It is one of the perennial criticisms we Socialists have to face: A harmonious society like Socialism is bound to fail because human nature is against it. Humans are not harmonious and co-operative, we are told. On the contrary, they are born aggressive and warlike. An article dealing with one aspect of this subject in this paper a while back pointed out that the notion that humans arc like tigers falls down on one simple comparison. Whereas it is no doubt easy to point to apparently barbaric humans (among one’s neighbours maybe, let alone the Hitlers and Stalins of history), it is equally easy to instance many of one’s acquaintances who are clearly the reverse. Every tiger is tigerish. Every human is not. It is the different that is important. (It is interesting that mention of the tiger’s aggression being as inevitable as his stripes brought a note of dissent from the editor of our American paper, The Western Socialist, in a letter to the writer, on the grounds that even a tiger has to be taught aggression by Mummy tiger. If not so taught, it can’t catch and rend its prey when it grows up. True, of course. But it is equally true that every tiger must be taught aggression because if it can’t hunt it can’t live. So it comes to the same thing in the end.)
Now even if, for the sake of argument, we accept our opponents’ case that human adults are aggressive and are not fit for Socialism, is this a built-in mechanism from which there is no escape? Let us look at two little animals, the human child and the tiger cub. Both are delightful creatures and it is a pleasure to study them and play with them. (The writer is not claiming to have played with many tiger cubs, but the reader will take the point.) We know what happens with the little tiger, it has no way of getting its living when it grows up except by “taking on the aspect of a tiger” and so the cuddly animal becomes a snarling brute which can tear equally attractive creatures to pieces.
Now few people would seek to deny that the little human cub is as friendly and sweet as the tiger cub. Not long ago, I saw on a beach a kindergarten teacher with a couple of dozen human cubs of two or three years of age. They were sitting on the sand making gurgling noises to each other and laughing and giggling in the most delightful way. I said to the young lady that she was lucky to have such a sweet lot of kids to lock after. She replied that she had many such classes and without exception they were all little angels. Clearly the lady was speaking (to mix a metaphor) through rose-tinted spectacles. The smallest children can be bad-tempered and appear possessive and cunning. Yet not even the most rabid anti-Socialist would suggest the opposite of the teacher’s thesis, that all are potential monsters. So where does behaviour come from?
In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoyevsky proposes that all children are innocent dears till they are seven and after that they diverge: some become aggressive in greater or lesser degree, while others remain truly human all their lives. One can see what he means. Though the innocent humanity of the gurgling infants on the beach was self-evident, among them there may well have been a potential Jack the Ripper or Irma Grese: who knows? But I do not recall that Dostoyevsky offered any insight as to why the innocents, as they grew up in society, separated into goodies and baddies. And in fact the position is a false one. Children do not grow up to be one thing or the other, kindly and self-sacrificing or aggressive.
Social behaviour has to be learned. From where? — from society in the shape of parents and others, themselves the products of society. As we have seen, the young tigers are moulded by the inveterate laws of the jungle. They must learn to kill in order to eat. There is no question of morale involved; Mummy tiger does not teach her little ones anything about right and wrong. One may think tigers are lucky in the simplicity of it all. For humans in the capitalist world, behaviour is not a firm single strand but a mesh. The essential humanity which made the kindergarten teachers’ work a pleasure is there. So is the training to behave as a social being that she and others impart. Yet these are set to function in a divisive system of society: the capitalist jungle.
In that environment it may seem a minor miracle that all humans don’t grow up like tigers. Instead, they behave in different ways in reaction to different circumstances. The IRA bomber may be kindness itself to his old granny. When Adolf Eichmann, the notorious Nazi, was found he was living not a murderous life but a very ordinary one. So far from aggression asserting itself come what may — as opponents of Socialism allege — it is the social and co-operative aspects of human nature that insist on coming to the surface. Think of the children on the beach. Regardless of what else is in their destinies they will all, despite the pressures to “look after Number One” in the jungly world we live in, help lame dogs over stiles, rush to the rescue of people marooned in floods or buried by earthquakes. Or lying wounded in No-man’s Land in one of capitalism’s wars. Some will be nurses and accept rotten pay and dirty work because they want to help their suffering fellow-humans.
Now how can there be anything intrinsically bestial in human nature in the light of these instances (which we can all multiply from our own knowledge?) And are not the effects of a “fortunate” environment obvious, as against those of conditions where the laws of the capitalist jungle operate at their most savage level? The laws against stealing are much the same in Millionaires’ Row as in a shanty town in Bangladesh. We can take for granted that fewer people will steal loaves of bread in the former place than the latter. The same human nature will produce two quite different sets of human behaviour. Put Inshan Ali from Bangladesh into Millionaire’s Row in his cradle and he will not feel the need to steal the loaf. And obviously the converse applies equally well.
Indeed one of the troubles in writing an article like this is that the word “obviously” keeps forcing its way in. The human nature argument against Socialism is so obviously untenable that it becomes difficult to take it seriously once one has got down to dealing with it. And it is obvious too that most of the anti-Socialists who use the argument can see the wood for the trees themselves quite well enough. It merely shows the weakness of the case against us that they keep trotting out this derisory stuff.
It is doubtful if Dostoyevsky tried to envisage the alternative to his idea of two human natures. As a citizen of the Tsarist system he could hardly be expected to imagine what a truly human society could be like. But he must have wondered: if there were different paths for the innocent infant to take at the critical age of seven, what was the origin of the paths themselves? In the Socialist world, human nature will blossom in a way that is perhaps barely conceivable today. The people of the future will surely not understand how it was ever possible for human nature to have thought other than humane. And to think that we humans could have that sort of world right now!
L. E and A. R. Weidberg
No comments:
Post a Comment