Are humans by nature evil
If we're, by nature, evil (or, even sinful, violent, hostile or aggressive), why do we express it with contempt, as though we ought not be? Or why would we raise that as a topic to debate, if it was, like hunger, our nature?
Bonding is real, natural to humans. As a species, by nature, we are not driven to bring unnecessary harm to one another, but rather, the contrary, to co-operate, and share useful memories, not to mention intimacy. That bonding is the real source of our so called ethics. But our so called ethics are made up. So too, the inevitable transgression of our so called ethics. Good and evil are not real, they’re made up out of a dialectical process (mind/history) which necessarily proceeds by synthesizing images into structures, out of competing binary forms, for functional expression (into nature/the body and the real world). Natural bonding has been displaced by narratives of good and evil, and those narratives trigger actions which, transcending our natures, are played out in the fictional theatre we construct and call history.
We’ve been wrong. It’s not that humans are at nature homicidal but history has devised a way to make the face say, “don’t kill me.” It’s that the human face says, by nature, to the other human, “I’m human, don’t [just] kill me,” but history has devised ways to make us homicidal.
Bonding is real, natural to humans. As a species, by nature, we are not driven to bring unnecessary harm to one another, but rather, the contrary, to co-operate, and share useful memories, not to mention intimacy. That bonding is the real source of our so called ethics. But our so called ethics are made up. So too, the inevitable transgression of our so called ethics. Good and evil are not real, they’re made up out of a dialectical process (mind/history) which necessarily proceeds by synthesizing images into structures, out of competing binary forms, for functional expression (into nature/the body and the real world). Natural bonding has been displaced by narratives of good and evil, and those narratives trigger actions which, transcending our natures, are played out in the fictional theatre we construct and call history.
We’ve been wrong. It’s not that humans are at nature homicidal but history has devised a way to make the face say, “don’t kill me.” It’s that the human face says, by nature, to the other human, “I’m human, don’t [just] kill me,” but history has devised ways to make us homicidal.
Comments (69)
Can’t we say something similar about what happens in all human thought, not just that related to morality?
I believe that, yes.
Humans are manipulative by nature, that can't be avoided. The world we live in is a violent one in part based on a need to eat other animals in order to survive.
Quoting ENOAH
It's not just a product of bonding, but a result of creativity and memory; perhaps remembering what happens when people violate certain ethics. Of course they're made up, because people are creative, and use their imaginations to survive because we are fairly weak and slow compared to some other animal species.
Not to dispute your statements, but to clarify mine. All of what you refer to, I suggest is "made ip" by that process, so called History. By bonding being the "real" source of ethics (and the conditions you refer to), I mean in nature, "before" history proceeds, where "evil" does not yet exist.
Our characterizations like "manipulative" and "violent" displace our nature, and that's the "domain' where ethics steps in.
Are we by nature hostile or evil? I think no, not by Nature. By history.
are you making a primitivist argument, where historical development unlocked our capability for evil?
That might be an angle. But not unlocking as if it was already there. Constructed.
Im saying the human mind, collectively, "history," by way of constructing everything humans perceive and conceive, constructed ethics, and its counterpart evil.
The point being evil does not play into humans by nature, only by the unfolding of history.
We evolved on the African plains, have you watched a nature documentary about what happens there in a natural setting? Everything is competing to eat each other.
Maybe if we had evolved in the forest like the mountain gorilla we would be different.
Popper's 'The Open Society and Its Enemies'. I think you would find it an interesting read judging by what you are questioning here.
I think there is truth in this but I think it might hide the fact that, although what you call bonding may be the source of ethics, they are completely different things. Bonding, empathy, is something personal while ethics is social. Bonding deals with emotions while ethics deals with rules. Bonding is done without premeditation or expectation but ethics is done with the expectation of reward or punishment.
I was thinking about saying even a society without bonding would need social rules, ethics. But then I realized such a society might not even be possible.
