they overlap. The phrase "two extended texts" refers to (1) the Chinese text of T 252, and (2) the Sanskrit Pañcaviṃśatikā-prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya nāma dhāraṇī “Dhāraṇī named The Heart of the Perfection of Insight in Twenty-five [Lines]”. The Pañcaviṃśatikā was subsequently translated into Chinese (T 253, 254, 257).

I will take each of these versions in turn and try to show that each adds something that was perceived to be missing from the Heart Sutra. I don’t argue that there was any coordination between the three processes and, indeed, they seem to have occurred independently and over quite a long timeframe. However, together with the hagiographic stories about Xuanzang, they were embraced into the established myth of the Heart Sutra as an Indian Buddhist text.

1. Dàmíngzhòu jīng

The Heart Sutra was associated with Xuanzang from the outset and this might have been enough to ensure its place as an authentic Indian Buddhist sutra. The four early Chinese commentaries, however, still exhibit some anxiety on this score. The commentaries are:

• Bōrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng yōuzàn «般若波羅蜜多心經幽贊» “Profound Explanation of the Sutra of the Essence of Prajñāpāramitā”, by Kuījī 窺基 (T 1710)
• Fú shuō bōrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng zàn «佛說般若波羅蜜多心經贊» “Explanation of the Sutra of the Essence of Prajñāpāramitā” by Woncheuk 圓測 (T 1711)
• Bōrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng shū «般若波羅蜜多心經疏» “Commentary on the Sutra of the Essence of Prajñāpāramitā” by Jìngmài 靖邁 (X 522)
• Bōrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng lüèshū «般若波羅蜜多心經略疏» “Brief Commentary on the Sutra of the Essence of Prajñāpāramitā” by Fǎzàng 法藏 (T 1712).

Fǎzàng's commentary is traditionally dated to ca. 702 CE and he died in 712 CE. The other four are not dated, but Kuījī and Woncheuk died in 682 and 696 CE respectively. Jìngmài’s precise dates are unknown but he was roughly contemporary with Xuanzang. Thus they all date from the late seventh or early eighth centuries, and span perhaps twenty years (682–702).

Each commentator notes that the Heart Sutra lacks the expected introduction and conclusion of an authentic sutra. They also note that it consists of extractions from Prajñāpāramitā, which at that point in history seems to have been a reference to Móhē. All four men went ahead and composed their commentaries, but they left some ambiguity. Each of the subsequent developments in the Heart Sutra seems to address this ambiguity.

One approach to securing the authenticity of the text was to create the impression that previous translations existed, notably a translation attributed to the greatest of all the Chinese translators, Kumārajīva, i.e. Móhē bānrě bōluómì dàmíngzhòu jīng «摩訶般若波羅蜜大明呪經» (T 250; hereafter Dàmíngzhòu jīng). Note the title does not include the word xīn 心 "heart". Many of Kumārajiva's translations from the early fifth century are still in use today.

The idea of a Kumārajīva translation and the title it was given (Dàmíngzhòu jīng) were used to make links to another story about an even earlier translation, titled Móhē bānrě bōluómì shénzhòu 摩訶般若波羅蜜神呪. This created the myth of the "lost translation" by Zhī Qiān 支謙 (fl. 3rd century).

Watanabe (1990) thoroughly debunked this story, pointing out that it relies on a two-step process: (1) the false attribution of the shénzhòu text to Zhi Qian—in the catalogue Lìdài sānbǎo jì «歷代三寶紀» (T 2034), compiled by Fèi Chángfáng 費長房 in 598 CE—and (2) the conflation of this shénzhòu text with Dàmíngzhòu jīng. The debunking of this story (some 34 years ago) has not stopped commentators from continuing to use the idea of the "lost translations" to push back the date of translation and assert the validity of the claim that the text is Indian in origin. To be clear, neither Kumārajīva nor Zhi Qian translated the Heart Sutra. This is a false trail, deliberately laid.

In fact, the first evidence of the Dàmíngzhòu jīng, of any kind, is a mention in the Dàtáng nèidiǎn lù «大唐內典錄» "Catalogue of the Inner Canon of the Great Tang" (T 2149), published in 730 CE. As far as I can tell there are no physical texts of Dàmíngzhòu jīng before the eleventh century. The idea that a translation by Kumārajīva could be lost and then rediscovered some three hundred years after his death is extremely far-fetched and scholars have long doubted this attribution, starting with Matsumoto (1932).

That a text produced after Xīn might be retrospectively attributed to Kumārajīva to bolster its perceived authenticity is entirely plausible. It is not merely theoretical to say that Dàmíngzhòu jīng might have been used this way since this is exactly the use that has been made of it in practice. Indeed, we may say that legitimising Xīn is more or less the only use that has been made of the Dàmíngzhòu jīng. In stark contrast to Xīn, there are no commentaries on Dàmíngzhòu jīng, for example, and no prominent inscriptions or famous manuscripts. To my knowledge, Dàmíngzhòu jīng was never transmitted outside of China or translated into another language.

Dàmíngzhòu jīng, then, seems to have been created with the intention of making Xīn appear to be more authentic by pushing back the date of its composition.

2. Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya.

In the historically dominant view, Xīn, the main text used in China, is a translation of this authentic Sanskrit version of the text. What some scholars still call "the Sanskrit original" proves that the Heart Sutra is an authentic Indian Buddhist sutra.

This view is spoiled by a detailed analysis of the text which shows that Hṛd definitely could not have borrowed its copied passages directly from Pañc. Rather the passages were clearly copied into Xīn from Móhē and then translated back into Sanskrit, leaving numerous telltales of the "back-translation" process. This was the gist of Nattier (1992) but has been confirmed numerous times by Huifeng (2014) and yours truly (see especially Attwood 2021b). The Sanskrit text is a translation of the Chinese. As such, it is not a stretch to refer to it as a "Chinese forgery".

It seems that the Sanskrit text was produced at around the same time as Dàmíngzhòu jīng was being created, i.e. in the late seventh or early eighth century. To date, we have no information on who did the translation or when. There is an ambiguous reference to "a Sanskrit text" (fàn běn 梵本) in Woncheuk's commentary (T 1711), though he does not name Hṛd and might have been referring to Pañc, since he says:

The reason there is no introduction or conclusion is that [this text] selects the essential outlines from all the Prajñā texts. It has only the main chapter, without an introduction and conclusion, just as the Guānyīn jīng is not composed of three sections (Adapted from Hyun Choo 2006: 138: emphasis added).

The Guānyīn jīng «觀音經» being originally the twenty-fifth chapter of the Miàofǎ liánhuá jīng «妙法蓮華經» (T 262; Skt. Saddharmapuṇḍarīka Sūtra), where it is titled Guānshìyīn púsà pǔmén pǐn 觀世音菩薩普門品 “Chapter of the Universal Gate of Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva”.

I assume that a manuscript of Hṛd was forged for this purpose, and passed off as an Indian “original” since later copies of a Sanskrit text do exist (such as the famous Hōryūji manuscript). A Sanskrit manuscript is the sine qua non of authenticity for a Buddhist text in China.

Now that it has been revealed to be a back-translation, Hṛd has little philological value. Those existing studies that treat this text as "the Sanskrit original" have to be deprecated. In a forthcoming article in Asian Literature and Translation, I revise Conze's unparsable Sanskrit edition of Hṛd to make it parsable. But even this was perceived as a dead end by one of the reviewers. Study of the Sanskrit text is now quite pointless except as a unique historical artefact from early Tang China.

It is not that rare for a Chinese Buddhist text to turn out to have been composed in Chinese. Examples of this have been well documented, even in antiquity. It is exceedingly rare for a Chinese text to be translated into Sanskrit. A few examples of this have been noted. To my knowledge, the Hṛd is unique for having been successfully passed off as an authentic Indian text.

The single most important sign of the authenticity of a Buddhist text in Tang China was precisely the existence of a Sanskrit manuscript. Once again, Hṛd appears to have been created to fill a perceived gap in the authentication of Xīn.

3. Extended Texts

All of the early commentators on Xīn comment on—and attempt to explain—the absence of the usual introduction and conclusion that we expect in Buddhist sutra (I cited Woncheuk on this above; the others make similar comments). The extended text is an attempt to supply exactly these missing sections and this appears to have happened at least twice.

The first extended text appears to be Pǔbiàn zhì cáng bānrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng «普遍智藏般若波羅蜜多心經» (T 252). This text has an introduction and conclusion that are substantially different from all other extended Heart Sutra texts. The introduction is much longer and has specific details —like the presence of 100,000 bhikṣus and 70,000 bodhisatvas—that are absent in all the other texts. At the same time, the conclusion of Pǔbiàn is much shorter and more perfunctory. It is quite striking that the significant differences here have been almost entirely overlooked by other scholars. For more, though still incomplete, detail see Attwood (2021a).

All the other extended texts are clearly from one source, probably in Sanskrit, though with Tibetan and Chinese translations. The Chinese versions of the extended text (i.e. T 253, 254, 257) appear to be genuine translations from Sanskrit. That said, all the Chinese versions, including Pǔbiàn, retain the text of Xīn and only retranslate the extensions.

Ben Nourse (2010) has noted several variant extended texts in the Dunhuang cache. He suggests that these may be hybrids of standard and extended texts, but an alternative explanation might be that they are additional attempts at creating an extended text. More work needs to be done on the Dunhuang texts.

