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ARE LIBERALS MUTANTS?

HUMAN HISTORY AS EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY

Michael Ryan

"...endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful

have been, and are being, evolved."

--Charles Darwin

My thesis is that human cognition in the advanced civil area of the globe from

Greece to China changed around the 6th century BCE, and this change in part accounts

for the difference between human forms ever since. The fact that the change is evident

from Greece to China suggests that it was an adaptation in response to a shared

environmental hazard. That hazard, I contend, was human created, and it consisted of the

danger posed by dependence on large-scale agriculture and the trade that distributed it to

large, non-agricultural urban populations. That environmental hazard made new kinds of

cognition necessary, and humans adapted either genetically (hard-wiring) or

epigenetically (a change in the operation of the existing genetic hardwiring). High levels

of social class stratification and assortative mating along professional lines meant that the

adaptation swept through select populations and was prevented from sweeping through

entire populations. The result was an uneven distribution of the adaptation that endures

to the present day.

The major cognitive adaptive ability that emerges in the 6th century BCE has to

do with non-sensory cognition, or thinking conducted in the absence of sensory

perception. When we listen, see, touch, and smell, we engage in sensory perception.

When we close our eyes and shut out the world of sounds, sights, and sensations, we

engage in non-sensory cognition. We see things in our minds or we mull over ideas and



thoughts; we imagine or we remember. Those whose minds are trained in this kind of

cognition can literally "see" things others cannot. For example, they can convert complex

mathematical symbols on a page into mental representations of forces in the world. Or

they can picture social structure with word tools and without actually "seeing" that

invisible structure. Some other words for this kind of thinking are speculation,

imagination, meditation, conceptualization, and reflection. The new mental ability must

have had effects in multiple realms that demanded cognition. It permitted the

development of empathy for others, the ability to imagine their life state and their

subjective condition. The new ability also led to new forms of imaginative art and to new

social institutions such as democracy, popular forms of justice, and legal principles such

as rights. New forms of mathematical calculation emerged that greatly enhanced trade

and facilitated the evolution of currency. All of these changes off-set the civilized

hazard, the danger of dependence on non-proprietary agriculture and trade to sustain

large non-agricultural urban communities that were in place from Greek to China by the

6th century BCE.

This change may have been genetic, but it need not have been. Environmental

pressure may have thrown a switch in some gene or combination of genes that triggered a

latent human possibility. Evolutionary biologists have yet to answer that question, and

not being an evolutionary biologist, I will not try to do so. Nevertheless, promising work

is being done along these lines. Coolidge and Wynn speculate that changes in the parietal

lobes of the brain affected such components of non-sensory cognition as long term

memory and concept formation (Coolidge and Wynn, 2009). The second possibility,

what is called epigensis, is fruitful because it reconciles cultural explanations of such



changes (that they resulted from greater trade, for example) with physical explanations

(that they resulted from some genetic modification). Trade may have fostered an

environmental hazard that triggered a genetic modification in humans that made a further

advance in non-sensory cognition both possible and necessary. As a result, institutional

changes occurred in human civilization that reflect a need to develop less hazardous, less

violent, and less costly modes of interaction. Those largely have to do with the

development of social norms of behavior and with rules and procedures for managing

conflict when the norms did not work. Public theatrical works, especially in Greece,

developed as a way of spreading norms and educating group members regarding them.

The creation of norms, legal principles and institutions, and propagandistic art all

required a non-sensory imaginative ability. That ability also permitted members of the

civil community to empathize with one another and to imagine others as fellow

"citizens." Group members could now practice non-violent civility towards people who

were neither kin nor clan but with whom one was nevertheless connected through

citizenship in a "nation" or "empire," both non-sensory entities that needed to be

imagined in order to be. These developments lessened the likelihood that a civilized

hazard might be triggered by human action (withholding grain from market, for example,

or ceasing to trade). The new normative culture fostered a sense of responsibility

towards others that off-set the natural proclivity toward individual organic survival.

Now, with norms and rules in place that fostered greater interactive civility, one's

individual survival could be imagined as a function of group survival.

Contemporary evolutionary theory holds that H. sapiens has not modified

significantly since the Pleistocene age some 120,000 years ago (Cosmides and Tooby,



1992). A universal human nature came into being then and has not modified since. The

Cosmides/Tooby argument makes sense from the perspective of human evolutionary

history, but the advent of human civilization has created new post-natural environments

and new human-made environmental pressures that seem to have speeded up epigenetic

differentiation within the species. A pacifist former law professor like Barack Obama

who believes in universal principles and a rifle-toting, moose-skinning, believer in

witches like Sarah Palin are noticeably different. If culture is not determinant, as

Cosmides and Tooby argue in their critique of "social constructionism," then some

physical explanation must be found for such differences. Cosmides and Tooby

convincingly argue that humans could not have changed much genetically in 120,000

years, given how many million it took to get to that point. Epigenesis offers a

compromise by suggesting that different locations (social, cultural, geographic,

economic) may trigger changes that, while they leave the basic genome intact,

nevertheless modify how it operates and make for genophenotypic variation (Boyd and

Richerson, 2005; Fuentes, 2009; Cochran and Harpending, 2009).

The claim that H. sapiens was fixed in time in the Pleistocene as a unified and

complete "universal human nature" seems less credible if cultural history is taken into

account. What one sees in that history is a species in the process of differentiation. If

sexual reproduction is not only preservative of a genotypic identity but also generative of

departures from the existing genetic paradigm so that adaptation to environmental

hazards can occur, then significant phenotypic differences merit closer attention.

Paleoanthropologists use the term "forms" for the various hominoids that evolved after

Africa in Eurasia, and a similar terminology might be needed to account for the



significant differences within H. sapiens. Differences of form, if they repeat over time in

predictable ways, are usually evidence of structural differences. They are not merely

"surface" variations.

Theory is a way of picturing the world. Some theory models are conceptual and

use words. Others are spatial and use graphic figures. Others are temporal and distribute

events and objects on a time-line. The Cosmides/Tooby model uses two quite common

forms of theoretical modelling. One is temporal, and it assigns a primary and

determining role to "universal human nature" or Pleistocene Man that was established in

the distant past. Pleistocene Man is the origin, and all apparent modifications in that

original nature are conceived as being derivative and secondary in relation to that primary

historical creation moment. Because of the weight and value given the axiomatic origin,

subsequent changes in humanity are considered to be of less importance, if they have any

weight at all as "evolutionary events."

The second theoretical model is spatial. A center is posited that is axiomatic, and

around it is drawn a globe whose surface is the assigned place for objects and events that

are derivative and secondary. In this version of evolutionary theory, a "universal human

nature" is a center, a structure that transcends accidents such as repetitive differences in

opinion between human groups. They are merely surface events that are of less weight or

value. That center transcends phenotypic differences, which are merely secondary and

epiphenomenal.

These two theoretical models reduce the likelihood that significance might be

found for the study of human evolution in either ongoing differentiation in H. sapiens or

human built environmental influences (social construction) that might acts as epigenetic



not taken seriously as a source of evidence because "social construction" has been

dismissed as irrelevant, significant differentiations within the supposedly unitary

"universal human nature" of Pleistocene Man are discounted. They are mere fluctuations

or historical accidents in a continuous identity that is undisturbed by them. Genotypic

structure is immune to merely phenotypic variation. According to this model, differences

of opinion in cultural history, however repetitive and seemingly structural, should be

treated as adventitious disturbances that are secondary in relation to a foundational

"nature" that transcends and is untouched by such events. The proof is not in the pudding

of on-going human differentiation but in the formal model. But such differentiations are

real nonetheless and must be accounted for, especially if their repetitive character over

time suggests the action of structure.

