World politics so often seems gloomy. Wars are bloody and frequent, most nations have high levels of corruption and lots of bad governance, and, even in the most successful polities, bitter partisanship prevents many important problems from being solved in a forward-looking manner. You probably agree with this short portrait, no matter what the details of your political stance.
Those outcomes are not inevitable but to see improvement we need to overcome some of our cognitive biases. That’s right, a lot of the problems of politics stem from human cognition. It’s not always a question of strengthening “the good guys” who are fighting “the bad guys.” We all tend to think we are the good guys more often than we really are. We fight when we should give in, we stick to our guns when we should change our mind, and we do not realize that we are sometimes part of the problem rather than the solution. If we are to improve politics, we need to help ourselves overcome these biases.
My colleague Robin Hanson runs a website called Overcoming Bias (www.overcomingbias.com) and that phrase reflects a central theme in his thought: How biased are we humans and what can we do to overcome those biases? I’ve long been a fan of Robin’s efforts to clear the world of false thinking and toward that end he is fascinated with cognitive biases, emotional biases, biases from overestimating our own abilities, and so on. Robin also attaches special importance to our bias to think we are smarter than are other people. We tend to attach more weight to our own opinions, when those opinions clash with equally smart others, than is rationally justifiable. How many people do you know who walk away from half their arguments saying that the other guy was right?
One way to correct for those biases is to check in with the perspectives of other people. And so I wonder: If we can learn something from autistic perspectives on aesthetics, what might we learn from autistic perspectives on politics? How could that contribute to self-education and the creation of my own economy? But of course we must first ask what it means to postulate an autistic perspective on politics. Autistics are not themselves associated with any particular political point of view, except perhaps for better treatment of autistics. If autism is fundamentally a cognitive profile, how can that possibly be mapped into the complex, messy world of real-world politics?
I believe that autistics are especially well equipped to appreciate modes of political thinking that are cosmopolitan and legalistic (in the sense of favoring rule of law), and more broadly the notion of a pragmatic “politics without romance.” I would like to offer some admittedly speculative perspectives on these questions.
I start with a simple but little-known observation: There is good evidence that people along the autism spectrum are in some measurable ways more objective than non-autistics. It remains an open question how far this objectivity extends, but, from psychologist Rita R. Jordan, here is a typical description of the current scientific consensus:
People with ASD [autism spectrum disorder] are therefore less likely to show egocentric, or other, bias. They are also protected from bias by the failure of their memories to adjust to existing context or to their general semantic knowledge. Thinking (including remembering) is unusually objective in people with ASDs…and memories remain both rigid and accurate (in relation to the time of their encoding). Such detailed discrimination of the particular should mean that people with autism are not prone to stereotyping in their thinking or memories.
We should not conclude that autistics are more objective about everything (we just don’t know), but the difference in perspective is intriguing.
Another well-known bias, familiar from behavioral economics, is called the endowment effect. People tend to place excess value on the objects they already own or perceive as belonging to them.
Some recent research (“Explaining Enhanced Logical Consistency During Decision Making in Autism” by Benedetto De Martino et al.) suggests autistics are less likely to suffer from endowment effects and in this regard they are more likely to behave according to standards of economic rationality. A classic laboratory experiment starts people with a sum of money, in this case fifty British pounds, and offers them a comparison between two sure options: “keeping twenty pounds” and “losing thirty pounds.” Given the starting point of fifty pounds, the two actual outcomes are the same, even though one framing sounds positive and the other framing sounds negative. But will people treat them the same? In the experiment the subjects are asked to compare the two sure outcomes to a series of risks. The economically correct answer is to view the two sure outcomes as equal in comparing them to the series of risks. But in the laboratory subjects typically are more averse to the prospect framed in terms of a loss (“loss aversion”). More specifically, once the outcome is framed in terms of a loss, people will accept greater gambles to try to avoid any loss at all, compared to the risks they will take when the position is framed in terms of gains.
In the study, the autistic subjects did significantly better at seeing that the talk of “loss” and “gain” was mere framing and that the two options should be treated the same, although they too showed some degree of loss aversion. Skin conductance tests run during the experiment indicated that the autistics reacted less emotionally to framing the one option in terms of loss rather than gain. In other words, the mere fact that a material resource is viewed as “theirs” seems to bias autistics less than it does non-autistics.
