To my mind politics, rightly conceived and consummated, is the social effort of crafting policy that allows for and tempers human nature to balance individual flourishing with community flourishing.
If there is any morality in politics, it is that the stability, social vitality, and individual purpose, part and parcel of healthily and honestly balancing these two competing forces, are good for both.
It is perhaps the most challenging of human endeavors. A very narrow and stoney path that requires an enormous amount of individual responsibility.
Hence the allure of the wide, smooth road of moralization. So much easier to offload responsibility onto others.
"If you think that somehow the Left does not include said mass-murdering tyrants, you are simply wrong. It is very revealing that there are clearly many folk on the Left who somehow edit out this history. They are not looking at the Left as it is in history, but as some set of noble aspirations that morally ennoble themselves."
Strikingly, this is also how Christians think with regards to the documented misdeeds of the Church - somehow, it is not the main show, and no amount of misdeeds will change their mind. I'm not sure where I'm going with that...something about faith being impervious to facts?
If by "documented misdeeds of the Church" you mean documented sins by Christians, then no, this not how Christians think.
A basic stating point of Christian thinking is that people, Christians included, do bad things. In Christian theology, the fact that Christians do sin is the actual reason for having a Church.
So when Christians tell you no Christian has ever done anything wrong, you can kindly point out to them that they are wrong, by their own lights.
On the other hand, if we are discussing whether believing in Leftism or Christ is a cover or motive for misdeeds, the conversation could take quite a different turn.
I suppose you articulated the standard Christian defense: “sure, Christians can be bad because man is fallen, but the Church is good because God is good, etc.” For the rest of us, this delineation is a little too convenient, as we know that long-lived institutions have an life of their own, and that some of them are constitutively corrupt or hostile to human flourishing. For that matter, so did Martin Luther believe. As for the very many Christians who died at the stake, perhaps not all of them blessed the Church in their dying moments.
"Standard Christian Defense" assumes that all Christians must answer for the crimes of all other Christians. Which assumes that Christians commit crimes because they are Christian.
The second thesis could be supported one of two ways - by showing that all Christians, or all Christian societies, commit certain crimes at a higher rate that their secular counterparts, or that we commit crimes which are unknown elsewhere.
The point was, Christians do not think that the Faith exonerates us from moral standards.
The point was not, please give me your permission to keep my faith. I will, regardless. But if one of my coreligious tells you "You can not criticize Christians because Christ is holy"; You are quite correct to question that person's motives. As anyone should question the motives of any ideology which seeks to exonerate its adherents from moral standards. Bringing us back to...
Lorenzo Warby, this was a great piece, thank you for making it available.
Oh, yes. However, moral philosophy is just "smelling philosophers' own farts" as Helen vividly put it - this short article I linked as a brief beam of sunlight for a difference. It doesn't make sense without an evolutionary foundation. The evolutionary foundation was to make the individuals and their small groups survive, and just very little remains as a guide for abstract morality, as moral feeling was just another adaptation to divide us from them (thus ingroup solidarity and outgroup animosity). The question is, what makes the tribe survive BETTER. Which the abstract philosophies hardly ever even consider - making moral philosophy, as I read it, infinitely more counterproductive than helpful. Actually leading to selfdestructive impotence of "law-based" bureaucracy. Hence the decay of "democracies" like the EU and the US Democrat party. Nice for Democrats grabbing the party name that is about the opposite on your diagram to what they pursue with full conviction of their moral superiority. Going on religiosity tour of guilt and demolishing the sinners, and trans and net zero and centering the rejects of society, etc. - just like 300s-500s AD with og Christianity taking over and inaugurating a millennia of dark ages with the identical moral righteousness. Or later Islam.
Morality becomes a grandiose status claim that turns out to empower monsters. I have a forthcoming piece on Helen’s Substack that tackles that very point.
Looking forward to reading it. I completely agree with you. My points were mostly that what people call "morality" is more often than not "a grandiose status claim."
And I agree with what you said above: in the current environment, the adaptation for morality is self-destructively mismatched.
As it is a ratchet process, the current dysfunction will keep ratcheting until civilization breaks - all because of "moral values". It will not be much consolation to anyone living through it that it may end up in yet another renaissance 1,000 or 5,000 years later.
I think there is a lot to contemplate buried in your sentences: "Our emotions are a much more basic decision-making mechanism than our reason and well precede it in evolutionary development. Tribalism is also normative and can have great emotional power. Politics operates by mobilising shared emotions and sense of belonging. Normative is not the same as moral."
