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PARTISAN REVIEW
is. What is universal is not belligerency or the will to boss or
be bossed. War was a late arrival on the human scene and for
tens of thousands of years man lived without weapons of warfare.
Even contemporary primitive societies are not always war·
oriented. And it is almost proverbial how many of them will not
stand for bossing or being bossed.
The sense in which human beings are one is not Max East–
man's sense. But it can be identified. Man does have a "native
endowment evolved in prehistoric times."
It
evolved slowly through
aeons. Its tentative first steps occur in birds and animals, and the
history of man is a story of how the pace of this development
quickened at last to a run. But the achievement itself is clear
and on it all human achievements are based.
This basic human achievement has to do with the new manner
in which organisms learned how to survive in their environment
Before mankind, organisms came to terms with Nature by organic
specialization and bodily differentiation. They adapted themselves
to their environment just insofar as their bodies were slowly modi–
fied to fit, and these solutions were transmitted by inheritance.
Once such a solution was made, it might persist from the Pliocene
to the present if the environment was propitious; if conditions
changed too rapidly, whole species became extinct.
But man slowly learned to come to terms with the natural
environment in quite another way. For better or worse, human
survival was increasingly pinned, not to inherited organic spe–
cializations, but to .learned behavior. Man learned to make him·
self clothes to protect himself against the cold; he made himself
houses. He made spears and bows and arrows with which to hunt
He did not grow dagger-claws on his hands or weapon-like teeth.
He invented ways to solve his problems and taught these solutiom
to his children. He took his ways of life into his own hands and
his survival was no longer predicated upon adaptations written into
his body but upon choice of expedients he had himself adopted.
With each successful, non-biological invention, the new pro–
cess became further established, and all human beings everywhere
on the earth share it. The great advantage man won by his para–
mount reliance upon learned behavior was plasticity. Possibilities
of adjustment were enormously increased in sheer numbers, and
the length of time that had to be consumed in effecting some solu-
