Human Universals

by Donald E Brown

  There is no good reason for this state of affairs: as described in chapter 3, it is an accident of the way the social sciences developed. In the early decades of this century evolutionary theory was in disarray, so that Darwinism was as much used to defend racism as to illuminate human nature; behaviorism, with its assumption that the mind comprises little more than generalized learning mechanisms, was sidetracking psychology; studies such as Margaret Mead’s on Samoan adolescence seemed to confirm the freedom of cultural traditions from significant channeling by human nature; there was an ethnographically diverse world to be studied before it disappeared, and this task seemed more urgent than did speculation on the remote evolutionary past in which humans evolved.

  Anthropologists entertained the notion that culture was a level of phenomena free of causation from lower levels, such as the psychobiological. Culture was thus separated from nature; “learned” behavior was posed against animal “instincts.” “Reducing” the former to the latter was bad science. Culture came to be considered the most important of all determinants of human action, and the study of culture effectively more important than the study of humans. What was human and not cultural was merely animal.

  Analysis was centered on cultures or societies and their characteristics rather than on the humans thought to be shaped like clay by their social and cultural contexts. The uniqueness of each culture seemed obvious, the variety of cultures very great, and the similarities only limited. In this context, universals seemed anomalous—unlikely to be real or significant.

  There were, however, some stated reservations about all this. Kroeber, as influential as anyone in separating culture from nature, acknowledged a “no-man’s land” between them that would one day have to be explored. Benedict, as influential as anyone in arguing for the variety of cultural orientations, thought that the variety resulted from one or another emphasis on what was given by human nature. Since no one denied that humans had evolved, and human societies and cultures did have a past, there would, it was thought, come a time when it would be appropriate to use the results of scientific ethnography to reconstruct the human past.

  There was an important unstated problem too. Whereas some things were “obviously” natural, and some were just as “obviously” cultural, there was no method for separating the cultural from the biological in cases where they might be mixed.

  In time, the notion that culture is a phenomenal entity sui generis, uncaused by lower phenomenal levels, came under sustained attack and for most anthropologists has long since given way to the obvious truth that material factors of environment and economy, at least, are potent determinants of cultural development. Others have posited the human mind as a shaper of culture, yet on this point there has been serious resistance. To “reduce” culture to psychobiology remains for many social scientists a sort of taboo.

  Whatever the motive may be for resisting the idea that there is a human nature whose features shape culture and society, its intellectual foundations have all but collapsed. Evolutionary theory today—after the synthesis of Darwinian evolution with Mendelian genetics, the virtual dismissal of group selection, and the various contributions of ethology and sociobiology—provides a framework for the whole of biology. Adapting this framework to the needs of anthropology poses special problems, but there is no reason to think that any part of the framework is inherently inimical to anthropology.

  Behaviorism and the tabula rasa view of the mind are dead in the water. Chomsky’s analysis of how language is acquired, studies of the consequences of brain trauma, the discovery of brain cell specialization, the implications of attempts to construct artificial intelligence (Tooby 1985), and other lines of evidence all point to a human brain that is a very complex combination of specialized mechanisms.

  Margaret Mead’s influential demonstrations that adolescence is stress-free in Samoa and that sex temperaments are reversed among the Chambri—which had supported the tabula rasa view of the mind and the apparent supremacy of culture over biology in human affairs—have been cast out. So, too, Whorf’s seeming demonstration of timelessness among the Hopi. Due to these and similar developments, universals—along with their implications for a human nature that underlies them and shapes human affairs—assume the renewed significance in the anthropological enterprise that is the subject of this book.

  The scientifically collected ethnographic reports that were all too few at the beginning of the century now strain the shelves, and it has long since been recognized that theory must give order to the collection of data: ethnographies are not just out there to be collected (but what passes for theory in anthropology too often suffers from the assumptions made early in this century). With the present wealth of ethnography, reconstructing the human past is much less the speculative matter that it was early in this century and is, therefore, a much more respectable activity.

  The ambivalence that anthropologists have shown toward universals, and the resistance many anthropologists still show toward the concept of a fixed human nature and psychobiological reductionism, are not reflections of what is known about the human condition. They are reflections of erroneous assumptions that for the most part lie at rather high, though not the highest, levels of the hierarchy of propositions that inform the anthropological enterprise. A close examination of these propositions, showing where they err, is a necessary step in the reintegration of universals, and what they entail, into the anthropological enterprise.