That is one of those sort of obvious ideas that I don't think made it fully into my consciousness until now. I can also see how it might play into my life long struggle to understand those people with strong and devout religious faith, vs. my own lack thereof and minimal orientation towards "transcendence" (at least of a divinely sourced variety).
I see you have some interesting titles in your list of references, so I will probably have to look into some of them.
That essay touches on a whole lot of large issues. Perhaps the largest is that our technological capacities are outgrowing our evolutionary adaptations. Or, to put it another way, the ever larger set of evolutionary novelties.
Well, the Marxists were half-right. There absolutely IS a parasite class in the world. But the parasites are the government, and the usually undeserving recipients of its favors.
Certainly the spouses and cousins with political patronage jobs and Learing Center fraud should qualify as parasites. I'd also include the illegal migrants getting free housing and food that exceeds the median income in my state.
The ones on welfare are trickier because in the USA it's a hodgepodge of programs with hard caps, where getting a job often makes you LOSE money and puts you further behind. But there are fraudsters and people who milk the system there, too - it's just more of a mixed bag, rather than blatantly obvious BS.
Simple error Marxists/commies/leftys make: if you complain that "the rich" own everything, well, giving government near-infinite regulatory power (along with the badges, guns, and courts) means that THE GOVERNMENT owns everything. Including you. And it will only work to serve itself.
A government court will never rule against the government, unless it already wants that outcome (or at least, those judges were put there to eventually GET that outcome). A government-run election will not be legitimate, if the government actually cares about the outcome (see: 2020). "If voting made a difference, they wouldn't let us do it."
For the left, there are no "principles." Only an incoherent hodgepodge of emotional catchphrases meant to pave their road to permanent power over the serf class.
I would not be quite so absolute in writing off government. But it is clearly true that government has a tendency to predatory parasitism that existing accountability mechanisms are not managing well.
My initial response is similar to that of functional hypocrite: "... the social effort of crafting policy that allows for and tempers human nature to balance individual flourishing with community flourishing." But then this translates into having both individual morality and group/ communal morality, as we try to navigate our political and governance postures with everyone else.
But pre civilization (and pre-culture even in hunter gatherer level groupings), our morality is totally individual and determined by our evolved and instinctual nature: fear of snakes; disgust at feces; general rejection of incest; lust and love of mate and love of children; some levels of sympathy, empathy, and "justice"/ reciprocity; aspects of our ability to gage theory of minds; etc. Basically elements necessary for us to live as an ultra social species.
Once we develop "culture" and culture, much of our morality extends to surviving successfully within our given group cooperatively, and in contrast and in competition with "the other" groups in our environment. But while our instinctual morality is more or less "absolute", our cultural moral decisions and developments are quite varied and relative, presumably reflecting that we have lived in a variety of different environments (forest, savannah, desert, tundra, etc.)
Jack Panksepp and Lucy Biven "The Archeology of Mind" find that the emotions - seeking, rage, fear, lust, care, grief and play - ancient and common to all mammals.
"After all, the Right includes Hitler". No it doesn't. Hitler and Mussolini were National Socialists.
The Right Wing exists only in the minds of Marxists, other socialists and the politically misinformed.
Socialists were alarmed by the horrors of Auschwitz, and worried about what people would think if they realised what socialism would do when it gained power. The answer - disassociate from it and say it was the Right wing, that mythical creature.
The Right Wing is a gift to lazy journalists who see all politics as binary.
I have some sympathy to this view, especially as there is no single value that unites “the Right”. But I am also loath to imply that there is some broad political tradition that cannot metastasise.
To my mind politics, rightly conceived and consummated, is the social effort of crafting policy that allows for and tempers human nature to balance individual flourishing with community flourishing.
If there is any morality in politics, it is that the stability, social vitality, and individual purpose, part and parcel of healthily and honestly balancing these two competing forces, are good for both.
It is perhaps the most challenging of human endeavors. A very narrow and stoney path that requires an enormous amount of individual responsibility.
Hence the allure of the wide, smooth road of moralization. So much easier to offload responsibility onto others.
When it comes to looking stylish, the Nazis will always beat out the commies. That´s why the commies hate them.
"If you think that somehow the Left does not include said mass-murdering tyrants, you are simply wrong. It is very revealing that there are clearly many folk on the Left who somehow edit out this history. They are not looking at the Left as it is in history, but as some set of noble aspirations that morally ennoble themselves."
