A Normblog Milestone

Profile number 200 is up, this time a very special guest. My favorite question and answer:

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind?

There was a time when I thought that, if not all, then at least most, human wickedness was produced by circumstance. I no longer think that. I believe there are bad impulses within the nature of human beings, though that's not to say that circumstances aren't important in either encouraging or restraining these. One of the things that changed my mind was studying the literature of the Holocaust. But as important an influence was observing the smaller-scale episodes of selfishness, dishonesty, mean-spiritedness, unkindness, and all the rest of it amongst people with comfortable enough lives and no obvious external reasons for behaving badly.