The Shrinking Circle: Moral-Singularity and the Rise of Nativism

How biocultural theory predicts the ascendancy of nativism and nationalism in a globalised world

ABSTRACT

Nativist and nationalist politics are ascendant the world-over. Hitherto prevailing analyses have primarily and narrowly focused on the economic conditions that underpin these developments. In this paper I offer an alternate explanatory model grounded in biocultural theory and evolutionary moral-psychology. Drawing upon the work of prominent biocultural theorists, and particularly on Buchanan and Powell’s model of inclusivist and exclusivist moral-response, I demonstrate that existing biocultural literature not only explains the aforesaid developments, as elicited by conditions which trigger a morally-exclusivist response (of which economic conditions are merely one), but also that the existing body of literature predicts such a response under globalised conditions. Additionally, I expand upon Buchanan and Powell’s model, demonstrating that under certain hypothetical conditions, over-expansion of the moral-circle precipitates conditions causative of its own contraction. Analogously to the critical-density of a black hole, I term this hypothetical effect “moral-singularity”, and offer the tentative suggestion that this effect is implicated in the present and ongoing contraction of the moral-circle, particularly across the developed-world.

Introduction

Any present-day observer of politics must surely acknowledge the global ascendancy of political nationalism and nativism, particularly in the European world (the continent of Europe-proper, and its offshoots). Such a trend has already been extensively documented¹ and should be familiar, requiring minimal elaboration. Proposed explanations for the rise of nationalism and nativism in politics (hereafter “N&N”) are manifold, and have included economic and psychological explanations amongst others. This paper offers a perspective on the global rise in N&N rooted in evolutionary and biocultural approaches to moral-psychology. More precisely, I suggest that evolutionary-psychological factors that govern, influence or otherwise delimit the bounds of human moral-generosity are substantially implicated in the rise of N&N.

I suggest that understanding human moral-generosity in terms of a “moral-circle”, whose scope is influenced by instinctual impulsions that are constituted by evolutionary-psychological nature and influenced by environmental-stimuli, is a powerful framework for understanding the rise of N&N, and that the rise of N&N (and the turn towards localism more generally) can be seen as a contraction or shrinkage of the moral-circle in response to stimuli which existing biocultural literature predicts should elicit this response.

The Moral-Circle: Inclusivity and Exclusivity

Contemporary biocultural theorists² configure the history of moral-progress as an “expanding circle”, understood broadly as the widening of the scope of moral-generosity, or the degree to which membership of the moral-community (those deserving of moral-consideration) is extended to others beyond the self, or beyond a given in-group. Peter Singer has perhaps most notably represented this view in his 1981 work of the same title (“The Expanding Circle”). More generally, the notion of a “moral-circle” has also found substantial representation as an applied latent-construct in contemporary moral-psychology.³

In a 1994 lecture for the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver Institute, Richard Rorty described the phenomenon of the moral-circle—the group to whom moral-generosity is extended—and its historical expansion as follows:⁴

“The only ahistorical ethical conviction—the only one that stays constant throughout all historical epochs and all cultures—is the idea that there is a group whose members should be treated with respect—the idea that we should treat ‘these’ people as we expect them to treat us. As soon as our cave-dwelling ancestors began to talk, they began to explain to their children how important it was to stick together, not to kill their siblings even when they were bad, and not to confuse the good people in our own cave with the disgusting people in the cave next door. Mutual respect among members of a group is a necessity for group survival, and our first moral intuitions are those of group loyalty

But most good loyalties are founded upon a sharp distinction between us and the outsiders, the people who do ‘not’ have to be treated with respect. A group is a group simply because its members recognize that they have obligations to one another. Every clan, every tribe, every political unit depends upon such mutual respect. But the historians and the anthropologists tell us that very few cultures have even dreamed of making the group in question as large as the human species. Further, they have contrasted the people who deserve respect with those who don't. For example, the tribe across the river, the heathen across the sea, the slaves, the women, the Jews, the blacks, the homosexuals. Sometimes the people who don't count are said to be not really human, a claim which was often made about black slaves. Sometimes, as in Aristotle's account of women, and in many people's view of homosexuals, they are admitted to be human but said to be degenerate cases of humanity, bad samples of the species.

