Shades of grey

A friend and I disagree over what constitutes a "natural" lifespan. He says it's the typical lifespan of an organism in its natural habitat. I say it's the organism's genetic (or otherwise innately determined) lifespan. A animal can get eaten by a tiger at at any point, but if you take all the tigers and other dangers away, it will still eventually die. That natural upper limit, the capacity the organism has evolved to allow, seems like a more sensible definition than incorporating highly variable environmental effects to me (though it's certainly an interesting question as to why some animals have evolved the capacity to live much longer than they usually do).

For example, he says that the natural lifespan of a human, i.e. living in a jungle, is about 40. But our genetic limit seems to be more like 100, and the things that get you in the jungle are random, unpredictable, and strongly individualistic. Stick me on my own in the jungle and I'll quite likely be dead within a week, but a survival expert may last many years. A survival expert with a bunch of specialist equipment will last even longer, and a whole team of well-organised survival experts may found an entirely new civilisation. Our lifespan, then, if we allow it to be defined by external effects, is also a function of other people and their associated knowledge. I don't call that especially natural.

The same applies to the animal kingdom. A young elephant without its matriarch may not last long in the Namibian desert where it needs to know the location of water sources, so its "natural habitat" would therefore have to constitute other elephants as well. Where do we draw the line ? Just because humans had to discover agriculture and building techniques, does that make them unnatural ?  If so, why should elephant culture be considered natural ? Then again, some people call anything human artificial and unnatural. And "natural habitat" is itself intrinsically variable. Animals move around - some of them migrate far more than we do, sometimes surviving where the habitat barely allows them to scrape through, sometimes living where they can thrive.

But this is really a relatively petty terminology problem over what constitutes "natural", or, as Terry Pratchett put it, "being assasinated is natural causes for a king." Perhaps it's better to forget the term "natural lifespan" altogether and instead speak of "innate lifespan" and "environmental lifespan".

Surely the same applies when it comes to behaviour (though I note that when we say "nature or nurture" in that context, we understand that "nature" means innate, not environment). We may  have some tendencies where are innately determined, and some which are environmental : there were no web designers around in 1457 for a very good reason. Likewise, and more importantly, behaviours that may be productive in some situations may be detrimental in others. Sometimes it's good to be individualistic, sometimes it's better to take a more collectivist approach.

Hobbes didn’t really think that we’re naturally evil. His point, rather, is that we’re not hardwired to live together in large scale political societies. We’re not naturally political animals like bees or ants, who instinctively cooperate and work together for the common good. Instead, we’re naturally self-interested and look out for ourselves first and foremost. We care about our reputation, as well as our material wellbeing, and our desire for social standing drives us into conflict as much as competition over scarce resources. 

For Rousseau, everything started to go wrong once humans perfected the arts of agriculture and industry, which eventually led to unprecedented levels of private property, economic interdependence, and inequality. Inequality breeds social division. Where societies had once been united by strong social bonds, the escalation of inequality soon turned us into ruthless competitors for status and domination. The flipside to Rousseau’s belief in natural goodness is that it is political and social institutions that make us evil, as we now are.

So both would seem to conclude that hell is other people. Or more accurately, but less quotably, hell is a bad way of organising people. I do not think the vast bulk of people are inherently good or inherently bad - if they were, everyday life would either be a heavenly paradise or an apocalyptic wasteland whether we've evolved to be suitable for it or not. It's generally neither. It rarely if ever becomes the former, but occasionally and catastrophically degenerates into the latter. There are extremists, the people who do nothing but help and the people who do nothing but hurt, but they are exceptions that prove the rule. Most people are neither impervious to their environments nor wholly products of it, but a blend of both. The question "are we inherently good or evil ?" is probably flawed - we can only ask how the environment affects our inherent tendencies, accepting the existence and complex interplay between both.

Hobbes vs Rousseau: Are We Inherently Evil or Good?

In 1651, Thomas Hobbes famously wrote that life in the state of nature - that is, our natural condition outside the authority of a political state - is 'solitary, poore, nasty brutish, and short.'