Tom Roeper, author of The Prism of Grammar, reflects on human nature and foreign policy.
Almost every day one can read a political analysis which moves from an image of human nature to an argument for foreign policy. George Will is perfectly explicit (Newsweek, Aug 19, 2002):
The toxic idea at the core of all the most murderous ideologies of the modern age. That idea is that human nature is, if not a fiction, at least so watery and flimsy that it poses no serious impediment to evil political entities determined to treat people as malleable clay to be molded into creatures at once submissive and violent.
Here are two more, one very recent, the other a few months ago. In the November 16, 2007 New York Times Book Review, Johann Hari summarizes Walter Russell Mead’s perspective in his book God and Gold:
Mead ends with a call. . . . to place the idea of original sin at the center of politics. All men are fallen so politics needs [to be]. . . . conscious of their hideous flaws.From there in a few sentences, imperialism is justified.
In his column, David Brooks, links his views to his perception of human nature:
Human beings, in our current understanding, are jerry-built creatures, in which new, sophisticated faculties are piled on top of primitive earlier ones. …Furthermore, reason is not separate from emotion and the soul cannot be detached from the electrical and chemical pulses of the body. There isn't even a single seat of authority in the brain. The mind emerges (somehow) from a complex light show of neural firings without a center or executive. We are tools of mental processes we are not even aware of…. We have a grand narrative that explains behavior and gives shape to history. (“The Morality Line” NYT Apr 16.2007)
From there to the justification of various things like the politics of the Middle East is just a few short steps (detailed in many columns). The argument rests on this idea: we have an unconscious which we do
not understand or control. Generally, this line of reasoning promotes the notion that those in power, parents or politicians, have a right to assume malevolent motives and therefore the right to intervene for the greater good. Few of us escape this modern habit, whether it is interpreting George
Bush or our 3 year old child.
Brooks claims that his ideas are based on modern cognitive science - and to a degree they are, citing Steven Pinker (though Pinker tells me that he is no supporter of such implications). While Noam Chomsky has commented that “on the ordinary problems of life, science tells us very little” ( Chomsky nov 6- 06 La Jolla on Edge website), one can stilll ask whether it causes harm. More pointedly, one can ask: do those of us who would disagree with Brooks and come from a cognitive science background, have any alternative to offer?
Since Freud the concept of the modularity of mind has become an accepted part of modern culture. Not only Freud, but Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Steve Pinker and others less well-known, like me, have argued that insight into mental processes demands a modular view of the mind. Brooks’ view seems to fall right into place in thisframework.
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