We so want to believe we are good people. Even if sometimes the outward evidence may say otherwise, we have this fallback: "I’m good inside." Or, "but my heart is good."
I’m inclined to doubt all that. I’m inclined to believe that the outside is the inside, so what you see is what you get. Most people I know are good by any useful standard you want to name, but we all do things that fall short of our own standard (let alone God’s).
The trick then is to say, well, yes, I sometimes act selfishly, but in my heart I am, here it comes, basically good. It’s a way of lessening the significance of our shortcomings (they're not the real me) and perhaps the beginning of an answer to the vexing question, why do I do the things I do?
But it is a statement of faith, one that cannot be proven. Indeed, when we seek to examine our heart (our true self or inner being) in order to discover that seat of goodness, we only get tangled in our own self-deceits. Things get complicated quickly. Better to fall back on a neat statement of faith about our inner goodness.
Even if the evidence runs counter. Because it can't be denied that outwardly I sometimes do what is not good, and this requires an explanation. Was I mistaken about my inner self? What if I am not truly “good inside.”
This doesn’t mean I’m bad inside. It may be I’m a sort of mixed bag, both good and bad. To insist that somewhere in me there is this good essential identity that the outward me does not always reflect requires me to see myself as two people; the inward me (who is good), and the outward me (who is not always good). I must insist on this divided two-person me in order to sustain this faith in my own innate goodness.
But what if our outward behavior perfectly reflects our essential being, our so-called inward self. What if we are not divided into an inner and an outer self that are sometimes in conflict? What if we are one being with contradictory impulses? What if what we do IS who we are?
This perspective doesn’t feel like an evasion of the evidence (at least). The real me, the essential me, may be difficult to accept. I don’t necessarily want to be that person. It is much better to be essentially good.
I will admit that “goodness” is a vexed subject. Sometimes we Christians talk about it in ways that are not useful. As soon as I say someone is good, there’s some Calvinist out there saying, “No one is good! We all fall short. Etc.”
The problem is, people have to have a working definition of goodness that can differentiate Mother Teresa from Pol Pot. Because the former is obviously better than the latter, right? Mother Teresa no doubt had her bad days, because we are all a mixed bag, but we are not all exactly the same mixed bags. Some through discipline and prayer (or whatever else) have leaned more toward goodness, some have leaned toward evil. It's useful to be able to tell the difference, as a matter of our own survival perhaps.
I know some good people, and I have also known some few nasty people. I don’t think people are “basically good,” but I do think there’s a lot of good in people generally. I have known some who reserved their good impulse for those close to them, their family and friends, but conducted themselves very differently with all others, a practice which in the end spoils all our goodness in my opinion.
Anyway, it’s a vexed subject, this matter of goodness. In the Christian tradition we say that we need our hearts changed, and that the Holy Spirit, the third person of God, can do that. So self-reliance is replaced by God-reliance, and the Great Surgeon goes to work on our hearts in a process that results (we say in faith) in increasing the goodness in us and a cleaning out of the selfishness, etc.
Lord, may it be so.
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