Human Goodness

4. Reflections

182 Reflections A t the beginning of this book I referred to Stephen Jay Gould’s expression the “ten thousand acts of kindness ” that illuminate the human stage every day, making it—on the whole—a good place for people. I also said that, given the amount of evil on almost every page of world history , one can’t help wondering whether these ten thousand acts of kindness are only points of light in a night sky of unrelenting darkness. Further illustrating this rather bleak view is the famous opening line of the Gospel according to John, “The light shines in darkness, and the darkness overcomes it not,” which makes one wonder whether light can do more than just hold its ground, whether it can expand into the dark realm, diminishing if not conquering it. Another thesis I raised is that, in real life, good people and virtuous acts are enduringly captivating and rewarding, whereas bad people and malevolent acts are boring, even if they give a momentary thrill at first encounter. Now this can only be true—this 4 183 is even obviously true—if somehow we see human goodness as points of light against a gray or black backdrop. After all, looking up at the night sky, the stars rather than the darkness catch our attention. But these are metaphors. In down-to-earth language I am saying that good people and good acts stand out against a gray background of biosocial behavior and against a darker background of evil. These backgrounds, both gray and black, lend themselves to quasi-scientific study because the events in them exhibit the repetitiousness—the patterned occurrences and recurrences—of nature. Social scientists study the backgrounds. Storytellers are drawn to the exceptions. However, they appear to be more drawn to exceptional evil than to exceptional good, and in this respect they are no different from newspaper publishers and their readers. I seek to rectify the bias by urging my fellow humans to do what comes naturally to us, namely, pay attention to the exceptional but with the understanding that genuine goodness is the truly exceptional . It, rather than biosocial or evil behavior, challenges easy scientific accounting. Dark Background Here are a few basic facts about our nature that go some way to explaining why evil so often blights our lives. First is the undeniable  184 fact of our destructiveness. We destroy for the sense of power it gives us. An infant too uncoordinated to raise a wood-block tower destroys it gleefully with a swipe of his or her arm. A toddler too young to set the table pulls the tablecloth and happily sends the plates crushing to the floor. These acts of violence are our first accomplishments , tokens of our power to make a difference. And, if we are honest, we will admit that in adulthood we retain a certain fascination for the car crash, the steel ball smashing into a derelict building, and even for the theater of violence (the battlefield), provided we are at a safe distance. When we destroy wantonly, as we often do, we reveal a dark side of our nature. But we not only destroy wantonly; we also have to destroy if only to build: we kill and eat to build our bodies, cut down trees to build our houses, clear an entire forest to build a village , town, and adjoining farms, and so on. Is any of life’s myriad activities exempt from some kind of destructiveness and violence? Even the sex act—and what act is more constructive than that?— can be violent to a degree unknown in the animal world. Those who try to civilize it, remove from it the entanglement and writhing of sweaty limbs, will end by making it humdrum, hardly worth the effort of undressing. Moreover, let’s admit that we enjoy the frenzy in sexual conjugation, enjoy even the domination and submission that it momentarily entails. Sexual passion, however, easily gets out of hand such that violence wholly takes over; pleasure  185 becomes asymmetrical in that it resides only in the strong and lies more in the sheer exercising of power over another than in erotic charge, although the latter never quite disappears. Sex is play, and being able to play with another—treat him or her as our whim dictates—is an intoxicating actualization of power. We all engage in it if only...