THE DEMONS OF OUR NATURE

Steven Pinker’s new 800-page book, The Better Angels of our Nature, is a real shocker. Pinker’s main point is that, evil as the present may appear, things in the past were much worse. In gruesome detail, he describes the horrible things humans have done to each other throughout history. After the first 100 pages, I stopped reading and looking at the illustrations of tortures, and skimmed the remainder of the book.

Pinker ends the book with some cautious optimism about the future. Perhaps we will continue on a path toward more humane and rational treatment of each other, guided by rationality and the need to survive.

I am skeptical. When we can push a button to destroy a city without seeing the carnage that results, are we any better than medieval executioners who watched their victims slowly dying on the rack? Are we not simply objectifying those we kill, treating them like avatars in a video game? Are we not still murderers?

We are slowly ruining our planet, also. Population biologists like Paul Ehrlich have warned since the sixties that for survival the world population must be controlled, but for some reason I can’t fathom, it has become politically incorrect to urge women to use birth control. At the same time, “pro-life” groups have fought against Planned Parenthood because their clinics offer abortion in addition to contraception. Apparently these groups are willing to allow unwanted children to be born to parents who cannot afford them, and some women forced to bear children resulting from  rape or incest. To me, that attitude is truly evil.

Sometimes we seem to be lurching back into the Dark Ages. As recently as the 1950s, when I was in high school in a conservative area of rural Michigan, the theory of evolution through natural selection was widely accepted in most of the country. No one was forced to believe the theory, but we were expected to know the scientific evidence that supported it. The Scopes “monkey trial” was just an amusing bit of history. Today creationists all over the country make it difficult for biology teachers to present the theory that unifies their field and that has been accepted by the scientific community since the late nineteenth century.

Voltaire,  that brilliant philosopher of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, spoke through his Candide that this is not at all the “best of all possible worlds.” After traveling the world and experiencing much of the depravity Pinker describes, Candide went home to “make his garden grow.” He recognized how much irreparable evil and ignorance surrounds us, and contented himself with trying to live his own life with honor and decency. Voltaire himself fought against religious intolerance and injustice throughout his life, at times being banished from France or imprisoned.

I am as saddened by the stupidity and evil of modern life as I am horrified by the wickedness of the past as described by Pinker. As we sang in the sixties, “When will we ever learn?” Voltaire had it right, though. We may not be able to change quickly or on a large scale, but as individuals we can work for social justice and for rational approaches to life; and perhaps if our species survives for a few more centuries we can change into the beings we are capable of becoming.