Column: What drives humans?
By Charles Jeanes
Homo sapiens: freely-willed choices, or inherent immutable natural drives?
“We haven’t changed, since ancient times.” Mark Knopfler, Iron Hand
“every soul — is like a minnow, every mind — is like a shark.” Leonard Cohen
Five “A’s” bedevilling our species
Humans have never resolved the puzzle of their freedom and their necessities, the things we have power to choose and those which are immutable, not subject to our choices. A simple formulation would be, we distinguish our nature from nurture and culture, the natural inherent aspect of us from the ones we can shape or design.
The five A’s I will comment upon: alcohol; automobiles; airplanes; ‘alphas’; America.
Inventions and cultural mind-shaping
I wish to explore five phenomena in human history; all are in the realm of culture, with one exception. Each represents an aspect of human behaviour that was within our apparent freedom to shape as we chose. Each was an invention and experiment with consequences for the future of our species’ social ordering, and for the physical environment including other life-forms, other species, the earth, the air, the water.
An instrument created by humans is also an implement that will alter humans. As we have been transformed so very recently by the internet and cellphones, in our past several things stand out as significant points in history when we were changed by human invention, creativity, innovation, experiment, and institutions.
There are also things about us that we must recognize as basic to our being human. I posit one kind of behaviour as such an ingredient of our species, in our DNA. This is the proposition in my essay least easy to draw conclusions from.
Fire, and ‘firewater’: the balance sheet of benefit and deficit
Fire might be accounted one of the greatest things homo sapiens ever put to human use; the fact is, it was not our species, but an earlier hominin, homo erectus, which brought fire under our command. No one would say this was detrimental to our species, our power to defend ourselves and to make our physical lives enormously better in the quality of our food, comfort, and security, and the power to apply flame to construction of so many things, pottery and metallurgy first to my mind.
But what about another invention that clearly changed our quality of life, our cultural potentials, our spiritual experiences, and our social interaction: alcohol … ? Some would love to regard it as an indisputable positive, but no one is so dishonest as to deny the negatives of this substance. A wonderful anaesthetic, and antiseptic, and social and spiritual instrument, alcohol also must bear a burden of great loss and destruction in the history of our species.
Male violence fueled by alcohol consumption, in war zones or in civil society, has destroyed lives and property beyond calculation. Combat without alcohol before, during, and/or after, is almost inconceivable.
Other substances are addictive, and have various balance sheets of good and ill, but who would argue that any other substance is first on the list… ahead of alcohol for destructive effect on human flourishing? Intoxication by booze is surely Number 1.
Personally, when I think of all the destruction wrought by humans abusing alcohol, I am certain we as a species would have been better without it.
Automobile and Airplane addiction: ‘choice’ becomes a prison of our making
I love my car, and that is the problem. We all love our cars. This is not an accident, for we have become so reliant on them. But that end was a lot of choices made over decades, of eliminating alternative paths. We imprisoned ourselves in dependency.
Why did we take the path we did? What would be an explanation for this history?
We, collectively, “wanted” to do it: obviously, this judgement from our history is not objective. Historians are never going to agree on it. I think we were manipulated.
Great capitalist corporations came to rule us thanks to our addiction to the internal-combustion engine. The fossil-fuel industry, killer of ecologies, would never have swollen to its deadly size without our dependency on our home on wheels.
Death, maiming, loss, and destruction of property, are in the deficit column for the car as an instrument of human purpose. The good results of car-use are mooted.
https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/topics/topic-details/GHO/road-traffic-mortality
https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/road-traffic-accidents/by-country/
We might have a more livable, humane society with very different physical environments if we managed our dependency on the single-person vehicle much more wisely. Think of much better public transit, with buses and high-speed electric rail. Some countries have done that better (I think of the Dutch and Scandinavians), but in North America, in the richest nations, and much of Asia, the picture of what cars have done to urban space is dismal and depressing. Rural space too is degraded, and the forcing of gas-powered machinery on roads ever deeper into wilderness is not easily seen as some desired goal of the majority of humans.
All these results come from owning this machine – at least one for each of us who can buy one, and that is just about everyone because the masters of capital aimed for that.
Imagine we kept its uses within limits, not so obviously surrendered to self-indulgence. Shudder to think of us with flying cars as available as autos are now.
The airplane is another disaster for our environment, no matter that is a wonderful thing to keep close with relatives and friends by air travel, and know strange places and peoples. This is the privilege of a minority; my readers, like me, are of it.
War became exponentially more horrible when “Man Conquered the Air” with our machineries. Warplanes, jets, missiles, drones etc. Better we never learned how.
Our psychology is altered by these machines – the automobile and the airplane. We become more selfish, as part of our “individual freedom to become who we want to be”, etc. I fully grasp the depths in which this notion of freedom holds my mind in thrall to my ownership and use of my car. I have no excuse.
