Evolutionary Politics

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.

We are politically homeless: we have no political party and don't occupy any recognized political position. To most intellectuals, what we say will seem conservative, since we see the Human Condition as setting limits to the progressive program of social improvement through reason and moral insight. To conservatives, our desire for shaping a new better world may seem like leftist utopianism.

The biggest difficulties that social progress faces are:

1. Due to unpredictability and cognitive limitations, it is hard to design a policy that will do only what we want (unintended_consequences), and
2. What we want may be physically or evolutionarily impossible, so we will fail. In hindsight we may may come up with a plausible story, but that doesn't mean we actually understand the real obstacle.

If loose evolutionary reasoning can really be used to prove anything (so its claims are meaningless), then where are all of the uses of neo-Darwinian reasoning to justify socially progressive theories? The application of evolution to the study of human behavior has lead to many results that are just not politically neutral:

• There are powerful human behavioral instincts that social structures must either cater to or work around.
• Self-promoting, selfish, and competitive behavior is ubiquitous.
• Reproduction and family structure are vitally important.
• There are innate differences in male and female behavior resulting from different reproductive roles.
• Punishment and intimidation are vitally important for maintaining mutually beneficial social cooperation.

In all these cases evolutionary argument points toward traditional views being correct, or at least implies that traditional views are likely to be more consistent with innate human motivations than some cleverly devised new way of living and behaving.

The less-developed theory of Darwinian Cultural Evolution has other predictions that seem not so much repugnant as puzzling or nonsensical:

• Existing policies and behavioral norms may be “good” (culturally adaptive) for reasons that are not and were never understood by anyone, any more than a fish understood why it wanted to grow feet.
• Conflict between cultural and biological evolution creates a huge disconnect between what is a good story (justification or explanation) and what people people actually do.

Because of this coupling to politics, we have adopted the tactic of not advocating public policy, instead recommending personal policies that you and your friends can adopt to make the world a better place. This reduces the tendency for our views to be pigeon-holed as being motivated by a political viewpoint, but (more subtly) also avoids our being dismissed due to confusion. Our views are confusing because we don't fall at a recognized political position. Evolutionary thinking leads to unfamiliar justifications for recognized policies. For example, in Luxury Fever, Robert Frank argues that work-safety and overtime regulations are desirable not because they prevent employers from exploiting their workers but because they prevent workers from compromising their own interests in a futile desire to get ahead in the rat race.