Posted on 12/30/2002 11:02:27 PM PST by JohnHuang2
No issue has a greater influence on determining your social and political views than whether you view human nature as basically good or not.
In 20 years as a radio talk-show host, I have dialogued with thousands of people, of both sexes and from virtually every religious, ethnic and national background. Very early on, I realized that perhaps the major reason for political and other disagreements I had with callers was that they believed people are basically good, and I did not. I believe that we are born with tendencies toward both good and evil. Yes, babies are born innocent, but not good.
Why is this issue so important?
First, if you believe people are born good, you will attribute evil to forces outside the individual. That is why, for example, our secular humanistic culture so often attributes evil to poverty. Washington Sen. Patty Murray, former President Jimmy Carter and millions of other Westerners believe that the cause of Islamic terror is poverty. They really believe that people who strap bombs to their bodies to blow up families in pizzerias in Israel, plant bombs at a nightclub in Bali, slit stewardesses' throats and ram airplanes filled with innocent Americans into office buildings do so because they lack sufficient incomes.
Something in these people cannot accept the fact that many people have evil values and choose evil for reasons having nothing to do with their economic situation. The Carters and Murrays of the West – representatives of that huge group of naive Westerners identified by the once proud title "liberal" – do not understand that no amount of money will dissuade those who believe that God wants them to rule the world and murder all those they deem infidels.
Second, if you believe people are born good, you will not stress character development when you raise children. You will have schools teach young people how to use condoms, how to avoid first and secondhand tobacco smoke, how to recycle and how to prevent rainforests from disappearing. You will teach them how to struggle against the evils of society – its sexism, its racism, its classism and its homophobia. But you will not teach them that the primary struggle they have to wage to make a better world is against their own nature.
I attended Jewish religious schools (yeshivas) until the age of 18, and aside from being taught that moral rules come from God rather than from personal or world opinion, this was the greatest difference between my education and those who attended public and private secular schools. They learned that their greatest struggles were with society, and I learned that the greatest struggle was with me, and my natural inclinations to laziness, insatiable appetites and self-centeredness.
Third, if you believe that people are basically good, God and religion are morally unnecessary, even harmful. Why would basically good people need a God or religion to provide moral standards? Therefore, the crowd that believes in innate human goodness tends to either be secular or to reduce God and religion to social workers, providers of compassion rather than of moral standards and moral judgments.
Fourth, if you believe people are basically good, you, of course, believe that you are good – and therefore those who disagree with you must be bad, not merely wrong. You also believe that the more power that you and those you agree with have, the better the society will be. That is why such people are so committed to powerful government and to powerful judges. On the other hand, those of us who believe that people are not basically good do not want power concentrated in any one group, and are therefore profoundly suspicious of big government, big labor, big corporations and even big religious institutions. As Lord Acton said long ago, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton did not believe people are basically good.
No great body of wisdom, East or West, ever posited that people were basically good. This naive and dangerous notion originated in modern secular Western thought, probably with Jean Jacques Rousseau, the Frenchman who gave us the notion of pre-modern man as a noble savage.
He was half right. Savage, yes, noble, no.
If the West does not soon reject Rousseau and humanism and begin to recognize evil, judge it and confront it, it will find itself incapable of fighting savages who are not noble.
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I most certainly do not. Most people will screw themselves up and screw you up in the process.
The perils of designer tribalism*** It is all part of what Bruckner calls "the enchanting music of departure." Its siren call is seductive but also supremely mendacious. Indeed, the messy reality of the primitive world-its squalor and poverty, its penchant for cannibalism, slavery, gratuitous cruelty, and superstition-are carefully edited out of the picture. In their place we find a species of Rousseauvian sentimentality. Rousseau is the patron saint of Third Worldism. "Ignoring the real human race entirely," Rousseau wrote in a passage Bruckner quotes from the Confessions, "I imagined perfect beings, with heavenly virtue and beauty, so sure in their friendship, so tender and faithful, that I could never find anyone like them in the real world." The beings with whom Rousseau populated his fantasy life are exported to exotic lands by the Third Worldist. As Rousseau discovered, the unreality of the scenario, far from being an impediment to moral smugness, was an invaluable asset. Reality, after all, has a way of impinging upon fantasy, clipping its wings, limiting its exuberance. So much the worse, then, for reality. As Bruckner notes, in this romance adepts "were not looking for a real world but the negation of their own. . . . An eternal vision is projected on these nations that has nothing to do with their real history."***
People are not inherently good. Nor are they inherently evil.
People are inherently people.
