I had a strange conversation the other day.

I was talking to an acquaintance about some relatively unimportant matter when something I said stopped him.

He paused, gave me an appraising look, then said, "Oh. You're one of those liberals."

I asked what he meant by that, and he proceeded to explain to me that "liberals" believe that "humans are good by nature, and all the evil in the world is caused by misunderstandings."

I didn't know what to say. He was, after all, right—except that he was also wrong.

My own point of view isn't rooted so much in liberalism as it is in a natural spirituality, and it's quite a bit more complicated than my friend seems to think.

To begin with, I don't mean the same thing by "good" that he does. In fact, I doubt if he has a clear idea of what he means by the word himself. It's a slippery term, which changes its meaning in different contexts, and is almost never clearly defined.

It's particularly hard to pin down what it would mean when applied to an entire species.

Are ants good by nature? Bears? How about Aardvarks?

I think it would depend on whom you asked. My Grandmother disliked ants—so much that she put out poison, designed to attract and kill them. If those ants had been bright enough to understand what she was doing, they would have probably thought she was evil, as well.

Think of a mother bird, feeding her babies. Is she being good, or bad? I'm sure she's good, from the chicks' point of view, but what does the worm think?

The mother bird is being a good bird. That is, she's acting the way a bird acts. It isn't really a matter of virtue, or of vice. Likewise, I can't really see how we can characterize the human race as "bad".

Humans are, well, human. We act according to human nature, the same way a bird acts according to its nature. It's as silly to call us "bad" as a species, as it would be to call robins "bad".

But, of course, from a robin's point of view, robin behavior is good behavior—on average, anyway.

That is, a robin may object to another robin entering its territory (are robins territorial?). It might, if it could talk, say the other robin was being "bad". But this is a distinction between robins, not a general indictment. And what do you think the chances are that the other robin would agree?

So with humans. We are what we are, as a species. It so happens that we are highly social, and value things like fairness and care for others. It also happens that we are highly influenced by all kinds of cultural constraints, and sometimes cultural priorities clash with each other.

We, like robins, have a certain amount of aggressiveness in our nature—a good thing, which can sometimes lead to unfortunate results. We also have a certain number of psychopaths among us, and borderlines, who can be dangerous.

Also, we do not do well in situations where there is a sizable imbalance of power, as there has been for the last 12,000 years or so.

Only an idiot would ignore all this. Only a Pollyanna would set public policy, or even a private policy, that pretended every human we meet can simply be reasoned with, or can be always and completely trusted—for all of the reasons above and more.

On the other hand, we are not going to get anywhere by assuming that our enemies are evil—that they are acting out of pure malice or perversity, or even excessive selfishness—that their motives, and nature, are fundamentally any different than our own.

Nor are we going to make any progress by assuming the same about ourselves.

We must find ways to be what we are (human) together, without ruining life for each other. 

That path does not begin by claiming that our species is, by nature, defective—or that our enemies are even more so.