Susan Sontag said, “10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.” She did not do sociological research to back up the numbers, but the numbers are not important, no one fits neatly into those three categories. It’s up to us to observe what is true in the relationships we have and within ourselves.
There is data on what she says, see Jonathan Haidt’s The
Righteous Mind for example. When Robert Sapolsky studied Bonobos, he
chronicled what you would expect, a male hierarchy dominated through violence
and intimidation. When most of those males died from eating human garbage, the
females imposed a new order. They welcomed new young males into the group, but
only if they followed the rules of mercy and compassion. Cruelty and mercy were
in the minds of all of them in varying degrees and environmental pressures
helped one or the other manifest.
There is a Cherokee story of two wolves that live within a
person. First, they should get that checked out, that is way too many wolves
living in you. One wolf is evil, anger, envy, regret, the other is good, joy,
peace, humility, compassion. They fight, and this fight is going on within
every person on earth. The question of which will win is answered with, “The
one you feed.” Unlike Hollywood movies, the story doesn’t end with one wolf
winning. The wolves are always there and always wanting to be fed.
Another version of the story ends with, “If you feed them
right, they both win.” If you are familiar with the Star Trek character Captain
Kirk, you might remember a few episodes where he spoke well of his evil side
and how it motivated him. In a transporter accident, he was split into two
people, with one of “wolves” in each. The evil wolf was easily identified and
subdued and quarantined. The good wolf was able to hide his thoughts for a
while but was unable to make difficult decisions or be a strong leader.
Richard Carrier refers to this as the bell curve of our
tendencies, “I claim every human being possesses both potentials, but not to
any universally fixed degree. I would claim some are born with less or more of
an innate tendency either way (probably matching a bell curve pattern within
the population as a whole), but that every human can cultivate one potential
more than another well beyond their biological tendencies (provided they
actually do so, and by a method that actually works: and there are methods that
work, and methods that don't--and working methods include the active, i.e.
self-development, and passive, i.e. parental and societal influence and
upbringing).”
Any of this would be difficult or impossible to study in an
ethical manner. Malidoma Some, who was born into a tribal society in Africa in
the middle of the 20th century and was educated at the Sorbonne in France, told
me that he knew of tribes that had lost most of their men to wars and it took a
generation or more to reinstate a culture of proper development for the youth.
We couldn’t design a study to track that. In the current Western culture,
language about the deficiencies of certain ethnic groups has been purged from
academia, but data is collected and presented that claims to show how much
better people do when raised with a mother and father in the household. I find
these to be coded in a way to put a veil of scientific reasoning over the
prejudice. It also demonstrates that there are underlying values that we share,
despite our differences about how to pass on those values and encourage them in
others.
From some of what I’ve said here, one might think there is a
system, something that we would have discovered by now to put in a book, create
a curriculum, or maybe a funny meme on facebook. I’m not leading up to that, or
avoiding presenting it, because I don’t know of one. What I have is a system
that will help us improve the system. I can’t say that work will ever be
completed.
One of the barriers is the lure of easy answers. They are
easy to write-up, easy to make them appealing, easy to swallow, comforting to
join with others who agree with them, easy. They can persist for centuries,
paradoxically enforced by violence while claiming it’s necessary to keep the
peace. Recent studies have shown that it is the community support that is more
important than the book or philosophy that them together, that is, an atheist
with a strong group of friends thrives as well as a member of church.
I think a big part of why this system for creating a moral
system is not taught is the way we teach history, and this includes Sunday
School. We teach dates and names for great people, usually men who come along
with something new and lead others into the new world they create. There are
really geniuses and breakthroughs, but they only come from what came before.
Great ideas don’t spring into a mind spontaneously, they are nurtured from the
fertile soil of a healthy community. We have yet to come up with one big list
of what is right, and the list will change as nature changes, and we are part
of nature.
The belief that there is an end, a singularity we are all
moving toward, a cosmic truth that will one day be revealed, keeps us fighting
over who has the best version of it. We spend more time fighting over the
latest list rather than reflecting on how to improve the lists. The list gives
us something to rally around and distracts us from keeping our minds open to what
others are saying or doing.
“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological
teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our
side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed
of good people who have something important to say.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind:
Why Good People Are Divided by Politics
