Approaching Limits

The philosopher Mortimer Adler, always desirous of showing that humanity is different in kind from other living creatures, not just in degree, argued that humanity is distinguished by having an almost unlimited potential which its members may or may not actually develop. We won’t find the same uniformity of behavior in people, Adler argued, that we find in other species.

By contrast the behaviorist, B.F. Skinner, argued quite the contrary. Skinner invented the Skinner box to demonstrated operant conditioning. It had an electrified floor (it could shock the test subject), a lever to cause food to be dispensed, and a communication port to signal when it was “all right” to press the lever—and when it was dangerous. Suppose now that some aliens make a Skinner box large enough to hold a person. They provide it with the same apparatus, but now it’s only the little bed, inside the box, that carries electric current. The subject can lie down on the bed only when the light is green—otherwise the bed will deliver a high-voltage jolt. The food-lever will produce a fast-food meal, but only when the light is yellow. They put a traditionalist into the box who will be damned if he’ll conform. He’ll show those aliens that he is human. The light is red but he lies down, writhing in agonies just to show them—but eventually the pain forces him off. He ignores the food lever when the light is yellow—but in a day or two he cannot help himself; he succumbs and wolfs down the fast food meal. Skinner’s great idea (discussed in his Walden Two) was to bring about millennium by engineering the environment so that it would produce the optimal behavior. Chicken and egg. How do you condition those who will engineer the optimal environment? Both Plato and Skinner needed an elite exempted from the drag of original sin.

FDR used to get speeches written by two speech writers, one on this, one on that side of an issue—and then hand these to a third to kind of, you know, blend the two. Thus must we do here. Humanity is a fusion of the all-too-easily conditioned and of the transcending. Human potentials are limited by nature—and nature is transformed, but only to a limit—by humanity.

These thoughts arose in wake of my post yesterday on changes in employment—services taking up the slack produced by enormously increased gains in agricultural productivity. That transformation points at a certain limit, it seems to me. The age-honored mode we follow is that a living, an income, must be earned by work. The work produces what people need to have—goods and services. But what if that which people need requires only a small portion of the labor available? Why in that case we must artificially augment those needs by creating human wants: and consumerism is born. Born—and then absolutely driven to grow, because people need to work to live. And so the products and services multiply. Suddenly Toys R Us—whereas, in my own growing up, a stick, a string, a ball wadded from old bits of cloth (it was World War II then) sufficed us for amusement. And we amused ourselves without uniforms or hordes of adult hoverers, played soccer in a corner of the church yard, and we weren’t members of a league, Little or Big.

Linnaeus was a Flatterer

We owe the biological classification of humans to the same man who named just about all other species too, Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), a Swedish botanist. We’re classified as Homo sapiens, “wise man.” Linnaeus’ assignment of wisdom as the defining characteristic of the human was, I would note, not his first instinct. His first name for Man was Homo diurnus, “man of the day” or “the man of today.” That works, minimally. Obviously it didn't please Linneaus. It failed to identify any particularly unique characteristic of the human beyond asserting that, to know us, we need but look around. Today. Therefore he went on to make us wise. Now it strikes me that Linnaeus was a flatterer. Clever, yes, but more than just a quip. It goes beyond that. It strikes me that Linnaeus made a mistake; he wasn't precise enough. I'll try to show why.

Almost the first thing that sapience teaches (once it has been, to some degree, achieved) is that humanity, viewed from a distance, anyway, appears to be be mad, asleep, confused, at war, cruel, negligent, unjust, egotistical, short-sighted, careless, and blind. On average and in general, it seems that such traits, which we don't share with any animal species, are muted or mitigated only by the experience of hardship. Hardship produces some useful habits here and there.

A story in today’s paper of an event in China: A drunk young man ran down another young man and a girl. The girl later died of her injuries. When the drunk driver was apprehended, he warned the security guards who’d grabbed him, saying: “My father is Li Gang.” His father was the deputy police chief in a district of his city. This sort of story is the point here. That's what humanity seem to be like when it is left to develop any-which-way.

An illuminating insight into this matter comes to mind. It is Mortimer Adler’s view of human nature. Adler is the famed editor of The Great Books of the Western World. His view appear in various places, including Ten Philosophical Mistakes. Elsewhere, in an interview, Adler argued that:

The denial of human nature rests ultimately on the striking contrast between the dominant behavioral similitude that prevails among the other animal species and the dominant behavioral differentiation that prevails among the subgroups of the human species. Looked at one way, the denial of human nature is correct. The members of the human species do not have a specific or common nature in the same sense that the members of other animal species do. This, by the way, is one of the most remarkable differences between man and other animals, one that tends to corroborate the conclusion that man differs from other animals in kind, not in degree.

