An Essay called "A Discussion of a Possible Problem with Chomsky's Apparently Tentatively Kropotkin-ish Conceptions about "Human Nature" and his Apparent Beliefs about the Effect of Institutions upon the Social Behaviour of Humans, with Predictable Discussion of Teleology"

A Discussion of a Possible Problem with Chomsky's Apparently Tentatively Kropotkin-ish Conceptions about "Human Nature" and his Apparent Beliefs about the Effect of Institutions upon the Social Behaviour of Humans, with Predictable Discussion of Teleology

Chomsky does seemingly sometimes talk as if he accepts a pre-Darwinian, teleological notion of “human nature” (don't worry, I will soon provide direct sourced evidence for this claim, which, as you can see, is only tentative in any case). At other times, he clearly talks in a way that implies the negation of this kind of teleology (I don't think Chomsky contradicts himself a lot, but I think he might a little bit). 

What precisely do I mean by my first claim? I mean that Chomsky seemingly sometimes talks as if he believes that humans have certain very strongly ingrained, highly developmentally canalised dispositions (in particular, altruistic, co-operative and creative dispositions) which most societies 'override' through education, institutional training, propaganda and brute force, but which nevertheless hide 'beneath the surface' even in these societies, and which other societies and institutions within societies (minimally hierarchical, democratic) merely 'set free'. This kind of teleological view is false (I will gradually explain why it is implicitly a teleological view, and in the process explain why any such a teleological view is false, for those who don’t know), and it entails the absurd consequence that basically 99% of all the evidence we do have of human social behaviour and politics can tell us almost nothing about “human nature” – that instead we have to look to the right kind of societies (probably pre-state societies (hunter-gatherer or hunter-horticultural societies), because of the lack of significant institutional structures for control and domination) to see the evidence for the True Nature.

One of the most striking pieces of evidence that Chomsky has at least often been drawn to thinking about human beings in this way is his famous debate on Dutch television with Michael Foucault. In this discussion, Chomsky bandies the term “human nature” about a lot, and in a fashion that often seems teleological. At the end of his first monologue, he gives a revealing definition: “Well, this collection, this mass of schematisms, innate organising principles, which guides our social and intellectual and individual behaviour, that’s what I mean to refer to by the concept of human nature.” Notice that behaviour itself is irrelevant to this conception; by human nature, he means those things we are born with that guide our “social and intellectual and individual behaviour”. This is wrong-headed. Firstly, it is just fucking odd to define human nature according to “organising principles” and “schematisms” (thereoretical constructs of cognitive science., and the very fact that one would do so suggests that one is some kind of extreme, teleological nativist (something Chomsky is usually accused of unfairly, and I say unfairly because he doesn’t write anything this blatantly teleological (although he does see himself in the same intellectual tradition as both Plato and Descartes)). Obviously, he’s really just talking about the aspects of the mind that can be studied in the field of cognitive science – but that has nothing to do with human nature in any conventional sense. I actually think Foucault is right in the debate to conjecture that this concept of “human nature” might just be a useful cathexis or ‘landmark’ for scientific inquiry into the mind, but turn out to not be investigable in itself.

Along similar lines, Chomsky has also said that not enough is known about human nature to point to any political conclusions (he has said this too many times to cite just one place). This I find very odd, for much the same reasons given above, and for further reasons which I shall elaborate below.

An even more striking piece of evidence that Chomsky has been drawn to thinking about humans as having a kind of essentially, irrepressibly altruistic nature is the following passage I found from a 1990 interview, echoes of which can be found in a multitude of other Chomsky interviews and in his fondness for Kropotkin [accessible here: https://chomsky.info/1991____/]:

“To the extent that there’s any progress in human history—and there’s some, after all—it seems to me that it’s partly a matter of exploring your own moral nature and discover­ing things that we didn’t recognize before. It wasn’t very far back when slavery was considered moral, in fact, even obligatory. Now it’s considered, grotesque. I think there are social and historical reasons for that—like the, rise of industrial capitalism, and so on—but that’s not the whole story. That may be something that stimulated something internal, but what it, stimulated was a deeper understanding of our own moral nature. It seems to me that these are various ways in which one might hope to discover the innate basis of moral judgment. But I think anywhere you look, if there’s any system that’s even complex enough to deserve being studied, you’re going to get roughly the same result and basically for Plato’s reasons.”

