Different Views of human Nature Prof. Michael W Sonnleitner

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.