Why We Need Radical Cultural Solutions to Overcome the World's Most Pressing Challenges
Michael Vlerick challenges the conventional—and often myopic—ways of looking at humanity's most pressing issues.
Humans are experiencing radical societal changes caused by technological innovations, says Vlerick, a philosopher of science, author, and global public speaker. Biologically engineered to live in groups of about 150 people, we are now living in and interacting with significantly larger masses thanks to the escalating power of technology. Consider what is normal today: We hold virtual international meetings and work with co-workers in other countries on a daily basis. Ideas, rules, and innovations cross borders and oceans. Globalization is happening on a rapid scale.
Vlerick, who is assistant professor of philosophy of science at Tilburg University in The Netherlands, refers to this as "the second alienation," a term he coined and titled his new book, De Tweede Verreemding. (The first alienation, he says, was caused by the agricultural revolutions, which first emerged about 12,000 years ago.) In his book, Vlerick explores the fascinating idea of how this second alienation is leaving us "very much connected" on a global scale—which presents great opportunities to overcome today's most critical societal issues, from climate change to poverty. What is needed are new, efficient ways to “create and maintain social cohesion and cooperation on a global scale" that will efficiently deal with these problems, Vlerick posits. This would come in the form of radical and inclusive new policymaking, as well as greater investment in endeavors that support the greater good. "Impact investments in education would be something of great, great value," he says, "and any way you can promote positions of women in places where there's no gender equality, that would do the world a whole lot of good."
What is impressive about Vlerick's work is how, given his exploration of grave and often overwhelming issues, he does not let the magnitude turn into discouragement or blame. Instead, Vlerick, who is fascinated by society and culture, is propelled by the potential for good that humans possess. Given our shared biology, he says, "we are able to come up with global answers to our problems, and global solutions that everybody—or the great majority of the world's population—should recognize as good and fair solutions."
A Q&A with Michael Vlerick
In your research you discuss how humans have become alienated. How and when did that start, and what challenges did that alienation present?
The term alienated is kind of a pejorative term. It has been used in very different contexts; it can mean different things for different authors. What I mean by being alienated is that we have been alienated from our natural way of living together. If you look at the biological world, all species have a natural group size and a natural interaction within that group—be that bees living together in a hive, wolves living in a pack, or any social animals for that matter. Research shows that the average group size for humans, for past hunter-gatherer societies and still for the remaining hunter-gatherer societies today, is about 150 individuals. Give or take, that means that we didn't typically live or interact with a group of people that would exceed a few hundred.
For humans, much of our social psychology is adapted to live in those kinds of groups. Interestingly, on social media, where you can sort of map the interaction between people, you can see that people typically have close contacts with about 150 people on average. When it comes to a larger number of people, we can know them by name and we can know what they're doing, but to closely follow the lives of more than a few hundred is just too much information to handle. (Researcher and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar came up with that hypothesis of humans being able to maintain 150 close relationships.)
So there is the typical group size and it makes sense when you look at our history. After the agricultural revolution, we've alienated from that kind of natural society that had relatively isolated groups of about 150 individuals. When the agricultural revolution happened—and we've seen that happen independently in very different regions, first in the Middle East in the so-called fertile crescents—you see that the groups started to expand. They did not only become sedentary, but also started living in much larger groups (initially about 1,000 or a few thousand people). That was a very different way to live together; a very different kind of social fabric. And that came with a number of important challenges, one of which is: How can we maintain social cohesion and cooperation within those groups? Because now for the first time people didn't have a close connection with the other people that they were interacting with on a daily level. And we can assume that there was more conflict within that group.
So agricultural societies came up with a number of cultural solutions like criminal law. They also started to come up with property laws to have a peaceful exchange of goods. They preserved common pool resources like drinking water and so forth to preserve those resources. So we've moved into a different kind of society.
You've stated there have also been many benefits as a result of that alienation. What are those?
Everything we have today, our welfare and our unprecedented healthy lifespan, we owe to that kind of cultural evolution because the larger the group is, the more innovations that can be produced by that group. And so we see that after that every cultural revolution, the rate of innovations that were introduced within the society and refined within that society started picking up. It is what made incredibly complex societies possible.
You also refer to a "second alienation," which is also the title of your book. What is that?
