From the beginning

The tendency to revert to human nature to justify social and economic structures and to explain their failures has been present from the very beginning of United States history. James Madison rationalized the system of checks and balances between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches that, at the time, distinguished the U.S. form of government, on the basis of a negative view of human nature. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” he wrote. “It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”³ No allowance is made for the fact that the framers of the U.S. Constitution were the richest men in the country at the time, busy enslaving Africans and massacring Indians, and that they, as rich white men, rather than humans as a species, were ambitious and aggressive and needed to be reined in.

The idea that capitalism’s failures should be blamed on the poor also got an early start. Eager to please their ruling-class benefactors, scientists and scholars have always been willing to develop theories and misinterpret or fabricate experimental results to support this notion. In the nineteenth century, eugenicists and “Teutonists” (think of an upper-crust Aryan Nation) fudged test scores and measured heads to produce what was considered scientific backing for the idea that poverty is the result of inherited weaknesses of character or intellect called “social inadequacy.” The resulting conviction that “poverty begets poverty” led to forced sterilization and enforced illiteracy; if the children of illiterate parents cannot be taught to read, the argument went, why waste money on schools?⁴

This “scientific racism,” which was applied to all members of the lower classes regardless of skin color, existed alongside of and in combination with the racism used to rationalize the enslavement of Blacks and the genocide of Native Americans. An excellent example of the way these ideas came together is a statement by Oxford University Professor Edward Freeman, who toured America in 1881, speaking to university and “learned society” audiences. According to Freeman, and to the delight of his “learned” listeners: “the best remedy for whatever is amiss in America would be if every Irishman should kill a Negro and be hanged for it.”⁵

At the start of the twenty-first century, one is struck not only by how shocking, but also by how shockingly familiar this statement sounds. In September of 2005, conservative talk show host Bill Bennett—who was secretary of education during the Reagan administration and director of drug policy under the first George Bush—told listeners of the Salem News Network: “I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could—if that were your sole purpose—you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”⁶

Though patently reactionary, statements like Bennett’s are not inconsistent with current ruling class views on the causes of social ills and inequality. Earlier in 2005, Lawrence Summers—then-president of Harvard University—attributed the shortage of women professors in the sciences and engineering to “innate differences” between men and women and discounted the role of discrimination in hiring practices and career advancement. According to Summers, “Research in behavioral genetics is showing that things people previously attributed to socialization weren’t” really the result of social influences but rather a lack of “natural ability.”⁷

What sort of “research” supports these views? That of the sociobiologists of the seventies and the evolutionary psychologists of today. Sociobiologists attempted to use evolutionary explanations drawn from the study of animals to understand the behavior of humans. Starting from an assumption of the “universality” of a particular trait, they would assert (but not prove) that there must be a genetic explanation for that trait. According to the sociobiologists, aggression, competition, gender hierarchies and a long list of other human traits and tendencies are biologically determined and therefore permanent features of human society. As anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Michael Ghislein point out, sociobiologists revised the theory of natural selection to reproduce almost verbatim “the precepts of laissez faire capitalism.”⁸ To make their case, sociobiologists used research in non-human animals, what Kohn calls “conceptual pole vaulting,” noting that “most forms of human violence are not analogous, let along homologous, with animal aggression. Only human behavior is saturated with cultural meaning, organized around symbols, [and] conceived in terms of long-range rationally devised purposes.”⁹

The 1990s saw sociobiology’s reincarnation in the form of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists argue that humans have countless instincts, all genetically programmed into separate “modules” in our brains, and that these instincts are responsible for most of what passes for “normal” human behavior—things like men being “naturally” attracted to younger women with “perky breasts.”¹⁰ They argue that human beings stopped evolving during the Pleistocene era that ended 10,000 years ago. Lo and behold, the instinctive processes of a “Stone Age brain” dovetail—if not seamlessly, then inevitably—with the demands of market capitalism. According to one defender of evolutionary psychology, “Those who command higher status in social hierarchies have better access to material resources and mating opportunities. Thus, evolution favors the psychology of males and females who are able successfully to compete for positions of dominance.”¹²

Evolutionary psychologists’ hypotheses gloss over the fact that little is known about ancient hunter-gatherers and the problems they faced. As philosopher David Buller points out, “We don’t even know the number of species in the genus Homo let alone details about the lifestyles led by those species.”12 Attempts to generate theories on the basis of currently existing hunter-gatherer groups break apart on the basis of sheer diversity; there is little consistency among the practices of modern-day hunter-gatherers—besides a general egalitarianism (no support for the evolutionary psychologists there!)—and no way of knowing which are more like our genetic ancestors. Mostly, the evolutionary psychologists recycle modern stereotypes and project them back over human pre-history.¹³

But perhaps most significantly, the theory is inconsistent with what little is currently understood about genetics and the human brain. If the claims of evolutionary psychology were accurate, and most of the structures of the brain were genetically determined, it would stand to reason that the human genome would be much larger than that of less cognitively developed animals to allow for the extra complexity of our brains. But this is not the case. Humans have the same number of genes as mice. And even if 50 percent of our genes are involved in building brain structures, most are dedicated to sensory rather than higher cognitive functions like the ones that evolutionary psychologists are attributing to genetically determined instinct modules.¹⁴

Like the eugenicists of the turn of the last century and the sociobiologists of the 1970s, the evolutionary psychologists of today provide scientific cover for existing unequal social relations. These variant strains of biological determinism have already been exhaustively covered in this journal,¹⁵ so I won’t go into any more detail here. Suffice it to say that, though they provide little proof of anything except their authors’ prejudices, each new crop of poorly supported nonsense is picked up by the mainstream press and pounded into the popular psyche, then retracted months or years later in a footnote or a sidebar.

