In my recent run with the Modern Scholar lectures on Evolutionary Psychology, there was a point made that I think might have some subtle applications to some contemporary issues and the anthropology of the boards as well. It pointed out that in our primate days, the consequences of a false positive would have been far less consequential than a false negative. For instance, if you were walking in the jungle and thought you saw a snake or a lion and there wasn’t one, nothing would be lost. On the other hand, if you saw nothing and there was a lion or snake waiting in the bush, you would likely end up dead. So what we’re talking about here is an evolutionary adaption that has managed to get us to this point thus far.
Now one of the modern phenomena that this is generally attributed to is phobias. And I think we can see the roots of many neuroses in it. But can’t we also see it evolve into the expect-the-worse attitude that tends to haunt modern society and the general negativity: that fashionable cynicism? For instance, I realize that not all of you are Walking Dead fans enough to want to watch The Talking Dead that follows. But for those that do, I ask you to pay close attention when they do their surveys about what is going on in the series. When they offer the 3 possibilities, I ask you to seek out the most cynical answer and see which one wins out every time. In fact, it would be interesting for social scientists to do a study on it. But I can’t help but feel it would mainly confirm my instincts on this –instincts based on what I have seen.
The scary thing to me is we have come to a point where this evolutionary legacy, while having gotten us to this point thus far, may end up destroying us as a species thanks to conservatives that want to conserve that legacy. This can be seen in a study by Dodd and Hibbings at the University of Nebraska Lincoln –go Huskers!!! They exposed both liberals and conservatives to a montage of images and randomly inserted violent ones. What they found out is that conservatives tended to react (through physiological measurements (more intensely to the violent ones than liberals. The conclusion extracted from this is that conservatism is a matter of wiring that tends to react more strongly to perceived threats. And we can easily see this at work in what they base their policies on: the perceived incursions on the well being of white heterosexual males by gays, Mexicans, environmentalists, and socialists.
And can’t we apply this to the anthropology of the boards as well? The fashionable cynicism that way too many people appeal to on here? The way they use it to beat down any attempt to do something positive and are often reinforced by others? And we should note here how they tend to prop it up through the group, how they can never seem to work alone. Could this be because they have passed their evolutionary usefulness and have to appeal to obsolete evolutionary legacies? That is as compared to the beyond our immediate self interest reasoning that we have evolved into?