Human Nature- A Lie if I've Ever Heard One

Great Debates
1

In various debates (notebly about communism, but it pops up elsewhere as well) people often bring up “human nature” as an explaination of why something can or cannot work.

I’ve given it some thought, and I don’t believe a word of it. Human nature does not exist in any way that can be used in a debate.

The concept of human nature has been around for a long time, and has been used to justify all sorts of causes. The most effective propaganda is that which makes it’s subject look natural. Human nature has been used as justification for colonialism, slavery, Nazism, subjegation of women, oppression of the poor and a multitude of generally heinous things. It does not surprise me that we still hear human nature being bandied about today.

The truth, I think, is that we cannot seperate ourselves from our material and social world. Environments change enormosly through time and space, and I find it hard to believe that humanity does not change through that as well. For example, a human born in a land where food is scarce with no family group may well believe it is human nature to horde greedily, where a human born in a land of plenty with a close family group would believe that it is human nature to share. A human in an unstimulating environment may believe that boredom and restlessness is human nature, where one in a stimulating environment may believe that stress and laziness is human nature. Whever we look for human nature, we see everything through a strongly tinted lens of the material/social world that we live in. It just isn’t possible for us to step back and be able to point to something and say “this- this is human nature.”

Not that human nature matters much anyway. We have built up socities based on all sorts of things that take far far away from any human nature that may exist. Looking at the difference between the lifestyle of a monk and a monarch (and various other dichotomies) shows that societies can be sustained on the basis of all sorts of thing, and in fact are not slaves to any dubious human nature that my be there.

2

It’s only human nature that you should feel that way.

And it’s only human nature that I should disagree with you.

Does it make more sense now? The point of “human nature” is that it is human nature to not do what is in our best interest, but to do what our own individual hearts believe, even if it seems to be the wrong thing to someone else, and then say “Screw you. I know I’m right.”

Hope this helps.

3

Nice one.

No, I think that ‘human nature’ doesn’t have a rigid fixed definition, but that’s true of a great many things.

So, for example, I don’t think it would be wrong of me to say “It’s human nature to tend to be more concerned with the immediate future, rather than the long-term view”
But I couldn’t replace that bold bit with “Always to be”, because that simply wouldn’t hold true, because sometimes.

4

Hmm, sven, I think I agree. “Human nature” is almost a completely empty term.

5

Well I certainly disagree. Quite what human nature is is still a matter of debate, but there are good reasons to think that there is such a thing and the elements of what makes up human nature are testable. Indeed, that’s what evolutionary psychologists and their friends in hunter gatherer studies do for a crust.

Human nature is a bundle of behavioural proclivities which allowed survival in the environment in which humans originally evolved. I like to think of this as Our brains are made of Pleistocene. Our interpretation of the way the world works, our acquisition of language and our appreciation of visual stimuli are all part of an evolved brain that has specific rather than general functions. There are different “modules” for seeing edges, depth, colour and movement. That they seem to us to come together in a seamless whole leads us to think that we have a general visual sense, but each of these modules has been observed to fail.

Similarly our various behavioural tendancies mesh to form (in normal individuals) a single coherent decision-making entity. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t made up of separate, context-sensitive blocks. I would argue that people have some tendancy to grab stuff for themselves and some tendancy to cooperate and that these are deployed according to circumstance in ways that would have maximised inclusive fitness in the environment in which humans first evolved. Evidence for this would come from observing Neolithic humans doing the same sorts of things in similar circumstances. One of my favorite stories in this area is from an anthropologist who studied a stone age tribe of hunters. They had a society based on sharing the proceeds of hunting. A hunter approached the anthropologist with a piece of meat he intended to hide from the others to keep for himself. The anthropoligist was surprised and said to the hunter that he didn’t think his people did that sort of thing. The hunter told him that he’d never had anywhere to hide the stuff before.

And this brings us to the question of environment. That people behave differently under different circumstances is beyond question. But that doesn’t mean there’s no human nature, just that behaviour is context-sensitive. Put people in a situation where cooperation will payoff and opportunism will get you killed and they’ll cooperate. But if you continue this situation for a few generations then reintroduce gains from opportunism, it will quickly reemerge. You will not have conditioned cooperation on a clean slate.

