THE FALLEN NATURE OF MAN IN ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY
Muslims in general reject the Christian concept of the fallen nature of humanity which resulted from Adam's rebellious attitude against God. Adam indeed disobeyed God, yet - according to Islam - every person is responsible for his own actions. If a person is righteous and practices what is good, he will be rewarded greatly, but if he deviates from the straight path and commits evil, he will surely suffer in an eternal hell. As the offspring of Adam we could not inherit Adam's sin and be accountable for it in God's eyes. Muslims ask, for example, If a man's arm is amputated, does that mean that his son will be born with one arm? And, by the same analogy, How can Adam's descendants inherit Adam's sin? Moreover, does the justice of God decree that children should bear the iniquities of their forefathers? These questions have often been raised to negate any possible need for a divine incarnation and/or redemptive act such as Christians see in the cross of Christ. Christians agree that if anyone is righteous and practices only good, he will be rewarded with heaven, but they also maintain that none except Christ meets that criterion. All others have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God because they inherited a sinful nature from Adam. For them divine intervention was an inevitable necessity for the redemption of fallen and sinful human beings. If we are really interested in probing the depth of this spiritual understanding of the fallen nature of mankind, we must examine objectively the story of that fall both in Islam and in Christianity.
Because of space limitations I will not attempt to quote all the verses cited in the Qur'an and the Bible which deal with this issue but rather select the most significant references which will highlight points under discussion and provide us with a deeper insight into the subject.
It is stated in the Qur'an, Sura (Chapter) 2:36, concerning Adam's disobedience:
Then did Satan make them slip from the (garden) and get out of the state of (felicity) in which they had been. We said: "Get ye down all (ye people) with enmity among yourselves; on earth will be your dwelling place, and your means of livlihood for a time."
In the commentary of the Jalalayn on this verse we read:
We said: "Get ye down" to the earth; that is, you and your offspring still contained within you. "among yourselves" means some of your offspring will harbor enmity for some others because of your oppression towards each other.
This means that God cast Adam and Eve and all those who were yet to be born to them in future generations out of paradise as a penalty for the disobedience of their parents and thus all mankind, represented in Adam and Eve, were punished.
If we scrutinize the details of the story of the fall closely, we will realize that the consequences were more serious than the mere action of punishment. As a result of this rebellion against God, a drastic change occurred in human nature. The Qur'an indicates that "all of you will become hostile to each other." This means that sin has entered the world and has created a new state of life. Human nature became enslaved to the power of sin and even the entire universe was subjected to a significant modification, for when Adam was settled in paradise God designated him to be the master of the earth, reigning over all its creatures. But as soon as he committed his sin and rebelled against God, that paradisical world in which Adam and Eve dwelt changed completely and became a world of evil, oppression, iniquity and polytheism. Even Adam's repentance did not help him much. Yes, God did accept his repentance and forgave him (according to the Qur'an - see verse 37) but neither Adam nor his descendants were able to return to paradise nor even to find it again. Since then suffering, misery, and hostility have dominated man's life.
`Abdullah Yusuf `Ali, a translator of the Qur'an into English, comments on this verse: Evidently Adam is the type of all mankind and the sexes go together in all spiritual matters.
This is a sound statement. Adam was, at the time, the representative of mankind when he committed his sin. Thus, when he fell, his offspring fell with him.
There are a few other verses in the Qur'an which denote the responsibility of Adam as the representative of the human race. For example, in Sura 7:172-173 we read:
When God drew forth from children of Adam - from his loins - their descendants and made them testify concerning themselves (saying): "Am I not your Lord (who cherishes and sustains you)?" They said: "Yea! We do testify! (This), lest you should say on the day of judgment: 'Of this we were never mindful.' Or lest you should say: 'Our fathers before us may have taken false gods, but we are (their) descendants after them; wilt thou then destroy us because of the deeds of men who were futile?'"
In the commentary of the Jalalayn we read the following interpretation:
He (God) drew forth each one of them from the loins of the other back to Adam, generation after generation in the form they will take when they are born. They were so numerous like the ants in Nu'man (a mountain) in the day of `Arafa. He erected in front of them the evidences of His deity and installed in them brains and made them testify concerning themselves.
Muhammad Farid Wagdi in his commentary on these verses, says:
Remember that your God drew forth from the loins of the children of Adam their offspring in the same form they will take (when they are born) century after century and erected in front of them the evidences of His deity and installed in their brains the capacity to make them recognize these evidences. Thus they were elevated to the level of those who were told: "Am I not your Lord? They said, Yes." Thus their full knowledge of it and their being deeply rooted in it made them, so to speak, witnesses, lest they say in the Day of Judgment: "Of this (that is, their knowledge of God) we were never mindful." Or they say: "Our fathers have taken false gods, thus we followed them. Wilt thou destroy us because of the coeds of the futile people?"
`Abdullah Yusuf `Ali goes one step farther in his understanding of the above verse. He says: The words of the text refer to the descendants of Adam; i.e., to all humanity, born or unborn, without any limit of time. Adam's seed carries on the existence of Adam and succeeds to his spiritual heritage. Humanity as such has a corporate aspect.
This is a clear confirmation of the deputyship of Adam for all mankind. According to the
aforementioned comments, God performed a miracle in which He drew forth the posterity of Adam who were yet to be born up to the Day of Judgment to make each one of them testify concerning themselves and bound each individual by a covenant. Then He replaced them in Adam's loins.
This interpretation is not foreign to Islamic theology. In fact Ibn `Abbas transmits to us Muhammad's interpretation of the text of these two verses:
God took the pledge from the loins of Adam in Nu'man; i.e., `Arafa. He drew forth all his posterity which He created and dispersed them in His presence like ants. He talked to them and said: "Am I not your Lord? They said: Yea, we testify!" Lest they say in the Day of Judgment, "Of this (i.e., the knowledge of God) we were never mindful."
Ibn `Abbas also said:
In the beginning when God cast Adam to earth He sent him to a desert in the land of India. Then he rubbed his loins and drew forth every soul he decided to create until the Day of Judgment. That took place in Nu'man which is behind mount `Arafa. God then talked to them end enabled them to speak. He took from them the pledge that they will worship him and never associate anything with Him. (He did that) after He installed in them brains and granted for them their sustenance and
Adam's loins. Thus the Day of Judgment will never come until everyone who gave his pledge is born. (See also Al-Khazin II, 191.).
