Are People Born Good or Bad?
Homo homini lupus
My mentor professor at university was a worldly, thoughtful, and brilliant fallen Jesuit who held secular reservations about inherent goodness in people. He liked to ask people the question over a drink, and in return unequivocally would always observe that humans are indeed born ‘bad,’ or were congenitally bad people. Despite his religious background, he didn’t mean that from a sectarian aspect, but from a humanistic one. I never once heard anyone challenge him on the subject and found myself in easy agreement with him.
The question of innate goodness or badness in people used to be a popular topic of conversation before modern attention spans regressed to neolithic-era levels of functionality. Nietzsche feared that in our desperation “we read something else into the heart of things: our own enigmatic nature, our contradictions, our deeper, more painful, more distrustful wisdom.
“People used to equivocate left-handedness with evil. Of course, the damned are always set on God’s left side — never on the right. That was what the Bible taught.
Psychomachia may no longer be of interest to the industrially enlightened — not only haven’t heard the question but haven’t heard of the question — but it still is a poignant and soul searching query I often check back in with and debate with myself — as no one else seems interested. So much for an objective POV.
Define good and evil you cannot
The conundrum with answering the enigma lies in the question of defining good and bad — terms of contradistinction that can’t exists without the other. There is no consensus of who bad people are, nor for the the things they do that are ipso facto bad. However, once associated with something bad, they become it. But not to everyone. Consider violent criminals and serial killers whose virtues are routinely extolled by their neighbors, even after the crime: “He was a good father … he helped old ladies … he loved his wife.” We immediately are skeptical of such judgments of character as being inherently flawed.
You will know (the good from the bad) when you are calm, at peace — Joda
Early models of, good and bad were conflated with conceptions of purity and evil that had their roots in Hellenic and Hebraic thought, and later — Christianity and Catholicism. Cicero believed that “the function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil,” whereas Nineteenth century Russian nihilists turned this wisdom on its head by inferring that there was no way to define good and bad because they didn’t exist.
The separation was necessary because religious institutions manipulated and molded idealistic conceptions of purity and evil for their own control platforms and industries — a disservice to humanity at large. As Freud observed with distrust that “immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.” Orwell insisted that religion must be kept out of the argument “mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.”
Along with the idealism, lost in translation from Christianity to modern parlance were many seemingly universal truths, discarded and replaced with modern ideologies that do even less defining than their immutable predecessors, muddying the pool of humanistic thinking even further. Though we know how we feel about it, we no longer know how to answer the question with any conviction — it’s too slippery a slope.
Oscar Wilde said “most people are boring and stupid.” This was in principle a social not a moral observation. If we add to it my passing notice “… overweight, gluttonous, and ugly,” we still lack a moral benchmark, yet we routinely think of such people as ‘bad’ when we otherwise feel a natural aversion to them nonetheless. If we thought about and challenged that process we would find ourselves unable to hold them in moral contempt. Wilde thought this parsing a waste of time: “it is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
If you’re like me, you feel a compulsion to think of people based on how we feel about them. In that equation, they are either good or bad, with no grey areas. We know this to be a jaundiced perception because we don’t really believe people are all good or all bad, but we love or hate them based on these semi-perceptions. We are simply trying to order our untidy universe in which there is a tacit imperative to know.
But it’s no fun giving up on the question altogether, so let’s have a go! If we accept the question as a plausible one, there can be but three answers:
- All people are born good
- All people are born bad
- There are both good and bad people
People are born good
However that sounds to you, you make it your own, and put into your own context. I sense that not all people are good. In the first sense it must allude to the Christian sense of goodness — that all are good and loved by Jesus. This belief never stood a rat’s-ass chance of permeating my doubts, or most peoples. New Testament tenets such as “love thy neighbor …” seem preposterous even to devout Christians.
There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify — so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish — John Keats
In another sense it smacks naive Pollyannaish — as if anyone really believed it other than small children who wouldn’t know the difference. Such characters exist only in fiction and serial television shows, like Barney & Friends. People don’t really desire such perfect beings anyway. Rather, they jealously betray a penchant for celebrating every time some unblemished soul is compromised. It’s more fun knocking people down than it is admiring them.
People are born bad
That’s an easy one to fathom until you focus that lens on those closest to you or on yourself. I belong to this group. I probably would say that regardless of reality, or of the many ways and things I do do help other people. That’s a factor of failing to live in the moment. You could call me a fallen Buddhist who believes that we are only the composite sum of all of our past and present experiences — notwithstanding past transgressions no matter how small.
That man is essentially born into evil has its roots also in western religions that subscribe to the notion of Original Sin, which can be expiated through various beliefs and actions. At Judgment Day, those who haven’t cleansed their souls are condemned to eternal misery as punishment for a life of sin. This meta-distinction makes the task of judgment a fairly cut-and-dried one for the world’s fundamentalists, Catholics, and of course Jehovah’s Witnesses waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Freud saw innate badness as a latent handicap — one caused later in life by the misery of childhood complexes and wish-unfulfillment, and exacerbated by social stresses, as well as pressure from one’s ego. Darwin’s theories of natural selection and survival of the fittest foment everlasting hostility of mano a mano in eternal competition and territorial confrontation. Freud insisted that all of this animus is of course reflected back onto ourselves through self-loathing channels that flow in both directions.
There are good and bad people
Despite really being able to define good and bad, we admit this is the most likely composition of humanity, and the most preferred. That makes the question easy to dismiss. Except I don’t buy that because we can’t define good and evil that it doesn’t exist — I believe that it probably does. It does so in a universal way that transcends language called the gut feeling.
“Any swinging dick can be canonized: 15,000 saints, and perhaps no more than one tenth that number famous for more than fifteen-minutes.
We must necessarily add that people change: they may be born good and turn bad (sinners) or born bad and turn good (saints). Let it be said that the bar for canonizing saints is considerably lower than ever in history. Indeed, since 2013, Pope Francis has anointed eight-hundred and thirteen ‘saints.’ With the exception of the popes, I have heard of exactly 0 of the anointed. That is a sign of the times. His predecessor — Pope John Paul II, anointed 482 saints in his tenure as the leading world hypocrite. He even streamlined the process by lowering the waiting period from 50 to 5 years. For a benchmark, by 1750, Butler’s Lives of the Saints marked a mere 1,486 entries. Nowadays, the number exceeds 15,000.
Judgement of Character
Anyone who studies them knows that birds, cats, dogs, and many other creatures have the uncanny ability to discern good and bad vibes in people with no other information about them. I don’t believe they intuit the way we do — they can’t — but they read people. They sense and feel the distinctive approach of another animal, see the way the animal moves, the sounds it makes, the way it smells, and the expression it makes, information that will inspire them to stay or flee. Pity that all of this high functioning character assessment is wasted on low-functioning animals.
But then Montaigne would ask who are we to make the distinction between who is and who isn’t a low functioning animal?
