Rationale 

People actually do think that humans are shit. 

Students in my class. 

It was the end of spring semester 2022, and my sophomore class had circled through all the major topics of high school biology … which meant it was time for my favorite part of the course, a whirlwind tour of the extravagant diversity of the entire family of living things. We looked at comb jellies and tardigrades and gnetophytes and slime molds and tunicates. Oh my gosh, there are so many weird things in this world! The day’s lesson was just about over, and students were packing up, when the kid in the front row by the windows (let’s call her Amanda) asked me what my favorite species was. 

“Humans,” I said without hesitation. “We have got to be the absolute coolest creatures that have ever lived.”

And Amanda raised her eyebrows with a look that said I must be joking. 

“Humans suck,” said Ethan from the back of the room. 

And now it was my turn for a quizzical look. “What do you mean humans suck?” How could people even think that? 

But think it they did. In that last forty seconds of class, it quickly became clear that my students had a rather low opinion of human beings. “Humans,” they said, “mess up everything they touch. They seem bent on destroying themselves. They’re greedy. They’re short-sighted.” One kid went so far as to say, “We’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to this planet.” And a class of nodding faces agreed. And then the bell rang, and they all walked out, and wished me a good weekend, leaving me at a loss for what to say. 

I don’t even know if anyone else from that Block 1 biology class even remembers that discussion. But I have thought about it a lot over the past two years …about what I might say if I had the time to collect my thoughts. This episode is a kind of do-over. It’s what I wish I could have said if I’d had the presence of mind and the time to say it. So if anyone from block one is out there listening, thanks for everything. This one’s for you. 

You’re listening to I Heart This. 

People on the internet. 

Apparently my students are not alone in their stark view of humankind. Hang out on the socials and you’re bound to run into something like these quora thread gems, 

“Human beings are arseholes. We are greedy, selfish judgmental, in fact I would say in comparison to every livinging [sic] thing on this planet we a like a plague, we multiply and we kill and we destroy.”

or how about: 

“People are the reason the world sucks, if left alone the world is full of beauty but people have destroyed every semblance of peace in the name of currency … ruined the only chance we ever had at enjoying ourselves, and as such I pray for the day the human race comes to an abrupt end.”

or

“Even the people I love suck, I suck, everyone sucks. Complete and utter suckage everywhere you look.”

Sheesh, man. Against that bleak backdrop, what hope do we have of redemption. No wonder we have so many apocalypse myths. We wish that there were some outside force to cleanse the world, to make it anew after we have so mucked it up. 

Their Evidence

How we Treat Each Other

In support of this dismal view, the people in these discussions say, look around. Consider the evidence. Humans treat each other like shit. They steal, rape, cheat, and swindle. Look at the Holocaust. Look at slavery. Look at genocide.

How We Treat Our Environment

Not only that, humans shit in their own drinking water and belch fumes into the air. They gobble up resources to make pointless tourist tchotchkes and fast fashion. They hunt creatures to extinction, and turn forests into plains of stumps. 

They  know that they’re messing with the climate and that the consequences are going to be terrible, and are somehow content to pretend that it isn’t happening. 

That’s whack! There must be something wrong with us. 

And these sentiments aren’t just the uninformed musings of angsty teenagers or poorly spelled diatribes on Reddit. Philosophers have made this case for thousands of years (albeit usually with more conventional punctuation.) 

Confucianists thought that hierarchy and ritual was the only way to cinch down on humanity’s inherent selfishness. For St. Augustine, humans were damned by Adam’s original sin. Calvinists took masochistic delight in the idea that humans were “feeble, despicable worms of the dust.” (Sorry, worms! Those are Jonathan Edward’s words, not mine. I think you’re awesome.) Hobbes, the  philosopher (and not the cartoon tiger), argued that only by surrendering freedoms to popes and emperors did we climb out of our primordial savagery, when human lives were nasty, brutish, and short. William Golding, Mad Max, Machiavelli, Freud, Aristotle, John Adam, Stephen Pinker, and Richard Dawkins … the list goes on … all of them wrote that humans are basically bad. It’s their nature to screw you if they can’t get away with it. 

In the past, people called these failings original sin. Today, scholars are more likely to invoke evolution. They’ll blame the evil inside of us on the principle that survival favors the fittest. Alpha males get the most mates. Selfish people get the resources. Bleeding hearts will always end up as losers–dying early with fewer mates and fewer children to carry on their altruistic genes. 

 We can’t just write off these ideas. A lot of smart people are convinced that they are true. I believe, with my whole heart, that they are wrong. But they deserve to be taken seriously.  They deserve an answer. 

