Different Views of Human Nature
Dr. Michael W. Sonnleitner
Hello everyone. Today we look at different views of human
nature. I want to make this complicated and uncomplicated at the same time. You
could say we have heard it said, "It's just human nature." It's just
human nature to kill. It's just human nature to be evil, individualistic, and
competitive. It's just human nature to be saintly and kind. It's just human
nature to be nothing.
We're simply conditioned responses to our environment. It's
just human nature. I've confused everyone, and yet perhaps I've confused no one
because we've heard it all. I would like to analyze this reality of our
perception of human nature. The first slide relates to the blind and the
elephant. I wanted to start by saying: beware of binaries. What does that mean?
A binary is either-or, dualistic thinking.
It's manifest in saying there is either peace or war, either
nonviolence or violence, either conversion through nonviolence or coercion
through nonviolence. By the way, we're also told we are either female or male.
Binary thinking is dominant. I'd like us to briefly understand why I believe it
is dominant and why it creates lots of problems for understanding Gandhi and
the world. First, I think it is reflected in Aristotle, who many declare the
founder of political science.
A bunch of Western thinkers began with the Greeks. Aristotle
argued for his view of the law of the excluded middle, which was that something
cannot both be and not be at the same time. Something cannot both be and not
be. It's the foundation of Western logic. And by the way, we need to recognize
that Aristotle was materialistic. That is, he believed in the five senses. The
only thing that is real is what we can see, feel, taste, touch, and smell.
So, for him, for example, looking at human nature as male
and female, the male is by nature superior. A woman is a deformed male
according to him. How does Aristotle come to believe in patriarchy as being the
truth? He looks around at his society where he is, at what he can feel, taste,
touch, and smell, and he sees patriarchy. What is becomes what ought to be.
Now, there's a logical leap.
Aristotle looks at what is—male dominance, patriarchy—and…
Professor Michael, then he says to himself, "It is natural. I can observe
it." Yes, yes, yes. Understand that this is a trap. I believe you can
accept it if you want, but people argue capitalism ought to be, men should be
dominant, or human beings are selfish because that's what they see all the
time. They say, "It is human nature. It is what is." Do you
understand? I'm not going to beat this to death, but I want you to understand
that Aristotle was looking at the world in a very materialistic orientation.
Not in terms of wealth, but in terms of what is real is what I can see, feel, and touch. That was his foundation for data: the five senses and only the five senses. But there are other ways. We have Mahavira and Buddha. Mahavira, the accepted founder of the Jain religion, heavily influenced Gandhi and his concept of ahimsa. Mahavira and others have this view of anekantavada. Now, that is the many-sidedness of truth.
And here is the blind and the elephant. You can look at the
slide if I'm looking at it on my screen. Many of you have heard of this.
Sometimes it's seven blind people. I guess for some reason they like odd
numbers. The simple story is, let's say there are three blind people and an
elephant. They're blinded by their gender. They're blinded by their culture.
They're blinded by the physical, economic situation that they find themselves
in. They're blinded by their conditioning. One says, touching the trunk of the
elephant, "It is like a snake."
The other touches the body and says, "No, it's like a
wall." Another touches the tail and says, "What? You're both wrong.
It's like a rope." The point of the story is very simple. They are all
right and wrong at the same time. What Aristotle missed was his own blindness.
You understand? He thought what he saw was absolutely true. He didn't have the
concept of anekantavada. Mahavira says you can be both right and wrong
at the same time.
Take the person who is touching the tail. Yes, the elephant
is like a rope. It's just that that's not the whole elephant. But it's true.
Yes, we could say the same thing about human nature. And if we had the elephant
as human nature, we could say human nature is self-centered, individualistic,
competitive. That's one part. Human nature is selfless, sharing, collaborative.
That's the body.
"No, no, no. You're all wrong. The elephant, human
nature, is completely a conditioned response to your environment." They
may be all right and wrong at the same time. I hope this isn't confusing to
you, but if you can't grasp this idea of being blind and seeing the world
through a vision that is often very limited, like Gandhi noted, you will not be
able to understand the complexities of peace, nonviolence, or human nature.
Okay, I want you to understand. So, let's start with that.
Let us go on a little to the second slide, if you want, which is the nine views
of human nature. Gandhi himself was interesting, I would suggest, because he
was West meets East. He was both Aristotle and Mahavira. He was both very
empirical and pragmatic, and very spiritual in understanding that there is much
beyond the five senses.
