Human Nature Hature Numan
You cannot speak down on human nature when Hitler does his thing and withhold praise from human nature when the common man on the streets stands up to Hitler
When people speak of human nature, they often speak of it in popularly two ways. The first is a rather cynical view of human nature that speaks of human nature when the worst of humanity comes to the light such as greed, selfishness, violence, envy, and everything undesirable in humanity. So, whenever these deeds appear, those who hold to this view are quick to say “human nature” and almost wave it as something to be expected, and as something that we can do nothing about. This, I will show as we go, is faulty, incomplete, and problematic.
The second other common view is not opposed to the first. It is of a different kind. This kind is rather abstract, almost fantastic — that is an object of fantasy rather than real experience. This view conceives of human nature not as a fixed element but rather as an element of man that is fixable and malleable; that if put under the right conditions, expects man to come out of the oven looking like an angel or a celestial being. I refuse to call it optimistic — optimism is not imaginative hope; it is hope planted in experience. It is not optimistic but fantastical.
I advocate neither for the first nor the second. Both carry their respective problems. And it is important to state that whichever view one takes of human nature largely influences their view of the world, how one approaches it, and how one approaches problem-solving. This is instead an attempt to explain the shortcomings of both views described above. To make this easier to treat, I should assign labels to either view: I call the first a cynical view, and the other, a malleable view. To reiterate, the cynical view is loudest about human nature when the nastiest sides of man shine. The malleable view of human nature insists that man can be anything we want it to be if we can find just the right conditions. Both are false.
I: Don’t Be Cynical (Don’t be Seneca)
My perception of this view is that it is a strong smokescreen for pessimists. But this explanation is just sheer Bulverism. It doesn’t explain why it is false. But I can simply bulverise because the explanation as to why it is false is as clear as daylight: man exhibits not only depraved qualities. Man has countlessly shown himself to be an angel. From men and women drowning in rivers in an attempt to save strangers, men running into the rubbles of 911 to save others, policemen performing their duties with all faithfulness, civil servants refusing bribes so that they may do the right thing by conscience, laymen setting up orphanage homes to care for babies; humanity is an account of innumerable good deeds.
It is outright false to characterise human nature as a total degenerate. You cannot speak down on human nature when Hitler does his thing and withhold praise from human nature when the common man on the streets stands up to Hitler. You may not call cowardice human nature but refuse to call the bravery of young men at the battle of Normandy human nature. Call Sextus’ drive for power human nature and simultaneously call Horatius’ attempt to stop Sextus human nature; they are one and the same thing. Degeneracy and the reach for a better nature are both found in man and will always be found in man. That is a fact. Man belongs both to the class of angels and to the class of brutes and beasts at the same time. I speak of course, from the things I have seen.
What then is human nature? That is the classic question that common men like me ask. We want a definition. We want to peg this ‘thing’ somewhere. We want to refuse it running willy-nilly; to be less susceptible to misuse by any lay speaker. We want coherence. We want sharp edges. Unfortunately, I cannot peg it ‘somewhere.’ I have something less precise and something vaguer to offer. I offer you this: human nature is what sets humanity apart from angels and beasts while adopting attributes from both classes. In other words, in human nature, you will see angelic traits and you will see animalistic traits.
For instance, when a kind doctor attends to his patients with something more than professional care and with extra human attentiveness, we see him radiate like an angel. The fireman is something short of a godsent. But on the other hand, the same man does not look so angelic when he is infused with an erotic passion that needs satisfying. Don’t get me wrong, the opposite of angelic is not necessarily animalistic violence. Without resorting to violence to meet his physical needs, our angelic doctor often looks and feels animalistic when he needs satisfying. Of course, I am implying here that the animalistic is not always violent and visceral. But one knows that he is on the animalistic spectrum anytime he feels a tinge of humiliation when he has to meet some of his material needs including hunger, thirst, and sex. One only needs to see how tender yet vigorous; how strengthened yet weak; how delighted yet comical a king appears as he begs his queen for ‘some minutes.’ Man in need of food and sex is so funny and strange a situation that I concluded privately that sex and all its concomitancy is God writing a joke into man’s nature. Do the heavens laugh when we copulate? I will know someday.