So for a third time, we see the Heart Sutra being modified to better fit a Chinese preconception about authenticity, in this case, that a real sutra has an introduction and conclusion. Only here, however, do we see two (or possibly more) attempts at the same modification.

Conclusion

I have been engaged in explaining the origins of the Heart Sutra for around twelve years. It already seems like old news to me and I find it frustrating that no one in Buddhist Studies seems willing or able to keep up with my oeuvre. At some point, the textbooks will have to change and I only hope I live long enough to see this. How this affects Buddhists is anyone's guess, but I suspect that they will continue to resist all attempts at a deflationary explanation.

The evolution of the Heart Sutra beyond its origins has been of even less interest to the field (and of no interest to Buddhists). The existence of multiple versions is, of course, well known. However, the dates of these versions have been obscured by presuppositions and this has hampered any attempts to understand how the text evolved. Watanabe (1990) debunked the attributions to Kumārajīva and Zhi Qian, making it clear that Xīn is the earliest version of the text. But his work has largely been ignored (including by me until 2023). The dhāraṇī tells us that Xīn cannot have existed before 654 CE, when Atikūṭa transcribed it in Tuóluóní jí jīng «陀羅尼集經» (T 901). This is our starting point.

As we have seen, Xīn diverged into four other versions—ie. Dàmíngzhòu jīng, Hṛd, Pǔbiàn, and Pañcaviṃśatikā. I have argued that we can see these versions as the result of three processes:

1. One attempt to push back the date of composition
2. One attempt to create a "Sanskrit original"
3. Two attempts to provide the missing introduction and conclusion.

In other words, the evolution of the Heart Sutra was driven by conscious attempts to make the origins of the Heart Sutra fit preconceived notions of authenticity in China. These attempts largely succeeded and the associated ideas were incorporated into the historically dominant narratives of the Heart Sutra as an ancient Indian sutra text.

What my work shows is that the Heart Sutra was never ancient, Indian, or a sutra. It was created in the mid-seventh century, in China, and is modelled on a chāo jīng 抄經 "digest text" (a Chinese genre of Buddhist text). And this created anxieties related to authenticity that were addressed in a variety of ways.

I hope that it is becoming clear to my readers that the historically dominant narrative, the myth of the Heart Sutra, is largely a fiction, created quite consciously (thought without much coordination) by Chinese Buddhists. If the Heart Sutra had been merely another ancient Indian sutra, it would have been quite prosaic, notable only for its popularity in East Asia. The idea that it was composed in China and deliberately (and successfully) passed off as an ancient Indian sutra is far more interesting (even a little exciting for a textual scholar).

While I am still not an expert in Chinese Buddhist texts, if I am right about this, it makes the Heart Sutra unique amongst Buddhist texts. Moreover, I think I am right because my approach has a great deal more explanatory power than the historically dominant narratives: expanding on existing work, I have explained the origins of the text in detail. I hope this essay shows that my approach can also explain subsequent developments in the Heart Sutra as well.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, Jayarava. (2021a). "Preliminary Notes on the Extended Heart Sutra in Chinese." Asian Literature and Translation 8(1): 63–85. DOI: http://doi.org/10.18573/alt.53

——. (2021b). “The Chinese Origins of the Heart Sutra Revisited: A Comparative Analysis of the Chinese and Sanskrit Texts.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 44: 13–52.

Huifeng. (2014). "Apocryphal Treatment for Conze’s Heart Problems: Non-attainment, Apprehension, and Mental Hanging in the Prajñāpāramitā Hṛdaya." Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies 6: 72-105.

Hyun Choo, B. (2006). "An English Translation of the Banya paramilda simgyeong chan: Wonch’uk’s Commentary on the Heart Sūtra (Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya-sūtra)." International Journal of Buddhist Thought & Culture 6: 121-205.

Kotyk, Jeffrey. (2019). ‘Chinese State and Buddhist Historical Sources on Xuanzang: Historicity and the Daci’en si sanzang fashi zhuan 大慈恩寺三藏法師傳’. T’oung Pao 105(5-6): 513–544. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/15685322-10556P01

Li, Rongxi (1995). A Biography of the Tripiṭaka Master of the Great Ci’en Monastery of the Great Tang Dynasty. Berkeley, CA.: Numata Centre of Buddhist Translation and Research.

Matsumoto, Tokumyo. (1932). Die Prajñāpāramitā Literatur. Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat zu Bonn.

Nattier, Jan (1992). "The Heart Sūtra: a Chinese apocryphal text?" Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 15 (2): 153-223.

Nourse, Benjamin. (2010) "The Heart Sutra at Dunhuang." Paper presented at the North American Graduate Students Conference on Buddhist Studies. Toronto, Canada. April 10, 2010.

Watanabe, Shōgo. (1990). “Móhē bānrě bōluómì shénzhòu jīng and Móhē bānrě bōluómì dàmíngzhòu jīng, As Seen in the Sutra Catalogues.” Indogaku Bukkyōgaku Kenkyū 39-1: 54–58. [= 渡辺章悟. 1990. 「経録からみた『摩訶般若波羅蜜神呪経』と『摩訶般若波羅蜜大明呪経』」印度学仏教学研究 39-1: 54–58.]

Zacchetti, Stefano. (2005) In Praise of the Light: A Critical Synoptic Edition with an Annotated Translation of Chapters 1-3 of Dharmarakṣa’s Guang zan jing, Being the Earliest Chinese Translation of the Larger Prajñāpāramitā. (Bibliotheca Philologica et Philosophica Buddhica, 8). Tokyo: The International Research Institute of Advanced Buddhology, Soka University.

We Need to Talk About Utilitarianism

Although there is some debate in universities over different approaches to ethics, the fact is that those of us living in developed societies have been steeped in utilitarianism all our lives and this has been the case for generations. Utilitarian ideas have dominated the moral landscape since the late 19th Century. And utilitarianism was developed by the early liberals. Utilitarianism is the moral philosophy of socio-economic liberalism. Economic liberals believe that trade will maximise utility without any help and thus morality in the abstract. They just want to do business and remove barriers to doing business (and this tells us who they are). Social liberals believe that societies must intervene and take action to ensure maximised utility and tend to have a more concrete and pragmatic approach. Liberals are not interested in equality of outcome, although social liberals pursue equality of opportunity. Economic liberals are ready to abdicate all decisions to the marketplace and financial necessity (including problems like global warming).

When I set out to describe liberalism, I noted that in its time it was a radical and progressive response to centuries of unquestioned absolutist rule. Tyranny, not just over the body, but also over the mind. Thomas Hobbes was a 17th Century transitional figure in that he raised questions about when citizens owe allegiance to a king. Soon, however, John Locke was asserting that liberty was innate in a person and not something that a king or slaver could grant, they could only take it away. However, it is important to keep in mind that classical liberals were all willing to take liberty away from some classes of people. John Locke argued for enslaving prisoners of war and for the expropriation of land and resources from first nation Americans. J. S. Mill campaigned for women's suffrage, but also for continued British rule in India. Thomas Jefferson argued against slavery but personally owned hundreds of slaves throughout his life.

However flawed the early articulators may have been, the concept of individual liberty took hold and fired up revolutionary fervor in France and the USA. It also captured the imaginations of the British intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie created by the Industrial Revolution. This, in turn, led to the assertion of individual liberty as a social, moral, and legal principle. At first, this really only applied to the elite: women, for example, were initially excluded enmasse along with people of colour.  Indeed, the only group that were seen as capable of exercising liberty were landowners, the very people who (literally) enslaved and exploited everyone else. Gradually, a new breed of liberal emerged that wanted to universalise liberty and to use the apparatus of the state to help individuals achieve liberty where it had been denied to them. New or social liberalism happened earlier in the UK than in the USA where exclusionary classical liberalism was and is a much greater force.

The central irony, then, of classical liberalism was its espousal of individual liberty, while denying liberty to whole classes of people. The neoclassical liberals, the ones who espouse an extreme form of economic liberalism, have that same exclusionary mindset. They are not quite the same as libertarians whose attitude is every man for himself. Rather, the economic liberals seek to appropriate and consolidate wealth and power, which they rationalise with a combination of twisted Darwinism and utilitarianism.

Having pulled down the idols of absolutist rule by priests and kings, however, created a whole new set of problems. This essay is about the liberal response to this change and why liberalism goes about it all wrong.

The Better Angels Argument
 

There will be readers already wanting to argue, along the same lines as Steven Pinker, that liberalism has in fact been very successful: people have more prosperity, freedom, and peace than ever before. I've already made the point that there is liberalism and liberalism. Classical liberalism created a vast amount of wealth but distributed it very unevenly. They moved a predominantly agrarian workforce into urban/manufacturing jobs, and thence into service industries, but job security and working conditions peaked in the 1970s. Since then uncertainty has crept back into work in the richest countries. There has been a decline in overall poverty, but this is largely because the elite are  exporting jobs to poor countries and grooming the world's poor to be the consumers of tomorrow.

It is doubtful that consumerism really does improve anyone's life. The major long term cost of consumerism is climate and ecological breakdown. No matter the positive impact that modern economic liberalism has had, it is about to be wiped out by climate change. We are already seeing the rise in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, both droughts and floods. We really don't know what is going to happen as we continue to heat the earth's atmosphere, but we can safely say that it won't been good for the majority of humanity (or non-human species). We are also seeing a collapse in the flying (i.e. pollinating) insect population across Europe. Economic liberalism is not the better angel of our nature. In all likelihood it has killed us via pollution, extreme weather, sea-level rise, and mass extinction.

