Myths We Live By

 

The common cultural myth, inherited from the romantics but not original to them, is that civilization is bad and man is naturally good. This is a consoling way to look at the world; it means by doing just whatever we want, we are also doing the good. But obviously wrong. If man is innately good, how could he have created a civilization that is innately bad? Where could evil, moral evil, have come from?

It ends up scapegoating the Jews, or rich capitalists. It ends up assuming that, while we are born good, some others are born irredeemably bad alien beings.

A correspondent recently cites the song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” as proof that racism is learned behavior. Broadway tunes are not good scientific sources. Nor are fantasies of some Garden of Eden in the South Pacific. Humans, like the other higher primates, and like dogs or sheep, are herd animals. Fear of the other is hard-wired by evolutionary pressures. Everyone is prejudiced who does not make an effort not to be. Fortunately, we are not animals, and can rise above our programming.

This naïve romanticism is, I suspect, also behind so many assertions that the solution to racism or sexism or “rape culture” is to educate people that “abuse of others is unacceptable.”

Yes, ethics needs to be taught. But knowing something is right does not compel anyone to do it. Morality is a struggle against instinct and self-interest. You cannot eliminate murder and theft by simply telling people murder and theft are wrong. If it were so, there would be no such thing as ethics.