emotions and cognitions cannot usefully be separated. Human reasoning
abilities –our capacities to make arguments and evaluate them, to reflect, to
build institutions, and to devise and revise practices –make us distinctly human
and also distinctly flexible.Abandoning the nature/nurture dichotomy, and a fixed view of ‘human nature’
necessitates the introduction of new, more precise, terms. There is human biology
(which in many respects is not dissimilar from other mammalian biology) and human
interactions and political institutions. Our biology, political cultures and institutions
interact and this interaction helps constitute (and reconstitute) homo politicus –the
human being in the political context. The next important question is, obviously,
how these forces interact and to what effect – a question that can only be answered
by examining specific biological-cultural-institutional complexes. Humans’ basic
flexibility allows us to make institutions and conduct social relations in many ways.
Forces of path dependency and institutionalization have helped shape the particular
historically specific conjunction of our current world. Although humans are well
suited to detecting threats and feeling insecure, a more complete view of human
capacity suggests that politicalsystems rooted in fear and mistrust are not the inevitable
outcome. The world could be otherwise.
It is extremely important for scholars of world politics to move beyond these
simple starting propositions. The next step is to examine how our ‘human natures’
influence world politics and how our previous views of human nature have shaped
the world we live in. In the next section I give an example of how a reformulated
understanding of human nature could change our understanding of world politics.
I focus on fear because it is so central to theories of world politics.
The biology of fear
Fear is a private sensation that has biological correlates but is also influenced by our
social construction of what we should fear or not fear. In other words, fear affects
our brains at a neurochemical level, but our social understandings moderate and
structure both our reactions to stimuli and what we do with fears.
A simplifiedschematic of the perception of potentially frightening stimuli and
human response may be useful to illustrate both the co-constitutive relationship of
nature and nurture, and our assumptions about fear in foreign policy. Fear begins
with the perception of some potentially threatening stimuli. That perception has to
be sorted and categorized. If we determine (and this occurs very quickly) that the
thing we perceive is a threat, our bodies begin a familiar neurochemical and
hormonal response which culminates in the release of adrenaline and other
chemicals. The release of those chemicals can, in turn, rewrite the neurochemical
circuitry of our brains – what neuroscientists call long-term potentiation and
‘plasticity’.
Further, fear affects our cognitions and the construction of memory but it is also
affected by our cognitions and memories. Fearful experiences understandably
164 Rethinking ‘man’