"Changing Human Nature"
(Speech prepared for a Worldcon panel chaired by Steven Barnes, with Andrew Adams, Eric M. Van, and Courtney Willis.)
Has human nature changed through recorded history, or are we the same old apes with new technology?
Coincidence is a wonderful thing. It's a wonderful thing, also, that the notion of coincidence is a relatively new one. What might once have been regarded as the invisible hand of god or gods at work in our lives took on a new, Jungian significance when introduced to the collective unconscious. Now, it could be something quantum at work, or just evidence of selective attention. Either way, it's a wonderful way to keep life interesting and, as it happens, to research for a panel.
No sooner had I been given the topic of this session when references seemed to leap at me from all directions. My interest normally, primarily lies in the way humanity may change in the times to come. The novels I've set in near and far future include Metal Fatigue, which puts notions of moral and physical humanity side by side to see if there's a match; The Resurrected Man and the Orphans series, both of which examine the notion of the copy and the self as the Other; Geodesica explores humanity's evolution as an on-going, self-actuated process that results in clashes over "ownership" of word itself. Finally, Astropolis, my new series, deals with four key expressions of humanity resulting in a caste-war that will engulf the whole galaxy.
Science fiction is full of such issues because we, as a self-aware species, cannot help but wonder about them. We like nothing better than drawing boundaries around things and naming them--including ourselves--and then arguing with each other about what the definitions mean.
The question "Has human nature changed through recorded history?" can have only one possible answer. If you believe in evolution, how else would we have crossed the bridge from the human/ape ancestor to the present day? Humans didn't spring into life fully-formed; such a leap couldn't be crossed in one step; so there must have been a gradual change.
Even if you believe that the bible contains a literal history of creation, there's reason to consider that humanity has changed: the Fall from grace in the garden of Eden, plus the life spans of some early humans like Noah and Moses, who may have lived for hundreds of years, suggest exactly that.
But what is humanity? It's one of those terms that demands definition but, like "consciousness", is notoriously slippery. To say that we know it when confronted by it, like pornography, is dangerously sloppy because the converse--to know what isn't human just by looking--can lead to all sorts of atrocities.
Perhaps we can look for it in the way we perceive and interact with the world around us. Perhaps we can demonstrate what sort of people we consider truly human by examining the rights we accord certain members of our species, such as children, criminals, movie stars, Muslims, nerds, the mentally disabled, and detainees in Guantanamo Bay, to name just a few. Our definition and application of human rights is historically quite changeable, yet we strongly resist any extension to closely related animals such as the great apes, even though they, arguable, are more human than some of our actual relatives.
This is where the coincidences started to pile up. New Scientist ran two articles in recent weeks that touched on this very topic. Henry T Greely, professor of Law and director of the Centre for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford Uni, wrote on the topic of physical enhancement, saying that "Some seek human nature in religion, but religions are generally fairly vague about what level of naturalness God intends." Fair enough. He also says that "Humans have long experience in treating other members of their species unequally; the express affirmation that all men are created equally is not rooted deeply in our history."
This notion of the changeability of humanity was echoed in Simon Blackburn's review of The Rise and the Fall of the Self by Raymond Martin and John Barresi, in which he discusses changing notions of free will and the self. "Barresi and Martin provide an enjoyable and rich account of the history of personal identity in western thought, from Plato and Aristotle, through the Stoics and Epicureans to the Christian world, and then up to our scientific consciousness, and finally to the more literary and narrative conceptions of the self that have been prominent since the late 20th century, which have us constantly telling and retelling ourselves who we are, thereby constructing our identities in something like the way an author constructs a character." Heady stuff, if you'll pardon the pun.
The web connecting
all this together, the third coincidence, came when my partner, a lecturer in
English and History at
So the notion of the self is slippery and changeable, which should come as no surprise given that it can easily be altered by lack of sleep or food, drugs, brain damage, mental illness, hypnosis.
The notion of the self is intimately and inevitably entangled with the notion of humanity. If one changes, so must the other. Humanity consists, after all, of the aggregation of individuals calling themselves human.
Sidonie Smith has a lot to say on this subject, including this: that "the individual self could endure as a concept of human beingness only if, despite the specificities of individual experience, despite the multiplication of differences among people, the legend continued to bear universal marks." That is, we're alike enough that we can call ourselves a species and recognise those who are like us. But at the same time we're different. "All 'I's are ontologically identical, rational beings, but all 'I's are also unique. This is the stuff of myth, imperious and contradictory."
If we can be so uncertain about who or what we as individuals are, how can we dare to presume to define what constitutes our species as a whole?
We belong to a species that through class systems, slavery, warfare, and the like, is quite accustomed to dehumanising people who are, by most definitions exactly the same as us. Few people today would regard an indigenous Australian as anything other than human, but it wasn't always the case. To me the question of whether our notions of humanity have changed seems, therefore, rather moot.
Perhaps it's no surprise that I should be bombarded by such issues when I'm thinking about a panel like this. We do, after all, devote a very large percentage of time to thinking about ourselves and how we fit into the greater scheme of things. Mainly the former. I don't know about the rest of you, but I could ponder it all day. What I'm going to eat, or wear, or say at events like this. It's probably not so different to what goes through an ape's mind, but with better vocabulary.
An article in this month's Scientific American describes how Paleolithic cave art might not be the work of shamans or artists, but graffiti by teenage boys concerned, as always, with hunting and mating.
The second half of this panel topic is: are we the same old apes with new technology?
The burgeoning field of evolutionary psychology gives us a lot of reasons to think, despite everything I've said so far, that the answer might be "yes". And truthfully, my cynical feeling is that we remain disturbingly ape-like, unable sometimes to see past knee-jerk territorial threats, beyond the immediate future, outside our familial or social groups, through anything more complex than basic interpersonal negotiations. Our perception of ourselves with respect to each other might have changed somewhat, but beneath that, beneath that self-reflective veneer, lurks all manner of primitive muscle. We might not like it; we might pretend that, by admitting it's there we somehow exorcise its power. But it's not going to go away so easily. The best way to be caught out by ourselves, by our all too human natures, changeable or otherwise, is to pretend that we are other than ourselves--smartly dressed apes who like looking in the mirror.
This is something we need to overcome, I think, either without our involvement, by letting evolution take its course, or willingly, by genetic or other forms of modification, or against our will, by letting others take those steps and maybe enforce them upon us.
Humanity has such
potential. Exploring that potential is
part of what makes science fiction so popular--in my mind, anyway. I have no doubt that humanity will not
achieve the heights I dream of (long-term, stable civilisations,
justice and freedom, equality, dominion over the galaxy and partnership with
nature, etc) without changes to what makes us tick. Fundamental changes. Instead of putting a suit on the ape and
hoping for the best, let's take the suit right off and teach the ape new
tricks. Unlike with dogs, that’s remains
an option.