What Is Your Experience of Human Nature?
posted May 14th, 2007 at 9:03 am by Betty
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Dalai Lama recently made a visit to Houston. On the Rice University campus, he spoke about compassion and tolerance.
Among his many inspiring thoughts his words about the young generation of the 21st century stand out for me. He rather bluntly stated that his generation (and those of us who lived through the latter part of the 20th century), instead of solving the problems, “created more problems in some cases.”
Yet he is optimistic, he declared, for the “young generation will create new reality in the 21st century.”
I think by “new reality” he means the younger generation will create a new way of seeing and thinking and feeling in the 21st century; they will practice compassion and tolerance. I don’t know about you but for me, I want to be in on that new creation.
The Dalai Lama did not go into the assumptions he is making when he speaks of this hope. I refer you to his The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living, especially Chapter 4 when he speaks of “Reclaiming our Innate State of Happiness.” In this Chapter he carefully sets out the new thinking about human nature that has arisen in recent scientific studies.
He first describes the old way of thinking about human nature and cites some of the philosophical and psychological giants holding the view:
Thomas Hobbes: “saw the human race as being violent, competitive, in continual conflict, and concerned only with self-interest.”
George Santayana: “wrote that generous, caring impulses, while they may exist, are generally weak, fleeting, and unstable in human nature but, ‘dig a little beneath the surface and you’ll find a ferocious, persistent, profoundly selfish man.’”
Freud: “claimed that ‘the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting, instinctual disposition.’”
Contrast these views, the Dalai Lama suggests, with recent scientific studies “indicating that aggression is not essentially innate and that violent behavior is influenced by a variety of biological, social, situational, and environmental factors.”
Take the 1986 Seville Statement on Violence (drawn up and signed by twenty top scientists), for example, that refuted the idea that humanity is innately aggressive: while acknowledging that of course violent behavior does occur, these researchers categorically stated that “it is scientifically incorrect to say that we have an inherited tendency to make war or act violently. That behavior is not genetically programmed into human nature.” And they continued: while we have the neural apparatus to act violently, that behavior isn’t automatially activated. There’s nothing in our neurophysiology that compels us to act violently. In brief summary, the Dalai Lama says that “most researchers in the field currently feel that fundamentally we have the potential to develop into gentle, caring people or violent, aggressive people, the impulse that gets emphasized is largely a matter of training.”
And from psychologists today we hear refutations that humans are innately selfish and egoistic: C. Daniel Batson and Nancy Eisenberg at Arizona State University have conducted numerous studies that demonstrate that humans have a tendency toward altruistic behavior. And sociologist Linda Wilson has theorized that altruism may be part of our basic survival instinct - the very opposite of what earlier thinkers theorized when they said that aggression and hostility were hallmarks of our survival instinct.
When the Dalia Lama was at Rice, he emphasized the natural bond between mother and child. And in his Art of Happiness, he speaks of the “tendency to closely bond with others, acting for the welfare of others as well as oneself,” as deeply rooted in human nature. This need to form close social ties persists up to the present day. “Reaching out to others may be as fundamental to our nature as communication.”
I would like your input on your experience of human nature. Our Magdalene Community has found in the Gospel of Mary an optismitc view of human nature and our quest is to reclaim our true humanness. Some have told me this is pie in the sky but I don’t think so. Also, in our Community, we are aware that the Gospel of Mary was a stream of Christianity that got lost in the West though it possibly moved into the East. Let me hear from you on this.
