Wrestling with Human Nature: The Anthropologist’s Dilemma

Our perceptions of who we are at our core are foundational to building a just society, yet uncovering who we are has been a centuries-old debate that is still highly polarized and contentious.

Photo by Nidhi Bhat on Unsplash

“Every debate about society and government makes huge assumptions about human nature, which are presented as if they come straight out of biology. But they almost never do.”

“The book of nature is like the Bible: Everyone reads into it what they want, from tolerance to intolerance, and from altruism to greed.”

-Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society

Do you perceive most humans to be fundamentally good or evil, peaceful or warlike? Are we inherently good or bad by nature, or are we encouraged to act one way or another, conditioned by the kind of culture and society we inhabit? How much does it matter that we understand the reality of human nature? Regardless of where we currently stand on this topic, it is nevertheless tremendously important that we all grapple with these questions and try to understand the answers to them because, in the end, how we ultimately see one another will determine how we treat each other and will affect the kind of society we continue to construct far into the future.

The goodness and evilness of humans have been scrutinized and debated by philosophers and laymen alike for centuries. The origins of this discussion are often attributed to the philosophical works of 17^th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the 18^th-century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Hobbes was on the side of the state of human nature being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and society was responsible for the “civilizing process,” while Rousseau thought the natural state of humans was predominantly peaceful and society acted as a corrupting force.

However, the theme of human nature has been a debate that likely long precedes these two gentlemen and has been discussed by many, if not all, cultures since the dawn of humanity. This is because it has been critical to human survival since the very beginning. It was vitally important to know who we could trust and cooperate with and who was liable to stab us in the back. Yet the debate continues as to what forces influence us to be trustworthy, affable, and generous or selfish, greedy, and spiteful. How do we grapple with such a paradoxical species as Homo sapiens and can we ever truly know who we are at our core?

I have been practicing the martial art of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for several years, and this experience has given me a clear insight into what it feels like to contend with another human body. You learn to intimately feel things like muscle, pressure, agility, and pain. Within milliseconds, you will be able to detect exactly what kind of fight you are in for when you face off against another opponent. Though it takes years, decades even, to adequately master a given martial art, there is no doubt we are all crafted by a much longer evolutionary period to fight for our lives. Take away all the technology of warfare from nuclear weapons to stone points, and we still have within us a capacity to strike and defend ourselves quite adeptly, even if we are merely a hairless ape with little more than weakened nails and teeth.

There should be no illusions that we are wired to fight when we have to. But even if we’ve been wired to fight, does that mean human nature is inherently violent—that deep in the human past we were born into a natural world “read in tooth and claw”? Is the state of human nature without “civilization” as bleak as Hobbes put it in his famous political treatise, Leviathan?

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Many political theorists, politicians, and cutthroat businessmen since Hobbes’ time have committed a dangerous mistake in their reading of human nature, or rather, their cherry-picking of details about the natural order and applying it to human society. This confusion, labeled the naturalistic fallacy by English philosopher G.E. Moore, states that since human nature is one where “might makes right” and the powerful can dominate the weak and vulnerable in a “survival of the fittest,” human society ought to operate accordingly. This discussion is also often linked to the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume’s is-ought problem, described in another important philosophical text, A Treatise of Human Nature. Such ideas spawned theories of Social Darwinism and influenced the eugenics movement.

Now, this concentration on the negative aspects of humanity is not all there is to the puzzle of our nature, for deeply bundled with our ability for aggression and control, is also found the ability to cooperate and empathize with one another, perhaps more so than our capacity for violence and dominance. The primatologist Frans de Waal eloquently framed this conundrum in his 2009 book The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, stating,

The problem is that one can’t derive the goals of society from the goals of nature. Trying to do so is known as the naturalistic fallacy, which is the impossibility of moving from how things are to how things ought to be. Thus, if animals were to kill one another on a large scale, this wouldn’t mean we have to do so, too, any more than we would have an obligation to live in perfect harmony if animals were to do so. All nature can offer is information and inspiration, not prescription…A view of human nature as “red in tooth and claw” obviously sets different boundaries to society than a view that includes cooperation and solidarity as part of our background.

I’ve read quite a lot on the history and anthropology of human conflict and violence, and an equal amount of human cooperation and empathy, to know that we embody this seeming paradox. Whether one is a subscriber to Jainism and passivism or an outright fascist and psychopath, humans represent a wide array of beings on the spectrum of human nature.

What we must all come to terms with is not that we are simplistically good or bad humans, but learn to grapple with the truth of this human variation. That we recognize we are capable of both war and peace, given the right circumstances and the right trajectory of causality. This isn’t to insist on excusing human behavior, mind you, but rather explaining and understanding it. Knowing that we are all on a spectrum from potentially becoming a Gandhi or a Hitler and that we cannot use nature as a prescription for society, how are we to come to a satisfactory understanding of who we are and how we ought to build a better society?

At a work conference a couple of years ago, our keynote speaker and a former hostage negotiator, Scott Harvey, left his audience with a lot of fantastic food for thought, but one phrase stuck with me:

This sentiment perfectly aligns with my philosophy on human nature: Most of the bad things in the world are not due to deliberate acts of evil but are linked to human ignorance or incompetence. This ignorance ultimately stems from a lack of experience and the limits of our minds, and I believe it is key to grappling with who we are as humans. Although our minds are incredible tools and have evolved to tackle many problems for our survival, they are up against some huge hurdles living in our modern times, which is something I will cover more extensively in my upcoming book, An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture.

