Ants, Guppies and Deer: biological analogies to explain why the topic of refugees entering irregularly was selected and framed this way as a populist rhetorical tactic for power.
If you’ve noticed that it seems somewhat random or accidental that prima facie refugees who enter by irregular means is the obsessive hate rhetorical tactic selected in UK politics now, I think you’re right, and I’ll explain why.
Before I present my main argument, the one in the title, I want to point out that I’m not saying this is the only explanation or that it’s an either-or kind of thing why/ how this particular topic has been selected, it’s both.
(Note about how I write: there a lot of explanations of concepts used in my main argument which unfortunately interrupt the logical flow but I think it’s necessary to provide an explanation so that the whole argument is followable for non-specialists in these subjects. I’ve marked off the explanations of concepts used in the main argument as side-notes. If you find it hard to read such a complicated logical structure, it’s fine to skip over the paragraphs in () brackets, or you might want to read those second.)
(Back to the main argument now.) There is also a logical pattern behind why fascists regularly choose the most unknown, the most Other group of people to objectify and otherize to construct their ideal scapegoat out-group — it’s because this group is the most unknown and Other to the audience who they’re persuading and recruiting into their political group.
If the audience had more personal encounters the people who are being assigned to the fascist rhetoricians’ ideal hated out-group it would be harder to construct the group* to use in their scapegoating political strategy. Humanistic / demoratic values emerge naturally in fairly balanced face-to-face interpersonal relationships. So to avoid and steer away from those values, they pick on people who are as unknown and Other as possible.
The scapegoating strategy is ancient, much older than the 1920s-1930s iteration of Ur-fascism (Umberto Eco’s term for the ideological commonalities of all forms of fascism). René Girard’s explanation of the scapegoating mechanism is largely convincing and traces it back to prehistorical times.
(*I am grateful to a law professor who I heard at a student Law Association public lecture in Groningen in, I think, 2017 who was talking about her research in Argentina and how she eventually became convinced by her Argetinian colleague’s argument that the political mass killings in Argentina under Pinochet’s regime constituted a genocide, even though the group to be destroyed was not a group from their own side but they were constructed as a group by the actors of genocide. Unfortunately I can’t remember the name of the professor who taught me this.)
I think it’s both partly a logical strategic choice and partly somewhat random accidental social selection processes how this topic has been selected and framed specifically. My guess about the proportions is approximately 70:30–80:20 accidental vs. strategic motives, i.e. most of the people participating in the social selection of this topic did not make a conscious systematic choice.
My main education is in biology but I’m now studying communication science. So I often refer back to biological analogies to try to explain big social phenomena in the field of political communications. Of course this is speculative, and because these are such big theories* it’s much easier to disprove them bit-wise and much harder to confirm them. I’m not worried about the likelihood that I’m at least partially mistaken, because that’s actually how science progresses, being willing to risk being mistaken.
(*It would require another essay to fully explain why, but just to say it now: I disagree with the habit among scientists now of only considering theories which have not been disproved yet and dismissing bigger, more systematic theories which some parts of or some predictions from have been disproved. One of the problems with over-relying on that methodology is that it’s always easier to disprove bigger theories which attempt to explain more of a system than it is to disprove smaller theories which really only explain a few facts or effects. However, bigger theories, which run the risks of being mistaken and uncertain in more ways, are more practically helpful in solving problems, or at least improving them. It’s easier to establish a tiny theory, one which only really explains a few processes, but it isn’t very pragmatically helpful. Of course we should keep a balance between conserving and innovating, but currently institutional science is erring too much on the conservative side.)
Main argument starts here! At last!
I was stimulated to write this iteration of my version of Media Ecology x Mediatization x Two-Step Flow theories using two biological analogies by Prof. Tanja Bueltmann’s Twitter thread pushing back to the issue of why the UK government are doing this, i.e. using populist scapegoating rhetoric against people who probably are mostly refugees but enter irregularly to claim asylum, instead of reacting to and amplifying their distraction tactics about Gary Lineker’s tweet which compared their rhetoric to 1930s Germany.
