House of Eratosthenes

Well, here’s a light, breezy topic for us to tackle over a long weekend. Is mankind essentially good and noble at his core with a few outlying, sick individuals messing things up for the rest of us? Or is man prone to evil on a genetic level, only managing a facade of civilization and goodness through strained communal effort? Writing at The American Thinker, Mike Konrad thinks he’s onto the answer, and it’s not a very cheerful one. But he argues that the truth can be found right in the Bible.

What separates Christianity from all other religions is a hard truth: Man is intrinsically evil. This flies in the face of hyper-leftist dogma that man is essentially good; all that is necessary is an environmental tune up.

While it is true that crime is greater in poor neighborhoods — poverty can bring out the worst in people — it is equally true that that potential for evil has to be there. Increasing prosperity will lessen street crime to be sure. Well-fed people have less need to steal, but crime will merely blossom in other areas.

This doctrine is called “Original Sin;” and it has been replaced in our culture by self-esteem.

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We are not born with any inherent sense of propriety, respect for property or the sanctity of the persons of others. These are things which are trained into us (hopefully) by our parents and the broader environmental lessons of civil society, assuming one is fortunate enough to be born into a civilized land. That’s why parents inevitably have to begin yelling at toddlers about why it’s wrong to take things that don’t belong to them and stop them from hitting their playmates…Anger, aggression and a desire to fulfill our own needs and desires, even if that comes at a cost to others, seems to be built into our hind brains in some fashion. The idea of organized societies which band together to enforce rules and maintain the rights of individuals is actually a fairly recent development in historical terms.

Coincidentally, a Facebook friend points to me to this essay by Matt Forney titled, provocatively, “The Case Against Female Self-Esteem“:

From the moment they’re old enough to speak, girls in America are bombarded with propaganda that artificially boosts their self-esteem. They’re told that they’re shpecial and you-nique because they have an extra X chromosome. They’re told that they’re smart, that they can do anything, that they deserve respect merely for existing. They’re encouraged to derive self-worth not from their inherent feminine nature but from their college degree, their job or the other illusory trappings of achievement in a man’s world.
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Feminists can screech as loud as they want, but they will never change this fundamental reality; men accord respect based on merit, and if girls want to play in our world, they’ll have to obey our rules. Otherwise, they know where the kitchen is. I have more respect for the starving artist couple busking down the street from my house than I do for all the career-driven, Strong, Independent Women™ in the world.

Dennis Prager, also coincidentally so far as I can tell, has kicked off a series exploring the differences between conservatives and liberals that paved his pathway toward the former after being one of the latter, and the first difference fits right into the theme:

I had to understand both liberalism and conservatism. Indeed, I have spent a lifetime in a quest to do so.

The fruit of that quest will appear in a series of columns explaining the differences between left and right.

I hope it will benefit conservatives in better understanding why they are conservative, and enable liberals to understand why someone who deeply cares about the “little guy” holds conservative — or what today are labeled as conservative — views.

Difference No. 1: Is Man Basically Good?

Left-of-center doctrines hold that people are basically good. On the other side, conservative doctrines hold that man is born morally flawed — not necessarily born evil, but surely not born good. Yes, we are born innocent — babies don’t commit crimes, after all — but we are not born good. Whether it is the Christian belief in Original Sin or the Jewish belief that we are all born with a yetzer tov (good inclination) and a yetzer ra (bad inclination) that are in constant conflict, the root value systems of the West never held that we are naturally good.

To those who argue that we all have goodness within us, two responses: First, no religion or ideology denies that we have goodness within us; the problem is with denying that we have badness within us. Second, it is often very challenging to express that goodness. Human goodness is like gold. It needs to be mined — and like gold mining, mining for our goodness can be very difficult.

There’s an update to the Jazz Shaw article that more precisely reflects my own thoughts about it:

Update (Ed): I’ll address this from the Biblical perspective, rather than from the philosophical perspective, as Jazz has done. This debate has raged from the very beginnings of the Christian church, and resulted in forceful denunciations for centuries, until modern theologians revived a few old heresies.

To declare that man is inherently evil is to misunderstand the nature of original sin. God created man in His own image, as He created everything else in the material world. The original sin of Adam and Eve was to reject God and grasp for His status through disobedience, for which they were ejected from the Garden, but still remained in the love of God. Put more simply, “original sin” is the predilection toward sinfulness, but we choose whether to be evil or good. We are not inherently evil, or the sacrifice of Jesus would have been in vain. To consider mankind inherently evil would be itself a rejection of God’s work and His image.

This is really, I think, a difference of opinion about standards. If there are two youths, one knows enough to take off his hat and stand when a lady approaches and the other one doesn’t, it’s not very plausible to try to deny that the well-mannered one is setting a better example. It’s a lot easier to argue against the setting of examples, to start making excuses for laziness. And once you go down that road you’re going to have to go all the way, right? He couldn’t get to school on time, because he was up late doing his homework. But by living together, we defeat the excuse: Are there any other kids in the school who also stayed up doing homework? What time did they get to school the next day? How many of them were late? Well, gee. Standards.

And this goes on to the more serious stuff: The “youths” are smashing storefront windows and starting fires because the neighborhood is blighted and they can’t find jobs. Huh, is there anybody else who can’t find a job? What are they smashing? So I agree with the editor, a debate about “man being inherently evil” somewhat misses the point.

The conservative vision, at least my own contemplation of it, is not about man being tainted with Original Sin but more like man choosing to do, rather than to be. This gets back to Matt Forney’s observation about precious snowflakey females, with their lives essentially being put on a path to ruin, through this repeated indoctrination about how worthy they are — for not actually having done much of anything. It’s not a female problem, there are quite a few snowflakey boys too. And men. And women.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Conservatism, to be worthy of the word, has to be in favor of conserving something, and what this “conservatism” on our minds today seeks to conserve is civilization. This difference Prager is noticing is just one part of it, since civilization cannot endure without the people living in it believing in the power of starting new days with clean slates, believing that the reputations they have, and will have later, and their power to affect those reputations, lies in their deeds and not in their…well, their whatever. That it lies in their doing and not in their being.

Without that, there’s no power at the individual level, no satisfaction at the end of the day about some improvement that was brought-about. Conservative or liberal, nobody with a working brain says to himself at that point, “The world today was a little bit better because I was in it.” At least I don’t think so. Some of us might get to think that about a thing we did — maybe. Once in a great while, if we’re exceptionally lucky and have made the most of the opportunity. But mentally healthy people don’t really think things are like that, just because they were there. Burning oxygen. That’s like a first step to becoming a sociopath.

Related: Imgur…click open the page and read the whole thing…

Also, get a load of the comments. I noticed overall, the closer the comments come to my own opinion, the further away they are from “best” and the closer they are to “worst.” Like for example:

Things like this always piss me off. My dad had it rough growing up. He worked hard and still came out on top. This is disrespectful.

Seems to me the people making all those other commie-comments, and the people up-voting them, are being rather choosy with the blind spots. You had help! You had help! Don’t you dare ignore the fact that you had help! But then we come to some other annoying truths, like…here’s someone who started out humble and ended up making it. Doesn’t even have to be a case of “making it without any advantages,” more likely it’s a case of “make your own advantages.” But the thing is, you can call it whatever you want, cast it however you want to cast it, tell the story long or tell it short…it doesn’t matter. The reds aren’t anywhere to be seen, can’t hear you, left the room awhile ago. Theirs is a monologue and not a dialogue. The “Don’t dare you ignore the fact that” people can’t be told anything.

And what a shame that is! Your chosen subject matter, if it’s based on truth, manifests a pathway. An avenue between starting without, and finishing-up with, this much-desired prosperity, and all these advantages. So they’re working rather hard to maintain a wall of ignorance that, if it were to be breached only a little bit, might directly address some of the problems they claim is agitating them so much.

Conversely, the people who agree with me about it — are we really turning a blind eye to the fact that we, and others who have it about as well as we do, or better, had help? Have you met anyone who actually takes the attitude “No! I refuse to acknowledge any of these rich people had help”? I have heard a great deal more lecturing about such examples, than I have of such examples themselves. I would regard this as a rather silly opinion to have. If you were born anywhere after, say, the 1750’s or so in the First World, you were born in a miraculous place during a miraculous time. Given that, if you still want to play a pity-party and eyeball the ones who are even better off with this attitude of disdain, there really isn’t anything I can do or say that would help you. Other than to advise that without a change of direction, your sense of despair is permanent. This is provable. There is always someone who has more.

Envy, by the way, is a “flaw.” I don’t know of any religion that says otherwise, and if one did say otherwise it would be a rather dick-ish way of looking at the universe and all the things in it…

Funny, isn’t it, how people whose favorite word is “social” never think about Society?

Liberal “morality” is the same as liberal policy — privatize benefits, socialize costs. Why shouldn’t I do or take whatever I want, thinks the liberal, provided nobody finds out? The Christian would say “because it’s a sin,” and the conservative atheist would say “because it lowers social trust,” but the liberal…

Well, it’s only “society” that’s harmed, and, if they ever even think that far (big if!), they figure “society” owes them for so many injustices already….
- Severian | 05/28/2015 @ 11:04
Funny, isn’t it, how people whose favorite word is “social” never think about Society?

Well said!
- mkfreeberg | 05/28/2015 @ 17:28
Anthony Burgess was asked Merv Griffin: “Why do your novels always have such strong undertones of morality? It seems you believe that there is a devil inside everyone or that there is an actual devil”

When Burgess replied that he did believe in an actual devil Griffins asked him how he, a well educated, progressive person could possibly believe that. Burgess replied: “Because parents do not have to teach their children how to be bad. They can figure out how to do evil without anyone teaching them. Since children can figure this out it must be inherent in them. Since they are personal there must be a personal evil and that personal evil is generally known as the devil or Satan.”
- Fai Mao | 05/28/2015 @ 17:51
[…] Late in Development” Panacea Flawed Using the DSM Happy Memorial Day, Here’s Obama Eating Ice Cream “Real Denialism” […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 05/29/2015 @ 06:47
Fai Mao,

I’m stealing that!
- Severian | 05/29/2015 @ 07:35
Funny how liberals are always say that anti-social behavior, crime, etc, are caused by poverty. If that’s true, than that must mean that rich people should be the most morally pure and blameless. But liberals say no, rich people are evil. So if poverty causes crime, and wealth causes crime, then, umm, I don’t think you’ve explained anything.
- saneperson | 05/29/2015 @ 10:49
I used to work with a guy who was always saying how unfair it was that some people are rich while people like him and myself had modest incomes. They should share the wealth, he insisted. So one day I pointed out that, as a middle-class American, he has much more money than the average person in, say, Haiti. Why doesn’t he share his wealth with the people of Haiti? He replied that Haiti wasn’t his problem, that it wasn’t his fault that people there were poor, why was I bringing up this irrelevant junk about Haiti when he was talking about greedy rich people here in the U.S., etc. My point, of course, was that rich people in America were no more responsible for his relative poverty than he was for the poverty of people in Haiti. (Of course, like almost all conversations like this that I try to have, he saw absolutely no connection between his failure to share with Haitians and Bill Gates failure to share with him. These are completely different situations. We just circled around for a while before I gave up trying to make him see the analogy.)
- saneperson | 05/29/2015 @ 10:57
It’s obviously true that some people have an easier time in life than others. I don’t know anyone who seriously suggests that the son of a billionaire has no advantage over the son of someone trying to live on minimum wage. My parents were able to support me while I went to college and pay a good chunk of the bills. There are plenty of people in the world who can’t go to college because they have no choice but to work to support the family. Etc, etc. I suppose there might be some children of rich people who are so clueless that they don’t realize that they had advantages that others don’t.

But it’s equally absurd to automatically suppose that the person with advantages has done nothing to earn what he has. I had plenty of advantages that some people don’t, but I still worked for what I have. Yes, my parents were able to help me through college. But they didn’t study for me and take the tests for me. Yes, I have a good income. But I’m still expected to show up for work and actually do work that benefits the company.

What it comes down to is this: Yes, some people get more for the same effort than others. The son of a rich man may get a job with a starting salary of $50 an hour while the son of a poor man starts out at $8 an hour. But usually, the rich man’s son still has to work for his money. A few people are in situations where they can just sit back and live off their inheritance and do nothing but party. But not many. If you want to condemn the idle rich as lazy good for nothings, you’re absolutely right. But if someone inherits a million dollars and works hard so that he can leave ten million to his children, he still deserves respect for his efforts. Maybe the man who inherits $10 and works hard so he can leave $100 to his children deserves exactly the same amount of respect. But both deserve respect. The person who sits around and lives off of the work or others when he is perfectly capable of working — whether he is living off rich parents or off of the welfare system — that person does not deserve our respect. And for exactly the same reasons.
- saneperson | 05/29/2015 @ 11:10
You can think of it as a formula: Prosperity = Choices + Circumstances.

Some people think of Circumstances as a number ranging from 0 to 10, and Choices as a number ranging from -10 to +10 — so it doesn’t matter what Circumstances you start with, you can in principle get from 0 to 10 if you make the right Choices.

Other people see Circumstances as a number ranging from 0 to 100 and Choices as a number ranging from -5 to +5; in this case, it doesn’t matter what Choices you make, if you start with Circumstances 90 you’re never going to drop below 85, and if you start at 5 you’re never going to get above 10.

The big problem is that when looking at someone else’s Prosperity, it’s a lot easier to assess someone’s Circumstances than their Choices, so people with a low overall score have as much interest in dis-claiming the influence of their Choices as the people with a high overall score have in claiming the influence for theirs.
- Stephen J. | 05/29/2015 @ 11:51
It’s a variation of Kip’s Law — just as every advocate of central planning always sees himself as the planner, so every critic of Privilege never examines his own. Oh, so-and-so the rich kid had all kinds of advantages in life? And you know this…. how? Ah, yes — you have an internet connection, and the free time to use it, and a nice fancy college degree in Protest Studies that you had the money, free time, IQ points (few though they may be), education, able-bodiedness, peace, leisure, financial security, etc. to pursue… all so that you can inform us that so-and-so was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.

Want to go ahead and dollarize your own privilege, comrade?

Thought not. It was ever thus — the Credit-Card Ches and Trust-Fund Trotskys take their cues from the original Ches and Trotskys. Marx himself sponged off Engels his entire life, and Engels’s father actually — get this — owned a fucking factory.

If they had principles, or were capable of minimal self-reflection, they wouldn’t be liberals.
- Severian | 05/29/2015 @ 12:05

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