In Search of Human Nature
Mary E. Clark | 2002-12-06 00:00:00 | Routledge | 496 | Philosophy
Human Nature offers a wide-ranging and holistic view of human nature from all perspectives: scientific, historical, and sociological. Mary Clark takes the most recent data from a dozen or more fields, and works it together with clarifying anecdotes and thought-provoking images to challenge conventional Western beliefs with hopeful new insights. Balancing the theories of cutting-edge neuroscience with the insights of primitive mythologies, Mary Clark provides down-to-earth suggestions for peacefully resolving global problems. Human Nature builds up a coherent, and above all positive, picture of who we really are.
Reviews
Mary Clark focuses on the issue of the nature of human nature, and she brings a wide range of scholarship from many fields to the question. Reviewer Jeffares is quite wrong; Clark's book is heavily referenced; the endnotes comprise nearly 50 pages of small print and the reference list is more than 30 pages. Perhaps what most disturbs many about her argument is that she suggests a "story of who we are" that differs significantly from the currently dominant paradigm of humans as driven to compete for resources and status and survival. Moreover, she has the temerity to point out that what is often taught in schools and promoted by opinion leaders is also a "story," one subject to interpretation as something other than the "facts" that proponents would claim it to be. Clark is not totally rejecting of modernity; but she does argue that modern civilizations are in danger unless some important truths about "human nature" are recognized and more adequately served than such civilizations currently do. She emphasizes that survival of our species from earliest times to the present required cooperation and human bonding more than competing and persuasively presents a case that our current perspectives on humans and the world in which they live lead us to behave in maladaptive ways. We all will ignore her message at our own peril. Clark writes clearly and argues cogently on a vitally important topic. This book should be in every college, university and municipal library. It needs to be understood by all those who consider themselves public intellectuals. Her perspective could lead us toward survival not destruction of our world.
Few books could be more important to us at this moment in time. I urge you to see that your local libraries, academic and general, order this remarkable new publication.
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