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In our last Forensic View blog post, we saw how anomalies in the human prefrontal cortex can contribute to impulsive behavior, which in turn may contribute to crimes of violence.
This is certainly true, and it fits comfortably within an implicit modern view of humanity as quintessentially good. However, since some criminal behaviors (other than crimes for gain, for which the motivations are obvious) do not derive from impulsive failures, we must then seek out additional explanations (e.g., Sharps, 2024).
The idea of innate human goodness is central to humanistic psychology, which has descended to some degree from the original Renaissance Humanism which spread from its Italian origins in the second half of the 14th century. There is of course no direct line of descent from humanistic philosophy to modern humanistic psychology; however, many of the concepts of Renaissance humanism still exist in modern humanism, explicitly or implicitly. For example, both Renaissance and modern versions of humanism agree on the value and dignity of human beings, which may bias us toward seeing the good in humanity, perhaps at the expense of the recognition of some of the bad bits.
This was especially problematic for Renaissance humanists, whose philosophy, though it was embraced by many religious intellectuals, flew directly in the face of religious teachings which held that humans were quintessentially evil and had to be redeemed by good works or through faith. Humanists needed humanity, rather than God, to become the virtuous core of their considerations. So, the problem of human evil had to be excised; and human nature gradually became quintessentially good. This viewpoint made it possible to overthrow previous religious beliefs, and it also permits human beings to get away with quite a bit; early humanists like Sir Thomas More could set fire to those with different religious views while presumably feeling good about it, and King Henry VIII, thoroughly versed in humanistic doctrine, could feel like a good person while executing the occasional wife, and discarding other wives like spoiled milk, without the slightest perceived stain on his royal virtue.
Modern and Renaissance humanism both have roots in the ancient classical world, the world which the Renaissance (the great “Rebirth”) was intended to reproduce. The resultant reliance on science and logic was intended to displace the violent dogmas of other, less humanitarian viewpoints.
So, we might expect the fountainhead of all this classical intellect and virtue, ancient Athens in Greece, to have been a place and time in which human virtue, logic, and all the rest of it would have triumphed over violence and barbarism; and there’s no question that the ancient Greeks turned in some awfully good work. The philosophy of Plato and Socrates, the tragedies of Aeschylus and the comedies of Aristophanes, the art of Pheidias and the nascent science of Aristotle all stand as major foundational influences on the entire modern world. So, they had that going for them.
But then, we modern believers in human goodness are stuck with yet another ancient Athenian: the historian Thucydides.
Thucydides (2006 ed.) provides us with the major extant source on the terrible Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. This was a mighty and massive conflict, extremely bloody for its day, that ultimately, through the complex politics of the day, roped in an awful lot of other nations and governments. These included the tiny island of Melos. Its 58 square miles were known for the export of obsidian but not much else, and when the Athenians showed up in 416 BC and demanded the Melians surrender, the islanders were nonplused to say the least. The Melians had ancestral ties to Sparta, true, but they had attempted to stay neutral through the whole bloody Peloponnesian mess; that is, until the Athenians destroyed their lands, at which point they were definitely unhappy with Athens. So, at that point, the Athenians invaded and demanded tribute.
What followed was the amazing Melian dialogue. We don’t have it word for word—Thucydides freely admits that all he remembered was the gist of what was said—but the Melians, effectively, created strong and occasionally brilliant humanist arguments against Athenian violence. They argued that their friendship would be of value to the Athenians. They argued in terms of abstract justice and fair play, of right and wrong as significant vectorial forces in the affairs of nations, and of goodwill between neighbors. The Melian part of the Melian dialogue bears a resemblance to a modern University humanist discussion of ethics and political psychology.
The Athenian part, however, is different. The Athenians explained that they didn’t have to listen to all that intellectual rubbish, because they were stronger and the Melians were weaker and therefore Melos had damn well better play along and pay up.
The Melians still wouldn’t surrender, so the Athenians, whose culture was foundational for so many good and advanced things in the Western world—for art, philosophy, and science— essentially just stomped the island into a greasy spot, murdered all the men of military age, and enslaved everybody else.
The Athenians didn’t do this for practical purposes; they probably had plenty of obsidian. They did, however, have geopolitical reasons which completely overwhelmed and obliterated any of the humanistic tendencies, the good in our modern sense of the word, that should have arisen from their great cultural achievements.
The Athenians, as far as we know, weren’t brain damaged, and their gain from the conquest of Melos was minimal at best; but they destroyed the island and its culture anyway. Ultimately, the great lesson of the Melian dialogue may be that good, in our modern sense of the word, is less an innate part of human nature than it is a choice, to be made with reference to both psychology and circumstance; a choice applicable to violent crime as well as to war and conquest.
It is therefore very important for us today to learn how that psychology operates, and how it works under different circumstances. We will return to this topic in our next Forensic View post.
