Far Better To Have Existed

Far Better To Have Existed

Thomas L. Lynn, Jr.

Earlier today, I encountered a provocatively entitled piece of Natalie Shoemaker on Big Think, Humans Have A Moral Duty To Stop Procreating. What is being advanced here? The thesis, evidently, that antinatalism, or the position that we should no longer bring children into the world such that the human species itself enters upon a fate of extinction is somehow a ‘fair’ view. The predicate upon which the author is advancing this rather charitable assessment seems to be twofold. For one part, there is an appeal to current ecological crisis. For the other, there is the more, one might say ‘essentialist’ framing of David Benatar. Yet neither of these lines of support can be viewed as ‘fair’ unless one is willing to countenance considerable lassitude with regard to logical or emotional coherence.

The Malthusian trope that the population must be ‘culled’ out of deference to the finitude of resource is an old one, likely older than Malthus himself. It is also convenient for misidentifying the ultimate or distal causes of ecological crisis in a manner which both forestalls the attainment of substantial solutions to that crisis, and preserves the iniquities so profitable to its beneficiaries.  What are the ultimate or distal causes of ecological crisis? To begin though with the proximate causes, In physical terms, we may look at such factors as the large scale emission of fossil fuel gases, or the suffusion of waterways with chemicals exogenous to local habitats, or the irradiation of certain vicinities with the toxic byproduct of nuclear power. What is notable is the fact that these stressors derive not from human procreativity, but the imperatives of a particular system of economic production, capitalism. By subordinating the determination of social production to a logic of unrestrained expansion, it engenders a relationship with technology, and on a deeper level, an antagonism with nature that  are more correctly the ultimate and distal causes of the problem.  This is not to aver, incidentally, that technology is to be rejected out of hand. Rather, it is to offer that our relationship with it needs to change that it can harnessed to reflect precisely a sounder relationship with nature.  In this connection, the deleterious consequences of capitalist imperatives are thrown into quick relief.

For patently, the raw capacity to produce energy from such sources as solar, or wind, or small hydro have been extant for decades. Yet the pace of their adoption has been glacial. Whither so? The stated ‘practical’ reason is cost of production. That is, the constraints upon or decisions deriving of the current system of economy.  This though is not the end of the matter. For intimately connected with the broad attachment to that system is a thoroughly conditioned belief in scarcity as the very horizon of our existence.  Indeed, the discipline of economics itself frequently is defined as concerned with responding to scarcity as the very situation which should limit our decisions of production and distribution. Now, it is not merely a syllogistic reality, but one which incarnates palpably that institutions and disciplines rely for their existence on the very problems for which they are set to resolve (e.g., pharmaceutical companies thrive on disease and are allergic to cures). Thus the tragic irony of classical economy that the categories whereby it would have us approach a situation of scarcity, actually perpetuate and create it. Thus billions are hungry in a world where food is thrown out at offensive scales. And, hence, pollution is seen as solvable by trading it as a commodity, and hence the adoption of sustainable strategies and approaches to energy production (e.g., distributed electricity generation, small hydro, et al.) are rejected for the question of their profitability. Moreover, the potential abundance of the world is actually concealed, masked not simply by the veil of ‘economic thinking’, but by the disastrous social relations which constitute the regime of capitalism.  Perhaps it will be seem that we’ve meandered somewhat afield. But actually, we return to the original point. The problem of ecological crisis derives not from a situation of overpopulation, but a system of production and distribution which creates iniquity and ravages nature. It is the system that is the problem, and not the people.

And it is to be added that within the antinatalist view is a not so latent racism worthy of the colonial pretensions of the nineteenth century. For it will be asked from what portions of the globe does the growth of the human population derive? The bulk of that growth by most accounts is to be found in Africa and India, and, now to a lesser extent, in China. Presumably, then, any project of ‘population reduction’ would then focus its efforts on the historical quarry of imperialism, the racially marginalize and impoverished. Thus the ‘humanitarian’ veneer of antinatalism is revealed to be a hideous sham, a patina put upon a view which would encourage the worst sort of cultural violence, while preserving the structural injustices of the current modes of economy and state.

