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Abstract
Most of human history and prehistory was lived in economic poverty but with social and ecological wealth, both of which are diminishing as commodification takes over most everything. Human moral wealth has also deteriorated. Because humans are biosocially, dynamically, and epigenetically shaped, early experience is key for developing one’s moral capital. When early experience is species-atypical, meaning that it falls outside the evolved developmental niche (EDN), which is often the case in modern societies, biopsychosocial moral development is undermined, shifting one’s nature and worldview to self-protectionism. Individuals develop into self-regarding shadows of their potential selves, exhibiting threat-reactive moral mindsets that promote unjust treatment of other humans and nonhumans. Humanity’s moral wealth can be re-cultivated by taking up what indigenous people all over the world know: that a good life, a virtuous life, is a one that is led by a well-cultivated heart, embodied in action that includes partnership with nonhumans. Moral educators can help students to revamp their capacities with self-calming skills, the development of social pleasure and communal ecological imagination.
Notes
* Thanks to Nancy Snow for her editorial role in reviewing the manuscript.
1. It was an honor to be asked to give the Kohlberg Memorial Lecture in the beautiful country of Brazil. Though it was my first visit to Brazil, it was not my first visit to South America. As a child I lived in Bogota, Colombia and Latin America was made familiar to me, with two years spent in Mexico and four of the first five years of my life in Puerto Rico, where my father was born. I was happy to recognize the jolly, kind and affectionate ways of Latinoamericanos in the Brazilians I have met.
2. This has led to selling the earth’s water (see the packaged water among conference attendees) and now even clean air is being bottled and sold, for example, by Canadians to the Chinese.
3. The wars occurring around the world and terrorism aimed at the West may have their roots in this combination of ecological and cultural destruction, driven by this dominant SMM ideology (a rigid worldview based on belief and not organic experience).
4. Small-band hunter-gatherers must be distinguished from other groups that may also hunt or gather, like complex hunter-gatherers, tribes, chiefdoms, which have some form of settlement or hierarchy that leads to resource accumulation and can promote war, both of which do not occur in SBHG (for extensive detail and data, see Fry, Citation2006, Citation2013).
5. See Narvaez, Citation2013, for contrasts with today’s dominant culture.
6. For vastly greater detail on current research and mechanisms please see Narvaez, Citation2014, Citation2016; Narvaez, Panksepp et al., Citation2013; Narvaez, Valentino et al., Citation2014.
7. This is similar to the Confucian notion of wu wei, a action through nonaction, a receptivity to circumstances.
8. ‘Follow your bliss’ is mythologist Joseph Campbell’s term for living a good life (Campbell, Citation1988, p. 113).
9. For perspective, the US dropped to 23rd place in 2014, from 12th in 2013. Afghanistan ranked last in the report, at 145. Gallup's researchers interviewed 146,000 adults in 145 countries to obtain its data. ‘Our research shows that people with higher well-being have higher productivity, lower healthcare costs, are more resilient in the face of challenges and are more likely to contribute to the success of their organizations and communities’ (p. 3).