I recently devoted my biweekly column in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles to analyzing why most Jews believe that people are basically good despite the fact that this belief is neither rational nor Jewish. In a lifetime of teaching and writing on Judaism, I have never encountered a single normative statement in 3,000 years of Jewish writing that asserted that man is basically good.
As I expected, the reaction — apparently all from Jewish liberals — was entirely negative. Almost an entire page of the journal was devoted to letters attacking me. One of the seven letters — from a prominent Hollywood screenwriter — bordered on hysteria.
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The question is, why?
Why would liberals in general, and Jewish liberals in particular — given the Jews’ singularly horrific history at the hands of other human beings — react so strongly against someone who wrote that people are not basically good?
In my original article, I offered one explanation: Since the Enlightenment, the secular world has had to believe in man (or “humanity”), because if you don’t believe in God and you don’t believe in humanity, you will despair.
But one critic opened my eyes to an even deeper reason most liberals do not acknowledge that people are not basically good.
This is what he wrote:
“What a sad world it would be if we all believed as Dennis Prager that mankind is inherently evil.”
And this is what I responded: “I did not write that man is inherently evil. I wrote that he is not basically good. And, yes, that does make the world sad. So do disease, earthquakes, death and all the unjust suffering in the world. But sad facts remain facts.”
“A distinguishing characteristic of liberals and leftists,” I concluded, “is their aversion to acknowledging sad facts.”
Years ago a woman writer, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, first made me aware of this. She wrote about liberals’ rejecting many facts about male and female natures. She used the French expression Les faits de la vie, “the facts of life.”
The Left, she wrote, rejects les faits de la vie.
I believe this is so for two reasons.
First, as with my correspondent above, people on the Left tend to be unwilling to accept the sadness and pain that recognition of such facts creates. Leftism is often predicated on avoiding pain. That is a major reason why the Left dislikes capitalism and free markets. Free markets create winners and losers, and the Left does not like the fact that some people lose and some win.
This antipathy to having losers expresses itself on the micro level as well. Many liberals oppose letting children play competitive sports because they can lose — sometimes by a lot. That is why many schools now emphasize “cooperation instead of competition.” They do not want children experiencing the pain of losing, let alone losing by many points. That is also why liberals introduced the absurd idea of giving sports trophies to all kids who play, win or lose. God forbid that only the winners receive trophies; the kids who didn’t win may experience pain.
Second, the Left lives by theories and dogmas into which the facts of life must fit. That is why left-wing ideas are usually wishful thinking.
Though either explanation suffices, the two explanations reinforce one another.
I have seen a lot of young people, people sheltered and pampered by foolish parents, run head down at full speed into "faits de la vie" like a fool running into a brick wall.
They get up bloodied, confused and, finally, awake to the reality of the world.
I have also noticed that they tend to raise their young ones differently.
It is often the fear of pain that is more debilitating than the pain itself. Watch the utter terror that a simple immunization strikes in a child. With experience, the fear is eliminated by knowledge, and is no longer at play. Then the pain itself can be addressed and dealt with, ofttimes with little care or fanfare.
Unfortunately, this article is itself a painful fact: as there will always be youth and inexperience to continually fear the irrelevant obvious pain, and lead us into debilitating hidden torment.
The Left rejects reality because they can not grasp that Man is not perfectable. The Left, since the days of the French Revolution, has believed that proper social arrangements can over come nature.
Conservatives recognize that not everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer, but that all humans have a spark of the divine and possess a dignity that is not connected to their economic worth.
People often act like it's a puzzle or a mistake that economic conservatism tends to accompany social conservatism, and economic liberalism tends to accompany social liberalism, and lament that no political party combines economic conservatism with social liberalism. But it seems foolish to suppose that such a longstanding and durable phenomenon is random or irrational. In thinking about this, it seems to me that what's consistent about socially and economically conservative views is (i) a willingness to live with imperfection, with a fallen world where bad things happen, (ii) a consequent willingness to allow/force people to accept the results of their actions, or even of their luck or fate, and (iii) perhaps more controversially, a tendency to look beyond what's directly in front of one's face and focus on the unseen or second-order consequences of an action.
Liberal social and economic views, in contrast, are both characterized by (i) an unwillingness to accept imperfection/imperfectability, (ii) an unwillingness to tell anyone that there are any unavoidable limits to what he can be, have, or achieve, and (iii) a tendency to react emotionally to a claimant directly in front of one's face, to the exclusion of unseen claimants or second-order consequences.
If correct, this would explain why the same people who tend to oppose abortion (paying attention to the unseen claimant, accepting the limitations unplanned pregnancy places on the mother, even if they weren't her fault) would also tend to oppose the welfare state (attention to negative second-order consequences, willingness to accept random fate) and favor relatively harsh criminal penalties (willingness to declare some people bad and write them off). Liberals tend to take all the opposite views, because they ignore second-order consequences and unseen claimants, and are unwilling to write anyone off or live with an unremediable injustice or misfortune.
I can think of a highly normative and highly authoritative piece of Jewish writing that does indeed assert that man is "very good." Genesis 1:26-31.
