If you believe that people are basically good ?

No issue has a greater influence on determining your social and political views than whether you view human nature as basically good or not.

In 20 years as a radio talk-show host, I have dialogued with thousands of people, of both sexes and from virtually every religious, ethnic and national background. Very early on, 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. I believe that we are born with tendencies toward both good and evil. Yes, babies are born innocent, but not good.

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.

Something in these people cannot accept the fact that many people have evil values and choose evil for reasons having nothing to do with their economic situation. The Carters and Murrays of the West – representatives of that huge group of naive Westerners identified by the once proud title "liberal" – do not understand that no amount of money will dissuade those who believe that God wants them to rule the world and murder all those they deem infidels.

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, how to avoid first and secondhand tobacco smoke, how to recycle and how to prevent rainforests from disappearing. 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.

I attended Jewish religious schools (yeshivas) until the age of 18, and aside from being taught that moral rules come from God rather than from personal or world opinion, this was the greatest difference between my education and those who attended public and private secular schools. They learned that their greatest struggles were with society, and I learned that the greatest struggle was with me, and my natural inclinations to laziness, insatiable appetites and self-centeredness.

Third, if you believe that people are basically good, God and religion are morally unnecessary, even harmful. Why would basically good people need a God or religion to provide moral standards? Therefore, the crowd that believes in innate human goodness tends to either be secular or to reduce God and religion to social workers, providers of compassion rather than of moral standards and moral judgments.

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.

No great body of wisdom, East or West, ever posited that people were basically good. This naive and dangerous notion originated in modern secular Western thought, probably with Jean Jacques Rousseau, the Frenchman who gave us the notion of pre-modern man as a noble savage.

If the West does not soon reject Rousseau and humanism and begin to recognize evil, judge it and confront it, it will find itself incapable of fighting savages who are not noble.

He was half right. Savage, yes, noble, no.

Prager is a treasure; but Prager is Prager, he is wont to soliloquize to the point of boredom when he should shout to numbness.

Of course man is evil, it is in his very nature to conquer, to eat, rend, rip and tear for if he sleeps, he dies.

How then, to tame this savage?

The only thing that seems to work is family, true flesh and blood offspring conceived with a faithful mate; this is where the battle lines are drawn, and the bloodshed seeps about that line until it pervades even the fringes of our single, unattached iconoclasts who are among the most surprised when the ravaging beast comes for them.

Conservatives are realists...

I agree. My ideas seem to be in the minority here, but most on this thread seem to be arguing from a religious/idealist view, not a realist or worldly view.

Perhaps I'm over my depth here, but I've always thought the liberal view on gun control most clearly exposed their view that people were inherently evil, and for the good of all the power of deadly force must be limited to an enlightened few and those who enforce their power.

The view of the Founding Fathers, and conservatives, was that deadly force in the hands of the "good" masses was a necessary check on evil persons who might take the reins of power.

This has nothing to do with original sin. It is a very practical matter that concerns us in this world.

re: Steven Pinker...

The Blank Slate and Human Nature

by Chuck Colson

Steven Pinker, the MIT professor and popular science commentator, has written a new book that won?t make him any friends in the politically correct crowd. But before you get too excited, you need to know that Pinker, who believes in evolutionary psychology, gets the most important question wrong: the "why" behind the "what" he is describing.

In his book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Pinker rebuts the most widely held explanations of why people behave as they do?that is, what we call human nature.

These explanations include the "blank slate," which holds that we are almost entirely a product of our environment and are infinitely malleable. Another explanation, the "noble savage," imagines primitive cultures as peaceful and naturally cooperative as against the conflict and competition of civilization.

For Pinker, much of human nature is intrinsic, "hard-wired" into us?that is, we?re the product of our genes. He asserts that people, irrespective of environment, behave similarly in similar situations.

Pinker?s rejection of the blank slate is most forceful in his chapter on gender. Men and women, he tells us, are psychologically, not just physically, different. They have different aptitudes, they see the world differently, and they have different approaches to solving problems. These differences aren?t learned; they?re inherent and rooted in biology.

Thus, attempts to ignore these differences, such as trying to have both sexes equally represented in all academic fields, are doomed to failure. Likewise, claims that women earn only three-quarters what men do for so-called similar work ignore real differences between the sexes?differences that arise from women?s role as child-bearers. (You can imagine how feminists are reacting to this book.)

Ideas about the "noble savage," says Pinker, are equally wrongheaded. Studies of primitive tribes show that deaths from warfare are between three and thirty times as high as in the civilized West. Rape and murder are also more prevalent. So much for cultural relativism.

This skewering of political correctness and postmodernism makes Pinker?s failure to identify the source of human nature all the sadder. Pinker?s book brings to mind something that Richard Dawkins, the well-known evolutionist, once wrote: "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." In other words, as Pinker sees it, we should ignore what nature itself seems to be telling us.

Human nature, the way Pinker describes it, conforms neatly to Christian ideas about human nature: male and female, a capacity for good, and a fallen capacity for evil. Yet, like Dawkins, whom he quotes in the book, Pinker attributes human nature to evolution.

Pinker?s Darwinism leaves him unable to provide a coherent explanation for things like self-sacrifice, true altruism, or mercy?what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. Despite his efforts, readers are left with no basis for why we should do good and not evil and no alternative to the nihilism that Darwinism brings in its wake.

This turns The Blank Slate into a case of "so close, yet so far away." Pinker is right: We aren?t blank slates. But it isn?t evolution that did the writing. It?s the Author of life.

So Close...So Far

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