We Evolved to Be Collaborative

Today’s conservatism counters our species’ heritage

‘Conservative’* politics pushes responsibility for societal wellbeing onto families and individuals, away from community responsibility for the common good, contrary to our millions-year-old heritage. Why?

*True conservatism would be about conserving humanity’s traditions, the oldest of which for our species is communal living and communal care which helps each develop their unique true self. “I am because we are” (ubuntu). Us, together.

The contemporary ‘conservative’ worldview was called normative by emotion researcher Sylvan Tomkins, who pointed to early life as the formative period for developing a worldview. The normative worldview has a distrusting, negative view of human nature whereas the humanistic viewpoint considers humanity to be basically good. Harsh parenting is associated with the normative worldview. Our data confirm Tomkins’ view. Evolved-nested childhoods are positively associated with the humanistic worldview and negatively associated with the normative worldview (Narvaez et al., 2016, 2018).

Harsh parenting is coercive parenting. It impairs species-normal development.

Coercive child raising is pervasive in the dominant culture, starting with medicalized birthing which coerces Baby out of the womb before they decide to trigger the hormones to leave based on when they feel ready, for example, to breastfeed.

But even after birth, Baby’s evolved needs are culturally ignored. Coercion follows Baby wherever they go, from being strapped in carriers instead of being held, subjected to scheduled feeding and sleeping, ignored in strollers, and isolated from touch and presence.

Simone Weil (1946)^ pointed out: using force against someone turns the recipient into an object; the recipient’s will is smothered.

^ See Simon Boymal’s review of Weil’s pamphlet, https://thelastanalogue.substack.com/p/what-force-makes-of-us .

In effect in the dominant culture, babies are treated like objects.

Moreover, Weil points out that the enforcer feels energized from being coercive. Hence the rewarding feeling parents can get from controlling their children.

Weil says: “The man who is the possessor of force seems to walk through a non-resistant element; in the human substance that surrounds him nothing has the power to interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection. Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice or prudence.”

No room for mercy. Or for attentive attunement.

Of course, coercion is not just about missing a chance for reflection. It’s also about how the automaticity of coercing others came to dominate action.

Here is a common way: The lack of evolved nest provision to babies and young children is toxically stressful to their brains. It leads to the automaticity of brain stem survival systems to take over functioning—rage, panic, fear, basic lust (Panksepp, 1998). When babies experience regular distress (e.g., separation from affectionate in-arms care), these survival systems grow enhanced, replacing the species-normal growth of social-emotional intelligence. During these sensitive periods in early life, Baby is not assisted in developing true self-regulation capacities.

Thus, undernurturing in babyhood can foster threat-reactive impulsivity which can result in automatic domination (or submission) behavior.

Dominance-submission strategies are pre-human inheritances that can keep us alive. They are not species-normal for everyday behavior. But because the USA so undermines wellbeing from the beginning of life, the country is full of people with this distrusting orientation. A great deal of attention and energy is spent trying to control the impulsive aggressive threat-reactivity that clothes the populace.

This is the burden that postconquest child raising places on people. After the critical periods for shaping automatic prosocial behaviors are missed, the culture spends enormous time on controlling the antisocial behaviors that result.

Weil tells us that the automaticity towards coercion can only be stopped with reflection. Indeed in postconquest culture, reflection is taught with rules for behavior which, if not followed as authorities expect, brings about more punishment!

Hence endless rules and punishments that the dominant culture imposes on people to control the automaticity of self-centered and self-aggrandizing behaviors that the culture itself brought about.

The dominant ‘conservative’ culture blames and punishes the individual for their misbehavior, which again seems to indicate a lack of social-emotional intelligence about how children develop (a common malady today).

But then in this post-truth, post-care era, the lawbreaking ingroup goes scot-free. ‘All for us and none for them,’ seems to be a governing attitude for those in power in the USA today.

