The old human nature problem
- George Black
- Articles Editor, OnEarth Magazine
- Blog | About
- Posted June 25, 2008 in Solving Global Warming
My worst arguments with my father were always about human nature. He was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, and his trump card in any political dispute was always to say that my high ideals about social reform were all very nice, but eventually I’d realize that you couldn’t change human nature. People were inherently short-sighted and self-interested, and the common good didn’t really grab their attention until it came and battered down their door.
The other day I was talking to someone who has written as widely and as wisely about global warming as anyone in the country. We were discussing my recent cover story on Bangladesh in NRDC’s OnEarth magazine, and the need for long-term (meaning 20-50 year) plans to confront the humanitarian emergencies and potential security threats that climate change and sea-level rise will cause in poor countries. Some diplomats, for example, are beginning to talk about creating a World Environment Organization with real enforcement powers, something like the World Trade Organization. My companion smiled ruefully. “It’ll never happen. People don’t think in those terms. It’ll take a million-casualty catastrophe to really wake people up. You can’t change human nature.”
This person is no conservative; quite the opposite. So I was shaken by what he said, wondering if my Dad was right all along. At my advanced age, that’s a tough thing to admit. Especially since, as we gird ourselves for the next phase of the climate wars, I need all the optimism I can muster.
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Comments
Earl Killian — Jun 25 2008 09:05 PM
Since we don't understand human nature, to use it as the basis of an argument is a cop-out. Consider those people who stood up to the bullets in Romania until the regime capitulated. Was that not also human nature?
Perhaps some words from George Monbiot's Manifesto for a New World Order will help:
"Another reason why we do not act is that, from the days of our birth, we are immersed in the political situation into which we are born, and as a result we cannot imagine our way through it; we cannot envisage that it will ever come to an end. This is why imagination is the first qualification of the revolutionary. A revolutionary is someone who recognizes the contingency of power. What sustains coercive power is not force of arms, or even capital, but belief. When people cease to believe – to believe in it as they would believe in a god, in its omnipotence, its unassailability and its validity – and when they act upon that belief, an empire can collapse, almost overnight.
"Those who possess power will surrender it only when they see that the costs – physical or psychological – of retaining it are higher than the costs of losing it. There have been many occasions on which rulers possessed the means of suppressing revolt – the necessary tanks and planes or cannons and cavalry divisions – but chose not to deploy them, because they perceived that the personal effort of retaining power outweighed the effort of relinquishing it. One of the surprises of history is the tendency of some of the most inflexible rulers suddenly to give up, for no evident material reason. They give up because they are tired, so tired that they can no longer sustain the burning purpose required to retain power. They are tired because they have had to struggle against the unbelief of their people, to reassert, through a supreme psychological effort, the validity of their power."
Václav Havel said something similar in Disturbing the Peace:
"I have never fixed my hopes there [in the sphere of power]; I’ve always been more interested in what was happening “below,” in what could be expected from “below,” what could be won there, and what defended. All power is power over someone, and it always somehow responds, usually unwittingly rather than deliberately, to the state of mind and the behavior of those it rules over. One can always find in the behavior of power, a reflection of what is going on “below.”