On the Paradox of Human Nature

 

On the Paradox of Human Nature

 

I’ve never written anything on human nature. What do I think of human nature? Well, I wonder how anyone could do what Descartes, Kant, Hume, Kierkegaard, van Gogh, or Mozart did. I also wonder how anyone could do what Hitler, Stalin, and Mao did. The human spirit can reach unimaginable heights and unimaginable depths. We are capable of great works of thought, art, science, peacemaking, and love. We are also capable of the Holocaust. We are capable of Stalin’s Gulag and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. We create the United Nations’ Children’s Fund, then Israel invades Gaza and kills 14,000 children, a horrific number but one that pales in comparison to the number of children Hitler killed. We are capable of great acts of charity, and we create a world where a tiny number of people control unimaginably great wealth while children starve to death around the world.

 

What does it mean to be human? We are, first of all, animals. We don’t like to think of ourselves as animals, but that’s what we are. We are homo sapiens who have evolved from other primate species that no longer exist. Like all animals, we have biological needs–air, food, water. Like all animals we have biological drives–sex and survival primarily. Our bodily functions are not significantly different from those of all other mammals. We eat like they do. We reproduce like they do. We die like they do. The similarities between us and other mammals are too great to ignore. We are, first of all, animals.

 

But we are also somewhat different from all other animals. We have cognitive abilities that, as far as we know, no other animal has. We are self-aware in a way that, as far as we know, no other animal is. We ask questions about ourselves, the world, and the nature of reality that, as far as we know, no other animal does. We aren’t the only animals who use tools. We aren’t the only animals who build things; but we do those things on a level no other animal can remotely approach. No ape has ever built Chartres Cathedral, and no ape ever will. No ape has ever written Critique of Pure Reason, and no ape ever will. Our cognitive and creative abilities exceed those of all other animals by orders of magnitude. After all, we study them, they don’t study us. 

 

So our starting point is as animals but as unique animals. We have free will, or at least we delude ourselves that we do. We go to the moon with far less computing power than is in this computer that I’m typing on, then we create thinking machines with far more computing power than is in this computer or than is in the cell phone in my shirt pocket. It seems there is no limit to our creative abilities be they artistic, philosophical, or scientific. 

 

We are capable of so much good, and we are capable of so much evil. We use enormous amounts of financial and human resources inventing more effective and efficient ways to kill people, then we delude ourselves that we do it to defend our freedom. We give some resources to charity, trying to address immediate human needs; but we pay much less attention to justice. We create a world tarnished by racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, and any number of other evil ways of thinking. Then we convince ourselves that these ways of thinking aren’t really evil at all but just reflect how things are. 

 

I always reject the Christian doctrine of original sin. It is based on an awful exegesis of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and it makes no biological sense whatsoever. Yet when we look at both human history and current human reality, it is obvious that there is something wrong with us humans. We did, after all, commit industrialized genocide against millions of people because we didn’t like them and blamed them for our problems though they had little or nothing to do with them. We did, after all, starve around four million Ukrainians to death to make them do something an ideology said they should do but they didn’t want to do. We did, after all, kill millions of people in an effort to erase thousands of years of great Chinese culture. We do, after all, fight war after war after war in which we kill and maim countless numbers of our fellow human beings and think we’ve done something good in doing it. We let children starve to death when there is enough food in the world for everyone. We convince ourselves that hatred is good, and we dehumanize other human beings to make it easier for us to kill them with a clear conscience. 

 

Yet there is something right with us humans too. For starters, we have the ability to distinguish right from wrong. We’ve never all agreed completely on what is right and what is wrong, but at least we all make that distinction. Most of us truly do care about at least some other people even if it’s only those closest to us. Nearly all of us love our children and want only the best for them. We create intimate personal relationships that lift our spirits and make our lives fuller than they otherwise would be. The human spirit sinks to the deepest depths imaginable, but it also soars to the highest heights imaginable. 