Gandhi was, I believe, an incredibly "both-and"
person. An extremely BOTH-AND person. He would agree with that, and sometimes
speak about how there is either violence or nonviolence, and yet in the very
same communication, he will talk about how we are both violent and nonviolent
at the same time. It's confusing. I'm sorry.
Aristotle avoided the confusion by setting up a logical
system that is simplistic. Gandhi may be confusing, but so also is life. And I
think we need to try to grasp this non-binary way of looking at human nature.
Now, this categorization is mine. I created it. It has its limitations. This
outlines nine distinct views of human nature.
There can be a great many more. What is human nature? This
is one way of looking at it: nine ways. You'll notice that you can be
social-sharing, selfish-unsharing, and conditioned if you go left to right at
the top of the screen, and this is individually. If you view human nature in
groups on the left side, you can see the columns for social, selfish, and
conditioned. Right?
So now we have kind of a graph. This is not too complicated,
but it's complicated enough, and this gives us nine distinct ways of looking at
human beings. Now, because I taught political philosophy—and that's mostly in
the Western tradition—I've learned a lot from the East. I have given examples
within each of these boxes of Western political thinkers who I'm not going to
argue today because it would take all of our time, but they can arguably be in
that box. I'll just deal with three to be quick.
If you believe that human beings as individuals are
unselfish, sharing, caring, social creatures, and if you believe in groups, we
are naturally also social, sharing, cooperative group people, then you have a
lot in common with St. Francis of Assisi, the person in the upper left box.
Yes, St. Francis of Assisi, the Christian saint of all of Europe. He was not a
great thinker; he was a feeler. He was sensing the unity of life. And
Franciscans were typically anarchist. Ultimately, they saw no need for the hierarchy
of the church or the hierarchy of the state. If people are naturally, normally
caring and sharing both individually and in groups, why do we need a
government? We can simply and spontaneously care for one another. Francis
wasn't stupid. He saw pain, he saw war, he experienced it, and he even
participated in it before he became aware of other realities. And yet, these
things he thought were abnormal. These are things that bring out the worst in
us, and the best is there inherently. That was St. Francis's hope and his
faith.
If you go to the middle box, Thomas Hobbes is the opposite
of St. Francis. Hobbes believes that human beings as individuals and in groups
are selfish and unsharing. It's a dog-eat-dog world. That's Thomas Hobbes. The
natural state of humankind according to Hobbes in the Leviathan is a
natural state of war, or preparation for war, of all against all. The
consequences of Hobbes's thinking that that is human nature becomes his
declaration of belief that we should have an absolute ruler for life. Hobbes
himself believed we should have a president or a prime minister elected for
life that will give us one person to live in fear of, and that one person who
we all fear will keep us from killing one another. It keeps us from falling
into a state of anarchy where human beings are, unlike St. Francis's view,
inherently competitive individuals. Everyone has their price. Love, according
to Hobbes, is simply a way of manipulating you for my needs. That's all. And
when I'm finished with you, I'll throw you away like a fast-food container and
I'll find someone else to satisfy my sexual needs.
We have extremes with Francis and Hobbes. If you go to the
far-right bottom, Karl Marx is also extreme. For him, human nature is a
conditioned response to your environment. There are no absolutes for Marx; you
are simply a conditioned response to your environment. He's very binary—there's
always the oppressed and the oppressor. There are always two classes competing
for power in the history of the world, and the history of the world is
described as class conflict, graduating from one stage to another where we have
different oppressor and oppressed classes. So, he's very binary, but he doesn't
think human nature is anything other than a conditioned response to your
environment. I don't want to get into the others, but if you really, really
want to, perhaps in the breakout sessions—if we survive them in this class—it
may encourage you to think about where you are, in which box, and you'll find
that you probably disagree amongst yourselves.
