HUMAN NATURE
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tion was enormously shortened. This plasticity is the basis of all
human achievement, for in the process all the essentially human
traits came into being. Reason, foresight and judgment are attri–
butes which are a very part of the process of inventing human
solutions of human problems.
This is the sense in which all human beings share a common
human nature which runs back even to Neanderthal Man. In this
sense men are one. But even to state clearly this common nature
of humankind underscores the fact that "human nature" does
not prescribe any one selected kind of human world. This human
dependence on invention and on learned behavior meant by its own
logic that man could fashion heavens or hells. Man could provide
against a time of want or he need not provide. He could make
a society where men habitually killed relatives on whom less pre–
cariously adjusted societies depended for daily sustenance. Men
could head-hunt among tribes on whom they depended for neces–
sary economic supplies. They could deal with their fellows in
terms of naked power or they could laugh and sing and work
together. The fact that human nature is at one in taking its ways
of life into its own hands has its grave dangers.
It
exacts its
penalties when men arrange their affairs badly. But universal,
up-from-the-ape human nature does not lay down laws which make
inevitable any particular forms of dominance-submission and of
aggression which may have established themselves at any one
moment of time or any one region of space.
The social disorders of the modem world do not come, as
many disillusioned intellectuals have said, from ignoring the bel–
ligerency of human nature. They are consequences of man's having
arranged his affairs to his own disadvantage. They are conse–
quences of inadequate social solutions of human problems. They
come especially from fundamental arrangements in our civiliza–
tion which make it necessary that a man achieve his own ends at
the expense of other men; groups of men equally believe that their
profit is only to be secured through loss suffered by another group.·
Some cultures outside of Western Civilization have organized their
arrangements so that purposes are achieved by acting in common
and in such societies a man's own interests are served by so acting.
No congenital aggression in human nature prevents such societies
from maintaining the way of life to which they are committed.
If
