The
Social Gospel Movement from the 1870's into the early 20th century
was a very different version of evolution than Spencer's laissez faire rugged
individualism. The early American
sociologists were predominately ministers who felt the human calling is to
alleviate as much human suffering as can be done by human hands and move us as
close to heaven on earth as possible.
Most
early sociologists from Comte on believed in Human Progress at least as much as
they believed in Science. Their
version of progress was a different version from predestination or manifest
destiny. They believed human
intelligence should be turned to the task of making a better society.
In
Europe, Karl Marx's ideas about intervening in human history for human
betterment attracted a following and would lead to the Communist
revolution. The Great Depression
in America led to social reforms aimed to improve life. When perpetual Socialist candidate for
president Norman Thomas was asked what happened to socialism in America, he
would say FDR watered it down and passed it.
Many
sociobiologists now claim the failure of communism in the Soviet Union and
waning of the welfare state demonstrate the folly of social experiments and any
intervention into human affairs.
Sociobiologists suggest conservatives understand the wisdom of the system
-- the free market -- whereas liberals need to manage everything. Such reminds me of Albion Small's
comment that the longer we refuse to acknowledge Marx's insights, the longer
will his fame and reputation grow.
Conflict
produces benefits but it also produces abuses. The rich and powerful don't really believe in free markets
-- that's just a marquee. They
want the public to not peek while they manipulate government behind the scenes
for their own benefits. Free
enterprise isn't free. We make
huge investments in the playing field and the shape of the game. As economist Peter Drucker once said,
in the United States, we have "socialism for the rich and rugged individualism
for the poor."
Society
involves both social processes and human made social constructions. A realistic conversation would be about
when we can rely on the pursuit of self interest and how does it let us
down? One can certainly find
examples of social interventions which made matters worse. However, that
doesn't mean humans must throw up their hands as the Social Darwinists would
have it and let whatever happens happen.
The great God of the economic system should not be plunder and
greed. There is a difference
between self interest and selfishness.
Thomas Jefferson worried about the fate of the young American democracy
fearing the monied interests might rig the game and destroy equal opportunity
for others. Power should not make
right. We should follow the
research on dealing with school yard bullies and as a group delegitimize
greed. We certainly should not
design a system that rewards it.
Sociobiologists
are reviving all the old stables of exchange theory -- Homans, the principle of
least interest, the Prisoner's Dilemma, arguments against the possibility of
altruism. But economic selfishness
disguised as biology does not make the best world. The only way to win the Prisoner's Dilemma is to recognize
we have mutual interests in the meta-game. However, the conservative worldview
looks to the past
instead of facing forward, regards man in the light of animals and fails to
respect his complexity. Their "games'
which simulate life view it as a competitive struggle for scarce resources,
rather than the synergistic creation of abundance. (Hampden Turner,
1970)
Actually
conservatives don't even taking our animal needs seriously. Ending world hunger isn't charity. If a bunch of greedy human animals
horde to increase their wealth, power, and status while other human animals
don't have food and clean water, then we are asking for wars and
terrorism. We are going to have to
find better ways to satisfy the human needs for status and power as well as for
food and clean water.
Sociobiologists
embrace primitive concepts of classic economic theory and old style political
science which view human beings as primarily motivated by money and force. However, behavioral science has
developed a much more comprehensive picture over the past century. Even an extensive body of research by
B. F. Skinner showed rewards are more effective than punishments for
animals. For the human animal,
intelligence makes the attraction of pulls even more important. Maslow showed meaning is motivation and
for the human animal, rewards (the pulls of "being" motivators, e.g.
love
& meaning)
represent
a
different realm than punishments, i.e. "deficiency" motivators
(the
pushes
of
hunger, pain, fear, exposure to the elements, insecurity). There is a direction to evolution. Human desires and purposes intrude. As Lester Ward and most sociologists
of
his day understood, the social forces are human needs and purposes. Human beings want better (however they
might define it) and a sense of personal well being.
For
all their talk about a new kind of Republican, today's conservatives represent
the policies of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Their arguments and theories are the same as the
industrialists and Social Darwinists of the late 19th and early 20th
century. Today's sociobiologists
also are trotting out these old theories.
