Views from Crestmont Drive

• How morality changes and can be used to build a better world, with tips about improving your moral technology;
• How choices and options may or may not have made us free;
• Music: Now on to Shostakovich; here’s Symphony #10.

One of yesterday’s items included an older link that I collected last October but never used. Let’s look at it now.

Again, a working premise here is that the human nature and morality of our ancestors, what can be called the tribal mentality, became optimized over hundreds of thousands of years for life on a Savannah in small groups, extended families or tribes of a few hundred. Loyalty was paramount, then authority and a hierarchy of obedience. As humanity filled up the planet and all these tribes merged and interacted, new ways of living *had* to be discovered, in order to avoid endless tribal wars. (Like the ones in the Bible, I’m tempted to say, written by the tribe that survived.) Those new ways involved principles developed during the Enlightenment and the French and American revolutions — rules about equality and rule of law, rules placing empiricism above received wisdom, and so on, all meant to subvert or avoid those tribal instincts. They’ve worked for a while, but the instincts are inherent in many people, as we are seeing with the current MAGA folks and their authoritarian leaders, who delight in flouting law and ignoring objective facts about reality.

OnlySky, Adam Lee, 30 Oct 2024: Morality is a technology to build a better world, subtitled “It’s not just material technologies that make our lives better. Civilization is also a collection of moral technologies.”

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