Human nature, constitutional government, and . . . It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia?

“But who versus? Who are we doing it versus?” the gang asks in one of the most renowned episodes of the long-running and controversial sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. They’re talking about a musical written by Charlie, one of their number, but the deliberately appalling characters in the show just can’t get their heads around the fact that there’s no ‘mark’. ‘No one writes a musical just to write a musical’, Dee scoffs.

They’re right, of course. Charlie is both the most naïve and arguably endearing character in a show about awful people, but he’s awful none-the-less – a stalker, manipulator and abuser. The play is ‘versus’ his regular stalking victim, a character known only as The Waitress, in the hope that she’ll be so impressed that she’ll marry him. And that’s a ‘versus’ thing because The Waitress clearly doesn’t want to marry Charlie, or even have anything to do with him, and never has.

The episode is excellent and the play becomes breathtakingly insightful as we realise that Charlie is unconsciously using it to work through his lifetime of trauma, including having been molested as child by his uncle with his mother’s connivance. But what does it have to do with politics, leadership, and the other topics of this blog?

Who are we doing it versus is an often unspoken but pervasive question in government. If you’re on the political side of the fence – MPs, ministers, SpAds, campaign strategists, etc – part of your mind always will (and often should) be thinking of everything you do as being done versus the other party(s).

Often politicians will have personal antagonists, people with whom their have (or believe they have) a zero-sum relationship, either in terms of values, or ambitions, or some combination thereof. By every account pretty much everything Gordon Brown did as chancellor was, to some extent, calculated in terms of being ‘versus’ his old friend turned [xxx] Tony Blair.

Sometimes you get a narrower focus, and like PMs from Harold Wilson to Rishi Sunak you find yourself doing something ‘versus’ trade unions. Or you get a wider focus, and find yourself working ‘versus’ the governments of other countries, or transnational actors.

But there’s another ‘versus’ behind all of this. Not a political ‘versus’ as much as a constitutional ‘versus’. Something that runs underneath government, and explains a lot of the seemingly inexplicable rules, formalities, and even inefficiencies in government.

Government, at its most basic level, is done ‘versus’ human nature. Or to put it another way, the evolved rules of government, what we call our constitution (albeit here in the UK that is a less precise term than in some other countries) have evolved precisely to manage those parts of human nature – in politicians and officials – that tend to inhibit good government.

A quick sidenote – what do I mean by ‘good government’? My one-line answer to that is government that seeks, and generally manages, to give all those people subject to it physical and economic security, and the right to conduct their life as they wish. Obviously there’s a lot to unpack in there, including more than a few implicit tradeoffs, but let it serve for now.

So how is that contrary to human nature? Why would we need to bridle the human nature of politicians and officials, from the sardonic Sir Humphreys at the top of the civil service to the front-line decision makers in Job Centers?

Start with this quotation from the Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek. Not usually someone at the top of my personal list of influencers, but this particular quotation is superbly well put, and captures one of the most important, and least discussed, aspects of government.

Part of our present difficulty is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within the different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e. of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilisation), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of world at once.[1]

The fundamental truth of human nature is evolutionary psychology. In a way that sucks, because it’s a relatively nascent field, and it’s susceptible to a lot of misinterpretation (see for example the ludicrous, but sadly not harmless, practitioners of toxic masculinity who have embraced their absurd misinterpretations of concepts like ‘alpha male’.)

Still, for all that evolutionary psychology is our best map for human nature, and while it’s incomplete, we’re filling out new bits every year.

One thing that is pretty well established is that human psychology, like human physiology, is largely adapted not to the present world (the macro-cosmos, as Hayek puts it, using a slightly archaic sense of 'cosmos' to simply mean ‘the world’, shorn of its current astronomical connotations) but to the micro-cosmos, the small band or troop. This, after all, was our social reality for the overwhelming majority of our evolutionary past.

A lot of the details of this are still waiting to be discovered, but it’s generally accepted[2] that this meant most of our interactions would be with members of our ‘band’, possibly of around 150 – 200 people (though this exact number is something that has become less certain since the anthropologist Robin Dunbar first postulated it in the 90s). A lot of our psychology is built around surviving and thriving in that context.

This leaves us with a bunch of instincts that serve us well in the context of a relatively isolated micro-cosmos, but not so well in the macro-cosmos we have created for ourselves.[3] The macro-cosmos has benefits – there’s no evidence, for example, that a society fixed at small bands could develop and make widely accessible CAT scanners, the internet, or margarita pizzas delivered to your door. Those things, and millions more, are dependent on the macro-cosmos (or what Hayek, somewhat excessively, calls Great Society), not to mention human rights laws or academia.

So to preserve those things we need the macro-cosmos. It needs to be stewarded, developed and advanced. That is more or less government in a nutshell. And government has to be staffed by human beings (we have not yet reached the stage of handing it all over to AI[4]). But those humans, who even in relatively junior or peripheral ways can face a bewildering array of decision every day, have instincts based on thriving in the micro-cosmos.

These instincts emanate from the twin evolutionary impulses of kin preference and reciprocal altruism. The desire to advance people who we are related to (or at least believe we are related to), and the desire to build relationships by, in effect, trading favours, often offering a favour pre-emptively. Broadly speaking they’re about strongly emphasizing social capital[5].

In their furthest emanation, they favour promoting family or friends, protecting people from seemingly ‘outgroup’ attacks – say, investigations into sexually inappropriate behaviour -, giving resources (such as contracts, employment, grants) to people you know, and like, rather than a stranger.

