What Has Happened to Human Nature?

“Why is it that we have child cruelty in this age? Why is it that we have animal cruelty? Why is it that we have violence? . . . Why is it that people take to terrorism? Why is it that people take to drugs? . . . Why, when you have got everything, do some people turn to those fundamental things which undermine the whole of civilization?”

THOSE questions were asked out loud by Britain’s prime minister. You have perhaps asked similar questions many times. Have you found any satisfying answers?

Putting her questions into perspective, the prime minister said: “For years when I was young and in politics with all my hopes and dreams and ambitions, it seemed to me and to many of my contemporaries that if we got an age where we had good housing, good education, a reasonable standard of living, then everything would be set and we should have a fair and much easier future. We know now that that is not so. We are up against the real problems of human nature.”​—Italics ours.

Human nature can be defined as “the complex of fundamental dispositions and traits of human beings.” Obviously, conflicting dispositions and traits can cause problems on a personal, national, or even an international level. But to what extent is human nature really to blame for today’s dangerous trends in violence, terrorism, drug trafficking, and the like?

Is human nature solely to blame for the conditions that threaten to “undermine the whole of civilization”? Or are there other factors we should take into account to explain why people so easily gravitate to degrading, selfish practices when they could aspire to higher, nobler pursuits?

All too often human nature gravitates toward what is negative and destructive.

In Britain, for instance, crimes of violence recently jumped 11 percent. “Our job,” says Britain’s prime minister, “is to try to find constraints so that great civilization can go on.” But can laws and political pressure, however well-meaning, really change the tendency of people to do what is wrong? The fact that lawlessness exists and increases in the face of legislation, and even in the face of stringent law enforcement, speaks for itself. Something more than legal restraint is needed. The very nature of people has to change.

The Bible, taking an honest, down-to-earth view of life, describes man’s bad traits. For example, the apostle Paul wrote to his fellow Christians in Galatia about “immoral, filthy, and indecent actions . . . People become enemies and they fight; they become jealous, angry, and . . . are envious, get drunk, have orgies, and do other things like these.” According to Today’s English Version, quoted here, all these degrading practices are “what human nature does.”​—Galatians 5:19-21.

The Root of the Problem

Today’s English Version, however, is a free translation and the expression “what human nature does” is merely a paraphrase of what Paul actually said. The Greek word used by Paul, sarx, means “flesh,” not “human nature.” For this reason, literal translations speak here of “the works of the flesh” to convey Paul’s expression accurately in our modern tongue.a

The Bible account of sin’s entry onto the human scene is clear and simple​—in fact, so simple that most choose not to believe it. This is how Paul described it: “Through one man sin entered into the world and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men because they had all sinned.” (Romans 5:12) Paul is here alluding to Genesis, the first book of the Bible, and to the creation of the first man, Adam, and his wife, Eve. Their willful disobedience is well-known. On account of it, they were sentenced to death. Their offspring inherited their imperfections and likewise died. So then, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” For this basic reason, human nature today is at best a muddied reflection of what it was when God originally created man perfect.​—Romans 3:23; Genesis, chapters 2 and 3.