  At the most fundamental levels of the anthropological enterprise there are a series of relatively noncontroversial assumptions that define the boundaries of anthropology roughly as follows. Anthropology is concerned with what humans are and what humans do, along with the problems of how humans got to be the way they are and came to do what they do. Phrased differently, anthropology is concerned with such broad topics as the human condition, human affairs, and (more controversially) human nature. The distinctively anthropological contribution to these concerns is its comparative perspective: anthropology pursues its subject matters among all peoples in all times and places, and even across species. When a comparative perspective is neither employed nor necessary, other disciplines step in.1 On the other hand, anthropology freely calls upon those other disciplines to solve its problems. I will call the propositions in this paragraph first-level propositions.

  At a second level lie several propositions that are still relatively noncontroversial and that constitute basic answers to some of the questions posed at the first level. Thus, anthropologists assume (or find) that humans are an evolved species with a distinct nature. As with other organisms, everything that humans do is a product of their nature (which at root is a matter of genes) in interaction with the environments in which humans live. The human species evolved over a very long period of time and shows only minor racial variation. The human mind is one of the most distinctive and important features of human nature, and (barring sex and age differences) it is fundamentally the same in all human populations. Humans live socially, and their societal arrangements show considerable variation. Humans have rich cultural traditions that also show considerable variation. Social and cultural arrangements, which are themselves ultimately products of human activity, are significant parts of the environments in which humans live.

  Beneath the very basic assumptions and findings just outlined, and that establish the raison d’être and scientific credentials of anthropology, are middle-level propositions, mostly connected with the concept of culture, that have an important bearing on how anthropologists have viewed universals. These propositions have a significance that transcends their level in the hierarchy of propositions informing anthropology. These propositions are now controversial, and well they should be, for almost all are false or misleading:

  Nature and culture are two distinct phenomenal realms.

  Nature manifests itself in instincts (which are fixed action patterns) and culture manifests itself in learned behavior.

  Because human nature is the same ever
ywhere, it is culture that explains differences between human populations.

  Human universals are likely to reflect human nature.

  Except for its extraordinary capacity to absorb culture, the human mind is a largely blank slate.

  Culture (because of 3 and 5) is the most important determinant of human affairs.

  Explaining what people do in biological terms (i.e., in terms of nature instead of culture) is a reductionist fallacy (in extreme forms, explaining human affairs in any terms other than culture itself is reductionist fallacy).

  Being autonomous, culture has an arbitrary and highly variable character.

  Universals (because of 5 and 8) are few (and unimportant?).

  The suspicion that proposition 9 might be false, and that this had ramifications for more fundamental elements in the anthropological enterprise, was one of the principal reasons for writing this book. And the logic that underpinned the suspicion can now be spelled out.

  One of the most important consequences of the middle-level propositions—summed up in the sixth—is to leave certain propositions at the two highest levels formally correct yet nearly devoid of significance. The reference to human nature at the first level is rendered nugatory by the proposition that human nature consists essentially of the capacity for culture. At the second level, half of the equation that explains human affairs (the genes in genes + environment) is similarly affected because the environment, and above all one element within it, culture, is seen as the source of almost all variation. As a consequence of the middle-level propositions, nature does little more than set a stage for culture. But if proposition 9 and others are false, the role of human nature in the anthropological enterprise surely needs reassessment. Let us examine each proposition:

  1. In its worst form, the proposition that nature and culture are two distinct phenomenal realms assumes a rigid dichotomy between nature and culture: a given trait, behavior, or institution is either cultural or it is natural, there is nothing in between. In any form, this proposition ignores the obvious truth that, whatever the validity of analytically distinguishing nature from culture, the latter must come from the former. Folk beliefs notwithstanding, there is no alternative to this materialist tenet. Moreover, there is every reason to think that any number of very interesting and important questions about humans and their affairs can only be fully answered in terms of quite specific interactions between nature and culture, often in dialectical, feedback relationships. But these interactions can only be properly explored if there are ways to distinguish nature from culture, and I submit that there is little if anything in the way of an established and valid method in anthropology2 for doing this (see also Sperber 1986). Typically, anthropologists simply do not concern themselves with this problem, because they assume (in accordance with other propositions) that what humans do, unless it is “obviously” natural, is essentially cultural.

  2. The proposition that nature is manifest in instincts (fixed action patterns) and culture is manifest in learned behavior presumes the validity of the first proposition and falsely caricatures the relationship between genetic and environmental determinants of the characteristics of any animal species. It ignores the vast array of animal behaviors, including some human behaviors, in which instincts blend with learning to result in entirely natural behaviors (speaking and smiling, for example, among humans). It ignores the Chomskyian critique of learning and such concepts as “preparedness” or “one-trial learning.” While it may be true that humans show relatively few fixed action patterns, this in no way indicates that the remaining human behaviors are learned in some manner that involves no genes specifically selected to facilitate that learning.