All said, there remains the second plank to the author’s congenial view of the uncongenial antinatalism, namely the account of it offered by David Benatar.  Within the article to which we are directed, Benatar (in a large way using the character Rust Cohle of True Detective as a qualified template) goes further than to offer antinatalism as a response to the ecological challenges of the present, but as a response to life itself.  Thus this choice expostulation:

When we look closely we notice just how much suffering there is. Consider, for example, the millions living in poverty or subjected to violence or the threat thereof. Psychological distress and disturbance is widespread. Rates of depression are high. Everybody suffers frustrations and bereavements. Life is often punctuated by periods of ill-health. Some of these pass without enduring effects but others have long-term sequelae. In poorer parts of the world, infectious diseases account for most of the burden of disease. However, those in the developed world are not exempt from appalling diseases. They suffer from strokes, from various degenerative diseases and from cancer...

This homage to the maudlin reflects an evasion both of the very problems that it cites, and an evasion of life itself.  Let it be quickly remarked, in respect to the former, that the greater part of the distresses and disturbances which it so laments  are founded not upon anything innate to life itself, but by  institutions, frameworks, cultural variables that are themselves fluid and subject to amelioration, and that amelioration by the very human agency which Benatar  would dismiss.Quite obviously,  it is true that pain and death are part and parcel of life. But to judge the weight of those difficulties which life presents before us as grounds for its total rejection is to court a worse than fatal myopia. Benatar, is at least ‘honest’ on this latter point. Thus the title of his 2006 book, and his claim that it is ‘better not to have existed at all’.  For Benatar, ‘consciousness is a curse’ and ‘self-consciousness’ a second and added one.

Here is the fundamental contradiction. Antinatalism constitutes a project, a recommendation for action. As such, it posits implicitly that there is some good which should guide our way through life, a moral compass. Consciousness is that very dimension of being which enables our awareness of, our comportment towards that good. Consciousness is the very condition whereby life itself enters upon meaning.  To designate it somehow a curse, is in effect to deny life itself, and, really,  being altogether.  In fact, this is a more grievous position than nihilism. Nihilism, questioning the basis of any valuation, argues for a kind of suspension of commitment. And, indeed, nihilism suffers from its own difficulties. Yet antinatalism is not so humble as to argue for any such suspension. It is rather very actively committed to a rejection of life itself…and not merely human life if its premises are consistently followed, for indeed it apparently sees sentience itself as the enemy.  

I shall be a bit old fashioned here, and respond as a simple existentialist. The condition of our lives is one of condemnation to freedom. Who and what we are is yet indeterminate. At the proverbial end of the day, what remains is to lend a contour, a shape, a determinacy that moves beyond, or even transcends that initial anomie. The task is to forge an identity, and, in that forging, to realize meaning.  There is, thus, a profound excitement in the possibilities which stand forth before us, both as individuals and as a society. There is in those possibilities a doorway to great and redeeming adventure.  There is also the possibility for great and profound generosity. To have a child and to raise that child to participate in life, in consciousness, in the great and redeeming adventure can be ultimately one of the most magnificent expressions of that generosity.  To close ourselves off from that expression is to cut deeply into the very heart of what it can be to be human.

For, again, that is the question.  What is it to be human?  And we are all involved in the determination of this question’s answer. For my part, I stake with not only an affirmation of life, but of humanity, of human beings as capable of responding to the difficulties of our age, and of creating a future which can, as it were, exceed the present. I can only encourage you to join me in that reply.

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See my YouTube Channel for an exploration of the alternative conception of nature offered by Social Ecology and its implications for the question of the human relationship with nature...

Nature - Static or Dialectical? Murray Bookchin and Social Ecology

Reflections on Jens Rushing, and Marx’s Value, Price and Profit

Reflections on Jens Rushing, and Marx’s Value, Price and Profit

Thomas L. Lynn, Jr.

A point of encouragement was the broad sharing of Jens Rushing's remarks about the issues surrounding the  the similarity in pay of fast food workers and Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs). By dint of a certain synchronicity, this came up as I was revisiting a talk of Marx that he gave in 1865. Entitled Value, Price, and Profit,  reading it in tandem with the present focus on minimum wage provoked a measure of astonishment. This was in virtue of that the contours of the question of worker compensation have persisted remarkably  since even the middle nineteenth century into the present.The talk was given to a Working Man's Association. In it, Marx responds directly to the claims of  John Weston that a general raise in wages would be detrimental to the working class, inviting retaliatory action from capitalists that would raise prices across the board. Today, the movement to hike the minimum wage, even to a rather anemic $15.00/hr, has elicited a very similar  resistance from many (e.g.,the Cato Institute).

