What's so Wrong with Human Nature? I remember reading a unique quote by the most illustrious of philosophers, Immanuel Kant, who noted that, "Everyone almost hates the other, tries to raise himself above his fellow men, is fully of envy, jealousy, and other fiendish vices. Man is not a god, he is the devil." Does Mr. Kant's idea raise itself to reality? Simply look at the evening news once in a while, and what shall you find? The most nefarious excrescences which could be imagined by any mere mortal in his own capacity apart from acting on them in one single instant, as if he were a rapacious beast rather than a man! When we see the rockets fall in the Middle East, what ought to be our response to those foolish men who think that humanity has a great innate element of perfectibility at the core of its nature? This is the question which must be raised and answered. When I was going through the tumultuous change of worldviews which came about in the summer and fall of 2003, I had brought into the Enlightenment's understanding of the possibility of perfecting human nature. One such man who captivated my thinking was a work by Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicholas de Caritat- the Marquis de Condorcet- in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Human Mind (1793). I now consider it to be one of the most naive and foolish writings ever made about man's state of nature during the Terror of the French Revolution, which, alas, would claim even this beloved author while yet needing to finish the very work! As the Marquis went on to say, "Our hopes for the future condition of the human race can be subsumed under three important heads: the abolition of inequality between nations, the progress of equality within each nation, and the true perfection of mankind. Will all nations one day attain that state of civilization which the most enlightened, the freest, and the least burdened by prejudices, such as the French and the Anglo-Americans, have attained already?" While this may sound like a valid hope for the future, we should not be taken captive by the arguments of misguided men who think that humanity is inherently good, but yet struggling because of bad social policy and education. Along with this litany of mantras that supposedly bring about the most noble sentiments in man, let us not forget what the Marquis thought concerning the necessity of the Europeans in the New World to bring about perfection by enacting policies that will either "civilize or peacefully remove the savage nations who still inhabit vast tracts of its land." Of course, racism was prevalent in the Enlightenment as it is in our own time. There is never a society which can say that it has a perfect record of never fostering intolerance and racial bigotry among its several members- and not even Fidel Castro's Cuba is immune from the ubiquitous disease, despite legally imposing that it is otherwise. The problem with any school of thought that does not take an approach to the study of man's inherent nobility and cruelty is that it will miss the full synthesis of human nature as it is in reality, which seems to suggest that man has the original nature of his benign aspirations which are always corrupted by his wicked aspirations. Certain ideological notions may say that we are in the birth pangs of a new era, and that we find this teaching especially true in our own time. Why else would we see a rise in both the splendor and goodness of the modern world in the technology and science it offers for the good of human advancement, along with the same hatreds and prejudices which lead men to kill? This question cannot be answered by merely saying that religion or politics robs man of his true spirit of humanity, because every society must have a political and religious base in order to give a full anthropological account of the community in its essence. And we cannot merely think that there is a cognitive dissonance of sorts in the enactment of evil by men when we think of them as not acting out of an evil impulse in itself, but from any other outside mechanistic impulse, thus giving the impression that the modern doctrine of man must be sought in a form of behaviorism championed by such notorious social theorists as B.F. Skinner and John Dewey, who implied largely in their teachings that man is a sort of epiphenomenon, an aggregate of forces derived from his physiological constitution into a center of gravity referred to as the "conscious self", or whatever you wish to call it. We could imply that many instances of human depravity were done in ignorance to the sufferings of others, such as the bombing of North Vietnam by B- 52 pilots who knew nothing of the thousands they slaughtered from on high. Of course they knew they were killing people, but the suffering of death is beyond their reach as the mission demands total fidelity to the mechanistic processes of releasing the bombs at command. No tense insight of hatred would be likely to befall anyone in the bomber cabin. But we are facing the fact that hatred is yet the animus that leads so many over the precipice to the most horrid acts of insanity imaginable. I would like to think that all of these acts are simply the excesses of man's passions which act upon his brain because he has let his muscles become too tense, or that his mind is only at the mercy of some greater demagogue of violence. All of this is true in many cases when we confront the acts of terrorism, which, regardless of whether or not we hold to behaviorism, attests that the theories of the great moderns lie in ashes. There is no relenting of the depravity of the mind, and anything remotely similar to what was experienced with the horrors of such madmen as Ted Bundy and John Gacy would show that human nature does not have any sense of innate perfectibility within it, or else we would see some evidence that certain individuals are living lives