It’s a wry observation but a common one: 'The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.’ Robbie Burns knew a lot about human nature. But then he was a poet. And as another poet put it, ’The proper study of mankind is man.’ That’s what being a poet is all about.
We’re unlikely to put our full trust in anybody who has only a slight understanding of human nature. Proverbs have their part in this. ‘Look before you leap,’ we say. But we also say, ‘’He who hesitates is lost.’ It’s when we say such things that’s important. What is said in a darkened hospital ward may not be quite the same thing as can be said on a sunny morning wit birdsong all around.
A similar proverb is: ‘The mills of God grind slowly yet they grind exceeding small.’ It comes from the Greeks but attained its usual form thanks to Longfellow. We see this in the rise and fall of empires, the Roman kind, the Mongolian kind, the British kind, the Nazi kind: they have their day and pass away. Only the dust remains.
Everything is temporary. Everything is provisional. Only diamonds are for ever. We mortals look for something more. We need something sure and lasting. That means something beyond the everyday, the sublunary, the mundane. It means what we commonly call ideals.
That involves a shrewd look at plans and outcomes – and also what we hold to be ultimately desirable. For some people that is principle; for others it is religion. We have to recognise the politics, the ideology. We can’t expect to manufacture a new ideology or a new religion ourselves. We have to choose from what is available.
Meanwhile we live in the shadows. We can’t be sure whether we are a man dreaming he is a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he is a man. Dreams are an admission to the problem. Philosophy gives us some clarity. Revelation (i.e. the incarnation and the Scriptures) give us something to get our teeth into.
The flawed state of human nature – original sin – is a distinctive Christian view little favoured by contemporary secular thinkers.
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