In defence of an immutable human nature: an inteview with Dr. David Berlinski
The thesis that something like an essential human nature must exist – necessity self-applied – is far more persuasive than any attempt made to describe it.
I asked Dr. David Berlinski about his views on human nature, in light of his 2019 book of this title, and in particular about his defence of an immutable human nature against materialist claims to the contrary. He was kind enough to reply with this extended answer.
Guy Denton: Your new book presents a stimulating defense of an immutable human nature against materialist claims to the contrary. What, in your view, are the essential characteristics of human nature?
David Berlinski: Whatever the materialist may be claiming, it is no concern of mine. Let him go claim. Immutability is something else. The same face stares out of every mirror. Our own. Until very recently, this has seemed obvious. Not anymore. In the nineteenth-century, both Darwin and Marx revived alchemy as a discipline and pronounced it scientific. The late-medieval alchemists, Isaac Newton among them, of course, were interested in transmuting base metals into gold. They underestimated the problem, but they were not wrong in thinking it soluble. They required the atomic theory of matter, and this they did not have. Bad luck. Darwin and Marx dropped the heavy metals from consideration. They kept faith with the alchemist’s commitment to transmutation – species in the case of Darwin, human beings in the case of Marx – both men arguing that so far as transmutations go, there are no limits. If a fish might become a man, who is to say that a man might not become a socialist?
It is history that has made the case to the contrary. The new socialist man proved to be neither new nor socialist. His type is now everywhere and encompasses, it is gratifying to report, no differences in gender, the women’s movement, in particular, suggesting one of those grim Politburo meetings in which party members denounced one another as wreckers. Groveling to follow. Transmutation has its limits. Human beings may easily be destroyed, but they cannot easily be changed.
Much the same is true of species.
The essential characteristics of human nature are those that human beings may enjoy, or must endure, necessarily. An appeal to the grisly apparatus of modal logic is unavoidable, and with it such modal terms as could, can, must, might, may, and would. They remain very poorly understood. Is it true that a man can do what he does if and only if he could have done what he did? Beats me. Still, some conclusions seem right enough. A man might be shorter than he is; but he could not be younger; a woman may become a mother, but she cannot become a reptile.
The claim that human beings have certain of their properties necessarily is widely dismissed as embodying the sin of essentialism, an affliction comparable to original sin and treated accordingly. “Edward Said,” one appreciative illiterate remarks, “beautifully explains the construction of the Orient and how it is problematic because it favours essentialism and othering.” Othering? Do not ask. It is a term of art. However problematic essentialism, its critics have scrupled at the skin of sin and not its core. Witness Elizabeth Grosz, who defines essentialism in terms of “characteristics shared in common by all women at all times.” What is common and what is necessary are two different things. Of death and taxes, both are common but only death is necessary. If we are to sin – esto peccator et pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo, as Martin Luther urged. Good advice.
An inference from what is common in human experience to what is essential in human identity is not easily made. It is universally true that all men are self-identical. There are no exceptions and there is no point in asking for a Darwinian explanation of the facts. The modal trigger is immediate, the conclusion necessary. The inference has, nevertheless, overshot the mark. Self-identity is no more an aspect of human nature than the tendency to fall toward the center of the earth. No one doubts the identity or the tendency: it is their assignment to human nature that is supererogatory. We fall as the leaves from the tree. Being human has nothing to do with it. There is no obvious evolutionary explanation for the pentapodal human body plan. Pickpockets and concert pianists may well have derived an advantage from a six-fingered hand. No inference to necessity is forthcoming. Nature may have dropped the five-fingered hand into the human genome in a fit of carelessness. It is in the gray zone where inferences slip and slide that human nature may be found.
The gray zone is not empty, but, as one might expect, it is gray. We live in three spatial dimensions, yes, but, necessarily? Special relativity is satisfied in four. This is more than a mathematical fiction. At the end of his life, Albert Einstein, in a moving letter written to the widow of the great friend of his youth, Michele Besso, remarked that for believing physicists, the passage of time is an illusion. Wittgenstein drew the obvious conclusion. “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness,” he wrote in the Tractatus, “then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
That these remarks are incoherent does not detract from the comfort they provide.
In the real world where human beings gawk and gabble, language seems necessary to human identity. No matter their superficial diversity, human languages are everywhere the same. Mohawk and English, Mark Baker argued in The Atoms of Language, are separated by only a handful of parameters. When the parameters of Mohawk are changed in favour of their English-language settings, it becomes clear that Mohawk speakers intended to speak English all along. It is possible to imagine a species otherwise identical to our own but lacking both the means and the eagerness to express itself. Silent as the sun, members organize themselves as lions do, hunting in small groups and otherwise sprawling in the shade where they may be observed solemnly licking their genitals.
Human?
There is a nice tangle of concepts connecting what is biologically given and what is humanly necessary. The arc of human life has a certain characteristic shape. Shakespeare was not far wrong in writing of the seven ages of man. Any number of billionaires are eager to change the arc by prolonging its length. Some of this is harmless. Every man, Dr Johnson observed, believes he has another ten years in him. Billionaires too. Other changes are otherwise. Would a woman who emerged fully formed from a Fabergé egg at age twenty, rather like Botticelli’s rising Venus, be a human being? No birth, no infancy, no childhood. She would, of course, be a marvel, but whether she would be a human marvel is another question. To assign some sense of necessity to the ordinary circumstances of human growth is to lend the force of necessity to ordinary human institutions. What follows from necessity is necessary. The family is as old as the race and although it takes different forms, it is, in essence, always the same. And for the most obvious of reasons: human beings are helpless after birth. The modal inference now discharges. The family is a necessary human institution.
