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I most certainly do not. Most people will screw themselves up and screw you up in the process.
The perils of designer tribalism*** It is all part of what Bruckner calls "the enchanting music of departure." Its siren call is seductive but also supremely mendacious. Indeed, the messy reality of the primitive world-its squalor and poverty, its penchant for cannibalism, slavery, gratuitous cruelty, and superstition-are carefully edited out of the picture. In their place we find a species of Rousseauvian sentimentality. Rousseau is the patron saint of Third Worldism. "Ignoring the real human race entirely," Rousseau wrote in a passage Bruckner quotes from the Confessions, "I imagined perfect beings, with heavenly virtue and beauty, so sure in their friendship, so tender and faithful, that I could never find anyone like them in the real world." The beings with whom Rousseau populated his fantasy life are exported to exotic lands by the Third Worldist. As Rousseau discovered, the unreality of the scenario, far from being an impediment to moral smugness, was an invaluable asset. Reality, after all, has a way of impinging upon fantasy, clipping its wings, limiting its exuberance. So much the worse, then, for reality. As Bruckner notes, in this romance adepts "were not looking for a real world but the negation of their own. . . . An eternal vision is projected on these nations that has nothing to do with their real history."***
People are not inherently good. Nor are they inherently evil.
People are inherently people.
Humans are individually motivated and individually satisfied. They can detect the motives and agendas of others, but can never feel them to the exact degree of intensity those others feel. They have the capacity for rationality, generosity, and transcendence of spirit, but they also have the capacity for mindlessness, vindictiveness, and the most appalling closure of self.
What matters to the construction and maintenance of any human society is whether the incentives it instantiates:
Christ told us to 1) love God, and 2) love one another as we love ourselves. What a brilliant encapsulation of the laws of successful societies! God, the supreme Lawgiver, cannot be overruled. His dictates about the nature of things must be accepted; the only way forward is to work with them. The capacities of individual men are so limited that real achievement is only available through division of labor in a regime of reliable contract among self-interested individuals. "Love of others" must include the sort of innocent benevolence, the willingness to see others prosper without rancor of envy, that's required by a free economy. Thus we arrive at the best imaginable system of social organization with no need for other arguments.
Best, not perfect. Perfection is not available to Man in this world.
All theorizing about goodness or evil in the human makeup must come to terms with this touchstone criterion: what works in the real world.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason:
http://www.palaceofreason.com
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.
But that's because I believe in the Torah — all of it.
People are born sinners, not neutral.
Dan
They used to teach morality in school.
Excerpt: The original 1836 version of the fabled reading instruction books which for three-quarters of a century were used by four-fifths of all American school children. Some 120 million sets were sold. No other books ever had so much influence over so many children over such a long period.
Good stuff with excellent phonetics and basic arithmetic. The books taught that "with Adam's fall, we sinned all" (introduction to the letter A, for instance) and the need to cultivate good qualities. McGuffey never assumed that children were born innocent, he knew they had to be taught such things as charity and mercy, and to avoid things like stealing, lying, etc. The McGuffey Readers did a great job of basic elementary education for 75 years.
"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death."
---Anne Frank
I tell myself that if she could think it, under the circumstances in which she found herself, who am I to doubt man's goodness? Yet, she died in a death camp eventually, so where did all her faith in man's goodness get her?
I struggle with all this yet, more so than ever in the shadow of 9-11.
A free economy, based on individual ownership, harnesses individual greed to achieve collective prosperity.
A constitutional republic balances the branches of government and the state/federal division to harness the will to power.
The genius of both is that they depend only on man's nature as it naturally occurs, and do not depend on any religous or moral awakening.