mistermack wrote:Horwood Beer-Master wrote:
Just curious, but why is capitalism "matching human nature" seen as an argument for keeping capitalism, rather than an argument for changing human nature.
I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere, but I can't quite make it out.
So in case you're serious, how do you propose doing that? Gene manipulation?
.
No joke at all.
There seems to be a ridiculously clichéd lazy assumption I frequently encounter in many topics of discussion relating to politics or economics that "you can't change human nature".
Bullshit.
A glance through history, or across the multitude of present day cultures shows that in many ways "human nature" is extremely subject to change and manipulation. Peoples basic values and motivations are
very dependant on both cultural upbringing and immediate personal circumstance (included in which is a persons internal narrative). All of this should be blatantly obvious when you consider, for example, that those who carried out the atrocities in Auschwitz were just as much humans as those that resolved that such things should never happen again.
Which isn't to say that some elements of human nature aren't more 'innate' or 'fundamental' and less alterable to change. Different elements lie on different points of the spectrum between being so easily changed that they are pretty much entirely culturally dependant, to being so innate that they almost universally present nearly anywhere you look, and are very highly resistant indeed to showing significant cultural variation.
But even universal human motivations that are clearly strongly biologically hardwired with an obvious evolutionary origin, can clearly show massive culturally dependant variation in how strongly people are driven by them.
Take male sexual jealousy for example. No sane informed person denies it has a biological basis or on obvious evolutionary cause, and it's clearly a human universal (half the literature ever written would be
very different without it), and yet despite this, a different cultural upbringing can have a staggering impact on not only the degree and manner to which a man
acts on sexual jealousy but even to the degree he even
feels it in the first place.
A man brought up in say an Islamic, or other "honour" culture, can quite easily be brought to (possibly murderous) rage by a mere unsubstantiated
suspicion that his wife
may be acting towards men in a way which
might be interpretable as mildly flirtatious. Whereas a man brought up in secular western society may well be forgiving, or in some cases totally accepting (to the point of encouragement) of his wife or partner
actually having sex with other men.
Is the difference between two such men biological? Clearly not. And nor is the difference merely in how the men chose to act, it's in how they actually feel. Sexual jealousy is clearly one of those "use it or lose it" things. If you allow yourself (or are encouraged by others) to succumb to jealous impulses, you will end-up feeling these impulses more and more strongly. If on the other hand you tell yourself (or are encouraged to) not let these impulses get to you, you'll increasingly find it's easier and easier to do so, potentially to the point where a jealous impulse simply no longer arises in you mind to begin with.
I strongly suspect that everything I've just said about male sexual jealousy is true to a varying degree of every other element of our "human nature", in other words to every other value or very other motivating drive/impulse we have.
So how does this feed back to the discussion? Since human nature is changeable, it stands to reason (and indeed is demonstrated through history) that society is also changeable, but because different elements of human nature vary in their malleability, with certain elements being extremely resistant to change, it also stands to reason that certain social/economic set-ups are more 'stable' than others, and these more stable forms of society exert to a varying degree a kind of 'gravitational' pull towards them.
Now people who parrot the "you can't change human nature" argument often argue that capitalism is some 'ultimate' kind of society towards which human impulses will always inevitably drag us, but I prefer to see it as just sitting a the bottom of one (particularly deep) gravity well. Deep - yes, but not a black hole. And like any body below the
Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit there must potentially be an achievable escape velocity. It must in theory be possible, by a change in our current human nature, to 'move' our society out of this gravity well and into the gravity well of a different kind of stable society driven by different values and motivations then our current one.
So yes I do propose we change human nature, and no I don't think it requires gene manipulation.
Which is not to say incidentally that I have any
a priori objection to the idea of changing human nature by gene manipulation. It's an idea for which I can see both potential pitfalls and potential benefits. No reason the idea should be held off-limits.
I concur, the whole "human nature" argument is such shit. People just use it to justify oppression, capitalism, war, etc.
