Every Good Morning

VI Cruelty may begin with submission freely given because a person wants to belong to a group because that group represents an idea he supports or an identity he wishes to take on or because doing so will provide him with advancement in the world. A Nazi does not have to be a fanatic. He can do his or her work in a desultory fashion, buried within a bureaucracy, while […]

III We appear to be neither fundamentally good nor bad. I see no evidence for either as the dominant virtue or vice, but I have seen and continue to see plenty of evidence of our fundamental malleability when we gather in groups, especially when peer pressure, dogmatic beliefs, fear, a lust for vengeance and propaganda come into play. Stanley Milgram’s experiment illustrated how authority alone, even without using threats or physical coercion, had […]

I I was about 10 when I pushed a lightning bug into an ants’ nest and watched them carry it to its death. I remember no pleasure coming from this. I remember being curious. What would happen? I felt no emotion. At the time the Baltimore Catechism presented age 7 as the age of reason, the age at which we  left our innocence behind and became accountable for our actions […]

We are in a moment when the utopian imagination is in full throated roar – the belief that human beings can be ‘fixed’ by the proper mix of social engineering and ‘virtuous thinking’.  In these various propositions of both the left and right, racism will be banished, women will have more babies, crime will vanish because every mother’s son and daughter will be armed, public schools will crank out Christian […]