6 Does Human Nature Prevent System Change?
Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?
—EMMA GOLDMAN1
THOSE WHO WANT TO CREATE an ecologically healthy society based on equality and social justice are confronted by a commonly held assumption that humans are hardwired for capitalism. It is an argument used by ruling elites throughout history—what better way to promote an economic or political system than by claiming it’s the natural outgrowth of human behavior?
Apologists for the system argue, as did Britain’s former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, “there is no alternative” to capitalism. Former U.S. State Department official Francis Fukuyama, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, went so far as to claim that capitalism represents “the end of history.” 2 More recently, in 2017 on CNN, in response to a student question about the fact that a majority of younger Americans now disdain capitalism and want something radically different, veteran Democratic Party leader Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi nevertheless responded that there was no alternative, “[W]e are capitalist. That’s just the way it is.”3 By their analysis, an equitable, just, and ecological society is not possible because human progress has reached its apex with the development and spread of capitalism. Capitalism is here to stay because humans are, by our very nature, individualistic, greedy, acquisitive, and competitive. The long march of human progress has, by this narrative, reached its apex with the overthrow of previous economic and political systems and the development and spread of capitalism.
Nevertheless, what is commonly referred to as “human nature” has changed a great deal throughout the history of humanity. When social systems change, so do culture and behavior, as people adapt to new social structures and customs. The wide range of human characteristics, traits, and behaviors runs the gamut from the killing or torture of others, greed, selfishness, individualism, and competitiveness to cooperation, reciprocity, empathy, altruism, and the desire to be treated, and treat others, with fairness. Though all these potentials are within us, different societies have encouraged and rewarded some while suppressing others.
Critics of change to the existing capitalist order argue that even if a successful revolution takes place—one based on solidarity, reciprocity, cooperation, equality, and genuine democracy—entrenched leaders and inequalities will inevitably reemerge. Driven by ambition and a lust for personal glory, wealth, or status, they will ultimately subvert the high ideals they had once promised to uphold.
Look at the Soviet Union, critics say. Tyrannies arise even out of well-meaning attempts to create just and humane societies because people are naturally selfish and will dominate others if given the chance. These critics assume the same behavioral traits are dominant in all human cultures as those that are prominent under capitalism—a form of social organization based on aggressive competition to maximize profit—but the actual history of our species illustrates a different, more hopeful reality. Education reformer John Dewey saw this more hopeful possibility when he wrote in The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences in 1932:
The present controversies between those who assert the essential fixity of human nature and those who believe in a great measure of modifiability center chiefly around the future of war and the future of a competitive economic system motivated by private profit. It is justifiable to say without dogmatism that both anthropology and history give support to those who wish to change these institutions. It is demonstrable that many of the obstacles to change which have been attributed to human nature are in fact due to the inertia of institutions and to the voluntary desire of powerful classes to maintain the existing status.4
Lets take a look at how people behaved in different societies and which traits or characteristics predominated. We’ll start with hunter-gatherer societies, in which our species spent more than 90 percent of our existence, and then look at small agricultural and mixed agricultural/hunting and gathering societies, and finally societies that developed fixed classes, using capitalism as the main example.