This is irrelevant. Whether there is such a thing as human nature is a question of fact. That someone has used it as an excuse for bad behaviour at some time is neither here nor there. But it is an important input into any social or economic policy we might like to pursue for good purposes.

No, these different societies draw on different aspects of human nature. And some may be better than others. But if a vision of a good society is one that ignores a tendancy shown by people over thousands of years (like the fact that people prefer their kin to strangers or sometimes act for personal benefit to the detriment of others) then it’s not going to be sustainable.

I’d recommend Stephen Pinker’s How the Mind Works on this topic.

6

I thought about mentioning this part in my earlier post. I agree with hawthorne on this that you can’t discount something just because its applications, the evidence of it, or its effects may be ambivalent.

Sunshine makes the plants grow and also causes cancer. Does this mean that sunshine does not exist? Clearly, the answer is no.

7

Well, we certainly are biological creatures, there is little doubt in my mind of that. I think sven is leaning more toward the evaluation of “man’s proper role” or “behavior” or “place” as drawn out by one’s perception of what “human nature” is. I don’t think they are talking biology.

It is certainly easy to fall back on physiology to make a case for human nature. That human nature, then, will have a difficult time reasoning about what good it serves social systems; the only application I can think of is an extention of animal training.

To what end does this distinguish us as “humans”? Such a broad statement could well apply, IMO, as a biological imperative for all life. In fact, it serves to work as a very general case for the interaction of all similar life forms.

Which says more about environment being the key factor, not some nebulous “human nature.” (dunno if you read my “commie” thread, but I feel man does have a specific nature; that nature, however, is so general and vague that we cannot derive that any particular situation ‘fits’ man’s nature)

From which perspective are you making this assessment? If the only time we hear “human nature” it is in response to justifying behavior that no other construct will, it certianly does seem to be a meaningless term (when applied to some appeal to absolute nature of creatures).

Forgive me for saying so, h, but you seem to be supporting sven more than anything. This whole post has been about how human nature can mean many things at many times; sven seems to say that anything which changes meaning so often is not a useful appeal to make when making assertions about morality, ethics, or what-have-you.

Well, true, but this isn’t any different from saying, “Man, as a mammal, has certain behavioral traits.” There is little behavior that is peculiar to man in some a priori fashion. I get the feeling you are espousing what I would paraphrase as “Lamarckian Consciousness;” that is, “human nature” is present always, but is only triggered by the environment. Is this a fair analogy? (note, of course, that whatever Lamarck’s work was worth in biology doesn’t necessarily make any analogies based off it bunk; on the contrary, I think the idea is rather powerful).

I think we may “piece together” human nature from assorted environmental experiences, but as such it is a somewhat vacant term for any particular cause still. It simply shifts the argument off of “what is right for man to do” onto “this is the environment we exist in and so we have no choice but to” which, seemingly, defeats the semantics behind “nature” as it refers to a creature’s essence/ qua being (else you wouldn’t have to ‘convince’ anyone of anything, right?).

8

Congratulations, you’re a sociologist! (It’s almost a required belief-in-common in the discipline: ALL human characteristics are “socially constructed”).

Horseshit.

It is human nature to prefer pleasure to pain. You may argue that our definitions of what is pleasurable and what is painful are socially constructed, but beyond a certain point this is not true. You can socially construct and indoctrinate and prosyletize and embed in language and pass along as memes until you’re blue in the face and it will still be true that drenching your hand in 200° F cooking oil is painful, and unpleasantly experienced.

On a more abstract level, it is collective human nature to prefer a range of predictability in individual behavior. (In the absence of same, no social structure can be discerned, since social structure is composed of individual behavior and interaction the same way your chair is composed of molecules and atoms and their interactions). You probably COULD train / behavior-modify / etc one or more individuals so as to significantly modify this preference, but collective groups of people within which such a shift occurred in its indivduals would, in the Darwinian sense, be less likely to survive as social systems. (At the extreme, they would by definition case to exist as social systems).

It is also human nature to seek an environment characterized by at least a minimum amount of mutual trust, cooperation, and safety. Again, there is a wide range of flexibility in what an individual can be trained to, but any social system in which a large shift in the overall population regarding this preference were to occur would be at risk of failing to remain intact AS a social system, and, again, at the extremes would be by definition a non-system.

