If they say why, why....

Human nature is more observed in the breach than in the observance. It has always been like this - it's unnatural for people to act or think naturally. Unlike animals, volcanoes and planets, humans have to be taught how to be humans - although there is undoubtedly a natural basis to what we do and what we are, the question of how that plays out in history requires work. It requires culture.

So human nature is one of those peculiar things that denies binary logic. It is fixed and yet it is always being changed.  This is a recipe for catastrophe and/or for salvation. It's nearly Christmas so we might as well choose salvation.

Recently I have been thinking about Rousseau’s famous indictment of agriculture and metallurgy as the moment at which human nature was fatally corrupted:

Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts which produced this great revolution. The poets tell us it was gold and silver, but, for the philosophers, it was iron and corn, which first civilised men, and ruined humanity. 

For Rousseau, before this moment human beings lived in a state of nature, wearing animal skins, living in 'rustic huts', and, crucially, working in such a way that they did not have cause to seize control of land as property or people as slaves. They were happy:

So long as they undertook only what a single person could accomplish, and confined themselves to such arts as did not require the joint labour of several hands, they lived free, healthy, honest and happy

When it's described so explicitly, this account of the fall of humanity from a state of nature into the paradise lost of the Industrial and Agricultural age seems, historically speaking, absurdly naive. And yet Rousseau's central point that property is the source of a lot of evil (There can be no injury, where there is no property) still has a lot of validity.

There are a lot of reasons to be very suspicious of this point of view. "There can be no injury, where there is no property". Oh really? Tell that to the millions upon millions of Ukrainians starved to death by Stalin in the 1930s. Tell that to anyone who's ever lived in a police state. If property is an affront to human nature then perhaps we're better off being unnatural? 

But I still think the idea has a lot of validity. Stalinism did not do away with property. It forcibly redistributed property for the purposes of maximising the power of the state. The central point that I take from Rousseau's thinking is that innovations such as metallurgy and agriculture worsened the quality of life for the vast majority of the agricultural labourers and proletariat, both in the public and private spaces of life, caught up in these revolutions. 

Rousseau's pre-agricultural fantasy about a state of nature is unnatural. Which is not to say that it does not have a reality. Its reality is in the form of a promise, a figure of  how things could change for the better. It is a trope that can be used to cast light on  political reality; but as such it is a utopia that tends to self contradiction if it forgets that it is no more natural than the dystopian reality it seeks to displace and transform. 

There can be no doubt that the victims of political idealism in the centuries since Rousseau published the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men number in the hundreds of millions. This does not mean that political idealism can be just jettisoned. 

For Rousseau, human nature is predominantly based on compassion and, all things being equal, a kind of self-love that is not manifested as a zero-sum game in relationships with others. These kinds of traits may not come naturally to many - however it is certain that they are 'in' human nature - otherwise they would not have a reality for people. 

The alternative to this version of human nature, as Rousseau well knew, was that advanced by Thomas Hobbes - it's natural for human beings to fear and suspect, fight and kill others. The same argument has to apply here, too. Hobbes has to be right - these things are 'in' human nature otherwise they would not have any more reality than the ability to communicate using sonar or breathe underwater.

The thing is, those traits that are in human nature are always subject to mediation, transformation, repression, exaggeration and so on. There is no human nature that is outside history. There is no human nature that is not cultural.

So on that note (culture), and returning to the opening, open question of catastrophe or salvation, I think it's time to paraphrase the Nazi 'poet laureate' Hans Johnst - "When I hear the word nature I reach for my Browning!"