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.
Both ‘capitalism’ — if understood to be founded on the conviction that individualism and competition are the basic motivation for the goals that we, humans set for ourselves, and that therefore our activities, of an economic nature at least, should be allowed free rein to operate without being constrained by rules imposed on those activities … and ‘socialism’ — if understood to be founded on the conviction that solidarity and cooperation between individuals are the dominant features of human nature, and that we should therefore impose rules that constrain human activities, of an economic nature at least, in order to secure optimal economic equality between individuals in a society … BOTH these alternative ways of thinking about human nature and society, depart from the misconception that human society must be based on ONE OR THE OTHER. It has led in the past, and will again lead in the future, to disastrous outcome. Within our human nature, competitive drive between individuals on the one hand, and on the other, solidarity and cooperation within the group (the size: small, medium or large, is generally decided by the ‘culture’ we are a part of) are in reality closely interwoven, if not entangled, and impossible to tease apart. Any society that does not create and maintain (for it is an ongoing dynamic process of striving for BALANCE) enough space to allow these two fundamental urges of human nature to contribute to our social structures, is destined to FAIL. Any successful society NEEDS to cater to the human ability and desire to care and look out for one’s individual well-being, AND also our human ability and desire to care and look out for others around us in the groupings we may be/feel a part of (our family, our tribe, our nation, ALL of humanity, or ALL earthly life).
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Afiena, and for the important emphasis on the need for balance between our identities as social beings and as individuals. I basically agree, and will just suggest a qualification to what you say.
Thurow says in the passage I quoted that individuality as we think about and experience it today is a product—I would even say an achievement—of history and culture, not an attribute of some putative basic (pre-cultural) human nature that must define and limit the kind of society and economy that we have. That latter notion is what underlies and often justifies capitalism, and it’s wrong.
Taking that a step farther, I think that the more basic problem lies in thinking of individual competitive drives, or the need for sociality, as purely features of pre-cultural human nature that somehow condition, or determine, or need to be balanced in, the institutions that make up our societies and economies. It’s not a one-way relationship. Our cultures also condition those supposedly basic drives of human nature. It’s a reflexive, circular, complex system. We make the cultures that make us. That’s where intentions and purpose and ethics come into the picture. As I said in the post, it’s where we become responsible—both individually and collectively—for the kinds of humans we are.
We’re so used to thinking in terms of a basic human nature that precedes and underlies culture. And it’s true: we are biological individuals as well as members of societies and cultures. We have biological drives and needs inherited from our reptilian and mammalian evolutionary forebears. But as humans culture conditions even these. What and how with whom we eat, with whom and how we mate, where and when we sleep and wake…. it’s all both culture and biology.
Even if we recognize that individualism as we’ve created it—maybe even we could say achieved it— in modern capitalist culture is as much a cultural as a biological phenomenon, however, we still do need to develop institutions (political, social, and economic) that balance that individualism with the reality of other aspects of our lives as social beings. As you say, any successful way of life must balance our identities and rights as individuals—our “ability and desire to care and look out for one’s individual well-being, and…care and look out for others around us….” Well said!
Great discussion! Thanks to you both.
Hi Mr. Boggs,
My apologies since my comment isn’t related to your post, but is there an email where I could reach you on? I’m writing a piece on Ray Peat’s Blake College and I saw that you had a lecture there in 1969 titled “Ways of Liberation: Mystical Transcendence”. Thank you for your time.
Jim,
I left you a message on your FB page. It appears you don’t use it much. I love what you’re doing with your blog, and I’ve been missing being in touch with you for years, now.
welcome back to blogging, jim/ yes, I agree, we need to get off our lazy chairs and THINK harder than most of us like to do, and we need to KEEP doing that and KEEP engaging others, more and more others, building an avalanche of fundamental, POSITIVE change in the way we live in this world, and once we do that, we need to ACT accordingly to our ‘new and improved’ notions about how to create societies that are way more inclusive, benefitting not just our family, friends, clan or nation, but all fellow-humans and also non human life, without which humans will not survive, and this ACTING for CHANGE does not, in our ‘democratic societies’ at least — unlike some others ! — require a more than average level of human courage, but merely that we start working our MINDS for real, to deal with these major issues while we can still hope to CHANGE how our human world is structured, based on, indeed! WRONG and DANGEROUS long ingrained notions, misguided tales, about ourselves, that threaten to destroy us, and much non-human life on earth in its wake as well/
**Jim,**
Your essay on Thurow is a genuine pleasure to read. The Pogo epigraph sets exactly the right tone — honest self-reflection about our capacity to be our own worst enemy is where any serious reckoning with capitalism has to begin. And Thurow’s central argument lands with real force: capitalism’s Hobbesian premise is anthropologically false. Groups precede individuals. Community produces individuality rather than the reverse. Social values inform individual values and not the other way around. You’re right to give that argument prominence, and Thurow deserves genuine credit for making it clearly in the language of economics.
