Drivers of Brexit and The Right Wing
Brexit appears to be a thing of the past, but immigration and sovereignty, two reasons for Brexit, are still discussed more than ever. The freedom of movement and powers to legislate over such movement are central to a post-Brexit UK. The article outlines three reasons why these topics are so powerful and powerfully felt by people discussing them: 1) Genetic cognition, 2) mythical ideologies of evolutionary and human nature theory and 3) the problem of moral-culture wars. It concludes that we must shake off the shackles of false scientific and imagined cultural traditions to reveal the myths of evolutionary theory.
Cognitive Underpinnings and Environmental Triggers
According to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (2012), some people are more likely than others, based on genetic makeup, to lean towards right-wing or left-wing values. Levels of openness influence whether people vote for left or right-leaning policies. If someone is less open, they will favour right-wing values like strict borders, controlling outside influence, group cohesion, tradition and hierarchy based upon moral values. If they are more open, they will prioritise moral values like compassion, care, inventiveness, and equality of outcome, which are valued higher on the left side of the political spectrum. British polls exploring views on migration appear to echo such beliefs, with Labour voters being more open to migration than Conservative voters (Richards et al., 2023).
In 2016, a cautionary tale around migration and lack of sovereignty was encouraged (see The Sun Dec 1, 2016). Migrants were deemed as the risky other, whilst the EU was the unstoppable migrant enabling institution (The Daily Mail Dec 1 2016). With the knowledge that genetics need to be environmentally triggered, it is not a surprise that right-wing values flourished within people less aligned with openness. As the saying goes, “Genetics loads the gun but the environment pulls the trigger” (Munzel et al., 2021). Brexit offered this idea of a bordered world of security and fixed identity. Brexit offered people an imagined chance to fulfil such perceived lost identities and cultivate reasons for such a perceived loss.
The Myth of Evolution and Human Nature.
People, media and politics imagine British culture as the forefront of evolution and civilisation (Lightman 2014). Being a part of an idea of ‘the West’, it locates itself alongside America as a counter to ‘the East’. Evolutionary thinking originates from values around one culture being superior or more advanced to another (Tylor 1871). Our natural tendency to categorise things into ‘purity’ and ‘danger’ also gives power to such ideas (See Douglas 1966). The migrating ‘other’ tends to fall into the danger category. In contrast, everything at home tends to be imagined as pure. Thus, these faulty ideas of evolutionary theory, placing the white man at the forefront of evolution and civilisation, when aligned with natural tendencies to categorise the world, lead to some questionably skewed visions of the world.
Moral-Culture Wars
These discourses tend to bring out the self-interested, competitive, us versus them nature of humans that Thomas Hobbes imagined might be a dominant characteristic of human nature. The party’s neoliberal and more right-wing conservative factions seem intent on creating ethical-cultural politics partly based on only Hobbes’s imagination of ‘human nature’ (see Wengrow and Graeber 2021 for more on the myths of human nature).
Brexit voters partly feel that the boundaries of the good and ‘pure’ British identity are threatened in the UK. This discourse has been underpinning the politics around migrants for many years now, so much so that outsiders and migrants attempt to adopt, perform, or prove that they can live in so-called modern societies and have to take a citizenship test to gain citizenship (Independent Aug 15, 2022).
What aspects of Brexit come down to is an argument over what counts as good and how to protect such goods, identities and ways of life associated with them. Moral values and believing one set to be superior to the other are the foundation of culture wars between nations, classes, and ethnic groups. These debates are heated because a sense of security and identity feels threatened. We absorb cultural morals without realising, making it difficult to see otherwise or change. They become even more powerful when embedded in biological mechanics of openness and purity/danger binaries.
Although some moral values are more superior universally to others, perhaps like those associated with anti-suffering, when we start to align ranked values to cultural groups, race, civilisation, and faulty ideas of primitiveness, problems arise. We need to look beyond these values as inherently natural or embedded within race or genes and instead look at historical, political and economic factors. The more racist-leaning Brexit voter is often guilty of making this association. We tend to imagine our highest values are pure and of our creation embedded in ‘our’ history and ‘our’ tradition instead of a product of cultural diffusion.
Beyond Myths and the Romanticising of Culture.
Associated with ideas of ‘purity’ is the idea that we were better off in the past. Brits imagine a bygone era without the influence of the migrating ‘other’ and globalisation. However, such pure cultural values only exist within our imaginations. We also tend to cherry-pick practices from different periods and elevate them above other not-so-pleasant traditions, forgetting other histories of ‘our’ past. According to the historian Eric Hobsbawm (1977), we can confuse invented traditions and our imagined past with genuine traditions. The need to take the rose-tinted glasses off when we delve into our past is more urgent than ever.
We must also see how tradition, culture and history are not interchangeable. We constantly create culture (Wagner 2016). It may partly resemble previous practices but often involves something new emerging from a dialectical relationship between the individual and social life, convention and invention. Tradition is an element of culture. History informs traditions and culture. It is vital to separate these notions. We must understand how each influences the other and highlight how cultures are not materially bound and cordoned off from others but instead imagined as such.
In reality, the UK has benefited massively from migration. Indian and Caribbean cultural practices are two of the most significant that come to mind. Food and music in England would be much less inspiring if migration did not occur. Pubs originate from 43AD Roman Taverns. We invented and created the pub culture in Britain in the 19th century from long-standing Roman culture and infrastructure. Culture is not static or bounded. It is not simply a pure tradition. If we start to think of culture as static, it is hard to account for the new. The invention of practices in Britain has always been and always will be entwined with people who have not lived in Britain or do not come under the imagined idea of a British person.
“Make Britain Great Again”
To make Britain great again is to delve into our history to find out what made it great in the first place! That is, to look at the beauty of multicultural life. Societies must avoid triggering genetic determinisms, arguing with faulty and restricting ideas of evolution and human nature to embrace the cosmopolitan human potential. Arguably, more than ever, it is vital to converse and build on each other’s achievements, to explore new environmentally friendly societies, and not pull up the drawbridge of cultural diffusion.
We can still do this culture-building project outside of the EU. However, it feels as if we may have taken a step off the gas from such a project. The EU’s origin attempts to come to political and economic agreements to avoid world war. Wars that are not just about political and economic power but cultural superiority. Britain should be a part of such a project, celebrating cultural diffusion and making the world safe for human differences. We have never been purely ‘British’, we never will be, and we are all the richer for this.
Conclusion: Reflections on Biological-Moral Triggers and Trading Emotions for Reason
We must understand why we start to think and feel the way we do about migration and sovereignty. Be reflexive of the cognitive and biological underpinnings triggered intentionally by various societal powers. Question why this is the case and look beyond how our biological drives for group mentalities and purity and danger are triggered environmentally. As the famous Marcel Mauss once said in his conclusion to his beautiful essay on The Gift, arguing for peace and exchange after World War 1. Historically, we have always put down our weapons to exchange, but they are never too far away.
It is by opposing reason to emotion and setting up the will for peace against rash follies of this kind that peoples succeed in substituting alliance, gift and commerce for war, isolation and stagnation (Mauss 2011 [1925]:80).
