04 February 1999, 838 words
The most useful paradigm I know for understanding human nature is evolutionary psychology. Developed by the anthropologist John Tooby and psychologist Leda Cosmides, evolutionary psychology is based on a quite simple premise: that human nature is determined by the imperatives of genetic survival.
This is not a perspective which finds much favour among traditional social scientists or other intellectuals who favour the Standard Social Science Model. For one thing, many of them would vehemently deny that such a thing as "human nature" even exists. From their perspective, how people behave and think is determined entirely by unique cultural factors and specific relations of power. Yet evolution tells us beyond any reasonable doubt that we all come from the same ancestors. Thus, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, author of How the Mind Works, writes: "A universal structure of the mind is not only logically possible, but likely to be true. A fundamental consequence of sexual reproduction is that every person's blueprint is scrambled with someone else's. That means we must be qualitatively alike. Natural selection is a homogenizing force within species...That is why all normal people have the same physical organs and why we all surely have the same mental organs as well."
In other words, since our biology is the same, it is a reasonable hypothesis that all human beings in all cultures also have the same basic patterns of thought and emotion. This, of course, is not an idea that people like Rajnie Ramlakhan and Devant Parsuram Maharaj would find palatable: that is why they continually try to deny that their ancestors were African. It is also why one of the unsigned Maha Sabha columns ridiculously asserts that "according to Hinduism, the world is billions of years old. This method of dating shows the superfluousness of arguments advanced by a number of people in respect of the presence of the first man in the world and his country of origin." (I find a sort of morbid fascination in trying to understand a psyche so diseased it requires a constant denial of a million-year-old event.) Unfortunately for Hindu and white racists, DNA analysis and fossil evidence clearly show that homo sapiens sapiens first arose in Africa and then spread over the rest of the planet. Also, racial differences are trivial, constituting a mere .012 percent of genetic difference between racial groups, which is unlikely to have any effect on anyone's biological competence.
So, if people are basically the same, then their cultures must also be basically alike - again, not an assertion that will find favour with the Selwyn Cudjoes or Kamal Persads of this world. "Contrary to the widespread belief that cultures can vary arbitrarily and without limit, surveys of the ethnographic literature show that the peoples of the world share an astonishingly detailed universal psychology," says Pinker. Consider, for example, as subjective an issue as the perception of beauty. Far from being in the eye of the beholder, as popularly supposed, there are certain fundamentals that people of all cultures recognize as defining beauty and, what is more, even perceive across cultures. These fundamentals are symmetry, cleanliness, unblemished skin, clear eyes and intact teeth - characteristics that all reflect health and fertility. In a well-known experiment, psychologist Devendra Singh showed photographs of females bodies of different shapes and sizes to hundreds of people of various cultures, ages, and sexes. Everyone found that a waist-to-hip ratio of .70 or lower (women with this ratio are more fertile) is most attractive. These results suggest that the hour-glass figure is universally aesthetic, and weight - within the limits of obesity or chronic malnutrition- irrelevant.
The same thing applies to mental traits. Consciousness is expressed most directly through language, and all human cultures have words for the elements of space, time, motion, speed, mental states, tools, flora, fauna and logical connectives (not, and, some, opposite, part-whole, general-particular). Therefore, all human beings basically think in the same way.
And what applies to body and mind also applies to feelings. In a famous experiment done in the 1960s, the psychologist Paul Ekman showed photos of six emotions to people from many cultures. Everyone recognized happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust and surprise. This seems like only common sense but it proves, contrary to what racists would like to believe, that people from different cultures are all equally human.
In Trinidad, where several diverse cultural groups have been pressed together in a small space, many of us have long understood all the facts just quoted. "I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad," writes Derek Walcott. What is true for the poet is truer for the person. In terms of human culture, Trinidad provides us with an evolutionary advantage. Those who have taken advantage of this advantage, whether intuitively or intellectually, are among the most evolved human beings on the planet. But those who have not are Neanderthals and, unfortunately, such people still dominate the political, social and intellectual life of our society.
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh