Human Goodness and the Perfectibility of Society

Humans were created good in the very beginning. They were good in every way. After God created the whole universe, including Adam and Eve, he looked at it all and observed it was all “very good.” (Gen 1:31) But the first humans made a choice to defy God’s command and they ate of the forbidden fruit. As a result, everything in creation was touched by a curse to remind humanity that the way the world is is not the way the world was meant to be. (Gen 3:16–19)

It didn’t take very long for sin to show itself in human society in powerful ways. One generation after Adam’s sin, one son murdered another in a fit of jealousy over God’s affections. (Gen 4:8) A few generations later Lamech uses his freedom and power to unjustly kill a man as disproportionate revenge for wounding him (Gen 4:23-24). Not too many generations, Scripture records, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” (Gen 6:5)

Despite the wickedness of humanity and the corruption of creation, God preserved eight of his people on a boat constructed because of Noah’s faithful obedience to God’s command. After the flood, God released those eight people and the animals back onto the earth and made a covenant with both the humans and the rest of creation not to destroy it again. (Gen 9:8–17) But despite God’s grace, the old story repeated itself over and over again. Humans fell into patterns of sin that included oppression, violence, and greed. These are patterns that seem to repeat themselves down to the present day.

And yet, despite their continual disobedience, humans remain good in God’s sight. So good, in fact, that he came himself in the form of a human with the name of Jesus.

Jesus came to restore the goodness of humans and to bring salvation from sin, but the process of redemption is ongoing. Though all creation witnessed moral perfection in the person of Jesus Christ, all of creation continues to live under the effects of Adam’s sin. Even those who have been redeemed by Christ’s blood on the cross still regularly fall short of the moral goodness that God demands.

One of the central purposes of government is restrain evil. As the apostle Peter notes, we are to understand that “governors [were] sent by [God] to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good.” (I Pet 2:14)

The government is necessary as a means to prevent the powerful from oppressing the weak. Among the things necessary for a healthy society are the rule of law and enforcement of property rights. These are proper roles for the government.

The worst documented humanitarian abuses in the world have occurred when government has moved from the role of attempting to restrain evil to creating a perfect society. According to C. S. Lewis, this impulse is common among many forms of modern government, as he noted in his essay, “Is Progress Possible?,”

“The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good–anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. . . . We are less [government leaders’] subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business.”

The pursuit of social improvement requires that government become engaged in social interaction. In order to move from obedience to the law to moral improvement, there must be an allegiance to the power of the government.

In modern forms of government that are seeking to perfect (or at least enhance) the moral fabric of society, that allegiance is often sought in the name of superior information, which often goes under the name of science. If government is to improve society and improvement is measured by science, then good must be scientifically measurable and the theories of advancement offered by science must be obeyed absolutely.

As C. S. Lewis writes, “I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent.”

If science is seen as the means to determine policy, then a party need merely control the direction and flavor of scientific research and publishing to change the direction of society and reinforce control. This is what is happening now in China. It is what happened through the German propaganda during WWII.

Human sin is exactly the reason why therapeutic structures of society are bound to be unhelpful, because it gives the state or community to continue to shape and reshape human behavior according to whatever the contemporary consensus is and by whatever means are socially approved. It seems like tenderness, but, as Walker Percy once wrote, “tenderness leads to the gas chamber.” Sin corrupts everything and ensures that even movements begin with good intentions don’t usually end there.

The Christian Mind of C. S. Lewis: Essays in Honor of Michael Travers

Wipf and Stock

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Technopoly - A Review

Neil Postman’s most well known book is Amusing Ourselves to Death. There is good reason for that, since he both explains the media ecology of the early ‘80’s, including the election of a movie star presidents, and predicts where culture will head. His predictions have proved to be largely true, which is a stunning feat. He provides no timeline for what he anticipates, but he looks at the trajectory of culture and describes where it is headed—for us, where it has headed—in the decades to come.

His book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, is less well-known, but in many ways more powerful and prescient. Published in 1992, Postman was standing at the beginning of the internet age, when personal computers were beginning to be more widely available.

