Invisible Man Big Question

The speaker in the book Invisible Man, goes through a lot of different social environments and experiences many different kinds of people. He met good people, bad people, and people who's hearts were in the right place, but just never found a good way to achieve their goals. What would the speaker say when faced with the question "Is mankind inherently good or bad?" The person who stands out the most when thinking of this question, is Ras the Exhorter, and later Ras the Destroyer. He is one of the people who's heart is in the right place, but never found an effective way of achieving his goals. He was molded by his experience. He had a dream, that was his goal. His experiences shaped his actions while trying to achieve that goal. If you compare the people we know and interact with to Ras, we are all shaped by our experieces. So mankind isn't inherently good or inherently bad. It depends on where the person in question was born, what his experiences were, and the people he grew up with.

Henry IV Part One Big Question

King Henry IV Part One presents a difficult case in terms of my big question: is humankind inherently good or evil? The characters are so complex and dynamic regarding their actions, it's hard to assign one character with a specific role of good or bad. There are three characters in particular that, even though one of them changes drastically throughout the play, are a little easier to decipher: Falstaff, Prince Hal, and King Henry IV himself.

Falstaff at first seems to be a very simple character. Give him wine and women and he's a happy man. But upon closer reading, he actually possess a lot more depth than some of the other characters in the play. Despite his affection for drinking, Falstaff is almost divine in a sense. He references God more than any other character in the play.  He sticks by his friend Prince Hal even when Hal casts him away. Though Falstaff seems like a bad role model with his over indulgences, he is basically a good person. Aside from the occasional violent robbery...

Prince Hal is definitely a dynamic character. He goes from a young "hooligan" as my mother would call him, to a very serious, noble King. In the Tuesday Writing I wrote earlier today, I explored the question of how honor affects moral. Hal, being a very moral person, gets his honor from his moral. He is more concerned about ruling his kingdom than what his kingdom thinks about him. This is a very good trait to have in a king, and just a person in general.

King Henry IV is a very different character compared to the other two. He is a very introverted man, introverted to the point where he can't rule effectively. He is worried about his public appearance, and is very shy. His actions don't derive from a bad personality, but they do cause harm. Aside from being an illegitimate king, he doesn't have the allure to assert his kingship. This lack of leadership combined with his illegitimate rule, is what allowed the rebels to rebel. Despite having won the war, a lot of people still died. It was a war after all. If the King was able to assert his claim to the throne, I don't think the rebels would have rebelled.

None of these characters are inherently bad. Despite being guilty of their crimes, they never truly wanted to actually hurt people just to hurt them. However, their actions did end up causing problems and sometimes cost lives. So in comparing King Henry IV Part One to the real world, no the people in the play are not inherently bad, like real life people. They just sometimes make bad decisions. However, remember that this is a play for entertainment. This kind of a question can't be answered from interpreting just this one book. Only time and experience can do that, neither of which I have very much of.

Oedipus Big Question

Oedipus is one of the most well known of the Greek tragedies. Oedipus, cursed from birth, is destined to murder his father and marry his mother. Learning of this curse he leaves his home to try to avoid his curse. Despite his best efforts however, he ends up fulfilling his fate. There are two main opposing parties in this story I think. Oedipus him self, and the gods that cursed him. The gods that curse Oedipus, to me, represent the evil part of humanity. We don't know why Oedipus was cursed. For all we know it could have been because of some petty squabble between the gods. Like humanity, they are random. And like humanity, they are immature, quarreling at the cost of individuals. Oedipus represents the individuals. He has no control over his fate. Despite the lengths that he goes to to try and avoid his destiny, he still fulfills the prophecy. The gods for some reason have decided that Oedipus is a very unlucky man.

Oedipus and the gods' representation of individuals and humanity also relates to chaos and order. The gods are chaotic because they're so childish and unpredictable. Oedipus is a force of order because he opposes the gods' chaos. Because the gods represent humanity and chaos, and Oedipus represents individuals and order, it can be said that humanity and chaos and individuals and order go hand in hand.

Wuthering Heights Big Question

Wuthering Heights revolves around revenge. One could argue that all misfortunes that Bronte's characters succumb to can be traced back to a grudge or a plan for revenge. So, if all the conflicts are caused by a character's need for revenge, could it be argued that the avenger is evil? Though it is a depressing book, I don't think so. Heathcliff  was originally a peasant in Liverpool, who was adopted by Mr. Earnshaw. As soon as he was taken in by the Earnshaw family, he was immediately shunned by everyone in the family except for Cathrine and Mr. Earnshaw himself. This isolation later drives Heathcliff to extreme levels of revenge, to the point where he starts treating his enemies' children badly. Heathcliff is turned into an evil man no doubt. But he wasn't a bad person to begin with. It was his environment that drove him to depression and hate.

