Human nature is a spectrum of emotions accompanied by a will to take action. Every feeling within us has various degrees and forms which have been felt by other humans throughout time. This is our connection with each other. The top of the spectrum is reserved for the emotion that we call love. Love is at the top of the spectrum because the range to which it can affect humans is on an infinite scale.
Caring is a byproduct of love. The difference is: In order to love you must care, but you do not have to love in order to care. This makes caring a much more predictable emotion. Caring for people and other animals or mammals we share this earth with should be an instinct within us all. However, some of us may not be that lucky and may have to work at it. Rita Manning talks about various ways people can adapt a caring quality in Speaking From the Heart: A Feminist Perspective on Ethics.
I agree with Manning’s vision that sees the world as a much better place if people cared to make it that way. However, this is based on the premise that you could help people care the way a teacher helps a student learn to read. Except, Manning suggests placing people into situations that would create relationships with others through needs and responses. For example, she talks about having students work in homeless shelters to teach them how to care for others1. The only flaw here is that people must be willing to engage in the caring exercises she puts forward that will condition a loving heart.
Manning also says that when we see someone suffering we feel it as though it were our own2. Here her premise is that all people care enough to feel that way. I wish I shared the optimistic views of Manning about human nature, but as I grow older I see the things humans do to other humans and I doubt man could ever rise to this level of caring for himself.
I believe some people are just born bad. Sometimes they are just born with psychological problems that block their ability to care at all. They feel no emotions. She really does not address this issue and to me it is the most important issue of all. How can we teach humans without the ability to care that caring is the right thing to do. I personally do not believe it is possible to make someone care if the person is heartless. There are various reasons that people are heartless. I will just deal with the people that are not born with physiological problems and just chose to become bad. There are some people that just develop a taste for blood. They enjoy inflicting pain and get off on murder. Sometimes it is power that corrupts the soul of man. Any of the reasons I have given make caring for others an impossibility for these individuals.
I think Karl Marx would agree it probably starts with the various classes that people divide their societies into. Media plays a very big role in convincing people that lower class citizens are thieves and drug addicts and upper class people are the only people with any class at all. Because of this, upper class citizens have a tendency to treat lower class citizens as if they (the lower class) were put here to shine their (the upper class) shoes. The upper class (like all classes) have good people in it that care for their fellow man and neighbor, but some of them buy into the medias propaganda and think that because they send a check once a year to the starving children in Africa that it absolves them from having to treat all people like they wish to be treated.
I know I sound very pessimistic and perhaps I am. To believe in Manning’s writings you have to overlook the qualities that men have shown exist in him since the beginning of time. I hope I am wrong. I truly hope that man can learn to live with each other and care about nature itself. I hope he can learn to appreciate the beauty this earth holds and the life that lives here. I hope that Obama is the president he has been promising he will be. I hope the United States citizens that are losing their homes get help from the stimulus package paid out to the bankers. However, many of these things will not change. I continue to have hope that it will. I hope that America will become the beacon of light it used to be for immigrants all over the world. I hope that we will stop imprisoning the innocent and paroling the guilty. I hope that our soldiers are not too scarred from the chores of war and that Obama will truly bring this war to an end. I hope that we can all learn to love each other and that life on this planet will always flourish. As long as there is one man striving to be good, there is hope for the entire civilization to get it right.