 

I feel no need to explain how we get to the heights. I just thank God that we do. What I’m struggling to understand is how and why we sink to the depths of violence and hatred that so often we do. That we do seems to be beyond critical understanding, yet it seems somehow to inhere in what it is to be human. We can try to blame it on the devil or some other concept we create that personalizes evil; but that’s just avoiding the issue. The Holodomor and the Holocaust are as human as are St. Basil’s Cathedral and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. What is it about us that allows us to sink so low so often?

 

I don’t have an answer. All I know to do to try to reach an answer is to start by considering just how we humans exist in the world. We exist as centered selves. From what we experience as a center, as a self, we discern what appears to be a world around and outside of us. Whether that’s just how we evolved or is how God created us, that’s how we are. Within us we have a biological drive for survival. It’s hardwired into us. We have a fight or flight instinct no different from that of other animals. Because we exist as centered selves, everything other than ourselves appears to us to be outside of us and other than us. Because it does, we can and often do perceive it as a threat rather than as a blessing. 

 

One of the things we do when we interact with that external world is associate ourselves with different groups and identities. I’ll use myself as an example. I am an American, and I am one whether I want to be one or not. I had nothing to do with my being an American, America is just where I happened to be born. I am a citizen of and reside in Washington state. I am a progressive Christian, and that’s something I choose to be. I am a member of the United Church of Christ, which is also something I choose to be despite my reservations about it these days. I am a member of a family that consists of myself, my wife, my two children, their five children, and my daughter’s husband. I self-identify as an Oregon Duck. In all of these ways I interact with what appears to me to be a world outside of me.

 

We naturally want what we consider to be good for everyone and everything with which we associate ourselves. We always want better for those things than their present reality seems to us to be. We perceive what to us are problems with which our associations must deal. We have a natural aversion to accepting responsibility for those problems. We’d much rather blame them on something or someone else. We do that because of our natural drive for personal comfort. If something other than us is responsible for a problem, we don’t have to blame ourselves. We don’t have to look inside ourselves for a source of the problem. We can direct our concern elsewhere. When we do, that concern often becomes anger. We get furious with whoever we can convince ourselves is responsible for the problem as long as it isn’t us. And anger often becomes hatred.

 

Germany after World War I is a classic example. Things were very difficult for the German people at the end of that war. They had lost a war they thought they couldn’t lose. Their economy was in shambles. Then the victorious allies made things worse by imposing the grossly unjust Treaty of Versailles on them. They created a democratic government of sorts, but few people had much faith in it. Then inflation got so bad that money literally was not worth the paper it was printed on. People’s life savings were wiped out overnight, and their futures became even less secure than they would otherwise have been. 

 

Post-World War I Germans were, of course, as human as the rest of us. They were faced with immense problems they had thought they would never face. Germans by the millions found it impossible to ascribe blame for their problems to themselves. As we humans are so wont to do, they looked for someone else to blame them on. Then Adolf Hitler and his Nazis came on the scene. He said the Jews were responsible for all of Germany’s problems. There wasn’t a shred of objective evidence to support that claim, but there didn’t have to be. By blaming the Jews for their problems, the Germans avoided blaming themselves; and we humans hate to blame ourselves for anything. Doing so conflicts with our instinct for survival. Hitler told the German people that Jewish people weren’t really people at all. They were a sort of subspecies that had corrupted every aspect of German life. Like the rest of Christendom, Germany had a centuries old history of anti-Judaism. That history made it easier for large numbers of Germans to buy into Hitler’s lies. 

 

The Jews were a perfect scapegoat for the Germans. They were different. They had a different religion, and the church had told people for ages that the Jews were all Christ killers. Most Jews were just ordinary people living lives not that different from anyone else’s lives, but a few of them were very wealthy. A few of them held positions of power and responsibility in the financial world and elsewhere. Mostly, the Germans had convinced themselves for centuries that Jews weren’t Germans. Even Martin Luther, the founder of the church of most Germans, had been a horrific anti-Semite. The Jews were, of course, guilty of none of the things of which Hitler accused them, but they were an easy target for him. Only a minority of Germans ever voted for the Nazis, but they grew big enough that the conservative powers of the country thought they could put Hitler in charge and control him. Of course, we know that they couldn’t.