And that answer matters. Our species has problems to solve. And believing that humans are terrible is not conducive to solving them. It leads to despair. And despair doesn’t get medical supplies into Gaza, restore peace in Haiti, or reduce our dependence on coal and oil. Believing that humans suck is a self-fulfilling prophecy that we can’t afford. 

So today, let’s talk about the beauty and goodness of humanity. It’s true, we can’t ignore our sins, but we can’t ignore our virtues either. Humans are miracles. This world, as beautiful as it is, would be so much poorer without us. 

My Celebration

Take a moment to compare humans with the creatures around us. Pretend that you are not one of us. Pretend that you’re an alien seeing all of us Earthlings for the first time on a grand tour of Earth’s life. Imagine seeing fish and rhinoceros as if you’d never encountered them before, sequoia trees and roses, mushrooms and soaring condors. And then you come to humans. Even amidst all the wild pageantry of life, there would be no doubt that humans were unique. 

What would you notice first about us? Would it be our wonderfully dexterous hands … able to grasp and juggle, carve and write. Maybe it would be our upright way of walking around on two legs like stilts, that seems laughable at first until you see us move. Oh, man, look at us move. What other creatures can match our versatility. We dance. We stomp. We swing our hips. We snap our fingers. Some of us even flip ourselves backward through the air and land with grace on a narrow beam or on the blade of a skate or into a pool of water with hardly a splash. Maybe you’d be floored by our endurance! We may not be fast, but give us enough time and training and we can overtake dogs, antelope, even horses. It’s true. I’m not making this up. 

Personally I think the first thing to catch my eye would be our beautiful, smooth, sensuous skin. In a world of fur and scales and bark and feathers, there is nothing like it. Coming in so many striking colors. Even if we were as dumb as dormice, our bodies alone would surely make us one of the most fascinating creatures to any extraterrestrial visitors. 

But as it turns out, we are not dumb. Our cousins the apes are pretty darn smart. Dolphins and whales too. Crows are so clever that they fashion hooks and displace water to get hard to reach bits of food.  But even they can’t begin to compare. Even a human raised by wolves could outthink them all. But humans are rarely raised by wolves, and that brings me to what would no doubt be the thing most marked by our alien observers. Our most conspicuous superpower is our unique ability to learn from each other. Think about it! No other creature that has ever lived in life’s nearly 4 billion year history can do what we do. We can make a culture, a kind of external and evolving intelligence, greater by orders of magnitude than even the most genius individual. No one person could ever be smart enough to invent a computer from scratch. But together, we send probes into space and rewrite our own DNA. 

These are the obvious things, the things that strangers might first pick up on a quick visit. But they are by no means my favorite things about humans. Think of laughter. There are some other species out there that laugh, but it is nothing like the musical sounds of delight that we make. 

Think of play! Every other show on animal planet has footage of lion cubs tumbling and wrestling and getting into mischief. But turn your attention away from them for a moment to watch their parents. I can tell you this. They won’t be playing. With a few notable exceptions, (otters come to mind) any other creature, if they play at all, they play as children and lose that playfulness as they grow up. A decline in playfulness is not the result of schooling as some widely circulated TED talks would lead you to believe. In mammals, it is the natural result of growing up. But. But! Humans do play all their lives long. They sing and dance and move cards around on tables and push buttons on their nintendo and tell jokes for no other reason than joy. Jellyfish do not do this. Deer do not do this. We are the species of play.

The evolutionary rationale for play is probably that it gets us exploring and trying things out. So a natural corollary to our lifelong play is our curiosity. We burn with it. We can hardly keep ourselves from pushing buttons just to see what they will do. Some of us will spend years of our lives and thousands of dollars to find out about the history of art. We travel to the ends of the earth to collect rocks and bugs. Even the most jaded and cynical stop with intrigue when faced with a mystery. And then we sit back in awe at what we have discovered. We, alone of all species, have science, the organized pursuit of awe and wonder. We, alone, wonder about how trees grow, and where mountains come from, and why stars burn.

But that’s not all! Look at our movies, our stories, our songs. Have you seen the 40,000 year old paintings at Lascaux? Have you seen the vibrant colors of the Sistine Chapel? Have you looked down from the window of an airplane that is flying miles above the ground? Have you watched the controlled explosions of powerful rockets push human beings into space? We are the species that makes things. We are the one that can see a beauty or utility that doesn’t yet exist and make it so. 

 A world without humans would be a world without poetry, without stories, without words. Even without language, humans express their hearts with a precision that no other species can match. We cry.  We laugh. We kiss. We make tender and passionate love. 