Newer ways of conducting theoretical thinking have been invented, and it might

be of value to evolutionary theory to ask how they might modify the current picture of

human evolution. The new models suggest much is to be gained from abandoning the

centuries old distinction between foundation and manifestation, center and surface,

structure and historical event, axiological ground and subordinate derivation (Derrida,

1967, 1975, 1976)). The new model of theory construction suggest that we consider each

factor, be it "surface" or "center," "origin" or "derivation," "nature" or "construction" as

being equally important. This level model of theory would allow us to study more closely

aspects of the world that we were encouraged by the older spatial and temporal

theoretical schemes to ignore. Supposedly "surface" events such as social construction

and supposedly secondary historical accidents such as phenotypic differentiation might

be seen as having more significance.



with the category-making and concept-formation ability that accompanies such marking,

according to Coolidge and Wynn. The new cognitive abilities allowed for greater social

stratification through the development of a social semiotic system of class demarcation,

and such stratification lessened the civilized hazard by assuring all tasks were assigned

and performed.

The adaptive response to the hazard created by human civilization seems to have

had to do with a change in human cognitive abilities pertaining to non-sensory cognition,

or the ability to think in the absence of sense data. Non-sensory cognition is preferable

for my purposes here to "general intelligence" or "fluid intelligence" for understanding

cultural history because it links the various individual cognitive changes that make up the

larger change of the first millennium (Mithen, 1994). Such cognition has since Plato

been a concern of philosophy; it consists of thinking about ideas that are not tangible

things in the physical world. Such cognition also allows humans to imagine fictions, to

picture deities as well as a spirit world, to think recursively in categories, to imagine

Euclidian space, and to make laws based on intangible principles such as justice.

Importantly, of course, it also allows them to make marks on wood, stone, or paper that

signify "ideas." While humans clearly had a capacity for non-sensory cognition prior to

the first millennium BCE, a major advance, probably with genetic roots fostered by the

genetic mixing brought about by trade along the metal routes, occurs across Eurasia

around 600 BCE.

At that point, one begins to see evidence of a significantly new form of non-

sensory cognition. In Greece, the laws of Solon in the 6th century BCE differentiate the

Homeric culture that celebrated martial virtues from the Aristotelian culture that



encouraged science and the building of an ideal civil political community. For the first

time, a philosopher, Plato, discusses a non-sensory realm of ideation and makes it the

centerpiece of his thinking, while the first efforts at mathematics (especially in fields such

as geometry that require non-sensory ideation) begin to appear in the works of

Pythagoras and others. Democratic forms of social organization for the first time

supersede autocracy, and they demand oratory which is characterized by the ability to use

long term memory to summon ideas easily in speeches made to a gathered population.

New forms of representational art emerge that evidence a new multi-dimensional ability

in regard to perception and imagination (Brener, 2010). In the other major areas of

human population throughout Eurasia at the same time, similar transformations occurred.

In India, in the 6th century BCE, an era of regional imperial warfare coupled to a

mythological literary tradition gives way to a new shramanic philosophy that emphasizes

the cultivation of higher order cognitive abilities and the renunciation of the instinctive

animal urge toward material goods. Gautama Buddha's call to renounce physical desire

and the material world for the spiritual (or non-sensory) is a prescription for restraining

animal urges and appetites for the sake of the cultivation of non-sensory cognition

favorable to greater civility and cooperation. The Upanishads, which were first attempts

at philosophy, were written at this time as well. In Persia, Cyrus (600 BCE-529 BCE)

created one of the first governmental administrative systems that was meant to be

beneficial to, rather than repressive of, its subjects, abolished forced labor, and advanced

the idea of human rights as well as the ideal of religious tolerance. At the same time,

Confucius (551-479 BCE) gave China a new way of thinking that would seem to reflect

adaptive non-sensory cognition at work. Confucianism sought to infuse public



institutions with universal moral principles such as justice, promoted the ideal of personal

virtue attained through self-control, fostered a culture of laws, and infused government

with the meritocratic ideal that replaced group affiliation as a standard of advancement

with evidence of higher order cognitive abilities.

That Greek, Chinese, Persian, and Indian civilizations would all undergo the same

kind of cultural change that required similar, if not the same, changes in cognitive ability

suggests that the development of human civilization was making possible genetic

responses across Eurasia to a similar environmental pressure--the civilized hazard

brought about by greater density of population, greater urbanization, greater dependence

on trade and purchased food, and a greater need for civil regulation if human civilizations

were to survive. With the replacement of agriculture by city dwelling, humans

inadvertently created an environmental hazard of potentially genocidal proportions in the

form of a possible failure of the surplus food supply for those not involved directly with

agriculture. Historian Joyce Appleby notes that "Traditional societies around the globe

were built on the bedrock of scarcity, above all the scarcity of food. . . . And because

farming often didn't even succeed in [feeding the whole population], there were famines.

All but the very wealthy tightened their belts every year in the months before crops came

in. . . . The effects of economic vulnerability radiated throughout old societies,

encouraging suspicion and superstitions as well as justifying the conspicuous authority of

monarchs, priests, landlords, and fathers. Maintaining order . . . was paramount when the

lives of so man people were at risk." 1 The newer forms of civility made possible by what

was apparently a new, more advanced form of non-sensory cognition were an adaptive

way of addressing that danger. With categories was born the allocation of tasks and roles



along social class lines to assure the survival of the group.

The ability to think in the absence of sense data existed in a more rudimentary

form before this moment in time. Religion antedates the new forms of law, philosophy,

science, and literature that flower in the 6th and 5th centuries, but religion is all three

rolled into one, the product of an early cognitive adaptation that had not yet acquired the

ability to differentiate between the functions of non-sensory cognition such as

conceptualization, empathy, self-regulation, and imagination. Moreover, religion was

probably a misinterpretation of this new cognitive ability. Once humans became able to

think in the absence of sense data, they had within themselves a new mental realm that

was initially misinterpreted as "spirit" or "soul". And its products, before ideation could

be trained into philosophy and science, were, I would suggest, mistaken for "Gods."

Along with religion and early legal institutions, the strongest evidence of genetic

change related to non-sensory cognition prior to the 6th century BCE is the emergence of

writing and of legal institutions. Writing requires a non-sensory cognitive ability. One

must be able to look at or sense marks on wax, paper, or some other material, and see

instead non-sensory ideas. Law operates in a similar way. It consists of both non-

sensory ideas such as fairness, equity, and justice as well as tangible institutions such as

courts and written rules that one can sense with one's eyes and ears. Without the

cognitive ability that permits sensory data to be "read" as non-sensory ideas or principles,

early humans could not look at a man in court in a seat of authority and see the idea of

justice at work. Yet they had to if indeed justice--self-restraint based on ideas rather than

physical coercion--was to work.

The genetic or epigenetic change that gave rise to non-sensory cognition thus



served an important function in large communities of the kind made possible by surplus-

generating agriculture. It permitted legal institutions to come into being because it

allowed physical things such as courts to embody non-sensory ideas such as justice. And

because ideas permitted thinking in broad formal categories such as "citizen," it fostered

the notion of universality, which meant that all were subject to impartial rules and

principles that applied equally to everyone. Social order needed no longer to be

maintained through tribal alliances, clan loyalty, dominance behavior, the control of

resources, physical coercion, and intimidating violence. The ability to create laws that

applied to an entire community diminished the importance of territory and of territorial

defense between human groups. The primitive tendency to side with one’s territorial

allies against one’s territorial enemies could be overcome by training members of the

group to adhere to norms and principles—ideas with universal applicability—that applied

to friend and foe alike, regardless of where they lived. One’s enemy was the same as

one’s friend in the eyes of the principles undergirding the law. Non-sensory cognition

and the suppression of territorial and tribal violence thus would have evolved together.