Abu Hurayra also quoted Muhammad's saying:
Thus Adam disobeyed and his descendants disobeyed likewise. Adam forgot and ate from the tree; likewise his offspring also forgot. Adam sinned and his posterity sinned too! (Quoted by Tarmadhi and others.)
It is obvious from these verses, interpretations and traditions that Adam is recognized by Muslims as the representative of his offspring and that the Qur'an alludes to this. Thus Adam, by his
disobedience and sin, made all his descendants sin too. Undoubtedly corruption permeated the essence of Adam's nature and caused a drastic change in its components, in some respects similar to the way a genetic change may produce a new breed or significantly alter an old breed. This change in human nature was transmitted to Adam's seed who inherited his fallen nature and his propensities.
In Sahih al-Bukhari (Vol. 3:1213, No. 3156)* there is further evidence of the veracity of this interpretation. We read:
We were told on the authority of Qays Ibn Hafasa ... on the authority of Muhammad that God says to the one who suffers least among the people of hell: "If you possess all the wealth of the world with which to redeem (yourself, would you do that?)" He said, "Yes." Then God said, "I had asked something which is much easier than this while you were still in the loins of Adam: Not to associate other gods with Me. Yet you have refused and worship false gods."
Therefore, we must ask, What happened to this posterity which pledged to worship God and not to associate others with Him so that it failed to fulfill its promise and broke its pledge? The only conclusion which explains this tragic failure is that it inherited the fallen nature of Adam, the father of mankind, who, in his capacity as the representative of man, has failed to live up to God's
expectations. How else can the Muslim explain the observable fact that all human beings continue to repeat Adam's sin of rebellion against the known will of God?
There is another tradition ascribed to Muhammad based on the authority of `Abdullah which says: Whenever a soul is killed unjustly the first son of Adam (Cain) would bear part of its blood
(responsibility) because he was the first who decreed assassination. (Al-Bukhari 3:3157. See also nos. 6473 & 6890.)
Thus if Cain, according to Muhammad, was morally responsible for every soul unjustly killed, why should not Adam be responsible for bequeathing the fallen nature of man to his seed, to those who carried his own characteristics and genes? Was it not Adam the first man who first disobeyed God? Yes, and so corruption has permeated the nature of man through his first parent.
The Qur'an declares in Sura 5:32:
On that account we ordained for the children of Israel that if any one slew a person - unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land - it would be as if he slew the whole people; and if anyone saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people.
`Ali explains:
To kill or seek to kill an individual because he represents an ideal is to kill all who uphold the ideal. On the other hand, to save an individual life in the same circumstances is to save a whole
community.
In light of the above quotations we can see that no instruction or teaching or guidance will ever enable us to restore the pristine essence of sinless human nature as it was manifested in Paradise. The essential change which is required is a change in the very nature of mankind. All the prophets have failed to generate any change in human nature or in man's character. Yes they called people to worship God only and to live according to the Ten Commandments, but that call could not change people. They knew the shortcomings of man and that he is bound by chains of sin. They realized also that all their teaching had failed to produce salvation because no one was able to meet God's standards nor His righteous demands. In this respect the Bible and the Qur'an agree.
The Bible asserts the existence of original sin which we have all inherited from Adam. We read in Romans 5:12:
Therefore just as through one man sin entered into the world and death through sin, so death spread to all men, because all sinned.
Thus the progeny of Adam carried forward all the characteristics of his fallen nature and became subject to the sentence of death. In other words, Adam sinned; therefore all his descendants sinned with him, too. Sin has distorted God's image in man. The Bible asserts that God created man in his own image; i.e., He bestowed on him reason, will, ability of free choice, freedom of conscience, and creativity. But man abused the freedom with which God blessed him and chose to rebel against God in the person of Adam. Soon this rebellious nature dominated the will of mankind and corrupted it. Therefore the fall of Adam was not a temporary defect but rather a determinative event which had a
tragic impact on the universe. Its effect has afflicted not only individuals but the entire human race across the ages. Since this nature became subject to the condemnation of God, man was destined to suffer in an eternal hell forever because God's holiness does not tolerate sin. "The wages of sin is death." (Romans 6:23) This is God's law and justice. Yet, God is LOVE. He created man in His own image which He would never dishonor for His own sake. Thus He planned a way of salvation for mankind. His plan is the only straight path which delivers man from his dilemma. God's holiness demanded justice while His love pleaded for mercy and forgiveness. In order to meet the
requirements of His holiness, justice, and love, the living Word of God, Christ, with all His perfection, righteousness and goodness became incarnate because of His great love for all people and suffered in Himself the consequences of their sin. Man has failed to save himself from the bondage of his fallen nature; therefore the righteous One, the Christ, who is free from all iniquity, determined to pay the price for our redemption. So He, the Living Word of God, became flesh and was crucified; that is, God's judgment fell upon Jesus who by His own choice and because of His love granted to us the gift of freedom and forgiveness of sin. The Bible says:
God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. (II Corinthians 5:19)
In other words, Christ's voluntary incarnation and His death on the cross opened wide the door of freedom for us because we became righteous in God's eyes through Jesus Christ has paid the price on our behalf by His atoning death. Our only obligation is to accept Him by faith. His sacrificial act of love enables Him to restore our pristine nature which was distorted by sin. II Corinthians 5:17 says: Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come.
The "new things" include our fallen human nature which is formed anew. It is now liberated, by the riving power manifested in Christ's death end resurrection, from its old dispositions. Christ has restored to it its beauty, purity and the greatness which it lost as the result of the fall. This restoration was not possible without God's intervention. That is why the verse above says: "New things have come."
The act of creation cannot be performed apart from Christ. Christ Himself realized the impossibility of man's deliverance from his inevitable destiny without divine intervention. This is why He said: Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. (Matthew 11:28)
Christ did not reguest that sinners should free themselves first, then come unto Him. He knew perfectly well that man is not able to justify himself before God. This is an impossible task. So he summoned them unto Him, as they were, burdened with sins, in order to recreate them anew. Then, and only then, they will be justified because the righteous Christ atoned for them by His death, for:
He who knew no sin was made to be sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. (II Corinthians 5:25)
Or, as the apostle Peter says:
He Himself bore our sins in His own body on the cross, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. (I Peter 2:24)
John, the apostle, reiterates the same idea as he states:
And you know that He appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin. (I John 3:5)
The phrase "take away sins" was not possible without an atoning act which meets all the requirements of God's justice and holiness. The Bible summaries this basic fact when it states: ... without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. (Hebrews 9:22)
The true greatness of this redemptive act is that Jesus was not compelled to carry out this responsibility, but He voluntarily gave Himself, of His own free will, to save us from the condemnation of eternal hell. In Hebrews 9:14 we read:
Of how much more value is the blood of Christ Who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God.
