The phrase "human nature" has become a cliche meaning, essentially, "selfish, violent, unchanging and unchangeable." Anderson does not join in this slander! He presents human diversity. His and Karen Anderson's Gratillonius is a model of social leadership and foresight. Nicholas van Rijn is self-interested but morally constrained whereas other League merchants are unprincipled gun-runners.
In Changes, I summarize my view of "human nature." Human beings change their environment, changing themselves in the process. Therefore, there is nothing unchanging anywhere within us. I should add that human beings are essentially social. Therefore, cooperation, most basically expressed through language, is more basic than selfishness. Some societies encourage individual selfishness; others do not. But much of our behavior is contextual. We do not (have to) fight for the air that we breathe but might well fight for the last oxygen cylinder if we were stranded in a space station. I argue against any proposition along the lines of "In any society, there will always be those who..." There will not always be anything!
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
But Poul Anderson AGREED with me during one of our exchanges of letters about how flawed and imperfect human nature is. Which he put down to either Original Sin or to us being incompletely or imperfectly evolved from simian ancestors. That imperfection was why Poul Anderson distrusted having too much power concentrated in the state, any state.
Sean
Sean,
I agree that you are correctly representing Poul Anderson's view. I certainly agree with his second suggestion. We are at a stage of evolution between simian ancestors and what we might become.
Paul.
"It may just be ... that there is something fundamentally unworkable about government itself. As long as *Homo sapiens terra* is a wild animal, which he has always been and always will be until he evolves into something different in a million or so years, maybe a workable system of government is a political-science impossibility, just as transmutation of elements was a physical-science impossibility as long as they tried to do it by chemical means."
"Then we'll just have to make it work the best way we can, and when it breaks down, hope the next try will work a little better, for a little longer...."
-- *Space Viking*, H. Beam Piper
Thank you, David. I am more optimistic than Piper!
Kaor, Paul!
The complicated response I have to make is that I believe in BOTH: mankind is imperfect because, somehow, some when, a bad choice was make. IOW, Original Sin. AND we are imperfect due to flaws in our evolution as a species. I would even say those flaws would have been corrected or overcome if the First Ancestor had not sinned.
Sean
Hi, David!
I think it's simpler to say government, any government or form thereof, can be said to be "fundamentally unworkable" BECAUSE mankind is so flawed, prone to corruption, foolish, etc. The problem is not the state as such, or any other human institution or construct, the problem is US, both individually and collectively.
But I do agree with what you quoted from Piper's "Space Viking." With the caveat that I don't think any merely human construct can last forever. Which means I don't share Paul's optimism.
Sean
Sean,
An interesting synthesis of Fall doctrine with evolutionary theory. I have not heard it put like that before.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Thanks! But I don't think I'm the first one to think of evolution like that. I had Fr. John Hardon, SJ, discussion of evolution in his THE CATHOLIC CATECHISM in mind. Evolution was never the problem for Catholics that it has been to most convinced Protestants. Partly because we interpret the Bible differently from how many Protestants do it.
Sean
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