Is Physics a Scam?

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”—Upton Sinclair

“Theoretical physicists used to explain what was observed. Now they try to explain why they can’t explain what was not observed.”—Sabine Hossenfelder 

Sabine Hossenfelder is a former scientist and now a well-known blogger and YouTuber. Her blog, Backreaction started in 2006 (about a year after mine) and continues today alongside her videos.

Over the years Hossenfelder has built a reputation for well-informed, honest commentary on modern physics (with occasional forays into light entertainment). She is an inveterate fact-checker and debunker of fallacies. Hossenfelder is very direct and forthright in her opinions.

In my opinion, her views on topics outside of her area expertise are no better than average. However, her physics explanations are usually quite good. She has accumulated 1.68 million subscribers (including yours truly) which is good for a channel that mainly offers hardcore science content.

Her blogs and videos cover a wide range of topics. Hossenfelder often takes and defends a stance on issues. Notably, she rejects aesthetics ("elegance", "beauty", etc) as a criteria for judging scientific theories. She also defends instrumentalism in quantum physics ("shut up and calculate"). And she is "against free will" (though I'm not sure which kind of "free will" she means). In this sense, Hossenfelder is very much an orthodox scientist who thinks quantum physics, as it stands, is the best we can do.

Hossenfelder's critical commentaries reliably inform, educate, and entertain. However, in the in the last year the content of the Hossenfelder's channel has begun to change in tone. Hossenfelder has always been critical of reported science, but she is increasingly critical of the science establishment.

On 5 April 2024, she posted a confessional monologue, emotively titled: My dream died, and now I'm here in which she described her harrowing experiences of academia and her realisation that the goal of the most of the research was merely to attract more funding. Derek Muller, the host of another hardcore science channel: Veritasium (~18 million followers) commented in response:

After finishing my PhD I went to a university-led session on ‘What Comes Next.’ What I heard sounded a lot like “now, you beg for money.” It was so depressing to think about all the very clever people in that room who had worked so very hard only to find out they had no financial security and would be spending most of their days asking for money. I realized that even what I thought of as the ‘safe path’ was uncertain so I may as well go after what I truly want. That led me here.

So, yes, academic science is dominated by the scrabble for funding, which means scientists often don't have job security but go from grant to grant, always uncertain. Based on conversations I've had with academics, Hossenfelder's comments on short-term contracts and the funding game also ring true.

But of course, Muller didn't have to also contend with sexism. I've heard very similar complaints about sexism in academia from women in Buddhist Studies, so I am inclined to believe Hossenfelder when she claims to have suffered from sexism. It seems to be very common for women in academia. In this case, the other comments on Hossenfelder's videos are worth looking at. A number of her correspondents are women who report having had similar experiences in academic science departments.

As such, I'm inclined to give Hossenfelder the benefit of the doubt. Let's look more at the substance of her criticisms.

Hossenfelder's Crisis

In 2017 Hossenfelder published a letter in Nature Physics, one of the premier scientific journals:

Hossenfelder, Sabine (2017). "Science needs reason to be trusted." Nature Physics 13: 316–317

It came with the strapline:

That we now live in the grip of post-factualism would seem naturally repellent to most physicists. But in championing theory without demanding empirical evidence, we're guilty of ignoring the facts ourselves.

This is quite emotive language, right out of the block. The article is paywalled by Nature, but it can be read online here. The kind of problem that Hossenfelder wanted to draw attention to is:

In December 2015, the LHC collaborations CMS and ATLAS presented evidence for a deviation from standard-model physics at approximately 750 GeV resonant mass. The excess appeared in the two-photon decay channel and had a low statistical significance. It didn't look like anything anybody had ever predicted. By August 2016, new data had revealed that the excess was merely a statistical fluctuation. But before this happened, high-energy physicists produced more than 600 papers to explain the supposed signal. Many of these papers were published in the field's top journals. None of them describes reality.

