The "Myth" of natural human goodness

David Brooks column on Sunday really agitated me. It's thesis: "Sometimes a big idea fades {...} until it has almost disappeared. Such is the fate of the belief in natural human goodness."

There are several points that I feel are disingenuous in this column. First, the equivalence asserted between the belief that "humans are naturally good" and the argument that this belief "...led people to hit the road, do drugs, form communes and explore free love in order to unleash their authentic selves." So it seems that by evoking the discredited hippie lifestyle (almost universally derided and loathed by the political right) as well as several other conservative hot button issues (promoting "self-esteem over self-discipline," the primacy of institutions over individuals) Brooks is attempting to similarly undercut the much more universal assertion that "humans are naturally good." By this trick his argument then asserts indirectly that over time history has proven "conservative" thought correct and discredited ideals considered more liberal.

He goes on: "Over the past 30 years or so, however, this belief in natural goodness has been discarded. It began to lose favor because of the failure of just about every social program that was inspired by it, from the communes to progressive education on up. But the big blow came at the hands of science.

From the content of our genes, the nature of our neurons and the lessons of evolutionary biology, it has become clear that nature is filled with competition and conflicts of interest. Humanity did not come before status contests. Status contests came before humanity, and are embedded deep in human relations. People in hunter-gatherer societies were deadly warriors, not sexually liberated pacifists. As Steven Pinker has put it, Hobbes was more right than Rousseau.

Moreover, human beings are not as pliable as the social engineers imagined. Human beings operate according to preset epigenetic rules, which dispose people to act in certain ways. We strive for dominance and undermine radical egalitarian dreams. We’re tribal and divide the world into in-groups and out-groups."

This smacks of arrogance and egocentrism to me. Not only because I work for a company whose first value is "people are basically good," and who has proven that in billions and billions of transactions around the world, or because I work in the field of conflict resolution, or because I spent two years in the Peace Corps and witnessed first hand the innate goodness of people from an entirely different culture and history than my own. As I've traced on this blog, evolutionary biology has not at all concluded that conflict is the natural form for human nature -- co-evolution scholars have asserted that humans have enforced social norms for milennia that have become part of the human genome. There are plenty of examples of human societies that have discovered ways to mitigate the negative aspects of conflict, from neighborhoods and towns to democracies and republics.

But there's even more: "Today, parents don’t seek to liberate their children; they supervise, coach and instruct every element of their lives." I'm sorry? Upon which data is this based? This is completely alien from my experience, yet it is presented as fact.

Here we get down to the real brass tacks: "Iraq has revealed what human beings do without a strong order-imposing state." Aha! So this is the lesson of Iraq? Because certain cheerleaders for the war, like Brooks, had their innocent faith in the inherent goodness of the Iraqis (or, as he put it, "the belief that societies in the colonial world were fundamentally innocent, and once the chains of their oppression were lifted something wonderful would flower") we can now definitively state (as Brooks does) that people are not good, they are motivated by base and selfish factors, and that humans inevitably "...strive for dominance and undermine radical egalitarian dreams."

For many people in the world, I suspect, Iraq has presented no such crisis of confidence in the goodness of humanity. The political class in the United States has long underestimated the power of nationalism, and that is the central lesson of both Vietnam and Iraq. Not only have most Iraqis resisted the imposition by force of US values and agendas in their country, clearly now most people in the United States resist the imposition as well, considering that it was sold (and continues to be sold) under false pretenses.

The argument that people are base, self-interested, and amoral does go a long way to justify a certain worldview: that force and power is the only way to make things change. However, I believe that worldview is radically over-simplistic. Humans are capable of great cruelty and great kindness, and the goal of civic and social institutions should be to mitigate the negative aspects of human nature and to promote the positive aspects. I think many of the world's religions focus specifically on this particular goal as well.

Brooks is universalizing his own hard-won realizations (which resulted from his errors on the war) in this column, but then twists the conclusion (that evolution affirms conservatism) to further affirm his worldview. And I think the reason why his piece agitates me so much is that the errors in his reasoning was predicted by my worldview at the outset, yet he turns his "lesson" around to somehow explain how my vision of the world is invalidated by his failure. This kind of intellectual contortionism frustrates me to no end, and I think it does serious damage to Brooks' credibility.