Back in the nineteenth century, anthropology was central to the imperialist project. Understanding and categorising all the strange new cultures for whom administrators became responsible was a political necessity, not an 'ivory tower' academic pursuit.

Racism, Science & Imperialism

As the (non-academic) Gyrus (quoting Ellingson), in a recent talk at the October Gallery, has pointed out, power struggles within Britain's Ethnological Society in the 1860s displaced the Quakers whose role in constructing an earlier liberal and tolerant attitude towards other 'races' had been important.

The intellectual triumph of Charles Darwin created a potential new model for social evolution. Racists with 'experience' of colonial administration, such as John Crawfurd, seized on the theory to build a new consensus for racial superiority.

In the years to come, skulls were measured, customs analysed and the primitive contrasted with the civilised. Colonial administrators spread across Africa and South and East Asia. Amerindians were hunted into reservations. Fu Manchu was to epitomise the wily oriental.

Survival of the fittest developed into a full-blown theory, actually owing more to Lamarck than Darwin, under Herbert Spencer. This fed not only the new ideology of empire but that of capitalism as a progressive force, even infecting Marxism a little on the way.

Anthropology became a central plank in the ideology of Western expansion, reaching its vicious and very unscientific apogee in the Germany of the 1930s and in the distinctly potty late-romantic narratives of the Ahnenerbe and the racial politics of mass murder.

Reform and Reaction

After the horrors of the death camps, a new anthropology emerged, derived from the far more liberal position in America of Franz Boas whose empirical research knocked most a priori racial theory firmly on the head.

Anthropology and political ideology largely separated out. No academic discipline can be called un-ideological and anthropology contributed from the academy to the massive liberalisation of Western culture from the 1960s but it was certainly not a central concern of states or the military.

But this is about to change. Whereas the first phase of the politicisation of anthropology derived from the expansion of empire, this second phase owes its potential to the renewed interest of authority to the preservation of empires under siege from below and from the margins.

There are three factors in this just as there were in the second half of the nineteenth century - shifts in scientific theory, shifts in political concerns and shifts in funding by those with resources that will bias the interests and positions of those working in all the social and cognitive sciences.

The Arrival of the New Cognitive Science

In the first phase, Darwinism kick-started a new vision of humanity as engaged in struggle. Empires actually did struggle and the ideological and moral justification for struggle required that patronage go to those who could service the intellectual needs of an expanding system.

In the latest phase, the underlying scientific theory is a revolution in the cognitive and neuro-sciences where the consensus seems to be, perfectly reasonably, that our minds are not blank slates but that some aspects of ourselves are innate and so genetic.

As far as it goes, this is, as with evolution, unexceptionable. It describes the world as it is and we would do well not to try and work against it. It has the same effect on radical attempts to change humanity through environmental manipulation as evolution had on religion.

The point here is that the new sciences do not posit God nor do they posit the possibility of changing conditions to change humanity but they do posit changing conditions in order to change behaviour in recognition of the general thrust of 'human nature'.

It may not be essentialism as we know it but it is still a form of it. It objectifies us and it posits, and this is important, that those in authority can make reasoned and right judgements about what is in our interest more effectively than we can ourselves.

Scientists & Politicians

This may seem a problem that we might have with the political process rather than with scientists - especially given this week's stand by Professor Nutt against Home Secretary on drugs policy. Surely, scientists will resist any manipulation of their work beyond the evidence available?

But some scientists have a tendency to get too big for their boots and to want to extrapolate their findings into public policy and the wider culture. We see this with the almost comical performance of Richard Dawkins in his campaign against religion but the matter is a deadly serious one.

The elision of evidence-based science into, first, the application of theory to society (as Spencer did) and thence to the use of the theory by the authorities to justify their own interests is often far too easy and smooth. There are always 'intellectuals' hungry for adulation prepared to help this process along.

This process is unchallenged by a cultured but not always very bright media. It is allowed to happen because critical theory about society constantly theorises about itself and relations of power but fails to turn its eye on the worm in its midst - the positivist who is too positive about what he thinks he knows.

