In Search of Human Nature

Mary E. Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134447688
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Human Nature offers a wide-ranging and holistic view of human nature from all perspectives: scientific, historical, and sociological. Mary Clark takes the most recent data from a dozen or more fields, and works it together with clarifying anecdotes and thought-provoking images to challenge conventional Western beliefs with hopeful new insights. Balancing the theories of cutting-edge neuroscience with the insights of primitive mythologies, Mary Clark provides down-to-earth suggestions for peacefully resolving global problems. Human Nature builds up a coherent, and above all positive, picture of who we really are.

NOTES

Introduction

1 Much of the material in this Introduction was presented in an essay, “Life: What Is It?,” at the Sixth Conference of the International Society for Philosophy and Psychotherapy, which had the theme “Life, Love, and Death,” Oct. 13–15, 1998, FuKuang University, Elan, Taiwan.

2 Karl Popper (1959: 5).

3 William Hazlitt, quoted by W.H. Auden in A. Freemantle (ed.) (1964: 13).

4 Edwin Hutchins (1996).

5 For an excellent yet brief discussion of the Laplacean fallacy, see Michael Polanyi (1962: 139–42).

6 To date, I have not been able to locate the original print from which I made this remembered drawing. At the time when I saw it, hanging on a faculty member’s office wall, it caught my eye and I studied it for many minutes, even though, at the time, I had no knowledge of the myth of Indra’s Net. When, many years later, that myth came to my attention, this image immediately came back to me. Thus, while I cannot vouch for its “authenticity” as a representation of Indra and his net, it seems to me to conform to what such an image might well have been in an artist/believer’s mind.

7 Thomas Cleary (trans.) (1984: 21).

8 Ibid, p.19.

9 Ibid, pp.20–1. The reader may find some parallels here with the nature of a hologram.

10 David M. Standlea (1998). Quote is from p.96.

11 Mary Catherine Bateson (1990).

12 Murray Gell-Mann (1994: 303). See also Alan Lightman and Owen Gingerich (1991) for an analysis of when scientific theories can no longer absorb “peculiar facts” and a discipline begins to change its viewpoint about the working “truth” it describes. They explore the human psychology involved in changes in world view.

13 At the turn of the millennium the British Government’s Natural Environmental Research Council reported that although some of the countryside is beginning slowly to recover from devastation during the past half century, other parts continue to decline. See John Vidal (2000).

14 For how unpaid interactions lie outside the social accounting system, see Jeremy Rifkin (2000). For how helping others is highly emotionally rewarding, see Robert E. Lane (2000).

15 Robert E. Lane (2000: 26ff). See also Michael Ellison (2001).

16 While I was living in England in the 1950s, the resettlement of nuclear working-class families to new “family housing” tracts in London’s East End destroyed extended family relationships. Parents with small children found themselves physically separated from the grandparents who helped to look after the children on a day-to-day basis, but who now could not afford the bus fare to travel each day to their children’s new homes.

17 See, for example, Harvey Jackins and others (1999). Jackins founded “Re-evaluation Counseling” in the 1970s. Although not a trained psychologist (and perhaps for this very reason), he has developed powerful insights into human psychological repression and methods for dealing with it. See also his The Benign Reality (1981).

18 See Harvey Wallace (1999) for excellent discussion of this still understudied topic. Domestic violence affects far too many people in Western countries, especially the United States. There is some question as to whether the incidence of domestic violence has been increasing or is simply more frequently reported in recent decades owing to changes in overall cultural attitudes that permit victims and outsiders more freedom to speak out and obtain social backing for intervention. Whole societies in the past have exercised “macro-denial” of common violent behaviors that occur in private. See Stanley Cohen (2001).

19 Catherine Cameron (2000). Although Elizabeth Loftus and others have argued that most memories are unsubstantiated, many others, such as Cameron, have files of corroborated cases that cannot be dismissed. See Elizabeth Loftus (1994) and E.F. Loftus, S. Polensky, and M.T. Fullilove (1994). Alexander McFarlane and Bessel A. van der Kolk (1996) counter Loftus’ arguments in detail, explaining the complexity of memory formation at different ages and of conditions of recall; they also note that perpetrators as well as victims are subject to amnesiac, dissociative repression of traumatic occurrences (see especially pp. 564–71).

20 Bridget F. Grant (2000). On page 112, she writes: “Approximately 1 in 4 children younger than 18 in the United States is exposed to alcohol abuse or alcohol dependence in the family.”

21 See Rodger Doyle (2000) and Sissela Bok (1998) for insightful descriptions of American attitudes toward violence.

22 Aaron Kipnis (1999: 4) reports how this happened to him after he was beaten as a child by his stepfather.

23 Psychiatrist James Gilligan, M.D., former director of mental health for the Massachusetts prison system, states: “America has for many years had the highest per capita imprisonment rate in the world,” higher even than the Soviet Union or South Africa in their most repressive heydays (Gilligan, 1996: 23). By the turn of the millennium, two million people were incarcerated in the United States, 10 to 50 times the rate in all other industrialized nations. Interestingly, U.S. presidential candidate Al Gore lost thousands of votes in Florida, enough to have made him president, had not the Clinton administration disenfranchised so many black exfelons who had served sentences for merely using drugs (see Duncan Campbell, 2000b).

