About human goodness...
08/09/08 13:57 Filed in: Human Nature | Philosophy
When I started to write about human nature, a major theme was whether humans either had the capacity or desire to make positive changes in their social, political, economic and physical worlds. I got badly tripped up on that one and there followed an endless debate about whether human nature is either good or bad. I take responsibility for that since I should have foreseen the interpretation that might have been placed on some of my words!
The arguments are meaningless since human behaviour might be perceived as good, bad, or millions of shades in-between, but that was not the point.
It was about whether humans wished for good in their world, but more than that, whether they had a desire, either individually or collectively, for better lives and consequently a better world. I concede in advance that “better” may mean different things to different people and social groups. To want other than better, or to want worse, would be pathological, if not psychopathic, and I don’t believe that the majority of humankind are pathological or psychopaths either.
Even those who are psychopaths frequently will offer altruistic and positive rationales for their psychopathic behaviour. Hitler started his invasion of other countries and his genocide of the Jews, and persecution of other social groups, such as homosexuals (the rationale for which came from psychiatrists among others) saying that he was acting in the cause of social good.
I believe that people do have an underlying desire for a better life. To suggest that people might desire worse lives, more killing, more wars, environmental damage that may threaten their survival, and the chance that their families, friends or children might die as a result of such eventualities would be completely pathological.
For any who say that there might be no worse or better, that things may remain the same; nothing ever remains in the same state, it will be better or worse.
The mighty military machine, political groups, trans- and multi-national corporations, the greedy and coercive may tell us that they too are acting in our best interests. They might deploy the media as a mass force for our conditioning; for stupefying and stultifying our powers of perception, feeling and thought; dumbing us down and numbing our ability to recognise that a naked emperor does not, in fact, wear any clothes!
But we too have the power to discriminate, to differentiate between truth and lies, to know that our happiness may not lie in more and more consumption to keep the rich, powerful and rich…to know that killing people is as undesirable as being killed, that wars risk the lives of our children and young people, that caring for our environment is as fundamentally important as caring for ourselves.
So I will write on about positive social change, as I believe that most people want and desire it. I do recognise that we may be told by the mass media, politicians, power groups and business elites that it is neither in our best interests to want it, and that we are impotent in a world that is best left to them to manage and control. I believe otherwise. I doubt if any mass media will be inviting me to express my views. So I’ll keep writing here…
The arguments are meaningless since human behaviour might be perceived as good, bad, or millions of shades in-between, but that was not the point.
It was about whether humans wished for good in their world, but more than that, whether they had a desire, either individually or collectively, for better lives and consequently a better world. I concede in advance that “better” may mean different things to different people and social groups. To want other than better, or to want worse, would be pathological, if not psychopathic, and I don’t believe that the majority of humankind are pathological or psychopaths either.
Even those who are psychopaths frequently will offer altruistic and positive rationales for their psychopathic behaviour. Hitler started his invasion of other countries and his genocide of the Jews, and persecution of other social groups, such as homosexuals (the rationale for which came from psychiatrists among others) saying that he was acting in the cause of social good.
I believe that people do have an underlying desire for a better life. To suggest that people might desire worse lives, more killing, more wars, environmental damage that may threaten their survival, and the chance that their families, friends or children might die as a result of such eventualities would be completely pathological.
For any who say that there might be no worse or better, that things may remain the same; nothing ever remains in the same state, it will be better or worse.
The mighty military machine, political groups, trans- and multi-national corporations, the greedy and coercive may tell us that they too are acting in our best interests. They might deploy the media as a mass force for our conditioning; for stupefying and stultifying our powers of perception, feeling and thought; dumbing us down and numbing our ability to recognise that a naked emperor does not, in fact, wear any clothes!
But we too have the power to discriminate, to differentiate between truth and lies, to know that our happiness may not lie in more and more consumption to keep the rich, powerful and rich…to know that killing people is as undesirable as being killed, that wars risk the lives of our children and young people, that caring for our environment is as fundamentally important as caring for ourselves.