‘Conservatives’# then likely were treated like objects during formative times, warping their trust in others and their social-emotional intelligence. Objectification may have occurred out of ignorance where adults did not mean to treat the baby as an object, perhaps because of their own impaired social-emotional skilled intelligence or cultural pressures, but it felt that way to the child because the adults did not sense (hear, see, feel) or attune to the being of the child and respond appropriately.

#Note, there are different kinds of conservatives. Here is one way to slice the pie: Cultural conservatives follow an ideology called conservative but their neurobiology is one of love, not fear. Biological conservatives were treated harshly in early life and developed a neurobiology of fear, underdeveloping their social-emotional intelligences, leading to fearful reactions to ‘strange others’ of one kind of another. The patterned response can be aggressive or arrogant as self-protection for deep insecurity. I was raised with this kind of conservatism but it was tempered at the same time with living outside the USA off and on.

The traumatizing culture actively discourages attunement to the young (e.g., ‘it’s normal for babies to cry’) and does not provide the support needed for parents and carers to be nurturing. And so generations of undernurturing and miscare continue.

Across the postconquest world, we have been raised to be dysregulated to one degree or another. We can be easily triggered into anxiety, depression, anger, panic, or fear, which takes away our free will in the moment, and makes us more controllable by coercive manipulators. This is perfect for an authoritarian regime, but destructive for everything alive, everything that has a stake in the future.

Collaborative responsibility means we care for one another, fostering our interrelatedness—human and non-human. We need to learn to trust each other and our deeper selves.

In this detached society, we must take up healing ourselves.

So, to take back our free will, we first need to practice self-calming, learning to recognize when we are getting triggered and turning down the overwhelm. My favorite way is to practice relational mindfulness:

Look around and notice where you are. See all the gifts being given to you. Earth provides air for you to breathe, the water in your glass. Give thanks. The Cosmos provides sunshine that grows what you need to survive. Give thanks. Earth and many hands have provided your clothes, your chair, your home. Give thanks. All are gifts, supports, for you. Give thanks. The Earth and Cosmos loves you! Feel it. When you feel loved, it turns you on to loving others.

Let’s return to our heritage of collaborative unity, what E.R. Sorenson calls “individualistic, unified at-oneness.” Together we can foster the common good for humans and nonhumans—all our kin.

Join us at EvolvedNest.org and NestedWorld.org to help re-nest the world and transform the future.

References

Bird-David, N. (2017). Us, relatives: Scaling and plural life in a forager world. University of California Press.

Bird-David, N. (2020). A Peer-to-Peer Connected Cosmos: Beyond Egalitarian/hierarchical Hunter-Gatherer Societies. L’Homme, No 236(3), 77-106. https://doi.org/10.4000/lhomme.38073.

Hrdy, S. B. (2009). Mothers and others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Narvaez, D., Gleason, T., Lefever, J.B., Wang, L., & Cheng, A. (2016). Early experience and triune ethical orientation. In D. Narvaez, Embodied morality: Protectionism, engagement and imagination (pp. 73-98). New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan.

Noble, R., Kurth, A., & Narvaez, D. (2018). Basic needs satisfaction and its relation to childhood experience. In D. Narvaez (Ed.), Basic needs, wellbeing and morality: Fulfilling human potential (pp. 51-89). New York: Palgrave-MacMillan.

Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sorenson, E.R. (1998). Preconquest consciousness. In H. Wautischer (Ed.), Tribal epistemologies (pp. 79-115). Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. AVAILABLE HERE: https://danbartlett.co.uk/preconquest-consciousness-e-richard-sorenson/

Tomkins, S. S. (1965). The psychology of being right-and-left. Trans-action, 3(1), 23-27.

Tomkins, S. S. (1965). Affect and the psychology of knowledge. In S. S. Tomkins & C. E. Izard (Eds.), Affect, cognition, and personality (pp. 72-97). New York, NY: Springer.