Yes. I agree. So completely that the latter has virtually displaced the former, alienating the human animal from our nature
While I do not dispute your points, I should clarify. As we inevitably have violence in our conditioning, the violence is not in our natures. Killing for food or territory, though evident in nature, is not the same as war, or murder. We cannot say lion's are murderous or evil. We alone have transcended nature
When you get into larger groups of people, I think that's inevitable. When that happens, you need rules to keep the wheels of social discourse lubricated.
I'm trying to make sense of this. Are you suggesting that "good" existed before "evil"?
Yes, and while they serve a positive function, they are made up, and they inevitably give rise to their antitheses, yhe breaking of rules, and evil. So, ethics, etc., albeit functional, yranscend our nature, creating a "fictional" domain in which only humans operate and experience.
If there is a God, this domain is outside of the one created for us; outside of "Eden," so to speak.
Im suggesting both are constructions. Our inherent nature requires/permits no judgement. So saying we are inherently evil or have a nature incapable of avoiding evil, is inaccurate.
IF we must appoint a judgement of our nature, it is more accurate to choose "good," especially since we commonly recognize it as preferable.
This makes sense, although I don’t see it as a negative thing as much as you do.
To expand into the functional ethics of it, such a perspective gives an excuse to continue being "evil."
This is from Gia-Fu Feng’s translation of Verse 57 of the Tao Te Ching.
But isn't judging inherent within or nature? It's just what we do, we judge all sorts of things.
Quoting ENOAH
Are you saying that we have a natural tendency to judge things as good, and judging things as bad is artificial, or unnatural?
I think whatever it is that is inherent, stops being that once we apply "judging."
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Im saying we don't have a natural tendency to judge period.
You might say we "judge" apples as good to eat and shit as bad. But that is the natural functioning of drives, which become naturally conditioned. Once names and forms arise [and they only do in history] that drive/conditioning becomes displaced by judging, so that its is conceivable one might judge apples as bad and shit as good. (very oversimplifying but to illustrate)
I think valuing, choosing, and liking are inevitable, but those are not the same as judging. If I choose brussels sprouts over eggplant, that doesn’t say anything about eggplant except that I prefer brussels sprouts. It doesn’t mean that eggplant is bad, although it is, as a matter of fact, very very bad.
What do you mean? I don't understand this. If judging itself is inherent, then we have to account for this or else our assumption of what is natural is wrong.
Quoting ENOAH
How can you say that? Even other animals judge. It's the essence of decision making. And other animal species clearly judge just as much as human beings do, though we might say that their capacity for judgement is not as highly developed.
Quoting ENOAH
I think you are making an arbitrary division between judging and not judging, within acts which are all forms of judging. This appears to be misleading you. I suggest that you start with the assumption that all decisions making involves judgement.
Quoting T Clark
That is clearly an act of judgement. Judgement is generally defined as discernment. If you differentiate between brussels sprouts and eggplants, then you have judged.
In nature/human nature, there is neither judgement nor decision making. There is drives and response which, if functional become conditioned.
In accordance with that premise,* when you observe decisions and judgements in humans and animals, you are doing so in history, that is filtered through the representations autonomously functioning in/as [what we call] mind. Of course, we see a squirrel stop and turn around at on- coming traffic as having made the right decision. It was her body functioning to survive. The reason it is "decision" for us is because that concept evolved into history n millennia ago, and we have all commonly received that data input so to speak.
No, not in the context we’re using here. It says nothing about brussels sprouts or eggplant. It only says something about me. I am not judging eggplant. If I said “eggplant is bad,” that would be a judgment about eggplant.
I do not understand how you can make this division, the separation between "the human acting in history", and, "In nature/human nature". Isn't it the case that it is human nature to have a history? If so, then to separate "human nature" from the human acting in history, is a mistaken approach. They are one and the same thing, human history is human nature.
Quoting T Clark
I can't grasp what you are trying to say about the context. To differentiate between this object, as a brussels sprout and that object, as an eggplant, is to make a judgement. This is regardless of whether you are saying that you prefer one to the other.