So I will write on about positive social change, as I believe that most people want and desire it. I do recognise that we may be told by the mass media, politicians, power groups and business elites that it is neither in our best interests to want it, and that we are impotent in a world that is best left to them to manage and control. I believe otherwise. I doubt if any mass media will be inviting me to express my views. So I’ll keep writing here…
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On human nature - Part 2
04/09/08 17:48 Filed in: Human Nature | Philosophy
There’s been a healthy debate raging down in the comments section of my earlier posts that has been getting fiery and passionate. All sorts of things have been rearing their heads down there from behavioural genetics to biopsychology, philosophical dualism, moral dichotomies, nihilism, post-modernism and debates about the nature of the question itself.
We’ve been going all over the place!
One argument went that the manifestation, complexity and multiplicity of human differences suggests that there can be no basis for suggesting any universal, underlying trait of goodness within human nature.
The word “goodness” has been a very emotive term! The word did not have to be “goodness”. It could have been several words like a “desire for a better life”. I preferred those words, since it’s easier to describe what underlying traits might represent “a better life” (for us all) than it is to say what goodness is.
The problem I had with this idea was that if I accepted it, I would slide into some black hole of moral nihilism, and I don’t want to go there, nor does anyone else I have ever known.
What is even more frightening to me is that it’s exactly this nihilistic view of humankind that supports religions everywhere…that we are all "sinners" who need to be "saved" from ourselves.
I strongly identify with the view of life that Chomsky expounds: one where I might feel autonomy, freedom, and work with others in voluntary association and without oppression, which means without economic repression too.
How do you feel? Do you not want that? Would anyone who understood what it meant not want it too?
On the point of religions, I believe that humans at a certain stage of their development took parables of wisdom and turned them into religions. Why? Because they didn’t have TV and stories by word-of-mouth were the way they communicated wisdom. Why? Because they desired and craved the goodness or the better life these stories talked about. The stories are totally unbelievable, yet men and women wanted what they promised so badly they reified them as objects of worship. They still do.
Religions of one sort or another have covered our entire planet, even in the most primitive societies, where they have worshipped totems or the elements. I don’t want to get into religious debate here. But the underlying attraction of religion, I would argue, is humankind’s overwhelming desire for a better life. Thus, I believe that desire to be an innate trait of human nature common to many throughout the world, and not simply part of western culture.
More soon...
We’ve been going all over the place!
One argument went that the manifestation, complexity and multiplicity of human differences suggests that there can be no basis for suggesting any universal, underlying trait of goodness within human nature.
The word “goodness” has been a very emotive term! The word did not have to be “goodness”. It could have been several words like a “desire for a better life”. I preferred those words, since it’s easier to describe what underlying traits might represent “a better life” (for us all) than it is to say what goodness is.
The problem I had with this idea was that if I accepted it, I would slide into some black hole of moral nihilism, and I don’t want to go there, nor does anyone else I have ever known.
What is even more frightening to me is that it’s exactly this nihilistic view of humankind that supports religions everywhere…that we are all "sinners" who need to be "saved" from ourselves.
I strongly identify with the view of life that Chomsky expounds: one where I might feel autonomy, freedom, and work with others in voluntary association and without oppression, which means without economic repression too.
How do you feel? Do you not want that? Would anyone who understood what it meant not want it too?
On the point of religions, I believe that humans at a certain stage of their development took parables of wisdom and turned them into religions. Why? Because they didn’t have TV and stories by word-of-mouth were the way they communicated wisdom. Why? Because they desired and craved the goodness or the better life these stories talked about. The stories are totally unbelievable, yet men and women wanted what they promised so badly they reified them as objects of worship. They still do.
Religions of one sort or another have covered our entire planet, even in the most primitive societies, where they have worshipped totems or the elements. I don’t want to get into religious debate here. But the underlying attraction of religion, I would argue, is humankind’s overwhelming desire for a better life. Thus, I believe that desire to be an innate trait of human nature common to many throughout the world, and not simply part of western culture.
More soon...
On human nature...
03/09/08 21:02 Filed in: Philosophy | Human Nature
I'm going to give my words a rest now. What follows are some extracts from an interview with Noam Chomsky on human nature, many of whose views I respect.