Among the lines which their objections take, we may take two here for our consideration. One of these is precisely a recapitulation of Weston’s point from 1865 that raising the minimum wage would provoke  a spike in prices to compensate for the resultant loss of profit margin. There is a granule of truth here as indeed a raise in wages would translate into a diminution of that fraction of the surplus value from which profit is derived. However, if one maintains, as those who oppose the raise of minimum wage often do, that the market is an adequate assessor of value, the coherence of this line of reasoning is open to serious question. This is in virtue of the circumstance that the value of a commodity is not a function of the capitalist's whim, but rather is founded upon the cost of its production and reproduction. As such, its determination is distinct from the relative proportion of value allocated to wage or profit.  To recall Marx:

The value of a commodity is determined by the total quantity of labour contained in it. But part of that quantity of labour is realized in a value for which and equivalent has been paid in the form of wages; part of it is realized in a value for which NO equivalent has been paid. Part of the labour contained in the commodity is paid labour; part is unpaid labour. By selling, therefore, the commodity at its value, that is, as the crystallization of the total quantity of labour bestowed upon it, the capitalist must necessarily sell it at a profit. He sells not only what has cost him an equivalent, but he sells also what has cost him nothing, although it has cost his workman labour. The cost of the commodity to the capitalist and its real cost are different things.

I repeat, therefore, that normal and average profits are made by selling commodities not above, but at their real values.  (Value, Price and Profit, Sec.X)

There is some subtlety here. For reflection shows though that what transpires in a raising of wage does curtail how much of a produced commodity’s value is available for extracting profit. Yet this does not change the overall value of the commodity, but rather merely how that value is subsequently allocated upon its realization in sale.  Thus, if one endeavors to raise the price of that commodity in response to more of that value being disbursed to labor, one will actually be swimming against the current of the market. This, of course, doesn’t prevent an effort to effect such a raise nevertheless. However, over time such efforts would founder upon the very shores where they seek refuge. For to offer  an item or service at a price above its value will discourage its sale.   Additionally, there are plenty of complications to muddy the water. In fact, if the general wage is raised, this should in principle translate to an increased effective demand for those commodities which are sought more specifically by the working class. But this would actually result in an enhanced profitability in the industries providing those goods and services, an enhanced profitability which would effect a shift in the distribution of investment capital in general. This would then provoke greater competition within those industries which would equilibriate the initial spike, returning it to its original level in real terms. And thus, the ultimately beneficial character of the raised wage is preserved.

This, it is worth repeating, is the outcome which derives from an adherence to the very principles of classical political economy as espoused by Adam Smith, or David Ricardo. What is seen thus is that the call for more robust remuneration of workers then is actually a rather conservative position, a reformist position. For simply to call for a raise in the general wage, especially the general minimum wage, is to leave intact the logic of the wage system itself. It is this latter which plays so essential a role in preserving class stratification by subordinating people to an economic rationality. To spell that out, one may recall that the wage is the price of labour-time, which is treated accordingly a commodity. The price of commodities is reflective of the value involved in their production and reproduction. Hence we arrive syllogistically to see that the proper level of a wage is what it would take to enable the worker to return to work the next day. In fact, the contract form whereby one one enters into such a wage agreement strictly insulates one from participation in the fruits of one’s own creative efforts. In this connection, a portal to volumes of elaboration is opened. Yet here we will restrict ourselves but one.  Namely, it is the concern to which Jens was speaking in his own happily distributed remarks.

