We are hard wired to ascribe to the group the behaviors of individuals. To be civilized we must watch ourselves as much as we watch others.

I think there's a corollary to this statement that you already touched on in the previous paragraph about looking for devils, including "demon people." That is, we are apt to ascribe to specific individuals weaknesses in human nature. In either case, bad stuff is something outside ourselves and something that happens to us.

Keeping to the argument that people are inherently good, I'm not sure which of the following I find more frightening:

1. Inherently good people are so readily misled and apt to abandon principle that one man named Adolph can enlist millions to help him commit atrocities.


2. Millions of inherently good people are powerless to stop the atrocities of one very powerful very misled man.

And in either case, this is happening not in some 3rd world country, but in the grand civilized Western World.

The "inherently good" assumption as an acting principle leads to all kinds of epistemological problems. How do you know when you're being misled? To their credit, those who live by the assumption of inherent goodness do tend to be people who emphasize education. They know their own Achille's heel.

This tendency to project human weakness plagues parties on both sides of the argument, however. I've never seen much distinction between the self-righteous attitudes struck by those who consider themselves highly educated or highly morally informed. Both often despise the other and both want power to fix other people's lives.

I think I prefer your Zen masters approach.

John.

It takes robust philosophy to resist this tendency.

The most surprised I've ever seen anyone was a student at an American university twenty years ago, after I'd thrown out the comment that "If one believes in freedom, one must tolerate much behavior one disapproves."

So far as I can tell the "essential goodness of man" in the West can be traced to Rousseau, although there are various Christian sects going rather far back that also made such a claim. The people I have known who believed it were generally ignorant of history, and took a very blinkered view of things, regarding all people as "just like them" for a start.

You are correct that the 6 million Jews have been trumped while the 6 million Gypsies, trade unionists, homosexuals, drug users, Protestant and Catholic Christians, Poles, Russians & other Slavs, and so forth tend to be forgotten. This makes the Holocaust a thing that "was done to the Jews" rather than something that was done to anyone that was on "the list" of the Nazis. Certainly the Senta and Romany peoples ("Gypsies") were specific targets for extermination just like the Jews, but since they tend to oral traditions rather than written, there just are never going to be the kind of memoirs that Jewish survivors of the camps created. So without a written memory, in time the stories fade.

Beyond that, one never, ever reads of the death camps of the Soviets, or the Chinese, or even the Khmer anymore. The Left somehow always finds these crimes to be both of no significance and somehow justifiable. Perhaps the fact that the Soviets targeted all religions (Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Moslem, etc.) and not just one has something to do with it. Or perhaps it's uglier; the Left still buys into Lenin's omelette, and the eggs broken are really of no significance. For whatever the reason, the lesson "collectivism is death" doesn't seem to be one that the Left wants the rest of us to learn.

As for "mind your own business", the Progressives began attacking that idea fully 100 years ago. That the tradition lasted into the Socialist New Deal is a tribute to human adaptability and American stubbornness, but the sad fact remains that socialism, and the idea that the government ought to mind everyone's business (except the business of Progressives and those they like, of course) was inculcated into a generation during the 1930's and 40's, and has become a part of US overall culture.

You can see a tiny example in the Boston Globe article here:

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/op_ed/view.bg?articleid=1035832#articleFull

pediatricians asking children if their parents drink alcohol, own guns, smoke, etc. and in at least one case reporting gun ownership to the police. All in the name of protecting the chillldren, of course, and basically following the Marion Wright Edelman playbook of the 90's.

Funny how the left screams that the government has no business in anyone's bedroom, except of course if there's a gun involved. Then it's "Waco" time...