Green Moral Exhibitionism

Political arguments should primarily be based on reason, logic and empirical justification, with ethics taking only a secondary consideration. The reason being: if a policy passes the test with regard to reason, logic and empirical justification, it should pass the ethicality test too. But if ethics is the primary goal, then it can mislead, as reason, logic and empirical justification often take a back seat in the deliberations, which then increases the chances of a mistaken proposal.

Ethics in politics usually takes two distinct forms. There is the ethicality which says something should be done because it is morally the right thing to do, and there is the ethicality which is based on posturing and exhibitionism. The first kind correlates with rationality and economics, in that if a policy passes the rationality and economics test it is probably ethical too, and hence morally right to support it. The second kind is all about being ‘seen’ to be doing the right thing – which doesn’t always mean doing the right thing. Naturally, being seen to be doing the right thing is about winning popularity; actually doing the right thing is about adhering to good arguments and good ethics irrespective of whether they are popular or not.

Examples of being seen to be doing the right thing to win popularity are things like higher taxes for the rich, the minimum wage, and import tariffs. They are policies based on posturing, leading to a moral exhibitionism that purports to care about the right kind of people but actually harms them. Despite the fact that the minimum wage law does harm to the very people it claims to be helping, few politicians serious about their career would ever publicly argue against it. Despite the facts against the minimum wage, publicly supporting it gives the impression that you are a champion of the working class – and that’s always a good vote-winner.

This is what the political arena is like – it has many opportunistic, public relations politicians who care about ‘looking’ like they are doing the right thing rather than actually doing the right thing. If everyone in the UK had an economics degree then almost nobody would support the minimum wage, and any politician that did would look like an incompetent liability. But because most of the electorate is unapprised of economics, the opposite happens, with the majority injudiciously supporting the minimum wage, and considering themselves to be decent in the meantime.

The Green Party is a party that makes many appeals to ethics – much of their ethos is based on ethical appeals regarding the state of the planet, the well-being of future generations, and the need to recycle our waste, preserve our green land and lower our emissions. The driving force behind the green ethos is the moral high ground – their policies are built on what can be summarised as our moral duty to future generations. But the problem is, all of these policies are either counterfactual or they are bad economically (often both), which means that as well as being intellectually fraught, they do not have ethical weight behind them either.

This gives us the situation whereby the Green Party is endorsing bad policies on grounds that they are thought to be ethical – which really means two things: either the Green Party members are unapprised of the real nature of their bad policies and are promoting their cause with genuinely good intentions, or, probably more likely, they know their policies are counterfactual and bad economically, but yet still support them because the majority of the public perception is that its members are morally good and caring. Neither of these is commendable. Being wrong about the merits and demerits of a policy is bad (however good the intentions); placing a premium on moral exhibitionism while knowing the policies lack virtue is even worse.

While I can’t know the individual minds of Green Party members, it seems to me that there’s every indication that their situation is closer to the latter than the former. That is to say, I suspect that they know their policies are counterfactual and bad economically, but yet still support them because they are placing a premium on moral exhibitionism and focusing on one of the few remaining areas of politics that the mainstream parties have yet to claim with any rigour.

I don’t doubt that many Green Party members are fully aware of the counter-arguments to their proposals – but these counter-arguments seem to make no impression on them whatsoever. This would be strange if the party members were diligently looking for the truth; but it is perfectly understandable if they are more worried about surviving as a party and winning votes rather than truth-seeking. Look at it from a Green Party member’s perspective for a moment. Take a typical member; they probably grew up in a time when most of the political ground was commandeered by the mainstream parties. As the old left and right has gravitated towards the centre, what has been left are smidgens of opportunities to stand out in a political landscape dominated by blue, red and yellow.

The one way to make yourself stand out is to champion a cause that is under-represented by the mainstream parties. The hard left Greens have done this with environmental and climate issues, and hard right parties (like UKIP and the BNP) have done this with immigration. Naturally, as popularity increases for these fringe parties, the mainstream parties incur selection pressure to take note and act, incorporating into their manifesto policies on issues like the environment, climate change, immigration, the bureaucratic nature of the EU, and so forth.

So typical Green Party members are rather hamstrung by their political limitations – so they must fight hard to ensure that their perceived strengths and the ways their party is different are ways that will seem like a good alternative to the electorate. Sadly, just as an animal is more likely to become aggressive when cornered, a hamstrung political party is more likely to ignore reason and evidence and become skewed towards the significant, profile-inducing identity that sustains it, even if truth and facts lie elsewhere.

When you look closely at the Green Party, you find that they are quite unlike normal, rationally minded people – their obsession with climate and the environment would be an astonishingly unusual thing if it were not for the fact that green obsession is one of the few remaining political identities on which one could base a party and sustain some electoral territory. Without the need for this green obsession to hold themselves together as an alternative party, what they actually subscribe to is quite bizarrely alien to the ordinary human mental constitution.

The upshot is, the majority of citizens in this country, if they are not shackled by a particular heavy party skew, nor soaked in self-interested opportunism, are not naturally green conscious. They don’t go around believing that the carbon they emit or the extra flight to Spain they take will have any serious catalysing effect on the global environment. Rational people know that green issues are largely down to a simple arms race between increased science and technology enabling us to sort out these problems, and politicians sorting them out with punitive green taxations and social duress.

While we can’t foresee the future with any degree of certainty, we know that all the evidence shows that the past 200 years gives great indication that science, increased prosperity and increased technological capabilities will show these present day green obsessions to have been scarcely worth all the time and effort that has gone into them.