 

So for most Germans, whether they ever voted for Hitler or not, the Jews were an alien enemy that was responsible for all of the woes Germany faced after World War I. After he had been in power for a while, Hitler gave them the “final solution” to the so-called Jewish problem. The only way to defeat them and take Germany back from them, he said, was to exterminate them. After the war, most Germans said they didn’t know what the Nazis with their soldiers and SS murderers had done. Many of us find that hard to believe, but it may be true. Whether it was or not doesn’t really matter. As a culture, as a people, they had done it.

 

Here’s a story from my personal experience that may be illuminating. When I was eleven years old my family lived in Berlin for an academic year while my father did historical research. It was 1957-58. My time in Berlin began only twelve years after the end of World War II. We shared a large apartment with a German lady. Her husband had died, but he had been a member of the Nazi party. She still had his Nazi uniform hanging in her closet. One day she said to us: “Yes, it is too bad what happened to the Jews. But then, something had to be done.” There you see the complicity of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust. Blame the Jews for our problems. Let the powers exterminate them. That way we don’t have to blame ourselves.

 

How was it possible? Christian history in general and German history in particular had prepared the ground for it. National crises provoked it. Hitler and the Nazis manipulated the German people into going along with it. Nothing in their human nature stopped most of them from going along with it if only through passive acceptance of the Nazi lies. In times of national crisis the German people looked for someone to blame other than themselves. And they conducted the Holocaust. They killed six million Jews and countless other people as well.

 

What is it about human nature that made the Holocaust possible if not inevitable? It is that we have no built-in bottom to our evil. None of us does. There is nothing inherent in our nature that can stop us from doing massive evil once we’re set on doing it. We like to think civilization and religion or just a supposed common sense of what is right and what is wrong can stop us. Sometimes they do, but far too often they don’t. We deceive ourselves if we think something like the Holocaust couldn’t happen in our country. It could. It could because we Americans are structured no differently than Hitler’s Germans were. They had no moral bottom. Neither do we.

 

So what are we to do? The only answer to that question that I can come up with is that we must never forget that we have no moral bottom, then we must be ever vigilant to stop any movement among us that tends even slightly in the direction of other national regimes that have committed mass murder. That includes the Germans of course. It also includes the Russians and the Chinese. And though most of us don’t know it and none of us likes to admit it, it includes us white Americans. We committed genocide against the people of the First Nations of North America. We did it so effectively that Hitler thought it meant we would not object to what he was going to do to the Jews. All of us humans are constructed the same way. Any differences between us are merely superficial. None of us has a bottom to our ability to commit evil. Of course, neither do we have much of a ceiling on the good we can do. How creative we can be. How caring we can be. How loving we can be. That’s the paradox of being human. We are potentially toweringly good and potentially bottomlessly bad at the same time. Sure. It would be great if we had something built into us that stopped us from committing evil. Having such a thing sure would make life easier. We don’t have it. So in its place we have to put awareness and a willingness to step forward to stop evil before it starts.

 

Today we can do that by defeating the MAGA movement and making sure Donald Trump never again occupies the White House. He is using immigrants the way Hitler used the Jews. Of course, he hasn’t constructed an American Auschwitz—yet. But Hitler didn’t start out with genocide either. He sort of slid into it. One anti-Jewish measure led to another, then to another, and then to another. Pretty soon, the Nazis were shooting and gassing millions of people to death. Hitler blamed Germany’s problems on the Jews, who weren’t responsible for them. Trump blames America’s problems on immigrants, who aren’t responsible for them. Trump and his MAGA movement are dire threats to American democracy. They are threats to American decency. They have the potential to do great harm to this country and to the world if we don’t stop them. So let’s stop them, OK?