Human Nature: An Issue of Inheritance
Celebrating Naturalism or Limiting Ourselves through Dogma
How should we consider or understand the substance that gives flesh and meaning to human nature? The answer depends on which story of birth is believed. Prometheus gave us fire, a metaphor for technology and therefore the ability to shape reality where our imagination leads us. A myth of Polynesian origin has human beings has us being created from the destructive power of a god having killed his brothers and yet unable to overcome the god of storms. Birthing stories are about identifying those attributes that are carried on from the mother figure or simply that which comes before (Turner, 1996). Importantly here, birthing stories are about ourselves, and serve as explanations for one or more aspects of our existence that seem perplexing or uncertain.
What is explanation? At bottom, it amounts to translating the unknown into the known, the unfamiliar into the familiar. And what do human beings know best? Themselves. They know how people think and feel and act. And from a very early stage of culture, people have projected human thoughts and emotions into the external world, endowing objects and forces of nature with human personality and greater-than-human power. (Origin Myths)
The relationship explored through these stories is centered on cause/effect, where something comes from or emerges from a creative act, resulting in causal connections to how the thing, in our case humanity, manifests in the world. Where a person believes humanity came from will largely determine the characteristics associated with being human.
Beyond myths or other forms of explanation concerning our ultimate origin as a species, the idea of cause/effect relationships is central to how we connect the constructive dots in our conscious experience between a person’s actions and our understanding of them. Whether we speak of "coming out of" or "emerging," as in "his actions came out of a sense of fear," we are identifying the power of causation through the linkage of a cognitive framework to particular actions.
We are, in our desire for explanation, asserting a form of inheritance that we as a species or an individual, carry forward from an origin. What changes in the various explanations is the origin, but a central consequence of those variations is that we then judge the nature of how we see the result. As an example, judging a person’s actions as inherited from a mental illness will often result in less moral opprobrium than if the same actions are seen as being inherited from a deliberated moral failing.
Competing Origin Stories
As we see from the consequences of judging a person’s actions based on varying origin points, so then there is a commensurate increase in the weight judgment can have when we look at our species, humanity as a whole. For that, we have largely two general and competing frameworks. On one side, there is an evolutionary origin, where our inheritance is an incremental accrual of adaptive features relating to particular environments, a frame that encourages the contextualization of behavior. On the other side is a monolithic origin, often instantiated by humanity being either fallen and predisposed to destruction or benevolent and with a righteous influence will inevitably pursue progress. Rather than encouraging a focus on context, this origin framing leads to a focus on identity.
The first is usually explored through science, notably evolutionary sociobiology, and psychology, whereas the latter can be found in mainline fundamentalist religious ideologies and liberal liberation-type theologies. Interestingly while humanity as an evolutionary construction is usually found in the domain of science, contemplative spiritual traditions, and mindfulness training also explore humanity through this rubric. Much depends on what is meant by “evolution,” where the term can direct one to the scientific exploration of natural selection through genetic inheritance, or a deeper change sought by spiritualists and revolutionary activists.
This latter point should not be overlooked. While conservative fundamentalist forms of religion get a lot of coverage, being as they feed directly into the news cycle's focus on sensationalism and simplicity, religion is a human construct and therefore capable of encouraging the best of our humanity rather than only making room for the worst. Further, fundamentalist forms of thought are not just religious, found as they are wherever an authority, person, or object, is endowed with inalienable and unquestionable authority. A deity can take this space, but it can be filled with individual leaders, groups, and ideological dictates. If at any time a point is reached where questioning is outright denied or dismissed through the escape-hatch of mystery or obscurantism, this is fundamentalism. The resultant behavior manifesting out of such tends to be rigid, dictatorial, prone to bigotry; and sees humanity through a static lens, incapable of change through any power of itself.
This static view of humanity is not merely conservative and religious, it can be liberal and political as well. Easy examples flow from the former, with notions of the innate sinful or fallen state of humanity topping the list of shame-filled destructive ideas. At no point in these ideas can anything humanity does result in their salvation or emergence into the good. It is only through an external savior of some form, whether embodied in a person or through particular acts of attrition. Liberal liberation-type notions are similar in this respect, the salvation of humanity is not found through the expression of any intrinsic quality, but from an external source. Any time the notion is offered that "if only x," where "x" is education, civil rights, democracy, women's liberation, etc., were to occur then societal ills would be cured or put on the path toward progressive civilization, this is the liberal version of salvation through an external source. In both cases, the external source is needed to unleash humanity from unseen chains, the only difference being what has been locked up; the former being a state of sin and depravity, the latter an innate drive for progress.
Both monolithic views meet up in a static view of humanity, in an attempt to limit people to a single aspect or innate characteristic. The result is an inability and unwillingness to see the interconnected and integrated whole of bio-social reality, the only matrix through which personal responsibility has any way of being fully understood. Declaring one's heinous actions to be no more than a case of humanity's depravity and an indication of the need for a savior is to set aside considerations of social morality and rational fortitude. Expressing the fantastical belief that if a society were to only support education, universal healthcare, socialism, or other progressive cause would result in freedom for all is to ignore the psychological inevitability of in-group/out-group thinking, status games, and other cognitive heuristics that make addressing the shifting needs/wants/desires of millions of people a matter of finding the “good enough.”
At times in a child's development, statements will be made of how she or he looks just like or acts just like one or the other parent, but at no time do such statements seek to capture the entirety of the person. We tacitly and often explicitly accept that each of us is an amalgam of our parents, the environment in which we live, and the social connections we express ourselves. This integral model for understanding our humanity puts us on a path to seek, expand, explore, or reach for, all of which will express itself through the lens of an evolutionary paradigm.
Seeing ourselves through an evolutionary origin does not lead to an easy or simplistic view of human nature. We must give up a narrow single-variable causation and embrace an integral model, recognizing that as perspective shifts what was once a cause can be an effect of something else at the same time.
So my supposedly “individual thought” is actually a phenomenon that intrinsically has (at least) these four aspects to it—intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social. They are all interwoven. They are all mutually determining. They all cause, and are caused by, the others, in concentric spheres of contexts within contexts indefinitely.
Wilber, Ken. The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad
An evolutionary birth story means incremental change embedded within various contextualized environments, bringing nuance to the understanding of any single person or social issue. Become less concerned with conclusions than with the questions that keep us humble within the expanding push of uncertainty, where judgment is less about limiting people to a singular static quality and more about determining how the multitude of variables in any life can open up new ways of being.
We do not need a savior because there is no salvation outside of ourselves and the natural world within and through which we formulate the multiplicity of who we are and can be. We cannot place the burden for evolutionary advancement on any single victory, on any single movement, no matter the level of social progress. The static models lead to a stillborn existence, whereas the multifaceted reach of an evolutionary integral model is forever listening to the life that will not be constrained. We have not inherited a life of narrow meaning, we have been brought into this world with the capacity to see purpose in everything we do.
References:
Mark, T. (1996). literary mind. New York: Oxford University Press.