We are back to the founding arguments of the discipline. Should sociology even exist? Does it have anything important to
contribute? What is wrong with a rugged individualism that relies on the
evolutionary force of the market to take care of all social needs? What can be changed by human
intervention and by human reason?
Should government intervene in human affairs to improve human
welfare?
Please
do not miss the point: social
science originated to be a conscious force in human evolution. No wonder sociobiologists whose
paradigm bias is conservative (detached, uninvolved observation of what is)
would be anxious to declare such a view dead. Both the sociobiologists' and the conservatives' best friends
--
the powers that be -- promote the wisdom of a laissez faire approach to
society.
But
sociology was not supposed to be hands off. Sociology was supposed to be hands on. That is why sociobiologists are so
intent upon destroying the left wing focus of sociology and leaving only a dead
remnant of the discipline to serve the needs of the masters.
We
can see today deep into the genetic structure as just a few decades ago we
could split the atom at its core.
But we have made no moral progress. Conservative theories threaten to turn the world into an
eternal war. "See, we told
you
so," they say, "human beings are evil."
In his biography of Lester Ward who originated the term applied
sociology, Samuel Chugerman wrote:
One of the obvious facts
in social evolution is the persistence of social problems in spite of all
progress flowing from inventions and discoveries which were directly intended
to solve such problems.
...moral progress has been negligible. The explanation of this paradox is not found in evil human
nature, but in the lack of applied social science, and the stubborn resistance
of even so-called moral elements in society to any basic improvements in the
condition of the mass.
....Instead of preaching
morality in the midst of an immoral social system of dog eat dog, ..Ward argues
for an entirely new concept of ethics based upon an intelligent, planned social
order in which the principle of "every man for himself" ...will not exist.
(Chugerman, 1939: pp. 547-549)
Remember
Ward was active in the late 1800's.
The same struggles being fought out then in the United States are being
repeated today only now they've gone global. Ironically, the battlegrounds are the same industries -- Big
Oil, the banking industry, the garment industry. Can unleashed capitalism answer all human needs? Are free markets the answer?
The rich simply grow
richer, and the poor, poorer, and the number of people who have nothing but
vanished hopes increases. The only
rational solution to this paradox, Ward repeats, is found in applied
sociology. ....By giving more
attention to the problem of happiness and less to that of amassing wealth..,
moral progress will have a chance. (Chugerman, 1939: pp. 547-549)
The
goal of social evolution, as conceived by the early American sociologists, was
moral progress. Applied sociology
would lead. Moral progress only
occurs when the human animal takes life in our own hands and decides to act on
the knowledge intellect provides.
Then and only then, will we have a Science of Humanity.
The machines we build, being artificial organs
that are added to our natural organs, extend their scope, and thus enlarge the
body of humanity. If that body is
to be kept entire and its movements regulated, the soul must expand in turn;
otherwise its equilibrium will be threatened and grave difficulties will
arise...between the soul of mankind, hardly changed from its original state, and
its enormously enlarged body.
Henri
Bergson's 1927 Nobel Prize acceptance speech
Ogburn
and Nimkoff would adopt a detached, scientific view of this same thing saying
social culture inevitably lags behind technology. It's just the way it is. " This is the ultimate conservative doctrine. Ogburn in his 1929 ASA presidential
address would say, "sociology is not interested in making the world a
better place."
The
early sociologists thought that culture must lead. Technology without moral progress can only take us so
far. As we look down at earth's
body as we ride high above in our airliners; as we count the collateral damage
from our "smart" bombs; as we clean up the pollution of unanticipated
consequences, we must seek solutions that count the cost.
The
human intellect has evolved to invent vast technological resources which can
script our own destruction:
biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, pollution possibilities to end
life on the planet, genetically modified food, human cloning. We must literally take human life and
the planet in our hands. Evolve or
die. And we do not have time to
wait for genetic mutations. The
next step in human evolution will be conscious or not at all.
As
feminists said so clearly: Biology
is not destiny. In 1964, birth
control pills separated women from the inevitability of childbirth and spawned
a sexual and cultural revolution.
The Catholic Church was immediately up in arms about interfering with
nature but even its own laity paid only slight attention to the advice of
celibate priests.
