Political instinct
When speaking of the role of instinct in humans, socialists tend to focus on the ‘adapted behaviour’ element which highlights our species flexibility and ability to learn relevant behaviour in a given natural or cultural context. Our long childhood gives the individual behavioural resources and social skills without which he or she could not flourish. Of course, as animals, we have many other instincts such as fight or flight, self-preservation, sexual desire, cooperation and the maternal bond etc and these are not always compatible with each other in certain circumstances. Socialists would like to add the need for meaningful and creative work to this list but for obvious political reasons little research (to my knowledge) has been done on this by biologists who, like other scientists, are restricted in their studies by the ideology that provides their funding.
The old nurture versus nature debate seems to have reached an uneasy truce but it would seem that the majority in society still prefer to believe in genetic determinism as an explanation for human behaviour – which merely serves as the latest incarnation of the ‘human nature’ ideology which readily embraces all of the negative aspects of humanity and none of the positive elements.
If we look closely at the cultural concept of instinct we can see that it excludes learnt behaviour. In our admiration for a sports person we might say that their talent is innate or instinctive which is felt to be somehow superior to those whose prowess is primarily the result of perfecting their craft through practice and the application of technique. Strangely many who suffer from ‘mental illnesses’ seem more content with a diagnosis of a ‘chemical imbalance’ in the brain rather than one that indicates childhood trauma or environmental and social degradation etc. Similarly, the debates concerning gender identity and sexual preference centre on whether gender and/or sexuality is determined by biology at birth or by childhood experiences.
There seems to be a desire to bypass complex sociological and psychological explanations for our behaviour in an attempt to get ‘back to nature’ which is felt to be more authentic and free of intellectual convolution. It’s hard to know if this desire is a result of the use of Ockham’s razor or just plain old anti-intellectualism. There is no denying that endless psychotherapy is a money cow but then so are the drugs produced by big pharma which claim to be remedies for medicalised emotional distress.
There are some who still believe in the concept of evil but socialists do not recognise this as a force in the world. People may be described as evil but this does not tell us why they behave in a way that qualifies them for this distinction. We would look to psychological explanations for such criminality – but then, of course, we run into the contradictions created by criminal law where the killing of individuals for money or jealousy etc. is considered to be murder but dropping bombs on innocent people during wartime is not.
It would seem that, given the right circumstances, many of us can compromise our moral values and behave in ways we would not think possible during our ‘normal’ everyday lives. Where does this overriding power for destruction come from? Some psychologists have theorized that usually dormant instincts are at the heart of this terrible behaviour that we see played out in recent history time and again. We might be able to explain wars in terms of the paranoia and greed of ruling classes but why can millions of ordinary people be seemingly so willing to murder each other at the caprice of such parasites?
The fabric of culture and morality sometimes seems to be a very thin veneer unable to restrain the hatred provoked by propaganda. Some have suggested that this is because of some innate and dormant instinct within humanity that is accumulated because capitalism is unable to provide the basic human need for meaningful work, political equality and social justice. It is reported that many young men happily went off to the First World War because it liberated them from a life of repetitive and meaningless toil. And if you give people hate figures to blame for their unhappiness (the Kaiser or Putin for example) you have a recipe for the mass murder called war.
All of us are initially dumbfounded when confronted by the evidence of the Holocaust; the City of Death called Auschwitz is a continual reminder of what can happen when the forces of hatred, sadism and genocidal madness are unleashed. Political explanations alone are inadequate in the face of such crimes. As soon as we turn from the rational consideration of politics and turn it into an ideological confrontation of faiths we begin to make room for the irrational which, if not checked, can become a full conflagration of madness. Many historians begin their analysis of Nazi Germany by saying how surprising it was that such a cultured and progressive country like Germany could plunge itself into an abyss of cruelty and destruction without considering that it might have been the very capitalist culture that they so admire which provided a fertile context for the growth of death cults like the Nazis.
No historian has given a comprehensive explanation of why the Holocaust happened and we simply don’t know if it was partly, or even mainly, the result of unleashing dormant self-destructive instincts. Human instinctual behaviour is a long way from being thoroughly understood. But what we do know was wonderfully articulated by Vanessa Redgrave in her role as Fania Fenelon in the film Playing for Time when one of her fellow inmates at the death camp condemns all the Nazi guards as ‘monsters’ to which Fenelon replies calmly and sorrowfully: ‘no, they are human beings just like us – that’s the problem’.
WEZ
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