At Court

Last week I served as a juror on a criminal case in federal court. The unpleasantness of having to hear testimony about nasty human behavior was significantly counterbalanced for me by my experience in the jury room, where all the members of the jury, of various walks of life and varying experience, deliberated with care, intelligence, responsibility, and determination to reach a fair and truthful verdict.

The experience renewed my faith in the wisdom of the Founding Fathers’ commitment to trial by jury. It occurred to me that most of what we hear about the behavior of the fellow human beings whom we don’t know personally is via the news, and most news is about bad human behavior. But here were eleven people whom I did not know, randomly chosen, seriously trying to do the right thing as I was and thereby justifying the Founders’ trust in their collective wisdom. It was the opposite of the news. It was good news.

When I returned to school and described the above, one of my colleagues suggested that my faith in the goodness of human nature had been renewed. I said I had no faith in the goodness of human nature. (There’s Rousseau again, blowing smoke.) Any particular human being’s nature may be good or bad; in general human nature is plastic, malleable, able to be influenced by training for good or ill, and at least in part subject to the government of the free will. I did not see how one could hear the testimony I heard and still believe that man is naturally good.

But what my experience did renew was my appreciation for the power of culture, tradition, education, social pressure, and law, when they are intact and rooted in wisdom and virtue, to influence people for the good. More specifically I found that in a relatively random sample of my fellow American citizens, the values of reason, patience, truth, the rule of law, common sense, politeness, honesty, and justice were very much in evidence.

Given the corrupting influences of our entertainments, schools, celebrities, politicians, and the usual news, the likelihood that such values will continue to characterize a random sample of citizens may be doubtful. But the behavior of my fellow jurors on last week’s trial persuaded me to hope that perhaps we are not so far gone as a culture as it sometimes seems.