Hossenfelder notes that this practice of of churning out speculative papers on hot topics is so common that physicists refer to it as "ambulance chasing". 600 papers on one experimental result that turned out to be a glitch. No one can possibly read all of them, and it would have been completely unprofitable to do so because, as Hossenfelder notes, none of them describes reality.

Hossenfelder (2017) argues that the problem is ubiquitous across physics and notes:

What worries me is that this flood of papers is a stunning demonstration for how useless the current quality criteria are. If it takes but a few months to produce several hundred 'explanations' for a statistical fluke, then what are these explanations good for?

This information overload inevitably leads to filtering. One doesn't attempt to read everything, one chooses which papers to read. But how? I suspect that they read papers in journals they trust, authored by scientists they recognise and they don't read papers by unknowns. It's not what you know, it's who you know. So social issues are deeply affecting science. Hossenfelder's plea is that physicists pay attention to social sources of bias. For example:

Thousands of papers have been written about [the blackhole information paradox] during my lifetime, and hundreds of solutions have been proposed, but theorists just can’t agree on one. The reason is that they don’t have to: For the black holes which we observe (eg at the center of our galaxy), the temperature of the Hawking radiation is so tiny there’s no chance of measuring any of the emitted particles. And so, black hole evaporation is the perfect playground for mathematical speculation. Backreaction (6 April 2017).

This example gives a sense of what Hossenfelder meant when she wrote about "championing theory without demanding empirical evidence". One might also describe it as fishing for new physics in the absence of any new observations. Science needs to be driven by observation rather than speculation. This was more or less the whole point of the European Enlightenment.

On 11 Feb 2023, Hossenfelder posted a video entitled "What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics? (This is why I lost faith in science.)" which sets out to indict (her erstwhile) field of particle physics claiming that the standard model was complete in the 1970s and no progress has been made since.

The argument goes that, as far as we know, the standard model explains all known observations and does not require any new phenomena (i.e. particles) to account for observations. We don't need a new model of particle physics.

What we have seen is a stream of arbitrary new "models" (computer simulations) which fit the existing data but also make predictions about new particles such as axions, wimps, and dark matter. Hossenfelder points out that all of these predictions have failed basic tests. And science has failed to make much progress because the best minds are wasting their time on toy models rather than investigating nature.

One of the best examples of this is string theory with its many extra unobservable dimensions. String theory soaked up vast amounts of funding but in the end it tells us nothing about the physics of world we live in, though arguably it does tell us something about the sociology of science.

One problem which seems to drive the quest for new particles is that the standard model of particle physics cannot be reconciled with the standard model of cosmology. But there's no principial reason that these theories should be reconcilable. The quest for "unification" is based on beliefs and aesthetics, not evidence. Moreover, the two relevant theories behind the models—quantum field theory and general relativity—are both incomplete on their own. For example, relativity predicts singularities that we know, from other observations, cannot exist. Worse, David Wiltshire has raised some serious doubts about the current cosmological models. Wiltshire persuasively argues that "dark energy" is an artefact of an incorrect assumption about the homogeneity of the universe.

There is some idea that reconciling these two theories requires a quantum theory of gravity. However, there is no reason to believe that gravity is quantised, since there is no known mechanism by which it could be quantised. To the best of my knowledge, in our universe the only mechanism that is known to quantize energy is a standing wave. It is the electron qua standing wave in an atom that accounts for the quantization of electrons and photons.

The 5 April 2024, video My dream died, and now I'm here introduces us to Hossenfelder's backstory, but I'm not sure it helps her case. By introducing her personal story, Hossenfelder reveals a motive for being critical that is personal rather than scientific. The fact that sexist and dogmatic scientists killed her dreams is not irrelevant to her stance as a critic and I think some people (not me) will simply assume that her complaints are sour grapes.

