The Myth of Normal 98

is rarely dismissed on the grounds that it is ‘just human nature.’”[1] There is a tendency in this culture, whether with approval or dismay, to see people as inherently aggressive, acquisitive, and ruggedly individualistic. We might cherish kindness, charity, and community-mindedness—our “better natures,” so to speak—but these are often spoken of wistfully, as exceptions to a hardwired rule. Not every culture accepts this as the quintessence of humanness. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, who studied societies across the Pacific basin, wrote: “For the greater part of humanity, self-interest as we know it is unnatural . . . it is considered madness . . . Rather than expressing human nature, such avarice is taken for a loss of humanity.”[2] Some peoples even give such madness a name. The Cree word wétiko (with variants in other Native languages such as Ojibwa and Powhatan) refers to a creature, spirit, or mindset of greed and domination that cannibalizes people and drives them to exploit and terrorize others. (Strikingly, in the Quechua language of the Peruvian Andes, a similar entity—associated with the gold-craving and ruthless Spanish colonizers—is called pishtako.) Far from embodying our nature, such a relentless pursuit of narrowly defined self-interest is seen as its opposite: “a very contagious and rapidly spreading disease,” according to the Native American scholar Jack Forbes.[3] I find discussions of a fixed human nature unhelpful and even misleading. A cursory look at our history confirms that we are not one way: Jesus was a human being and so was Hitler. We can be noble and narcissistic, generous and genocidal, brilliant in our ingenuity and buffoonish in our stupidity. We are, it seems, all of the above. So where to begin? Rather than trying to adjudicate between the many competing visions of what a human being is, we could instead see our nature as a range of possible outcomes. I very much like this formulation by Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurology and biology at Stanford University:[*] “The nature of our nature is not to be particularly constrained by our nature.” If we’re constrained by anything, maybe it’s that very open-endedness; strange as it may sound, our miraculous talent for adaptation could also be a liability. Because our nature is so influenceable, different conditions evoke different versions of us, from