Something About the Duality of Man

[tagonist]

Interesting read on reddit (from Ran as usual) entitled I spent about two weeks living in something very close to pure anarchy, and you know what? It sucked. about surviving the Chilean earthquake. Without getting into either the writer's observations or the voluminous comment threads that follow (though they are worth perusing on your own- be ready for smart people talking smartly about anarchism, with interruptions) the discussion sheds light on an interesting aspect of Western intellectual history: the vaunted "duality of man."

Bluntly, the duality of man means the difference between nature and culture. More precisely, it means the difference between the innate moral and ethical characteristics of "human nature" as embodied in the platonic individual, and those inculcated into actual existing people through their interactions with a social matrix. By far the strongest belief in history, predominant since people started writing down their philosophy for archaeologists to interpret, is what I would call the Classical Duality, which states that innate human nature is greedy, violent, untrustworthy, and dangerous, liable to kick your little brother and steal your chickens. Only by education, family and community ethics, law, religious belief, or threat of violence can these "primal" urges (the language recapitulates the belief) be controlled and channeled into the creative and loving society we all take for granted.

The classical duality expresses itself as an anxiety when social institutions seem close to rupture- when church attendance drops, when people forego formal education, when government seems preoccupied or confused, or when "law and order break down" and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The classical duality is behind the idea of the White Man's Burden, that claimed (erroneously) that as Europeans had the most sophisticated educational, artistic, legal, and civil institutions, it was their responsibility to rescue the savages of the world from their nasty, brutish and short lives. The classical duality remains a strong rhetorical feature of even modern political debates about the ethics of banking regulation and bailouts- economic actors are seen to be overwhelmed with greed and opportunism unless restrained by the civilizing hand of the SEC, without which they are prone to moral hazard. All kinds of social misbehavior, as percieved by any and all political tendencies, are seen as a failure of institutions to correctly instruct us poor misbehaving primates in right and wrong- police, unrestrained by oversight committees, will naturally abuse their power; unhappy couples without restrictive laws, will freely divorce; teens in the "moral vacuum" left behind by absent fathers in single-mother (or dual-mother, or mother-and-grandmother, or mother-grandmother-neighbor-and-big-sister) families will inevitably become amoral superpredators, etc.

The problem with the classical duality idea is that while there are always examples of antisocial behavior coming from people whose access to educational or economic resources is limited, the converse does not seem to apply. People *with* access to educational and economic resources behave terrible as well. The classical duality has run up against the real world many times in history, but probably never was dug such a large grave as the first world war. In 1914, Europe considered itself the most civilized, educated, and accultured people ever on the face of the earth, and what's more, those people were entering something that seemed like a new golden age. Mechanization and industrialization were moving from factories to consumer goods. Radio, affordable railroads and passenger ships, and even horseless carriages were melding a geographically disparate continent (and its colonies) into a unified, open world. The children of peasants were migrating to cities and finding wealth where their predecessors found only gutters and exploitation.

A patent clerk had changed the way the world thought about space and time, overturning centuries of Newtonian physics, a Viennese neurologist was midway through a career of opening the processes of the mind to science, and HG Wells had not only written half his works, he had inspired a man to become a Princeton researcher who would, the following year, patent the liquid-fueled rocket. The world had the narrative film, jazz, and submarines, and a man named "Ishi" ("Man" in Yahi) was being cared for in California as a survivor from another age.

Then, this happened:


What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

The most civilized people ever marched their educated, enlightened, sons down into the mud where they stood, waiting to be shredded in the name of their precious civilization. Here's the other Wilfred Owen poem you learned in freshman English by the way.

The counterpoint, never a significant majority opinion prior to the great war, was a romantic view of the duality of man. The romantic duality says, in contrast to the classical, that in fact the untampered state of human nature is far better than the person who exists in an acculturated world today. Here we find the tale of the "natural man"- the nature-mystic purged of the corruptions of civilization, the noble savage, the untampered tribe in the wilderness. If you're reading this blog and you've never come across this view of edenic innocence, I can't help you now.

