Anthrapology

It occurred to me the other day, now that I have my finals done (and kicked each of their asses) this was a very depressing semester in terms of classes. I don't know how anthropologists can be so optimistic when what we learn is so disheartening. In fact I'd say the one class that had a positive message was my Honors thesis and I wrote the damn thing. Never mind the fact that my adviser sent it back with the first four pages in red. Aside from the knowledge and understanding one gains from a class, I think there's a message or moral that accompanies each class as well. Like the GenEd psychology class I took last year definitely had the message "Don't believe everything you think" or maybe "Don't blindly go along with the crowd". My Exobiology course made us walk away with the message "There are almost definitely aliens and they probably don't want to kill us". Not as inspirational as one would like but for something we know nothing about it's pretty optimistic. This semester the messages seem to be: "Basic impulses of human nature are genetic and people are genetically predisposed to not like 'others'." "Poor people will live miserable lives and only the rich people (who don't care about the poor anyway) have the power to change that." "If you try to help people in developing countries you'll end up inadvertently helping wife-beaters and warlords and give people you're trying to help a new means of committing suicide." "Utopian experiments always fail because of human nature." "There will always be people to take advantage of the kindness of others."
I mean, fuck, where do you go from there? The only option seems to be to rewire human genetics to get rid of selfish, spiteful tendencies, but I'm not a fan of tinkering with human instincts. I don't agree with this negative assessment and I'm kind of hoping it's just a fluke that I took all downer classes and that the opinion of the anthro department is not so dim. The way I see it, humanity has slowly but surely been improving itself for the past 10,000 years. I mean sure we gave up being egalitarian (we think) nomads to become a hierarchical society with a horrible diet that created disease wherever we went. And yes, we've only relatively recently increased human life expectancy to higher than what it was before we invented agriculture, but look where it's gotten us: we can finally explore the unknown possibilities of existence and search for answers to how and why the Universe is the way it is instead of just saying "God did it." I'd say the amount of cruelty in the world has reduced since the past. The quality of life for many people has increased and the means to help people is greater than it has ever been. The only trick is to raise people in such a way that our advancements actually mean something. Don't be cruel, don't be selfish, don't be stupid. How that's accomplished globally I have no idea. I will say, though, if anthropologists can see all those negative things about the human condition and still be optimistic that they can change the world then they're the best people for the job.