Humans are basically good.
That’s an appealing idea. I want to be good. I’d like others to be good too. Imagine a world where everyone is good. Where we look to the good of the community just as actively as we look to the good of ourselves (to love our neighbors as ourselves). I’d like to live in that world.
But we don’t. And the fact that we don’t does not bode well for the theory that humanity is good at its core. If we really were good by nature, if that was our born state of being, wouldn’t the world be better than it is now? If an impartial observer was to skim through a grand book of the history of mankind, it’s hard to imagine that observer coming to the conclusion that we are basically good. We kill each other too much for that. We let each other starve to death too much for that. We wear different colored hats and scream at each other too much for that.
But Tom, you interject, that doesn’t mean that people are bad. That badness is learned. Our natural goodness is contaminated by the evils of our societies. Our institutions are rotten, and they pass on the rot to everyone who lives inside them. Which seems fair enough. But who made our institutions? Naturally good people? To argue that our problems are simply the result of bad systems is to argue by obfuscation. It ignores the fact that those institutions are made by people just like you and me. It is hubris to think that people on earth right now have any right to moral supremacy over the people that came before. That somehow, they were corrupt but we overcame that corruption and are now good people. If they were corrupt, then their corruption is part of us too.
The statement, “humans are basically good,” fails to properly describe the human condition, but that does not mean the converse is true either. Humans are not basically evil. If we really were evil by nature, if we were by nature ignoble, selfish, and cruel, wouldn’t the world be worse than it is now? Our impartial observer glancing through that grand book of history would not come to the conclusion that we are incapable of good. There are too many examples of self-less cooperation, too many people caring for the weak and helpless, too many people sacrificing themselves for the people around them, too much love for creatures that are evil.
It is more accurate to say that humans are capable of good. That there is in us a conflict between evil and good. That sometimes good wins and sometimes evil wins. And these wins and losses happen on the grand scale of countries and the microscale of individuals.
One of the things I love about Christianity is that it describes the world as we find it. The Bible describes a world where were made to be pure but chose corruption. And that corruption sets up an internal tension between wanting to be good and sliding into evil. The heroes in the Bible aren’t heroes in the Disney sense. David was a man after God’s own heart, blessed and elevated to king. But he was also an adulterer and a murder. The Bible is full of stories of fallen saints and sainted sinners. It does not shy away from the cruelty of the good and the mercy of the cruel.
We are, each of us, responsible for choosing to be the good we are capable of being. And we are, each of us, responsible for doing what we can to make sure that the structures and systems and institutions that we build are as good as we can make them.
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