Some days it seems as if the entire species is one seething mass of unexamined assumptions.
When we aren’t paying attention, we all tend to behave as if it’s possible for human beings to be …something other than human beings. We’d all be happy, healthy and morally upright if gender inequities were eliminated, true democracy instituted, the word of God made law, tribal lifestyles revived, corporations outlawed, breastfeeding banned in public—pick any utopian notion.
But would we? Can elephants be something other than elephants? Lizards, pigeons, luna moths something not envisioned in their respective genetic encoding? Is homo sapiens so different from other members of the Gaian family? What evidence supports this unexamined assumption?
Steven Pinker raises this question in The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature. He insists that there is such a thing as “human nature” and that human behavior tends to fall within certain recognizable parameters. In fact recent decades have seen quite a lot of research and speculation about what these givens might be and how immutable they are.
Our continued existence as a species now depends on our willingness to examine our own determinants, to understand and accept who we are. We must hope that amongst our basic instincts are some which can lead us away from self-destruction.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
People quibble all the time about what it means to be 'human', with no signs of stopping the debate any time soon, and oftentimes their quibbles grow out of culturally conditioned expectations.
The problem inherent in claiming that there are just certain natural behaviors that necessarily engage in is that pretty much anything can be argued to be just a natural behavior. Currently, the trend is to make all 'natural' behavior come down to genetic material (ex: 1, 2, 3, 4), but that is because of the place of genetic science in society (previously much of natural behavior was argued often from the basis of race). This sort of argument collapses the 'genetic' and the 'natural' into one category which may or may not be disingenuous and certainly shouldn't be overlooked, as it is itself an assumption. Argumentatively, 'natural' carries normative weight while 'genetic' carries an aura scientific surety.
I am sure there is a point to all that.
Yes, and a pretty good one. My point is that there is an accumulating body of evidence about human behavioral patterns which tend to be consistent across a majority of cultures. Ultimately many of those patterns stem from "genetics," yeah— although I prefer the term "hard-wiring," it's more vague— but I think we are a long way from being able to delineate the path from cause(s) to effect.
We still need to recognize that there are such causes. It makes no sense, for example, to work toward a culture in which human individuals are isolated from others. And yet, that is the general direction of current western— increasingly global— culture. We are fundamentally social animals and no society can be successful which does not recognize and accommodate that characteristic.
I feel another graphic coming on...
Post a Comment