Placing boundaries around the human . . .
I would like to prompt some debate with a few questions that seems relevant to contemporary Anthropology, particularly for those of us interested in science and technology studies, human and non-human relations, material culture, semiotics and so forth.
Anthropology would seem to be an avowedly humanist discipline. Is there a view of "human nature" or "human being" that we could agree on, or that we implicitly employ without realizing it? Should there be? If not, why not.
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Permalink Reply by Keith Hart on
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This thread comes out of John McCreery's blog post Yes we Kant.
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Permalink Reply by John McCreery on -
First response: Why boundaries? Why not a prototype, instead. The question is then no longer a binary choice, human versus non-human. It is, instead, how close any particular example comes to the prototype.
Second response: Anthropologists in my generation were l taught to approach the problem from two directions: biology and culture. On the biological side, the paleontologists needed to distinguish homo sapiens sapiens from other similar species. On the cultural side, it was talk and tools, a.k.a., culture, that were held to distinguish humans from all other animals. Neither approach has resulted in hard and fast distinctions. Most of us, I expect, are aware of ethological studies that attribute tool use or rudimentary forms of language to other species and the never-ending debates among paleontologists about when genus homo split off from other primates and whether H. Erectus or H. Neanderthalis should be counted as fully human on a part with H. Sapiens. These distinctions remain, as Bourdieu asserts of all distinctions, sites of struggle.
Third response: Why not, I ask myself, a third approach? Serendipitously I am, as I have written before, reading Miller and Scott (2007) Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life. Observing that modeling adaptive social systems assumes the presence of agents and that agents are prototypically human individuals, I wonder if agency might be the key feature of humanity that we are looking for. I note, too, that confronted with the problem of how best to model agency, Miller and Scott turn to the Buddhist Eight-fold Path, as follows, translating the Buddhist path into examples of the model-builder's focus.
Path Focus
View Information and connections
Intention Goals
Speech Communication among agents
Action Interaction
Livelihood Payoffs
Effort Strategies and actions
Mindfulness. Cognition
Concentration Model focus and heterogeneity
P.94
Right View
"as Herb Simon pointed out, agents typically confront a wealth of information, and thus the scarce resource here is not information but rather attention. Given the inherent limits of information processing, agents must actively ignore most of the potential information that they encounter."
P.95
Right Intention
"the most interesting results come about when the outcome of the model is, at some level, at odds with the induced motivations of the agents -- to use Schelling's terms, when the micromotives and macrobehavior fail to align." Or when micro level and system level goals are out of sync.
P.96
Right Speech
"Models can differ in terms of the kind of information that is allowed to be communicated, how the information is allowed to flow among other agents, and the quality of the information."
Right Action
"Each agent receives and processes information and, by its action (or even inaction), generates information that influences the other agents and the system itself." Thus, the order (random or constrained, synchronous or asynchronous) in which agents act may be critical for the outcome.
P.97
Right Livelihood
"Payoffs can arise via the pure 'physics' of the model, where actions aggregate some benefit to, or impose some cost on, the individual agents." They may also be shaped by collaboration or negotiation between the agents.
P.98
Right Effort
"One feature that makes social science particularly interesting, and difficult, is the way in which agents anticipate and react to the potential behavior of other agents....Strategies can take many forms, from simple-fixed heuristics to elaborate optimization routines that change over time."
P.100
Right Mindfulness
"is the level of cognition employed by an agent: how smart should agents be? It is true that most agent-based models rely on simplistic agents, and people are often more sophisticated. Of course, as the evidence from behavioral economics mounts, it also appears that people are often less sophisticated than most game theory models assume. More likely than not, the sophistication of the agents is context dependent, and in some situations attempts at optimization predominate, while in others simple heuristics are employed."
P. 101
Right Concentration
"is the focus of the model—namely, it requires the model to be just sufficient to capture the phenomenon of interest. Models always have contexts, and what works well in one context may fail in another."