Even Christ Himself said publicly:
For this reason the Father loves me because I lay down my life that I may take it again. No one has taken it away from me, but I lay it down on my own initiative. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. (John 10:17-18)
In short, the fallen nature of man which he inherited from Adam is a fact recognized by both Islam and Christianity. But this nature could not be changed by guidance, instruction or teaching because such a change requires an internal transformation which touches the depths of the human soul. Doctrines have failed to produce such change because they lack spiritual power. Man's endeavors can never acquire God's favor or reach the level required by His justice. Who among us, for instance, can comply completely with the Ten Commandments? What prophet is there who did not commit sin and did not need to ask for forgiveness? The founder of Islam himself attested, as recorded in more than one sound tradition, that he asked for forgiveness seventy times a day. If the prophets from Adam to the latest prophets of the Old Testament have failed to meet God's requirements
without offering a sin sacrifice, how could any ordinary man elevate himself to a level which pleases God???
For this reason the sinless, perfect and righteous One became incarnate to liberate us from the bonds of iniquity and has elevated us to a higher level and made us acceptable to God. The divine love was embodied in Christ on the cross. The Bible epitomizes the majesty and greatness of God's love in John 3:16:
For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son so that whoever believes in Him would not perish, but have everlasting life.
By the merits of the Living Word of God we are liberated from our fallen nature which we inherited from our forefather, Adam, and therefore we are justified in the presence of God as we become new creatures in Christ.
___________
(*) In the text, Dr. Bagha's Numbering system is used for Sahih Buhkari. The next two quoted hadith are Sahih Bukhari, Vol. 4, Nos. 551 & 552 according to the numbering system used by M. Muhsin Khan in his English translation.
Jewish Beliefs about Human Nature
A fundamental Jewish belief about human beings is that they are created in the image of God. This does not mean that we look like God, for God is incorporeal. The general rabbinical interpretation of this concept is that humans have the ability to reason.
When Genesis 2:7 says "God formed man," it uses the Hebrew word vayyitzer ("formed"). The Talmud finds special meaning in the unique spelling of the word in this context, with two yods instead of one. The two yods, the rabbis explain, stand for the two impulses found in humans: the yetzer tov and the yetzer ra.
According to this view, the yetzer tov is the moral conscience that reminds a person of God's law when one considers a specific action or choice. The yetzer ra is the impulse to satisfy one's own needs and desires. There is nothing intrinsically evil about the yetzer ra, as it was created by God and is natural to humankind. It is also what drives us to good things such as eating, drinking, having a family, and making a living. However, it can easily lead to sin when not kept in check by the yetzer tov.
The idea of human free will is fundamental to Judaism. The concept of original sin is rejected, and every person has the ability to choose good or evil.
The following rabbinical teaching is illustrative of the Jewish view of the soul:
This may be compared to the case of a king who had an orchard containing excellent early figs, and he placed there two watchmen, one lame and the other blind. He said to them: "Be careful with these fine early figs." After some days the lame man said to the blind one: "I see fine early figs in the orchard." Said the blind man to him: "Come let us eat them." "Am I then able to walk?" said the lame man. "Can I then see?" retorted the blind man. The lame man got astride the blind man, and thus they ate the early figs and sat down again each in his place.
After some days the king came into that vineyard and said to them: "Where are the fine early figs?" The blind man replied: "My lord, the king, can I then see?" The lame man replied: "My lord the king, can I then walk?" What did the king, who was a man of insight, do with them? He placed the lame man astride the blind man, and they began to move about. Said the king to them: "Thus have you done, and eaten the early figs."
Even so will the Holy One, blessed be God, in the time to come, say to the soul: "Why have you sinned before Me?" and the soul will answer: O Master of the universe, it is not I that sinned, but the body it is that sinned. Why, since leaving it, I am like a clean bird flying through the air. As for me, how have I sinned?" God will also say to the body: "Why have you sinned before Me?" and the body will reply: "O Master of the universe, not I have sinned, the soul it is that has sinned. Why, since it left me, I am cast about like a stone thrown upon the ground. Have I then sinned before You?"
What will the Holy One, blessed be God, do to them? God will bring the soul and force it into the body, and judge both as one.
1. The "human"
In asking what it is to be human we cannot see what we are because, as the ones who see, we are at the wrong end of the line-of-sight running from seer to seen. Nor can the problem be solved by mirroring, for when I look at myself in a mirror I see what I look like rather than what I am seeing like. The mirror experience is fascinating, certainly, because it takes me right up to the edge of seeing myself seeing, fudges an approximation of this, a kind of Doppelgänger experience, but it never quite delivers myself.
We cannot say or pass judgment on what we are, because we are ourselves the grounds of judgment. By analogy, the drafters of a national constitution cannot decide whether or not a suggested provision is constitutional, since constitutionality does not exist before they make their determination. And their constitution can always be overthrown or amended for extraconstitutional reasons. Now we may discover a superior constitution to judge ourselves by, some divine or cosmic standard, but we cannot stand apart from our own act of constituting that standard as superior.
Most perplexing of all, we cannot even be what we are, because if we raise real questions about ourselves we open ourselves up to novel determinations. In reinterpretation we must change, since interpretation is not just about us but is us; but this means that we can never catch up with
ourselves. Questioners cannot have a fixed nature. But in spite of that condition, or because of it, we cannot keep from relating ourselves to the horizon of thinkability, the "Absolute," which in
surpassing us tells us what our limits are. Since we take part in the surpassing by thinking that very thought, we must read ourselves as "image of God" or "shepherd of Being," distending our identity toward a transcendent First or Highest.
Such limitations belong to the structure of our inquiry. If we were to escape them, we would no longer be anything like human beings, and there would be no more discourse on the human.
That we can have no fully adequate awareness or definitive construal of ourselves does not mean, however, that there is nothing to be learned by asking about "human nature" or that we can keep from asking. There are observable human phenomena and practical problems that give shape to our openness, and there are conclusions about human existence that must be thought out just to navigate from today to tomorrow. Our need for conscious orientation is such that we become paralyzed if we do not have some view of what we take to be our true capabilities and constraints. We must interpret ourselves to live, and we can no more interpret our experience without a working anthropology than a surgeon can operate without a working knowledge of anatomy.
