2 Who are We?
2
Who are We? Wondering about Human Nature
‘To know myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.’1
Raymond Carver
Human beings are strange creatures. We want to matter. To feel that we are loved. To be fulfilled. To be special. To achieve our potential. We pursue these goals in all kinds of ways, not really understanding why we feel driven to pursue them, yet knowing that achieving them might bring fulfilment and meaning to our lives.2 These longings, aspirations and interpretations of life arise within us in ways that are not forced or contrived, but somehow seem to us to be inevitable and proper. In short: they are in the first place human and in the second natural.
Why Get Preoccupied With Ourselves?
Some would – perhaps not without good reason – express concern with this human preoccupation with our own situation and significance. Isn’t this really a form of narcissism, which needs to be challenged and corrected? Surely we should be looking outwards at the world and its many problems that need sorting out, rather than indulging in this kind of self-important and self-preoccupied navel-gazing? It’s a fair point. But what if critical reflection led us to grasp and embrace some hard truths about ourselves, which force us to give up on any delusions of grandeur and face up to ourselves as we really are?
That was certainly the view of Sigmund Freud, who declared that human narcissism had been deflated and discredited in the modern age.3 Three geniuses had stripped away our delusions of grandeur and finality, inflicting fatal wounds on our inflated sense of self-importance. We used to think that the world revolved around us. Then Copernicus forced us to realise that the earth does not stand at the centre of the universe. We are on the periphery of things, the inhabitants of an insignificant planet.
Yet more was to come. We took comfort in the idea that, while human beings weren’t actually the central focus of the universe, we were at least special on planet earth. We were the supreme rulers of the planet, utterly distinct from every other living species. Then Darwin came along, and challenged us to realise that we are part of the animal kingdom. Humanity does not even have a unique place on the planet earth.
Both these points had been made by earlier writers.4 Freud, however, went further and declared that a third genius had come along, and wounded our self-esteem still further. Humanity is not even the master of its own limited realm, but is the prisoner of hidden unconscious forces, subtly influencing our thinking and behaviour. And who was this third genius? None other than Sigmund Freud himself.
According to Freud, each of these revolutions added to the pain and wounds inflicted by its predecessor, forcing a radical re-evaluation of the place and significance of humanity in the universe, deflating human pretensions to grandeur and uniqueness. Yet while Freud’s analysis may indeed challenge our assumptions, it does not answer our questions. For many scholars, he has overstated the impact of these scientific developments. We now know that the recognition by Copernicus and Kepler that the earth is a planet orbiting the sun does not entail any diminution of the status of humanity. Some writers of the eighteenth century – such as the German poet Goethe – may have thought so. But not Kepler himself, who ingeniously (though not entirely persuasively) argued that the recognition that the earth is a planet subverted any suggestion that the earth and its inhabitants were ‘below’ or ‘inferior to’ the sun or planets.5
But whatever we make of Freud’s assessment of our self-understanding, and his own role in this process, there can be little doubt that we need to be honest about ourselves. It’s far too easy for us to take refuge in consoling stories about ourselves which depict us as supremely rational and moral beings who stand at the centre of all things. As the philosopher Iris Murdoch emphasised, we are ‘anxiety-ridden animals’ who try to deny the unbearable truth about our failings and delusions, and spin stories of meaning that isolate us from disturbing insights about our motives and failings.6 That’s the point that the French writer Albert Camus was getting at when he suggested that we humans are creatures who spend our lives trying to convince ourselves that our existence is not absurd.
So where shall we start our reflections? Perhaps we might begin by thinking about a model of human nature which has secured wide acceptance in some parts of Western culture.
Nothing but Atoms and Molecules
‘We’re nothing more than atoms and molecules! Get used to it.’ It was the punchline of a rather dull lecture I once attended in London. Fortunately, I cannot recall either its title or the speaker, although I can still recall my despair over the poverty of the lecture’s content and its delivery. It was, we were promised, to be a scintillating and compelling presentation of the latest scientific insights on the riddles and enigmas of human beings, which would sort out all the great questions of life. In the end, it was little more than a dull and derivative monologue, rather like warmed-up leftovers from a meal that someone else had prepared. As became clear from the speaker’s glib and superficial responses to the questions afterwards, the big questions of life were not sorted out that evening, but remained tantalisingly open. They simply could not be reduced to the level of ‘atoms and molecules’.
