Meet the Enemy
Darwin’s theory of evolution clinched it: We humans evolved just like and along with ants and ant-eaters, butterflies and bison, and all other Earthly living beings. What, then, sets us apart? Some might say it’s that we’re intelligent; maybe others would point to tool-use and technology; many still say it’s that we have a soul.
Without precluding other answers, I would sum it up this way: What sets us humans apart is that we think. We are highly social beings who think. With thought comes choice; and with choice comes morality and ethics. All that makes us more than the sum of our physical selves which may be, at least in part, what we mean by soul. Thinking also makes it possible to review the past, plan the future, and design tools and ways of life. So, symbolic thought, language, in the context of our being highly social beings, are part of or behind all other possible answers to what sets humans apart from all other Earthly life.
This very thing that makes us distinctively human, and the most successful species on the planet, is also our greatest challenge. In the immortal words of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Our human lives are based in thought which is both rooted in and shapes our cultures. The ideas by which we live fundamentally shape the lives we live, and often the lives of other beings we ourselves need to survive.
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We and we alone on the Planet design (whether we know it or not) how we live based on what and how we think. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz puts it, “thinking is a social act, and one is therefore responsible for it as for any other social act. Perhaps even more so, for, in the long run, it is the most consequential of social acts.”
Geertz goes on in this article with a sensitive and insightful account of anthropological fieldwork in what he calls “the new states,” and others call “the third world”; but I’m going to stay with his identification of thought as a social and moral act.
Different peoples in different cultures learn to think in different ways about themselves and their world. Not that all these thoughts are conscious, or recognized as such. There’s a lot of custom, and habit involved in the very different ways of thinking, feeling, believing, acting, and ingrained practices in the mix in every culture. But one way one way or another it all boils down to thought.
Further, that great diversity of cultures around the globe illustrates what I said above: that how we humans think—the story we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world around us—shapes how we live. This, I think, is what Geertz is talking about.
But why is this self-reflective realization “chilling”? Well, as Geertz suggests it makes us personally responsible at deeper levels than perhaps we had realized for the ideas and beliefs we hold and their real-world consequences. As the truth of it sinks in, it takes such comforting notions as a distant God, or fate, or destiny, or some supposedly natural economic system, or a presumedly fixed human nature, out of our moral equation. Now we can’t pass off responsibility to such distant beings or abstract forces. We ourselves are responsible for ourselves in the here and now. Woah!
It’s up to us. If God created us with minds and souls, he/she gave us some core principles to live by in the example and words of Jesus and other great teachers and now leaves it to us to use them and challenges us to get it right. She/he doesn’t step in like an over-protective parent to fix what we break. If we ourselves simply evolved into mind and spirit—if mind and spirit and moral compass evolved into the universe with us—then with that also comes the responsibility to figure it out, and live with the intelligence and moral compass that is our evolutionary birthright. Either way it’s up to us. For all practical purposes, it seems, we’re alone with ourselves at the cutting edge of intelligent and moral life in our small corner of a big universe.
Taking responsibility—that’s what grown-ups do. So this realization that we and we alone are responsible for how we think and its real-world consequences—if we really understand it and take it in—that would mark a milestone in humans becoming responsible grown-ups in the universe and on the Planet we share and are part of along with its other living beings. But it’s complicated, no question.
Human Life is Complicated
Like other living beings on our Planet we humans act within webs of possibilities and constraints. What makes us different, special, is our ability to think about what we do—to make self-reflective conscious decisions based on what we know (or think we know); and, crucially, the values we have. This is what makes us responsible in the sense just discussed. And on top of that we can change what we know and what we value with new knowledge and greater insight.
Think about it! Take your dog, for instance—that (thinking) is what he doesn’t do. At least not in the sense we’re talking about here. When you put down her bowl of kibbles she doesn’t sit on her butt and scratch her ear and think about it. He doesn’t worry that they might make him gain weight, or that other dogs out in the world are starving, or that there might be a cockroach hiding in there. She doesn’t double-check their best-before date, read the ingredients label, think about their cost, or wonder about the environmental impacts involved in their manufacture. She eats them. Life is simple. He’s the very personification of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy!” When he’s finished gulping them down he wags his tail and takes a nap on the couch or asks to be let out in the yard to play, or whatever. It’s a lot, lot more complicated for us.
I’ve come to these reflections in round-about ways after reading a couple of chapters beginning with Chapter 13, “Democracy Versus the Market,” in a book that’s languished on my shelf for I don’t know how long. The book is The Future of Capitalism by the late MIT economist, Lester Thurow. I started reading with Chapter 13 because its title caught my attention when I took the book down and idly thumbed its Table of Contents before consigning it to the box for the Rotary book sale; but now after I finish I’ll go back and read the rest of the book from the beginning before it goes into the box (if it does).
How Can We Get Society Right If We Get Human Nature Wrong?
Based on what I’ve read so far, it’s clear that for an economist Thurow thinks widely and deeply about our society as a whole. It’s an old book now, published in 1998; but much of it couldn’t be more relevant—which is kind of scary in itself. Almost all the trend lines have only gotten worse faster. Anyway, what Thurow says about our present circumstances got me thinking again about human nature—and about what we as a modern Western society think about human nature. That’s what I want to share now.
I’ve been interested for a long time in how humans shape our societies and economies around core beliefs about human nature and its place in the wider natural order of things. In that light, some of Thurow’s observations about mistaken thoughts at the foundation of the capitalist economic system stand out. Since the economic system we’ve put in place dominates—by way of expanding commodification and privatization—ever more aspects of our lives, this is an important issue.
