On Tue, 23 Mar 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Apropos Ralph Nader, this is the quote of the day from Thomas Heald's
> daily Pridelets <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pridelets/> email
> (which also notes that today would be Joan Crawford's 100th birthday):
>
> >"It is essential that we realize once and for all that man is much
> >more of a sex creature than a moral creature. The former is inherent,
> >the other is grafted on." -- Emma Goldman
I have a dear place in my heart for Emma, but she has to be wrong about this. Certainly sex and sexual desire are "inherent" to human beings, an integral element of natural selection. However, even evolutionary psychologists note that our sense of morality is not simply "grafted" on: caring for others, self-sacrifice, cooperation are all traits that help humans thrive and get their genes into the next generation of humans. If people in the past were amoral brutes, how could they have survived? (E.g., if men and women are by nature selfish, vicious, and uncaring, any children they had would be very likely to die. --Also, no matter how vicious you are, taking a nap in the savanna is dangerous; if you don't have someone watching your back, you're a tasty lion snack. Mutual aid = survival.)
I realize this veers into the "just so" speculation Justin rightly makes fun of, but here's a tentative claim: natural selection has produced humans capable of both sex and morality, and both of these "inherent" characteristics are expressed in radically different ways, depending on cultural and historical context.
Miles