Original Sin: Part 3, Immoral Society in a Malthusian World

In my last post I made the case that human acquisitiveness isn't driven by an innate and sinful selfishness. Rather, human acquisitiveness is a logical and predictable adaptation to living in a Malthusian world. In this post I want to move away from individuals and consider human society in a Malthusian world.

To make my point I'm going to borrow the sociological and anthropological analysis offered by Reinhold Niebuhr in his classic book Moral Man and Immoral Society.

First, we should acknowledge that the reactions to Niebuhr's "political realism," as articulated in Moral Man and Immoral Society, have been diverse, contradictory, and controversial. Most of the controversial bits in Moral Man and Immoral Society come in the second half of the book. What I'd like to do is focus on the first half of Moral Man and Immoral Society, the sociological analysis.

In the first half of Moral Man and Immoral Society Niebuhr makes the argument that informs his title. That is, individual persons have a chance at behaving morally while societies, inherently, cannot. As Niebuhr writes:

Individual men may be moral in the sense that they are able to consider interests other than their own in determining problems of conduct, and are capable, on occasion, of preferring the advantages of others to their own. They are endowed by nature with a measure of sympathy and consideration for their kind, the breath of which may be extended by an astute social pedagogy...But all these achievements are more difficult, in not impossible, for human societies and social groups.

Why are these moral achievements impossible for social groups? To provide his answer Niebuhr describes the psychological prerequisites necessary for moral behavior. These are empathy and perspective. Humans, as individual moral agents, can, at various times and places, pull these moral levers. They can experience compassion and envision life from the other person's perspective. By contrast, Niebuhr argues that social groups are too large and heterogeneous to get everyone's sympathies and viewpoints in line. As Niebuhr writes:

[Nations] know the problems of other people only indirectly and at second hand. Since both sympathy and justice depend to a large degree upon the perception of need, which makes sympathy flow, and upon the understanding of competing interests, which must be resolved, it is obvious that human communities have greater difficulty than individuals in achieving ethical relationship. While rapid means of communication have increased the breath of knowledge about world affairs among citizens of various nations, and the general advance of education has ostensibly promoted the capacity to think rationally and justly upon the inevitable conflicts of interests between nations, there is nevertheless little hope of arriving at a perceptible increase of international morality through the growth of intelligence and the perfection of means of communication.

In short, social groups are moral idiots, in the the old meaning of the term: Lacking skill. Morality involves accurate information to weigh various goods, fellow-feeling, and the ability for self-transencence. Although individuals can, and often do, accomplish these things it is impossible to get a whole group of people to behave, collectively and spontaneously, in a moral manner.

This doesn't make social groups inherently evil. It does, rather, suggest that social groups tend to be rather deaf and sluggish when it comes to doing "the right thing." Take, for example, America's response to Rwanda or Darfur.

But here is Niebuhr's point: This isn't going to change. It's impossible to change it. As Niebuhr notes, better education and a flatter world may improve the moral capabilities of social groups and nations but any improvement will be modest. Someone, somewhere is just not going to be on the same page. They will have been affected by skewed information or are just plain out of the loop. Darfur? Where is Darfur? By the time you get the national conscience informed and sensitized it is often too late.

My point isn't that nations can't be evil. It is, rather, that nations can't be good. And this moral idiocy isn't due to Original Sin. It's simply a sociological dynamic.

Just to be clear, this isn't to say that any of this is okay. It's horrible the way nations behave. It's abominable how slow nations react to world catastrophes and needs. Thus, we should do everything we can to spread the word, rouse the passions, and rally our fellows. But even if much of what we are fighting against is demonic or the product primal human depravity I'm suggesting that, even if you subtract those things out, societies will still be immoral due to the fact that social aggregates, per Niebuhr's analysis, cannot move cohesively and nimbly in the face of moral challenges.

In short, you don't need to posit human depravity to get a pretty crappy world. The world is going to be fundamentally immoral because groups are, through no intrinsic fault of their own, moral idiots. And this brings me back to my Malthusian theme that we are finite creatures in a finite world. We don't need to go into the souls of men to look for a twisted worm at the core. We might, rather, take note of extrinsic factors, like impersonal sociological dynamics, that make morality difficult if not impossible to achieve.

Next Post: Part 4