Strikingly, this is also how Christians think with regards to the documented misdeeds of the Church - somehow, it is not the main show, and no amount of misdeeds will change their mind. I'm not sure where I'm going with that...something about faith being impervious to facts?
The inclination to congenially edit history is very strong.
If by "documented misdeeds of the Church" you mean documented sins by Christians, then no, this not how Christians think.
A basic stating point of Christian thinking is that people, Christians included, do bad things. In Christian theology, the fact that Christians do sin is the actual reason for having a Church.
So when Christians tell you no Christian has ever done anything wrong, you can kindly point out to them that they are wrong, by their own lights.
On the other hand, if we are discussing whether believing in Leftism or Christ is a cover or motive for misdeeds, the conversation could take quite a different turn.
I suppose you articulated the standard Christian defense: “sure, Christians can be bad because man is fallen, but the Church is good because God is good, etc.” For the rest of us, this delineation is a little too convenient, as we know that long-lived institutions have an life of their own, and that some of them are constitutively corrupt or hostile to human flourishing. For that matter, so did Martin Luther believe. As for the very many Christians who died at the stake, perhaps not all of them blessed the Church in their dying moments.
"Standard Christian Defense" assumes that all Christians must answer for the crimes of all other Christians. Which assumes that Christians commit crimes because they are Christian.
The second thesis could be supported one of two ways - by showing that all Christians, or all Christian societies, commit certain crimes at a higher rate that their secular counterparts, or that we commit crimes which are unknown elsewhere.
The point was, Christians do not think that the Faith exonerates us from moral standards.
The point was not, please give me your permission to keep my faith. I will, regardless. But if one of my coreligious tells you "You can not criticize Christians because Christ is holy"; You are quite correct to question that person's motives. As anyone should question the motives of any ideology which seeks to exonerate its adherents from moral standards. Bringing us back to...
Lorenzo Warby, this was a great piece, thank you for making it available.
I think it goes even further, like so:
Are Your Morals Too Good to Be True? https://archive.ph/dewUo
I vividly remember the emotional crisis from studying moral philosophy and having what I had simply taken for granted suddenly be up for grabs.
Oh, yes. However, moral philosophy is just "smelling philosophers' own farts" as Helen vividly put it - this short article I linked as a brief beam of sunlight for a difference. It doesn't make sense without an evolutionary foundation. The evolutionary foundation was to make the individuals and their small groups survive, and just very little remains as a guide for abstract morality, as moral feeling was just another adaptation to divide us from them (thus ingroup solidarity and outgroup animosity). The question is, what makes the tribe survive BETTER. Which the abstract philosophies hardly ever even consider - making moral philosophy, as I read it, infinitely more counterproductive than helpful. Actually leading to selfdestructive impotence of "law-based" bureaucracy. Hence the decay of "democracies" like the EU and the US Democrat party. Nice for Democrats grabbing the party name that is about the opposite on your diagram to what they pursue with full conviction of their moral superiority. Going on religiosity tour of guilt and demolishing the sinners, and trans and net zero and centering the rejects of society, etc. - just like 300s-500s AD with og Christianity taking over and inaugurating a millennia of dark ages with the identical moral righteousness. Or later Islam.
Morality becomes a grandiose status claim that turns out to empower monsters. I have a forthcoming piece on Helen’s Substack that tackles that very point.
Looking forward to reading it. I completely agree with you. My points were mostly that what people call "morality" is more often than not "a grandiose status claim."
And I agree with what you said above: in the current environment, the adaptation for morality is self-destructively mismatched.
As it is a ratchet process, the current dysfunction will keep ratcheting until civilization breaks - all because of "moral values". It will not be much consolation to anyone living through it that it may end up in yet another renaissance 1,000 or 5,000 years later.
Then again, another evolutionary mismatch unprecedented in the human history, so insightfully predicted by Kipling's The Female of The Species:
10
She is wedded to convictions—in default of grosser ties;
Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him who denies!—
He will meet no suave discussion, but the instant, white-hot, wild,
Wakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child.
11
Unprovoked and awful charges—even so the she-bear fights,
Speech that drips, corrodes, and poisons—even so the cobra bites,
Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw
And the victim writhes in anguish—like the Jesuit with the squaw!
12
So it comes that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer
With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her
Where, at war with Life and Conscience, he uplifts his erring hands
To some God of Abstract justice—which no woman understands.
