Are humans violent by nature? Is it possible for us to be nonviolent? Some say we are violent by nature. Some others say we are not so by nature but by choice, by habit and practice. We need to examine both the positions.
‘Violence is part of Nature’
A colleague of mine argues that the animals are violent by nature. If they are not so, they cannot survive. Humans too as a higher form of animals are violent. Violence is part of one’s biological makeup.
Response: On the one hand, the animals are violent according to the law of the jungle. The carnivorous ones are violent towards their preys which they have to consume for their survival. On the other, they take care of their little ones. The animals are guided by their instincts whereas human behaviour in principle is governed by intentions. I think we humans tend to be violent for two reasons: one, we too have our instincts which may not always be under the control of reason; two, some of us may be raised in and nurtured by an overpowering environment known for violent practices. In such cases, the instincts take the upper hand and we may be more under the pressure of our passions. That does not mean humans cannot transcend the environment. They can but may yield to it sometimes for some reason or the other. The animals are not moral beings whereas we are. I think the best definition of human is that they are moral beings. What about humans as rational, intelligent, linguistic beings? Is it not an excellent definition of humans since they are the only rational beings in the entire world? Yes, it is true that they are the only rational beings on earth. Why I uphold morality as superior to intelligence is that moral choices, decisions are made by us; we choose, deliberate in freedom and are responsible for our choices. Our choices can be creative, liberating, fulfilling, dynamic, purposive and in tune with our destiny.
Rationality is not of our making. It is something given to us by nature/God. We are born rational. We have not given rationality to ourselves but are endowed with it; whereas our moral choices are what we make. We are involved in them. Rationality is part of our being; morality is more of part of our becoming. We become more and more through our right moral choices. I know to be rational is to be moral. We cannot be moral without being rational. It is because of reason we are able to distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong, true and false. There cannot be morality without a rational basis. Nevertheless, the right moral choices more than our intelligence will eventually save us and the world. I do not underplay the importance of intelligence. The world today needs good human beings more than the intelligent ones. I think we have messed up the world with our intelligence. What we need is more of goodness to redeem the world. The right moral choices depend on our goodness. So we can decide to be nonviolent, communitarian and caring which are always in the making. Our entire life is an experiment with goodness which is inaccessible to the non-moral animal kingdom which is good in its own natural way. How different we are as moral persons in comparison to animals!
‘One Human is Wolf to Another’
In support of a violent human nature, people quote the philosopher Hobbes who says that one human is wolf to another and that human, in the state of nature, is selfish, brutish and nasty. None can be trusted.
Response: My understanding of Hobbes is that he says that in the absence of proper governance, which he calls the state of nature, there will be lawlessness or the law of the jungle. Lawlessness can be overcome and protection of life, family and property can be ensured only by proper governance through social contract. For him, social life requires a social contract. I tend to think that Hobbes did not pass judgment on human nature as such but he envisioned clearly total lawlessness in the absence of proper governance. Our selfish tendencies can be curbed by morality and genuine spirituality. Down through the ages there have been men and women known for their unselfish lives, altruism and commitment to noble causes. So a blanket statement that humans are selfish by nature is untenable. However, that does not mean humans have no tendency to be selfish.
‘Primacy of Instinct’
Historically, some people have had difficulty accepting humans as they are. On the one hand, there have been attempts to exalt human as a spirit caged in a body. This amounts to treating them as divine beings rather than human. Nietzsche wants human to become superman/superhuman. An impossible task, indeed! What we can try best is to achieve physical, intellectual, moral and spiritual excellence. On the other, psychologists like Freud, Pavlov, Watson and Skinner tried to bring human to the level of the animal. How hard it is to be normal and human in the face of attempts to turn human into either supra-human or subhuman!
The British writer D.H.Lawrence asserts the superiority of the instinct, especially sexuality over reason in his works such as Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Women in Love and Rainbow. For Sigmund Freud, sex is the most powerful drive in human beings and he explains all of human behaviour in terms of sex. The Behaviourists treat human as a higher animal and explain all human activities through animality, through stimulus and response with no reference to any mental act. Pavlov’s conditioned reflex too brings human close to an animal. The materialists reduce human to matter. For them, human is a highly developed animal with a complex nervous system.
“Behaviorism originated with the work of John B. Watson, an American psychologist. Watson claimed that psychology was not concerned with the mind or with human consciousness. Instead, psychology would be concerned only with behavior. In this way, men could be studied objectively, like rats and apes. Watson’s work was based on the experiments of Ivan Pavlov, who had studied animals’ responses to conditioning. In Pavlov’s best-known experiment, he rang a bell as he fed some dogs several meals. Each time the dogs heard the bell they knew that a meal was coming, and they would begin to salivate. Pavlov then rang the bell without bringing food, but the dogs still salivated. They had been “conditioned” to salivate at the sound of a bell. Pavlov believed, as Watson was later to emphasize, that humans react to stimuli in the same way. Behaviorism is associated today with the name of B.F. Skinner, who made his reputation by testing Watson’s theories in the laboratory. Skinner’s studies led him to reject Watson’s almost exclusive emphasis on reflexes and conditioning. People respond to their environment, he argued, but they also operate on the environment to produce certain consequences. Skinner developed the theory of “operant conditioning,” the idea that we behave the way we do because this kind of behavior has had certain consequences in the past. For example, if your girlfriend gives you a kiss when you give her flowers, you will be likely to give her flowers when you want a kiss. You will be acting in expectation of a certain reward. Like Watson, however, Skinner denied that the mind or feelings play any part in determining behavior. Instead, our experience of reinforcements determines our behavior.” [1]
Response: Aristotle defines human as a rational, social and political animal. Human nature is a combination of rationality and animality. As pointed out earlier, our basic bodily functions are similar to those of the animals. Believers in evolution might say that our instincts are so strong and overpowering because our ancestors evolved from the animals and the remnants of the animal are entrenched in us. If human is reduced to the status of an animal, then violence would be part of their nature and the law of the jungle would prevail. I think such a view must be corrected by an understanding of what is to be human. So we need a proper philosophy of the human person which would avoid extreme views in favour of a balanced and moderate conception of the human person.
