The Case for Social Democracy: Part 1
On the Right to Live Comfortably as a Non-Negotiable Premise
The human species as we know it has existed for somewhere on the order of 100,000–300,000 years. For most of that time, we lived as hunter-gatherers in close-knit clans, subject to the mercy or lack thereof of the natural world around us. About 12,000 years ago, agriculture was developed for the first time, allowing food to be produced in quantities sufficient to support the larger populations of the early complex societies. Around the world, various cultures explored the realms of spirituality, music, art, medicine and mathematics, as the first written languages took shape about 5,000 years ago. However, these things alone were not enough to give humanity a taste of the prosperity that we have since learned is possible. Large swathes of the population still led lives of servitude and submission to the few who had consolidated the power and resources among themselves, many devastating diseases remained untreatable, and bloody wars were often fought for dominance and prestige. Only in the last 500 years or so has what we would consider a modern way of life emerged, as the twin movements of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment brought about a mindset viewing civilization as a question to be solved, that is within our capability to solve. Even then, much of this progress was facilitated by the brutal oppression of those who were colonized by the European nations where these movements were primarily unfolding.
When there was only one model that people could conceive of for how to organize their society—the aforementioned model of stratified hierarchy—political philosophy as we know it was only on the minds of the educated elite. But when more and more people began to see civilization as a question to be solved, that would be solved using reason and not superstition, they became skeptical of this model, and suddenly a whole new world opened up. In the year 1789, this trend came to a head in France, where the ruling class faced mounting pressure amid widespread economic instability. In his attempt to contain the situation, the king called for a session of the Estates-General (a legislative assembly consisting of three estates: the nobility, the clergy, and the commoners, all of which received the same level of representation, despite the first two making up a small minority of the population) for the first time in over a century, and during these proceedings and those that followed, a trend emerged whereby those representatives pushing for a more equitable distribution of power and resources sat on the left side of the hall, while those in favor of preserving the status quo sat on the right. This is where we get the modern-day meanings of the political descriptors left-wing and right-wing.
At the time of writing, Wikipedia defines left-wing politics and right-wing politics as follows:
Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy as a whole or certain social hierarchies. Left-wing politics typically involve a concern for those in society whom its adherents perceive as disadvantaged relative to others as well as a belief that there are unjustified inequalities that need to be reduced or abolished, through radical means that change the nature of the society they are implemented in.
Right-wing politics is the range of political ideologies that view certain social orders and hierarchies as inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically supporting this position based on natural law, economics, authority, property, religion, or tradition. Hierarchy and inequality may be seen as natural results of traditional social differences or competition in market economies.
With the advent of industrialization, regardless of whether one fell on the left or right of the political spectrum, people widely began to expect and demand a continually improving standard of living from their leaders. Also with industrialization came a new, in many cases more severe form of disparity that took the place of the old one between the feudal lords and their peasants—i.e., that between the factory bosses and their workers. Given these conditions, and coinciding with the wave of popular liberal uprisings that swept across Europe in 1848, German philosopher Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto, which was to him as the theory of general relativity was to Einstein, and which was framed as being just as scientifically rigorous. In this treatise, Marx laid out a model of civilization in which the primary engine of history is the ubiquitous struggle between an oppressed class and an oppressor class, and predicted that the oppressed would eventually, inevitably achieve their ultimate victory. This spawned a field of scholarship, since referred to as Marxism, to further study these concepts, and also fueled the accompanying political ideology that sees itself as the obvious conclusion to draw from studying Marxism, since referred to as socialism. (Although many people use the terms socialism and communism interchangeably, socialism technically refers to the political ideology that would theoretically be used by its adherents as the tool to achieve communism, the imagined ideal end-state of society.)
Although Marx was relatively obscure at first, his ideas had gained considerable traction by 1875, when the Social Democratic Party of Germany was founded in the newly-proclaimed German Empire (ruled by the Kaiser as a parliamentary semi-constitutional monarchy). Within this party, two camps began to emerge with differing interpretations of Marxist politics. One of these camps, led by Eduard Bernstein, saw the gradually improving living conditions in the country, reflected by the emergence of a robust middle class, as evidence that Marx’s prescription of an armed revolution to overthrow the existing hierarchy was unnecessary, and that a society embodying socialist principles could be achieved peacefully. It is this perspective and similar ones, favoring a more measured approach to societal change (as opposed to those calling for more immediate, radical action), but still determined to reach the end-goal of abolishing unjust systems of discrimination and exploitation, that became what people mean when they use the term social democracy.
In these articles, I will be advocating for social democracy. As a scientist, I am very sympathetic to Marx’s approach of essentially viewing societies like Petri dishes, where certain experimental procedures can be conclusively shown to lead to certain predictable results, helping us gain a better grasp of the physical laws underlying the phenomena that we observe. I believe that based on the experimental data that has been produced over the last century, we can confidently say that societies organized along the lines of far-right ideology, i.e. fascism, are bound for failure, where that failure entails a precipitous decline in prosperity and freedom for most if not everyone involved, be they a full citizen, a second-class citizen or a foreigner. I also believe that authoritarian models of leftism, such as those that have been promoted by the world’s various communist regimes, have been shown to not deliver on their promise of producing the most successful societies, where that success would entail achieving the ideal of prosperity and freedom for everyone involved. I believe that such a “theory of civil society” that would tell us the best way to organize a society could one day become as agreed upon among world leaders and their electorates as Einstein’s theory of general relativity is today among physicists. I am just not convinced that Marxism, as understood and advocated for by its 20th- and 21st-century proponents, is the best that we can do in terms of developing such a theory. I don’t claim to have all of the answers, but admitting that not everything has an obvious answer is an essential part of the scientific process.
In the remainder of this introduction, I will be laying a foundation by asserting that failing to provide for people’s needs when it is possible to do so represents an unnecessary waste of human potential, that is morally wrong in the same way that walking up to a random stranger on the street and punching them is wrong.
In the second part, I will continue by examining a concept that many people today never think twice about, but which was a novelty in the relatively recent past— that of the nation-state, which in the modern era has represented the basic building block of politics, such that most significant political discourse tends to pertain to which policies ought to be pursued by governments on a national level.
In the third part, I will be considering the various competing definitions of words like “freedom” and “democracy,” such that there is no ambiguity when it comes to using phrases like “authoritarian models of leftism,” which some might consider somewhat oxymoronic.
In the fourth part, I will be exploring how political communication often fails to facilitate a meaningful exchange of ideas, and how the kind of political communication often engaged in by the American left can actually backfire and serve to make it more difficult to build the kind of robust coalition necessary to effect change.
Finally, in the fifth part, I will be looking to the future, imagining how what we do now will affect the lives of uncountable generations to come.
People are often judged based on how much it is perceived that they can contribute to society. Conservatives tend to be opposed to providing assistance to improve the lives of homeless people, on the grounds that “they don’t contribute to society; all they do is take up resources.” What conservatives don’t consider is that it is nigh-on-impossible to contribute to society when one is homeless, and that if we provided them with housing, they could then start contributing to society. The country of Finland did this, and found that it was in fact profitable in the long term, given that the contributions that the formerly homeless people made to Finnish society were more than enough to cover what it had cost to house them. But in the conservative worldview, subjecting homeless people to brutal deprivation is not seen as contradicting the capitalist commandment to maximize profits, for a handful of reasons. First of all, long-term profit is hardly ever seen as justifying short-term expenses. Never mind that the amount of money that it would actually cost to solve homelessness in the United States is roughly equivalent to what we spend on the military every single week, 52 weeks per year, so we’re not even talking about extraordinary short-term expenses here. But a deeper reason why conservatives are so dead-set on keeping people homeless is because they genuinely feel that it would be morally wrong to help them. They believe that people find themselves homeless only if and because they deserve to be homeless. They believe that if we as a society decided to help them, we would be rewarding “laziness” and discouraging hard work, which is seen as inherently virtuous. But a person who’s homeless cannot actually do any hard work if they’re also unemployed, which they often are and cannot help but be, since many businesses will simply not hire a homeless person, be it because they don’t have an address to receive paychecks at, or because they show up to a job interview in dirty clothing. The idea that someone who’s homeless would simply sit around at home all day being lazy if they were provided with a house ignores the reality that people are not naturally lazy; they just want work that’s meaningful and enriches their lives, not work that’s soulless and only enriches their bosses. And even if a homeless person did sit around at home all day in their new house after we provided them with one, does that really mean that they deserve to starve and freeze instead? In what kind of twisted belief system is it morally wrong to help people in need? I can certainly think of a couple places in the Bible, which evangelical conservatives thump but don’t read, where the virtue of lifting up one’s neighbor is expounded.
