THE DOVE PARTICLE: HUMAN NATURE AND AMERICAN POLITICS

Lecture given at Lewis University, Nov. 22, 2022

It is a fixture in the historical and scholarly and introductory literature to hold Thomas Hobbes to the view that people are terrible creatures. We are reminded time and again that Hobbes’s “state of nature” ensures a reality that is “nasty, brutish, and short.” This, of course, is not what Hobbes says in his masterwork Leviathan. One grows weary of seeing the same quotes over and over again—like Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” 

These quotes are used to distort the thinker’s actual arguments. Hobbes observes that, when you go to bed at night, you close your doors and lock them. Is this a reflection of your personal philosophy of human nature? Hardly.

Nevertheless, Hobbes does draw humans mechanically, as physicalistic beings. A number of thinkers during the Enlightenment sought to put a smiley face on Hobbes’s mechanical human. 

Two earlier thinkers, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Bishop Joseph Butler, set up what would become known as moral sense theory. Shaftesbury observes:

Because a sense of right and wrong is as natural to us as natural affection itself, and is a first principle in our make-up, there is no theory, opinion, persuasion or belief that can immediately or directly exclude or destroy it.

Butler, in his sermons at Rolls Chapel in London makes a similar case using similar language:

There is a principle of reflection in men, by which they distinguish between, approve and disapprove their own actions. ... This principle in man, by which he approves or disapproves his heart, temper, and actions, is conscience; ... And that this faculty tends to restrain men from doing mischief to each other, and leads them to do good, is too manifest to need being insisted upon.

We possess an internal, native sense of right and wrong, and tend toward former. This is not to suggest that people are angels, just that we are moral beings; we make moral judgments and use moral language—even the worst among us. 

Jean-Jaques Rousseau took the position that humans are motivated by pity. Rousseau says:

Pity is what, in the state of nature, takes the place of laws, mores, and virtue, with the advantage that no one is tempted to disobey its sweet voice. Pity is what will prevent every robust savage from robbing a weak child or an infirm old man of his hard-earned subsistence, if he himself expects to be able to find his own someplace else.

Yes, people do vicious things. But most of us do not. Rousseau maintains that we would be little more than monsters without this pity in our nature. We would live in the hell that so many attribute to Hobbes; we would tear one another limb from limb, with nary a thought given to our behavior.

Prominent Scottish Enlightenment figure David Hume challenged the history of philosophy’s position that moral judgments are the product of reason. Hume famously stated that “Morality is more properly felt than judg’d of....” Hume makes the case that morality is more a “neck-down” proposition than a “neck-up” one. Our sense of right and wrong is just that: It’s a sense, a feeling. Hume had a profound influence on friend Adam Smith, another key Scottish Enlightenment figure.

In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith lays out a more developed moral philosophy than Hume’s, one that recently seems to be garnering greater attention. Smith and Hume were certainly simpatico philosophically, and Smith, too, bases his moral philosophy on feeling, or sentiment. 

The first sentence in Moral Sentiments goes as follows:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

Smith sketches the moral conscience. Like Hume, he offers a “neck-down” hypothesis. He says that we desire naturally to be loved and to be lovely. That is, to be deserving of that love. One sees this all over the world. If one is only willing to look. I have had the good fortune to travel internationally and it’s hard to miss. Most people want the same things—to love their children, to seek to get along with their neighbors, to see their streets devoid of foreign tanks, and so on.

Yes, some people abuse their children, make for awful neighbors, and support military aggression. But the language is hard to miss. Those who support military aggression and abuse their children tend to use a moral vocabulary. Tyrants and war criminals use it. When the United States rained death and destruction on Vietnam, policy planners employed moral-sounding justifications. Americans were told the United States was doing wonderful things in Southeast Asia. Likewise in Iraq and Afghanistan in the twenty-first century. Naturally, it’s virtuous if we do it. We, at worst, make mistakes. The Russians and the Chinese don’t make mistakes. What they do is the work of the devil himself—even if they’re doing the same things we do.

However, most people do not behave this way. War criminals are rare. Child abusers are rare. Rousseau’s point about monsters obtains. If we were without pity, without sympathy, the world would be an absolute nightmare. Poor behavior unfortunately receives the preponderance of attention in the press. As they say, “If it bleeds, it leads.” But should our view of humanity be defined by CNN?

The world of twentieth- and twenty-first century science has repeatedly substantiated the work done during the Enlightenment. Primatologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, and psychologists time and again reference Hume and Smith in their books. 