I like it, since it engages the debate on my last post, and provides a bridge between my ideas and those of Melinda whose views I also respect.
In the meantime, I'm going to put my thinking cap on and try and work out where I go from here!
This interview is Copyright © 2006 Noam Chomsky
QUESTION: You have argued that any stance one takes on political, economic, social or even personal issues is ultimately based on some conception of human nature. Why is this?
CHOMSKY: Any stance we take is based on some conception of what is good for people. This conception will tacitly presuppose a certain belief as to the constitution of human nature -- human needs and human potential. You might as well bring them out as clearly as possible so that they can be discussed.
QUESTION: According to your view of human nature, all human beings possess certain biological functions endowing them with common mental capacities. How do you defend this position against postmodernist critics who argue that there is no such thing as human nature, and that all attempts to define it are guilty of reading other cultures in the light of Western perceptions and values?
CHOMSKY: Not even the most extreme postmodernist can seriously argue that there is no such thing as human nature. They may argue that the exact properties of human nature are difficult to substantiate -- this is certainly correct. However, it is impossible to coherently argue that an intrinsic, universal human nature does not exist. This amounts to the belief that the next human zygote conceived might just as well develop into a worm or a crab as a human being. Postmodernists might limit their assertion to denying any effect of human nature on our mental make-up -- our values, our knowledge, our wants, etc. This also makes no sense. The postmodernist will argue that a child growing up in New York will develop a certain way of thinking, and if that child had grown up amongst Amazon tribespeople she would have developed a completely different way of thinking. This is true. But we must then ask how a child could develop these different consciousnesses. In whatever environment it finds itself, the child will mentally construct a rich and complex culture on the basis of the extremely scattered and limited phenomena it is exposed to. That consideration tells us (in advance of any detailed knowledge) that there must be an extraordinary directive and organisational component to the mind that is internal. We can begin to see human nature in terms of certain capacities to develop certain mental traits. I think we can go further than this and begin to discover universal aspects of these mental traits which are determined by human nature. I think we can find this in the area of morality. For example, not long ago I talked to people in Amazon tribes and I took it for granted that they have the same conception of vice and virtue as I do. It is only through sharing these values that we were able to interact -- talking about real problems such as being forced out of the jungle by the state authorities. I believe I was correct to assume this: we had no problem communicating although we were as remote as is possible culturally.
QUESTION: Are you suggesting everyone agrees about the nature of vice and virtue?
CHOMSKY: In fact I think they probably have a very high measure of agreement. One strong bit of evidence for this is that everyone -- a Genghis Khan, Himmler, Bill Gates -- creates stories of themselves where they interpret their actions as working for the benefit of human beings. Even at the extreme levels of depravity, the Nazis did not boast that they wanted to kill Jews, but gave crazed justifications -- even that they were acting in 'self-defence'. It is very rare for people to justify their actions by saying 'I'm doing this to maximise my own benefit and I don't care what happens to anybody else'. That would be pathological.
QUESTION: Most people certainly try to offer moral justifications for what they do. But there is also enormous diversity in what they do, and defend as right to do.
CHOMSKY: And there is a lot of variation in people's size. Take a walk through a museum where they have the armour from medieval knights and just look at the size of them: you could barely put a child into that armour. We have the same genes today as people did then, but we are very different because there have been radical changes in diet. This is characteristic of every aspect of organic development. Hence we should not be in the least surprised to discover that it is also characteristic of our social nature, our moral positions and so on. We are biological creatures.
QUESTION: But I think you would agree that not all cultures are equally viable from the standpoint of promoting human fulfilment and wellbeing? Are you wanting to argue that your understanding of human nature can give us a kind of objective understanding of the conditions of human flourishing?