The moral of the story, which historians and anthropologists tell us, is that morality is a matter of loyalty to and trust in people like ourselves. The difference between morality and prudence is the difference between what we do as members of a group of those like us and what we would do if we had no such membership. What we 20th century heirs of the European Enlightenment call moral progress is a matter of coming to think of more and more people as enough like ourselves to matter. It's a point of pride in our culture that we identify the moral community with the biological species rather than with any more restricted group. (Rorty, 1994)

Having identified the phenomenon itself, evolutionary anthropologists have subsequently arrayed a variety of explanations for how the expanding moral-circle is in fact possible, given that it appears to be in contradiction with the genetic-imperative to prioritise one’s self, one’s kin and one’s extended family more generally.

One line of possible explanation lies in the human faculty for reason. That humans are capable of reasoned, deductive inquiry and deliberation, including about moral affairs is an integral aspect of human nature. To a significant degree, it is by means of our rational faculty that we are capable of engaging in the impartial consideration of universal subjective interests (foundational to morality), and to deduce properties of moral conduct.⁵

On the other hand, we are creatures whose values, judgements and sentimental attachments are informed substantially by powerful evolved instincts that compel us to feel and act in particular ways, some of which are quasi-moral or altruistic and compassionate, and others of which are selfish or tribalistic. I have explored this polarity of forces elsewhere.⁶

Our analysis herein primarily concerns the domain of human instincts, in particular those that mediate “moral-generosity” (understood as the degree to which one extends membership of the “moral-community”—those that are deemed to have morally-considerable interests—to others or to perceived out-groups). Notably, in an extensive survey of the history of “moral-progress”, Buchanan & Powell offer a compelling hypothesis regarding the instincts that mediate said generosity:⁷

Buchanan and Powell suppose that humans have an intrinsic capacity for inclusivist moralities—whether as a matter of sentimental inclination or guided by reason—but hypothesise that we retain a powerful instinctual predisposition to adopt exclusivist or nativist moralities under certain conditions. They write:

Our central hypothesis is that exclusivist morality is … the result of an adaptively plastic “toggle” that is keyed in to cues of out-group threat that are detected in the environment in which individuals and cultures develop and evolve together. More precisely, exclusivist moral response is a conditionally expressed trait that develops only when cues that were in the past reliably correlated with out-group predation, exploitation, competition for resources, and disease transmission are detected. In the animal world, the adaptively plastic detection of a predation threat can involve not only the detection of pertinent chemical cues, but also more cognitively sophisticated inspection of predatory types, motivations and behaviours.

Because humans are linguistic and robustly cultural creatures, the detection of out-group threat can also involve the social transmission of beliefs about out-groups. This can take the form of explicit and implicit beliefs that individuals come to hold as a result of a combination of personal experience and cultural inculcation through “testimony” broadly understood”. (pp. 198-199, 2018))

Buchanan and Powell’s model expands upon already existing literature which has demonstrated that humans are prone to exclusivist tendencies in response more specifically to pathogen-detection, broadening the criteria to include predation and economic scarcity (conditions which is it plausible to imagine would have resulted in group-group competition in ancestral environments).⁸ We can easily imagine how this would have played out in primitive tribal environments:

In ancestral environments, groups that adopted exclusivist-responses in conditions of scarcity may have favoured better in survival terms. For instance, whilst there may be a survival benefit to sharing access to a watering hole with a neighbouring tribe if water is abundant enough such that sharing it and avoiding conflict would have been beneficial to survival, likewise not sharing it—not granting membership of the moral-community to outsiders—would have been beneficial to the group if water was highly scarce. If there is not enough water to go around, granting moral-equivalence to an out-group is maladaptive from a survival point of view.

