Does Human Nature Have a Future?
LAWLER, PETER AUGUSTINE
Does Human Nature Have a Future? The end of history, Bobos, and biotechnology BY PETER AUGUSTINE LAWLER Human nature—the very idea of a human nature—has been under assault for cen-B turies. That...
...Human beings pervert nature even when they are doing what seems to come naturally...
...So our anthropologists and sociologists and postmodernists and deconstructionists—the critics of "human nature"—say that there is no such thing as human sex...
...Their inability to speak of their love for other human beings and God doesn't really show that they don't have such longings, or that those longings are not natural...
...As Walker Percy predicted in The Thanatos Syndrome, we may be able to free ourselves from all the stress of self-consciousness, becoming happy and productive animals who in the right environment are never in a bad mood...
...The political objection to depriving human beings of the pains, problems, and perversities that naturally arise from self-consciousness is that we will have succumbed to a form of tyranny...
...But in truth, we don't know to what extent we are really at war yet...
...Biotechnological progress might make life progressively more hellish...
...Harsh necessity may make them more courageous...
...September 11 had the virtue of reminding Americans that it is good that human beings are, at their best, naturally spirited defenders of truth and liberty...
...But of a human sort...
...But when it comes to seatbelts and smoking, there ought to be a law...
...Does human nature have a future...
...Families, the evidence tells us, do a better job of raising kids than the alternatives, and it's good for the species for children to be raised well...
...Surely the separation of the bare act from begetting is not natural...
...The more death seems accidental rather than necessary, the more we will go to extraordinary lengths— living in lead houses and never going outside—to avoid what no longer seems so inevitable...
...Bobos don't have the virtues associated with war, and they can't imagine their own lives without easily acquired wealth and liberty...
...If history had a beginning, mustn't it have an end...
...Perhaps it would be better if they did not...
...Yet the argument that biotechnological progress will necessarily make us more miserably death-obsessed is itself questionable...
...Once we realize that gender is within our control and is barely limited by nature, then we can change it however we please...
...After all, as more than one observer has noted, most Americans have no idea of the extent to which they have already surrendered their sovereignty—their personal judgments concerning their personal experiences—to such experts...
...it's a great source of comfort and socialization for social beings...
...The family can in this way be rescued from the assault of the liberationists...
...And yet we may well not be able to recognize that we are enslaved...
...Or almost everything: When it comes to the soul, they reject as repressive the morality of traditional religion, but when it comes to the body, they are far from being laissez faire...
...But we do it differently...
...Perhaps it's unlikely...
...And what is human is not natural...
...and death by chemically managing our moods...
...III Have such seemingly permanent and fundamental experiences as love and death all but faded away...
...We are, from nature's view, often kinky...
...The president has said we are all soldiers now...
...And Prozac calms women who used to be regarded merely as nervous or anxious...
...They constantly plan for their children's future because they can't figure out how to be in love with them in the present...
...For Bobos, opposing the latest biotechnological breakthroughs would seem almost as unthinkable as choosing against bodily health today...
...But if Bobos, as I believe, are really the most bourgeois or Hobbesian Americans to date, then they must still be distinctively human...
...And so they suggest, in a way despite themselves, that human nature does have a future...
...I First of all, does human nature even exist...
...At first glance we might plausibly say that philosophic yearning and religious dread have disappeared among sophisticated Americans...
...They are diversions...
...Ritalin and Prozac are powerful, widely used drugs that change human experience and behavior...
...Unbridled biotechnology could destroy human nature...
...Their ridiculous spirituality and pseudo-bohemian pretensions are not really satisfying...
...And we have no reason not to expect that in the future drugs will do a progressively better job of taking the edge off the psychological effects of just being human...
...Still, if history is ending, if all is not flux or meaningless freedom, then human beings do have a nature of a sort...
...We could, in other words, make sociobiology's view of man true by eliminating all those perverse features of human nature that have made this view untrue so far...
...A world in which evolutionary biology or sociobiology expresses the whole truth about our existence would mean the end of history...
...far less connected to the necessity of reproduction than is that of other animals...
