Until a generation or two ago, we were all taught that animals had no feelings, no intelligence, that they were incapable of feeling pain -- it was all autonomic reaction, they were mere robots. Only humans, magically endowed by God, had these distinguished qualities.
With such staggering, almost unfathomable, universal ignorance of animal nature, it's not surprising that we really know nothing of human nature. We can, after all, judge the nature of our species only from our own personal nature. There is absolutely no consensus on our innate nature, or even if there is such a thing. Some people believe we are all inherently evil, sinful, and need strict control to prevent us from running amok and committing deadly sins without remorse or restraint. Some people believe we are all inherently well-intentioned, and in the absence of stresses we will always be sociable, generous, even altruistic.
Psychologists and sociologists, with their dumbed-down, simplistic models, seem especially incompetent at understanding our nature. We are left to piece together our own perception of what makes us tick, and we tend to socialize with others who share our worldview of human nature and how the world works.
In Straw Dogs, John Gray painted a picture of human nature as self-absorbed and driven by immediate needs (urgency before importance):
The mass of mankind is ruled not by its own intermittent moral sensations, still less by self-interest, but by the needs of the moment. It seems fated to wreck the balance of life on Earth -- and thereby to be the agent of its own destruction. What could be more hopeless than placing the Earth in the charge of this exceptionally destructive species? It is not of becoming the planet's wise stewards that Earth-lovers dream, but of a time when humans have ceased to matter...
Humans use what they know to meet their most urgent needs -- even if the result is ruin. When times are desperate they act to protect their offspring, to revenge themselves on enemies, or simply to give vent to their feelings. These are not flaws that can be remedied. science cannot be used to reshape humankind in a more rational mould. The upshot of scientific inquiry is that humans cannot be other than irrational.
This assessment seemed intuitively valid to me, consistent with Pollard's Law: We do what we must, then we do what's easy, and then we do what's fun. While this book's assessment of the future of our species was gloomy, Gray seemed to be making the point that, just as we emerged from the cauldron of evolution as a remarkable accident, an improbability, so too was our demise accidental, the result of overpopulation and overconsumption that was in turn the result of a series of extraordinary adaptations (the inventions of catastrophic agriculture and what we call civilization) necessitated by a horrifically bad roll of the cosmic dice (the striking of Earth by a meteor that wobbled its orbit and caused the ice ages). I could buy short-sightedness and selfishness as 'human nature' but only in the context of the four boldface words above. When times are desperate, yes, I can see us behaving the way we now do. These are not normal times. We live in a horribly overcrowded, violent world where psychopathy is an effective survival strategy and where we are all (and not always just metaphorically) prisoners.
This is what lies behind the apparent contradiction between my belief that our civilization is in its last century, and my passion for creating models of better ways to live. If we can get away from the mental and physical prisons of modern society, we might rediscover how we were meant to live. In a world without desperation, scarcity, urgency, what true human nature and what astonishing joy and accomplishment might emerge? And even if it's too late to save our species from civilizational collapse, that knowledge of working models might be useful to the survivors. And if we gotta go, what a high to go out on!
In his new book, Black Mass, Gray removes the above four word qualifier from his assessment of human nature. Not only does our world face intractable problems, he asserts, we live in an "intractable world". He rails for most of the book against various "idealistic" approaches to coping with such a world: Western religious orthodoxy, utopianism, the entire spectrum of political ideologies, and post-modern ideologies of scientific, teleological, 'free-market' economic and techno-utopianism. Only realism, an acceptance that 'progress' is a myth and that civilization necessarily entails a constant struggle against despots, liars, murderers, thieves, megalomaniacs, genocides, oppressors, hoarders, extremists, psychopaths, mobs and other manifestations of human frailty. Moral dilemmas where opposing views and needs are simply irreconcilable are inevitable, he argues. And then, wham:
The cardinal need is to change the prevailing view of human beings, which sees them as inherently good creatures unaccountably burdened with a history of violence and oppression. Here we reach the nub of realism and its chief stumbling-point for prevailing opinion: its assertion of the innate defects of human beings. Nearly all pre-modern thinkers took it as given that human nature is fixed and flawed, and in this as in some other ways they were close to the truth of the matter. No theory of politics can be credible that assumes that human impulses are naturally benign, peaceable or reasonable.
No when times are desperate qualifier. It's hard to say whether this represents a darkening of Gray's perception of human nature or merely a tacit acknowledgement that in our terrible modern world times are always desperate. My guess is that it's the former, and that Gray would not think much of intentional communities. He would probably believe, as others who see humans as 'fixed and flawed' would, that such communities are merely idealistic, smaller-scale 'fixed and flawed' societies even more open to despots and cultists than larger, more heterogeneous cultures.
And this takes us back to the essential point that no one really 'knows' human nature. Our experience and context of it is too narrow, and the narratives of human behaviour throughout history are inevitably tainted by their authors' worldviews. As Lakoff has explained, we accept information that is consistent with our personal worldviews and reject, almost subconsciously, information that is not. Paul Simon, quoted at the top of this article, said the same thing. We believe what we want to believe. There is no 'objective', unarguable data that can be applied to change those beliefs. We are all, ultimately, as Gray himself argues, figments of reality -- lonely collections of organs that evolved consciousness in their collective self-interest. He writes, in Straw Dogs: "We act in the belief that we are all of one piece, but we are able to cope with things only because we are a succession of fragments. We cannot shake off the sense that we are enduring selves, and yet we know we are not."
What is the 'nature' of a 'succession of fragments'? I would argue that (at least when times are not desperate) its nature is evolutionary -- to live, to experience, to be happy, and to socialize in the interest of enabling a continuation of that happy experience. It is in our collective interest to get along, to love, to converse, to live together in community, to maximize life and its diversity.
But then what do I know. I'm just a figment of reality, a succession of fragments, a complicity of the creatures that make up my body, like anyone else. |
