I would like to touch on the topics of the social sciences, human nature, and alienation...well why not aim beyond my capacities!Markovic writes: "The fundamental assumption of all revolutionary thought is that it is possible to build a genuine community of free individuals who have equal opportunities for development, creative work, and satisfaction of their basic material and spiritual needs." And that: "The idea of making the world more humane presupposes a well developed idea of the nature of man, and what it means to exist in an authentic way as a truly human person." The somewhat utopian vision of unconditional freedom, spontaneity, creativity, and social solidarity are presumed to be part of some essential "essence" of mankind as a species. And yet at the same time, there is some ambiguity with regard to what Marx (and Marxists) mean by "human essence" and "human nature". That is, to what extent are such human "traits" as greed, aggression, envy, or even subjective alienation the product of a coercive social system in which private property, exploitation, and the commodity fetishism prevail and to what extent is human behavior a consequence of biological architecture.
Marx (and modern sociologists) have been philosophically informed by anthropological assumptions that while the human mind is not a "tabula rasa, it is rather like a computer but with the programs fed to it from an outside environment. "For Durkheim (and for most anthropologists today), even emotions such as "sexual jealousy", and "paternal love" are the products of the social order and have to be explained 'by the conditions in which the social group, in its totality, is placed." (The Adapted Mind - Barkow;Cosmides:Topoby) The influence of culture (and cultural relativism) has been to a certain extent driven by revulsion to Social Darwinism and Nazi Racialist ideologies. Thus human beings became empty vessels, to be filled by whatever cultural conditioning agents might be at hand.
The developing field of evolutionary psychology assumes that there is a human nature and that it is expressed through evolved psychological mechanisms and that these mechanisms are the result of selective adaptations to environment - most of which evolved during the hunter-gathering millennia of several million years of human history. These mechanisms are held to be universal and are part of our genetic heritage. That current social science and anthropology has focussed on particular variants of behavior when encountered under different environmental conditions, has served to obfuscate an underlying universality.
To quote once again from "The Adapted Mind":
"The consequences of this reasoned arrival at particularism reverberate throughout the social sciences, imparting to them their characteristic flavor, as compared with the natural sciences. This flavor is not complexity, contingency, or historicity: sciences from geology to astronomy to meteorology to evolutionary biology have these in full measure. It is, instead, that social science theoriesare usually provisional, indeterminate, tentative, enmeshed in n endlessly qualified explanatory particularism, for which the usual explaination is that human life is much more complex than mere Schrodinger equations or planetary ecosystems. Because culture was held to be the proximate (and probably the ultimate) cause of the substance and rich organization of human life, the concensus was, naturally, that documenting its variability and particularity deserved to be the primary focus of anthropological study….This single proposition alone has proven to be a major contributor to the failure of the social sciences….Mainstream sociocultural anthropology has arrived at a situation resembling some nightmarish short story Borges might have written, where scientists are condemned by their unexamined assumptions to study the nature of mirrors only by cataloging and investigating everything that mirrors can reflect. It is an endless process that never makes progress, that never reaches closure, that generates endless debate between those who have seen different reflected images, and whose enduring product is voluminous descriptions of particular phenomena." (p.42)
At least for me, Marx's greatest contribution was his analysis of the mechanisms of alienation to be found within capitalism. That what we sometimes describe as concepts or values such as "co-operation" or "fairness" may in fact be part of an inherited "human nature" that has been deformed by a coercive social system. If this is the case, Marxism and the revolutionary ideal could have a truly scientific underpinning in the social sciences. (Those who would argue that the prevailing satus-quo only reflects the current expression of human nature would have to be able to respond to the proposition that the status-quo has provided a measure of freedom and creativity for a relative few at the expense of many).
One aspect that has been consistently ignored is the fear that man is by nature "brutish", "acquisative", "selfish", etc. THE VERY FACT that these terms carry with them a negative sense IMPLIES a natural or inherent trait that places a positive value on values incorporating cooperation, "reciprocal altruism", and mutual aid as described by Kropotkin.
bill (just throwing some stuff out there.
P.S. Chomsky's disagreement with Skinner had more to do with the mechanisms by which children learn a language. It is pretty well accepted that there is what Chomsky terms a 'Language Acquisition Device' [LAD] and that syntax and grammer are not "learned" through positive reinforcement mechanisms, but are part of our mental architecture, cross-cultural and universal.
Well - just throwing some stuff out there-
Bill.