What other creatures imagine their own death? And know that when it happens, this self will be no more? What other species look into each other’s eyes and see that there is another self in there. And here’s the real miracle. The greatest of our many unique gifts. We look into those eyes at those other selves, and we care about them. We wish them well. We want good things for them beyond just the food or warmth or sex or safety they can give us. Some would dither over whether this altruism is real or just some convoluted self-interest in disguise. I say, who cares? It is the most beautiful thing in this vast, cold, lifeless universe and, so far as we know, it is ours alone. 

We have empathy. You see someone else cry, and you feel sad. You watch a video of a young woman deaf all her life who, after an experimental implant hears sound for the first time. You don’t know anything about her and yet when she holds her hand over her mouth, you weep with joy. You see a picture of a firefighter carrying the tiny body of a toddler from the rubble of the Oklahoma City bombing on a magazine when you are seventeen years old, and you feel echoes in your own heart of the crushing grief that her mother must surely know and you never forget those tiny white socks. What other creature has such capacity to feel pains and joys that are not our own. To momentarily jump into the heart of some other person. 

We love. We love. We love. I will risk being sentimental to say it. But Hugh Grant’s voiceover was right. For humans, “Love, actually, is everywhere.” I have seldom gone a day in my life without seeing people being kind and generous. Appreciating each other. Writing notes to teachers they had years ago to say thank you for touching their lives. Working two thankless full-time jobs so that their kids can go to college. My dad goes twice a week to grow food to feed people who need it that he’s never met and probably never will. 

And we don’t just love. We run back into battle over and over again to pull our wounded friends to safety. We stand down tanks in Tiananmen square. We walk across that bridge in Selma because we love our children and want them to be judged by the content of their character. 

 Now think on that, and you tell me … would the world really be better off without us? 

Rebuttal

But maybe my students still aren’t convinced. Maybe they wonder whether our best moments are outweighed by our worst. Fair enough. Let’s look closer. Let’s take apart the elements of the “humans suck” argument, one by one. 

Our destructiveness is (mostly) not a moral failure. 

Jury is still out

Let’s start with our crimes against the life systems of our planet. They are really real. I really do lie awake at night with that sinking feeling in my belly thinking about what the consequences mean for my kids. But even here, even in the face of civilization-unraveling disaster I have sympathy for the people perpetrating the crime.. 

Not motivated by greed

My students, like lots of people, think humans are destroying the Earth out of greed. Like the  Captain Planet cartoons from the 90s where, in every episode, teenagers with magic rings fended off villains gleefully polluting the planet. I don’t deny that there are unscrupulous people making bank by doing evil things for big oil companies. But that’s not what’s driving climate change. Climate change is driven by a system where fossil fuels get burned whenever everyday people bring their kids to school and build a new house and fly to Grandma’s for Christmas or buy burgers for a backyard bar-b-que. Humans didn’t plan to become an ecosystem altering force. Mostly, they planned to stay alive and protect their kids. When something came along that made life a little bit easier or improved the thin margins of survival, they took advantage of it. In my book, that’s not a moral shortcoming. 

And, yes, we now know better. And, yes, people are eating up what little time we have by stalling or bickering. But in context, our response is not that slow. Think of the 70 years of continuous struggle from Seneca Falls to women’s suffrage. Or the 90 years that passed between when Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal to when the United States finally prohibited slavery. The public at large didn’t even know that humans could change the climate until about 35 years ago. And by that point we had spent almost two centuries becoming dependent on fossil fuels for nearly every aspect of our lives. 

Not inherently destructive. 

My point is not that we can relax and give ourselves a pass. My point is that human beings aren’t assholes because we haven’t figured all of this out yet. We are not inherently destructive. Most human societies in history actually did live within their carrying capacities. Even modern humans, with our massively complex and powerful economies, still have a decent track record of addressing environmental problems once we realize what the problems are. In the United States, for example, the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act have been resounding successes. We have effective laws for protecting endangered species and wilderness areas. And it only took two years from the discovery of the so-called hole in the ozone layer, for every nation in the world to ban CFCs, and right now the ozone layer is on track to return to pre-CFC levels by 2045. 

Extinction Would Not Diminish Our Beauty

Will our efforts to draw down atmospheric CO2 be enough? Will we be able to sustain the good lives that we’ve built? I don’t know. But all species end at some point. Being permanent is not a prerequisite for being awesome. Stegosaurs were awesome. That doesn’t change just because they died out. When humans go extinct, even if we cause that extinction ourselves, it won’t erase the beauty that we made. 

And maybe we won’t. Right now, people from around the world are mobilizing address this crisis. It is an act of species-wide foresight and empathy unprecedented in the entire history of life on Earth. If we pull it off, it will be the greatest triumph of spirit in the known universe. It would secure our place as the most remarkable species that has ever lived. Even more remarkable than stegosaurus. 

