Our Base Instincts
Can we subdue them?
It’s a common trope that humans and nature are at odds. That nature is harmonious, balanced, measured, wise and fair, while humans are greedy, evil, stupid, violent, selfish, tribal and reckless.
Yet nature is full of horrors. Male lions are known to kill cubs sired by other males. If food is scarce, storks and other birds will throw some of their babies out of their nests. Praying mantises and some spiders devour their partners after mating. The examples are innumerable, and many are even more gruesome than these.
Humans are animals and part of nature. There’s no reason for our instinctual predispositions to be uniquely evil in the natural world. For instance, our circle of affection extends beyond our close relatives. We typically care about our friends, colleagues and acquaintances, and the people in our community, and although we are doubtless naturally liable (genetically inclined) to have hostile feelings toward those we perceive as outsiders, that’s not so under any and all circumstances. We are not necessarily indifferent to the suffering of people geographically and culturally remote from us.
That’s why I’m always puzzled by the countless articles that decry humans as some sort of monstrous plague and by the legion of approving misanthropes that never fail to rear their contorted faces in the comments section.
In fact, we alone, in all of nature, have the potential to elevate ourselves over some of the urges of our “reptilian brains” and create a more peaceful, caring, and just system. We’re very far from it, of course, but it’s always good to remind ourselves that we have the capacity to do better, something that neither a lion nor a stork could claim.
As it happens, we have already been moving in that direction for centuries (contrary to the claims of the ever-popular professional purveyors of doom and gloom, according to whom the current world is a cesspool of depravity and corruption the likes of which we’ve never seen before). There’s nothing inexorable about such progress, though, especially given that it has been the result of cultural evolution, not the Darwinian type, so we could easily revert to the beastly ways of old, where torture, slavery, witch burning, the disenfranchisement of women, sexual repression, and religious tyranny were the norm. Denying such progress is dangerous, because it may make us question and undermine the very values and institutions that have made it possible, such as the rule of law, freedom of speech and religion (and from religion), inalienable human rights, reason and science, the legal use of physical force (except for self-defense) granted to the state alone — the broad ideals from the Age of Reason.
Genes vs us
To what extent are we then free to pursue our own, superior, goals, and not those of our genes? I don’t think there’s a free-willed soul floating inside our skull that can act independently from nature and nurture. There’s nothing beyond nature and nurture guiding our desires and behavior. Since our culture is inextricably intertwined with our nature, all we can do is channel and nourish the innate predispositions in us that we deem likely, thanks to our reason, to maximize our overall well-being.
We tend to think of ourselves in dichotomous terms: our base and ugly instincts pitted against our reason and our more elevated sentiments and aspirations, as if the latter were to be drawn from an ethereal sphere of spirituality and transcendence to be found outside ourselves. But again that’s not so. Those nobler aspirations are as part of our nature as our selfish tendencies. Reason alone has no propelling force, but it can help us to choose from within ourselves those natural proclivities likely to lead to a fairer and happier society. It’s in that limited sense that we, alone in the natural world, have the possibility to vanquish or rise above our primal urges. We can attempt to do so only with respect to some urges — ideally the “ugly” ones — since we can never escape them all. But that’s enough to distinguish us from all other animals, and potentially enough for us to manage to escape the grisly savagery found everywhere in nature.
PS: This essay was partly inspired by a remarkable passage in Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene: “We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. […] We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.” I disagree with Dawkins because I don’t think we can rebel against the tyranny of our inborn inclinations (such a desire would have to come, even if just indirectly, from our genes too). We can only rebel, to some extent, against the nasty ones — and only with the help of the nice ones.