I’ll come back to those results, but first let’s look at some autistic perspectives on politics.
I have noticed that self-aware autistics are especially likely to be cosmopolitans in their thinking. That is, they tend to attach weaker moral importance to the boundaries of the nation state than do most other people. I view the relative lack of cosmopolitan sympathies as a bias held by others and a case where the autistic perception, if I may call it that, is closer to being the correct one. Since war has been very costly in human history, I view the benefits of the less biased cosmopolitan perspective as significant.
Much of this cosmopolitan tendency is rooted in experience rather than cognition. Most autistics have lots of experience with being the “out group” when it comes to “in vs. out” confrontations or social settings. That makes them naturally suspicious of political persecutions, extreme forms of patriotism, and groupthink. Autistics are in any case less synchronized with mainstream social fads, as we have seen.
In 2008, a Florida classroom voted 14–2 to expel a five-year-old boy labeled as Asperger’s. The teacher held an impromptu “trial” of the boy, in front of the class, with testimony from his five-year-old detractors. Each student was asked to say something he or she did not like about the boy and many called him “weird” or put forward related epithets. Then the vote was held, again at the instigation of the teacher. (I am heartened by the two votes to keep the boy in class and I would have liked to have heard an exit poll from his defenders.) This is an extreme example, and the teacher was later removed from that post, but it represents an all-too-familiar tendency to pick on people who are different and unable to defend themselves.
So to the extent nationalism is based on cultivating or encouraging an “in group” feeling, it probably won’t appeal much to autistics. Many autistics will be wary of nationalism and they will see it as rooted in the same in-group feelings that led to their taunting or oppression in the schoolyard or elsewhere.
To a self-aware autistic, nations, or for that matter religions, will not always seem like the most important moral dividing lines. The general phenomenon of neurodiversity implies that within a single nation or religion individuals can be very different. Two autistic individuals in Baltimore and Beijing might have some important features of cognition or behavior in common and they might feel stronger bonds with each other than either would with many of their countrymen.
The association of diversity with national boundaries or with regional geography is built into a great deal of the contemporary discussion of globalization, both among scholars and in the popular arena. If the nation of France becomes more like the nation of Germany, there is a presumption that “cultural diversity” has gone down. When people in Bangkok started wearing blue jeans and thus neglected native modes of dress, a wide array of commentators, from Naomi Klein to Benjamin Barber, suggest that such instances show a decline in cultural diversity. These writers asked how much one geographical region differs from another, and using that benchmark, they judged the progress of cultural diversity.
But why should we focus on the form of diversity that lines up so closely with physical space, national boundaries, and “face time”?
Many of the most important forms of human diversity, including neurodiversity, don’t line up with geography in any simple way. Self-aware autistic individuals are more likely to be aware of the diversity across people’s minds, neurologies, and behavior patterns. When I know that autistics are using the web to organize, to teach each other about social interaction, and to make new friends I think: “Ah, diversity is going up!” Of course these trends go far beyond autistics and they cover newly organized groups of many different kinds. Suddenly there is greater space and latitude for many pursuits, experiences, and ways of life. Only later do I wonder whether these people are in separate countries or in the same country or whether their countries are becoming more alike. It’s a bias to focus so heavily on one’s countrymen, or any other form of in-group relations.
There also may be more fundamental cognitive reasons for an autistic predisposition toward cosmopolitan attitudes. A nation or culture is a bit like an endowment effect, namely that most people value it more highly, with special degrees of fervor, simply because it is theirs. Herodotus remarked long ago that each person thinks that his way of life is best. You can find exceptions, but if you look, say, at the wars in the former Yugoslavia, most Serbs favored the Serbian side, most Bosnians favored the Bosnian side, and so on. There were Soviet dissidents who hoped their country would be conquered by the United States but overall political “turncoats” of this kind are relatively rare. Most people take the side of their country or their culture or their region, simply because it is theirs.
If autistics suffer less from the bias of endowment effects, perhaps they are also less likely to value a nation highly, again, simply because it is theirs. Autistics may be more able to take an objective point of view. I again stress that this is speculative, but it is a first step toward contemplating autistic perspectives on politics.
