What is human nature?
Someone lies or steals because they can; another schemes to get ahead no matter who else gets hurt; a man beats his wife in a fit of possessive jealous rage; a nation goes to war to expand its empire. A common response to such selfish or aggressive activities is something like: Well, what can you expect; it’s just human nature. “Human nature,” it seems, or “basic human nature,” in that view of humankind is what we’re really like underneath the thin veneer of civilization and culture.
The thing is, that view of “human nature”—no matter how engrained it is in our thinking about ourselves, no matter that it underlies much of our economy and political institutions—is flat-out wrong. Where did it come from, then?
(Image by Gerd Altmann. Downloaded from Pixabay.com 2019-06-05)
That rather jaundiced notion of who and what we most basically are—of what humankind most basically is—is part of our own particular cultural legacy. It was part of the huge cultural shift that occurred about five centuries ago in Europe and North America known as the Enlightenment.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), for instance, famously wrote in his book Leviathan that without civilization humans were doomed to a “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” life, or even to perish in an unlimited “war of all against all” (Bellum omnium contra omnes). Being also rational and self-interested, however, humans formed governments to protect them from themselves. Adam Smith (1723 – 1790), like Hobbes, imagined a theory of society based on a machine metaphor in which greed explains economic human behavior like gravity explained the movements of the planets.
Other major social, economic, and political philosophers of that era articulated similar dismal views; and politicians along with social and economic entrepreneurs embodied them in the actual institutions, practices, beliefs, and habits of thought that would become modern Western culture. They still live on, as many scholars have observed in our capitalist economy and democratic governments where it’s often assumed that everyone’s out for the bottom line and votes their own narrow interests. It’s easy to find examples that illustrate the ongoing force of such ideas.
When you say out loud that such negative ideas shape modern Western culture, or write it explicitly as I’m doing, there’s going to be pushback. People don’t like to think that they think that way. It’s easier when such notions remain implicit. And, of course, there are many positive ideas about humans that also are part of our cultural legacy. But all that said, it’s easy to find examples that illustrate the ongoing force of those more negative ideas about basic human nature.
As we’ve seen, phrases like, “What can you say, it’s just human nature,” float around in conversations and in peoples’ heads. Our economy operates on the principles that humans are naturally greedy, and that greed is good (or at least inevitable). Words and actions, and even institutions, embody the implicit belief that we have something at the core of our being that makes us be selfish, greedy, conniving creatures.
So it’s hard to deny that such basically cynical beliefs—which, by the way, help hold inequality in place and make the kind of avarice and self-interest behind so many exploitive and environmentally-destructive actions seem normal—are themselves one defining element of North American culture. Not the only one, but a prevalent one nonetheless. Such notions become self-fulfilling when they underpin institutions and habits of thought. Cynicism abounds. The economy looms large in every election. When acted on and institutionalized, such ideas become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Widespread ideas that underlie critical institutions and practices are part of what we now call culture. So to make more sense of our own culturally-engrained notions about human nature—both that 500 years old limited and limiting understanding of human nature that is embodied in present economic and governmental institutions, and the updated more complicated and nuanced understandings of human nature that now prevail in today’s sciences and humanities—requires some understanding of the idea, or I would say the theory, of culture itself. What is culture?
What is culture? That’s a hard one. Whole books have been written to answer that question—and even just to catalogue various answers that have been proposed. For now here’s a relatively simple and traditional approach: Our culture is our way of life, including language, customs, beliefs, habits of thought, mores and values, world view, economy, and so on, that distinguish us from other cultures around the globe.
Today we can offer another quick answer: Culture is our human nature. As human beings we are cultural beings. Culture as just defined—a symbolically ordered, language-based system—distinguishes humans from all other Earthly beings.
We simply know more now than Hobbes and Smith and other cultural forebears of a half a millennium ago knew. Enlightenment philosophers and social thinkers did not have a theory of culture. We do. They reasonably used the reductionistic and mechanistic model of physical science they had at the time to try to understand human behavior. We now have a much expanded science that includes notions of systems and complexity that better represent empirical human life. We know, for instance, that culture, not biological race, shapes our human abilities and actions. In the same way our desires, feelings, and actions are shaped by culture, not by some biologically-based universal human nature.