in accordance with consistent altruism and goodwill towards everyone. But the moderns refuse to see this, partly because they think that their conceited philosophy of man applies to them as well, and nothing could hurt their false sense of self-esteem more than a thorough realization that every one of us has the inclination at some point in our lives to wish for evil to befall others- and we even have the urge at times to kill others, although we are only restrained by the sense that we cannot justify our acts before the rest of society, (which seems strange, because if murder is illegal, then why is war not?) But nonetheless, we would strive to think otherwise than what I have just noted above. the fact that every one of us has had, at least once, the urge to enact murder- whether out of hatred or anger- shows that no one is totally immune from the potential to make those urges actual. It is evident that if society had a more liberal view towards adultery, it would happen much more often than it does at this present time; I think that same could be said if we had public executions, in the sense that many of us would probably be there to witness the death of a man, for not other reason than because we have the instinct of revenge built into us from an early age, especially when we are raised in a society that teaches us that justice ought to be retributive rather than medicinal. I hold that this idea of the justice of the death penalty would have to depend upon the ferocity of the murderer's intent; no man imbibed with justice and reason would wish that innocent men ought to be executed, and so I would hold that the extent of "revenge" can only go so far in the case that only those who have been charged as being guilty in murder of the first degree would really deserve death in the sense of a moral principle. In other words, I would hold that there is nothing morally reprehensible in putting such a man to death, but that it would be of a greater moral excellence to keep even a man such as this in a life- long state of penance for his sins. They are too deep to simply justify immediate death by execution as the greatest punishment to be enacted. The problem over the death penalty arises when we think that it is to be a gleeful occasion to witness the death of a man, because if we think so, then we are in the same set of mind as the man who committed murder. We may think that our glee is just, but we are nonetheless guilty of partaking in bloodlust instead of mourning for a man who has strayed so much from the path that he, along with all of us, were originally meant to follow for the moral good of mankind.As for the possibility of the moral reform of mankind, I would hold as scant that progress can be made in the sense of making him above and beyond the state in which he currently resides as a distorted creature because of the fact that education consists in the whole of man's experiences, rather than only the indoctrination received in the classroom. To hold to the view that an education of morals will solve the crisis of human evil is to be premature in judgment, for we know that human nature dictates to the mind the desire to live out the passions of the flesh in such a manner as to make it the will of man that deliberately takes the initiative of inducing itself into following such a course of action. This must be the case, seeing as how the will of man is paramount to his decision making, although I would not hold to the libertarian view of freewill on the basis that it cannot be substantiated that an individual would suddenly wish to do one thing or another on the basis of pure arbitration, and hence man's will would only be nothing more than an analogy of a matter particle appearing and disappearing within a total vacuum. There must be a principle of the character and the personality to make a man will to do one thing or another, and in this sense man cannot be free, but neither can any other man claim to be in a more exalted state- if we hold to the Augustinian view of human nature as having a sinful tendency to be self- gratifying. Quite frankly, I would find little apparent departure between Augustine and Kant on the reality of human depravity, and Augustine is especially vivid with regards to his early youth:" Where was I, and how far was I exiled from the delights of Thy house, in that sixteenth year of the age of my flesh, when the madness of lust (to which human shamelessness giveth free licence, though unlicensed by Thy laws) took the rule over me, and I resigned myself wholly to it?" (Confessions, Book II, ch. II), and is it yet not even more apparent that those who would defend man's supposed innocence should postulate that his will does not always wish evil, but also good? To this objection, I would have to reply that human evil does not take hold of every person in the same manner, and that some shall indulge evil less frequently and less intensely than others will. This does not prove that man's will is free in the sense that we always hold it to be in tradition. It may be the case that the will of man may not always have the same opportunity or inducement to act in the full potential of evil, but it is less likely to be the will of man that this should be the case than it is the nature of his circumstances on an individual basis.With the sense of the human will being in fetters, we would think that there would be little hope for the improvement of mankind's constitution. But this is not the issue, because we are faced with the problem, every one of us as an individual, and thus there can be no thought that anyone can think of himself as better or inherently endowed with greater moral faculties that let him condemn others as being less moral and less civilized. If only we could see this, then a universal love and friendship among men would take root, and such consciousness would lessen our evil nature to a great extent.