Is Another Human Nature Necessary

Over the years, eager young women and men entered this course with unabashed enthusiasm. They were about to receive the “Keys to the Kingdom” of a brighter future. They would become the apostles of a new age. But during the semester, I watched as their shoulders gradually began to sag under the burden of so many seemingly intractable problems: global population growth, resource depletion, pollution, and the escalation of militarism, of exploitation, of disease, and of corruption. It also became clear to them that the Endless Frontier of Science and Technology – so highly touted by Vannevar Bush and others after World War II as the saviour of humankind – was unlikely to be the ultimate answer. At the end of the semester, they would say things like – “Well, I guess I’m glad I know all this but I kinda wish I didn’t.” Or, “Well, you’ve given us the problems but none of the solutions.”’ Most puzzling of all was the oft-repeated, and hopeless phrase – “Well, you can’t change human nature.”

After hearing that repeated semester after semester, I began asking myself what, exactly, is this human nature that they believe cannot be changed? Slowly, I began to perceive that almost all modern Western political, economic, and social philosophy rests on a stereotypical image of “human nature”, based on hugely derivative, enormously simplified interpretations of Darwin’s evolutionary thinking, interpretations that turned his cautious phrase “survival of the fittest” into a blood-and-guts, winner-take-all, free-for-all war among groups of human beings. This latter interpretation perfectly fitted the needs of late 19th and early 20th century social scientists. As noted by Joan Robinson, a humanist economist from the circle of John Maynard Keynes, the notion of “competitive individualism” as an intrinsic attribute of human nature perfectly suited their theories of how political-economies “naturally” functioned. And of course, over the past few centuries when this idea was being incorporated into daily institutions, it created a history that further “proved” the truth of the matter. Among today’s Western capitalist democracies – and especially in the United States – this theory has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and is being imposed, economically and militarily, on the rest of humanity. No wonder our students felt so helpless about the future! The inevitability of a nasty, competitive, selfish human nature was held up to them in every class in the humanities and social sciences that they encountered – from philosophy and history to political-economy and courses in business (about half of them, at the time, were business majors!) Indeed, they were being taught that if they, themselves, wanted to survive in the modern world, they had to outcompete their friends and neighbors. And courses in biology did little to correct this image as they presented in truncated form, Darwin’s ideas about evolution. The scientific analysis of the evolution of human nature has all but ignored how the emergence of culture influenced human adaptiveness. It overlooks the psychological propensities that our increasing need, as individuals, for belonging to a functional group implanted in our evolving brains. Today, I would argue we have fractured the “scriptures” Darwin left us – by rewriting evolution in terms of Western economic theories of “scarcity” and “efficiency”, and assuming that this image is the true one, embedded in us.
This falsely simplified image of human nature has led us to create psychologically unsatisfactory societies that fail to fulfill our deepest human needs. Thus we are led to (1) ignore important universal qualities of human nature that are significant for our species’ adaptability and survival, and (2) to misunderstand the causes of our social dis-eases.

What is needed, then, is not an attempt to change human nature, but rather to better understand it. Once we do that, we begin to see that we have reason for Optimism, after all. I begin with a list of the three, very broad psychological propensities – or fundamental, emotionally-guided “drives” – that all humans strive to fulfill. These all have to do with living successfully in social groups.

The first propensity is for belonging – for being accepted within a group, from helpless infancy onward. Human survival depends on being accepted, being attached to others. The second propensity is for autonomy – for being free to discover, explore, and learn via self-motivated, first-hand experience, how to do things, to solve problems and discover the connectedness of things. It is essential to the full development of all of our life skills. The third propensity, which emerges out of our highly developed levels of self-consciousness, is for meaning – for making sense of our world, not only for practical survival purposes, but for existential reasons: “what is the purpose of all that is?” This last requirement is one that we naturally come to share with the group we belong to, and it thus becomes our culture’s “world story”, incorporating not only practical information and codes of behavior toward one another and the world on which we depend, but also an all important sense of “meaningfulness” in life. During human evolution, cultures evolved around the planet, each inventing and encoding its own shared “story”. And these stories changed – they “adapted” over time to meet changing circumstances – they, too, “evolved.” And, as we know, from time to time, cultures failed to adapt, and went extinct, sometimes without leaving any descendents.

Because these three propensities are so crucial to our individual survival, they are profoundly protected by our emotions. Thus, being rejected by a group is about the worst thing that can happen to a person. It creates a surge of emotion – a combination of fear, anger, hurt, shame - all of them a threat to one’s survival. Anger or depression are the consequences and social dis-ease results. But being coerced by a group, especially in physical ways that inhibit creative exploration and freedom of action also raises a negative emotional response, with similar consequences: anger and resistance, or depression and fear. Finally, threats to personal – and even more to shared - systems of meaning raise similar kinds of fear and anguish.

A little reflection reveals that these three propensities do not easily fit all together in a single cultural story. So we find that some cultures emphasize “freedom” at the expense of social integrity and shared meaning (something that the United States and some other societies suffer from). Others, anxious to preserve social harmony, tend to limit individual freedom and become burdensome. And, with respect to shared systems of meaning, wherein the rules of social behavior are also to be found, we discover that some are extremely rigid, and therefore do not adapt easily to changing circumstances (overly “conservative” cultures, where shared beliefs have been turned into eternally true “sacred” stories), and others are so “free” and relaxed as to fail to be able to coordinate themselves when the need to change is encountered.

