The Question Every Man Must Answer

There is a temptation to imagine that the great arguments of history — about government, about education, about marriage, about war — have been about many things. They have not. Under every one of them is a prior question. A more basic question. A question that most men alive today have never once been asked out loud, and have therefore never once been forced to answer honestly.

The question is: what is a human being?

There are only two coherent answers. Every serious view of man in the history of the world reduces to one of them. Not three. Not fifty. Two.

The first answer says that man is a creature made in the image of God, bearing a dignity that nothing else in the universe shares, and at the same time fallen — cracked, corrupted, capable of cruelty that would make a beast look merciful. He is neither basically good nor basically evil. He is both, at once, all the time. And he cannot save himself. He needs a savior from outside of himself.

The second answer says that man is basically good. That the evils of the world are produced by bad systems, bad environments, bad information, bad upbringing — anything at all except the human heart. That if the right conditions could be arranged, man would freely choose the good. That he is, in the end, his own savior.

Both answers are internally consistent. Both can be lived out. Both claim the evidence of history. But only one of them can survive honest contact with the twentieth century.

The idea that man is basically good did not fall out of the sky. It was built — carefully, deliberately, by men who thought they were doing the world a kindness.

It is usually traced to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century. Rousseau taught that man is born good and is corrupted only by society. Take the child out of the corrupting influence of civilization, raise him in nature, and he will grow into a virtuous being. This was not a small claim. It was the seed of a hundred revolutions.

The logic runs downhill from there. If man is born good, then the problem is not sin — the problem is structure. Bad laws. Bad schools. Bad economics. Bad parenting. Bad messages. Remove the bad structure and man will be free to be what he always was, deep down, which is good.

Rousseau has a modern disciple in B.F. Skinner, who taught that human behavior is entirely the product of environment and conditioning — that there is no soul, no free will worth speaking of, only inputs and outputs. Change the inputs, and you change the man. Every progressive education reform in the twentieth century borrowed from this well.

Ludwig Feuerbach took the next step. God, he said, is nothing more than a projection of human ideals onto the sky. Man is the real god. We do not need a savior. We are the savior.

Karl Marx took it further still. Religion is the opiate of the people, he said — a drug the powerful use to keep the poor content. Abolish religion, abolish private property, abolish the family, and man will finally become what he was always meant to be. The twentieth century ran this experiment on a scale of hundreds of millions of lives. The results are not ambiguous.

Sigmund Freud and Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche each took a piece of the old picture and offered a replacement. By the end of the nineteenth century, the intellectual class of Europe had largely accepted the second view. Man was an animal. Man was good. Man was improvable. Man was the measure of all things.

This is not ancient history. This is the water a modern man swims in. He has never been told that another view exists, because almost no one in his culture has ever been told either.

The first view is older than any of the men just named. It is the view of the Hebrew scriptures, the Christian church, and the men who built the civilization of the West. It claims four things.

One: Man is made in the image of God.

Every human being bears a stamp that no other creature bears. This is the ground of human dignity. It is why the founding documents of the United States speak of rights that come from a Creator and not from a government. It is why a man is worth more than a beast, and why an elderly woman, an unborn child, and a young man in his prime are all of equal worth.

Two: Man is fallen.

Every human being is also cracked. Not slightly. Deeply. The capacity for cruelty, deception, greed, and self-justification runs through every person who has ever lived. Scripture does not say this is true of some men. It says it is true of all. "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23).

Three: Man cannot save himself.

If man is cracked, then every man is a cracked tool trying to repair himself with a cracked hand. He can improve. He can discipline himself. He can do enormous good. But he cannot reach the root. The root is not his behavior. The root is his heart. And the heart, as Jeremiah says, is desperately wicked and beyond human knowledge.

Four: Man needs a savior from outside himself.

This is the point that separates the two views more than any other. The first view says the answer is not education, not policy, not therapy, not self-improvement. The answer is a person, acting from outside, on behalf of the cracked man who cannot fix himself. Christians call him Jesus.

Most men reading this have been avoiding this question for their entire adult lives. Not from cowardice. From exhaustion. The question is heavy, and a man with a job, a wife, and children is already carrying more than he can lift.

There is another reason too. The second view is flattering. It tells a man that his failures are the fault of the system, that his anger is a response to injustice, that his appetites are natural and therefore good. It requires nothing of him that he does not already want. It asks for no repentance, no humility, no confession.

The first view asks for all three. It says the man himself is the problem. That is a hard sentence to hear, and harder to accept. It is the reason most men — if they hear it at all — hear it and walk past it.

But a man who will not answer the question will still answer it. He will answer it with his life. He will answer it every time he responds to his wife in anger, every time he lies to himself about his appetites, every time he looks at his children and wonders what kind of man they will become.

The question is not whether he will answer it. The question is whether he will answer it honestly.

If the second view is true, then a man's primary work is to improve his environment. Fix the schools. Fix the economy. Fix the laws. Fix the messaging. He is a repairman working on the world outside himself, and the world's problems are always somebody else's fault.

If the first view is true, then a man's primary work begins closer to home. He must look at his own heart before he looks at anyone else's. He must consider that he himself is capable of the very things he condemns in others. He must consider that the enemy of his family is not only outside his house but also inside his own chest.

This changes everything about how he raises his sons, how he treats his wife, how he votes, how he runs his business, and how he speaks in public. It changes what he does with the twenty minutes between the moment he gets home and the moment he disappears into a screen.

A man does not need to be a philosopher to answer this question. He needs to be honest. And honesty is a rare thing.

• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755).
• Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity (1841).
• Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843).
• Skinner, B.F. Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971).
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Anti-Christ (1895).
• Prager, Dennis. Think a Second Time (1995).
• Prager, Dennis. The Rational Bible series (2018–present).
• Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.