Pat Stuart

Mass shootings, like the ones of the past month, remind us that we are a killing species and lead us to shrug and say, “You can’t change human nature.”  

But is that true?  

A Canadian cognitive psychologist, Stephen Pinker, wrote a book about this called “The Better Angels of Our Nature.” In it he takes on that piece of common knowledge — everyone knows that people are violent and that we’ll never change. 

Based on statistics gleaned from the past couple thousand years of human records, he states that common knowledge in this instance is wrong. “The better angels of our nature,” he tells us, “have been slowly making a statistically provable difference in our behavior. We have become less violent.”

No way was I prepared to believe him. After all, we live in a time of genocide and carpet bombing of cities, of starvation and war. But, it’s all relative, isn’t it? Slowly, I became convinced. Not by statistics, which can be manipulated, but by historical fact. For most of history, lives were short and lived under continuous threat. That’s a fact.

It was a sad old world for the human race. Wars were fought up close and personal in both state and non-state societies, with entire generations of men being periodically eliminated.  People struggled hard to maintain even a most basic existence, then died young anyway.  Utopias existed on paper, not in reality. Humans simply lacked the will or the way to ameliorate starvation or fend off disease.   

As for brutishness, you know the stories. You know that societies across the earth and for most of human history validated enslavement of whole populations, exercised horrible punishments for the smallest of crimes, considered public torture and execution entertainment, and the list goes on. Those examples are just for starters.    

Empathy for others simply had no value. That began to change with a few 18th-century thinkers who gave us a new way of looking at life and who kick-started a series of reforms that, put simply, cover the pursuit of what is necessary for humans to flourish.  

Most famously, these were codified in our own Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident ... .”

Except that they weren’t at all self-evident at the time — they were more a hope. The hope for people, “that they are entitled to ...” would become a reality and would change the world.  

And, here we are. We are no longer people who regard cruelty as the norm or kindness as a weakness. Our thinking and behavior has changed. We may not consciously use the flourishing humanity yardstick to judge behavior or assess need, but don’t we apply it every day? We support education for the young, food for the starving, affordable housing, and the list goes on.  

Using one basic criteria, we have problem-solved everything from our colonial status to our well-being, not just prospering but making once unimaginable changes to the human condition.

One basic criteria. Yet, we have a long way to go and violence to eliminate.

Maybe in the aftermath of this latest example of a school mass shooting, we should remember the question: What is necessary? Take just one suggested change. Is it really necessary to put automatic rifles and unlimited ammunition in the hands of young males who have no need for them?  

Is it even desirable?  

Because we can change. We’ve proved it.