The culmination of Hossenfelder's criticism, to date, is a video titled I was asked to keep this confidential, posted on 15 Feb 2025. In the video, Hossenfelder reads out an email that she says was sent to her, in confidence, after her letter appeared in Nature Physics. The email, ostensibly from a former colleague, expresses concerns about the potential impact on the jobs and careers of scientists of exposing the real nature of science to funding bodies.

The obvious problem with the confidential email is that we have no way of discerning the authenticity of the email. We cannot observe it. If anything, it sounds like a caricature of exactly the kind of practices and attitudes that Hossenfelder is critical of. Which seems a little too convenient. I'm not saying I don't believe her, I'm saying that secret sources and anonymous informants don't contribute to a concrete case. And they give the trolls an easy way to dismiss her. I know it is personal, but I also know that whenever I let my personal feelings show, academics look down their noses at me. It's counterproductive.

Is There a Crisis in Physics?

To be clear, everyone acknowledges that the two best theories of physics—general relativity and quantum physics—are incomplete as they stand. They have been incomplete for a century or more. The fact that these theories remain incomplete has to be seen as a failure. I believe I know why quantum physics has failed, though as an outsider, I doubt anyone is interested in my opinion. But in any case, whether this failure represents a "crisis" is moot.

The sexist treatment of women in science is an egregious a failure as well. The evidence is that women are entirely capable of doing science at the highest levels. Patriarchy has no place in science, and yet... patriarchy continues to play a role. Come on, men, you know sexism is bullshit!

We might argue over whether this or that problem constitutes a "crisis", but given Hossenfelder's observations, I would have thought that no one could argue that science is "going well". I'm definitely wrong about this.

Hossenfelder is not the only one who talks in terms of a "crisis in physics". Sean Carroll (31 July 2023), has used these very words for example. But in his case, the headline is clickbait because in his preamble he says

In this solo podcast I ruminate on the unusual situation fundamental physics finds itself in, where we have a theoretical understanding that fits almost all the data, but which nobody believes to be the final answer. I talk about how we got here, and argue that it's not really a "crisis" in any real sense. (Emphasis added)

Indeed, despite being highly critical of attitudes to the foundations of quantum physics, Carroll apparently believes that physics is a victim of its own success. Hmm. This attitude is hardly credible and looks like good old fashioned denial.

Eric Weinstein (who has a PhD in maths, but has mainly worked in the finance sector) is another trenchant critic of modern physics. This interview seems to be representative of his views: What If the Smartest People Are Lying to You? - Eric Weinstein.

The counterargument with Weinstein is that he has a pet "theory of everything" that scientists have dismissed. When you listen to him talk, there is very obviously sour grapes over this. Hossenfelder at least maintains the impression of being mainly concerned about science. Weinstein is openly annoyed that scientists won't take him seriously and seems to believe that this is personal rather than professional.

As I know from personal experience, it's difficult for an outsider to break into any field that requires expertise, even when outsiders are experts. Nothing I do will change the fact that I'm an outsider. I don't have a PhD or institutional credentials; I don't play the game the way it is supposed to be played. It's not that scholars disagree with me, it's that they ignore outsiders as a matter of course. Given that 80% of humanities articles are never published, it seems that they mostly ignore each other as well. So I feel for Weinstein, but having listened to his pitch, I don't find him credible and was not motivated to look up his theory (I'm more interested in another outsider, John Macken).

I do believe that Weinstein has met "trolls with PhDs". I've met them too. My sense is that people who are smart but not creative (don't have original ideas) become gatekeepers and station-keepers. They know they can never tackle any of the big problems, that they will never win a Nobel, but they want to stay in the game. So they appoint themselves as keepers of "standards" which is what they have instead of ideas. And thus the religion of scientism was born.

Where I sympathise with Weinstein and Hossenfelder, is that physicists do seem to be caught up in ambulance chasing, gaming the system, and other unprofitable activities because, they believe that this what is required of them. Dissenters and outsiders are treated poorly, especially in the face of massive information overload. The insiders feel no compunction to be polite to outsiders who they regularly describe as "crackpots" (whether we are or not). And yet, the main theories of physics are still incomplete.

