Commentary : Perspectives on the Holidays : On Skid Row, a Holiday Cramp : Keep the Faith, Reject Despair : With bad news all around, we forget a mighty force for good: one another.
It may be time to reaffirm the basic goodness of human beings.
What?
From our perch atop the world’s tallest newspapers, we Americans survey a landscape of war, environmental destruction, inhumanity and chaos. In these days of ethnic cleansing, Russian right-wingers and walk-up shootings, it’s tempting to despair; to imagine that our own species is a hateful swarm let loose on the planet by some extraterrestrial spirit of revenge. This is goodness?
It’s important not to give in to that view. Human beings are, by and large, pretty good folks. It is despair itself--that loss of faith in one another--we must fear, because it is the door to evil.
Whether people behave decently by nature or training has been debated for years by philosophers, behaviorists, novelists, psychologists and sociobiologists. What matters to me here is not the background but the evidence, which I have seen in 20 years of reporting all over the world: Human generosity, altruism, restraint and kindness are real and widespread.
We know this. We mock the earnest youth who hangs platitudes on the wall--”Love is perennial as the grass”--not because cute sayings lie, but because they state truth too baldly-- much as I do here. It’s like writing about sex: The experience is so powerful and private that words are silly.
So why does it seem important to acknowledge this now? Because under this onslaught of contrary news, it’s tempting to abandon trust in one another. Hate seems to clarify even as it distorts. But if we lose contact with our basic trust, it is not the other guy who will get us; we will destroy ourselves. When we’re persuaded that a chunk of humanity behaves without humanity, our own good will can be perverted, en masse, into a desperate, defensive evil.
This works all around us. We expect kindness and honesty of others, but when we lose that expectation, it’s our own kindness and honesty that dies. On a small scale, perversions within our families or work groups are often caused when a leader, even with high motives, trades trust for control.
On a larger scale--Nazi Germany springs to mind--widespread loss of trust allows aberrants to delude people into hate for other races or nations. Boom! War and genocide. Invariably, nations so afflicted require far more police than others, partly because it’s harder to enforce inhumanity than decency and partly because distrust undermines the social fabric of good will. The group that abandons trust in others becomes less trustworthy.
So I affirm my respect for the individual and the mass of humanity and reject despair. This does not mean that my season’s wish for good will toward men and women also anticipates peace on Earth. The world is overcrowded, and it’s reasonable to expect that violence and inhumanity will continue to increase with population, because genuine bad guys, though rare, seem to affect us in geographical zones rather than per capita. But in this increasing danger, the only thing that can prevent a great spasm of violence that, like the plague, may cut back our numbers with terror, is recognition that across the board of this planet, we are good people.
Many have faith in a Creator they cannot see. We must also maintain our faith in a powerful force for good that we meet face to face every day: One another.