You can built from there, and theorists do, but of course agreement diverges rapidly as you move farther and farther from the basics. Nevertheless, it isn’t a useless concept, any more than “the general welfare” is useless.

9

I believe I’m more with hawthorne on this one. From the research I’ve read one universal tendency among humans is self/group interest.

In other words humans tend to be most concerned with their personal wellbeing first, then the wellbeing of people who are close to them, then people who are less close, then strangers, etc. And the reason why humans behave this way? Humans tend to categorize things and people in order to more easily process them and adapt to their environment. People that we encounter are “grouped” just as easily as new experiences and things we experience. It’s why we identify most strongly with people more similar rather than dissimilar to ourselves.

Let’s say we take a look at an average person named Joe, who is a lifelong resident of Kansas. Joe has red hair, is a Dodger’s fan, is homosexual, and enjoys historical novels. Joe first and foremost strongly identifies with himself since he’s intimately familiar with his own thoughts, feelings, history, etc. in a way which no one else, no matter how close they are, can come. Secondly Joe is probably pretty close to family and friends, other folks who are pretty familiar with him and his attitudes and who like him. Thirdly Joe probably (whether consciously or unconsciously) identifies with people who are similar to him even if he doesn’t know them. Other people who live in Kansas, other people with red hair, other homosexuals… the more things in common, the more he identifies with that group of people. Joe then probably identifies with people from the states closest to Kansas, then to other Americans, finally to other english speaking foreign peoples (British, Canadians, Australians, etc.). So on and so forth. Last on Joe’s list are people far removed geographically, linguistically, and culturally.

This tendency to group people and things and to identify more strongly with people the more similar they are is pretty universal. It’s why we have tribalism. It’s also a major source of the conflicts between groups even when each group has it’s basic needs and desires met.

Let’s examine one of even sven’s hypothetical situations:

What is this land of plenty we’re talking about? Even the most wealthy lands have had income inequality between the richest and poorest. This has been true throughout all of history no matter what time period or political system was in place. Some “lands” have had less of a disparity between the rich and poor but the disparity has always been there. And it always will be. But, for the moment, lets assume that there is such a land… we’ll call it Beakerania.

In Beakerania there is a nano-computer hive mind with an army of nanomachines which ensure absolute economic parity between all citizens (pretty kewl eh?). Are there still differences between it’s citizens? You bet. Some have different skin or hair color, different heights, a variety of accents, some are more attractive, there is a vast range of different intelligence levels, some are famous scholars or scientists, some are great athletes… the list goes on and on. As these differences emerge so does the grouping phenomenon and with it the conflict inherent in all human societies.

It’s human nature.

Grim

10

I both agree and disagree with the OP. The phrase “human nature” seems to me to be little but a shorthand of “something that most people do, most of the time, for good or bad.” It is human nature to enjoy some sort of music. It is human nature to strike back at your attacker. It is human nature to lie.

We can, indeed, hypothesize lots of situations in which “human nature” might be defined differently, but, if things were different, they’d be different. “Human nature” doesn’t apply to small sets of people, only to humanity as a whole.

It is human nature to either praise or ridicule those people who transcend human nature. Monks are an excellent example of this. Strict denial of “the pleasures of the flesh” (or whatnot) does, indeed, transcend human nature. Some folks think monks should be admired, others find them silly.

(The opposite end of sven’s scale, a monarch, is more like “human nature personified,” in that it’s human nature to desire a cushy lifestyle - monarchs appear to get to live the dream.)

Personally, I don’t see how “human nature” could possibly be a justification for the Nazis (etc). That society actually appears to be an example of “bully nature” or “massively evil nature,” neither of which are attributes of the population as a whole. While being a bully does appear to come naturally to some people, “human nature,” once again, doesn’t apply to individuals or small groups.

Actually, as a “justification” for anything, “human nature” is pretty weak. The phrase is shorthand for an observation, not for actions. On the other hand, “communism won’t work because it is human nature to be individualistic” seems like a workable argument for one side of a debate to me.

P.T. Barnum was a gifted student of human nature.