A notion of humanity that comprised all this and asked how human beings came, as both biological and social beings, to be this way, strikes me as far more promising than yet another rehash of now ancient debates.
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I am not greatly interested in what makes us different from other life forms nor do I believe that the parameters of 'being human' have already been established. Rather I ask what potential we have as a species to act as responsible stewards of our planet's future. Chimps, ants and the rest may have qualities that overlap with ours, but I doubt if they could generate the means to correct the global processes that human beings have set in train. As my friend Skip Rappaport used to say, we are the frontal lobes of the biomass, the only part of life on earth that can think.
As it happens, I agree with Engels when he said 'My dog is rational'. But dogs think as individuals and we have built collective means of thinking, knowing and acting that they can never participate in. So the issue is less our individual capacity to think, but rather what steps we are taking to enable us to think as a species. The invention of writing, the book, libraries and printing launched this process well before the machine age, but the digital revolution, building on a century of radio, telephones, movies, television and the rest has clearly speeded up the creation of a universal communications network with the potential to express universal ideas effectively for the first time.
Marcel Mauss said that Homo economicus is less a feature of the remote human past than a teleology to which we might aspire in future. I have launched a book and a research program based on it (involving a dozen people so far) that seeks to identify principles of "the human economy". Our focus is on what people do and how to make ideas for economic improvement practically accessible to them. The motives for economic action are taken to be holistic, not based on narrow self-interest; but they need to be empirically determined. Economic life is invariably complex, being realised through plural institutions of a very particular kind. And finally, humanity is the sum of all humans who live, have lived and will live; a moral quality of kindness; and a historical project for our species whose outcome is far from certain. We have created a world economy that in many ways contradicts the goals of freedom, equality and democracy on which global civilization ought to be founded. It is an urgent priority to figure out how to put it right.
What does it take to be human in this context? We have to learn to be individually self-reliant and to belong to others in many complex ways. This task is made harder by a culture that posits self-interest against mutuality, the economic against the social. How many human beings do you know who have successfully reconciled these poles? So I tend to think of humanity as a strategy whose aim is to devise more effective insitutions at the species level. Being able to think as a species does not preclude thinking as an individual. In fact, it depends on our capacity to do both. For this reason, I believe that the digital revolution in communications will not stop until we are able to replicate at distance what we do with each other face-to-face.
We are a long way from such a future, but what humanity does now will have major repercussions for the generations to come, whose number may be limited. Identifying what is human and what not is for me prospective, not actual.
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Permalink Reply by John McCreery on
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the digital revolution in communications will not stop until we are able to replicate at distance what we do with each other face-to-face.
Murder? Rape? Torture? Deception?
We have, if I am not mistaken, two proposals on the table: the first, advocated by McCreery, is what Clifford Geertz called a 'model of' the human. The second, advocated by Hart is what Geertz called a 'model for' the human. The first, based on the Buddhist Eightfold Path as interpreted by Page and MIller, is richly, if still abstractly, specified. The second is a 'teleology,' a grail, described as a state of affairs in which, "The motives for economic action are taken to be holistic, not based on narrow self-interest; but they need to be empirically determined." Neither speaks directly to the concerns that motivate Reno, who needs a definition of human nature both broad and compassionate enough to include persons with disabilities, which lead others to treat them as less than human, as well as such currently only imaginary but certainly possible creatures as aliens from outer space who resemble cannibalistic crabs or artificial intelligences (I am thinking of the Prador and the AIs in Neal Asher's Polity series of science fiction novels).
Where shall we take this? Josh, what would be most useful?
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As far as I understand it, Josh was inviting wide participation from the membership. Do you think your last post increases or diminishes the chance of that, John? The previous thread was an in-house trio, but I was hoping for more than that here. That's why I delayed posting.
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Permalink Reply by John McCreery on
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Given that we are midway between Christmas and New Year, I'd expect participation to be slow. Be that as it may be, I will wait upon Josh's advice before proceeding further. It his his thread, after all.
