It is so ugly Dean that I had to quit watching the news on television for now. Just reading the blogs and hearing the gossip and scandal is so bad.

I love my country so much and out of respect for her I just can't post on a blog that is bringing awful stuff up-Bush AWOL, Kerry afair, Clinton schmiten, billary Hillary.

Keep writing about things that don't turn our stomachs Dean. You said it..A War is going on.

We need to keep our minds and hearts on our troops.

Politics is just an abstracted forum for evolutionary behaviors that got humanity where it is today: Acquisition of vital resources (whether the scarcity is real or imagined), status in the tribal hierarchy, competition with other tribes for territory, regulation of sexual behaviors, and competition over whose genetic material gets passed on. This is certainly nothing new, and it tends to make a lot more sense when you view human cultural behavior as species-based, rather than from a specific cultural standpoint. As a species, Eastern humans aren't qualitatively different from Western humans -- it's all in the details.

This doesn't mean that ideas don't matter -- ideas are one of the things that have helped human beings succeed. But it means that we tend to have some difficulty reconciling our higher-order reasoning with survival-based behaviors that aren't necessarily relevant anymore. In the United States, at least, there isn't a meaningful scarcity of resources, though we do talk a lot about a "class war", which in the crudest terms is just about resources (who gets to earn more money, who gets to keep more money). There isn't much competition for territory, since we have a pretty successful model of land ownership and transfer, and the vast majority of people who want a place to call their own can get one.

Currently it seems like the biggest resource we compete over is a pure abstraction: Culture. It isn't about who has the most nuts or berries or dried carribou meat, but who holds the majority in terms of how our human culture defines itself. Who controls art, media, sexual mores, political identity, and concepts of heritage? (E.g., are we a "Secular" society or a "Judeo-Christian" society?) People outside our culture (i.e., a gay atheist who's into Hip-Hop versus a heterosexual Baptist who likes Country & Western music) are seen as outside our tribe, and according to our limbic systems, they immediately become threats to our way of life (read: *resources*).

That's why conservatives tend to see liberals as a threat (on things like taxes, distribution of wealth, security and social mores), while giving people in their "tribe" the benefit of the doubt; and liberals (who are no better in terms of their species-based biases) similarly tend to demonize conservatives on similar grounds, though they view the fringe elements in their own "tribe" as a harmless minority as well.

Here's a simple example:

I'm generally liberal. A coworker of mine who I'm very fond of -- let's call her Ruth -- is conservative. We were discussing gay marriage.

I thought that the Mass. Supreme Court decision was great because it seemed to protect gay people (a minority) against the perceived threat of anti-gay people, who I believed wouldn't be happy until homosexuality was illegal again and we were barred from all aspects of public life.

"Oh, that's just silly," said Ruth. "Sure, there are some wackos out there, but they're just this tiny minority. I don't really think there's a threat there -- certainly not one worth subverting the courts over. It offends me when people try to lump me in with Fred Phelps."

"What scares me," she continued, "is that there's this huge push to *force* people to think that being gay is *good*, and screw your own feelings or your religion or your upbringing. It's as if there's this new PC orthodoxy, where if you don't think being gay is absolutely wonderful, you're a homophobe."

"But I certainly don't believe that," I said, aware that despite her reservations, Ruth respected me as a person and acknowledged my primary relationship as a good thing. "And neither do most of the people I know," I continued. "We don't want to regulate what people believe, but at the same time we don't want their beliefs to regulate our relationships and our private lives. And yes, we do draw a hard line there, even in the absence of Constitutional support. I think there are some PC nuts out there who are overplaying their hand and being as stupid as people who want to outlaw homosexuality, but I really think they're on the fringe. They don't represent us."

Rome never asked itself whether it had the right to conquer the "Barbarians". They just did it. They grabbed land, resources and people, according to ancient evolutionary dictums of survival. Grow or die.

Today we're asking ourselves deeper questions, but our fundamental drives for resources, territory, security and tribal identity haven't changed. How humanity will continue to evolve, given the sharp change in evolutionary selectors over the past 2,000 years, is interesting enough that I entertain foolish hopes for cryogenics, reincarnation or immortality.

And then there's the argument to be made that, while government scrapes and screams over the stupidest of minutae, it is NOT busy eroding our freedoms and consuming our resources with unilaterally adopted bad ideas designed to "save us."

I, for one, wish the government would get even MORE petty, until it stops crafting all new legilsation and regulations, making it safer for those of us who actually produce in this world to live as free men and women.

"Tribalism" always makes me think of that other word. Holy, sacred, worship word. "Tribalism And Politics" "Tribadism And Religion"

I enjoyed reading your post John. I usually enjoy your (along with many other regular contributors to Dean's World) posts.

Entertain foolish hopes. This is a good thing.

I do it alla time.