Why We’re Better Than We Think We Are, Better Than We Look

This piece appeared as a newspaper op/ed in mid-September, 2024.

**********************************

An important truth I think important for people to recognize is that we are better creatures than we think ourselves to be. Better than we have been taught to believe. And, therefore that we’re capable of doing a lot better on this earth than we imagine—with our negative views of human nature.

(You’ll notice that almost invariably, when people say, “That’s human nature,” they’re pointing to some sort of defect they think we are born to possess.)

It’s important first of all because it’s true.

Important, too, because we know that people live up – or down – to their expectations. (If we recognize that we’re inherently better than we thought, we’ll be more likely to find our way toward a better human world than the one we’ve got now.)

Consider two ways we’re better than we imagine.

1) Dragged Downward by Systemic Forces

The heart of my case concerns the inevitable consequences of any creature’s taking the step onto the path of civilization  – i.e. taking a step unprecedented in the history of life on its planet of extricating itself from the niche in which it evolved biologically by inventing a new way of life.)

It can pretty well be proved that this Fateful Step will inevitably unleash a destructive systemic force that will drive that creature’s civilization in directions that the creature would never choose but could not avoid.

(“Pretty well proved” in my book, The Parable of the Tribes, which shows that the new system itself largely mandates how civilization will evolve – so that any creature on any planet anywhere in the cosmos that takes that Fateful Step will manifest as much ugliness as we see in the history of human civilization.

The social evolutionary force inevitably unleashed by a creature’s inventing a new way of living will have the inevitable effect of giving “the Spirit of the Gangster” a disproportionate say in how that creature’s civilization will develop.

(That’s regardless of the inborn nature of the particular creature creating the “Civilization.”)

This inevitable force – acting much as “Evil” has been traditionally envisioned, will inevitably permeate that creature’s civilization.

But that ugliness we see in human history is not a picture of what we humans are by nature.

So one way we are “better” is on the moral dimension. A social evolutionary force that favors the Spirit of the Gangster makes everything worse – more “Evil” — than it might otherwise have been.

iHUntapped Human Potential

Another way we’re better than we’ve believed concerns the potential – regarding our “gifts” – that we don’t realize.

There are times and places where creative human achievement seems to defy the laws of probability:

• the writings of ancient Athens,
• the paintings and sculptures of Renaissance Florence,
• the thought out of Concord, Massachusetts, in the first half of the 19th century,

the innovations in thought and art in Vienna around the turn of the 20th century,

to name a few.

What does it mean that so much higher a proportion of the population flowers forth in genius than what we see in the great majority of human societies through the centuries?

The numbers involved – e.g. that so many made extraordinary contributions in ancient Athens out of probably mere tens (or at most hundreds) of thousands of individuals – suggest it’s highly improbable it could happen by mere chance. (With enough coin-tosses, heads and tails will come up pretty much the same.)

We are entitled to assume that the inborn abilities of populations of that size were representative of humankind generally.

Once we exclude change, and genetically superior populations, what’s left are environmental factors (i.e, the circumstances of the various cultures at various historical moments) to explain such extraordinary flowering of human creativity.

I’d love to understand the ways circumstances – and how they shape people’s formative experiences – can stimulate an unusually high proportion of the population to make exceptional contributions to human endeavor (in artistry, thought, inventiveness, etc.). For example, to understand the cultural and historical forces that led to remarkable flowerings of genius (like in Renaissance Italy, or Elizabethan England)– producing achievements of genius that people will talk about forever.

(I wonder, too, how much those formative experiences are positive in fulfilling the potential of people’s gifts. And how much they involve some unwelcome kinds of stress— the way irritating grains of sand get oysters to make pearls.)

But we don’t need to understand how cultural environments can foster such flowerings of creativity to see the important conclusion this evidence compels us to draw: we can infer from this evidence that the potential for (what we might call) “genius” is present in humankind generally far more widely than we imagine.

How to see Ourselves

• We’re more basically decent, by nature, than we thought. (Respectable studies reveal that considerable tendencies toward empathy, compassion, and fairness are built into us.) We’re creatures who by nature prefer peace to war, kindness to cruelty, love to hate. And
• We possess potentialities that could enable more people to achieve greatness (of various kinds). Humankind is even more gifted than our species’ spectacular accomplishments demonstrate.

As both morally better creatures – by nature — than we have been taught to believe, and more gifted than we imagine.

Both being good reasons for us to believe ourselves more capable than we thought of building a better human world.