Understanding Human Need 2e. Dean, Hartley
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СКАЧАТЬ – while uniquely capable of comprehending that imperative and of innovating to provide for its needs – demonstrates a tendency for self-destruction: first, because of its potentially fatal impact on the ecology of the planet it inhabits (Lovelock, 1979); and secondly, some would suggest, through its own revolutionary digital technologies. These technologies are impacting, perhaps unstoppably, upon the culture of human societies; not only are they providing new ways of automating the production of tangible goods and services; they are also facilitating the infinite mobility of capital as the intangible store of conceptualised wealth upon which ‘growth’ is postulated to depend. They are capable of generating new forms of artificial intelligence that portend the possibility that human beings may eventually be superseded by intelligent machines (Kurzwell, 2005). Thirdly, we can’t conclude this hasty overview of the human species’ development without some mention of its propensity for violence among its own members and the possibility that it has developed the capacity to destroy itself through thermo-nuclear war. It must be acknowledged that there is some limited evidence of occasional killings of humans by humans during the prehistoric era of hunting-gathering societies, including disturbing incidents of both infanticide and senilicide (that may have been, if not necessary, instrumental to the survival of foraging groups). But human history has since, of course, been replete with violent struggles, armed conflicts and wars, and in this respect the species is wholly unique.

      In the overall scheme of things, homo sapiens is a young and precocious species, that within a staggeringly short period of time has transformed both itself and its natural environment. It has wrought destruction on itself and the planet. But its needs and the ways in which it both succeeds and fails in meeting those needs are a complex function of the essential characteristics of the species itself.

      The thumbnail sketch of the human species that has just been presented is one premised on a two-fold humanist assumption: first, that the human species was not divinely created but has naturally evolved; second, that it is unique and fundamentally different from other naturally evolved creatures. Humanism – or humanisms – has taken a variety of ideological forms, some of which accommodate themselves with religious beliefs and others that claim to assert principles they believe to be somehow ordained by nature, or which they contend to be self-evident. Humanism can be manifested as an implicit form of human arrogance – an assumption of superiority over other species and of dominion over the planet and its resources; or else as an explicit quest for a secular alternative to religious beliefs and religiously inspired and/or supposedly apolitical value systems (see, for example, Cave, 2009).

      The earliest humanists were to be found among the classical Greek philosophers, and in Chapter 3 we shall pay particular attention to Aristotle’s thinking about human nature and human well-being. The philosophers of the ‘Enlightenment’ era took the thinking of their Classical forbears in different directions; directions that we may associate directly or indirectly with the principal competing ideologies of the modern era that followed (Hamilton, 2003; Harari, 2011; 2017).

      Liberal-individualist humanism would become the most enduring modern orthodoxy. Central to its emergence has been ‘Cartesian dualism’: the seminal distinction drawn by Descartes (1637) between the human body and the human mind, and the conception of a person not merely as a natural living organism, but in a very separate sense as an individual thinking being. The emphasis upon essential individuality and freedom of the human being spawned the supposition that it is through reason and the senses that human beings can divine for themselves the universal moral rights and duties that should govern relations between individual members of the species (Kant, 1785; Locke, 1689). Liberal individualism – premised on empiricist philosophy – can take many forms, but as will be seen in later chapters, it has been a hegemonic influence within the international world order. It continues to underpin the assumptions of market economics and, as we shall see, a particular understanding of human rights.

      Solidaristic humanisms, of which there are several, have a more ambivalent attitude to the individuality of the human subject, illustrated initially, perhaps, in the manner that the romantic philosopher, Rousseau (1762), sought to combine the principle of individual freedom and ‘sensibility’ with that of community; with the idea of collective identity, the collective interest and the ‘general will’. Rousseau’s ideas, it is supposed, helped fuel the French Revolutionary demands not only for liberté and egalité, but also fraternité or solidarity. However, the emphasis on solidarity or community would find expression in very different forms of communitarianism:

      •some conservative, which would seek to preserve elements of the traditional sources of social order and security;

      •some reformist, which seek to temper the extent to which unfettered individual freedom might undermine cooperation, sharing and substantive equality between human beings;

      •and some revolutionary, which have sought to establish a form of human society founded (and managed) entirely on strictly collectivist principles.

      Critical to these kinds of humanism is an acknowledgement that Descartes’ ‘thinking individual’ does not think alone: her understanding of the ever-changing world around her is shaped intersubjectively through her relations with others. And it was supposed by Hegel (1821) that there is something essential to the character of humanity – some ‘absolute spirit’ or mind2 – that drives our shared understandings. This idealist interpretation of the human condition is consistent with a caring and sharing form of social conservatism, as it is with certain religious beliefs. Critics of Hegel – most particularly Karl Marx – adapted Hegel’s insights to argue for social changes that might unlock or realise not some abstract ‘spirit’, but the substantive potential of humanity; its distinctive ‘essence’. During the Industrial Revolution, Marx and Frederick Engels directly influenced the emergence of modern socialism in both its reformist Social Democratic and revolutionary Communist or state socialist variants.

      Supremacist humanism might seem to follow from a particular interpretation of Darwin’s (1859) theory of natural selection and an assumption that not only have humans achieved supremacy over other species, but also that the fittest and strongest human beings will, or indeed should, achieve supremacy over weaker and inferior members of the species. However, the seeds of this approach had been sown in Hobbes’ (1651) earlier portrayal of human society as a ‘war of all against all’ and it found explicit expression in the views of Nietzsche (1883), who, having proclaimed that God is dead, contended that human beings are primarily driven by their own ‘will to power’. Darwin’s evolutionary theory, of course, was concerned with a natural process, but if human beings are capable of consciously seeking domination over other members of their own species, then it is through war, conquest, genocide and eugenics that the species might supposedly improve itself or else evolve an aristocratic super-human elite or super-race. The most extreme and by far the crudest illustration of this paradoxically misanthropic form of humanism is fascism (Harari, 2017: 299–300). But central to supremacist humanism is the celebration of greatness and the capacity of great men to exercise leadership, impose order and achieve subservience within СКАЧАТЬ