Hola mi Gente…
Let’s be clear: the harsh, punitive “voter ID laws” being
passed throughout mostly southern states are nothing but a blatant attempt at a
new Jim Crow. The menace here is voter
suppression, not voter fraud, which is almost nonexistent. In South Carolina
alone, there are over 80,000 registered African Americans who would be disenfranchised by the voter laws passed there
* * *
[Several months ago, I wrote the following for an online magazine I am no longer affiliated with. It's about the underlying premises
of conservative and libertarian thought. Essentially, people like Ron Paul don’t
trust human nature and what is a democratic experiment if not the collective
expression of human nature?]
If you listen -- really listen
-- to the underlying beliefs of many people, you’re immediately confronted with
common assumptions about human nature that in actuality have no grounding in
reality (or are at least empirically baseless). This is far from an academic
exercise; the basic assumptions drive our economic policies, for example, and
are often used as rationales for zero-sum societies (winners take all), and,
most of all, justification for austerity measures and brutal wars that impact,
for the most part, innocent women and children.
This false portrait of humankind
feeds both a dangerous reverence for dog-eat-dog individualism and a sense of
powerless in the face of holy market forces that must be obeyed no matter the
cost in lives, global environmental catastrophe, or gross economic injustice.
Its roots lie in the gloomy
conservative worldview of an essentially brutish human nature needing to be
tamed. Conservative thinkers, looking to rationalize authoritarianism and
explain away the social destruction wreaked by unrestrained greed, simply
invented whole-cloth concepts of human nature that made their policy goals seem
inevitable.
The irony in all this is that
this authoritarian Kool-Aid is swallowed whole by so-called libertarians. You
hear it all the time that human nature is selfish, war-like, brutal. Of course,
the theory that we have a “selfish” gene is just that, a theory, founded upon
absolutely no evidence. Yet it is propagated as if it is the gospel truth. As
social scientist Riane Eisler, who in her seminal work, The Chalice and the Blade (1990) (and her later work) successfully
dismantled this view, stated:
I don't want to lump every
single sociobiologist into the same category, but the kind of sociobiological
theories that tend to get popularized present what I call a dominator way of
relating as the only human possibility. This is the model of human relations,
as I describe in my work, in which males are ranked over females; violence and
abuse are systemic and institutionalized; the social structure is hierarchic
and authoritarian; and coercion is a major element in sexuality. And it's all
supposed to be just human nature.
The ugly, empirically invalid
portrait is this: a human is a cold and isolated individual who uses
unemotional reason to reach pre-determined ends. This is the widely discredited
but still popular “rational actor” model. And there’s another nuance, which
some are now calling the “rat choice” model. This tells us those pre-determined
ends are always selfish or self-interested. This myth is what is at the heart
of so-called libertarian and conservative worldviews, popularized in economic
terms by historical ignoramuses such as Ayn Rand and Hayek (and their progeny: Friedman,
Greenspan et al.).
We are rats, these conservatives
say.
As Eisler conclusively demonstrates,
however, virtually every field within the human sciences has found that we are
nothing like that. Cutting-edge neuropsychological investigations show that
because we are hard-wired for empathy, we can (and do) act altruistically. We seek fairness. Our selves are not
isolated, but interconnected in many ways. Yes, we are competitive, but we are
also cooperative. Reason and emotion
are intertwined. There’s no such thing as reason detached from emotion. We
don’t coldly follow the rules of logic in making moral decisions.
The notion that there is no such
thing as altruism is based on the neo-Darwinian theory of kin selection. In
other words, if you do something altruistic, you’re protecting your genes so
you can pass them on. Well, what about the people in Nazi Germany who took in
Jews, total strangers, knowing that not only they but their whole families
would be killed if they were discovered? Where is the kin selection there? This
notion just doesn’t hold up to rigorous scrutiny.
Darwin also wrote a little book
called Descent of Man, in which he very explicitly stated that natural
selection, random selection, survival of the fittest, simply do not apply as
the only factors, and certainly not
as the primary factors, when it comes
to human evolution. There is also the very important factor that he called “the
moral sense.”
Despite the overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary, the narrative
of human nature as intrinsically evil is still the dominant prevailing religious and scientific narrative championing
“original sin” and “selfish
genes.” These also present male dominance as justified by either God or evolution (talk about irony), though scholars
from many disciplines tell us a
different story of our cultural origins.
From a scientific perspective, the invention of tools does not begin
with the discovery that we can
use bones, stones, or sticks to kill one another. It begins much earlier, with the use of sticks and
stones to dig up roots (which chimpanzees
still do) and continues with the fashioning of ways to carry food other than with bare hands (simple
vegetable slings and baskets) and
of mortars and other tools to soften foods.