Seems to me by your standard just about any statement would be a judgment.
"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." ~Steven Weinberg
Of course, one must decide which words to use. Don't you agree?
And how do we get evil people to do good things?
More bigoted baloney.
We don't. :mask:
Quoting T Clark
Yeah, but which happens to be true.
Kill them then?
"What would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? After all, shadows come from objects and people. Here's the shadow of my sword. But there are also shadows from trees and living things. Do you want to strip the entire globe bare, wiping out all the trees and all living things because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You're stupid."
These are the words Woland (the lord of darkness) used to reply to Matthew Levi from Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.
I don't agree. If a cat "plays" with a mouse until it dies, yet doesn't eat the mouse, many would call that torture.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That's evil, sir!
Not quite. All it takes is making someone believe something—anything—that results in dehumanization (or dehumanization by proxy ie. elevation of one's self over others, which per human ego and evolutionary confidence is an easy, almost natural ingrained dynamic of the human experience to appeal to). Very easy. Natural, even, per our scientifically recognized "own race" bias. Sure, most beliefs that have profound effect incorporate some idea of a higher power, otherwise it's just one man's opinion in a sea of innumerable others. There are few people on Earth who at the end of the day aren't looking out for number one first and foremost. If it comes down to your kid or a stranger's kid getting fed, let's not kid ourselves as to who you're going to act toward getting fed, irrespective of gods, religion, and who's food it "rightfully" is or should be.
Yes, I agree with your premise, but there are tendencies in our natures which appear to be there from birth for certain people to be disrupters, a tendency for psychopathy, sociopathy etc.
Such that in any society these people can disrupt or take control and themselves have to be controlled. This might be an evolutionary development.
Where we are most severely mistaken is in our singling out of the cat as individual and the mouse as same. They are not selves. We construct that pronoun, again, as a function of that process. That's the same error which causes us to judge our own species as inherently evil, or selfishness as permeating nature.
Organisms, of which we are one, really, and, by that, I mean naturally, behave by evolved drives and conditioning. But for humans born into history (i.e., not prehistoric humans) our dialectical process--Mind/History--displaces our natures. We are born as a species, our drives are to bond and mate and survive together. Good and evil have no place. Mind displaces that with laws, the manifestation of those processes. And because yet another mechanism of that process is difference, not that but this, good and evil are inevitable; but not as a result of our natures.
Can you imagine life without a concept of evil? The bible presents evil as some kind of spirit that affects our lives and requires us to be saved by a god, to be free of evil, and even escape the evil of death by having immortality if we are pleasing to god.
However, what do we do differently from the animals? Whether animals mate for life or mate for one day is determined by the animal's survival needs, and we don't get excited if a female or male animal has other unions that result in having offspring. We accept their sexuality as their nature. But boy, can we get a little crazy about our sexuality?
Our behaviors are regulated by hormones, just as is so for all other animals. Many animals are social animals, mothers nurse their young, and the young learn their place in their social group.
So are animals also evil and in need of being saved? :lol: Before a lion lies down with the sheep and eats grass alongside the sheep, it will need a whole efferent set of teeth.
:chin: As I read your post, and the relationship of the cat and mouse, I began thinking of all the different stories about animals making special packs with humans, such as the buffalo giving its life so the people can meet their needs, in exchange for humans honoring the buffalo, or whichever animal is the main source of food. This comes up around the world because, obviously, humans felt bad about killing to eat. They needed a story to make killing okay.
I don't know how stupid white men came along and slaughtered animals for the fun of it. :chin: I never thought of this before. How could it be that some groups of people are more evil than others? They kill and destroy with no conscience, making them aware of their evil. How can that be? Why is the savage the better spiritual human being than the White man who comes with a gun and believes he is morally superior, and he needs to teach the savage about being saved and being moral? Is this justice of a god? Strange.