HUNTERS AND GATHERERS
Certain traits, some found in closely related species, are thought to have been critical for the evolution of humans and their subsequent development. For example, the desire for just outcomes in humans and a number of nonhuman species is indicated by a profound sense of wanting to be treated equally. Protesting unequal treatment and trying to equalize outcomes are examples of this phenomenon. Researchers summarizing numerous studies on a variety of animals conclude: “Humans and other species seem to share basic [negative] reactions to inequity, which serve the need for sustained cooperation.”5
Cooperation among members of our particular species, Homo sapiens, was critical for early survival when it emerged about 200,000 years ago. It also greatly contributed to the development of ancient cultures and societies:
It was cooperation … whether in the form of monogamous pairs, nuclear families or tribes, that enabled humans to succeed when all our fossil ancestors and cousins went extinct. In fact, cooperation may be the greatest skill we have acquired during the past two million years [of evolutionary change]—one that enabled our young genus to survive through periods of environmental change and stress and one that may well determine our geologically young species’ future.6
Over millennia, members of our species, the only remaining member of the Homo genus, demonstrated a high degree of cooperation and adaptability as they spread throughout most of the world. Science journalist Stefan Klein describes the evolutionary and social benefits of cooperative traits and helping others in early human societies and how it relates to today:
Everything argues that our ancestors could only afford [the energy expenditure needed to maintain] their large brains once they had learned how to minimize the risks of existence by working together. Before they were smarter than their cousins the chimpanzees, they had to improve their cooperation. Intelligence, language, culture—we owe all of these accomplishments to our sympathy and our ability to put ourselves in another’s place. We humans became first the friendliest and then the most intelligent apes…. Cooperation that went beyond the biological family became possible and necessary.7
Semi-nomadic herding and hunter-gatherer societies still survive today, even if they are simultaneously integrated into aspects of the commodity economy. For example, until very recently, the !Kung (variously, Khoisan, Khoe-San, or San) of Southern Africa had hunted and gathered for tens of thousands of years. They are believed to be humankind’s oldest continuously existing society. They have a high genetic diversity and at one time they may even have been the largest human population. The !Kung have a gendered division of labor, with women doing most of the gathering, providing some two-thirds of the calorie intake, and men doing most of the hunting. At the same time, there is a high level of equality between men and women.
Anthropologist Marjory Shostak summarizes her findings regarding the relationship between the sexes among the !Kung as follows:
Here in a society of ancient traditions, men and women live together in a non-exploitative manner, displaying a striking equality between the sexes…. Other contemporary gathering and hunting societies have a similar high level of equality—higher at least than that of most agricultural or herding societies. This observation has led to the suggestion that the relations between the sexes that prevailed during the majority of human prehistory were comparable to those seen in the !Kung today.8
This has been confirmed by other studies, such as those of the Mbendjele BaYaka in Central Africa and the Agta of the Philippines, showing that equality between men and women is indicated not only by day-to-day behavior but also by the social structure of the hunter-gatherer bands and their living arrangements.9
The prominent role and behavior of women in such societies caused consternation and condemnation among colonial Europeans in the territory that became Canada. In the early seventeenth century, Paul Le Jeune, superior of the Jesuit mission at Quebec, spent many months in Eastern Canada learning the language of the semi-nomadic foragers of the Montagnais-Naskapi. It was his intention to civilize them. He was horrified by the sexual freedom in Montagnais society and describes one encounter:
I told him that it was not honorable for a woman to love anyone else except her husband, and that this evil being among them, he himself was not sure that his son, who was there present, was his son. He replied, “Thou hast no sense. You French people love only your own children; but we love all the children of our tribe.”10
Studies of the !Kung people and other hunter-gatherer societies have found that “humility, humor, and strict protocols about distributing meat helped keep people on an even footing…. !Kung people traditionally downplay their accomplishments: A hunter will say he’s caught only a small skinny animal, even if it’s big and meaty, and his comrades will agree.”11 Among the hunter-gatherer societies studied by anthropologists, “someone other than the successful hunter distribute[s] the meat.”12 And the hunters of the !Kung “exchange arrows before they hunt. The owner of the arrow, not the bowman himself, gets the credit and decides how to distribute the meat while everyone looks on.”13
In such societies, the economy is a function of the social relations and people are not allowed to profit from trading transactions. Karl Polanyi got to the heart of the matter regarding hunter-gatherer societies when he explained, in 1944:
The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets.14
In hunter-gatherer societies, social standing is gained by being helpful and cooperative. There is a tendency to suppress characteristics that are harmful to their own society: individualism, selfishness, greed, competitiveness, and aggression. They view these characteristics as counterproductive, even destructive, to the welfare of society.
Instead, these communities encourage and reward caring, empathy, cooperation, and sharing of food and other resources. There is nothing especially unusual or noble about people in hunter-gatherer societies (or contemporary indigenous communities). They are not inherently more environmentally conscious or socially just. These behaviors persist because they are foundational to the cultural survival and maintenance of their societies.
Enormous climatic changes 16,000 to 12,000 years ago resulted in a warmer world; glaciers melted and retreated and rising seas inundated vast areas of land. New groupings of plants spread with the creation of new biomes. Soon after, around 10,000 years ago, during the last phase of the Neolithic period—the New Stone Age—a new form of human interaction with the natural world began with the domestication of animals and plants. Agricultural societies were highly varied, including many that never developed a class structure and continued to hunt and gather along with growing food. People living in forests tended to practice shifting (slash-and-burn) farming with land cleared by felling trees and burning, farmed for a few years, and then allowed to regenerate forests for decades before being prepared once again for planting food crops.