As understood in today’s sciences and humanities, culture is what makes us human—and thus it defines our human nature. Humans are highly social animals; culture by definition is first and foremost an attribute of human societies. Right there the idea of culture corrects the over-individualistic and reductionistic premises that still define popular notions of human nature and shape much of our public life. (I’ve written more about this gap between what we know and how we live in an earlier post titled “Catching Up To What We Know.”)
Reflexivity. Only humans judge their own looks, behavior, or thoughts. Only humans worry about how others perceive them. Only humans ever could exclaim “I hate myself,” or purposively commit suicide or self-harm. As far as we know, only humans get embarrassed, or become either healthfully or pathologically narcissistic. What is all that about?
It’s about one unique aspect of culture that especially needs mention. With language and culture humans become self-reflexive. That is, we’re able to view ourselves, to know ourselves, even to act on ourselves, from perspectives outside ourselves—as in the above instances. This seems like such a distinctive and important aspect of being human, yet in my experience it isn’t much thought about or talked about.
We’re reflexive in many other ways as well: in science (including anthropology, for instance, and sociology, psychology, and other social sciences), in poetry and novels, in meditation, sometimes in the visual arts, in music, and many others. And even, I would say, in natural sciences like astronomy and biology, that give us knowledge of our place in the broader scheme of things.
While rarely explicitly mentioned, reflexivity in human life is often assumed. An earlier anthropologist, Clyde Kluckhohn, wrote a 1949 introduction to anthropology titled Mirror for Man, indicating that in this discipline we see and study ourselves. Australian anthropologist, V. Gordon Childe, wrote a 1936 book titled Man Makes Himself about the rise of civilization. Putting aside the gendered language of another era, that’s reflexivity.
Reflexivity is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a key aspect of human consciousness, and conscience. It makes us humans responsible for how we think and act in ways that that other species who lack language and culture can’t be. I’ve explored this aspect of being a cultural species a little more in a separate post here.
Like the broader theory of culture of which it is one aspect, reflexivity also counteracts the overly individualistic and mechanistic views of human society still prevalent in popular thought. If we can “see,” think about, and change how we think, what we value, and how we act, then no mechanistic theory of human society based on supposed universal human nature (like greed or self-interest) of individuals, can ever hold water.
That leads me to the next question, the next topic: Why Politics? I’ve written quite a bit about politics here—both from my own frankly partisan (in the sense of taking sides in a political issue) position, and sometimes from more academic perspectives. In the latter context, politics as part of culture ties into this discussion about human nature and reflexivity.
Why politics? How we think about ourselves becomes self-fulfilling prophecy when it’s embedded in our political and economic life. This is yet another dimension of reflexivity. Ideas about human nature couldn’t be more political if they tried.
The basic political and economic institutions of our society remain largely based in particular ideas of human nature that we inherited from our Enlightenment forebears. Given that those ideas have been superseded by the growth of knowledge over the last half-millennium, it’s fair to ask—to explore—what institutions based on more up-to-date culturally-based understandings of human nature might look like. A first step, perhaps, might be to more fully take in the reflexive insight inherent in cultural theory that we ourselves make the institutions that make us. We’re the responsible party here—not some fictive universal human nature, not fate, not destiny, not some pre-ordained path.
These observations themselves are political. In that light, let me tentatively put forward an observation, maybe more a hypothesis, something to think about. It is that economic and social conservatives by and large still subscribe to the individualistic and even mechanistic views of a fixed human nature we’ve inherited from the social philosophers of the Enlightenment. That’s why they’re so often anti-science, and anti-regulation, preferring to rely on the mechanisms of the market to deliver economically and on authoritarian rule to keep the peace, rather than on the designs and values of experts or politicians. Progressives, contrast, are more willing to see our human nature as more malleable, more shaped by culture and intention.
And finally, a closing question….
How do we cultural beings fit in the bigger scheme of things in which we emerged? What’s our rightful place in the cosmos, and in the rich, complex, and delicately balanced webs of life on Earth? Are we Lords of Creation, or vulnerable and ephemeral specks of conscious life on a remote planet in an inconceivably vast universe? Or are we something different—maybe both less and more? Are we, through music, art, language, science, struggling toward becoming those beings through which the universe knows itself. What is our Human Nature in Nature?
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