Bulwark against Change: Human Nature, excerpt from The Campaign

The following is an excerpt from my novel, The Campaign. It is the first of four speeches delivered by the candidate, Jackson Turner, about the "Bulwarks against change". It's been a while since I have used this blog, and reading through my first attempts shows that I am still concerned about similar issues.


The Campaign, Chapter 28

“Thank you for your warm reception. I hope that by the end of this speech I will have earned it.” More applause. “When I announced my intention to run for Senator, I made a pledge that this campaign would be about uncovering the realities that we all face, and the forces which keep us largely in the dark. The forces which support the status quo of injustice and inequality. One of my favorite quotes from anthropologist Marvin Harris led me to see things that we are not supposed to see. He made the claim that “Art and politics fashion the collective dreamwork that prevents us from understanding the realities of our social lives.” I have spent literally days unpacking this one quote with my students, and I ask for your indulgence. I have no attack or applause lines, or sound bites, just a story to tell. There are several parts to this story that I call the “bulwarks against change” - tonight I hope to explain one: the concept of Human Nature.


“When challenged to imagine a world where there is no hunger, poverty, or want, all would agree that that is a world they would want to live in. When asked why we don’t have that, many respond because it is against human nature. We naturally create hierarchies, all known large scale civilizations have been organized hierarchically. Despite repeated pleas for more social justice from all of the world’s prophets from Moses to Jesus to Mohammad and Buddha, we always end up with inequality. This seems so self evident that we never truly question it. Despite all our best intentions, we always end up creating winners and losers, Pharoah and slave, lord and serf, owner and worker. This is even the case in those nominally Communist societies which may be the most hierarchical societies of all time. Thus even when we set up explicitly to create equality, we create inequality.


“Why? I would argue that one of the strongest, yet most incorrect, arguments is that equality is against human nature. I say strongest because it seems to have the whole weight of history behind it. The foundational thinkers of our culture claimed that human nature was inherently greedy and self serving. A “war of all against all.” That given a choice, humans would harm their neighbor to benefit themselves. And that benefit? They narrowly defined it as gold, or wealth, which, they argued, would lead to a better life. Please raise your hand if this sounds about right?”


What a risk that was, Biz thought. He could die up there, but miraculously most in the hall raised their hand.


Jackson continued: “I say ‘most incorrect’ because we now know better. The modern, largely accepted, concept of human nature was created by these very same wealthy landowners. They wished to defend their right to a greater supply of the earth’s resources. When it became apparent that the divine right to rule, claimed by nobility all over the world, would no longer suffice to explain why some lived lives of luxury while most lived lives of deprivation, they needed a different justification for inequality. Specifically I speak of John Locke and his second treatise on government. Now, I hate to sound like a history teacher, but, well, I am a history teacher.”


That got the crowd chuckling at the just the right moment. He could have really shot right past the attention span.


“He coined the phrase that all men are entitled to life, liberty, and property. I know that sounds familiar as Thomas Jefferson used most of it in the Declaration of Independence, just softening the property bit by replacing it with the pursuit of happiness.”


Another chuckle.


“But the euphemism did not change the intent. Men, and they did mean men, had a right to claim property for themselves. The reasoning was that this was in line with...you guessed it...human nature. And the rightful goal of government was to protect that property. Thus, they reasoned, men of property should be the rightful rulers of the society as who better to create a government that would protect property than property owners themselves. They have “skin in the game,” as you might say.


“This is the basis for the creation of a market society, which is often labeled capitalism. Adam Smith built upon the thoughts of Locke to claim that men, acting in their own self interest, in a free and unfettered marketplace, would naturally create the most efficient and effective economy. Again, we hear this all the time so that it generally washes over us, but the phrase “acting in their own self interest” is key here as it is another call to human nature as a justification for inequality. Some are capable and able to effectively act in their own self interest, and some are not, Smith argued. While we were never taught this explicitly in school, it has now, and has always, served to explain the obvious inequality we see around us every day. So to return to the main point: why do we have so much inequality? As my students would say, it's just human nature Mr. Turner. Some are more able than others to accumulate property. So whose fault is it if you don’t accumulate that property? That’s right, it’s the individual's own fault. So the poor are to blame for their own poverty according to this philosophy. And now, the modern political discourse has taken this even further - the poor are to blame for your poverty as well, or the immigrants, or the blacks, or the Muslims, or whatever the fear mongers can get away with.