Keith Hart said:
As far as I understand it, Josh was inviting wide participation from the membership. Do you think your last post increases or diminishes the chance of that, John? The previous thread was an in-house trio, but I was hoping for more than that here. That's why I delayed posting.
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I appreciate Heesun's comment, especially for her specific references. I agree that the category of non-human is too broad and often misleading. There has been a spate of writing in recent decades, some of it playful, some less so, along the lines that she explores here (Latour and ANT, Haraway etc). The general idea is what's special about being human? Why give Pasteur the credit when the molecules do the work of fermentation? The exercise of identifying non-human actors is even claimed to be 'democratic'. As it may well be from some points of view, such as a dog's. (My mother-in-law used to remind visitors "not to treat my dog like a dog".) So I would suggest that, instead of just listing a variety of opinions on either side of the fence, we could identify why our position matters. At least I can explain where I am coming from on this issue.
My question is, How is democracy attainable unless each of us can determine our own personal responsibility in a world driven by unknowably remote impersonal forces? Morality concerns the principles of good behavior, what we ought to do.Although it is possible to express “the good” abstractly as a rule – “always be kind to children and animals” — morality can only be expected of persons who face the choice to be good or otherwise in complex situations that cannot be reduced to simple rules. What politics, law and business have in common is that they define “the good” in a collective sense. A group must be protected from subversion, disorder or loss and this more general good may require leaders in particular to sacrifice personal morality to that impersonal end. When society is organized through depersonalized rules, as ours has been for a century or more, the normative exclusion of personal judgment as a force for good or evil provokes a permanent moral crisis. It is hard to discuss this crisis using the methods of impersonal social science, although that hasn’t stopped some from trying. I like to draw on works of fiction, since they are designed to give dramatic expression to this very question.
So we enter collectives of various kinds as ways of coping with the world and even making society more inclusive. They are obviously human in that people made them, but the ability to direct them is highly unequal. Before the late 19th century the law distinguished between real and artificial persons. The latter included churches, political parties, businesses and many other kinds of association. Real persons in law were you and me, individual citizens. Rights and duties were different for the two on the grounds that living persons generally have less longevity, wealth and power than artificial persons.
For over a century now, business corporations have been exempted from this legal distinction (but not the rest). They retain limited liability for debts, unlike us, but have acquired the full rights of individual citizens. Thus Walmart can claim discrimination under the 14th amendment (designed to prevent unequal treatment of blacks after emancipation) if a town tries to protect its small shops against another hypermarket. The US Supreme Court ruled only this year that preventing corporations from backing their favourites in a so-called democratic election would infringe their human rights. No wonder the US Congress serves mainly the interests of the rich. Thomas Jefferson held that democracy has most to fear from ruling elites, organized religion and mercantile monopolies (which he termed 'pseudo-aristocrats'). I fear that we have lost the ability even to see the threat.
This is the context for my perspective on the fashion to elide the difference between human and non-human actors. If chimps could be their own anthropologists in a thought experiment, if inanimate objects can be actors, how could we begin to establish grounds for resisting the usurpation of our democracy by organizations that are actually the result of human action and represented by human beings? I realize that this is my beef and not necessarily anyone else's, but it is why the question of what is human matters to me. General Motors is not a human being. I will start from there.
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Permalink Reply by John McCreery on
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General Motors is not a human being.
An excellent point, and one, don't be surprised, Keith, with which I totally agree. Would you extend its logic to, for example,
China is not a human being or
Kurds (considered as a collectivity) are not a human being?
In other words, would you extend its implications to other artificial, a.k.a., socially constructed "persons," including nation states and "nations" that aspire to become nation states?
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Permalink Reply by John McCreery on
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I fear that we have lost the ability even to see the threat.
