“I still don’t see how you are going to change to hearts and minds so many for whom life is so meaningless, be it by bombing, hand guns or knives. Sure you can make small changes in a few lives, but is the commitment there in large enough doses. More power to those of you who are fighting for the ‘cause’ of peace and justice.”When this kind of thing happens, I too feel tempted to condemn all of humanity for the atrocious acts of a perverse minority. But it helps put things back into perspective when we remember that the great majority of people are honest, loving, caring, tender, and generous.
“While I appreciate your enthusiasm for a new, different world, I am discouraged by the apparent fact that human nature doesn’t change, and when put in the right position we all have the ability to fall into the syndrome of Nazi Germany, Bosnia, South Africa, etc., where man does unto man thing that seem unimaginable.”
It is a great paradox of the 20th Century that while most of us would describe ourselves as such, yet too many are willing to accept the siren songs of pseudo-scientific claims to the effect that the “perverse minority” is the true measure of human nature, based on “theories” that have arisen, not from a sincere search for truth, but in an effort to defend an agenda meant to further the vested interests of precisely that very same perverse minority seeking to justify itself.
This way of thinking is one –if not the– major reason why most people don’t dedicate more time and energy to changing things. The idea that human beings are by nature inherently selfish, greedy, competitive, and aggressive, has given way to a type of “paralysis of will” in the world, which is actually a logical response to the question: if we are violent by nature, how can we expect to establish a peaceful world?
It would be like trying to build a house of gold using bricks of lead. And of course nobody is going to make an effort to achieve something they believe deep down to be impossible. So we limit ourselves to seek whatever personal “happiness” can be had given the circumstances.
I think this view of human nature is not only dangerous, but also grossly incomplete and biased. As far as I can tell, this puddle of paralyzing poison has been fed by at least five streams of thought.
One is the sister idea that human beings are nothing more than rational animals, and thus determined genetically to behave as such. There is an interesting article that has come to be known as the “Seville Declaration on Violence”, written and signed in Seville, Spain on May 16,1986 on the occasion of the International Year of Peace by twenty scholars of the biological and social sciences coming from twelve countries, and printed in the publications “Medicine and War” Vol. 3, 191-193 (1987).
It defends the view that it is “scientifically incorrect to state that we have inherited the tendency to make war from our animal forefathers... that war or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed into our human nature... that over the course of human evolution there has been a selection of aggressive behaviors over other types of behavior... that human beings have a ‘violent brain’ (and) that war is caused by ‘instinct’ or by any other single motivating factor”.
It concludes that biology does not condemn humanity to war, that just as war starts in our minds, peace also begins there, that the same species that invented war is able to invent peace, and that the responsibility to choose lies with each of us. I encourage you to find this article at your local university library, study it deeply, make copies of it and spread it around.
A second stream of thought is our idea of what the “law of the jungle” is. The old concept of the law of the jungle as conflict and competition for scarce resources was based on prescientific observations made centuries ago, and yet has become so widely accepted that we have fashioned most of our social institutions on that supposed “natural law”, be they our economic systems (Capitalism and Communism both have this in common, among many other things), party politics, social relations (reflecting vestiges of tribalism through racial, cultural and religious intolerance), our “justice” systems, our medical and agricultural practices, and so on.
When ecology appeared on the scene during the 1960’s, it was able to challenge this view scientifically for the first time and hypothesize that if the law of the jungle were conflict and competition for scarce resources, then if all the members of one same species were extracted from an ecosystem, all other species would improve their lot. Of course, the disastrous results of these experiences showed that the true law of the jungle is cooperation and mutual support: not “the bigger piece of the cake I can get, the more there is for me” (scarcity mentality), but rather “the more I give, the more there is for all of us” (abundance mentality).
A third stream of thought is the way history has been studied and taught over the past few centuries. We are presented with a long chain of wars and revolutions, conflicts and crises, pillaging and pirating, and asked to believe that this is the stuff of history. I don’t want to go into whose vested interests such a view might serve, but the fact is that it blithely ignores the long decades, centuries and even millenniums of peace, prosperity, progress. The approach is much like looking at a person’s medical history and assuming that it is a representative sampling of his/her normal condition, totally overlooking the days, weeks, months and even years of health, happiness, and well-being. Disease is but a temporary disturbance of our normal physical equilibrium, as war is a temporary upset of social health.
Instead, we should view history as mankind’s “Search for a Just Society” (Click to see a review John Huddleston’s brilliant re–writing of human history under that title). The going has not always been smooth, and many mistakes have been made along the way. But after each fall we have gotten back up, all the wiser for the experience, and continued our struggle.