Abortion
was a different matter. It has
become one of the crucial battle lines of our time. Who defines human
life? We know the embryo
goes through all the stages of evolution while in the womb. It does not develop the advanced brain
anthropologists associate with the step to humankind until after the sixth
month. Is it a child or a
fertilized egg?
Even
though we can see down to the molecular level, who gets to decide whether to
convey human status on this fertilized egg? Trotting out arguments from religious authorities doesn't
help. We are back to Martin Luther
nailing a document on the church door.
You and your God have to decide where to draw the line. Feminists say this should be a basic
human right -- to be able to have control over your own body and make the
choice with your God and your conscience.
Experts can't decide the ultimate questions of life. There is no great scientific Authority
who can tell us. Science fails us
in the ultimate questions of life.
It is a mystery. What
happens after death is a matter of faith.
And no one knows for sure what happens before birth.
Abortion
is only the tip of an iceberg.
Human cloning looms on the horizon. Fetal tissue research stands to alleviate the suffering of
even conservative ex-President Ronald Reagan and we find his wife campaigning
for it. Love does take us past
ideological boundaries. What is
important? What matters? What lines do we draw and where?
As
public opinion expert Daniel Yankelovich (1991) says, democracy depends upon
realizing we can't rely on authorities for the crucial decisions -- experts can
tell us how to make a nuclear bomb but they cannot tell us whether it should be
done. The values must be
ours. Is a nuclear bomb for oil
profits worth the price? How about
a nuclear power plant in my neighborhood?
Do genetically modified foods increase our profits or our risk of
cancer? And what about this
strange disease called cancer? Is
it just because we are living longer?
Or are we altering the earth's body and our habitat in ways that cause
our own bodies to mutate cancerous cells?
With
technology unleashed, when do we take responsibility -- aware of the interconnectedness
of all things? We do not act with
impunity no matter how strong we think we are. For every action, there is a reaction. Terrorism should teach us that. With the advance of technology,
individuals may soon have their own personal nuclear devices, biological and
chemical weapons just like we today have personal computers.
We
can no longer continue to separate mind from matter, mind from politics, and
technology from a conversation about what matters. George Bush has the greatest arsenal of any superman in
history and a third grade cartoon-show understanding of human behavior. We cannot let technology lead. We must make values matter.
Like
a modern day Frankenstein monster, a conversation at the top of the world
awaits. An unconscious, value-free
technology will not take us where we want to go. What have we unleashed and what would we make?
It
is getting frightfully late in human history for the ostrich approach known as
today's conservatism. In
the 19th century, we saw Herbert Spencer "despite his extreme libertarianism,
regard society as the machine of the gods which can only be described but not
controlled" (Chugerman, 1939: 305).
Conservatives want to just leave God alone. The universe is a big machine set up by God, let it be. Bow down before the ultimate authority
-- of God and Nature.
There is no room for human involvement. Turn off your intellect and have faith.
When
Spinoza reached the "God or Nature" conclusion, religion and values went one
way and science another. But it
didn't have to be that way. We
could have instead dumped the metaphor of the universe as a machine with a
mechanical God pulling the levers (or driven by genetic replicators). We could have instead entered into a dialogue
with God and the infinite. It is the ultimate conversation about
values. How shall we shape the
universe? In what direction do we
move creation?
With
human hands and a valueless technology, we have made some dreadful things. But what if we would not separate
values from world? What sort of
world should we design?
Conservatives
say respect authority -- we have the truth. But you see, that's just the problem. They don't have the truth. What they create depends upon where
they start. That brings us back to
the ultimate conversation -- in which values should we place our faith?
Reducing
all of life to mechanical chemical replicators such as genes destroys much of
what we know as humans. Saying
this does not mean we deny our animal heritage. What it does is question the wisdom of insisting on a
mechanical metaphor for science.
The
20th century "God is Dead" movement was really about the death of a mechanical
God and the emergence of a new way of being and knowing life (and God if you
will). Sociobiology would struggle
to get all this back in the mechanistic framework of science as if it never
happened. But we must push the
dialog to a New Being and a new relationship with the infinite. It is a mature relationship of a child
grown up from the cave. It is
Bergson's dialog between creature and creator. How do we shape the human?
