A realistic view of human nature

Always with the Apocalypse. That's what sells rags, you know? The Earth is about to be destroyed, but not before all your children become heroin addicts and are molested by terrorists who were influenced by violence on the radio and suffer from undiagnosed autism caused by being overweight ad nauseum. And then the press wonders why everybody's getting their news from The Daily Show; well, because they have just as many jokes, but theirs are funny.

So when Newsweek muses on the end of religion in America, one is simultaneously unimpressed and nonplussed by the hysterical reaction in some quarters: unimpressed because this is what the media does, takes one survey and bloats it up into Something Tremendous and people go nuts, and nonplussed because you'd think "Boy-Cries-Wolf" Syndrome would kick in at some point and everyone would say, "Oh yeah, Newsweek, what is it this week? 'The End of Christian America'? Enh."

(The other week, in conversation, the subject of the Washington Post came up and I asked, "Who reads the Washington Post?" It was a rhetorical misstep that was swiftly leapt on, and I can't complain: I mean I read the Post for fuck's sake, it's bookmarked on my smartphone. What I meant though was something like the previous paragraph: not who literally reads the WaPo, but who takes it all that seriously? And I guess there are people who do, but it just seems like it would be tempered by the realization that there's a whole lot of talking-out-the-ass that goes on in the media, and it's one thing to take facts seriously--the release of torture memos, the extent of Somali piracy, the state of the American auto industry--and quite another to take reportage seriously--the death of religion, say, or George Will's latest semi-informed blatherings. In one sense I "read" the WaPo and Newsweek, in that I regularly visit their websites and look at the words and my brain interprets them. In another sense I don't "read" them at all even when I'm looking right at the pages--my brain ascribes exactly the degree of import the words deserve, which is frequently zilch. Who reads the Post indeed.)

But that's a sidetrip, yes? The point of talking about Newsweek is really to get at something silly that was said about Newsweek at another favorite source of blatheration, Huffington Post. As bad as Newsweek can be, HuffPo is frequently worse, though it at least frequently manages a kind of endearing awfulness--yes, a particular post might be moronic and simply wrong, but there's such spirited earnestness that one sometimes ends up vaguely rooting for a writer who possibly spent his or her childhood huffing paint fumes (there's probably a "HuffPo" pun in there somewhere, but I'm too lazy to make it up) before embarking on a semi-successful career in movies, TV, or partial-or-complete nudity. That's a broad brush, I know: some of HuffPo's contributors are brilliant, it's just that the dumb ones somehow tend to stand out.

And they're not all actors. Bruce Ledewitz, who got a bit frothy about the Newsweek article and wrote a response in HuffPo that is sort of the point of the rambling blog entry you're now reading, is a law professor. Mr. Ledewitz is of the opinion that the secularization of America's actually-rather-secular-already culture will have possible ill-effects in the future. "I think raising children without religion is quite difficult," he writes, which doesn't seem false so much as it seems, for want of a better word, meh. And let's make that "meh" truly dismissive: please imagine Frankenstein's monster saying it to a chair with a clumsy, full-shouldered shooing-motion while he looks for a fiancée to defenestrate, perhaps muttering "break later" as he turns.

Indeed, Professor Ledewitz's central point isn't even worth responding to at all, and that actually isn't the point of this blog entry: whether a less-religious culture is healthier or not is something culture will have to determine for itself, regardless of what Professor Ledewitz or I have to say about it. He can point to whatever he'd like to point to, and I can point to the world's various theocracies, and in the end everybody listening will most likely believe whatever it is they believed before we started pointing at things.

No, the real point of this response to a response is Professor Ledewitz's statement that:

But religion by and large does not claim that it makes people good. Instead, religion, and especially Christianity, begins with the proclamation that people are not good. We lie, we cheat, we steal, we cheat on our spouses and we allow a billion people in the world to live on a dollar a day.

Which is more realistic about human nature, Dennett or the classic Christian view? And what, and for that matter how, will you teach your children the truth about such matters?

Oh please. Life is nasty, brutish and short, we are all born in sin, blah-blah-blah. Professor Ledewitz might be surprised to find that Professor Dennett's view of human nature seems to be supported by studies of our biological cousins. Capuchin monkeys may have a sense of justice. Chimpanzees might possess a sense of awe in addition to feelings of empathy, grief and altruism. While we can't quite get into another animal's head, and must be wary of anthropomorphizing and projection, it has to be acknowledged that such feelings may be a part of our cousins' wiring and therefore a part of our wiring, and logically so: after all, our nature is that we are social animals. Like other primates, humans are not necessarily as strong or fast as predatory rivals, or armed with teeth-so-sharp or hide-so-thick. Even a gorilla or chimpanzee, as strong as such creatures are, may find itself quickly overmatched by species that have evolved as dedicated predators--lions and tigers, to cite obvious examples, if not necessarily bears (oh my). But what our cousins are adept at to varying degrees is adapting to environments as a social group. And humans represent a peak, perhaps the acme, of that quality.