The book is not about some dystopian future where Artificial Intelligence has taken over and time traveling robots have been sent back to wipe out the people that started it all. But it is a book that helps explain what technology is, why understanding that definition is important, and what it is doing to society.

From the very beginning, Postman makes it clear that technology is all around us in ways that we no longer detect. Technology fundamentally changes the way society works and how our brains function. (This is part of Jacob Shatzer’s argument in his recent book, Transhumanism and the Image of God, which is also worth your while.) He begins with one of Plato’s dialogues, Phaedrus, which contains a story of Thamus who resists the use of written languages, especially books, because it will change the way people receive information and allow readers to gain info apart from the oral tradition. To modern readers, so many centuries beyond that technological revolution, and also well beyond the revolution enabled by moveable type on printing presses, it may seem incredible to consider what life would be like without written communication. And yet, that was a technology that has fundamentally changed society in a way that we can no longer fully comprehend because it is so ubiquitous.

The central message of Technopoly is simple, but it is important: Every new technology that gets widely adopted changes society. It would, therefore, important that we ask whether those changes are good or not and what we are giving up by adopting new technologies.

According to Postman,

“Technology is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology. This requires the development of a new kind of social order, and of necessity leads to the rapid dissolution of much that is associated with traditional beliefs. Those who feel most comfortable in Technopoly are those who are convinced that technical progress is humanity’s supreme achievement and the instrument by which our most profound dilemmas may be solved. They also believe that information is an unmixed blessing, which through its continued and uncontrolled production and dissemination offers increased freedom, creativity, and peace of mind. The fact that information does none of these things––but quite the opposite––seems to change few opinions, for such unwavering believes are an inevitable product of the structure of Technopoly. In particular, Technopoly flourishes when the defenses against information break down.”

Postman further notes, only a couple of pages later, that social institutions are supposed to function as control mechanisms to help people discern which information is important and which is noise. As he notes,

“Social institutions sometimes do their work simply by denying people access to information, but principally by directing how much weight and, therefore, value one must give information. Social institutions are concerned with the meaning of information and can be quite rigorous in enforcing standards of admission.”

In this information age, even the best of our institutions cannot function fast enough to accomplish this task. And, based on the violation of trust that many institutions have engaged in or been accused of, people tend not to trust some of the institutions that might possibly be able to do a fair job at keeping up with information.

Technopoly helps explain the dis-ease of contemporary culture because we are being perpetually swamped by information and it is difficult to discern what is true. We have few reliable handlers of information that we can count on to present the information in a reasonably unbiased way. Some of the gate keepers of information, including members of the media, abuse their institutional role as information handlers to intentionally mislead through shifting perceptions.

Technopoly predicted our present state and our ongoing trajectory. Postman’s book highlights the epistemic and social nightmare we live in: there is too much information and we don’t know who to trust. Postman has few suggestions for a solution (indeed, he pokes fun at himself in the last chapter for that fact), but simply having the problem exposed is helpful.

Personally, I think that part of the solution needs to be a renewal of the Christian Mind, which I have written about previously and will discuss further in this context in a future post.

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

By Neil Postman

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Who Killed Civil Society? - A Review

We often take it for granted that the bulk of social issues have a government funded solution with a complex bureaucracy behind it. Is someone out of work? To the unemployment office they go to fill out forms, search for jobs in the database, and collect a check. Are they short of funds for food? There is a program to issue a card with funds that can be spent at certain retail outlets to fill the pantry. Privately funded soup kitchens, shelters, and other programs exist, but they often serve as contractors for the government, subject to the rules laid down by the centralized bureaucrats. Or, such charities exist on the margins to fill in gaps until the real help from the government can get there.

Many of these social issues used to be dealt within civil society rather than through governmental policies and programs.

The rise of the government as the primary welfare agency is an artifact of the late industrial era. Prior to around the turn of the 19th to 20th century, the majority of civil welfare was funded and conducted on a private basis. There are certainly cases where those organizations fell short of excellence, but one thing they were able to do was help transmit norms and values that might help people adapt to the system and succeed within it.

