by Ali Minai
Following the shock of Brexit in Britain and the cataclysmic election of Donald Trump in the United States, there is much soul-searching, head-scratching and gnashing of teeth in liberal circles. Some see the end of democracy, others predict the collapse of liberalism, or at least of the liberal world order. The more sanguine speak of history's pendulum and some see both promise and peril in new technologies. A sub-genre of political analysis that has blossomed in these troubled times is the critique of cruel, corrupt neoliberalism that has abandoned the working classes in its search for a technocratic utopia powered by unbridled markets. For the most part, all these responses take for granted the existence of a well-defined liberal ethos, and – more importantly – its stability in human affairs. Not surprisingly, liberal thinkers see liberalism as inherently "better" than the alternatives, and approach their analysis from a "How will liberalism succeed?" viewpoint. Conservative critics, in contrast, see liberalism as a deviant human condition that seeks to subvert the "natural" order of things. Understandably, these views are regarded as contradictory. The central aim of this article is to argue that, in fact, accepting both viewpoints as valid may provide a better understanding of liberalism, its promise, its challenges, and its current state.
An early disclaimer is also in order: this article on a very complicated topic is intended as a "view from 36,000 feet", and does not speak to the microdynamics of activism by individuals and organizations. The world is full of good works on all sides of the political spectrum; the focus in this piece is on historical forces and long-term global patterns.
Political analysts often express amazement that, in many important instances, ordinary people support leaders and causes against their own rational interests. But this surprise stems from an idealized and rather inaccurate view of human decision-making as a rational process focused on optimizing economic costs and benefits. In the practical situations of daily life, people usually make choices driven by values, not calculation or analysis. And, as students of human nature have always realized, and as the recent work of behavioral economists has shown systematically, these values are instantiated in a toolbox of heuristics – rules of thumb – that suffice for reasonably good and highly efficient real-time decision-making, but often flout the rules of probability and logic. At different levels, this repertoire of heuristics is termed instinct, intuition, or common sense, and is identified with the "natural" – as opposed to calculated – decision-making. Amos Tversky – one of the pioneers in this field – famously termed these irrational heuristics "natural stupidity" as a tongue-in-cheek contrast with "artificial intelligence", and with the implication that, in fact, much of "real" intelligence arises from this "natural stupidity" rather than the logical rules that underlie theories of classical economics and artificial intelligence.