As a student of human nature, I have considered the question of whether “we” are fundamentally good or bad. The answer is of course both/and.
Most people practice what is called situational morality which means their definition of being “good” is doing whatever serves their interests given the conditions and incentives in any situation.
Some people have a strong internalized set of ethics/morals that impels them to act “good” in most situations.
Some people act out of ruthless self-interest in every situation without regards for the interests and well-being of others (narcissists, psychopaths). Ruthless (guilt-free) psychopaths are drawn to acquire and exercise power, and often become kings and tyrants. This enables them to exert their malevolent control over large numbers of people, which makes them happy. In the face of a sadistic psychopath, most people flee and submit and fawn in order to survive. It’s reasonable to do so.
From time to time, a rare human phenotype appears on the scene with the features of compassion, generosity, charity and courage. Impelled by their internal ethical code, they will run into a burning building to rescue its inhabitants without regard to their own safety. We call those people heroes and saints.
I wrote about John Lewis, a member of the sainthood, in attempting to understand a bit about this rare human variant:
Alexei Navalny (1976-2024)
Alexei Navalny was a champion for justice and freedom and democracy in Russia.
He died today in prison at the direction of the psychopathic crime boss and dictator of his country. We can read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago for details of that regime that has tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people to terrorize a population into submission.
Alexei Navalny was a saint.
Those of us with even a shred of his good DNA can cry if we need to today, and then keep him in our hearts as a model and inspiration for our own lives.
Baird, your article about when saints walk among us is one of my favourites and I think of it a lot. And of course I've been thinking of Alexei Navalny today and what causes a person to stand up for what is right despite the dangers involved. He was a brave man, the bravest, braver than I know I would be. But we can be brave and stand up for what is right in the small things in life. Often it is the small things that presage and give free rein to large things, large erosions of freedom and erosions of behaviour that exists to keep us safe.
I recall a time in a school I worked in and a staff meeting where one of the management was making jokes about the children and many of the staff were laughing. I looked around at them and realised that this person making the jokes was putting us all in an unprofessional and therefore dangerous position. I did not laugh. I was horrified. I went to the head right after the meeting and told her how I felt. Long story short, the person was eventually dismissed. Her 'grooming' of the staff was just one in a litany of inappropriate behaviour. Of course, if I had been really brave I would have spoken up in the meeting, but I was aware that I had at least registered that what she was doing was wrong and I refused to go along with it.
Alexei Navalny reminds to hold fast to our beliefs and defend them when required.
Wise and wonderful essay as you so often gift us with.
Are we we good by nature or are we bad? I've come to the belief that a property true of a set is not necessarily true of all elements of a set and if you look at an individual as the collective set of all the time slices of the individual's life then the property of being good or bad of the whole is not shared by all the time slices of that individual.
But that is all being excessively reductionist. I don't think Putin is always bad, but as an average, he is definitely such. As for Humanity, the jury is out, we don't have enough data points..we may get better we may get worse. On the whole, I would be hesitant to make a judgement other than to say that the trend line is that we are neither good nor bad, but that we are definitely harmful- to ourselves, to other species, to the environment.
The appropriate moral response to the trend line is to reduce the harm by voluntarily reducing our numbers, even if it means reducing the numbers of saints walking the earth.