What Lineker said was “in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”. He didn’t say the policies are similar (although they are partly) or that we’re living under conditions like then, but that the populist scapegoating rhetoric against a constructed out-group is similar. That’s true.
I think it’s ridiculously blatant that they used the virality of Gary Lineker’s tweet as a distraction tactic, part of aiming to get their Bill passed by parliament in an extraordinary rush with as little substantial debate on it as possible, because if it’s contested on the facts and legal assumptions it relies on then it cannot pass Parliament. They’re allowing less than one week between the first and second readings in parliament, the second reading is set for Monday, and it looks like they won’t even have published the legally mandated impact assessment before the second reading.
That’s an incredibly inappropriate rush for a Bill which seeks to make legislative changes which imply changing fundamental constitutional principles, namely:
First, the order of priority between levels of law — that human rights law has priority over administrative procedural law, because administrative procedural law logically derives its legitimacy from human rights, as, ultimately, what all legitimate administative procedural laws exist for is to apply and balance different human rights claims in reasonably proportionate and practically efficient ways;
Second, the principle that legitimacy in a constitutional democracy flows from human rights recognised in law to state authority, not the other way around — you might argue that this isn’t explicit in UK constitutional law, but almost nothing is explicit because we don’t have a unified and codified constitution as such, but the clearest formulation of it as a principle of constitutional democratic law generally is in the German Basic Law, which was made as part of the cultural denazification process (the Marshall Plan) initiated mainly by the USA and UK governments, which says:
“Basic Law Article 1
(1) Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.
(2) The German people therefore acknowledge inviolable and inalienable human rights as the basis of every community, of peace and of justice in the world.
(3) The following basic rights bind legislation, executive power and jurisdiction as directly applicable law.”
Or to put it more simply: the legitimacy of state authority logically follows from the tripartite state authorities practically upholding and applying human rights, as recognised and formulated in human rights laws. It is not correct in principle for any constitutional democracy to conceive of the assumption that state authority grants or creates human rights. As a matter of democratic values and principles, logically is it the other way around.
(This of course also assumes a level of natural law legal philosophy, appropriately balanced with positive (or posited) law philosophy, that human rights exist naturally before they became conventionally recognised and formally declared in international human rights legislation post-WW2. This is what it says in the Preface to the European Convention on Human Rights, which was largely a British initiative, “effective recognition and observance of the Rights therein declared”, “profound belief in those fundamental freedoms which are the foundation of justice and peace in the world and are best maintained on the one hand by an effective political democracy and on the other by a common understanding and observance of the Human Rights upon which they depend”, and “collective enforcement of certain of the rights stated”. The point I’m emphasizing which is shared by all these statements is that the the set of international human rights legal treaties which originated in the context of the aftermath of World War Two were conceived of as acts of recognition and declaration, rationally warranted by a reasonably universal* and natural human sense of justice. (*Yes, the formulations are partly culturally specific, as they come from Western European civilization (you could also call it a closely related cluster of cultures if you don’t want endorse the superiority claim implied in ‘civilization’), but what the positive laws they made are meant to be are, as universally valid as they could manage back then, forms of recognition and declaration of the universally human, natural sense of justice or social morality, not just conventions.)
This post-WW2 legal philosophy of human rights was framed in constitutional laws then because that generation had just seen what can happen when the notion of ‘democracy’ as only following majority popular will, unbalanced by universal-in-principle democratic values and principles written into constitutional laws to check and constrain majority popular will so that it cannot just do whatever the majority feels like or wills to minorities or marginalized group/s. Degrading the constitutional firewalls against majority will seeking to enact laws or policies which are in-principle undemocratic, i.e. violate the universal democratic values of inherent human dignity, respect for the freedom of others, equality under the law, and solidarity or promoting social equity, is dangerous and leads to an undemocratic state, even if the majority wills it.