If we are not put off by the inconclusiveness of self-interpretation, there are still other serious difficulties of principle to reckon with. The ideal "we" of "our" thinking is subject to challenge whenever some subjects believe themselves to be left out of its assumptions or presumptions; correspondingly, claims to discern the human "in general" are constantly shadowed by doubt whether one person's or community's experience is like another's or commensurate with it. It is important to recognize that any would-be reasonable discourse is an experiment that supposes the possibility of acceptable publicity, on the one hand, and accurate and useful generality, on the other. It may never pretend to succeed, only trust that it can make meaningful progress--precisely in rectifying human relationships--by trying to correct its flaws. Granted this license, we are allowed, if not to say just anything, at least to begin.
The classic form taken by a conclusion about the sort of being we are in general is an attribution to "human nature." To say that X belongs to human nature is to say that X is "how we are" in general, or that X is among the criteria by which a life or life-part is given its fullest identification as a member of the class "human." (How we play the classing game can be an important problem, but for our purposes the reference group for setting class criteria can be all members of the biological species homo sapiens who are not thought by the majority of their conspecifics to be extraordinarily impaired or deprived.) We discuss human nature in order to strengthen our seeing-together of human beings: to appreciate individuals, it is necessary to grasp the resemblances off which their individuality plays.
Human nature is interpreted by a variety of categories. One group of categories has to do with observable shape. To know that human life is mammalian is to know a great deal about our organismic design and also about patterns in our relationships and emotions. Likewise we have vertebrate, animal, living, and entitative shape. It seems that this mammal-to-entity progression of categories has less and less to do with our identity, that it concerns how we are, or the means of our existence, all that in which we "find ourselves," rather than who we are, or our end. The humanity of who we are is centrally interpreted by categories that organize us inwardly rather than outwardly. A human being is one kind of person, that is, a consciously relationship-oriented, linguistic being, and a person is one kind of intentional subject, that is, a sentient being aiming at other beings.[1]
We humans require a double definition, then, along the lines of the traditional formula "rational animal," because we come into two distinct yet (through us) mutually qualifying series of categories. The chief Western creation story introduces us in double aspect: we are made in the divine image, and we are made male and female (Genesis 1.27).[2] Whatever is true of person-as-such is true for us only in the way that it can be true of sexually reproducing animals; "animal," more specifically "mammal," names a particular field of intentional relations in which human subjects find
themselves. That is the other side of the familiar point that we are a distinctively personal sort of animal.
To say we are "persons" is ambiguous, for we may mean by this nothing other than human persons, but then again we may be thinking of features that are relatively abstract and not specifically human, like rationality (unless we mean to think of specifically human rationality). On the other hand, when we say "human being" we may actually mean the more abstract "person." Statements purporting to be anthropological often tacitly mislead in this way. To take an example at random, Hegel once declared that the "fundamental characteristic of human nature is that man can think of himself as an ego."[3] Thus humans are distinguished from the "lower animals," as Hegel intended, but we learn nothing about what makes for a specifically human realization of self-consciousness. The anthropology is abstract. It is like saying that the fundamental characteristic of primates is that they nurse their young: that is indeed a point of fundamental importance for primates, and might well be their most striking characteristic in the absence of comparison with other mammals, but it leaves out much of the heart of the primate story.
Another source of confusion is to mean by "human" only that which is the same for all humans without regard for differences among them. The legitimate purpose in this is to contemplate our commonality. In abstracting from our differences, however, we forget that being subject to differentiation is part of everyone's humanity. The literature of philosophical anthropology is
pervasively marked by this forgetfulness.[4] Perhaps it is caused by the wish to create an ideal model of humanity as a sort of public utility--an inclusive apotheosis.
Let us give the designation of anthropomorphism (in an honorific sense) to the pursuit of full concreteness, the enforcing of all pertinent categories, in representing humanity. That our thinking about ourselves so often slides off into zoomorphism or theomorphism, observational biology or idealized psychology, shows that maintaining an anthropomorphic balance is not easy.
*
Since it is sometimes argued that "nature" is the wrong scheme in which to display the meaning of "human"--that we ought rather to speak of a human condition or a human project--we should try to get a view of the relations among these conceptions.
"How we are," or "human nature," and "how it is with us," or "the human condition," are distinct yet mutually entangled notions. Knowing something of how we are is assumed by an insight into how matters stand with us, since we must be aware of what it is that faces a situation or what
possibilities might or might not be realized in a theater of action. On the other hand, the enduring features of our situation stamp us so strongly that we cannot readily conceive ourselves apart from them. Does death pertain to human nature, or to the human condition? In which of these two
categories are we speaking when we say we are mortal? (In which category were we speaking when we said "We cannot know ourselves"?) It is impossible to choose one against the other. If we regard ourselves as capable of living in a fundamentally different situation, we become then other-than-human--for instance, we imagine ourselves in heaven as angels. To put the point in the most general terms: insofar as we abstract from homo sapiens' emplacement in the world, separating our nature from our condition, we shift toward a wider genus than the human, such as "person," and humanity is thought of as what happens when persons inhabit human circumstances.[5] This is not an
unmeaningful idea. It conveys insight, as much as in saying "A bat is what happens when a mammal has to fly." But there is still batness; it is like something to be a bat, and also to be a human; and that returns us to our more specific nature.
Among the ingredients of human nature are desires (say, appetite and our "spirited part") and capacities of awareness (the senses and the mind). Correlative with these are the ingredients of the human condition: we are given a certain array of happy and unhappy transactions to engage in, a certain array of aspects the world can wear. Taking all of this together as a living whole, we conceive a human project or perhaps a bundle of characteristic projects. What we are up to is surely the crucial revelation of what we are as well as where we are.
Whatever is generally determining for the interpretation of human life belongs to anthropology, so we must attend to human nature (as a dimension of individual beings and as a specification of personhood and mammalianness), human condition, and human project alike. But it is right to give preeminence to human nature, for in that category we inspect ourselves most directly and
intimately, in our portentous obscurity. Our very intentions are drawn into what is in question about ourselves, and possibilities of imagining different kinds of human life stand only as open as they appropriately can.
The notion of "nature" is so rich and slippery, however, that we should pause to try to foresee where it can lead us if we adopt it for our self-interpretation.
2. "Nature": four primary senses
"My nature" is "what I am"; my human nature, what I and other humans commonly are. Whatness is a form of being. Our human whatness is the ideally knowable form you can match against other forms in determining whether something is or isn't one of us, or how fully or with what slant an individual represents us. Anything identifiable has a "nature" in this sense. When the words "I" and
"you" are spoken to rip Self and Other loose from the already-woven fabric of experience, precisely to introduce new grounds of identification, then at that moment and in that aspect we have no natures; we are transcendences, holes in being. But we also always have a comprehensible aspect.
