The Goodness of people

Here’s a question for you: would you say people – in general – are essentially good, or bad? There are two opposing schools of thought on this, and what we decide is reflected in the society we create.

Our society (the way things are set up in Britain, and probably the western world generally) operates from a general assumption that people are corrupt. Their default is to be bad – that if left to our own devices we will disintegrate into lawlessness, selfishness and infighting. So society is set up to try and police people and control them (in a benign way, admittedly) and hold them back from their base roots. A bit like masters in an old-fashioned boarding school.

We have the influence of religion and culture that reinforces that. Old-school Christianity that focusses on things like the Psalmist saying; ‘Surely I was sinful from the moment my mother conceived me’ (Psalm 51) and Paul in Romans writing that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3). I believe in the accuracy of both pieces of scripture, but I also believe that there is more to the story – the picture is more nuanced (and more generous to our human nature).

Something that reinforces this religious control perspective is popular culture from the past, usually born out Victorian style boarding schools. Like the depressive William Golding and his book Lord of the Flies. A group of boys are shipwrecked and have to fend for themselves, and it ends in a breakdown of ‘civilised’ behaviour into tribal battles. This is what we think happens if we set a group of people loose with no external control, moderation or policing – they will devolve into animals and end up killing each other. Civilisation breaks down. We descend to our lowest default state.

I would like to challenge that worldview. I don’t believe that it is the case that we are essentially evil and corrupt. What if we are essentially good? That if you lift the control and civilising influence of the school master state – or as used to be the case the priest keeping everyone on the straight and narrow – our goodness might shine? We might get the chance to grow up and display naturally inherent goodness in our society.

We’ve seen how the majority of people have pulled together this year in response to the coronavirus pandemic – and actually once rules were enforced externally and we got back to our old ways, some of that goodness – that altruism – was lost.

What if we shipwrecked a group of boys on an island for real? What would happen then? If a group of boys were shipwrecked and left to fend for themselves, would it be like Lord of the Flies where they descended into base animal behaviour, or would we find the essential goodness of humankind would prevail?

Well, in the 1960s a group of six boys from a boarding school in Tonga found themselves in that very situation. There were six such boys who were discovered 15 months after being shipwrecked on an island in the South Pacific, and a very different picture to William Golding’s was discovered.

Retold in the book Humankind, by Rutger Bregman, the man who discovered them found a well-organised camp, with hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater and a communal food garden. While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year. The boys agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer.

It is in stark contrast to what we imagine might happen – and maybe it points to people (in general) being essentially good. And maybe we need to address this narrative that exists that we are bad. We pick on the few who do seem intent on ruining it for the rest of us, or the minority who do commit crime and perpetrate evil, and we construct a narrative that humankind is corrupted, and needs saving from itself. And then we boil down that narrative to a personal level – that we are bad.

It is true that we have all sinned – we consistently do the things we ought not to do and don’t do the things we ought to do (in the words of the Anglican prayer of penitence). And no religion has ever found a solution to the problem of sin. And then Jesus came and stepped into our place to take the punishment we were due, and we find that he also agrees to work on our hearts and cleanse, heal and restore us as human beings. But back into what? Our original design. Who we really are. Made in God’s image. And to paraphrase God – don’t ever call unclean something which I have created and made clean.

God thinks you’re OK. And his love for you is not performance-based but identity-based.

I think we need to rethink people, and their innate goodness. And create conditions where their good, inner-selves can flower and flourish, rather than trying to control and supress their bad sides. In God’s Kingdom the good is called out from people’s identities, and they are enabled to step into the people they were truly destined to be. Now that’s a model for society if ever there was one!