From where I sit, physicists do seem to be more interested in continuing to live in the manner to which they have become accustomed than they are in explaining the world.

Note added 14 May 2025. See also the essay just published in Nature by Carlo Rovelli (2025), which expresses similar criticisms, though framed rather differently. 

"But an epochal sequence of experimental results has proved many such speculations unfounded, and confirmed physics that I learnt at school half a century ago. I think physicists are failing to heed the lessons — and that, in turn, is hindering progress in physics... My hunch is that it is at least partly because physicists are bad philosophers."

I certainly agree with the last proposition. Moreover, as Mary Midgley said in 1979 (with reference to "the selfish gene": "There is now no safer occupation than talking bad science to philosophers, except talking bad philosophy to scientists."

As Hossenfelder highlights when reading out the "confidential email", there is a lot at stake in this spat: tens of thousands of physicist's jobs, and the identities and social standing of physicists.

There is clearly a sense of entitlement amongst physicists who think we should spend £billions on, say, a new super-collider despite having no reason to believe it will find anything new. Because, to them, physics is intrinsically important. Physics tells us how the world works. Except, of course, quantum physics (Hossenfelder's field) has largely abandoned any attempt to explain the world, replacing it with aimlessly twiddling the sliders on virtual models in the hope that something of value might turn up.

It might be interesting to consider how physics got into this mess. Which is all about politics.

Physics and the Military Industrial Complex.

Adam Becker (2018: 79-83) notes that after the war and the "success" of the atomic bomb program, and with the Cold War just beginning, money flooded into physics. A good deal of that money came from the US military.

In 1938 the total spend on physics research was ~$17 million per annum. Almost none of which came from the public purse. By 1953 the total funding was $400 million p/a. Similarly, in 1941, 170 students were awarded PhDs in physics. By 1951 that figure was over 500 and rising.

Moreover, by 1954, 98% of the funding for "basic research in the physical sciences" was coming from public funds. This is a dramatic change. Under the current political-economic regime, when you use public funds, there has to be some kind of public accountability.

With the ascendency of physics and the glut of funding came a sense of entitlement. Becker (2018: 80-81) cites Samuel Goudsmit:

It's been a shock. We've got marvellous laboratories for basic research, which is the real love of any self-respecting physicist, but somehow we don't have the same tender affection for them that we would have had years ago, when acquiring a three-hundred-dollar spectroscope was reason enough to throw a party. Today we're given a multimillion-dollar piece of equipment, and the minute the dedication ceremonies are over, we're poring over the plans for an even more powerful one.

With the flood of money and new graduates into physics, obtaining funding rapidly became a game. The aim of the game is to secure funding while promising as little as possible and providing little or no return on investment. While the Cold War arms race helped to push things along, the situation became considerably worse with the advent of target culture in the 1980s.

In the 1980s, science, along with everything else in life, became a matter of setting arbitrary targets and defining "success" as having met those targets (target culture). Whether or not meeting those targets represented any kind of contribution (often it does not). For example, quantity of publications became a common measure of "success" ("publish or perish"). And this led to an explosion in scholarly publication, but not to an explosion in knowledge. Roughly the same amount of knowledge is now swamped by a vast amount of noise.

There are clearly some real problems in science in 2025. However, scientists are not responsible for the competitive funding models. That is actually the fault of the funding bodies themselves. The neoliberal zeitgeist emphasises individualism, competition, utilitarianism, and commerce. Making scientists compete for short-term funding was their idea of driving improvement in science, because they have an ideological belief in the value of competition and of keeping their clients hungry.

The fact that science is a collective, collaborative, and cooperative knowledge-seeking activity seems not to have registered with neoliberals. That sounds like socialism. Better to divide and conquer!