Hunting-gathering bands consist of around 30 to 50 people with mostly informal and temporary leaders who exercise little power. Historian Yuval Harari suggests that once there are around 150 people living in the same community some more formal decision-making process is needed, because it becomes impossible to informally organize activities needed for life.15 Although there were undoubtedly village leaders, such agricultural societies did not produce large food surpluses nor did they develop hierarchical class systems. The customs and traditions of such societies encouraged expression of traits and behaviors similar to those fostered by hunter-gatherer societies.
It was not so long ago—considering the 200,000 years of human existence—that native peoples in much of North and South America had a very different consciousness from that imposed by the invasions and conquests by European armies and settlers. Although the Inca and Aztec empires existed at the time of first contact with Europeans when the population of the hemisphere was 100 million, millions of people in the Americas lived in a variety of types of settlements, practiced both horticultural systems of growing food agriculture and foraging for plants and animals, and had ways of cooperative behavior similar to hunter-gatherer societies.
The economics of these societies often took the form of reciprocity and redistribution. Trade existed, using an extensive network of paths and roads over which people traveled far-and-wide. But trade was not for the sale of commodities for personal gain, but rather for exchange of goods. Agricultural land was not privately owned, nor could it be bought and sold. Instead, it was generally allocated and reallocated by village elders or community councils. Much of the food collected was redistributed at village ceremonial feasts. Leaders were chosen based on their generosity and ability to provide for others. These were not perfect societies, but the point is that people had different values, social mores, and “human natures.” Thus Christopher Columbus wrote after his first voyage to the Americas:
Nor have I been able to learn whether they held personal property, for it seemed to me that whatever one had, they all took shares of…. They are so ingenuous and free with all they have that no one would believe it who has not seen it; of anything they possess, if it be asked of them, they never say no; on the contrary, they invite you to share it and show as much love as if their hearts went with it.16
The observations of a missionary working in the Caribbean in the 1650s is quoted by William Brandon, a leading historian of Native Americans:
they are all equal, without anyone recognizing any sort of superiority or any sort of servitude…. Neither is richer or poorer than his companion and all unanimously limit their desires to that which is useful and precisely necessary, and are contemptuous of all other things, superfluous things, as not being worthy to be possessed.17
And French philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote of the experience of three Native Americans who visited France in the late sixteenth century, and were struck in particular by the differences between the poor and wealthy:
They had perceived there were men amongst us full gorged with all sorts of commodities and others which [were] hunger-starved, and bare with need and povertie begged at their gates: and found it strange these moieties [groups] so needy could endure such an injustice, and they tooke not the others by the throte, or set fire on their house.18
The Europeans who settled in the original thirteen colonies of the United States had no doubts about their superiority over the “savage” Native Americans they encountered. A comparison of the practices of Native Americans with those of the colonists provides evidence as to which society might justifiably be called savage.
The five nations comprising the Iroquois Confederacy, living in what is now Central New York and along the St. Lawrence River downstream to Montreal, had democracy involving not political parties but people’s participation in decision making and in removing unsatisfactory officials. Women voted with the men and had special responsibilities in certain aspects of life. Benjamin Franklin thought highly of Native American councils and their decision making. He observed, “All their Government is by Council of the Sages; there is no Force, there are no Prisons, no officers to compel Obedience, or inflict Punishment.” 19
At the same time, the so-called civilized settlers relied on white indentured servants and black slaves and severely restricted women’s rights. It took another two and a half centuries after the Pilgrims landed and a civil war to end slavery, and three centuries and a long militant struggle for women to get the right to vote.
Compared to today’s capitalist societies, those of pre-colonial America clearly had different social relations as well as relations to the resources they used. Prosocial behavior and basic gender equality were prominent features. But some agricultural systems around the world produced surpluses large enough to allow the development of non-farming classes as well as large settlements, even cities and empires. The traits and behaviors that became the norm in class societies were significantly different than those of hunter-gatherers and small agricultural societies.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF CITIES AND CLASSES
Wherever new farming techniques with greater productivity resulted in production of significant amounts of surplus food, a layer of classes frequently developed: full-time craftsmen, merchants, priests, civil servants, soldiers, kings, queens, or other royal figureheads and families. Some societies, but by no means all, developed writing and metalworking as they grew into larger units, kingdoms, and empires.
