IS HUMAN NATURE A CHOICE

You all must have faced the human analogy into two beings;

Spiritual and Animal kind

Spirit: the non-physical part of a person which is the seat of emotions and character; the soul. Supernatural incarnation while almost every creed emphasize and favor Pierre Teilhard de Chardin words ‘We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.’

Animal: physical appetites or animal desires. A person gulping a family-pack biryani is an example.

Research done by The British Psychological Society upon Human nature found from psychology point ;

It’s a question that’s reverberated through the ages – are humans, though imperfect, essentially kind, sensible, good-natured creatures? Or are we, deep down, wired to be bad, blinkered, idle, vain, vengeful and selfish? There are no easy answers, and there’s clearly a lot of variation between individuals, but here we shine some evidence-based light on the matter through dispiriting findings that reveal the darker and less impressive aspects of human nature. 

We view minorities and the vulnerable as less than human. One striking example of this blatant dehumanisation came from a brain-scan study that found a small group of students exhibited less neural activity associated with thinking about people when they looked at pictures of the homeless or of drug addicts, as compared with higher-status individuals. Another study showed that people who are opposed to Arab immigration tended to rate Arabs and Muslims as literally less evolved than average. Among other examples, there’s also evidence that young people dehumanise older people; and that men and women alike dehumanise drunk women. What’s more, the inclination to dehumanise starts early – children as young as five view out-group faces (of people from a different city or a different gender to the child) as less human than in-group faces.

Lets Observe this in India, As being Indian it’s a sad thing to hear that even after Half a decade of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s departure, a man who effected social change through passive, peaceful resistance to injustice, a man who lived for peace, harmony and reconciliation and he laid down his life for the vindication of these ideals. As Arun Gandhi recalls Growing Up With Mahatma Gandhi, Today India is still plagued by injustice and divisiveness, just like when Mahatma was alive.There’s a lot of hopelessness, frustration, and disparity in India now. We talk about religion and we practice religion, but we don’t go to the essence of religion. All the religions of talk about love, compassion, respect, and understanding each other—and not about hate and prejudice. We need to get back to the fundamentals of religion and live not for ourselves but for the community—helping each other attain peace. After all, we cannot be at peace with ourselves if the community is not at peace. So we have to be agents of change and work toward helping each other create a peaceful society.

We’re not alone, Orlando Sentinel Editorial Advisory Board, Maloey Jones considered the Dominican Republic, which is divided between people who believe there should be a wall between it and its neighbor, and those who feel that these neighbors should be treated with kindness and compassion. While some Dominicans believe that the xenophobic nationalistic wave sweeping their country has more to do with their neighbors’ darker complexion than the porousness of the country’s border, other Dominicans question whether their fellow citizens born of Haitian heritage are “real” Dominicans.

I believe that such distrust between people is not caused solely for economic or ethnic differences. I believe the cause is much deeper than this. Humans are inhumane to other humans for many reasons, all of which have the same root: like me, good; unlike me, bad.

For example, consider the years of war in Ireland over religion between ethnically identical people, all of whom were Christians. Or the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis on many who were virtually the same genetically as they were, but who practiced a different religion.

I believe a large part of our animus toward one another is the fact that we are — despite our resistance to the idea — animals. We are advanced intellectually compared to other animals, but we also share their primal urge to like that which is alike, and abhor that which is different. It’s a trait that can be seen throughout nature. Consider the pine tree that drops acidic needles, poisoning the soil for other plant life, but also shares nutrients with other pine trees through its root system.

It seems life has survived for millions of years through a built-in instinct to get its genes into the next generation. This inherent instinct exists in every living thing. For humans, it resides in the area of our brain called the amygdala, or lizard brain. The amygdala is what causes us to jump when we see a snake before we are even aware of what we’re seeing. It’s also the seat of emotions that compel us to fear and dominance.

Another region of the human brain is the prefrontal cortex. This area sets us apart from other animals and gives rise to language, poetry, prose, song, art and music. In the prefrontal cortex, cognition is formed, and it’s our most unique trait. Cognition, the ability to think and reason; we think, and therefore we are. We are able to resist our baser instincts and be fully human.

We humans can choose our own nature, be it our primitive animal instincts, or our more complex humanness, which includes the part of our nature, our morality, that Martin Luther King spoke of when he said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” The choice of which part of the brain we heed is ours and ours alone to make.

This post originally appeared on oneup.in

Shaik Waseem is Entrepreneurial Educator and start-up influencer. He is on a mission to promote academia to be ICE(Innovative Creative Entrepreneurial). He has been co-founder and managing partner for multiple companies that are run under investment group members listed by Forbes middle east as top 100 Indian leaders in U.A.E.