Better Angels of Our Nature

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” -Abraham Lincoln, inaugural address, 1861

We are living in trying times. The global pandemic we are now experiencing comes on top of already strained human relations due to political and religious extremism, a dangerously warming planet, and a general fear for our future and the future of our children. And it’s not bringing out the best in many people. Let’s face it, we humans have our dark side, not just on the grand scale of Holocaust and Slavery but on the basic level of unkind thoughts, selfishness, gossip…the list could go on for a while. We look at videos of people fighting over toilet paper with horror and disgust and forget that three and a half months ago we were looking at videos of people fighting over televisions on Black Friday. Perceived scarcity is not our best look.

But thank goodness that’s not the whole story. For every story you hear about someone who breaks quarantine or persists in shaking everyone’s hand in spite of being exposed to the virus, there are many unheard stories of people being extra vigilant – not out of a sense of self preservation (98.9 percent of those who contract the virus will not die from it, after all) but from a sense of civic duty and a desire to protect everyone’s “nana and granddaddy,” to paraphrase US Surgeon General Jerome Adams.

I was listening to the podcast “On Being with Krista Tippett” recently and she was interviewing Nicholas Christakis, who runs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University. Christakis studies not only how humans come together to form a good society through our capacities for love, friendship, cooperation, and teaching, but how these capacities have been formed by strong evolutionary forces. In other words, these positive capacities are part of what has ensured our survival as a species and are therefore deeply ingrained. Although we can sometimes despair that humans are becoming less good over time, some studies have shown that we are actually becoming less violent and more cooperative (one critical look at that assertion can be found here). As Christakis says, “You don’t need to just look at what I would regard as relatively recent historical and cultural forces to get an account of a good life. Deeper, more powerful, more ancient forces are at work, propelling a good society, endowing us with these wonderful capacities, which were always there, are still there, are unavoidable; and if anything, these moves that we’ve made as a species in the last few hundred years are, again, as I’ve said, the thin veneer over this more fundamental reality of the better angels of our nature.” 

Saturday night Chris, Sam, and I were all feeling worn out by our efforts to stay informed and well prepared, the constant low level of anxiety and sense of claustrophobia that news of the pandemic invokes, and the frustration of knowing leaders at the top level of our government have failed us. Chris suggested that we watch something uplifting on TV, specifically the movie “Arrival.” It reminded me of how much I love movies about alien-human contact. Not the “Independence Day” type of movie where the aliens just want to annihilate all humans. No, I like movies like “Contact”, “Arrival”, and “Star Man” – movies that use the storytelling device of alien-human contact as a way to shed light on human nature. These three movies all show the dark side of humans (fear, violence, suspicion, militarism), but also our strength and beauty. In Contact, the alien Jodie Foster’s character encounters comments, “You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.” 

Be safe out there, beautiful dreamers. xoxo