Is a change in the basis of society from one of minority class ownership to one of common ownership against human nature?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Are human beings naturally lazy, aggressive, hostile to one another? \nOr are we by nature friendly and co-operative, ready to help others when\n they are in trouble and share what we have with them? Or alternatively,\n does it make little or no sense to say that we are anything very \nspecific “by nature”, since the society and culture we live in play a \ngreat part in determining how we behave? Questions like these have been \naround for centuries, and they are important for the socialist case, for\n if people are bound to behave aggressively and take more than their \nfair share, then a socialist society, based on equality and \nco-operation, is presumably impossible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The questions we raised above are part of the debate on human \nnature. One recent academic contribution to these issues is the theory \nof evolutionary psychology, which attempts to apply Darwin’s way of \nexplaining biological evolution to human behaviour and psychology. \nDarwin’s theory of natural selection explains how organisms change by \nadapting to their environment and so becoming more fitted to survive and\n reproduce. Evolutionary psychology uses the same kinds of arguments in \nattempting to account for human behaviour and the nature of the human \nmind which underlies this behaviour. In the words of leading \nevolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, in his book How the Mind Works<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The mind is organized into modules or mental organs, each with a \nspecialized design that makes it an expert in one arena of interaction \nwith the world. The modules’ basic logic is specified by our genetic \nprogram. Their operation was shaped by natural selection to solve the \nproblems of the hunting and gathering life led by our ancestors in most \nof our evolutionary history.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n This, to take one of Pinker’s own examples, according to evolutionary\n psychology our disgust at unpleasant food is not due to any innate \ndislike for particular tastes. Rather, it would be an adaptation that \nemerged as a safety device: we don’t eat things unless we are pretty \nsure that they are unlikely to harm us; thus we stand a good chance of \navoiding foodstuffs that may well be poisonous\u2014an invaluable trait in a \nworld where humans relied on hunting and gathering but were surrounded \nby masses of potentially toxic plants and animals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hunting and gathering (sometimes known as foraging) is the way that \nhumans lived for 90 percent of our species’ time on earth. People lived \nin smallish tribes, moving frequently from place to place, gathering \nwild plants and hunting animals. Money did not exist, nor did any form \nof government, and there was no distinction between rich and poor. The\nrise of settled agriculture about ten thousand years ago put an end to \nhunting-gathering communities in most parts of the world, though some \nare still just about surviving nowadays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A lot would seem to rest, then, if the evolutionary psychologists are\n right, on the nature of hunting-gathering society: if it was \nessentially peaceful and based on sharing, then the human brain and mind\n would have evolved to fit in with a peaceful way of doing things, \nwhereas if hunter-gatherers were often violent, then (on the \nevolutionary psychologists’ view, anyway) our minds are adapted to \nsurvive in a violent world. Let’s quote Pinker again, as he makes the \npolitical issues here quite explicit:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “One of the fondest beliefs of many intellectuals is that there \nare cultures out there where everybody shares freely. Marx and Engels \nthought that preliterate peoples represented a first stage in the \nevolution of civilization called primitive communism, whose maxim was \n‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ .\n . .<\/p> Foraging peoples, to be sure, really do share with nonrelatives, but \nnot out of indiscriminate largesse or a commitment to socialist \nprinciples. The data from anthropology show that sharing is driven by \ncost-benefit analyses and a careful mental ledger for reciprocation. \nPeople share when it would be suicidal not to . . . warfare itself is a \nmajor fact of life for foraging tribes. Many intellectuals believe that \nprimitive warfare is rare, mild and ritualized, or at least was so until\n the noble savages were contaminated by contact with Westerners. But \nthis is romantic nonsense. War has always been hell.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Most work in evolutionary psychology takes a similar view, that \nhunting-gathering society was built around\u2014or at least marked by\u2014power \nand aggression, and that therefore the human mind has evolved along \nlines designed to enable us to cope with power and aggression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More recently, however, an alternative has begun to emerge within \nevolutionary plsychology itself. Andrew Whiten of St Andrew’s University\nin the U.K. has argued that egalitarianism, sharing and lack of \ndomination were the most prominent features in hunter-gatherer \nsocieties, and that it is this is that lies behind human psychological \nevolution. In papers such as “The evolution of deep social mind in \nhumans” and “Egalitarianism and Machiavellian intelligence in human \nevolution” (the latter co-written with David Erdal) he has presented a \nvery different picture from that offered by most evolutionary \npsychologists. At a recent conference in Edinburgh, Whiten argued that \nour ancestors evolved through sharing and co-operation in line with \nsocialist ideals, a claim that was even noticed in the press (Times<\/em>, 19 August). Let’s look a little more closely at his ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Examination of a wide range of studies of present-day \nhunter-gatherers shows that they share food, especially meat, and that \nthis sharing takes place even when food is scarce. This sharing, Erdal \nand Whiten argue, occurs because it reduces the risk for all \nindividuals, enabling them to get by on unlucky days, secure in the \nknowledge that some time soon they are likely to be successful in their \nown hunting. Sharing means that nobody has priority of access to food, \nand this ties in with the fact that hunter-gatherer societies lack any \nkind of dominance or rank. There are no permanent leaders, and anyone \nwho has ambitions for dominance is ridiculed or ostracised. Co-operation\n extends beyond food-sharing and countering would-be chiefs, as it also \ninvolves co-ordination, such as the organisation of hunting expeditions \nand care for the sick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Non-human primates (chimps and gorillas) do have dominance \nhierarchies, so the human capacity for egalitarianism is an evolutionary\n innovation. According to Whiten possibly people who put time and effort\n into trying to dominate others found they had less time to devote to \nforaging and enjoyable leisure pursuits, so the would-be leaders \ndiscovered that they were living less well than their more co-operative \ncolleagues. This last part is speculative, but it does help to emphasise\n the point that humans are different from our closest non-human \nrelatives, so that it is quite invalid to argue that whatever holds for \nchimps must be valid for people too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So what does Whiten’s work have to say about the prospects for \nsocialism? The answer is: not necessarily very much. It would be nice if\n we could conclude that human characteristics, as they have evolved over\n the millennia, have made us “naturally” egalitarian and co-operative. \nBut what matters is not whether people are naturally like this or not. \nMore important is whether our behaviour, influenced as it is not just by\n our evolutionary heritage but also by the social conditions we live in \nand our cultural response to these conditions, can fit in with the idea \nof a co-operative and egalitarian socialist society. Even under \ncapitalism people often share and work together. Hunter-gatherer \nsocieties also show that people can live in a co-operative way, without \nbosses or governments. It might be nice to bolster this by claiming that\n humans’ long egalitarian heritage means that we are better adapted to \nsharing than to competing, but this extra, and more speculative, \nargument is not really essential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We may conclude that humans are not condemned to be endlessly \ncompetitive or selfish, and that socialism is not contrary to human \nnature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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