Such non-sensory cognition also probably played a role in diminishing

interpersonal violence. It required that one give up immediate perception in favor of an

internal mental process. Such suspension allows affect to be regulated. Contemporary

psychology suggests an ability to construct non-sensory mental representations of varied

complexity and nuance is essential to the formation of a separate self, to the development

of an objective sense of the world, and to the regulation of affect (Fairbairn, 1954;

Mahler, 1968; Blatt, 1997; Auerbach, 2005). Mental representations range from fruzzy to

clear, fantasy filled to realistic, monolithic to highly differentiated. On the one end of the



range are images that are typological, lacking in detail, and simple, and on the other end

are mental representations that are highly differentiated, realistically detailed, and

complex. Imagine the difference between a mythological story about Zeus and Poseidon

and another about a French housewife stuck in a small town with a boorish husband who

longs for the high life and has an affair with a local aristocrat. One story--one mental

representation, if you will--will be painted in simple brush strokes; characters will have

usually one dominant trait; actions will be limited and lack nuance of motive and

complexity of effect; the tone will be one of exaltation and fear. In the other story,

characters will be portrayed as having complex motives; their life situations will be

described in rich realist detail; the characters will be portrayed with irony and empathetic

analysis. Depending on where they fall on this spectrum of cognitive abilities, humans

vary in their ability to form separate identities that are not dependent on fusion with the

object world or with the social group. They vary in their ability to see the world

objectively and clearly. They also vary in their ability to regulate affect. In human

children, mental representations allow stresses such as separation from care-givers to be

tolerated and accepted. In the maturation process from child to adult, the God-like

physical presence of the mother is replaced by a God-like mental representation of the

mother that allows behavior to be inhibited and affect regulated. Rage and fear, the bases

of violence, can be muted and transformed into other, more temperate feelings. It is

likely that self-regulation became possible once mental representation, based in non-

sensory cognition, was possible. And once self-regulation was possible, efficient

civilizations were possible. One did not need to exert force to gain compliance with

community norms. Citizens did not need to be told what to do because they could tell



themselves what to do. Civility, living by shared rules that are internalized, was quite

literally "imaginable."

Advanced cognition in the form of complex realist mental representations would

also favor the development of non-authoritarian civil societies of the kind that emerged in

6th and 5th century BCE Greece. Such cognition encourages a sense of individuation

and of objectivity in regard to the world. The non-sensory cognitive ability aids the

development of a separate self, one that has achieved a mature distance from its

surrounding world and readily takes that world as its object of knowledge. Such a

cognitive ability is therefore conducive to science. But not all mental representational

abilities in modern humans are the same, and in all likelihood, the same was true of our

ancestors. Some live with mythological mental representations while others live with

realist detail. Realistic mental representation assumes a more successful separation from

one's object world. One sees it better because it has become more of an object for the self

through the separation of the self from the object world that mental representation brings

about. The presence of the mental representation means the absence of the literal thing,

and it necessarily implies an ability to tolerate the thing or object's absence; it implies

self-regulation. Individuals who live in a fused relationship with their object world and

do not separate from it successfully also do not develop a capacity for complex, realist,

detailed mental representations, and they are frequently associated with an inability to

control affect. They instead rely on mental representations that more resemble

mythology and that contain exalted characters (great leaders), extreme emotions (fear of

strangers, rage against perceived enemies), and ideals of fused communities in which

individual difference is dissolved (the nation, the ethnicity, the patria or homeland). If



this kind of mental representing is more proximate in some ways to how early humans

must have thought (mythology, territoriality, tribal identity), the kind of mental

representing that is more complex, detailed, and realist would seem to lead eventually to

science and to an ideal of human community as an embodiment of ideas that possess

complexity, reach, nuance, and realistic applicability. Not surprisingly, someone like

Cyrus is associated both with advanced legal system building and tolerance for diversity.

Predictably, in ancestral human culture, mythological thinking accompanies

undifferentiated tribal and clan social forms. Non-sensory cognition that is more realistic

and differentiated, in contrast, probably made possible the kind of internally

differentiated and articulated democratic civility of 6th and 5th century BCE Greece, a

culture characterized by significant advances in science, law, and philosophy of a kind

reflective of more advanced cognitive abilities and a culture in which individual identity

was a prominent feature of civil life. We know who Demosthenes was, but we have no

clue who the articulate spokesmen of earlier Greek clans were because there probably

weren't any. If advanced non-sensory cognition fosters separation from one's ambient

object world and the assumption of a stance of greater objectivity towards it, the kind of

cognition it supersedes, what might be called ancestral sensory cognition, is more likely

to merge self and world, to treat objects animistically (as in religion) and to favor fused

social forms in which the self's identity is indistinguishable from group identity.

The advance in non-sensory cognition registers in the writing of the Greek

Enlightenment from 800 to 400 BCE. While Homer may speak of Gods, what

distinguishes his writing is the near-scientific description of bodies and feelings and

actions, a literary mode quite different from the simple broad strokes of the stories of



Greek mythology. Moreover, for the first time, a story has a clear pedagogical value of

promoting norms. Plato and Aristotle are constantly reaching for greater and greater

detail in their philosophic analyses. And Sophocles was a master of emotional and

existential complexity that was proximate to actual human experience, and his plays are

also inadvertent dramas of evolution in that they picture conflicts between ancestral

sensory cognition and the new non-sensory cognition that begins to appear in full flower

in the West for the first time in the Greek Enlightenment. The idea of fate is a projection

of lower order mental representational abilities premised on fusion with one's object

world rather than a separation from it. In Sophocles' plays, the tension is often between a

sense of fate premised on simple mental representational abilities and a sense of

individual responsibility that arises from a more realistic representation of the world.2

Early human history suggests that the genetic change that gave rise to this more

advanced form of non-sensory cognition was differentially distributed. The fact of the

regular slaughter of adversarial populations during this time suggests that the quelling of

violent urges by non-sensory cognition was not universal. The gene flow initiated by it

did not sweep through the human population. In all probability, it was blocked and

redirected by the strict social stratifications of societies of that period. Class and caste

barriers that promote assortative mating stood in the way of genetic sweeping. Scribes in

all early societies were an elite caste that was in certain instances deliberately self-

reproductive. They married amongst themselves, and fathers and sons succeeded each

other in their posts. Usually, they were distinguished from social strata assigned more

practical tasks, such as engineering, law, agriculture, trade, and warfare. As with

Ashkenazi Jews charged with doing complex calculations in the absence of zero, so also



in the social classes charged with running such institutions as complex legal systems,

assortative reproduction probably led to genetic strains that reproduced and preserved

caste-specific genetic differentiations. (Brahmins remain a separate genetic strain in

India today, one that bears more noticeable European-originated genetic admixture.

(Barnshad, 2001)) In Rome plebs and patricians would not have married, and throughout

the Middle Ages, severe class differences persisted. It is only in very recent experience

that flux and flexibility have come to characterize human mating behavior. And it is

probably noteworthy that along with the scientific, industrial, capitalist, and philosophic

revolutions of the 18th century came as well the domestic revolution so evident in Jane

Austen's Pride and Prejudice that brought flexibility and personal freedom to mating

practices.

