What the Pandemic Reveals about Human Nature: Homo Homini Lupus

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.

 

What does it even mean to be a ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’?

 During a political argument, when someone calls you a liberal, they probably mean you are a hypocrite. To be tarred a progressive or leftist is to be declared at best naïve, at worst, a bloody communist.

If the slur is you’re a conservative, they mean you’re heartless. To be slugged right-wing means you’re on the reactionary-fascist continuum.

The premise of these political putdowns is that your interlocutor holds your thinking – maybe you too – to be not just disagreeable but bordering on devilish.

Since many of us are locked into this weltanschauung, the prospect that the camp we disagree with will be ascendant is downright terrifying.

Liberalism and conservatism are ideologies.   

Political scientist James Q. Wilson, who died in 2012, defined ideology as “a coherent and consistent set of beliefs about who ought to rule, what principles rulers ought to obey, and what policies rulers ought to pursue.”

Liberalism and conservatism have been defined and redefined over time and place. The Liberal Party of Australia is conservative by the American definition. In Israel, left and right only approximately mean what it does in the US.

In the contemporary American setting, liberalism meant championing liberty in personal matters, free-market capitalism in economics, and gradualist reform in the social sphere. A liberal would favor decriminalizing abortion and homosexuality, support low tariffs on international trade, and favor welfare and health coverage for the indigent.

Conservatism arose in the face of reforms gone too far (specifically, the 1789 French Revolution which overthrew King Louis XVI but led to the Jacobian Reign of Terror). A conservative would be someone who wanted to safeguard enduring values and the traditional way things were done. Change, more often than not, was to be resisted. Conservatives tend to be skeptical of the government’s ability to be efficient and effective.

Liberals were those who favored government intervention to make things better in the economy and the social sphere. They argued it was the government’s responsibility to ensure that all Americans had access to a socio-economic safety net. While conservatives were worried that if the government became too interventionist, it would become overbearing and interfere with personal liberties.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was a quintessential liberal who instituted Social Security for older Americans. Ronald Reagan was the archetypal conservative who famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

In a healthy polity there are few pure liberals and conservatives. Most thinking folks calibrate their positions as they grapple with thorny real-life challenges. For example, a social conservative might in principle oppose abortion but not in the case of rape or incest.

Today, it seems to me, ideologues have moved from Wilson’s description of “coherent and consistent” to calcified and fanatical. We seem to have lost the ability to adjust – to determine the Golden Mean.

A realignment of America’s political spectrum is underway. Liberals and conservatives are embracing increasingly extreme positions. Liberals are becoming less tolerant and open-minded. Trumpian conservatives are interested in radically changing the liberal status quo.

Partisan trench warfare predominates. Ideological nonconformists who stick their heads up to utter something that sounds vaguely nondogmatic are liable to get their brains blown out. There is no place for anti-Trump conservatives in the Republican Party. There is less and less safe space for old school liberals in the Democratic Party.

New Conservatism

These days Trumpian conservatism stands broadly for championing protectionist capitalism, neo-isolationism, nationalism, opposition to gun control, partial re-criminalization of abortion, and robust individual rights against an overprotective and intrusive state.

Trumpian conservatism not only holds that the government can’t competently address climate change, but it also denies global warming is even a problem. According to the president, California’s forests are burning because the state has neglected to clean the leaves from the forests’ floors. Remnant conservatives who care about environmental conservation carefully package their concerns so as not to infuriate the Trumpians.

On the porous margins of Trumpian conservatism are the conspiratorial-minded neo-fascist extremists who run the gamut from nazis and klaners to militiamen and white nationalists.

New Liberalism

Over in the liberal camp nowadays, the push has gone way beyond equal opportunity in race matters, beyond affirmative action quotas in hiring and education. Today’s liberals want the government to guarantee economic and social outcomes, use taxes to profoundly redistribute societal resources, robustly regulate the private sector, and take sweeping steps to repair the despoiled environment. The government’s role is to steer citizens toward healthier more just lives.

That the seam from reform-oriented liberalism to change-oriented progressivism has been crossed is nowhere better reflected then in vanguard media outlets like The New York Times. If liberals in the 1960s sought to protect criminal suspects from self-incrimination and to guarantee legal due process, in the 2020s progressives want suspects arrested for nonviolent felonies (subway turnstile jumping, belligerent panhandling, or vandalism) to be released without having to post bail.

The Trump era seems to have accelerated a shift that has delivered many liberals into the progressive bloc. As progressives they are reoriented to be mortified that whites continue to dominate the United States. Support for the amorphous Black Lives Matter movement, whatever its rolling open-ended demands, is axiomatic irrespective of reactionary, supremacist, or anti-Semitic positions voiced by some BLM figures. Jewish liberals once felt sufficiently secure to challenge the excesses of the Black Lives Matter narrative. Now, making BLM engageable is the order of the day.

Taking a page from Maoism, progressives aim to refurbish human nature with an emphasis on those of European white origin. Prejudice regardless if it is subconscious or dormant must be excised through a process of self-criticism and reeducation. Individuals who fall short should be prepared to be publicly humiliated. At the same time, white progressives must take care to avoid cultural appropriation by, for example, relocating into a historically black neighborhood.

Progressives are trained to acknowledge that whatever good fortune birth bestowed upon them is an illicit privilege. This has led some progressives to defend looting by people of color as legitimate. Male progressives have additional obligations to be “woke” or acutely attuned to political and social transgressions and patriarchal tendencies. Men need to abjure interrupting a woman while she is speaking or mansplaining, which is talking to a woman in a way that could be perceived as condescending. Progressive individuals need to unconditionally support LGBTQ+ culturally and politically, though the highest level of woke might also endorse the idea that the endgame should be the abolition of the family.

On the margins of the progressive camp is the hard-left amalgamation known as Antifa. Anarchist, Antifa follows a utopian philosophy aimed at repairing human nature and opposing all forms of hierarchy, including the state. In other words, they do not want a change in government. They want to collapse the state. Adherents, dressed in black, come together to fight the police and their right-wing adversaries.

To further muddle matters, some anarchists belong on the radical right because their goal beyond the downfall of the United States is the rise of whites-only enclaves.

Whatever the terms “liberal” and “conservative” once meant, their definition continues to evolve and not, it seems to me, in a politically healthy direction.

The Trumpian camp commands the GOP and the conservative brand. I assume his followers will continue to do so even if Donald Trump is no longer president.

While tensions between liberals and progressives are rife within the Democratic Party, these have mainly been put on hold to present a united front against Trump. Should the Biden/Harris liberal ticket be victorious, the Sanders/Warren/ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez progressive wing can be expected to demand their due.

For those Americans who are not at home either among Trumpian conservatives or woke progressives there is – for now at least – only the political wilderness.

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