The ideas at the heart of liberalism, especially "reason" and "self-interest" have led us to existential crises of unimaginable scope and scale. In retrospect our behaviour has been irrational and suicidal.

Yes, of course, classical liberalism has promoted trade between nations making war less likely. Pinker is right about that. But the staggering cost of this is now apparent. Even in the short term, government has been captured by wealthy special interest groups. Based on research they helped to fund, oil companies are redesigning their offshore rigs to cope with massive sea level rise, while at the same time lobbying governments to prevent effective responses to climate change by undermining the credibility of that same science. Worse, we have been fooled this way before, by Big Tobacco, who took the same approach in the mid-20th Century. But also by Big Finance leading up to the 2008 global financial crisis. The "big lie" is a term coined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf (1925) to explain how Germany became Europe's whipping boy. Hitler's idea was developed as an active PR strategy by his PR advisor Joseph Goebbels. And now for Big Business, and politicians the big lie is part of their stock in trade.

It is social liberalism, rather than economic liberalism that has done more for expanding enfranchisement, reducing slavery, objecting to wars, and generally making people free. And which is (belatedly) coming around to trying to prevent and mitigate climate and ecological breakdown.


Political Divisions

Social and economic liberals are to some extent at odds over the role of the state in society. Economic liberals want to minimise the scope and power of the state to allow for business people to make unrestricted profits. Social liberals are willing to accept a larger scope for the state in order to give the poor a hand up (note this is not a hand out). It is this last point that distinguishes social liberals from socialists.

A social liberal wants the individual to prosper. They see that systems sometimes place barriers in the way of individuals and are willing to use the power of the state to level the playing field. Classic responses to systemic inequality are state funded and standardised education. But even education is tailored to finding a job and being a productive member of society. For liberals, the ideal is the self-made person, especially if they have come from humble beginnings. Someone who worked hard and overcame obstacles to become a success in material terms. It's no coincidence that the American Dream is couched in these terms.

Socialists, by contrast, do not see progress in terms of the progress of individuals. Progress is really only progress if everyone benefits equally. Socialists want not (only) equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome. They are more inclined to solve inequality by actively redistributing wealth towards the poor and using the state apparatus to inhibit wealth accumulation. The socialist ideal is more about making a contribution towards the flourishing of the nation, helping people who cannot help themselves.

Despite the ongoing use of the terms, modern politics is not about left-wing and right-wing any more. It is about the clash between economic (classical) liberals and social (new) liberals, i.e., between the right and the centre-right. Actual socialists are rare in Europe these days and absent in the USA. President Trump is centre-right in his economic policies (trade barriers to "protect" American workers are a classic social liberal policy). But he is strongly authoritarian, nationalistic, and racist, which is falsely attributed to the far right, but is in fact independent of the left/right access.

Utilitarianism encapsulates some of the ideals of liberalism, mostly classical/economic liberalism. It prioritises the individual and undervalues context, particularly the social nature of humanity. Utilitarianism was framed by the mercantile class and thus expresses the ideals of economic liberalism as though they are self-evident truths. Like liberalism, it was formulated by members of the educated elite who were (unconsciously) seeking justification for their behaviour on the world stage, i.e. brutal and rapacious empire.

How did we get to this point?

The Collapse of Idols

One of the most important roles of the ancient kings and prophets was as law givers and moral arbiters: The Code of Hammurabi, the Laws of Moses, the Dharma of Manu, the Annalects of Confucius, and dozens of others. And one of the recurring anxieties of history (down to the present) is that in the absence of obedience to such laws human beings would simply run amok. In the Western tradition this anxiety is manifested in Thomas Hobbes' highly influential book Leviathan. As I noted (On Liberty and Liberalism), Hobbes lived through a time of war and socio-political turmoil and as a result described the natural state of people as war. Hobbes' opinion that the life of man in the absence of a tyrant to rule over them was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". As a result he argued that only a strong authoritarian leader (the eponymous Leviathan) could impose order and civility on us.

Unfortunately, this view became quite widespread amongst Enlightenment intellectuals. They saw themselves as a uniquely civilised elite surrounded by a sea of barbarians (the rest of us). They probably read too much idealised Roman history and utopian fiction. They seem also to have been infected with a secular version of the "God's chosen people" myth. In particular, the classical liberals saw themselves as having risen above the hoi polloi. They saw themselves as establishing a new kind of rational social order, with themselves at the apex, that would displace the hereditary aristocracy and the Church.

However, they also saw themselves as facing exactly the same problems: how to protect the wealth and justify the power gained through exploitation; how to subdue and control the barbarians outside the gates and avoid the fate of the Roman Empire. The minds of the elite have been obsessed with this ever since. So on one hand they were wrestling with the problem of the collapse of traditional authority and on the other they were very much interested in taking over, exploiting, and expanding that authority. All they needed was some kind of justification that the masses would accept.

The New Idols

One of the products of the early successes of the Enlightenment was hubris. Natural philosophers or scientists as they came to be known, promoted the idea that the universe was a gigantic complex mechanism and that everything could be understood. At this point they did not know that the visible stars are part of a galaxy, or that it was one of approximately two trillion such galaxies, or that all the galaxies are flying apart at an accelerating rate. They were only just starting to get clues that matter could be divided and subdivided into very much smaller units.

The mechanistic universe followed predictable patterns and was governed by simple laws: F=ma, V=IR, 2H₂+O₂→2H₂O and so on. French philosopher Auguste Comte envisaged an anthropocentric hierarchy of such laws. Physical laws would govern matter at the lowest scale and give rise to chemistry. Chemical laws would govern biology. Biological laws would govern the functions of minds, and laws of the mind would govern how societies function. This idea was taken up and developed by none other than J. S. Mill, hero of Liberalism and also one of the first generation of Emergentists. Mill was the first to describe matter as having emergent properties.

The idea here is that the world is governed by natural laws. And the key feature of such laws is that they don't require human intervention; they are universal, impersonal, and follow logical patterns that can be apprehended through the use of reason. Anyone can discover the natural laws for themselves, though in the myth only the elite had the required education and intelligence (women were still excluded from the elite). These laws became the new idols, and those who could discover them the new priests. The Copernican revolution was accompanied by a social revolution.

Many of the natural laws we take for granted were discovered by the classical liberals and their friends. The individual who could discern the law was at the heart of this new idolatry; he was Nietzsche's übermensch. Various threads of modernist thought exploited the new emerging dynamic giving rise to some new archetypes, or at least new manifestations of the what Nietzsche called Apollonian and Dionysian archetype. Most obviously "the scientist" discerns laws through observing nature and applying reason and logic; and "the artist" lives in contact with nature and discerns deeper truths through paying attention to their own subjectivity and through self-expression. Even the protestant plays the game, observing a personal relationship with god and allowing that to guide their actions. Of course, Luthor predates Hobbes by about 150 years, but arguably the loosening of the mental shackles imposed by the Catholic Church opened the way to other changes that loosened the shackles imposed by kings; and thus to the deposing of both.

We are not all as pessimistic as Hobbes. Still, being social animals, humans intuit that their lives must be governed by someone and many believe that they could be that person. Replacing the all powerful law givers with the idea of natural laws was a genuine breakthrough. Potentially, it shifted the power and authority to an abstract, but still natural, third party outside the group. In the early days, it seemed that natural laws would resolve all of our differences and conflicts. Heady stuff.

Of course this was hubris and it did not pan out as the Enlightenment figures hoped it would. There are limits to knowledge, some of which may turn out to be absolute. And the natural laws that might govern our lives, the social analogues of the formulas of physics and chemistry never really emerged. The increasing complexity inherent in the hierarchy of sciences meant that the Enlightenment project floundered and was eventually rejigged into modern science with its emphasis on uncertainty, and statistics, and our ongoing failure to understand quantum mechanics or to reconcile QM with relativity. The early promise of materialism faltered and it fell by the wayside.

What did happen was a swindle: the ideology of liberalism was passed off as a natural law.

With the classical liberal ideas of the individual (i.e. the individual, wealthy, educated, white man) as the chosen one of the new order and their individual liberty (from the oppression of the masses) as the sine qua non, came the emergence of a new form of morality, i.e., the Utilitarianism of J. S. Mill and Adam Smith. The pursuit of happiness was enshrined in the US constitution as a fundamental right, though it took some time until they abolish slavery and longer still to enfranchise women and the descendents of former slaves. Utilitarianism is framed in universal terms, but its founders still saw humanity in Hobbesian terms (i.e., in need of a good tyrant). In particular, the expansion of European imperialism shifted the narrative from a God-given right to rule over man and beast towards naturalistic arguments about survival of the fittest and the lack of fitness of some people to rule over themselves.

Rational Self-interest

If you hold individual liberty to be an inalienable right and also that there are almost no justifications for infringing that right (as did Locke and Mill), then there is really only one viable moral arbiter: each individual must decide for themselves how to behave. This is protestantism reductio ad absurdum. But when human nature is vicious, aggressive, and acquisitive something ought to stand in the way of one human simply killing another and taking their stuff.