All of that is good micro-cosmos behaviour (there’s evidence that sticking with a group even when the group is choosing a less-than-optimal option is better strategy than taking a better option on your own, or with a small fragment of the group) but bad macro-cosmos behaviour. Bad government behaviour.

If the study of ethics is anything, it’s finding ways to pick and choose between threads of micro-cosmos instinct and macro-cosmos necessity. In general, though, government ethics (or rather, ethics-of-people-in-government is generally all macro-cosmos necessity. We want our leaders to recognize and understand all the reasons why, for example, an elderly parent might want to be cared for by their own adult child rather than a stranger so they can build welfare / social care structures that support that, but we don’t want them to build a fast track to elite medical care for their own elderly parents (or other family members, in the manner of say the USSR’s elite).

This, when you get down to it, is why we have so many rules about how you do things in government. Why there are so many rules, and codes, and expectations. It’s why we have the Civil Service Code. Integrity, honesty, objectivity, impartiality.

· ‘integrity’ is putting the obligations of public service above your own personal interests

· ‘honesty’ is being truthful and open

· ‘objectivity’ is basing your advice and decisions on rigorous analysis of the evidence

· ‘impartiality’ is acting solely according to the merits of the case and serving equally well governments of different political persuasions[6]

Really, they’re just four different aspects of the same imperative – serve the macro-cosmos, without being influenced by your own micro-cosmos.

In theory, we’re a little more relaxed with MPs. In pure constitutional theory, MPs are accountable wholly and only to their constituents. To remove an MP, or materially limit their power as an MP, through some other process would be to undermine the democratic rights of their constituents to be represented by whomever they choose.

In practice though there are process that serve, to some extent, to check and manage the behaviour of MPs. Some of those try to align completely with the idea that MPs are accountable only to their constituents by focusing on public disclosure of information – let the people see (for example) what outside financial interests their MP receives, and then decide for themselves whether they want that person representing them (though in practice that’s rarely a fact most voters are acquainted with, let along one they consider decisive).

Other procedures, especially more recent ones, are more intrusive. The current process for investigating claims of inappropriate behaviour by MPs towards staff, whether their own staff or that of Parliament, might be pretty toothless but it does rely (at least in principle) on more than the disapprobation of the MPs constituents to sanction them.

The instincts of the micro-cosmos, or the instinctive band, or the Dunbar group, interact in different ways with the reality of the modern-day macro-cosmos. As Johan Norberg explains in his excellent book ‘Open: How Collaboration and Curiosity Shaped Human Progress’ our ingroup instinct, no longer capable of being fully satisfied by our social reality, gets projected onto other things.

In recounting a particularly fascinating experiment, Norburg shows how quickly a seemingly deep-rooted identity (in this case that of eight Christian children and ten Muslim children from Beirut, many from strongly religious schools) can be superceded by some other identity, when it is made more relevant (they were divided randomly across religious lines into two groups – Blue Ghosts and Red Genies) and set in conflict with one another. This conflict culminated (and the experiment ended) when three of the Genies threatened one of the Ghosts with a knife. All four were Christian, but those affiliations, high significantly in their own society, were quickly subordinated to their new, wholly artificial, identities. (It’s also notable, and unfortunate, that the intensity they brought to their identities wasn’t significantly lessened.)

When worrying about a politician or official favouring someone who on a microcosmos basis we don’t just need to worry about them favouring people actually in their personal microcosmos – friends and relatives. They can project that instinct onto any person or persons with whom they identify in some way. Identities work on many levels – a person might be Christian, northern, a Liverpool fan, a firm believer that Sean Connery was the best Bond and a cancer survivor (among many other things). All of these things might, at different times and in different ways, generate a sense of identifying with some other person, and therefore instinctively wanting to support and protect that person, advancing their interests and forming a relationship with them.

It’s this unconscious, mostly unexamined, instinct that many of the rules in government are designed to mitigate. It’s why we have anonymized bidding for many contracts (and anyone who doesn’t believe that that anonymity is preserved is welcome to buy me a coffee and listen to me tell war stories of the exhaustive lengths we took to preserve it in rail franchising, for example), why we go to great lengths to recruit on an impartial, objective basis, why we check and double check submissions and briefing documents. And, because we’re not just creatures of instinct, we’re sapient, morally aware human beings, why we have training and a constant culture of improvements around all of this.

Who are we doing it versus? When it comes to good government, we’re doing it versus ourselves – our own biases, our own worst instincts, our own irrational preferences. And on balance I think we’re doing it okay, but we could certainly stand to be doing it a whole lot better.

[1] The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, 1988 [2] For a good overview of the current state of our understanding, try The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve, by Steve Stewart-Williams. (2018). [3] This is where I deviate from Hayek (or to put it more strongly, where Hayek’s position is superceded – see for example Sapiens by Noah Yuval Harari.) Hayek’s view was based on the idea that contemporary western society is a kind of pinnacle and that any cost to create and maintain it is worthwhile – that somehow it optimally suits human nature. While I’m in awe of the benefits of this society, I see it as improvable and don’t take a Whiggish view of how we got here. [4] For a rare example of this working well, check out Iain Banks Culture novels. But for god’s sake start with Player of Games, not Consider Phlebas. [5] As opposed to cultural or financial capital. This theory of the three types of capital is one I’ve found invaluable for career / life planning. [6] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/civil-service-code/the-civil-service-code