Human nature

Ok.  A number of times on the blog before I’ve used a formulation something like the following: “Human nature, as I am using it here, expresses a stochastic rather than an essentialising category.”  I feel this is a little hand-waving and opaque, and in this post I’d like to unpack what I’m trying to get at a little more.

The core point here is that I want to hold two positions simultaneously.  One is an anti-essentialism about human nature – there is no one essence of human behaviour.  The other is a relatively high degree of cynicism about human nature – given the opportunity, people will behave in cruel and/or self-interested ways a fair amount of the time.  Both of these positions are important to me and to the project I’m pursuing here, but I think they stand in some tension.  In general, if you are an anti-essentialist about human nature, it may seem natural to also believe that human nature could in principle be transformed in fairly dramatic ways – including in positive ways, so what’s the basis for a high degree of cynicism?  On the other hand, cynics about human nature often understand that cynicism in more or less essentialising terms – there is an ineradicable darkness in human nature somewhere, which can maybe be tamed and managed but which cannot be eliminated.

By contrast, I think we can (so to speak) have our cake and eat it here (not that it’s very appetising cake).  The three-tiered framework for thinking about psychology and behaviour that I’ve been (extremely sketchily and crudely) outlining in the last few posts seems, to me, like a good way to think about this problem space.  That framework incorporates the basic insight of ‘homo economicus’ – that humans are centrally motivated by self-interest – but it can also accommodate extremes of non-self-interested behaviour (above and beyond the simple modification of our basic individual-level preference functions to be other-oriented).  There are two mechanisms for departure from homo economicus within the framework.  On the one hand, the ‘investment’ of the individual in the judgement of peers means that social pressure can play a major role in shaping preferences, beliefs, and behaviour.  This means a recognitive community can ‘bootstrap’ itself into more or less any behaviour if its self-reinforcing mechanisms are strong enough.  On the other hand, the individual is internally divided against itself, and can bring its own ‘internal sanctions’ to bear against itself (the individual is already, in a sense, an internal community).  Here, I’ve suggested, we can think in terms of habits or dispositions (which bear implicit norms or preferences), or in terms of the intentional preferences of subcomponents of the psyche.  Taken together, the dispositions of the self, the ‘preferences’ of the subcomponents of the self, and the structural features of the internally divided psyche’s sanctioning and reward system all amount to what we call a person’s ‘character’.

So this is my ‘behavioural framework’.  This framework is extremely formal – it doesn’t commit us to any specific analysis of human beings’ likely behaviour.  There is no ‘core essence’ of the human – whether a benign and generous core that has been corrupted by oppressive social relations, or a malign and vicious core that has been tempered by socialisation.  At the same time, I think the following things make sense within this framework: 1) an expectation that a large proportion of humans will behave in a self-interested way a large proportion of the time (a la homo economicus); 2) ‘group behaviours’ of both very positive and very negative kinds; 3) departures (again both positive and negative) from both group behaviour and self-interest that arise out of the internal dynamics of the psyche.

You’ve gotta have all three of these things if you want to have any hope of analysing social behaviour in any kind of useful way, I feel.  Frameworks that try to make do with just some of this story end up missing out a large proportion of human behaviour.  Now, that’s not necessarily a problem – our stories or models don’t have to include everything all of the time, and it’s ok for us to adopt, in any given case, a very partial perspective.  But for my own thinking I like to be able to have some vague sense of how the different elements of our different accounts fit together – and this is my (still obviously very gestural) effort at that, on the topic of human behaviour or human nature.