...But death has not really faded away...
...They do not really experience themselves as being fully at home in this world...
...Bobos surely have retained some human distinctiveness—no other animal goes to Starbucks—but perhaps far less than meets the eye...
...The end-of-history argument and sociobiology are in this decisive respect two sides of the same coin...
...The renewed need to be responsible citizens may well make them both less bohemian and less bourgeois...
...For they are screwed up in a distinctively human way...
...Should the law even allow it...
...Can—and should— that transformation be resisted...
...That it does was the thought of philosophers from Plato to John Locke...
...Nature, they claimed, provides a standard by which distinctively human behavior can be judged...
...In our freedom, we can think up all kinds of ways to satisfy our strange desire to rut without reproducing...
...According to this view, there is no such thing as a distinctively human nature...
...Being chaste, they say, is unrealistically hard for our young people...
...It would be a world without the greatness and the misery of distinctively human existence...
...For one thing, with the near disappearance of death would also come the near banning of birth...
...What is natural is not human...
...It also reminded us that, despite our best efforts, religious and political distinctions have not withered away...
...But everyone also knows that Ritalin is now given to boys who used to be regarded merely as spirited or aggressive...
...They have distinguished between subhuman nature and human freedom...
...Their distinctive qualities seem to be evidence of their human nature...
...But obsessing like an existentialist about one's own existence is not a useful human activity...
...They seem, at first, to be following our pragmatic professor of philosophy Richard Rorty's advice, putting death to death simply by not talking about it...
...The truncated view of human nature presented by the champions of "the end of history" and sociobiology leaves no room for genuine human distinctiveness...
...II Or can it be...
...It's not altogether bad news that Bobos, despite what they say even to themselves, are really screwed up...
...All that we have ascribed to "human nature" is in fact "history," what we have made for ourselves...
...We are really qualitatively no different from other animals...
...That conclusion stands even without the introduction of more subtle and controversial evidence for Bobos' human nature...
...But maybe the challenge of war will cause them to confront the truth about their natures more clearly...
...But they are curious defenders...
...We turn out to be the most clever of animals, with bigger brains, but ones that are used for nothing more than calculation and manipulation...
...We have already had great successes with neuro-pharmacology or drug therapy...
...History ends because human beings finally have satisfied their distinctively human desires through their distinctively human work...
...Is it conceivable that Bobos will resist such "progress...
...They are defined, above all, by their rebellion against death, against the necessity that constrains us all...
...Most education in the social sciences and humanities today is dedicated to the proposition that human beings are free to create themselves—to "liberate" them-selves—however they please...
...The most sophisticated and avant-garde talk today is about nature...
...The end of history would seem to have arrived, in particular, because the principle of liberal democracy has triumphed: All human beings are now recognized as free and equal beings by those in the know everywhere in the world...
...Bobos' children may well not be drafted, and few of them will volunteer...
...If human beings are historical beings, and history has ended, it makes sense to say we have become just like all the other animals again...
...It's the hard-headed scientific discourse of evolutionary biology or sociobiology, which scorns the woolly-headed postmodernist chatter about human liberation...
...In addition, more and more human beings now live contentedly in freedom while doing very little work...
...IV Still, history seems far less certainly at an end than it did in the Clinton era, and so human nature would seem to have a future—unless, of course, human nature itself actually can be changed by biotechnological progress...
...So while it is true, for example, that we human beings have bodies and to some extent are governed by instinct, even our basic instincts are affected by our freedom...
...It seems that man as a political animal is back...
...American opinion was affected significantly by September 11, but American behavior has changed hardly at all so far...
...Feel-good therapy has replaced the genuine desire to know oneself...
...They seem not at all disordered by the human passions connected with love and death...
...And the new model Americans—the bourgeois bohemians, or Bobos, as David Brooks describes them— even claim to have reconciled the modern conflict between bohemian self-expression and bourgeois productivity...
...The apparent end of history has led to a comeback for the idea of nature—but perhaps not human nature...
...They seem unable to come to terms with the ineradicable vulnerability and mortality of those they really do love...