The early liberals believed that men, and more especially educated white men like themselves, were in a position to rise above (Hobbesian) human nature through the use of reason and become their own moral arbiters. They partly did this by sending boys to private schools where education in the classics combined with beatings, humiliation, and peer pressure either shaped them into members of the elite or broke them. This is still the preferred route for the children of the elite, though methods have changed somewhat. Private school boys (and now girls) subtly learn that they are better than the masses and destined to be a limb of the modern polypod Leviathan, i.e., the State. Heads of the UK state are once again old Etonians as they were before social liberalism opened the door to common people like Margaret Thatcher.

As we have seen, the early liberals adhered to a view of reason as:

"a specific conscious mental process by which we apply logic to problems and arrive at knowledge of the truth, which then guides our decisions." (We Need to Talk About Reason)

If a citizen could be persuaded by reasoned arguments to follow some basically civilising prohibitions on barbaric behaviour (like murder and stealing), then there was really no need for anyone else to get involved. Lawful citizens ought to be free to go about their lawful business (the word "business" in this cliche is no accident). But this reveals another problem created by the destruction of the pre-modern idols. In religion there is a point to being obedient, i.e., salvation. If salvation is off the table, what is the motivation for being lawful?

In moving away from the lists of banned or taboo actions typical of religious morality, utilitarian liberals had a problem. What was the point of behaving yourself? Their fixation on the individual strictly limited the possible answers to this question. In the end, the best they could come up with was the lame idea that being good led to happiness.

“Happiness is the sole end of human action, and the promotion of it the test by which to judge of all human conduct” (J. S. Mill. Utilitarianism, X: 237).

For any individual, a moral life will consist of maximising happy outcomes; while for a society, morality becomes the greatest happiness for the greatest number. This is known as the greatest happiness principle. It is just as banal as it sounds. I'm sure most people think happiness is important, even if we do not agree that it is the "sole end" of human action. The founding fathers of America placed the pursuit of happiness alongside life and liberty as fundamental rights that all men have. But what exactly is happiness? In general, and against the grain of millennia of religious thinking, utilitarians argued that happiness is pleasure.

You know you are in the twilight zone when people who argue that humans are rational and make rational decisions at the same time argue that the sole end of human activity is an emotion and that the promotion of an emotion is the test of whether our rational decisions have been a success.

Any fan of Star Trek (original series) can see this contradiction in the character of Commander Spock, who consistently denies having any emotions although, because he is half human, he sometimes does display emotions to his acute embarrassment. The obvious question is raised from time to time. Why does Spock show preferences at all? It is, he claims, because it is logical. But what kind of logic is he talking about? Deductive? Inductive? Abductive? How can these guide us to, say, a moral decision? Doesn't it all depend on what we believe in the first place. And as Michael Taft says, "a belief is an emotion about an idea." Of course the TV show plays on the contradictions in Spock. His colleagues are constantly catching him out expressing and relying on emotions and teasing him about it. At which point he always becomes visibly annoyed. Another emotion. Later Star Trek writers took the idea of an emotionless man ever further in the form of Commander Data (who was more obviously crippled by his lack of emotions). But let us return to the main theme of utilitarianism.

Jeremy Bentham stated the happiness = pleasure argument quite crudely but, starting with J. S. Mill, utilitarians have refined the idea. Mill, for example, argued that mere quantity of pleasure it stimulated could not account for the goodness of an action. Indeed, Bentham's theory sounds like a justification of hedonism rather than a moral doctrine. Mill introduced a dimension of the quality of pleasure, arguing that some pleasures are better than others. In a sense Mill was just reflecting the elitism of his day which allowed the refined hedonism of the ruling classes, but frowned on and repressed the simple pleasures of the working classes. This class discrimination persists in the UK despite the muddling of the classes. Middle class British people, especially, like to mock both the elite and the workers. They are our satirists, though they often seem to target (other) celebrities rather than politicians. They are educated enough to understand the exercise of power, but excluded from wielding it, and contemptuous of those who are compelled by it (including themselves).

In the manner of philosophers, some responded that if there is a distinction in the quality of the pleasure then it implies something other than pleasure is involved: some being for this other thing (whatever it was) and some being against it. And so on. Philosophers are trained to argue without any sense of needing to make a contribution to knowledge: the ultimate liberal art.

A central plank in the economic theory associated with classical liberalism, especially associated with Adam Smith and his interpreters, is that "markets" create an invisible hand that steers the economy. The market here is an abstraction from market places. The idea of the market is attractive because it is presented in the form of a natural law; one that can order our lives for us, maximising utility and thus happiness. Markets also ensure fairness (which is why Alan Greenspan was reluctant to prosecute white collar criminals in the finance industry).

Smith's idea of the market is based on a crude understanding of supply and demand, where supply and demand is presented as a "law" (it really is not a "law"). In this view humans only make rational, self-interested decisions; humans are motivated to maximise their utility (i.e. pleasure) through their participation in the economic system. In the myth of supply and demand, a producer responds to demand by making more or less of their product. The market informs the producer about the level of demand via the price that people are willing to pay. And knowing the price of a commodity is tacitly equated to sufficient knowledge to operate in the marketplace rationally. When the cost of production exceeds the price people are willing to pay, production will fall. None of which is true!

By the mid 1970s (at the latest) mathematicians had shown that supply and demand was not, and could not be, lawful in that simplistic sense. Supply and demand, even on the micro scale, does not work (the reasons for this are spelled out in detail in Steve Keen's book Debunking Economics). What is worse, in order to fit this micro idea to the macro economy, i.e. the economy of a state considered as a whole, economists have had to make a series of assumptions, each of which assumes that the previous assumption is true. A macro economy typically consists of thousands if not millions of producers and products, multiple levels of suppliers, and millions of consumers, and none of it following the idealised supply and demand law. In order to make the equations of macro-economics work, the economist assumes that an economy consists of one producer selling one product directly to one consumer.

Philosophy is Bunk

Let's cut short all this frivolous philosophising and call bullshit on utilitarianism. It might still dominate our society, but utilitarianism is not true. Not only have Buddhists been saying so for 2500 odd years but the Positive Psychology movement have confirmed it though empiricism: the pursuit of pleasure does not lead to happiness. And it is not hard to see why.

If I have one digestive biscuit with a cup of tea that is pleasant. A second biscuit may still be pleasurable, but if I keep eating at some point the same combination of texture and sweetness becomes unpleasant, no matter how much tea I wash it down with. It is quite possible to make oneself sick from eating too many biscuits: pleasure turns to nausea. Any addict will tell you that as you become accustomed to a certain level of stimulation it normalises. To get pleasure from it, you either need more of it or the same amount more often. As many experimental psychologists have attested, we rapidly become habituated to pleasurable sensations so that there is a diminishing return from the simple minded pursuit of pleasure. Even the more sophisticated hierarchies of pleasures are bunk.

But more than this, there is the existential truth that every experience ends, and usually quite quickly, because it is dependent on attention, and attention wanders. No matter how much you enjoy an orgasm, it is short lived and soon over and you are back to casting about for some other source of pleasure. The cessation of pleasure itself is unpleasant. If pleasure is happiness then no one can ever be truly happy.

It is difficult for a proponent of self-interest to formulate any coherent moral doctrine since morality is about how we treat other people. Anyone who treats other people only according to their own best interests would in practice be regarded as monstrous rather than moral. Societies very often shun selfish people. Morality is relational or it is meaningless. Even consequentialist or virtue ethics have to define what counts as good/bad in relation to some standard and that standard has to be relational.

Morality is Relational

Fortunately, we don't have to waste too much time on utilitarianism: the pursuit of pleasure makes us unhappy and the pursuit of self-interest makes both us and other people unhappy. At this point we could ask two questions: Firstly, is there a better definition of happiness that could rescue utilitarianism? Secondly, is there a better basis for morality. Ultimately, the answers these questions are "no" and "yes", but I think it's interesting to dwell on the first question a little and here Buddhism has a small contribution to make.

What makes us happy?

Assuming that a human being has food, water, and shelter, what makes us happy is the company of other humans (and some domesticated animals). This is far and away the most important facet of wellbeing. We are social animals and we are happy when we are securely embedded in our social group. In general, our well-being is promoted by sublimating our own needs to serve the group.

Primate social groups are not utopian, and especially they are not a socialist utopia. Primate groups are all hierarchical and all primate groups are violent compared to human groups. They are held together by empathy and a keen sense of reciprocity (including the fear of violent retribution), but there are also some individuals who are well liked, who form coalitions to dominate the group although usually in a narrow sense. An alpha male chimp has primacy when it comes to mating with receptive females, but not in much else. He's also expected to lead the charge against leopards, get involved in all intra-group conflicts (on the side of the weaker party), and has to spend much more of his time grooming other chimps than any member of the group.

Violence also plays a part in primate social hierarchies. Having members of the group who are big enough, strong enough, and aggressive enough to protect the group from predators like leopards, and who defend the territory in which they feed against neighbouring groups, requires social mechanisms to manage that capacity when it is not needed. And thus Frans de Waal has observed older male chimps intervening to prevent conflicts between others, defusing tension through physical contact and grooming. When things do get out of hand, the alpha male is often the one consoling the injured party and reintegrating them into the group. In Bonobos, females play the same role. Conflict cannot simply go on occuring because it breaks down the bonds that hold the group together and undermines the fitness of the group to survive.

So on one level what makes us happy is to be part of a healthy social group. Of course we are also individuals with individual goals. The anonymity afforded by living in groups of tens of thousands and even millions, gives us much more scope for individuality than living in a traditional village of ca. 150 people. We only share minimal mutual obligations with strangers and even if our actions are scrutinised there may be few consequences for transgressive behaviour compared to a more traditional small-scale setting. However, there is another answer to this question that we should consider.

