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Human Nature in Nature Blog Politics

Thoughts on Reading Lester Thurow’s The Future of Capitalism(1998)

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.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e6/10/cc/e610cca50fd8267729a7823e640556cc.jpg

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.

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Human Nature in Nature Blog

Ideas, Culture, & the Freedom to Error

Every great advance in human history—the use of fire, the wheel, agriculture, writing, our highest religious ideals, democracy, the internet—starts with a new idea which in turn is based on earlier ideas. Humans live by ideas. What does it mean for us when the ideas we live by are in error?

Living Beyond our Genes

When humans attained culture, we moved beyond genes—or, rather, grew up into a new level of organization and evolution. That happened fifty or   sixty thousand years ago, maybe earlier.  Until then we evolved like other life forms, primarily by natural selection working on our physical bodies, instincts, and more or less fixed patterns of relating. But now as cultural beings our own ideas are the means by which human life advances, evolves, becomes ever more complex.

Ideas also can hold us back.  Wrong or limiting ideas restrict what we do and who we are.  Anthropologist Clifford Geertz said that humans live in webs of meaning that they themselves spin.  Living in a world of ideas that we ourselves create gives humans degrees of freedom that no other being on Earth enjoys. But this includes, as I said in an earlier post, the freedom to make mistakes, to be fooled, to be played the sucker, and to wrap ourselves in straight-jackets of limited thinking.

The human mind has freedom to divide, categorize and combine things in novel and creative ways.  But we also use this gift to build fences—ones that keep others out, and ones that confine our own minds.

Living according to mistaken ideas can work for a while, even get you ahead. And, your living by mistaken ideas can get someone else ahead (and of course vice versa, depending on the circumstance). But more often, and always in the end, in the complex interconnected ecologies in which we live and subsist, wrong ideas eventually lead to unpleasant or even deadly consequences.

Socrates (or was it Plato?) said the unexamined life is not worth living. For us, with our terrifying capabilities and the large scale of our works, the unexamined mind is becoming a dangerous way to live.

Waking up to both our freedom and our fallibility can be terrifying.  Or, more positively, it can bring us home to ourselves, help make us more real, caution us to live with respect on the fragile planet that sustains us.

Ideas We Don’t Know We Have

People have inborn tendencies to take—and sometimes mistake—their ideas for perceptions, their dogmas for truths.

People don’t generally realize that they’re in the grip of a limiting or mistaken idea until a new idea comes along and challenges it. We believe what we believe for as long as we can. The most powerful ideas or ideologies are those we don’t know we have, but rather take for granted as just the way things are. It’s a bit of a stretch and a simplification, but you could even think of a particular culture as one big idea, a world-view. Those big ideas that give form to our world most deeply define who we are, and are the hardest to grow out of, to change.

The Flammarion engraving (1888) depicts a traveler who arrives at the edge of a flat Earth and sticks his head through the firmament. By Anonymous – Camille Flammarion, L’Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire (Paris, 1888), pp. 163, Public Domain.

It’s easiest to “see” ideas we don’t have ourselves. Take the idea of the flat Earth as the center of the universe around which all the heavenly bodies revolve that I mentioned in my last post.

Setting aside those curious few who still believe the world is flat and the round-earth idea a conspiracy (a notion most people today rightly regard as pseudo-science nonsense), the rest of us readily recognize the idea of a flat Earth as a particular idea, even a peculiar idea, because it is not our idea. It belongs to different times, different cultures. We have distance from it. We don’t perceptually and conceptually inhabit a universe that idea described.

But in past times and distant places, without the benefit of Newtonian physics and photos from space, the idea of a flat Earth as the center of the cosmos could be and was compelling because it seemed to come directly from people’s own senses. It was not just what people thought, but what they experienced, as they looked out over the land and watched the sun rise and set, and saw the stars wheel their set ways across the dome of the night sky. They believed what they empirically, naïvely saw—not recognizing it as a belief—and constructed whole religious cosmologies around it. They inhabited that world. They lived within their idea of the world, and they viewed the world from within (from the perspective of) that idea. Therefore, how could they recognize it as an idea? It was not just an idea; it was who they were; it was simply truth; it was how things are.

Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam. By Jörg Bittner Unna – Own work, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the West, that idea of the Earth (and of “Man” created in the image of God), as the literal center of God’s Universe wasn’t widely recognized as a particular idea subject to challenge until Copernicus and Galileo put it in question. At first, it was Copernicus’s notion that the Earth was not at the center of the universe, but rather the Earth and the other planets orbited the sun, that seemed unbelievable. As evidence mounted and it became believable, Copernicus’s world-shifting idea ushered in another large new idea, that of science. And with science a whole new world-view arose as an alternative to the religious orthodoxy of the Middle Ages.