Another reason genetic sweeping may have been blocked is civility. In the zone

of civil protection that non-sensory cognition made possible, some could forsake

predatory defensiveness, distrust, and violence for the sake of behavior guided by

adaptive forms of non-sensory cognition without fearing extinction. But equally, those

lodged in an ancestral cognitive disposition would not have failed a fitness test and

passed out of existence so long as they were willing to play by the new rules. No

replacement occurred. Non-sensory cognition made possible a level of civility that

prevented the natural culling of populations that usually occurred when a significant

adaptation made greater fitness possible. In this instance, the fitness made possible was

protective of all. It consisted of an ability to elaborate laws that made large pacified

communities imaginable. In the peaceful and non-violent communities adaptive humans

designed, all survived, including those who had not benefitted from the adaptive change.



With the emergence of civil institutions, nature's harshest harvesting laws ceased to

function. An agricultural surplus, made possible by organizational forms fostered by

non-sensory cognition, protected everyone from nature's random violence. What this

meant as well, however, was that human dispositions that were more ancestral continued

to exist.3 And much of subsequent human history has been about that problem.

What might that ancestral human disposition have been like, one that did not

benefit from fully developed non-sensory cognitive capacities? And what kind of

behavior might s/he have engaged in as a result? A world without large protective human

communities was in all likelihood a world driven by raw survival imperatives,

characterized by inter-group violence, and populated by groups organized, like adjacent

primate species such as chimpanzees, around opportunistic alliances, dominance

behavior, the lop-sided control of resources, hierarchy, and subordination. Cognition in

such a context was probably limited by those imperatives and probably reflected their

pressure. It primarily addressed the self’s need for safety and security. Such cognition

would be defensive, devious, expedient, and absolutist. And it was predominantly

sensory.

Defensiveness in a predatory context obliges one to monitor one’s immediate

environment carefully for signs of danger, and it therefore favors highly sensory modes

of perception over non-sensory ones that require one to relinquish one’s self-protective

perceptual grasp on what is immediately before one's eyes, ears, and nose. As a result,

such sensory cognition is less equipped to use the mind’s speculative capacities to

develop formal or abstract non-sensory models of the world. Such cognition is thus less

capable of affect regulation. Violence, rather than verbal negotiation, will be more likely



as a way of dealing with adversaries. Such intensely sensory cognition would also be less

inclined to embrace a universal principle and to submit its urges to the control of formal

regulation. The possibility that one sacrifices one’s immediate survival chances for an

idea that applies equally to all and that restrains one’s self-interest for the good of others

would be both alien and dangerous. The consistent hostility in the history of the West to

speculative cognition and to the constraints on pure freedom of action that it often

mandates may result from the fact that it is associated with the possibility of letting go of

the security and safety sensory perception affords.

What is at stake is the fear of death, a fear still felt by some human groups more

so than others. Jost, et al, found that self-described ideological conservatives in the U.S.

fear death more than liberals (Jost, 2003). There is a noticeable difference in cognitive

style between the two groups. Conservatives prefer ideas, actions, values, and

institutions that assure survival and might be said to stave off a greater fear of death.

They prefer mythology and fusion over realism and science, and they tend toward highly

regimented forms of social organization, expedient and opportunistic alliances,

dominance behavior, social control through the accumulation of resources, and hierarchy-

preserving behaviors designed to assure a greater rate of survival in a predatory context

than liberal values such as tolerance, respect, empathy, and civility. They prefer violent

to peaceful solutions to conflict, and they abandon principles that impose restraint on

defensive behavior (such as rules against torture) when self-defensive expediency and

self-interest demand. Liberals, in contrast, seem more capable of non-sensory thinking

that posits formal or ideal entities such as “human rights” or “universal justice” that are

not real sensory objects. Allowing such non-sensory principles to dominate one's mental



more advanced non-sensory cognitive abilities seemed to dominate southern European

life for several centuries, until the first century BCE. Early Rome inherited the principles

and practices of Greek democracy. But the advances in civility did not take hold, an

indicator, perhaps, of how difficult it is for a new trait to sweep through an entire class-

stratified population in a short period of time, and eventually, violence triumphed over

civility. The Roman republic ends in civil war in the first century BCE and the rise to

power of emperors who rule for nearly six centuries before succumbing to invasions by

Germanic tribes. The change from fifth century BCE Greece to fifth century CE Rome is

a shift from democracy to authoritarianism and from civil legality to brutality and

plunder. It is as if evolution shifted into reverse. If the positive developments in human

civilization that seem attributable to a new kind of cognition were remarkable in the

Greek Enlightenment, no less remarkable is their disappearance in a thousand year span

of time.

In isolated Greek city states, assortative mating maintained genetic consistency of

the sort that underwrote political democracy by making such non-sensory cognitive

capacities as thinking in concepts and speaking from memory possible and culturally

retainable.4 But once Greece gave way to Rome, a highly unstable empire with much

migration and no consistent, isolated reproductive pattern, the Greek moment passes. In

early Rome an effort is made to preserve the democratic institutions created in Greece,

but Rome was a magnet for wealth through conquest, and the high stakes fostered both

lofty ambitions and low desires. It must have been a tempting situation for anyone with

an ancestral disposition. There were few incentives to suspend urges and regulate affect

for the sake of universal principles. It was a case of the Prisoner's Dilemma without any



prisoners. In the first century BCE, democracy was cast aside in favor of autocracy, and

a several centuries long era of plunder and corruption began. Simone Weil notes that

what distinguishes Rome from Greece is the coming to dominance of a sensibility that

might be called ancestral and sensory as opposed to adaptive and non-sensory (Weil,

2005). Oriented toward violent defensiveness and the control of resources for the sake of

domination, it eschewed non-sensory principles in favor of a brutal expediency whose

goal was the subordination of others through the control of resources. Authoritarianism

superseded democracy, unempathetic violence replaced oratory in public spectacles, and

propaganda replaced nuanced, realist forms of literary representation. The difference

between Demosthenes and Cicero is the difference between principle and expediency,

and the difference between Homer and Vergil is the difference between a finely analytic

mind devoted to the expounding of civil principles and a hack propagandist for a corrupt

imperial regime who was willing to sell his skills to serve the interests of those in power.

In Rome, despite its fate, one nevertheless sees evidence of non-sensory cognition

at work. Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, two Roman Tribunes of the second century CE,

were among the most intellectually gifted men of their era (Stockton, 1979). Their mother

was a famous intellectual of Greek origin who oversaw their educational training by

Greek teachers. The brothers were noteworthy for their skills at diplomacy and

legislation. As political leaders, the brothers sought to reintroduce Greek principles of

democracy to Roman life and proposed ways to make the distribution of property to army

veterans more equitable. Large property owners who stood to lose if the new principles

of distribution were put into effect murdered each one of them before their reforms could

be implemented. We might interpret such events as a difference of opinion untouched by



genetic variation, but when the difference is between those with a capacity for principled,

non-sensory thinking on the one hand and those characterized by unregulated impulses

normally held in check by such cognition on the other, one has reason to speculate that

the clash has genetic or epigenetic roots.

With the collapse of Rome in the fifth century CE, western genetic history also

seems to change. Economic historians use the term "simplification" to describe the socio-

economic system that succeeds Rome in western Europe, one in which craft skills

disappear and people forget how even to use money for trade (a sign of the absence of

symbolic thinking abilities) (Ward-Perkins, 2005). The word "simplification," given what

did happen, has an unfortunate intellectual resonance as well. It is as if the simple-

minded and leaden-headed took over, and those with more advanced cognitive abilities

are driven out of public life by the brutality and violence of their fellows. Very little of

any genetic evidence is available to sustain an hypothesis like that, but phenotypic

behavior can be taken as an index, and by all accounts, the Germanic tribes that displaced

the Romans were more given to physical activity than intellectual life, practiced antique

forms of religion that included human sacrifice, cultivated martial violence in men as

well as women in a manner that was more Homeric than Aristotelian, and had trouble

adapting to basic civilized rules such as the one barring incest. Even as late a figure as

Charlemagne kept his daughters "close" throughout their lives. That the ability to use

imagination to engage in detailed and realist artistic representation also disappears for

eight centuries is a further indicator that a genetically based cognitive ability was either

lost or shunted aside by people who did not possess such abilities but whose drive for

dominance assured that their disposition would set the tone of the era and of their



societies.

