“It is marvellously easy to confuse ‘our local culture’ with ‘universal human nature.'” (Renato Rosaldo 1989 Culture and Truth. Beacon Press, p.39.)
“Sorry, beg your pardon, Western society has been built on a perverse and mistaken idea of human nature.’” (Marshall Sahlins)
What do you think people are really like, deep-down, at the core of their being? Are we inherently selfish, individualistic, rationally self-interested, mean-spirited schmucks with a proclivity for violence motivated primarily by our fear of others who are just like us? Or, are we rather inherently social beings—cooperative, generous, compassionate, more inclined toward enlightened self-interest than toward narrowly selfish combativeness?
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Granted, humans have all the above possibilities and capabilities. They’ve all been amply on-stage throughout history. The daily news shows us the most awful actions based on fear and hate and bigotry, as well as examples of extreme courage, generosity, and even putting others or the greater good first. They’re all within us, the shadow and the light. They’re the stuff of great literature, theater, and other art. They’re reflected and mythologized in our great religions. But out of that vast range of human possibility, what tendencies best, most deeply, characterize our human nature? Most importantly, which view of human nature should we build our politics, our economy, around?
Those are not trivial nor naïve questions. How we answer them defines who we are and how we live. They also are unavoidable questions. As a people, as a culture, we have answered them. How?
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Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) adopted the first, the shadow, view of human nature. Much in our present economy and society remains based on his views, and on related ideas of like-minded thinkers who followed.
As one contemporary writer put it, the social philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (of whom Hobbes was one of the earliest and most important) projected the conditions they experienced in the social life of their time, that of early capitalism, onto their understanding of the “state of [human] nature.” Then they read forward this state of nature as defining the “natural law” by which society should be governed—to which, ideally, it should conform. The upshot of this circular intellectual maneuver was the social ideal of “possessive individualism” that we have today, that conceives of each individual “as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them.”
Thus, a whole social and political philosophy developed, became influential, and endured. It both reflected and helped create cultural reality of the times. Because we are self-possessing, rational individuals, we form contracts to help protect us from ourselves. This is the contract theory of the state, and the social philosophy by which we live today. For Hobbes, civilization is all that protects us from our own brute nature. Without civilization, Hobbes famously wrote, the state of [human] nature will force us into a permanent war of each against all, and “the life of man [would revert back to, could only be] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Another important idea that underlies the social order we live by and within today features mechanism. Hobbes, followed by many other influential thinkers in the Western political tradition, also tried to advance a theory of society and politics based on mechanistic natural science. Hobbes pointed to fear as the main motive force in human action. Fear is the inertia that defines the quality of our being. Later writers in the same tradition focused on self-interest as “the moral equivalent of the force of gravity in nature.”
Based on such notions, we’ve developed an economy that (supposedly), like an “invisible hand,” gathers and guides narrowly competitive self-interest to benefit society as a whole. Given that view of human nature, it’s a virtuous economy, the most natural economy, maybe in the end even the only possible economy, because of how it automatically, mechanically, augments the individual competitiveness (that in its own view most defines individual human nature) into a social good.
The social and economic system we have today is fundamentally based on those ideas. Is this what we really want? Is it necessary because it most truly reflects who we really are? Is it really working in our larger self-interest now? Will it serve us well in the long run?
Aspects of the individualism at the heart of the Western political and economic system, that has been part of those views of human nature, has worked to free the human spirit in many positive ways; and we won’t want to give that up. But do we have to be stuck with the rest of it as well? I hope not. Because the system we’ve inherited, based on these ideas, is like a machine designed with no moral compass or brakes. Now running amuck, it threatens all of us and all of Earth’s other creatures.
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Regarding our original question about basic human nature, I think that the renowned religious scholar Karen Armstrong nailed the answer in her book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life. She writes (p.13-14):
“There is no doubt that in the deepest recess of their minds, men and women are indeed ruthlessly selfish. This egotism is rooted in the “old brain,” which was bequeathed to us by the reptiles that struggled out of the primal slime some 500 million years ago. Wholly intent on personal survival, these creatures were motivated by mechanisms that neuroscientists have called the “Four Fs”: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and—for want of a more basic word—reproduction.”
We still have our lizard brain, and when activated by immediate stress or danger it can serve us well. But on top of that ancient lizard brain, we also have the newer human brain. “Over the millennia,” Armstrong continues,
“human beings also evolved a ‘new brain,’ the neocortex, home of the reasoning powers that enable us to reflect on the world and on ourselves, and to stand back from these instinctive, primitive passions.”
But, she continues, “the Four Fs continue to inform all our activities.” They are meant to be overwhelming when triggered. They rightly override reason when we’re in danger. Thus, Armstrong observes, “our two brains coexist uneasily.” This coexistence can become especially perilous itself when “humans employ their new-brain capacity to enhance and promote old-brain motivation….”
Our present society, however, is based on a basically Hobbesian, reptilian, and thus reductionist, view of human nature. It foreground the individualistic competitive drive that supposedly (in the individualistic ideology that drives so much of our economic life, and increasingly pervades our social life as well) reflects basic human nature. Pitting one person against another, each against all, it thrives on fear as a fundamental motivator: fear of failure, of impoverishment, of lacking access to adequate food, shelter, and medical services. Ultimately fear of death. The many homeless visible on our streets and in our parks drive the point home. Let’s be human, and let lizards be lizards.
Along with the physiological development of the “new brain,” another integral feature of human nature also separates us humans from our reptilian ancestors. Lizard and snakes, you might have noticed, are pretty individualistic. You usually find them out hunting or hiding under rocks on their own. A vast evolutionary gulf separates the inherent sociability of humans from the individualism of our ancient reptilian ancestors.
We’ve reached a time in the human journey when we need societies that celebrate our new brain capabilities instead of foregrounding old brain motivators. We need societies modeled on consciousness and compassion, not mechanics; on our natural human sociability, not individualistic competition and fear.
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