Douglas H Shennan

Evolution and the Nature of Good Douglas H Shennan

People have inherited from their animal ancestors a natural urge to help and co-operate with their fellow-humans. But the advance of our culture has made us selfish. Modern humans need co-operation, goodwill and a charitable attitude more than ever, because stability is necessary to raise children for the long period that humans require.

In particular, modern lapses from the parental and sexual discipline imposed on all our ancestors, animal and early human, which enabled them to survive, have caused great problems for children, depriving them of parental love and resulting in maladjustment and crime. We should aim to recover an attitude of helpfulness in place of a competitive and often hostile one towards other people, most particularly a willingness to tolerate the stresses that develop between fellow-parents, so as to provide care and stability for the children. That simple approach, however, is greatly complicated by the complexity of modern life. The key to dealing with it is to maintain within oneself an attitude of goodwill and charity, even when under the considerable pressures that modern life imposes.