From Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo. It's largely a scathing indictment of right-wing "morality" and how we lost our bearings, but this summation strikes me as apt:
This goes back to my conviction that our morality -- the real thing, not the Bronze Age tribal taboos -- is hard-wired, or close to it: we're social animals, which implies that our primary moral imperative is to work for the benefit of the group, which necessarily (in most cases) works to our own good.
The American right seems to have dispensed with that idea.
Update: In support of that last statement, read this and this.
What strikes me is how this research echoes something paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey said about Turkana Boy in speculating about the development of compassion in early Man:
Bipedalism carried an enormous price, where compassion was what you paid your ticket with. You simply can't abandon somebody who's incapacitated because the rest will abandon you next time it comes to be your turn.
There but for the grace of God. Compassion has an evolutionary advantage, Leakey suggests. Perhaps it is what helped us rise above the law of the jungle.
This goes back to my conviction that our morality -- the real thing, not the Bronze Age tribal taboos -- is hard-wired, or close to it: we're social animals, which implies that our primary moral imperative is to work for the benefit of the group, which necessarily (in most cases) works to our own good.
The American right seems to have dispensed with that idea.
Update: In support of that last statement, read this and this.
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