Excerpt from paper presented by Prof. E. Richard Davies to the Fifth International Congress on Science and Philosophy, Vienna, August 23-27, 1998. Liberalism and socialism: a case study of philosophical factions on the Internet. Albert P. Carlsson and E. Richard Davies Department of Psychology, CSU Introductory Quote: "Do you think there is a place for philosophy in today's world? Of course, but only if it is based on the current state of scientific knowledge and achievement...Philosophers cannot insulate themselves against science." ~ Claude Levi-Strauss (1988) [Snip] After studying the social psychology of such groups, it is my view that usually, differences which do exist are based more on tribal dynamics than genuine philosophical points of principle. I intend to illustrate this idea by taking two political groupings who are extremely active on the Internet, and who claim to be philosophical opposites of each other. These are the socialists and the liberals. It is our finding that, as presented on the Internet at least, these two groups really have more intellectual similarities to one another than they have genuine rational differences. This notion may at first appear surprising. In order to establish its validity, therefore, it is necessary for me to make a fairly lengthy diversion into the commonest form of what is regarded as liberal (hereafter 'libertarian') philosophy, and examine how a socialist might interpret and apply its central tenet if he or she were to come across it afresh. Subsequently, I will extend this analysis to include two other groups, environmentalists and feminists. I trust you will bear with me in this. My purpose is to establish that many socially-evident differences between these groups are not philosophically based, as the various group members generally suppose, but derive from the misattribution of personal preferences for rational arguments. It is convenient here to start with the primary credo of the libertarian viewpoint, because it is probably the most concisely stated of the various political preferences. This is known as the "non-initiation of force" principle, and can be stated in various ways. For ease of discussion, I have chosen the following form: "Everyone should be free to do as they please, as long as their actions don't harm anyone else." Although it is arguable whether this principle has any inherent biologic validity, it can be allowed nonetheless that many people would still like to apply it as a purely political preference, in order to bring about what they might consider to be an utopian world. Groups espousing this idea include the U.S. Libertarian Party and related organisations, and it has been variously said that either all of libertarian thought is encapsulated by this expression, or all of libertarian thought is derived from it. According to this principle, people should not respond with force unless force has first been used against them. In other words, the only justifiable force is regarded as retaliatory force. The principle is regarded as fundamental to libertarianism, and as the definition of what defines and distinguishes a libertarian. So, the question might be fairly asked, this being the case, how well does this principle really define a libertarian? Could a scientifically-literate alien who dropped in from space make good use of this principle to distinguish our self-professed libertarians from our self-professed socialists? Well, from a scientific perspective, this apparently innocuous phrase (in either form) still leaves a number of things unspecified. It is not as cut-and-dried as it sounds at first hearing, particularly in the light of findings which continue to accumulate relating to the primary causes (pathogenesis), progression (etiology) and risks of various diseases, human and other animal biology, epidemiology, and neuro-cognitive processes. I'd like to take a deeper look at this apparently straightforward phrase, in order to demonstrate what I mean here: In the phrase: "Everyone should be free to do as they please, as long as their actions don't harm anyone else." Here are the sort of questions our scientific alien would ask, before attempting to separate people who apply the principle from others: Point 1. Is harm to be taken as just immediate harm, or as both immediate and potential future harm? Acute injury only, or both acute and chronic injury? My understanding is that most libertarians would take it as both. Yet since the time of the seminal figures of liberal thought, science has identified the potential for long term chronic harm from all sorts of things, some serious, some not so. Here are some examples: (a) One of the first large-scale industrial poisoning examples was "itai-itai" disease, a case of chronic cadmium poisoning which occurred in the Fuchi-Machi farming community in Japan, and killed over 100 people. Cadmium from the nearby lead and zinc factory had been deposited in the community's paddy fields, so that persons living there ate slightly more cadmium each day than they would have ordinarily. The disease took 20 to 30 years to manifest, and was characterized by the bones becoming soft and breaking under slight pressure (itai-itai means "it hurts it hurts"). Most victims were older women with a low calcium status, due to a biochemical interaction between cadmium and calcium. (b) The next cases were also in Japan, in Minamata Bay and then Niigata. They involved death of many hundreds of non-occupationally exposed people in fishing communities due to discharges of mercury into the sediments