Bad policy slips in through the cracks between good science and a self-referential and scientifically-illiterate intelligentsiya. Elsewhere, on a private blog, we have critiqued one such case, Stephen Pinker's claims about social violence in contemporary society, but we do not want to get sidetracked here.

From Liberation to Manipulation

The new cognitive sciences feed into the social senses via psychology. Just as Darwin enabled Spencer, so important new and, in our view, liberatory thinking about the mind is drifting into strategies of 'nudge' and social manipulation that are far from liberatory.

These social applications are emerging at a time of crisis for authority in two separate but linked directions - libertarian mass resistance to authority enabled by globalisation and new technologies and the increased ability of marginal groups, especially in the emerging world, to resist 'empire'.

In another age, the power of law enforcement internally and brutal application of superior military force externally could solve anything but times have changed. Mass global social networking exposes any extreme expedient use of power. Much of the public is no longer trusting or tolerant of authority.

The application of the cognitive sciences to the social sciences provides not merely practical methods for getting people to do what Governments want ('in their own interest', of course) but is the basis for an ideological justification for such actions here and overseas.

It is no accident that Pinker, an experimental psychologist and leading populariser of the attack on the 'blank slate' theory of mind, has weighed into an essentially anthropological debate about violence in tribal and modern societies.

The new cognitive scientists are becoming as dynamically engaged in the application to society of their theories of human nature as were those who had received, through Darwin, their revelation about evolution.

Evolution was to go through many years yet of sophisticated development. There is also no necessary relation between evolutionary theory and either social structures or the actual workings of the mind. Leading intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century did not understand this.

One suspects that the cognitive sciences will have to learn the same lesson. Evidence-based science is not an absolutely reliable guide to how existence is either experienced or organised. But a lot of personal ambition and vanity might lead to a great deal of damage being done in the meantime.

Military Patronage

This brings into play the third factor in the story - patronage. The first phase represented patronage within a middle class elite where relatively few jobs were circulated amongst a closed group that was embedded in the system. Generational change would conspire with this to construct 'group think'.

After the death camps, academic futures were dictated by academic standards. Social democratic or liberal states respected traditional academic freedoms - basically, taxpayers' money was doled out without very much being asked in return other than that findings be published and students taught.

But there was another source of funding for science with much more direct demands for results - the military and the whole panoply of organisations that covered issues of state security. Investment has tended to be hard science in orientation - guns, rockets, encryption, submarines, energy and so on.

The global public relations, advertising and market research industries were partly midwifed out of the psychological warfare operations of the late 1940s and 1950s but these latter were largely directed at propagandising at the populations of rival systems - and can't be said to have achieved a great deal.

Manipulation within states was largely left to dull public information, private sector marketing and corporate communications and political snake oil sales. Little direct social and political manipulation was required because common cultures, with limited media and state education, tended to be self-correcting.

Big Budgets, Big Changes

Things are now changing fast. The Pentagon, for example, has a massively increased budget and a re-orientation away from big ticket military hardware to counter-insurgency, while 'homeland security' concerns have seen the emergence of significant diversions of funds into social monitoring.

This is where things may get very dodgy indeed.

If States in general have massive resources to apply and academics need resources to undertake research, get tenure, be published and, indeed, not end up unemployed during a general contraction in the domestic economy, then obviously we have a marriage made in heaven ... or hell.

Where might this lead? The cycle of cod-racism that started with Crawfurd's coup in the Ethnological Society ended in the death camps. Even now we are still trying to root out daft racial politics 140 years later in British inner cities and the American backswoods.

The new alliance between frightened authority, the military, ambitious science and hungry academics is unlikely to result in anything so obviously dark but it may end up with its own evils in due course. Let us speculate intelligently.

Universalist Egalitarianism Under Benign Authority

First of all, though, let us remind ourselves that no modern ideologist has any theory of class or racial superiority - on the contrary, they are all almost painfully liberal. Instead, the new ideology treats us all equally, equally recalcitrant, ignorant, victims of blind drives and not knowing our best interests.

