Two Views of Human Nature

Keeping the Faith

When it comes to human nature, the Scriptures are blunt.  No gilding of lilies here.  Jeremiah says,

The heart is deceitful above all things,
    and desperately sick;
    who can understand it?
“I the Lord search the heart
    and test the mind,
to give every man according to his ways,
    according to the fruit of his deeds.”
[Jeremiah 17:9-10]

At root, humanity is so bad, the deceit so deep rooted, that the truth within a man's heart cannot be discovered, let alone mined.   The intentions, the motivations, the principles, the emotions at play are all so complex and interwoven and confused that man is beyond understanding.

Thus runs the Bible's indictment of us all.

Not so, says the modern politician.  Humans are basically honest and decent folk. Oh, well, that settles that, then.

Whilst this optimistic view of mankind is everywhere, nowhere is it more dangerous than in the corridors and offices of political power.  It leads politicians to ignore the goals and motivations of human behaviour; instead, politicians they can benefit society hugely simply by passing rules (which all citizens will hasten to obey and comply with because they are honest and decent folk.)  The passing of the law is all the that is required for a righteous outcome.

Recently this has been grandly displayed in New Zealand with the left-wing Labour Party gaining power.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (About The Rebellion Against Nature)

A Surgical Rape of Nature

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

Over the years I have expressed in various ways my great debt to The Abolition of Man. This book was published as a non-fiction companion to my favorite novel, which is That Hideous Strength. Every year that goes by simply reinforces Lewis’s prescience.

In this post, I want to summarize The Abolition of Man in a paragraph, then take issue with a passing reference that Lewis makes near the end of his argument, and then go on to make some observations about Lewis’s profound insight into the precise nature of the modern rebellion.

Lewis begins with the modern effort to debunk statements of value, showing that this debunking spirit is a universal corrosive. It will eat out any container you try to store it in. He shows how our brand of relativism is arbitrary and capricious, tending to select one aspect of traditional morality, and absolutizing it randomly over against the rest. The result of this rejection of the Tao is something that Lewis calls “men without chests.” They have no fixed system of value and so it is that they are adrift in a blind and stupid cosmos.

Now at the same time we are embracing an inchoate hot mess as an ethical system, we are simultaneously making tremendous advances in the technocratic sciences, such that more and more of nature is coming under our authority.