Becoming human: a user's guide

June 15, 1994
Issue 

by Dave Riley

When Charles Darwin synthesised the biological knowledge of the 19th century into a theory that humans evolved from other mammals, Frederick Engels in a short essay hypothesised that in the transition from ape-like creature to human being, much more was involved than the advance of nature alone. The dynamic unleashed, perhaps in the first instance by an upright stance and the consequent narrowing of the pelvis, led to a qualitatively different product — one that was both of nature and other than nature.

While we can talk of a "bird nature" or an "ant nature" or a "worm nature", it is extremely difficult to define "human nature" because of its immense variability in both time and place.

Dogs, for instance, learn spontaneously all canine languages, and a Chinese dog can communicate with an American dog as well as an Egyptian one. But the human nervous system, "wired in" through individual experience, can speak only one language. The remaining 2000 or so tongues remain forever foreign unless the individual engages in new learning.

Unlike animals, whose behaviour is fundamentally determined by their nervous system — a new calf will stand within an hour of birth — almost all our activity is learned. The way we sit, roll over, stand, eat, play a musical instrument, repair a watch or ride a bicycle are all learned.

Factors such as our extended period of dependency as young humans, the potentials of our opposing fingers and thumb, and our upright stance have enabled us to escape the limitations of our animal nature and replace it with something else. Between nature and ourselves are a series of mediations which have been fostered and developed through time — consciousness, social cooperation and tools. What draws them together is human labour.

Self-construction

Engels wrote that labour invented us. The biological laws that govern animal life were forced by the conscious nourishment of labour into the background. Darwinian-style evolution, which chiselled our shape and altered our brain size, merged with labour to invent culture so that more than just biology could be passed on through the generations.

We not only developed naturally, we have constructed ourselves. This is perhaps the most difficult assertion to believe. Human nature is precisely what animal nature is not — it isn't encoded or set, but is self-constituting. To be human is to be almost required, in the absence of a fixed instinctual disposition, to create one's own nature.

In fact, that is what history is all about — the continuous transformation of human nature.

To put this into perspective, it is worthwhile asking yourself how you view human nature. Is it good? Is it bad?

History suggests that there is no specific potentiality. If we are essentially good at our core, then the promise we strive for lives every day with us and we do not so much have to remake the world but delve inward to find our true selves.

The contemporary growth movement has made a fetish of the "true" self and abhorred political practice. In the '60s counterculture and within the current greening, there is a belief in a natural innocence. Touch the core of goodness that supposedly unites us beyond aspects of class and power, and the winning is assured.

On the other hand, if human nature is and always was bad, how on earth did we create society in the first place? This is a pivotal aspect of many theories of individual psychology, such as that developed by Sigmund Freud. Its key feature is that each human is isolated and aggressive — the wolf in us — and the psychic mechanisms of suppression and repression are essential to keep the wolf at bay.

A further variation is one that exaggerates the role of our sexuality. Theorists such as Wilhelm Reich believed that a free expression of our libido drive through full genital satisfaction was the beginning of human happiness. Remove the constraints of society to uncover our liberation in the exploration of our genital sexuality. As Reich wrote: "To define freedom is to define sexual health."

All these positions — the good, the bad and the gonad — depend on the assumption that there is an intrinsic opposition between society and human nature. Either we should look inward and eschew confrontation with social reality, or in taking up the good fight we do so only to expose our true individual essence.

Society and individual

But the most consistent view of human nature is that advocated by many socialists. Here the notion that the individual is opposed to society is almost incomprehensible. As Karl Marx wrote, our essence is "the ensemble of social relations". Our activity in the society of others determines our nature. We are forever being remade.

Human nature is therefore not predisposed toward any specific end. At birth we are neither wholly formed nor wholly unformed. Instead we form ourselves in a social world.

Unfortunately, each generation experiences the world as a natural fact, permanent and unalterable. The traditions of all dead generations bear down upon us so that the past dominates our present. We feel powerless because the world seems so ready-made.

This illusion of permanence rests on a lost awareness of history. To make sense of our social selves, we rely on our ability to think. This assumption of rationality leads us to presume that we, individually, are the initiators of activity in the world.

However, we are conditioned by processes which we do not control or even know, and generally we fear and misinterpret them. For each generation struggling with existence, reality refuses to reveal itself — it hides. And what is hidden contradicts what seems so obvious. So that no matter how many individual wills are active in history, they quite often produce results other than intended.

The key to understanding this contradiction is that both in history and in society, ends and means are not just the conglomeration of individual activity. Instead it is the "ensemble of relations" — human to human, species with nature, applying the tools of our creation — which determines the dynamic. Society therefore is not the sum total of individuals driven by motives and desires of their own. Individuals are not elements from which the system is constructed like bricks in a wall.

Such an outlook has immense practical significance. Since our disposition is neither fixed nor instinctual, we are forever capable of self-transformation. Perhaps the simplest approach is to recognise what Che Guevara called our "unmade quality", our status as an "unfinished product." The production of human nature is achieved by means of human nature. We are always in a state of becoming.

Among the current plethora of new ageism and humanistic ideals generated by vegetables and crystals, we should lock in our intent with the pure bliss of this socialist vision. This ideal of what it means to be human is what makes it possible to recommend socialism as being a higher form of existence than some other historical system — because it expands the real possibilities of choosing and creating our human nature.

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