Do we need a theory of human nature to know how to act? Perhaps the best
way to approach this question is by turning it around and asking: does human
nature shape the way we act? That is, does it shape our moral, social and
political lives?
There are two broad contemporary responses to this question. The first holds
that the facts of human nature and the values that frame our lives belong
to distinct realms, and are unrelated to each other. This has been the predominant
view of the postwar years, largely in response to the experience of social
Darwinism, and the belief that the moral good was defined by success in the
struggle for existence. For social Darwinists, might was right and ought derived
from is. Morality - how we ought to behave - emerged from the facts of nature
- how humans are. This became an argument to justify capitalist exploitation,
colonial oppression, racial savagery and even genocide. As a consequence,
it became an article of faith in the post-Holocaust world that is and ought,
facts and values must be kept distinct.
But here's the problem. If our values do not emerge from the facts of our
existence, whence do they derive? Unless we wish to believe that values are
simply plucked out of the sky, then we must accept that there must be some
relationship between the kind of values that we hold, the kind of beings that
we are, and the kind of world in which we live.
The second approach attempts to understand this relationship by looking to
science to help determine the boundaries of our moral and political lives.
The scientific study of human nature, the argument runs, can reveal why certain
types of societies and moral codes work and other do not. So, according to
Matt Ridley, communism failed because Marx 'designed a social system that
would only have worked if we were angels; it failed because we were beasts'.
Socialism doesn't suit human nature, Ridley argues, though chimpanzees, with
their highly authoritarian social structure, would apparently take to it like
Marx to the British Library. Markets, however, are written into our genes.
According to Ridley, 'Man the hunter-gatherer' is also 'man the exchanger'.
Socialism is for chimps; real Men barter.
The Australian philosopher Peter Singer disagrees. He wants to reclaim Darwinism
for the left and suggests that 'a readiness to cooperate seems to be part
of our genes'. Opposing Ridley's desire to leave it all to the market, Singer
claims that an evolutionary view of human psychology shows the need for state
intervention to create a more egalitarian society.
For Francis Fukuyama human nature leads neither to capitalism nor socialism
but to communitarianism. Human beings, he argues, possess 'built-in, natural
capacities for solving problems of social co-operation and inventing moral
rules to constrain individual choice'. Contemporary problems of lack of trust
and weakening social bonds are best solved not by social policy but by human
nature. Human beings will, he suggests, 'without much prompting, create order
spontaneously simply by pursuing their daily individual ends and interacting
with other people'.
Homo thatcherus, Homo equalitas, Homo communitas
- all, apparently, have emerged from the East African savannah where humans
first evolved. But if human psychology can lead to a Thatcherite, an egalitarian
or a communitarian society, why base political arguments on the nature of
human psychology? Why not simply make a political argument? It's a question
that gets to the heart of the issue here.
Evolutionary psychologists are right that there must be a relationship between
the kind of creatures that we are and the kind of moral and political lives
that we should lead. But evolutionary psychology possesses, I think, an impoverished
understanding of the kind of creatures we are.
Consider, for instance, the distinction between an explanation for a behaviour
and a justification for it, a distinction that lies at the heart of contemporary
Darwinian theories of human nature. Evolutionary psychologists rightly argue
that an explanation for, say, male promiscuity is not necessarily a justification
for it. The question of whether a behaviour is right or wrong is distinct
from the question of how it comes about.
But for what kind of being does it make sense to make such a distinction?
Certainly, not for the kind of being that is a non-human animal. In medieval
Europe, pigs and cats were put on trial for murder. Today we recognise this
as absurd and cruel because non-human animals are not the kinds of creatures
to which such moral values could inhere. They are 'disenchanted' creatures,
in the sense that Max Weber used the word.
Science, Weber said, disenchanted the world. Whereas the prescientific world
viewed the universe as full of purpose and desire, the scientific revolution
transformed nature into an inert, mindless entity. In that sense animals are
machines; not because they are inanimate, nor because ants or apes work like
computers or TVs, but because, like all machines, they lack agency and will.
