This is some journal rambling I did on January 29, 2023. I’m
not sure why I’m posting it here, but here it is.
I’m reading Jon Meacham’s book The Soul of America, The
Battle for our Better Angels. I just started and haven’t read much of it
yet, but boy to I have bone to pick with Meacham. He is painting far too rosy a
picture of American history. He mentions Jefferson without saying he as a
slaveowner. He mentions some of Jackson’s flaws but doesn’t go far enough in
blasting him for them. He praises Teddy Roosevelt without saying that he was a
God-awful imperialist. He praises Woodrow Wilson without calling the racist
that he was. He quotes Eisenhower on leadership but doesn’t mention his
reluctance to act on matters of civil rights. At least not yet he hasn’t done
any of those things. Maybe he’ll get around to it, but so far he’s being way
too much of Pollyanna for me.
Meacham quotes Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, and other
Enlightenment optimists on the proposition that people are basically good.
Smith says the successful won’t close the door after them to keep others out.
Like hell they won’t! That at least was my first thought. But the question
occurs to me: Just what is my opinion of humanity generally and humans
individually? Are people basically good, or basically bad, or basically both? I
think we are by nature naturally selfish. Our egos want us to look out for No.
1 and sometimes say to hell with everyone else. We are so distinctly created as
centered selves that it is nearly impossible not to be self-centered. True
fullness of life comes from overcoming self-centeredness, but very few people
are ever able to do it. Fullness of life comes for living agape love, but human
culture mostly pushes so strongly against that kind of living that relatively
few people even know that there is a way of living that is not destructively
self-centered. And yes, striving for fullness of life is also self-centered in
a way. But there is a distinct moral difference between self-centered as being
concerned only for oneself and being self-centered as a way of being concerned
for others, for justice, for peace, for environmental protection, etc.
We subsist as centered selves. We cannot subsist any other
way. That we do makes it more likely that we will do harm to others than that
we will do good for others. The highest stage of human development is
self-transcendence. That doesn’t mean we cease to be a centered self. We can’t
cease being a centered self. It means living as a self out of oneself. Out of
one’s ego. Out of one’s concern only for oneself. So very, very few people ever
reach that stage of development.
Our dominant American culture says work to get yourself ahead
and take your immediate family with you, but don’t worry much about anyone
else. We’ve long idolized the “self-made man,” not realizing, or pretending
that we don’t realize, that there is no such thing. Something like twenty-four
hundred years ago Aristotle said humans are social animals. Of necessity we
live in relationship with others. We can’t thrive without living in
relationship with others. That should mean that we improve ourselves and our
lives not by being selfish but by cultivating healthy relationships with others,
relationships that benefit both ourselves and the other. Yet it seems to me
that so few of us do it. Or at least, very few of us are intentional about
doing it.
I've never been particular intentional about doing it myself
except with my immediate family. I’m an introvert, or at least most of the time
I’m an introvert. I don’t make friends easily. Essentially no one seeks me out
as a friend, nor do I seek anyone else out as a friend. I’ve had friends. I
married two of them. But I’ve been telling myself recently that my Irish
Terrier Jake was the best friend I’ve ever had canine or human. Jake had no
choice about living with me. Mercifully, that reality for dogs doesn’t seem to
bother them. They create a pack with us and have no thought of doing anything
else, or at least most of them don’t.
We humans always have a choice about being in intentional relationship
with another person. We live of necessity in unintentional relationship with countless
others, most of whom we never meet. I’ll never meet the people who created and
built this computer I’m using right now, but I have a relationship with them. I’ll
never meet the people who designed and built the roads I drive on so
frequently, but I have a relationship with them. I’ll never meet the people who
discovered and manufactured the prescription drugs I take every day, but I have
a relationship with them. That’s why there’s no such thing as a self-made man. Rich
people often think they got rich solely through their own efforts. They may have
devoted immense efforts to getting rich, but they simply did not do it alone. As
Donne so wisely said, “no man is an island.”
So much of the harm we do comes from our failure to
understand and live into that truth. At least in the dominant American culture
it is quite the cultural norm for people to claw their way to the top of some
economic or political structure giving not one good God damn about the people
they trample on the way up.
So I guess my basic conception of humans is that we are
capable of being and doing good, but the odds are stacked against our being and
doing good. Yes, the world has a great many good people. A very few are saints.
Many are just decent folk who don’t intentionally harm anyone and are ready to
help others as they are able. A great many others, however, don’t give a damn
about anyone else. They’re perfectly willing to harm others to advance what
they think are their own self-interests. They vote for politicians who they
think will benefit themselves with no thought to whether or not those
politicians will benefit society as a whole. There’s a reason “liberal” has
become a dirty word among us. Those who want everyone to focus only on
themselves or their own class or race have to put down people whose focus is
broader as weak or a socialists who want to take people’s money away and give
it to people who don’t deserve it. Many people consider the term “do-gooder” to
be an insult. So many of us do being human so badly.
Then there are the instances in which people, usually but
not always as part of a group of people, whether a small street gang or a whole
nation, do such horrific things that we can hardly believe humans are capable
of doing them. Some human being in an SS uniform shot all those Jews in Poland
and the USSR. Some human being in an SS uniform opened the valve to gas a huge
number of innocent people to death, and some other human being ordered him to
do it. Someone shot all those people Stalin ordered to be shot. I read once of
a Russian man whose regular job was to spend a regular work shift shooting people
in the back of the head. Some human beings broke into the homes of Ukrainian
peasants and stole the little bit of food they had so they would starve to
death, and some other human beings ordered them to do it. Mao didn’t kill
millions of people with is own hands. Other human beings did it for him. The
Japanese soldiers who carried out the rape of Shanghai were human beings. Being
human carries with it no insurmountable barrier to being a murderous monster.
Yet of course most of us by far are not murderous monsters.
Most of us are just ordinary folk going about our lives trying to live as best
we can and not intentionally harming anyone. But so many of us, myself
included, live privileged lives as beneficiaries of systems of oppression and
even genocide. I’ve never killed a Native American, and I never will. But it
was Americans of European heritage like me who carried out a policy of theft,
violence, and oppression against Native Americans that really did amount to
genocide. I’ve never dropped an atomic bomb on anyone, and I never will. My
father never did either, but he may have survived World War II because someone
else did.
People like me like to think of ourselves as so innocent,
but we really aren’t. I live in a country that makes up something like 3% of
the world’s population but consumes something like 25% of the world’s
resources. Just being an American with privilege makes me guilty because I
benefit from so much wrong. I am a white American who benefits every day from
my country’s history and present reality of virulent racism. I live on land my
white ancestors stole from Native people. I buy products made in countries with
low wages so I can afford them and someone else can make a lot of money off of
them.
When I stop to think about what it is to be human, it all
gets awfully depressing. Yes, there is a lot of good in the world, though we
don’t hear about it nearly as much as we hear about all the bad. We see
horrific video of police officers beating Tyre Nichols to death. We don’t see
video of police officers actually helping the people they supposedly are there
to help. Yes, there is a lot of good in the world. But the amount of bad in the
world can just be overwhelming. How can we humans do so much harm to other
humans, to other living beings, and to the earth itself? Most of us don’t want
to do any harm at all, but we do it nonetheless. And most of us Americans don’t
even know all the harm our levels of affluence cause in other parts of the
world.
So are human beings good? Or are we bad? The answer has to
be, yes. We have so much potential in us both for good and for evil. Our call
as humans is to avoid the evil and do the good. Many of us succeed in fulfilling
that call, but many of us don’t. I guess the bottom line here is just that
being a human being is a very complicated thing. Sadly, I don’t think it’s
every going to get simpler.