A thing's whole nature governs everything about it for the trivial reason that it includes everything about it; but since we never know everything about anything that is empirically actual (like
ourselves), and in our own case have the extraordinary difficulties of knowledge already mentioned, we will not foolishly try to treat our "nature," with its decently limited predictiveness, as an
absolutely predictive "essence."[6] If there are necessary implications of our conception of a thing's nature, the necessity will belong to our thinking, not to the thing we are thinking about.
Nature-as-such is all that really is, the totality of whatnesses, which we must conceive to possess some sort of internal structure or "system" of real and logical compossibility.
We did not, of course, demolish the prospect of human form in our opening arguments. Much can be seen in ourselves, without everything being seen; much can be said about us, despite the absence of a clinching judgment; and our living cannot but realize our form, even if we are continually
changing it. (Still, the significance of our form's hidden aspects is never measurable.) But granting the possibility of doing anthropology, what does it matter, anyway, what we say about the form of humanity? What is at stake? Let us review the ways in which we line ourselves up in relation to what, if anything, we believe to be the form of humanity--what molecular structures are formed when the atoms of what we mean join with the atom of what we think we are.
(a) Endowment
We encounter our "nature" as an already-given involuntary factor in our lives, an origin not subject to shaping by us. Even if we think of human "nature" as pure creativity or an open site of radical transformations, we take that embroilment in novelty to be the involuntary horizon of our lives. The involuntary is also the inalienable. When we can say "We enter the world as the kind of being that is A, B, and C," our identity is secure in those respects.
We feel, in always finding ourselves with our "nature," that we have received it, and we readily speak of what we have received as an endowment--but this is not so small a step, because with endowments there is the issue of conservation and prudent use vs. wasting, and even a question of appropriate gratitude and respect for the endowing source. An endowment becomes the matter, the about-which, of piety. So far as the pre-givenness of our "nature" goes, what counts is that the fundamental order of our lives is really settled in some way, and settled, one might say, all the way
down, not open to significant questioning; we know that not this but other matters are to be
determined by our thought and action, and so we can more easily decide how to point our attention. We also have a genealogical sense of who we are.
For some purposes, we trace our endowment on the slope of what comes "naturally," that is, easily, to us--the fact that it is much easier to walk on our feet than our hands reads as a sign of what is natural to humans in the matter of locomotion--while for other purposes we look to what is difficult (wisdom, courage, or even walking on our hands, or even celibacy) as most fully revealing of our given potential. Clearly, what we recognize as our endowed potential depends on what we want to do and how we are able to harmonize our efforts.
(b) Consistency
For more direct and active self-orienting, our "nature" amounts to whatever we can make evident about ourselves and reliably refer to when we have to include ourselves in our calculations. The surgeon knows the anatomical part of our nature; the industrial psychologist knows how we are likely to behave under a given set of working conditions; the theater director can predict how we will react to stimuli from the stage; more deeply and indefinitely, everyone knows (up to a point) what everyone is like, for everyday purposes. Human "nature" is what we can hold on to like a guide-rope or an anchor-chain. It is the consistency of our life, what we can generally expect to be possible or impossible, connected or unconnected, easy as "with the grain" or hard as against it. (From the stress on the fixed comes the equation of "nature" with "law," and from the stress on the tangible comes the use of "nature" to mean physical nature.)
Consistency is more objective than endowment, often observable and measurable. But it is also changeable, if we can figure out how to change it, whereas endowment is in principle what cannot be changed.
One could point out that useful knowledge of human consistency always pertains to certain people rather than to humanity as such; and indeed many recipes do not travel between communities. But there are two reasons to go ahead and qualify what is known of certain people as human nature. One is that any particular person could, for all we ever know, be any other person at all, if the other were placed in the very same circumstances. The theatergoers of Beijing might not react to plays as New Yorkers do, but they very probably would if they had been raised in New York by New Yorkers. A second reason is this. When we cross community lines and have to guess how to deal with
strangers, we operate by two rules--to expect them to be different from the sort of people we know, and to expect them to be basically our own sort of being. The second rule reflects a presumption that community with the strangers can, should, and will be realized, and the first is subordinate to it
inasmuch as we are sensitive to difference for the sake of making any adaptations that are necessary for community. We normally want to maximize mutual understanding and cooperation with
strangers, and so while we are ready in general to be surprised by them, we are committed to finding everything we know to be true of our own people to be true in some way of them as well, and everything we learn of them to be true in some way of ourselves. The rule is not always vindicated, but no other fundamental heuristic points to the pay-off we are aiming for. (Seekers of the "exotic" are not really an exception to this rule; they are adventurous explorers of their own humanity.)
(c) Métier
We take up a relation with our past when we regard human "nature" as the already-given; we assume a relation especially with the present when we regard it as a consistent reference-point for our calculations; and we invoke the "natural" again when we take an attitude toward the future. Since we are free agents we have to ask the moral question, To what account shall we turn our endowment, or to what end shall we use our hold on human consistency? The "natural" appears in this light as the fulfillment of the best promise of our given selves. We have distinctive and valuable potentialities--whether as human, as kinds of human, or as individuals--that it would be a "natural shame" not to actualize. The goal of self-cultivation, beauty or power or serviceableness, may be called "virtue," and the meaning of selfhood may be identified very closely with it. The path of optimal self-cultivation is one's métier.
Métier can be a mischievous idea. Is a young man, strong, well-coordinated, and seven feet tall, who chooses not to play basketball, guilty of a crime against "nature," a "vice"? One doesn't rush to that judgment. All the same, one is irrepressibly curious to know what else he is doing with himself. One hopes he is doing something else he is good at, and so one continues to impose the category of the métier, though without holding him to a particular one. Suppose that even though he lacks a good color or design sense, he persists in cultivating himself as a painter. That is a mistake. The more strongly we believe that he is in a position to be aware of his mistakenness, the likelier we are to judge him deviant not only in action but in interpretation, hence "perverse."
Seven feet of height are not self-evidently and intrinsically for playing basketball. We can let this example reveal the absurdity of all claims that natural attributes are ordered to chosen goals by anything other than choice. But we cannot bring our awareness of the seven feet of height into relation with our planning and evaluation of life without caring whether it is put to some intelligent use. Other things being equal, and admitting that many other features of the person are worth caring about more, we will be gratified if the seven feet play a part in what he achieves (maybe as a lifeguard).