There are many who have expressed grief that the gains made by fast food workers (yet still minimal, but at least emergent) result in a rather unfair situation for those in other professions, such as, but not exclusively, EMTs. As Rushing points out, this is a rather inverse manner in which to see the situation.  The problem is not that fast food workers make too much, but that EMTs, and indeed most people make too little. The more appropriate response then should be one of solidarity, not antagonism. And we may recall to avail Rushing’s own remark. “Look, if any job is going to take up someone's life, it deserves a living wage. If a job exists and you have to hire someone to do it, they deserve a living wage. End of story.”  I may hazard to append to this the additional, technical point: within a classical, or neo-classical economic framework, the function of a wage is not to provide reward for one’s efforts, but simply to enable the perpetuation of work. Thus, we see, that by and large, the notion of jobs being differentially rewarded actually is at odds with the imperatives of a commodity logic. Under that logic, the worker’s s  ontological status, or rather our status ontological status  is commensurate with that of mere machines requiring maintenance and fuel for operation. As we are human beings and not mere machines, though, we do not fit well on the Procrustean table of that rationality. And hence when its full implications begin to unfold we are drawn to revolt against its absurdity. To this point we shall return presently. But first, to complete the thought started in this paragraph, anxieties about how different sorts of works are in fact valued err, I would contend, in fixating upon wage or remuneration as the locus where upon to focus their concern.  For one, such fixation misunderstands the function of the wage. But of far greater significance, it also distracts from appreciating the more substantial roots of the troubles which confront us in the very system of economy whereof the wage is but emblematic.

Yet even the system is not the bottom line. It is but the material expression of our  relationships. And as such it very largely masks the dynamics of power which constitute them. It is in fact the distortions within those dynamics where the glaring tragedies of our time originate, manifesting macroscopically in the gross class stratification of our cultures and societies. And those we return to the question of revolt. Here is not meant some adolescent reactivity. Rather, it is the notion emergent from our very hearts, the perception that this state of affairs is simply incongruent with what we are and with what we are capable of being. It is thus not only against the oppressive structures that we inherit. Indeed, the opposition is secondary. Rather it is a movement to create a different world, the different world which Charles Eisenstein has eloquently called the more beautiful one that we know in our hearts to be possible. This world’s birth though is not to be found as macroscopically originated. Instead, it’s birth, its naissance is found within our immediate lives. That is, it originates in how we treat each other.  Let us, in that, err on the side of the generous.

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Here is a video reflection of similar themes from my YouTube Channel:
Karl Marx, Minimum Wage and Questions of Power

A Brief Reflection on Existentialism and Political Correctness

A Brief Reflection on Existentialism and Political Correctness

Thomas L. Lynn, Jr.

To realize that one is free is to realize in the like instant that one is radically responsible… and that not only for one’s own self, but for all human beings: that one exists is only possible in virtue of that one’s identity, one’s being is, from the start, both indeterminate, and yet proceeding to some concrete determination. Or, as Sartre put it more concisely, “Man is at the start a plan which is aware of itself.” (Sartre 16)  If the situation was otherwise, if one was ruled inexorably by some essence, some nature, some specified definition...then one would merely be.  Such a bare being is dishonest as it flees from the very fact that I am aware, and that I act; and that you are aware and that you act. What lends to our actions a power which ramifies for all people is that is precisely through the election of those actions, those decisions that human being moves beyond its origin towards concrete determination, towards its meaning. This though, is not a process which unfolds but once with finality, but rather which recurs in every moment.  Thus even the most mundane of our gestures assume a great significance. Or, to recall Sartre again,

If...existence precedes essence, and if we grant that we exist and fashion our image at one and the same time, the image is valid for everybody and for our whole age. Thus, our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind…Therefore, I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing. In choosing myself, I choose man. (Sartre 18)

From this point of departure, I would like to draw out a quick line of implication for our current public discourse.

The plaint that ‘political correctness’ hampers effective or honest communication has been a staple refuge on the American scene for some time now, and most recently has resurged with the distressing candidacy of Donald Trump. Where it is invoked, caution and sensitivity in language is generally dismissed as but an inauthentic posturing, or even as participation in a regime of thought control. As such, to invoke the charge of political correctness is often an effective rhetorical stratagem for evading the question at hand by displacing the focus from a statement’s content to questions about the speaker (It is, in effect, a version of ad hominem fallacy.).Concommitent to the denouncement of ‘politically correct’ speech is often the exhortation to a kind of roughness of talk that is unconcerned with the potential offensiveness to some involved.  There is no small irony in this, when one recalls the original charge that forward conversation has been impeded. For is it not precisely offensive tone which translates into an alienation which nullifies the possibility of a deeper mutual understanding?

