There is no question more interesting, important and emotionally charged than what it is to be human. The unswerving commitment of many leading intellectuals over the last 100 years to promoting an utterly debased account of human nature is therefore profoundly depressing. We are told that a human being is not such a fine thing after all; that men and women are beasts (and beastly beasts at that); or that they are well-nigh unconscious automata, culturally or genetically programmed to further their own interests or those of their genes.
Vehemently anti-humanist views, once the preserve of far-right misanthropes such as Joseph de Maistre, are now commonplace. As Kenan Malik says, at the turn of the new millennium “we might think of man as weak, wretched, barbarous, savage, inhuman… But never again, it seems, as dignified and noble, or as the measure of all things.”
School children who study William Golding’s Lord of the Flies-a GCSE set text-get marks for noting how thin is “the veneer of civilisation” and how badly civilisation suits us. They will get no additional marks for wondering how, if this is the case, civilisation got going in the first place and how it seems to continue from day to day.
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