The métier-norm is two-sided and ambiguous. Partly we use it to appreciate an individual's life for its own sake and on its own terms, but partly we use it to call for responsible role-playing. We will ask the seven-footer to be a basketball player if we believe that the community will profit more from what he does in this area than from what others would do. But the question of community benefit is not really separable from the question of individual fulfillment. Flourishing individual and flourishing society require each other; ideally speaking, imperfection in either dimension impairs the other. (And of course there is the further difficulty that all conceptions of flourishing are debatable and subject to change.)
Although "nature" as métier already relates the individual to a larger system, there is another aspect of the notion of "nature" that touches this issue more directly.
(d) Harmony
Endowment was especially a religious issue; consistency, a scientific and technical issue; métier, a moral issue. Nature as harmony combines all these dimensions.
Nature-as-such is the sum of things that exist. But things can only coexist if they are compossible in principle and mutually adjusted in fact. Thus to speak of "Nature" is implicitly to speak of a "natural harmony," an order of things, and we call "natural" for us, with reference to nature-as-such, whatever accounts for the possibility of our coexistence with everything else in the universe, along with whatever actually adjusts us. The contemporary destruction of the world's forests is an "unnatural" human act in that it changes an order of things on which our own existence depends. (Once again, no conception of natural order is immutable or indisputable. We even hear arguments that human engineering is the ultimate principle of order in this universe; if we learn to manage our atmosphere and ecosphere differently than by relying on forests, that will only prove that all merely found orders are properly subordinate to our ordering.)
Natural harmony is always a fact given to observe, but it can be apprehended in intenser fashion as the holding- and belonging-together of the elements in the harmony, a unifying presence, what Emerson called "the integrity of impression made by manifold things."[7] The "natural" in us would then be especially the feelings, judgments, or actions that participate in this larger integrity. One important implication of adopting this posture is that harm of other beings becomes a sin against ourselves: all are jointly defined by this present "nature."
The harmony on which our own existence rests is our origin, seen in its full extent. To be unsociable toward the universe is felt as ingratitude and impiety. Further, our vision of natural harmony sets the main lines of the consistencies we observe and the vocations and virtues we practice.
In sum, we find four important senses of human "nature": as an already-given constitution serving as a platform for our present and future acts; as a checkable reference point for calculations involving ourselves; as a goal for self-cultivation; and as a larger harmony which we can support or interfere with. We have here four kinds of light in which to appraise any human qualification.
3. Following nature
Though we never said outright, "Follow nature!", the uses of "nature" that we discussed were generally prescriptive. The apparent purpose of "nature"-talk is to call for conformity to a pattern. The reader will be aware, however, that the propriety of making any such move has been contested.
Partisans of reason have sometimes affirmed "nature" as the concrete expression of rationality, mixing in selected features of real living conditions to lend stability and weight to their visions. We see this in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century "laws of nature," although they still trade
rhetorically on the older view, classically expressed by Aquinas, that human reason is but the dependent reflection of a divine reason expressed in the universe's "nature." But Hobbes' "laws of nature" are set over a violent "state of nature": we are to look to convention, rather than our given condition as such, for our norms. Thus the ultimate liberal revulsion from the "natural" is
foreshadowed.
The revolution that puts human reason on the throne is consummated by Kant. Kant can grant no moral force to empirical anthropology, for "natural" facts about ourselves can always be otherwise and thus cannot absolutely bind judgment, as the concept of morality requires; but he wants to include among his formulations of the moral law, "Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature."[8] By this he means to impose the moral test question, "What if things always had to happen this way?" He does not seem to be interested in determining whether a law of occurrences dictated by willing is compatible with regularities that we already observe in the world. If it is not--if, for instance, people always do a certain amount of lying according to a social-psychological law--then so much the worse for the immoral world. It is enough that we can conceive without contradiction a world where only truth is told. Only rational
Nevertheless, Kant's "law of nature" formulation does prompt us to investigate the larger framework of "nature." It turns out that moral reasoning is very often decisively affected by this sort of
consideration. For instance, if, for the sake of the rational goal of peace, I propose to give up all forms of recourse to harming others, it is not reasonable to imagine my pacifist "natural law" operating in a vacuum. To complete the moral gesture, I must conjoin my idea with known probabilities of aggression, conflict, and the consequences thereof. I realize then that even if I can conceive of a peaceful world, I can't plan on one, and that my peace policy had better be
appropriately qualified if I am not to admit unacceptable results. Moral consistency is both rational and real.[9] Even if its premises were different, Aquinas' "natural law" thinking nevertheless brought us to the same balancing point between reason and "nature," for it presumed that our way of realizing fullness of being in our given form must involve the use of our intelligence.[10]
More carefully relating and to some extent reconciling moral thinking with observation of the whole system of nature in his "Critique of Teleological Judgment," Kant still declares that for the final purpose commanding our obedience "we must not seek within nature at all."[11] (Published in the same year was Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France with its many expressions of horror at the Revolution's "war with nature.")[12] Mill, more radical, does not try to conserve any of the meaning of the Enlightenment's "best of all possible worlds"; for him, "nature" is not only not a moral norm, it no longer provides any reliable clues to right action. Mill can paint nature the way Burke painted the Revolution, red in tooth and claw. "The physical government of the world being full of the things which when done by men are deemed the greatest enormities, it cannot be
religious or moral in us to guide our actions by the analogy of the course of nature."[13] Nature is for amending rather than imitating. Emerson, still trying to hold nature and reason together, restates the Pauline claim that "the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps . . . because man is disunited with himself";[14] but Mill has let go of this vision and blames no one (except, tacitly, those who have rationalized injustices by dressing them in the gown of "nature"). His is the progressive spirit overleaping all the barricades of piety.
On either Kant's or Mill's view, and on liberal views continuous with theirs (including contemporary liberal attitudes toward sex, race, and age), "follow nature" becomes at best a hollow, at worst an offensive piece of advice. But notice what such views forget or forswear that belongs to the thought of "nature." According to them:
1. We have no "origin" beyond our own present discernment of the good. We have no past; we always constitute our identity right now, in our reasonings or negotiations. Thus we don't really have a history, we only have this one constant scenario.
2. Our anchor-chain consisting of reason only, we have no solidarity with our flesh and gain no support from our tangible surroundings. The natural world can set problems and we can use it to
illustrate solutions, but it has no intrinsically meaningful moral form of its own, and in that sense is enigmatic. We hear it on the moral wavelength only as static.
