Views from Crestmont Drive

• Thinking about the morality of primitive humans living on the Savannah, tens of thousands of years ago — apparently the basis for conservative morality unto this day;
• How DeSantis, authoritarian, is worse than Trump;
• How MAGA women reject modern options in preference to Savannah morality, which makes them happier.

I’m growing more and more fascinated by the idea of “Savannah morality,” the protocols of survival in the ancestral environment of tens of thousands of years ago, when humans lived in small tribes on the Savannah, resources were scarce, rival tribes were demonized, infant mortality was high, sexual expression or behavior that was not about having more babies and expanding the tribe was condemned to the point of death, and powerful leaders were venerated over principles.

So much of modern conservative morality seems simply explained as appealing to those primitive notions; human nature hasn’t had time to evolve to adjust to the modern environment. Yet, ever since humans settled down and pursued agriculture, 12,000 years or so ago, those notions have gradually become obsolete, or inoperative as scales have expanded, or have been superseded by other, democratic and humanistic principles more suitable to a global culture. As humans have expanded across the planet, we’ve all become obliged to get along with one another, and individuals have increasingly been able to express themselves in many ways, especially sexually, without being suppressed by tribal values, since obsessive population growth is no longer necessary, is even counterproductive.

And science in just the past few centuries has revealed that the various outlandish myths of tribes around the globe are mostly false.

Conservatives don’t want to hear it. The protocols of base human nature, evolved in the ancestral environment, still largely prevail among many people; other people recognize that these intuitive values are inappropriate in the modern world. The former are those we call conservatives.

I’ll think more about this. (No doubt someone has a better term for this core idea that “Savannah morality.”) (And as an aside, that human nature evolved in a different environment from our own explains most, if not all, of the psychological biases — motivated thinking, and so on — that people are prone to.) For now some examples.

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Salon, Kirk Swearingen, 25 Jun 2023: Why the right is so terrified of “woke”: There are truths it just can’t face, subtitled “Conservatives didn’t want to hear about white privilege. So they abandoned reality and joined the orange man’s cult”

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