Ego Dissolution

I cannot speak to this from personal experience, but there is a load of anecdote and an increasing amount of actual evidence that the experience of ego-dissolution opens up the possibility of a much deeper sense of satisfaction and well-being. Indian meditation techniques have been inducing ego-dissolution for millennia, as has the use of psychedelic drugs. Importantly, ego-dissolution is often accompanied by a greater sense of interconnectedness. It can be experienced, for example, as a weakening of the boundaries between one's body and the outside world; or as a sense of oneness; or of merging into a totality. How it is interpreted is partly determined by one's cultural conditioning.

Transcending the sense of being an individual seems to be a more satisfying state. Self-interest cannot have much meaning for someone who does not organise their experience around a sense of self.

There is an argument, still largely doctrinal, that it is the ego which seeks to take ownership of experience that causes unhappiness. Even a temporary experience of ego-dissolution opens up the possibility of being in the world without the grasping after experience that causes dissatisfaction. Ordinary experiences, not even pleasurable experiences, become more satisfying and effortlessly so.

However, it is doubtful whether ego dissolution is a realistic possibility for the general populace. The people having this shift in perception have always been a tiny minority.

The Angels of Our Nature

A new approach emerges from evolutionary perspectives on the ethology of social animals. I have written several long essays on this subject, beginning with The Evolution of Morality. This view argues that what we call morality is an emergent feature of the way social mammals, particularly social primates, live.

As Frans de Waal has noted, we share the same body plan and have all the same internal organs, including the endocrine system, as other mammals, so it would be weird if we did not experience the same emotions. Importantly, we seem to have at least two characteristics in common with other social mammals: the ability to experience empathy and a sense of reciprocity.

Empathy operates on many levels, the most basic of which is emotional contagion. When a monkey sees an approaching predators and gives a warning cry, the sound of the cry stimulates fear in the whole colony and sets them all in motion away from the threat. But at its most sophisticated level empathy allows us to use observations of the facial expressions, posture, and gestures of other group members to internally model—and thus experience—the internal states of other individuals. We do this with individuals that we interact with, but we can also understand interactions between other pairs or groups of individuals. We not only know the disposition of a given individual, but we know how they feel about different members of the group. This is vital for the functioning of the social group.

Reciprocity is the application of this ability to know the minds of the rest of our group to keeping track of the contributions the group have all made to each other. The levels of mutual grooming between individuals are important to chimps for example. If everyone sees Steve and Dave grooming each other a lot, then we can safely assume that the two of them will stick together in a fight. So if I want to pick a fight with Steve, I need to wait until Dave is otherwise engaged. But equally, if I'm angling to be alpha, then I know that if I groom one of the pair, the other might also join my coalition.

In my account of the evolutionary origins of morality, I argued that, far from being selfish, social mammals must err on the side of generosity. We can think of reciprocity as a network of feedback loops. I share with you and you share with me; I withhold from you and you withhold from me. If there is no bias towards generosity the second, negative feedback loop would quickly reduce cooperation to zero, whereas social mammals are highly prosocial and highly cooperative.

What's more, we also know from primate ethology and from anthropology that societies often punish selfishness. Jared Diamond recounts the story of a fisherman who one day decided that he wasn't going to share his catch. Not only did the community respond very negatively, he got a reputation for being stingy and this continued to affect him for a long time afterwards. Reputation with respect to meeting mutual obligations within a social group is very important. After all, we evolved to be prosocial in order to better survive.

This approach to morality comes under the heading deontology: it concerns right, duties, and obligations. Sometimes deontology is caricatured as "rule following", but this is an over-simplification. We can still think of morality in terms of consequences (as the utilitarians did) but we understand that desirable and undesirable consequences are relative to our mutual obligations. Similarly, this does not prevent us from seeing morality as a matter of virtues, as long as we understand a virtue is defined in terms of mutual obligations. Generosity is a common virtue, for example, and it is a virtue because it plays a vital role in creating and maintaining mutual obligations.

One might even argue that this view is also consistent with a particularist account of morality - i.e. one in which there are no moral rules and we take each situation as it comes. It is true of this deontological approach to morality that rules may not be easy to articulate or apply because our commitment to mutual obligation can vary from group member to group member. We tend to have one set of rules for family and another for more distant group members. In other primate groups, familial relations are also important, though like us one or other sex will often leave home at sexual maturity and join another community (male chimps and female bonobos).

Cities and Megacities

As I have already observed, the limitation of this account of morality as evolved and based on mutual obligation is that the bulk of human now live in urban settings in which we are surrounded by, and mainly interact with, strangers with who we may have little or no sense of mutual obligation. According to Robin Dunbar's research on social groups and neocortex-to-brain volume ratios there is a physical limit to how many relationships of mutual obligation we can keep track of. Chimps live in groups of 30 - 50 while, other things being equal, humans tend to live in groups of around 150. But we also form looser arrangements with ca 500, 1500, 5000, and so on.

In a group of up to 150 we have a pretty good idea of the overall structure of mutual obligations amongst the group: we know who are friends or enemies or lovers; who is related to whom and how; we know who to ask for help; and we know who is where in the social hierarchy. And so on. Beyond this we begin to take membership on trust. We rely more on external emblems of membership such as personal adornment; this allows us to expand our circle of trust that an individual will be likely to meet their obligation to us.

If I am from the large tribe who paint their faces with red ochre and I meet a stranger whose face is painted with red ochre I can assume that they will be likely to interpret mutual obligations in the same way that I do. I don't have to worry too much about a false flag operation, because we kill any outsider who attempts to adopt our emblems and we have subtle ways of assuring ourselves of the authenticity of membership (shibboleths). Mutual membership of a large tribe means we will probably speak the same language and have the same worldview. I can trust this person and make agreements with them with some assurance that they won't break the agreement. This is still a relatively small world. 

Beyond this, when dealing with strangers we don't automatically have a relationship of mutual obligations. One of the main functions of governments (of all stripes) is the enforcement of contracts between strangers. And this brings us back to the need for laws that govern our behaviour. We need laws to government behaviour but not because Hobbes was right and our natural state is war. Rather, we may say that, in social primates, mutual obligation is only strongly experienced within one's  social group at the 150 layer. 

In a modern state ,we grow up understanding that we have a mutual obligation to the state. We obey laws and pay our taxes and, in return, the state attempts to create an environment that is safe and stable, and the state provides certain services. Importantly, the state seeks to balance the rights and duties of players who have differing amounts of power to prevent the exploitation of the weak (this is the classic alpha-primate role): So the state legislates the rights and duties of buyer and seller, landlord and tenant, employer and employee, and so on. Each state may have a different take on these rights and duties and they may change over time, but the role is the same. 

Philosophers like to use the fact that laws and conventions vary in different societies and states to argue against seeing morality in a unified way. Arguments for moral relativism are not tenable when we look at the structure and function of laws. Yes, to some extent laws are arbitrary and changeable, but they always serve the same functions within the society. It is a classic case of emergent properties in which the higher level (human society) is constrained by not determined by the lower level (primate ethology). By analogy, just because there are many different types of boat, does not mean that boats don't float. 

However, we may say that, under utilitarianism as an expression of economic liberalism and mercantilism, the rights of the rich and powerful tend to be protected ahead of the poor and vulnerable. I am still sometimes shocked at the difference in presumptions in New Zealand where I grew up, and in the United Kingdom where I live. The presumption in favour of landlords and employers, for example, is much stronger in the UK. Although to be fair, under the influence of neoliberalism this balance shifted in my time in New Zealand as well.

One of the features of the modern world is that morality is linked to socio-economic status in the minds of the ruling classes. To be wealthy is held to indicate superior moral qualities and, on the contrary, to be poor or without work is to be considered morally inferior. These days accepting state assistance when out of work requires that one almost becomes a ward of the state. The state undertakes to oversee your redemption in the form of returning to productive work. And to do this it uses a mixture of rewards, punishments, and psychological "nudges", including a barrage of press releases from government departments on the moral qualities of those individuals who accept state help. This is social liberalism in operation: paternalistically trying to make you into an ideal individual. 

Conclusion

Utilitarianism is ubiquitous as a moral theory across the English-speaking world. And yet the assumptions behind it are demonstrably false, the goals of it known to be unreachable, and the methods it proposes do not lead to the stated goals. Utilitarianism was supposedly the Enlightenment rationalism contribution to moral theory but it turns out to be completely irrational.

It's not that at some point people abandoned irrational religion and dedicated their lives to rational pursuits. As we've seen, the classical notion of reason that the moral theorising of Bentham, Mill, and Smith was based on was a fantasy. Many intellectuals did abandon religion, and atheism is now the standard position for English speaking intelligentsia, but there is nothing rational about the beliefs that they now profess with respect to morality. This is nowhere more apparent than in a BBC radio 4 programme called The Moral Maze in which the same group of opinionated neoclassical liberal intellectuals argue with invited guests about the "morality" of some situation. Moral principles are never articulated, but utilitarianism is assumed through out. The panellists adopt a position of superiority to their (often expert) guests and devise arguments against everything that is said. No wonder morality becomes a maze for the rest of us.