The Left, of course, neither accepts the Divine ground of that goodness, nor the explanation for the degeneration of that goodness that followed. But conservatives should not forget or ignore the God-created goodness that persists in His creation.
The Liberal Mind does believe a portion of humanity is evil. Classic liberals, capitalist, conservatives Christians and orthodox Jews are the enemy and not deserving of an equal place in society, i.e. constitutional rights, political position/power or media representation.
They will open their hands in friendship to dictators and terrorists but will shake their fists at Reagan, Bush, Cheney, Palin etc..
I disagree on the "man is not basicallly good" point. Man is created by God. All that God creates is good. Therefore, man is good. God does give man free will which he can use to reject evil or embrace it. People who are not good are so because of their own personal choice. Sin is always a choice.
Liberals reject unpleasant facts because their foundational philosophy rejects the basis of facts. Along with the belief in the Judeo/Christian God comes an objective reality. It is out there, not dependent on you. We've been learning in our colleges for a few generations that there is no objective reality. Liberals are committed to the notion of creating the world they desire, often only in their own heads.
The same Bible that tells us that everything that G-d created is good, also tells us that "the inclination of man's heart is evil since his youth" (Gen. 8:21).
All of G-d's creations, humankind and its drives included, are "good" in the sense that they can be used for good purposes. But they need direction for this purpose; on their own they are self-centered, which unfortunately easily leads to evil. So our job is to be partners with G-d in creation - to take the potential goodness that He created and make it a reality.
So I think Mr. Prager has his formulation quite right. People are not naturally good, but nor are they naturally evil; they are naturally amoral (which is not the same as immoral).
What proof do you have that people get more conservative as they age? Is it because older people tend to be more conservative than the younger ones?
If so then you're drawing a line that doesn't exist. The world seventy years ago was different than the world will be seventy years hence. Look at the progression of politics over that period: the expansion of the voter franchise to everyone eighteen and older, regardless of race or gender; the legalization of interracial marriage; the prohibition of alcohol and drugs followed by the repeal of the former. I think the march of history will lead to at least the decriminalization of the latter, and hopefully to support drug abuse programs the legalization and taxation.
Economically the elder generations broadly support government healthcare (medicare), universal government pensions (social security), and they also expect the younger generation to subsidize most museums, public transit, and even restaurants for them. (Senior discounts).
The historical evidence is that while a currently elder American is more conservative than a currently junior American, the elder Americans liberalized mainstream society. This to me suggests that they became more liberal and not less.
I'm not sure how you conclude from noting that "everything that God created is good" and also that "the inclination of man's heart is evil from his youth" that people "are naturally amoral." The Scriptures you cite indicate that we are created good, and also that we are inclined to evil. This does not make us somehow neutral, or "amoral." It makes us morally complicated.
Prager is quite right to state that operating on a simple principle that "people are basically good" is dangerous blindness. But operation on a principle of human amorality and neutral instrumentality is even worse. My moral nature is quite different from amoral instruments such as a shovel or a telephone. The complicated "sad" fact is one of degraded goodness--we are created good, yet are inclined to evil.
Re rednaxela's point: Rocks and animals are amoral. Humans are not. They are called to sainthood from the moment of conception. Aquinas tells us that God draws all things to himself so good is our default setting. The problem is that people use their free will to change the default and embrace sin. We can always reset the default through contrition but we are programmed for good from the beginning. This is why evil is a violation of the natural law.
This argument is overly broad, and if extrapolated to its logical ends could be used to say conservatives are cynical, selfish, and hopeless while liberals are idealistic, charitable, and hopeful. I can imagine how irked people may be when reading that last sentence, and rightly so, because its not true. The impulse to define people solely as liberal or conservative and assign to them a whole set of beliefs and attributes based on that one criteria hardly ever works out when dealing with people in real life (as opposed when you do it in the media). People are inevitably more complex than Prager suggests here.
Two reasons Liberals can maintain their fantasies:
1) They imagine themselves to be paragons of virtue.
2) They deny the existence of those who don't subscribe to self-righteous Liberal identity. They reduce all opposition to a handful of players like Fox News, Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck. They truly do not realize that these voices (which they tend to consider as evil) actually represent millions of Americans.
The logic in inescapable: We are good, most people are like us, most people are good.
How does one reconcile the juxtaposition of "man is not basically good" and "Black males disproportionately commit violent crime in America"? What's Prager's point in putting these two "facts" (the second one's a fact, but the first one?) in the same piece?
Why not add "NASCAR fans are dumber than polo players" or "orthodox Jews disproportionately obtain Medicaid benefits fraudulently because they don't report cash income"?
What -- you mean there's an agenda to my "facts" and not Prager's?
People are not basically good. All that God created was good until sin came into the world. As David writes in Psalm 51:5
"Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me."
Another fact of life that people refuse to believe is that people DO NOT have free will to choose good from evil. As was cited before: "every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood" and "Only God is good." Even when we try to choose good, Isaiah 64:6 says, "All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags"
