The Line Through the Heart

For a hundred years, Western intellectuals argued that man is basically good. That cruelty is a product of ignorance. That poverty produces crime. That education will cure brutality. That if the right structures were put in place, the human being underneath them would turn out to be decent.

Then came the twentieth century, and the argument ended.

Two world wars. The Armenian genocide. The Ukrainian famine. The Holocaust. The Soviet Gulag. Mao's Great Leap Forward. The Khmer Rouge killing fields. Rwanda. Bosnia. Darfur. The century did not produce one horror. It produced a cascade of them, on an industrial scale, in the most educated and technically advanced civilizations the world had ever produced.

This is the fact that cannot be talked around. If man is basically good, then none of this should have happened. The men who committed these crimes were not primitive. They were not illiterate. They were not the products of bad schools or bad neighborhoods. Many of them were doctors and lawyers and professors and artists. The commandants of the Nazi camps went home to wives and children and listened to Beethoven on the phonograph.

The twentieth century did not disprove the first view of human nature. It confirmed it.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet artillery officer, a mathematician, and a man who spent eight years in the Gulag for the crime of writing a disrespectful remark about Stalin in a private letter. He was released, exiled, and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union. He spent the rest of his life writing down what he had seen.

His masterwork, The Gulag Archipelago, is one of the most important books of the twentieth century. It is not a political tract. It is a record of what one man saw, and what he learned about himself while watching it.

In it, Solzhenitsyn wrote a single paragraph that has shaped more serious thinking about human nature than any other paragraph written in the last hundred years. He was describing what happens when a prisoner begins to realize that the guards and the prisoners are not as different as they had once believed. He wrote:

Read that again. Slowly.

The line dividing good and evil is not drawn between nations. Not between political parties. Not between races, classes, religions, or generations. It is drawn through the heart of every human being. Every man carries the guard and the prisoner inside him. Every man is capable of both the crime and the mercy.

This is why Solzhenitsyn's writing is so uncomfortable. He is not writing to condemn his captors. He is writing to describe himself. He learned, in the camps, that he too could have been a guard. That the difference between him and the man who beat prisoners to death was not a matter of nature but of circumstance — and grace.

No secular theory of human nature has ever produced a sentence like that. Only the first view can. Only the view that says a man is both made in God's image and fallen can account for the fact that the same creature who tortures his fellow man also weeps at the bedside of his dying child.

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who survived four Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. His wife, his mother, and his father were all killed. He was stripped of his clothes, his name, his profession, and everything he had ever owned. He watched men die by the hundreds. He watched men who had once been doctors and lawyers become indifferent to suffering they had once sworn to relieve.

And yet, in the middle of all this, he watched something else too. He watched men give away their last piece of bread to a sick stranger. He watched men comfort dying companions when they themselves had nothing left. He watched, again and again, the small acts of dignity that no amount of degradation could destroy.

In Man's Search for Meaning, his account of the camps, Frankl drew the conclusion that no other writer on the Holocaust drew quite so cleanly. He wrote:

Frankl went further. In the same book, he described the two categories of men he had actually met in the camps — not the categories the guards had imposed, not the categories of nationality or religion or politics, but the only categories that held up under the conditions he had lived through:

Two races. The decent and the indecent. Not divided by skin color, by class, by religion, by nation. Divided by decisions every individual man makes about his own life.

This is not comfortable. It is not the language of the modern academic, who has been trained to explain human behavior in terms of systems and structures. It is the language of a man who saw the systems and the structures at their worst, and who concluded that they were never the whole story. A man is not only what has been done to him. He is also what he chooses to do.

Frankl named this the "last of the human freedoms" — the freedom that cannot be taken from a man, no matter what is done to his body. The freedom to choose his response. It is the freedom that separates the guard from the prisoner even when the guard holds all the power. It is the freedom that makes a man, in the deepest sense, a man.

Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychologist who became famous in the last decade for refusing to use compelled speech in a Canadian university. He has written two books that have sold millions of copies — 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order — and has spoken to more young men in the last seven years than any other public figure alive.