of their respective bays, also through chronic poisoning. In the Minamata Bay case, the toxic discharge was from a plastics factory. (c) In the mid 1970s, a number of humanitarian aid agencies moved in to India and helped dig wells for the local populations. Now, 25 years on, in many places the water-table has dropped due to use and in a number of places the arsenic-rich bedrock is being oxidized, releasing higher levels of arsenic into the drinking water. About 3 million people in India are now suffering from chronic arsenic poisoning, and are too poor to do anything about it. A certain proportion of these will go on to develop a particular type of cancer. (d) Sex hormones are wonderful in many delightful respects, but are also known cancer promoters. Estrogen can assist in the progression of breast cancer in women, and testosterone can assist in the progression of testicular cancer in men. Point 2. Does one need to know exactly who it is that they might be harming, or would a libertarian be willing to apply the adage to nameless people as long as they knew that these people were human beings? I think most libertarians would favor applying it to both known and unknown people; it shouldn't matter whether or not they know their names. Point 3. Should failure to perform an action be included, if it is known that such failure might result in someone being harmed? I think most would concur that it should. For example, Civil Engineers should be conscientious about calculating stress-loadings on their bridges. If one wasn't, and the bridge subsequently collapsed as soon as ten cars and a heavy truck were driven on to it, I think there would be justification in prosecuting (in libertarian terms, "initiating force against") the lax engineer for professional neglect. Point 4. Are carefully calculated statistical probabilities acceptable in assessing potential harm? Examples: (a) there is a statistical "certainty" that an earthquake will strike a heavily populated urban center in the next 50 years. We might not know where, but we do know it will happen, and therefore are justified in applying and enforcing precautionary building regulations ("initiating force") everywhere. (b) a second example relates to Point 2; the people who caused DDT to be banned also caused many premature deaths around the world due to resurgence of malaria; but they wouldn't have known any of their victims. We can now predict the relationship between use of DDT and the prevalence of malaria. I think that statistical probabilities would be regarded as valid in assessing the possible harm a person might do by their actions. Point 5. How far does one draw the harm boundaries? Here's a scale: death >> severe injury >> moderate injury >> punch on the jaw >> mild slap >> psychological abuse >> verbal abuse >> verbal bantering. What's your personal cutoff point? Should there be an official one? Point 6. At some point, a libertarian attempting to apply the non-initiation of force principle might have to make a pragmatic decision about acceptable risk, whether consciously or not. How does one value a human life? For example, in setting limits for potential cancer risk, a pragmatic cutoff of one excess cancer in one million people per year is taken. Is this too high? Is this too low? You might think it is too low if you happened to be the millionth person who got the cancer. Point 7. Who do you define as 'anyone else?' Both Judaeo-Christian religious fundamentalists and the libertarian equivalent ("objectivists") have both tended to emphasize human uniqueness, but recently it has been established that Chimpanzees (who share 99% of our genetic material) also possess the same IQ as human 5 year old children. Are human 5 year old children part of the "anyone else"? I would think so. To how many animal species might the anyone else be extended? Just Chimpanzees? This is possibly a matter of personal preference. Points 5 to 7 might look fairly insignificant. However, in many contexts the weighting applied to these might be the only thing that separates a declared libertarian from a socialist or an environmentalist or a politically-correct feminist. To put this another way, socialists, environmentalists and feminists can easily argue, quite legitimately, that they are applying the very same adage: "Everyone should be free to do as they please, as long as their actions don't harm anyone else." Allow me to illustrate: Why some socialists are libertarians: Some socialists have decided, in Points 5 and 6, that the needs of the many individuals outweigh the needs of the few individuals; they have also taken a broad definition of what harm might be. Why some environmentalists are libertarians: Many environmentalists have decided, in Point 6, that all species are included, and if they think that the earth is alive, they might well include that. Why some politically-correct feminists are libertarians: A recent psychological study showed that college women's exam-scores (and assumedly future livelihoods) were much worse in a group who were exposed to media images (advertisements) depicting women as "airheads," compared with a matched control group. Feminists might well argue that such product advertising constitutes an "initial force." After all, it has been demonstrated to have a definite outcome on future earning-capacity. By their understanding they would be justified in attempting to put limits on the use of language (for example, by attempting to impose rules on gender depiction in language), because "force has been initiated." Thus the