CHOMSKY: Now we're taking an essentialist position which the relativist would contradict. I'm not willing to go that far. We can develop a stronger conception of human nature through drawing on Enlightenment thinking on the issue. This has support from some of the sciences, but is mainly founded on a philosophical investigation into our hopes, intuition and experience, and an examination of history and cultural variety. There are needs for conditions which allow the flourishing of human capacities. Insights from the Enlightenment show us that people need to exist in free association with others -- not in isolation, and not in relations of domination. There is a need to replace social fetters with social bonds. Therefore any social structure that involves relations of domination -- whether it's the family, a trans-national corporation, gender relations -- has a very heavy burden of proof to bear. It must demonstrate that the benefits it provides outweigh the restrictions it imposes on human capacities. If it can't demonstrate its legitimacy, it should be dismantled.
QUESTION: Right. Can I ask you about your position on the possibility of ecological constraints on the realisation of human needs? Do you think -- even if there were the political will to achieve it -- that it might be impossible, for ecological reasons, to provide the necessary conditions for continued human flourishing?
CHOMSKY: Humans may well be a non-viable organism.
QUESTION: Do you think they are?
CHOMSKY: It's very likely. From an evolutionary point of view, higher intelligence seems to be maladaptive rather than adaptive. Biologically successful organisms have a rigid character and are well adapted to a certain environmental niche. If higher intelligence helped adaptation you would expect it to have arisen over and over again. However, it didn't. It arose in a single, not particularly successful organism, Homo Sapiens. And while the human population exploded, human societies developed in a way that has caused enormous damage to the environment. The human race could destroy itself and much organic life as a result.
QUESTION: Do you think that different social and economic circumstances either block or reinforce certain dispositions -- that, for example, whatever there might be in the way of a natural tendency towards selfish and aggressive behaviour is reinforced by the capitalist market society?
CHOMSKY: There's no doubt about it. Let's take Germany, for example. In the early 20th century Germany was the most advanced area of Western culture -- in music, the arts, science. In the passage of a few years, it entered the absolute depths of human history. Small changes in German society allowed people like Joseph Mengele to flourish rather than people like Einstein and Freud. The market is a radical experiment which violated fundamental human needs and capacities. You can see this in the violent struggles that were required to impose market conditions on people. In the United States, for example, about one sixth of the gross national product, over a trillion dollars per year, is devoted to marketing. Marketing is manipulation and deceit. It tries to turn people into something they aren't -- individuals focused solely on themselves, maximising their consumption of goods that they don't need.
QUESTION: Granted the truth of what you say about our distinctively human capacities for freedom and co-operative action, how come we are so open to that kind of manipulation and deceit? How come we remain both globally and locally so caught up in oppression?
CHOMSKY: It's a serious question. Why are we born free and end up enslaved?
QUESTION: Is there a case here for viewing social factors as more determinant than biological factors?
CHOMSKY: You can't say which factor is more decisive. They interact. Take the example of puberty: small changes in nutrition can modify the onset of puberty by a factor of two, or even terminate it altogether. Or the visual system: in a kitten you can destroy the neural basis for vision simply by not presenting pattern stimulation in the first couple of weeks of its life. However, does this mean that the environment is the decisive force? No. Puberty is a process which human beings undergo at a particular stage of maturation because that's the way they've been designed. You don't undergo puberty because of peer pressure. Likewise, human limbs will not develop into wings rather than arms or legs. The genetic component determines strict limits within which variation is possible. I believe the same is true of our social and mental development.
QUESTION: Your ultimate political goal is anarchistic, the erosion of state institutions and any form of authoritarian control. But you have also recognised the need to defend some forms of state regulation as protection against a wholly unregulated market. Can you say more on how you view this two-edged process of possible political transformation?
CHOMSKY: I'm not in favour of people being in cages. On the other hand I think people ought to be in cages if there's a sabre-toothed tiger wandering around outside and if they go out of the cage the sabre-toothed tiger will kill them. So sometimes there's a justification for cages. That doesn't mean cages are good things. State power is a good example of a necessary cage. There are sabre-toothed tigers outside; they are called trans-national corporations which are among the most tyrannical totalitarian institutions that human society has devised. And there is a cage, namely the state, which to some extent is under popular control. The cage is protecting people from predatory tyrannies so there is a temporary need to maintain the cage, and even to extend the cage.
