Humans as Social or Natural Beings?

Thus far, Sayer's thoroughly social account of human nature is persuasive, and consistent with a great deal of substantive social scientific research. However, I have a reservation about the way he explains the difference between our ‘biological' and our ‘cultural' natures.

Of course, there is a long history of critiques of those forays of the life sciences into territory also claimed by the social sciences. These critiques are justified by the commonly imperialist, racist, homophobic or sexist character of the most widely popularized misappropriations of biology (see Rose, Kamin and Lewontin 1984; Benton 1999; Rose and Rose 2000; Williams, Birke and Bendelow 2003). These misappropriations are by no means mere relics of the past, as carefully reported in Saini (2019), and there are current attempts to ‘decolonise' curricula in educational institutions. This is probably one reason why Sayer wishes to hold ‘biological nature' at arms' length, while not wanting to ignore it.

As I argued many years ago (Benton 1991), the social sciences lose too much in terms of their explanatory and emancipatory potential by simply refusing to engage critically with the life sciences. Drawing on the work of Eyerman and Jamison (1991), I tried to show that in the conceptual innovations of many emancipatory social movements (relating to ethnicity, gender, the politics of health, disability and the environment) had already called into question the simple opposition between ‘nature' and ‘society' upon which ‘mainstream' social science relied, and had done so without falling into racist or other reactionary uses of biology. At the same time, the argument can be taken from within the life sciences themselves, where leading practitioners have challenged public misuses of their disciplines (as indicated in some of the readings just cited).

Here, I will offer an alternative route to a philosophical anthropology that complements much of Sayer's account of our social being, but is much more strongly rooted in (a critical appreciation of) what the life sciences have to offer. This gets its justification as these sciences have more to offer in relation to the fourth sense of ‘nature of' that is distinguished above. This is the search for an explanatory account of the powers and activities of a being in terms of its internal structures and composition, but, in the case of beings such as humans, which have highly variable powers and patterns of activity, the explanatory strategy has to include various levels of interaction between structure and context in the process of living a life.

There is another reason why this might be a preferred strategy. This has to do with the initial case for thinking about human nature, as an important basis for a critical social science. The version of this that was advanced by the early critical realists involved the development of an ‘emancipatory critique' (see Chapters 8 and 12) but an adequate critical social science, it is now clear, must involve more than that. For the proponents of an emancipatory critique, the central concern was with correcting the injustices between social groups, and the overcoming the illegitimate domination of some groups over others. These concerns are no less pressing today, with the urgent claims made by the ‘Black Lives Matter' and ‘#MeToo' movements, as well as the less publicized day-to-day struggles in the workplace, civil society and the domestic sphere to challenge injustice and the infliction of harms of many kinds.

But the Covid-19 pandemic with which we began this chapter can be regarded as symptomatic of a far deeper and wider existential crisis in the relation between contemporary society and its conditions of existence in the rest of nature. In recent decades the global threat of climate change has become widely recognized even among the business and political elite, and belatedly the significance of the intertwined crisis of mass extinction of other life forms is also beginning to dawn, alongside the more specific and geographically distributed matters of acidification of the oceans, desertification, forest destruction, flooding, extreme weather events and melting of polar ice-caps (see, e.g. Wallace-Wells 2019). The urgency of these ecological threats certainly does not displace, or render any less important, the issues of social justice addressed by the more traditional emancipatory critiques.

Conservative intellectuals have long drawn on characterizations of nature to dash the hopes of radicals for convivial and egalitarian future societies. These have sometimes represented the inner lives of people as inherently self-interested and mutually antagonistic, but perhaps the most persuasive sources of conservative thinking have to do with what might be called the ‘human predicament': external nature forever presents a limit, or obstacle, to the meeting of human desire. Here, the parson-economist Thomas Malthus, writing at the turn of the eighteenth century, is a key figure. In his famous essay on the principle of population (Malthus 1798, 1970), he declared himself ‘warmed and delighted' by the speculations of utopian writers such as Condorcet and Godwin, and claimed that he ‘ardently wished for such improvements' (Malthus 1798, 1970: 69).

Unfortunately, there were ‘unconquerable difficulties’ in the way of achieving them. These difficulties stem from the truth of three propositions:

1.Human populations cannot increase without means of subsistence;

2. Where there are means of subsistence, population will increase;

3. The ‘superior power’ of population cannot be checked without ‘misery and vice’.

Malthus’s claim that the power of population is ‘superior’ stems from what he saw as a disproportion between the tendency of population to increase (geometrically - or, as we would now say, ‘exponentially’) and the ability to increase the supply of means of subsistence (arithmetically). This pressure of population growth on the limits to the supply of food entails the unavoidable persistence of poverty and disease (the ‘positive checks’ to population).

But though the rich by unfair combinations contribute frequently to prolong a season of distress among the poor, yet no possible form of society could prevent the almost constant action of misery on a great part of mankind, if in a state of inequality, and upon all, if all were equal.

(Malthus 1798, 1970: 79)

Malthus’s arguments have been recognized as a serious challenge for thinkers of the left, from Marx and Engels, through to contemporary environmentalists, struggling to combine their recognition of the power of nature with their progressive values. Marx and Engels countered with two - doubtfully consistent - lines of attack: the application of science to agriculture knew ‘no limit’ and would always allow food production to keep pace with population, and, in any case, most of the earth’s surface was yet to come under cultivation. And there was a fall-back - if, in the distant future, such a limit was reached, then humans themselves had the power through education, to bring their population under control. In his later versions of his Essay, Malthus himself came to recognize in ‘moral restraint’ an alternative to ‘vice’ as a means of checking the rate of increase of population.

The utopian claim that scientific advances in agriculture are without limit is doubtfully consistent with the general tendency of the ‘materialist’ understanding of society and history of which Marx and Engels were pioneers. In their realist moments, Marx and Engels shared with Malthus a clear recognition of the unavoidable dependence of humans on continuous interaction with their naturally given conditions of life:

Nature is man’s inorganic body - nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature - means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die.

(Marx 1844 in Marx and Engels 1975: 276) That early view was developed further in the later work, notably in Marx's major work, Capital:

The labour process... is human action with a view to the production of use­values, appropriation of natural substances to human requirements; it is the necessary condition for effecting exchange of matter between man and Nature; it is the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, it is common to every such phase.

(Marx 1867, 1970: 183-84) The naturalistic tendency in Marx's thought was, in any case, clear from his and Engels's recognition in Darwin's Origin of Species the counterpart in the natural sciences of their view of human history. So, drawing on a materialist view of history derived from Marx and Engels, combined with an account of living nature and its transformations derived from Darwin and Wallace it is possible to give at least a provisional outline of an approach to human nature that includes our status as natural beings and our dependence upon our relations to the rest of nature. This recognizes the features of individual human nature, and especially our needs and capacities for social life, as argued by Sayer. But as evolved ‘natural beings' the varied forms of social life we develop remain interdependent with other living beings, as well as with their, and our, physical and chemical conditions of existence. Not only do we relate to those other species in complex systems of ecological interdependency, but can recognize our closer or more distant kinship with them. As provisional outcomes of aeons of the workings of natural selection (and some other mechanisms) through innumerable vicissitudes of life, animals, as ‘active natural beings' are equipped to pursue two overarching purposes: survival and reproduction. Each species occupies a distinct location in the immensely complex web of ecological connections, but the human species, having no fixed mode of life, may occupy many possible locations, and is liable to ‘forget' that it occupies any at all. So, our alternative account of human nature may begin with features which we share with other species: all have met the challenges of survival and reproduction, usually over many thousands of years. Consequently, all have met these priorities in a myriad of ways that are at the centre of their and our modes of life.