Internally within the West this elides naturally into 'third way' or guided democracy models where authority looks on the more overt confucian models of the Chinese and wonders how to reproduce them within a framework of democratic and liberal values - the arrival of 'nudge' is heaven sent.

Externally, the vision is more subtle. Undeveloped, insurgent and native peoples are not inferior as persons (after all we are now all equally inferior and flawed compared to our past cultural aspirations) but their cultures are undeveloped and far less noble than romantics would have them be.

There is no loss in the daft idea of the 'noble savage' but the new ideology sees a process of modernisation as liberatory of persons from cultures, especially from the taboos and constraints that are regarded as oppressive of individual human rights.

Whether they want it or not, non-European peoples are to be 'liberated' to become nearer in status to us ... we are lowered and they are raised into something close to a universal citizen, quite similar to the flawed sinful universalism of Christian ideology.

The Nightmare Society

Some may find this highly attractive but the devil is in the detail - and in the implementation. It is not that 'nudge' and other psychologically-based policies may not work, but that politicians will become impatient.

There will always be the temptation to remove the recalcitrant and to force through conditions to ensure that, as far as the public are concerned, they will always appear to work.

This is the road to hell that is paved with good intentions because, as with all universalist churches (and we include Soviet Marxism in this), the problems of implementation ineluctably lead to the weeding out of heresy and increased pressure on right behaviour, right speech and right thought.

People can be very recalcitrant. As in any species, there is wide variation and this variation includes the eccentric, the dissident, the far-sighted, the highly ethical and the stubborn. 'Nudge' policies tend to promote external 'norms' removing the variation that is central to social and cultural survival.

The nightmare society of 80 years from now (the trajectory from Crawfurd to Auschwitz) is a highly 'normalised' and sclerotic society where lack of conformity means low status and, worse, where free speech, free behaviour and free thought is curtailed to achieve normality.

Instead of the physical death and dispossession of Jews and gypsies, we will have the cultural and existential extinction of creativity and deviance. Fortunately, the invention of the internet has doomed such an enterprise from the start - so long as it remains a free channel.

And Anthropology?

Which brings us back to anthropology which is in danger of shifting from being a science of description, with a determined stance against interference, to a science of intervention in order to pacify recalcitrant communities, deal with 'failed states', undermine enemies and preserve allied elites in power.

There is no doubt that the wave of post-Soviet colour revolutions were partially engineered by Western political scientists and that the failure to overturn the Iranian regime will redouble efforts to find new techniques in what may amount to a sociological arms race.

The US military in particular will soon be flush with cash. There are hungry social scientists, political scientists, neuroscientists and anthropologists eager and willing to please such patrons rather than be thrown on to the job market.

There will be private sector intermediaries keen to sell the latest social science or psychological gizmo. Fortunes may be made on the application of new technologies to prove that academic theory can be made practical 'in the field'. That 'field' may be Waziristan, Somalia, Leeds or Detroit.

By its very nature, this massive investment in social manipulation strategies, domestically and overseas, poses a threat to democracy and to all forms of self-determination - individual, community and national - and leaves us with the question of what 'ideology' will serve it and it serves.

The Threat

Social Darwinism became associated with a now-discredited imperialist mind-set. The new ideology is associated with the primacy of 'good' authority over 'bad' liberty. Just as racist missionaries believed that they acted in the interests of their victims, so do the new ideological liberal 'progressives'.

The nearest analogy that we have for an unprecedented situation is the transfer of power from the ramshackle Roman Republic to the Augustan Empire and, when that started to crumble under its own weight, from a multi-faith world to the hard-line authoritarian Catholic Church under Constantine.

Or at least that is what underpins the thinking of the new authoritarian 'liberals' who are seeing their world crumble under the twin onslaughts of economic correction and new communications and information technologies. They are now relying on weight of cash to turn the situation around.

So, be warned, we are entering a new phase in the West, an attempt to reassert authority over us and over the 'imperial' periphery. Work has started on developing an ideology and a theory of human nature that will help it along. It could yet result in a sclerotic politics and a dead culture.