QUESTION: How do you see the relationship between work and free time in a more liberated society?
CHOMSKY: Polls in the US, Germany and elsewhere have shown that people value free time over material goods. Therefore, there are major propaganda efforts to reverse this. One reason over a trillion dollars a year is spent on marketing in the USA is to try to undermine our natural tendency to want free, liberated time.
I like it, since it engages the debate on my last post, and provides a bridge between my ideas and those of Melinda whose views I also respect.
In the meantime, I'm going to put my thinking cap on and try and work out where I go from here!
This interview is Copyright © 2006 Noam Chomsky
QUESTION: You have argued that any stance one takes on political, economic, social or even personal issues is ultimately based on some conception of human nature. Why is this?
CHOMSKY: Any stance we take is based on some conception of what is good for people. This conception will tacitly presuppose a certain belief as to the constitution of human nature -- human needs and human potential. You might as well bring them out as clearly as possible so that they can be discussed.
QUESTION: According to your view of human nature, all human beings possess certain biological functions endowing them with common mental capacities. How do you defend this position against postmodernist critics who argue that there is no such thing as human nature, and that all attempts to define it are guilty of reading other cultures in the light of Western perceptions and values?
CHOMSKY: Not even the most extreme postmodernist can seriously argue that there is no such thing as human nature. They may argue that the exact properties of human nature are difficult to substantiate -- this is certainly correct. However, it is impossible to coherently argue that an intrinsic, universal human nature does not exist. This amounts to the belief that the next human zygote conceived might just as well develop into a worm or a crab as a human being. Postmodernists might limit their assertion to denying any effect of human nature on our mental make-up -- our values, our knowledge, our wants, etc. This also makes no sense. The postmodernist will argue that a child growing up in New York will develop a certain way of thinking, and if that child had grown up amongst Amazon tribespeople she would have developed a completely different way of thinking. This is true. But we must then ask how a child could develop these different consciousnesses. In whatever environment it finds itself, the child will mentally construct a rich and complex culture on the basis of the extremely scattered and limited phenomena it is exposed to. That consideration tells us (in advance of any detailed knowledge) that there must be an extraordinary directive and organisational component to the mind that is internal. We can begin to see human nature in terms of certain capacities to develop certain mental traits. I think we can go further than this and begin to discover universal aspects of these mental traits which are determined by human nature. I think we can find this in the area of morality. For example, not long ago I talked to people in Amazon tribes and I took it for granted that they have the same conception of vice and virtue as I do. It is only through sharing these values that we were able to interact -- talking about real problems such as being forced out of the jungle by the state authorities. I believe I was correct to assume this: we had no problem communicating although we were as remote as is possible culturally.
QUESTION: Are you suggesting everyone agrees about the nature of vice and virtue?
CHOMSKY: In fact I think they probably have a very high measure of agreement. One strong bit of evidence for this is that everyone -- a Genghis Khan, Himmler, Bill Gates -- creates stories of themselves where they interpret their actions as working for the benefit of human beings. Even at the extreme levels of depravity, the Nazis did not boast that they wanted to kill Jews, but gave crazed justifications -- even that they were acting in 'self-defence'. It is very rare for people to justify their actions by saying 'I'm doing this to maximise my own benefit and I don't care what happens to anybody else'. That would be pathological.
QUESTION: Most people certainly try to offer moral justifications for what they do. But there is also enormous diversity in what they do, and defend as right to do.
CHOMSKY: And there is a lot of variation in people's size. Take a walk through a museum where they have the armour from medieval knights and just look at the size of them: you could barely put a child into that armour. We have the same genes today as people did then, but we are very different because there have been radical changes in diet. This is characteristic of every aspect of organic development. Hence we should not be in the least surprised to discover that it is also characteristic of our social nature, our moral positions and so on. We are biological creatures.
QUESTION: But I think you would agree that not all cultures are equally viable from the standpoint of promoting human fulfilment and wellbeing? Are you wanting to argue that your understanding of human nature can give us a kind of objective understanding of the conditions of human flourishing?