If Heathcliff isn't inherently evil though, what about the people who drove him to evil? Hindley resented Heathcliff from the first night he spent at Wuthering Heights. Later, after Mr. Earnshaw and Hindley took control of Wuthering Heights, he cast out Heathcliff as a servant, denying him an education, despite the fact the they were brothers. Hindley's hate for Heathcliff was uncalled for, and was fueled by jealousy. He wasn't poor, he wasn't pushed away, he was just stuck up. Hindley was just jealous of his father's attention for Heathcliff.

These two men, who caused so much pain and suffering for the people around them, are both meant to be resented by the end of the book. They both fight with each other over childhood grudges, and harm they're loved ones in the process. They are both despicable. But Heathcliff was driven to hate, while Hindley was inherently stuck up and cruel. Society, like Hindley, falls into bad habits and morals. Individuals I think are not inherently evil, they're driven to evil by society, like Heathcliff was driven to evil by Hindley. 

Is humankind inherently good or evil?

The world is full of evil. It's everywhere, and it's not hard to find. From the smallest thing like stealing someone's wallet to committing genocide, all you have to do is watch the news, or read a history book to see that evil is something that everyone has to deal with. It's part of being human. And yet, there's still snippets of good too, although sometimes they can be hard to find. They're there though if you look. Like the motorbiker who stopped to walk the old lady across the street, or candy bombers of Berlin. It seems like there's a balance of both in humanity, constantly battling each other for the upper hand. Mainly, is humankind inherently good or bad?

Imagine this: a young boy of about thirteen, is living in a setting that doesn't suite him very well. He's uncomfortable, and strongly dislikes all the rules he has to follow. One day his father, the town drunk, comes along and kidnaps him. He takes the boy to his cabin and locks him inside everyday while he goes fishing. Being the town drunk would require getting drunk a lot, a task which he fulfilled every night after dinner, followed by having violent nightmares. Long story short, the boy fakes his death, finds a slave friend, they build a raft and go floating down the Mississippi River in search of adventure. We've all read Huck Finn in high school, and even if you don't remember the book in detail,  we all know the basic story. Now, these "adventures" that Huck and his friend Jim go looking for often turn out to be quite violent, sometimes deceitful, and almost always involve scheming. The point is that they always involve something that we have been taught was bad. The Duke and the King for instance: their whole thing was that they'd lie to a town to make a profit off of it. And the Grangerfords and the Shepardsons, a family rival that had been going on for so long that it's become tradition. Almost every place that Huck and Jim traveled to or sneaked through, they ran into some sort of scum.  The humanity that they faced was inherently evil, with only bits of good like fairy sprinkles on a Satan cake.

Despite the Satan cake, more recent literature says that humanity is inherently good. By literature I mean movie, and by movie I mean Guardians of the Galaxy, and by humanity I mean sentient humanoid life forms that represent humanity in a comical sort of way. The main back story is that a group of out casts and runaways through a series of events finds themselves the only thing standing in the way of a maniacal and bigoted sociopath with the power to destroy the galaxy. Throughout the movie they always met with selfish criminals with only their best interest's at heart, and just when all hope seemed lost, they all got captured. Yet at the end of the movie (spoiler alert), the galaxy pulled together as a team, and defeated the crazy antagonist. Why this is relevant, besides being an awesome movie, is that people as a group, humanity (or the representation of them) pulled together for everybody's benefit. I'd consider that inherently good, despite earlier misunderstandings.

There is one last thing to consider though, and that's a real life experience. It's been a hard nine months for everyone, but this has to be mentioned for a question like this. We all know the events of December 13th in detail so I won't go into any background or flashbacks. But it did make me think, is humankind good or evil? For a long time after we got back to school, I did think it was evil. I thought of all the comments on the news web pages, trying to twist our life changing event into their agendas for gun control laws and new security policies, and it honestly made me sick. They were turning a student's death into a political statement. I couldn't and never will see any good in that. I saw people judge and bicker over who was in the wrong, and I even saw a few people say that it had never happened at all and that it was staged. I honestly couldn't see anything good come out of that day. As 2014 switched from first to second gear and eventually into third, more school shootings took place, Ebola broke out, the city of Ferguson turned into a war zone, and Robin Williams is dead. Yet, recently, I've found the courage to finally look back on December in detail, and what I found was not ignorant party members tweeting from the comfort of their homes, nor did I find any news outlets milking that Friday just for a good news story. Instead, I found teachers caring for their student's well being. I found parents being more supportive than most of us have ever known. I found law enforcement from every city on the front range making sure that we all got out safely. I found students helping each other out, supporting each other. And if that's not inherently good, then I don't know what is.

So is humankind inherently good or evil? Some literature says good, a lot of it says evil. We all have different experiences that shape our lives and our perspective of the world. Just like some literature pieces are more optimistic than others, some people are more positive than others. Life is what makes you. We've all met our Grangerfords and our Shepardsons, our Dukes and our Kings. We all have taken at least one bite out of the Satan cake of life. My previous bite left a very sour taste in my mouth. However, I was able to find sprinkles somewhere in the cake. So I think humanity is inherently good. It may be hard to find, but it's good.