Sociobiology
is revisiting all the classic arguments.
One stop is B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Skinner argues that like it or not, we
have vast powers and people are going to be manipulated. He says we need to surrender outmoded
ideals such as freedom and human dignity.
I could not disagree more.
Some things are sacred.
There are limits beyond which we must not go -- limits beyond which we
cannot go without destroying the human.
It may sound strange, but perhaps we
must discuss the theology of our brand of sociology. Theologians would claim that a loving God allows free will
and therefore does not control the outcome. A loving God values the human. A loving social science must do the same. A humanistic social science cannot opt
for prediction and control that destroys free will and the human. (Du Bois and
Wright, 2002)
As
Becker (1968, p. 364) notes, "opting for man as an end, ...means introducing
indeterminacy into the world."
That is what it means to be a humanist. If we are to allow free will, we can't control the outcome. We must have faith in people. Parents know that. Real lovers know that. Why don't politicians, managers and scientists
know that? You can't have it both
ways, you either have free will or not.
If children always do as their parents want, then their freedom is
untested and only hypothetical.
We
need to control say the conservatives.
"We will keep you safe." Fear
brings that strategy. But
authoritarian strategies never work.
There are never enough troops or surveillance and prisons. Do you really believe our bombs and
missiles and surveillance are fail safe?
The
spirit of humanity is sacred. Is
the Golden Rule practical? Should
we trade in freedom for security?
Where do we put our faith?
We must somehow find a way to live together and share a world.
As
Ernest Becker (1974) says, sociobiology is "speaking the truth falsely." Human beings are not a blank
slate. That is absolutely
right. There are limits to human
nature. True. But as Fromm notes, it is not that we
cannot twist humanity in convoluted way -- it is that there are terrible
consequences when we violate human nature. The human tries to get out no matter in what twisted warped
way it must struggle to poke its little head out of the confines.
Rather
than starting fresh with a sociobiology that knows little about behavioral
science, let's ask what have we learned about human nature in 150 years of
sociology and psychology. In The
Structure of Evil,
Becker concludes what social science has learned about evil is this:
[It] showed exactly what
Comte had wanted: the fullest
possible correlates of the dependence of personal troubles on social issues.
The problem for all
thinkers of the Enlightenment, and especially for Comte, was how to get social
interest to predominate over selfish private interest. The new theory of alienation showed
ethical action could not be possible where man was not supplied with self
critical and socially critical knowledge, and with the possibilities of broad
and responsible choices. Recurrent
evils like sadism, militant hate, competitive greed, narrow-pride, calculating
self-interest that takes a non-chalant view of others' lives... -- all stem
from constrictions on behavior and from shallowness of meanings; and these could be lap in the lap of
society..... and the kinds of choices and cognition which its institutions encourage
and permit. Man could only be
ethical if he was strong, and he could only be strong if he was given fullest
possible cognition, and responsible control over his own powers. The only possible ethics was one which
took man as a center, and which provided him with the conditions that permitted
him to try to be moral.
The antidote to evil was
not to impose a crushing sense of supernatural sanction, or unthinking
obligation or automatic beliefs of any kind -- no matter how 'cheerful' they
seem. For the first time in
history it had become transparently clear that the real antidote to evil in
society was to supply the possibility of depth and wholeness or
experience...... It had never been so well understood that goodness and human
nature were potentially synonymous terms;
and evil was a complex reflex of the coercion of human powers
(Non-inclusive language original) (1968, pp. 325-326)
We
are not just the creature trapped in the maze. We can choose to look up, see the environments which shape
our behaviors, and change the environments. The core design principle must be to start with our
understanding of what it means to be human. We can only violate it at a terrible cost.
While
B. F. Skinner is very wrong about freedom and dignity, he is right about the
other half of his argument. Human
beings have come through the looking glass and there is no going back. It is not a matter of whether to shape
the world or not. Our only choice
is whether to do it consciously with attention to what we want or to just allow
it happen by chance. Human intellect
won't go away. We have the
power. If we abstain, we are just
giving the decision to others. The
Enrons, military powers and Big Oil companies are very much trying to shape the
world and human destiny. We enter
that crucial conversation which makes us tremble to our core.
