In spite of postmodernism there is a straightforward and stable human nature

When old Terence said “I am a man, and nothing human is alien to me,” he was talking about universal human nature. The science of sociobiology has been offering good definitions of human nature for some years now, which are not all that different from traditional definitions of human nature.

All humans have the same impulses of human nature, but as Denis Dutton suggests in writing of Hume, human nature is also prone to mistakes, corruption and different dispositions ethnic and otherwise. Having different dispositions, foibles and corruptions does not mean that, say, beauty is only in the eye of the beholder, because there is a straightforward and stable human nature which includes the variations.

If we remove the mistakes, foibles and dispositions ethnic and otherwise, we arrive at something like the definitions of human nature which are repeated in this blog: that is, even the smallest change in human nature and our DNA structure, for example, in our immune system, takes hundreds of thousands of years---we remain kin-centered, gender defined, age-graded, heterosexual marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and religious-making, among other things,with group-selection as the primary unit of selection.

Our cultures need to unite with real human nature, they tend to do so anyway over time. This is why ethnopluralism, with small states, and protecting differences, is the healthy way to go.