The idea of humans as animals, as specifically the most distinguished species of great ape, though often passingly acknowledged, is rarely given the focus it deserves when we are attempting to understand human behavior. The Abrahamic myth is that we humans are essentially spiritual beings who fell into likeness with animals. The Darwinian narrative is that we humans are the product of millions of years of natural selection on an upward climb. Not necessarily a spiritual climb, but certainly an intellectual climb separating us from all other animals. We like to think of ourselves as a distinct sort of being.
But we are animals still. Sometimes I think that at our most worthy level of development we broach a post-animalistic existence. But we are never quite there as far as I can tell. Something of the brute clings even to our most spiritual gestures still.
So we should put more thought into not just what ancient instincts account for our actions today (how often do you hear a talking head on NPR tell us that, well, our ancestors had to eat as much high-calorie food as they could get because calories were scarce for cave dwellers… Or some such stuff), we should put more thought into how those instincts drive our present actions in our private psyche as well as in all our social relations. We should do all we can to re-consider Hobbes’ notion of a “State of Nature,” taking from that primitive attempt the idealized, hypothesized, impossible past. We are IN a state of nature now.
The notion, which is associated most closely with Nietzsche but which is by no means original to him, that the quest for power lies behind all human actions may be helpful. It is certainly better than Freud’s notion that sex is the most fundamental impulse. But the thing about instincts is that there is nothing behind them. They are just there. Evolutionary processes tell the bee to dance and the bird to migrate and Donald Trump to lash out with absurd lies at everyone who challenges him. None of them know what they are after. And placing linguistic or conceptual abstractions upon instinctive actions, though certainly to some degree useful and even enlightening, is always going to be a limited and misleading move.
If we think of power, we can see a lot. If we think of love or sex, we can go a long way to making bizarre actions less discomforting. But we don’t really explain the actions. We domesticate in the Glad bag of narrative. It may be the best we can do if we want our knowledge to be comforting, to give us power over what we are endeavoring to understand. The problem is that we will be able to substitute any number of concepts into the center and reconfigure the elements endlessly—as it seems to me we have been doing ever since the Enlightenment at least. We could certainly put “comfort” in the center of that circle rather than power or love.
Animals act in response to impulses wired in their brains, into their autonomic systems, in an analogous way that a computer acts in its programmed way in response to the impulses it receives, though slightly less precisely (or nothing would ever evolve; it’s the accident and the mistake that keep species going in the ever changing universe). So what’s more important to explain is not why people act certain ways in certain defined circumstances but rather to notice HOW they act in these circumstances. Girardian anthropology is a good example of this. He explains how violence becomes revenge which becomes counter revenge, which spreads like a virus through a society until the very existence of the society is threatened by the war of all (in various tribal configurations) against all, until the violence is finally put to an end by a symbolic sacrifice.
The pattern seems universal, though various mechanisms, including religion, can keep it at bay indefinitely.
Courtship behaviors (no surprise) also follow the identifiable, repeated patterns, from eye contact across a room to coitus. And so do all human behaviors, everything going on under the glances, the physical contact, the tone of voice, the word choice, the stammering out of sentences, the poses one makes to assert oneself in a group, the heckling, the pounding of the chest at the finish line, the harassing of the weak, the grabbing of a pussy by a troglodyte who hasn’t the capacity to think or endocrine system to block the impulse. Our fundamental animal guides as not only in virtue of or individual bodies but as a response to our environment. Every classroom has a bully and a clown just as every gender bending school of angel fish has an appropriate mix of male and female.
I'm sure that a lot of this essential work is being done in various fields, my profound ignorance (so clearly manifest in this sketch) notwithstanding.
The goal of this sort of knowledge goes beyond the comfort of understanding but leads toward the two goals of living in harmony with our animal and overcoming the beast.
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