What History Tells Us About Us

History can be a great teacher.

It’s relevant because, through history, we can test our pet ideas and today’s popular views against the millennia of human experience and against essential human nature at work across all cultures and places.

The hard realities we find at work can disabuse us of magical ideas like the inevitable arc of human progress, the perfectibility of the human nature, etc.

For when we compare our present character, our tendencies, and our base responses with those of our ancient forebears, it is quite shocking how little we humans have actually changed.

So what do we find in our own long history?

A Violent Human Race

First, human beings are inherently, compulsively violent.

Peace, instead of being the norm, is the exception and history is littered with both small and great ways humanity has resorted to both organized and unorganized violence to settle its disputes.

The ancient world, both prehistoric and historic eras over all the stone, bronze, and iron ages, was totally full of raids, invasions, tyrannies, enslaving, murders, rapes, and wars.

Both inside and outside the most ordered State of the ancient world–the Roman Empire–violence was barely checked and often unchecked.

The generation upon generation blood feuds between neighboring clans, tribes, and regions drives so much of our history and creates so many of our tragedies.

Law was invented, largely, to check the blood feud and to deescalate these infinitely escalating violent disputes.

A Selfish Human Race

Second, human beings are thoroughly selfish.

Behind almost all of the violence is a collision of wills, a sense of real or perceived injury against one’s honor or a dispute over women and goods or a coveting of resources and riches.

Like toddlers, the creed “what’s yours is mine, I’ll take it” has been a hallmark of the human race.

We don’t live and let live, we invade, steal, and grab whatever we can from whoever we can and try to get away with it.

Concepts like “the rule of law”, “checks and balances” and “the right to a fair trial” are much rarer in history than “frontier justice” and “grab what you can”.

History amply shows us that lawlessness is the historic norm in a violent, selfish world.

An Unjust Human Race

Third, human beings–even the very worst practitioners of violence and selfishness like the Nazis–blame the other guy and justify themselves.

The classic triangle in family systems thinking–villain, victim, hero–is a window into how we see and respond to others.

We always think of ourselves (or our group or our kind) as the victim, blame the other guy, and look for a hero to save us and take vengeance on our enemies.

But on the other side, our enemy fiercely believes they are the victim of our own side’s evils, labels our heroes as their villains, and raises up their own heroes to fight back against us.

Whether it’s the dysfunctional family, or the blood feud between clans, or a world war between alliances of nations, this nefarious triangle of mutual injustices is at work driving how we see reality and how we respond to it.

History tells us we humans minimize our own injustices and justify them as being right and necessary, and highlight the other guy’s evils and call them inexcusable and unforgivable.

A Biased Human Race

Finally, human beings are shown by history to be biased against outsiders, especially those who live right next door.

Our worst evils are done inside of families and to our closest neighbors.

In history, it’s next door neighbors, neighboring clans and tribes, and neighboring nations are the ones most likely to despise and fight each other.

We naturally prefer our own kind, our own tribe, our own culture and hold in great suspicion and avoid associating with the other kind, the other tribe, and the other culture.

Little children mock and tease those who look different, talk different, or act different than the majority–and don’t have to be taught to do it.

And human history tells us that we adults very naturally divide into opposing camps, parties, and factions who favor our side and despise the other side.

The Bible calls this the sin of partiality.

Universal Sin of Partiality

We can be partial to the poor or partial to the rich.

We can be partial to the long-timer or partial to the newcomer.

We can be partial to our own race/culture/society/nation, or partial to the victims of our race/culture/society/nation.

We can be partial to our own family and friends, or partial to the stranger and outsider.

And we are especially partial to our own self–circling us back to selfishness, violence, greed, etc.

The truth is everyone is partial to something or someone at the expense of somebody else or something else.

And from partiality come injustices, disparities, and structural, entrenched evils that favor group one over another.

And from injustices come resentments, malice, violence, and a host of evils done in the name of righting wrongs where we commit new wrongs to redress old ones.

Is there any escape from our own nature?  Can we ever break out of these cycles? Is there any hope for the human race?

Indeed there is–but not in the places we normally look or the voices we normally listen to.

More on that the next time….