Biology Enables, Culture Forbids
How can we distinguish between what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’
—Y.N. Harari, Sapiens, Chapter 8, There is No Justice in History
We get a little confused when deciding if a particular human behavior is cultural or biological. Is homosexuality a natural act or unnatural? How about Facebook? Is it unnatural human behavior? Abortion? Non-procreative sex? Slavery? Mixing of races?
Many of these are either explicitly or certainly border on being taboo subjects. As in, they may not be discussed in polite company, even when encouraged.
Yet, for for those of us seeking to understand reality as it is, to understand deeply the most important buckets of knowledge, taboo is no reason to avoid the hard subjects.
So how should we think about this?
“From a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural.”
— Yuval Harari
Professor Yuval Harari, who has previously taught us why humans dominate the earth and the false natural state of man, has an interesting take, discussed in his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The chapter is aptly titled “There is No Justice in History.”
Professor Harari’s well-informed heuristic boils down to: Biology Enables. Culture Forbids.
How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obligates people to realize some possibilities while forbidding others. Biology enables women to have children — some cultures oblige women to realize this possibility. Biology enables men to enjoy sex with one another — some cultures forbid them to realize this possibility.
Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.
[…]
…Evolution has no purpose. Organs have not evolved with a purpose, and the way they are used is in constant flux. There is not a single organ in the human body that only does the job its prototype did when it first appeared hundreds of millions of years ago. Organs evolve to perform a particular function, but once they exist, they can be adapted for other usages as well. Mouths, for example, appeared because the earliest multicellular organisms needed a way to take nutrients into their bodies. We still use our mouths for that purpose, but we also use them to kiss, speak, and, if we are Rambo, to pull the pins out of hand grenades. Are any of these uses unnatural simply because our worm-like ancestors 600 million years ago didn’t do those things with their mouths?
Our biology gives us a very wide playground and a lot of berth. We’re capable of a wide variety of activities and forms of organization, while other species generally fall into far more fixed and predictable hierarchies.
Over the course of history, humans have taken advantage of this wide range in a variety of positive and negative ways by creating and sustaining myths not supported by biological reality.
Take slavery, once a common practice throughout the world and now thankfully considered a scourge (and illegal) on all parts of the planet. Or the caste system, still in place in some in certain areas of the world, although perhaps less strictly than in the past.
Both slavery and the castes were carried out through a series of pseudoscientific rationalizations about the “natural order” of things, stories strong enough to believed (in part) by all constituents of the hierarchy. This “forbidding” aspect of culture was not supported by biological differences, but that didn’t make the stories any less powerful or believable.
Even the American political system, ostensibly founded on a bedrock of “liberty and equality”, only provided those things to certain small groups. The Founders used cultural myths to rationalize a deeply divided society in which men had dominion over women, European whites had dominion over blacks and the native people, and the historically rich had dominion over the historically poor. Any other order would have been “unnatural”:
The American order consecrated the hierarchy between the rich and poor. Most Americans at that time had little problem with the inequality caused by wealthy parents passing their money and businesses onto their children. In their view, equality meant simply that the same laws applied to rich and poor. It had nothing to do with unemployment benefits, integrated education or health insurance. Liberty, too, carried very different connotations than it does today. In 1776, it did not mean that the disempowered (certainly not blacks or Indians or, God forbid, women) could gain and exercise power. It meant simply that the state could not, except in unusual circumstances, confiscate a citizen’s private property or tell him what to do with it. The American order thereby upheld the hierarchy of wealth, which some thought was mandated by God and others viewed representing the immutable laws of nature. Nature, it was claimed, rewarded merit with wealth while penalizing indolence.
All the above-mentioned distinctions — between free persons and slaves, between whites and blacks, between rich and poor — are rooted in fictions…Yet it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable. For instance, many people who have viewed the hierarchy of free persons and slaves as natural and correct have argued that slavery is not a human invention. Hammurabi saw it as ordained by the gods. Aristotle argued that slaves have a ‘slavish nature’ whereas free people have a ‘free nature’. Their status in society is merely a reflection of their innate nature.
This isn’t to argue that there aren’t biological differences between certain groups of people, including men and women. There are. But history has shown our tendency to exaggerate those differences and to create stories around our exaggerations, stories that uphold a certain desired hierarchy. These stories have a way of creating their own reality.
Just as frequently, we commit the opposite sin by restricting certain behavior based on some idea of what’s “natural” or “unnatural”, confusing biology with religious or cultural taboos. (And these myths die hard: It’s hard to fathom, but homosexuality wasn’t even legal in the United Kingdom until 1967.) As Harari rightly points out, anything we can do is perfectly natural in the biological sense. We come well-equipped for a variety of behavior.
And this certainly isn’t to argue that all behavior is equally acceptable: We put bumpers on society to reduce murder, rape, slavery, and other vile behavior that is perfectly biologically natural to us, and we should.
But unless we recognize the difference between biology and cultural myth and seek to reduce our unfair taboos wherever possible, we fail in some way to see the world through the eyes of others, and see that our imagined order is not always a fair or just one, a natural or inevitable one. Maybe some of the things we see around us are just a historical accident if we look closely enough.
Even more than that, examining the relationship between biological reality and cultural myth allows us to appreciate our basic storytelling instincts. Human beings are wired for narrative: We’ve been called the Storytelling Animal and for good reason. Our thirst and ready acceptance of narrative is a basic part of our existence; it’s hard-wired into our genetic algorithm.
Much of our narrative superpower can be observed in the structure of human language, which is unique among species in its infinite flexibility and adaptability. It makes us capable of great cooperative accomplishments, but also great evils.
Fortunately, the modern world has done a pretty good job steadily loosening the grip of mythical “natural” realities that only exist in our heads. But a fair inquiry remains: What sustaining myths still exist? Are they for good or for evil?