An Addendum on Human Goodness
I recently wrote a post on here about how I believe people are mostly good. The post begins with me wrestling over whether or not to publish it at all. Something just didn’t sit right with me about it, even after publishing. A couple of things I’ve read recently have filled in a missing piece and given me a broader vocabulary around the matter.
Here is the edit: People are capable of good. Of course, people are also capable of immense harm, and sometimes that is especially true when we are convinced of our own good intentions.
It is true that in times of crisis, we as people have shown ourselves capable of great cooperation and care. I think that when that falls apart, it is because we have decided there is a them out there that is somehow against us. When we decide that some group of people is outside the bounds of our community, we lose track of their humanity and become willing to allow atrocities to befall them in the name of some self-described good. We as a species have shown ourselves capable of, if not actively participating then certainly looking the other way, while people are hungry, ill, alone, imprisoned, exterminated in the name of God, salvation, economic progress, colonialism, even our personal comfort. When we allow ourselves and one another to create an us and a them, what follows is slavery, Holocaust, hunger, homelessness, abuse, mass incarceration, broken families, violence.
John Green writes in his book The Anthropocene Reviewed, “It is human in a crisis not just to blame marginalized people, but to kill them.” This is what I was missing in my first post, the thing that didn’t feel quite right. It is my privilege that allows me to focus on the good. I want to focus on the flowers because that is what’s beautiful and comfortable. But my privilege also requires me to dig up the weeds - to call out the attitudes and the biases in myself and others that put us on a team against some other. I am able to look for the good because that is most often what I encounter. I recognize that is not true for all. There are many who are simply trying to survive in this world that has neither shown them love nor prioritized their humanity. They are choked with the weeds. If I tell them to look for the good, or even to be the good, then I am adding to the harm.
I was struck by a poem by Clint Smith called “When people say ‘we have made it through worse before’”. It begins:
“all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones
of those who did not make it”
People are capable of good. If we will only ground ourselves fully in the human community and, as Valarie Kaur writes in her book See No Stranger, approach everyone we meet as “a part of me I do not yet know”. If we commit to continuously wondering about one other, listening to one another, grieving with one another and fighting for one another, then our collective goodness will flourish.
“You are a part of me I do not yet know.”