Primitive Morality, Stories, Politics

Posted on Friday 22 May 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

JMG, from Oklahoma Watch, today: Oklahoma GOP Rep Opposes Ban On Child Marriage Because Mary Married Joseph When She Was Underage

Senate Bill 504, which removed exceptions in the law that allowed minors to marry with parental consent and court approval, passed the House 51 to 36 after unanimously passing the Senate in March. All 36 no votes were cast by Republicans.

Some against the bill, such as Rep. Justin Humphrey, argued that the government should not interfere with parents’ rights. Others argued the bill would impede the creation of stable families; Humphrey anecdotally cited knowing people who married as minors and “remained married until they’re dead.”

This is precisely the problem with applying primitive Biblical ‘morality’ to the modern world, which *does* have standards of morality, for the sake of non-tribal, non-zero-sum civilization, that are more advanced than the morality of all those stories in the Bible. Note how this guy quotes scripture. Keep scripture out of the government.

Also, morality is *not* fixed. It depends on circumstances. There might be certain broad principles that remain fixed, e.g. to maximize well-being, but how that plays out in any given society at any given time depends on which people, how many, under what circumstances. Everyone ignores the idea that the Ten Commandments were applied only to a specific tribe. Killing people in other tribes was perfectly fine, then. As it is now, by the US, as long as they’re brown people in other countries.

\\\

Here’s an apt video by Yuval Noah Harari that could precede all discusses of religion and morality.

Storytelling has always been important, from the Stone Age to the 21st Century, whenever a large number of people are trying to cooperate on something, whether it is to hunt a mammoth or whether it is to build at atom bomb. Just knowing the facts about the objective world, about objective reality, is not enough. If you want, for instance, to build an atom bomb, you need to know some facts about physical reality. You need to know that E = MC2. If you try to build a bomb and you ignore the facts of reality, the bomb will not explode. But just knowing the facts is not enough. Becuase in order to build an atom bomb, you need millions of people to cooperate on the project. YOu need physicists to write complicated equations, … [skipping some]

And this is where storytelling comes into the picture. What really motivates people. It could be religious stories, mythologies and theologies, secular ideologies like communism or capitalism. And it’s always the people who are experts in storytelling who give the orders to people who merely know the facts of nuclear physics.

We’ve read this before: it wasn’t tool-making as once thought, it was cooperation, that enabled primitive humans to build tribes and communities and eventually conquer the world. And communities are united by stories. It doesn’t matter whether the stories are true.

\\\

It strikes me that conservatives make relatively simplex assumptions about the world and human nature (e.g. people are bad by nature and need saving), whereas reality is more complex. (And: my conclusion is that humans default to good, and cooperation, unless betrayed.)

The Atlantic, Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker, today: The Economic Experiment That Upended Reality, subtitled “Minimum-wage increases were expected to kill jobs. The fact that they didn’t should make us rethink a lot of assumptions.”

The writers describe their proposal some time back for a $15/hour minimum wage. They were laughed at.

In 2014, Seattle went ahead and implemented a $15 minimum wage anyway. And all the apocalyptic predictions failed to come true. The restaurants did not close. The jobs did not disappear. Instead, 100,000 workers got raises, and spent them. Seattle’s economy, far from collapsing, continued to boom. San Francisco soon passed its own $15 minimum wage. Then came minimum-wage hikes in state after state, including not just liberal New York and California but also Missouri, Nebraska, Florida, and Alaska—red states where voters, given the direct choice, said yes. In every case, predictions of economic catastrophe proved false.

Conservatives miss the part where, if people get more money, they will spend it. The same argument supports the idea of a universal basic income.

\\\

Briefly noted.

  • Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 20 May 2026: White House ballroom is turning into a symbol of Trump’s failures
  • Subtitled: The president’s only legacy will be greed and corruption
  • Most of the world, and most of the nation, realizes this, while the MAGA folks don’t. Is this about anything other than the range of human nature, how some people are always drawn to authoritarians? Maybe; I’m reading a book by Kurt Andersen that provides an unflattering view of the origin of “American exceptionalism.”
  • JMG, from Washington Post, 20 May 2026: House GOP Moves For Year-Round Daylight Saving
  • Every year, sigh. This is nonsense. They (the Republicans of course) want to redefine time. They don’t remember that this has been tried before and failed, because year-round daylight saving time applies in the winter, too.

/

Finally for today, a comment from Facebook:

If capitalism is the best option, why do the most “successful” corporations need so many tax breaks, subsidies, favors, grants, and bailouts? And when Americans need these things, why do they call it socialism?

There is a sunk-cost fallacy here. It’s always been this way, so it must always be this way. The way it’s always been is the true, proper way.

This entry was posted in Economics, Morality, Narrative, Politics. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *