Too Many People

 

Friend Xerxes notes that he finds individuals almost invariably kind, while society as a whole is systemically at least nearsighted.

I am completely in agreement with his claim that individuals are more trustworthy than people in groups. What he presumably does not see is that this, if true, is a powerful argument for free markets and individual liberty, as opposed to government control and group identity. In other words, for the right and not the left.

Xerxes, on the other hand, is probably trying to argue for original blessedness; for the idea that people are innately, naturally good, and will always do good if they just follow their instincts—a romantic notion, in the proper sense of the word. Therefore, impositions on instinct from “society”—formal ethics—are the source of all evil.

But the basic claim, that individuals are usually more trustworthy than groups, is in accord with what we all can observe: mobs are irresponsible and dangerous. 

The problem is with identifying the mechanism to explain this. If you assume that people are all individually good, yet corrupted by society, you have a classic “problem of evil.” Society is a human creation. If people are good, yet society is evil, where did the evil come from?

Xerxes’s theory is that people are good only in moderation. The evil comes somehow from there being too many in one place. He uses, among others, the analogy of a campfire versus a forest fire. Too much fire is bad; too many people are bad.

But the difference between a campfire and a forest fire is not quite that. It is that the campfire is under control, and the forest fire is not. A fire in a waste paper basket is probably smaller than a campfire, but it is still bad. A controlled burnoff of a field is a common agricultural practice, and it might easily be larger than a forest fire. A nuclear reactor is a rather bigger fire in a sense than a forest fire, but can be useful.

So with people. The problem is not more or fewer of them, but whether they are controlling their animal instincts and their selfishness. As individuals, we are obliged to take responsibility for our acts, so our conscience is engaged. If we pass our individual responsibility over to the group, we can more easily shirk our conscience. We can let our sinister tendencies “run riot,” to use the familiar phrase. This is most evident in a mob, but a clear danger in any group. “I was only following orders.”

This is because, like fire, we already have those sinister tendencies. This cannot support a romantic idea of original blessedness. The bad tendency must already exist at the individual level; but be held in check.

Trying to find an analogy that might work better to justify Xerxes’s concept of innate human goodness, I thought of locusts. According to at least some theories, they change from relatively benign to humans to a plague due to overcrowding—due, then, to sheer numbers, more or less. But again, this does not really work in support of his concept of humans, because each individual locust also transforms in nature. In Xerxes’s human model, the individual remains good even as the society in which he or she participates misbehaves.

I have read that lab rats, if overcrowded, begin to bite one another. Perhaps this is more apt, but it still does not work. Each bite is an individual, not a group, action. The individual does not remain moral while the group imposes immorality.

Given the correct observation that people behave better individually than in groups, we are left needing to acknowledge the concept of original sin. The tendency to evil as well as good must be innate at the level of the individual.

There is also something troublesome, surely, in the very concept of “too many” humans. Too many for what? If your measure is what is good for humans, surely existing is the most fundamental of goods. If your standard is not what is good for humans, what is your standard? The obvious suspicion is that it is what is good for yourself…