On Human Nature

By Wade Lee Hudson

Assumptions about human nature shape beliefs about the potential for change. Reflections on human history and child development indicate that compassion and the desire to cooperate are more primal, stronger, and deeper than hate and the desire to dominate. Which instinct prevails depends on many factors, including training, social conditions, and personal decisions. As Sitting Bull said, “Inside of me there are two dogs. One is mean and evil and the other is good and they fight each other all the time. When asked which one wins I answer, the one I feed the most.”

When people feel secure, they’re more likely to be loving and cooperative. But when they’re insecure, they’re more likely to be hateful and domineering — and willing to submit. Insecurity hardens the tendency to form ingroups and outgroups. Healthy competition becomes vicious. The hope to improve your material condition becomes all-consuming.

Society can encourage one pole or the other — domination or cooperation — or it can nurture a balance. Most countries have been grounded on more solidarity than the United States, where the driving force has been libertarian hyper-individualism. But many countries are becoming “Americanized.” Movements affirming communitarian compassion in the United States have countered the dominant self-centeredness with some success, but how deep and lasting those efforts become remains to be seen.

Understanding early human history and the emergence of modern societies helps to clarify human nature. Initially, most human beings lived in lush environments as hunter-gatherers. Examples include Native American tribes in Northern California prior to the Spanish invasion, and the Bushmen in southern Africa who were separated for 150,000 years from Western influence by an enormous, impenetrable desert. The Spanish who invaded California and anthropologists who studied the Bushmen have provided compelling descriptions of these cooperative lifestyles, which have been reflected elsewhere as well.

These examples indicate that so long as humans were blessed with ample food, they lived in highly egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies. Generally, men and women were roughly equal. Hoarding and displays of authority were discouraged. Sharing of food and material goods produced economic equality. The Bushmen even used certain rituals to discourage greed and envy. Given abundance, hunter-gatherers felt no need to conquer nearby bands, much less enslave them.

Over these almost 200,000 years, evolution firmly established in humanity’s DNA the deep, innate tendency to be good, friendly, and cooperative. Likewise, it’s instructive that our closest animal relatives, chimpanzees, prefer cooperating over competing—though selfish tendencies are also exhibited. (The innate pursuit of truth, justice, and beauty is also refseen lected in infants and toddlers, who are naturally curious, caring, and awestruck.) With the growth of modern civilizations, oral traditions preserved the memory of primordial peace, harmony, stability, and abundance with myths such as the Garden of Eden. The hunter-gatherer in our DNA persists.

Then, for multiple reasons, about 11,000 years ago the development of centralized, single-crop, grain-based agriculture required the storage of food. This led to the risk that neighboring peoples would raid stored food and enslave inhabitants. Partly as a way to guard against this threat, towns formed militarized social hierarchies that imposed taxation, conquered and enslaved neighbors (partly to prevent being conquered by them), and built protective walls that confined populations. These trends inflamed the innate human tendency to be hostile toward “the Other” and separate into ingroups and outgroups. Humanity began to feed Sitting Bull’’s mean dog. 

Along with the growth of agriculture and centralized population centers, governments emerged with the power to establish and enforce laws. Along side these governments, religious institutions formalized themselves and established spiritual practices. The relative balance of power these institutions varied over time and regions. The religious institutions served to legitimize governments, which in turn protected them—unless the government was an outright theocracy ruled by religious leaders. Regardless, these religious leaders were not merely power hungry. Their beliefs were genuine and they truly wanted to convert non-believers.

In the American colonies, Christian religious groups were powerful. According to the Facing History website, “Most attempted to enforce strict religious observance through both colony governments and local town rules…and laws mandated that everyone attend a house of worship and pay taxes that funded the salaries of ministers.” And in New England, “Government in these colonies contained elements of theocracy, asserting that leaders and officials derived that authority from divine guidance and that civil authority ought to be used to enforce religious conformity.”

Isabel Wilkerson reports that “the conquering men” who seized America “took preexisting notions of their own centrality, reinforced by their self-interested interpretation of the Bible, and created a hierachy of who could do what, who could own what, who was on top and who was on the bottom and who was in between. There emerged a ladder of humanity, global in nature, as the upper ring people would descend from Europe…. Everyone else would rank in descending order on the basis of their proximity to those deemed most superior.”