What if Immanuel Kant’s teachings that, “human nature is understood to be composed of selfish natural appetites” is true? Then what? What if the selfishness with which we are born in order to survive, is not replaced with care for others?
We have all had close encounters with babies. They look adorable, especially a few days after birth when they look up at you trying to focus their eyes on you. They turn into screaming magpies in short order. If their needs are not met instantly, they start to fuss. The fussing gets noisier and the whining begins. If that doesn’t get our attention they scrunch their little faces, eyes become so small they almost disappear, they beat their little fists in the air and scream so hard that you think they will stop breathing.
It doesn’t take long for our progeny to learn that the one who gets your attention is the one who has the best chances of survival. Selfishness is ingrained in us so that we can live and pass our genes down to the next generation. It is Darwinian. Why would we assume that selfish babies will become unselfish, sympathetic adults all by themselves? Logically, why should people care for others?
“There is a universal moral core that all humans share. The seeds of our understanding of justice, our understanding of right and wrong, are part of our biological nature. Yet, Paul Bloom professor of psychology at Yale Universityat“We are predisposed to break the world up into different human groups based on the most subtle and seemingly irrelevant cues, and that, to some extent, is the dark side of morality… to some extent, a bias to favor the self, where the self could be people who look like me, people who act like me, people who have the same taste as me, is a very strong human bias. It's what one would expect from a creature like us who evolved from natural selection, but it has terrible consequences.”
Evolution predisposes us to be wary of "the other" for survival, so we need society and parental nurturing to intervene. “And the truth is, when we're under pressure, when life is difficult, we regress to our younger selves and all of this elaborate stuff we have on top disappears.”
There are references throughout the Bible that call us to care for “the other.” The prophet Isaiah expounds upon the importance of caring for others. He teaches and preaches the need to care for others, to rise above our personal survival and be concerned for the survival of others, beyond our own tribe because we are tribal from birth. We start as a family, the smallest unit of authority and come together to form tribes transferring loyalty to tribal leaders. With time and the development of cities and city-states to the concept of countries, loyalty has to move up the chain to the leaders of each new, larger unit. For loyalty to be maintained there must be common shared stories, common shared beliefs, desires and goals. What keeps disparate tribes together if they cannot find commonality? We have seen what happens in countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Rwanda and Iraq. Left to our own instincts, we fall back onto our primal fear of the other and do not care for the stranger.
Even in democracies, de Tocqueville (1805-1859) pointed out that “each citizen is habitually busy with the contemplation of a very petty object, which is himself.” Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau believed that man, by the state of nature, is free and equal and has all the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of property, but this state of nature can lead men to war. Civil society’s purpose is to protect each of us, one from the other and “make peace where nature’s imperfection causes war.” Is nature’s imperfection our inability to see beyond tribal loyalties?
Allan Bloom in “The Closing of the American Mind” questioned the modern concept of living in the state of nature without the constructs of religion, country or family. Yet, here we are in the 21st century where so many today wax nostalgic over the past, yearning to return to times when we were closer to nature, to our natural roots. Romanticizing the past comes from deep within our being. The myth of Prometheus tells the story of our deep desire to become one with nature, again. Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and brought it to mankind. He suffered terribly for that theft. With this gift, man is no longer solely under the control of the gods and the whim of nature. With fire, he can cook his food. He can light up the night and he can warm himself and live without fear of freezing to death, unlike the animal kingdom, still rooted only in nature, natural law. With the advent of fire, we have one foot in the world of nature and one foot in the world of human nature. Fire comes to represent “man’s cultural break with the natural world, and the deep discomforts which this break has left in our souls.” For those of us who believe in God, that break reflects our longing to return to the Source. For others, it is a romanticizing of nature.