North
Dakota has the lowest repeat rate for juvenile offenders in the nation. They hire an independent Colorado firm
to track real numbers not just what looks good. They have a 10% repeat rate. The next lowest state has 30% rate. Most are 40-50% ranging all the way up
to 70%. As Eastern North Dakota
Director of Juvenile Corrections Lisa Bjergaard says, it all begins with a
philosophy. They start by asking
what kind of person they want at the end.
It is the question for all social designers.
No
where is the bias of today's crop of sociobiologists more pronounced than with
politics. Conservative
interpretations of history, politics and economics are being projected onto
biology. In what pretends to be A
Darwinian Left,
Peter Singer concludes his book by saying we need "a sharply deflated vision of
the left, its utopian dreams replaced by a coolly realistic view of what can be
achieved." With such a version of
the left, we scarcely need conservatives.
Who
gets to decide what is realistic?
Sociologists and human beings must contend against such views. Much of Sociobiology stems from
sophomoric versions psychology and sociology and misunderstanding of basics
such as the difference between self love and. selfishness, alternatives to
exchange theory, the relationship between self and community, and how to
effectively manage and motivate people.
Many
sociologists and psychologists seem not to understand the pronouncements of
sociobiologists are just that -- pronouncements. We must not be enamored by the hard sciences and give them
too much weight. We should
realize:
The world has been created by two conflicting
tendencies. One of them represents matter which, in its own consciousness,
tends downwards; the second is life with its innate sentiment of freedom and
its perpetually creative force, which tends increasingly toward the light of
knowledge and limitless horizons.
Per
Hallstršm, remarks presenting Nobel Prize to Henri Bergson, 1927
Mind
heads for the horizon -- the ideal world.
And body is stuck here on the ground. The mind-body split undoubtedly originated in the human
animal's desire to separate spirit from a body it knew would die.
Biologist
Konrad Lorenz attacked the lack of humility of an animal creature who is a
product of evolution but sees itself as made in the image of God. Sociobiologists note we cannot so
quickly abandon our bodies and head to pure spirit. And yet in their haste to reduce all of life to a mechanical
objectivity, sociobiologists also can't be accused of humility (Becker,
1974). Their grand pronouncements
claim knowledge of all of life and implications for what is possible and
impossible for human culture.
But
we also must not so quickly abandon the ideals which have filled the human
heart across time and history. As
Becker (1968) notes, the science of man is utopian in its very nature. We must have a vision of the ideal if
we are to move in that direction.
Utopia is not a destination.
It is a direction. But
between mind from body, between the real and the ideal, there is a world to
make.
Human
nature surely provides parameters.
But we must be careful to not ground the human potential in someone's
mistaken version of a biological imperative. Grounded in what we know of life, what can we actually say
is impossible for the human animal?
There
is nothing that sends sociobiologists and conservatives on a rampage faster than
Jose Ortega y Gasset's (1941: 200) statement:
"Man is no thing,
but a drama . . . . Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is . . .
history." (Ellipsis Original)
In
his book Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, sociobiologist
Steven Pinker (2002) rants
at
this
as
the
cornerstone
of
the
modern
denial of
human nature. He sees it as the liberal "denial of imperfectability." Rejected Supreme Court nominee Robert
Bork (1996), who remains a darling of ultraconservatives, heads straight for
denouncing the same quote
in Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline. He ridicules both the human potential
movement and the counterculture.
Conservatives want to eliminate any notion that human nature is a self
fulfilling prophecy. They want to
close that chapter in human history completely.
Modern
science was born in the 17th and 18th century Enlightenment idea that human
reason could be used to improve conditions, life, and happiness. The mind-body split went off in
different directions. Physical
sciences set out to discover the real world of matter -- rocks and bodies and
things. Treating the world as an
object, would lead to all sorts of technological breakthroughs. The other direction didn't look like a
science at all. The human mind
went straight towards the horizon -- human affairs and the perfectibility of
man. It is an important part of
our story, because those folks led to American Revolution and the French
Revolution. As Ernest Becker
(1971) outlines, it was only when these revolutionary movements got blocked and
became routinized, that revolutionary dreamers came indoors to regroup and
build a science of humanity.
