The Perfectability of Humanity

There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed . . . I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

-Cormac McCarthy

There are a handful of “basic” questions that everyone asks himself at some point: Is there a God? What happens when we die? Why am I still living on my parents’ couch?

Such questions are open to debate and analysis, and can never be answered definitively. But we do answer them, and our answers influence all subsequent questions. Debating and discussing issues of politics, education, morality, et cetera, et cetera, I often realize that my interlocutors and I are talking at cross-purposes. It’s not so much that we disagree on these issues; it’s that we disagree on much more fundamental questions. For example, two people debating, say, the necessity of school vouchers should first address their basic presuppositions about the purpose of education and the government’s role in it. If these basic principles aren’t sorted out, most arguments inevitably take on a caustic tone, each interlocutor not understanding why the other “just doesn’t get it.”

The question answered by Cormac McCarthy is, “Are humans basically good or evil?” McCarthy’s answer is unequivocal, and his novels bear out this basic presupposition about humanity.

And I tend to agree with him, though with the tiniest hint of optimism. We are sinners at the core, but, sometimes, we are also saints. I believe that humans are basically rotten, but that sometimes they can, miraculously, act justly and mercifully. However, such actions are the exception, not the rule. Like McCarthy, I don’t believe the species as a whole can be improved in any way. There will always be war; there will always be chaos and murder; there will always be injustice. We should expect nothing less, and thus be renewed spiritually by the good we do see.

Half a million years of human progress, and we still inflict upon one another the same petty misdemeanors and wholesale slaughters perfected by our ancestors. I’m always amused when we post-moderns decry European colonialism as though the natives had been living in perfect harmony. The Spanish conquered the Inca and the Aztecs, true, but what do we think the Inca and the Aztecs had been doing? Do people honestly believe that indigenous empires became empires by being nice? Likewise, the Native Americans were surely treated brutally and unjustly by the British . . . but it’s vain to believe that the British introduced the Natives to brutality and injustice. And as Henry Louis Gates has reminded us, whites, blacks, Asians, and Arabs were all complicit in the rise of colonial-era slave trading. Warfare, brutality, and subjugation were not invented by greedy Europeans circa 1492. They are part of the human condition, and every race, class, and ideology in the human pantheon is perfectly capable of their murderous implementation.

Because I believe injustice to be the common denominator of human action, it’s difficult for me to get on board the progressive social justice train. Anyone who talks of collective social change makes me think, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” I’m sure this comes across as conservatism, but it’s not. I simply disagree with the fine social justice folk on this fundamental issue, the perfectability of humanity. I’m very wary of anyone trying to enact change (no matter how seemingly noble) beyond the individual level.

But the individual level is vitally important. People do good things, and it’s more important to be good than to be smart, successful, or anything else. However, I believe that goodness is realized through individual choices, not through a collective vision of society. When we latch ourselves onto such visions of perfectability, we become, as McCarthy rightly notes, enslaved to those visions, which can never be realized beyond local, individual acts of goodness.