The malleability of human beings is at once their greatest strength and their greatest weakness. It is the malleability of human beings that makes it possible for human beings to survive in the very bowels of hell and to surmount the seemingly insurmountable. By contrast, it is the very same malleability of human beings that makes it possible for one human being to look another human being squarely in the face and not recognize the other’s humanity.
But for their malleability, human beings would not have survived such horrors as American Slavery or the Holocaust. And yet again, but for their malleability human beings would not have enslaved the very people whom they would have care for their children. Nor, again, would human beings have sought sexual relations with the very people whom they sought to put in gas chambers.
Again, human beings can come to love the repentant wrongdoer. Or, human beings can wallow in self-deception to such an extent that they fully participate in their own self-destruction.
Precisely because human beings are so utterly malleable, it stands to reason that moral training and upbringing is so very important to the survival of human beings. And this, of course, is a point that both Plato and Aristotle saw ever so clearly. Aristotle explicitly claimed that human beings are neither good nor bad by nature. He held that insofar as human beings come to have an immutable moral character it is through proper moral upbringing.
One way to bring out Aristotle’s point is to look at a creature whose survival powers are rather extraordinary, namely the cockroach. This creature is capable of surviving under a variety of rather extreme circumstances—even a nuclear holocaust. The cockroach’s survival, however, has nothing to do with creativity on its part. The insect does not make a rational assessment of the situation and then chooses a very appropriate strategy of survival.
It is human beings, and only human beings, who have the ability to evaluate fully their environment and then to choose a multi-layered strategy whereby they can survive. This is something they may do explicitly. Or, this is something that they may do implicitly relying upon well-developed moral sensibilities.
One way in which we can understand contemporary Liberalism is that it diminishes the importance of moral upbringing. One way in which we can understand contemporary Conservatism is that it gives pride of place to moral upbringing. This difference when played out over generations of lives makes for a most formidable difference in the character of our moral and social reality.
The contemporary Liberal conception of the self is tied primarily to the satisfaction of desires. Liberalism has retreated so much from moral objectivity that it does not have the resources to say much about which desires should be satisfied and which should not except in the case of those desires the satisfaction of which would explicitly harm others.
The contemporary Conservative conception of the self gives pride of place to moral objectivity; accordingly, it insists that self-discipline can be virtuous even when the satisfaction of a desire would harm no one.
Now, the poignant observation that I would like to make is that it is the Conservative conception of the self—and not the Liberal one—that makes it possible for human beings to survive even in the bowels of hell.
In the face of evil, there is nothing that is more central to survival than self-discipline. In the absence of self-discipline, the Selma (Alabama) protests against racism would have failed and have failed mightily. Again, in the absence of self-discipline, the sit-ins in protests of racism would have never succeeded. Precisely, what made these stances against racism possible is the immutable commitment to a mode of behavior that had as its aim to bring about a good in society.
Now the very heart of Aristotle’s point is that those who participated in these marches and sit-ins would not have had the wherewithal to persevere if they had not had the proper upbringing from the very outset of their lives.
We can now rather pointedly state the difference between cockroaches and human beings. Evolution has programmed cockroaches to survive well in the face of a variety of harsh environments. Cockroaches do not need proper upbringing. By contrast, as evolution has constituted human beings, they will survive well in a harsh environment only if they bring to a crisis sufficient self-discipline and sufficient reflective powers. And this will happen only if, in the first place, human beings have the proper upbringing from the outset of their lives.
And if anything is true, it is true that, in the name of vapid freedom, as I would say, modernity has mightily trivialized the importance of just that—the proper upbringing from the outset of life. This is the difference between the present and yesteryear. In the past, nothing excused the absence of proper moral training—not racism, not anti-semitism, and so on. No child would dared have excused inappropriate behavior on her or his part by citing some social injustice against the group to which she or he belongs.
In the present, in anything and everything is an excuse for the absence of proper moral training. Consequently, it is now commonplace that without so much as blinking people give the most ridiculous excuses for not doing what is so profoundly and manifestly appropriate. Worse, it frequently happens that people do not even see that they need an excuse. Against this backdrop, there is simply no reason at all to be optimistic about the survival of humanity.