But I want to push back on one thing, then push further than either you or Thurow go — and end somewhere you might not expect.
The pushback first: Marx actually gives us a richer account of human nature here than Thurow does, and he deserves more credit than your essay grants him. Thurow treats Marx as part of the problem — one of the thinkers whose reductive explanations of human behavior contributed to our current loss of confidence in Reason. That’s fair as far as it goes. But Marx’s deeper account of what makes us human is more sophisticated than his reputation for economic determinism suggests.
Marx’s concept of species-being holds that what distinguishes humans from other animals is that we make our own life activity the object of our will and consciousness. A beaver builds a dam by instinct. A human architect builds the structure in imagination before building it in reality. We are the animals who consciously produce our own conditions of existence — including the social and cultural conditions that then shape the individuals who grow up within them. That’s not far from what Thurow is saying about community preceding individuality, but Marx grounds it more deeply in what we actually are as a species rather than simply appealing to anthropological observation.
Where Marx goes further is in insisting that this capacity — conscious, purposive, creative production — isn’t just a nice feature of human nature that capitalism happens to undervalue. It’s our essential nature. And capitalism’s specific injury is that it alienates us from it. The worker doesn’t experience her labor as the expression of her humanity. She experiences it as something extracted from her for someone else’s benefit. The critique isn’t just that capitalism distributes its gains unfairly. It’s that capitalism as currently practiced prevents most people from living as the kind of beings they genuinely are. That’s a sharper diagnosis than Thurow offers, and your essay would be strengthened by acknowledging it.
Now let me push further — and here I want to say something that may surprise you.
Capitalism, properly understood, is actually the most powerful system ever devised for allowing individual human creativity to flourish. Not because greed is good. Not because inequality is just. But because no human institution has ever been better at coordinating the freely chosen actions of millions of people pursuing their own visions of a good life — and doing so without requiring anyone to know in advance what those visions should be.
Here’s the key insight that neither Marx nor Thurow fully grasps. Technology will continue to expand material prosperity. Automation, artificial intelligence, and scientific advance will reduce the real cost of goods and services in ways we can barely imagine. But technology cannot solve the fundamental problem of scarcity, because the scarcest resource of all is time itself — and no advance in productivity changes the fact that each of us has only twenty-four hours in a day and a finite number of years to live. How we spend that time, what we trade it for, what we consider worth doing — these are irreducibly personal value judgments that no planner, algorithm, or expert committee can make for us. A market, for all its imperfections, allows each person to express those judgments through their own choices, and coordinates the results without requiring agreement on what a good life looks like. That’s not a defense of any particular distribution of wealth. That’s a recognition that human flourishing is too diverse, too creative, and too personal to be administered from above.
The real problem isn’t capitalism itself. It’s that capitalism got built on a false story about why it works. It told people the engine is greed. But the real engine is human creativity, cooperation, and the deep social nature that both Thurow and Marx correctly identified. When we understand that, we don’t need to abolish capitalism. We need to give it the right foundation — one that recognizes we are social, creative, meaning-seeking beings, not just consumers maximizing personal consumption.
Which brings me to what I think your essay is reaching for but doesn’t quite say.
You write that taking responsibility for what we think — understanding that we design our way of life based on how we think — would mark a milestone in human maturity. I agree entirely. But notice what that argument requires. It requires that there are real standards against which our choices can be evaluated. That truth and goodness are not merely cultural preferences but features of the world we can get right or wrong. Your essay gestures toward this without fully committing to it.
Thurow strikes me as a metaphysical agnostic on this point — he wants the normative weight of a better story about human nature without quite committing to what would make that story true rather than merely useful. I understand the impulse. After the certainties of both religious dogmatism and Marxist historicism, agnosticism can feel like intellectual honesty. And it is genuinely better than the nihilism of postmodernism, which simply gives up on the question entirely. But agnosticism is an unstable resting place. If the better story about human nature is merely a more adaptive cultural narrative rather than a true account of what we are, then we’ve already conceded the relativist’s central premise while trying to resist his conclusions.