In this story, the evolution of hominid, and then human, culture also
follows more than one path. We have alternatives. We can organize relations in ways that reward violence and
domination. But, as some of our
earliest art suggests, we can also recognize
our essential interconnection with one another and the rest of the living world.
In his recent
book, The Fair Society (2011),
biologist Peter Corning writes:
Contrary to
the stereotype about our innate selfishness and greed, most of us share a
desire to live in a society where fairness is the operative norm, where
everybody’s basic needs are met… where there is a robust sense of ‘reciprocity’
-- a rough balancing of benefits and obligations.
Corning’s
provocative challenge is this: what if we’re wrong simply to resign ourselves
to the notion that human nature is essentially destructive and war-like? What
if we have the power -- and more importantly, the duty (the moral obligation) -- to change society for the
better?
As cognitive scientists such as George
Lakoff (2008) have been advising us for some time, it is impossible to advance
a progressive social vision using false frames of reference clothed as unbiased
scholarship. Assumptions that, by the way, rule out a fair, progressive, and
democratic society.
Lynn Stout demolishes the
concept of human beings as selfish creatures who respond only to punishments
and rewards in her book, Cultivating Conscience
(2010). She shows that the lonely, selfish, hyper-individualistic creature
invented by conservative propagandists is actually a myth. That view, Stout
correctly observes, “implies we are psychopaths.” I would add that the sociopath is the ideal of the
conservative/ libertarian worldview.
Rather than depend on the power
of greed to shape laws and human behavior, Stout argues, we should rely on the
force of conscience. Stout makes the compelling case that conscience is neither
a rare nor quirky phenomenon, but a vital force woven into our daily lives.
Using empirical studies from culled from social psychology, behavioral economics,
and evolutionary biology, Stout demonstrates how social cues -- ideas about
others' selfishness and unselfishness, and beliefs about benefits to others -- play
a powerful role in triggering unselfish behavior.
It should come as no surprise
that corporations and the financial elite have funded the decades-long effort
to convince Americans our nature is intrinsically evil. Rational choice theory,
a theory that postulates that people working separately to pursue their
ego-centered needs creates the ideal society (a libertarian talking point, BTW),
has held sway over economics and political science and has redefined the
foundations of public policy by assuming that self-interest defines all aspects
of human activity. It was also used to redefine “freedom” as a fundamental
aspect of greed (George Lakoff, 2007). When applied to corporations, the theory
exempts them from any social responsibility other than that owed to their
shareholder. Today, that corporation is considered a legal (if fictitious)
entity. Or, as Mitt Romney succinctly put it, “Corporations are people [too].”
As a former scam artist, I have
to admit that this has been the greatest scam ever in the history of humankind.
The wholesale acceptance of the idea that there is a moral imperative for the
pursuit of wealth and power, whatever the consequences for the many and for
society at large, is almost too ugly to countenance. But this ideology is what
supports our current political system -- this false and destructive view of our
own natures. In fact, this scam has succeeded to the point that many so-called
libertarians, “independents,” progressives (many of whom like to make fun of
the rest of us unwashed masses) remain content to operate within the frames and
narratives generated by the scam.
This particular form of
pathology can be found in so-called progressives who support the racist, feudalistic policies of Ron Paul. Libertarianism is nothing more than feudalism
in that both depend on decentralization, rigid local hierarchies, a martial
culture of honor, a strong religious caste system to keep everyone in their
place, isolationist trade/ foreign policies, and the lack of a middle-class tax
base that would demand social services and a representation in government
affairs.
To paraphrase Einstein, the same
consciousness that is part of the problem cannot be used as a solution. A
society organized around the values generated by an evolved consciousness look
radically different from political and economic structures forced upon us by
the greedy authoritarians who sold us a bill of goods about ourselves. But
before that can happen, you have to
disabuse yourself of the myths of human nature.
My name is Eddie and I’m in
recovery from civilization…
References
Corning, P. A.
(2011).
The fair society: The science of
human nature and the pursuit of social justice. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. (
click
here)
Eisler, R. (1990).
The chalice and the blade: Our history, our
future. New York: HarperOne. (
click
here)
Lakoff, G. (2007).
Whose freedom?: The battle over America's
most important idea. New York: Macmillan. (
click
here)
Lakoff, G. (2008).
The political mind: Why you can't understand
21st-century politics with an 18th-century brain. New York: Penguin. (
click
here)
Stout, L. A. (2010).
Cultivating conscience: How good laws make
good people. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (
click
here)
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