The Better Angels of Our Nature

By Tim Howard

I am an atheist, but one of the most moving experiences of my life began with a simple question from a religious friend.

“Imagine God is real,” she said. “Imagine you have died and are going to heaven. What do you think it will be like?”

My first thought wasn’t of God. It was of my dogs.

I imagined all the dogs I had loved throughout my life waiting for me. I imagined the joy of our reunion after so many years apart.

Then another thought occurred to me. What would it be like for all those dogs to meet each other?

They all had such different personalities. Some would bound excitedly towards one another. Others would be cautious. One or two would probably wander off to investigate something more interesting.

And I found myself hoping that, in heaven, we would finally understand each other perfectly. Whatever had been lost in translation between humans and dogs on Earth would simply disappear.

It was a lovely thought.

A consolation.

What surprised me was that it did not trouble me when I realised that consolation is not the same thing as truth.

The beauty of the thought did not make it true. Nor did recognising that diminish its beauty. For a few moments I had imagined something wonderful. That was enough.

But not all consolations are beautiful.

Some ask nothing of us except that we endure grief. Others ask us to surrender curiosity, distrust evidence and blame our neighbours.

They offer certainty where the world offers complexity. They replace difficult questions with comforting answers.

During the COVID pandemic these darker consolations were on full display.

The virus was a hoax. The vaccine was poison. Scientists were lying. Governments had planned it all.

Every theory offered the same emotional reward. The world no longer seemed frighteningly uncertain. We had a target for our worries. Someone was to blame.

Science offered something far less emotionally satisfying.

We were told: “This is a novel coronavirus. We are learning. Our advice will change as our knowledge improves, we will develop a vaccine”.

That was not science failing. It was science behaving exactly as it should.

Science is not a collection of eternal truths. It is humanity’s best method for correcting its own mistakes.

Yet many people interpreted uncertainty as evidence of deception and certainty as evidence of honesty.

That inversion has not disappeared now that the pandemic has faded.

The subjects have changed. Russia invaded Ukraine. Populist movements have continued to grow. Conflict in the Middle East has become another arena in which the appearance of certainty often triumphs over understanding.

But the habit of mind remains remarkably familiar. More and more people begin not with a question, but with an answer. Evidence becomes something to collect in support of conclusions already reached.

Trust is transferred from institutions that openly admit mistakes to personalities who never admit any.

We should not be surprised by this. Human beings have always sought consolation. We seek stories that reassure us the world makes sense.

The danger comes when consolation demands victims.

History is littered with stories that explain our problems by blaming minorities, migrants, intellectuals, scientists, journalists or political opponents.

These stories are comforting because they simplify the world. Complexity disappears. Uncertainty disappears. Someone else becomes responsible for our disappointments.

My imagined reunion with my dogs asked nothing of anyone else.

These consolations ask us to distrust, to resent and sometimes to hate.

A friend – the son of a farmer – told me his dad described humans as “strange cattle”.

We are capable of extraordinary kindness and extraordinary cruelty. We produce people who appeal to our better angels, and we produce those who profit by awakening the darker ones.

Abraham Lincoln understood this. On the eve of America’s Civil War he appealed to “the better angels of our nature”.

Four years later, after one of history’s bloodiest conflicts, he urged his country to act “with malice toward none; with charity for all.”

John F. Kennedy made the same appeal in different words. He reminded us that, whatever our differences, we all breathe the same air, cherish our children’s future and are all mortal.

Those are not sentimental observations. They are political ones.

I was reminded of them during the long battle over the Murugappan family in Biloela. The people who knew the family wanted them to stay.

They had worked alongside them, gone to school with them, shared meals and celebrations with them. The family had ceased to be an abstraction. They had become neighbours.

Distance encourages categories. Closeness reveals people.

Perhaps that is one of civilisation’s great tasks: not simply to restrain our darker impulses, but to create the conditions in which people encounter one another as fellow human beings rather than competing tribes.

Laws cannot force affection, but they can quietly express the kind of society we aspire to be.

They can invite us to think first about belonging rather than exclusion, about neighbours rather than strangers.

We all need consolations. They help us survive loss, disappointment and uncertainty. There is nothing shameful in that.

But we should be wary of consolations that require us to abandon truth, or each other.

The darker angels of our nature offer certainty, blame and the comfort of enemies.

The better angels ask something much harder: humility, curiosity and the courage to follow truth even when it offers no consolation at all.