Randall was a serious kid, who always wanted to do the right thing. He was deeply troubled by his grades in high school, and, I suspect, even more troubled by what he thought his parents thought about them.
We were looking at a math test he had recently taken, and he was very upset.
"No matter what I do," he said, "I still fail—I tried so hard."
"What makes you say that?" I asked.
"Well, just look at it. Remember all that help you gave me, and all the extra problems I did? And I still only got 78%."
"Yes. But when you first started working with me, you were getting 30% and 40%, remember?"
Randall, like many of my clients, was fighting a battle with arbitrary expectations. He fully believed that any grade less than an "A" was a failure. He had made tremendous strides so far, but he couldn't see them.
And he was lucky. He had more perseverance than many, so that, so far, he had not become discouraged enough to give up.
Arbitrarily high standards can actually endanger students' chances of success, making it impossible for them to see the real progress they are making, and get the encouragement they need to continue. I often have to spend time and effort getting clients to see that a jump from 30% to 60% is an important improvement, and, all too often, I have to do the same for parents and teachers.
But this post is not about academics. It's about a similar mistake people often make when talking about human nature.
I had a conversation last week with a friend, who asked why anyone would do anything for anyone else if they weren't forced to, by moral rules.
I told her that we were a social species, and that helping others was just something we did.
"Except," she said, "we don't." She proceeded to list a number of (I assume) her favorite causes, and to point out that no one cared enough about them.
I can empathize. I have favorite causes myself. And I can understand why she thinks hers are so important. There's a lot of suffering in this world, and we are not addressing all, or even most of it, very well.
But it doesn't make sense to leap from that to a criticism of human nature.
Consider. We evolved in small groups of hunter gatherers, who had absolutely no way of knowing what was going on with humans in the next valley, let alone on the other side of the world. Is it any surprise that our kind and generous natures are primarily focused on the people we are closest to?
The surprising thing—astounding, when you think of it—is that we actually do care, at all, about people we have never met.
But you don't need to take an evolutionary perspective to see this. Just think of simple efficiency. We care most about those who are closest to us—in other words, about those whom we can most efficiently help.
Imagine what a bizarrely inefficient world we would live in if it were the other way around—if each of us cared more (or even equally, for that matter) for people we didn't even know, on the other side of the planet, than we did for our own families and neighbors. "Sorry kids, no food tonight, I'm sending the money to Borneo." (Where, presumably, some or most of it would be sent elsewhere, for similar selfless motives.)
It makes great sense that humans care more for those who are near than for those who are far.
That is not to say that there aren't great inequities in the world. Things are definitely out of balance. But the mere fact that we recognize those inequities, and that many of us actually try to do something about them, is a tribute to the species.
Of course, I only think that because I care, and I only care because I'm human.
Can we do more? Certainly. We've only just begun to adjust to a world in which we know what's happening on the other side of the globe, and we still have to figure out how to balance our empathy for these newly discovered relatives against our empathy for our immediate friends and family.
But we're getting better.
Don't give up on the human race.
We just have to figure out how to get a "C" before we can move on to "A's".
