Belief in the inherent evil of people or the world can lead us into hostile, tribal thinking that makes us more likely to carry out evil acts ourselves, writes David B. Wong. Classical Chinese philosophy teaches us that our capacity for good and evil is complex and responds to our environment. We should check our own perceptions and beliefs by engaging in open discussion and finding common ground to work together for a shared good.
It is a serious matter to call people evil for what they do or who they are. It is also inherently ambiguous. That human beings have it within them, under some circumstances, to intentionally commit terribly wrong, enormously destructive acts against others is among the most important truths we must accept about ourselves. This sense of ‘evil’ points to what we do as evil, and to ourselves as capable of it. However, we sometimes mean, in calling someone evil, something much harsher—that the tendency to commit these acts is a fixed and incorrigible feature of their character. This second sense draws our attention away from the role of the circumstances that engage with our capacity to harm and destroy.
Most of us are familiar with the circumstances that engage with our own capacity to do what is inexcusably wrong. For example, we feel aggrieved by what others have done to us and seek payback. Anger and fear can lead to disproportionate response and to harming not only the perceived offender but also others connected with them. If we are aware that what we are doing is usually wrong, we point to “exceptional” circumstances as justifying our acts. Not everyone is so charitable to themselves, but it is common to fail to give to others the sympathetic understanding we award to ourselves, especially if the others belong to another “tribe.”
One plausible explanation of the tendency to believe others to be inherently evil goes back to the tribal tendencies that help people to fight for their group when in competition with other groups for resources. It becomes easier to harm others if one believes them to be evil. This may be connected to the tendency to be more motivated to defend one’s group against an aggressor as compared to the situation in which one’s own group is the aggressor. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict features each side pointing to horrific acts of the other side as justifying its response. Civilian status offers little protection against retaliation for these acts.
Trump regularly employs the tactic of portraying those he seeks to rally to his cause as the victims of aggression, as in his 2015 announcement in his bid for the presidency that Mexico sends to the U.S. people who bring drugs, crime and rape with them. In the U.S., U.K. and continental Europe, hostility to immigrant groups commonly arrives in the form of accusations of criminal behavior. When perceptions of increased criminality converge with economic and cultural insecurity (“they’re taking our jobs,” and “they’re aiming to replace people like us”), it’s a potent brew for hostility and aggression rationalized as defense.
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Judgments about evil as intrinsic to and definitive of character, whether limited to others or applied universally to human nature, can function as self-fulfilling prophecies.
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By contrast, it becomes more difficult to harm if one recognizes what one has in common with potential targets. Consider George Orwell’s recollection of why he did not shoot at a soldier on the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War: as the man ran into Orwell’s rifle sights he was holding his trousers up. At that moment he was not a Fascist to Orwell but simply a fellow-creature. According to the “contact hypothesis” in sociology, we are more likely, other things being equal, to become less hostile to others the more knowledge and experience we have of interacting with them; the less we know of them, the more room for simplistic negative images, purveyed by those who have something to gain by dividing people from one another.
Misconceptions about the ways others are different from us often encourage destructive tribal divisions. But beliefs about the way we are similar to each other may also divide us, depending on the content of those beliefs. A view that is taken pretty seriously if not accepted universally is that human nature is fundamentally self-interested. Kant is famous for the view that the rationality of human beings enables them to grasp the moral law and to act in ways that were contrary to their self-interest and animal dispositions. However, he saw in human beings widespread failures to act according to reason and concluded that these failures could only be explained by our evil natures.
The classical Chinese philosopher Xunzi held that human nature was evil or bad because we tend to act on strong impulses toward sensual gratification and material prosperity. Kant and Xunzi were surely right to point out that human beings can act in self-interested ways, but if we take this tendency as definitive of who we are, we may act in ways that undermine social cooperation for the sake of a common good. In one study, young infants showed willingness to help others without expectation of reward, but when they were rewarded for helping, they ceased helping when the rewards ceased. This “overjustification effect” seems to show that social expectations and the resulting incentive structure might influence us to perceive an intrinsically valuable end as merely a means to a quite different end.
Thus judgments about evil as intrinsic to and definitive of character, whether limited to others or applied universally to human nature, can function as self-fulfilling prophecies. These judgments are liable to have the biggest negative effects when unmitigated by the recognition that human beings are also capable of good, at least under some conditions. This is where the ambiguity in judgments about evil becomes very important. Philosophers, even when they recognize evil in human beings, usually also recognize the human potential for goodness.
Kant, of course, believed that human beings can do their moral duty out of their recognition of what reason requires, even if they do not do so very frequently. Xunzi held that we can transform our evil natures by retraining our impulses and strengthening more promising impulses such as the natural urge to be in the company of others. Another classical Chinese philosopher, Mencius, held that we have inborn “sprouts” of goodness such as natural compassion that can be nurtured through effort and a conducive environment.
As I have stressed, we should recognize our capabilities for evil, but be wary of assuming that it takes much worse forms in others with whom we are not disposed to sympathize, and we should be aware that the evil we attribute to our human natures can make us worse if we assume that is the only or main thing about us. We are much more complex and responsive to our environments than is captured by the ideas that we are intrinsically evil or intrinsically good. Much of what we have so far learned about human nature and nurture is that they are deeply intertwined.
Insofar as we are tempted to denigrate others because of their differences from us, we should be open to the definite possibility that these differences stem from their life experiences that we do not necessarily have to fear. In fact, we might learn something from them. The classical Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (or “Chuang Tzu”) had an insight into our human condition that is receiving much confirmation from predictive coding theory in current philosophy of mind and cognitive science.
We do not simply receive sensory input from the world and unproblematically turn that into knowledge. Rather, we take a small slice of that input and interpret it within a conceptual framework that we have partly inherited from our society and culture and partly from our own previous experience. We are constantly predicting what will happen next on the basis of our interpretations, but because that slice of input is so slender our interpretation and predictions can be wrong or very much incomplete. Others may take different slices and so start out interpreting and predicting what will happen in the world in different ways.
Zhuangzi makes the point humorously by comparing the way humans perceive the world with the very different and multifarious ways in which other creatures such as fish and birds and monkeys perceive the world. Each kind of creature has perspectives on the world shaped by its distinctive sensory equipment and the way it is built to navigate the environment to fulfill its needs. Human beings invariably develop perspectives on the world that differ not only from those of nonhuman animals but also from those of other human beings. We would do well to consider the possibility that we can learn something about the world from others who see it differently than we do.
So we have strong reasons to interrogate our beliefs about the depth of evil in our nature. We might behave worse because of what we mistakenly believe about ourselves and about others. We need to learn much more about the conditions encouraging the growth of capabilities for goodness as opposed to our capabilities for evil. Our social institutions can help us to form images of ourselves as intrinsically evil or as beings with far more complex and flexible potentials. Simplistic images can narrow our perceptions of who we are and function as self-fulfilling prophecies.
People of different backgrounds can arrive at more complex images when they are gathered in common purpose to deliberate on matters of importance, as exemplified by the Irish Citizens’ Assembly, especially in its recommendations for the legalization of abortion and same sex marriage equality. In face-to-face conversation with each other, they explained to each other the ways their own experiences shaped the views they brought to their cooperative deliberations, providing them the opportunity to learn from each other. Such deliberations should not simply be forums for debate and certainly not raucous demonstrations of tribal identities but need to become genuine opportunities for people to be open to each other as valuable embodiments of life experience that they themselves may lack.
15th July 2024
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