Those who resist this kind of inflated reductionism are often declared to be unscientific fools, trapped in a religious mindset opposed to the deliverances of scientific orthodoxy. Yet many of those who protest against this trend are atheist scientists who are appalled that such a misrepresentation should have become scientific orthodoxy in the first place. Raymond Tallis is a good example of a leading atheist who regards such views as indefensible and dehumanising. ‘I am an atheist humanist; but this does not oblige me to deny what is staring me in the face – namely, that we are different from other animals, and that we are not just pieces of matter.’7 Others would support this, pointing to various aspects of human culture – such as religion – as marking us off from others.8
Yet the closing words of that London lecture set out, clearly and precisely, the great unexamined orthodoxy of our day: that a purely scientific account of human nature and identity is possible, which makes philosophy, religion and the humanities irrelevant and outdated.9 In its most aggressive form, this dogmatic mindset asserts that a scientific explanation is the only valid explanation and account of anything – including the deepest questions about human nature. Its main target is not, as is usually asserted, religion, but philosophy. Edward O. Wilson dismissed philosophy as consisting mostly of ‘failed models of the brain’.10 Stephen Hawking declared that ‘philosophy is dead’, allowing scientists to fill this gap and become ‘the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge’.11
Now a fair point is being made here, even if it is overstated. To give one example: modern psychology has discredited the naïve notions of human rationality that gained credence in the ‘Age of Reason’ – for example, by showing how much that we like to think is ‘rational’ is really intuitional. Yet that’s good for philosophy, because it forces it to think harder about how the human mind works. However, while a psychologically chastened philosophy would be wise to avoid a priori reasoning or conceptual analysis, it can be genuinely helpful in offering empirically informed reflections on critical issues.12 We need philosophy as a critical tool; it has multiple failings when it believes it can provide indubitable answers to the great questions of life – such as the meaning of our existence.
So in what way are human beings different from other animals? What conceptual toolkits can we use to explore this question? Let’s look at one, which has the potential to open up some important ways of understanding human nature, and helps us to avoid the massive shortcomings of reductionist accounts of the human.
Why We Need Multiple Perspectives on Human Nature
There are multiple aspects to human nature. Many of my academic colleagues at Oxford are involved in medical research. Each focuses on a different part or aspect of human beings. It’s sometimes difficult to appreciate that psychologists, cardiologists and oncologists are studying the same human beings. They each focus entirely on one specific aspect of human wellbeing, which is their specialist area of knowledge and research. Yet there is more to human nature than any one of these areas. Somehow, we have to work out a way of recognising the complexity of humanity, without losing sight of the fundamental unity of a given human being.
That’s why many philosophers and scientists are drawn to the idea of recognising human nature as a complex reality with many aspects or perspectives, realising that a failure to respect complexity leads to over-simplification and distortion. Any single perspective or viewpoint is likely to be partial and limited. It is only by recognising and integrating multiple perspectives on humanity that we can hope to understand ourselves as a whole.
A good example of this kind of approach is seen in the writings of Charles A. Coulson, Oxford University’s first Professor of Theoretical Chemistry. Coulson knew the importance of good analogies in helping people to grasp difficult ideas, and developed several such analogies in affirming the complementarity of multiple perspectives on reality afforded by science and the humanities – such as poetry and religion. One of the best of these seems to have arisen out of his love of mountain walking, which developed during his period as a lecturer in Scotland during the Second World War.
Coulson realised how the complex topography of the Scottish mountain Ben Nevis could serve as an analogy for the need for multiple perspectives on life. Assuming that many of his readers would be familiar with Ben Nevis, Coulson invited them to join him in an imaginative walk around the mountain, and reflect on what they saw. Seen from the south, the mountain presents itself as a ‘huge grassy slope’; from the north, as ‘rugged rock buttresses’. Those who know the mountain are familiar with these different perspectives. It’s the same mountain, yet a full description requires these different perspectives to be brought together, and integrated into a single coherent picture.13
Coulson’s core insight is that ‘different viewpoints yield different descriptions’. The scientist might thus stand at the north side of the mountain, the poet at the south, and so on. Each of these observers reports on what they experience using their own distinct language and imagery.14 ‘Each looks at the mountain; each sees certain things and each tries to describe his encounter with the mountain in terms that make sense. Each devises a language that is suitable for his particular purpose.’ So where one observer might see grassy slopes, another might see a rocky mountain. Yet both are representative and legitimate viewpoints of a complicated natural feature.
