I started this blog many years ago with the intention of exploring the question of what is “natural” for humans. The topic is one that has been widely discussed in various academic disciplines, from child psychology to environmental sociology. Through fiction and academic study, I continue to ponder the complexity of this question, and one of the ways I do this is by participating in a book club that discusses utopian and dystopian literature.
The Utopian Book Collective meets once a month to discuss literature that explores human society and what is good about it. Inevitably we have also read a lot of dystopian work, as this often serves as a great exposition on some of the aspects of society and culture that are frightening and a warning about what it could be like if such things were to become more dominant or extreme.
Recently, we read an Ursula Le Guin novella, The Word for World is Forest. I found this book fascinating because it speaks to a question that I often contemplate: that of whether humans are violent by nature, or by culture. There are many dimensions to this question and I feel Le Guin opens up the possibility to contemplate this through the creation of fictional future humans who have evolved in different ways, having split off on different planets. The Terrans or Earthlings have followed a path of colonialism, extractivism, exploitation of nature and other humans, whilst the Athsheans have evolved into a peaceful, harmonious and stable society in which there is apparently no violence, conflict, war, rape or exploitation.
Is violence a natural tendency that is tempered by culture, or is it our culture that promotes violence through systems of dominance and exploitation, such as patriarchy, colonialism, racism, and sexism? In The Word for World is Forest, these questions are explored through the characters of Captain Davidson and the Athsheans. Captain Davidson embodies racist, sexist, extractivist, and colonialist culture, while the Athsheans live in harmony with each other and the forest.
Le Guin wrote the book in 1968, in the midst of a sense of fury at the incredibly destructive American involvement in Vietnam. However, taking advantage of the freedom of fiction, it is also a commentary on the atrocities committed throughout human history. Captain Davidson, who is almost a caricature as a character, embodies all the toxic attitudes involved in dominance and exploitation of multiple kinds. He is sexually violent towards the female Athsheans, treating them as objects to fulfil his desires. Likewise he dehumanises, exploits and abuses the male Athsheans, upholding an idea of them as intellectually inferior as well as inferior in other ways, and treating them essentially like animals that are there for his service. This attitude is eerily familiar of colonialism and exploitation of the native peoples of Africa, the Americas and Asia by white Western colonial powers.
There is a gender dimension to the violence and exploitation as well. The Terrans have begun as a seemingly entirely male society, with women being sent later to enable them to colonise through breeding. There is a suggestion that the lack of women and the imbalance of the society are part of the reason that the men are able to perpetuate their violent and exploitative ways. There are no women to hold them to account. This is an interesting idea in general. Although it relies on a kind of essentialist idea of gender, there is certainly a suggestion that gender diversity, even on the most basic level, would have tempered the situation. This is something explicitly talked about among the Athsheans, who laugh at the notion that a society would send only men to make a place ready for the women to come, rather than the other way round.
In our group we discussed this aspect in relation to looking to animal societies to understand our own behaviour as humans, and what is natural about it. I watched a fascinating documentary some years ago about a study of bonobos, and how the study of these other primates (who we are as related to as we are to chimpanzees) was questioned and doubted and denied. Bonobos, unlike chimpanzees operate in matriarchal groups and are non-violent, but instead have sex and groom each other. The documentary suggested that this was how they maintained harmony, and channelled the energy of the males. The female leaders of the group actively discouraged the aggression of the young males, and maintained order and peace. Although this comparison does not map onto the societies that Le Guin depicts, it does give a sense of how matriarchal rather than patriarchal society might operate, and questions the notion that human society is inevitably patriarchal and violent.
The introduction to The Word for World is interesting too, particularly in noting that although when writing the book Le Guin did not have any particular society in mind, she later discovered via an anthropologist that there had been such a society in Malaysia. When I read the book, I thought the Athsheans had echoes of aboriginal culture, particularly in their use of and reverence for dreaming which sounds a lot like aboriginal dreamtime. There are now few, if any, cultures on earth untouched by colonialism and capitalist extractivism, so it is difficult to find existing examples, although it also felt like there was reference to indigenous cultures of Papua New Guinea, particularly in the mention of the clusters of food forests around settlements, which Davidson recognises from the air when he’s trying to kill everyone off by firebombing them (reference to Vietnam tactics).
I do not know whether the food forests were or are also part of Vietnamese forest cultures as well but I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m only aware of the Papua New Guinea example through really interesting work that was done by anthropologists Fairhead and Leach, in which they discovered that earlier assumptions of Western researchers upon finding little clusters of forest around human settlements were incorrect. They had assumed that the cultures living there had cut down all the rest of the forest, leaving only these clusters around settlements. However, they later discovered that in fact it was the other way round, and the forests had been deliberately planted where none existed, adding food sources and habitats for many species. This could be read as proof that in fact humans are not inherently destructive in their activities but can go about meeting their own needs whilst also not destroying their surrounding environment, even enhancing it.
One of our party critiqued the book for the simplistic depiction of the Athsheans and the idea of the ‘noble savage’ so there is this counter-argument as well. However, I feel that Le Guin suggests that there is the propensity or possibility for a culture to be touched by another such that it is changed fundamentally. If the culture is exploitative and extractivist, and as a result of this certain proportions of that culture become very dominant, it is understandable that there will be elements in the native society that will adopt that culture in order to personally thrive. This too is a common story of colonialism, where a subset of the native population becomes complicit in the exploitation of their brethren. Le Guin does not go quite this far, however leaves us with the notion that once they have participated in war, the Athsheans are unable to return to being the peaceable society they once were.
What to take away from this all in terms of understanding human nature? As many books of this kind, it serves as a warning to pay attention to the behaviours that overlap and result in death and destruction, exploitation and domination. These are attitudes of racism and sexism, dehumanisation, othering, subtle or not-so-subtle senses of superiority and entitlement. In our contemporary society these attitudes still pervade politics, legal structures, social norms, in ways that can be very hidden. Violence, carried out in war zones, often by powerful countries who have no business being there, particularly America, but others as well, is sanctioned and justified through narratives of defence, or the same narratives that were used to justify colonialism, e.g. ‘bringing democracy/civilisation’. Military action is rarely open to critique, and the violence that is learned and sanctioned pervades our cultures in the form of homicides, police violence, school shootings (thinking of America, but other places are no immune to this). Toxic masculinity, ideas of the ‘alpha male’, and movements like the ‘Incel’ (involuntarily celibate men) who argue that they are entitled to women’s bodies or that there is a need for ‘alpha males’ in society, speak to just how pervasive and toxic these cultures remain.
Is there reason to be hopeful though in spite of this? I think there is. For all those actions and narratives, there are also those who question them and who provide alternative narratives. Could we find our way to a harmonious, non-exploitative, non-violent way of living as a society? It seems wildly far off and like a futuristic science fiction, but perhaps it’s through telling different stories that we start to open up the possibility for movement in that direction.
Human Being Natural 