Conservatives would rather have our society forgo the contributions that people who are currently homeless could make, just like how specifically white conservatives would rather be poor in a society that lets them harass racial minorities than be prosperous in a society that treats everyone with dignity. This is despite the fact that conservatives also hate being poor, such that they will look for anyone else to blame for their poverty—immigrants, people of color, etc.—and won’t apply their own logic, which states that poor people deserve to be poor, to themselves. Conservatives hate being poor, but they love the system that made many of them that way—unregulated capitalism—because, in words attributed to John Steinbeck, they see themselves “not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” They believe that serving the system of hierarchy is their best shot at one day being able to climb it, like the people who spend a fortune to scratch off lottery tickets, convinced that it’s just a matter of time before they make it big, when in reality, one is more likely to be struck by lightning. They’re too far deep into the sunk-cost fallacy to turn back, believing that because they have experienced suffering, it would be unfair if others were saved from going through the same. That’s what truly sets conservatives and progressives apart—as progressives, we believe that if we’ve suffered from some injustice, we must save others from going through the same. We must give them what they need to realize their full potential, not just because they’ll be better off, but because we will be, too. And we can still fight for them even if—especially if—they’re suffering from an injustice that we haven’t experienced ourselves.
At least in the U.S., anti-abortion advocates say stuff like “well, what if the baby you aborted would’ve grown up to be the next Albert Einstein?” and then vote to defund the schools where such a hypothetical genius would get their education. They vote to make child labor legal again. They vote against protecting children from being shot in school. Stephen Jay Gould once said, "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops,” and conservatives want little more than to keep it that way. If they had been alive during the time of the Enlightenment, it is an undeniable certainty that they would’ve been against it. Based on how widespread some of these beliefs are in a so-called “developed country,” one could easily argue that the human species isn’t ready for civilization yet. Maybe we’re not ready for the responsibility that lies at the other end of the journey away from savagery. After all, we didn’t evolve for this; we evolved to fight for survival on the savannah and in the jungle. There’s never been a species before us whose evolutionary adaptations had to factor in the fact that we live on a rock floating in an endless void with no other life as far as the eye can see. In one of Carl Sagan’s most appreciated speeches, he said,
Look again at that dot [in a photo of the Earth from far away]. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Put another way, there is no fail-safe built in to human civilization, no net ready to catch us if we fall. If Nazi Germany had won the Second World War, or if the Cold War had resulted in a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union (which it almost did on several occasions), there would’ve been no cosmic intervention to avert those atrocities. In one of Hayao Miyazaki’s thoughtful masterpiece films, The Wind Rises, renowned aircraft designer Giovanni Caproni (who existed in real life) laments, “Humanity has always dreamt of flight, but the dream is cursed. My aircrafts are destined to become tools for slaughter and destruction,” but by the end of the film, the takeaway for the audience is clear: “You must live.” That is what we must do, together, as a planet, as sentient beings; we must live, and we must do what it takes for ourselves and for each other so that we can live well. After all, nobody has any definitive proof one way or the other that anything is waiting for us once our time here is up, despite claims you may have heard to the contrary, and I, for one, am not willing to bet the house on the possibility of a pleasant afterlife, such as the heaven that evangelical conservatives think they’ll be rewarded with for hurting other people here (not that I’d want to go there, anyway).
As touched on previously, part of the scientific process is admitting that there are things you could be wrong about. But at the same time, we do know that we’re right about some things, like how the ocean tides work, and in the same way, I know I’m right about how a healthy society would look, or at the very least, I’m on the right track. And if, after what I’ve said here, you can share that vision, then congratulations; you may be a social democrat too.