I know there are lots of everyday moments of humans being kind to each other, but do you have any good examples on a wider scale to counter that capitalist realist idea?
I usually try and invoke the fact that humanity for hundreds of thousands of years lived in tribes where they had to co-operate or they would die and that “human nature” is just the product of the system under which you live, but are there any better examples you’ve found to convince your lib acquaintances?
I feel like one of the major hurdles towards getting somebody to become a leftist is the idea that humanity can, if organized democratically and if properly educated and with the right ideas of solidatory instilled, create a better system than the capitalists or technocrats have created. It’s easy to look around and superficially see everybody as bumbling idiots or greedy assholes, particularly if you’re socially atomized and apathetic, and so conclude that the working class, if left to it’s own devices, would infight and crumble.
Or is this just one of those axiomatic things where if somebody you know believes it, it’s very difficult to make them not believe it through historical examples unless they do major soul searching after a personal crisis?
Also any stories of large scale disasters people usually help each other :shrug-outta-hecks:
Graeber’s new book The Dawn of Everything is filled with examples of human societies constructed explicitly against impulses like greed and selfishness. Like dozens upon dozens of examples of exactly what you’re looking for.
AFAIK this largely stems from two places, “The Selfish Gene” and protestant brain “original sin”.
Can’t really do much about Prot brain, but you could check out Jonathan Haidt who has some beef with “The Selfish Gene.”
For nearly 50 years scientists have generally agreed that selfish genes shaped human nature to be mostly selfish, with exceptions made toward kin, partners in reciprocity, and a few other cases. Group selection was banished from respectable discourse. But recent findings from multiple fields have re-opened the question. Haidt showed that human nature appears to have been shaped by natural selection working at multiple levels, including not just intra-group competition but also inter-group competition. He suggested that we have in our minds what amounts to a “hive switch” that shuts down the self and makes us feel, temporarily, that we are simply a part of a larger whole (or hive). This uniquely human ability for self-transcendence is crucial for understanding the origins of morality and religion.
https://hecc.ubc.ca/jonathan-haidt-the-groupish-gene/
I haven’t read his books but I saw that lecture a while ago and thought it was good.
I dont think that’s quite correct. “selfish” gene is just a catchy title some publisher came up with, it has nothing to do with human selfishness. That paragraph seems to confuse different things. While group selection is disafavoured within the scientific community, that’s not about selfishness. Scientists have understood the evolution of altruism under the “selfish” gene for as many decades.
Group selection does not equal selflessness and gene-centric selection does not equal selfishness. This is a debate that is not fully settled and it’s about the so called “unit of selection”. Does evolution operate mainly at the level of genes, individuals or populations? It’s not about selfishness in any meaningful way though it’s easy to see how a term like “selfish gene” can be easily eaten up by bootlickers and reactionaries.
Oh, I was specifically referring to Dawkins’ book as in "Alot of people get this idea about natural selfishness from Dawkins [and protestantism,] here’s someone who disagrees with Dawkins’ conclusion.
If I understand it right Dawkins didn’t even think it was necessarily correct.
Protests against the Iraq war were the largest in the entire world. Even though people were scared and the propaganda machine was on 110%, people still recognized that the war will be disastrous for everyone whether they were involved or not.
The book HumanKind by Rutger Bregman should be exactly what you’re looking for. He’s a center left humanist, so there’s no real political theory involved, just simple historical/anthropological examples of humans being predisposed to cooperation (and debunking popular examples demonstrating a selfish human nature)