The White man is the savage and the Indian is morally superior. The White man has subverted the truth, twisted it around and inflated his ego. While all he’s doing is ruthlessly exploiting and destroying nature for his own selfish ends.
Wherever we encounter indigenous peoples they all say the same thing, They revere their environment and seek to live in harmony with it. They respect their environment and natural balance and inherent wisdom of the animals and plants they live alongside.
Here’s the rub, it is the fall of man you are describing. When Adam and Eve left the garden of Eden, they were leaving their instinctive behaviours which had been shaped by evolution in their evolutionary niche. They had to develop new drives, motivations, goals to replace them. But what they didn’t realise is that those finely honed instincts and behaviours had been fined tuned for millions of years achieving a balance with their ecosystem and that it couldn’t easily be replaced. From that point on, humanity became destructive (this doesn’t include many indigenous societies who have learned to live in harmony with their ecosystem).
Not so, if it occupies the world pre-judgement, which I believe is what you are illustrating when you say the cat and mouse are not 'selves'? Is it not fair to attribute your shift from 'human nature' to judgement the emergence of 'free will' in humanity? Very interesting OP/thread, btw!
Quoting Outlander
:up:
Quoting Punshhh
This is a pretty broad generalization when talking about a diverse population. I know indigenous people personally who would disagree with your statement, along with those who would agree.
If I am understanding correctly, yes, it is fair to do so. But note, the emergence of free will in humanity. That is, free will too, is a construct, a mechanism in the operation of mind which upon "emerging" (along with the "self") proved to be functional in the operation of mind/history, and so, stuck.
"Ethics" and the necessary binary aspect, good/evil, only happens to humans. That is because those mechanisms and processes (admittedly, vaguely described) emerged. At nature, there is no good and evil, there is only bonding and surviving, for example.
I don't think the philosophical mind raises the question of evil, because the philosophical mind recognize that "evil" is a made up concept, unconsciously invented to cope with the lack of knowledge of the things that hurt us.
We are just nature, we are just part of a chemical soup which formed itself into increasingly complex emergent behaviors until it became so complex that it formed meta-interactions with itself through what we call consciousness. But in the end, we're still just that chemical soup, in which we attributed parts of its behavior as "evil" because we are yet to understand just how the physics of it all, works.
Yes. I agree. "Attributed parts of its behavior," the point being that "evil" has no place in that chemical soup. Rather, some of the emergent behaviors, for a species which inescapably assigns "meanings" to things, were assigned to evil. I am thinking that both the assigning and evil, are "outside" of nature, not eternal truths which our complex thinking has uncovered, not inevitable vis a vis nature, but made-up.
Okay, we have agreement. I hope someday we all become spiritual and care for our planet and each other. That would be so much better than what is happening now. I no longer recognize the US as I remember it, and I fear that if we can not correct the problems before my generation dies, our democracy built on virtues will be lost.
I don't think we could get much more evil than we are now. I don't believe our wars have been wars against evil, but were wars for control of world resources and a wealthy banking system. We are capable of so much, and some people have very good hearts, but I don't think these are the people in control right now. We are in a period of transition with no guarantee of our future being a Garden of Eden New Age, a time of high tech and peace, and the end of tyranny.
That is agreeable. I have a question. Do the world's spiritual people have the same understanding of evil as the three God of Abraham religions? For those who are spiritual, the snake represents all that is good, including wisdom and transformation for the good. However, in the mythology of the God of Abraham the snake is evil.
Until we embrace the spiritual point of view, is it possible for us to see the snake differently?
They also tend to engage in murderous cultural norms, sexual assault, xenophobia and plenty of other pretty ridiculous things. The Noble Savage concept should have died a century ago. Rousseau is perhaps the single worst thing for thinking about indigenous cultures of the 20th century. Its a weird European nonsense.
Are you making a deterministic argument here/throughout?
Who was it that argued that they 'prefer' to believe in free will? I find myself aligned with that stance. Even if we likely do not have it, should it not remain a possibility, even if merely for the meaning it might bring to a determined life?
