People need answers to ultimate questions. That is a rational as well as emotional need

The Left vs. Human Nature

by James Kalb

... it seems that the problem people have with human nature today has to do with the current view of nature as pure blind fact. That view makes it morally impossible to treat nature as a substantive guide for how to live. The result, unless we ignore the facts and say human beings do not have a nature, is a choice between a technological approach leading to Left-wing transhumanism and a humanist approach based on a religious or philosophical outlook that sees moral principle as implicit in nature. The practical question, if you take the latter approach, is what outlook of that kind best fits the world we live in and how such an outlook can be embodied in a stable tradition sufficient to motivate the life of a society. But those are big issues we are not going to resolve today.

Human nature exists, and we cannot deal with life in a sensible way without accepting that. So the question we face is how to overcome an outlook that categorically rejects the very concept and is deeply rooted in the way the people who dominate our political life understand the world…

The Left does not like the idea of human nature. It tells them they are not free to do what they want. From a factual perspective, it tells them people do not change much, so the way things were in the past is mostly how they will be in the future. From a moral perspective, it suggests a standard for what is good other than satisfying desire, since it tells people to act in a way that fulfills their nature, or at least is suited to it.

The Left does not like any of that and they have been very successful turning their dislike into accepted dogma. The result is that if you talk about human nature today you are not going to get anywhere. People will say you are stereotyping, you are denying Hope and Change, and you are presenting existing power relations as natural and unchangeable. You will have to prove every detail of every claim and the standard of proof will be infinitely high. Also, none of your arguments will stick—next time the matter comes up, you will have to go through every issue all over again at the same level of detail.

All of which seems odd. On the face of it, every living thing has a nature of some kind. It has characteristic ways of acting, conditions it tries to bring about, and conditions that help it thrive. Why would that not be true of human beings? Is accepting human nature not basic to good sense in dealing with people? If the point looks obvious, why is it not generally accepted, or at least generally acceptable as something to consider?

As it is, people dismiss it without discussion. The result is that claims like “gender is a social construction” get taken seriously and, in fact, are basically treated as true. There are Midwestern public schools that tell teachers they should not use expressions like “boy” and “girl” because they are gendered. That is the new normal.

General acceptance of insane views can cause problems, so it is worth asking how we have ended up in this situation. The cause, I believe, is a tendency in modern ways of thinking to try to do too much with too little. The result is that people end up becoming irrational in the name of reason.

The Left is said to be progressive. That means that they apply modern thought to social affairs more single-mindedly than other people. That gives them a big rhetorical advantage. If you oppose them you are opposing the general movement of thought and once the modern world is thoroughly established, and everyone who matters has been subjected to mass higher education, you are opposing what everyone’s been trained to view as reason.

The modern thought I am talking about, which I think is the main tendency if you cut through a lot of fluff that ends up canceling itself out, tries to make knowledge rigorous and useful by concentrating on exact observation and immediate causal mechanism. It tries to use that knowledge to remake the world in accordance with whatever it is we want. That is what technology is about and it is what the functional part of the Left is about.

That general approach has been extremely effective in some settings. Obvious examples include modern natural science, modern industry, modern medicine, and modern warfare. So, everyone agrees that it works and makes sense.

There is not the same agreement as to other types of thought; for example philosophical thought of various kinds, religious thought, poetic thought, or thought based on tradition or informal good sense. The result is that reason has become identified with scientific thought, or at least what passes as such. Reason has to be common to all and the only kind of thought all accept is the kind associated with modern science, so that is what reason is understood to be.

That is a problem because people need answers to ultimate questions. That is a rational as well as emotional need. Part of what it is to be a rational actor is to act in accordance with a rational understanding of the situation you are in, and what makes most sense to do in that situation. If reason is modern scientific thought, and we want to be rational actors, then modern scientific thought has to give us that kind of understanding. It has to give us usable answers to questions about what actions, and therefore what goals, ultimately make sense. In other words, it has to tell us what the good is as well as how to bring it about.

The problem, of course, is that it cannot. 

....

Read more: theimaginativeconservative.org