I would suggest to you that if you kind of want to
understand Gandhi better, he doesn't fit into these boxes very well. That's
because, like I mentioned, he is extremely "both-and" and non-binary
in his way of looking at the world. If you were to draw a line from the top
corner left through Marx, through Hobbes, through St. Francis, and just take it
out a little bit at the top, you'd probably find Gandhi. Because Gandhi would
probably say, "Yes, we are conditioned responses to our environment. Yes,
depending upon our environment and our state of mind, we can have a world like
Thomas Hobbes describes: nasty, brutish, and short. We can also, if we go up in
our understanding, live in a world closer to St. Francis where we are naturally
and inherently surrendering our body to our soul within. We have become
spiritually enlightened, self-actualized people." So, Gandhi would
probably say all of these nine views have truth. We have nine blind people and
an elephant. And yet, to illustrate this, I'm suggesting that he would say
Marx, Hobbes, and Francis are all right and wrong at the same time.
To make this maybe fit a little bit better, I would like us
to have the slide relating to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and you can give us
that if you want. We will be reminded that according to Abraham Maslow, the
psychologist, every person has five levels of needs—not four, but five. And
these are the five levels of needs: physiological, safety, belonging,
self-esteem, and self-actualization. Now, the belonging and self-esteem needs
we could collapse if we wanted to, as I think was done before, into describing
them as feelings, and that's okay. We can do that; it's just another way of
looking at it.
But with these five, we can begin to see perhaps how Gandhi
could say Marx, Hobbes, and St. Francis are all right and wrong at the same
time. How can you say that, Gandhi? My god, you're just blowing my mind! No,
relax. Look at the physiological and safety needs. The physiological needs—the
most basic according to Maslow—include breathing, water, food, shelter,
clothing, and sleep. Yes, basic physiological needs that the body needs. And
safety and security are also matters of matter; that is, we can feel, taste,
touch, and smell them. We need them: employment, family, social abilities. One
could put sexual reproduction in there. The first two levels are fundamentally
materialistic—we can feel, touch, and smell them. Aristotle would be pleased;
that's what we can really focus on.
And if they are met, according to Maslow, we can then begin
to go into the more social or emotional needs: love, belonging, and
self-esteem. If physiological needs, safety, and security needs are not met on
the individual level or in groups, then we have what Thomas Hobbes lived in—a
period of almost constant conflict in Europe during the Thirty Years' War. The
years were 1618 to 1648; you can look it up. Hobbes's view of what is—and in
that sense, he was very much like Aristotle, looking at the world that he saw
around him and deciding what is ought to be—was that the world is nasty,
brutish, and short. Everyone has their price. It's a state of war, or
preparation for war, of all against all. This was the environment that Thomas
Hobbes lived in. Between those years, 1618 to 1648—Hobbes's intellectual years
where he did his writing and his publishing—half of the population of Europe
died. Half! Either through war, combat, disease, or starvation. The bubonic
plague, which people didn't know at the time was basically transmitted through
rats and the propagation of rats, took away people from almost every family.
Hobbes's view of the world was conditioned by his reality.
Your individual views of the world may very well be
conditioned by your reality as you see it in your world. The key, I believe,
for us to see is that we're both blind and not blind at the same time. We're
blind by our historical circumstance. By our realities in Sudan, or Syria, or
Congo, or the United States, or France, or Manipur in India, or Bangalore in
India, we are heavily influenced. Whether we come to see that or not, I hope
will be able to happen by our mind—our rational capacity to reflect upon our
reality.
We are the only creature that we know of that has that
capacity to reflect upon who we are, to have a mental awareness. I believe
we're not alone. I think porpoises and dolphins quite possibly are smarter than
we are. They have larger brains compared to body size, and they don't make war,
which to me is an indication that they may be a lot smarter than we are. But we
give ourselves the credit for having the capacity to think. And according to
Gandhi, we can use that capacity to reflect.
"Am I primarily a soul?" That's his kind of
dualistic way of looking at things, kind of a Western way. And yet he knows
that between body and soul there's a lot of emotion. There's a lot of
physiological and safety needs for love and belonging. We need to have
self-respect before we can have self-actualization. He knows that—in his mind,
he knows that.
But simplistically, Gandhi will sometimes suggest that if
you identify primarily with your body, that is the primary source of violence
in the world. If you are overwhelmingly materialist in the way you look at the
world, you believe only what you feel, taste, touch, or smell—the five senses.
If that's the foundation for all of your data, you're not going to believe
anything else. You're probably going to be very concerned about self-defense.
What's that? Self-defense. No, it's not obvious. What is your "self"?
