On Monday I ended a post with this observation:
[O]ver a decade or so I have begun to wonder whether there is something intrinsic to a certain kind of well-meaning progressive outlook that makes it resistant to recognizing the darker possibilities which from time to time overwhelm whole segments of humankind.
From Australia, Sophie Masson writes with these reflections:
I think your final comment is quite right. I have to say that I think that there is a fatal flaw at the heart of much optimistic humanist thought, or progressive thought: that is, that people are good by nature and only society makes them bad. The reality of people having a divided nature and having to struggle against the ugly side of it within themselves and in the wider world was, I suppose, rejected by Rousseau and Voltaire as indicative of a bad old world view that shackled people. It’s hard, too, to find a balance that doesn’t just lead people to fatalism or defeatism. Personally I think the idea of original sin – as the faultline that developed with consciousness itself, leading both to our greatness and our horror, to good as well as evil – is due for a re-evaluation.
All too many people don’t seem to believe in the reality of evil… I think there’s an unwillingness for many people to think or feel outside their insulated bubbles. They can’t imagine evil coming close to them. They think they’re protected… It’s the dark side of optimism.
I’m not familiar enough with the theology here – the theology of original sin – to be able to say how much my own present thinking might share with it. As a resolute atheist, all I can say is that I derive nothing from it directly. But one thing I was alluding to in the sentence with which I ended that post of mine was a puzzlement I have over why many of those who believe in extending and enhancing human freedoms, who believe in the possibility of a much better world in this respect, also tend to see great wrong-doing, the perpetration of atrocity, in a word, evil, as produced by external circumstances and not also by people’s choices. As if human beings are free (to deliberate and choose), or at least capable of that freedom, but could not ever, in benign circumstances, choose to harm others. But it is a fact of common experience that they can.
It is right to hope that such negative tendencies or impulses could be checked, held within more tolerable limits than they historically have been. But it is better to face up to the various different sources of human trouble. Bad circumstances may be the root of much of it, but they are not the root of it all.
(Updated at 3.45 PM: I have argued these points more carefully and at greater length in chapter 2 of The Contract of Mutual Indifference.)