The unique core of humanity, Adler asserted, was potentiality. Man appears with a great many potentialities which its members may (and I would emphasize also may not) actually develop. I agree. In my mind the central fact of being human is that we are incomplete and undeveloped—unfinished, potentially something and, failing that, much worse than animals. Linnaeus erred because he designated humanity with a characteristic that, God willing and the crick don’t rise, we might actually develop. But we are, in truth, Homo potentialis at best.

Astonishing Diversity

Not just the Christian Science Monitor, which has long specialized in looking at the entire globe, but these days also in the pages of the New York Times and in images on television news shows (we rather like the new World Focus) we see many images of Asian and African cultures. On World Focus our presenter is usually Daljit Dhaliwal, herself of Asian roots; we got to know her back in the days of BBC’s often hapless world news on PBS. By way of an aside, we knew Daljit by name before she had a chance to introduce herself—because Brigitte likes fascinating sounds, and Daljit Dhaliwal had been one of those. Just for fun, sometimes, Brigitte will remind me of Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, prime minister of Sri Lanka in the 1990s. And Brigitte is one of those who’d never dream of speaking of E. coli. No! She will produce the full Escherichia coli name at the drop of a hat and glory in each and every one of its rich, almost mouth-watering seven syllables. End of aside.

In any case, what with Africa in what appears to be a centuries-long turmoil of transition to the regions of Modernity, a process that unfortunately for humans always involves unutterable horrors of bloodshed, oppression, disease, and mayhem—plus our current culture-clash with Islam and our tense confrontation of Asia as an emerging economic behemoth—it is very easy to become aware of human diversity. The fifties and sixties were quite different. The signs of cultural mixing we sometime encountered back then took the form of ordinary white suburban youngsters dressed in odd robes approaching us in airports with “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare.”

After the news I went upstairs to do some reading, presently A History of Private Life, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium (Paul Veyne, ed., 1987)—a book that merely reinforces what surrounds me in the news if not in the flesh, namely that it’s always been so. The book documents a transition between what its French authors are pleased to call pagan antiquity to early Christian times. Greek, Roman, and the Israeli experiences are included. The authors deal with multiple layers of society that, in those times, often lived very different lives. The focus is on private life and hence illustrates diversity down even at the level we call real life, thus life lived at the personal level. Astonishing.

I woke up with that phrase this morning: Astonishing Diversity. I do believe that we go right on thinking after the body slumbers off—or rather, it seems to me that we detach, depart for celestial regions and then, in the morning, resuming our bodies, we kind of check in to see what the status at departure was—and there, in our brains, the traces of the last thoughts still glimmer, the fire not quite extinguished, and so we wake up as we fell asleep.

Unbelievable diversity—but at the core a single nature. This because we are quite able to put ourselves into the shoes of the most arcane past and present modes of thought and feeling with a little effort and imagination. Something stirred in me, and then I remembered that Mortimer Adler had somewhere addressed this very subject. Adler was the editor of the Great Books of the Western World, an enterprise begun jointly with Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago. Adler has been, still is, treated with disdain by some of academia’s aristocracy—perhaps because, as a popularizer, he gained wide recognition. Too bad. In my humble opinion Adler did more for real culture than most of that elite has done as a body.

Anyway, despite the ordered disorder of my so-called library, I soon had the volume in hand: Ten Philosophical Mistakes. In one of those essays, “Human Nature,” Adler defends the unity of human nature against its outright denial. This denial Adler assigns to existentialism, quoting Merleau-Ponty as saying that “it is the nature of man not to have a nature.” Adler’s defense may be stated this way: That which humans have in common, and that which makes the radical difference, is that all humans have the same potentialities—but these potentialities, while given to every human, may be—and are—developed in astonishing varieties. All other species are narrowly and genetically determined and therefore are essentially unchanging, but humans have a single potential which flowers in amazing ways. This supports Adler’s other characterization of the human condition, namely that humans are different from other creatures in kind, not merely in degree—a subject on which he produced a book-long exposition titled, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes.
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Books mentioned at Amazon:

A History of Private Life, Volume I, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium
Ten Philosophical Mistakes
The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes