Conservatism and Evolution

Nine out of ten new mutations in evolution are unfitting, the development of new and better mutations is slow. This parallels Conservatism and its policy of attempting to alter the more ugly aspects of change, while accepting slow change.

Selection by groups seems to have helped develop the ethical values that are also tied to religion. Ethics which encouraged mutual respect and self-sacrifice by individuals for the group enhanced the group’s survival success. Societies with low ethical standards tended to collapse.

Decline is influenced by luxury, pluralistic ethics and egoistic individualism. American Conservatism struggles against these things but at the same time addresses the danger of sameness. Big bureaucratic states and global business often hurt competition and variation.

The disappearance of all groups but one would be catastrophic. Men like Stalin and Hitler damage the survival and variation of smaller groups by seeking world domination, more or less. Cooperative competition among separate state powers is the essence of Federalism. War is a breakdown of competition, it tends to lose the physically and mentally fit, and the most patriotic among us.

Conservatism and Federalism, as well as religions that affirm subsidiarity and traditional ethics, work in harmony with human nature and evolution. When we sink to imperialism or universalist ambitions we move away from the mutual love and self-sacrifice that has always worked best in smaller communities.

I see these developments in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology as renewing traditional American Conservatism.

Not For Cash

There are salt mines in our modern
cities, where men are free, they say,
not slaves, so far away from ancient
forms of craft, with few objecting
cries, no blue sky dreams, only
convention and monotony, and
this strange belief that we are free,
when freedom serves the sacred,
and not for cash.

We Will Go Back

We move faster toward an undifferentiated
mass, the last aristocrat was seen
playing with his cat on the back waters
of the Mediterranean, the sun is setting
on the artificial empire–
they won’t even get up to put out
the fires–the line between order
and chaos has grown thin,
therefore, we will go back
to where we had been before
the doors separating the regions
were removed, before the global
legions built plastic factories
where our gardens used to grow.