In the past, I’ve been chastised by stressed-out managers time and again for not knowing how to do a particular task at work. “How do you not know that!?” my manager would scold me. Being someone who LOVES acquiring new knowledge, this strikes a bit of a nerve with me. The inner smartass in me would quickly rebut, “Well, there are two plausible reasons: (1) Either I never had the experience to learn it, or (2) I did learn it and have since forgotten. Neither of those is technically my fault, are they now?”

Much of our society, unfortunately, still misunderstands evolution and likewise has a lousy understanding of how our brains operate. I suspect even the most educated among us often forget we are products of evolution. While the human mind is a wonderful piece of nature, it isn’t a computer with perfect recall of information. If we’ve studied human psychology and neuroscience, we are aware of how faulty human memory and decision-making can be. The mind can only store so much information from our experience, and our experiences of the world, too, are typically and greatly limited. Also, the mind is alarmingly full of bugs or cognitive biases that can profoundly disrupt our thinking and decision-making.

Thus, there is only a finite amount of information an already compromised mind can possess, and here lies not just a dilemma for a studious anthropologist, but for all of us: Of all the knowledge about human nature, what is most accurate and valuable for all of us to know and be kept mindful of? How do we prevent such information from becoming distorted and turned into propaganda, and impart enough wisdom of humanity to humanity? If more of us understood who we are at our core, would this make for a genuinely better world and future?

In the grand scheme of things, we are all ignorant in all but a few areas of expertise for which we have been trained. Look at it this way: If we are lucky, we will master one to a handful of fields and skills in life, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that we are all 99% ignorant about most things in this world. A brilliant mathematician may know nothing of how to fix his own plumbing, and an exceptional entrepreneur may likewise know very little of how government works. No matter how much better I get at grappling with someone on the mats during Jiu-Jitsu, I know there will always be thousands of others out there who can beat me. However, with each defeat, we are gifted the opportunity to learn from our mistakes and keep growing. It is our limitations that should humble us and be the basis for constructing a more trustworthy and cooperative society, because that is the only way we will all grow and thrive together. Cooperation, empathy, and sympathy are not just a part of one’s political ideology after all, but have genuine truths in human nature that should not go unnoticed.

I hope that we can at least begin to adopt the idea that “ignorance is not malice” into our culture, and slowly wean ourselves off presuming the worst in others. Though most of us may be unaware of all the insights of human biology and evolution, we can at least learn some of its basic insights that lend us the chance to be more charitable both to ourselves and others, and not immediately assume someone has bad intentions. The more we realize how easily we are tripped up by our own mental faculties, the more humble we ought to become. But is that last statement also mistakenly deriving an ought from an is? Where are we to derive our prescriptions of society and human behavior from, anyway?

This brings me to why I so adamantly believe extensive travel and reading are so important for our minds to be exposed to and why I’ve written for nearly two years here on Substack about it. Without a broad view of human nature and global cultures, we are vulnerable to perceiving the world (and each other) in extremely narrow, petty, and hostile ways. I see this playing out daily, not just in the news, but among my closest friends and family. The dominant narrative of media nowadays fixates almost exclusively on the negative aspects of our nature. It has an inherent selection bias toward the greedy, sinister, and violent ways of humanity and rarely balances it out with the tremendous amounts of generosity and compassion that those who wander this planet know all too well exist in far greater supply around the world. If the majority of us are not coming into contact with the realities of this world face-to-face with all senses present, we are doomed to seeing our world primarily through a distorted lens filled with propaganda, outrageous memes, and clickbait headlines.

Yet it gets trickier because real-world experiences can also distort the larger picture of humanity. A sad feature of human nature demonstrates that we can be far too easily duped into thinking that because we had a few bad encounters with someone that we do not typically engage with, they must be representative of whatever group they are a part of, e.g., their race, sex, gender, or political affiliation. Because we briefly saw the pattern of someone’s behavior, we can now apply that as a model to everyone else who looks or thinks like that person who wronged us. This has been a perennial feature of tribalism for millennia.

However, we live in an incredibly unique time with technologies that are just now giving us opportunities to expose us to the larger picture of humanity if we do not destroy ourselves. Deep exposure to the world of human nature and culture allows for the recognition of human variation to flourish in our mind’s eye. The longer one travels down the road of curiosity and exploration, at a certain point, it becomes nearly impossible to hold certain prejudices against another human being because we now know all too well all the possible routes humans can take on their life journey to end up where they are: That we are all crafted by both nature and the environment in which we live.

The age of genetic engineering is already upon us, which presents both exciting and deeply unsettling possibilities of tweaking the nature side of who we are and who we might become. Nevertheless, this problem of grappling with human nature and parsing all the dimensions of influence on our behaviors will likely persist for many more centuries to come. And it is because of this sobering fact: We all have a stake in what human nature fundamentally is and will all still need to grapple with the truth of who we are, because there will always be someone in power making consequential decisions based on what they think they know about human nature. “What is your view of human nature?” ought to be one of the first questions on the edge of every journalist’s lips whenever they interview someone seeking power with every listener’s ears cocked at attention awaiting the answer.

There is endless more to be said about human nature, but I will leave it here for now and conclude on this reflection once more from Frans de Waal,

If biology is to inform government and society, the least we should do is get the full picture…and look at what evolution has actually put into place. What kind of animals are we? The traits produced by natural selection are rich and varied and include social tendencies far more conducive to optimism than generally assumed. In fact, I’d argue that biology constitutes our greatest hope. One can only shudder at the thought that the humaneness of our societies would depend on the whims of politics, culture, or religion. Ideologies come and go, but human nature is here to stay.

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.

Cheers!

-JSB