All things work according to their nature

The great tragedy of the twentieth century that will have the greatest impact in the twenty-first may well be that we have discarded the idea of human nature. Turn on the news. Watch it as long as you can stomach it. A woman is murdered in New Orleans by three fifteen-year old kids. In Indiana a man shakes his infant son nearly to death. Four toddlers are burned with acid by their mother's boyfriend in Texas. What is more horrifying than this? My reaction, and probably yours. We look at these incidents and are saddened or angered, but we get on with our day. The simple fact is that this stuff happens all the time. We learn to deal with it. The world is riven. That is simply the way things are. That is the way people are. Not everyone kills someone or robs a bank or blows himself up in crowded restaurant, but we all are born with the potential, and this potential is causing pain we can scarcely imagine yet clearly see.

Welcome to the sin nature. Welcome, as Morpheus puts it in The Matrix, to the real world.

But, thanks to modern thought and philosophy, the human sin nature need not be blamed, or even acknowledged. America has embraced Rousseau. "Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains." The most heinous offenses are not a matter of sin, or evil, or even morality. Chemical imbalances. Environmental factors. Genetic predispositions. Emotional repression. Our shiny new scapegoats. Suddenly, no crime can be blamed on the perpetrator. We are "born free." It was his parents. It was his medication. It was her genes. It was the NRA. It was the economy. Even Twinkies have been blamed for murder. Why the drastic effort to shirk responsibility?

The answer to this question is easy but also deeply troubling. We would like to believe that there is some hope of a better life. We want to believe that things will improve. And, indeed, they do. To an extent, the human race has made progress. We live longer, have microwaves and television, enjoy penicillin and trichinella-free pork. We have a stable structure in place for mediating international disputes (in theory) and the global standard of living has improved. We want to believe that if we advance enough we can somehow live together as a big, happy family. On the other hand, we have invented astonishingly effective ways to kill each other, allowed and fostered the spread of AIDS, and committed the worst genocides in history.

Welcome to the real world.

The word "utopia" means nowhere. Far too many have forgotten this, especially in Washington. Many of today's leaders are operating under the impression that the right laws and the omnipresent influence of government can correct the flaws of humanity by correcting the conditions that give rise to conflict. We hear talk of fusing all of society into one great middle class. Poverty will be eliminated. Crime will be a bad but fleeting memory. Boom and bust cycles will be replaced by the steady growth promised by government regulation. If we all just work together...

The problem, of course, is that we can't. Hobbes speculated that the state of nature is war. His solution amounted to totalitarianism. All well and good, but the people with the reins of power are inevitably just that: people, and people subject to the same imperfections that plague the rest of us. I am fond of likening society to a bunch of eight-year-olds on a playground. It is easy to neglect the fact that our leaders and guardians are not teachers but peers. Human nature is universal, and it neatly kills the idea of an earthly utopia. Hence the fact that every effort at utopia has gone the way of New Harmony and the Soviet Union. Utopian states usually were based on the ideals of socialism, and quickly went more George Orwell than Thomas More.

Welcome to the real world.

So, why does the dream of utopia survive? The entire idea stems from the assertion that our problems are somehow external to our nature and thus solvable. I said a few paragraphs ago that I had a simple answer to why we try to shirk responsibility. Well, here it is: it's in our nature. Read Genesis for the first example of the blame game, all structured around Man's first failing. Watch C-SPAN for contemporary examples. Every problem in our world is our fault. We are also powerless to fix them. Dante should have nailed the words "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" over the exits of maternity wards.

Or should he? The truth we must remember, the only source of true hope, is that this world is not permanent. We all die; we all move on. We cannot place our hope, our investments, in this crumpled and broken realm. This earth will pass, the Earth will be revealed. We have been offered salvation by our Maker. We can only do the best we can to hold on until He says,

"Welcome to the real world."