come to see that the only lesson of either history or anthropology is our
extraordinary malleability. We are coming to think of ourselves as the flexible,
protean, self-shaping animal, rather than as the rational animal or the cruel
animal.^63In Man, the State, and War,Waltz argues that, ‘human nature is so complex that
it can justify every hypothesis we may entertain’.^64 Our biology iscomplex, but that
does not mean we ought to give up trying to understand the complex ways that our
biology and social institutions interact. Thus, it should be clear that I do not intend
to reduce all to biology. Neuroscience can tell us about our basic biological capac-
ities, but social science, psychology, and philosophy can better help us understand
why we do what we do. Biologists are finding that we are shaped in nearly equal
parts by ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’. Our biology matters but we are not prisoners of it.
Our biological natures and our institutions interact.^65 Our cognitions, memories and
emotions also interact.
Moreover, because of the human capacity for reflection and reason, we can
understand and manipulate the forces that shape us. It is therefore important to
attend to the complexities of interaction. Specifically, we must attend the ways that
institutions can reinforce aspects of our ‘natures’ that promote conflict but conversely
how other institutions engender cooperation. Similarly, we must attend to the ways
our cognitions and emotions interact, influencing not only the process and content
(how and what) of our cognitions, but how much and what we feel. In other words,
while our amygdalas might react nearly instantaneously to a perceived threat, our
pre-frontal cortex and hippocampus react nearly as quickly and can direct our
behaviour. Moreover, we can train ourselves not to react fearfully to something.
Further, because we are social animals who live in community and must make
decisions and act together to achieve goals, we must argue and persuade others about
both how to interpret situations and how to act.
I am thus, ultimately in agreement with Waltz (and Rousseau) in one sense: the
structures we make matter and in some ways powerfully determine the kind of
world we create. Where I disagree strongly with Waltz is in assuming that atten-
tion to human nature, understood as biology, is ‘reductionist’. Waltz argues that
competition and power balancing are to be expected in anarchic systems and that
the international system is stable in the sense that disrupted balances will be ‘restored
in one way or another’.^66 The simple fact is that humans have structured world
politics on the basis of assumptions about human nature, namely about fear,
rationality, and distrust. Those assumptions have been institutionalized and become
the ‘system’. Our fears and our beliefsabout how fear works, make this system. We
need not wait for human nature to change for world peace to become possible, nor
should we lament the capacity of human nature to change. Our biology has all the
capacity we need. We can shape our institutions and foreign policies to work more
or less better with our biology.
The realists’ tendency to assume that we know all we need to know about homo
politicushas likely done scholars and foreign policy decision-makers an enormous
172 Rethinking ‘man’