Ideology as a Moral-Relational Language

Abstract

All group-living animals must coordinate securing and distributing territory, resources, rights, and care. Human society presents a ubiquitous and unsurpassed level of cooperation extending deep into our psychology, which evolved to enable and exploit the transmission of generations of accumulated cultural knowledge in part in service of securing the resources necessary for groups to survive and thrive in varied habitats (Richerson & Boyd, 2005). These processes present a series of critical questions about how reciprocal cooperation beyond immediate kin may be sustained within cultural groups so as to not be undermined by defectors (see e.g., Trivers, 1971; Van Veelen, Garc ıa, Rand, & Nowak, 2012; Sugden, 1986; Nowak & Sigmund, 2005; Panchanathan & Boyd, 2004, 2005; Boyd & Mathew, 2021; Richerson & Boyd, 2005), pointing to the importance of enforcing shared moral norms for what is a fair manner of cooperating in the production and distribution of adaptive benefits (cf. Panchanathan & Boyd, 2004; Richerson & Boyd, 2005; Boyd & Mathew, 2021; see also Rai & Fiske, 2011, Fiske & Rai, 2014). Alongside the role of history and cultural context in setting what is seen as fair, the complexity of the social world gives people considerable moral wiggle room for applying and reasoning about general justice norms in motivated, selective, opportunistic ways that best further their own particular interests (cf. Batson, 2008; Dana, Weber, & Kuang, 2007; Eftedal et al., 2022; Eftedal & Thomsen, 2021; Kahan, 2016; Kunda, 1990; Larson & Capra, 2009; Regner & Matthey, 2005; Slothuus & De Vreese, 2010), likely often without even realizing that they are doing so (cf. Eftedal & Thomsen, 2021). The result is a situation in which different parties and coalitions may be in stark ideological conflict while everybody is nevertheless convinced that universal morals and justice support their particular partisan point of view. With the goal of understanding the shared rationality and morality underlying both sides of the political spectrum, Baumeister and Bushman (this issue) connect psychological insights to those from the study of evolution, culture, history, and politics. They argue that human’s evolved readiness for culture yields two abilities and related sets of preferences concerning the generation of resources on the one hand, and their distribution, on the other. It is suggested that these opposed orientations are differentially triggered by working in jobs that are linked with resource generation versus redistribution, yielding ideological groups primarily concerned with one societal function over another, while societal flourishing in fact demands a healthy dose of both. Here, we bracket the question of the factors that lead to social and economic flourishing (whether in historical or contemporary context), one deep within the domains of history, sociology, anthropology, macroeconomics, and political science. We instead focus on efforts toward an evolutionarily attuned and culturally sensitive account of the origins of individual and group differences in ideological preferences, for which robust psychological theorizing is pertinent. What might be the necessary ingredients of such an account, and what would it look like? The target article’s proposed ‘cultural animal’ theory of political partisanship and hostility echoes Aristotle’s claim that “man is, by nature, a political animal” and that the community or polis is a body which has many parts playing their own unique role working in tandem for the greater common good. In Baumeister & Bushman’s version, society needs both people who produce resources and people who distribute them, but in modern society these roles have been polarized so that political partisan hostility follows. We agree with Baumeister & Bushman (and Marx and many others) that ideology is ultimately grounded in the very issues of securing resources that also form a basic currency of evolutionary processes (Sidanius & Kurzban, 2013; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). But we doubt that any one role or selective strategy profile would evolve to focus solely on the production of resources, leaving issues of their distribution to others. The evolution of any functional phenomenon is constrained by the reproductive benefits which it offers (Darwin, 1859). Hence, by nature, generating and securing resources is fundamentally linked to the question of who will enjoy their reproductive benefits—oneself, one’s kin, one’s coalition, one’s society. Indeed, the evolution of cooperation and culture hinge upon the very questions of how evolutionarily stable strategies might coordinate the production and distribution of resources, rights and care so that cooperators, or producers, are not outcompeted or undermined by defectors (Boyd & Richerson, 2009; Hamilton, 1964; Richerson & Boyd, 2005, 2020; Trivers, 1971). This suggests that a psychology and ideology for