In a previous blog, I discussed how humans create constructs, narratives, paradigms or presuppositions to fill the gaps between what we observe and what we can’t explain. That article logically leads to the question, “what are More Spock’s presuppositions – what are the things More Spock believes to be true that are unprovable?” Here are a few:
People are people. Homo Sapiens emerged from Africa some 70,000 years ago and as they migrated to the various corners of the globe, some genetic changes emerged that altered skin tone, hair color, eye color, and some other superficial traits. But humans behave the same way the world over. We experience and express the same emotions. We love our children, smile when we see someone familiar, laugh when something is funny, cry when we are sad, and fight when we perceive a threat. Our ancestors were just as smart as we are, and as educated as their access to recorded knowledge allowed. Humans are clever, creative and industrious the world over. Music, art, dance, and language are part of the human experience from earliest recorded history to the present.
Humans are tribal. While there are always examples of a person who chooses to exit society and live a solitary life in a shack or cave, most of us elect to live around other humans. In the early days of written history, the tribe was literally the tribe, clan or family unit. Later it expanded to the city-state, empire, or religion. In modern America, people are loosely affiliated with multiple tribes. One might simultaneously see themselves as an American, a member of a specific racial group (white/black/hispanic/asian), a member of a specific ethnic group (Irish/Italian/Chinese/Jewish), a member of a religious group (Roman Catholic/Methodist/Sikh/Muslim), a mid-westerner, a Chicagoan, a Northwestern University alum, a White Sox fan, and a member of a gender group (male/female/other) just to name a few. People are not equally committed to every tribe for which they qualify. Generally, whatever they are most passionate about defines their primary tribal allegiances.
Humans are motivated by self-interest. More specifically, to summarize theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, humans in groups are motivated by predatory self-interest. Early humans strove to protect their food sources and other resources from predators, including competing tribes of humans. If one tribe’s food source became exhausted, they might go across the hill or valley and forcibly take what they needed from another tribe, even if it meant slaughtering those other humans. Humans build constructs to justify their predatory behavior. Human history is the story of humans being unbelievably cruel to other humans while simultaneously accomplishing amazing things.
If superficial genetic changes such as skin tone had never evolved, the world would still look about the same. Because humans are tribal and predatory, even if every human had the same skin tone, eye and hair color, we would have found other ways to separate ourselves into “us” and “them” tribal units. For example, imagine this scenario: Hannibal leads Carthaginian forces to victory over Rome in 215 BCE. Rome is destroyed and Carthage in North Africa becomes the seat of the modern world for the next thousand years. Imagine clans in modern day Germany, France, England, Scotland and Ireland staying divided and somewhat technologically primitive. They are eventually colonized by the Africans with their superior technology and organization skills. Imagine explorers from West Africa sailing west to find a previously unknown land and eventually bringing slaves from northern Europe to help settle and farm it. This is just one of an infinite number of alternative histories that could have been written by humans on earth if the dominoes had lined up in a slightly different way. The takeaway from this construct is that since no one race or group of people is any more likely to commit cruelty on another group than any other race or group, it is illogical to harbor resentment toward a particular group simply for doing what humans have always done. To advance society, we must come to terms with our history but not be handcuffed by it.
These four foundational constructs form the basis for thinking about social problems in a different way. As humans, we must have presuppositions in order to start discussions that lead to progress. I believe this is a healthier place to start than the constructs I’m hearing from many activist groups today.