24 Kipnis (1999: Ch. 6, “Drugs and Criminalization”). Many European countries, particularly Holland, have had considerable success decriminalizing drugs, thus removing organized crime and all its money from the equation. Not only has drug use dropped, so have crime, AIDS, and other socially costly diseases, not to mention prison costs (see Kipnis, 1999: 137–8). And on July 1, 2001, Portugal, a socially conservative country, enacted a law that totally decriminalizes drug use, treating it as a social and health problem instead. (Holland and other liberal countries simply ignore their laws against drug use; Portugal is the first to legally treat it as an illness.) See Giles Tremlett (2001).

25 Anecdote is by personal communication with David Groves, 1998. Other data are from the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation’s 1999 survey, “Kids and Media at the New Millennium,” reported in John Leland (2000).

26 Herbert I. Schiller (1973); Jerry Mander (1978); Michael N. Nagler (1982). For the effects of media violence on society see Thomas Robinson et al. (2001), Craig Anderson and Brad Bushman (2002), and Jeffrey G. Johnson et al. (2002).

27 Eliot Marshall (2000d). For manmade environmental pollutants as a cause of ADHD, see Theo Colborn et al. (1997), especially Chapters 10 and 11.

28 See Leland (2000), cited in n.25 above.

29 Linda Holler (2002).

30 Lucinda Franks (2000). See also the interview on NPR’s Merrow Report, November 29, 2000.

31 P.C. Violas (1978: 13).

32 The political hue-and-cry of presidential candidates campaigning during the 2000 election about keeping America’s future economy competitive by pushing schoolchildren to meet ever-higher academic standards is a case in point. No one seemed to notice, during the month-long post-election battle over “validly marked ballots,” that had children in earlier decades been trained in citizenship as well as academics, today’s voters would have been as skilled in the voting booth as they are in the workplace.

33 Elliot Aronson (2000: 13 and 15).

34 Ibid, p.19. Elliot Aronson (2000, ch. 6).

35 See also Ron Powers (2002) for an insightful look at the causes of increasingly violent acts among American teenagers from middle-class homes. He repeatedly demonstrates the absence of meaningful community and feelings of significance in their lives.

36 Nathalie Guibert and Marie-Pierre Subtil (2000: 33).

37 Alice Miller (1980).

38 The November 2000 issue of Multinational Monitor, and many other issues as well, document ongoing corporate and regulatory failures to protect workers’ physical health. Mental stresses on workers are also the subject of numerous monographs, including such classics as John Kenneth Galbraith (1978) and Paul Wachtel (1983). More recently, see Eileen Applebaum and Rosemary Batt (1993), John Kotter (1995), Anthony Sampson (1995), and Richard Sennett (1998).

39 Wachtel (1983: 120).

40 Sennett (1998: 22).

41 Lewis Carroll (1883/1960: 209–10).

42 See Brayton Bowden, and Public Radio Partnership (1999).

43 See Vern Baxter (1994) and Vern Baxter and Anthony Margavio (1996). See also Tom Brown interviewed by Bowden (1999) for the Public Radio Partnership, Tape #5, and Brown’s own book, The Anatomy of Fire (1999).

44 Two recent books making this point are: John Gray (1998) and Peter Söderbaum (2000). The first is more polemic, the second more measured in its arguments, with suggestions for modifying our definitions of “economic values.”

45 The historic search over several centuries by the Russian people for their own identity – and their failure to find it as they looked outside themselves for “models” to follow – has been well documented by Esther Kingston-Mann (1999). This sad story is being replicated today by any number of societies trying to “modernize” by copying the West, especially the United States.

46 Alan Briskin (1999a, 1999b).

47 Urie Bronfenbrenner et al. (1996: Ch.3). For the situation in Great Britain see Richard G. Wilkinson (1994).

48 Tom Brown in Bowden (1999), Tape #5.

49 Rodger Doyle (2000: 22).

50 Bronfenbrenner et al. (1996: Ch.21).

51 Kipnis (1999), various places.

52 Ibid, pp.173–4.

53 Data cited by Alan Briskin (1999a), Tape #5. See also Shankar Vedantam (2002).

54 James Garbarino (1996).

55 Curtis Gans (2000).

56 Joseph Tainter (1988). Today the impact on our natural support syst...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• A Word to the Reader
• Introduction
• I: Questioning the “Scientized” Image
• II: Why We Primates are Not “Game Theorists”
• III: The Selecting of Homo Sapiens
• IV: Brain Matters
• V: A Thirst for Meaning
• VI: How Experience Shapes the Brain
• VII: “Who am I?” – Where Biology and Culture Meet
• VIII: History, the Story of Meanings Through Time
• IX: Humankind Crosses the Rubicon, 1900–2000
• X: Conflict: Control or Reconciliation?
• XI: The Search for Autonomy Within Community
• Postscript
• Notes
• Bibliography