Also, there have been major changes of paradigm over the centuries and millennia -- from family to tribe, then to feudal city-state, recently to independent nation state, and now to a world federation of nations. These mega–steps have required a tremendous effort and rearranging, both inwardly and outwardly, and so have often left blood stains and scars on our collective history. But bloodshed has been the exception, not the rule, being the result of temporary distortions of the human spirit.
A fourth stream of thought is more recent. The fact is, we are currently in the midst of one of those mega-changes in paradigm, from independent nation-state to world federation of nations. The immense upheavals that must necessarily accompany such a step began at least a century and a half ago, and I am convinced that we are currently poised on the very threshold of its darkest hour, after which we will begin gradually to emerge renewed and having achieved a much higher level of collective maturity as one human race. The problem is that we were born into this storm, and so naturally assume that things have always been this way, an idea which is reinforced by the view of history we are fed at school.
To exacerbate things, the mass media have found that their news programs can make the most money by (1) confirming, not challenging people’s views and beliefs of how the world works and (2) presenting the most dramatic events possible. Unfortunately, both of these mean that the bad news gets first and in many cases sole priority.
So it is difficult for us to perceive the fact that a new world is being born right under our noses, parallel to the death of the old, unless we make an extra special effort to free our minds from the chains of common belief and investigate matters below the surface of what is immediately apparent.
Unfortunately, most people are complacent and skeptical, and would prefer not to make the effort, at least not just now when it is unfashionable to even hold such views, much less defend them, and God forbid one might be tempted to make a life-long COMMITMENT (number one 20th Century dirty word) to them.
The fifth hypo–mental needle injecting the brain and heart of humanity with this virulent venom is a traditional western tendency to dichotomize or polarize everything into two extremes: good or bad, true or false, left or right, up or down, black or white. If you say you like or agree with one thing, that automatically means you dislike or disagree with another. If you say that one thing is true or good, then you are assumed to be implying that the other is false or bad.
So we ask ourselves if human beings are good or bad, like in the movies (which have done much to bolster this error in reasoning) where we are trying to figure out whether a character is the “good guy” or the “bad guy”. The answer is that there are all types, and even that we are each a mixture of both, but that does not jive with our need to polarize everything, so we take a vote and find that the “bad guys” are more numerous.
Our conclusion is backed up by what the mass news media would have us believe, by how both Capitalism and Communism have defined the “homo economicus” (another of their numerous similarities where we must start clearing the terrain for the building of a new political and economic order), and by several ecclesiastical orders that pound away day and night on sin (original and otherwise), the devil, hell-fire, and eternal damnation.
The few “good guys” that have the guts to raise their hands above the dust and din of all this are promptly relegated to the category of “weirdoes”, perhaps even a separate species from ours, and therefore of a class that is inaccessible to mere mortals such as we.
One practical consequence of this belief in the inherent evil of the human race and consequent disbelief in its potential goodness, besides the paralyzing effect that I have already mentioned, is that this way of thinking has kept us from cultivating the seed of good that lies more or less dormant in all of us. After all, who in their right mind would go out in the garden and plant and care for a dead or infertile seed, much less a lifeless rock?
Somewhere along the line, religion forgot that this was the reason why it was created in the first place, and chose instead to quibble over who has more truth, is more righteous, or has reached more salvation. The various social, economic and political ideologies that have risen up to replace religion have done more to cultivate the greedy, selfish, violent side of people.
Neither did the government ever see its role as putting the economy at the service of the nation’s human growth, but rather as putting its citizens at the service of the nation’s economic growth. And of course, through advertising and more subtle means, industrial / commercial interests do whatever damage to the human spirit they can get away with in the name of free enterprise, free speech, free this, and free that.
Some ask whether the “bad” element of mankind will ever change or if an external structure will keep it in check. And it is precisely the focus on the lower nature of humanity that has lead us to establish all kinds of external structures, institutions, laws, courts, prisons, checks and balances, to either keep people from doing harm to each other, or to turn our lower nature into an advantage to the system (that is precisely how capitalist thought was born with Adam Smith, who was actually not an economist but a moralist).
Not that the external structures are not important, but we have come to rely almost solely on them, despite the fact that they are impotent to change things, as they were not designed to cultivate our higher nature but only to keep our lower nature in check.
What the world needs now is a concerted, systematic, persistent and all-out effort to (1) cultivate the human potential for good and (2) modify our institutions to reflect this new way of thinking about who we are and where we can go. This is an endeavor that could save the people tremendous suffering on the short term and enable humanity to fulfill its glorious destiny on the long term.
The historical errors of reasoning mentioned above are precisely what has gotten us into this predicament in the first place, and like Einstein said, "You can’t solve a problem with the same mindset that created it."
(Tuesday, November 17, 1998)
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