CHOMSKY: Now we're taking an essentialist position which the relativist would contradict. I'm not willing to go that far. We can develop a stronger conception of human nature through drawing on Enlightenment thinking on the issue. This has support from some of the sciences, but is mainly founded on a philosophical investigation into our hopes, intuition and experience, and an examination of history and cultural variety. There are needs for conditions which allow the flourishing of human capacities. Insights from the Enlightenment show us that people need to exist in free association with others -- not in isolation, and not in relations of domination. There is a need to replace social fetters with social bonds. Therefore any social structure that involves relations of domination -- whether it's the family, a trans-national corporation, gender relations -- has a very heavy burden of proof to bear. It must demonstrate that the benefits it provides outweigh the restrictions it imposes on human capacities. If it can't demonstrate its legitimacy, it should be dismantled.
QUESTION: Right. Can I ask you about your position on the possibility of ecological constraints on the realisation of human needs? Do you think -- even if there were the political will to achieve it -- that it might be impossible, for ecological reasons, to provide the necessary conditions for continued human flourishing?
CHOMSKY: Humans may well be a non-viable organism.
QUESTION: Do you think they are?
CHOMSKY: It's very likely. From an evolutionary point of view, higher intelligence seems to be maladaptive rather than adaptive. Biologically successful organisms have a rigid character and are well adapted to a certain environmental niche. If higher intelligence helped adaptation you would expect it to have arisen over and over again. However, it didn't. It arose in a single, not particularly successful organism, Homo Sapiens. And while the human population exploded, human societies developed in a way that has caused enormous damage to the environment. The human race could destroy itself and much organic life as a result.
QUESTION: Do you think that different social and economic circumstances either block or reinforce certain dispositions -- that, for example, whatever there might be in the way of a natural tendency towards selfish and aggressive behaviour is reinforced by the capitalist market society?
CHOMSKY: There's no doubt about it. Let's take Germany, for example. In the early 20th century Germany was the most advanced area of Western culture -- in music, the arts, science. In the passage of a few years, it entered the absolute depths of human history. Small changes in German society allowed people like Joseph Mengele to flourish rather than people like Einstein and Freud. The market is a radical experiment which violated fundamental human needs and capacities. You can see this in the violent struggles that were required to impose market conditions on people. In the United States, for example, about one sixth of the gross national product, over a trillion dollars per year, is devoted to marketing. Marketing is manipulation and deceit. It tries to turn people into something they aren't -- individuals focused solely on themselves, maximising their consumption of goods that they don't need.
QUESTION: Granted the truth of what you say about our distinctively human capacities for freedom and co-operative action, how come we are so open to that kind of manipulation and deceit? How come we remain both globally and locally so caught up in oppression?
CHOMSKY: It's a serious question. Why are we born free and end up enslaved?
QUESTION: Is there a case here for viewing social factors as more determinant than biological factors?
CHOMSKY: You can't say which factor is more decisive. They interact. Take the example of puberty: small changes in nutrition can modify the onset of puberty by a factor of two, or even terminate it altogether. Or the visual system: in a kitten you can destroy the neural basis for vision simply by not presenting pattern stimulation in the first couple of weeks of its life. However, does this mean that the environment is the decisive force? No. Puberty is a process which human beings undergo at a particular stage of maturation because that's the way they've been designed. You don't undergo puberty because of peer pressure. Likewise, human limbs will not develop into wings rather than arms or legs. The genetic component determines strict limits within which variation is possible. I believe the same is true of our social and mental development.
QUESTION: Your ultimate political goal is anarchistic, the erosion of state institutions and any form of authoritarian control. But you have also recognised the need to defend some forms of state regulation as protection against a wholly unregulated market. Can you say more on how you view this two-edged process of possible political transformation?
CHOMSKY: I'm not in favour of people being in cages. On the other hand I think people ought to be in cages if there's a sabre-toothed tiger wandering around outside and if they go out of the cage the sabre-toothed tiger will kill them. So sometimes there's a justification for cages. That doesn't mean cages are good things. State power is a good example of a necessary cage. There are sabre-toothed tigers outside; they are called trans-national corporations which are among the most tyrannical totalitarian institutions that human society has devised. And there is a cage, namely the state, which to some extent is under popular control. The cage is protecting people from predatory tyrannies so there is a temporary need to maintain the cage, and even to extend the cage.
