Miserable

At the bar the other night, the bartender said that people who are miserable make other people miserable. It's human nature.

Is that true? Does everyone who is miserable try to make other people miserable?

We know so much about this. The man who comes home from a bad day of work and abuses the wife, the wife abuses the kid, the kid kicks the dog. We know that people who were abused when younger have a greater likelihood of abusing their own kids.

But, the things is, these are tendencies. Part of my point is that human nature consists in tendencies. We can encourage these tendencies or we can discourage them. A person can encourage her tendency to be nice to others, or encourage her tendency to be mean to others. These are choices we make, and we can do things to develop these tendencies until they become habits or, even, virtues.

Of course, not everything is under our control to that extent. A person who is manic-depressive has little control over their tendencies without some pharmaceutical help. An alcoholic or drug addict must struggle his whole life with the disease (which is why jail time for drug addicts is so irrational).

Are all of our tendencies of this type? Saints say, for instance, that they had no choice in doing what is right. Mother Theresa had no choice in feeding the poor of Calcutta. But that is not true of most of us. We have more or less control of our actions every day.

But this just exposes the idea that human nature is not one universal things. Human nature lies along a spectrum. Discovering that spectrum is part of our own cultural and personal journey.

For Janet

Beautiful, Intelligent, Supportive, Delightful.

I could never have hope for such a wonderful presence in my life.

Happy 15th!

jln

A "naturalistic" explanation

My friend is having a debate on his blog (social practices blog link) about the issue in the social sciences on whether we need to include supernatural reference in our explanations of human action. That is, how do we understand the causal nature of human reality.

On a tangential line, a colleague and I discussed yesterday the Catholic Church's position on evolution. For those who do not know, the Catholic Church has for some time now accepted evolution. My colleague, who teaches theology, will not even allow students to mention intelligent design in his classes. But the issue arises, what role did God have in the creation of the universe if we deny intelligent design -- that is, what is the causal impact of God, not only on nature, but on human beings.

We need, I think, to find some way to speak about ideas, supernatural causes, and other non-material things when we consider the human beings. This seems to be the great promise and the great failing of the modern period to me. We can view the entire period of modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant as an attempt to wrestle with the deterministic nature of the world and the freedom of the human being, immortality, and the existence of God. The answer, in the end, is to either deny the supernatural or to distinguish, as Kant did, the supernatural from the causal world of experience so starkly as to be unable to say anything intelligible about the supernatural world.

For a philosopher, this seems to forgo the most important parts of humanity -- if we are free and immortal, and created by a supernatural being, that means something for who we are. What it means can be debated, but that it means something seems a foregone conclusion.

So the struggle in my book will be to adequately deal with these two aspects of human reality. How is that we are natural beings with a supernatural element? But this is part and parcel of the debate over the social sciences and a debate about the future of humanity.

Winch and Human Universals

When I think about human universals, I generally think about Peter Winch. Winch named three constants in all human societies: birth, death, and copulation.

But these three things give us little in the end. We share these with animals. As Cahill points out, Thomas Aquinas defined three general areas of natural law: what we share with all things -- the desire to be -- what we share with animals -- the desire to mate, eat, etc. -- and then those things that belong to us as human beings -- rationality and sociality.

These three areas define the parameters of human nature. But how do we understand them, and what are the last two? As I've noted in previous posts, I do not believe we are the only rational animals, and we certainly aren't the only social animals. But this last point is OFTEN missed in modern philosophy which views human beings as individuals first.

Still, we have to understand that rationality and sociality within the context of out animal -- dare I say material -- nature.

Are there other ways of thinking about human universals? We can think of Amarta Sen and Martha Nussbaum's human capabilities approach. These seem to me to be Western presumptions however. For example, they include "money" on the list. This is a particularly modern and Western good. But they may provide a starting point.

Do others have things they want to add to the list?

Human Nature, Feminism, and Universals

Lisa Sowell Cahill notes that feminism has an ambivalent relationship with the notion of a universal human nature. On the one hand, the concept of a universal human nature has, in the history of philosophy and the world, shown women to be less rational, home-bodies, mothers, and, in many cases, less human. On the other hand, the notion of universal rights, which feminists rely on to fight for justice throughout the world, relies on the notion of a human nature that grounds those rights. She, then, calls for a theory of human nature which can support women, and other marginals, in the support of human rights but which also respects difference, either between genders or between races.

I whole heartedly support that call, and part of the idea behind my own research is to discover and elucidate such a human nature. The fact that there is a human nature cannot be denied if we pursue science which uncovers a human genome. But the genome is only part of the science and part of the story of human nature. That genome is expressed in material and immaterial ways.

When authors, such as Wilson or Dawkins, claim that genes determine everything or that human beings are material beings, they do not really say much. The question is, what does it mean for us to be human beings. For me, Mary Midgley has made great progress in thinking about this when she distinguishes between strict and open instincts. Something like a honey bee's dance is dictated by strict instinct. There are no options there. But something like caring for the young is guided by an open instinct. How a human mother cares for her child can vary along a wide range of "caring" types of activities.

On top of this, though, we have to include the immaterial reality of human life. For example, what ideas support certain "caring" types of activities and disallow others? This is where difference and oneness meet in the search for human nature.

So my project is a search for the biological roots of human practices.

References:
Lisa Sowell Cahill's article in Is There a Human Nature, ed. Rourner.
E. O. Wilson On Human Nature
Dawkins The Selfish Gene
Mary Midgley Beast and Man

Too Many Cats

A tray showed up the other day. We already have three cats. We do NOT need another one. And my wife does not like animals. It took us ten years to convince her to get an animal at all. Unfortunately, we got three within the space of a month. Now, eleven months later, a fourth shows up.

But as I sat thinking of cats, I wondered about our sense of altruism. Sometimes we hear of how one animal will "raise" another as its own. And we human beings often adopt children. There are long lines waiting to adopt. And yet, psychologists say that we don't always treat the adoptees as well as our own children. Still, we do adopt. And why?

If altruism is genetically ingrained in us, that, to me, seems something wonderful, even powerful. Imagine if we didn't have a gene (or, to be precise, set of genes) for altruism. Would we have a "warm, fair Christmas"? Would we have fire fighters? Would we have children who cried because they ate duck?

And would we adopt cats?

Even if it is a gene, then that does not lessen the fact that we -- human beings -- as part of the animal kingdom, care for others. That is, perhaps, our noblest element.

Ducks and Morality

No, I'm not writing about the Oregon ducks. We had duck for dinner tonight. I got through dinner telling my daughter it was roast beast. She was excited and ate it and said it tasted great.

Then the clean up. My wife said "duck" and my daughter went crazy. She just said here's the problem. "These ducks see us feed them, and then we turn around and shoot them in the butt."

Yes, my 12 year old has a moral sense. Most of us do, and when we see someone who doesn't, we say things like, they aren't human. Many of us define, not only human beings, but ourselves by our moral sense. I am so and so and I believe X or Y. President Bush has, in many ways, defined himself by his moral code.

Do other animals have moral codes? Did pre-homo sapien hominids have moral codes?

And what is a moral code? Is it just our culture? Our society? Ninety (90) percent of Americans define ethics as what the culture believes is right and morality as what the individual feels is right. This subject of human nature, then, can have very important consequences for how we live our every day lives and whether we allow holocuasts or even if we allow someone to eat duck.