American Human Nature, etc.

Human nature is neither good nor bad, but rather somewhere in between. Otherwise, why would it be called human nature? Categorizing things into only two categories, on good, one bad, oversimplifies matters. According to the Pima Creation Story, humans were made out of the shadow of the Creator’s eye, a metaphor for places where things are less than defined and neither good nor bad. Similarly, Walt Whitman affirms that “[no] man really knew aught of my life,/Why even I myself often think know little or nothing of my real life” in his poem “When I Read the Book”. Stanley Kunitz believed that human nature was like “a disembodied voice/.../...as much as one can bear to listen to its long mournful cry, a sorrow without name”, as if sorrow carved humans’ souls and guided them towards good and bad in accordance to what might ease that sorrow, even if it meant looking for more sorrow first, as he wishes he could do in “Father and Son”. Gertrude Stein believed human nature was based on repeating and repeating and repeating and loving repeating and repeating loving and that “to love repeating [is] complete understanding”.

However, this nature has generally pushed the world and America in particular towards the greater good. This may not necessarily spring from the goodness of human nature, but perhaps instead from the fear of looking like one is up to no good. Regardless, the collective human nature of the country has helped tremendously to propel it forward, something it should be commended for. As Walt Whitman put it in his Preface to Leaves of Grass, “the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors... but always most in the common people.” Perhaps not willingly or consciously, but the average American benefits his or her nation: our ‘national goodness factor’ is pretty high. We have had many successes as a country by following our human nature. Is this not the land of freedom and the people’s rule and opportunity and tolerance? (Imagine! An entire town accepted Rip Van Winkle’s crazy ideas!) Then again, we have had some setbacks, such as the institutions of slavery, racism, and murder of natives. However, we have managed, in the long run, to overcome these obstacles and shake off the dust of slavery, to restore the Indians to some of their lands, and to hold back on racism, if not eliminate it entirely. We might take a while as Americans, but we will get there.

But none of that matters at all if we do not even have a notion of what ‘good’ is. As soon as something confronts you, you unconsciously start categorizing it or possible reactions to it into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ categories. One problem: something clearly good to one person may be absolutely horrific to another. Case in point, the Iroquois Creation Story emphasizes simplicity as an essential to goodness; Walt Whitman, in his Preface to Leaves of Grass, not only venerates the American “aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean”, but leans strongly on the point, using over a dozen pages to get his point across, offering list upon colorful list to say a single thing and reveling in the quantity and complexity. Conversely, both agree that freedom is a key element of goodness and celebrate it, if in different ways. Good can best be defined as the points where the human natures of large portions of society overlap and agree that things are good. Bad can be defined the same way. All the places where opinions do not Both the Amerindians and the new settlers and the ex-slaves wanted freedom, and they got it, even if it did take time because different groups disagreed about how to get it. And so on in many other things, evolving slowly at times, but surely towards what we as Americans call good, helping countries in need, eradicating horrid institutions, moving forward. This is the point that shows that despite being only human in nature, American society can be and often is a force for good in the world.