Because exclusivist-response is conditional upon scarcity or threat-detection, and inclusivity is conditional upon environments of relative plenitude and peacefulness, moral-inclusivity is therefore a “luxury-belief”, and is “only likely to be widespread and stable in highly favorable conditions—namely, those in which the harsh environmental conditions of the early-ancestral environment (EEA) have been overcome”.⁹

The Shrinking-Circle and the Ascendancy of Nativism

This model of moral-generosity and its preconditions substantially illuminates (and as I shall argue subsequently, under certain conditions even predicts) the ascendancy of nativist sentiments across much of Europe and the Western world more generally. In essence, nativism and political nationalism are manifestations of the emergence of an in-group-oriented and ethically exclusivist moral-circle. Nationalists identify along the lines of a national grouping, and nativists along the lines of an ethnic-grouping, and tend to argue for exclusivist policies as regards outsiders: e.g, political favouritism towards the nation or ethnic group, immigration restrictions/strong borders and diminished generosity towards perceived out-groups (for instance, in the form of lessened generosity towards asylum seekers, less generous international aid or welfare policies for foreign nationals or migrants).

If Buchanan and Powell’s model is correct, N&N politics (understood as a form of moral-exclusivity) can therefore be understood as responses to perceptions of predation or threat, economic competition with outgroups, and pathogen detection.

The Lexicon of Nativism and Nationalism

That N&N politics are a manifestation of the aforesaid biocultural phenomenon is substantially illustrated by the lexicon and rhetoric of N&N movements. The lexicon of N&N proponents is substantially reflective of their in-group preference and moral-exclusivity, and also of the detection of cues that elicit the response. One sees the imprint of the aforesaid mechanisms at play in numerous dimensions of political discourse:

THE LEXICON OF MORAL-EXCLUSIVITY

That N&N movements are morally-exclusivist or in-group preferential hardly requires elaboration, but can briefly be illustrated by considering the following rhetorical tropes that are common to their lexicon. N&N movements frequently:

• Style themselves as “X-first”, whether “America First”, “'Britain First” or otherwise. (Reflecting moral preferentialism for the perceived in-group)

• Argue for withholding full membership of the moral-community from those who at perceived to be out-groups (such as by advocating for the deportation of foreigners, the stripping of citizenship or reduced generosity in terms of welfare or international aid for foreigners).

• Some more extreme N&N subgroups adopt dehumanising characterisations of out-groups, whether in the form of racial-slurs, or other categorisations (e.g., “subhuman”), evidencing a hierarchy of preference for different groups, or the belief that perceived outgroup do not belong to the same morally-considerable tier as the in-group.

THE LEXICON OF EXCLUSIVIST CUE-DETECTION

This model also provides a powerful theoretical explanation for why immigration debates tend to overwhelmingly focus on the economy and crime, since those factors pertain to the detection of scarcity and resource-competition, and threat-detection and predation. To a lesser extent, pathogen-detection plays a role in immigration debates (for instance if migrant populations are shown to have higher transmission rates of infectious diseases, or low vaccine-uptake), but the issue is somewhat less prominent as an overt consideration. More prominently, one finds that N&N rhetoric commonly employs pathogenic tropes in order to characterise and dehumanise target out-group populations (this is familiar, for instance, in the propaganda of Nazi-era Germany, which commonly portrayed target groups—e.g., Jews—as parasites, spiders or insects).

Examples of economic competitiveness detection include:

• The accusation that out-groups are taking in-group jobs.

• The accusation that out-groups are an economic-drain.

• The accusation that out-groups consume key resources in vital sectors, such as housing or healthcare.

Examples of predation threat-detection include:

• The accusation that out-groups are more criminally disposed.

• The accusation that out-groups are disloyal or side with hostile-enemy nations or groups.

Since the principal concern of this paper is not to answer whether or not these accusations are justified or correct (the matter is the subject of persistent and on-going debate), I’ll not attempt to provide evidence one way another. Indeed, as Buchanan and Powell note, merely the perception that out-groups are implicated in these trends is sufficient to elicit a morally-exclusivist response; thus, the central thesis of our paper is unaffected by whether or not the perceptions are in fact true. The question of the veracity of the aforesaid observations is left to the realm of ongoing debate.

Moral-Singularity: The Black-Hole Effect

Contained within the aforementioned model of moral-circle contraction is the inherent implication that under certain given real-world conditions, over-expansion of the moral-circle could itself reintroduce a threshold of conditions under which it triggers its own subsequent contraction:

This can be understood analogously to the point of critical density at which a given body of mass collapses in on itself into a black-hole:

We could conceivably imagine this unfolding in a variety of scenarios, but let us focus on two hypothetical scenarios pertaining to the principal detection-mechanisms that elicit moral-exclusivism: scarcity and threat-detection.