Etiquette

One problem is that not all social rules are moral rules. As Sangharakshita pointed out many years ago, for example, most of the rules in the Theravāda Vinaya have no moral significance at all and are merely a matter of etiquette. In her book, Watching the English, anthropologist, Kate Fox, described the complex rules for queuing to buy a drink in an English pub. These are significantly different from queuing in other contexts. Generally speaking the English take queuing very seriously so doing it wrong can result in verbally expressed disapproval. Such mutually agreed rules of conduct—etiquette—both help to establish reasonable expectations and to identify strangers. One of the reasons we may be stressed by immigrants is that they don't--they have not internalised our etiquette (as an immigrant I still struggle with this and cause stress for the locals, sometimes with a certain amount of delight on my part).

Why do we separate out moral rules and etiquette? Well, largely because of religion. Moral rules are those which relate to soteriology. Since atheists have abandoned the notion of soteriology, why have we not abandoned discussion of morals? Why do some decisions have moral connotations and others not. Why, for example, does editing a child's genome using the CRISPR/Cas9 technology seem to be a moral issue, but using food to calm a child down (leading to obesity and the attendant health problems) not seem to be? One is a matter of public debate and the other a matter of personal choice. Again I think answers to such questions can be found in primate ethology. There seem to be rules of human conduct that are non-arbitrary and ubiquitous across human groups (such as killing a member of the group) some that are arbitrary and vary with limit. And I think the deciding factor is the effect on the overall health of the group.


Alternatives?

The question, then, is whether there is any alternative to the moral maze created by treating liberalism in its various forms as a natural law and to utilitarianism as one expression of this. Or does this inevitably lead to objectionable moral relativism? I've hinted that I believe that primate ethology and a structuralist approach offer us some relief. In this view, despite the plethora of human societies each with its own rules, we can see the purpose of having such rules as being shared at some level of structure. As long as the rules accomplish the deeper purpose of binding the group and enabling cooperation it does not matter what form those rules take at a higher level of organisation. Indeed, to some extent the forms that human societies take are constrained by our underlying membership of the set of social primates. And these constraints have some objective basis, i.e. empathy and reciprocity. 

In my next essay in this "We need to talk about" series, I'm going to revisit this whole topic from the point of view of objective morality. It is often said that science cannot tell us how to behave, but I think this is now self-evidently inaccurate. Science, particularly the kind of Darwinian evolution articulated by Lynn Margulis, has been very influential on how I see morality, as has the primate ethology of Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal. Science disproves the validity of utilitarianism as a good basis for morality. Evolution and ethology have opened up a whole new way of thinking about what morality is, how we evolved to be moral, and what forms morality can or should take in human societies at different levels of organisation (as well as informing us as to the nature of those levels).

~~oOo~~

See also: Cooperation with high status individuals may increase one's own status https://phys.org/news/2019-08-cooperation-high-status-individuals.html

"The finding that status depends on cooperation provides insight into why human societies, particularly small-scale societies like the Tsimane, are relatively egalitarian compared to other primates," says von Rueden, joint lead author of the study. "Humans allocate status based on the benefits we can provide to others, often more than on the costs we can inflict. This is in part because humans evolved greater interdependence, relying on each other for learning skills, producing food, engaging in mutual defense and raising offspring."

Setting Ourselves Apart

Nihang Sikh

In this essay I will explore some issues surrounding our identity as members of a religious group (which might also be of interest to readers who aren't religious). Some of the opinions I'll express in this essay will be controversial. I'm not entirely convinced by liberal rhetoric on difference and tolerance. I do believe that we should be tolerant of difference, but when I look at the society I live in I have to admit that I might be in a minority. And given that a sizeable proportion, perhaps even a majority, of this society is not in tune with liberal rhetoric, what does that mean for religieux in practice? My purpose here is to try to understand issues of identification with a religious group and how that might play out in practice in the actual society I live in, rather than with reference to an ideal society that does not exist. Clearly there is a certain amount of intolerance towards minorities here. I think an evolutionary perspective on humanity helps us to understand why that might be, and at least to me, it suggests that our approach to diversity might be flawed. It's fair to say that this essay is a bit of a ramble and an opinion piece.


Evolution

I've written about evolution and human societies quite often now. The facts seem to be that human beings are evolved for living in small communities of up to 150 people. These communities may be part of larger units—multiples of 150—but larger units tend to fission for purposes of daily life, coming together on special occasions. This limit is imposed, according to research by Professor Robin Dunbar, by the ratio of neocortex to brain volume. Larger groups require more neo-cortex because we have to keep track of more relationships in real time (family, friends, lovers, feuds, alliances, etc). Other primates mainly use one-to-one grooming to ensure individuals are well integrated in the group and that it has overall cohesion. Our groups are now so big that we could spend all our time grooming and still not interact with everyone in our group. And we have to eat and sleep! So we evolved group activities to help balance our time budget. Cooking food also helped by making our food more calorie-rich, reducing our foraging time.

Some of our most important faculties, such as reasoning are designed to work in small groups. Our orientation to the world as a social primate, like all social animals, is safety in numbers and cooperation to achieve common goals. An aspect of this is that we are distrustful of strangers and intolerant of individual differences where they threaten group cohesion. Our distant ancestors survived and prospered by ganging up and pulling together. Individuals who were loath to work with us or who worked against us were bound to be neutralised either by assimilation back into the group, or by expulsion from it (or in extremis by being killed). One of the most powerful means of social control we have is isolation: shunning, exclusion, banishment. Ironically, loneliness is often a feature of urban life, especially as we get older.

In his book on the people living in the New Guinea highlands, The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond explains that a hunter-gather tribe there has a well demarcated territory in which they can forage for food. They usually have uneasy relations with immediate neighbours and encroach on their land at their own risk. To be caught outside your own territory is to risk being killed on sight. A person living in this environment would seldom, if ever, stray much beyond the traditional borders of their tribe. They would never meet their neighbour's neighbours. Of course New Guinea is densely populated compared to some other places. However, rather than clump and blend, the tribes there stayed small and distinctive, with hundreds of languages between them. They are vastly more culturally diversified than similarly sized countries in the rest of the world. Australia was similarly diverse before the arrival of Europeans. We are evolved to suit this kind of situation of small groups and strong in-group/out-group boundaries. Since then our culture has changed at a very much faster rate than evolution can keep up with.

About 10-12,000 years ago our communities began to clump together. This is usually associated with the invention of agriculture, though at first this was a relatively unsuccessful venture that led to reduced food availability. It took centuries of trial and error for settled agriculture to begin to produce enough food to be a more effective way of life than hunting and gathering. It's likely that domestication of herd animals like sheep, goats, and cattle, was a key move towards larger groups, since it makes more protein available in a more reliable way. As long as there is pasture, herd sizes can increase exponentially (according to Dunbar the limiting factor is rainfall). Once we worked out how to produce a food surplus that would support non-farming society members, the stage was set for a revolution in how we lived. Numbers in our groups began to swell beyond the limits of neocortex. Once a few members of our society were freed from the necessity of finding food they could specialise in other activities (though they still had to sleep and participate in community bonding activities). Civilisation began to emerge. By which we mean groups with large populations and institutions to enable them to live together: division of labour, kingship, land ownership, organised warfare, religion, etc.

In these early stages of our social evolution, religion emerged partly as a way of helping groups members experience themselves as connected to the others. As already mentioned, Robin Dunbar has argued that as group sizes increased in our early ancestors, our usual primate methods of group bonding became ineffective. The time taken for one-to-one grooming with every group member, for example, became more than the time available. A variety of many-to-many grooming substitutes had to evolve alongside our burgeoning groups. Amongst these were group laughter, singing, and dancing. Presumably story telling also played a part. The first anatomically modern humans to migrate from Africa almost certainly carried myths with them that then took root and survived in far flung places like New Guinea and Australia. These group activities result in the production of the endogenous opioids (or endorphins) that produce a feeling of well-being. Religion took the form of collective rituals, often involving group dancing, singing and story telling, and explicit shared beliefs. This helped the group to experience a sense of connection and common purpose. Rites of passage for children becoming adults often involved a shared ordeal that helped to bond group members. A distant echo of this is "hazing" and groups often haze new members to help bond them (ironically this may involved inflicting suffering or humiliation on them). One has to be willing to undergo hardship for the group. And lastly groups of people like to ensure that they look different to neighbouring groups. One of the ways that tribes of people, multiples of 150, identify each other is through distinctive clothing, symbols, or body modification. In small societies every one is marked the same way. Armies still use this concept in their adoption of uniforms, flags, and insignia.

However, many of us now  live in massive, multi-ethnic societies in which any number of sub-groups exist based on ethnic identity and/or religion amongst other things. And members of some of these communities are still going out of their way to identify themselves with their sub-culture through wearing special hats, special grooming practices (involving hair in particular), and/or adopting special clothing. The subculture might be based on ethnicity or religion or it might be based on something more abstract. And we might identify with more than one subculture.

A lot of the discussion in the UK at the moment is over how Muslims fit into Britain. Many Muslims feel bound to make strong statements of their identification with their religion often through grooming and sartorial statements, or through beginning their contribution to public debates with the words "As a Muslim...". They are Muslims first and they want everyone to know and acknowledge this. A few vocal people, who adopt the same identifiers, are openly critical of the British way of life and wish to impose a traditional Middle-Eastern form of governance (ironically if they got their wish they'd almost certain lose the right to freedom of speech). Some extremists argue for violent overthrow of the state and the culture, and some are currently plotting to kill British people to make their point. Muslim terrorists have succeeded in one major terrorist attack, ten years ago, and several other plots have been foiled. I'm using Muslims as an example because they are in the news. We Buddhists also get involved in flouting our religious identity, and not a few would love to overthrow the current government and impose some kind of Buddhist rule (though they are generally speaking more circumspect about this). I sometimes see monastics wandering around in their robes and shaved hair. Or one sees people with ostentatious jewellery: badges, mālās, vajra-necklaces,  monk's bag etc. I do it too some extent because I prefer to use my Buddhist name in most circumstances. To religious people, religious identity is important. And usually we want other people to know we are religious. If it's not obvious from our hair or clothes, we'll habitually bring it up in conversation. We're tedious like that.


Society & Tolerance

It's not that long since British people felt their society to be relatively homogeneous. Yes, it was riven by strong class divisions, but these divisions were familiar, and the classes were unified to some extent by their rejection of outsiders. Even today Brits are almost nostalgic for the version of the class system of the 18-19th century - witness the constant rehashing of stories set before liberalism took hold. British people will joke about incomers to some villages being treated as the "new people" for three or four generations. This is a joke based in reality. Some people are really like that.

In fact immigrants have long played a part in British society, though usually on a small scale. An almost continuous series of waves of immigration from Europe have arrived over the centuries. Some were completely absorbed (e.g. Huguenots) and some were not (e.g. Jews, Roma). For their own reasons Jews tend to retain their identity, live somewhat apart from the mainstream. Hasidic Jews are definitely separatist. Which brings us closer to my main point. Ironically this very practice of separatism has itself often been a trigger for prejudice against Jews. This is not a justification or an excuse. I'm not saying that it is right! I'm saying that anti-Semitism is a something that Jews still encounter and that sometimes they inadvertently trigger it.

The trouble is that if you are apart from the mainstream, then when times get tough the mainstream may well turn on you. This can happen in any number of ways. In contemporary Britain there is a backlash against people who accept welfare for example. It was relatively socially acceptable in the 1970s, but nowadays if one accepts welfare it is, for example, very difficult to rent a house to live in. All people who accept welfare are tarred with the same brush: lazy, unreliable, and criminal; whereas British people generally see themselves hard-working, steadfast, and honest. Fifty years ago the Brits described people of Afro-Caribbean ethnicity using the same slurs. Before that it was the Irish. The Spanish have often been a target. As have all people of colour from Africa, America, Pacifika, and Asia. Outsiders, especially minorities, are easily portrayed as representative of the antithesis of in-group values. The English language has many apparently innocuous terms that were once ethnic slurs: French letter, Dutch courage, Wandering Jew, and so on; and even more outright terms of abuse, such as nigger, kraut, frog, dago, wop, spick, etc. The English will still depict the Scots as miserly (when in fact they were just poor, mostly because of the English). Within England the English make fun of the accent of Birmingham, or suggest that people from Norfolk are inbred. It's often done in a jocular way, with a nudge and a wink, but its done almost continually. Where there is smoke, there is fire. And the thing is that this kind of attitude is general amongst people I've met. In India the low caste Buddhists I know tell me that even the very low castes have other low castes that they look down on. Despite how caste has blighted their lives, they are still caste conscious. Where I grew up, people from Auckland are called jafas (after a sweet called a Jaffa). This is an acronym for Just Another Fucking Aucklander. And we told jokes about Australians being stupid and immoral (they told more or less the same jokes about us). When I lived Auckland, my neighbours from mainland China confided in me that they "did not like Indians". The awareness and marking of difference seems to be ubiquitous. I would argue that it reflects an evolutionary outcome of being a social species: high in-group trust, low out-group trust.

I want to argue, against the liberal mainstream, that this distrust of strangers is not a bug of society, its a feature. Again, this is not an endorsement. It is an attempt to understand an apparently senseless behaviour in evolutionary terms. I believe that the better we understand our unconscious motivations, the better able we will be to overcome the conditioning. But the first step is admitting that most of us don't like strangers. If there is any doubt about this, I can cite various politicians such as Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Tony Abbott, Marine La Pen, from around the world who represent a silently fuming body of people who are fed up with multiculturalism, tolerance, and immigrants; fed up with liberal values being pushed down their throats. The danger is that we don't understand this phenomena and fail to take adequate steps to counter it. We ought to be reflecting on our failure to effectively communicate evolution for example. If we believe that tolerance and migration are good, then we need to better understand why some people oppose it and why politicians who voice that opposition are increasingly popular at the moment. But too often liberals are not at all interested in how their opponents think. Rather ironically, they define conservatives as out-group and demonise them.


The Religious Other & Liberalism

This essay was sparked by reading a news item about a Sikh man who had been beaten up by a red-neck in America. The Sikh man's family had lived in their adopted town in the USA for over a century. And the man who beat him shouted, "Why are you here?" Chances are, the Sikhs migrated to America before the red-neck's family did! Any thoughtful American would already have concluded that they have more to fear from "white" Americans with guns than from any Sikhs. A quick trawl through the long list of mass shootings in the USA suggests that none of them were carried out by Sikhs. In fact one of the shootings involved a white American shooting up a Sikh temple and murdering many people. So it seems that a Sikh is significantly more likely to be the victim of mass murder than the instigator of it. So why would a red-neck target a Sikh man?

Part of my answer is to do an image search for "Sikh". The top 100 images are mostly of men with long beards, wearing turbans. The images are of Sikhs are mostly men, but from all walks of life. Importantly Sikhs often serve their adopted countries in the military (usually a high status job for red-necks). But a Sikh man is instantly recognisable as a Sikh. Sikh men ensure that they stand out as Sikhs. What I am suggesting is that if you were never educated about Sikhism, and most Americans are not, and at a time in history when the news was full of stories about foreigners who want to kill Americans, and all you saw was someone making a sartorial statement along the lines of "I am not one of you, I am a Sikh", then that might trigger a primal, aggressive response. I'm going to emphasise this point: this explanation is not an excuse, the point here is to try to understand why people become aggressive towards strangers and suggest ways to mitigate such reactions. 

I don't mean to single out Sikhs, it's just that the news story featured a Sikh man and they do often make this strong statement of setting themselves apart. Another group who often suffer this kind of abuse, in Britain at least, are Muslim women who insist on wearing full-face veils, something which is almost an anathema for mainstream British women who fought for the rights to be seen and heard, and are still fighting for equality. The British women I know find the wearing of veils and face coverings very difficult to empathise with. They are still concerned with finding an equal footing in society with men. They continue to fight inequality and discrimination and the veil seems to represent both. I recall quite an interesting radio interview with a British Muslim woman who became so fed up with hearing cat-calls from men that she decided to wear a full-face veil. She would go out covered from head to toe with only her eyes showing. But unfortunately this change in her appearance meant that cat-calls turned to sometimes violent abuse. It was awful. She was in an invidious position, but it was made considerably worse by her adoption of ostentatious religious garb that set her apart from the people around her. It was not an effective strategy. Anyone who looks, speaks, or acts differently from might become a target for hostility - where difference is entirely relative to the situation.

As I say, our distant ancestors survived and prospered by ganging up and pulling together. Nothing unites people like a common enemy. Who that enemy is, is also entirely relative. 

Liberals seem to naively expect society to just accept differences. To be sure, they have had notable successes in outlawing prejudice against people who are different in ways that they have no control over. It is illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender, sexuality, or ethnicity for example, which is not the same as saying that it has been eliminated. But for example, being sexually oriented towards your own gender carries far less stigma than it used to. We have also made it illegal to discriminate on some differences that are based on individual choices, such as political views (up to a point) or religious profession. Social liberalism has been a force for good in that it has helped minorities to emerge as equals in society. And it continues to have successes, in the form of marriage law reform for example, despite a decisive shift to the right in politics in Britain. But liberalism has to some extent steam-rolled these changes through. And under these circumstances there is always the risk of a backlash.

The Liberal response to all of the situations I've described: aggression towards a Sikh, cat-calls, and violent abuse is the same each time. Such things should not happen. Every one must be tolerant. Our laws reflect these values. But our streets, apparently, do not. We invent new crimes to make it clearer. Now if you abuse someone of a different race or sexual-orientation, that is not simply a violent crime, it is a race hate crime that carries harsher penalties than mere violence. We've defined a whole variety of hate crimes with harsh penalties. These offences often come with new labels. We mistaken refer to hatred of something as a phobia (or fear). I'm not sure this confusion of terms helps. Islamophobia is not a fear of Islam, it refers to a hatred of Islam. It's not born from fear, it's more likely born from disgust, the response to a stranger. Similar homophobia is not a fear of homosexuals. Personally I see theistic religion as a rather negative influence in society, though for some people it can be personally positive. Hate is probably too strong a word for what I feel. I'm certainly against theists having more say in society and would very much like to see the Church of England disestablished and a true separation between church and state. Nor do I hanker for a Buddhist state, since all the Buddhist states in history have been awful or even monstrous. In this sense I'm a secularist.

Making a law and punishing offenders is not the same changing the culture. A more successful strategy might be to welcome different people into public life. It's only in living memory that Britain allowed radio and TV presents to speak in regional accents. People of colour are still vastly under-represented in public life. And as we've seen some institutions, like the Oscars, seem determined to resist any liberal reforms that would make them treat women or Africans as being of equal status and value. TV is currently squeezing in a trans-gendered character where-ever it can, because this has become a cause célèbre. No reason it should not be a time for more awareness of this issue, but it's not as if we have solved the problem of under-representation in a broader sense. Women are still vastly under-represented in the higher echelons business and politics for example. The chances of an African American winning an Oscar are still minimal. And so on. Equality laws are not going to change things while, say, a woman only rarely gets a senior cabinet post in a British government (and this true of the cabinet of the only woman Prime Minster we've had as well).