Humans, however, are not disenchanted creatures. We possess - or, at least,
we believe we possess - purpose and agency, consciousness and will, qualities
that science has expunged from the rest of nature. Uniquely among organisms,
human beings are both objects of nature and subjects that can shape our own
fate. We are biological beings, and under the purview of biological and physical
laws. But we are also reflexive, rational, social beings, able consciously
to exploit those biological and physical laws to our benefit.
Human agency transforms human nature. Human nature is an inherently ambiguous
term. On the one hand, human nature means that which expresses the essence
of being human, what Drawinists would call 'species-typical' behaviour. On
the other, it means that which is constituted by nature; in Darwinian terms,
that which is the product of natural selection.
In non-human animals the two meanings are synonymous. What dogs and bats or
sharks typically do as a species, they do because of natural selection. But
this is not true of humans. The human essence - what we consider to be the
common properties of our humanity - is shaped as much by our history as by
our biology.
The unspoken assumption in discussions at this conference is that universals
are biological. Hence the polarisation between biological universalists and
cultural relativists. Biological universals clearly exist - such as the facial
expressions for emotions, for instance. But universal social forms can also
be the product of social and historical, not biological, development.
The fact that humans are rational, social beings places certain constraints
and creates certain opportunities that can shape the way we think about the
world and organise our collective lives. Being rational we are able to apprehend
the regularities of the objective world and to draw conclusions from them.
Being social creates certain opportunities common to all societies - the possibility
of a division of labour, for instance - and imposes certain universal restrictions
- such as the need for social order. Being both social and rational means
that the common social goals, opportunities and constraints are often tackled
in a similar fashion in different societies.
In 1945 the anthropologist George Murdoch set out a group of items which he
believed occurred in 'every culture known to history or ethnography'. More
recently Derek Brown has updated this with considerably more comprehensive
list. There are two striking features of these lists. First, the banality
of many of the items. Brown's list, for instance, includes such categories
as childhood fear of loud noises, conflict, means of dealing with conflict,
crying, containers, decision making, food preferences, hope, insults, meal
times, play, shelter, liking for sweets, use of string, visiting people, and
so on.
What is also striking about these lists is how many of these universals can
be understood in social or cultural terms. The universal recognition of the
cyclical nature of the seasons, for instance, relies on objective regularities
in the world, the capacity of humans to apprehend such regularities and the
social need for humans to understand such regularities. Creation of regimes
of cleanliness is crucial given that humans live in communities, fear the
spread of disease and have the rational capacity to design ways of avoiding
this. The practice of using personal names becomes important in a species
in which individuals not only have distinct characters but distinct duties
and responsibilities for which they can be held to account.
A second expression of the historicity of the human essence lies in the way
that human nature is often normative. Salman Rushdie has suggested that if
human nature did not exist, then 'the idea of universals - human rights, moral
principles, international law - would have no legitimacy'. In a similar way,
evolutionary psychologists have suggested that revulsion at the practice of
slavery, for instance, is part of human nature because we have a natural aversion
to being humiliated and imprisoned.
For most of human history, though, slavery was regarded as natural as individual
freedom is today. Only in the past two hundred years have we begun to view
the practice with revulsion. We have done so partly because of the political
ideas generated by the Enlightenment, partly because of the changing economic
needs of capitalism, and partly because of the social struggles of the enslaved
and the oppressed. Certainly, today we view opposition to slavery as an essential
aspect of our humanity, and see those who advocate slavery as in some way
inhuman - but it's a belief that we have arrived at historically, not naturally.
To understand human values such as the belief in equal worth we need to explore
not so much human psychology as human history. Human universals are not just
given by nature, they are also constituted in history.
A final illustration of the historicity of the human essence lies, paradoxically,
in the universality of great art. Many thinkers from George Steiner to EO
Wilson have suggest that great artists such as Dante, Shakespeare or Beethoven
are appreciated across cultures and over time because their work taps into
the universal features of human nature. That's why Shakespeare is appreciated
in 21st century Japan as much as it was in 17th century England.
Shakespeare, however, did not simply articulate universal themes of love,
lust and power; he also helped fashion a new vision of what it is to be human.