By drawing from angels and animals, man becomes something different from both of them. That is human nature. But more succinctly, human nature is a broad but fixed category of traits and actions that man embodies or that man ought to embody. We exhibit them all; not just in a particular order. This is what pop psychologists fail. We may be able to summarize what man can and cannot do. But we cannot safely predict when and how he will do them. This deals a blow to our attempts to overengineer man. I stand with the notion that human nature is fixed and finite. But what is fixed and finite does not necessarily mean small and totally observable. It is broad, yet fixed, finite, and flawed. And to add one more, Brownian.
The difficulty lies in the Brownian movement of human nature. It is also why the malleable view is false.
II. Not A Malibu (Malleable) Man
Fixed, flawed, but Brownian — the devastating blow to the malleable view of human nature. And without shying from what to me is obvious, the malleable view is a less respectable view than its cynical counterpart. I expect readers to disagree. You should. You should disagree because what we are dealing with here has a different appeal. It is enchanting. The cynical view may appeal to our common pessimism and exasperation at the worst that comes of man. But this latter view actually has no view of man. Yes, it has no view of man even while it purports that it does.
The cynical view of man may call man devil and degenerate. But at least it calls man something. Its counterpart, however, calls man nothing. At best it calls man a victim. A victim of what? The answers are many: environmental conditions, ignorance, technological conditions, class systems, historical forces, political systems, family and religious upbringings, blah-blahs, and yada-yadas. Whatever man is, to the malleable view, is always a product of something else outside man. He is an object, not a subject. He is acted upon and acts on nothing. So here, there really is no idea of human nature; just a cloud of smoke that has a human shape filling a human-shaped hole in the fabric of the cosmos.
This is why I say it is fantastic rather than optimistic. The optimist can always reply to the pessimist by presenting experiential data, refuting the pessimist that the pessimist is willfully ignoring the constant rays of hope that shine here and there. But what will we turn to refute the person who believes that all that man does is in finality a response to a plethora of external stimuli? What would you tell a class-demolition hawker that would deter him from appealing to class as the cause and destiny of man? Or technology as the omnipotent driver? Will you ever be free of your father, mother, and siblings, where they themselves are the products of something that they could not so much contribute to or affect?
We must pause and reflect on the implications of theories that we may or may not have evidence for. If the theory is that man will become what we need him to be by fitting him under optimal conditions, we will have no need to hear what that man has to say. In other words, we tacitly believe that man has no part to play in his own destiny. He simply must be acted upon; nothing else matters. This is the flaw of the malleable view; man, who supposedly carries human nature, is ignored in the grand scheme of things. How shall these things be?
The doctor then is not necessarily kind. He is responding to some stimuli. When he is infused with passion, he is responding to a stimulus. While we may concede to the latter the place of stimuli, I am sure that we will not want to diminish the weight of kindness — say of men who gave up lifeboats on the Titanic — by saying it is all stimuli. And this is a vital point: Man may excuse his animalism by pointing to his instincts. But he points to human agency when he does the angelic. Of course, both are characterised by human agency.
When we say human nature is fixed, it means that the potential remains. Envy remains; so does genuine admiration. Greed remains; so does generosity. Selfishness remains; so does selflessness. Cowardice remains; so does courage. But above these things that remain, something else remains: the capacity to choose. Agency.
What is wrong about both views presented about human nature is their willful elimination of the fact that agency remains. The cynical view eliminates agency by sticking to only one-half of human possibilities. The malleable view eliminates agency by theorising that man is simply a product of stimuli outside him. But our everyday language, without which life would be incoherent, signals to us that we cannot — even if it were merely a placebo — do away with the thoughts of agency. If we truly believe that man is only brutish or that man is merely a product of some determining agent, we should do away with some words in our vocabulary and deal with our beliefs head-on. Some of the words include courage, heroism, kindness, love, sincerity, faithfulness, patience, and every angelic trait. We may as well discard every word that describes a moral value: don’t call anyone evil or even a bad person. Simply describe them in deterministic language; agitated, stimulated, defective.
But let’s face malleability. The Malibu (malleable but I will use Malibu from hereon) conception of man, because it does not conceive man, falls back to designing systems. Quite agreeably, I admit that designing systems is important. But like the conception that does not primarily see man, the Malibu conception designs systems that are not fitting for man. It designs systems almost as if for the love of systems rather than for the love of man. It is an obsession with design that justifies itself with the argument that it is actually a design made for man. How may you tell the difference? Watch its language and its outcomes. Very often the sleight of hand is so swift that we can’t tell; that is why it is enchanting.
