THE SEARCH FOR GOOD GOES AWRY
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Fred Turner isn’t so sure any more about the purity of human beings. He started walking across America to prove that most people are good. His theory was that only one in one hundred was bad. “I found my one bad one,” he said. Turner only got as far as the state line. Walking across the Tuckaseking Bridge in South Carolina, two men pulled up in a red pick-up truck. “They asked me if I was the guy walking across America. I said yes and they said, ‘Good, give me your wallet.’” They robbed him, punched him in the chest, and pushed him off the bridge. He probably would have been killed were it not for the backpack cushioning his fall.
There have always been idealists who believed than man is basically good. I wish it were so. But if man is so good, why has he been so bad? The classic answer to that question, made popular by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the mid-eighteenth century, is that we are born good but are corrupted by civilization. But how did civilization get so bad? Answer: by bad individuals. But how did those individuals get so bad if they were born good?
Round and round we go.
We have not always been the best of citizens.
· In January, 1993, 75-year old Russell Plaisance offered to help a poor family he had read about in the newspaper. They repaid his kindness by kidnapping him at knife point, tying him up and leaving him in a ditch. Plaisance believes they would have butchered him had he not begged for his life.
· Milton Metcalf of Loveland, Ohio, claims to have helped some stranded motorists. When he bought them gasoline, they splashed it on him and lit a match. He died from his wounds.
· Around thirty years ago, Amy Biehl, a 26-year-old a Fulbright scholar in South Africa, was attempting to help black citizens register to vote. A few days before she was scheduled to leave, a mob pulled her from a car, crushed her face with a brick, and stabbed her to death.
· Wallace Tope, a street evangelist, went into the midst of a Los Angeles riot to preach to looters. He was brutally beaten so and died after nineteen months in a coma.
In spite of these horrifying accounts, some continue to insist that man is born good. To prove their point, they occasionally trot out a tribe of primitives who are apparently non-violent, passive and loving. “If these primitives can do it,” they seem to be saying, “then the rest of civilized humanity can also live in peace. We can learn from them.” The trouble is that those “peaceful,” smiling tribesmen invariably turn out to be as barbaric as everyone else.
In 1924, sociologist, Margaret Mead travelled to Samoa to where she “studied” the natives. She described them as “one of the most amiable, least contentious, and most peaceful people in the world.” She claimed further that “the idea of forceful rape… is completely foreign to the Samoan mind.” Forty years later, anthropologist, Derek Freedman, debunked all of Mead’s findings. “I have yet to meet a Samoan,” wrote Freeman, “who agrees with Mead’s assertion that adolescence in Samoan society is smooth, untroubled and unstressed.” More to the point, he concluded that Mead’s findings, “are, in reality, the figment of an anthropological myth.”
The numbers bear this out. Serious assault in mid-1960s Western Samoa was 67 percent higher than in the USA, 494 percent higher than in Australia, and 847 percent higher than in New Zealand, while common assault was 500 percent that of the USA. Freeman reports that rape convictions in 1960s Samoa were twice the level of those in the USA and twenty times those of the UK. Meanwhile, the seemingly peaceful Hawaiians in quaint grass skirts fought bloody battles. Rousseau, who never traveled to America described the natives as “noble Savages,” living in natural innocence, freedom easy sex and equality. But some burned enemies alive, ripped their scalps off, sacrificed hundreds of their own people, and ripped out their beating hearts.
The nobleness of primitive tribes is more than an anthropological myth; it’s a dangerous absurdity. Why dangerous? Because we need to deal with people as they are, not as we would like them to be. Some are evil, some are good, and all are subject to flaws of the species. We humans have a problem. It won’t be ameliorated by making believe it doesn’t exist.
Poor Fred Turner. He wants to show that people are good. And in truth, many are. The vast majority of us have never killed or raped anyone. Many of us give to charities and volunteer our time to help people.
But we lock our doors at night just in case.