The ancestral sensibility that was displaced temporarily in Greece by those

possessed of non-sensory cognition returned to dominance over public affairs, largely as

a result of a population shift that drew in new human groups from northern and central

Europe. But where then did those benefitting from the genetic modification that gave rise

to advanced non-sensory cognition in the Mediterranean basin go? They did not

disappear or get culled because the adaptation they bore shows up later in the

Renaissance and bequeathes us modern, normative, rule-bound civilization. In all

likelihood, after the collapse of Rome and the beginning of the era of tribal rule, they

entered religious life and became the great intellectuals of the Roman Church from

Origen, Augustine, and Gregory to Copernicus, Occam, and Aquinas. Religion was a

realm where matters pertaining to non-sensory cognition could be explored and

discussed, often with great analytic detail, as Aquinas proved. While in the contemporary

era, belief and interest in spirituality has come to seem alien to the scientific sensibility,

during the Middle Ages, spirituality was an intellectual realm that allowed those

possessed of non-sensory cognitive abilities, even ones we might now consider scientific,

to thrive. It had a different meaning and social function then than it has now. Abbeys

and monasteries were the places where minds capable of science were preserved, and that

may explain why the writings of Occam and Aquinas seem like early science, even

though they are about religious matters.

Feudalism, the economic and social system that obtains from 500 to 1600 CE,

was a system of dominance and subordination carried out by force and centering on the

over-accumulation of resources as a means of maintaining control within the group. It



might also be characterized as a particular kind of cognitive reign. If the ability to

develop highly differentiated and complex mental representations is linked to advanced

forms of democratic civility in the Greek experience, a coming-to-dominance of ancestral

sensory forms of mental representation in public life during the Middle Ages brought

with it a diminishment of civility and a growth of the absolutist social forms that the

ancestral disposition favors, forms that assured that society would be organized not

around non-sensory principles such as justice or democracy but around dominance,

hierarchy, defensiveness, violence, and resource control. In art and literature, the Middle

Ages witnesses a return to forms that are neo-mythological in their simplicity. It is

interesting that when Europe begins to "wake up" around 1300 CE, one of the first signs

of awakening is new, more realist painting forms, such as those practiced by the

Lorenzetti brothers in Siena and of literary works such as Cervantes Don Quijote that

mock medieval mythology in a realist mode.

The case of the suppression of Catharism in southern France in the 13 th century is

instructive regarding both the ancestral character of cognition prevalent in the dominant

social group at the time and the persistence of the disposition evident in 5th century

Greece. With economic and social simplification after 500 CE, the Roman Catholic

Church asserted its intellectual dominance in Europe. Early discussions amongst Jews

and Christians after the death of Jesus Christ reflect a rich mix of ideas, many of which,

such as Gnosticism, clearly bear the mark of non-sensory cognition. But those ideas were

expunged from the New Testament of the Roman Church (Pagels, 1979). And Ireneus in

the second century began the Church's assault on the Gnostics, declaring their ideas

heterodox and the ideas sanctioned by the authority of the Church orthodox. With the



Crusades from 1100 CE to 1300 CE, however, an opening eastward occurred that led to

the rediscovery of Greek culture and of Greek books. Gnostic ideas once again became

popular in Western Europe, and were spread by Greek merchants. Those ideas

emphasize a distinction between a corrupt material world and a non-sensory spiritual one.

Gnostics divide humans into groups, with the lowest being those absorbed in material

concerns and the highest or most spiritual being those who have absolved themselves of

such concerns (by among other things renouncing material possessions and taking vows

of chastity). It is as if the Gnostics were observing humanity and noticing the division

between those with an adaptive ability for advanced non-sensory cognition (misconstrued

as spirituality) and those without that genetic benefit whose snouts were firmly in the

trough and whose hands firmly grasped their swords.

The Cathars were an aristocratic caste in southern France in the 13th century who,

like the Gnostics, believed the material world was a corrupt realm of power. They were

offended by the opulence of the Roman Catholic Church and saw it as an example of

corruption. The Cathars believed as well in a more pure spiritual realm of forms or

principles such as love and peace. In this, they resembled the philosophers of the Greek

Enlightenment. They developed a sophisticated culture characterized by sung poetry.

They opposed war because it was a manifestation of power rather than of love. The

Cathars believed in universal principles associated with restraint placed on animal urges,

and such restraint is linked in their lives and their group philosophy to the ability to work

with mental images or ideas that embody universal principles.

Catharism might be understood, therefore, not on its own terms as a spiritual or

religious movement but rather as a manifestation of non-sensory cognition at work in



human affairs, generating values, ideals, principles, and norms that restrained violence

and furthered cooperative civility. One could even hypothesize that its spread within

Provence and Languedoc was due as much to cultural transmission as to genetic

sweeping through a geographically isolated population over a period of centuries. The

Cathars represented a serious challenge both to those in power in the Roman Catholic

Church and to the ancestral sensibility they embodied. The Cathars' opposition to wealth,

power, and materiality was in fact a statement against the motives and practices of that

ancestral sensibility as it was embodied in those with power generally in Western Europe

at the time. The Cathars, predictably perhaps, were violently suppressed by the Catholic

Church in alliance with Frankish lords who were promised their lands and wealth in

return for brutally eliminating the heresy and torturing and murdering many of its

advocates. (de Rougemont, 1956).

Catharism is significant because it prefigures the Renaissance, the cultural,

intellectual, scientific, and political revolutions set going in Europe (1300-1700) by the

Crusades. But the resurgence in learning also can be understood in terms of the

resurgence and spread of advanced non-sensory cognitive abilities. Once again, Greece

plays a prominent role in the cultural transformation. Genetically, Greek influence was

probably significant since the Renaissance originates in an Italy saturated with Greek

genetic mixing. Aquinas, for example, comes from a region of Italy heavily populated by

Greeks over the centuries. But it was the rediscovery of ancient Greek texts, both

religious and secular, that sparked the new emphasis on learning and science in Western

Europe. The rediscovery of the Greek Bible would lead eventually to the Protestant

Reformation, which shifted emphasis in religious matters away from domination,



subordination, and obedience of institutional authority towards a mode of cognition that

emphasized separate individuality, private reflection, and spiritual purity (in

contradistinction to the palpable material corruption of the Roman Church).

Francesco Petrarca, the person credited with initiating the Renaissance both in his

writings and through his purchase of Greek texts for translation, is one of the first

indicators of the reappearance in public life of people possessed of advanced forms of

non-sensory cognition. In his famous climb of Mont Ventoux, he turns from the world

and focuses instead on his mental processes, which seem to give him access to a non-

sensory kind of thinking associated with the regulation of affect: "I was thus dividing my

thoughts, now turning my attention to some terrestrial object that lay before me, now

raising my soul, as I had done my body, to higher planes . . . How earnestly should we

strive, not to stand on mountain-tops, but to trample beneath us those appetites which

spring from earthly impulses."5 If non-sensory cognition worked under the guise of

religion to encourage self-control and the regulation of pre-civil affect in the religious

writings of the Medieval Period, it began to operate as secular philosophy to encourage

the elaboration of rational principles that function to further the building of more civil

institutions during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

At this point in time, laws between nations began to be codified, a sign of a

greater sense of international cooperation. Republics such as Venice, which presupposed

an educated populace, once again became popular modes of government as they had been

in Greece and early Rome. Feudal authoritarianism still persisted, but modern, more

scientific divisions between administration, adjudication, and deliberation began to

emerge as did universities such as Paris and Bologna devoted to the new divisions of



political institutions. One of the major discoveries of the period was that how we think

about the world and how we organize institutions and social forms are crucially linked.

