ACT I
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What does it mean to be human?
When people ask that question they usually mean it as philosophy, or religion, or psychology, or even biology. But another way to answer it is with anthropology.
Anthropologists study people by studying cultures, looking for similarities and differences.
An anthropologist named Donald E. Brown made a huge contribution to the field. He discovered a number of relationships between constants and variables in human decision making. A lot of things that anthropologists thought were characteristics turn out to be traits.
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To understand what Dr. Brown discovered, look at a modern map of the world. You’ll see that there aren’t any blank spaces on it. That’s because people have explored the entire land surface of the Earth and wrote down what they found there.
To some people it sounds arrogant for anyone to claim that anthropologists have visited every culture on Earth and reported what they found. But think about that map of the world that doesn’t have any blank spaces on it. Cultures are made of people, and people live on land.
All that anthropologists need to do to see where all the people live is look at a map. If there were any cultures that hadn’t been studied and reported on yet, some anthropologists would find out about them, go there, and greatly advance their careers by making important discoveries in their fields.
While there certainly are some small groups of people in different parts of the world who haven’t been recorded in census data, there is no part of the world that’s sufficiently unexplored by the people who make the maps for groups of thousands of people to live there without us finding out about them.
ACT II
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Dr. Brown realized that if he compiled the data from anthropologists’ reports it would tell a much bigger story of people now. So he read through all those reports and made a list of all the behavioral traits that appeared in every culture on Earth with no exceptions.
Usually when we talk about human behavior, we’re talking about the behaviors of individual people. Behavior is the result of people acting upon feelings or ideas. That implies that we’re talking about how feelings or ideas of individual people lead to the behavior of individual people.
If we can talk about behavior of people all over the world, with no exceptions— which we can, because of all those anthropological records— we can see something very different.
If everyone in the world has some patterns of behavior in common, then that behavior isn’t a variable. That means it isn’t a part of the aei side of v = aei. It’s a constant, which makes it part of v.
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Some behaviors aren’t universal in the sense of everyone doing them. But they are universal among easily defined biological groups, like men, women, children, or adults.
Some behaviors are universal among people with normal abilities, like ordinarily people have patterns of behavior that depend on sight, even though people who were born blind don’t have them.
Some behaviors depend on people living what we can call a normal life, where they use their abilities to provide for themselves, make choices, and interact with other people. In rare circumstances some people get left out of that. Like, children whose parents keep them locked in their basements don’t learn much from interacting with people.
And some of these behaviors aren’t universal among individuals but are universal among societies wherever people have the choice to do these things. For example, not everyone makes music, but in every society there are people who make music, and everyone could make music, so if all the musicians moved away other people would take their place.
Human universals seem at first like ideas people think of, until you realize that nowhere on Earth are there people who didn’t think of these ideas. That’s the difference between a characteristic and a trait. It isn’t possible to be human without thinking of these things, unless there’s a fairly simple explanation for why people didn’t.
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Some of these constants are easy to imagine being greatly affected by variables from one culture to another. Things like marriage rituals, mythology, and the jokes people tell.
On the other hand, the behavior of newborns is completely unaffected by cultural variables, since they haven’t had time to learn ideas from other people.
Some behaviors are largely unaffected by culture, but are to some extent, and sometimes in unexpected ways.
For instance, all over the world babies baby-talk by making vocal sounds that aren’t words. But at the same time they’re imitating the sounds they hear from people talking. They start out making random sounds, but the older they get the more their baby talk sounds like the local language and accent.
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By the time Dr. Brown finished compiling his list of human universals, it was almost 400 items long. The part of the list I’m going to tell you here is a little less than half of that. These are the ones that are easy to visualize.
So think about this the next time you comb your hair, take a shower, or enjoy your favorite food. The action you are taking right then connects you to people everywhere in the world, because they all do some version of those things too.
ACT III
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In 100% of cultural groups on Earth…
…People have their own names.
They’ve invented, developed, or use fire, tools, levers, spears, knot-tying, weaving, numbers, and measurements.
…People baby talk.
Babies suck their thumbs.
Children play with toys, play to develop skills, and pretend.
They have childhood fears, which include fears of strangers and loud noises.