There is not space here to provide examples of all these variations, but the reader will soon realize that there is never going to be one “best” kind of society in the world that will perfectly balance all of our human psychological needs and at the same time will allow us to live in harmony with our nurturing planet and all our fellow creatures. Such an awareness at first seems like an affront to our image of ourselves as the “ultimate” evolutionary form of life. How can we be so flawed? so poorly constructed? so unfinished?

But this, of course, is the nature of all life, from lowest to highest. Indeed, it is the nature of the whole universe. Nothing is ever “finished” – everything is evolving. And, what we in the West ignore more than almost all other cultures that preceded our “Modernity”, is that everything in the universe is connected with everything else. There really are no precise boundaries – no lines in the sand – no disconnections – between any parts of the whole. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Of course, for us humans to think at all, we need to organize our experience of the world into compartments – the metaphors that we live by, the stories we tell, as aids to making sense of all that we experience and all that we need to remember.

Our task for the future, then, is not to try to “reinvent” our biological selves, which we cannot do, but to continue to question the assumptions on which our current stories about ourselves rest. This means, very often, opening up to questioning some of our most sacred and cherished beliefs. Because, as I’ve noted above, these beliefs tend to be defended fiercely by our emotional selves, since they form a large part of our self-identity, this exploration must be done with gentleness and understanding and compassion. For this purpose, I would suggest, we are not likely to make much progress relying on many of the several dominant social institutions for change that are in use today. In particular, attempts to impose an already rigid set of principles on another group, are certain to fail. Historically, the old colonial systems eventually crumbled, from Rome to the 20th century, leaving in their wake psychologically devastated societies around the planet. The ideas of Marx (which truly were more suited to meeting human needs than was the West’s exploitative economic and political imperialism) when forcibly imposed, likewise collapsed. In both instances, the loss of autonomy and the destruction of meaning of the original cultures resulted in failure of successful change. This lesson is being once again demonstrated today in Iraq.

The process of social change is a truly sacred undertaking. Given the psychological underpinnings of human nature, it can never be brought about from outside, but only by the will of the people who are being affected. Any group must have communal ownership of the changes that are to affect its future. Just as individual humans need freedom and autonomy, so too do cultural groups. There is a terrible arrogance in any society’s presumption of understanding the needs of human nature better than any other – of “knowing what is best for ‘them’!” It is hard to think of a less pleasant example – other than outright violence--of social decision-making than that exhibited in the recent 2004 United States election. The very meaning of self-governance by the people was absent. Ballot boxes are like the ancient Roman “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” voting in the colosseum: no truly public dialogue: just “yes” or “no”. We Americans clearly have a long way to go before we discover a more inclusive way to generate the dialogue needed for creative and adaptive social change. We are not an appropriate model.

There is a need, during cultural adaptation to changing circumstances, for as many ideas as possible to come together. Thus, it behooves us as a species to institute habits of social interaction that permit such ongoing exchanges of ideas. The best places to start are in small communities, within the everyday institutions which such a community comprises: its schools, religious centers, volunteer associations, panchayets, village wells , markets, town halls and other places where local people come together. These are the most important, because they are the places where many people can meet face-to-face – and do the important tasks of Listening and Talking. The integration of local changes into ever larger circles of relationships should, as much as possible, be carried out in a similar way, such that ordinary people are still the ones representing, in face-to-face forums, their own local values and institutions.

I believe that gradually this kind of Dialogue Model can expand and replace the current World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other similar structures as a center for worldwide decision-making and creation of far more socially just global institutions. At the same time, the autonomy of local communities would be retained, and a generous diversity of different cultural ideas would be flowing constantly back and forth, allowing for far more creativity in human social adaptation than is currently possible. The World Social Forum, which is free of any formal, power-based institutional controls, is an example of what could be possible on a much wider basis. The dialogue circles that I envision might ultimately culminate in a Global Dialogue Council in the United Nations, replacing the current power-based gang of military and economic hegemons in the Security Council as the guiding voice for the General Assembly of national representatives – surely a much-needed improvement!

These ideas I put forth in the belief that they would better serve the psychological needs of human nature around the globe, and provide for an on-going diversity of human cultural understandings, while simultaneously preventing overly rigid, maladaptive societies from arising that could threaten the survival of the species as a whole. Continuous, open dialogue among ordinary people respects the necessary differences our species needs to keep evolving, while maintaining adaptive flexibility overall – and allows all us to benefit from the best solutions, wherever they may originate.

People always ask “how” do we bring about such change? Where do we begin? What is the formula? the process? the Road Map? But, like genetic evolution, social evolution has no Road Map. It “evolves” out of an astronomical number of small events. When people asked the well-known humanist, E.F. Schumacher this same question, he replied to them “start”. They said, “how” and again he repeated, look around you, choose the task, and then, “Just START.” However, I am appending a list of Ten Thoughts for the Universal Fulfillment of Our Shared Human Psychological Needs, that might be useful to ponder at group discussions. Perhaps they will catalyze breakthrough insights as to where, in your local community, there are points of entry into the process of change.