Reversing the logical order of legitimacy of state authority and human rights means effectively normalizing authoritarian arbitrariness. That is what is implied in the government claiming the kind of authority logically necessary to create laws which invalidate certain fundamental human rights in cases when people violate an administrative procedural law, the border procedures laws. Reversing the order of priority between levels of law is arbitrary, and if they can get away with it in one case they also begin to normalize that systematically, which fundamentally degrades the constitutionally democratic legal constraints which prevent a re-run of events like the Holocaust and like the other mass atrocities in WW2.
As I explained before recently, I think border procedural laws— at least partly, although some now go too far — have legitimate reasons based in human rights and in the need to balance different human rights claims in a reasonably proportionate way. But that doesn’t, and cannot logically within a moral system of democratic values and principles, ever justify making a usually harmless, relatively trivial administrative procedural law violation — irregular entrance, override a fundamental human right — that a person who is on first appearances in need of international protection who enters by irregular means in order to claim protection from well-founded fear of persecution or realistic risk of indiscriminate serious harm (e.g. war) cannot legally be penalized for it. Non-penalization of irregular entrance in case a person does it in order to claim international protection and if their claim is not manifestly unfounded is the law (Article 31 of the Refugee Convention 1951 and ibid. IHRL) because the reasons why they broke the administrative procedural law about when and how to cross an international border, are usually much more serious than the reasons for the procedural laws about when and how to regularly cross borders, and protecting human life is ultimately the most important purpose of borders have (e.g. by containing infectious epidemic diseases), so it doesn’t make any sense to make a border more important than a human life. Putting a national group’s objectively less serious interests in having borders above a human being’s objectively more serious needs to enter is arbitary and irrational, and that undermines the whole of legal rationality.
Legal rationality is a necessary part of justice, and justice is the ultimate common good (i.e. a good which exists only to the extent it is universal), so undermining legal rationality for anyone ultimately diminishes justice for everyone, because you can’t have more justice for some and less for others as that is not justice. I’m emphasing this point for a really long time because it is a really necessary understanding to maintain or to re-stabilize a democratic culture. That’s why the post-WW2 constitutions emphasize it too.
The norm of authoritarian arbitrariness is a key part of the populist rhetorical strategy used by fascists to recruit and gain mainstream acceptance, and it is called, in Russian, произво́л • (proizvól). It’s not an accident for the fascist leaders who designed this time around’s iteration of populist rhetoric that they are pushing to normalize this implicit idea of state authority as legitimately arbitary, and it’s not an accident that it’s also a Russian idea of state authority, because the groups formed by using populist rhetoric are linked with Russian intelligence. It’s an essential part of any authoritarian system of values and principles, and it’s the opposite of democratic. Again, the ECHR Preface makes this point more briefly:
“the foundation of justice and peace in the world, and are best maintained on the one hand by an effective political democracy and on the other by a common understanding and observance of the Human Rights upon which they depend” i.e. both majoritarian voting and constitutional human rights law.
Thirdly, if government and parliament make this bit of Rishi Sunak’s announement into legislation, “You can’t make spurious human rights claims”*) that means taking even more* judicial matters into the executive’s hands. If the executive government is empowered to decide what is a spurious application to a court and whether it should be dismissed or denied public legal aid funding, which currently depends on proving it is a manifestly unfounded and vexatious application, that is properly something for a judge to decide on, not for any member of the executive government, otherwise we break down another one of the constitutional firewalls against executive overreach and for judicial independence. (*It’s already problematic that asylum decisions are made in the first instance by the executive government, as they are inherently a judicial kind of matter.)
I said I was getting to the main argument a while ago but at last it’s here:
This is in response to Prof. Tanja Beultmann’s question to the government, about “why the Government are doing what they’re doing because ‘stopping the boats’ is not actually the key rationale here”.
Personally my hunch about why they’ve selected these rhetorical tactics and this theme is that, for most of them, there isn’t and wasn’t originally a rationale behind why they’re using this specific theme. I think that for most of the government, Conservative MPs who are supporting them, and even the Labour leader now echoing a relatively milder version of the same framing narrative and similar values, how they ended up with this theme in particular probably occurred mostly by unconscious collective level cognition, like how ants collectively decide which path to take even tho the individuals ants are not conscious of the decisions they’re participating in.
Instead of the selection factor being survival and reproductive fitness, the selection factor here is engagement and network reach. By ‘network reach’ I mean the size of the network cluster which they maintain direct communication with via the mass media outlets they have privileged access to. Effectively it’s selection for ‘unity’, as fascist rhetoricians would usually call it. It’s the opposite of the divide and conquer strategy, but it can have the same aims. That’s because, to achieve unchecked power and purify the nation by eliminating the out-groups, i.e. fascist politics, which is what’s really driving the populist rhetorical strategy, they need to do both: divide society along cleavage lines where the other side are too incompatible in values to be potentially recruitable into ‘the people’ or the national/ ethnic/ religiously defined in-group; and unify the in-group who support their power. It’s a social network structural manipulation strategy, and it helps to understand it if you can visualize it in social graph terms.
For the unifying part of the strategy, it works better if they pick really low public-interest relevance issues which are more amenable to framing in a simple way, rather than more relevant issues which are more immediately present in more people’s lives so that they know more actual details and facts, because then they are more likely to question or argue with the rhetoric, leading to a less unified blob in the network.
Simple bullshit wins over complex reality when the game is competing for engagement and network reach / power.
I think we’re at a stage of mediatization when there are two layers of media environments — like in two-step flow theory but the two steps I see are: political actors > mass media > social media. The most politcally active part of the public participate the most now in social media, so effectively this is the environment in which they receive the messages, so its social media’s values, logics & routines which are mostly shaping mass media’s, which in turn are shaping political actors’ rhetorics, which shape public discourse.
Mediatization theory basically says that over time, in a system with independent media, where the independence of the media is culturally valued and there’s a strong degree of commercialization of journalism and media, then the values, logics and routines of the media tend to structurally influence politics and eventually the political actors have to shape their rhetoric to fit the media’s expectations rather than their own or other systems of values, logic and routines. This theory needs updating for the era of social media, because since social media is now the main environment in which the most politically active members of the public receive political messages, it’s really social media’s values, logics and routines which are shaping the system, including the public discourse. Social media is built with consumerist values and basic assumptions embedded, because the original context of the intentions for building it were to create a platform for advertising, and the platforms are basically designed to generate engagement to get eyeballs on adverts.
The big problem with that is that humans tend to read the structural cues and signs in the environment around us as tho they’re still mostly natural, as they probably would’ve been in the ancestral environment of evolutionary adaptedness. (Side-note: the concept of ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness’ is that, because we are a species with dual inheritance — genetic and cultural, and because cultural evolution is a faster process than genetic evolution, there’s a big time lag between them, so that our genetically pre-adapted traits are largely still adapted to an environment which existed about 250,000 YBP. That time-point is also known as ‘human behavioral modernity’. Now back to the main story.)
So my hunch/ slightly vague hypothesis is that people tend to read the structural signs of values and other kinds of basic assumptions (epistemological and ontological assumptions) in socially artificial environments as tho they’re natural and therefore mostly unconsciously accept them as true, most of the time without any conscious reflection or choice. This is my own version which I came up with mostly before reading McLuhan’s Media Ecology theory but I do think it’s a version of that theory.
So I think where we’ve got to is that we’ve got a system of political actors (I mean professional political actors, not the whole public or all voting citizens) who’ve effectively collectively selected a theme to obsess about, for the most part not because of any individually conscious rational choice, even a divisively selfish and short-termist kind of choice, but because it just happened to attract the most engagement and grow their network reach, or in other words enable them to occupy a bigger habitat or territory within the global digital environment now. Part of how that happened is the populist phase which was driven by political actors who are frankly fascists or fascist-adjacent, so those themes became popularly viral, and then mere opportunists who I guess don’t strongly believe in the ideology behind why those topics got amplified so much, jumped on the bandwagon to try to ride it into power. So the 70:30–80:20 proportions of ideologically motivated vs. engagement-seeking motivated rhetorical use of this topic are interrelated: the ideologically motivated ones I think chose it first, then the cynical electoral opportunists, a much bigger group, selected it just because it’s useful for gaining engagement and network reach, which lead to power.