Me too. So likely, does everyone. Since we are born into history and generally share the same input, items like the self, free will, good, evil, ethics, etc. etc. are highly functional. And, since those items, and the rest of human history is what we are structured to perceive, we can hardly function without them.
My "purpose" is not to call for an existence without mind. It is to point out that all of these "things" are necessarily relative, and none of them are inherent, pre-existing or so called eternal truths.
Humans in history might be called evil because we despise our own actions, but we are not inherently so. We despise our own actions because they are not our natures. And, therefore, albeit a centuries or millennia long process, history can be constructed differently.
I wasn’t referring to indigenous people living in modern civilisation. Rather indigenous peoples prior to their contact with modern civilisation.
Yes, I know. I was specifically referring to how they regard the ecosystem they live in, usually a forest.
But yeah, fair - thanks for clarifying.
Also a too-broad generalization, also contested by the indigenous people I know. Isn't this stereotype referred to as 'the noble savage'?
Isn't determinism a fairly common thread in philosophy? I was arguing for the choice to believe among those that have considered the arguments against free will. Without question, the average person believes in free will. The average Christian, for example, believes God has given them free will, which to me seems inconsistent with his omniscience.
Quoting ENOAH
I agree with you here. I can't see our modern concepts of morality without all the historical and biological contingencies. I fear the biological component, our 'nature', has been diminished in our 'constructivist' era, which compromises understanding.
I am new to philosophy, so this is likely naive, but the free will debate strikes me as a false binary. Something about our natures and the environmental factors surrounding our ancestors intersected to the point at which we began to 'despise our own actions'. At what point can this be called free will?
:smirk: Denial is a hell of a drug ...
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
~Blaise Pascal, Pensées
All that means is laypersons need to be controlled by governing authorities and penalized when they act out. Which they are. Those who aren't sneaks, at least.
What is your solution going forward? People want to believe in something greater than the cold, calculated, and ultimately empty mechanical workings of this world. That the warmth and resplendence we feel from a mother's embrace or a child's hand is more than just an illusion and nothing more than a series of neurons firing and responding to one another So they will. Bet.
It's almost as if you're saying a person who is a genuine atheist can't ever get obsessed with eugenics and consider certain people "obsolete" or "defective" and attempt to remove them with a genuine sentiment of doing them and the world a favor. Ego or confidence and "self-assurance" is an ingrained biological mechanism for survival. It seems almost natural for someone in a position of power over others to end up with that line of thinking. If there's really nothing that matters, including one's own humanity, what harm is there to engage in genocide, enslavement, and anything else for that matter?
C'mon, this same rhetorical question / rationalization has been invoked "In The Name Of God" by countless priests & princes at least since the Bronze Age (ergo theodicy, teleological suspension of the ethical, Deus Volt/Inshallah, ends justify means, just following orders, etc). :mask:
So what's your solution? People will follow anything. Someone or something attractive, larger than themself, popular, or of course, yes, religiously elevated. If it's not "religion" and "God" one is following it's "honor", if it's not that it's "scientific advancement", if it's not that it's "free will". We all follow something as if it were God (an ultimate truth or at least path to a better state of being). I don't see how changing the name of the phenomenon would ultimately prevent anything. Do you? :confused:
Resist every temptation to not think.
We share the belief that religion tends to beget bigotry. We've seen this in the last two days. We don't share the belief that 'thinking' is a solution. Courage is what's needed to trump easy thoughts, and this cannot be bumper-stickered. Something much more interesting needs to be happening than thinking.
Our aggression and violence are not a negative traits. The simple fact that they are no longer directed in opposition to the forces of nature (for most people) means we seek out other avenues of direct opposition to combat against. This comes in many forms over the course of human civil history.
A tree bears fruit we can gorge on and branches that can impale us.
Humans offers both opportunities for companionship and competition.
If saying, we have a natural tendency to judge things as good, it is because owing to cosmology that we tend to wish the good for ourselves.