People tickle each other.
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…People get married and have families.
People normally have sex in private.
They have sexual statuses and sexual regulations, which include regulations against incest.
They have sexual attraction, sexual jealousy, and sexual modesty.
Sex is a main focus of people’s interest.
They have childbirth customs.
Mothers feel maternalism.
Biological mothers normally care for their own children, and normally provide the majority of childcare.
Mothers normally have some sort of male partners during their childbearing years.
Husbands are generally older than their wives.
The Oedipal complex exists in every culture.
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…People feel and express affection.
They communicate with gestures and facial expressions.
They have facial expressions for anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.
They also control their facial expressions to mask their emotions.
They feel ambivalence, envy, and pride.
Sometimes their thoughts, words, and actions don’t correspond.
They also have an interest in living things and things that look like living things.
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…People have senses of aesthetics.
They adorn their bodies, style their hair, and care for their hygiene.
They are aware of their personal appearances, they affect their personal appearances, and they like to look good.
They create art, tell stories, write poems, sing, dance, feast, play music, and make musical instruments.
They use music along with dancing.
They use music in religious activities.
They write and play children’s music.
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…People believe in religion and/or the supernatural.
They have beliefs about death, disease, fortune, and misfortune.
They use divination, rituals, and death rituals.
They mourn.
They tell myths and folklore.
They use some form of magic, and use magic to try to increase life, sustain life, and win love.
They try to predict the future and control the weather.
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…People make medicine, heal the sick and try to heal the sick.
They see a relation between sickness and death.
They have mood and/or consciousness altering techniques and/or chemicals.
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…People have false beliefs and overestimate the objectivity of their thought.
They make choices among alternatives.
They come up with explanations.
They adapt to the their environment.
They see males and females and children and adults to have different natures.
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…People distinguish between voluntary and involuntary actions.
They treat patterns and relations as objective things.
They distinguish between concepts of good and bad, and distinguish between truth and falsehood.
They use psychological defense mechanisms.
They take responsibility for their actions and practice self-control.
They resist dominance and what they believe to be the abuse of power.
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…People cooperate, and they build cooperative groups of individuals beyond their biological families.
They live in groups, and they give their groups collective senses of identity.
They have conflicts, they resolve conflicts, and they use mediation and consultation to help resolve conflicts.
They have a sense of culture, and they have cultural variations within that culture.
They have collective decision-making and government.
They have economic inequalities and they are conscious of economic inequalities.
They have laws, leaders, punishments for crimes, and rules of inheritance.
They trade goods and services.
They right wrongs.
The males dominate the public and politics.
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…People have ethnocentrism and insults.
They cry and feel pain.
The males are more prone to aggression, violence, and theft.
They have outlawed some forms of violence.
They have murder and rape.
They have outlawed murder and rape.
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…People use symbolism and symbolic language.
They use metaphors and use words to represent sounds.
They make special speeches for special occasions, and they admire people who can use words proficiently.
They have proverbs.
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…People follow daily routines, establish meal times, cook, and share food.
They have personal preferences in food, and like sweet food.
They have taboos, taboos on food, and taboos on things people can say.
They like to visit with friends and relatives, and they exchange customary greetings.
They show hospitality, practice etiquette, give gifts, and admire generosity.
They seek revenge for wrongdoing and they repay benevolence.
They have rites of passage.
They have divisions of labor between men and women and among ages.
They have dreams and try to interpret their dreams.
They joke, gossip, lie, and make promises.
They believe in fairness and taking turns.
They have worldviews.
They take risks.
They make plans for the future.
ACT IV
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All of those are things that people all over the world do, even though we do them differently.
Everyone who’s ever hated another group of people had all these thingsin common with them.
Europeans had all these things in common with Native Americans in 1492.
White people had all these things in common with Africans in 1619.
Protestants have all these things in common with Catholics, even in Northern Ireland.
Germans had all these things in common with Jews.
Russians have all these things in common with Ukrainians.
And of course, Americans have all of these things in common with other Americans.
This is not to say that everyone in the world wants to be your friend. But if you do want to make friends with anyone in the world, you have a lot to talk about.