The question is forthcoming though as to what we are really seeking to accomplish in our speech.  For the tacit presumption that has operated here so far is that by such speech we are seeking to in fact effect a deeper mutual understanding. However, it must be granted that this is not always the case. There remains the possibility of a talk that is in bad faith.  And thus, the realization of our radical responsibility then assumes a marked poignancy in connection with our words, our speech. For within our words, our speech the determination of human being arrives in an all but explicit manner. Through our utterances, we are expressing an evaluation of the human project itself.  As such, to insist upon preserving manners of articulation which carry within them implications which demean, or which ratify prejudice is to insist upon a diminished or truncated view of our potential.  

And so, to be sure, bad faith is also a possibility within speech delicately chosen. And perhaps, at the end of the day, an ‘authentic roughness’ is preferable to a ‘refined insincerity’. Yet, while this logical possibility remains, in the great preponderance of situations the use of mere force in speech is an escapism. As a rule, forceful speech aims to present a curtailed or simplified reality, an easier reality than the one which confronts us.  It aims, ultimately, to reduce the terms of choice, and perhaps even to eliminate the very fact of choice under the guise of providing certitude. Certitude, though, is a luxury not afforded to the free.

Source Cited

Sartre, Jean Paul (Bernard Frechtman, trans.). Existentialism and Human Emotion. New York: Kensington Publishing Corp., 1957, 1985.

And here is a brief gloss on Sartre's essay Existentialism which I did for YouTube: 

Existentialism by the Lights of Jean Paul Sartre

Genetic Determinism, Natural Selection and Reflections on Biology As Ideology

Reflections from Richard Lewontin’s Biology As Ideology

Thomas L. Lynn, Jr.

Among the many themes addressed in Richard Lewontin's very fine Biology As Ideology, some that struck us as especially deserving of reflection are the deeper presuppositions of the narrative of the sciences, biology in particular; and the manner in which those presuppositions result in a story amenable to the service of certain ideological commitments.

To begin with the first, underlying the biological determinism which seeks its justification in the terms of the New-Darwinian synthesis is a particular conception of the world as being, in essence, but the sum of so many parts. It is a conception which grows out naturally enough from the methodology so decisively accounted by René Descartes in his seminal Discourse On Method.

The first was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgement than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt.

The second, to divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution.

The third, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little and little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex; assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence.

And the last, in every case to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that I might be assured that nothing was omitted. (from Part II)

And, indeed, within the framework of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis the ontological implications of the Cartesian method have translated into resultant misunderstandings of organisms and their relationships to both their internal constitution and their external environment.

Within respect to the relationship of the organism to its internal constitution, the atomistic heuristic has led to a ‘scientific image’ of beings has but complex physical systems.This found expression with Descartes himself, who configured animals as but especially complicated automata. Contemporarily, that reductionist rubric has found a specious refuge in the language of genetic determinism (genetics being one pole of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis). Among the reasons that is is a specious refuge is a mischaracterization of the function of genes themselves within the life of the organism.  It is a function which is subordinate to a broader metabolism whose thematic unity defies specification as originating in any single aspect or element of its complexity.  Thus, in the essay Causes and Their Effects  Lewontin relays,

It is  usually said that genes make proteins and that genes are self-replicating. But genes make nothing. A protein is made by a complex system of chemical production involving other proteins, using the particular sequence of nucleotides in a gene to determine the exact formula for the protein being manufactured.  Sometimes the gene is said to the “blueprint” for a protein or the source of “information” for determining a protein. As such, it is seen as more important than the mere manufacturing machinery.  Yet proteins cannot be manufactured without both the gene and the rest of the machinery. Neither is more important…

Nor are genes self-replicating. They cannot make themselves any more than they can make a protein. Genes are made by a complex machinery of proteins that uses the genes as models for more genes. When we refer to genes as self-replicating, we endow them with a mysterious, autonomous power that seems to place them above the more ordinary materials of the body.  Yet if anything in the world can be said to be self-replicating, it is not the gene, but the entire organism as a complex system. (Lewontin 48)

The consequences of the irreducibility of the organism the to simply its subordinate parts are significant, both for the descriptive aspirations of science more ideally, and also for the question of our own agency. To this latter point we shall recur momentarily.

