At the heart of any political belief is a vision of the kind of creatures
human beings are. Liberalism, conservatism, Marxism - not only does each embody
a view of what an ideal society should look like, but each also derives that
view from a particular understanding of what human nature is.
For Adam Smith, one of the founders of classical liberalism, humans were rational,
self-contained atoms, each seeking above all to maximise his satisfactions
and minimise his dissatisfactions. The role of government was simply to create
the conditions wherein individuals could best pursue their own selfish interests.
Edmund Burke, the first modern conservative, had a much darker view of human
nature. In his eyes humans were creatures not so much of reason as of instinct,
prejudice and habit. Any social change, he believed, had at best to be slow
and gradual. For Karl Marx, human nature was not fixed but was shaped by the
material conditions of society. To change human nature and human consciousness,
therefore, one had to transform the material conditions of human existence.
All politics, then, is rooted in beliefs about human nature. As the American
writer Henry Adams put it, 'Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and
end of political education.'
But how do changes in our perceptions of human nature shape political beliefs?
This is a particularly important question to ask today as we are living through
what many consider to be a revolution in our understanding of what it is to
be human. For much of the postwar period, human beings were perceived as highly
malleable creatures whose nature was moulded largely by the culture they inhabited.
In the 1950s and 1960s the still-fresh memories of the Holocaust scared away
many scholars from thinking about the biological basis of human nature. As
the highly influential anthropologist Ruth Benedict suggested, 'The vast proportion
of all individuals who are born into any society always assume the behaviour
dictated by that society'.
This view of human beings as blank slates waiting to be moulded by the environment
not only seemed to act as a bulwark against the excesses of Nazism and racial
science but also met with political approval in an age of social planning.
There was a widespread belief that through social engineering one could make
people good or bad, intelligent or stupid.
How different it is today. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the demise of
Marxism and disillusionment with ideas of social engineering have all transformed
visions of what it is to be human. There is increasing acceptance, among academics,
policy makers and the public, that humans are biological beings with a fixed,
unchangeable nature. Darwinian arguments about human nature, far from being
reviled, have become acceptable, even fashionable. Twenty-five years ago sociobiologists
such as EO Wilson were treated with great hostility. Today figures such as
Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Helena Cronin - and indeed Wilson
himself - have become the scientific superstars of our age, as much entertainers
as scientists, writing bestsellers, starring in any number of TV documentaries,
and injecting evolutionary wisdom into all manner of political and cultural
debates, from why Bill Clinton shared a cigar with Monica Lewinsky to whether
it is morally proper for women to have toyboys as partners.
What are the political consequences of this changing view of human nature?
The blank slate view gave credibility to the kinds of programmes of social
engineering that were fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s. What kinds of political
policies are favoured by the new Darwinian theories of Man? That's the question
I want to investigate in this series of programmes.
First, however, we need to establish what evolutionary psychologists understand
about human nature. At the heart of their argument is the belief that the
human mind, like the human body, has been designed by natural selection through
the process of evolution. Natural selection favours physical traits and mental
abilities that allow the individuals who possess those traits and abilities
better to survive and reproduce. Because such individuals survive and reproduce
better than others, so these particular capacities get passed on to the next
generation. In this way animals evolve and their characteristics change, better
suiting them to their environment.
Evolutionary psychologists argue that the human mind was designed in exactly
this fashion. Our desires, intuitions, and forms of reasoning - the way we
fall in love, the importance we attach to our families, our willingness to
help out a neighbour, our ability to pick out a face in a crowd, men's obsession
with sports - have all been designed with one thing in mind: to help spread
our genes more efficiently by coping with the kinds of problems humans habitually
face in their environment. Not, however, the environment in which we now live
but rather the environment in which our ancestors used to live. For most of
our history humans were hunter-gatherers. The mind has been designed not to
solve the kinds of problems with which we are faced today but the kinds of
problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. It is designed, therefore,
not to bring peace to the Balkans, or to unravel the human genome - nor indeed
to make radio programmes about politics and human nature - but to hunt mammoths,
build shelters and find a mate.
Postwar academics and politicians saw humans as immensely flexible. Contemporary
evolutionary psychology views human nature as fixed, and moreover as fixed
in the Stone Age. Modern humans are, in effect, Stone Age beings living in
a space age world.