3. Clues to the fulfillment of personal character are entirely inward and thus individual. A person's métier is discoverable only by experiment, and identifiable with some confidence only when extraordinary talents come into play (since unique capabilities remain hidden in lives of an average type).
4. The fact of adjustment between natural beings is not worth consideration in its own right; it is overshadowed by questions like "How can we make life better?" and "How can we implement our ideals?" As progressives, our worry is that we might not make the best use of our opportunities, as against the conservative worry that we will fail to preserve the built-up order that secures a good life.
The upshot of the liberal turn is that anthropology, as a mode of normative thinking, dissolves without remainder into ethics and politics. To think anthropologically about human qualities requires some sort of recovery of the aspects of human "nature" that are excluded by liberalism.
Biological view
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The main question is: "Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage? Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications to the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?" This idea has been met with demonstrations, denunciations, picketings, and comparisons to Nazism, both from the right and from the left. And these reactions affect both the day-to-day conduct of science and the public appreciation of the science. By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.
A BIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING OF HUMAN NATURE: A TALK WITH STEVEN PINKER [9.9.02]
Introduction
Every few years a book is published that commands our attention and causes us to consider questions that challenge our basic assumptions about ourselves. This month marks the publication of such a book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by MIT research psychologist Steven Pinker.
Pinker is a unifier, someone who ties a lot of big ideas together. He has studied visual cognition and language acquisition in the laboratory, and was one of the first to develop computational models of how children learn the words and grammar of their first language. He has merged Chomskyan ideas about an innate language faculty with the Darwinian theory of adaptation and natural selection. Pinker also wrote one of the most influential critiques of neural-network models of the mind.
His book The Language Instinct discussed all aspects of language in a unified, Darwinian framework, and in How the Mind Works he did the same for the rest of the mind, explaining "what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life."
In The Blank Slate, he notes "that there is a quasi-religious theory of human nature that is prevalent among pundits and intellectuals, which includes both empirical assumptions about how the mind works and a set of values that people hang on those assumptions. The theory has three parts".
One is the doctrine of "the blank slate": that we have no inherent talents or temperaments, because the mind is shaped completely by the environment¤parenting, culture, and society.
"The second is "the noble savage": that evil motives are not inherent to people but come from corrupting social institutions.
The third is "the ghost in the machine", that the most important part of us is somehow independent of our biology, so that our ability to have experiences and make choices can't be explained by our physiological makeup and evolutionary history.
These three ideas are increasingly being challenged by the sciences of the mind, brain, genes, and evolution," he says, "but they are held as much for their moral and political uplift as for any
empirical rationale. People think that these doctrines are preferable on moral grounds and that the alternative is forbidden territory that we should avoid at all costs".
—JB
STEVEN PINKER, research psychologist, is Peter de Florez Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the MIT; director of the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT; author of Language Learnability and Language Development: Learnability and Cognition; The Language Instinct; How the Mind Works; Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, and The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
His research on visual cognition and on the psychology of language has received the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences and two prizes from the American Psychological Association. He has also received awards for his graduate teaching at MIT and for his undergraduate teaching at MIT, two prizes for general achievement, an honorary doctorate, and five awards for his popular science books.
Pinker is a fellow of several scholarly societies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is an associate editor of Cognition and serves on many professional panels, including the Usage Panel of the American Heritage
Dictionary and the Scientific Advisory Panel of an 8-hour NOVA television series on evolution. He also writes frequently in the popular press, including The New York Times, Time, Slate, and The New Yorker.
Steven Pinker's Edge Bio Page
Beyond Edge: Steven Pinker's Home Page
EDGE: How did you go from being an up-and-coming young Mandarin in the Cognitive Science department at MIT to a radical thinker attempting to overthrow the conventional wisdom regarding human nature?
STEVEN PINKER: I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker. My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries. The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution. Madison, for example, asked "What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?" People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections. But a conception of human nature, and its connections to other fields such as politics and the arts, have been there from time immemorial.
EDGE: What questions are you asking yourself, and what do you hope to accomplish by going after the intellectual establishment in terms of their denial of human nature?
PINKER: The main question is: "Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage? Why do people believe that there are
dangerous implications to the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?" This idea has been met with demonstrations, denunciations, picketings, and comparisons to Nazism, both from the right and from the left. And these reactions affect both the day-to-day conduct of science and the public appreciation of the science. By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.
EDGE: Why do we need to assuage people's fears? What's the matter with telling the truth?
PINKER: It's harder to find the truth if certain factual hypotheses are third rails—touch them and die. A clear example is research on parenting. Hundreds of studies have measured correlations between the practices of parents and the way their children turn out. For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to be violent, parents who are neither too authoritarian or too lenient have children who are well-adjusted, and so on. Most of the parenting expert industry and a lot of government policy turn these correlations into advice to parents, and blame the parents when children don't turn out as they would have liked. But correlation does not imply causation. Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make
children articulate. Until those studies are replicated with adopted children, who don't get their genes from the people who bring them up, we don't know whether the correlations reflect the effects of parenting, the effects of shared genes, or some mixture. But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo. In developmental psychology it's considered impolite even to mention it, let alone test it.
EDGE: Why?
PINKER: Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics. They're afraid of four things.
First there is a fear of inequality. The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero. If we all start out blank, then no one can have more stuff written on his slate than anyone else. Whereas if we come into the world endowed with a rich set of mental faculties, they could work differently, or better or worse, in some people than in others. The fear is that this would open the door to discrimination, oppression, or eugenics, or even slavery and genocide.
Of course this is all a non sequitur. As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. It's a moral claim that in certain spheres we judge people as individuals, and don't take into account the statistical average of the groups that they belong to. It's also a recognition that however much people might vary, they have certain things in common by virtue of their common human nature. No one likes to be humiliated or oppressed or enslaves or deprived. Political equality consists of recognizing, as the Constitution says, that people have certain inalienable rights, namely life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Recognizing those rights is not the same thing as believing that people are indistinguishable in every respect.
The second fear is the fear of imperfectability. If people are innately saddled with certain sins and flaws, like selfishness, prejudice, sort-sightedness, and self-deception, then political reform would seem to be a waste of time. Why try to make the world a better place if people are rotten to the core and will just screw it up no matter what you do? Again, this is a faulty argument. We know that there can be social improvement because we know that there has been social improvement, such as the end of slavery, torture, blood feuds, despotism, and the ownership of women in Western democracies. Social change can take place, even with a fixed human nature, because the mind is a complex system of many parts. Even if we do have some motives that tempt us to do awful things, we have other motives that can counteract them. We can figure out ways to pit one human desire against another, and thereby improve our condition, in the same way we manipulate physical and
biological laws—rather than denying they exist—to improve our physical condition. We combat disease, we keep out the weather, we grow more crops, and we can jigger with our social arrangements as well.
