Depravity

I'm not sure whether I like how the word "depraved" is loaded, but I do think the question of "how naturally or fundamentally evil are people?" is an important one, and I guess "depravity" is how that's talked about in Christian theology.

How "depraved" are people?

I don't think reality makes a lot of sense if people have zero moral agency, no ability to make choices morally. (Moral free will is why there is unbearable suffering, as far as I can tell.) So I don't think people can be 100% predisposed to evil, otherwise they wouldn't be the evil ones, but rather that predisposition, or, originally, the being or beings that predisposed them so. I guess it's possible for it to be the case that suffering is permitted for the sake of other beings who have free will, other than humans. Then, perhaps, humans could be 100% predisposed toward evil -- but I think really humans just wouldn't exist as persons, and only as appendages of the body of the being that used them for evil.

On some level, I know myself, and can't be wrong about myself, having privileged access to myself, and I make decisions sometimes. They may be constrained by the options available, but I choose. I know that I affirm the good, and chafe at evil. Sometimes I fail to deeply oppose evil, or perhaps even like it, and that comes from the real me. Perhaps I am not in touch with decisions I have made (and likely will make) that go against my affirmation or chafing in the moment, and my whole person is not as affirming of the good, or inclined to chafe against evil, as I feel, but in the moment, with that little piece of me that is alive right then, I do affirm, or chafe, out of the I that is saying "I affirm good" or "I chafe at evil". My will is free, most of my waking life, though it may have limited options and efficacy.

In some moments I find myself doing things that I don't want to do, automatically, and being tempted by forces that I didn't choose to put into my thought-life, which put me in positions where my behavior is relatively far from what I would do if I were left in the most favorable situations. Part of my human nature is my body, the flesh of my brain, and it paints a picture of me to others and even myself which is not always accurate, through my behavior. It distorts the signal I'm really trying to send to others, and I can even take it to be who I am when it is a distortion, and not a trustworthy image of my real intentions.

Human behavior is somewhat naturally depraved, because our brains are programmed to sometimes be aggressive, hypersexual, manipulative, controlling, etc. But humans are not exactly the same as their behavior. Human behavior is often naturally whatever we would call the opposite of "depraved". And again, humans are not exactly the same as their behavior.

Where does this extra-human depravity come from? We don't choose it. Does God choose it? Why would God choose it? I don't think God could choose it. So who chose it? Presumably it came through the power of Satan. Satan wills that we have these aggressive, hypersexual, manipulative, controlling, etc. psychological natures. If Satan's will no longer prevails, then they go away. Psychopathy seemingly follows from genes. If these genes, and their phenotypes, are healed, then those who seem to be, from a behavioral point of view, moral monsters, may turn out to be merely humanly depraved. It's possible for someone to freely choose to be a psychopath, but perhaps in many or even most cases, people are psychopathic apart from any decision they made.

What do humanly depraved people look like? Someone like Tim Keller (whom I am using here as a name for a sincere, thoughtful, and kind Calvinist) would say "like me -- at my best". These are the horrific depths of human depravity, apart from the interference of Satan. It may sound like I'm making a joke at the expense of Calvinism, but I see an important truth in that view, which is that it's dangerous to assume you are no longer evil in any significant way, like your evil side could be rounded down to zero in your eyes, even if you are as mild-mannered as Tim Keller. We are tempted to view human nature through the lens of how bad Satan makes us, and how good God makes us, the behavior and outward appearance of us, and not our hearts which really choose.

I think that people are programmed or possessed both to be good and to be evil, and in their freedom, really are both good and evil, until they (we?) finish fully choosing the good. (Or choose to be evil sufficiently firmly to prevent them (us?) from fully choosing the good.)

Book Review Preview: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

See also the review.

One thing I've been thinking about recently is how nations are and are not like individuals. We can mentalize nations as individuals, or as horses with riders, or as impersonal phenomena (maybe in other ways?).

When a president acts, does the nation act? Presidents come and go, like different personalities in someone with multiple personalities. An individual president can be evil. Do they make the whole nation -- all of its trends, cultures, emergent phenomena -- evil? We attack a whole nation to deal with an evil president. We might have discipline to not see the nation as being the same as the president. But maybe the president affects how we see the nation. A president (or other elites) can shape the nation they live in.

We are privy to our own conflicting thoughts and feelings. But when we see other people, we are not privy to theirs. All we see is their behavior. We mentalize a person within the behavior -- that is them. But we know from our inside view of ourselves that there is a distinction between the I and the different forces within us. It's like we are presidents of ourselves. We have some control over our body's behavior. But we are not identical with the body that behaves, even though that forms other people's view of us. Functionally, maybe, we are the body that behaves. And maybe if we are good presidents of ourselves, we rule over our conflicting thoughts and feelings better, to form a stronger, more coherent "nation".

That's one dimension of the question of "how do nations resemble individuals?" and I assume that there may be other dimensions. Does it make sense to look at nations using the tools of psychology? Are nations like people with borderline personality disorder, multiple personalities? Are there therapies to use on a nation that might produce more coherent "national psychologies"? Other questions, after those, might be "is it maybe a good thing that nations are incoherent or semicoherent?" or "what are the upsides of national incoherence or semicoherence?"

One story I've written recently (Two Personalities in the Body Politic) talks somewhat about these issues and it is a takeoff on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. I don't remember in any detail what goes on in that book, but I can easily re-read it because it is short.

So, I intend to read it, through the lens of how it might possibly shed light on this question of "national psychology".

I think Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde might give insight on the ways in which temporary leaders of bodies of people might think about how to behave given that they won't always be in power. Also, how to think about nations that have within them radically different factions.

News: 26 January 2022

Over the last month, I wanted to get work done on the Bible project and MSLN book. But some things came up and I found it hard to get into a good workflow for those projects. I did do some good work for the MSLN book one day.

I did get some thinking done about the Bible project. I realized there was a significant "bug" in my process so far (which I had left off at the beginning of Exodus). I missed a couple of important dimensions to the question of how to ask who God is, the question I've been pursuing in the first pass of the Bible project. So now I realize I need to think of some way to make sure I have a good set of sensitivities before going forward. I don't want to get to the end of Revelation and realize "I should have been looking for X the whole time." It might happen but I want to do what I can to prevent it.

I thought about trying to come up with a philosophical account of what goes into who a person is. That's not an easy task, at least it doesn't seem so at first. Another approach is to go through Genesis and try really hard to think of different dimensions to who God is as I go through it. Then take a break. Then go back and do it again. Until I'm not getting anything new. Perhaps I will pursue a mixture of the two approaches.

Unrelatedly, I also thought of a way to improve my overall project (a better plan of action for the Bible project).

It's tricky managing this project because I don't think there's a formula for how to work. Should I push ahead? If I were really good at that, I might miss some of these improvements in "how" I do things. (I might get so far in I can't change to accommodate them.) I might excel at "that" I do them but have a worse final product. But if I don't ever push ahead and get things done, no final product will result.

Some of the time this last month I was working on computer maintenance. It's an interesting perspective to compare ideas to computer programs. Also, thinking about analogies between computer security and "mental security" (an analog of "mental health" or "mental strength"). I was struck by how when I looked in my virtual private server's logs, there were a lot of login attempts by bots that were just trying to see what would work (guessing passwords randomly). (This is typical for VPSes.) By analogy, things try to gain access to your mind and control you, like advertisements or attacks from the spiritual world. They are low-level and pervasive like the bots. And there's something cheap and dumb about them, like bots guessing passwords randomly -- "seeing whatever works".