“As I said when I began, it is a strong argument. The way the world has played out, the way the world is, and the way we understand history all SEEM to support this view of human nature. In fact, all large scale societies have been stratified and unequal. This is a very strong argument as we tend to believe that what has never happened will never happen. But we have countless examples of things that never happened, in fact happening. Neil Armstrong, anyone? 2004 Red Sox?


However, the entire argument is based on this false concept of human nature. What if human nature is not as they imagined? So let’s look at what is actually there in our collective past. Since anthropologists forced us to understand that our current society and humanity are not the same thing, we now know that there is an incredibly wide diversity of reasonable human societies. In fact there are a quarter of a million years of human societies that were, and in some cases still are, more equal, or egalitarian. If human nature was as we are taught, then ALL humans would be prey to it. We would see all people acting selfish and greedy most of the time, but this is simply not the case as these egalitarian societies prove. Humans do not always act selfishly, and they are certainly not organized around an idea that they do. When we add some ideas from Economics, the argument of human nature becomes even more egregiously incorrect.


“Economists claim that all people seek to maximize their utility which is defined as perceived benefit. This is not always money or financial gain - it is a much broader concept which includes prestige, leisure time, family and a variety of other factors which motivate human behavior. Think about the choices that you have made in your lives. It is likely that you could have done more to earn money, but chose a different path. You choose to spend time volunteering at the firehouse, not taking a second job. You choose to stay at home with young children and not return to work even though it hurts the family finances. The list goes on and on. Utility is not profit. We are not the greedy materialistic robots that those enlightenment thinkers thought us to be.” Jackson paused and looked out over the audience for effect. “We are simply much more complex than that.


“Taking that a step further, let us examine how we really behave. Think about the myriad of decisions that you make in any given day. Do most of them harm another so that you may gain? Or are most of them filled with compassion, for family, friends, and community? Are most of your days filled with cooperation and empathy? I ask these rhetorical questions because I DO know the answer - mostly we are empathic, compassionate cooperators. Do we occasionally act greedy and insensitive? Sure, but that does not mean that we always will behave in that way. And that is my answer to the “it's just human nature” response. If mostly we act with great kindness and care, why do we believe that human nature tends to make us act terribly toward one another?


“In fact, what has happened is that cause and effect have been turned inside out. When we look at our society and see injustice, greed, selfishness, we attribute it to human nature. But the reality is that this narrow, incorrect vision of human nature came FIRST, and then society began creating political and economic frameworks, which I call institutions, which fostered self-centered pursuits at the expense of the common good. Thus, we now have many who do in fact act for their own interests at the expense of the common good. However, that is not their nature, but simply how they have been taught to behave by a society which promotes this incorrect view of human nature.


“This false concept of human nature is a bulwark against change. It is one of several, but it serves the purpose of making true systemic change more difficult, in fact, virtually impossible. As I have mentioned before, all people in power seek to maintain that power in some way, through declaring themselves divine in past times, to making huge campaign contributions today. This is pretty normal. To get the rest of us to go along, and not strive for something more, they have to create a justification for the current division of the country and the world into haves and have-nots. A normal first reaction to my call to envision a more egalitarian world, one without the deprivation that is so evident, is to say that that sounds nice but it's “unrealistic” because it is not human nature. According to this reasoning, any effort at a future of more social justice is doomed to fail, so why bother even trying. That, my friends, is an effective bulwark against change. This bulwark truly prevents us from even LOOKING for potential answers.


“Once we strip away the mythology surrounding human nature, and actually look at the evidence, we see that virtually anything is possible. So we must get past the misconception of who we are and how we act. We must see that this is just a dreamwork which perpetuates injustice. If we start from the proposition that there will always be poverty, then we will create a system which always has people in poverty and all measures will ultimately fall short, as the Great Society of LBJ has fallen short and may have even been counterproductive. But it is not about changing each person to think differently. It is, however, about having the political will to change our institutions. To change them to encourage the kind of community building we all so desperately want. To change them to foster cooperation. To change these institutions to reflect what is truly in our nature: empathy.


“Again, this campaign is about ideas. Ideas which help unshroud the cultural myths that perpetuate the status quo of inequality and pain. Once we rethink these assumptions, we can begin to evaluate proposals with a fresh set of eyes, unclouded by propaganda. Then we can begin the work of making a society that we are truly proud of because it enhances the human experience. Then we can begin the work of healing the wounds that these lies about ourselves have created. Then we can begin to see each other as common allies in a striving for good. Then we can begin to Heal Maine. Thank you for listening, truly.”