non-initiation of force paradigm turns out to be powerless for really defining what, for example, a libertarian might be, as distinct from a socialist, when examined more closely. Differences between the purportedly opposite groups self-identified as libertarians and socialists are not found to be based on genuine philosophical points of departure, when viewed in the light of scientific findings about the nature and causes of harm. On this basis, we were able to suggest that differences between such groups might be more tribally-based than members of either group are able to either appreciate or admit. Bringing the discussion now around to the topic of our own research, our analyses of newsgroup discussions provide strong supporting evidence for the validity of this deduction. We have been researching patterns of behavior and statistical prevalence of different forms of argument taking place in Usenet discussion groups on the Internet. For those unfamiliar with this part of the Internet, these discussion fora are referred to a newsgroups. Entry to these discussion groups is not restricted, and in the groups we studied (so-called unmoderated groups) participants may freely contribute their comments in a similar way to sending an e-mail message. Messages are archived, and these archives provided a convenient research window into voluntary group dynamics. The main groups involved in his study have been the most active political groups, and the most active religious newsgroups. In many of these, despite the fact that many of the participants claim reverence for principles such as "non-initiation of force"(e.g. libertarians and objectivists) or "do unto others" (e.g. Christians) disagreements are extremely common, and often heated! Of the philosophico-political fora, those which relate to this extended example are the libertarian (and related objectivism) groups, and the supposedly opposite socialist groups. One of the most intriguing findings we made about these groups was that although they don't appear to recognize this, when it came to topics related to the libertarian non-initiation of force position (in name or otherwise) a lot of objectivist and libertarian discussion time is actually spent debating the potential risks of this and that, which is Point 5. They discuss the gun laws, the greenhouse effect, the ozone hole, passive smoking, pesticides, the positive aspects of genetic engineering, effects of discrimination, the war on drugs, mis-use or otherwsie of Government force, you name it. But the most telling thing we found was that for the most part, the emphasis in their discussions is on arguing against potential risks. Comparison of this trait with the predominant mode of argument in Usenet groups relating to the purportedly opposite philosophy of socialism revealed that the socialists, by contrast, when broaching the same sort of topic areas, spend much of their debating time emphasising the significance of the potential risks. In expanding this work, we found that in general, self-identified socialists, environmentalists and feminists have a tendency to see the potential for harm in many places where self-identified objectivists and libertarians don't. Libertarians, by contrast, have a tendency to be inherently skeptical about potential risks. This skeptical approach of libertarians and perhaps overly-aware approach of socialists to risk assessment is of course not intellectually defensible, nor philosophically justifiable - it's just an unfortunate habit many such people pick up as part of the psychological necessity to delineate their respective tribal positions. These often become thoroughly entrenched as defended positions move well beyond the reach of rational argument. [Snip] From a psychological vantage point, we can see that in attempting to define their differences from each other, libertarians and socialists are stuck between a rock and a hard-place. In order to be right, the other group is portrayed as being wrong. Similarities are ignored and minor differences are emphasized. In order to be good and attain coherence as a group, the other group is made evil and opposite. Considerable effort is expended attempting to demonstrate that each group is opposed to the activities of the other. Intriguingly, members of opposing groups appear to collude with each other to attain this common goal, though it is assumed they are unaware of this. In the convenient social laboratory of Usenet, this tendency extends to deliberate attempts to goad the so-called opposition to some form of retaliation, which is duly forthcoming, and serves as proof (proof of evil or proof of righteousness, depending on the direction). [Snip] Summary: We believe that a general lack of appreciation of the common elements in supposedly different political beliefs is at the core of much unnecessary conflict among different groups. This idea finds support in the documented tendency for increased levels of education to go hand-in-hand with greater flexibility of thought, and less reliance on dogmatic systems of belief. It is further supported by our analysis of discussion modes among members of specific Internet newsgroups. This being the case, we suggest that socio-economic systems which work to allow members of the global population to become better educated are extremely valuable investments. Our specific findings suggest that in the general case, encouraging people to attain a more accurate scientific understanding of their world is likely to result in a reduction in the number and severity of human conflicts.