If you are primarily identifying in your mind with your
body, your "self" is your body. So, what you're talking about with
self-defense is really body defense. And primarily, you defend your physical
body through physical force. That makes sense, doesn't it? You'll fight over
food, you'll fight over water, and you'll fight over property of different
kinds. You'll never have enough because your body is never adequately
protected. You need to have more of a surplus. We need to have the best weapons
possible to prevent other people from violating our safety and security needs.
I need to protect my warehouse full of bananas. No one else
can have my bananas. I will shoot anybody who takes my bananas. I may need to
develop a nuclear weapon to scare the crap out of you to keep your hands off my
bananas. Right. So, keep in mind, if you in your mind, according to Gandhi,
identify primarily as a body—where material reality is your only reality—then
don't be surprised if this becomes a foundation for war, for conflict, for
class conflict, for all sorts of violent conflict where you're willing to harm
and even kill other people's bodies for the sake of protecting your own. Like
Hobbes said, it's a dog-eat-dog world, and I'm going to be the top dog. I'll
eat you before you eat me.
"You're all blind. I'm not blind. I see clearly. The
elephant is as I say it is. I don't have to listen to you who hold the tail.
You hold the ear; I don't have to listen to you. My security needs come first,
and that's just the way it is." It's not evil people or violent people who
are the problem in the world, according to Gandhi. The problem is the way we
are thinking—our minds.
If we think of ourselves primarily as soul—as that which
cannot be harmed, that which is immortal, that which is the life force that
manifests itself in everything from butterflies to trees to human beings to
algae in the ocean—if we are the life force, if in a sense God is within us, if
we focus our mind upon our soul within, the drop of water that is within us, we
can focus on that drop of water and it becomes the ocean. The ocean is the
entire life force that manifests itself in all of creation. You are God, and
yet you are not God at the same time. According to Gandhi, you are atman.
You are the soul, but you are not paramatman. You are not the ocean, the
supreme soul. So, you're both—and you are both body and soul.
If you focus your mind primarily upon the reality that you
are ultimately the soul within you, according to Gandhi, then it becomes
logical that you should be willing to sacrifice your body for the sake of
understanding better ultimate reality, that is your soul. You may be willing to
suffer. The body suffers; that is the nature of life. In Buddhism, suffering is
there. How do you go beyond suffering? Ultimately, spiritually, you come to see
that what is immortal—the life force within you—is ultimately real.
Bring us back here. What about self-defense? Doesn't Gandhi
believe in self-defense? Again, what is human nature? If your mind thinks of
your body as who you are, then self-defense needs to be physical defense, and
all forms and kinds of violence—including very coercive nonviolence—become very
acceptable. The more materialistic you are in believing your five senses, and I
would suggest the more like Gene Sharp you are from our last session, then
nonviolence becomes a method, a tactic preferable to the overt taking of life
and doing greater harm. But for Gandhi, nonviolence is not merely a method, or
a tactic, or a strategy. His thinking says, "My self ultimately is my
soul, and those who want to save their soul may need to give up their
life." It's not such a big sacrifice because you cannot be killed. Your
soul cannot be harmed.
Gandhi had no enemies because he saw soul, or spirit, or God
in all of creation, including his opponent. By calling them an enemy, it would
be to disrespect himself, because the same life force that is in me is in Adolf
Hitler. In a sense, my real enemy is the way I think. My attachments to this
world, my perceiving it as being entirely data-driven by taste, touch, and
smell—the five senses. We need to transcend those things. According to Gandhi,
we need to see truly that Vasanta, who is right here, looks to be a woman, but
she's a person before she is a woman. And she's not only just a person; she is
the life force embodied in all of creation. She is not just a member of my
family; I see God in her. Why in the world would I want to do any violence or
harm towards Vasanta if she is God?
Are you beginning to see a little bit how Gandhi is looking
at human nature and how it reflects throughout just about everything else? I'm
not evangelizing, though I know I sound like I am, because honestly, Gandhi's
picture is right behind me. He has been a guiding spirit in my life for over 50
years. I've met and been inspired by over 30 people that knew Gandhi
personally. I have interviewed two of his personal secretaries. I went to
Afghanistan to meet with Abdul Ghaffar Khan. I spent a week with Vinoba Bhave.
