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What behaviors have human beings displayed in the last 30,000 years that aren't human nature?
^^^^^ CB: Suicides, war, greed.
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Do you have an encyclopedia of unnatural human behaviors you can point me to regarding your claim?
^^^^ CB: Not really. Do u agree that the one's I gave u are unnatural human behaviors ? Don't u think that humans have a natural instinct for self-preservation ?
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Does such an encyclopedia include entries on using anesthesia for childbirth and surgery? Does it discuss the creation of rockets to send people out into space or specify indeafsible criteria for making the natural/unnatural partition?
^^^^^ CB: I'd say avoidance of pain is a natural instinct, avoidance of pain in childbirth and life preserving surgery sort of doubly natural.
(!!!)
The creation of rockets for space, but better, invention of airplanes or the wheel, I'd term super-natural , but not in the mystical or religious or godly sense. Super-organic , after the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber's term for cultural products. Much ( not all) of human history and culture is the creation of means to go beyond human natural limitations. Our natural mode of individual locomotion is to walk ( bipedally). The wheel was invented to go beyond the limits of those instinctive means. Part of human nature is to transcend the original human natural limiits. However, with the inventions of these supernatual institutions the original natural instincts don't go away.
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The noted authorities in the wonderful Dictionary of Marxist Thought [Bottomore] have no entries for suicide or greed and the entry on war by Kiernan skirts the issue of the claimed unnaturalness of war altogether. The entry on human nature is utterly unsatisfying to my tired brain.
^^^^^^^ CB: I'm not inclined to defer to too many authorities on Marxist thought ( well Lenin gets special props ; giggles) I favor understanding Marx and Engels, and thinking on our own, making our own
logical inferences,, etc. (right here on lbo-talk). I'm not against getting ideas from Bottomore , bringing them onto lbo-talk so to speak, but making us the active thinkers on these threads the final arbiters of what makes sense, right here , right now. ( your brain is not tired :>))
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I would note that suicide has been around a lot longer than the relatively recent proclivities to assert the immorality or unnaturalness of the act and that warfare is an ecological phenomena that can be about as destructive as large volcanic events or large objects smacking into the earth from outer space. That it is made by supposedly civilized animals by no means makes it unnatural in a human sense. And what would civilization be without so-called greed? :-)
Ian
^^^^ CB; I did say _some_ suicides. If you accept that self-preservation is an actual human instinct, then some suicides are unnatural in the sense of going against an instinct. I don't think that Kevorkian-style euthanasia is unnatural , because there is also an instinct to avoid pain, and the two instincts come into conflict in the case of people who sadly suffer extreme continuous pain. Also, maybe older people in hunting and gathering societies may have just "laid down and died" sometimes, too avoid being burdens on the group. I also said that sociality is a human instinct, so sacrificing one's self _for the group_ might not be considered against human nature in that case.
The point on greed is very important. Both Marxism and my school of anthropology hold that pre-class based society did not have greed. Greed is fulfilled by exploitation of others, and there is no exploitation in pre-class society, the form of human society for most of the time of the human species. Classes only arise 7,000 years ago and the human species has existed for 200,000 years For most of human existence we have been communists. There were no rich and poor, no greedy exploiters. That's why I propose the name of the species be changed from homo sapiens to homo communis or communas ( or whatever the Latin or Greek ending would be; I think sapiens is Latin). Greed is against human nature, by this theory.
I have discussion on warfare on facebook . Will send it later, cus I gotta to to a funeral of a great comrade, Al Fishman.