•Broadly identified four of the ways in which human need may be thought about. These have been characterised (for now) as the economistic, moralistic, paternalistic, and socially reformist approaches.
•Argued that the essential distinction between absolute and relative needs can be understood in two ways:
◊first, in terms of a distinction between thin needs and thick needs; a distinction concerned with the quantitative extent and qualitative nature of human need;
◊second, in terms of a distinction between theoretical (top-down) and practical (bottom-up) understandings of need; between the needs that individuals may be conceptualised as having by virtue of being human and needs that are experienced in the course of everyday human existence.
•Explained that this book, in developing these arguments, will contend that human need is best understood in the context of human interdependency and as the basis upon which social rights may be constructed and claimed. It will argue for a radical humanist understanding of needs.
1.Why should it be difficult to define what human beings need?
2.Can any of the binary distinctions in Table 1.1 be regarded by themselves as meaningful or helpful?
This chapter will:
•consider a broad-brush anthropological account of the history of the human species;
•discuss the variety of ‘humanisms’: that is to say, the plethora of conceptual approaches and belief systems that in contrasting ways prioritise humanity;
•present a radical humanist analysis of the constitutive or ‘essential’ characteristics of the human species as a means by which to define its needs.
This chapter sets out to consider what is distinctively ‘human’ about human need. Its conclusion informs the critical stance that informs the rest of the book: for appraising the distinction between that which is necessary to a human being’s existence, and that which is – in a literal sense – essential to her humanity (to which we shall turn in Chapter 3): and for understanding the dynamic relationship between human needs whose meanings are framed through prescribed beliefs and/or reasoning, and those which are framed through direct human experience, feelings and struggles (to which we shall turn in Chapters 4 and 5, respectively).
Recorded history began only with the development of systematic forms of written communication some 5,000 years ago. But biological, archaeological and anthropological scholarship tell us that what we now refer to as the human species, homo sapiens, had by that time already existed on this planet for perhaps 150,000 years. There had been even earlier species of genus homo, some of whom developed the use of tools and fire, and the oldest of which may have first appeared some 2 or 3 million years ago. The homo sapiens brain, however, was twice as large as that of the earliest hominin species, and what set it apart was a process characterised by Harari (2011) as a ‘Cognitive Revolution’, which began to unfold somewhere between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago as our species, in small foraging bands, began to colonise pockets of the world, hunting with bows and arrows and sometimes, for example, travelling in boats. While doing so, they began to evolve more elaborate forms of language and communication, and to develop artistic and symbolic modes of representation. Importantly, it appears that the small, generally nomadic hunter-gatherer communities in which they lived were able adaptively to develop methods of social cooperation well in advance of those of other species (Dunbar & Shultz, 2007; Sahlins, 1974; and see Wilkinson & Pickett, 2018).
Some 12,000 years ago, the Cognitive Revolution was followed by the beginnings of an Agricultural Revolution. Human beings started in some parts of the world to settle and cultivate the land; to domesticate both plants and animals. The sedentary societies that emerged began to generate increasingly sophisticated technologies, including eventually the use of metals. And by the time recorded history began some 4–5,000 years ago, some human societies in certain parts of the world had expanded in size, establishing various forms of government, religion and formalised ‘civilisations’ (Elias, 1978). Such societies became possible, in part because productive technologies made it practicable to feed, shelter and clothe larger groups of people, but also because shared (or sometimes imposed) systems of belief and understanding made it possible to coordinate such processes. The medium of language had made it possible to classify and name, to communicate about and plan access to the palpable or concrete things that people needed for survival. But it also made it possible for human beings to unify themselves around imaginary or abstract things; to create and share legends and myths; to invent and promote shared beliefs in spirits and gods; to define and agree cultural practices, customs, rules and laws. Whereas the elaborately evolved behaviours and habits of their primate ancestors were driven primarily by genetically instituted instincts, homo sapiens had generated and internalised intersubjective understandings of their world, so constructing what might be regarded as ‘artificial instincts’ (Harari, 2011: 181). As this process accelerated, human beings found new ways to exchange information and produce and exchange the goods they needed. Language could be expressed through written script. Produce could be traded with people from beyond the immediate group or community that produced it, not by barter, but using money; a medium of exchange requiring a shared conceptualisation of comparative value symbolised through tokens or coinage.
To what extent did these changes constitute human progress? Partial insights into the prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies of the early Stone Age can be obtained from anthropological studies of surviving aboriginal, indigenous and nomadic tribal peoples, findings from which suggest that the daily existence of prehistoric foragers may have been frugal by contemporary standards, but their ‘wants were scarce and [their] means (in relation) plentiful’ (Sahlins, 1974: 13). Theirs, perhaps, was the original ‘Affluent Society’, in which rules and rights of exchange were governed, it has been suggested, by ‘The Spirit of the Gift’. Though we should not romanticise the quality of life of prehistoric foragers, the evidence suggests that in supposedly more ‘developed’ agricultural societies, by contrast, most people had to work longer and harder than the foragers in order to achieve their means of subsistence, their diets were less varied and less nourishing, and their livelihoods were not necessarily any more secure. Certainly, the societies that emerged were more hierarchical. Ruling elites could enslave, exploit or oppress parts of the populations over which they ruled. Kingdoms and empires sought to expand or compete for domination across ever greater portions of the global human population. Whereas human beings had once existed in small self-sufficient groups, largely isolated from each other, they evolved into a species that was on the one hand uniquely interconnected through language and trade, yet on the other divided by conflicting religious beliefs and/or territorial allegiances and by socially constructed relations of class, caste or ‘race’.1
As human civilisations of various shapes and sizes evolved,