Man As Animal

 Unleashing Sin

One of the abiding lusts of Western pride is the lure of a perfect society brought into being through human ingenuity, planning, and enlightened application.  No matter what problem we face, throw enough resources at it, study it to death, put a management plan in place, and hey presto, the problem will be solved. 

Such approaches may work well when we are dealing with problems arising out of the non-human natural order.  They fail miserably when we are dealing with human beings.  Why?  Precisely because man is not a cipher.  He is not the impersonal product of impersonal natural forces.  He is altogether more wonderful and complex: he is a moral agent made in the image of God.  When sin entered the human race through Adam and spread to all mankind "descending from him by ordinary generation" the wondrous complexity and moral agency of mankind became perverted.  The sophisticated complexity of humanity became a spectacular resource for cunning, duplicity, and evil.  

But modern man has "advanced" to the point where he sees himself as a sophisticated animal, nothing more.
You can train mice to do certain things.  Similarly human beings can be conditioned to do whatever can be imagined.  If man is malfunctioning and if there are problems in society, all we need is the right plan, the application of marshalled resources, and all will be well. 

Economics has been called the "dismal science".  For good reason.  Modern econometrics offered the prospect of unending growth and prosperity through, firstly developing a sufficiently complex model of how the modern economy works, then having applied sufficient computing and civil powers, governments could control the economic machine through adjusting inputs, prices, outputs, wages, capital availability, labour hours, and the money supply.  If we could do that well enough (that is, if the model were both accurate and comprehensive) we could have an economy which would grow at 3.256 percent real GDP endlessly.  No more crashes.  No more "Great Recessions".  No more systemic unemployment.  No more plutocrats.  Just a well run, smooth machine-like progress to perpetual wealth and prosperity.

Go figure!  Well, the econometric modellers did.  They failed dismally.  Why?  For many reasons, but chief amongst them was this: human beings were not ciphers, and economics is always about human beings and their actions, goals, choices, preferences, fears and lusts.  Moreover, value is a subjective concept.  For one person, value lies in owning nothing.  For another, value is to own the whole world.  As soon as an econometric policy or lever were put in place, human beings (the market) cleverly adjusted to make the lever ineffectual and inoperative.  

Take for example monetary policy where a central bank (or government) manipulates the money supply, using short term interest rates.  Econometric research established that this would work.  Put up the price of short term money (the interest rate) and economic activity would slow.  It worked for a short time, until clever, resourceful human beings worked out that they too could use the same analytical tools and anticipate what the monetary authorities would do.  In gaming this system they could make money.  And they did.  As a consequence, the manipulation of the short term money supply by central banks became more and more ineffectual. 

So powerful is this phenomenon of human anticipation and adjustment it coined an economic "law": Goodharts's law--which reads,

"As soon as the government attempts to regulate any particular set of financial assets, these become unreliable as indicators of economic trends." This is because investors try to anticipate what the effect of the regulation will be, and invest so as to benefit from it. 

The assumption that human beings are not moral beings but mere ciphers to be manipulated and controlled has worked through almost all societies in the West.  Take, for example, the issue of crime. 

Already at the turn of the century, Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who achieved notoriety defending Darwinism in the Scopes trial, was portraying criminals as helpless victims of their circumstances.  In 1902, in a widely published speech to the prisoners in Chicago's Cook County Jail, he declared that "there is no such thing as a crime as the word is generally understood. . . . I do not believe that people are in jail because they deserve to be.  They are in jail simply because they cannot avoid it on account of circumstances which are entirely beyond their control and for which they are in no way responsible." [Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, 1999), p. 181.]

The implication is that if "society" were to change the circumstances of such people, crime would disappear.  A further implication is that no-one is responsible for any actions whatsoever.  We are creatures of instinct and conditioning.  We are animals and animals only.  If we do evil it is the fault of "society"--that is, of the powers that created bad conditioning in the first place. 

These false beliefs are now so disseminated through Western culture that they crop up everywhere and govern almost all social policies.  Take the punishment of crime, for example.  The man-is-a-cipher philosophy applies here as well.  Harsher and longer punishments will condition the prisoner not to do such things again. Punishment is nothing more than a calculation of incentives. There is little consideration given to the prisoner as a moral being, responsible for every action, thought, word and deed performed, firstly to the Living God, and then to his fellow man. 

Man is a glorious being--capable of highly moral actions, and of desperately wicked depravities.  Modern society ignores the possibility and reality of depravity.  Instead, modern society conducts a never-ending symphony of exoneration.  It's always someone else's fault.

Preposterous examples are legion.  Like the woman who entered a hot-dog-eating contest in a Houston nightclub.  In her rush to outdo the other contestants, she ate too quickly and began to choke.  Did the woman shrug off the mishap as a natural consequence of her own zany behaviour?  No, she decided she was a victim.  She sued the nightclub that sponsored the contest, arguing that the business was to blame because "they shouldn't have contests like that." (Ibid., p. 182).

When we deny sin as a society, when we officially regard human beings as ciphers or nothing more than animals, then we foolishly concede that all we need is more planning, more controls, more government and social programmes to resolve all human problems.  But by so doing we do not remove sin and evil, we actually unleash its destructive power on the community.