With regard to "race" it's important to emphasise that skin colour is a particularly bad determinate of relatedness. Skin colour is simply a measure of how close to the equator your ancestors lived. If they were from the tropics, you'll have dark skin. If they were from higher latitudes you'll have pale skin. It's all to do with how much vitamin D one can synthesise and it changes quite rapidly - just 5000 years and your skin will change to suit. Humanity is all one species by any definition of the word. That said, the human population of, say, Africa is far older and thus far more genetically diverse than the rest of the world. Thus any two Europeans with pale skin are far more likely to be related than any two African people with dark skin. It's only legacy thinking that makes us think of dark skinned people as homogeneous. Of course in countries where Africans were transported as slaves, the slave population became a melting pot. The whole concept of "race" is bankrupt and more or less meaningless. The fact that Britain uses "black" and "white" as ethnic terms still makes me feel deeply uncomfortable, because the terms are meaningless (no one in the world is either black or white), but also because they preserve the prejudice of the recent past and reflect continuing discrimination against people with brown skin.

An important issue in Britain is immigration. In 2015 around 100,000 people emigrated to the UK. That's a town the size of Cambridge, where I live. Providing housing, infrastructure, and services to another 100,000 people, at a time when government spending continues to fall is stretching the resources of the country. If it happens every year, and it does, then we have a major problem here. Research seems to show that migrants taken as a whole make a net contribution to the economy, but even so the government is still cutting spending on things like the National Health Service, which struggles to cope with serving the needs of the present population. Unfortunately, compared to the rest of Europe, Britain continues to attract economic migrants, both temporary and permanent. And European law says that we cannot place barriers in the way of the movement of labour within the Union. This has led to the leaders of the country to offer an in-out referendum in which the citizens can vote to leave the European Union. The issue of identity and where we belong (and how we treat outsiders) is playing out in national and international politics also. 

Britain has also seen a number of high profile terrorist attacks on our soil. These were carried out by Islamic fundamentalists. And we are told that a large number of plots to commit acts of terror are foiled on a regular basis by the security services. Some of these result in public prosecutions. And yet we are being drawn further into wars in the Middle East that appear to be fuelling the fundamentalist recruitment drive. The media that reports these situations has a vested interest in promoting negative emotions. The media thrive on our fear, anger, and disgust. And we, collectively, seem only too willing to feed the troll. The local terrorists are ostentatiously Muslim. There is a legitimate fear of religious fundamentalism amongst Muslims inspiring violence against British citizens. Some say that such people are "not Muslims". But this is facile. Islam, like every religion is split into sects that disagree on who is in charge and who is an authority. Appeals to the authority of the Koran are meaningless unless we accept the premise that it is God's word. Even then, what God meant is open to interpretation - God always seems to like to leave room for different readings. In the end it is men who decide what God's will is. The terrorists are Muslims. Very much so. The fact that other Muslims disagree with them is interesting, but not definitive, even if the British Prime Minister co-opts that view for his own ends. 

Rights

And amidst all of this are religious people who insist on asserting their religious identity over and above any other aspect of their identity. Like many groups who are insisting on their "right" they seem to unconcerned with unforeseen consequences. They have a right and it is up to the rest of us to protect that right of theirs, whatever it may cost us. In Britain I observe that there is a general unwillingness to think that one's actions might have consequences, especially if the actions are an expression of some right. If one is claiming a right then the consequences are not the responsibility of the individual. Society is seen as a guarantor of rights. And if our behaviour involves risk then it is up to society to eliminate that risk. So many people here go out at night and binge drink so that they completely lose control of themselves. And these people expect to be safe. But they are not safe. In many cases they might not even be safe doing what they are doing if they were sober. They are definitely at risk when falling down drunk. And yet they assert they have a right to be safe, whatever risks they may take. And complain when the government treat them like children. Sadly in the Cambridge News today is the story of a bright young Cambridge University student who was killed by a car: it was 1:30am, she was very drunk, wearing dark clothes, walking in the middle of the road, on a major arterial road, when she was struck by a car. The driver was going under the speed limit and watching out for cyclists with no lights (very common in Cambridge). 

Having been a victim of violence I sympathise to some extent, we all want to feel safe when we go out at night. But while society has yet to eliminate violent people, wouldn't it be more prudent to take reasonable precautions against becoming a victim of violence? Is there any rational or realistic expectation of eliminating violence from society? I can't imagine it myself. Is it realistic to expect everyone to obey the law all the time? Not really. So why would anyone expect to act as though they lived in a utopia? Of course we don't want to simply blame the victim. That's not what I'm getting at. But if you are in a minefield, there's no point in complaining that mines are illegal and immoral. One must take practical steps to get get out of the minefield without getting blown up before complaining. Nor am I saying the campaigning is pointless. We have seen a good deal of positive social change in my lifetime. What I'm talking about is a culture of entitlement. The idea that we are entitled to live in a utopia. That we ought not to have to make an effort to defend our rights from those who would deny them to us. It's the sense of entitlement that I don't understand. 

Talking about these things is difficult because if one expresses a dissenting opinion one tends to become a target for trolling. Labels get thrown around and thinking through the issues gets replaced by an enforced orthodoxy. And anyone who dares to dissent from this orthodoxy is characterised as evil. Lately the trend is to label anyone who argues with the liberal mainstream as a Nazi. Its as if we've forgotten the mad imperialism that brought the whole of Europe and half the world into an all-out war characterised by massive loss of life and destruction of property. We've forgotten that the Nazis attempted genocide, murdering sex million Jews. The Nazis were not simply authoritarian or dictatorial or anti-liberal. They were mass murderers on a scale that's hard to imagine. We trivialise the word Nazi at our peril. Once we trivialise a phenomenon like the Nazi's we raise the risk of it happening again: and this at a time when far-right groups are making steady gains in some European countries. 

There's a worrying trend to argue that people should not be allowed to say things that liberals disagree with. That one should not be allowed to say things that people might take offence at. Recently the British parliament actually spent time debating whether or not Donald Trump, a major investor in the UK economy, should be allowed to visit the UK. The reason was that he'd just said that his policy would be to stop Muslims entering the USA until there was some way to be sure they were not terrorists. This was shortly after the Paris bombing, where one of the bombers had entered France as a refugee. Many people argued that Trump should not be allowed here any more. The fact that this was a debate suggests that we have lost sight of what freedom of speech means. Trump can say what he likes. Our fear can only be that people will take him seriously. Why would we fear that? Of course the Trump the irony is that apart from one egregious example (9/11) most of the murderous attacks on American soil, the mass-shootings, are by non-Muslims and Americans of European rather than Middle-Eastern origin. Their problem is not so much religiously inspired terrorism as it is gun crime.

Setting Ourselves Apart.

If we religieux wish to set ourselves apart then we need to be realistic about the possible consequences of this. Out-group members may well receive harsh treatment, especially at times when there is economic or political upheaval. Arguing that this is not fair is childish. The world is not fair. People are what they are. Liberalism has certainly made some progress in the West, but our society is far from perfect, and many places are profoundly anti-liberal. We do not live in a utopia and probably never will. (I've written about this before: Living in a Non-Utopian Universe, 12 Sep 2014)

On the other hand I don't think it's true to say that religious people have more in common with each other than with non-religious people. The shared values that we have tend not to come from religious profession, but from the wider society. Religion is paradoxical in this sense. Since any one religion is always a minority these days, identifying with it to the point that one feels one must make a public statement of identification makes for a stronger sense of belonging to the religious community, but of being more set apart from society generally. If one also characterises society as generally evil or misguided, then the "us & them" effect is even stronger. Do we ever think about what we are sacrificing in order to experience a strong sense of belonging to our religious group?

Setting ourselves apart amidst a larger community is a two edged sword. A common enemy does bring people together, but we run the risk of becoming that common enemy and uniting people against us. This ought not to surprise us. At the level of our adaptation to pre-civilisation lifestyles, this makes perfect sense. It's part of our of survival strategy. As admirable as liberal values of tolerance inclusivity, and egalitarianism are, by setting ourselves apart we run the risk of testing how deep those liberal values go. And all too often they don't go very deep. So it might be worth religious people asking themselves, is it worth it. Can we get that feeling of belonging without all the public displays of affiliation and overt tribalism? Or is the acknowledgement of strangers really that important to us? 

One thing we need to think about is why some people are happy to define their in-group as "humanity" and why for some it is so much narrower. Why for some people seeing a man in a turban is a delightfully exotic sight, and for another it is a trigger for violence. And we really urgently need to drop any moral rhetoric along the lines of "because they are stupid". Sometimes people are stupid. But pointing this out never really helps. We need to try to get beyond our own simplistic, moralistic judgements and really connect with the values of others. That we might not share those values makes this difficult, because all of us find it difficult to embrace someone who's values are different from ours. But until we understand those values we will not make a connection of the kind that can bring change.

~~oOo~~

See also

•  Lusca, Emanuel L. (2008) Race As A Social Construct. Anthropology.net 
• Yudell, Michael et al. (2016). Taking race out of human genetics. Science magazine.