A Manifesto for Literary Studies

Who Owns “Human Nature”?

15 Who Owns “Human Nature”? The proper study of mankind is man. Alexander Pope, “Essay on Man” I In the wake of the events of September 11, 2001, people around the world struggled to understand what the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon could possibly tell us about “human nature.” The London Guardian suggested that “we are struggling to adapt our perception of the world, our safety in it, and our understanding of human nature—to incorporate a new dimension of evil.”1 A letter to Newsday remarked that the actions taken by rescue workers at the World Trade Center showed that “when it is required of people to disregard basic human nature, which is greed and selfishness, and put the needs of a civilization first, it can be done.”2 (The author of this sober assessment was a high school senior.) The Los Angeles Times observed that the job of a firefighter seemed “almost antithetical to human nature: When everyone else flees from danger, they run toward it.”3 And an obituary notice for one of the thousands of victims lost in the World Trade Center attack began with a poignant observation: “It is a quirk of human nature that the person who does an act of kindness may forget it, but the recipient does not.”4 What is “human nature”? And what kind of measure can define and assess it? “It’s just human nature,” people often say with a shrug about cultural, social, political, and moral actions from greed to optimism to studied indiªerence. It is human nature to think we can win the lottery; it is human nature not to want to “get involved” in reporting a crime; it is human nature to believe that our current aªair of the heart is true love. (Thus Samuel Johnson defined a second marriage as “the triumph of hope over experience.”) The shameful silence of the thirty-eight witnesses to the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese on a quiet street in Kew Gardens, New York, in 1964 (none of whom called police until after she was dead) was attributed to human nature, but so is kindness to animals, and a passion for team sports. The “dark side of human nature” turns up in many journalistic accounts of mayhem, trickery, and violence. And it is not just “life,” but art, that is periodically called to witness. A production of The Nutcracker ballet is said by a critic to plumb the “tragic side of human nature.” Reality television is said to cast a “bleakly pessimistic light . . . on human nature.”5 Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities Short Studies 16 “Human nature” is praised, or blamed, for the good behavior of samaritans and the bad behavior of politicians. Journalists use it all the time. A reporter writing during the MonicaLewinsky scandal announced that “human nature being what it is” in the case of male politicians and female interns, we have a long way to go before attaining equality between the sexes.6 The idea that Americans could quickly forget the irregularities of the presidential election “contradicts whatever we might have observed about human nature,”7 wrote Francine Prose. It was simply “a matter of human nature” that political contributors wanted to go to Senator Hillary Clinton’s new house for a fund-raiser, observed Democratic strategist James Carville.8 The national debate about stem cell research suggested to conservative columnist George Will that “the parties represent diªerent sensibilities—diªerent stances toward nature, including human nature.”9 What in the world is “human nature”? Few phrases are used so confidently and promiscuously, by parents and children, religious figures and laity, optimists and pessimists, humanists and scientists. And few phrases have been responsible for so much disinformation, or so much attitudinizing. John Keats thought it finer than scenery. William Wordsworth exulted that it had been born again in the early years of the French Revolution. Karl Marx called it an “aesthetic delusion.”10 Journalist turned fiction writer Anna Quindlen, disclaiming any right to be considered an ethicist or a philosopher, announced with mock modesty, “I’m a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is really all I know.”11 But where thinkers from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries—from William Shakespeare to David Hume to Virginia Woolf—felt both the necessity and the right to oªer opinions on this key phrase and its rami...