...Indeed, talk about the end of history seems merely a prologue to biotechnological developments that threaten to transform—or even eradicate— human nature as we have known it...
...But we, thank God, still seem able to see our new Islamic enemies as tyrants...
...And many others have noticed that Americans now prefer comfort to truth...
...Sure, our bourgeois bohemians claim not to be obsessed with it...
...Classes in gender studies are all about freeing women and homosexuals not from nature but from the willful oppression of heterosexual men...
...we see the truth by focusing on what's best for the species...
...There appears to be nothing really new for human beings to do...
...We will conquer our troubling propensities to be moved by love As September 11 reminded us, it is good that human beings are, at their best, naturally spirited defenders of truth and liberty...
...We could design our babies and improve our descendants and the species...
...It could be that the problem of global terrorism will be contained quite well by a relatively small and expertly trained elite military force abroad and an equally expert "homeland" intelligence service...
...Bobos are nonjudgmental on every issue but health and fashion, and so they cannot oppose the claims of self-preservation with some higher principle...
...The result would not really be a return to nature, but rather the human construction of an unalienated human environment...
...So far the main sacrifice the president has asked of American citizens is to be inconvenienced at airports...
...They are pro-choice on abortion...
...Drugs are taking the edge off being either a man or a woman, and they perhaps are leading us to the sort of androgyny that Marx, for example, thought we would have at the end of history...
...The Bobos' behavior is far more predictable and unbohemian than they would like to believe, but no other animal behaves as they do...
...They seem to lack a point of view that would allow them to see there are good human reasons to choose against indefinite longevity...
...We have achieved a sort of paradise of laziness and luxury...
...There is nothing in Bobos' souls that keeps them from being comfortable and productive...
...We have a hard time seeing experts as tyrants, because they don't claim to rule through personal authority but on the basis of the impersonal results of scientific studies...
...Could Bobos summon the courage to make such a choice...
...Even the security-obsessed Bobos may become lovers of liberty...
...Bobos are perhaps equally afraid of death and of the truth that whatever they do they cannot fend off death...
...That's why they speak not of sex, but of gender...
...Indeed, both the wise and the foolish—the right and the left, Allan Bloom and Woody Allen—observe or claim that the most sophisticated Americans are no longer moved by love and death...
...So even Bobos, perhaps, will now acknowledge that war allows certain virtues to flourish in human nature, or at least that wherever we find human beings, war will always be a possibility...
...They act, the end-of-history theorists say, fundamentally out of envy, and they present no credible alternative to our liberal democracy...
...And of course there's no evidence either that God exists or that the human desire to know Him is natural...
...The aim of both views is to allow human beings to experience themselves as fully at home in this natural world...
...Biotechnological success would then be, from one view, the decisive evidence for and the final act of human freedom: We will make ourselves into what we imagined natural perfection to be...
...Who would make perverse choices against what is best for any of our children...
...Would human life be worth living if it were completely freed from the hard and joyous responsibilities of birth, parenting, and aging...
...Neither the alleged end of history, nor the supposed truths of sociobiol-ogy, seem to provide any real grounding for what is distinctively human in nature...
...They can't say what they really know about love and death...
...According to the sociobiologists, though, love and faith are just illusions—useful ones, to be sure, helpful in dealing with the experiences of anxiety and homelessness that come with self-consciousness or individuality...
...The stock market has returned to the September 10 level, and very few Bobos work in the troubled airline industry...
...Choosing against indefinite longevity would be choosing against mere self-preservation, and for virtue, for love, birth, and death...
...According to sociologist James Davison Hunter, the view that it is more important to feel good than to be good has even infused itself in most of our religious musings...
...The sociobiologists believe they know that the idea of human freedom from nature is an illusion...
...Because no human sexual activity is really natural, everything we do should be regarded as an equally free assertion of human freedom...
...They manage to work hard and to have countercultural tastes without being in any way alienated from their social or political world, without yearning for a life better than the one they now have...
...Religion is also back...
...That philosophical, historical, and anthropological attack is now fading, and .^L...
...end-of-history theorists, followed by sociobiologists, have come riding to human nature's defense...
