A revolution in scientific thinking has changed the world before, can it again? By Nat Dyer
Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson’s recently published The Inner Level got me thinking about how to build a new vision for society.
The pair, best known for their widely-discussed The Spirit Level – which showed that public health, education and social mobility are worse across society in more unequal countries like the US and UK – make the case in their latest book that a more equal society is the rallying call that progressive politics needs
In a write up in the current issue of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine they ask. “Do we want to live in a society based on cooperation and reciprocity, or competition and rivalry?”. For almost everyone, they say, more equality would bring better social lives, less work, less conspicuous consumption and boost the “psychological wellbeing” of whole populations.
The article ends: “Sometime after the late 1970s, it seems, progressive politics either lost its conviction that a better form of society was possible, or lost the ability to convince people that politics was the route to achieving it. The result was the almost uncontested rise of neoliberalism. Now, facing the evidence of global warming and calamitous climate change, the world is in need of a radical alternative, a clear vision of a future society which is not only environmentally sustainable, but in which the real quality of life is better for the vast majority. Only then will people commit themselves to the long task of bringing that society into being.”
Most of that is indisputable. The thirst for a new economic settlement is seen everywhere. The question is, how can we get there?
We need an alternative vision for society that fits with our understanding of how life works.
I would argue that new economic and political visions alone are not enough. It has seemed next to impossible in the past ten years to escape from a globalised, financial system which crashed the economy and is pulling our societies apart. We need an alternative vision that fits with our understanding of how the world works. We need to consider more closely what influence our major scientific ideas have on society and economics.
To make it more plain, let’s consider how this has worked in the past. The pan-European Enlightenment movement – which started in the 18th century and paved the way for modern liberal, tolerant societies – was moulded by, perhaps even sparked by, Isaac Newton’s physics.
Voltaire, the famous French philosopher who epitomised the Enlightenment, saw in Newton’s universal laws an ordered rationality which he transposed onto the social and political sphere. He almost single-handedly introduced the ideas of Newton into France laying the intellectual foundations for the French Revolution of 1789. As the universe was rational and knowable, it became untenable for society to be governed by religious superstition and custom. New scientific understanding brought social change and not just in the distant past.
More recently some have identified the influence of scientific ideas – especially those of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene published in 1976 – on the U-turn in economic thinking in the 1970s mentioned by Pickett and Wilkinson. Steven Rose, a distinguished professor of biology, said at the time that the “switch in scientific fashion” towards ideas like the selfish gene “will come to be seen as part of the tide which has rolled the Thatcherites and their concept of a fixed, 19th century competitive and xenophobic human nature into power.”
Radical ideas in science, like those of Lynn Margulis, might mould alternative visions for society and the economy
That view remains controversial but I think it is no coincidence that just when the life sciences embraced a view of nature based on individual, selfish competition that these values were strengthened in society too. In turn, new radical ideas in science might mould alternative visions for society and the economy. For these, look no further than the late American biologist Lynn Margulis, a US National Medal of Science and the Darwin-Wallace Medal winner.
Margulis, the star of a new documentary Symbiotic Earth, was a rule-breaker who never shied away from the social and cultural implications of her thinking. The film shows how she clashed frequently with Richard Dawkins and argued that his understanding of evolution was wrong (in her words, “a minor twentieth-century religious sect”) and closely aligned as she put it with the “capitalistic zeitgeist”. As an alternative, she promoted the idea – later confirmed by DNA evidence – that evolution had progressed through merger and symbiosis, not just selfish competition, and co-developed Gaia theory which has influenced the deep ecology and environmental movements. Clearly, we cannot directly translate what happens in nature to human society, but to argue that our understanding of nature has no impact on the human world is wrong-headed.
Progressives inspired by Pickett and Wilkinson’s new political vision should look more deeply into how our scientific understanding of the world pushes us closer or further away from it becoming reality.
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Equality of Life: A Vision For the Future by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson is in the January/February 2019 issue of Resurgence & Ecologist.
The quote from Steven Rose is included in Richard Dawkins’ introduction to the 30th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene.
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