Human nature--like primate nature--isn't wholly noble. Chimpanzees fight tribal wars over scant resources, much as we do. The sense that we are part of a group--a family, a clan, a tribe, a nation--necessarily invokes an other, something alien and not-us to which we instinctively respond by protecting our group, frequently invoking fear and violence to do so. But these facets of our nature (a word I don't think too highly of in this context, but Professor Ledewitz invoked it) are not opposites so much as they are manifestations of the same impulse. The instinct to drive off or kill a rival is married to the instinct to protect the members of the family/tribe.

Part of the reason the foregoing is so significant is that it drives a stake through the heart of Ledewitz's cynical assertion: yes, there are people who lie, who cheat, who steal; and what happens to them? They become outcasts, pariahs, they are punished. Even the most liberal and forgiving of us see the man or woman who has broken the implicit social covenant and feels the same upswelling of instinctive rage in the heart that the capuchin monkey who throws down his cucumber might feel watching his brother receive a grape. (There is a popular slander against the bleeding hearts that claims we care more for perpetrators than victims; no, we allow other instincts of pity and fraternity to move us as well, or attempt to moderate our more extreme feelings with reason, experience and education, but believe me, the sense of justice and the instincts for protection and retribution are no less present and accounted for.) The person who tries to live as a lone wolf suffers the fate of lone wolves--and wolves are social pack animals as we are; the lone wolf is unlikely to hunt as well on his own as a pack does as a unit, suffers the psychological wounds of being unable to satisfy his social impulses (ever seen a dog whimper when the family leaves without him?), and ultimately dies cold and alone (sometimes with the teeth of wolves in his throat).

I'm not ignoring the second part of the good Professor's indictment: there are humans who cheat on their spouses and we indeed allow a billion people to live on a dollar a day. These are another apple and an orange, respectively, to the previous apples. The spousal relationship may not be instinctual, but whether it is or isn't, adultery surely is a matter of lying (to the spouse), cheating (breaking the rules you agreed to in your wedding vows), and perhaps stealing (to the extent that any married man or woman might "belong" to his or her wife or husband), no? As for the injustice of poverty (the orange): surely if you accept what I wrote above, it's obvious that allowing people to live on a dollar a day is the perverse result of the same tribal instinct that leads to loving our brothers and sisters. The "tribe", understand, can be and has been redefined, from the family to (eventually) the nation, but it doesn't yet include the planet. The failure to address the problems of others ultimately comes from a failure to recognize them as being the same, members of the extended clan, but we are getting progressively better at this with each generation, I think. Certainly the idea that we are one enormous human family is taken for granted far more often than it seems to have been a century ago, and one can go back farther and find a time when the notion scarcely existed at all. We are not merely products of instinct; we can (and have), for instance, moderate or structure our instincts with culture and reason--channelling our innate tribalism into the forming of non-familial communities like cities, states, religions, nations. There is no reason to think that it's impossible for the "tribe" to someday be universally seen as a human one that spans the globe.

The realistic view of human nature (if there is such a thing) is that it is complex, that we possess instincts that evolved to allow us to function as a pack: we recognize that others have feelings, have a sense of what is fair, feel compulsions to share and support those who are fellow-members of the pack. By-and-large, our instincts tell us that our personal survival follows the group's, because creatures who lack these instincts tend to die and breeding populations of humans in which these instincts do not predominate are breeding populations that decline (usually in the face of successfully cooperative breeding populations); this is Natural Selection 101. That said, these instincts go hand-in-hand with instincts that have detrimental effects, indeed the positive and negative results frequently stem from the same impulses (e.g. the desire to kill an outsider who appears--however falsely--to threaten the pack merely by existing).

I feel obligated to close with one more obvious point (but one that is frequently missed when discussing this sort of thing): none of this has any bearing on the existence of any deity or deities, including the Christian. Regular readers are aware, of course, that I'm openly an atheist and have been for most of my life; but I honestly don't care if you think likely human instincts that are demonstrable in our genetic cousins are the result of God's clever long-term planning or merely a natural result of selective pressures favoring social behavior. That humans are the product of evolution is something that has to be accepted as a given: there is far too much evidence of that. Just as it has to be taken as a given--from physics, astronomy and geology just for a start--that the world is more than six thousand years old. But any religious person who doesn't think his otherwise-omnipotent deity can't craft an intelligent, tool-using civilization by means of evolution probably might download DOSBox and SimEarth in order to truly appreciate the bliss of watching a "species" evolve from a few basic rules.

My issue with Professor Ledewitz's claims isn't an atheist-versus-whatever Ledewitz is issue, in other words. My issue is that his view of humanity is constipated and wrong; if Christianity's view is what Professor Ledewitz makes it out to be, than Christianity is indeed wrong on that score, irrespective of the divinity of Jesus, salvation of Man, or existence of God. We are not the sum of our faults, steeped in Original Sin. We are something far more complicated, interesting, and beautiful.