...For a while, maybe for a long while, the new Hot War will affect daily life here in America even less than the old Cold War did...
...But rejecting or even directing biotechnology would seem to require a political will that Bobos have not yet shown they possess...
...Our hopes and happiness are, we are told, largely determined by our genes...
...And our future can be anything we liberated human beings choose to make for ourselves...
...In their puritanical disdain for cigarettes, drunkenness, and rich food, the Bobos show themselves to be far more bourgeois than bohemian...
...Comparatively speaking, their predecessors— the martini-drinking, chain-smoking, dessert-eating, and war-fighting WASP establishment—laughed in the face of death...
...If human freedom is historical, if men have made their history, can they really keep on freely doing so...
...Human sex is Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor of Government at Berry College, and author of the forthcoming Aliens in America: The Strange Truth About Our Souls (ISI Books...
...We are tempted to conclude that at least for now their lives are still defined by their natures in a distinctively human way...
...Many experts say that advances in biotechnology could soon add at least a couple of decades to the average human life, with the not-so-remote possibility of doubling the average human lifespan...
...We will make ourselves fully at home in the world...
...What's human is our free, social construction of gender...
...Who wouldn't choose the best available body and brain for his or her child...
...Life is far harder for them than it is for any other animal...
...After all, why wouldn't Bobos welcome such remarkable advances, which would seem to be an extension of the progress they have already made through their rigorous regimes of diet and exercise...
...No other animal uses condoms...
...But philosophers at least from the time of Rousseau have denied the reality of this standard...
...Distinctions between the sexes are, humanly speaking, insignificant...
...Their form of spiritual solace seems not to include any thought about what happens with or after death...
...A real pragmatist works in the most disciplined and scientific way against death while refusing to talk about it...
...Are they too obsessed with the fear of death to realize that an indefinitely long life, without virtue, might immeasurably heighten the fear of sickness and of death...
...Birds do it, bees do it, and we do it...
...Even our Islamic enemies—who can and will use our technological success against us to cause much death and destruction—have no real chance of derailing our fundamental accomplishments...
...He mouths Rorty's therapeutic platitudes from his treadmill, while faithfully following a low-carbohydrate, high-fiber diet...
...The sociobiological return to nature consists in the recognition of what is required for us to live comfortably and productively as a certain kind of social animal...
...Perhaps we are not at the dawn of an era of radical freedom, but rather at the end of history...
...Our enemies believe they can defeat us because we are in the decadent thrall of the illusion that we can dispense with some of the human virtues, especially the manly ones...
...They seem to be clever and tasteful animals and little more...
...Surely the Brave New World can and should be resisted...
...By practicing safe sex, for example, we show our distinctively human freedom...
...Who can deny that they help those who are severely disruptive or depressed...
...All that we have wrongly called "natural," so we are taught, has really been socially constructed by men or heterosexuals...
...Bobos claim to be laid-back bohemian nonjudgmental-ists on everything...
...Human sex is different from winged sex because it is mixed up with human freedom...
...Bobos restlessly over-organize their own and their children's lives to keep themselves from having time to think about how empty their lives are...
...In the Brave New World the tyrants will be the experts who exempt themselves from the consciousness-negating treatment...
...It reminded us that the virtue of courage is indispensable not only for living well but for living at all...
...The brain, our biologists tell us, like the rest of the body is merely a mechanism for comfortable self-preservation...
...Sex finally really would have nothing to do with reproduction...
...To be sure, we don't know yet whether Bobos have what it takes to cope with the present terrorist threat...
...Sex of all kinds can be safe, but being fat is genuinely risky business...
...But they can and should just say no to drunkenness and obesity...
...But they've also discovered that Rorty's merely imaginative solution doesn't really work...
...Bobos can't help but be troubled, because they seem to have been deprived of the words with which to describe truthfully their experiences as beings with speech by nature...
...Perhaps even our Bobos and our experts can come to understand that a distinctively human life, with all its suffering and limitations, is good, precisely because the longing to love others and God is not an illusion, nor does it finally go unsatisfied...
Vol. 7 • February 2002 • No. 20