It
was also at this time in the 1800's, that the physical sciences who were
enjoying great success with technological breakthroughs and public adulation
turned their eye towards mind.
However, with the split of mind from matter, we had separated values
from action. When the focus of the
physical sciences turned to mind, science couldn't change methods without
calling off the whole charade of objectivity. So we focused on building theories to explain other people
but not quite big enough to
understand the hand of life or even ourselves. We could manipulate and control, but we did not
understand. And from this
convoluted lenses, our new knowledge of biology and genetics emerges.
Pinker's
(2002) characterization is that when Wilson first wrote Sociobiology, he stumbled innocently
into political controversy. As he
tells the story, the poor fellow was just trying to be objective. But you see that's the problem. We can't have a world without
values. The human animal must
prioritize in order to make decisions and live. Human nature is the ultimate political and religious
battleground. The pretense of
objectivity will not do. Remember
it was Wilson who said of Marx, "wonderful theory, wrong species." (And he thought that was just
objective?)
Sociobiologists
would say humans can't be changed but scientists have no trouble changing the
world -- cloning, genetically altered foods, pesticides, chemical and
biological weapons, nuclear weapons, the biosphere -- those things can be
changed. Moral progress however,
they claim is not possible. This
is just the way humans are. But
there are other alternatives.
However if we are to move in a direction, we would have to pick up
values.
Sociobiologists
claim they are scientists who are being objective. As Steven Pinker (2001: 422) writes:
Acknowledging
human nature does not mean overturning our personal world views, and I would
have
nothing to suggest as a replacement if it did. It means only taking intellectual life out of its parallel
universe and reuniting it with science...
It
could not be said better. It is
the summary of both what is right and what is wrong about sociobiology. Pinker is right that we need to
acknowledge human nature. It is
the truth sociobiology has to recommend and is crucial for person, planet and
all creation.
But
notice how in Pinker's view, science and our worldviews do not have to
change. Pinker does not want to
have to change the place from which he sits. It is that objective perch. He wants intellectual life to be
subservient to what he designates as the intentions of the genetic code. The sentence following his quote above
says, "The alternative is to make intellectual life increasingly irrelevant to
human affairs, to turn intellectuals into hypocrites, and to turn everyone into
anti intellectuals." We must
submit. But those are not the only
two alternatives --
anti-intellectualism or typical science. We could instead graduate to more mature thought and a
different way of thinking about a human science that begins with values.
As
Comte knew, acknowledging human nature TOTALLY overturns personal
worldviews. The point isn't to
remain a scientist and go, "oh golly," at the mystery of the universe. The point is to bring our knowledge to
reflect back upon life and change the world. We must understand Comte's program for the Life Sciences. It is to use human knowledge to reduce
suffering and improve human happiness.
And
Pinker is transparently honest that he has nothing to replace the typical
scientific paradigm. No wonder
sociobiology is so resistant to Ortega y Gasset's crucial insight. Let me quote Ortega y Gasset at length
because putting his original quote in context gives us great insight into what
is wrong with sociobiology.
Today we know that all
the marvels of the natural sciences,
inexhaustible though they be in principle, must always come to a full
stop before the strange reality of human life. Why? If
all things have given up a large part of their secret to physical science, why
does this alone hold out so stoutly?
The explanation must go deep, down to the roots. Perchance it is no less than this: that man is not a thing, that man has
no nature (Ortega y Gasset , 1941: p. 185).
Physico-mathematical
reason . . . was in no state to confront human problems. By its very constitution it could do no
other than search for man's nature.
And naturally, it did not find it.
human has no nature. Man is
not his body, which is a thing, nor his soul, psyche, conscience, or spirit
which are also things. Man is no
thing, but a drama .(Ortega y Gasset, 1941, pp. 199-200).
........man, in a word,
has no nature; what he has is . .
. history" (1941, p. l7)
. . . human life, it would appear then, is not a
thing, has not a nature, and in consequence we must make up our minds to think
of it in terms of categories and concepts that will be radically different from
such as shed light on the phenomenon of matter (Ortega y Gasset, 1941, p. 186). [Italics Original]
No
wonder sociobiologists have to crucify Ortega y Gasset. It is unfortunate the word human
"nature" allowed sociobiologists to be distracted from the crucial point that
human beings are not things and must be studied with different methods than
those used in the physical sciences.