Doing bad ≠ inherently bad

Okay, well then what of all that genocide and slaveholding? You can’t say that these things were just unintended consequences. You can’t say that they were just mistakes. Humans have done some spectacularly awful shit to each other, not because they were ignorant but because they were being awful. 

I’m not saying they haven’t. It’s not like that’s news. But to leap from, “Humans do bad things,” to “Humans are bad,” is based on specious reasoning. Humans also do lots of good things. Which things are because of their nature? To follow the evolutionary thinking I summed up a few minutes ago, humans are bad because we evolved that way, and if we do good things it is only because society holds us in line. Our badness is hidden under a thin veneer of civilization. Without laws and cops and nation-states to stop us, it’d be Mad Max and Lord of the Flies all over the place. 

But consider for a moment what evidence it would take to support this. I can think of four types. First, you might look to so-called “uncivilized” people, foragers who lived outside the confines of governments and religions. But a century of ethnography reveals only egalitarian bands with economies based on sharing. Maybe you’d look at how modern people act during emergencies where society can scarcely enforce its rules. But there you’d find that over and over again, people in emergencies go to great lengths to help others in need. Third,  you could study children, people  whose supposed “true nature” hasn’t yet been trained out of them, but there researchers find the same complicated mix of self-interest and empathy that you find in the rest of us. Well, what about controlled laboratory experiments on human behavior? Surely there we’d find something definitive. There is certainly no paucity of psychologists who masterminded all kinds of contrived situations in order to reveal humanity’s true colors. Many are now famously debunked, like the Stanford Prison or Robber’s Cave experiment. Some of these so-called “experiments” were un-scientifically designed, where researchers drew their conclusions first and then set up situations they hoped would “prove” them. These ill-conceived attempts to indict people of “man’s inhumanity to man” are mostly instructive for their spectacular failures. Take the story of the Acali raft whose passengers were frustratingly harmonious, despite the anthropologist-researcher who tried repeatedly to instigate violence and conflict to support his flawed thesis about how most human conflict was the result of competition for sex partners. After months at sea, it turned out, everyone got along pretty well except with the asshole who kept trying to provoke them into fights. No matter where you look, the preponderance of evidence shows that humans in a state of nature, whatever that might mean, are actually pretty good at getting along. There is no case to be made that people are just naturally bad. 

Our evil does not outweigh our good.

But what if it’s not about our true nature? What if humans just suck because we have happened to do more sucky stuff than good stuff. When I started writing this essay, I was reluctant to do that kind of moral accounting. I mean, how could anyone measure our goodness against our badness. But that thinking is inherent in the minds of a lot of people who have concluded that humans suck. They’ve compared the good and the bad and found the goodness wanting. So, since they insist, let’s go there. But how? 

What’s the Norm

Perhaps we could look at the norm of human behaviors. This seems relatively easy. As much as we like to write young adult novels about them, most people do not live in a dystopia. This is not just a glass half-full perspective either. We objectively and measurably save more often than we kill and give more often than we steal.

What’s the Trend

Or maybe we should look at the trends over time? On that morning two years ago, my students were convinced that humans were making the world worse. But that is NOT TRUE! Since we’ve been able to measure such things, war has declined and democracy has spread. By almost every measure of well-being, life is better than it has been in thousands of years. Well into the 19th century, some of the world’s wealthiest countries saw between a quarter and a third of all children die before their fifth birthday. Today, even in Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in the world, less than 7% do. In the year 1800, about 10% of the world could read. Today, in the global north almost every single person can, and in the global south more than two-thirds can, and there, most of the people who can’t are over sixty-five. In the 1500s, every so-called great power went to war; today there are only two conflicts that involve them. The people of 2024 live with more comfort, more food, more light, more education, more knowledge, and more security than at any other time in recorded history. That is not an accident. It is the result of an entire species working for good.

We just can’t see it because our brains focus on threats, and the media focus on capturing our brains’ attention. No tweet goes viral by pointing out that the world has reduced its nuclear arsenal to a fraction of what it was. No cable news show will run a headline about all the people who didn’t die of polio today. 

No matter how you look at it, the idea that humans do each other more harm than good just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. 

Evolutionary Explanation

Nor is it true that evolution selects for selfish behavior alone. Evolution can and does also select for kindness and cooperation. If you watch out for the people around you, their survival is enhanced by watching out for you. Treating your mate with respect and standing up to bullies makes it more likely that your kids will thrive. Our goodness doesn’t exist in spite of evolution. It exists because of it. 

