Can humans respond to crisis? More or less …

February 3, 2009 by
Filed under: Credit crunch, Social brain 

The economic crisis is an opportunity to think afresh about the good society. To learn from this disaster and to avoid the next crisis means not just deciding what we think but understanding how we think.    

Phillip Blond has every right to call himself very influential. Writing just a few days ago in Prospect, the self styled ‘red Tory’ advocated turning the Post office into a people’s bank – which Peter Mandelson has now apparently agreed - and the break up of massive private sector corporations, which is in keeping with George Osborne’s suggestion yesterday that wholly or part privatised banks be dismantled when they are fit to return to the private sector.

But the part of Phillip’s engaging article that caught my attention was this line:

‘The current political consensus is left-liberal in culture and right–liberal in economics. And this is precisely the wrong place to be’

Until recently I was fond of describing the last three political decades in the West through the following aphorism (although I never could find the source):

‘The right won the economic argument, the left won the social argument and the centre won the electoral argument’

Blond turns this on its head. Whatever the substantive view of his argument, there are three broad categories of response: first, he is wrong; second, he is right; third, he is right (or wrong) but only in relation to how things are now.

It is the third of these possibilities I find most interesting, the implication being dialectical: three decades ago we may have needed to liberalise social attitudes and to free up markets but now we need to reassert common values, hierarchal authority and the need for business to serve the interests of society.

At our joint seminar with the neuroscience folks at UCL on Friday we had a presentation from Professor Nick Chater. His research supports the thesis that the human brain has a very limited capacity to organise immediate perceptions in relation to an objective index. Instead, he argues, when we are asked to compare perceptions along an axis (such as brightness or loudness) we have only five categories: basically, much less, a little less, the same, a little more and much more. This may help to explain some of the idiosyncrasies in the ways human beings value things, for example the way comparison (over time and between people) seems more important to us than absolute measures.

Is this true also of human affairs? Instead of  human societies reaching higher levels of wisdom as we learn from past mistakes, we simply move from wanting more of one view of the world until it becomes excessive,  at which point we want less of it and more of something else. The human race does advance but only through a succession of failures, which can sometimes turn into disasters.

There is nothing new about this kind of gloomy dialecticism, indeed this world view is neatly captured in common parlance (for example, ‘plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose’). But in cultural theory, psychology and neuroscience we may find a richer insight into how we might find less painful and dangerous forms of learning.

Cultural theory is one of a family of theories arguing that human decision making is neither, on the one hand, explicable on the basis of a single logic (as in the model of homo economus) or, on the other, impossibly complex and indeterminate. Instead social problem solving derives from a limited array (in most theories between three and six) of basic responses, each of which is largely defined in terms of its antagonism to the others.

The social dialectic (which may underlie Phillip Blond’s call for a reversal of the conventional wisdoms of the last three decades) could be partly rooted in the collective expression of our cognitive predisposition to a limited array of comparative responses to the social world: ‘What we used to want more of, we then had too much of, and now we want less of.’

The point here is not to succumb to some kind of historical, much less neurological, determinism. Instead it is to argue that our capacity to learn from the past and plan realistically for the future is (in this year of Darwin) enhanced by better understanding of the predispositions and limitations of our species.

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6 Comments on Can humans respond to crisis? More or less …

  1. Indy on Tue, 3rd Feb 2009 6:45 pm

    2. I have to object here:

    It is the third of these possibilities I find most interesting, the implication being dialectical: three decades ago we may have needed to liberalise social attitudes and to free up markets but now we need to reassert common values, hierarchal authority and the need for business to serve the interests of society.

    This is just not a case of “we needed to have business serve society less and went too far.” To state things the way you have is to buy into the frames of doctrinaire (Manchester) economic liberals who just don’t have a good evidence base for their views. And that’s a far different problem from the one you are describing.

    And it’s no coincidence that we live in an era that has seen a 30 year propaganda effort to convince us that society’s best interests are served by “businesses whose only responsibility is to themselves.”

  2. Prospect in the news at First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog on Tue, 3rd Feb 2009 10:17 pm

    3. [...] Royal Society’s Matthew Taylor takes a positively anthropological approach, explaining the piece as a product of a “social [...]

  3. Matt Grist on Wed, 4th Feb 2009 10:43 am

    4. I think we needn’t characterise history as lurching from one extreme to another – from blanket free-markets to blanket nationalisaton, say. There is a sense of correction at the moment along various lines: less individualism, less materialism; more of a concern over equality and living a ‘good’ (rather than rich) life. There are also not so nice corrections: from free-movement and tolerance to protectionism and xenophobia.

    But these corrections are not necessarily lurches into one-sidedness that will necessitate further reconfiguring down the line. Or that’s the hope anyway. It’s a case of getting the configurations of attitudes and organisational structures right for the job in the particular areas, in order to serve the ends of a ‘good society’, where the various fundamental socio-economic attitudes (individualism, egalitarianism etc.) can operate in the right places and in the right proportions.

    But we will always get things wrong and things will always change so rejigging continually is what we have to do to correct our mistakes and blindspots. These will never go away.

    I think there is a tendency to get on the bandwagon – a well-known cognitive bias. This can lead to expanding a timely good idea from one area to all areas – say, using free markets to deliver everything, or praising an individualistic attitude in all areas of human activity. These simplifications are what we must resist if we want to learn from history.

  4. The recession and social change « Social Brain on Wed, 4th Feb 2009 1:39 pm

    5. [...] recession, social change, the good society Matthew Taylor raises an interesting question on his blog: Do we ever learn from crises in history? Or do we just lurch from too much of one socio-economic [...]

  5. matthewtaylor on Thu, 5th Feb 2009 11:47 am

    6. Hi Indy

    I’m not sure I get this. I’m not making value judgements simply suggesting that thirty years ago we were susceptible to an argument that society was too bureaucratic, hierarchical and statist and that we needed more freedom and individualism. Whilst now the case for shared values and social leadership has more power.. My point is to ask whether the way social change happens aggregately is as much driven by a ‘more or less’ perception than by a continuous process of progress driven by truth and wisdom

  6. matthewtaylor on Thu, 5th Feb 2009 11:52 am

    7. Thanks Matt

    I absolutely agree with this. The interesting question – but beyond me – is the process by which ideas become too dominant and spread beyond their scope for useful application. This is a kind of cultural epidemic – brilliantly captured by Adam Curtis in The Trap. Evolutionary psychologists would see this as a process by which memes emerge, grow, dominate and then having reached saturation fall back. Any thoughts as to who has written most interestingly about this. I wonder whether we should try to get Curtis to come to the RSA and speak to an edited summary of his series – it seems even more powerful now than it was when first broadcast

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