A good example is the invention of democratic government. As Madison argued, by instituting checks and balances in a political system, one person's ambition counteracts another's. It's not that we have bred or socialized a new human being who's free of ambition. We've just developed a system in which these ambitions are kept under control.
Another reason that human nature doesn't rule out social progress is that many features of human nature have free parameters. This has long been recognized in the case of language, where some languages use the mirror-image of the phrase order patterns found in English but otherwise work by the same logic. Our moral sense may also have a free parameter as well. People in all cultures have an ability to respect and sympathize with other people. The question is, with which other people? The default setting of our moral sense may be to sympathize only with members of our clan or village. Over the course of history, a knob or a slider has been adjusted so that a larger and larger portion of humanity is admitted into the circle of people whose interests we consider as comparable to our own. From the village or clan the moral circle has been expanded to the tribe, the nation, and most recently to all of humanity, as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It's an idea that came from the philosopher Peter Singer in his book The Expanding Circle. It's an example of how we can enjoy social improvement and moral progress even if we are fitted with certain faculties, as long as those faculties can respond to inputs. In the case of the moral sense the relevant inputs may be a cosmopolitan awareness of history and the narratives of other peoples, which allow us to project ourselves into the experiences of people who might otherwise be treated as obstacles or enemies.
The third fear is a fear of determinism: that we will no longer be able to hold people responsible for their behavior because they can they can always blame it on their brain or their genes or their evolutionary history—the evolutionary-urge or killer-gene defense. The fear is misplaced for two reasons. One is that the silliest excuses for bad behavior have in fact invoked the environment, rather than biology, anyway—such as the abuse excuse that got the Menendez brothers off the hook in their first trial, the "black rage" defense that was used to try to exonerate the Long Island Railroad gunman, the "pornography made me to it" defense that some rapists have tried. If there's a threat to responsibility it doesn't come from biological determinism but from any determinism, including childhood upbringing, mass media, social conditioning, and so on.
But none of these should be taken seriously in the first place. Even if there are parts of the brain that compel people to do things for various reasons, there are other parts of the brain that respond to the legal and social contingencies that we call "holding someone responsible for their behavior." For example, if I rob a liquor store, I'll get thrown in jail, or if I cheat on my spouse my friends and relatives and neighbors will think that I'm a boorish cad and will refuse to have anything to do with
me. By holding people responsible for their actions we are implementing contingencies that can affect parts of the brain and can lead people to inhibit what they would otherwise do. There's no reason that we should give up that lever on people's behavior—namely, the inhibition systems of the brain—just because we're coming to understand more about the temptation systems.
The final fear is the fear of nihilism. If it can be shown that all of our motives and values are products of the physiology of the brain, which in turn was shaped by the forces of evolution, then they would in some sense be shams, without objective reality. I wouldn't really be loving my child; all I would be doing is selfishly propagating my genes. Flowers and butterflies and works of art are not truly beautiful; my brain just evolved to give me a pleasant sensation when a certain pattern of light hits my retina. The fear is that biology will debunk all that we hold sacred.
This fear is based on a confusion between two very different ways to explain behavior. What biologists call a "proximate" explanation refers to what is meaningful to me given the brain that I have. An "ultimate" explanation refers to the evolutionary processes that gave me a brain with the ability to have those thoughts and feelings. Yes, evolution (the ultimate explanation for our minds) is a short-sighted selfish process in which genes are selected for their ability to maximize the number of copies of themselves. But that doesn't mean that we are selfish and short sighted, at least not all the time. There's nothing that prevents the selfish, amoral process of natural selection evolution from evolving a big-brained social organism with a complex moral sense. There's an old saying that people who appreciate legislation and sausages should not see them being made. That's a bit like human values—knowing how they were made can be misleading if you don't think carefully about the process. Selfish genes don't necessarily build a selfish organization.
EDGE: So if intellectuals are afraid of human nature, what do they believe instead? What are some of the indications that we are in denial? What are some of the prevalent myths?
PINKER: I think that there is a quasi-religious theory of human nature that is prevalent among pundits and intellectuals, which includes both empirical assumptions about how the mind works and a set of values that people hang on those assumptions. The theory is has three parts.
One is the doctrine of "the blank slate": that we have no inherent talents or temperaments, because the mind is shaped completely by the environment—parenting, culture, and society.
The second is "the noble savage": that evil motives are not inherent to people but come from corrupting social institutions.
The third is "the ghost in the machine", that the most important part of us is somehow independent of our biology, so that our ability to have experiences and make choices can't be explained by our physiological makeup and evolutionary history.
These three idea ideas are increasingly being challenged by the sciences of the mind, brain, genes, and evolution, but they are held as much for their moral and political uplift as for any empirical rationale. People think that these doctrines are preferable on moral grounds and that the alternative is a forbidden territory that we should avoid at all costs.
EDGE: How has the empirical work in the sciences undermined these beliefs?
PINKER: The blank slate has been undermined by a number of discoveries. One of them is a simple logical point that no matter how important learning and culture and socialization are, they don't happen by magic. There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization. Once you try to specify what those learning mechanisms are, you're forced to posit a great deal of innate structure to the mind.
It's also been undermined by behavioral genetics, which has found that at least half of the variation in personality and intelligence in a society comes from differences in the genes. The most dramatic demonstration of this fact is that that identical twins who were separated at birth have fantastic similarities in their talents and tastes.
The Blank Slate has also undermined by evolutionary psychology and anthropology. For example, despite the undeniable variation among cultures, we now know that there is a vast set of universal traits that are common to all of the world's 6,000 cultures. Also, evolutionary psychology has shown that many of our motives make no sense in terms of our day-to-day efforts to enhance our physical and psychological well-being, but they can be explained in terms of the mechanism of natural selection operating in the environment in which we evolved.
A relatively uncontroversial example is our tastes for sugar and fat, which were adaptive in an environment in which those nutrients were in short supply but don't do anyone any good in a modern environment in which they are cheap and available anywhere. A more controversial example may be the universal thirst for revenge, which was one's only defense in a world in which one couldn't dial 911 to get the police to show up if one's interests were threatened. A belligerent stance was one's only deterrent against other people whose interests were in conflict with one's