Humans are individually motivated and individually satisfied. They can detect the motives and agendas of others, but can never feel them to the exact degree of intensity those others feel. They have the capacity for rationality, generosity, and transcendence of spirit, but they also have the capacity for mindlessness, vindictiveness, and the most appalling closure of self.
What matters to the construction and maintenance of any human society is whether the incentives it instantiates:
Christ told us to 1) love God, and 2) love one another as we love ourselves. What a brilliant encapsulation of the laws of successful societies! God, the supreme Lawgiver, cannot be overruled. His dictates about the nature of things must be accepted; the only way forward is to work with them. The capacities of individual men are so limited that real achievement is only available through division of labor in a regime of reliable contract among self-interested individuals. "Love of others" must include the sort of innocent benevolence, the willingness to see others prosper without rancor of envy, that's required by a free economy. Thus we arrive at the best imaginable system of social organization with no need for other arguments.
Best, not perfect. Perfection is not available to Man in this world.
All theorizing about goodness or evil in the human makeup must come to terms with this touchstone criterion: what works in the real world.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason:
http://www.palaceofreason.com
Attending college in the 60's, I was exposed to the writings of BF Skinner in a mandatory Psychology 101 class. At the time I was struck by the time and energy the department devoted to this man and his theories. Essentially, he put a chicken in a box and taught it to play baseball by rewarding it with feed. When the chicken pressed a lever on cue, or ran a base, it got a pellet. Skinner was able to train animals to a remarkable degree with this method of positive reinforcement. He also demonstrated that negative reinforcement, such as electric shocks, was not as effective as positive reinforcement in controlling animal behavior.
So far, Skinner has not done the world much harm and perhaps he has even contributed something useful if you are Siegfried and Roy. But it soon became clear that Skinner and my psych professors had ambitions grander than dog and pony shows when they required a reading of Skinner's Walden Two. Here Skinner extrapolates his findings from chickens to people and causes real mischief. Essentially, he postulates that the humsn animal is a TABULA RASA, neither good nor evil, which can be conditioned into good behavior. There are no evil people just poorly conditioned behavior. All that is required to have generations of well behaved human chickens is a grand enough Skinner box to positively reinforce positive behavior. Of course, it does not take a socialist to see that it would take more than a village, indeed it would take a federal burocracy, to build and maintain a big enough box.
The mischief comes in when this thinking invades the penal (whoops, I mean corrections)system or the educational establishment and so on. Praeger, in his wonderful essay, has alluded to the effects on education of this baleful presumption about the nature of man. He is absolutely right when he says:
No issue has a greater influence on determining your social and political views than whether you view human nature as basically good or not.
This is why liberals loathe believing christians. This is why liberals are collectivists and conservatives are individualists. This is why the Democrat party slices and dices the electorate into groups. This is why Patty Murray said what she said. The old adage that liberals love mankind in the abstract and as a group (read African-Americans) but despise them on an individual level finds its origins here. This is why believing Christians and believing Jews are finding that they hold much in common and have a common philosophical enemy in secular Jews and goyische pagans. The application of this insight is almost endless.
Extremely well put. Thought you might want to know that.
If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it."
Too little effort to master sin is sadly practiced by so many.
That bogus theory has been blown out of the water most recently by Steven Pinker. I can't recall the name of his book, but it's being discussed and reviewed on a lot media outlets.
Conservatives believe that everyone is basically evil and that's we need protection.
Libertarians believe that it cannot be known so we should only stop people after they have shown themselves to be evil.
But that's because I believe in the Torah — all of it.
People are born sinners, not neutral.
Dan
Dan
If he had included sinfullness wouldn't you have been in accord with this point of Pragers?
I thought that he was remarkably right on.
Regards
Bonehead
Dan
And people are inherently evil. That is, the natural man is inherently evil. On the other hand, most people individually believe they are good. People cope with this klang and dissonance between the reality of their depravity and their self-perception that they are fundamentally good by externalizing the evil onto others or by rationalizing their own motives and behavior.
Go to DU and read their posts. The liberals posting there are convinced their hearts are noble and pure. They truly believe they are good people--perhaps the only good people. On the other hand, DU'ers know conservatives--especially conservative Christians--are base and evil.
DU'ers and other liberals excuse Bill Clinton's sexual depravity and Hillary Clinton's (whom they perceive to be a reflection of themselves) abuse of power by imaging them also to be good, empathetic, compassionate people who only want to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and uplift the downtrodden. Never mind that they are stealing from more efficient citizens and sources and creating ever-larger classes of "victims" through their stupidity and hubris. Through the jujitsu of self-deception they persuade themselves that they are more Christ-like than Christ. After all, which of them would ever say something as "cruel" as "leave the dead to bury their dead"? No, thay are convinced that through the bloody expedient of gross government extortion they can forcibly create the good and just society that Christ "failed" to deliver.
