re: human nature

Tue, 7 May 1996 18:21:11 +0100 (BST)
Richard K. Moore (rkmoore@iol.ie)

5/05/96, Andrew W. Austin wrote:
>Can you name, using a nonfunctionalist interpretative frame and avoiding
>explanations of human phenomena (myth, rituals, attitudes, norms) based
>on sapien capacities and/or morphology (such as 'we play Bach and other
>animals can't'), name some human culture "traits" that are transepochal?

First, there is the inheritance from animal-hood that must be
identified and characterized. In this regard, for example, our innate
social nature is closer to the family/tribal patterns of baboons than it is
to, say, ant colonies or giraffe nursery-groups. The scope and details of
these fixed-traits are, shall we say, controversial -- but this is a major
part of human nature nonetheless.

Second, in comparison to animal behaviors, one thing that seems to
centrally characterize mankind is our "re-programmability". Animals are
born with a comparatively fixed trait-program (including migration
patterns, hunting methods, etc.) which is modified only slightly for local
conditions. Man's "behavior computer" seems to be _almost_ infinitely
re-programmable, especially during the period prior to adolescence.

But once the re-programming (aka socialization) occurs, then
man-in-culture acts much like animal-in-wild. People find their economic
niches in their community much like an animal stakes out its territory, and
people typically conform to the language & customs of their group with all
the rigor of a lion pride on a hunt. Its almost as if each culture is a
sub-species, but with a socially-carried "patch" appended to the
bio-evolved DNA-string.

Just how much of our "program" is fixed, and how much is
modifiable, is an interesting question -- and one which could probably be
elucidated by appropriate re-interpretation of many existing studies from
psychology, anthropology, etc. Also the question of switching cultures is
interesting -- past a certain age, for example, immigrants tend to keep the
old language and customs, regardless of how maladaptive that may be in the
new environment.

The reprogrammable part also carries some operational baggage.
There are mechanisms of learning and memory, for example, that determine
the range of languages we can learn, and the kind of syntax structures that
are likely.

It seems that through intensive/intrusive conditioning, man can be
re-programmed even more than is "good for him" -- an "override program" in
"volatile memory" can supercede parts of what I would call the bio-fixed
"basic nature". This is perhaps what Freud was talking about in
Civilization and its Discontents, and it seems that much of our neuroses
and feelings of estrangement come from ignorance and inattention of that
which is intrinsic within us. There is a tension between what we "need to
be" and what we "force ourselves to be".

Andrew - with some fairness, you might say that I've merely punted
your question -- rephrased it as further questions re/ boundary between
fixed and reprogrammable traits, and the "operational" constraints on
learning. But it seems to me that an adequate containing model of human
nature is necessary before useful questions can be asked.

---
5/06/96, Greg Ehrig wrote:
>Humans differ from animals in that they
>have a concept of time  -- both future and past.  This leads to the
>modification of behavior to take into account results from the past
>and possible consequences for the future: Thag-- "Thag kill all horses.
>Tribe eat good,  therefore, Thag good!".

Thank you Greg for continuing to articulate the canonical concensus-reality position, concisely summarized for WSN. You perform a noble service to the group by revealing the shallow assumptions and thinking that characterize most public (and much academic) discourse re/ our various topics. I mean no personal slight in my critical remarks -- I respond to your crafted presentation, and assume the subtleness of your own thinking may not be fully represented therein.

Where does one begin to unravel such a house of cards, as your familiar cave-man scenario of human development? I could mention that many animals _do_ have a sense of time, do learn new tricks, and even pass on learned behavior to offspring -- but that would be nitpicking.

The more central fallacy in your scenario is the assumption that human "tribes" (an OK moniker for a variety of group sizes and structures) started out with very little savvy, and developed cultural forms, hunting, etc. as a cognitive activity. Typically this scenario is extended to include the claim that man started as individual cave-men, with only nuclear family in tow, and entered into a voluntary "social contract" to form tribes in the first place.

This whole scenario is fantasy, the invention of eighteenth and nineteenth century thinkers who wanted to find Laws as simple as Newton's underlying every observable system. They HYPOTHESIZED tableau-noir cognitive man because it suited their model of a useful-theory paradigm, not because it had any basis whatsoever in observation. In fairness, there was virtually nothing then "known" (that clever academia-centric term) about what we'd now call ethology, ethnology, or even psychology. We can credit their audacity in tackling complex systems with virtually no base-knowledge, but we need not continue to wear their chains (as do the behaviorsists), now that we have some elementary observation-based understanding of the subject.

It is an interesting comment on the academic/scientific process -- as it actually operates -- that old theories persist even when their assumptional underpinnings have been fatally eroded by discoveries in "unrelated" fields. "Unrelated", of course, means "out of communication, institutionally", not "unrelated, scientifically", so we can (sadly) understand the continued promulgation of dinasaur-vintage models. To wit...

As Andrew W. Austin later wrote: >Humans and their conceptual understanding of the world are social >constructions. This means that particular views of how human beings and >their relations are naturally constituted are constructed by human >beings.

What we now "know" is that man-in-tribe evolved as a system. The whole time the higher (super-animal) cognitive machinery was evolving, it was ALWAYS in the context of a cultural/economic system at least as complex as what we can now observe in, say, baboon troops. The whole concept of individualism is a relatively modern notion, perhaps first conceived in near-historical times, and not given its full modern articulation until the Greeks.

---

Greg hypothesized cognitive-thought, and even spoken language (ie. "Thag"), as being the primary vehicle of cultural development among human tribes. This of course ignores the adaptability-quotient of proto-man tribes, which was probably considerable. Even more, it ignores the richness of the functioning tribal socio-economic infrastructures that came with man from his pre-higher-cognitive origins. There was never a tableau-noir world which cognition/language was forced to contend with, except as we've later invented, ala existentialism.

As with other animals, there must have been a time when human language was "less complex" than culture -- when it barely stretched to provide the action-tokens and thing-identifiers necessary to organize the hunt or to describe over-the-hill dangers. Much later, of course, language is infinitely more complex than culture, and has evolved to fill new worlds of its own making. It would be interesting to speculate on when the cross-over point was: when did language first match culture in complexity, and then begin to rapidly outstrip it? Would this millennia-granularity "point" mark a beginning of accelerated cultural innovation? Would it mark an acceleration of cross-tribal communications?

rkm

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