Sans Fig Leaf
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"Human nature"
27 March, 2008
I was reading a column
recently where the author confessed to basing his whole life on a
contradiction. He had always said that he believed human nature was
basically good. However, he had also spent his life being morally
outraged at various injustices in the world. The contradiction, he
claimed, was that if he thought that people and institutions were
always acting in these greedy, selfish, and malicious ways, how could
he also believe that human nature was basically good?
The problem with his new conclusion is that it is based upon a false
premise. There is no contradiction. Because the world is not binary.
People and events and institutions don't fall into simple categories of
right versus wrong. Unfortunately, we are conditioned in our society to
think of everything as an either-or proposition. People are either
good, or they are not, for instance. How he should have stated his two
supposedly contradictory beliefs was something like this:
- Most people do not act with malicious intent most of the time
- Some people do act with malicious intent some or all of the time, and there are enough people in the world that even if it is only a tiny fraction who are acting maliciously, then at any given moment you can find someone behaving that way, somewhere
When stated that way, not
only aren't they contradictions, they aren't even separate propostions.
They are part of the same truth. There's plenty of room to debate about
what proportion of people fall under the first category and how often.
We can also acknowledge that many injustices or social outrages in the
world are less about malice than they are about the law of unintended
consequences. But the fact that there's a lot of bad news in the world
isn't sufficient evidence to prove conclusively that human nature isn't
more often than not "good."
Arguments have been made that all living organisms are inherently
selfish. We act out of self-interest to meet our needs, avoid pain and
suffering, et cetera. Altruism is an illusion, this argument goes,
created by our ability to act out of enlightened self-interest and
through socialization. We are conditioned to restrain some of our
selfish impulses, in other words. Under this reasoning, any good we see
in the world is learned behavior overriding our basic human nature.
Except that argument completely ignores the meaning of that word
"socialization." Social conditioning only works because we are social
animals, hard-wired from birth to seek the approval and acceptance of
our "pack" or "herd." The learned behavior--socialization--is a direct
outgrowth of something which is an inherent part of our nature. Again,
it isn't a separate proposition, but part of the same larger truth.
We like to put things into simple categories. We try to state
everything in a nutshell. No one has time for complete explanations. We
want simple summations of problems and simple solutions. Which leads to
all kinds of problems. Take the simple question: what's the solution to
this problem? The phrasing to the question paints us into a corner.
What real world problem ever has only one single solution? Most of them
don't even have a best solution.
By framing our search with the assumption that there's one and only one
solution, we discard numerous opportunities for good or even great
outcomes, in favor of a mythical perfect solution. This may lead us to
take a course of action that leads to more problems than we had to
begin with. We then classify those problems as unavoidable, when some
of them may have been easily avoided if we'd been willing to consider a
few more alternatives. Or, we conclude that there is no solution,
because we can't find that perfect answer, and do nothing to make a bad
situation at least a bit better.
Human nature is good, bad, selfish, selfless, capricious, faithful,
mysterious, knowable, and many other things. It isn't defined by a
single word. It isn't governed by one and only one simple rule or
desire. It is potential incarnate, capable of being or not being just
about anything and everything.
There are no whole truths; all truths are half- truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.
--Alfred North Whitehead
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