What Is Normative Human Nature?

Robert George published an article in First Things a handful of weeks ago, commemorating the ten-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that required states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex partners.

But ten years later, George notes that the “stunning impact on American public opinion” the case had may not be as irrevocable as we tend to think: he tracks the waning of “woke ideology” in various sectors, and the “vibe shift” toward right wing politics that talking heads, in the last year or two, have been flummoxed by. The time could be ripe, George proposes, for Obergefell to meet the challenge it’s eventually toppled by.

It's impossible to say if George’s prediction will be right. What we can say is that the kind of shift in public opinion he’s asking after would run deepest if accompanied by a shift in more fundamental views about the nature of human reality. Lying beneath debates like that over same-sex marriage is a question one could put this way: is there such a thing as normative human nature?

An Italian philosopher, Agosto del Noce, sometimes speaks of the responses to such a question as falling into a “Platonic” view of the world and an “anti-Platonic” view. The former takes values (such as love, goodness, truth) to possess an “objective reality,” “independent of the situation of the human subject.” The latter views values as “reflections of given historical situations . . . [Thus], any transformation of social conditions must produce a transformation of values.”

In other words, the “Platonic” camp believes that our freedom and goodness are tied to being as fully human as we can be according to the nature given us by the Creator. The “anti-Platonic” camp believes our freedom and goodness to depend on unshackling ourselves from biological constraints and conventional, historical notions of morality. The gap that spans these two positions is profound, and it is unbridgeable.

Most, however, probably don’t think their position through to these fundamental bases: they’ve inherited the flotsam and jetsam of what’s been a historically “Platonic” culture in the West, but they are also swimming in a media bath that often implicitly or explicitly assaults that historically Platonic culture’s purportedly objective – and therefore “oppressive” or “backward” – ideals. Folks are, as a result, wont to be moved by whatever emotive appeal has the most power within them at the moment, whether that means an unconscious sway back toward the Platonic camp or toward the anti-Platonic one.  

For Christians who have the benefit of God’s revelation, of course, the matter is clear, and liberating. We have been created by another for a high destiny and for genuine freedom. Aligning ourselves with our Creator is therefore the road to life, joy, and an immense expansion of being. Turning from him or from the “constraints” of the nature he’s given to us is not liberating; it is a turn toward non-existence.

So, whatever comes of the next ten years post-Obergefell, it’s good to simply get that point clear: the view that would respond “yes” to the question about whether there is a normative human nature is not a draconian, repressive one. It’s a view that resonates, perhaps more profoundly than any other view does, with our innate human longing for freedom, for joy, and for real and lasting love.