Humans: Wild or Domesticated?

I'm not sure that I know the answer to that exactly, but let's explore it a bit. This should be fun. A few years ago, I got into a rather heated debate with a college professor on this subject...but I'm jumping ahead, so let me give a little background first.

We were traveling with a group of friends that are what I would consider 'liberated' Christians.  We were on a cruise ship crossing the Atlantic and had lots of free time for interaction with other passengers. One of our group had conducted a chapel service on the ship, and the professor had mistaken his more liberated view of Christianity with a liberal ideology. So he approached us in one of the lounges and promptly announced that he was a gay college professor, presumably expecting to find us sympathetic to him. Well, we are, but not in the way he expected, and things rapidly descended into a debate of conservative vs. liberal ideology.

This was the year of Katrina, and like many Christians, I had traveled to the Gulf with a church group to help out a bit. My group was working with the Gulfport, MS Police Department and had been sent into a number of poor areas to make sure that people had water and such. One of the neighborhoods we went to was the largest and poorest public housing project in Gulfport. This was not a pleasant place in the best of times, least of all during the aftermath of Katrina. Our police escort was very clear that we needed to stay very close to the entrance of the project, and to not drive in any further than was necessary to turn the vehicles around and point them out the gate. Ominous.

The place seemed largely abandoned, but you could see a few people peering out windows. The next part surprised me greatly. Slowly, women and children began to filter out of the buildings and move toward us. They were in no hurry and had no apparent sense of purpose. The whole thing had an almost surreal quality to it. It seemed familiar, but at first I had a hard time putting my finger on why. And then it clicked. I live next to a pasture where cattle are kept, and every day when the farmer drives up in his pickup to bring feed, the cattle wander over in a very similar way. I was completely horrified at the revelation: In our quest to help those less fortunate, we have effectively domesticated them and rendered them completely helpless and dependent on the system. Of everything that I saw in Gulfport...the destruction...the loss of life...the sights...the smells...the thing that vexed me the most was that revelation.

As this was very fresh on my mind at that time, I offered it to our professor friend as an example of how social programs have had exactly the opposite of their intended effect. He was not happy with me, so I suggested that we simply look at what we know about nature. After all, most liberals are also evolutionists, and evolutionists should see the obvious parallels between how things work in nature and how things work in humans. Well, that made him even more angry. I really wasn't sure that I understood why. To an evolutionist, we are simply highly evolved animals...why would it be so controversial to make comparisons between nature and humanity.

I guess that he got mad because he knew the implications of my line of reasoning and he knew that it was checkmate. When beaten, flail about angrily and make wild accusations. I got a bit agitated, because he was agitated, and eventually one of my friends had to separate us. Well, amen.

So, wild or domesticated? Still not sure. I like the nature viewpoint because it allows us to study cause and effect in the most pure laboratory, without the encumbrances of ethics and human compassion. In nature, we can easily see that to provide too much and expect too little is to guarantee dependence. Compare farm animals to wild animals. Farm animals are slow, dimwitted, vulnerable, and completely incapable of caring for themselves. Wild animals are quick, smart, agile, and fully capable of caring for themselves. I don't think I need to draw the obvious parallels in political ideology.

Another major irony is that if liberals are evolutionists, and truly believe in evolution, then why do they do the things that are completely contrary to it? Socialism weakens the gene pool by subsidizing weakness and bypassing natural selection's tendency to weed out the weak. Capitalism...in it's pure form, not the monopolistic bailout infused junk...is completely dominated by natural selection. The logical conclusion is that liberals don't really believe what they claim to believe.

Now before you pounce on me as espousing eugenics, let me clarify that I am NOT an evolutionist...I am merely pointing out the logical endpoint of an evolutionary mindset. As a Christian, I believe that we should be helping each other. The looming question is how, or perhaps as importantly, how much? I think the answer is found in giving a man a fish vs. teaching him to fish. The best way we can help the less fortunate is in helping them gain the skills to survive, but also by insisting that they use them. That should include job training and placement assistance, but certainly isn't limited to that. Once trained, we must insist that they work. It really isn't that hard, at least not for the able-bodied majority.

In the end, people need to be independent, at least to a significant extent. Governments can and should help, and I personally have no problem using tax dollars to do so. The key is that these must become investments in the lives of people...not handouts. I think that somewhere between fully wild and fully domesticated exists a comfortable balance of independence and community. We must find that balance.