  3. The proposition that it is culture that explains differences between human populations, because human nature is the same everywhere, falsely assumes that because differences must in some way be involved in explaining differences, similarities are therefore irrelevant to explaining them—as though fluid mechanics were irrelevant in explaining streambeds, because streambeds manifestly differ from each other. Proposition 3 also falsely presumes that features of human nature only manifest themselves in invariant forms—i.e., that there are, for example, no mental mechanisms that specify different responses to different inputs (Tooby and Cosmides 1989b). Different cultural traditions do explain many differences between populations, but there is no reason to think that culture explains them all or even most of them.3

  4. By itself, the proposition that human universals are likely to reflect human nature is correct. It is misleading only when it is coupled with the previous proposition.

  5. As outlined above, the evidence suggests that the proposition that the human mind is a largely blank slate is simply false.

  6. When compared with other animal species it is correct to say that culture is particularly important in shaping human affairs. But given the invalidity of propositions 3 and 5, not to mention 1, there is no good reason to think that culture is more important than, say, genes, except when explaining certain quite particular aspects of behavior. Besides, anthropology utterly lacks a method for quantifying the cultural contribution to human affairs.

  7. The general meaning of reductionism is to explain complex phenomena in terms of (overly) simple phenomena. But since the human mind is not simple—physically, the human brain is the most complex entity in the known universe—there is no reason to think that explaining human affairs in terms of psychological mechanisms is necessarily reductionist. Furthermore, reductionist explanations are routine in science (see, e.g., Williams 1985). There is, thus, no reason to assume the fallacy of reductionist explanations.

  8. The proposition that culture has an arbitrary and highly variable character is a logical inference from propositions 1, 3, 6, and 7. But their invalidity renders this proposition suspect. The potential for arbitrariness and variability is, I think, a hallmark of the cultural. But there is much in human affairs that is presumed to be cultural that is far from arbitrary and much less variable than is logically possible (see, e.g., Friedrich 1975). The vast gap between the character of human affairs as they are and what would be possible if they really were arbitrary is to my mind striking evidence that fundamentally they are not arbitrary.

  9. The proposition that universals are few (and maybe unimportant) is untenable, as the evidence presented in previous chapters shows. Given the invalidity of 5 and 8, this is to be expected.

  The nine propositions just discussed are central to what has long been the dominant paradigm of American anthropology. And yet the deliberate or acknowledged erosion of the validity of those propositions has gone on for decades (recall, from chapter 3, the reservations about cultural autonomy expressed by Kroeber, Bidney, Kluckhohn, Mead, Murdock, and others). It only remains to admit their invalidity and to integrate some sort of an interactionist framework into anthropology. In important respects, this is no more than a matter of adjusting the balance between background and foreground: in the first chapter I showed that universals, with their unstated implications for a complex human nature, are already in the background of even the most culturologically oriented anthropological studies. Accommodating the implications in terms of method and theory is more complicated, but the necessary adjustments are well under way. Until these adjustments are made, the relationships between particulars and universals, or between nature and nurture, will continue to be obscured by the myths and contradictions that bedevil anthropology today.

  Bringing universals, and the human nature within which they make sense, out of the shadows of the anthropological endeavor and into the full light in which our inquiries should be conducted has more implications than can properly be dealt with here. But I must say something about the two principal directions of research and thought that spring from the links between universals, human nature, and anthropology. One looks toward the fields of psychology and biology and is particularly concerned with explaining universals. The other traces the causal chain in the opposite direction, is concerned wit
h using an understanding of universals and human nature to make sense of human affairs, and engages anthropology, the other social sciences, and the humanities.

  Many anthropologists, pondering the thought that universals often rest on the nature of the mind, which in turn is a matter of neurology, biochemistry, and evolutionary processes that took place in a very remote past, will certainly think that universals are, then, matters for psychologists, biologists, and maybe physical anthropologists to explain. This is true, of course, but it does not mean that social or cultural anthropologists have nothing to contribute. To begin with, anthropologists are the ones to determine that something is a universal and whether it is unrestricted, implicational, or statistical. In the event that it is implicational or statistical, anthropologists are still the ones to determine the conditions that appear to give rise to the phenomenon—and anthropologists have a long history of doing just that. Furthermore, even what appear to be unrestricted universals may very well be illuminated by comparative study—which is just what has happened with the incest taboo, now seen as incest avoidance.

  It is true that a full explanation of any universal that appears to rest on the nature of the human mind involves specialized knowledge that very few anthropologists now possess. But a full explanation also involves evolutionary theory, and here anthropologists are in a strong position: anthropologists are specialists in the evolution of the human species, and ethnographic as well as archaeological studies of foraging societies are indispensable in reconstructing the conditions in which humans evolved. Thus however much psychology or other disciplines may be involved, anthropologists have a secure place in the task of understanding the human mind (see, e.g., Gardner 1985:223–259).