Mass Politics as an Evolutionary Mismatch

Abstract

Abstract Evolutionary mismatch is a concept that designates the situation in which individuals and their physiological and behavioral mechanisms, which are the result of a long evolutionary process, are no longer adapted to new and different environments that have emerged very recently in our evolutionary history. Contemporary food, for example, with its excesses, low nutritional value, and full availability, is causing the current alarming rates of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and several other health problems. So, this theoretical paper suggests that we use the same methods used to look into the problem of modern nutritional evolutionary mismatch to also look into how the big political systems, especially democracies, are evolutionary mismatches from the point of view of psychology, behavior, and cognition. Our argument is that the deliberative aspirations of democratic regimes, proposed by philosophers such as John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, are unrealizable in large mass societies. First, we present some definitions of evolutionary mismatch, such as those presented by Norman Li, Mark van Vugt, Randolph Nesse and George Williams. Next, we briefly present evidence for contemporary evolutionary food mismatches. We then present the basis of our argument by showing that Robin Dunbar's theory regarding cognitive limitations for interactions between human beings needs to be taken seriously in political discussions about deliberative processes. With this in mind, we comment on the evidence presented by authors such as Michael Bang Petersen, Lene Aarøe, Gleen Geher and others on the impacts of evolutionary political mismatches in contemporary societies. Starting from our nutritional evolutionary mismatches and relating them to our cognitive limitations of social interaction, we show that no matter how good the attempts to improve deliberative processes are, they will be unable to modify the limitations of human nature that are behind the evolved mechanisms for group and coalition formation and decision-making processes. Keywords: evolutionary psychology, politics, evolutionary mismatch, behavio