13
And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him
Must command but may not govern—shall enthral but not enslave him.
And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,
That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male.
I think there is a lot to contemplate buried in your sentences: "Our emotions are a much more basic decision-making mechanism than our reason and well precede it in evolutionary development. Tribalism is also normative and can have great emotional power. Politics operates by mobilising shared emotions and sense of belonging. Normative is not the same as moral."
That is one of those sort of obvious ideas that I don't think made it fully into my consciousness until now. I can also see how it might play into my life long struggle to understand those people with strong and devout religious faith, vs. my own lack thereof and minimal orientation towards "transcendence" (at least of a divinely sourced variety).
I see you have some interesting titles in your list of references, so I will probably have to look into some of them.
I found this essay later this day, and thought about its relevance to the tussle between our emotions and our logical cognition:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/final-battle-your-mind
The Final Battle For Your Mind
by Tyler Durden Saturday, Apr 25, 2026 - 07:50 PM
Authored by Casey Fleming via The Epoch Times,
That essay touches on a whole lot of large issues. Perhaps the largest is that our technological capacities are outgrowing our evolutionary adaptations. Or, to put it another way, the ever larger set of evolutionary novelties.
Sir they edit out yesterday, this morning, what they just said…
Well, the Marxists were half-right. There absolutely IS a parasite class in the world. But the parasites are the government, and the usually undeserving recipients of its favors.
Certainly the spouses and cousins with political patronage jobs and Learing Center fraud should qualify as parasites. I'd also include the illegal migrants getting free housing and food that exceeds the median income in my state.
The ones on welfare are trickier because in the USA it's a hodgepodge of programs with hard caps, where getting a job often makes you LOSE money and puts you further behind. But there are fraudsters and people who milk the system there, too - it's just more of a mixed bag, rather than blatantly obvious BS.
Simple error Marxists/commies/leftys make: if you complain that "the rich" own everything, well, giving government near-infinite regulatory power (along with the badges, guns, and courts) means that THE GOVERNMENT owns everything. Including you. And it will only work to serve itself.
A government court will never rule against the government, unless it already wants that outcome (or at least, those judges were put there to eventually GET that outcome). A government-run election will not be legitimate, if the government actually cares about the outcome (see: 2020). "If voting made a difference, they wouldn't let us do it."
For the left, there are no "principles." Only an incoherent hodgepodge of emotional catchphrases meant to pave their road to permanent power over the serf class.
I would not be quite so absolute in writing off government. But it is clearly true that government has a tendency to predatory parasitism that existing accountability mechanisms are not managing well.
Yes, and Clarence Thomas's recent speech in Austin, Texas elucidated it nicely.
My initial response is similar to that of functional hypocrite: "... the social effort of crafting policy that allows for and tempers human nature to balance individual flourishing with community flourishing." But then this translates into having both individual morality and group/ communal morality, as we try to navigate our political and governance postures with everyone else.
But pre civilization (and pre-culture even in hunter gatherer level groupings), our morality is totally individual and determined by our evolved and instinctual nature: fear of snakes; disgust at feces; general rejection of incest; lust and love of mate and love of children; some levels of sympathy, empathy, and "justice"/ reciprocity; aspects of our ability to gage theory of minds; etc. Basically elements necessary for us to live as an ultra social species.
Once we develop "culture" and culture, much of our morality extends to surviving successfully within our given group cooperatively, and in contrast and in competition with "the other" groups in our environment. But while our instinctual morality is more or less "absolute", our cultural moral decisions and developments are quite varied and relative, presumably reflecting that we have lived in a variety of different environments (forest, savannah, desert, tundra, etc.)
Jack Panksepp and Lucy Biven "The Archeology of Mind" find that the emotions - seeking, rage, fear, lust, care, grief and play - ancient and common to all mammals.
"After all, the Right includes Hitler". No it doesn't. Hitler and Mussolini were National Socialists.
The Right Wing exists only in the minds of Marxists, other socialists and the politically misinformed.
Socialists were alarmed by the horrors of Auschwitz, and worried about what people would think if they realised what socialism would do when it gained power. The answer - disassociate from it and say it was the Right wing, that mythical creature.
The Right Wing is a gift to lazy journalists who see all politics as binary.
I have some sympathy to this view, especially as there is no single value that unites “the Right”. But I am also loath to imply that there is some broad political tradition that cannot metastasise.