The Rediscovery of Human Nature

"I believe that the day has come when we can combine sensory deprivation with drugs, hypnosis and astute manipulation of reward and punishment to gain absolute control over an individual's behavior."

--James V. McConnell

A BEHAVIORIST speaking. In the past four decades the heady belief has grown that people can be molded by simply deciding what they should be and then manipulating their behavior, as though the world were a laboratory and man a rat or a pigeon. No one has done more to advance the notion than B.F. Skinner, Harvard psychology professor and author of the bestselling Beyond Freedom and Dignity (TIME cover, Sept. 20, 1971). Those who claim to leave man "free," Skinner believes, are merely abandoning him to uncontrolled forces in his environment. To Skinner, observable behavior is the only reality and belief in an "inner man" is mere superstition. "Something going on inside the individual, states of mind, feelings, purposes, expectancies"--all these, Skinner insists, are no more than fictions.

Freudianism, the other dogma of the era, is very much concerned with what is going on inside the individual. To Freud, man was, in fact, buffeted about by internal, unconscious drives. These frequently caused neuroses, which, to be sure, could be alleviated by psychoanalysis. Repressed sexuality was a major problem in Freud's day, and he was not particularly concerned with other concepts of neurosis, like the feeling of meaninglessness that is so prevalent today. "I have always confined myself to the ground floor and basement of the edifice called man," Freud once wrote to a friend. As for religion, Freud put it in "the category of the neurosis of mankind."

The psychoanalysts and the behaviorists still man the academy. For all their differences, what do they have in common? They share a reductive, limited view of man, according to the humanistic psychologists working today, who consider themselves a "third force" knocking at the academy gates. In sociology and anthropology, other challenges are being made to long-held beliefs. The challenges add up to a new regard for human intractability--and potentiality. There is a sneaking reappearance of the old notion that certain fixed elements in man (once unscientifically known as "human nature") are not susceptible to environmental changes. That notion obviously has major political overtones, since traditionally liberalism has posited that man is almost infinitely changeable, if not perfectible, while conservatives tend to believe that man is man, and that he has an irreducible core of evil (another nonscientific term).

The best-known humanistic psychoanalyst is Rollo May. Although May feels that psychology owes a debt to Freud for his emphasis on the "irrational, repressed, hostile and unacceptable urges" of a man's past, he also believes that Freud's approach leaves out much that is most human. At the same time, May warns that the behaviorists must beware lest they create a totally mechanical society. "My faith is that the human being will be rediscovered," says May. With this rediscovery, he hopes, will come a new emphasis on love, creativity, music and all the other qualitative, introspective experiences.

These are among the experiences stressed in the "human-potential movement" (TIME, Nov. 9, 1970), which includes Esalen and other growth centers. But, writes May in his new book Power and Innocence, "the human-potential movement has fallen heir to the form of innocence prevalent in America, namely that we grow toward greater and greater moral perfection." Evil is present in everyone, along with good, May insists, and one should grow toward greater sensitivity to both.

Anyone is a utopian, says May, who believes "that when we develop a society which trains us rightly, we'll all be in fine shape." He does not agree that "it is society's fault that we are what we are." For one thing, there will always be strong individuals who will step forth from "the conditioned mass." Just as evil is a distinguishing characteristic of human beings, so too is the capacity to rebel, to fight against bureaucracy or loss of integrity. In man's relationship to society, May believes, a new ethic is needed for our age--"an ethic of intention, based on the assumption that each man is responsible for the effects of his own actions."

In humanistic psychology, as well as in much contemporary psychoanalysis, there is a new sense that man can become a more active force in shaping his life. Freud, with his emphasis on man's being driven by his unconscious, tended to undercut the notion of will. Writes Italian Psychoanalyst Roberto Assagioli: "The will can be truly called the unknown and neglected factor in modern psychology, psychotherapy and education." San Francisco Psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis agrees. "Knowledgeable moderns put their back to the couch, and in so doing may fail to put their shoulders to the wheel." But this should change. Wheelis talks about the desirability of "self-transcendence, a process of change that originates in one's heart and expands outward," beginning with "a vision of freedom."

Freedom to or for what? In the opinion of Viennese Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, a man's "will to meaning" is more basic than the Freudian will to pleasure. To ignore his concern with value is to fail to do justice to "the humanness of man." As Freudian analysis aims to liberate the mature sexual and aggressive drives, so Frankl's treatment (called logotherapy) seeks to free man's spiritual unconscious so that he can realize his innate need to find meaning in life.