In a way that antedates modern evolutionary psychology, Locke and others, from Spinoza

to Hegel, noticed that epistemology is ontology, how one thinks is materially connected

to how one organizes human life.

The 18th century is crucial because of the congruence in western Europe of

significant advances in thinking ability and in human institutions. Philosophers such as

Kant and Hegel explored the implications of non-sensory cognition both in itself and for

civil institution-building, while thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson actually undertook the

work of interlacing the new cognitive advances with new political forms of life.

Cognition is physiological, and the important common ingredient in the great changes of

the era is new thinking abilities and new ideas that infuse human physical reality,

reshaping moral emotions, the psychology of expectation, institutions such as law and

economics, practices such as scientific reasoning and industrial invention, and the like.

Modern human civilization is invented at this time, its basic forms and institutions

established. The era resembles in some respects the Eurasian Enlightenment of the 6th

and 5th centuries BCE. What is remarkable about the era is that non-sensory cognition

itself becomes a topic of discussion and an object of philosophic reflection, and

philosophers like Immanuel Kant link it to the need to develop better political and legal

institutions. Kant's distinction between Vernunft or empirical cognition and Verstand or

reason exercised apart from sense perception could be interpreted as an

acknowledgement of non-sensory cognition. For Kant, Verstand is the basis for the

universality that underwrites modern liberal notions of ethics and law that universalize



rights.

It is in regard to the great changes wrought by the Enlightenment and the French

Revolution that one encounters for the first time widespread antipathy to speculative

reasoning and non-sensory cognition. It is as if those who had benefitted from social

institutions organized around domination, subordination, and the control of resources

finally recognized, after the success of the French Revolution, the danger of non-sensory

cognition and the threat it posed to their interests. In Burke's writing one encounters an

attack on speculation or theory, and in the conservative philosopher David Hume, one

finds an attempt to undermine, using skeptical argumentation, Locke's idea that one can

construct universals from particulars and thereby secure a material and empirical basis for

ideals of just government. The era of conservative reaction and monarchial retrenchment

that followed the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 was accompanied by a concurrent anti-

speculative turn in discussions of cognition in western Europe. Positivism sough to limit

acceptable or legitimate knowledge to sense data arrived at only through prescribed

methods. The speculative methods that produced the ideal principles of the

Enlightenment were rejected. As a result, those who, on the basis of the ideal principles

made accessible by non-sensory cognition, had in the past used speculative methods to

make their points now turned to more practical forms of argumentation. Utilitarianism,

the philosophy that measured the success of ideas and institutions by their measurable

gains for humanity, was a compromise solution that furthered the improvement of human

institutions using the tools of non-sensory cognition while nevertheless hewing to the

new emphasis on non-speculative positive knowledge. In the work of Jeremy Bentham

and John Mill, principles such as ethics and the common good were joined to scientific



objectivity. The two sides of non-sensory cognition--the elaboration of ideal principles

apart from world objects and the emphasis on greater realism, objectivity, and

differentiation in scientific representations of the object world--were beginning to work

together more so than in the 17th and 18th centuries, when a divide still existed between

"empiricists" such as Locke and "idealists" such as Hegel. The two philosophers were

using the same cognitive tool to explore the same issue but from different ends of the

telescope. The issue for both was how human cognition can improve the civil world,

which is civil because it consists of the infusion of human cognition into environmental

objects, a common language of norms, and educationally fostered cultural beliefs to

create institutions. Considered in this framework, there is much greater similarity

between Locke's exploration of the sensory basis of the non-sensory ideals that justify the

social contract and Hegel's only apparently quite different (even antithetical) exploration

of the way non-sensory ideals infuse universal validity into particular, concrete human

institutions, giving them a society-wide meaning and functionality.

I will cease my historical review here because as we approach the present and as

time becomes more compressed, it becomes more difficult to see differences that suggest

further development in non-sensory cognition.

If what I have suggested is the case, then we should be moved to ask: have

genetic or epigenetic differentiations occurred in humans that make us different from

each other in ways that are more profound than we have so far imagined or would even

like to imagine? With the advent of human civilization, the harshest aspects of natural

selection have been put on hold. Nature no longer requires that physical adaptations be

universal if each individual human organism is to survive. But if human cultural history



contrast to such efforts at intimidation, liberals on such talk shows seemed to strive to be

civil and polite, empathetic and respectful. They seemed to value civility much more

than conservatives.

Such differences might be merely ideological, I knew, but the fact that they

manifested themselves in physical actions led me to wonder if they might also be the

result of physical causes. I had been studying the history of conservatism for years, and I

recognized repetitive, apparently structural elements of the "ideology" that suggested

something deeper at work than ideas. That led me to ask: what if the ideology is

genetic? What struck me especially was that while liberals seemed capable of seeing the

importance of universal principles such as the Geneva Convention against torture,

conservatives did not. It was not that conservatives disagreed with such principles and

offered reasonable arguments to justify ignoring them. They simply seemed incapable of

grasping them, as if they lacked the "principle grasping" cognitive module. And that

went along with a much more pronounced sense of expediency than one finds in liberals.

Conservatives like Bush were not just unprincipled; they lied for expedient ends, and did

not seem to recognize that there might be something wrong with that if one wanted to

preserve the community one lived in. I began to wonder too if the fact that principles are

non-sensory ideas with universal validity had something to do with this failure on the part

of conservatives. What if liberals benefitted from an adaptation in the realm of cognition

that is associated with an ability to think in terms of universal principles that allows

humans to build cooperative civil institutions that assure individual survival by assuring

group survival? And what if conservatives simply cannot think in the same way because

they did not benefit from this adaptation? That would explain what I saw in the



conservatives I had been studying in cultural history: a greater tendency towards

violence as a means of solving conflicts, a drive to control resources as a way of

controlling others, a tendency to engage in dominance behavior, an inability to restrain

affect for the sake of ideal universal principles, a preference for the social hierarchies that

subordinated others, a bent towards simple cognitive empiricism, a preference for fused

authoritarian groups, an urge toward self-serving mythology and distrust of science, etc.

At about this moment in my work, I came across research that suggested that

there are physiological differences between liberals and conservatives. I was especially

struck by the fact that conservatives fear death more so than liberals. And that made

sense to me because such a fear might be part of a genetic wiring that makes one more

alert to the dangers predators pose, and conservatives fostered predatory societies in

which "freedom" allows those with a resource advantage to prey on others. Moreover, a

fear of death would make one struggle all the more fiercely for one's own survival. That

suddenly explained a number of features of conservative ideology such as opposition to

taxes (why give resources to competitors?) and to government regulation (which

interferes with survival-oriented activities in a mutually predatory capitalist setting). It

also explained the primary motive of most conservative ideology and action: the quest to

over-accumulate resources (a guarantee of survival in a resource-competitive context). A

fear of death would also motivate one to be more prone to be defensively violent towards

perceived threats to survival (hence the conservative obsession with military defense).

U.S. conservatives in the 1980s had surprised me with their willingness to exercise

brutality against adversaries in Latin America. They seemed entirely lacking in a sense

of empathy of a kind found in those, such as Jesuit priests and Maryknoll nuns, they



murdered because they were too friendly to the poor and the subordinate. Conservatives

condoned death squad murders and accepted as routine the massacre of civilians by allies.