Scenario 1:

Suppose a given environment has finite resources R which are plentiful enough so as to engender a sense of resource-abundance and plenitude amongst inhabitants A. Suppose group A is therefore at liberty to generously extend its moral-circle to include group B. Suppose that due to some factor (e.g., sudden environmental change, or over-consumption of resources, perhaps by the new group B itself), the resources R are no longer enough to sustain the needs of both groups A and B. Under such conditions, group A may retract its formerly-held moral-inclusivism as regards B.

Scenario 2:

Suppose a given community A has cultivated a peaceable and non-threatening environment for itself (whether by means of cultural standards, self-domestication or otherwise), suppose it therefore feels generous enough to extend moral-generosity to group B. Suppose group B are less so culturally domesticated or peaceable and thus, after having been granted membership of the moral-community, are subsequently found to be implicated in a variety of threatening and trouble-making behaviours. A’s threat-detection mechanisms are activated, and they therefore begin to withhold membership of the moral-community from group B.

This expansion-contraction effect can be illustrated diagrammatically as follows:

We can therefore see how assuming certain given parameters, Buchanan and Powell’s model predicts an expansion-contraction effect as regards the bounds of the moral-circle. If the aforesaid hypothetical scenarios are demonstrably and empirically analogous to real-world scenarios (e.g., globalisation and the policies of mass-migration and their effects), then the moral-singularity effect can be understood as operative in genuinely extant contexts.

Whether these hypothetical scenarios legitimately analogise real-world events is again, a matter for subsequent empirical and political debate, but at bare minimum I hope to have demonstrated that assuming similar parameters, the moral-singularity effect is a latent implication of the biocultural model heretofore outlined.

Conclusion

Contemporary biocultural literature provides a vital window into the biopsychological and material conditions that underpin expansion and contraction of the moral-circle. Existing literature provides a powerful a priori theoretical model that explains the rise of N&N politics as a manifestation of a morally-exclusivist response, triggered by the detection of relevant cues (predation, scarcity, etc.) that elicit it for evolutionary reasons. Both the contraction of the moral-circle, and the detection of relevant implicated cues are reflected in the lexicon of N&N political rhetoric and concerns. Implicit in the model is the latent possibility that under certain hypothetical conditions, the moral-circle can over-extend, reaching a critical-density (singularity) and eventually contracting, by bringing about conditions stimulative of its own shrinkage. This hypothetical phenomenon of moral-singularity potentially offers a holistic explanation for the rise of nativism and nationalism in reaction to (perceived) negative aspects of globalisation, and provides a framework for further analysis.

1. e.g., Helms, B. (2023) ‘Global Economic Integration and Nativist Politics in Emerging Economies’, American Journal of Political Science; Bieber, F. (2018) ‘Is Nationalism on the Rise? Assessing Global Trends’, Ethnopolitics.

2. e.g., Singer, P. (1981) The Expanding Circle, Princeton University Press; Buchanan, A., et al. (2018) The Evolution of Moral Progress, Oxford University Press.

3. e.g., Waytz A., et al. (2019) ‘Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle’, Nature Communications; Anthis, J. R., et al. (2021) ‘Moral circle expansion: A promising strategy to impact the far future’, Futures. Rorty, R. (1994, March 19). Do we need ethical principles?

4. Rorty, R. (1994) Do we need ethical principles?, Cecil and Ida Green lecture delivered at the Vancouver Institute, University of British Columbia.

5. Explored in Ch. 4, Singer, P. (1981).

6. van der Werf (2024) In Two Minds, Birkbeck Colloege, University of London.

7. Buchanan, A., Powell, R. (2018) The Evolution of Moral Progress, Oxford University Press.

8. e.g., Fincher, C., et al. (2012) ‘Parasite-Stress Promotes In-Group Assortative-Sociality: The Cases of Strong Family Ties and Heightened Religiosity’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences; Navarette, C. D., et al. (2006) ‘Disease AVoidance and Ethnocentrism’, Evolution and Human Behaviour. Cited p. 200, Buchanan & Powell (2018).

9. Buchanan & Powell used the term “luxury-good”, first introducing it: (p. 188, 2018)