A method of treating emotional disturbance called psychosynthesis also assumes the reality and the importance--for a few men, at least--of their spiritual side. Assagioli, the Freudian-trained psychoanalyst who originated the method, explains that "we walk to the door of religion, but we let the individual open it." Assagioli's theory postulates several levels of man's "inner constitution," including a higher realm that is the psychic home of his spiritual, philosophical and artistic "imperatives." To gain access to this region, Assagioli uses conventional psychoanalysis as well as a series of esoteric exercises and meditation techniques.

Other therapists are using the concept of altered states of consciousness that became familiar through the drug culture. Some are even using drugs. One of the best known of these researchers, Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, is experimenting with LSD for dying patients. He has found that they progress through several stages. At the last they have mystical experiences that Grof recognizes as similar to those "described for millennia in various temple mysteries, initiation rites and occult religions." Such experiences, Grof concludes, are intrinsic to human nature and "suggest the possibility of bridging the gap between contemporary science and ancient wisdom."

Other experiments in altering consciousness have concentrated on alpha waves, a brain-wave rhythm often associated with states of relaxed alertness. Investigators believe that human beings can learn to produce these waves at will if they are guided by "biofeedback training," a system of recording brain waves and letting a subject know (by means of a light or other signal) whenever he succeeds in emitting alpha. Capitalizing on the widespread hunger for instant nirvana, commercial promoters are selling "alpha machines" for home use and opening "alpha training institutes." According to Psychologist Thomas Mulholland, chairman of the Bio-Feedback Research Society, these attract chiefly "the naive, the desperate and the superstitious."

Nevertheless, biofeedback is a real phenomenon. So is "visceral learning," a process of becoming aware of and controlling such usually unconscious and involuntary physiological processes as heartbeat, blood pressure, temperature and intestinal contractions. As with alpha waves, the teaching process consists of asking a subject to try to produce a particular bodily effect, then signaling him whenever he manages to do so.

One investigator in the field is Psychologist Neal Miller of Manhattan's Rockefeller University, who has had spectacular though temporary success in teaching a victim of serious hypertension to lower her blood pressure at will. (He points out, however, that similar efforts with other patients have failed.) At Topeka's Menninger Foundation, Psychologist Elmer Green is regularly successful in alleviating migraine headaches by teaching patients to increase the blood flow to their hands (as yet, he cannot explain why this works). Green has also tested Swami Rama, an Indian yogi who demonstrated his ability to stop his heart for 17 seconds. Like that of his colleagues, Green's research is motivated by a belief that human beings can assume responsibility for their own wellbeing. Ultimately, Green predicts, people will be able to stay healthy not by taking drugs but by practicing intensive exercises in self-awareness and body mastery. Whether or not this will be possible, the new research is bound to result in a better understanding of the complex, little-explored connections between biology and behavior and thus to reveal new facets of man's nature.

JUST as the behaviorist establishment in psychology has long centered its attention on environmental influences on man, so too have the leading figures in anthropology. From the days of Franz Boas, most American anthropologists have been cultural relativists, seeing each society as distinctive and trying to show how man's feelings and thoughts were shaped by the way he lived. Anthropologists did not believe in a narrowly fixed, hereditary human nature. Early in her career, Margaret Mead, for example, set out to show how even the notions of maleness and femaleness vary from place to place. As she explained later: "It was a simple--a very simple--point to which our materials were organized in the 1920s, merely the documentation over and over of the fact that human nature is not rigid and unyielding." Linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf contributed to cultural relativism by stating that different linguistic groups conceive reality in different ways, that the way they think shapes the language they speak and vice versa.

Mead subsequently modified her views, and other anthropologists and linguists came along with different notions. Noam Chomsky contends that the way people learn languages and the structure of those languages are basically the same the world over. Claude Levi-Strauss, the French structuralist, gathered thousands of myths from different cultures and demonstrated that beyond their great diversity were even greater similarities. At the deepest level, believes Levi-Strauss, there is an implacable pattern ingrained in the human intellect and this pattern has not changed since primitive times.

To humanists and others who believe that both man and society are perfectible, Levi-Strauss extends small comfort. "Humanism has failed," he believes. "It has lent itself to excusing and justifying all kinds of horrors. It has misunderstood man. It has tried to cut him off from all other manifestations of nature." He is gloomy about the population explosion, the pollution of air and water and "the destruction of living species, one after another." Like many another student of past societies, he admires those primitive cultures that struck a balance between man and his natural environment.