The Yanomami are from Mars and so is everybody else

Take, for example, Napoleon A. Chagnon’s studies of the Yanomami. In the 1960s and 1970s, anthropologists like Chagnon considered the Yanomami of Venezuela and Brazil to be prime examples of the darker side of human nature. “Engaged in endless wars over women, status, and revenge, the Yanomami were supposed to exemplify the natural human condition of eons past. Some people took Chagnon’s work to imply that aggression is in our genes.”¹⁶ Chagnon’s book, Yanomamo: The Fierce People, was assigned reading in introductory college anthropology courses across the U.S.—the only anthropology that students who did not go on to major in the subject would ever read.

Unfortunately for those students, alternative interpretations of Yanomami behavior did not become public until more than thirty years later. Although anthropologists had been debating the source of the Yanomami’s “fierceness” almost from the moment Chagnon published his book, the debate was not popularized until a journalist accused Chagnon of starting the Yanomami wars himself. Anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson’s more reasoned view—that the Yanomami warfare was neither pre-historical nor the fault of a single anthropologist, but could be traced to the colonial era—had been published in 1995 but largely ignored by everyone outside of the professional community. According to Ferguson, the introduction of scarce supplies of manufactured goods produced competition; the simultaneous introduction of steel weapons ensured that competitive conflict, when it occurred, was more deadly.

Although there is still some dispute over who, exactly, is responsible for Yanomami aggression and when it began, “no one paying attention to this controversy still claims that Yanomami wars can be understood without taking into account the tribe’s highly disrupted historical circumstances.”¹⁷ That is, rather than proving that humans are naturally violent, a closer look at the Yanomami reveals them changing their behavior in response to drastic alterations in &# 220;the ensemble of social relations”: the disruption of kinship and sharing patterns by the early slave trade, disease, game depletion, and other fallout from the introduction of Western-style “free trade.”

The idea that aggression and its correlative violence are human universals is a favorite of biological determinists. Fortunately, it does not hold up to anthropological or archaeological scrutiny, or even to a casual survey of the world today. Most people are nonviolent most of the time. If humans were naturally violent and prone to kill, it would not be necessary to put soldiers through the rigors of boot camp to make them fit for war. There would be no need to dehumanize the soldier or the enemy, and soldiers would not be returning from battle with shattered psyches. But in reality this is not the case. Soldiers are taught to deny instincts and reason. They are taught to view their opponents as less than human in order to make them easier to kill. Even so, many return from battle so broken psychologically and emotionally that they cannot function in society. According to the February 2006 Journal of the American Medicinal Association, 20 percent of soldiers returning from the occupation of Iraq “met the risk criteria for a mental health concern,” and 10 percent were actually diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), many after killing or seeing people killed.

What is human nature?

Although the human race has seen enormous and rapid cultural evolution, human beings’ basic physical needs have remained the same for hundreds of thousands of years: we need air, water, food, shelter, or other protection from the elements, sleep, parenting for the young, and sex to propagate the species.¹⁸ These general needs are accompanied by a set of specific abilities: because humans have large brains, walk upright, have hands with opposable thumbs, and vocal chords that allow speech, we are able to use our physicality, our bodies and brains and the five senses they afford us, in ways that other creatures can’t. First and foremost, we work in a distinctively human way and, through social labor, we change our environment and the conditions that determine our “nature.”

Friedrich Engels, writing in 1876, placed labor at the very center of human development: “[Labor] is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labor created man himself.”¹⁹ Engels goes on to attribute changes in human anatomy to work in general and working with tools in particular, comparing the bone structure of the human hand to that of other primates and noting “the great gulf between the undeveloped hand of even the most man-like apes and the human hand that has been highly perfected by hundreds of thousands of years of labor.”²⁰

In addition to working with tools, humans have always lived and worked in groups: “The development of labor necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by increasing cases of mutual support and joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual.” From cooperative labor arose the need to speak and the development of language: “In short, men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to each other. Necessity created the organ; the undeveloped larynx of the ape was slowly but surely transformed.”²¹ The development of complex systems of language allowed for human social consciousness: the transmission of culture and history from generation to generation.

Of course it can be argued that animals also work: they hunt, gather, and in some cases store food; they build nests and dens and tend their young. Some cooperate; some communicate, albeit nonverbally; some even use tools. But the work done by animals is mostly instinctive and unchanging. Otters may use stones to crack open sea urchins but they can’t invent a sea urchin cracker. Beavers take down trees to build their dams but they’ll never use a chain saw. Whales may communicate through songs, but they can’t write lyrics or mass produce CDs. Only humans have the ability to record their history and create art. Only humans can conceive of a project, plan out the various steps to completion, and reflect with satisfaction on a job well done. Only humans can invent and construct complex tools that alter the environment and allow for enormous increases in productivity—tools that enable us to make a lot more stuff with a lot less effort.

By acting on nature to produce their subsistence, human beings change themselves. Laboring socially, humans change the material forms of what Marx called their means of production. These engender new social relations, allowing, in the end, for the distinctive variability of human behavior through history, and from one society to the next.

The impact of capitalism

Marx observed that, under capitalism, human productive capacity increased so much that, for the first time in history, it was possible to have enough of everything for everybody. What’s more, the satisfaction of basic needs and the ways in which they were satisfied led to the development of more complicated needs. Crowded living conditions create a need for systems of sanitation. Complex machinery creates a need for higher education. These complications further the development of human tastes and abilities, and could lead, under conditions of socialized, planned production, to the fullest expression of human nature:

Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under the collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature.²²