It is remarkable the push-back I get in the classroom when I discuss the fact that animals are born knowing things—including human animals. (I am counting humans in the title of this post.)
Spiders are born knowing how to construct those elaborate, intricate webs you see on the patio during a summer evening. Birds just seem to know how—and to—construct nests for their young. Mama spiders and daddy spiders did not teach the young spiders how to do it. This is not acquired know-how. It is not the product of trial and error. They just do it.
And we would not expect the reverse to occur: One does not see spiders building nests out of twigs and leaves.
Well, with a far more complex brain architecture, it stands to reason that if spiders and birds come pre-loaded with software, humans would also be born knowing stuff. Take, for example, a bunch of kids on a playground. They will invariably begin playing a game. They will make one up if they have to. If one kid cheats during the game, the other kids will read the poor cheater the riot act. He or she might be expelled from the game. Did someone teach them this? No, no one did.
Another example might be placing a newborn infant in the arms of a seated four-year-old. What does the four-year-old do? He or she is very, very careful with the infant. The four-year-old is not following instruction. Four-year-olds do not follow instruction; they are notoriously difficult on this score. Anyone who has been around a four-year-old knows this. The four-year-old just knows to be careful, to not throw it on the floor, to not hit it.
You have seen beauty and geometry in the world since you were quite young. Your dog doesn’t. And your dog never, ever will. Yes, someone taught you what triangles and rectangles are called. But no one taught you to see geometry in the world: the clock is round, the door is rectangular, and so on.
Around 200,000 years ago we became anatomically modern. And 50,000 years ago we became culturally modern. That is, we started to look like us, then we became us in full. It is between these two points that we began speaking and thinking grammatically. And we likely developed our moral conscience around this time. We were already exhibiting what I would call proto-religious behavior. What we call religions came much later; those are a rather recent phenomenon: codified, scriptural religions. These are new, like our impulse to do philosophy and science are new. (We started doing all these things at about the same time.)
Why do we do any of it? Grammatical language and the spiritual? Hard to say. Humans exhibit a list of behaviors we do not understand. We have catalogued a very long inventory of behaviors that all human societies on record exhibit. In the appendix of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which is a book I highly recommend, he includes Donald Brown’s list of “primarily … ’surface’ universals of behavior and overt language noted by ethnographers.” (p. 435-9)
Here are all the T’s:
• taboos
• tabooed foods
• tabooed utterances
• taxonomy
• territoriality
• thumb sucking
• tickling
• time
• time, cyclicity of
• tools
• tool dependency
• tool making
• tools for cutting
• tools to make tools
• tools patterned culturally
• tools, permanent
• tools for pounding
• toys, playthings
• trade
• triangular awareness (assessing relationships among the self and two other people)
• true and false distinguished)
• turn-taking
• two (numeral)
You get the idea. Music, dance, laughing, body ornamentation. Why do we all do these things? We have no idea.
Do giraffes or alligators have the same list? No, they do not. Would we expect a leopard to act like a chicken? No, they have very different structures. So do we.
Why do many resist this thinking? I’m not sure. They seem to prefer to think of humans as, well, blank slates. Your parents programmed you to become who you became? Doubtful. The nurture vs. nature polarity has basically been put to bed. Parents have little to do with how their kids “turn out.” (I anticipate some readers screaming at me: “Do YOU have kids??” I have been been told for decades parents are among the wisest people on the planet, and that I am an imbecile because I’m not married and have no kids. I’m ready for your jeers.)
Psychology researcher Judith Rich Harris has done the heavy lifting on this subject, and her book The Nurture Assumption has become the authoritative text on the subject (promoted by Steven Pinker, incidentally).
So, chalk one up for Plato. We are born with native senses of justice, beauty, equality, and so on. Like a bird knows how to build a nest, we see beauty in the world.
As Noam Chomsky said, you cannot be a Cartesian rationalist and be a racist. Here he is referencing philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who was very much influenced by Plato. To take the position that humans have a nature and are not programmed is incompatible with racism. One cannot take the position that those humans over there have not been programmed properly and are therefore uncivilized. We must program them with our values.
They already have your values; they’re human. Sorry.