His central claim about human nature is not original to him. It is drawn from Jung, from Nietzsche, from Dostoevsky, and from the older Christian tradition underneath all three. It goes like this: a good man is not the man who has nothing dangerous in him. A good man is the man who has everything dangerous in him and has chosen to hold it under voluntary control.

Peterson's earliest book on this subject, Maps of Meaning, examines the difference between the hero and the tyrant. Both have power. Both can be dangerous. The difference is that the hero has integrated his capacity for aggression, for cruelty, for domination — and then chosen not to use it. The tyrant has not.

This is why Peterson argues that a man who has never known violence, who has never been tested, who has been raised from infancy to be "nice," is not a good man. He is an untested man. He is a man who has not yet discovered what he would do if something he loved were threatened.

In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson draws the picture more explicitly. He asks his reader to imagine a man who has been made into a "nice" creature through constant pressure from culture and school. This man is not virtuous. He is merely weak. He has no capacity to resist evil, either within himself or outside of himself. He has not been trained to stand, only to avoid causing offense.

Peterson's prescription is not to make men dangerous. It is to make men capable of danger and then to make them good. The two halves cannot be separated. A man who has no capacity for danger cannot protect anyone. A man who has no goodness cannot be trusted with the danger he possesses. Only the man who has both can hold a line.

This is what the older writers called virtue — the Latin virtus, which shares a root with vir, the word for man. Virtue was never merely the absence of vice. It was the strength to be dangerous and the discipline to refuse. It was what separated the Christian knight from the marauder, even when both carried the same sword.

Put the three witnesses together and the answer is not vague.

Solzhenitsyn tells us where the line is drawn. Not between nations, not between parties, not between classes. Through the heart of every man. Through his own heart. Through yours.

Frankl tells us what that line produces in practice. Two races of men — the decent and the indecent — found in every group, in every country, in every walk of life. The membership rolls are not fixed. Every man decides which race he belongs to by the choices he makes.

Peterson tells us what the decent man actually looks like. Not a harmless man. Not a nice man. Not a man who has been trained never to offend. A man who has everything dangerous in him and who has chosen to hold it under control.

All three of them are saying the same thing scripture has been saying from the beginning. The enemy is not primarily outside the gate. The enemy is inside. Every man who has ever hurt someone he loved, every man who has ever lied to himself about what he was doing, every man who has ever gone one step further than he ever intended — every one of them has met the enemy. The enemy is familiar. The enemy has a name. The enemy is his own.

The second view of human nature — the view that says man is basically good — is not merely wrong. It is dangerous in specific, predictable ways.

It makes every man blind to himself.

If man is basically good, then a man's own failures must be somebody else's fault. His anger is a response to injustice. His laziness is a response to an unfair system. His appetites are natural and therefore not to be questioned. The one place he never looks is inward.

It makes every institution weaker.

If man is basically good, then a school does not need to teach character. A church does not need to preach repentance. A business does not need real accountability. A government does not need checks and balances. Every safeguard that the older generation built into these institutions was built on the assumption that men will do wrong when given the chance. Remove the assumption, and the safeguards come down with it.

It leaves children unprotected.

This is the hardest consequence to say out loud, and the one that matters most. The modern West has spent fifty years telling itself that institutions can be trusted with its children without oversight. That teachers, coaches, clergy, and doctors are safe by default. That parents who ask questions are paranoid. The record — and this is the record, documented in court files and investigative reports and disclosed settlements — is that the assumption does not hold. Institutions are made of fallen men. Where fallen men are given unchecked access to children, harm follows. Every parent who has ever had to make that fact real in his own home knows exactly what this means.

• Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago, Volumes I–III (1973–1975).
• Frankl, Viktor E. Man's Search for Meaning (1946; revised editions 1959, 1984).
• Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1999).
• Peterson, Jordan B. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018).
• Peterson, Jordan B. Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life (2021).
• Prager, Dennis. Think a Second Time (1995).
• Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.