Politics, Meet Metaphysics

To paraphrase Richard Wagner, the pledge is beginning to bore me. So let’s kick out some good ol’ fashioned philosophy. Anyone else think it’s utterly strange that the generally secular left is typically hostile to the idea of a “human nature,” while the right (more often associated with religious sensibilities) makes regular use of it? I mean, it’s clear why socialists and whatnot find the idea of human nature politically inconvenient: if the general prevalence of selfish bastards is a function of biology, and not bad capitalist programming, plans for new social orders which require people to change radically are in trouble. But in another sense, it’s quite puzzling. If (as I assume most on the left do) you buy some brand of evolutionary theory (rather than “special creation”), you think we’re organisms in many ways like other animals, whose bodies and organs have been shaped over time by natural selection, surviving because they fulfill specific adaptive functions. Presumably, “organs” there includes our brains. But then how could we not have a fairly determinate “nature”? How could we not, in other words, have minds made up of specific programs and dispositions which proved useful to our hunter-gatherer ancestors (and their gametes)? The idea of a totally plastic human nature seems compatible with, if anything, the idea that what we “really are” is some sort of immaterial soul with a radical capacity for free choice. I guess the existentialist left gets a free pass on this one, but there can’t be all that many of them around anymore. So what gives? Seems like an indication that lots of folks are letting their preferred politics pick their metaphysics (or theory of mind) rather than the reverse.