Human Nature Redux

Sometimes a big idea fades so imperceptibly from public consciousness you don’t even notice until it has almost disappeared. Such is the fate of the belief in natural human goodness.

This belief, most often associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, begins with the notion that “everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Human beings are virtuous and free in their natural state. It is only corrupt institutions that make them venal. They are happy in their simplicity, but social conventions make them unwell.

This belief had gigantic ramifications over the years. It led, first of all, to the belief that bourgeois social conventions are repressive and soul-destroying. It contributed to romantic revolts against tradition and etiquette. Whether it was 19th-century Parisian bohemians or 20th-century beatniks and hippies, Western culture has seen a string of antiestablishment rebellions led by people who wanted to shuck off convention and reawaken more natural modes of awareness.

It led people to hit the road, do drugs, form communes and explore free love in order to unleash their authentic selves.

In education, it led to progressive reforms, in which children were liberated to follow their natural instincts. Politically, it led to radical social engineering efforts, because if institutions were the source of sin, then all you had to do was reshape institutions in order to create a New Man.

Therapeutically, it led to an emphasis of feelings over reason, self-esteem over self-discipline. In the realm of foreign policy, it led to a sort of global doctrine of the noble savage — the belief that societies in the colonial world were fundamentally innocent, and once the chains of their oppression were lifted something wonderful would flower.

Over the past 30 years or so, however, this belief in natural goodness has been discarded. It began to lose favor because of the failure of just about every social program that was inspired by it, from the communes to progressive education on up. But the big blow came at the hands of science.

From the content of our genes, the nature of our neurons and the lessons of evolutionary biology, it has become clear that nature is filled with competition and conflicts of interest. Humanity did not come before status contests. Status contests came before humanity, and are embedded deep in human relations. People in hunter-gatherer societies were deadly warriors, not sexually liberated pacifists. As Steven Pinker has put it, Hobbes was more right than Rousseau.

Moreover, human beings are not as pliable as the social engineers imagined. Human beings operate according to preset epigenetic rules, which dispose people to act in certain ways. We strive for dominance and undermine radical egalitarian dreams. We’re tribal and divide the world into in-groups and out-groups.

This darker if more realistic view of human nature has led to a rediscovery of different moral codes and different political assumptions. Most people today share what Thomas Sowell calls the Constrained Vision, what Pinker calls the Tragic Vision and what E. O. Wilson calls Existential Conservatism. This is based on the idea that there is a universal human nature; that it has nasty, competitive elements; that we don’t understand much about it; and that the conventions and institutions that have evolved to keep us from slitting each other’s throats are valuable and are altered at great peril.

Today, parents don’t seek to liberate their children; they supervise, coach and instruct every element of their lives. Today, there really is no antinomian counterculture — even the artists and rock stars are bourgeois strivers. Today, communes and utopian schemes are out of favor. People are mostly skeptical of social engineering efforts and jaundiced about revolutionaries who promise to herald a new dawn. Iraq has revealed what human beings do without a strong order-imposing state.

This is a big pivot in intellectual history. The thinkers most associated with the Tragic Vision are Isaiah Berlin, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Friedrich Hayek and Hobbes. Many of them are conservative.

And here’s another perversity of human nature. Many conservatives resist the theory of evolution even though it confirms many of conservatism’s deepest truths.

February 21, 2007

The Bright Side of Human Nature (5 Letters)

To the Editor:

I have long believed humanity to be anything but good by nature and, as such, find myself agreeing with the basic premise of “Human Nature Redux,” by David Brooks (column, Feb. 18). But unlike Mr. Brooks, this is precisely why I am a liberal.

I can think of no better bulwark against man’s dark nature than a big government with checks and balances and accountability to the people. This is the brilliant scaffolding the founders of our democracy put in place.

It is the conservative dismantling of checks and balances, accountability, regulation and discourse built on truthfulness — a dismantling that is a specialty of this administration — that has unleashed or enabled catastrophes in which our darker nature runs rampant.

Matthew Brookoff
Greensboro, N.C., Feb. 18, 2007

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To the Editor:

David Brooks is half right in asserting that evolutionary biology shows human beings to be selfish, nasty and competitive by nature.

In the process, he conveniently doesn’t mention the other half, which is far less conducive to conservative political ideology: the adaptive outcome in question through the machinations of our selfish genes is often achieved by organisms behaving altruistically toward one another, contributing to genetic success by enhancing the success of other bodies like relatives, reciprocating friends and even, on occasion, unrelated individuals within the social group.

It appears that today’s conservatives do not limit their cherry-picking to matters of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

David P. Barash
Redmond, Wash., Feb. 18, 2007
The writer, an evolutionary biologist, is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington.

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To the Editor:

David Brooks is reading the wrong evolutionary psychologists.

It’s true, as he says, that “status contests came before humanity, and are embedded deep in human relations.” But recent studies have argued very persuasively that humans are different, and that E. O. Wilson and Steven Pinker are needlessly pessimistic.

We compete for status, true, but paradoxically the way we display status is by showing that we can afford to be generous to one another.

As all consumers of fiction know, heroes help people, and those who help others are those we all acknowledge as heroes.

It would be a shame if the pessimism that is itself one badge of generous feeling distorted our views of the altruism and helpfulness that are embedded so deeply in human nature.

William Flesch
Waltham, Mass., Feb. 18, 2007
The writer, a professor of English at Brandeis, is the author of a forthcoming book about contemporary biological theories of human altruism.

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To the Editor:

Anthropological research shows that of all human groups, hunter-gatherer societies are the least likely to be deadly warriors.

Their members live in small, loosely organized bands related by bilateral kinship. They practice reciprocity with little trade, and their leadership is informal and situational, largely functioning as arbitration in group decision-making.

Hunter-gatherers, as the name suggests, have little domestication but follow animal and plant life for subsistence. With limited group or personal ownership, egalitarian social structure, and no formal laws or religious priesthood, there is little impetus to become deadly warriors.

The right to use force within the band is communal. Only after the introduction of agriculture did tribes and chiefdoms further evolve into landowning states. Then classes like rulers and the ruled, private and state ownership, formal laws and full-time priesthoods produce those deadly warriors.

Bushmen and Pygmies are among the few remaining hunter-gatherers.

Harriet Koenig
Stamford, Conn., Feb. 19, 2007
The writer is an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut.

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To the Editor:

David Brooks describes human nature in terms of stock binaries like Hobbes versus Rousseau, or self- esteem versus self-discipline. Such categories represent diverse tendencies of our nature.

It is not a matter of one or the other or making a choice as to which is more basic. To put who we are in terms of one tendency versus another is to maintain an all-too-prevalent dissociative attitude that has played havoc with our sense of self for a good part of our history.

I believe that evolution requires us to get beneath such categories and begin to partner the profound interweaving of multiple tendencies that give human nature the plasticity and persistence it demonstrates.

Michael Eigen
New York, Feb. 18, 2007
The writer is the editor of The Psychoanalytic Review.