When it comes to political theory, my expectation is twofold. First, autistics are attracted to simple and straightforward codes of ethics, applied universally to all human beings. Apart from autistic cosmopolitanism and autistic objectivity, it also may stem from a greater willingness to question whether socially common exceptions to the rules are justified.
Second, I suspect that a subgroup of autistics has a relatively easy time accepting or grasping ideas about constitutions, rules-based approaches to social order, legal reasoning as it is written down, and the long-term impersonal benefits of the rule of law. Appreciating the abstract operation of any mechanism, whether a watch, a machine, an economy, or a polity (or atonal music; see the previous chapter), is quite difficult. We should expect to find that skill in relative or disproportionate surplus among groups that have a comparative advantage in understanding ordered, abstract mechanisms. Appreciating the practical benefits of a free society—at a high level of abstraction—may be correlated (loosely) with autism in the same way that math or engineering or clock repair skills are. Some small subgroup of autistics is especially likely to have those skills, even if autistics as a whole usually do not.
Again, the claim is not that autistics are “more this way on average.” Instead cognitive specialization and varied cognitive skills will put autistics into various intellectual nooks and crannies, in a wide variety of directions, political or otherwise.
Writing the Declaration of Independence surely required an extraordinary ability to look afresh at an important problem. There is in fact a heated debate as to whether or not Thomas Jefferson was on the autism spectrum, in part due to his extreme propensity to collect and catalog information. As I have discussed, the difficulties of any diagnosis across history are daunting and I don’t think it is possible to categorize Jefferson in this manner. The point stands that unusual or important ideas—just like unusual aesthetic perspectives—often come from people with specialized cognitive skills. Living in 2009, we often take ideas about a free society for granted but in fact such ideas have been totally absent throughout most of human history and they still have not taken hold in many parts of our world. An understanding of a free society and its benefits does not come naturally to most human beings and that understanding had to be discovered and communicated by people with some highly atypical minds.
On average autistics are better with print-based modes of reasoning than with oral discourse. Many autistics have a strong memory for factual details, strong pattern recognition skills, and an ability to interpret principles of equality very literally and in a cosmopolitan manner. These are exactly the sorts of skills that go into legalistic and constitutional reasoning. Furthermore those skills are especially relevant in appreciating social systems based on written laws, rather than systems based on unspoken or implicit personal favors.
One thinker who did very much appreciate the abstract workings of the economy—and a good legal system—was the late economics Nobel laureate Friedrich A. Hayek (though I would not suggest Hayek was autistic). Hayek stressed that the market economy was an effective abstract mechanism for coordinating plans and discovering new ideas; he also favored a constitutional order based on the rule of law and equal treatment for all human beings. In his Constitution of Liberty and other works, Hayek outlined a vision of a liberal society as a “spontaneous order,” namely a proliferation of institutions, conventions, norms, and other social and economic practices that are not generally the result of central planning. Most of all Hayek is skeptical about the ability of human beings to plan all outcomes in advance by using their reason. Hayek argued that a rich and largely unplanned order can blossom when society is governed by a relatively small set of abstract rules, and, ideally, a constitution; you don’t have to share Hayek’s libertarian and conservative version of this blend to find this an appealing vision.
Hayek also thought his political arguments should be grounded in an understanding of human neurology. Before the Second World War he wrote a work that was later titled The Sensory Order (the book was not published until 1952). This book, a study in neurology, reflects many of the broader themes of knowledge and interpretation in Hayek’s work. Hayek argues that the mind is governed by the decentralized classification of sensory inputs. Cognition is not about top-down processes or a unitary decision-maker sitting in a single mental chair. In Hayek’s view the spontaneous mental order, resulting from the ongoing classification of sensory inputs, makes cognition possible while limiting the ability of our mind to know reality in all its fullness. In an argument reminiscent of Gödel, Hayek stresses how a decentralized process of classification can never fully understand itself and thus can never fully understand the social world. Hayek was one of the first neuroeconomists (probably Adam Smith was the first), and while he showed no interest in autism, his core model of the mind touches on some key issues of autistic cognition.
Hayek’s neurological analysis isn’t informed by recent scientific research but it is nonetheless significant that he takes neurology to be so important for his projects in economics and political philosophy. If the imperfections of human knowledge drive Hayek’s arguments on politics and economics, the natural inclination is to want to understand knowledge better and thus he was led to study neurology.
