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Now imagine society not as an agreement among individuals but as something that emerged organically over time as people found ways of living together, binding themselves to each other, suppressing each other’s selfishness, and punishing the deviants and free riders who eternally threaten to undermine cooperative groups.
The basic social unit is not the individual, it is the hierarchically structured family,
which serves as a model for other ...
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Individuals in such societies are born into strong and constraining relationships that profoundly limit their autonomy. The patron saint of this more binding mor...
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who warned of the dangers of anomie (...
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value self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one’s groups over concerns for out-groups.
Durkheimian world is usually hierarchical, punitive, and religious.
For liberals, such a vision must be combated, not respected.
E pluribus unum (from many, one).
the fairness of the Protestant work ethic and the Hindu law of karma: People should reap what they sow.
keep the fruits of their labor.
conservative notions of fairness, which focused on proportionality, not equality.
nomadic hunter-gatherers are always egalitarian?
Hierarchy only becomes widespread around the time that groups take up agriculture
These changes create much more private property and much larger group sizes.
Christopher Boehm.
Hierarchy in the Forest,
Boehm concluded that human beings are innately hierarchical, but that at some point during the last million years our ancestors underwent a “political transition” that allowed them to live as egalitarians by banding together to rein in, punish, or kill any would-be alpha males who tried to dominate the group.
Once early humans had developed spears, anyone could kill a bullying alpha male.
first true moral communities.32 In these communities, people used gossip to identify behavior they didn’t like,
“reverse dominance hierarchies”
“self-domestication.”
our ancestors began to selectively breed themselves (unintentionally) for the ability to construct shared moral matrices and then live cooperatively within them.
reactance.
Sic semper tyrannis(“Thus always to tyrants”).
Conservatives, in contrast, are more parochial—concerned about their groups, rather than all of humanity.
don’t tread on me
don’t tread on my business
don’t tread on m...
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equality is just a special case of the broader principle of proportionality.
We added the Liberty/oppression foundation,
This foundation supports the egalitarianism and antiauthoritarianism of the left, as well as the don’t-tread-on-me and give-me-liberty antigovernment anger of libertarians and some conservatives.
We modified the Fairness foundation to make it focus more strongly on proportionality.
MORALITY BINDS AND BLINDS
We Are 90 Percent Chimp and 10 Percent Bee.
Glaucon was right and that we care more about looking good than about truly being good.
We believe our own post hoc reasoning so thoroughly that we end up self-righteously convinced of our own virtue.
strategically altruistic,
people are groupish.
We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players.
“group selection,”
Morality binds and blinds.
natural selection works at multiple levels
Cohesive tribes
shared intentionality.
the experience of communal effort in battle … has been the high point of their lives.
human beings are conditional hive creatures.
the hive switch.
Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Barbara Ehrenreich
thoroughly “savage.”
