Evolutionary Ethics and the Conservative Mind

In last month’s news one possible conclusion emerged; that people in Minnesota are paying entirely too much for dental care.  Walter J. Palmer, the Bloomington, MN dentist who also fashions himself a big game hunter (emphasis on the word ‘big’) can now be internationally known as Dr. Shameless.  Still, the fact that he and others like him exist at all is far more a revelation to the general public than the fact that root canals and crowns can allow a relative nobody to spend $50,000 to shoot a big cat.

Throughout most of recorded history killing big animals would rarely raise an eyebrow, if at all.  Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, when the need to hunt for food and clothing was effectively eliminated and wealth could be produced remotely, the killing of big animals somehow became sport. Few found a problem with it. From Theodore Roosevelt to Ernest Hemingway, to the capturers of King Kong, generations viewed such “sport” Romantically rather than repulsively.  That’s not the case anymore, we love our buffalos. So what happened?

As there has been social evolution for human beings generally throughout our history, so have ethics evolved.  Quite different from sluggish biological evolution, evolutionary ethics over the past few centuries appear to be changing at increasingly faster rates. The changes seem to coincide with both the expansion in human population and speed of communication. There is hardly a youth introduced to history who isn’t amazed by what we considered ethically correct only two hundred, one hundred, or even fifty years ago. In fact, one only needs to read the Bible and observe how long people have adhered to its archaic rhetoric.

Yet in the present, behavior that can seem so blatantly unethical on its face can also feel painfully slow to change. One primary reason is an irrational fear of change and blind self-interest which, most often, lays deep in the Conservative psyche. 

Perhaps one day I’ll meet a poor, old, black lesbian with cancer.  She will be a very special person, indeed, for she embodies most major human traits that over the past one hundred years or so Conservative America has fought tooth and nail from being ethically acceptable.  You won’t see a statue of her on Monument Avenue, but you should.  On it would be carved: Once I Wasn’t You, but Now I Am.

Let’s briefly take a look at what this lady has had to endure in her struggle to become one of us.

First she’s black.  Forget the Civil War, in which the entrenched Conservative South was more than willing to sacrifice everything to preserve ethically acceptable slavery. Instead, start with Jim Crow laws that most of the Nation didn’t have a problem with for decades after the Civil War ended. The segregation that existed up to the civil rights laws of the 60s was, by in large, accepted social order, even sometimes by those who were repressed by it. 

Segregation and prejudice still exist today, whether by choice or economics, but only on the fringes would anyone say or feel they are ethically correct today. That same Conservative mind fought the legislation that codified the new ethic, not just in the Conservative South, but also nationwide (think government institutions and the military). It took generations to change the ethic.  Even today foolish symbols of supremacy and ego, such as flags, cannot resist the changed ethics on race as they might have 25 years ago.

Second, she is a woman. She is one of a class of human beings that have been essentially the chattel of men since Homo sapiens wiped out the competition.  She made little progress toward full human status for the first 160,000 years or so.  The ethic that condemns the idea of women as the possessions of men didn’t finally change until the first half of the 20^th century, yet Conservatives fought that ethical evolution for centuries.

The 19^th Amendment (woman’s suffrage in the US passed in 1920) refused to be ratified by most states of the old Confederacy until decades after it had passed, as late as 1984. In many cases women’s equal status was fought with overt discrimination, violence, and personal abuse. It often still is. However, it is hard to argue the correctness of such inequity, even as Conservatives continue to oppose equal rights legislation for women and conservative religious zealots practice scriptural female exploitation in the US and around the world.

My lady is also poor, old, and sick.  Perhaps because the over 65 population is so large, the ethic that it is socially and morally wrong to let the poor and aged rot in the streets once they can no longer work has gone mainstream with Conservatives. Still, we only have to go back 100 years or so to see how Conservatives fought vehemently, up through the 1930s, what became Social Security, or what led to Medicare in the 1960s.


The patron saint of Conservatism, Ronny Reagan, campaigned as a spokesperson across the country that Medicare would destroy Capitalism in America.  How far would he have gotten in the 1980s with his gray patriots if he advocated the repeal of Medicare? Today self interest drives the opposition for means testing, but the ethic is fully adopted and the solutions to solvency for SS and Medicare won’t turn against it.

The Affordable Health Care act (aka Obamacare) is in the midst of the same battle.  The ethic that supports a reality in which everyone in the US would have adequate access to health care and that no one should be made bankrupt simply because they got sick is not shared by Conservatives.  Not yet. They will lose the fight, possibly at great cost to everyone by delaying the control of medical expenses. When they do finally lose they will embrace the new reality as if it was always theirs, just as they have with racial ethics, women’s ethics, and elder ethics.

Finally, she is gay. The acceptance of her sexual orientation still awaits the death of the current senior generation of Conservatives.  Once they are gone, a marriage of a same sex couple will garner less notice than a change in hair style.

If my extraordinary lady lived in say 1914 and I proclaimed she was free to go where ever she wanted to, she could vote without restriction, after she stopped working she would be given an income for life on which she could survive, if she got sick her medical care would be covered in full, and she could have all that while married to another woman with whom she has sex, I would have been vilified (if not shot) as a Socialist-atheist-anarchist-Satanist, anti-American hybrid. Yet all those social benefits are accepted today as ethically sound and many a diehard Conservative would defend most of them as such.

A fear laden, Fox watching, Reagan loving Conservative mind would run a Republican out of town for suggestions of eliminating Social Security and Medicare and scoff at calls to repeal a woman’s right to vote or an African-American’s right to equality. Yet, they continue to support those that benefit from the status quo.  Limited health care, unrestricted access to handguns and assault rifles, restrictions on gays, a woman’s right over her own body, institutional executions, to name a few, are issues to which Conservatives will ultimately relent as they take up arms to delay the next evolving ethic.

How someone who has even a rudimentary knowledge (and understanding) of history can proudly call themselves a Conservative is a befuddlement.  The evolution of ethics in modern America is mostly our attempt to modify our behavior to deal with the numbers in which we populate this planet and share information and resources.  The post-enlightenment social Conservative wants to ignore both.  More likely that Conservative mind sees their social ethics supported on a three legged stool.  One leg is fear, one is ignorance, and the third is greed or (more kindly) self interest.  Pull out just one leg and the whole thing falls… none too soon