My perspective on politics and neurology is, however, a bit different from Hayek’s. He tries to argue something like “A mind cannot very well understand itself and so a polity cannot reshape itself effectively according to principles of rational argument.” That leads Hayek to some relatively conservative conclusions, along the lines of the classic British conservative Edmund Burke. Hayek repeatedly stresses the dangers of revising long-standing institutions all at once according to some supposedly rational plan; he fears that the limits of the human mind will cause such plans to overreach and go askew. I don’t see a strong correlation between how well a mind can know itself and how well a government can make broader plans for society. Hayek’s work on neurology, even if correct on its own terms, did not succeed in justifying or grounding his political ideas.
My core intuition is more along these lines: “Different kinds of human minds often have difficulty appreciating each other’s virtues, so social arrangements, and personal individual judgments, should be robust to this fact.” That is still an argument for social and economic decentralization, but it has a different slant than Hayek’s. In most disputes, cosmopolitan perspectives that include an appreciation of abstract social hierarchies are likely to be undervalued by most people and they shouldn’t be. As is probably obvious by now, I think autistic perspectives on politics are extremely valuable.
Autistic insights won’t, on their own, settle the debates between Democrats and Republicans or between libertarians and progressives or whatever the dispute may be. But when combined with other values and empirical judgments, those principles will influence our political conclusions. Those principles could make us less partisan, more willing to cooperate, more willing to admit we cannot judge every issue correctly, and, most importantly, less willing to define politics in terms of “us vs. them.” Such changes would improve the political problems discussed in the first paragraph of this chapter, namely war, corruption, and bad governance.
Consider the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. (Warning: Two paragraphs of abstruse metaphysics will follow; skip them if you wish!) If there is any thinker who exhibited a very general attraction to the ideas of rules and ordering, whether in personal or public life, it is Kant. Perhaps more than any other thinker of his time, Kant stressed the importance of how the mind orders reality (Kant, by the way, influenced Hayek). For Kant this was not neurology but rather it was a fundamental metaphysical principle. He was trying to solve the debates of his time about how human beings can possibly know anything at all. He doubted the constructions of the rationalists, who claimed to deduce knowledge from pure reasoning alone; he thought pure reason taken alone would collapse in contradictions and dead ends. He also was unpersuaded by the empiricists, such as John Locke and David Hume, who looked to sensations in the mind as a source of knowledge. Kant did not see how the mere accumulation of particular pieces of knowledge about our sensations could possibly lead to something as powerful and as certain as mathematics and geometry. In essence Kant set out to refute skepticism about the possibility of knowledge, and he did this by emphasizing how our minds order reality and thus make possible knowledge of that reality.
With this talk of order and ordering, Kant wasn’t referring to daily acts of classification and collection but rather that our minds contribute rational underlying structures to the entire universe, including the categories of space and time. Order comes from our ordering processes. For Kant, we know reality not because our minds perceive it passively but because we help create it. Furthermore we can never know things in themselves (“noumena”) but rather we have access only to how our minds impose structure on things. Much of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason outlined his account of the categories and rules that the mind contributes to reality in this “synthetic” fashion. In Kant’s terminology of “phenomena” and “noumena,” we can never know noumena but we know phenomena by helping to create them with our minds.
Maybe that sounds a little heady and if you don’t understand it all, I’m not sure that I do either. In fact I’m not sure that, if you look at it closely enough, it makes much sense. Metaphysics slips easily into ill-defined concepts and without clarity of language metaphysical ideas can be very hard to understand, much less evaluate. But still, Kant was obsessed with the idea—no matter how exactly you interpret it—that the mind orders reality.
Kant’s biography shows that ordering took on many forms in his life, not just in his epistemology and metaphysics. Kant ordered his own reality through his regular walks, through his interest in mastering human knowledge, and through his attempt to construct a failsafe philosophical system. Ordering was such a strong idea and also practice for Kant that when it came to metaphysics, apparently it was natural that ordering should assume primary place. I read Kant as, quite simply, a brilliant but biased thinker who elevated neurology to the realm of metaphysics. Kantian metaphysics is a kind of autistic dream, as if the specialized cognitive strengths of the autistic mind somehow were fundamental to all of reality.
In Kant’s life the idea of ordering pops up in many different contexts. Kant was a polymath and he devoted his life to accumulating and organizing knowledge. He taught a wide variety of courses, including mathematics, geography, anthropology, the natural sciences, metaphysics, logic, theology, ethics, and pedagogy, and he was renowned for having expertise in all of these areas. Kant never married or seemed to have an active sex life. He actively socialized but usually toward the end of intellectual conversation and engagement. It is reputed that the citizens of Königsberg, where Kant lived, set their clocks by his daily walk. It’s hard to tell how much of those historical accounts is exaggeration, but it is known that Kant lived a quiet academic life and avoided small changes in his daily routines. His letters show that noise and noisy environments disturbed him greatly. We don’t know if Kant was autistic but the idea of ordering—now in the sense of overt behavior rather than cognition—had a strong hold over his life.
If you look at Kant’s ethical and political ideas, they reflect his fascination with ordering. He favored a very strict morality of obligation based on the idea of fixed rules of conduct that were not to be broken under any circumstances. We should not for instance tell lies, even to save human lives. In the more practical political sphere, Kant was a strong and early advocate of the rule of law, constitutionalism, and political liberty, including a cosmopolitan world order of peace. Kant had a strong appreciation for the operation of abstract mechanisms.
What has gone wrong with many of the non-free societies in today’s world is a lack of adherence to abstract rules of behavior and a lack of understanding of such rules as beneficial abstract mechanisms. A country where people do not wait in line in orderly fashion, or where the drivers do not stay in their lanes, is usually a country with serious economic and political problems. It is instructive to compare rule-following behavior in Chile and Argentina. In Chile people are far more likely to obey the laws and to obey the unspoken rules, and they make these decisions of their own accord without the prospect of immediate reward or punishment. You cannot bribe a policeman and most drivers follow the rules of the road. Overall the country is remarkably non-corrupt, especially compared to its neighbors, including Argentina. Chile is also more prosperous than Argentina and for some time now its political life has been more stable and also freer. Contemporary Chile is by most accounts the most successful society in Latin America. In most Latin American countries—but not Chile—the system of income tax collection does not function. You can argue about whether rule-following behavior is the cause or effect of the Chilean success but probably it is both.
A list of the most successful societies in the world usually would include the United Kingdom, the Nordic countries, Japan, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Rule-governed behavior is a paramount idea and indeed ideal in each of these societies. The Hungarian émigré George Mikes noticed that “an Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.”
For an example of political failure, consider contemporary Russia. Despite a substantial freeing up of the economy after the fall of the Soviet Union and a well-educated population, Russia today is not a free society. It does not have free speech, most of the resources are state-controlled or mafia-controlled monopolies, and corruption is rampant. Democracy is vanishing as each election is more controlled than the last. Freedom of the press is dwindling.
Many Russians value freedom but their conception of freedom is not tied to a comparable understanding of the benefits of rules or how rules can operate as a useful abstract mechanism. Too many Russians lack a strong idea of adherence to the norms and principles behind a free society. Instead most Russians, including most of the numerous freedom-loving ones, find their first attachment to their friends and to an ideal of friendship. Their attachments are highly emotional and directed toward very particular human connections, not toward the abstract or toward a principle of order. The connection to friends also comes before the duty to country or the idea of loyalty to an abstract principle of order.
Many Russians are cynical about large-scale political units and for that matter about large-scale political principles. And because of both the Great War and communism, they are used to relying on friends to survive. So in any political setting the natural tendency is toward particularism, favoritism, and that means corruption too. General civic spirit is weak and written constitutions have little or no meaning. Political life degenerates into a grab for resources and few people stop or protest on the grounds that this is breaking some set of explicit or implicit rules. And so we are seeing a descent into tyranny and control once again. Yet at the same time most Russians are incredibly warm and loving human beings (I don’t just say that because I married one…). That warmth reflects their deep and very personal ties to their circles of friends and families.
But where is the attachment to an ideal of abstract order in the political sphere? The notion of abstract orders is found in many areas of Russian life—just look at all the phenomenal Russian chess players—but sadly it is not much found in the Russian conception of the polity.
As I write, Russia is losing the potential to become a free society. And why? We’ve already seen that autistics have cognitive strengths at mental ordering, and also that many autistics have cognitive advantages in understanding the benefits of abstractly ordered systems. It can be said that the overall Russian mind-set, when it comes to politics, is not sufficiently autistic.