On Human Nature and Politics

1.

No animal mistakes its fundamental nature.

Every wolf knows how to be a wolf among wolves.  Every bee knows how to be a bee among bees.  This is true of termites, apes, yaks, Big Horn sheep, mountain gorillas and giraffes and all other creatures.  

Only human beings question their nature.  Only human beings are uncertain about the polity best for them.

2.

Perhaps, the fundamental nature of human beings is to be uncertain about their nature.

3.

Anthropology describes many different social and political organizations with which humans have experimented.  People have lived as anarchists, monarchists, feudalists, under constitutional monarchies, republics, and democracies.  Various types of socialism and communism have been tried.  Governments have been constituted as theocracies, technocracies, rule by authoritarian dictators and military juntas.  There have been Fascists, regimes governed  by the wealthy (plutocracies) and aristocraties.  People have organized their lives according to ethnic principles or sexual identity.  In the so-called state of nature, there are tribes, clans, confederacies and alliances of tribes, chieftains, and warrior societies.  History shows examples of every imaginable structure for the society of human beings (and some difficult to imagine).

Bees only have the hive.  Wildebeest flourish only in one kind of herd.  But there seem to be innumerable kinds of herds and hives for human beings.

4.

Human beings alone have evolved a complicated system of language.  There is no doubt that animals communicate, but they don’t speak.  Their signs, like their herds and hives, mean only one thing at a time.  People use language not for communication but for the expression of ideas about invisible, even, non-existent things.  Language is organized according to tense – there is a past tense descriptive of what no longer exists and a future tense that tells us of things that have not yet come to pass.  Human language is evolved to give voice to untruths.  Animals are capable of stealth and even deception (camouflage) but they can’t lie.  People lie all the time.  The essence of human language is not communication but ambiguity and miscommunication.

5.

In its essence, human language involves exercise of the subjunctive.  Subjunctive verbs are auxiliary: “would”, “could”, “might”, “may”.  All future tense constructions are practically subjunctive – they describe what “could” happen or what “might” come to be.  Even, more, notably, human beings can use the subjunctive to imagine alternative pasts – things that “might have happened” except that they did not.  

The subjunctive tense allows humans to imagine alternative realities and to dream about futures that theoretically might happen, but probably will not.

I think that the range of experiments in human governance arise, fundamentally, from the subjunctive characteristics of our language.  Language lets us experiment with thought.  Thought experiments lead to diversity in aspirations as to what is good and true.  Thus, the enormous variety in theories and practice as how our polities should be organized.

6.

The Messiah is coming, but, this time, not with a host of angels, but rather accompanied by a million journalists.  

February 13, 2021