A misguided view of human nature, Thurow says, animates capitalism. This error actually contributes to capitalism’s success so far including some of the values we cherish, like individualism, being “productive,” and personal initiative; but it also contributes to today’s unprecedented economic and social turmoil and the very real hazards of climate change and other environmental problems.
But maybe we don’t have to give up on capitalism entirely. Perhaps those positive values of capitalism could be grounded in truer and more positive understandings of our human nature.
What does Thurow mean by saying that capitalism gets human nature wrong? He puts this quite clearly:
“The conservative (capitalist) view of government,” Thurow writes, “sees men in a violent state of nature submitting to central authority in exchange for security and stability. Chaos, the lack of private property rights, essentially leads to the need for government. But historically it wasn’t so. Capitalism’s conception of government is precisely backward. Groups came long before individuals. Social support and social pressure is what makes humans human”
Thurow, L. C. 1996 The Future of Capitalism: How Today’s Economic Forces Shape Tomorrow’s World. New York: William Morrow and Co., p. 275
As an anthropologist I have to say that we’ve known this for a very long time now. It’s nice to see others apply this knowledge in their areas of expertise. Thurow, the economist, focusses on economic dynamics and related economic and social problems; but I think he’d agree that this error, this distorted and dismal view of human nature he’s describing, is the key driver of those dynamics. Thurow elaborates further:
“No significant group of human beings has ever lived in an individualistic state of nature. No set of individual savages ever got together to decide to form a government in their own self-interest. Government or social organization has existed as long as humankind has existed. Instead of existing first and being subordinated to obtain social order, [p. 276] individuality is a direct product of [our] social order. Over time individuals have gradually gained rights vis-à-vis the community rather than giving up some of their individual rights in order to gain the benefits of community. Social values informed individual values and not the reverse. Individuality is a product of community rather than something that must be sacrificed to community” (Thurow 1998: 275-276).
Well said! Others in different fields and from different perspectives identify the same error underlying capitalism, as I mentioned in an earlier post on obsolete “Zombie Ideas.” To illustrate his point Thurow points to the Dark Ages.
“In the Dark Ages the public was squeezed out by the private. … In our societies just as in the Dark Ages, the private is gradually squeezing out the public. … Almost by definition feudalism is public power in private hands. … In the Dark Ages as now, there was no vision of how one made a better life. … Today there is a similar lack of vision. Something is going wrong, but no one knows how to fix it” (p.164-167).
But maybe we do know how to fix it. Thurow doesn’t say in so many words that the mistaken view of human nature as naturally violent, self-interested, greedy, and chaotic that he catalogues is an—maybe the major—underlying cause behind the dysfunction we see in our Western democratic capitalist countries. But based on what he does write it’s certainly fair to ask whether, finally, this error has caught up with us? A case could be made. It is, after all, a fundamental error of thought and judgment—a wrong, limited, and we can now say ignorant view of what we humans are and can be. Problems could show up in various ways in any economy or society built up around such an error. Thurow himself documents such many problems throughout his book, and at least suggests this mistaken idea of human nature as a root cause:
“What is the story that capitalism tells to the community to hold the community together when capitalism explicitly denies the need for community? Capitalism postulates only one goal—an individual interest in maximizing personal consumption. But individual greed simply isn’t a goal that can hold any society together in the long run” (p. 257).
Greed & Fear
A key part of capitalism’s mistaken view of human nature is the notion that blind greed not only defines the natural human condition but ultimately is a good. Everyone striving and competing for themselves drives Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market, and, so the theory goes, in the end benefits everyone. (Everyone, that is, except the marginalized, drug-addicted, and homeless who seem to become more numerous on our streets every day, and those in the underdeveloped corners of the world economy. Capitalist ideology not only justifies extreme inequality on the one hand, and the ever more visible homeless on the streets of the world’s richest countries on the other; the visible homeless also serve a purpose. They introduce another fear factor, another motivator for other citizens to work hard and conform. Who wants to live, and die, like that?)
Based on its theory of human nature, capitalism runs on greed and fear. Like other socioeconomic systems it creates self-fulfilling prophecies whereby its members, at least in much of their public and work lives, respond to those ideas and the actions they motivate that define it as a system. We humans, swimming in our seas of ideas and knowings and beliefs, make the culture that makes us. We need a better story to tell ourselves about who we are.
A Better Story
Fundamentally, then, wrong thoughts based on inadequate knowledge add up to misunderstandings of human nature that result in problematic and even dangerous outcomes. We need a different, more accurate, and better story to tell ourselves about ourselves, about who we are. Fortunately, we already have that better story—one that’s empirically-based, authoritative and complete. It comes from anthropology, history, biology, systems theory, and other up-to-date sciences that correct the mistaken view of human nature that capitalism is based on.
So, according to modern science what is that better story? That question takes us back to the beginning of this essay. What really ultimately makes us human? We can now be sure that capitalism has it wrong. It isn’t our drive to accumulate or win or dominate—you find those drives way down on the evolutionary scale. What makes us human is our ability to think and learn and feel and value, to strive to be better, to care for others. To paraphrase Thurow, our human nature isn’t bestial, it’s cultural.
There are consequences to designing our way of life on that foundation of wrong ideas that underlie the capitalist system. That’s a harsh reality, but it is our reality. No invisible hand, no mechanistic economic or political system, no distant God, no pre-ordained destiny, will save us from ourselves. We have to design our own cultural and social and economic systems that make us who we are; and if they are to reverse the dangerous social, economic, and environmental trends we see today, they will have to be based not on false ideas of human nature motivated by greed and self-interest, but rather on what most makes us human: our intelligence and moral sensibilities.