The ways of liberals are often mysterious to us and so one can be intrigued, perhaps morbidly so, by trying to understand what makes them tick. If we knew that, we might be able to make ourselves at least understood by them although I entertain little hope that many will be persuaded by reason.
In this endeavor one of the few commentators willing to grapple these issues, (actually one issue) liberals attitude toward good and evil and what makes them tick, is Dennis Prager who has written more than once on the subject.
Here is a reply I posted a couple of years ago in response to a Prager column in which he argues that all politics flows from whether one believes that the nature of man is good or evil (my introductory remarks appear in italics):
Our view of the essential moral nature of man, whether he is good or essentially evil, is profoundly important and indeed constitutes the bed rock upon which all political divisions break apart. The author of this piece is correct in his observation that conservatives have a negative view of the essential nature of man. But he miss -applies it. I invite your attention to a far more thoughtful article-at least as it concerns this subject-which appeared some years ago in free Republic authored by Dennis Prager. The article can be found at:http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/814573/posts.
I offer some quotations from the article:
No issue has a greater influence on determining your social and political views than whether you view human nature as basically good or not.
I realized that perhaps the major reason for political and other disagreements I had with callers was that they believed people are basically good, and I did not.
Why is this issue so important?
First, if you believe people are born good, you will attribute evil to forces outside the individual. That is why, for example, our secular humanistic culture so often attributes evil to poverty. Washington Sen. Patty Murray, former President Jimmy Carter and millions of other Westerners believe that the cause of Islamic terror is poverty. They really believe that people who strap bombs to their bodies to blow up families in pizzerias in Israel, plant bombs at a nightclub in Bali, slit stewardesses' throats and ram airplanes filled with innocent Americans into office buildings do so because they lack sufficient incomes.
Second, if you believe people are born good, you will not stress character development when you raise children. You will have schools teach young people how to use condoms....You will teach them how to struggle against the evils of society – its sexism, its racism, its classism and its homophobia. But you will not teach them that the primary struggle they have to wage to make a better world is against their own nature.
Third, if you believe that people are basically good, God and religion are morally unnecessary, even harmful.
Fourth, if you believe people are basically good, you, of course, believe that you are good – and therefore those who disagree with you must be bad, not merely wrong. You also believe that the more power that you and those you agree with have, the better the society will be. That is why such people are so committed to powerful government and to powerful judges. On the other hand, those of us who believe that people are not basically good do not want power concentrated in any one group, and are therefore profoundly suspicious of big government, big labor, big corporations and even big religious institutions. As Lord Acton said long ago, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton did not believe people are basically good.
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Finally, if you will indulge me at present another reply from 2002 which reacts to a Prager column dealing the recognition of evil:
GOD AND MAN IN THE SKINNER BOX
Attending college in the 60's, I was exposed to the writings of BF Skinner in a mandatory Psychology 101 class. At the time I was struck by the time and energy the department devoted to this man and his theories. Essentially, he put a chicken in a box and taught it to play baseball by rewarding it with feed. When the chicken pressed a lever on cue, or ran a base, it got a pellet. Skinner was able to train animals to a remarkable degree with this method of positive reinforcement. He also demonstrated that negative reinforcement, such as electric shocks, was not as effective as positive reinforcement in controlling animal behavior.
So far, Skinner has not done the world much harm and perhaps he has even contributed something useful if you are Siegfried and Roy. But it soon became clear that Skinner and my psych professors had ambitions grander than dog and pony shows when they required a reading of Skinner's Walden Two. Here Skinner extrapolates his findings from chickens to people and causes real mischief. Essentially, he postulates that the humsn animal is a TABULA RASA, neither good nor evil, which can be conditioned into good behavior. There are no evil people just poorly conditioned behavior. All that is required to have generations of well behaved human chickens is a grand enough Skinner box to positively reinforce positive behavior. Of course, it does not take a socialist to see that it would take more than a village, indeed it would take a federal burocracy, to build and maintain a big enough box.
The mischief comes in when this thinking invades the penal (whoops, I mean corrections)system or the educational establishment and so on. Praeger, in his wonderful essay, has alluded to the effects on education of this baleful presumption about the nature of man. He is absolutely right when he says:
`" No issue has a greater influence on determining your social and political views than whether you view human nature as basically good or not."
This is why liberals loathe believing christians. This is why liberals are collectivists and conservatives are individualists. This is why the Democrat party slices and dices the electorate into groups. This is why Patty Murray said what she said. The old adage that liberals love mankind in the abstract and as a group (read African-Americans) but despise them on an individual level finds its origins here. This is why believing Christians and believing Jews are finding that they hold much in common and have a common philosophical enemy in secular Jews and goyische pagans. The application of this insight is almost endless.
13 posted on Tuesday, December 31, 2002 2:53:31 PM by nathanbedford
