The Presumption of Decency

Those aggressive drivers or dreadful waiters you meet may not be terrible people after all, says Harvard economist Edward Glaeser. He believes we should presume more decency in our fellow humans

Welcome to This I Believe -- an NPR series presenting the personal philosophies of remarkable men and women from all walks of life.

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This I believe. I'm Jay Allison for This I Believe. Edward Glaeser is a professor of economics at Harvard. His work has included research on political extremism and how hatred arises among different groups particularly hatred which has little basis in truth. He says that economists don't tend to think of themselves as moral arbiters, and in fact it is in the reticence about judging others that he finds his belief. Here's Edward Glaeser with his essay for This I Believe.

I believe in the presumption of decency.

While I like to think of myself as being as rational as an economist should be, I can get a little miffed at minor offenses that somehow appear to me, momentarily, as great villainy. In some of my more embarrassing moments, I've come to see law-abiding and therefore slow cab drivers as violators of the basic standards of taxicab decency, which, in my haste, I have convinced myself demand utterly breakneck speed.

While my retribution may be limited to cutting their tips from 15 percent to 13.25 percent, I have then spent the next hour furious at the cab driver, his dispatcher, his country of origin, and pretty much anything else in my way. Sadly, I have also privately vilified editors who have rejected my research, restaurants that haven't taken my reservations and even politicians who have had the audacity to push policies that I oppose. This is the type of folly that can be avoided with the presumption of decency.

Academics can be a little arrogant, and I am certainly among those who are quite comfortable thinking that I am right and that someone else is wrong. But it is one thing to think that someone else is misled and another to think that they are evil. We don't hate the merely annoying or the purely pathetic. Hatred starts by believing someone to be a villain without decency. And hatred is a pretty good emotion to avoid. It is personally painful to hate. Hatred clouds our judgment and can lead us to make spiteful decisions that do no one any good.

There is a personal value — the presumption of decency — that counteracts the tendency to let hatred befuddle our reason. If we hold tightly to the view that people around us are as decent as ourselves, trying, like us, to muddle honorably through life, it is harder to turn them into villains and to turn ourselves into creatures of irrational judgment. Besides, I'm certainly no more decent than most of mankind.

The presumption of decency is not naiveté. Instead, it requires a certain amount of realism. If you expect perfection, you will spend your days being furious at irresponsible teenage babysitters and equally irresponsible politicians. A better approach is to recognize human frailty and to be generous in our judgments. Today's political dialogues could particularly benefit from the recognition that both parties are led by imperfect but not terrible people, whose mistaken policies are more often the result of error than evil.

I don't always succeed in presuming the decency of others, but I do my best. Like most people, I'm pretty flawed but trying to be decent, and I'm trying to believe the same about others.

Edward Glaeser, with his essay for This I Believe. Glaeser said he began thinking about this essay last year after the death of his father, who lived in Nazi Germany and was exposed to evil in its most extreme forms, and yet even after that Glaeser says his father had the mature wisdom to be moderate in his moral judgments about other individuals. We welcome essays from everyone for our series at npr.org/thisibelieve. You can find out more see all the essays we've aired and that have been submitted. For This I Believe. I'm Jay Allison.

This I Believe is independently produced by Jay Allison, Dan Gediman,John Gregory and Vicki Merrick with Emily Botein.

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Support for This I Believe comes from the Cooperation for Public Broadcasting.

This I Believe is produced for NPR by This I Believe Incorporated Atlantic Public Media. For more essays in the series, please visit npr.org/thisibelieve.

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