I Want to Believe in the Essential Goodness of Humanity

Some days, I find it hard to feel that humans are essentially good. Most people must experience this feeling, I think, especially if they work with the public. It is easy to slip into a permanent state of mind, wherein humans are only to be viewed through the lens of our worst qualities. Certainly there is enough fodder to fuel this; we are driven by greed, by malice and hatred towards our fellow human beings, both ones we know and ones we don't, people who are different from us. We destroy ancient forests for a few dollars, we kill each other over absolute pettiness, like whether or not the communion wafer literally becomes the body of Christ, or the fact that our skin is a different color. The litany of the crimes we've committed against each other is long and never ceases to grow. Our history as a civilization is littered with purges and pogroms, assassinations and Terrors, and that doesn't even begin to cover what we've done to other species, blithely sending thousands into extinction, sometimes through deliberate action and sometimes just through carelessness. 

Yet in spite of all of this, I want to believe in the essential goodness of humanity. Yes, we are petty and cruel without need, but we are also kind and caring. Sometimes we may be driven by fear to attack others of our species, but I think at heart we want to help one another, and sometimes this manifests itself even in the darkest of places and in surprising ways. Even when humanity is acting at its worst, there are still wonderful people who act out of love for their fellow humans. It can be truly inspiring to see, like when Christians formed a circle while a number of Muslims prayed during the protests in Egypt a few years ago. 

Tahrir Square, 2011

We are not defined by our cruelty, though it is a sad feature of our species, but by our compassion for others. The image above is just one example of this compassion. There are instances of this every single day and in every single place, if only we look. I have begun to think lately that the true division of humanity is not along the lines of politics or religion, but between those who are motivated by hatred, and those who are motivated by love and kindness. It is not Christian against Muslim, liberal against conservative, it is the hateful who stand in the way of progress, in the way of those who want compassion to drive our actions. No one system of belief has a monopoly on this hatred; those who are driven by hate, and also by fear, are to be found in every Party, in every religion, across the globe. 

Those motivated by hatred may seem more numerous and powerful than those who are kind, but this is an illusion. Our brains remember the negative more often than they do the positive ones; they stand out as memorable simply because they are so infrequent. We can have a hundred positive interactions with others in the course of the day, but the one negative interaction is what we remember and tell others about. 

We can choose how we respond to the problems of the world, to those who are hurtful to us, who act out of hatred. We can recognize that they are likely acting out of hurt themselves, that we just happen to be an easy target at the moment, and recognizing this we can refuse to respond in kind. When we are hurt ourselves, we can reject the easy temptation of lashing out at other people. Sometimes we may feel powerless to make things better, but at the very least we can avoid making them worse by our actions. And some days, that has to be good enough, to win the battle within us against our worst instincts and choose to be kind.