One of the more significant misconceptions about poverty is that it is primarily material. There are certainly material aspects to poverty, but simply writing a check, giving a credit card for food, and subsidizing rent are insufficient to overcome poverty. Those who live in poverty often see it as a spiritual and emotional condition, as much as it is a lack of material resources.

Government programs can be very efficient at proving material relief, but by their very nature, they often discourage helping solve non-material problems. While the government may have better resources to meet physical needs, civil society might be more efficient at helping change values and behaviors that contribute to material poverty.

Who Killed Civil Society? The Rise of Big Government and Decline of Bourgeois Norms tells the story of the shift from civil society functioning to alleviate poverty to the dominance of government programs. Simultaneously, this also accompanied the shift from the transmission of “bourgeois” values to supposedly value-free providence of material aid. The author, Howard Husock, tells the story through the biography of six significant figures who were engaged in seeking to improve the lot of the poor.

This short book has six content chapters with a brief introduction and conclusion. The introduction tells the story of the author’s father who passed through civil society as an orphan and came out as a success case. The biographies include significant historical figures within the poverty alleviation movement such as Charles Loring Brace, Jane Addams, Mary Richmond, Grace Abbott, Wilbur Cohen, and Geoffrey Canada. From Loring Brace to Cohen, the biographies chart an arc from concern for imparting values while helping the poor to primary focus on alleviating the physical symptoms of poverty. The final example is of an African American who was exceptionally successful in changing the trajectory of the lives of poor African Americans living in rough neighborhoods.

The author’s affiliation with the Manhattan Institute, which favors free markets and limited government, as well as the subtitle of the book make it fairly obvious that Husock begins with the assumption that government as the primary solution to poverty is not the best option. However, the book is an even-handed discussion of the historical facts. This is not a diatribe against big government, but a call to recognize that even if government is a large part of the solution to poverty, we cannot rely on that.

There is a segment of the population who view bourgeois norms like thrift, hard work, and aspiration, as a form of oppression. For those that believe that the system is irredeemably gamed, this book will likely be of little interest. However, for readers trying to figure out why poverty seems to be increasingly generational, Husock has some possible answers. It may be that teaching people they are victims of the system is less effective in alleviating poverty than helping them to succeed within the system. That is the essential argument of Husock’s book.

This historical account shows how and why the transition from civil society to government programs happened. It was well intentioned advocates seeking to alleviate the physical symptoms of poverty, which they believed to be the cause of social ills. However, the data seems to support Husock’s thesis that this was not necessarily a good thing and that the lack of appropriate values tends to encourage and exacerbate the physical symptoms of poverty.

Marvin Olasky’s book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, traces a similar trajectory from civil society to government programs as the solution to poverty. Who Killed Civil Society? and Olasky’s book complement each other well and could be paired to good effect in a course on poverty alleviation. Their agreement, however, could be explained by the fact that both are right-leaning thinkers.

However, more recent books by left-leaning authors tend to make similar cases about some of the issues with government programs for poverty alleviation and the need for civil society. Daniel Hatcher’s book, The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America’s Most Vulnerable Citizens, outlines many of the abuses by government programs that entrap and victimize those they are intended to help. Hilary Cottam’s book, Radical Help, details her efforts to create programs in the UK’s expansive welfare state that rebuild the fabric of civil society.

If we are serious about poverty alleviation, we need to talk about what the actual causes of poverty are. Then we need to ask how to eliminate those causes. Even as the fabric civil society continues to fray at an increasing rate, it is becoming clear to the left and the right that whatever the funding model, civil society is necessary to prevent and eliminate the symptoms of poverty.

Husock’s book is an interesting read, especially for those wondering how the contemporary welfare state in the U.S. evolved. The book handles a contentious issue fairly, though the author clearly has a point of view. At the same time, the biographies are handled so sympathetically that it is possible for readers who strongly favor limited government to see why these individuals sought to alleviate poverty primarily through the growth of government programs. This book makes a solid argument that a return to encouraging hard work, thrift, and planning deserves more attention and care than the contemporary system tends to allow. Whatever the funding model is, Husock makes a strong case that teaching norms would do a great deal to improve society.

Who Killed Civil Society?: The Rise of Big Government and Decline of Bourgeois Norms

By Howard A. Husock

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NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.