What I call the second alienation is the second time that technological innovations are radically altering the shape and size and the social fabric of the human context. For human societies, the first time of technological innovations was in the form of agricultural technology. And now it is in the form of telecommunication and transport technologies. And with these new technologies we see that we're altering our society in a radical way again because the groups in which ideas, goods, and people first saw light no longer contain those ideas and goods and people. They now travel freely across borders of groups. And that has the profound consequence of making those groups dependent of each other.
Before the era of globalization, major societal challenges and problems within a group, like the economy and so forth, could be solved within that group. Now that's no longer possible. We are very much interconnected for many of the important societal challenges facing us. Think about climate change, think about migration, think about poverty, and so forth. In order to deal efficiently with these problems, we need to coordinate policy on a global scale. Now that is not easily done because our psychology is still one that is inherently tribalistic. Our social psychology evolved for cooperation in small groups of people, and also many of our institutions or political systems still hang on to that kind of group primacy, therefore we see that at the global level, It's often very hard to come up with satisfactory solutions to these problems. And so we need answers again, we need cultural solutions again, to this kind of second alienation, this new social context in which we find ourselves, which is the global context.
What are some of those cultural solutions that we need?
The main thing we need is an efficient global institution. And we do have such an institution, which is a very important historical step towards overcoming those global problems. We have the United Nations, which was born out of the League of Nations. And so that, in a very real sense, was the first answer we came up with in the face of ‘the second alienation’—i.e. globalization and the global problems that followed in its wake. But I think we need to redesign the institutional structure of the UN to a certain extent because today it's structured in such a way that representatives of groups come together and they will negotiate with one another on global policy. All too often this leads to global policy that is not for long-term global interests. That is because short-term group interests still dominate.
In my book I developed a proposal to strengthen the UN by integrating citizens assembly, an assembly composed of citizens that would be representative for the world population. And after they would be informed thoroughly on the different problems at stake, they would deliberate with one another and formulate policy. This may seem like a bit outlandish or perhaps even a radical idea, but there are more and more of these kind of social experiments with new forms of democracy. And this type of citizen deliberation has repeatedly been shown to bring people closer together, meaning that it has been surprisingly easy for these groups, although they are very diverse and their interests may diverge, to come to a relative high degree of consensus on what kind of policy we should take. And most often, the proposals that these groups come up with are well thought out, and informed by experts, so they seem to be able to tackle complex problems in an efficient manner.
We should be willing to at least experiment with new forms of policymaking and decision making in a democratic way in order to improve the chances of having good policy.
How do varying cultures, backgrounds, ethnicities, and beliefs play a role in this new form of policymaking?
Cultural ethnicity will be an influencing factor in this new kind of context. We would bring together a representative sample of the world population, so you would have people from very different linguistic, cultural, ethnic backgrounds together. That would present a whole bunch of logistics that need to be taken care of, including simultaneous translation. But nothing that wouldn't be feasible.
One thing that is often viewed as a major challenge is the question: When you bring together people of very different cultures with different kind of cultural values, will they be able to agree on certain kinds of solutions? A well-discussed example is the Western countries, which are more individualistic in nature as opposed to Eastern Asiatic nations that are often more collectivistic in nature. You see that both groups will have different kinds of inclinations: For Western people it's often viewed as highly immoral to sacrifice certain individuals for the greater good because the individual is considered to have inalienable rights, so we should not sacrifice those, even for the greater good. Whereas that's viewed as acceptable in a collectivistic culture. So there are definitely differences there. But I think we often overestimate those differences.
There is also research that suggests that people actually have a surprisingly easy time coordinating on certain kinds of proposals that they all can readily reflect as being socially just and righteous proposals. And that's an interesting finding. There seems to be a universally shared intuition about what are fair divisions. Children develop these intuitions at a pretty early age and show an extreme preference for fair treatment of people than unfair treatment of people. So the hypothesis there is that we develop this kind of moral machinery and this fairness focus that enables us to coordinate really well with one another.
That is something that is biologically anchored, to an extent, and therefore transcends cultures with different kinds of cultural norms. Given our shared biology, I think we are able to come up with global answers to our problems despite our cultural differences.
What about those opposed to this idea? There are people who may think that only certain people with specific backgrounds and educational foundations should be making decisions and deciding what's best for society. What is your response to that?
There are two important elements I'd like to talk about in response to that. The first thing you often hear is that uneducated people make poor political decisions. They often vote for populist leaders, even if it's not in their long-term best interest and it's not in the interest of anybody. I think the major issue there is not so much that these people may or may not be educated or have university degrees. But rather that they don't have an incentive to inform themselves about what the policy proposals are, and what the problems being addressed actually are. Political scientists call this rational ignorance.