Human beings are more than just matter. The reason the human has held out so stoutly refusing to
surrender its secrets is because the scientific view would obliterate the
human. The hard sciences ignore
questions of consciousness, belief, and values.
Ortega
y Gasset's other point is quite succinct.
We can't use human history to deduce human nature. There are certainly some basic human
parameters of human existence which must always be addressed. But within the existential
contingencies, there are a wide range of options. Perhaps, Ortega
y Gasset was right -- we shouldn't call it Human Nature because that would
indicate it is a permanent state.
And as Plato knew, human nature is not a matter of what is. It is becoming.
We
can't have a theory of human betterment without accounting for evil. But what do we do about evil? Conservatives say liberals don't
understand evil. But actually
liberals know far more about evil.
Conservatives constantly avert their eyes. Conservatives want to quickly label people as evil and
discard them -- bomb them, throw them in prison. While they may dwell on gore to titillate like a tabloid or
to coerce like a prosecutor seeking the death penalty, they don't want to take
the time to understand the real human struggles that produced human evils. Evil gets projected over there as
something foreign. Liberals have
the same initial human knee jerk reactions as conservatives but have learned to
pause to reflect and understand.
Conservatives accuse them of being bleeding hearts. However, without sympathetic
introspection, we can never understand human behavior.
Coming
out of World War II there was a great deal of research by social scientists
hoping to prevent it from ever happening again. We have discarded that research on authoritarianism, evil,
the will to meaning, going along with the crowd and human destructiveness. Ruth Benedict who was part of that
research once said she had "the faith of a scientist that behavior, no matter
how unfamiliar to us, is understandable....
and the faith of a humanist
in the advantages of mutual understanding among men." (Mead, 1974: 75)
There
are core social and psychological processes at the center of existence. The desire for union. The need for differentiation. Conflict. Cooperation. Do
we designate them as needs, drives or fundamental social processes? When Carl Jung was asked about the
difference between gods and archetypes, being an honest man, he responded they
were the same. We need such candid
dialogue. Hal Pepinsky so
brilliantly pinpoints the social dynamics of communication and conflict in The
Geometry of Democracy and Violence.
However, there was no need for him to ground them in the hard sciences
(geometry) to improve credibility.
It should have been enough to identify them as elementary social
processes. Do you prefer to we say
human needs are based on the existential contingencies of life or grounded in
our biological makeup? We need
honest dialogue to establish common ground. All that is necessary for a Science of Humanity is for us to
agree on processes and components are fundamental. Psychology and Sociology has already covered this ground
(although so many have forgotten).
How
do we create a Science of Humanity?
First, we must commence a conversation for that purpose. What can we conclude about the human
condition?
To
build a better world, I think we must begin with love, meaning (framework of
orientation), and the need to be effective (Marx/Fromm's love of work, i.e. the
need for productiveness). In other
words, we need connectedness, the opportunity to be a star (a participant in
our own lives) and social resources to help us live our dreams. Self esteem and synergy (win-win)
should be our referents and evaluative standard. I think the case certainly can be made that lack of a
subjective feeling of well being leads to all sorts of problems and that
win-lose arrangements produce disastrous social consequences in the long run
and are socially expensive to maintain
Happiness is the only workable methodology. If we do not create a society promoting self esteem and
synergy, we need to go back to the drawing board.
I
would suggest these are more than my own personal opinions. We have learned something in 100 years
of behavioral science about human behavior. As a social scientist, I conclude: Human beings want to feel good about themselves and to make
sense of existence. We need love
and human connection -- to matter to someone and care about someone. Along with Maslow, Fromm and Becker, I
concur there are some conclusions we should draw.
1. We are going to die. That is a biological truth. And from that stems the human need for
meaning -- to make sense of existence.
2.
Alternatives exclude. Human
beings need a framework to organize information and values in order to
prioritize so we can act. Human
needs provide an adequate foundation for human political agenda.
3.
Cultural myths aside, we are connected and our lives depend upon
others. We must find a way to
share the world -- both in cooperation and conflict -- to get our needs met
while acknowledging others' need to satisfy theirs. Self esteem and synergy should be our guidelines. The entire body of knowledge in
sociology and psychology details the costs of ignoring this.
