human nature

[alanjjohnstone]

You can’t characterize human nature if studies overlook 85 percent of people on Earth

Ninety percent of psychology studies come from countries representing less than 15 percent of the world’s population. Researchers are realizing that universalizing those findings might not make sense. Specifically, the vast majority of what we know about human psychology and behavior comes from studies conducted with a narrow slice of humanity – college students, middle-class respondents living near universities and highly educated residents of wealthy, industrialized and democratic nations.

WEIRD – Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic.

[LBird]

Anyone who’s a Marxist won’t be surprised by the thesis that ‘human nature’ is a social product, which changes over time, and since it is our socio-historical product, we can change it.

Only those who believe in ‘materialism’ will disagree with Marx’s ‘social productionist’ view, and will argue that ‘nature’ (of all forms, including the ‘human’) is not a social product which changes, but is ‘something out there’ which ‘bourgeois science’ ‘objectively discovers’, and so we can’t change it.

[alanjjohnstone]

You might be interested in this letter to a Socialist Standard editor reply

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2019/02/letters-more-about-human-nature-1988.html

[LBird]

Thanks for that link, alan.

The writer of the letter, H D Walters, is very confused. On the one hand, they appear to support Marx’s ‘idealism-materialism’ (ie. social productionism), but then on the other revert to a form of Engels’ 18th century ‘materialism’ (‘stuff-in-itself’, like ‘matter’ or ‘biology’).

Walters writes :

“The terms human nature and human behaviour are not interchangeable terms because they mean and connote different things.

They are not, however, mutually exclusive. The one (human nature), cannot exist without the existence of the other (the phenomenon of human behaviour) and vice versa. They are complementary.” [my bold]

.

So far, so Marxist. We can’t talk about ‘matter’ or ‘biology’ without talking about the conscious producer of ‘it’. Humans are the social producer of anything which ‘exists-for’ them.

But then Walters writes, in denial of their first statement:

“May I point out what can only properly be called human nature (in contrast to human behaviour) is the sum total of the biological attributes common to all members of the human species. Far from being insignificant this unique combination of biological attributes is not only not insignificant, it is the most amazing and important biological event (apart from the emergence of organic matter itself) that has ever taken place.“

.

Here, they revert to ‘biological attributes’ and ‘biological event’ (and, indeed, ‘organic matter itself‘ [my bold]), which apparently are supposed to predate human social production. This is simply 18th century ‘materialism’, which Engels mistaken continued to employ, in contrast to Marx, who clearly rejected this ‘materialism’ and insisted that ‘matter’ cannot exist without the existence of humanity. For Marx ‘biology’ is a social product, which is why ‘biology’ changes as we change our forms of society, especially our forms of social production. ‘Biology’ for many other societies, now and in the past, is very different from our current ‘biology’. And of course, ‘organic matter’ is a fundamental concept of 18th century materialism, which has been superseded by later concepts such as ‘mass’ and ‘energy’ (which themselves will, have no doubt, be discarded in the future, as we humans refine our concepts, our theories and practices, about ‘ourselves’ and our ‘origins’).

Marx’s views require the concept of ‘for-us’, not the pre-Kantian ‘in-itself’. There is only the changeable ‘biology-for-us’, a socio-historical product, which we produce and thus can change, rather than a ‘biology-itself’, which supposedly pre-exists our production of it, and so can’t be changed. It’s this supposed ‘biology-itself’ to which Walters is referring, and which breaks apart his earlier concept of ‘complementary existence’.

I hope this clarifies the issue for you, alan.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by LBird.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by LBird.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by LBird.

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