Science is our own big idea; it is how we think, who we are.  And, as I said last time, and will also talk about next time, we’ve reached the point in our evolution of ideas where more people can, and should, and in fact more do, think farther in the round—think more consciously about what we think.

An ancient symbol in many cultures: The Uroborus—The Snake That Swallows Itself.

(Granted, that’s not a totally new idea either: In examining our thoughts, even making theories about our own minds, we circle in on the essence of being human as captured in the ancient image of the uroboros—the snake swallowing its own tail.  But in the world we’re making, we need not just philosophers philosophers and mystics but more everyday people who vote—to keep getting better at it.)

If we take on the task of thinking more consciously about what we think, then our big idea—namely science and technology, and not just science but our whole current world-view that got shaped in the ideas and images of earlier science—is the first course on our plate. But what’s a good angle to approach it from? Here’s just a couple of suggestions. We can look critically at science and the modern world-view it shaped without falling into relativism.  And we can see, based in part on later scientific discoveries, when and where early science gave right answers on particulars while larger “pictures” of our world and ourselves based on those particulars were incomplete and even wrong.

Science—Our Big Idea.  Is It Our Mistake?

The advent of modern science was in many ways a huge advance in human learning, human understanding, and human life. Lifting Western culture out of its “Dark Ages,” it became the scaffolding for what we, with some basis but also some hubris, call the Enlightenment. Early mechanistic science and the universe that it describes became our big idea, a foundation for our culture. It shaped the big idea of the universe and our place in it that we live by and live within.

But what, exactly, is that big idea? Who has appropriated it, shaped it, and used for their own ends?  It has different aspects that have changed through time. Two central ones today are that we can transcend culture and command nature.

 

Transcending Culture, Commanding Nature.  Anthropologist Sharon Traweek memorably and paradoxically describes the cultural world of high energy physics as “the culture of no culture.”  The phrase has a catchy ring to it because this is the world-view not just of a clique of specialists, but of science at large—or was until quite recently.  And it still is the general outlook of modern Western civilization that has grown up around that earlier scientific world-view and incorporates it in many of its day-to-day practices, institutions, and beliefs.  “Cultures” of various strange kinds are what others have.  But us—why we’re just folks.

In the minds of those who practice it, as recorded by Traweek and many others, scientific methodology works to transcend culture, to take all cultural influences—dogmas, assumptions, particular perspectives, opinions, prior beliefs emotions, superstitions—out of its equations. In science, or so it is told, we take ourselves out of our work, and out of the world we observe. By taking ourselves fully out of the natural world from which we emerged, we think, we become almost like gods, able to understand nature’s workings on its own terms—and control it on ours.  That’s linear thinking.  That’s Descartes’ Chasm—the Cartesian split at the heart of the modern world view. What hubris!  What a BIG mistake!  We forgot and now are having to relearn that we’re always within and part of the systems we’re messing with.

An Ironic Error

Traweek’s wry characterization reveals an ironic error at the heart of the modern scientific world-view: the “culture of no culture” is itself a culture. We humans are by nature cultural beings.  Culture is what defines and sustains us as human; we can no more lose culture and remain human than a cloud, say, can lose its water vapor and remain a cloud.  Culture is our cat’s meow. Neither can we abstract ourselves from the natural world within which we humans evolved. We’re in the world we think we control, and what we to do to it affects us (remember the uroborus).

Adding irony onto irony, it is the ongoing development of science itself that now more clearly reveals those errors. That in itself is unexceptional: it’s how science works, how knowledge advances, how new theory supplants or sublates (incorporates) earlier more limited theory.

But when new theoretical understanding supplants old theory on which a whole culture developed—when the advance of science challenges earlier scientific viewpoints that continue to underpin a civilization’s institutions, practices, and attitudes—things get more complicated.  

That is our circumstance today.

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Human Nature in Nature Blog

Straight Thinking v. Thinking in the Round

A few things in nature go in straight lines, or seem to do so—but only a few.  And even they are suspect.  So why do we limit ourselves to straight thinking?

