The Americans

American Samizdat: A Hard Look

Surely, never in human history have the people of Earth lived their lives with more varying beliefs in the nature of the humanity to which they belong than they now do.

In societies of deep faith or of pervasive religious observance – for Western, industrial societies, that would be the in the past — faith in the capacity of humans for goodness has generally contested with an equally strong sense of people’s innate capacity for sinfulness in separation from God. Even in the significantly secular Western world, many hopeful people believe that human beings are “basically good.” Not unlike what the religious think of their faith — how spiritually hard it is to live life without it — the lesser commitment of the secular among us, in believing our fellows to be basically good, seems necessary for most people to keep their spirits up in life.

What could this life possibly come to (like the macabre, speculative fancy of an evil God) if human beings — we, the animating centers of our connected…