Is Human Nature Unchanging?

Is Human Nature Unchanging?

Human Behavioral Ecology Vs. Evolutionary Psychology

Modern psychology is largely premised on belief in a universal and unchanging human nature. Regardless of varying surface behavior human beings are and have always been the same. But is this true?

“My genes made me do it,” say evolutionary psychologists. We share the 50,000-year-old genes of our Cro-Magnon ancestors whom evolution rewarded for traits such as male promiscuity, propensity to rape, and valor in battle. Men are naturally jealous, insisting on sexual fidelity in their mates. Women are far less concerned with infidelity, focusing instead on men’s abilities to supply much needed protein through hunting and fishing. This may sound unpleasantly sexist, but the fundamental question is whether evolutionary psychology’s conclusions are supported by good science.

Human behavioral ecologists don’t think so. For one thing, our genes do not necessarily go back 50,000 years. Recent research suggests that the human genome is significantly composed of genes 10,000 years old or less. Hundreds of behavioral ecology studies have led to the conclusion that “social and environmental forces select for various behaviors that optimize people’s fitness in a given environment. Different environment, different behaviors – and different human ‘natures.’”

“Where, then, does the fall of evolutionary psychology leave the idea of human nature? Behavioral ecology replaces it with ‘it depends’ – that is the core of human nature is variability and flexibility, the capacity to mold behavior to the social and physical demands of the environment. As David Buller says, human variation is not noise in the system; it is the system.”

In other words, human beings have no “nature” but history.

We Are What We Speak

In 1956 the linguistic anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf posed the intriguing question: How does language determine the way we experience the world? A leading researcher of Hopi culture, Whorf observed:

I find it gratuitous to assume that a Hopi who knows only the Hopi language and the cultural ideas of his own society has the same notions, often supposed to be intuitions, of time and space that we have, and that are generally assumed to be universal. [italics mine] In particular, he has no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past; or, in which, to reverse the picture, the observer is being carried in the stream of duration continuously away from a past and into a future.

Whorf’s insight has been experimentally confirmed by a new generation of cognitive psychologists, whose most articulate exponent is Stanford’s Lera Boriditsky, leader of an international research group rather cleverly called “Cognation.”:

We've looked at the influence of language on the patterns of early vocabulary acquisition in English and Navajo, on thinking about time in English, Greek, Spanish and Mandarin, on color memory and color perception in English and Russian, on people's thoughts about the gender of toasters (and other inanimate objects) in Spanish and German, and on people's representations of actions and events in Indonesian, Mandarin, Turkish, and Russian.

Sharon Begley writes, “In a series of clever experiments guided by pointed questions, [Boroditsky] is amassing evidence that, yes, language shapes thought. The effect is powerful enough, she says, that ‘the private mental lives of speakers of different languages may differ dramatically,” not only when they are thinking in order to speak, ‘but in all manner of cognitive tasks,” including basic sensory perception.” For example, “To English speakers, time is horizontal and the future lies ahead. In Mandarin, however, time is vertical, springing up like oil from a well. . . . Bilingual people report that news seems much more dynamic, full of energy and violent when written in a language like English that has descriptive verbs.”

Although to my knowledge no one has yet pointed out the implications of “Cognation’s” findings for historical research, they are stunningly obvious and strongly supportive of the implications of the behavioral ecology thesis that man has no nature but history.

Language, whether written, spoken, or both, is the chief constituent of human culture. The Biblical languages, Hebrew and Greek, were not the same languages in 1st century Palestine or 4th century Rome with the same subtle connotations and layers of meaning as modern scholars understand Hebrew and Greek. And we have an even poorer understanding of 1st century spoken Aramaic. To reconstruct Aramaic words that appear in the New Testament, scholars must rely on 4th century texts that employ a written form of Syrian Aramaic.

The Social Construction of Reality

To begin to grasp anything at all about the historical Jesus, we must first place ourselves in his world. Not that we can see that world precisely as Jesus saw it. Given the absence of trustworthy evidence, that is literally impossible. But we unless we try to do a better job of reconstructing his world and his thoughts, our sense of Jesus and his mission will necessarily be superficial and misleading.

First, I take it as given that there are really only two metadisciplines: philosophy and history; e.g., both a philosophy of history and a history of philosophy are possible. Indeed, many scholars have achieved each with varying degrees of success.

The social and behavioral sciences have much weaker claims to metadisciplinarity. There is a kind of sociology of history and a psychology of philosophy and, I suppose, an economics of history but these are all clearly derivative of history and philosophy and could not exist without them. How much easier it is to speak of economic history or the philosophy of psychology than the reverse.

The Sociology of Knowledge

Amidst the semi-scientific claptrap, ahistoricism, and anachronism of that species of the higher nonsense known as the social sciences, the sociology of knowledge represents an enclave of humanist scholarship, especially as exemplified by Peter L. Berger, the author, along with Thomas Luckmann of the classic The Social Construction of Reality, which has lost neither relevance nor freshness since its first publication in 1966.

Indebted to the methodology of the phenomenologist philosopher Alfred A. Schutz (Luckmann was a student of Schutz and co-authored a book with him) Berger and Luckmann argue that the primary reality we experience is “intersubjective,” socially and culturally constructed. Throughout history we have grown accustomed to thinking of reality as an absolute. It is not merely that human beings have generally agreed that, indeed, “something exists out there,” but if they consider themselves as belonging to a particular culture, they experience almost universal agreement as to what it is, exactly that exists within that culture.

In this important sense, reality consists of those perceptions that are universally shared by individuals within a specific culture. This is the reality of everyday life. To a 21st century American it is the reality of car payments and credit card transactions, of TV, pornography, and potato chips. Those aspects of reality that all people in a culture share are “intersubjective.” The social construction of reality is the dialectic between so-called “objective reality” and “subjective reality:” As Berger and Luckmann demonstrate, arriving at an understanding of a society, either present or past, involves ridding oneself of preconceptions and looking at the interaction between the two realities as do (or did) the members of that society. “The sociology of knowledge understands human reality as socially constructed reality.”

For unknown reasons this model, ideal for historical research, has rarely been employed by historians. Among contemporary New Testament scholars, only Gerd Theissen uses the methodology of the “social construction of reality” in his research. As a result, his insights into Jesus’ miracles, healings, exorcisms, the nature of illness in 1st century Palestine, and many other New Testament subjects, are often insightful. Theissen, who is German, is not nearly well enough known in the United States, except among other Jesus scholars. Regrettably his “historical novel,” The Shadow of the Galilean: The Quest of the Historical Jesus in Narrative Form (2007), now available in a new English translation, is filled with anachronisms. Jesus is a “security risk,” the brigands are “terrorists” and so on. In short, Theissen is a terrible novelist, although a competent historian, despite his Lutheran theological bias. Burton L. Mack and Jonathan Z. Smith utilize analytic methods quite similar to mine that derive from cultural anthropology. Their principal objective, however, is to create a new theory of religion untainted by theological presuppositions. A worthy goal, to be sure, but not mine.