We need the stronger claim. The awe that religious traditions have always pointed toward — the sense that reality is remarkable, that goodness is written into the structure of things, that truth and beauty are worth pursuing for their own sake — doesn’t require mythology to be legitimate. It requires an account of why beings like us, in a universe like this one, have genuine reasons grounded in what we actually are to live well, treat each other with dignity, and pursue understanding.
That account exists. It’s just a little deeper than either Thurow or Marx dug.
Hi Todd,
Thanks very much for your interesting and insightful comment. I haven’t read Marx himself—perhaps now I’ll go back and do so. But I do I agree with the observation you attribute to Marx that:
“What distinguishes humans from other animals is that we make our own life activity the object of our will and consciousness. … We are the animals who consciously produce our own conditions of existence — including the social and cultural conditions that then shape the individuals who grow up within them.”
Applying that insight to the question of capitalism, I think we might both agree that we in the modern West produce capitalism as a cultural form that then shapes who we are as individuals. In this context, though, I’m curious about your statement that “capitalism… prevents most people from living as the kind of beings they genuinely are.” I agree; but that observation seems at odds with your next claim that “capitalism… is actually the most powerful system ever devised for allowing individual human creativity to flourish.”
Creativity to what ends? Other times and other cultures have produced great art, music, and deep philosophical and religious teachings that have endured and inspired people across the globe and down through the ages. Has capitalist modernity produced anything equivalent in these areas? It’s hard to judge without the perspective of time. We’ll have to wait and see, but I don’t think so.
Harvard Political Philosopher Michael J. Sandel (2022, loc. 118) says that “philosophy inhabits the world from the start; our practices and institutions are embodiments of theory.” Jerry Mander (2012) observes that capitalism, dependent on endless growth, is “designed to operate free of morality.” Paul Collier (2020: 18) writes that “Economic man is utterly selfish and infinitely greedy, caring about nobody but himself. He became the bedrock of the economic theory of human behaviour.” These and many others point to the lack of broader social and ethical values in capitalism as that socioeconomic framework within which “we consciously produce our own conditions of existence.”
Capitalism has nurtured creativity toward the end of accumulating great wealth, and with that science and technology have developed and flourished. This expansion of knowledge and technological control is a magnificent achievement and expansion of the human mind and spirit.
Ironically, among other things advances in science and philosophy increasingly expose the problems and false premises of capitalism, forming an ever-widening gap between what we know and how we live. They also record the harms that capitalism as practiced, especially under neoliberalism, inflicts on the natural world and on human beings around the globe—especially on those multitudes who don’t share in its unevenly distributed benefits. With all that we know today, how does a social system that was conceived and functions as a mechanism of endless growth, free of any larger vision or morality, make sense in a finite, interconnected world?
There’s lots more to discuss about all this, but I’ll close for now by affirming what you write at the end of your comment. If I didn’t adequately do so earlier, I’ll now commit to your statements that “truth and goodness are not merely cultural preferences but features of the world we can get right or wrong.” And that “reality is remarkable, that goodness is written into the structure of things, that truth and beauty are worth pursuing for their own sake… (and that we do) have genuine reasons grounded in what we actually are to live well, treat each other with dignity, and pursue understanding.” Well said!
Those values find expression, even under capitalism, because they reflect who we are humans. But I don’t see the kind of unrestrained capitalism we have today—where society is embedded within the capitalist economy rather than the economy being embedded in society and expressing its finer ethical principles—as nurturing those values. Turning to Sandel again: we need to “reconfigure the economy to make it amenable to democratic control…” (2022: loc. 235).
References:
Collier, Paul 2020 The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties. New York: Harper. Kindle Ed.
Mander, Jerry 2012 The Capitalism Papers: Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press.
Sandel, Michael J. 2022 (1996). Democracy’s Discontent A New Edition for Our Perilous Times. Kindle ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
glad to see you’re still actively posting, Jim/ about that response (to one of your postings) just received, I dunno… exceedingly woolly toward the end/ last paragraph: ‘That account exists. It’s just a little deeper than…’ geez, what? where? deeper…, eh? like, a black hole somewhere?