cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/677606. Why I’m cross-posting this here as it’s mostly a criticism of capitalism.

I got curious about human instincts and ran into this (delightfully retro even though it’s from after 2010) page while googling the subject. Haven’t read it fully yet but I’ve found it interesting and figured I’d share.

Abstract. Like all animals, humans have instincts, genetically hard-wired behaviors that enhance our ability to cope with vital environmental contingencies. Our innate fear of snakes is an example. Other instincts, including denial, revenge, tribal loyalty, greed and our urge to procreate, now threaten our very existence. Any attempt to control human behavior is bound to meet with resistance and disapproval. Unless we can change our behavior, humans are facing the end of civilization. Our problem has several elements. (1) We have invented economic and social systems that encourage greedy behavior, and we have actually institutionalized runaway greed. (2) We are in a state of complete denial about the growth of human populations. (3) Earth’s finite resources simply cannot support 7.6 billion of us in the style to which we’d like to live. (4) We must make a choice between quantity and quality of human life. (5) To head off the inevitable collapse, we can no longer wait and merely react but we must become proactive. We must find ways to control dangerous human instincts, especially denial, revenge, tribal loyalty, greed and our urge to procreate.

  • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I’d question some of the premises of this article. For example, I’m not comfortable simply accepting this:

    For example, greed must certainly have been adaptive for early cave dwellers. In times of scarcity, a greedy caveman who refused to share his food stores during an ice age or at the onset of winter would have been more likely to survive and hence would have enjoyed higher fitness (reproductive success) than a generous one who shared his limited resources with the less fortunate. Natural selection programmed us to be selfish. Greed is a natural human instinct – we are all selfish and greedy at heart, and for sound evolutionary reasons. Humans invented money and institutionalized runaway greed, allowing others to become billionaires – what sense does it make to have more than you can actually use?

    To me it smacks of two things, which are not unrelated:

    1. Social Darwinism - the tendency to explain complex social phenomena crudely in terms of basic evolutionary pressures, and in doing so to cite “just so stories” about the distant past, which are essentially fictions constructed specifically to achieve the desired explanatory outcome.

    2. The tendency to read the characteristics of human behaviour in contemporary capitalist societies as deep characteristics of “human nature”. Is greed really “a natural human instinct”? Evolution may have selected us to be effective resource gatherers, but selected for greed? Where’s the evidence for that?

    For both of those reasons I question the author’s claim that “Greed is a natural human instinct – we are all selfish and greedy at heart, and for sound evolutionary reasons.” In addition, the “selfish caveman” described here would likely have the shit kicked out of him or be ostracized by his fellow cavepeople. Indeed, in the very next sentence the author says, “Similarly, tribal loyalty and revenge made sense – if another caveman messed with your tribe, you bashed him over the head and he was unlikely to do it again.” If there is loyalty and revenge against the other tribe’s caveman who “messed with your tribe”, why not also revenge against a member of your own tribe who’s acting greedily and stealing other people’s resources?

    It’s inconsistent, simplistic and reductionist, and it plays right into the hands of capitalist propaganda that tells us greed is inevitable and built-in. There have been more and less greedy societies, and many societies whose goal was to live in harmony with their environment, to understand it, and not to take more than it gave. There are many people living by these kinds of principles today. Is there inherent greed just not expressing itself? Is it repressed? Or are only some people greedy because it’s a personality trait that is allowed to thrive in some social situations, such as consumerist capitalism?

    On another topic, also questionable is the author’s assumption of a dichotomy between “rationality” and “mysticism” in his analysis of human nature. That dichotomy strikes me as a very obvious construct for which we might credit Socrates and Plato and, much later, Enlightenment thinking. Again there have been many societies where no such distinction is made, where there is not this relegation of some phenomena to the “mystical” while others can be treated “rationally”. If you’re going to claim this is fundamental to human nature, you’re going to need to argue it, and I don’t see this author doing so.

    There’s also the reductionistic explanation of the difference between male and female sexuality in terms of natural selective pressures to maximize offspring. Again, social construction and societal circumstances are ignored in favour of a universal, crudely reductive social Darwinism.

    And this:

    Competition is ubiquitous wherever resources are in short supply. Plants compete for light and water. Fungi and microbes compete for nutrients. Animals compete for food and space. Competition leads to greedy behaviors. Humans have institutionalized greed – we allow, even encourage, runaway greed. Our political and economic systems facilitate greed. Greed is the underlying driving force for both capitalism and entrepreneurship.

    Again, crude social Darwinism as an explanation for capitalism. I’d argue that he gets the last sentence here quite the wrong way around. It’s not that greed is the underlying driving force for capitalism, but that capitalism is the underlying driving force for greed.

    I get that he’s trying to criticize capitalism, and this is a fine thing to do, but in so many ways he plays right into the hands of the crude social Darwinist philosophies that lurk in the worldviews of capitalist tech bro CEOs like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. These views do insidious damage by limiting our ability to see the flexibility of human nature and the historic and social specificity of the forms it takes under today’s capitalism.