Why Can’t We Be Good?

Jacob Needleman has been a secular philosopher and a professor of philosophy of religion for many years at San Francisco State University. Some years ago he wrote a remarkable book called Why Can’t We Be Good? His thesis is that even though social theorists, therapists, politicians, and everybody else are working like crazy to write books about how people should live, there’s just one thing they’re forgetting: everybody basically knows how he or she ought to live, and we just can’t do it.

Nobody’s got the strength to do what we know we should. This, says Needleman, is the biggest mystery and problem of the human race. Why are we writing all these books telling people how they ought to live? People know what they ought to do, but they just won’t and can’t do it. It’s impossible. And people know they should not do certain things, but they do them anyway. That’s our problem, Needleman says. Human beings know how they should live but they can’t and they won’t, and he has no idea why.