Does Human Nature Exist?

Thinking about prediction last week reminded me of Isaac Asimov's robot novel THE NAKED SUN. In this book, human detective Elijah and his robot partner solve a murder on a world where people very seldom interact in the flesh. "Meetings" usually occur by means of holographic projections so refined they look real. Even married couples spend very little time physically together. Nothing is said about sex, but one must assume it's customarily of the virtual type. Reproduction is accomplished in vitro, and offspring are brought up in public creches rather than family homes. Babies, of course, are still born with the instinctive need for touching (so we know these are normal human beings, not a mutated subspecies). This "impolite" behavior is trained out of children at an early age. Yet, as far as we can tell, the people of this outwardly idyllic world somehow grow up more or less normal aside from their distaste for physical contact—instead of turning into the emotional cripples, perhaps even sociopaths, they assuredly would become in a real-life equivalent of this culture.

The fact that Asimov and his contemporary readers accepted this society as plausible illustrates a belief prevalent through much of the twentieth century and deconstructed by Steven Pinker in his penetrating book THE BLANK SLATE, the assumption that human nature is infinitely malleable. The same idea lay behind the devastating experience of the boy whose story is told in AS NATURE MADE HIM, whose penis was severely damaged in a botched circumcision during infancy. Doctors recommended that the child undergo sex reassignment surgery and be raised as a girl. Despite being treated as a girl throughout childhood and given female hormones, he/she never felt or behaved "feminine." Eventually learning the truth, he chose to be restored to his original male sex, since he had thought of himself as more boy than girl all along despite never having consciously known what had been done to him. Apparently, contra the behaviorists and their followers, there IS such a thing as "human nature." While we certainly aren't completely controlled by our genes, we can't ignore them, either.

The "blank slate" ideology underlies so much literature of the mid-twentieth century, even among authors whose philosophies are radically dissimilar. For a few decades it seems to have been one of those shared cultural assumptions no one even thinks to question. Despite their vast philosophic differences, WALDEN TWO (by B. F. Skinner), BRAVE NEW WORLD, 1984, and C. S. Lewis's nonfiction THE ABOLITION OF MAN all assume that “conditioning” can mold people into anything the conditioners desire. Skinner viewed this prospect positively, while the other authors mentioned deplored the idea, but none of them seemed to doubt that it could be done. On the contrary, we now know that certain human traits really do seem to be inborn. Babies enter the world with individual personalities rather than “blank slates,” and on a wider scale, a common set of basic reactions, emotions, and social institutions can be found in cultures and ethnic groups throughout the world. No matter how much technology changes, it's probable that our descendants two or three centuries from now will be, in the essentials that make them human, fairly similar to ourselves.