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Thomas Blenkinsop
Lower Sixth
South Town

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What is Human Nature?

“What is a man?! A miserable little pile of secrets!” – Vlad Tepes Dracula of Wallachia (Vlad III the “Impaler”).

Blind, unblinking cruelty. Utter, ruinous hatred. Burning, riotous passion. Predatory, well-aimed malice. Cold, crackling logic. In essence, humanity is a sum of all brutalities, hatreds, combined with a malignant intelligence and logic used to aim the more fiery aspects of human nature at a given point; aiming theft, murder, rape and all manner of deviancies at the weakest targets, or those most likely to bring benefit. So argues St. Augustine of Hippo.

Privately, like St. Thomas Aquinas, I am forced to believe otherwise. Firstly because of St. Augustine’s moderately awful method of theoretical basis, namely if one baby is both precocious and ruthless, and knocks its sibling from the mother’s teat, all humans are born evil and will continue to commit acts of malignancy unless reined in, which is to say the least, presumptive. Namely this leaves in only the mass-murderers, the child rapists, the parasitic and bloody-handed members of society. This leaves out the scientists who research cancer for good causes, those who champion the weak, those who champion the meek, or even those who are so hard-hearted they want nothing more than to be left alone! What an insult to the great variety of human experience, the richness of the human life! However, although I would LIKE to believe St. Thomas Aquinas’ view that the nature of humanity is fundamentally good (and while I agree with several of his other points); in this I cannot agree. Humanity is clearly not born morally, but neither is it born amorally. Humanity clearly acquires morals, but equally contains certain basic morals within it. Another philosophy is needed.

I will reject egocentrism out of hand. Human beings are NOT fundamentally selfish, human beings do NOT necessarily get a “kick” out of altruism, human beings CAN suppress their selfish instincts in the interests of all, and human beings CAN sacrifice themselves for ABSOLUTELY NO BENEFIT. Assuming that there is a soldier who despises all his comrades, and they all despise him. Assume he has no family. If he should jump on a grenade and save them because he BELIEVES IT IS RIGHT, then he will have sacrificed himself to save others, not out of a desire to help them in particular, but because his moral philosophy requires it. They may celebrate his heroic sacrifice and he may gain a posthumous medal, but of what benefit are these to a dead man? Thus is egocentrism defeated.

Leaving behind pure evil, pure good, and pure selfishness, rejecting each as being overly simplistic: As I am a human, a man, indeed I am technically a man, and as I know that I contain evil and selfishness, as do most, and by certain views of the world I am “good”: In others I am a far deeper evil, but on the whole the actions I would take in a given situation are what most Westerners would consider to be good. Thusly each is overly simplistic; I possess the capacity for reason, for thought, for emotion, for ripping my enemies into bloody shreds and shrieking out curses in Japanese. I possess the capacity for all of these things.

Therefore we require a philosophy which illustrates the fact that man is rat, monkey, fish, lizard and at last a naked ape. To know what man was and is, to demonstrate that there are people in this fair country who throw up kebabs and cheap lager every night, there are white-collars, blue-collars, executives, scheming politicians, noble politicians, the meek, the furious, the average men, the nauseating American tourists, the hawking vendors, the racist, sexist, creedist individuals who generally (a) vote for the BNP, or (b) start burning crosses. We need humanity wrapped up in a box. And that we do not have.

But Human nature can be summed up mostly by this: it is fickle. Where there is chaos, humanity seeks to impose order. When there is order, humanity will contrive a way for chaos to be brought back. When there is evil, humanity will seek to restore that which is good but when given a choice between utter, overriding selfishness or the creation of greater good for others, most will choose the latter. It is therefore of little surprise that the average human is in a situation of true horror, confounded by the various and deep ranges of his morality and his desires. It is not without reason that there actually exists a universally adhered to law of the internet: That whatever exists, there will be someone, somewhere who finds it ... attractive. Therefore we are forced to retreat from our entreaties that man is good, or pure, virginal perhaps; yet we must shrink from the idea that humanity is wholly evil and that every action we take is evil. Quoting St. Thomas Aquinas once more (paraphrasing, really), adultery is evil because the laws of reason and God declare it to be so; the act of sex and procreation is not evil in and of itself, but adultery is evil by the merit of it being insufficiently good.

We must conclude thusly; humanity is an amalgam of parts assembled from the cold, long sleep of evolution. We are not God’s chosen people, for if we were, then surely He/She/It would have created us with a far better scope. We are not equitable, we certainly aren’t just. Let us grant humanity the equal right to be superior or inferior, capricious or fastidious, conservative or liberal, anarchic, authoritarian, fascist, American, English, French, African, Asian, or even Inuit. Splitting humanity down lines simply doesn’t work. It isn’t in a human’s nature to be anything in particular. It is simply in a human’s nature to be.

13 October 2008

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