Paper For Unit 4: Understanding Universal Human Motives

Yigit

Understanding Universal Human Motives

29th April, 2019

Aggression involves the desire to inflict physical or moral harm on the person of others. In the broadest sense, there is violence whenever people do not receive the respect they deserve. Demonstrations of destructive force, as well as the police are violence, even if they intervene in different institutional frameworks. The expression “naturally” can be understood in two senses: it refers to the state of nature, that is, to the postulate of a way of life of man prior to society. And it refers to a nature, that is, to an essence defining, in this case, man. No matter how strong or weak we are, we are still very aggressive creatures by nature and our aggression is primarily connected with the need to defend our interests in this cruel world, in a world of limited resources and unlimited egoism. Therefore, it is necessary to perceive our bestial essence positively, since nature endowed us with it not by chance, it is simply necessary for us to survive. We created a world in which even the weakest human individuals can survive, whereas, only the strongest survive in nature, only those who can fight not only for their lives, but also for a place under the sun.

Our world, the world of people is an unreal world, an artificial world in which aggression and aggressiveness are perceived negatively, while in the wild nature, this phenomenon is natural and necessary. The irenic nature of man in the state of nature The state of nature corresponds to the following postulate: there would exist a state anterior to the society where men lived separately, in a state of perfect autonomy, and of which they are not come out only for their misfortune and the perversion of their irenic nature.

It seems to me that today, when humanity has come close to an environmental catastrophe, when all the terrible consequences of utopian claims to total control of social processes are clear, the fate of the humanistic ideal is associated with the rejection of the idea of ​​mastery, repression and domination. The idea of ​​co-evolution, a joint evolution of nature and humanity, developed by a number of modern thinkers, in particular, known by our scientist N. N. Moiseev, does not correspond to the new understanding of the relationship between nature and humanity, but it can be interpreted as a relationship of equal partners, if you please, interlocutors in an un programmed dialog. This can and should be understood more broadly. Freedom as an integral characteristic of the humanistic ideal is not conceived as mastering and control, but as the establishment of equal partnership relations with what is outside man: with natural processes, with another person; with the values ​​of a different culture, with social processes, even with non-reflective and "non-transparent" processes of my own psyche.

Culture forms the identity of members of society, thereby it largely regulates their behavior. Clifford Geertz calls culture "a system of regulatory mechanisms that includes plans, recipes, rules, instructions ... that serve to control behavior." He believes that without culture, people would be completely disoriented: “Not human behavior caused by cultural models (systems of significant symbols) would become practically uncontrollable, it would be reduced to spontaneous senseless actions and unrestrained emotions, a person could hardly have any experience.” If culture governs people's behavior, can we go so far as to call it repressive? That is what Sigmund Freud thought. He explored the conflict between culture (or “civilization”) and the instinctive principle of human nature. Often a culture really suppresses a person’s motivations, mainly sexual and aggressive. But she does not exclude them completely. It rather determines the conditions under which they are satisfied.

The study of social change is fundamental in sociology. Perhaps all sociology is focusing on change. “Change is such an obvious feature of social reality that any scientific social theory, whatever its initial conceptual position, should sooner or later approach this issue.”And this is true since the emergence of sociology. Science itself was born in the XIX century. as an attempt to realize the fundamental transition from the traditional to the modern society, the emergence of the urban, industrial, capitalist way of life. Now, at the end of the 20th century, we are in the process of an equally radical transformation from triumphant modernity, gradually embracing the entire globe, to the emerging forms of social life that are so vague that they deserve only the vague label “postmodernism”. Already in the 70s it was clear that “the most striking feature of the modern world is its revolutionary forward movement, or social change. Never before has the familiar world changed so quickly for the vast majority of mankind. Everything has changed - art, science, religion, morality, education, politics, economics, family life, even the internal aspects of our life. These changes are becoming more pronounced as we approach the end of the 20th century.

References

Reinisch, J. M. (1981). Prenatal exposure to synthetic progestins increases potential for aggression in humans. Science, 211(4487), 1171-1173.

Samovar, L. A., Porter, R. E., McDaniel, E. R., & Roy, C. S. (2014). Intercultural communication: A reader. Cengage Learning.

Adler, N. J., & Gundersen, A. (2007). International dimensions of organizational behavior. Cengage Learning.

Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (2001). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression. Cambridge University Press.