Who is the "we" in this assertion? I can see its force if applied to anthropologists qua anthropologists, especially those of us who are untrained in the arcana of corporate groups, kinship and marriage, property and succession to office, topics that once linked anthropology to the legal scholarship from which now-despised structural-functional analysis emerged. That said, one has only to subscribe to any number of political websites, especially those on the progressive-liberal-left end of the political spectrum, to see that awareness of this issue is, in fact, quite high among other segments of the politically engaged intelligentsia.
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John McCreery said:
I fear that we have lost the ability even to see the threat.
Who is the "we" in this assertion?
See The Hit Man's Dilemma.
1. We as in modern English speakers for whom trust is now "belief in a person, idea or thing". So that I can equally trust John McC, the dollar or my car, whereas before and in places I have studied, trust is something reserved for persons.
2. We as 20th century citizens who have grown up with the collapse of the legal distinction between real and artificial persons as it affects corporations. This has led to the usurpation of our democracy by plutocracy. Not that you would notice from the general media.
3. We the anthropologists and cognate intellectuals who disparage the democratic tradition as a fraud and support plutocracy indirectly by eliding the difference between human and non-human actors.
The first claim is unassailable but so what? The second is more of a stretch and the third even more so. I would like some anthropologists or indeed anyone to try to clarify the interaction of governments, corporations and ordinary individuals in contemporary world society in ways that have a chance of reaching beyond parochial journals and websites. Moreover I believe that the whole trend of postmodern social thought works to obscure how power is exercised in our world. So finally, we as in humanity.
I wrote a longer answer and lost it, hence this telegraphic reply. But the link is a summary of a short book.
Also I seem to have inherited a larger font from John's post and can't change it.
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Yes, John,
I am aware that the issue is much more general than the particular case I have settled on as my bugbear. In order to make society on a larger scale, we have to create abstract entities like nation-states, churches, business corporations etc. In my first major post here I wrote of the need to extend intelligence to the species level. This might lead to our individuality being swallowed up in collective identities of a huge and abstract kind. But I don't think it has to mean that. If we keep our focus on live human beings, we will always have to grant that level significance in any discourse or action involving larger persons or indeed planetary coordination.
My point is that collapsing the difference between individual human beings and the collective entities they join is as harmful as insisting on a radical separation of the two or repression of one pole, as in market and totalitarian ideologies. Language itself has the property of generating inclusive categories in which each of us can so easily lose ourselves. So it takes a particular intellectual effort to keep the poles of our social experience in controlled relations of identification, separation and dialectical interaction. It doesn't help that our education militates against such thought habits. Anthropologists have colluded in making it difficult to think about individuals and collectives separately and at once by preferring to generalise about the latter. There are exceptions and I celebrate those. My question is, What is the place for human personality in a world driven by huge impersonal social forces? In the end, whatever the scale of our collaborations, it pays to remember that they only hand out brains one at a time.
John McCreery said:
General Motors is not a human being.
An excellent point, and one, don't be surprised, Keith, with which I totally agree. Would you extend its logic to, for example,
China is not a human being or
Kurds (considered as a collectivity) are not a human being?
In other words, would you extend its implications to other artificial, a.k.a., socially constructed "persons," including nation states and "nations" that aspire to become nation states?
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Permalink Reply by John McCreery on
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If we keep our focus on live human beings, we will always have to grant that level significance in any discourse or action involving larger persons or indeed planetary coordination.
Keith, I agree, absolutely. Here we stand on common ground. Given that my own tradition is that of a Lutheran boy raised in the same county as the Yorktown battlefield where the last battle of the American Revolution was fought -- with Luther's "Here I stand, I can do no other" and Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" words I was taught to venerate, I could never disagree with what you say here. I join with Jefferson and the other signers of the Declaration of Independence in affirming that,
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
I see no human group, be it nation, corporation or tribe as immune from what Jefferson writes about governments. All are instrumentalities to be judged by their contribution to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by their members—and, I would add, the rest of humanity. All this is bedrock as far as I am concerned.
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