And if social regressives such as conservative Christians (who truly understand the mystery of the Kingdom and are loathe to accept a human-made substitute) get in the way? In their heart of hearts, they would like nothing better than to eliminate them as enemies of mankind--if they could get away with it. That was Stalin's view of Christianity, too.
As for me, I am not deceived about the depravity of the human heart. I know, I am painfully reminded every day, of the natural man. I don't expect the perfection in others that I cannot achieve myself, but neither do I excuse their depravity and imagine they are fundamentally good. Rather, I know that the best of them is struggling.
They used to teach morality in school.
Excerpt: The original 1836 version of the fabled reading instruction books which for three-quarters of a century were used by four-fifths of all American school children. Some 120 million sets were sold. No other books ever had so much influence over so many children over such a long period.
Good stuff with excellent phonetics and basic arithmetic. The books taught that "with Adam's fall, we sinned all" (introduction to the letter A, for instance) and the need to cultivate good qualities. McGuffey never assumed that children were born innocent, he knew they had to be taught such things as charity and mercy, and to avoid things like stealing, lying, etc. The McGuffey Readers did a great job of basic elementary education for 75 years.
Exactly. And often, those with noble intentions cause great damage because they cannot understand the unforeseen impact of their actions. That is why we must encourage individuals to act in their own self-interest, even when it may seem to be a better idea if we force them into "charitable acts" (redistributing their wealth, for one).
"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death."
---Anne Frank
I tell myself that if she could think it, under the circumstances in which she found herself, who am I to doubt man's goodness? Yet, she died in a death camp eventually, so where did all her faith in man's goodness get her?
I struggle with all this yet, more so than ever in the shadow of 9-11.
A free economy, based on individual ownership, harnesses individual greed to achieve collective prosperity.
A constitutional republic balances the branches of government and the state/federal division to harness the will to power.
The genius of both is that they depend only on man's nature as it naturally occurs, and do not depend on any religous or moral awakening.
The bulk of people....depends on the how that basic personality and intelligence is trained.
Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown - Happy New Year
Is it not clear that, if there are moral absolutes in the world, which there surely are, then all gradations of human progress in the moral realm require an ability to perceive differences in moral stature? That such differences are impossible to separate from the idea of "better" and "worse" -- and that the privilege of judging remains with those on the "better" end?
What would any moral judgment be worth, if we were all inherently evil? Each of us could point to the permanent fault of being human as exculpation for all his deeds -- and no human being would possess the elevation to argue with him!
Is it not clear that one could not even aspire to moral improvement if one were inherently evil, any more than one could be subject to temptation if one were inherently good? That the joined need and ability to struggle against temptations to abuse one's fellows is testimony to a divided nature, a nature of parts, neither inherently good nor evil?
I reject all categorical classifications of Man. It does immense harm to attribute to our shared natures what should be marked down to the weakness of individual wills. That's quite as bad as any other form of collectivism, and lead to results just as catastrophic. Christianity, a faith which exhorts us to nurture our better natures and resist our worse ones, and to encourage the same in others by example, has no place for such a thing. It gives our opponents the raw material they need to portray us as hateful bigots and prigs, with neither charity nor mercy in our souls.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason:
http://www.palaceofreason.com
...Their brainwashing was a success. Individulists are more resistent to conditioning.
Wrong, how?
However, you are missing the main point. You are looking at this from much the same perspective as the secularist Liberal. You are looking at man and his "goodness" from man's view, not God's, and in light of man's wisdom, not God's Word.
The fact man continually corrupts God's view and purpose - even when genuinely trying to act on God's behest and in accordance with His Word - only lends increased credence to the principle of the genuine hopelessly depraved state of a natural man.
"A person is smart; people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals."
--Agent Kay, Men In Black
The same observation (with about the same amount of individual exceptions) seems to apply to moral conduct.
I was basically trying to demonstrate based on these conflicts that what we are seeing is what we are really like. We don't teach children to be bad. We teach them to be good. And the tricky part is teaching them WHY they should be good.
He simply didn't get it. He thought it was just innocent conflict. Innocent yes, because the kids don't know any better. But did he ever reflect on why he knows it's good to compromise and to share? Perhaps not, because he must have assumed that we eventually come to that realization simply by aging, I guess, since we are basically good.
Sorry but you are wrong. Christianity states that all men are inherently evil. That's why we need a Saviour. For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
God Save America (Please)
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