QUESTION: How do you see the relationship between work and free time in a more liberated society?
CHOMSKY: Polls in the US, Germany and elsewhere have shown that people value free time over material goods. Therefore, there are major propaganda efforts to reverse this. One reason over a trillion dollars a year is spent on marketing in the USA is to try to undermine our natural tendency to want free, liberated time.
Does human nature exist?
01/09/08 20:35 Filed in: Philosophy | Human Nature
I’m through with writing social critiques right now. I’m done with determinism too, saying that we are all such weak injured souls because this or that power elite causes us to be so.
I’ve been thinking about change: What we would need to do in order to make the world a better place to live in.
In looking at social and political philosophy there is one question on which all this stuff seems to hinge. I’m not entirely sure that I believe the question in a way, but it’s about the state of human nature itself and what of us is innately human.
So what is human nature? Do humans seek autonomy, freedom and is their nature predisposed towards moral good, an innate desire for a better world or is that some philosopher’s intellectual desire? There are many theories of human nature that appear so ethnocentrically and culturally biased that I would dismiss them out of hand.
Inevitably theories of human nature tend to be predicated on individualist ideas coming from a liberal tradition. I’m not sure if they go anywhere, nor do right or left political views. The left takes us towards the authoritarian state more often than not and these days, the right veers towards laissez faire capitalism that is laissez faire so long as they control it. Free market competition produces winners and losers, and often the winners are the same and there are an awful lot of losers out there. The further left or right one seems to go, the more likely one is to end up with totalitarianism.
But my question is about people. Is there really such a thing as human nature, OR do we live within a consciousness that contains moral values that change and shift as our collective consciousness develops? Development can be disjointed, fractured by revolution and not conform to any Darwinist evolutionary notion. Consciousness may sustain badness as well as good, but I believe that the underlying desire of consciousness is towards social improvement fuelled by humankind’s desire to survive and little more. Survival, like hunger, is a strong natural instinct.
The marketing guys, the media, advertising, and the world of politics know all about consciousness. Their aim is frequently to manipulate it to their own ends or those of their controlling shareholders.
The question of human nature has dogged philosophical, social and political thought forever, but what do you believe? Does it really exist?
I’ve been thinking about change: What we would need to do in order to make the world a better place to live in.
In looking at social and political philosophy there is one question on which all this stuff seems to hinge. I’m not entirely sure that I believe the question in a way, but it’s about the state of human nature itself and what of us is innately human.
So what is human nature? Do humans seek autonomy, freedom and is their nature predisposed towards moral good, an innate desire for a better world or is that some philosopher’s intellectual desire? There are many theories of human nature that appear so ethnocentrically and culturally biased that I would dismiss them out of hand.
Inevitably theories of human nature tend to be predicated on individualist ideas coming from a liberal tradition. I’m not sure if they go anywhere, nor do right or left political views. The left takes us towards the authoritarian state more often than not and these days, the right veers towards laissez faire capitalism that is laissez faire so long as they control it. Free market competition produces winners and losers, and often the winners are the same and there are an awful lot of losers out there. The further left or right one seems to go, the more likely one is to end up with totalitarianism.
But my question is about people. Is there really such a thing as human nature, OR do we live within a consciousness that contains moral values that change and shift as our collective consciousness develops? Development can be disjointed, fractured by revolution and not conform to any Darwinist evolutionary notion. Consciousness may sustain badness as well as good, but I believe that the underlying desire of consciousness is towards social improvement fuelled by humankind’s desire to survive and little more. Survival, like hunger, is a strong natural instinct.
The marketing guys, the media, advertising, and the world of politics know all about consciousness. Their aim is frequently to manipulate it to their own ends or those of their controlling shareholders.
The question of human nature has dogged philosophical, social and political thought forever, but what do you believe? Does it really exist?