And this is not restricted to science. We live in an era of the commodification and monetization of everything, including the commodification of the self. Commodification and monetization is almost always followed by enshittification.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Cory Doctorow (2023).

This clearly affects all social media, for example, and things like Google Maps, and this blogging platform which was considerably better when it launched than it is now (every "upgrade" breaks something that was important to me).

Science was commodified after the atom bomb. Scientists became merely workers. This process was already well underway when Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto in 1848:

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into it's paid wage-labourers. (1992: 5)

This should not be read as an endorsement of Marx and Engels generally. I'm not advocating for Marxism per se. I'm just pointing out that it was obvious in 1848 that social changes in capitalism tend to downgrade the the status of petite bourgeoisie. 

Multinationals and governments became the patrons of science with the expectation that they could exploit the products that scientists produced. And physics in particular seemed to promise more weapons of mass destruction like the atom bomb (and duly produced the H bomb and neutron bomb). Those "glory" days seem to be over. 

On the other hand, no one living in Cambridge can fail to notice that Cambridge University is constantly spinning off science-driven business ventures like a rat shedding fleas. Vast amounts of time and resources are still being spent to commodify and monetize science. In Cambridge, at least two former shopping centres are being converted into science labs funded by venture capitalists. 

Changing Tack

What I hear in Hossenfelder's recent videos is a distinct change in her critique. She is no longer complaining that the unhelpful attitudes or fraud scandals are "killing science". Rather, she emphasises that the science funding model is economically incoherent.

Hossenfelder appears to have concluded that scientists are not listening to her and that they won't ever listen. In adopting the language of return on investment, she appears to be addressing her remarks to funding bodies, i.e. governments, militaries, and multinationals, i.e. to the military-industrial complex itself.

If the military-industrial complex are listening then they might be annoyed to think that their investment has been largely wasted in recent decades because scientists are gaming the system. They might feel that the whole exercise has been a scam (though to be fair, funding bodies made the funding of science a competitive game).

If the military-industrial complex were to take Hossenfelder's critique to heart, they might want to drastically rethink how science is funded and how quality is assessed. They might want to reassess the return on investment of multi-billion dollar projects that don't produce any income or useful products.

Looking at the push-back on social media, I don't think physicists have even noticed the change in language. The trolls-with-PhDs are still vocal defenders of the system of taking public money and getting no results: the sense of entitlement is palpable. They seem to believe that this is how science works and that they are entitled to public funds without public accountability.

And a lot of what Hossenfelder complains about are the results of this process in which neoliberalism revolutionised our lives in detrimental ways. For this reason, I'm not delighted to see Hossenfelder adopting the language of neoliberalism. I get it, since the chances of funding bodies listening is higher if she speaks their language. On the other hand, have scientists remained wilfully blind to the problems within their own field. Hubris, meet Nemesis.

I did see several people on social media responding to Hossenfelder by whining that "politics should be kept out of physics". My response to this is simple. When scientists began to take vast sums of public money, they also signed up for public accountability. There is no entitlement to funding.

Conclusion

I find Sabine Hossenfelder an intriguing figure. On one hand, based on her letter to Nature, Hossenfelder might be seen as a dissenter and critic. On the other hand, Hossenfelder is also a conservative defender of scientific orthodoxy. As far as I can tell, she's not someone who has contributed much in the way of new ideas or even new ways of seeing old ideas. But she clearly understands complex concepts and mathematics very well, and she is an effective science communicator with a popular YouTube channel. An influencer.

I think Hossenfelder is sincere and my limited experience of academia is consistent with her complaints. Patriarchy is, sadly, alive and well in academia. There is also no doubt that the neoliberal revolution has, long since, thoroughly penetrated to the heart of our universities in the form of treating the education of our children as a business opportunity. This is accompanied by target culture, short-termism, over-emphasis of competition, insensitivity to social inequality, utilitarianism, treating commerce as the highest form of human culture, and all the other faults of liberalism. All the things that are fucking up the world right now. The process of commodification, monetization, and enshitification is just a specific instance of how this plays out.

