“Human Nature” and the Santa Barbara Killings
May 31, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader
The blatantly woman-hating killings in Santa Barbara and the widespread outrage in response have shined a light on the misogyny that permeates the culture as a whole. There is a toxic strain about “human nature” in the internet circles which influenced Elliot Rodger’s deadly rage towards all women. From Rodger’s posts: “The fact that women still prioritize brute strength just shows their minds haven’t fully evolved,” and “women are not drawn to indicators of evolutionary fitness. If they were they’d be all over me.”
There are big discussion groups at Reddit, a social news site, centered on these terms. These are not fundamentalist religious forms of misogyny but ones which have a veneer of “scientific” rationale. Frequently referenced in their discussions are pseudoscientific notions that men have a different “human nature” than women which developed during the evolution of our species. A prime example of this thinking is that “men have a much stronger taste for no-strings-attached sex with multiple or anonymous partners,” and “men are far more likely to compete violently.”
The quotes above are not from some young man spewing his frustrated entitlement on the internet, but from the former Chairman of the Department of Psychology at Harvard.
I was distributing Revolution newspaper on the campus of an elite university a few weeks ago and was approached by a male student. He wanted to talk one on one with a communist over coffee. His first question was “are women attracted to men who have more resources?” This is the other half of the supposedly innate sex difference—men spread their seed as widely as they can and women want security for their offspring.
This is bullshit and it is a huge question that we need to keep returning to more than I can do in this letter. As Sunsara Taylor wrote in her recent “On the Santa Barbara Mass Killings”: “All this violence and terror against women is NOT ‘human nature.’ It is the system that rules over the people.”
There is very important discussion of “what is ‘human nature’?” in Bob Avakian’s work Birds Cannot Give Birth to Crocodiles, But Humanity Can Soar Beyond the Horizon (now available as an eBook):
“…the ‘human nature’ that people constantly assert as why things are and have to be the way they are, is nothing other than a reflection of the underlying relations and dynamics of a certain system, the system of capitalism.
This is a point of such importance that we do need to keep stressing it, particularly in this period in which there is so much confusion created around this, much of it the result of the distorting and obfuscating viewpoint of the ruling class, which has such widespread influence today, which seeps down among all sections of the people, so to speak, and is aggressively promoted at every turn by political and ideological representatives, operatives and apologists of the ruling class, and those who follow in their wake, while—and this is a very important point—it is also reinforced by the underlying dynamics of the system itself. This view of human nature is reinforced constantly by the underlying dynamics of the system itself—so that we need to continue to return to this, and dig into it deeply with people, bringing to light and to life Marx’s great insight that all of human history involves the continuous transformation of human nature; that human nature, if (or to the degree) it has any valid meaning, is a part of the superstructure. It is an ensemble, if you will, of values and viewpoints, culture and morality, which correspond ultimately to a certain underlying system—underlying social and fundamentally economic/production relations. It is not some transcendental thing that been with us “since Adam and Eve”—or, more scientifically, since human beings first evolved—and has remained unchanged and will always remain unchanged and unchangeable.” (my bold)
Note how this definition incorporates both the religious “original sin” theory of human nature and the pseudoscientific evolutionary psychology theory. They actually complement each other to further lock down any thoughts of radical change and emancipation.
So that is what “human nature” is. Now to what it is NOT. It is not a widespread pattern of behavior that exists in society, or even in all societies at the present time. It is not something that you can measure, and then make up an explanation for. This is the methodology of evolutionary psychology. This is why we can say it is pseudoscience. This methodology violates a first principle of the scientific method, which is to base your experimental hypothesis, or assumption, on what science has shown to be true up to the present time. Assumptions that complex social behaviors in humans can be reduced to biology have repeatedly been disproved by science. Why do they keep coming up in new ways? As BA said “This view of human nature is reinforced constantly by the underlying dynamics of the system itself…”
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