But that becomes understandable if one sees the quest by poor people for economic

equality of the sort that motivated the social and political movements in Latin America as

a threat to the survival of those with resources that would need to be shared more

equitably if such movements were to succeed. Lacking the kinds of non-sensory

cognitive ability that allows liberals to embrace universal principles and to more

successfully control negative affect, conservatives react violently to threats to their

resources. Murder in Latin America was justified to preserve the ability of conservatives

to over-accumulate resources without interference from the community in the form of

universally valid and universally binding restraints.

That the cognitive disposition of conservatives may be more "ancestral" might

explain some odd, almost humorous features of conservative life, such as their affection

for hunting. The fact that Sarah Palin can take down a moose as ably as she can skin a

liberal is if nothing else an occasion for reflection on the persistence of the Pleistocene.

The seemingly phenotypic taste for guns and hunting just might be significant of a deeper

difference. What I have found most interesting about conservatives, however, is their

capacity for deceptive trickery. They favor harsh regimentation in society, yet they call it

"freedom." They mean, of course, that those who are in a superior position in terms of

resource accumulation should be allowed to continue to accumulate. They also should be

free to exercise dominance behavior as a means of preserving control over others. But

because liberals from the 17th century on made "liberty" or freedom such an attractive

ideal, conservatives have been obliged to borrow it and to bend it, quite opportunistically,



to their own ends--which consist of assuring that society will be organized in such a way

that their own survival interests are assured. Interestingly, what conservative mean by

"freedom" resembles feudalism. And when things really get rough, conservatives

explicitly embrace and implement neo-feudal social forms (in the Nazi experience). This

deceptive trickery is of a high order indeed, and it makes lying to justify the invasion of

Iraq in 2002 or calling laws that allow pollution by one's buddies in the energy industries

"Clear Skies Initiatives" seem trivial.

If what I am suggesting is true, then we may need to stop using a term like

"human nature" in the singular when we discuss the behavior of the various locally

adapted, epigenetically differentiated forms of H. sapiens. What we may be witnessing

in modern societies such as the U.S. is not so much a culture war as an intra-species

conflict. More psychological and behavioral testing will need to be conducted on the

difference between conservatives and liberals, but one advantage of human cultural

history is that it affords ample evidence of the forms of cognition that characterize each

social group. Movies are cognitive products, and they are weighted with values that are

near digital in their simplicity (think good guy versus bad guy) especially in popular fare.

If human values are shaped by epigenetic change and are preferences that are in a sense

necessities, then a study of how acts of valuation or preference manifest themselves in

different groups' representations of the world, especially at times when physical survival

is at issue because the civilized hazard has manifested itself, may have fruitful

consequences. The Great Depression of the 1930s was a time when human civilization's

hazard suddenly became evident. In a cooperative civilization in which delivery of food

supplants self-provision, the implicit hazard is that human-made institutions might fail,



threatening the survival of all. During the 1930s, conservatives and liberals in America

debated in film what the proper response to the economic crisis should be, but what they

were really debating goes much deeper and has to do with the evolutionary issues I have

been discussing. In the lexicon of popular political discussion, a key term was "liberty"

(the freedom of conservatives to conduct economic activities without regulation by the

community). But at an evolutionary level, that term really means "dominance." Because

political discussion is meant to sway a large audience with ideas that are attractive and

likely to gain support for the group promoting them, such popular discussion is often

characterized by representations that are never fully accurate. A certain duplicity,

especially on the part of conservatives, is needed to be effective. In order to succeed,

conservatives are obliged to call dominance liberty or freedom.

Cultural fantasies like film are a different matter, and while it may seem odd to

say so, they are often if not always more true than popular political statements. Fantasies

have long been favored by cultural scholars as sources for evidence regarding underlying

dispositions because fantasies, for precisely the reason they are not taken seriously by

many--they lack seriousness--, are a mode of expression where internal cognitive censors

and the sensing devices that might guide representational expression toward effective

deception, are turned off or at a lower ebb. One sees what people are really thinking. If

conservatives proclaim a love of "liberty" or "freedom" but in fact favor feudalism, one

will be more likely to see that in conservative fantasies than in conservative political

speeches. In fantasy is an honesty lacking in censored and expedient public discourse.

The Gold Diggers of 1933 is a liberal film, while My Man Godfrey makes a

conservative argument in 1937 against the liberal New Deal, a set of programs anchored



in liberal ideals of universal governance for the common good. In the midst of the worst

period of suffering during the Great Depression, Gold Diggers promotes cooperation,

mutual support, empathy for others, and the use of public instruments for private needs,

especially that most basic need--hunger. In contrast, Godfrey takes a much harder, even

harsher approach. The strong competent individual entrepreneur will save us, it argues,

but he can do so only if everyone else submits to discipline, accepts their subordinate

place in a hierarchy, and, to use an appropriate primatological metaphor, knuckles under.

Gold Diggers is noteworthy for its musical numbers, which move out of the limited space

of theatrical representation and portrays a much larger space in which choreographed

sequences can occur that exceed the bonds of the theater stage. (The move is about the

staging of a musical on Broadway.) The shift from realist theater stage to non-realist and

imagined stage is an exercise in non-sensory cognition. It is as if one closed one's eyes to

sensory perception and imagined a different mental world entirely. That exercise in

super-sensory cognition is linked in the movie's argument to the need to use one's

imagination to see how others live, to adduce their true motives, and to empathize with

their suffering. Only such imagination can permit us to live cooperatively without

distrust and to empathize with and help one another at times of economic crisis. In a

crucial plot move, a wealthy man, after initially being suspicious of the motives of

showgirls, learns that they have virtue and are responsible and hardworking. Despite

appearances or prejudices, they are not in fact "gold diggers." They deserve help. The

argument of the film is that we can trust others in times of crisis; we should empathize

with those in need because they may in fact be us. Using our imagination, our ability to

engage in super-sensory cognition, we can inhabit their lives and sympathize with their



needs.

Godfrey argues for realism and mocks and demeans the kind of imaginative social

idealism Gold-Diggers promotes. In the "real" world, imagination is a frivolous

indulgence, as is self-pity. Godfrey, himself wealthy though apparently poor, upbraids

the wealthy for self-indulgence and frivolity. The group's survival is threatened because

women have gotten out of control, play has supplanted the serious work of securing

material survival, intellectuals and artists, who are portrayed as self-indulgent free-

loaders and cheaters, have been given too much power, and the dominant male (played by

an actor who resembles a silverback) has lost his position of dominance. Godfrey's task,

one he succeeds at, is to restore that dominance by exercising his superior entrepreneurial

abilities. What is striking is the physical character of this exercise in restoration. The

free loading artist is expelled from the house violently, and the unfaithful wife is

intimidated into assuming a seated position of subordination within the visual frame.

Physical force conjoined to expedient self-guided economic activity staves off the crisis

of survival.

In the conservative vision, community cooperation interferes with the ability of

the superior individual to pursue survival goals unimpeded and unregulated. He, not

they, should dominate if group survival is to be assured. The liberal vision displays what

non-sensory cognition has made possible for humanity--cooperative institutions,

empathy, and the imaginative transformation of "reality." The representational style of

the liberal film is predominantly connective and horizontal, while in the conservative

vision the editing style isolates the individual from the group or assigns him significance

as a superior being who stands apart from and above the community. At different times



principled ideas that take resources from them. But more problematically, they oppose

such principled ideas because they simply cannot grasp the formal, non-sensory,

universalist reasoning that makes such principled ideas reasonable. They are incapable of

seeing that helping others improves the likely survival of the community and thus also of

oneself.