Yet first, it will be worthwhile to identify the misunderstanding of the relationship of the organism with its environment that derives from like atomizing heuristic. Here, generally vis-a-vis some version of natural selection (the other pole of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis), it is seen as the passive outcome of that environment’s determination. By contrast, the environment, as the environment of an organism, is very largely determined or shaped by the organism. This is the case not merely in how the organism interacts physically with the spaces within which it lives, but with how the environment itself actually is conceived: It is construed precisely as the constitutive spaces within which the organisms act and live. In a substantive way its being is defined by its inhabitants. Hence, Lewontin, in Science and Social Action, conveys,

First, there is no “environment: in some independent and abstract sense. Just as there is no organism without an environment, there is no environment without an organism. Organisms do not experience environments. They create them. They construct their own environments out of the bits and pieces of the physical and biological world and they do so by their own activities…

There is an infinity of ways in which parts of the world can be assembled to make an environment, and we can know what the environment of an organism is only by consulting the organism. Not only do we we consult the organism, but when we describe the environment, we describe it in terms of the organism’s behavior.(Lewontin 109-110)

And we are drawn hence back to the question of agency. The organism does not simply react or respond to its surrounding, It does not merely interact with those surroundings. It is creates that environment. To use a somewhat Kantian phrase, it is the condition of the environment’s very possibility.

Here we are recalled of perhaps the most important lesson of Biology As Ideology. Namely, that all too often the language of biology, rather than reflecting a particular description or explanation of the ‘mere facts’ (and indeed the question of what a ‘mere fact’ is deserves its own consideration, a bit beyond the scope of this present reflection), serves to further ideological commitments of a decidedly problematic nature. In particular reductionism lends itself to use in this regard.  For the reductionist account of the universe effectively erases subjects from the universe. We are no longer active agents constituting the world, engaged with each other, but rather so many concatenations of ‘atoms in the void’. This material nihilism not only has the potential to demoralize us sufficiently to give our liver away  to a stranger knocking at our door, but it can conceal, or at least obscure the very real social and political factors which converge to create the challenges we confront by focusing only by their physical facets.

Lewontin considers several cases of this, such as tuberculosis in the late nineteenth century. Whilst the disease is proximately the tubercle bacillus, the distal or ultimate cause was the implementation of industrial capitalism that created the disastrous conditions which made people susceptible to the bacillus. Or, as Lewontin puts it, the tubercle bacillus was but the agent of the more substantial cause. (Lewontin 41-45) The same variety of obfuscation can be seen in many quarters. One can look at the proliferation of cancers, diabetes, and heart disease. Often the accounting of their ‘causes’ are more or less merely physicalist. Yet by and large those physical causes are merely proximate. They are most often agents of social, political and economic causes for which we are responsible.  This, it should be stressed, is not to imply some ‘blaming’ of individuals who are afflicted by the tragedies of illness. It is rather to direct our focus to the manner in which the system of political economy in which we have ensconced ourselves has had serious and damaging consequences for our well being and relationships, consequences which suggest that that system of political economy should be transcended.

I use the word political economy advisedly: the trope of ‘economics’ as a domain unto itself is itself a misleading if not outrightly deceptive one: the suggestion that there are ‘laws of the market place’ to which we are inexorably bound is but a variation on the perils of reductionism that we have cursorily glanced here. By appending the designator ‘political’, we are recalled to the reality that there is nothing inexorable about the financial sphere, and that the laws and customs which constitute it are themselves the outcome of human decision. But this is somewhat to digress. To return to Lewontin in closing. Having reflected on how reductionism, whether of the genetic or environmental sort is inadequate, he draws out this ultimately encouraging conclusion.

Our DNA is a powerful influence on our anatomies and physiologies. In particular, it makes possible the complex brain that characterizes human beings. But having made that brain possible, the genes have made possible human nature, a social nature whose limitations and possible shapes we do not know except insofar as we know what human consciousness has already made possible. In Simone de Beauvoir’s clever but deep apothegm, a human being is “l’être dont l’être est de d’être pas,” the being whose essence is  in not having an essence.

History far transcends any narrow limitations that are claimed for either the power of genes or the power of the environment to circumscribe us...They have been replaced by an entirely new level of causation, that of social interaction with its own laws and its own nature that can be understood and explored only through that unique form of experience, social action. (Lewontin 123)

For a more extensive consideration of genetic and environmental determinism, check out my thoughts here: Biology As Ideology