The western tradition being what it is, scientists have attempted to find evidence for both the romantic and the classical views of the duality of man. Psychologists have searched for exceptional individuals, wolf-men and feral children, bereft of civilizing influence and left to their own internal compass for moral development. The history of this search is sad, since most of the "feral" humans turned out to be either autistic or abused (a magisterial treatise on the subject may be found here) and ultimately turned up few insights on moral development. It said a lot about language, but we'll get to that in a moment.

Anthropologists, meanwhile, searched for evidence of ethics or utopias among "primitive" peoples and had similarly little success. Two fallacies troubled early writings about so-called uncivilized peoples. First, when sample sizes are small, statistics are hard to compile. We think of Philadelphia as a city with a high murder rate, but if that same rate were applied to a village of 100 people, it would have been forty years since anyone had killed anyone- two generations without a homicide. Secondly, while many people seemed to enjoy a peaceful, happy life without any of the benefits of western civilization, this is not the same as saying people are uncivilized. There are sociable and antisocial ways to be !Kung, civilized and uncivilized ways to be Dine'; every culture has its rules and codes, and feels anxiety about those who do not obey them closely.

Two things happened in the middle of the twentieth century to significantly change thinking on the question of duality.



The first was the shakeout of psychological research in response to the horrors of the second world war and the holocaust. Experiments like the obedience tests conducted by Stanley Milgram (pictured) in which an unsuspecting subject, thinking themselves to be a lab tech, calmly electrocuted an actor when prompted to do so by the "senior experimenter," or the experiment by Solomon Asch in which participants agreed with actors posing as co-subjects that dissimilar lines were in fact identical, shook people's faith in the concept of independent moral judgment in the face of social standards.

The second event was Noam Chomsky's (yes, that Noam Chomsky) claim that human brains contained a "language organ" that generated every known language according to a set of biologically innate patterns. While languages themselves could vary widely, certain invariant conditions had to be met for humans to process symbolic thought, and furthermore humans raised without exposure to existing languages were as destined to spontaneously generate their own rule-following private languages as they were to learn to walk or swallow.

Suddenly, everything was different. The duality of man collapsed- it was no longer possible to separate psychology from culture, culture from nature, civilized from primitive, and any judgments or assumptions based on that separability were bound to come apart. The new question was, what is invariant, that is, present everywhere the same for all people (cultural squicks against mother-son incest), what was variable but constrained (circumstances under which killing is allowed, or classification of novel words) and what was truly free to vary (the definition of an attractive hairstyle.) None of these conditions existed entirely in the individual mind or entirely in the society in which the mind was embedded- a continuum of norms and behaviors connected people with communities, rising out of the architecture of the human mind, and the traditions and practices that these minds co-created together.

Without the duality-of-man model, though, social questions became very difficult. The conflict between anarchists and statists had always hinged on the question of whether people would be better off without legal and political control; now that (romantic) question seemed unanswerable. The project of socialism was to imbue the institutions with justice and rationality- a (classical) gambit that wouldn't contradict the psychological capacity of the individual for exploitation.

[ETA: I don't think I was very clear in the first draft of this paragraph. My point about socialism is that one can't design rational institutions independently. and then overlay them onto complex- and complexly cultured- populations. "Civilizing" institutions can no more exist in a vacuum than "primitive" individuals. Systems just aren't made of bricks/they're mostly made of people]

Stripped of moral concerns, advertising psychologists have learned well how to manipulate people under the new models, but social movements have shrunk from doing likewise, retreating to the classical/romantic arguments on the duality of human nature. So, what then?

I will never tire of recommending this woman:

Click to view

In 1985, Doris Lessing gave a series of lectures later collected as "The Prisons We Choose To Live Inside." The embed above is the first part of the collected audio. I leave you with no remark other than a suggestion to listen; no commentary I could add would better summarize her insight into the question of how cultural and political movements should respond to the revelations of social psychology and the collapse of the culture/nature dichotomy. If there is a way forward, it will have to dispense with the mechanistics of classical or romantic undestandings of "the mind" and focus instead on what we know about human cognition and behavior, viewed, as Lessing suggests, as clearly and dispassionately as we view the behavior of other species.

Believe it or not, she's a better utopian than the rest of us.

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