Primatologist Frans de Waal has looked closely at mainly chimpanzees and bonobos and has noted the building blocks of our morality on display. De Waal notes that the animal kingdom is not as dog-eat-dog as we have been told it is. This characterization is not fair to dogs either, it should be added. The closer we look at animals, in general, the smarter they get and the more order we see. Where scientists saw little else but chaos in the jungle less than a century ago, we now see a relatively impressive amount of order and cooperation. This is not to suggest that chimps don’t fight, but when it’s a relation or a friend, they don’t go full throttle in the brawl. And conflict resolution is not rare in the world of chimps and bonobos. I highly recommend De Waal’s book, The Bonobo and the Atheist.

Developmental psychologist Paul Bloom at Yale is conducting fascinating research on babies and toddlers. Though this sounds sinister, Bloom, and his wife and colleague, Karen Wynn, conduct what amount to puppet shows for their diminutive subjects. And gauge the attention an infant will pay to a particular puppet. These “looking time” tests indicate the infant’s interest in a specific character. And time and again, babies show a preference for stuffed animals that behave well over those that behave badly. As Bloom summarizes in his book Just Babies:

[The] experiments suggest that babies have a general appreciation of good and bad behavior ... Now, we certainly haven’t proven that the understanding that guides the babies’ choices actually counts as moral. But the baby responses do have certain signature properties of adult moral judgements.

Bloom also says,

“[W]e are finding in babies what philosophers in the Scottish Enlightenment described as a moral sense.”

He quotes Hume and Smith throughout his book. Many—almost all—of the scientists I have looked at—De Waal, Bloom, philosopher Patricia Churchland who focuses on neuroscience, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt—mention and applaud Hume and Smith in their books. When the books arrive from Amazon, I remove them from the box, experience guilt for using Amazon, turn to the book’s index, and there they are. Hume and Smith are now—250 years later—the talk of the town.

Another instance of confirmation comes from anthropologist Christopher Boehm. Boehm suggests that it was 45,000 years ago that humans conducted a revolution, suppressed alpha-male tendencies, and created a more horizontal distribution of power in foraging groups. Equitable meat sharing became the priority in the context of large-game hunting. We are not sure what came first, the large-game hunting or the change in group dynamic, but now alpha-male greed would no longer be tolerated. Human forager groups became egalitarian. Over maybe a thousand generations, a list of behavioral expectations entered the human genome. You will know this as your moral conscience. When you do something wrong, it bothers you.

Scientific research has caught up to philosophy. In other words, we have not gone much further than Hume when it comes to major insights into the nature of humans. Perhaps Noam Chomsky’s work on linguistics might be added to the story—that language is part of our genetic endowment—but as for our understanding of human morality, the Scottish Enlightenment represents the high-water mark. We haven’t gone much past the eighteenth century.

We are a cooperative species that shares a universal moral core. There exists profound moral continuity across the globe. There is really very little moral disagreement in the world. I realize to some that sounds insane. But at the level of principle, there is broad species-wide agreement on a range of issues. It is at the level of value systems—which are cultural—where humans can get themselves into trouble. Because morality is biological, there tends to be similarity at the core.

At the cultural surface, we see greater diversity. Our religions are also like this: virtually identical at the core, dramatically different at the surface. Likewise, with our languages. At the grammatical core, it’s hard to tell English, Arabic, Greek, and Russian apart. On the surface, those languages are quite different: how they sound, their lexicons, and how they look could not be more different. Our religions and languages bear a strong resemblance to us: basically the same on the inside, quite different at the surface.

Like language and morality, culture is part of our biology. It is people, and not always people, imitating one another. Many animals do it, too. When you pick up an idiosyncratic mannerism or turn of phrase from a friend or loved one, that is the transmission of one unit of culture. You now do that thing with your head while you talk, much like your mother does, which is one meme. And when someone points it out, you have no idea what the person is talking about.

Humans transmit small things—like you and your mother doing that weird thing with your heads while you speak—and humans transmit enormous things as well. Extensive belief systems that influence people by the billions. Humans likely began as animists, viewing the forest as being inhabited with spirits and energies. And it was the tribal shaman, or witch doctor, who made contact with the spirit world—where dead things obviously went. The long-held assumption is that humans underwent the Agricultural Revolution, transitioning from foraging to farming, and then built structures and places of worship. The immense 22-acre archaeological site Göbekli Tepe in Turkey indicates a completely different narrative, where foraging groups started with the structure. The best guess is that Göbekli Tepe, which is 7,000 years older than Stonhenge, was a temple, a place of worship built by foraging communities. Not far from Göbekli Tepe, some of the earliest domesticated wheat has been found.

