Convenient Untruths About "Human Nature"

Details: Published on Tuesday, 02 May 2017 22:00; Written by editor

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1407 .... May 3, 2017
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Convenient Untruths About "Human Nature:"
Can People Deal with Climate Change and Nuclear Weapons?

Judith Deutsch

At this most critical of times, do current erroneous assumptions about human nature play a role at a deep level in the prevalent responses to catastrophes? Apropos, Raymond Williams summarized Antonio Gramsci's view of hegemony as a "central system of practices, meanings and values saturating the consciousness of a society at a much deeper level than ordinary notions of ideology."

There are new and old normals and it is hard to know where public knowledge is on this. Movies from similar times evoked normal, even beautiful scenes from daily life, of intimacy and love, but with ordinary life shadowed by foreboding threats: The Garden of the Finzi Continis... under Fascism, Burnt by the Sun under Stalin's terror, Hiroshima Mon Amour and nuclear holocaust. Focusing on Donald Trump and immediate realities is urgent, but now looms the specter of human extinction.

Trump has brought increased attention to social pathology. An observation made by Canadian First Nations lawyer Pamela Palmater pinpoints a core problem in Canada when it comes to understanding people and society, but it is applicable to the broad public. She writes that "the difficult part about public discourse related to genocide is that the majority of Canadians don't have all the facts." The public knows even less about the extinction threat of nuclear weapons and climate change.