Shakespeare's characters speak to us in a different way because, unlike previous
literary figures, they possess a self-consciousness as we possess self-consciousness.
Shakespeare was not alone in developing a new language through which to understand
our emotions and feelings. The kind of sensibility that Shakespeare brought
to the stage, his near-contemporaries Rembrandt and Vermeer worked into a
canvas. Rembrandt is regarded as the first, perhaps the greatest, of all self-portraitists
because when we view his paintings we come face to face, for the first time
in history, with a person, a self. In a similar way, Vermeer's paintings reveals
the new eyes through which painters now viewed their subjects as persons.
In Shakespeare, Rembrandt and Vermeer we can see the beginnings of the development
of the modern sense of subjectivity, and of the individual as a rational agent.
Human emotions may be furnished by evolution, but the self that possesses
those emotions was forged in the furnace of history. That's because, today,
whether we live in Britain or in Japan, we are able to recognise in his characters
the workings of our own self. It is contingent because this concept of the
self was not given by nature but made in history.
Human nature, then, can only be understood in the context of human agency
and the human capacity for making history. Existing as we do not just as natural
objects but also as social subjects, we have the ability to transform our
natures and our world, an ability denied to any other physical being. All
animals have an evolutionary past. Only humans make history.
There is, however, a widespread reluctance today to acknowledge this idea
of humans as transformative beings. A reluctance common to both sides of the
debate about the relationship between human nature and human values.
On the one hand, postmodern, postfoundationalist thinkers, view human beings,
in words of social theorist Rom Harre 'not [as] natural objects but [as] cultural
artefacts'. For such thinkers, there can be no such thing as a human essence,
nor the possibility of universal values. Values are created not by human nature
but by the nature of particular cultural circumstance. Culture and language
imprison human beings and limit the possibilities of agency and of social
transformation. As Richard Rorty - who would not accept the idea that humans
are merely artefacts - nevertheless puts it, there can be 'no such thing as
getting outside the web which constitutes oneself, looking down upon it and
deciding in favour of one portion of it rather than another'. There is no
possibility of transcending our immediate circumstances, so no ways of acting
or possibilities of social change meaningful to all.
On the other side of the debate, human properties and powers are seen as arising
from our natural constitution and hence to be understood in the same way as
the properties and powers of any natural being. 'Humans think they are free,
conscious beings', the philosopher John Gray has written, 'but in truth they
are deluded animals'. Morality is a 'sickness', freedom an 'illusion' and
the self a 'chimera'. 'Those who struggle to change the world', Gray suggests,
are merely seeking 'consolation for a truth they are too weak to bear'.
Few would revel in this kind of evolutionary misanthropy. But many accept
that science has transformed the political landscape. So, Steven Pinker has
argued that 'biological facts are beginning to box in plausible political
philosophies' and that 'the new sciences of human nature really do resonate
with assumptions that historically were closer to the right than to the left'.
But it's not the science of human nature that has undermined the political
project of social transformation. Rather the political disillusionment with
the possibilities of such transformation has given credibility to certain
interpretations of what science tells us about human nature.
The barbarous history of the twentieth century has left many people disillusioned
about what it means to be human. 'For the first time since 1750', Michael
Ignatieff observes, 'people experience history not running forwards, from
savagery to civilisation, but backwards to barbarism'. The result has been
a growth of anti-humanism, of despair about human capacities, a view of human
reason as a force for destruction rather than for betterment.
There has been increased acceptance of the idea that we should limit our political
horizons, that we should look to manage rather than to overcome problems,
and that we should look to science to explain why we cannot do certain things
rather than to politics to see how we can.
What unites postmodern relativists and more naturalistically-inclined thinkers
is a common distrust of the human subject, and hence a degraded view of human
agency.
The kind of creature that we are certainly shapes the ways in which we act.
But the ways in which we act helps transform the kind of creatures that we
are - or aspire to be. Today, the impoverishment of our political lives, and
the constraints this places on the possibilities of social action, has inevitably
led to an impoverished view of what it is to be human.