What we witness in such situations is not disagreement but incapacity, and that

insight has consequences for how we move forward as a human group that is aware of its

internal divisions. One of the problems that is now evident with the current model of

democratic governance is that it gives conservatives equal say with cognitively better

equipped liberals in the project of building a more principled community even though

conservatives, by virtue of their cognitive incapacity, must oppose that undertaking

because it threatens their perceived survival interests. Giving much of government's

responsibilities to a meritocratic civil service with high cognitive standards would help

solve this flaw in democracy.

The commercial activities of conservatives would need to be regulated and

controlled so that they cannot continue to threaten civility as they have in recent years

through the self-interested manipulation of financial instruments. In the U.S. healthcare

and financial systems, conservatives have made self-interest paramount to principle by

making healthcare too costly for the community and by almost wrecking the world

economy by using the ideal of "freedom" to elude appropriate community controls over

their activities. In recent years, they have allowed self-interested risk to prevail over a

more community-preserving sense of caution. To control the danger their strong survival

urges pose for the larger community, it would be necessary to eliminate the strong



incentive to over-accumulate financial resources. The principle of a "maximum wage"

similar to the principle and institution of a "minimum wage" would help solve this

problem by removing the incentive for incivility. The amount any one person can take

out of the social pool would be regulated by a siphon that would increase redistributive

taxation substantially in relation to income. At a deeper level, we need to rethink those

points where evolved adaptive actions such as taking advantage of others' needs to

increase one's own survival chances intersect with community-sustaining activities such

as trade. The supposed "law of supply and demand" grants a license (by not restricting)

the evolved adaptive tendency to take more than one needs or merits (in an overall

picture or scheme of relations) when the opportunity affords itself through scarcity to

charge more for something. These basic natural components of economic life cede to

conservative instincts processes that should be regulated by liberal principles of civility.

Because words are things which have physical effects (Ingram), conservative

public discourse, especially in the televisual media, must also be regulated to assure that

harm is not done to the principles of civility. Other countries such as Canada are much

better than the U.S. in this regard, and that probably explains why verbally violent

conservatives such as Ann Coulter have a more difficult time speaking there without

opposition from proponents of civility. The liberal formal ideal of free discourse must be

revisited and returned to take conservative verbal violence and deceptive trickery into

account. Both need to be restrained for the sake of the community and for the sake of the

ideal of civility.

Finally, conservatives choose violent solutions to conflict than liberals largely, I

would argue, because they fear death more. Still bearing an ancestral fear of predation



within them, they have been incapable of developing the same higher order cognitive

abilities that allow liberals to formulate and to embrace universal principles that regulate

community behavior for both the common good and the good of the individual organism.

Conservatives' cognitive abilities do not have the kind of non-sensory architecture that

places restraints on affect. They as a result use mental representations that are fuzzy,

non-realist, undifferentiated, mythographic, and fused. Religion and an opposition to

science were, as a result, in the Bush years as common in governmental discourse as

bellicosity, dominance behavior, resource over-accumulation, and predatory

defensiveness. Nevertheless, conservative mental representational abilities are quite clear

and well-focused in regard to defensiveness, and that is where the true danger lies in

continuing to permit conservatives access to certain kinds of governmental power. For

access to government is access to weapons. And since conservatives lack a cognitive

module that allows the interests of the community to trump the individual organism's

survival interest, the danger always exists that something as anti-communal and

unprincipled as the use of nuclear weapons for expedient, self-interested, and

particularistic ends is possible. Recall that Bush did entertain the idea of using "tactical"

nuclear weapons against Iran but was prevented from doing so by his military officers.7

The appropriate solution, based in universal principle, to this problem is for all national

military establishments to be eliminated and replaced with one single one that is in the

hands of the United Nations.

My argument has been that human cognition made a major advance in the first

milennium BCE that included becoming capable in a more advanced way than before of

distinguishing form from substance. A capacity for formalism gave us universalism, and



universalism gave us civilization in its modern normatively regulated, highly integrated

iteration. But formalism has also blinded us to differences of substance that we need to

address. According to the principles of formal universalism, we are all the same. But in

evolutionary substance, we are not. Addressing that problem (and it is a problem) will

require steps that offend the ideals of formal universalism. But it is possible that such

universalism needs to be supplemented with newer, more complex kinds of thinking and

theorizing if it is not capable of solving the problems that face us.

Works Cited

J. Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York, 2010),

J. Auerbach, et. al., Relatedness, Self-Definition, and Mental Representation: Essays in

Honor of Sidney J. Blatt, (New York, 2005).

M. Bamshad, et. al., "Genetic Evidence on the Origins of Indian Caste Populations,"

Genome Research. 2001. 11: 994-1004.

S. Blatt, et. al., "Mental Representation in Pesonality Development, Psychopathology,

and the Therapeutic Process," Review of General Psychology. Vol. 1 (4), December

1997, 351-374;

S. Blatt, Continuity and Change in Art: The Development of Modes of Representation

(Hillsdale, N.J., 1984).

R. Boyd and P. Richerson, The Origina nd Evolution of Cultures (New York, 2005).

M. Brener, Evolution and Empathy (New York, 2010).

Michael Chossudovsky, "Is the Bush AdministrationPlanning a Nuclear Holocaust?"

Global Research. February 22, 2006. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?



http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/petrarch-ventoux.html.

H. Plotkin, Necessary Knowledge (London, 2007)

Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (New York, 1956).

David Stockton, The Gracchi (New York, 1979).

Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2005).

Simone Weil, The Iliad or the Poem of Force (London, 2005).



1 Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York, 2010), p. 5, 6.

2 The history of western literature is a history of increased realism, and that would suggest a

development over time that was characterized by an increased number in the population capable of more developed non-sensory cognition. It is suggestive that more detailed and realist mental

representations are linked to a greater capacity for individuation and separation from the object world

and that both modern liberalism (a legal and political doctrine organized around the ideal of theindividual and his/her rights) and modern science (which presupposes increased objectification of the

world) come into being at the same roughly time as modern literary realism. From Galileo and

Boccaccio to Darwin and Zola, a development and a linkage is imaginable.

3 "Once a trait has become genetically fixed, it may continue to be expressed even if an environmental

change causes it to lose its advantage or become detrimental. . . . Possibly the most important aspect of

local adaptation in two antagonistic species is the relative rate at which they (co)evolve." T. Kaweckiand D. Ebert, "Conceptual Issues inn Local Adaptation," Ecology Letters (12 Noveember 2004),

Volume 7, Issue 2, pp. 1225-121.

4 "Thus restricted gene flow is a pre-requisite for local adaptation. Restricted gene flow (due to low

passive dispersal or active habitat choice) also makes the conditions for maintenance of polymorphism

more favourable. The conditions for maintenance of polymorphism are more favourable for loci withlarge effects; such loci also show greater differentiation of allele frequencies under divergent selection.

Furthermore, alleles with strong effects are less likely to be lost by drift. Therefore, loci with large

effects on fitness should disproportionally contribute to local adaptation." Kawecki and Ebert, op.cit.

5 Letter to Dionisio da Borgo San Sepolcro, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/petrarch-

ventoux.html.

6Gregory Clark contends in A Farewell to Alms (Princeton, 2007) that demographic changes during

late Medieval times account for the change in intellect evident in the 18th century across western

Europe, but such reasoning does not account for the earlier presence of similar cognitive abilities bothduring the Greek Enlightenment and across Eurasia at the same time.

7 Michael Chossudovsky, "Is the Bush Administration Planning a Nuclear Holocaust?" GlobalResearch. February 22, 2006. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=2032

ryan social nature culture liberalism

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