For Coulson, this makes the need for an overall, cumulative and integrated picture of reality essential. ‘Different views of the same reality will appear different, yet both be valid.’15 The analogy is easily applied to the relation of science and the humanities, and to the various disciplines which engage with human nature. It is only someone ‘who cannot, or will not, look at it from more than one viewpoint who claims an exclusive authority for his own description’.16 Each provides only a partial account of a greater reality.
So how does this model help us think about the complexity of our existence? Let’s apply it to various ways of understanding human nature, and see how it works out.
Resisting Reductionism; Affirming Complexity
I was dining with a scientist colleague at his Oxford College. It was a rather splendid meal, and I remarked on this. My colleague laughed. ‘Maybe we’re all just very sophisticated metabolic processing machines!’ He didn’t mean me to take the remark seriously. Yet it opened up a line of thought for me as I walked home that night. Yes, we are metabolic processing machines. If we were unable to convert the proteins and carbohydrates of our everyday food into energy and the basic building blocks of our bodies, we couldn’t survive. Metabolism is essential to life.
Yet that doesn’t mean that we are only metabolic machines, as if that provided a total description of a human being. It simply (and rightly) recognises that one aspect of our identity is our capacity to process food. Yet this human capacity to convert food into energy sustains a series of more complex and meaningful operations, such as the quest for meaning, and showing love to others. Metabolism is not an end in itself. It is the means by which some of the most significant characteristic features of human beings can be resourced. It is the means to these ends, not an end in itself. Metabolism is going to be an integral part of any full account of human nature. Yet it is emphatically not the whole picture. Being able to metabolise allows human beings to do more interesting things – and it is those that arguably define what is distinct about us.
The same issue can be seen in another familiar model of human nature. This highly reductive model is found in the writings of the biologist Francis Crick, who defined human beings in purely neurological terms. ‘ “You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules . . . You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’17 It’s a bold statement that some clearly find enthralling. Its simplicity seems to pull out the rug from under all kinds of philosophical and theological debates which they find irritating. Human beings can be defined simply and neatly in terms of one of our physical components, which plays such a critically important role in our lives that we can treat it as determinative and identity-giving.
But we need to appreciate that Crick’s highly reductive approach to our human identity assumes that a complex system is no more than the sum of its parts – and that one of these components can be singled out as being of defining importance. The most generous way of understanding Crick’s hopeless overstatement is to suggest that it is a neurologist’s perspective on human nature, which somehow manages to ignore the obvious fact that there is a lot more to human nature than neurons. Of course we need these if we are to function properly. But we are not defined exclusively, or characteristically, in this way. There’s more that needs to be said.
Richard Dawkins’ ‘gene’s eye’ view of human nature attracted a lot of attention back in the 1980s, although it has since fallen out of favour.18 This approach sees human beings essentially as machines which are controlled and determined by our DNA – the complex biological molecule which transmits genetic information. ‘DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.’19 Our sole purpose in existing is to pass on our genes to future generations. Human beings are just gene-perpetuating machines.20
Once more, the problem is that of privileging one perspective of reality, and over-stating its importance. Dawkins is right to argue that human beings want to pass on their genes (even if they might not use this specific way of talking about this urge or instinct). But it’s just one aspect of our complicated identity. Again, it is part of the picture – but it cannot conceivably be seen as the whole picture.
Another reductionist myth that has gained some popular traction is the idea that human love is just the behavioural outcome of our hormones. Now there is an obvious truth in this. There is clearly a correlation between vasopressin receptors and pair bonding in males, and probably between oxytocin and pair bonding in females. Love is indeed a drug – a heady chemical cocktail of hormones which drive us to seek out mates.21 But that’s not the full story.
The Russian writer Alexander Men (1935–90) helps us to see just how much more needs to be said here. Drawing on a story by the nineteenth-century Russian dramatist Nikolai Gogol, Men asks us to imagine Afanasy Ivanovitch, a withered old man in his eighties, who lost his wife years ago. He still bursts into tears when he remembers her.22 He may have lost his hormonal drive, yet something deeper remains present and active. As C.S. Lewis pointed out in his late writing The Four Loves, erotic love is only one aspect of human relationality; it is supplemented with other forms of love – such as ‘affection’ – which shape our behaviour, and help determine what a truly human life might look like.