The division into different classes in large agricultural societies varied over time and place, but it began with the rise of agriculture: slaves, lower castes, serfs, or peasants occupied the bottom rungs. The more socially privileged stratum of people developed into ruling classes as they came to identify their interests in acquiring more wealth and status, regardless of the conditions of lower classes.
With the growth of expansive agricultural societies with well developed class systems the treatment of women changed dramatically. Although a sexual division of labor existed in hunter-gatherer societies, the roles of women and men were seen as complementary and equally necessary. Some hunter-gatherer societies did exhibit inequality between the sexes, but unlike class-based societies this was far from a universal attribute.
However, in agricultural societies based on a plow pulled by animals such as those in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China, as men became the field-workers and producers, women were removed from productive activities to exist within a new social structure in which their focus was on reproduction of the next generation of workers. Compared with Eurasian agricultural societies based on the plow, women in the Americas, even with the rise of cities and states, tended to help more with farming work and to have other roles such as weaving goods for tribute or trade that gave them a more prominent role in economic life.
The advantage of more reliable and greater food supplies came with disadvantages. Skeletal remains indicate that people in agricultural societies were not as well nourished as hunter-gatherers, who ate a much wider variety of foods; their height and life expectancy declined and they had to work significantly more hours per week in the fields than they ever had collecting roots, seeds, berries, and nuts. In addition to the declines in height and general nutrition and the negative impact on women with the rise of social hierarchies, there was another drawback to those societies that developed to rely exclusively on farming.
Agricultural productivity (output per farmer and per area of land) did not increase much because the technologies used remained mostly unchanged. Therefore, as populations of non-farming classes grew relative to the number of farmers and elites desired greater quantities of wealth, there was a need to expand the area under production or to conquer other peoples in order to extract greater quantities of surplus (tribute). This more socially privileged stratum of people developed into a social class when it begins to identify its own interests (in acquiring more wealth and status) as if they were the interests of the entire community. At that point, the interests of this proto-ruling elite diverge from the those of everyone else, as they attempt to force increases in productivity by those laboring directly on the land, an increase in land area (through conquest), and a larger and docile labor force (slavery, kidnapping).
There is no pre-destined line progressing from egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies through mixed agricultural-hunting and gathering societies to city and state agriculture-based class ones. Human history is far more contingent and dependent on the people alive at the time and the decisions they made in the specific ecological, technical, historical, and cultural contexts. These various societies evolved in response to the problems that people faced, such as climate change, poor harvests, population growth, as well as to the opportunities that presented themselves, and the realization that harvested wild grain would reseed itself when dropped near the village or home granary.
CAPITALISM AND HUMAN NATURE
Relations among people and between people and the rest of the natural world changed dramatically when economic and social relations were revolutionized with the appearance of capitalism. Private property, money, and trade for the purpose of immediate gain came to the fore; reciprocal obligations were eliminated; and social relations eventually became a reflection of the needs of capitalist economics.
Brought about by the forcible overthrow of previous societies, capitalism has existed for about 500 years, as industrial capitalism for the last 250 years. In other words, capitalism has been prevalent for less than 0.3 percent of the entire period that modern humans have walked the earth. In some parts of the globe, capitalism has held sway for an even shorter time period; in a few locations it has barely arrived.
Acculturation to society and its norms happens in many ways, much of it brought about through unconscious assimilation from the general culture. But behaviors can be instilled and reinforced beginning at an early age. Competition as a positive and “natural” behavior begins with childhood exposure to competitive sports and competition for grades and other rewards in school, then moves on to competition among adults for jobs, educational opportunities, social status, and housing. Businesses compete for market share, cities and states compete for new businesses, and countries compete for export markets, geopolitical power, and access to resources.
