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Human beings have made progress in various areas, though it is often fitful, double-edged and reversible. But are we capable of substantial moral improvement? Could we someday be much better ethically than we are now? Is it likely that members of our species could become, on average, more generous or more honest, less self-deceptive or less self-interested? I have known individual people who have improved morally in various ways (and many who have made the opposite journey) but I’m not sure that as a species as a whole we are any better than we were 100 or even 10,000 years ago.

This question has been explored throughout history — we might turn to Confucius or Aristotle, or to Jesus or the Buddha, to help illuminate the matter. But I’d like to focus here on a more recent moment: 19th-century America, where the great optimism and idealism of a rapidly rising nation was tempered by a withering realism.

It is often said that the American character is inherently hopeful, always expecting things and ourselves to be better. There is perhaps no better embodiment of this than Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, in a lecture delivered in Boston in 1844, confidently awaited the emergence of “the young American”:

Here stars, here woods, here animals, here men, abound, and the vast tendencies concur of a new order. If only the men are employed in conspiring with the designs of the Spirit who led us hither, and is leading us still, we shall quickly enough advance out of all hearing of other’s censures, out of all regrets of our own, into a new and more excellent social state than history has recorded.

Emerson thought that “the Spirit who led us hither” would help perfect us; others have believed the agent of improvement to be evolution, or the inevitable progress of civilization. More recent advocates of our perfectibility might focus on genetic or neurological interventions, or — as in Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity Is Near” — information technologies.

Given our history, though, we might well wonder, whether the average American is any better morally now than he or she was in 1840, or at any other point in time. American thought has always produced less inspiring but more cleareyed positions on the future moral condition of our species. Edgar Allan Poe, in a letter to the critic James Russell Lowell, written the same year as Emerson’s paean to the “young American, ” said flatly that “I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect on humanity. Man is … not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6,000 years ago.”

One reason that a profound moral improvement of humankind is hard to envision is that it seems difficult to pull ourselves up morally by our own bootstraps; our attempts at improvement are going to be made by the unimproved. The people who implement the singularity, mess about with the genome, prescribe the medication, preach the uplifting sermons, or design the moral curriculum will be, precisely, people, and hence, for example, corrupt and inattentive. In particular, they’re liable to be wrong even about what is really good or evil.

People and societies occasionally improve, managing to enfranchise marginalized groups, for example, or reduce violence, but also often degenerate into war, oppression or xenophobia. It is difficult to improve and easy to convince yourself that you have improved, until the next personality crisis, the next bad decision, the next war, the next outbreak of racism, the next “crisis” in education. It’s difficult to teach your children what you yourself do not know, and it’s difficult to be good enough actually to teach your children to be good.

Plans for our improvement have resulted in progress here and there, but they’ve also led to many disasters of oppression, many wars and genocides. Our technologies may, as Kurzweil believes, allow us to transcend our finitude. On the other hand, they may end in our or even the planet’s total destruction.

As to evolution, it, too, is as likely to end in our extinction as our flourishing; it has of course extinguished most of the species to which it has given rise, and it does not clearly entail that every or any species gets better in any dimension over time. Mark Twain put forward his own version of Darwin:

And so I find that we have descended and degenerated, from some far ancestor — some microscopic atom wandering at its pleasure between the mighty horizons of a drop of water perchance — insect by insect, animal by animal, reptile by reptile, down the long highway of smirchless innocence, till we have reached the bottom stage of development — nameable as the Human Being. Below us — nothing. Nothing but the Frenchman.

One thing that Twain is saying is that many forms of evil — envy, for example, or elaborate dishonesty — appear on earth only with human beings and are found wherever we are. Creatures like us can’t see clearly what we’d be making progress toward.

Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series.

Poe is more of a philosopher than he is often thought to be; one of the last things he wrote was the astonishing cosmological essay “Eureka.” His poems and tales also bristle with ideas. His story “The Imp of the Perverse” shows another sort of reason that humans find it difficult to improve. The narrator asserts that a basic human impulse is to act wrongly on purpose, or even to do things because we know they’re wrong: “We act, for the reason that we should not,” the narrator declares. This is one reason that human action tends to undermine itself; our desires are contradictory.

But “The Imp of the Perverse”” holds out a shred of hope. The main line of the story is the tale of a man who ingeniously murders a man (perhaps his father; the narrator never makes it clear) by poisoning a candle so that the victim breathes the noxious smoke. He inherits the dead man’s estate and gets away with the murder entirely, until, years later, it occurs to him that, because he is the only witness to the crime, he is entirely secure, unless he is stupid enough to confess. At that point, he becomes obsessed with the idea of confessing, and in a perverse act of self-destruction, admits his crime and, Poe hints, is condemned to death. But note that confessing to your murders, if any, is in fact the right thing to do. This is the typical Poe-ish twist: the imp of the perverse may lead a morally ignorant or evil person to the right outcome.

Twain — neither as dark as Poe nor as sunny as Emerson — explored a similar idea. Huck Finn was tortured by his guilty conscience for helping a slave (his friend Jim) escape. Huck knew perfectly well that it was wrong to help a slave escape — having been taught so since he was a small child — and yet he did it anyway, egged on by his own imp. In circumstances where a society as a whole practices and approves evil, the antisocial impulses of individuals, which are often thought of as themselves as foolish or evil, become one of the few conceivable sources of improvement.

Perhaps, then if we cannot improve systematically, we can improve inadvertently — or even by sheer perversity.

Crispin Sartwell is an associate professor of philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. His most recent book is “How to Escape,” a collection of essays.

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