Alpha leadership: violence and human misery
This is arguable: humans are an animal primed and programmed by evolutionary process to be hierarchical, to have dominance traits, to be aggressive.
Here is the phenomenon that is not a human cultural artifact, but a natural ingredient of homo sapiens: the innate behaviours of human individuals who are “alpha” types. A look at research on the behaviour of the males in species like gorillas, chimpanzees, and baboons – who are all social animals and related to us, particularly the first two – will demonstrate what an alpha male does.
Alphas are driven to dominate, to compete, to ascend hierarchies, to be leaders. Our species has such individuals. The consequence in our politics, economies, and social order, is incalculably profound, transformative – and more negative than positive.
Imagine human life without alphas; as John Lennon said, “I wonder if you can.”
Violence and aggression are inherent in the male much more than the female, and I have already made a point about male violence with alcohol involved. The mix of testosterone with alcohol is deadly. War depends on male aggression, organized and taken to the level of mass societies, serving their forces mobilized into armies.
Ursula K. Le Guin in her novel The Left Hand of Darkness describes a society without the phenomenon of war; there is violence — but the nations on planet Gethen do not mobilize their entire societies to fight wars: “They lacked, it seemed, the capacity to mobilize. They behaved like animals in that respect; or like women. They did not act like men, or ants.”
I fully accept there may be no such real type as an ‘alpha male’ among humans — but the possibility that men model such behaviour by mistaken ideas of the good it will bring them, is sufficient to argue my thesis.
Just one example of research on the problem. https://committees.parliament.uk/work/5005/women-in-finance-inquiry/news/98945/abolish-alphamale-culture-to-encourage-progression-of-women-in-finance/
So: I realize that my thesis, that alpha male behaviour is so innate that we seem unable to stop it by cultural means, is not proven, not in the least. Science is not able to prove it. It might be mutable. We keep on trying to eliminate it with cultural (moral) methods. So far, we have failed.
America: politico-socio-economic-cultural experiment gone awry
“In the Middle Ages people understood there were severe limits to how far one might make society less sinful and ‘Fallen’ by deliberate design… We in the North Atlantic world take for granted we can design law and policy. It has become the unreflecting norm that human nature is infinitely malleable; it would be changed by efforts of the State [and Church]. The belief was that nothing in principle stood in the way of this social engineering.” Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 121
Humans have not always believed in Progress, and until very recently, have not conceived of great designs to re-shape and “engineer” a human individual by application of coercive discipline with a regimen of reward and punishment backed by the possibilities institutionalized in State, Church, School, and Military.
The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment were two phenomena of history unique to the West, and with the ideas and practices set loose in the West by these great movements in politics and so many other spheres of human activity, there arose potent States capable of dominating the world from Europe and its colonial copies.
The United States of America is the most outstanding example I know of in history of a new society, one experimenting with the powers Europe evolved in the modern era. The American Constitution is an Enlightenment document, written by minds completely shaped in the thinking of that time; the Founders believed in Progress and the improvability of the human person. They propounded rights for such a person, and aimed to create by design conditions for the improvement of each one.
Well … do you like the American Experiment, so far? A ridiculous question, I realize. It is too big, too multi-faceted, to say what ‘America’ is. Yet it is intrinsic to its history — and the people who live there and outside of it too, constantly try to say what “America” is. Some definitions are divine, some demonic; none are adequate.
Today is not a good day for asking such question about America’s experiment; in 2025, strange alpha males in a rogue misshapen patriarchy are in charge of that Superpower’s government and military.
When racism, misogyny, narcissism, and megalomania are words not out-of-the-ordinary to describe the various hierarchies ruling the USA, well might we be fearful of the near future. We, and Americans and many all over the planet, should fear.
Canadians have a front-row seat on the spectacle, and might be a victim of the perversion of the great American experiment. Our own more-humane experiment is in peril from the leadership of the “great republic.” Empires in decline and decay are very dangerous. History provides many examples of atrocities committed by imperial forces as a great state deteriorates but its rulers try to maintain its power over its sphere. Recently, history records the degeneration of British and French empires.
Conclusions: trying is its own reward
History keeps on coming. I am not going to essay predictions for the near future.
Humans, hold your heads high. Do not succumb to the worst expectations about our species no matter what the nihilists try to tell you about an inescapable path of Horrible History for homo sapiens. We still have choices.
The internet, the cellphone, and A.I., are all at work, changing us. We know that. And our knowledge is the only weapon we have to resist degeneration of our souls.
Again, I offer only one example to start readers on their own research into the topic of the digital transformation of the species’ mind: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7366944/
If I have contributed to pessimism by my writing and my radio programs – and I admit, my own thoughts seem to slide toward the shadowed way, of dark imagining, – I am sorry. I do that more than “the better angels of my nature” would like me to.
But I actually believe that one lives best by never stopping one’s efforts to leave the world a better place than one found it. The effort is worth it. The effort is the point.
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