The problem with good and evil

Is human nature inherently bad?  Yes.

Are human beings fundamentally good?  Yes.

Are these contradictory answers?  No, not really.  They are just answers to different questions.  Each might be convincing in its own limited terms.

The problem is that the questions are not very good.  Each is designed to elicit only one of two possible answers.  Yes or no.  Neither one is very useful.  But the questions themselves are not meant to promote useful discussion.  They are rhetorical, designed to bring an end to discussion.  They are intended to promote other ends—the marketing of salvation schemes, the discovery of like-minded partisans, the unmasking of hidden enemies.  But if you are interested in a more meaningful and productive conversation—that is, a conversation whose end is not known in advance—the best answer to such a question is: Ask a better question.

Wait, what sort of question?  What’s wrong with those questions?  Surely we need to know those things!  Are they not the most burning of questions?  No, not really.  We might agree that we would like to have clear answers, but that does not mean that there are such answers to be had.  Yet we keep on asking, one way or another.  So why do human beings feel compelled to ask (or think they can answer) such simple questions about the nature of good and bad?  Well, that at least would be a better question.

We are all familiar with the terms good and bad.  We think we know what they mean.  We even assume that the terms are about real, objective, independently-existing entities.  They aren’t really.  Point them out on a map.  Show us an address.  Where would we locate these powerful entities for which, apparently, we poor mortals perform the role of feeble servants?  Hell comes to mind.  Perhaps this is the final address of one of them anyhow.  But the notion of evil was around long before there was any mention of an abode of suffering, as if the place were merely conjured to serve the darkness.  And the notion of a heaven, apart from the familiar sky, was only dreamt of as a counterpart to the other.  There is only one place where these entities can reliably and consistently be found.  It is the same for both the good and the bad.  That address is the human mind.  The concepts are only observed in human speech, in human conflicts, in the shared and negotiated human imagination.  As far as we can tell, they are terms that have only ever been conceived by human beings.  Good and bad are found wherever human beings are gathered in cultures.  From the available evidence, we may reasonably conclude that they are human-made terms that only make sense in human exchanges, debates, discussions.  This is to say that they only make sense in a human context.

All human cultures we know of have employed variations on these concepts.  They have been invented again and again because they serve a basic human purpose.  They help us understand ourselves.  The terms reflect the vigorous imaginative capacity of a species that has, uniquely, gained self-awareness and then set about trying to make sense of the ideas they have become aware of.  The terms good and bad are really about ourselves.  Neither can be understood without the other.  They are stand-ins for opposition, conflict, striving, suffering.  They must exist together.  Human nature is to be found in the pairing of these oppositional concepts, though particularly in the broad and well-traveled terrain that lies between the extremes.  That is where human beings have always lived—between.