Human Nature

[Ricardo]

Today in school, i was debating my friends, they didn't know how i could say there's no such thing as human nature. To prove it, i used this as an example,

"Say i was cloned, one was put into a rich, republican capitalist family, and one was put into a poor working class family, which had to work hard to survive, do you think we would be the same?"

It seemed to be a good example, because they didn't have a rebuttal, but i was wondering if this is really an easy simple way of disproving human nature, or if this is something totally different?

Thanks

[violencia.Proletariat]

You dont have to "disprove" human nature. They think it exists, therefore they have to prove it. However they CAN'T do this. You can't predict human behavior in a scientific way, you can't isolate behavior.

[LoneRed]

ya you get the benefit of the doubt, the burden of proof is on them

[Storming Heaven]

You can't predict human behavior in a scientific way, you can't isolate behavior.

I assume you mean that you can't isolate behaviour from it's context, which is true. But it doesn't follow that you can't predict behaviour or study it scientifically. In actual fact I think you can, but this has very little to do with 'human nature'.


ya you get the benefit of the doubt, the burden of proof is on them

This might well be true, but in informal debates it seldom holds true! (if only everyone obeyed the rules of logical reasoning through formal argument...). In any case, you should always be ready to criticise any 'proof' that they manage to produce.

And now for the question of 'human nature'...

The first thing you should realise about so-called human nature is that different behaviours have been attributed to it in different ages. For example, during medieval times it was though that it was 'human nature' for 'commoners' to subordinate themselves to Kings and Priests, who in turn subordinated themselves to God. More recently, people think it is human nature for people to be greedy and competative. The pattern is that ideas about 'human nature' seem to be conservative notions fostered by the society in which they originate. While this by itself doesn't disprove any theory of 'human nature', I think it gives us reason to be suspicious of all such theories.

Currently, many people seem to think that people are 'by nature' greedy, selfish and competative, interested only in their own success and ruling out the possibility of a co-operative society run for the good of all. Most often a crude description of evolution or 'survival of the fittest' is drawn upon as an apologetic for this view.

You should realise that this is a complete mis-understanding of evolution, and that some unchangable 'human nature' is actually completely at odds with the ideas of evolution. Yes, evolution does work through competition and differential survival as it's mechanism, but this doesn't mean that it can only produce competition. In fact evolution frequently does throw up co-operation rather than competition - biologists call this mutualism. Witness the co-operative activity of pairs of birds building a nest and raising chicks, or the truly amazing social interactions of vampire bats, which share their food with starving members of their colony.

When you think about it, the idea that people have an unchangeable set of insticts called 'human nature' is ludicrious. That would mean that we would share the same set of insticts as our earliest ancestors - and it is quite obvious that we are not the same as an ameoba!

[TomRK1089]

If there is such a thing as human nature, why doesn't everyone act the same?

When I can read Reader's Digest, Time, or any other magazine, and see that every person in every article has the same views, actions, and thoughts, then I'll agree that there is such a thing as human nature.

Perhaps in the context of original sin, there is such a thing--we all feel that urge sometimes. But again, some resist, others don't. What's that tell you?

[Nathe]

isnt altruism a direct contradiction to 'human nature' as greed, selfishness, and competition.

you could argue that there is a 'human nature' with regards to instinct, like a 'natural' tendancy to understand spatial and temporal relationships, but no more 'nature' then that of animals, and it cirtainly dosent encompass something like greed or selfishness

[Djehuti]

Man have a biological nature and therefor biological needs. These needs are, according to Marx, not only fysiological: they are also social and emotional and intellectual, because we are born as social creatures and as feeling and thinking individuals, at least potentially.

The existance of this biological, congenital nature is something very irritating for the masters and their ideological companions. If it weren't for our biological nature we would be like wax in their hands. Hitler would have had his aryan pawn and Stalin his new "socialist" man, Fredrick Winslow Taylor his robotized moment worker, the priests of the millenium their idealistic worshipers and the rulers of the millenium their mindless subjects.

The irritation over this biological creature does not seldom takes expression in that they hysterically denies it's existance. Is it not possible (and it is not possible), they claim, that this "old Adam" is some sort of ape man that was not only drived by, but also totally run over by the evolution. To what degree he still can be traced, he is still a regrettable atavism, the schimp within us, like the sinful Adam of the teologists, the reason of all kinds of worrying c of un-cultural and animalistic nature, but not worthy of any respect. Better people have (in difference to the lower class that Lobroso and others viewed as backward and beastialy, together with negros and women and other lower beings) completly liberated themselves from this schimp and now lives exceptionless in a higher sphear, the sphear of culture.

It is assuredly sure that man have built herself a second nature, the cultural or civilized. It is on almost every areas overlayered the biological, like the loose layers of earth over the mountain it covers. This culture is admittedly not unique for mankind; most mammals have behavior repertoires, feelings and even rational thoughs that are not congenital but socially transmitted. It is nevertheless the part of us that has developed in a degree worth mentioning, over the last millenias. The biological nature is much slower, and beneath the costume we are all ice age hunters, at best. social organization, science, technology, language and "culture" in a narrow sense, all this is both products of, and mediate through our cultural "second nature".

But without the biological "first nature" the other would not exist. The very ability to learn, to language and to social behavour lies in our biological nature, that by the way is not of mystical or teological kind, but a function of our genetically programed nerve paths and our ditto inner secretion, not to forget our digestion. In the same way as the superstructure of society gains its limits but also its resources and its dynamics from its material base and its relations, in the same way the entire culture in is wide sence, base and superstructure together, gains its limits and its life power from our biological nature. Would you really want to live like a computre program in a memory unit, a aggregate of accepted relations and allowed operations, without feet in the grass or the least green pear on your tongue?

We should not either forget the backside. It is our biological needs that gives the cultural their enforcing power. If we could fold up a foliage in the sun and gain our nourishment by burrying our toes in the humus, then the masters would have no power over us; for the power they have they gain though denying us all means of existance other than on their own terms.