I think there is a crisis in physics. The most important physics theories remain incomplete and the efforts to complete them have been spectacular and costly failures. Moreover, gaming the system has become a raison d'être for academics. And computer models make it all too easy to practice "ambulance chasing" and flood the literature with noise. Although, to be fair, this funding model was imposed on science rather than being a choice that scientists made. Focussing on insoluble problems like the blackhole information paradox helps to perpetuate this dynamic (and, anyway, Noether's theorem gives us no reason to believe that "information" should be a conserved quantity since there is no associated symmetry).

But is it a "conspiracy"? It's clear that the commodification and gamification of everything is part of the capitalist agenda. And capitalism is a conspiracy amongst those who have excess capital to ensure that they and their children can continue hoard resources and have power over other people.

Most scientists have no new ideas to speak of and make no lasting contribution. They are happy to shut up and calculate, because calculating is difficult and they are good at it; so it is rewarding. The fact of not making any contribution to science is no longer a concern, since attracting funding is now seen as a science activity in its own right.

Is physics a scam? Not really, or at least not entirely. I think the physics community is scamming the funding bodies (and deluding themselves). But physics per se is still a very useful paradigm for thinking about the world and I genuinely appreciate all those science communicators trying hard to make science accessible to people like me. I'm currently revising all the mathematics I've forgotten in the last +40 years, with a view to doing some online physics courses. I love science. I hope the ideas in these essays might find an audience, though I'm likely to remain firmly in the "crackpot" category as far as the gatekeepers are concerned.

If funding bodies take notice of Hossenfelder, then science funding is likely to be redistributed and physicists are likely to face mass redundancies. Given the reach of her YouTube channel and the fact that she is now talking the language of return on investment, I think it highly likely that funding bodies are going to notice.

Also we cannot ignore that the tide is turning in the world. Fascism is ascendent once more. It's one way to ensure a compliant workforce for the capitalism without forcibly enslaving everyone. And fascism seems to be blind to systemic/existential problems like climate change, pollution, overpopulation, and ecosystem collapse. Fascism is also anti-intellectual, since intellectuals are the first line of defence against fascism. As we transition from neoliberalism to fascism, there are going to be casualties. And this will be true in science as much as any other walk of life.

~~Φ~~

Bibliography

Becker, Adam. (2018). What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics. John Murray.

Doctorow, Cory (2023). "The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok Or how, exactly, platforms die.". Wired. 23 Jan 2023. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Marx, K and Engels, F. (1992). The Communist Manifesto [1848]. Oxford University Press.

Midgley, Mary. (1979). "Gene-juggling." Philosophy. 54(210): 439-458. 

Rovelli, Carlo. (2025) "Why bad philosophy is stopping progress in physics." [essay] Nature. 12 May 2025. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01465-6

A selection of Hossenfelder's critical videos in reverse chronological order.

• 15 Feb 2025: I was asked to keep this confidential.
• 16 Nov 2024: Science is in trouble and it worries me.
• 4 Nov 2024: The crisis in physics is real: Science is failing. .
• 9 Oct 2024: These new scientific fraud cases worry me: Now also in material science.
• 5 Oct 2024: This is why physics is dying.
• 9 May 2024: Scientific Progress is Slowing Down. But Why?
• 5 April 2024: My dream died, and now I'm here.
• 1 Mar 2024: Astrophysicists keep finding things that “shouldn’t exist”. I think I know why.
• 18 Feb 2024: Alarming: Fraud spreads in Science -- and I fear it will become worse.
• 10 Feb 2024: Prominent Physicist Misleads Public about Prospects of Expensive Particle Collider.
• 5 Aug 2023: Do we have evidence for new physics?
• 11 Feb 2023: What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics? (This is why I lost faith in science).
• 5 No 2022: The Quantum Hype Bubble Is About To Burst.

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.