Capitalism is characterized by competition. Cooperation is cultivated only so far as it reinforces and drives more competition. For example, corporations and countries may cooperate but only as a means to an end: so that larger and more powerful enterprises and states can vie for dominance more effectively against their competitors. The 2016 obituary for Dwayne Andreas, former CEO of the food-processing giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), quoted his comments at a 1990s meeting of American Sugar Alliance which perfectly capture a capitalist’s view of competition: “A gazelle must run faster than the fastest lion or be eaten, he said. A lion needs to outrun the slowest gazelle or starve. ‘It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle,’ he said. ‘When the sun comes up, you’d better be running.’”20
Another characteristic of capitalism is the need to develop a culture of consumerism, the unnatural desire to acquire material goods. For the vast majority of human existence, “consumerism” was a concept that would not have made any sense, let alone be embraced as a real possibility. In the words of the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, capitalism is a system of “manufactured discontent.” It is not some fixed innate compulsion, but rather a set of behaviors that capitalist societies develop and promote in order to continue selling products, as we discussed in chapter 2.
The emphasis on the specific assortment of characteristics and behaviors promoted by capitalism has detrimental effects on both communities and individuals. The authors of an article in Psychological Inquiry made this observation:
Substantial evidence suggests that when the values and goals necessary for the smooth functioning of ACC [American corporate capitalism] become increasingly central to individuals and to institutions, the result is a corresponding conflict with three other aims: concern for the broader community and the world; close, intimate relationships; and feeling worthy and autonomous.21
We can conclude that human behaviors most commonly expressed in capitalist societies are starkly different from those in pre-class societies or even prior class-based societies. For a society based on relentless competition, expansion, and warfare, greed and individualism must dominate the social and cultural mores of society and be justified ideologically as natural.
HUMAN NATURE AND THE RICH
There are those from every economic stratum who engage in antisocial behavior. Among the poor this is usually based on the need to eat or pay the rent; sometimes it’s a result of activities that develop in high-unemployment areas where people have few ways out. But there are differences in average behaviors as one goes up or down the economic ladder and the poor generally tend to be more pro-social than the wealthy.
In capitalism, the rich, powerful, and greedy are our social as well as political leaders. They consider themselves to be the most important positive contributors to society, the so-called job creators and creative geniuses, thus explaining why they deserve to be paid so handsomely and receive the accolades and thanks of a grateful society. Greed is the emotion that most perfectly complements the economic compulsion toward continuous accumulation. Gordon Gekko’s famous quote from the movie Wall Street accurately sums up the attitude of the newly minted rich in the 1980s, naturalizing greed as part of human evolution: “The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed—for lack of a better word—is good. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” In 2017, we have a newly minted President who campaigned as the greedy candidate whose platform was greed as faith. At a rally in Iowa, he told his followers:
I like money. I’m very greedy. I’m a greedy person. I shouldn’t tell you that, I’m a greedy—I’ve always been greedy. I love money, right? But, you know what? I want to be greedy for our country. I want to be greedy. I want to be so greedy for our country. I want to take back money. 22
Not only is greed considered to be good in a capitalist society it is an attribute necessary to guarantee the smooth working of the system. It is the emotion that most perfectly complements the economic compulsion toward continuous accumulation.
