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Originally Posted by Nefeli

i was thinking that as a personal belief i m leaning towards what you say.
however, you say it yourself. "we managed to create culture".
us with the evil inside us and society/culture, who manages the evil, is again us. we created it, we felt the need to have it. we acknowledge evil. if we didnt, then evil would just exist. i dont mean that all our movites while creating culture were pure and nice, but there certaintly were motives to protect ourselves, our feelings etc.
im saying the obvious here, but its all us. there is constant fight between evil and good and which ever wins and makes us happy, depends on each one of us moral scale. since people are different (apart from the upbringing, and parents personalities and genes?, yes, its a mystery, how someone with evil in all those parametres, can be good, must be his/her nerves). we all carry inside us different numbers of sensitivity, empathy, what we think as right and wrong, sense of justice.

yes, you know, in the middle of writing what i wrote i caught my own contradiction, i.e., framing culture as a subset of human nature but also as outside of that human nature. but then as it was the interwebs and there was no real beer consumed i just posted it. whereas with real beer or coffee and cigarettes i would have corrected course.

anyway, there's a thing about culture and it's this-- that while it is a natural creation after all, it can be more easily modified than our genetic makeup. i do not believe in the tabula rasa, and old-school anthropologists are wrong, we cannot be programmed by culture to go against our nature, but i do believe that here we have the chance to modify the initial impulse, i.e., rather than, say, murder people outright, take a deep breath & draw violent comic books.

that is not to say of course that culture redeems us-- take the nazis, who were great art connoisseurs, and pillaged europe at the same time that they exterminated jews, gypsies, homosexuals, etc. at the physical end of every culture and civilization there are always weapons and yes, everything we are is in it.

i also did (on purpose) left out the part of us that we consider "good" (that definition changes also from culture to culture but that's another story). i did not mention them also because i think that's our nature as much as the nasty parts-- the instinct to care for others, to look beyond self-interest, to have empathy, etc.

both sides of the coin however i look at as survival mechanisms, not so much as morality. love, empathy, have to do with group cohesion and survival of the herd rather than the individual-- a product of natural selection just as violent impulses are. that doesn't make love, justice, empathy and generosity any less nice or beautiful or uplifting; i'm just saying, it's a part of the whole package, and more than that even-- we have these currents running through us some times in contradiction of each other.

but in any case-- i do have some hope in culture as a medium for us to choose, *to an extent only* how we modify what we are. however, i don't think we'll ever be these super-enlightened holy beings who do no harm.

of course, once we get to master genetic engineering, all bets are going to be off and i have no idea what we'll become.