I'm teaching an American Literature survey course this semester, something I haven't done in a while. I last taught such a course to high school juniors; now I'm teaching it to adults. I prefer the adults - they have some understanding about human nature, their own as well as others, and our discussions about the Puritans or Emerson or Whitman are sharpened by their assumptions about what their fellow humans are.
The class, some thirty strong, have resolved themselves into informal "camps," based on their beliefs about human nature. There are "Puritans," who believe in the innate corruption of people. They don't necessarily buy the Adam-and-Eve story, but they understand clearly its message: disobedience against rules corrupts the human soul (and human society).
The Deists are a bit more relaxed, Unitarian in their outlook. They acknowledge a decline in society, but attribute it, not to the innate badness of people, but to an ignorance imposed by overbearing institutions: people have been diverted from their natural urge for harmony. This is admittedly a loose camp, but not without moral integrity. They act upon the belief that gray is the normal color of most human relationships.
I don't have any anarchists, but there are a few who give Tom Paine a good hearing, and several who are a bit introspective, shadows of Dickinson, or Whitman in his more melancholic moods. (Luckily, no one much cares for the moodiness of Poe.) By discussing literature as if were a read-out on the nature of being human, we can't help but begin to see that we really can't define what human nature is, capture its essence in a pithy memorandum. Are humans naturally corrupt? Perhaps, but then someone acts with Kant's good will, and the corruption, if it's there, is overturned. Or someone behaves according to Kant's categorical imperative, but then gives in to the crude aloofness of Nietzsche's Over-man. If there is a human nature, it lies in the tendency for humans to assume any moral shape they wish, to be plastic in the face of the historical, natural, social, economic, and political forces in their lives. As biologists are discovering, more of that plasticity is limited by genetics than previously believed, but human nature seems more like Proteus, the sea god who could change shapes, than the bed of Procrustes, on which everything must be stretched to fit.
We've also concluded that it's the nature of humans to differ about what makes humans what they are. That is the real gift of this class: a reaffirmation of the beauty and bounty of good talk among people learning together, the suspension of mistrust while we examine our spirits.
Freelancing
Koppelization