Is human nature terminal?

To be or to become. Is that the question?

🕳️🐇 Join me in a tandem dive into a mystical, skeptical, wee-bit-grim rabbit hole.

A literal perspective of Easter is not an element of my current personal worldview, but perhaps because so many people are currently focusing on Easter themes, I find myself reflecting on them too. My abiding focal concerns directly relate to the archetypal patterns and themes at the heart of Easter, not to any specific doctrines.

Among the Easter-related themes abuzz in me this morning are:

• The principle that in bridging any gap between or among people, the person with greater capacity and agency has to meet the less capacious person where they are, not where it ‘would be nice’ or convenient for them to be.

• The slipperiness and counterintuitiveness of hand-up (direct engagement in a deeply relational context) versus handout (indirect, decontextualized resourcing, often with performance expectations) dynamics.

• Affordances: In the life sciences and design practices, the word ‘affordance’ means a feature of an object or process that makes some interaction with it possible, and in particular ways. For example, a cup’s handle telegraphs its purpose so clearly that no instructions are needed. The handle ‘affords’ grasping and orienting the mug.

When we perceive that someone’s circumstance is less well positioned than our own in a given context, we may consider helping them. To accomplish that, the better-positioned person must have or create affordances the other person can both recognize and effectively engage with. This can be tricky, especially if we lack adequate awareness and appreciation of their actual situation. (I am aware of colonializing tendencies and that many mines and tripwires lie hidden in assumptions of being better positioned than some needy other, but bear with me.)

Returning to Easter, in the Gospel story, God creates an ‘affordance’ at the organic level in human form. The more complete and competent Being meets the less complete beings where they are: as an organism in (yet clearly also apart from) the world-enmeshed situation of humans.

In any social context, choosing to really see and meet others where and how they are, rather than prodding them to be more like us, is not how humans tend to interact with each other.

This principle that the more capable one bears the greater relational responsibility is intuitively clear and compelling across all relational contexts. Consider the driver in a parking lot lane yielding to the driver backing out of a parking space. The driver in the lane is more capable by virtue of seeing more context than the driver backing out can see. The driver in the lane bears greater relational (specifically, safety ensuring) responsibility in this case. If she honks the horn and speeds ahead, she fails this common test of mature relationality. Examples abound and characterize not only individuals but also societies.

Implementation of asymmetric responsibility among humans is full of difficulties, of course, because

• We can mistake having more (money, social privilege, power, knowledge, etc.) for being the ones whose values and ways should be emulated.

• We can misapply empathy by trying to force others, “for their own good,” into our ‘enlightened’ patterns (which typically amounts to them being extraction sources).

• Via dark-triad personality tendencies, we can seek to disempower, dispossess, and dominate others.

There are endless ways to botch even sincere (if naive) intentions at giving a hand up, reasons often having roots in biases about what ‘up’ and ‘the other’ mean.

Moving back toward Eastery territory, I’m marinating in an unresolved tension between (a) sensing the fragmentary nature of myself and others and (b) my awareness of a Field enveloping, penetrating, connecting, and enlivening all within One. Inadequate awareness of and relating with that Field is what I perceive as separation from ‘the divine’, which is the gap requiring spanning, which calls for the agent with greater capacity to move toward the ones with less.

The curiosity I lovingly hold, while resisting an impulse to collapse the tension to doctrinal propositions is:

How can I, being a fragment of the Whole, meet and participate in That which is not fragmentary or incomplete? How can I, who am so limited, participate in the Boundless?

The ‘as if’ aspect here is in declining to look for or attach to definitive, crystallized stories or claims. I hold most claims, especially claims on or about Reality, as provisional. They stay provisional until they prove themselves.

I do have beliefs, beginning with the proposition that one of two propositions is true:

1. Some kind of materiality (energy, matter, space, time, etc.) is fundamental, and consciousness depends on and emerges from it, or

2. Some kind of Consciousness is fundamental, and we and whatever we can perceive, measure, etc., arise from It.

By the way, after pitching my tent in Camp 1 for years, I’m back in Camp 2, sans a lot of baggage from my years in Camp 1.

As for ‘sin’, I find the classic notion too simplistic. I believe there is something about how humans are shaped by evolution and reinforced by other evolved facets of human nature, something inextricable in our configuration, that locks us into an extinction-seeking path that entails a dilemma: We must either

• engineer or discover a way to change our fundamental nature to prioritize mutuality, stewardship, and ecological homeostasis, or

• become extinct (taking most macro-level biodiversity with us).

We are well on our way along the second path of the dilemma, the extinction path, with our collective foot mashing the accelerator pedal.

There’s a vast array of options available to us to avoid the worst, but we keep doubling down to act against our and Earth life’s better interests. How can anything but something innate and fundamental explain that?

Some expressions of religiosity claim to offer the first fork in this dilemma: fundamental change of human nature. While it has led to important civilizational outcomes, I see no evidence that religion alters the aspects of human nature in question. They are ‘hardwired’ by evolutionary configuration. When I say alter, I mean at the level of the neurological and endocrinological systems and processes that enable and modulate our affective (emotional) and cognitive functions and tendencies. Because alterations to fundamental human nature are taboo and likely will remain taboo in democratic societies, we will stay on the self-elimination path.

The heart of the dilemma echoes the saying of disputed origin, You cannot resolve a problem from the same perspective that caused it. But if the issue is inherent in our constitution, any attempt to pin it down and mitigate it will be distorted and undermined by it.

Scarier to many is the notion that we might actually discover the self-damning factors of human nature AND invent ways to mitigate them. That potential is frightening for at least two reasons.

First, we are back to the one who is the source of the issue being empowered to define and implement a fix at the level of essential configuration.

Second, even if the fix works, any change to human nature implies potential changes to individuals’ identities. I was a being who sensed, perceived, valued, and acted one way, but now that chain is altered. Am I still me? Attachment to our narratives about our identities causes much confusion and fear.

The only other potentially feasible end-run around our extinction-seeking that I can imagine is some form of benign, superintelligent absolute dictator that would deprive our species of the ability to keep acting in sociopathic, ecocidal ways. But if we are to design such a wise and superintelligent dictator, we would have to figure out how to prevent our human faults from infecting it. In any case, this option does not try to change human nature. It seeks to contain it. We would still be our pre-dictatorship selves, with the same extinction-seeking impulses, but constrained by a powerful and much-needed (if non-conscious) parent. Sadly, AI outcomes to date (specifically, LLMs trained on human content laced with human biases, blind spots, and values lapses) don’t give us much to hope for along this path.

In sum, religion can inspire us with visions of liberation through constitutional change, and we need such a vision, but in my observation, the troublemaking elements of human nature persist and wreak compounding damage. Let’s consider upping our game and taking explicit, evidence-informed charge of our fundamental nature.

We should hold on to the most promising, life-enhancing stories and ideas that originated in the past, adapting them from hereafter bypassing to here-and-now course correction. We also require new stories to inspire us to take the next steps for surviving and thriving here in this reality. This living world.

And that’s why I write, friends. It’s not much, but it’s something.

This bunny requires some air and sunshine. ☀️ 🐇 🕳️