In Adam’s Fall
We Sinned All
These are the words that begin the New England Primer,
written in the late 17th century. This is the book that taught
children their ABCs. It is at the same time a statement about human nature. We
were all born in sin, and sinfulness is our natural state.
We can find a lot in our own experience to support that
view of humanity. We don’t need to reach very far to the great evil doers of
history, the Hitlers and the Stalins. We can find examples in our own lives. Even
the best of us sometimes fail to live up to our own ideals. We have all done
things that we knew were wrong, wrong by our own standards. We knew this even
as we committed these wrongful acts, yet we went ahead and committed these
sins. All of us have indulged in at least some of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Did those old New England Puritans have something? Is
human nature depraved to the core? Are we at best, at least some of us, kept to
the relatively straight and narrow because of the strictures of society? Do we
obey the rules of society mainly because we fear the punishment of disobeying?
Trailing Clouds of Glory
While human imperfection is undeniable, not everyone believes
that we born in sin, that our very nature is sinful. The English poet William
Wordsworth believed that each of us had an existence before our birth. He wrote
about this belief in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.”
Our birth is but a sleep
and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
In this view we are not born in sin. On the contrary, we
are born trailing clouds of glory, from God.
If we are not born in sin, how does one account for our
many failures as human beings? How do you explain the difference between our
lofty aims and our ineffective accomplishments? Where do those clouds of glory
go? How does the innocent child become a despot, a murderer, an egomaniac? What
has corrupted this child?
According
to the Romantic poets like Wordsworth, society is the corrupter. Society with
its artificial rules takes the child molds him into something that is unnatural.
The further we get away from nature, the more imperfect we become.
These
two views of human nature mark the fundamental difference between the political
views of conservatives and liberals.
We
no longer use things like The New England Primer to teach young children that
we are born in sin. How, then, do people acquire a sense of the quality of
human nature? How do they decide whether people are fundamental good or
basically bad? We derive these opinions inductively from our experiences. We
all have had experiences where other people treated us badly. We have also
witnessed many acts of goodness from our fellow human beings. The way we encounter
these actions determine the way they shape our outlook.
Our
opinions on human nature are not derived as conclusions based on logical
considerations. Rather they are attitudes that we are barely aware of having
considered, but they are attitudes that influence our thinking most of the
things we do.
Few,
if any, people think of themselves as evil. Or their close family members or
best friends. If the people they know best seem like decent human beings, how
can they think of the vast majority of people as being fundamentally bad? Most
people follow most of the rules most of the time. But we weren’t born following
the rules. In so many ways society teaches us the rules. In effect it civilizes
us. We learn the Golden Rule. We learn the ways we are dependent upon one another.
We
learn that if we apply ourselves in school as children, we will be able to get
into college and learn a career that will help us succeed as adults. These
opportunities are available to everyone. Of course we can’t deny that opportunities
are more readily available to some than to others, but we can all think of
members of minorities who have made great successes of their lives.
It
is virtually impossible for someone who violates too many of the rules to
succeed. If a young woman has several children, all by different fathers, she
is going to be unable to be a fully functioning member of society. If a young
man drops out of school before graduating and joins a gang rather than take a
minimum wage job, he is unlikely to ever hold a “good” job. While people like
these clearly do not have the opportunities that most of us have, they do have
some opportunities.
We
may not be born in sin, but we are born as little narcissists. As we grow, we have
a responsibility take advantage of whatever opportunities are available to us
and allow society to civilize us. That is the bad that some see as infecting large
numbers of humanity. It’s not that that we are born in sin. The bad is the
failure of some people, not just members of minorities, to make the effort
required to become functioning, productive members of society.
If
some people are too lazy to follow the rules and take care of themselves, the
conservative asks, why should I donate some of my hard-earned money through taxes
to take care of such people?
Some
people have a more sanguine view of human nature. Most people, they believe,
are basically good. Obviously there are some bad actors among us, some truly
vile human beings. If we are born fundamentally good, how do so many of us turn
out to be less than sterling characters?
Conservatives
may feel that we need society to civilize us and make us conform to appropriate
patterns of behavior. Liberals, on the other hand, may feel that society itself
is the culprit. Society might corrupt the innocent soul and force it to be an
unthinking conformist.
Two
iconic books, both published in the 1950s, illustrate these two views of human
nature. In Lord of the Flies a group of English schoolboys are stranded on
a desert island. Without the guidance of adults to civilize them, the boys
descend into savagery.
In
Catcher in the Rye, the main character, Holden Caulfield, is not sure
what the phrase “coming through the rye” means. He envisions innocent children
playing in a field, and someone is there, a catcher in the rye, to catch them
if they fall off. Playing in the field is innocence. Falling off is losing that
innocence, becoming phony, like most adults in Holden’s view. Adults, society
destroy the innocence that we are born with.
There
is more to this question than the view of humanity of liberals and
conservatives. For example, one wonders why so many evangelical Christians embrace
a man as morally deficient as Donald Trump. We also wonder why Republicans are
more likely to ignored the science in issues like climate change and the
coronavirus. We will look at these
questions in later writings.