“1. Behaviorism is naturalistic. This means that the material world is the ultimate reality, and everything can be explained in terms of natural laws. Man has no soul and no mind, only a brain that responds to external stimuli.
2. Behaviorism teaches that man is nothing more than a machine that responds to conditioning. One writer has summarized behaviorism in this way: “The central tenet of behaviorism is that thoughts, feelings, and intentions, mental processes all, do not determine what we do. Our behavior is the product of our conditioning. We are biological machines and do not consciously act; rather we react to stimuli.”
3. Consistently, behaviorism teaches that we are not responsible for our actions. If we are mere machines, without minds or souls, reacting to stimuli and operating on our environment to attain certain ends, then anything we do is inevitable. Sociobiology, a type of behaviorism, compares man to a computer: Garbage in, garbage out.
4. Behaviorism is manipulative. It seeks not merely to understand human behavior, but to predict and control it. From his theories, Skinner developed the idea of “shaping.” By controlling rewards and punishments, you can shape the behavior of another person.
In summary, the ethical consequences of behaviorism are great. Man is stripped of his responsibility, freedom, and dignity, and is reduced to a purely biological being, to be “shaped” by those who are able to use the tools of behaviorism effectively.” [2]
Behaviourism ignores the findings of cognitive science. Human is more than a being of stimulus and response syndrome. What makes humans specifically what they are, is their capacity for thinking, the most unique thing in the world. True, sex is a powerful drive in human beings. But to say that all of human behaviour is centred on sex is unacceptable. There are other motivational and driving factors present in human. Human is more than a biological being. To say that human is completely a material being and there is nothing spiritual about them is contrary to the experience of humankind. Such a view would deny the historical experience of human beings. Ever since human beings appeared on the face of the earth they have had a sense of the Divine/Transcendent. Even in our own technological age, we have not succeeded in getting rid of belief in the Transcendent. August Comte said that the religious and metaphysical stages of humankind would be surpassed by the scientific stage. That has not yet happened. Metaphysical and religious concerns are very much alive even today. These concerns point to what human beings are -- they are not merely a highly developed biological organism.
Are humans violent by nature? To answer this question we need to know what human nature is. Ontologically, every being has its own nature. Nature of a being refers to what makes a being what it is. In other words, the ‘whatness’ of a being is its nature. As is the nature of a being, so is its activity. Human nature is what makes humans human. ‘Humanness’ is human nature. What is humanness? Human is a rational animal. That means human is a composite being of body and reason whereas the animal has a body and instinct. It lacks reason. Human is unique in the sense of possessing reason. So human nature is constituted of both body and mind. Therefore, human activities are both physical and mental. As rational beings, humans have two faculties which are the intellect and the will. The intellect is oriented to knowing and the will to volition or willing. Humans are capable of knowing and loving because of the intellect and the will. It is because of the faculty of the intellect humans have accumulated colossal amount of knowledge known as information technology today. And it is because of the faculty of the will we are capable of decisions and choices. Both the intellect and the will constitute human rationality.
Human nature as such is good; it is not bad in itself. Metaphysically, we are all good. Theologically, whatever God created is good because he is good. God did not create evil. What we call evil is the privation or absence of a perfection which a being ought to have. Violence is an evil because it is the absence of goodness. Some people are violent and some others nonviolent. Are humans violent by nature? No, they are not. Violence is not a constitutive element of human nature. In other words, violence does not go into the making of human nature. If humans are violent by nature they would not have survived so long. Theologically, humans have a propensity to violence because of their fallen nature. But this propensity can be curbed by right moral choices, by making our passions subservient to reason. A violent person does not have an evil nature. He has human nature like anyone else which is ontologically good. But he chooses violence for some reason or the other. He makes a bad choice. His nature is not evil because he makes a bad choice. He has yielded to his propensity to do something bad. If someone slaps us, we feel like automatically slapping that guy back. But it requires enormous moral strength not to hit back. Nonviolence does not come to us spontaneously. It demands tremendous discipline and years of practice. Today’s global situation is such that our choice ought to be no longer between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.
Endnotes
[1]
DeMar, Gary. Behaviorism, The Forerunner, 1 April 1989. Retrieved on 31 March 2016.
[2] Ibid.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joseph Isidore Fernando is Professor Emeritus, Arul Anandar Autonomous College, Madurai, obtained a Baccalaureate in Philosophy from the then Pontifical Athenaeum, Pune; Masters in Ancient Indian Culture, MPhil in Philosophy and Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Pune; and a Diploma in Gandhian Thought from Madurai University. He participated in a Postdoctoral Research Seminar Program conducted by the Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, Catholic University of America, Washington D.C. and has presented papers at several international conferences abroad. He has been teaching philosophy in India, Thailand and Macau. His books are: Dynamics of Liberation: The Social Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., Pathway to Peace: A Nonviolent Lifestyle, and Heidegger on Science and Technology.
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