While the wealthy have more control over their lives and live far more easily, such an existence that emphasizes and rewards greed corrupts their humanity, leading to antisocial attitudes and behavior. A 2012 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is titled: “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased, Unethical Behavior.”23 The authors found greed propels this behavior and that “relative to lower-class individuals, individuals from upper-class backgrounds behaved more unethically in both naturalistic and laboratory settings.” One of the authors, Dacher Keltner, commented: “As you move up the class ladder, you are more likely to violate the rules of the road, to lie, to cheat, to take candy from kids, to shoplift, and to be tight-fisted in giving to others. Straightforward economic analyses have trouble making sense of this pattern of results.”24
The capitalist economic system fosters misconduct in the affluent class in the pursuit of wealth and unethical behavior in general. As George Akerlof and Robert Schilling explain in Phishing for Phools, “every chance for profit more than the ordinary will be taken up” and “competitive markets by their very nature spawn deception and trickery.”25 In a 2014 article in the New Republic, Michael Lewis reports: “A UCLA neuroscientist named Keely Muscatell has published an interesting paper showing that wealth quiets the nerves in the brain associated with empathy: if you show rich people and poor people pictures of kids with cancer, the poor people’s brains exhibit a great deal more activity than the rich people’s.”26
The antisocial ethics of the wealthy have to be effectively transmitted to their offspring for the system to replicate itself and the wealthy to stay wealthy. The greater the family income, the less altruistic the children will tend to be. According to one study:
Our finding that family income negatively predicted altruism implies that this culture of self-focus could potentially be present in children as young as 4 years old who are from higher SES [socioeconomic status] backgrounds. The implication that their parents socialize greater self-interest in these children is consistent with findings that parents of higher SES value autonomy and individualism as socialization goals, whereas parents of lower SES are concerned with fostering respectfulness and obedience.27
Liberal economist Paul Krugman was correct when he summarized a number of these studies in his New York Times column by asserting, “Wealth can be bad for your soul.”28
Businesses large and small act in unscrupulous ways, hoping that profit gains will outweigh any penalties and litigation costs they might have to pay. In the financial arena, the fallout from the Great Recession exposed significant problems: from Ponzi schemes, to banks pushing the sale of investments they knew were rotten (and that they were betting against), to banks cheating to make money on setting the LIBOR rates, to “liar loans” in which the mortgage originator fabricates information to make it appear that borrowers have the ability to carry the mortgage when they really don’t, to robo-signing mortgage documents that were supposed to be signed by an actual person, to the sale of complex financial “instruments” that few, if any, actually understood, and on and on and on.
In an example from the manufacturing sector of the economy, in 2015 General Motors was ordered to pay a $900 million fine for hiding an ignition switch defect that caused the deaths of 124 people. In the same year, Volkswagen admitted to installing software in its diesel-powered vehicles that turned off emission controls in order to enhance car performance, causing the emission of forty times the U.S. legal limit of nitrous oxide (N2O), a greenhouse gas which also depletes ozone in the stratosphere.
Among the many examples of corporate immorality with great consequences are the following: Exxon’s forty-year cover-up of the effects on global climate change from fossil fuels; the tobacco and asbestos industries engaged in a decades-long cover-up of the negative health effects of their products; DuPont knew about the consequences of water contamination from poisonous chemical PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid, aka C-8, used to make Teflon) but for many years it did nothing29; the Japanese company Takata was aware for more than a decade that its airbags were defective—and responsible for maiming and killing numerous people—but it wasn’t until 2014 that they were forced to initiate an extensive recall; one that 3 years later is still underway. Figures provided in late 2016 indicate that upwards of 42 million vehicles have been found with potentially defective Takata airbags in the United States and more than 7 million have been recalled worldwide, including 3 million in Japan. The cars affected included various models by Ford, BMW, Jaguar, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Volkswagen, Daimler, Chrysler, Honda, Acura, General Motors, Ferrari—basically the whole gamut of popular car manufacturers.
When such problems arise, the modus operandi of most corporations is to delay acknowledging and remedying defects and environmental damage for as long as possible. When they get caught violating health and safety laws that lead to the death or ill health of workers or pollution of the environment, corporate lawyers are on hand to minimize the financial costs and any damage to public image and brand, as well as delay litigation as long as possible hoping that the suit might be dropped.
No matter how many illegal activities committed by rich individuals or corporations we find out about, they recede into insignificance beside the social and ecological destruction caused by their perfectly legal day-to-day activities.
The system’s need for CEOs to act in antisocial ways and not feel guilty tends to attract and retain those best suited to the role. According to recent research findings, psychopaths disproportionately populate the ranks of corporate leaders. Forensic psychologist Nathan Brooks and a team of colleagues studied corporate professionals in the supply chain management industry across the United States and found 20 percent of CEOs were psychopaths, compared to 1 percent in the general public.30
From toxic products to toxic effluent, from the deformation and shortening of people’s lives to the degradation of the environment, the activities of corporations in pursuit of profits have few consequences under the legal, philosophical, and institutional setup of capitalism. The almost complete lack of criminal prosecution of CEO’s for wrongdoing, and the inadequate or nonexistent fines of corporations that get caught, indicates that the legal system was set up to protect capitalists and corporations, not hold them to account.
If the rich are so “ethically-challenged,” how do we understand their donations to charities (even though they donate a lower percent of their wealth than do people with less income and wealth)? Philanthropy is a booming business that helps the wealthy appear as social benefactors and disguises the ecological and social damage they cause. Charitable giving by individuals and corporations makes them look and feel like benevolent patricians. In the process, they funnel money into areas that will make them look good while manipulating public policy. Corporate philanthropy and rich benefactors are an important ideological safety valve for the system that also provides the wealthy with lucrative tax write-offs. Charities and foundations do nothing to reduce inequality or human misery; they merely address some of the immediate symptoms without considering why such inequity exists in the first place.
There is a material reason for a system-wide orientation toward war in class societies of any kind, the motivation for which does not exist in semi-nomadic bands without much property and with space to move elsewhere should conflicts arise. Nevertheless, there are those who believe that we humans, by our very nature, are innately aggressive, endowed with a built-in propensity toward violence, killing, and war. In fact, it’s often thought of as a commonsense proposition: people are inherently warlike and drawn toward conquest and systematic violence.
Biologist E. O. Wilson writes of war as a phenomenon that transcends history, built into human DNA: “It should not be thought that war, often accompanied by genocide, is a cultural artifact of a few societies. Nor has it been an aberration of history, a result of the growing pains of our species’ maturation. Wars and genocide have been universal and eternal, respecting no particular time or culture.”31 Indeed, Wilson goes so far as to argue that our predilection for violence stems from our evolutionary connection to chimpanzees, or even further back in prehistory: “There is a good chance that [tribal aggressiveness] could be a much older heritage, dating beyond the split six million years ago between the lines leading to modern chimpanzees and to humans.”32
Wilson is far from alone. Based on his own studies of violence in chimpanzees, Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham argues for an evolutionary propensity for violence we inherited from our closest genetic relatives dating back millions of years, “Chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human war, making modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, five-million-year habit of lethal aggression.”33
For some scholars even the violence of ISIS is merely an expression of our ancient tribal imprinting toward brutality and warfare. In an article for the Washington Post titled, “How the Tribal Warfare of Our Ancestors Explains the Islamic State,” Harvard scholar Luke Glowacki writes:
My colleagues and I have been studying the origins of war through systematic analysis of chimpanzees, hunter-gatherers and modern conflicts. We have learned that lethal violence against out-groups is found, in one form or another, at all scales of society, including among our closest relatives, the chimpanzees.34
There are a number of problems with the story of chimpanzees as natural born killers (“data in support of these theories have been weak”35) that is supposed to back up the claim that the same is true for humans. While chimpanzees have been observed to use “lethal violence” against other chimpanzees, another close relative of chimpanzees and humans, bonobos, are known for their lack of aggression and resolving disputes peacefully, frequency by having sex. But there are even complications involving the contention that chimps normally partake in war or “lethal violence.” Humans have destroyed so much of their habitat by logging and farming that chimp bands have no alternative but to live closer to other bands and to compete with them for resources. Thus, what is being observed are the interactions of animals living under very stressed conditions. One of the early examples of chimp aggression came from the fieldwork of Jane Goodall, who later recognized that the artificial conditions she had created were influencing behavior. She noted that:
the constant feeding was having a marked effect on the behavior of the chimps. They were beginning to move about in large groups more often than they had ever done in the old days. Worst of all, the adult males were becoming increasingly aggressive. When we first offered the chimps bananas the males seldom fought over their food; … now … there was a great deal more fighting than ever before.36
As with chimpanzees, there is little evidence of early hunter-gatherer humans as violent and prolific killers. In an archeological study of 2,900 skeletons from over 400 sites that dated back to before 10,000 years ago only 4 bore “signs of violence.”37 John Horgan, describing the study in in Scientific American, concludes:
The evidence is overwhelming that war, far from being an innate behavior that evolved millions of years ago, was a cultural innovation—an “invention,” as Margaret Mead put it—that emerged relatively recently in our prehistory, toward the end of the Paleolithic Era. We should take responsibility for our wars instead of blaming them on our genes.38
Corroborating that study, a 2016 study published by the Royal Society of Great Britain on violence in Japanese society from 12,000 to 7,000 years ago shows that far from being omnipresent, it was an aberration, concluding that “violence including warfare in prehistoric Japan was not common.”39
President Obama reiterated the theme that since humans have always engaged in warfare, continuing to wage war is normal. He did this in—of all places—his acceptance speech for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. He began his speech (while waging two wars) by addressing this dichotomy: “I come here … filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.” Obama then went on to naturalize warfare as stemming from the very first human: “Now these questions are not new. War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease—the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences.”40 He then made a moral justification for why war is necessary as an instrument of policy, and amazingly, even a policy of peace: “There will be times when nations—acting individually or in concert—will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified…. So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.”41
Clearly, under a variety of conditions, humans exhibit aggressive behavior, going so far as to kill other humans. And warfare continues to plague our species. But contemporary discussion of warfare as innate and, therefore somehow acceptable, neglects the role of capitalist state national interests in waging wars such as those in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and many more and absolves imperial intervention and conquest as just a part of “human nature.” During the long human history before class societies, the preponderance of evidence indicates that peaceful dispute resolution was the norm.
PROSOCIAL TRAITS AND BEHAVIOR
The desire to act in ways that promote social well-being is deep within us. One of the earliest behavioral traits exhibited by infants is the desire to help others. A review of research on these early developments concludes:
Young children help those for whom they feel sympathy; they are not motivated by extrinsic rewards; and they are less concerned that they provide help than that the person in need be helped. Young children’s prosocial behavior is thus intrinsically motivated by a concern for the other’s welfare, which has its evolutionary roots in uniquely human forms of social and cultural interactions in which individuals are concerned about the well-being of those with whom they are interdependent.42
There is well-documented and widespread evidence of psychological and physical benefits to helping others. For example, researchers at the University of British Columbia have shown that when people are given money and asked to use it generously, it “enhances one’s own happiness, and that the benefits of such ‘prosocial spending’ hold up around the world, from the United States and Canada to Uganda and India…. People assigned to use the money in generous ways showed a significant reduction in blood pressure … similar in magnitude to what is typically observed when people start engaging in regular aerobic exercise.”43
Prosocial behavior and traits are often suppressed by the need to express those contrary behaviors required to survive and flourish within the system of capital. However, even where antisocial capitalist social relations are prevalent, there are expressions of the deep human values of empathy, solidarity, and cooperation. Though latent, they rise to the fore during natural disasters and periods of mass resistance such as strikes and anticolonial struggles. In her study of how people react in the wake of natural disasters, writer and activist Rebecca Solnit concludes:
The history of disaster demonstrates that most of us are social animals, hungry for connection, as well as for purpose and meaning…. Two things matter most about these ephemeral moments. First, they demonstrate what is possible or, more accurately, latent: the resilience and generosity of those around us and their ability to improvise another kind of society. Second, they demonstrate how deeply most of us desire connection, participation, altruism and purposefulness.44
That prosocial behavior still occurs despite the many rewards of capitalist society for anti-social behavior and that humans naturally lean against individualism is a strongly hopeful sign. It is one more indication of the wide range of human characteristics within each of us, our tendency toward empathy and care for others. It raises the issue of how a future society would best encourage prosocial behavior while discouraging anti-social behavior.
SO WHAT IS HUMAN NATURE?
There is no such thing as a hard-and-fast human nature. To assert otherwise is to promote a position based not on science or the history of our species but on ideology. The specific set of traits and behaviors encouraged in our society and referred to as “human nature” is a sociological, historical, and political question, not a biological reality. Over the millennia since Homo sapiens emerged as a species there have been many different kinds of societies, with various types of cultures, social organization, and relations among humans and between humans and the resources that we use to perpetuate our existence.
It is evident that the concept of an inbuilt human nature is not a useful indicator of what it means to be human. Thus it makes no sense to refer to a “human nature” apart from the context of a particular society. As Marx wrote, “All history is but the continuous transformation of human nature.”45
We humans are not a tabula rasa—a blank slate capable of being imprinted and conditioned to unquestioningly accept whatever propaganda we are fed. In some situations, people can certainly be manipulated to believe false ideas, but our primary assets as a species are our ability to learn and our flexibility, which can lead to changes in thinking as well as action.
Human behaviors and traits have changed before and can therefore change again. To reach a truly just and ecologically healthy world, they must change to enable prosocial behavior patterns to become dominant, and antisocial behavior, so prized and rewarded in capitalist societies, to fade into the background. The question to address, therefore, is not whether human values and relations can change, but how they change, as part of a transformation of our society into a more humane and ecological social organization.