Evolutionary thinkers argue that all social policy must take into account
the constraints created by our evolved psychology. This is how Helena Cronin
and Oliver Curry, both of the London School of Economics, put it in a paper
on family policy:
A realistic understanding of our motivations and desires is vital for changing people's behaviours. Darwinian theory provides this understanding: human nature is fixed but we are designed by natural selection to respond appropriately to the ever-shifting sands of social conditions. Thus the task for the policy-maker is to work out which aspects of our environment need to be altered in order to achieve the desired ends.
The argument runs something like this. Human nature is fixed but human behaviour
is flexible. That's because our fixed nature responds in different ways to
different environments. Put a group of humans in environment A, they are likely
to exhibit behaviour X; in environment B, behaviour Y; in environment C, behaviour
Z. And so on. A particular environment will always elicit a particular response.
If policy makers want people to behave in certain ways - if they want, for
instance, to reduce anti-social behaviour or to ensure that husbands do not
desert their families - then they must use their knowledge of evolved human
psychology to create social environments that constrain behaviour in the desired
fashion.
In a sense, then, evolutionary psychologists are promoting a form of social
engineering little different from that advocated by postwar social scientists
except that they view human nature as fixed, not pliable. The problem with
postwar social policy, they believe, was not the attempt at social engineering
as such, but the failure of to heed the structures of human nature.
They also believe that the fixed character of human nature reveals why certain
types of societies work and other do not. According to the writer Matt Ridley,
communism failed because it attempted to frustrate the basic human instinct
to put family above others. Marx, he writes, 'designed a social system that
would only have worked if we were angels; it failed because we were beasts'.
Ridley concludes that 'Universal benevolence evaporates on the stove of human
nature.'
Evolution reveals why governments are bad and markets are good. 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 moral of his evolutionary story is that
governments should stop meddling in our lives: 'If we are to build back into
society the virtues that made it work for us, it is vital we reduce the power
and scope of the state.'
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.
The celebrated American commentator Francis Fukuyama stands somewhere in between
the free market views of Ridley and the socialist ideas of Singer. Like Ridley,
he wants to dispense with government as far as is possible; like Singer he
pines for greater civic virtue. In his book The Great Disruption, Fukuyama
bemoans the destruction of social life brought about by the break-up of the
postwar order. The transition from an industrial to an information society,
he believes, has led to increased crime and social disorder, the decline of
the family, a collapse of trust and confidence in social institutions and
the weakening of social bonds and common values. The solution to these problems,
he argues, lies as much in human nature as in social policy:
Human beings by nature are social creatures with certain built-in, natural capacities for solving problems of social co-operation and inventing moral rules to constrain individual choice. They will, 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. How
convenient that on the African savannah of 100 000 years ago we should find
the tools to remake the politics of today. And how even more convenient that
these tools should match exactly one's own political inclinations. Over here
we find evidence that humans are, by nature, freetraders, over there that
they are naturally inclined to fairness, and round the corner we find that
stitched into their souls are the necessary means to heal the great disruption.
Evolution allows us to dream it all. And that's the problem. 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? The fact that we don't suggests an uncertainty
about politics and a newfound respect for nature. We live in an age in which
many people have become disillusioned with reason and politics as agencies
of change. An age in which human activity is often disparaged as the cause,
not of progress, but of destruction - from global warming to ethnic cleansing.
An age in which in almost every aspect of life - from health treatments to
energy sources to the food on our table - the 'natural' is regarded as morally
superior to the artificial, or the humanly-created.
Against this background, it makes sense for politicians and writers to appeal
to our natural as opposed to our political instincts. An entreaty to nature
short-circuits the need for rational political debate - you can no more debate
with Nature than you can with God. An appeal to human nature, like an appeal
to God, is to invoke a seemingly independent arbiter to sort out our affairs.
Humans no longer have to take responsibility; God or Nature will.
The young Bob Dylan once satirised the belief that religion can tell humans
how to act. Whatever politicians did, he sang, they always discovered that
they did it with 'God on their Side'. In politics, Nature is a bit like God:
somehow, it always seems to be on your side.