Human Nature
emjohnson | July 28, 2009Conservatives and liberals conflict over their basic views on human nature.
As an evolutionary anthropologist and student of history, I'm always fascinated to learn what politically motivated figures have to say about human nature. It's one area of life where people require zero expertise but can still claim authority in. A case in point appears in Newsweek where Yuval Levin, Fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, insists that "Partisanship is Good" because it is based on conflicting assumptions about human nature.
Our deepest disagreements coalesce into two broad views…
emjohnson | July 24, 2009English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679) is widely held as the "father of political science." His 1651 book Leviathan makes the case for why monarchy is the only political system that is consistent with human nature. He bases his argument on the following assumption about humans in "the state of nature" (what we would now call indigenous peoples):
Let us return again to the state of nature, and consider men as if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity without all kind of engagement to each other . . . Whatsoever therefore…
emjohnson | July 9, 2009Ernest Cline, director of the recent film Fanboys, has this hilarious spoken word piece that pretty sums up my philosophy perfectly. It's put to music by The Penguin Cafe Orchestra and is accompanied by an 80's style film strip which only adds to the fun.
For more of his great work (including spoken word, info on his films and his blog) click here.
*Obligatory note: Humans are not monkeys. We're apes along with chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons. In general, monkeys have tails whereas apes do not. But I agree that the word monkey is much funnier.
[Video below the fold…
emjohnson | July 3, 2009Human nature is one of those concepts that, like "common sense", everyone knows what you mean but no one knows how it's defined. Ironically, the most insistent proponents of human nature are often those who have benefited from the status quo in society and prefer people to remain just as they are.
June 27 (the day before my son was born) was the birthday of the famed feminist, author and political radical Emma Goldman. I had the opportunity to spend last summer at the Emma Goldman Papers in Berkeley, California to study her unpublished speeches and correspondence. As someone who was…
emjohnson | June 29, 2009
Sunrise on the Maasai Mara, Kenya. Vearl Brown / Creative Commons
From the beginning our human family has been on a journey. Born together, in eastern Africa about 100,000 years ago, our ancestors migrated to distant points around the globe. Our family scattered, communication was cut off and, in most cases, we forgot about them all together. We went our separate ways and lived our separate lives. Like siblings each adopted by different parents in distant lands, we came to identify with where we were raised instead of where we were from. Now, after accumulating so many years of…