And yet Gandhi is not perfect. You will see in the future, I have plenty of
criticisms of him. And he would not mind, because he did not claim to be
perfect. His soul was perfect, but he was not a great soul. Gandhi did not
allow anyone who lived with him to call him Mahatma. He was not worthy of
Mahatma. You understand? He recognized that he was a blind person trying to
learn from other blind people in a dynamic, revolutionary way that will
increase his capacity to understand the whole elephant.
And human nature for him was just that—it's a matter of
conditioning, and how we respond to our environments will bring out a Thomas
Hobbes or a St. Francis of Assisi. We have about as much free will as a person
on a crowded ocean liner. According to Gandhi, you might not have a lot of
control over the ship that is crossing the sea. You don't have control over the
weather, the hurricanes, and the typhoons that may be hitting the ship. You
don't have control over this, but you do have some control over being on the
ship, where you sleep on the ship, and how you relate to other people on the
ship—whether you have a democratic sort of system on the ship that helps tell
the captain where you want to go, or whether you have a dictator, in which case
you might need to have a small revolution on the ship to be able to replace the
captain with someone who's more worthy of leadership. So, we both have free
will and yet there's determination at the same time. We have some free will,
but it's very limited according to Gandhi.
Question Answer Session
Q. It was a wonderful and insightful talk that we
heard from you. And if you're asking the question about reality, or anekantavada
as you mentioned from Jainism, I think that is the only way to look at the
world. I think we are blind, maybe not only by physical appearance, but even
our inner eyes are also closed if we think that this is the truth. So, the only
way to look at it is that there can be multiple sides to any one phenomenon or
anything that we observe. So, I totally agree with you on what you are telling.
But in reality, today, if you have any social or academic or whatever circles
we are in, and if we agree or disagree equally to two different ideologies or
different views, we will be tagged as indecisive. So, I feel that there is a
practical conflict. Personally, I face that. So...
A. Gandhi understands that, and that is why a satyagrahi—one
who holds firm to the truth at any point in time—must always be open to
learning from others and then adopting a new truth. But at any point in time,
you are not indecisive. Gandhi was very decisive. The obligation is to hold
firm to the truth as you see it, even as if it were absolute. But Gandhi knows
it isn't. That's why he's willing to modify and change his truth over time.
That's really revolutionary. That's personally and also politically
revolutionary. He's humble, not because he's proud of his humility; he's humble
because he knows that he has various degrees of being blind himself, and he
admits it. I don't think Gene Sharp had that awareness. I'm trying to be a
little bit hard on Western dualistic thinking. If we only accept nonviolence as
a method or a tactic, it is as likely to be abandoned when repression comes as
for it to be continued. Gandhi would say when four thousand people are arrested
in Delhi or more, that's a sign of effectiveness. It's not a sign to give up
and become violent. Nonviolence is powerful precisely when it brings
repression, when it shakes up the status quo. That's the time to hold more firm
to your truth, not abandon it to take up weapons of another kind. We're running
in one more comment and then we'll try small groups.
Q. When we go into a conflict, let's say it's
important to agree on something for us to proceed with the talks, right? For
example, if you and I had an argument, and I said, "Michael stole my
pencil," we have to agree on what happened, right? We have to have some
observation to at least start. If you say, "Yeah, you have your
perspective, I didn't steal it," then what was Gandhi's—how to say—how did
he proceed in situations like this where I agree that we can all have different
perspectives, but then something happened and what is the agreement?
A. I don't think it's human nature, but Gandhi
himself, I've seen many times, can be very hard to live with because he wants
to so live what his values are that he, without even trying, demands that of
others. And certainly, in his ashrams, in his living communities, you were not
supposed to eat meat, for example, or have sugar or even salt. And yet
Kasturba, his wife, would serve guests to the ashram cookies and tea with
sugar. So, he and his wife, they have conflicts, and I think they simply
learned to live with one another. He didn't kick her out of the ashram. And
there were times when he would have a guest to the ashram like Abdul Ghaffar
Khan, who was a meat-eating Muslim from the Northwest Frontier Province. And
Gandhi would actually have meat to serve Abdul Ghaffar Khan out of respect for
Badshah Khan's truth. Even vegetarianism, which I personally believe in, is the
rule, but the house needs to be broad enough to include everyone. Does that make
sense? So, Gandhi was a dictator and yet very democratic at the same time. I
find it amusing. He could be very patriarchal and yet extremely non-binary and
even feminine at the same time.
