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Human Nature
Our Inner Tribesman
Human nature is real. Few statements are less controversial among the people who study the subject and more controversial among people who don’t.
It is fair to say that no reputable psychologist, neuroscientist, linguist (including Noam Chomsky), or economist disputes the fact that human beings come preloaded with a great deal of software. Indeed, the fashionable metaphor today is not software but “apps”--as in the applications we have on our smartphones. Different situations trigger different apps, and sometimes these apps can be in conflict.
All of the serious debates about nature versus nurture start with the premise that there is already a lot built into our nature. The only question is what we can add on top of nature or what apps we can override. Think of a car. We all generally agree that a car comes with an engine, four wheels, and a steering wheel. These things come standard. That’s nature. Nurture provides the options, and there are a great many options. But no matter how many add-ons you buy, a car is not going to be a helicopter.
In his enlightening book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, psychologist Paul Bloom chronicles a remarkable number of experiments conducted on infants and toddlers. (Rest assured: No babies were harmed in the process.) He demonstrates that babies as young as six months already come preloaded with a number of psychological traits that suggest an innate moral sense. For instance, infants between six and ten months old were shown puppet plays. One puppet would be trying to get up a hill. Another puppet would either come to the hill-climbing puppet’s aid or it would get in the way, stymieing the climber’s efforts. Afterward, the babies were given a choice between the mean puppet and the nice puppet. The babies almost uniformly preferred the nice puppet over the jackass puppet. When a similar study was performed with twenty-month-old toddlers, the kids would reward the nice puppet with candy and punish the bad puppet by taking its candy away.1 Other studies confirm that we are all born with some very basic programming about empathy, altruism, cooperation, and other moral intuitions.
Bloom takes great care in pointing out that, just because we are born with a kind of moral sense, that doesn’t mean we are therefore moral. Rather, we are born with moral taste buds. How we use them depends on the environment we grow up in and, crucially, how we define “morality.”
One of the most important findings of not just Bloom but thousands of researchers across numerous disciplines is that we are all born with a natural distrust of strangers. Very young babies can identify language; their cries even have regional accents. “Young babies can recognize the language that they have been exposed to, and they prefer it to other languages even if it is spoken by a stranger,” Bloom reports. “Experiments that use methodologies in which babies suck on a pacifier to indicate their preferences find that Russian babies prefer to hear Russian, French babies prefer French, American babies prefer English, and so on. This effect shows up mere minutes after birth, suggesting that babies were becoming familiar with those muffled sounds that they heard in the womb” [emphasis mine].2
Interestingly, our brains dedicate an enormous amount of resources to facial recognition. We are born with an intense interest in human faces. No doubt there are many reasons for this. For instance, much early human communication was done nonverbally and that’s still true for humans today, particularly before we learn to speak. One can debate whether reading faces was important in the past or today, but our ability to recognize faces was clearly more vital in the past. Being able to instantly recognize kin or friends from strangers could mean the difference between life and death. (It’s telling that our ability to identify faces is actually much more sophisticated than our ability to verbally articulate the differences between faces. Most of us can instantly distinguish between, say, Matt Damon’s face and Matthew McConaughey’s. But can you instantly explain what makes their faces so different?)
The desire for unity and distrust of strangers are universal human tendencies--but just tendencies. While I don’t think they can be wholly taught out of us, they certainly can be tempered and channeled in productive ways. It is a common cliché among certain tribes of humanists to say something like “There is no race but the human race,” which of course is just a more secular version of “We are all children of God” and similar endearing platitudes. All things being equal, I think this is a benign cliché and worth incorporating into our civilizational dogma. But I should point out that, of all the systems ever created that actually put this belief into practice, none has been more successful on the ground than the market. The market lowers the risk--or “price”--of distrust by letting very different peoples and cultures find common interest.
The distrust of strangers and the craving for unity are important themes in this book, because they illuminate a much broader fact: Ideology is downstream of human nature. Children and adults are constantly told that one needs to be taught to hate. This is laudable nonsense. We are, in a very real sense, born to hate every bit as much as we are born to love. The task of parents, schools, society, and civilization isn’t to teach us not to hate any more than it is to teach us not to love. The role of all of these institutions is to teach what we should or should not hate.
Bloom writes that “just about all the readers of this book believe that it’s wrong to hate someone solely because of the color of his or her skin. But this is a modern insight; for most of human history, nobody saw anything wrong with racism.”3 All good people are supposed to hate evil, but the definition of what constitutes evil is rather expansive across time, and refining the definition of evil is the very essence of what civilizations do.
Every culture ever known has things it hates and things it loves. And every political ideology ever known has some group it considers the Other. The pro-Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt famously said, “Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are.”4 Fascism is supposedly defined by its demonization of “the other.” Obviously, in Nazi Germany, the Other was best represented by the Jew. But communism had its Others too. They went by such names as the bourgeois, or the ruling class, or the kulaks. Contemporary liberalism has a host of Others it hates. We’ve all probably met avowed lovers of tolerance who talk about how much they hate intolerant people--but only certain kinds of intolerant people. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard people insist that the slightest prejudice against Muslims is evil and then proceed to explain how awful evangelical Christians are.
The anthropologist Richard Shweder compiled a useful list of things that different societies have thought was praiseworthy, neutral, or appalling:
masturbation, homosexuality, sexual abstinence, polygamy, abortion, circumcision, corporal punishment, capital punishment, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, capitalism, democracy, flag burning, miniskirts, long hair, no hair, alcohol consumption, meat eating, medical inoculations, atheism, idol worship, divorce, widow marriage, arranged marriage, romantic love marriage, parents and children sleeping in the same bed, parents and children not sleeping in the same bed, women being allowed to work, women not being allowed to work.5
In other words, the capacity for...
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