If you have one vote in 10 million, or even less, well your vote is obviously not really going to make a difference. And many people don't go to vote for that reason. But even if they do so, very few people think it's worth to invest days or weeks to studying exactly what the policy proposal and the problems are, how they think society should be governed, and so forth. And I think that has a lot to do with our current democratic system, which is a representational system and consults citizens only at election time. This is problematic because it leaves people uninformed and therefore very open to all kinds of information that is not fact-based. We are so often talking about fake news and the post truth era.
The best protection against fake news and direct manipulation of voters with misinformation it to have people informed and be willing to really investigate the issues themselves. And they're not really incentivized to do that. So I think that is a major problem in our current democracies. There are interesting proposal by political scientists, like James Fishkin who thinks we should get people more involved in what is going on politically, get them much more informed, and perhaps organize communal discussion panels before elections (and incentivize people to attend these). People need to inform themselves more. Because in a democracy, your decisions are only as good as the people giving the mandates to the people taking the decisions. So, the major issue is not a lack of education: You don't need a college degree to understand the problems at stake and the possible solutions.
The second thing I often hear is that perhaps it would be easier to just do away with democracy and have a benevolent dictator making all the right decisions in our long term interest. Or perhaps have a bunch of technocrats running the show. However, even if that dictator, or those technocrats, had the best intentions, even if there was no abuse of power (and that’s a big ‘if’), this still wouldn't be the best system to govern a country and to make policy. You often see that when you bring together a very diverse lot of people discussing a certain kind of topic, you get very interesting proposals, which you do not get with a less diverse but perhaps much more able, kind of group. Political scientists call this the ‘diversity trumps ability paradigm’. So that kind of diversity of different perspectives, especially when it comes to policy and ways of organizing society, can be a real, real benefit.
How do you incentivize people to go against that rational ignorance? And furthermore, as individuals, what can we do to support a thriving global society?
That is a very important question. In my book I outline five important elements that contribute to less conflict between groups and more cooperation between groups. In addition to reinforcing our global institutional structure by integrating a citizens assembly in the UN, there are a number of important elements that are going to be vital in creating a thriving global society and a peaceful one.
The first, undoubtedly, is education: Bringing education to people all over the world and having young people reflect on society. From that, two things happen: First of all, there's more innovation, more scientific research, which has positive effects for society as a whole because the wealth of the society goes up, health goes up, and so forth. But also, I think it's vitally important to have young people reflect on the practices of their society; to critically think about the moral norms in their society and the way societies are being run. This kind of critical thinking protects against the lure of (violent) sectarian ideologies and populism playing on our natural suspicion (and even hostility) towards other groups (our innate tribalism). That is a political success recipe as we can see in the US and Europe, with rightwing populist leaders getting elected by amping up our fear of migrant invasions. The best protection against that is by giving people the means to reflect on society and inviting them to do so.
So it's education, but it needs to be education that makes you reflect on society. Sometimes you have people with university degrees engaging in extreme acts of group violence. I think the best example are the 9-11 terrorists. Many of those terrorists had college degrees. But they were only being educated in technical sciences. If you look at the education profiles of people committing crimes in the name of a group, like terrorists, in only very few instances did those people have some kind of background in humanities or social sciences. This kind of education makes you reflect on society in a certain way and that seems to protect people against these kind of sectarian ideologies and violent ideologies. That is very important because in a globalized era where groups of people are constantly coming in contact with one another, there's a possibility of conflict, of course. And in order for us to see past the confines of our own cultural group and take into account the interests, and the values of other people and other groups, we’ll need to reason our way beyond our innate tribalism. That is what the research suggests.
I also think that by bringing to light positive things happening in the world, we can create a positive change. It’s a kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. All too often the media is too focused on what goes wrong in society and the conflicts between groups. The media doesn't really highlight the wonderful achievements and the fact that society on all kinds of levels is improving. We definitely live in a better time than 100 years ago by almost any kind of metric you could think of but people still have the feeling that we live in times of great turmoil and great problems. And of course you don't want to be blind to our current problems. You want to solve these problems and still improve society. But by thinking that everything is going the wrong way, that makes people apathetic and it makes them lose the will to create positive change. There are definitely important challenges to overcome but we need to put them in a positive narrative. And that narrative is justified. With this globalized era comes many great opportunities.