Anthropology: The Scientific Study of Human Nature
Some will rightly suggest that we should turn to anthropology – the science of human nature – to help us understand our true identity. After all, the natural sciences are one of the most reliable sources of human knowledge. Anthropology ought therefore to be able to unlock the secrets of human identity and significance with ease and precision, in much the same way that biochemistry is able to make sense of the human digestive processes. Since there is a dedicated science of human nature, we should surely take its secure findings with the greatest seriousness.23
Yet things turn out to be rather more complicated than might seem to be the case. For a start, like any discipline, anthropology goes through phases. Ideas that dominate the discipline in one age then fall out of favour, to be replaced with new ideas and approaches. It is fatally easy for a non-anthropologist to fail to appreciate this point, and base her ideas about culture or religion on an outdated and discredited anthropology. One of the greatest and most puzzling weaknesses of Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion (2006) was his baffling decision to accept as normative the outdated anthropological account of religion in James Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890). While Frazer’s views were influential in the period before the First World War, they are now regarded as discredited.24 It remains unclear why Dawkins chose to make his own views on religion so dependent on this outdated and discredited account.
There are important debates within the discipline of anthropology itself over its nature and scope, and whether it indeed can be considered to be an ‘empirical’ discipline in the first place. Does anthropology study material cultures using an implicit behaviourist paradigm from outside; or does it describe symbolic cultures from within? What is the role of theory in observation? The recent critical assault on the presuppositions, methods and conclusions of Margaret Mead’s ethnographical bestseller Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) – which defined for many what anthropology was all about – does not discredit the discipline, but does raise important questions about the status of external observers and their agendas.25
Anthropology cannot avoid interpretative elements – as when an external observer of a culture tries to make sense of what is observed, yet in doing so interprets that culture using presuppositions derived from their own cultural context.26 This is not about the ‘scientific’ analysis of culture, but the interpretation and evaluation of one culture from the standpoint of another culture (typically a secular Western mindset).
Anthropology is superb at identifying common features of human culture – such as the virtually universal human tendency to use stories as a way of organising memories of the past, and sustaining the identity of individuals and communities.27 But it can’t make normative judgements (e.g., which of these stories is ‘right’, or whether this basic human tendency is itself fallacious and misguided). In this work, I shall draw on anthropological studies, as appropriate, as a description of human nature and culture, particularly in noting certain universal tendencies – such as the phenomenon of religion, and the use of stories to remember the past, and make sense of the present.
The Need for a Bigger Picture of Human Nature
Reductive views of humanity represent a single aspect of human existence as if it were the totality of that existence – or at least the aspect that really matters. Often, such approaches treat one element of the human body which supports life as if it were the ultimate reason for life itself. Yet this view surely needs to be challenged. For a start, it overlooks the relational and social aspects of human life. Human beings need to exist in relationships. As Aristotle pointed out more than two thousand years ago, human beings are social animals. It’s a vitally important aspect of human existence. Yet it is only part of a more complex picture, not something which can be isolated from the remainder of human life, and treated as if it were the essence of human nature. The best way of challenging these inadequate and partial approaches is not to get lost in their fine detail, but to set out a richer and deeper vision of human nature which includes what is good about them. Human beings are complex systems; our whole transcends our individual parts.
It is always useful to have a theoretical model that both helps us to identify the difficulty with the reductionist approaches to human nature we have just noted, and also enables us to develop a better alternative. One of the most promising approaches is the philosophy of ‘critical realism’ developed by the social philosopher Roy Bhaskar, which recognises the ‘stratification of reality’. Human nature thus needs to be conceived as consisting of different levels or strata. Humanity can be – and, indeed, ought to be – investigated at the physical, chemical, biological and sociological levels (to mention a few of the possibilities),28 yet none of these multiple levels is to be regarded as normative or definitive; rather, each is to be considered part – and only part – of the complex reality that we know as humanity.
This ‘multiple levels’ approach affirms that we are indeed made up of things like atoms and molecules, or neurons (as well, of course, as many other constituent elements). This does not, however, mean that we are ‘nothing’ but neurons, or atoms and molecules. This hopeless over-simplification just confuses a component or level within a system with the system as a whole. We must learn to consider human beings as complex totalities, which cannot be defined or described in terms of any one of their constituent parts.
To open up this discussion further, we need to look at some of the rich understandings of human nature that have emerged down the centuries, and reflect on the questions that these raise. In the next chapter, we shall consider four divergent views of human nature, and allow them to open up some of the issues that we need to consider more thoroughly in this work.