Two other scholars with a nostalgia for primitive societies are Rutgers' Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox (who met, ironically enough, at the London Zoo). They too believe in implacable, ingrained patterns of behavior that they call "biogrammar." "A species is what it is because of the pattern of successful adaptation built into its genes," they wrote in The Imperial Animal. "It is programmed to grow and develop in a highly specific way." Aggression is central to man's emotional evolution and survival.

And the mother-infant bond is essential. "Nature intended mother and child to be together." Add the authors: "The human mother is a splendid mammal--the epitome of her order."

Tiger and Fox have been called everything from fascist to sexist to simply "unpersuasive" They are not suprised, "You don't go up to someone who has taught cultural relativism for 40 years and say, 'Sorry, old chap, but you're wrong,' and expect to be loved," says Fox philosophically. He believes that they are being criticized primarily on political grounds. The critics "think we should be striving for the good and the right and the true."

Tiger and Fox are preaching that man's survival as a species depends on finding out what kind of creature he is. "What is proposed here is not a kind of determinism," they insist. "To those who think that the law of gravity interferes with their freedom, there is nothing to say. To most sensible people, this law is simply something that has to be taken into account in dealing with the world ... In the behavioral sphere, we may be ignoring laws just as fundamental." Man must learn from his animal heritage, or evolution will be as ruthless with him as it was with the dinosaurs, say the anthropologists who are laying their bets on the biological roots of man's behavior.

ANOTHER discipline in a state of flux is academic sociology. It is largely an American invention--about 75% of the world's sociologists work in the U.S. The discipline took hold in the universities after the first World War. After World War II, with burgeoning demands for applied social science by both industry and Government, sociologists began to do research and become consultants off campus. Asked to help expose and solve the nation's problems, sociology became almost a wing of the liberal establishment. The "sociology of poverty" was a study in itself, and the '60s were especially busy years, with work on such programs as urban renewal and the Office of Economic Opportunity. When these efforts collapsed, many social scientists became less sure of their solutions. "We're asking ourselves harder questions now," says Otto Larsen, executive officer of the American Sociological Association. Political activism, Harvard's Lee Rainwater adds, "washed out. Sociologists found out they were not very good on the firing line. Now the issue is more what is the problem, rather than what you do or don't do to change it."

Says Yale's Wendell Bell: "There's a feeling that traditional social engineering doesn't really matter. Whatever it does--curriculum planning, neighborhood studies, compensatory social factoring--doesn't really work." Such notions have been characterized by New York University Sociologist S.M. Miller and his colleague Ronnie Ratner as symptoms of "the American Resignation," the tag they give to the Nixon years. One of this resignation's principal themes is that many social problems are insoluble "because they have their roots in immutable individual characteristics." Miller and others stoutly deny this and point out that what the "resigned" theoreticians are really saying is that "nothing is wrong with America that lowering our objectives won't solve." Columbia University Sociologist Herbert Gans believes that it is not that the programs of the '60s failed so much as that they were never really tried. Nevertheless, the '70s are not promising years for reformers.

Sociologist Alvin Gouldner agrees: "The period of radical criticism in sociology has, for the moment, come to a halt. Criticism needs energy, and it needs courage, but people are getting tired. Today the radicals are licking their wounds."

In the '60s, Gouldner writes, it became the role of the "sunshine sociologist" to "foster the optimistic image of American society as a system whose major problems are deemed altogether soluble, if only enough technical skills and financial resources are appropriated." This image included a vision of men "as the passive raw materials of society and culture." This is a false view that does not take into account man's reason or his passion, says Gouldner. In The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, Gouldner also argues that in the future sociologists should be more aware of themselves as a part of society, instead of pretending to objectivity. "The social world is to be known not simply by 'discovery' of some external fact, not only by looking outward, but also by opening oneself inward," he maintains.

A similar conclusion has been reached by a former Harvard professor of government. "We have tended to suppose that every problem must have a solution and that good intentions should somehow guarantee good results," philosophized Henry Kissinger not long ago. "Utopia was seen not as a dream but as our logical destination if we only traveled the right road. Our generation is the first to find that the road is endless, that in traveling it we will find not utopia but ourselves."

Many sociologists are making the same discovery. For them, and for some anthropologists and psychologists as well, a long-held vision of a utopia engineered by human minds has begun to fade. The new mood is one of bitter resignation for many. Others are hopeful that man can apply his newly found will to the realization of his limited but inherent potential. To these optimistic pragmatists, the idea that man is made by society is giving way to the notion that society has to be made by men, with all the personal responsibility and travail that the task entails.

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