An essential human identity is morally valuable, if only because it suggests that we are all in this together; and for a very long time, it has been some sense of an essential human identity that has stood as the best defense against efforts to outrage it. The Holocaust was as a crime against humanity because it was a crime against human nature. Until yesterday, this has seemed obvious. Things are today different. So many things are. If a proposition is necessary, its negation is impossible. No one is pleased to have the iron door of necessity slammed in his face, or on his toe, I suppose. Every culture draws a clear and inviolable distinction between men and women. The distinction is clear because no matter how exotic the culture, no stranger requires instructions before dividing it into two sexes; it is inviolable because it is no more possible for human beings to change their sex than their species. A man who, after beating his female athletic competitors silly, insists that he is just one of the girls, remains an object of unexpressed derision. If the claim that some things are not possible outrages opinion, it does not affect belief. “The thought of man,” Justice Brett remarked, “is not triable for even the devil does not know what the thought of man is.” A proposition that cannot be believed does not necessarily express an impossible proposition. It comes close. An immense amount of psychic and political energy is required to enforce the requisite sense of collective solipsism.
That diversity is our strength functions as an axiom in the logical system now governing university life. It is obligatory for university administrators to say as much and fatal to deny it. Their animadversions have acquired the aspect of a comic ritual, but with the caution that no one is allowed to laugh. Nor to observe that if diversity is anyone’s strength, it is self-defeating as a moral injunction if no one is allowed to deny it. And no one is. The promotion of previously marginalized communities to prominence is an undertaking that has required the entire intellectual class of the west. The results are, at best, a remedy for injustice, and, at worst, a nuisance. When the French Minister of Health is required to deliver an important message, the deaf must be given access to his words and so he appears on television in the company of a woman undertaking a series of spastic gestures and repellent facial grimaces. The deaf are said to consider this a convenience. What the congenitally retarded may hope for by way of comparable accommodation remains to be determined.
That there is some diversity in human life is undeniable. The Chinese eat bats, the Norwegians, herring. To each his own. The diversity of human life is on the surface. It is not of the essence. Cuisines may vary, but eating is everywhere ceremonial. Animals are different. Dogs eat like pigs; cats, like runway models; and the Baleen Whale, like Presidential candidate Joe Biden, gets by by opening his mouth and hoping for the best. Among human beings, eating is sheathed in ritual. To reduce a man to eating as animals eat is to outrage his human nature. Defecation requires ritual of its own: euphemisms are obligatory; privacy demanded; and, as Freud observed, an involuntary sense of disgust serves to disguise the gratification afforded by the act. No celebrity is yet prone to Twitter that she is pleased to have moved her bowels and wishes to be appreciated for the effort.
Every human society enforces some distinction between what is private and what is public, but the distinction remains gray within the gray zone, since it appears among the felines. When death approaches, they chose solitude. The distinction may be an essential property of the mammals, an aspect of human nature by virtue of the fact that human beings are mammals. These judgments are of exceptional delicacy. That human beings find nakedness a universal source of shame, on the other hand, is a true property of human nature, a desire to conceal one’s nakedness essential.
Shame is a universal human emotion. Along with fat-shaming, slut-shaming has entered into rhetorical currency as a reproach, so much so that fat sluts are now provided the benefits of intersectional victimhood, their decision to disrobe provocatively in public neatly balanced by the revulsion that they inspire. Vouchsafed an additional affliction such as childhood abuse or erysipelas, such women are, at once, promoted to the intersectional pantheon and freed from the obligation to pay taxes. No matter the degenerate babble of sex workers (whores) and sex therapists (frauds), the sexual dynamics between men and women remain a part of their essential identity. No culture beyond our own fails to value female modesty, or enforce standards of decorum on a woman’s art and artifice. This is no proof that these properties are essential; it is strong evidence that they are not negligible. If this is so, then women who demand the transgressive right to be lewd without censure or lascivious without reproach are wasting their time. The right is as much an illusion as the correlative demand that they be entitled to violate the law of identity. And if no one is prepared to say so, this is hardly because the proposition, although widely denied, is nowhere believed. Some boundaries cannot be crossed.
Original sin seems to me to touch on a deep and inexplicably essential characteristic of human nature. It is the best explanation for much of human history, if only because it is the only explanation for much of human history. “With respect to original sin,” Dr Johnson remarked, “the inquiry is not needed for whatever is the cause of human corruption, men are evidently and confessedly so corrupt, that all the laws of heaven and earth are insufficient to restrain them from their crimes.” To be a human being is necessarily to have a deep ineradicable sense of what George Steiner called ontological guilt. He was right in so calling it. It is something essential; it is something essential in human nature.
All of this is anecdotal and attempts to provide a comprehensive account of human nature have inevitably proved disappointing. When Nicolas Christakis, writing in Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, boiled things down to their essentials, critics were surprised to find Facebook, but not language, in the mix. Yuval Harari has done no better. It may well be that our concepts are inadequate, and that the inference from what is common in human society to what is essential in human nature is too gross for the good that it does. James Joyce wrote of the word that all men know and critics with some diffident sense that they might be accused of sentimentality suggested that it was love. Thousands have lived without love, W.H. Auden replied, but not one without water. My reluctant sympathies are with Auden. The thesis that something like an essential human nature must exist – necessity self-applied – is far more persuasive than any attempt made to describe it. Human nature remains hidden, a part of the great worm of being stretching invisible from the beginning of time.
