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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The Human Swarm - A Review

As Western Civilization seems to be fraying rapidly, the nature and origins of human societies seems significant. Why do societies arise? Why do they hold together? What makes them fall apart? These are big questions whose answers help explain human history and the world around us.

Mark Moffett explores these giant-sized questions in his recent book, The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall.

According to his biography, Moffett is something of a misfit. He dropped out of high school but managed to get a PhD from Harvard. His degree was in biology, but he has done more journalism than anything else. He was a student of E. O. Wilson, who is an intriguing figure himself, and likely has a million stories to share.

The book is long and expansive in scope. As such, it has more of a theme than a thesis. Moffett doesn’t grind away at a particular point as he does show the general direction that his research has pointed. This may sound like a criticism, but it is a strength in this case, because to force analogies of insects and animals onto humanity tends to result in critical failures. And yet, Moffett makes the case that we can learn something from the way societies form among non-human creatures. He does not rely on zoological observations alone, though, but also draws on research from anthropology of various human societies at various levels of organization and structure.

There are nine sections in this large volume. Section I begins by discussing how individual creatures are recognized as part of a group (e.g., enemy vs. friend). Section II explores anonymous societies, noting some significant similarities between ants and humans in our ability to socialize with those whom we don’t know as individuals. The third section dives into anthropology, looking at hunter-gatherer societies in human history. Section IV continues in anthropology (with zoological analogies) by considering how cultural markers can tie anonymous individuals together.

In the fifth section, Moffett digs into the human psyche, specifically evaluating how types, family relations, and other associations can aid creatures in existing in societies. Section VI evaluates whether conflict is a given, ultimately concluding that it is likely inevitable at some level. The seventh section traces the rise and fall of various societies, making an implicit argument that decline is inevitable and not entirely bad. More significantly, this section shows how societies morph over time. In Section VIII Moffett outlines how tribes turn into nations and, eventually, fracture. Then, finally, in Section IX, Moffett asks hard questions about ethnic and racial differences, whether societies are even necessary, noting that societies will always be a collection of people with differences.

The conclusion Moffett offers is that societies are generally good things, but they are also notably temporary things. Understanding their nature and proclivity toward fracture can be helpful as we wrestle the fracturing of our own society.

The Human Swarm is an engaging book. Well-written and copiously research. I am an expert in none of the disciplines that Moffett is drawing from, so I cannot critique whether he gets the nuances of various theories from a diverse range of fields correct. However, based on a review of the extensive end-notes in this volume, Moffett appears to have done his research faithfully and well. Not only does this work reflect copious research, but he thoughtfully engages with contrary theories, admitting disagreement where appropriate, in his notes. This is a book that bears the marks of being well-thought through, despite being an expansive volume that is wrestling with an interdisciplinary question.

A strength of this volume is that it avoids the naturalistic fallacy. There are times, especially when reading the distilled versions of scientific research, that firm conclusions are drawn in error. A scientist publishes research on aggression in Chimpanzees and either a popular interpreter or, sometimes, the scientist herself will draw straight-line conclusions to human behavior. Moffett recognizes the danger of this fallacy and avoids it. There are analogies between human societies and those of animals, they can provide some clues as to how societies form and creatures behave, but we cannot derive firm ethical conclusions from them.

Another significant strength of The Human Swarm is that Moffett does not romanticize any stage of human existence. The hunter-gatherer is recognized as a human with joy and suffering, interacting with the world as it was and in a particular context. There is neither the myth of a noble savage nor of the hapless primitive. We can learn about human behaviors by considering similarities and differences in typical behaviors in varied contexts.

One of the more helpful aspects of this volume is that it helps put contemporary politics in perspective. There are those who view America’s rise or fall (as categorized by the other party getting control) as dependent upon the next election. Though Moffett doesn’t talk about American politics at all, the framing of the constitution and disintegration of human societies within millennia helps put our current battles in perspective. The United States has been an imperfect union, better on balance than many other nations, but its rise or fall will not determine the final course of human events. In the meanwhile, Moffett provides some ideas about what makes societies cohere, which can help thinkers understand how cooperation and neighborliness can be cultivated.

This is one of those books that warrants being read, simply because of how well it is put together. There will be no reader who does not find points of agreement and disagreement with Moffett, but the final product is thoughtful and thought-provoking. For example, Moffett recognizes the goodness of a plurality of human cultures, but he also identifies the problem when immigrants within a larger society refuse to meaningfully integrate. On the other hand, he also notes that attempts to integrate excessively also have negative societal impacts. There is a tension that is necessary whenever societies mingle that cannot be resolved by the extreme proposals of either political pole.

There are careful considerations of how humans form their identities woven through this book. Contemporary scholars writing about human interactions would do well to read The Human Swarm alongside other, more theological, reflections.

Perhaps the factor that will most likely reduce the use of this volume is the sheer length. This is a comprehensive book, reaching back into basic animal behavior to finally arrive at signs and contributors to human society. It takes some patience to get to the end. This is an engaging book, overall, but there are points that a careful reader can easily lose sight of the final destination.

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall

By Mark W. Moffett

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