These
provide the basis for a synthesis of the disciplines and the foundation for a
Science of Humanity. With an agreement on
any one of these three fundamentals of human existence, we can design a better
world.
Arcaro, Tom and Chrissy
Kilgariff. "Humanistic Sociology
and Darwin: An Argument for a Sociobiological Approach." paper presented at Association
for Humanist Sociology Meeting, Madison, WI, October 2002,
http://www.elon.edu/arcaro/titles/partiv.htm
Bardwick, Judith. In Transition: How Feminism, Sexual Liberation, and
the Search for Self Fulfillment Have Altered America. New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1979.
Becker, Ernest.
The Structure of Evil: An Essay on the Unification of the Science of
Man. New York: Free Press, 1968
The
Lost Science of Man. New York: Free Press, 1971
"Toward
the merger of animal and human studies." Philosophy of the Social
Sciences
4: 235-254, 1974.
Bergson, Henri.
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Translated by R. Ashley, Audvra and Claudesley Brereton
with assistance of W. Horsfall Carter.
Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, 1935.
Bork, Robert H., Slouching
towards Gomorrah : Modern Liberalism and American Decline, New York : ReganBooks,
c1996.
Buber, Marin. I
and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Scribner, 1910.
Chugerman, Samuel. (1939). Lester
F. Ward: The American Aristotle.
New York: Octagon Books,
1965.
Cronk, George.
"George Herbert Mead." The
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/m/mead.htm#The%20Nature%20of%20History
Daly, Martin and Wilson,
Margo. The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Paternal
Love.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press (1998).
Dawkins,
Richard. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press (1976).
Dennett, Daniel.
Darwin's Dangerous Idea. New
York: Touchstone, 1995.
Du Bois, William and R. Dean Wright. "What Is Humanistic Sociology?" The American Sociologist, Volume 33, No. 4, 2002.
Fromm, Erich. The
Art of Loving. New York: Harper and Row, 1956.
Escape
from Freedom,
New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1941.
Man
for Himself. New York: Fawcett Premier Books, 1947.
The
Revolution of Hope. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.
Griffin, Susan.
Woman and Nature: The
Roaring Inside Her. New York: Harper and Row, 1978.
Hampden-Turner, Charles. "The Borrowed Toolbox and Conservative Man," Radical Man. Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing, 1970.
Hocking, William Ernest. Types of Philosophy.
New York: Scribner, 1959.
Hume, David. An
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.
Edited by J. B. Schneewind.
Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing Company, 1983 (c. 1751).
Luhrmann, T. M..
Of Two Minds. New York: Alfred Knopf,
2000.
Maslow, Abraham. The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance. New York: Harper and Row,
1966.
Mead, George Herbert, Mind, Self, and Society
, ed.
C. W. Morris (University of Chicago 1934)
The
Philosophy of the Act , ed. C. W. Morris et al. (University of Chicago
1938).
Mead, Margaret. Ruth Benedict.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1974.
Miller, A.
For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of
Violence. New York: Noonday Press, 1990 [1983].
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Will to
Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and
R. J. Hollingsdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.
Ortega y Gasset, Jose.
(1941). History as a
System. New York: Norton, 1961.
Pepinsky, H.E. (1991). The Geometry of Violence And Democracy. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University
Press.
Pinker, Steven.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking, 2002
Rogers, Carl. Personal
Power.
New York: Dell, 1977
Roszak Theodore. The Makings of Counterculture: Technological Society and Its Youthful
Opposition. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1969.
Simmel, Georg. The
Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated by
Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1950.
Singer, Peter. A
Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation. New Haven and London: Yale University
Press (1999).
Skinner, B. F. Beyond Freedom and Dignity. New York: Knopf, 1971.
Tillich Paul. Love,
Power, and Justice. London: Oxford University Press, 1954.
Ward, Lester F.
Glimpses of the Cosmos. 6
Volumes. 1918.
Warmoth, Arthur.
Personal Conversations.
Yankelovich, Daniel.
Coming to Public Judgment: Making Democracy Work in a Complex World. Syracuse University Press, 1991.