Public health authorities uniformly agree that if you put distance between yourself and people who don’t live in your household, cover your mouth and nose with a mask when around others, and wash your hands often – COVID-19 would stop spreading.
Thinking about this recalls the Jewish
legend that if every Jew were to observe two consecutive Shabbats, the Messiah
would come.
But human nature keeps getting in
the way.
During ordinary times, the
continuum of human nature finds most of us somewhere between self-interested
and altruistic. However, during prolonged periods of crisis such as the COVID-19
pandemic in which we find ourselves people gravitate toward extreme
self-interest.
So what our pandemic reveals to
me about human nature is, as Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote,
paraphrasing Thomas Hobbes that Homo Homini Lupus “man is a wolf to other men.”
Garden variety liberals being
optimistic about human nature, would take exception to this glum view. While utopians
– be they communists and anarchists on the left or nazis on the right – claim that
they know how to alter human nature. The genocide carried out by Hitler, Stalin,
Mao, and the Khmer Rouge was intended to perfect humanity.
But what does the Corona pandemic
show us about human nature? Consider how political systems (Israel, China, or
the US, for instance), organizations (such as hospitals, HMOs, and universities),
and the private sector (like big technology) have deported themselves during
the COVID-19 pandemic.
At best they have mostly failed in their missions.
It is easy to blame a nincompoop
president, a distracted prime minister, or a sclerotic public health
bureaucracy.
It is right to doubt the decency
of clerics, who would wantonly endanger their flock to preserve control and
insularity.
However, in the last analysis,
isn’t the refusal by so many to take individual responsibility the crux of the
problem?
The davka decision not to
wear face masks, wear them as bracelets, or with noses protruding spotlights varying
degrees of self-centeredness. Individuals or groups who demand to exercise
their absolute right to crowd together for rowdy street demonstrations or pack
into confined interior spaces to pray or party are being maliciously egocentric.
Of course, that’s not how they see it.
In his legendary The
Tortoise’s Little Green Book, Robert Ringer offers this maxim about human
nature: “The most prudent way of
dealing with people is to assume that their way of defining things is: Good is
what I do; bad is what you do. Right is what I do; wrong is what you do. Ethical
is what I do; unethical is what you do.”
The protesters shrieking at
police near Israel’s Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem see themselves not
as vaporizing virus-laden aerosol but as warriors for justice. Everyone thinks
the best of themselves, from youthful party animals
and attendees at illicitly large Arab weddings, to Haredim
jammed into
mega-synagogues and politicians negotiating the contours of a lockdown with politics, not public health their
paramount consideration.
Thinking about human nature and what
makes people selfish or considerate delivers me to the intersection of
philosophy-theology and psychology.
Philosophy
Thucydides tells us that left to
their own devices, people will commonly exacerbate chaotic situations instead
of pulling together. Aristotle understood that by nature, the Masses are Asses.
Whatever else, he believed, Spinoza agreed that people were not inherently well-intentioned.
Likewise, James Madison believed
foremost that men were not angels – human nature could go either way. That
given the opportunity, individuals would choose to tyrannize their fellows. While
no form of government could protect people from each other’s passions, in crafting
the US Constitution, Madison, taking human nature into account, designed the US
not a popular (majoritarian) democracy but as a republic. The people did not
elect the president; they did not elect their senators. The original US
Constitution also constrained the ruling elites (through checks and balances and a separation
of powers) so that they did not act rashly in the heat of the moment. In
Madison’s eyes
…Man is known to be selfish… We all know that conscience is not a
sufficient safeguard and besides that conscience itself may be deluded may be
misled… into acts which an enlightened conscience would forbid…
Theology
Jewish tradition instructs that individuals
have free will. God expects us to choose wisely. By creating us in His
image, humans were endowed with reason. For Maimonides, following Aristotle,
reason should move a person to behave in a virtuous manner, which means pursuing
the Golden Mean. I suppose in Corona terms, that requires acting neither solely
self-interestedly nor self-sacrificingly altruistic.
A midrash suggests that God
created man because angels were, well too angelic, and animals, perhaps, too
bestial. Our assignment is to balance our good and bad inclinations.
Jewish civilization holds that reasonable
self-interest is perfectly normal. The sages also figured that a person’s real
character is revealed when their guard is down. Nothing takes your guard down more than a pandemic.
Psychology
Sigmund Freud argued that
civilization hangs on our ability to sublimate the desire for immediate
gratification. The constraints placed on us by political society compete with
base instincts. Only the discipline of living in society caps our instincts.
“The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization,” Freud says in Civilization
and its Discontents.
When individuals or groups lose
their sense of shame – when shanda disappears – the foundations of civilization are
undermined. Guilt is the price we pay to advance civilization, Freud argued.
Now that we’ve stopped worrying about “what the goyim will say,” we’ve compromised
ourselves.
Perhaps Israelis’ collective ennui
has made us angrier. We appear incapable of expressing remorse for acting
against the greater good. On the contrary, the dissonance between what we know
is right and how we behave leads us to self-justification and finger-pointing.
While the Messiah tarries and COVID-19
spreads we pay pre-Yom Kippur lip-service to introspection and repentance.
Alas, the morbidity and mortality
numbers two weeks hence are likely to reveal the truth about our natures.
Great piece! Grand Ideas. Got me thinking…
ReplyDeleteThe conception of human nature as Homo Homini Lupus could very well be our baseline condition, which really comes to the fore during a pandemic, but I wonder how that is tempered, or exacerbated in particular political systems and climates.
Some countries – South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Canada, Germany, Argentina, to name a few – have done really well to contain the virus. People and politicians in those countries appear to be acting in unison with public health directives.
Could it be that Israel’s current brand of fierce political polarization and, as you say, politicians acting on political calculations (not public health ones), coupled with an Israeli modus operandi of anti-freierism (willingness to flout the rules, lest you become a sucker) has made everything much worse here?
And ditto, or something similar, for the U.S.?
Not too long ago, it seems to me, Israelis seemed much more willing to put political differences aside when confronting a common threat. Israel’s survival in a precarious neighborhood required a level of consensus-building not common to other countries.
But that consensus has broken down, and only very recently, or so it seems to me. Political tribalism, of the kind strikingly similar to that of the U.S., has become ascendant. What caused this sudden rift?