Unfortunately, many people in the past and even today believe that human nature is irremedially selfish. This dogma does not correspond to any scientifically established truth. Yet, people have clung to it and thereby forfeited fantastic opportunities that could have been seized. One reason why people have tended to think in this way is due to the commonly known fact that change can be extremely slow. For example, it can take decades and centuries for a tree to grow and give fruit. Similarly, it has taken millions of years for humans to evolve. Nevertheless, to think that human nature cannot improve is an extremely flawed conclusion. Gandhi writes:
We do see men constantly becoming better under effort and discipline. There is no occasion for limiting the capacity for improvement. Life to me would lose all its interest if I felt that I could not attain perfect love on earth. After all, what matters, is that our capacity for loving ever expandsBahá'ís believe that it is essential for us to reject the idea that we cannot grow and improve through effort. The Universal House of Justice[11]
![[footnote]](img42.png){kind=small}
, in
The Promise of World Peace
explains:
Indeed, so much have aggression and conflict come to characterize our social, economic and religious systems, that many have succumbed to the view that such behaviour is intrinsic to human nature and therefore ineradicable.
With the entrenchment of this view, a paralyzing contradiction has developed in human affairs. On the one hand, people of all nations proclaim not only their readiness but their longing for peace and harmony, for an end to the harrowing apprehensions tormenting their daily lives. On the other, uncritical assent is given to the proposition that human beings are incorrigibly selfish and aggressive and thus incapable of erecting a social system at once progressive and peaceful, dynamic and harmonious, a system giving free play to individual creativity and initiative but based on co-operation and reciprocity.
As the need for peace becomes more urgent, this fundamental contradiction, which hinders its realization, demands a reassessment of the assumptions upon which the commonly held view of mankind's historical predicament is based. Dispassionately examined, the evidence reveals that such conduct, far from expressing man's true self, represents a distortion of the human spirit. Satisfaction on this point will enable all people to set in motion constructive social forces which, because they are consistent with human nature, will encourage harmony and co-operation instead of war and conflict.[12]Esslemont also touches on some of these points:
Education and religion are alike based on the assumption that it is possible to change human nature. In fact, it requires but little investigation to show that the one thing we can say with certainty about any living thing is that it cannot keep from changing. Without change there can be no life. Even the mineral cannot resist change, and the higher we go in the scale of being, the more varied, complex, and wonderful do the changes become. Moreover, in progress and development among creatures of all grades we find two kinds of change--one slow, gradual, often almost imperceptible; and the other rapid, sudden and dramatic. The latter occur at what are called ``critical stages'' of development. In the case of minerals we find such critical stages at the melting and boiling points, for example, when the solid suddenly becomes a liquid or the liquid becomes a gas. In the case of plants we see such critical stages when the seed begins to germinate, or the bud bursts into leaf. In the animal world we see the same on every hand, as when the grub suddenly changes into a butterfly, the chick emerges from its shell, or the babe is born from its mother's womb.
In the higher life of the soul we often see a similar transformation, when a man is "born again" and his whole being becomes radically changed in its aims, its character and activities. Such critical stages often affect a whole species or multitude of species simultaneously, as when vegetation of all kinds suddenly bursts into new life in springtime.
Bahá'u'lláh declares that just as lesser living things have times of sudden emergence into new and fuller life, so for mankind also a ``critical stage,'' a time of ``rebirth,'' is at hand. Then modes of life which have persisted from the dawn of history up till now will be quickly, irrevocably, altered, and humanity [will] enter on a new phase of life as different from the old as the butterfly is different from the caterpillar, or the bird from the egg. Mankind as a whole, in the light of new Revelation, will attain to a new vision of truth; as a whole country is illumined when the sun rises, so that all men see clearly, where but an hour before everything was dark and dim. ``This is a new cycle of human power,'' says `Abdu'l-Bahá. ``All the horizons of the world are luminous, and the world will become indeed as a rose garden and a paradise.'' The analogies of nature are all in favor of such a view; the Prophets of old have with one accord foretold the advent of such a glorious day; the signs of the times show clearly that profound and revolutionary changes in human ideas and institutions are even now in progress. What could be more futile and baseless therefore, than the pessimistic argument that, although all things else change, human nature cannot change?[13]