"If we are convinced, for example, that Thomas Hobbes was correct and people are naturally inclined to be nasty and brutish, this has implications for our politics, including our sense of national budgetary priorities — how much to invest in, say, education and health care versus the police and the military — which in turn is liable to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. How many arms races and cycles of international distrust have been fed by a pre-existing view that the other side is aggressive, potentially violent and irremediably warlike, which in turn leads to policies and actions that further confirm such assumptions? Especially when they speak to matters of war and peace, theories about the fundamental nature of human beings are more insidious and influential than other evolutionary research, such as whether modern humans carry Neanderthal genes, or the potency of gene versus individual versus group selection, and so forth. It’s not that I believe in a postmodern world in which language and ideology construct reality. Rather, I recognise that these particular ideas have real effects on crucial topics such as national levels of defence spending and whether or not to go to war. I am not arguing that scientific perspectives should be evaluated by their ideological, political, and social implications. Unlike matters of ideology, theology, or ethics, science must be assessed only by the degree to which its fruits are, or are not, falsified, the confidence with which we can agree on their usefulness, and the extent to which they generate further testable ideas. But we must also remain alert when science risks being misused for ideological purposes, not to mention the subtle extent to which researchers can unintentionally bias their findings, simply by their choice of research subjects — as when one or a few human societies are taken as indicative of our entire species. Worse yet is when the danger goes beyond being misled on the ‘merely scientific’ to embracing consequences for social and political policy. The human mind is drawn toward simple either/or statements — God versus the devil, cowboys versus Indians, you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists — but reality is more nuanced and complex. This applies particularly to the seemingly simple question of whether human beings are ‘naturally’ or ‘instinctively’ aggressive or violent. In the past, popular treatments of human beings as ‘killer apes’ have clearly been misguided in their single-mindedness; ditto for others purporting to demonstrate that we are uniformly co-operative and peaceful. Our human nature is neither Rousseauian nor Hobbesian; instead, both a devil and an angel perch on our shoulders, gesturing toward evolutionary predilections in both directions. At this point, readers looking to evolution for guidance can be forgiven if they feel confused, even frustrated by the fact that our biological heritage is so ambiguous, or ambivalent. It is certainly worthwhile interrogating the evolutionary background to our predilections, but the answers will lead us back to Jean-Paul Sartre’s formulation that human beings are ‘condemned to be free’. Advocates for peace might be relieved that we are not biologically obliged to war, or be distraught that we are not unilaterally predisposed to peace, but we are all stuck with an obligation (if not necessarily a predisposition) to assess our uniquely human situation as honestly as we can. When dealing with matters of war-proneness versus peaceful capabilities, it would be far better, not only for scientific accuracy but also for social consequence, if we took seriously this pronouncement by one of the premier authorities on human nature, Theodore Geisel (aka Dr Seuss): ‘You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.’"
Posted on: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 17:58:51 +0000
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