But it was the Agricultural Revolution that had perhaps the biggest influence on human religious orientation. For the first time, humans stayed put, cultivating crops on a farm. When people died, you buried them on the farm. And when more people died, you buried them on the farm. These burial grounds quickly got crowded. When foragers lost members of their group, they buried them wherever they happened to be and kept on moving. Not so with farmers. Now there was a cemetery. The farm therefore took on a spiritual significance. People began worshipping their ancestors. And not all ancestors were equal. The family patriarch or elder was paid greater reverence. These ancestors over time became “high gods” of immense power, some involved in human affairs. Fast forward thousands of years, to approximately the time between Homer and Socrates, we see the emergence of Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, and later, Islam. This all basically happened at the same time. And these major world faiths bear much in common, principally the Golden Rule, that is, I should not do to you what I don’t want for myself.

Humans seem to gravitate toward the spiritual. As paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer puts it, “Humans do seem to be preprogrammed for religious beliefs.” And historian Karen Armstrong takes the same position by saying: “[T]here is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus.”

There are important political implications to this narrative. If we are basically the same and are in greater moral agreement than not, it should stand to reason that we would want and need more or less the same things.

If we consult the public opinion polls, we see quite striking agreement among Americans. The artificial red-blue, liberal-conservative polarity disappears and the true centrist, liberal America emerges. And this point bears highlighting: the center of the political spectrum becomes the true center when we calibrate it to where most Americans stand on most issues most of the time. And when we consult the literature, we see that Americans are in agreement roughly to the tune of two-thirds on just about every major political issue. 

Raising the minimum wage: 70 percent

Free public college: 55 percent

Addressing “now” the rich-poor gap: 65 percent

Raising taxes on people earning more than $1 million per year: 68 percent

Medicare-for-all universal healthcare: 58 percent

A US–Iran diplomatic agreement: 55 percent

The right to a legal abortion (including “certain circumstances”): 85 percent

Loan forgiveness for students: 66 percent

Background checks for all gun buyers: 89 percent 

More stringent gun laws: 57 percent

Who feel corporations pay too little in taxes: 69 percent

Disagreement with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowing corporate money to flood the political process: 78 percent

Legalization of marijuana: 69 percent

This is not a definitive list by any means, yet the previous figures come to an average of 67 percent.

So, that’s the liberal center—liberalism being a centrist political philosophy. When John Locke authored his Second Treatise on Government, he didn’t do it as a radical. And when Thomas Jefferson described Locke’s work as “perfect,” it was likewise not as a radical.

When the center is calibrated correctly, certain questions arise. Why is Congress to the right of the population? Why do Obama and both Clintons and Joe Biden define what “liberal” is? Why is Bernie Sanders labeled a “leftist” and despised by journals like the New York Times? Bernie Sanders does not have a leftist or socialist bone in his body. He is an FDR Democrat and little else. He can call himself a socialist in much the same way that I can call myself a matador. But labeling a thing a particular name does not make it so. If Obama and both Clintons and Joe Biden define the left edge of respectable opinion, what does this say about the population? It is disreputable? Is it despised by the New York Times? Is it the case that what the population wants is radical and leftist and therefore is beyond the pale of legitimate political discourse?

Thinkers during the Enlightenment redrew the human being. They took into account humanity’s sense of pity and sense of sympathy and for the first time placed those feelings at the center of what we are. As David Hume said, “[It] cannot be disputed, that there is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove, kneaded into our frame…” (§IX) He does concede that the elements of the wolf and the serpent exist alongside it. But the elements of the wolf and the serpent do not define what we are.

Modern science continues to verify what these thinkers had to say. They laid an important groundwork that researchers today are corroborating in test after test, in book after book.

And this quickly becomes a political story, one I feel is worth telling, one that we would do well to bear in mind. We should be talking about politics, we should do it better than your uncles. We can dispense with the polarizing language of liberal and conservative—something I urge my students to do—and instead begin the conversation with what you want. And you will find there is much room for agreement. You can have a productive conversation that will likely not degenerate into bickering and the hurling of ideological labels at one another. The Enlightenment has shown us how to proceed. And if we would like to see a United States—fifty of them—in twenty years, we might follow their lead.