Not Sucky, Just Aware

But in a sense, none of this matters, because good and bad are not objectively real. We invented them. Cruelty and injustice bother us. We are aware that other people feel pain and joy just like us. We know that the way we treat others matters. And so far as we can tell, we may be the only species that has ever done so. The very fact that we contemplate whether the good we have done outweighs the bad is evidence of just how remarkable we are. 

Compassion Not Persuasion 

I believe that humans are awesome. And I believe in the power of reason to persuade those of us who have given up on humanity. But I also know that reason is not always what’s most needed. My students’ despair about humanity wasn’t a rational case at all. Looking back now, I think it was actually a cry for help. I think my students looked at things like global inequality and climate change and they were afraid and angry and sad. They looked at adults like me standing in the front of the room who didn’t have answers to these big problems, and they wondered if we didn’t have the answers … then what hope was there. Maybe when they said that humanity was terrible, they were really looking for some hope to believe in. 

What do you do when someone tells you they hate themselves? I don’t really know. I actually don’t think that I’ve done a good job responding to things like that. But I don’t think you argue your case like a lawyer. That’s not what they need. Maybe, you just listen. Maybe you acknowledge what they’re feeling. And then, maybe, you just express why YOU are grateful for them. Not as a counter-argument. But as a celebration. To reveal, with your own clear seeing, what they might be taking for granted. 

Humans are beautiful everywhere. 

So, in that spirit, here’s a story. It’s a Thursday evening in late May. The sky is blue. The shadows are long and a light breeze is coming in from the west. I have just dropped Eva at the high school chorus room for her call at the spring concert, and since there are still 45 minutes before the show begins, and since it is a beautiful evening, I go for a walk around the school. On the field the boys are playing lacrosse in a way that reminds me of that poem where Sherman Alexie says. 

“Indian boys

gallop across the grass, against

the beginnings of their body.
On those Saturday afternoons,
unbroken horses gather to watch

their sons growing larger
in the small parts of the world.” 

In the grandstands, friends and family cheer on their teams. Kids hang on the chain-link fence. Some of them with lacrosse sticks of their own mimic the moves of the players on the field. A pair of lanky teens wobble around the parking lot on roller blades. A mother and her daughter walk behind me on the sidewalk and I try to eavesdrop on their conversation, but I cannot make anything of it because they are laughing too much. A young couple flirts and walks their dogs. 

Later, at the concert, I lock eyes with a cute girl in a sundress. She can’t be more than two. Her parents pass her back and forth and whisper in her ear about how to listen quietly to the musicians. On the stage, the high school band produces preposterous amounts of sound from ingeniously crafted convolutions of brass. Some of these songs are centuries old. Just a few notes out of place is all it would take to collapse into discord, but it never happens. 

The people in the audience are not on their phones. Even the sundress girl in her tiny shoes is listening with wide eyes. I try to calculate how many years of teaching and learning, how many years of scales must have been played at how many kitchen tables so that these few minutes could sound so rich and so sweet. And tonight the young musicians make something beautiful, free to anyone who cares to walk in off the street to listen. Or  … even if you can’t listen. Two ASL interpreters sign both the words and somehow, remarkably and convincingly, even the music. 

And the music ends and hearts have been moved. Parents are proud of their children. Strangers are impressed by their skill. And all of us are reminded of music’s ability to make us feel something. All through the auditorium people rise to their feet and cheer. 

This whole evening, everywhere I look people are being beautiful. They learn. They create. They face challenges and master skills. They play. They work. They love. But the real miracle of this evening is how commonplace it is. It could have been any evening in late spring. And not just here. Evenings like this happen in small towns all over America. Allow for a few changes in dialect, climate, clothes, and choice of sport, it could be any of a million towns around the world. People are beautiful everywhere all the time. Then never seem to stop. 

Conclusion

Human beings are worth saving and cherishing and celebrating. Not because we do more good than harm. Who knows if there even is a way to weigh our good against our harm. But harm is built into the universe. That’s not humanity’s fault. That’s the second law of thermodynamics.  Life will always be an uphill battle. It will always be easier to destroy than to build. 

Even if you do nothing, terrible things will happen. But not beauty. You have to work for that. Everything beautiful that humans have done required someone to pour love and care into something. And humans have done that work. We figured out why earthquakes happen and how stars live and die. We went to the moon! We learned to fly! We made movies and wrote novels. Many of us freed ourselves from slavery and poverty and wrested the right to vote from those who didn’t want to give it to us. Every day, we make music. We protect national parks. We return our library books. We plant gardens. We stop at stoplights. We kiss. Look at all the love we’ve made!