The fascist political leaders (at that time, mainly Viktor Orban) who designed and drove the populist rhetorical strategy for recruitment which peaked in 2016 were also partly just opportunistically following the engagement patterns which were generated by Russia Today and its associated grey propaganda outlets using the refugee mass influx in 2015–16, which they had caused by their carpet bombing of Aleppo to expel the civilian population who participated in the protests in 2011–13, as material for propaganda to benefit their political proxies and agents in Europe. Most of the participants in their divisive and chaotic strategic manipulations probably aren’t aware that they were used, but that doesn’t matter.
As well as comparing them to ants, I’m also going to compare them to guppies. Guppies are a classic example in biology of social mate selection.
The analogy I’m making is that the way this specific culture war topic has been selected and formed is similar to the process of social mate selection, which means that in social animal species the females often make mate selection choices collectively. So effectively the most successful males are not having to compete for each and every mating at equal starting points because the more often they’ve been selected by other females in the group before the more likely they are to be socially selected by this female again, even if their relative fitness value is no longer the highest available. (It could be seen as a hybrid process of selection x hysteresis.)
Another feature of social mate selection, which is the relevant one for the analogy I’m drawing from guppies, is that the secondary sex traits which are selected because they’re reliable signals of a really valuable primary trait which is invisible on the outside, their structures aren’t fully determined by the selection for the primary traits they predictively signal. Within contraints set by selection and hysteresis, the specific form of seondary sex traits is kind of accidental or a little bit random. They could have evolved the same function with many different possible structures.
In the case of social mate selection, it’s indirectly selecting for adaptive immunity genes (aka. major histocompatibility complexes, which are also why your sexual partner/s smell/s nice to you, because their MHCs are compatible with yours), but the direct selection is on secondary traits which predict the primary trait of value. E.g. deers’ antlers are a secondary sex trait, and they reliably signal how healthy a male deer is, which depends on how adaptive his immunity genes are. But the specific form of the secondary trait which signals that could be many other possibilities, as long as they also had the function of reliably signaling the primary trait which is being selected on, immunity, and as long as they’re not too costly.
(Side-note: the evolutionary purpose* of sex is for slower reproducing multicellular organisms’ adaptive immune systems to keep pace with the rate of antagonistic co-evolution of manipulation strategies of our micro-parasites (*yes, purpose! Teleonomy evolves in complex systems, even tho the teleological fallacy is also a real thing), to evolve resistance strategies.)
The point of this long analogy is that the theme of scapegoating refugees who enter by irregular means has been selected, I think, for the most part because it gains engagement and network reach in this socially artificial environment where content is ranked by engagement metrics and then attitudinally judged by consumerist values and basic assumptions*, but the selection of this thing and the form of rhetoric about it are secondary to the thing which is actually selected for — engagement and network reach, so the specific shape of it is as accidental as why deer have antlers not any other particular form of secondary sex trait which signals for immunity.
(Last side-note: I see the 2016-onwards iteration of populism as partly due to the consumerization of politics. What I mean by that is that because of the mostly unconscious process of reading the cultural cues and signs built into the artificial environment of social media platforms combined, people get unconsciously enculturated into treating politics as a just another consumer matter, which means people decide what to believe and what to do primarily according to their individual subjective feelings and preferences as a consumer, rather than attempting to reasonably judge as a democratic citizen what is true or probably true about the shared reality outside of everyone’s subjectivities and social cliques, and what is in the common interest of the political community/ies which they are members in.)
That’s why I think it’s mostly an unconscious and accidental process how we’ve got to this particular point where obsessive hate rhetoric against prima facie refugees who enter irregularly is the topic socially selected for engagement and network reach by politicians who really just want power.
It’s banal and stupid, as most evil always is.