Q.   In Asian societies, especially Chinese society, there’s a strong patriarchal assumption. While in Singapore, one of us had this very debate on innate human moral authority, and they said, “No, the innate human moral! authority is that men should be superior to women.” So there’s a strong cultural impasse that we seem to bring out. Do you have any insights on that? Is it that we’re more advanced than Asians or Chinese society?

A.    Well, I think we are. For example, I admit that this is a value judgment and I can’t prove it, but I would suspect that there’s going to be an evolution (assuming that the human race doesn’t self-destruct), which it’s likely to do from rigid patriarchal societies to more egalitarian societies and not the other way around. I would suspect an asymmetry in development because, as circumstances allow, people do become more capable of exploring their own moral nature. Now “circumstances allow” means that the conditions of freedom generally expand, either partially for economic reasons or partly for other cultural reasons. As there’s an expansion of the capacity to inquire into our own cultural practices instead of just accepting them rigidly, the assumptions about the need for domination or the justice of domination are challenged and typically overthrown—like peeling away layers of an onion. If that’s correct, then yes, for cultural reasons, the move away from patriarchy is a step upwards, not just a change. It’s a step toward understanding our true nature.”

https://chomsky.info/1991____/

It will take a fair amount of philosophy-of-biological explication to explain why these speculations are not just unlikely to be true, but also wrong-headed (like before). Here goes.

The first, and most important, point to make is this: even if there are obviously limits to the psychological and behavioural manifestations (the ‘phenotypic manifestations’, as it were) of the genotype, one can’t really declare that certain psychological and behavioural manifestations of the genotype are “unnatural” (“contrary to human nature”) if one accepts that there is no ultimate purpose in nature (that teleological metaphysics is false), only apparent purpose or teleonomy. The degree to which institutional training, immoral hierarchies, violent coercion or propaganda is used in culturally enforcing the psychological and behavioural manifestations of the genotype is not relevant to the question of whether the psychological and behavioural manifestations are “natural”. To even think this betrays a teleological way of thinking (see Janet Radcliffe Richards in The Sceptical Feminist (1980) for a wonderfully lucid discussion of this point).

Now, one might of course say that certain psychological and behavioural manifestations of the genotype are not adaptive, because they weren’t selected for in our evolutionary history – but that has no bearing on the question of the nature of human beings, if that question is construed in a non-teleological, atheistic way. One might fairly observe that certain psychological and behavioural manifestations of the genotype are, as it were, ‘much harder’ for a culture to induce, but only in the sense that there are certain psychological and behavioural dispositions and traits which are not likely to be dominant in the vast majority of societies that come into existence, in much the same way that, within ecological zones where Achillea plants can survive at all, it is only in the medium-elevation hospitable ecological zones that Achillea plants sometimes or often grow stunted and fail to flower (although even in medium-elevation environments of this type, they will sometimes or often grow to a roughly ‘normal’ size and flower) [http://www.flyfishingdevon.co.uk/salmon/year3/psyc364evolutionary_psychobiology/psy364_genotype_phenotype/suzuki1981.jpg]. Now, to be clear, I do believe that it is possible to make reasonable generalisations about human nature – but that shouldn’t be at all a surprise, because I believe this for the same extremely elementary reason I believe that it is possible to make reasonable generalisations about any other species, like the just mentioned Achillea millefolium, Pan paniscus (the Bonobo monkey) or E. coli or whatever other species you care to name. The elementary reason is simply this: that species are species precisely because they differ from each other in definite ways. In much the same way that one can fairly claim that Pan paniscus is a ‘highly co-operative and altruistic species’, I believe it is possible to fairly make some very general generalisations about Homo sapiens. I think, for example, that it is even possible to make justified high-level political claims (with tremendous implications for certain political ideologies) based on a properly historically and anthropologically informed understanding of the ways humans can be made to behave socially, and the ways humans tend to behave when they are surrounded by this or that set of institutions and/or this or that set of social conditions and/or belong to this or that type of dominant culture (see further here: http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2016/11/a-very-long-work-called-political.html and here: http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2016/08/an-essay-called-refutation-of-most.html). But note this key fact: if one is trying to generalise ‘above’ this all – above the institutions and social conditions – one can only make extremely vague and airy generalisations. One cannot talk about a “true nature” only emerging in certain social conditions, in a certain society, and so on. One can just say really bland, comparative things like “We are a social species”, “We are a species with a highly sophisticated moral faculty”, “We are a highly intelligent species”, “We are the only species with infinitely creative language with the property of recursion”, “We are a species of complex culture”. Evidently, though, these generalisations are not very interesting.

While I’m on this subject, I should say that I strongly object to a very similar thing that people often do in political discourse: to claim that X type of society is “doomed to failure” for literally the reason that it is “incompatible with human nature”. Why do I strongly object to this? Because this in itself is not any kind of reason, but just an incredibly vague slogan. This kind of ‘argument’ is simply on the wrong level of abstraction. One should attack people’s Utopian visions by appeal to history and historical evidence relevant to the actual social behaviour of human beings within specific social conditions and the outcomes of policies considered against a specific social background, not the more general and abstract claims of evolutionary biology or evolutionary psychology (it is useless to say “Marxism” (ill-defined) is a religion because “people are individualistic”, though one might cite historical evidence to fairly claim that Marxism is a dangerous ideology (a very different thing)). As aforementioned, I have drawn data from the correct level of abstraction (sociological, economic) to develop sophisticated critiques of both Left and Right fantasies. (Unlike most critics of “Utopianism”, I don’t ignore the hugely important role of (left-wing) Utopian fantasies in motivating people to overcome appalling social injustice.)

Moreover, these abstract and general claims about “human nature” and society are so easy to subvert with more sophisticated and detailed (but still abstract and general) claims about “human nature” and society, as Kropotkin exemplifies here in this brilliant passage, famous among anarchists: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-are-we-good-enough.

So, anyway, I believe it only makes sense to talk about human nature as whatever is distinctive about the behaviour and (phenotypic) psychology of our species, Homo sapiens; cognitive science, the investigation of the way biological minds work (the investigation of the “schematisms” and “organising principles”), is barely relevant at all. Cognitive science can help us get clear on certain properties of the human species that anthropologists and historians haven’t really paid any attention to: e.g. cognitive science has helped us get clear on the fact that everyone who isn’t severely retarded is capable of language, and human language is a combinatorial system with the property of recursion, which is a property not possessed (according to Berwick and Chomsky [2015]) by any other species on the planet, and the systematic methodology of cognitive science can also help us get clear on a whole range of universal features of human thought and perhaps even the ‘basic concepts’ we use (see Pinker’s discussions in The Stuff of Thought (2007).  But the point is that we don’t look for the nature of an antelope in the mass of schematisms and innate organising principles in its mind; we just observe its behaviour. The same ought to be true of humans (one important reason why it’s hard for us to get clear on the parameters of our nature as a species is because we see differences within our own species so much more starkly than differences within other species). Ultimately, human nature is just, you know, whatever you see around you, whatever is represented in newspapers, history books, the archaeological record and so on. One can make generalisations from this evidence, and some people have attempted to do this (e.g. the anthropologist Donald Brown in the book Human Universals).

Of course, we do have to talk about our nature in comparison with other species, because we are otherwise wont to miss the forest for the trees (it’s easy for us to see the differences between human beings, but much less easy to see the innumerable things that make us one, and mark us out as a species). But you can’t get anything interesting out of this. We cannot say that human nature is what humans are like “without chains”.

At the start of this essay, I said that Chomsky has also talked in a way that implies the negation of the teleological view, and this is indeed true. Here is one example, which can be found in the book Chronicles of Dissent and also on this excellent Wikipedia FAQ, https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Anarchist_FAQ/What_is_Anarchism%3F/2.15,:

"Individuals are certainly capable of evil . . . But individuals are capable of all sorts of things. Human nature has lots of ways of realising itself, humans have lots of capacities and options. Which ones reveal themselves depends to a large extent on the institutional structures. If we had institutions which permitted pathological killers free rein, they'd be running the place. The only way to survive would be to let those elements of your nature manifest themselves.

If we have institutions which make greed the sole property of human beings and encourage pure greed at the expense of other human emotions and commitments, we're going to have a society based on greed, with all that follows. A different society might be organised in such a way that human feelings and emotions of other sorts, say, solidarity, support, sympathy become dominant. Then you'll have different aspects of human nature and personality revealing themselves."

This clearly echoes Kropotkin’s famous argument in the essay “Are We Good Enough?”. What Chomsky says here is undeniably true. Human nature is not one thing, but the kind of framework of possibilities. We can alter the reality by the way we design our society and the kind of culture we induce thereby.

And see my Political Investigations essay for what exactly I think about Libertarian Socialism.