Another very important aspect is feminization. You see that in societies where women are allowed in positions of power, the willingness to engage in any kind of conflict with other groups radically decreases. There's more cooperation and harmony between these groups. And that has important evolutionary reasons. The so-called ‘male warrior hypothesis’ suggests that males may be more incited to engage into conflicts with other groups. It is important to provide education to young girls and allow women in positions of power. When this happens you see that fertility rates radically drop, so that takes care of the overpopulation problem, but it also leads to a more peaceful international relations. And there are many ways to contribute to this. I can link it to impact investment. Impact investments in education would be something of great, great value—and also in any way you can promote positions of women in places where there's no gender equality, that would do the world a whole lot of good.
How can impact investing help these issues you've discussed and bolster the global social contract?
Allocating resources to the right places in society will do a massive amount of good. We cannot reach any of these goals without investments, of course. It [impact investing] has a central function in overcoming the challenges we're faced with. When it comes to climate change, the major thing we should be investing in is scientific research. We have to come up with solutions on how to take some of those greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. There is interesting research being done, and there are some breakthroughs, but it is very disappointing how little is being invested today in that kind of research.
We are always talking about reducing consumption, such as that we should stop flying. Of course it is important to be aware of the elements that pollute the air and contribute to climate change, but it is both extremely undesirable and utterly unrealistic to stop air travel, which is what some are calling for. While I applaud their strong desire to make a better world, I do think their solutions are too radical. If we were to do that [stop air travel] we would create a massive amount of human suffering in the form of poverty because economies would collapse.
What we should really be doing is investing in technological innovation and scientific research—and that we are barely doing. All we are doing now is talking about how we're going to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Yes, we should tax greenhouse gases, but we should also—with all that money we will hopefully get from taxing carbon emission—be allocating that to coming up with actual solutions. We should never underestimate the possibility and the speed with which solutions and scientific breakthroughs can being created today. The scientific community is larger than ever. Lots of scientific minds all over the world thinking together, coming up with plans and solutions. But today there is just not enough funding for this incredibly important mission to transition to climate neutral energy sources, filter greenhouse gases out of our atmosphere and deal with the consequences that climate change will already bring about. Technological innovation is the only viable response to the very important threat of escalating climate change. Impact investing could really help. There could be a very nice payoff on investing in this research and it could have a hugely beneficial impact on the world.
Research has shown that tragedy can lead to greater cooperative social behavior. Have you seen this in your research? And is climate change potentially impacting a global cooperation?
Tragedies bring people closer together. That is one of the good things about war (if you can talk about good things in that context). When war happens you see there is more solidarity and cohesion in the group.
Now with climate change, that is an interesting question. I often compare it to terrorism, which really scares all of our societies. It is amazing to see the amount of responses we come up to deal with terrorism. We go to great lengths to prevent this from happening again. You see, for example, security in airports is ramped up incredibly. It is something society should take seriously, but if you look at it statistically, the chances of individual lives being affected by terrorism is negligible compared to the chances that our lives will be negatively affected by climate change (if only because of the massive migration streams that would follow in its wake with the potential to profoundly destabilize societies).
Climate change is a so much bigger problem than terrorism ever can be. But still terrorism creates a huge emotional response. With climate change, for a very long time, it was the opposite. We knew it was there. But it was a theoretical thing. We knew it might be a few degrees warmer in the future, but that really doesn't seem like a problem. But it's when you look at the consequences—a rising sea level; places on the earth that will be completely dry; more severe weather; hundreds of thousands of people having to move— these are problems aren’t readily connected with the climate heating up a little bit. And that is part of the problem. We don't really see what is at stake here; what the problem really is about. Therefore it remains this scientific problem that people don't have a strong affective response toward and they fail to take a strong action in response to that. That contributes to the lack of response we have to this important problem.
When did you become interested in this research?
I've always been interested in society and other cultures. I studied in Egypt for a year and half, and learned some Arabic and studied political science there. I was interested in the possible polarization between the Muslim world and the west. But when I did my PhD in philosophy I studied the status and limits of human knowledge. After my Phd, I was finding myself reflecting on the impact of my research. It was intellectually interesting and it might lead to some interesting new observations about science, but the impact is limited. So, I started considering new ways of doing research that could potentially have a much higher impact on the world. So that's when I got thinking about our major societal challenges, democratic innovation, global governance, and so forth. Because I believe that when we have the possibility to change the world for the better, and we all have in some way or another, it is our responsibility to do so.
To learn more about Michael Vlerick and his work, visit: www.michaelvlerick.com/
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