The language of design-obsession presents in sweeping totalitarian terms. It is riddled with terms of imposition sprinkled with a few words that pertain to human agency presented in the vocabulary. It is filled with fantasies of goals, and the provision of roles for the human agent is scarce within its lexicon. It talks about what it wants to achieve, how it wants to achieve them, what they need the human agent to do to achieve them, and a swift assumption that the human agent cannot possibly be against them. For instance, how can any non-ghoulish person oppose the ideas of equality, inclusion, and diversity? By couching in acceptable language — concepts a sane person could not possibly oppose — it assumes the consent of the human agent. Design-obsession speaks less humanese and speaks more fantasese and abstractese. It has efficiency and optimisation written everywhere. Of course, everyone loves efficiency; no one loves a broken machine. But love for efficiency does not immediately imply that unbridled efficiency is a necessity for human flourishing. However, by the time you make this objection, the design-obsessed fellow has assumed your assent. Malibu disdains the individual and assumes — as if axiomatically — that the individual assents to its designs and systems.
Let’s be fair, which human in their right senses would oppose a design that is meant to remove the worst of man permanently and stimulate his best while — wait for it — asking the individual to do nothing other than be within the perfect system? I find it appealing that without sufficient discipline I can be a good man. That if I am not a good man, it is not my fault, I have just not found the right design. Take my money and give me that design. But watch the flaw.
The flaw is that the Malibu view asks less of man and asks more of the design. Ultimately, man does not own his destiny; he owes it to a system. This is still not terrible in itself. Except, of course, the problem is one step down the road; and it is this: the man who is waiting for the perfect system sheds his discipline. Maybe not always; but it is to be expected. The wait for the perfect system offers a kind of helplessness. Man descends heavily when he is removed from his agency. I don’t know if the designer considers this. But there is one more revelation.
When the apocalypse happens — where apocalypse is ‘revelation’ rather than ‘end of the world — and the perfect system is unveiled, are we certain that man would be perfected? The answer is no. We have no certainty that man would be perfected by the ‘perfect’ design. That is the fixed nature coming to bear. How do I know that? As I said, you cannot divorce man from agency and retain human nature. What is fixed is agency; agency needs choice; choice needs options; hence, human nature needs options. By eliminating any option of traits from the pool — as Malibu so desires, you will have nothing called human nature. Man without his agency is nothing. He must draw on the angelic and the animalistic. Malibu seeks to in practice, divorce man from his agency. But that is because his theory starts by divorcing man from his agency.
Under the reign of the perfect design, the agent who does not show the traits that have been preselected by the designers may face a few problems. If we believe truly and genuinely that we have the perfect design, the blame must fall somewhere else. But this time we will neither blame the design as fallible — it is perfect; neither can we blame Human Nature — it does not exist. There is only one element left to blame — the particular human. In the absence of an imperfect system and the new model of man, the non-conforming agent is defective. He is a bad product — not a human in his own right. He must either bend or be thrown out like every deformed product that we refuse to ship with the perfect goods. But he cannot even bend. Why? He does not have his agency. This invites the implication that a perfect system that cannot provide a perfect product may still face a problem — this is the case if we are honest. The designers may not admit this though. If they insist that the system is perfect, it will be automatically true that the non-conforming human is defective. If they admit that man is still imperfect, they say their design is imperfect — off we go searching for another design. Essentially, a perfect system, to lay claim to being perfect, must, by all means, produce perfect entities. But unlike what Jesus said that “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath,” the perfect system was not made for man but man for the perfect system. In this way, Procrustes becomes fact rather than myth.
I believe that some fellows have come under the illusion that we have run experiments on men in laboratories and that this gives us a guess of what man can and cannot do under ‘certain conditions.’ But this is an illusion. Perhaps a type of ludic fallacy. What happens in a controlled, sterile, simulated environment does little to predict what happens in an uncontrolled, organic setting. When “researchers” then are enamoured by their experiments and decide to transfer their predictions without care, we have the resultant effect of labelling free agents as defective products. There is only one thing to do: take them out.
Have a thoughtful week.
Of course, here are some Roman soldiers with a bombastic side eye telling you that Jesus rose from the dead.