Lightening Strikes       Photo Credit:  Sethink

 

Thinking Straight

Where can you find straight lines in nature? Well, time, for one, seems to be linear, “the arrow of time” shooting forward from the past into the future. Evolution, which occurs through time, exhibits linear movement from lesser to greater complexity. But even those examples may reflect limited human vision more than absolute truth. For instance, I can (in principle) lay a rail, cut a road, or simply draw a straight line on the ground. But extend that line far enough on the Earth’s surface and it becomes a circle.

How do we really know the shape of time or the trajectory of evolution?

Flat Earth Map. Image courtesy of the Flat Earth Society

People used to think that if you sailed in a straight line you’d eventually drop off the edge of the flat earth. Now we know better—most of us do, anyway. What you’d actually do is become ungrounded and go off on a tangent.  By the way, did you know that there’s still a flat-earth society dedicated to the empiricist belief that what you see is what you get? Look here, or here, or google it for yourself.  (Some people still deny human-caused climate change too.)

Going the other way, from large to small, if you get a ruler and draw a straight line with your pencil and magnify it a thousand times, it won’t look so straight any more. Maybe being or looking or thinking straight is always an illusion, an artifact of limited vision, a trick of perspective or scale, or a simple fear-response to the real world being round, chaotic, and unpredictable.

Light may be an exception. Light actually does travel in straight lines, doesn’t it? Well, maybe, sort-of, sometimes. One summary of the physics explains that “light traveling in a straight line is a consequence of light going every which way.” Light, the straightest thing we can think of, is a paradox. Being straight, it seems, rarely or never is a simple, straight-forward thing, even for something as basic as light.

Straight is mostly against the grain of nature, against the natural order of things. Yet whenever possible we modern Western peoples create living environments comprised of straight lines and flat plains. It’s our thing, but it doesn’t come from our genes arrayed in their spiralling double helix. No. It’s our culture. We like square shooters and straight talkers and people who are on the level. Wherever in the world people with our culture go (and now that’s everywhere), we endlessly replicate square buildings, square rooms, square yards, cities laid out in square grids, roads as straight as the land allows, chairs with flat seats and straight backs, square fields, square windows to look out of and frame our world. But most of all, we hobble ourselves with straight thinking.

 

Thinking in the Round

I don’t know when or why straight thinking got to be such a fixation. Maybe factories and machines helped channel our minds into regular grooves and repetitive dogmas. But I think that the linear cause-and-effect logic of Newtonian physics that was so influential in the early formation of modern Western culture bears much of the blame.

Newtonian insights were great in their day, and still work well for many everyday problems. They laid foundations for later scientific learning about the world. That kind of reductionist, one-way linear thinking, however, as the major framework for scientific thought, began to fall behind its “best-by” date with the advent of relativity and quantum theory in the early twentieth century; and it soon thereafter became positively passé with systems theory, and more recently complexity and chaos theories. Science, in the disciplined but non-linear ways it has, moved on.

But the kind of linear thinking that early science helped institute still keeps a firm grip on today’s everyday thought. It shapes and limits our customary cultural mind-set and world-view. What’s the problem? you might ask. It’s worked pretty well for us, hasn’t it? Well, yes. In some ways it has. Maybe too well. Cold blood and large size worked well for the dinosaurs too—for a while.  Until they went as far as they could and hit a dead-end. Continuing to behave like cold-blooded bullies on a fragile Earth, are we buying the same one-way ticket?

 

What’s the Problem

Dimetrodon Dinosaur

What’s the problem?   The problem is that the self-imposed straight-jacket of linear thought constrains our human ability to imagine the full, realistic range of human possibilities.   We’ve reached a point in our cultural evolution where we will need to free up that imagination, to think outside the box.

According to growing numbers of serious writers and thinkers, as I said in my last post, we’re reaching the end of our ability as a global civilization—as a species—to carry on as we have been. If they and many others are even half-way right, we need to get to the next level, to open ourselves to the wider possibilities of our human nature.  How can we do that without giving up at least some of the linear thinking that’s been working so well for us, so that we can think more in the round instead?

Instead of thinking so much about the world and how to exploit it (linear thinking), we could think more about how we think about the world (thinking in the round). Rather than continuing on the straight and narrow paths of trying to get more things, make more money, grab more control, we might instead come around, back to ourselves, and ask “What do we really want?” Instead of falling back on excuses mired in linear logic (“What do you expect, it’s just human nature?”), we might open to the real possibilities of becoming more rounded, more fully, human—possibilities that only we ourselves can open.

The essence of human nature—it’s defining quality—is culture. We’re cultural beings by nature—which means that we ourselves create the best part of our human nature as we go. So, let’s make the human nature we have the one we really want. Let’s just do it, for ourselves.

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