What Is Your Theory Of Human Nature?

A telling sentence by a conservative pundit jumped out at me: "They had no illusions about the depravity of human beings." Given what is happening in the world, that worldview seems to be confirmed. But is it a self-fulfilling prophecy?

'Human nature' is one of those terms, like love, that everyone thinks they know just what it is, but very few can say just what they mean by it. Saying human nature is depraved is like saying there will always be war. The cliché that "only the dead know the end of war" is a platitude of the past; it cannot pertain to the future if humanity is to survive.

In any case could anyone maintain a worldview of "the depravity of human beings" if they weren't partly depraved themselves? Besides, making such a generalization is misanthropic and self-fulfilling.

To be sure, humans are often depraved. And in this culture, as someone said to me recently, "people have become shitty and shady." Civilization hasn't civilized man. And man, the tribal primate, is increasingly depraved. But human beings are not depraved.

'Depravity' means "moral corruption; wickedness." Some of its synonyms are: "degeneracy, degradation, immorality, shamelessness, sordidness, wickedness, sinfulness, vileness, baseness, iniquity, nefariousness, criminality, viciousness, brutality and brutishness." Listing them that way seems funny…until one watches the news for an hour.

Cynicism about human nature, even when dressed up in salvation creeds, lies at the root of the, Christian worldview, whether Roman Catholic/Protestant or Eastern Orthodox.

Indeed, the idea that man is inherently a sinful, depraved creature is foundational to religions' rationalizations for war. It only sounded like parody to us that Putin quoted the Bible at a rally speaking of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

Nearly all commentators and analysts of this de facto world war are making what philosophers call category mistakes. They foolishly see the war either in personal terms - Putin vs. Biden and Zelensky – when it’s actually an eruption of historical forces possessing tremendous momentum.

Facile categories such as "democracy vs. autocracy" and the “clash of civilizations” only widen the conflict. And continuing to place pathology of war in either nationalistic or religious contexts reinforces the sources of man's depravity.

It's no exaggeration to say that our relationship with others and the world is predicated on two things: one's relationship with nature; and one's theory of human nature.

So what do I mean by human nature? To my mind, human nature is the condition of being conditioned. As humans we’re ruled by psychological thought, with its strong tendencies toward division and fragmentation, which appear to be terminating ecologically and socio-politically in our age.

To be sure, human nature, however we conceive or intuit it, is very old. The implicit assumption is that given our long experience with human nature, it is immutable. However the present world, with all its cresting crises, is testing to the hilt the assumption that human nature will never change.

I submit that since the human species does not have an unlimited number of chances to change course, continuing to believe in the unchangeability of Homo sap is a tremendous impediment to human nature radically changing.

What would that look like? It's become imperative to the inward survival of the individual, and perhaps the outward survival of the human species, that ordinary humans care about more than just 'my family' and 'my country.' People have to begin, for the first time in human history, to care about humanity as a whole.

Moreover, ordinary folks urgently need to learn the daily art of quieting the mind-as-thought, thereby bringing peace to the heart and unconditioning the brain. The path from humans/man to human being is a pathless journey each one of us has to undertake essentially alone.

As difficult as it is, self-knowing individuals take that inward journey, growing out of the destructive tendencies and conditioning of human nature, wrought by the wrongful use of symbolic thought, to a mind and brain that are regularly bathed in silence and emptiness.

The evolution of conscious thought made us man, but his time is over. We can take total responsibility for human consciousness as it is enfolded within us. We can continually question and attend to the movement of thought and emotion without judgment or choice. That’s the way ahead.

At dawn's first light, Venus, rising in the southeastern sky, is as bright as I’ve ever seen it.

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