Crowley and Aziraphale are a demon and an angel, respectively, who have spent the last 6,000 years living on Earth among human beings—and because of this, they both have a keen interest in what it means to be human. Crowley and Aziraphale put forth different (and at times, contradictory) definitions of human nature, but Good Omens suggests that there are a few things that define human beings. Namely, it shows that people have the ability to be both extremely cruel and profoundly kind—and what really defines humanity is people’s capacity to choose between cruelty and kindness, due to their ability to learn and grow over time.
Crowley primarily associates humanity with cruelty. He explains that, at various points in history, he’s considered contacting his bosses in Hell and telling them that “there’s nothing we can do to [humans] that they don’t do themselves and they do things we’ve never even thought of, often involving electrodes.” In other words, Crowley recognizes people’s capacity for creativity and innovation, but he believes that it’s part of human nature to harness this capacity for evil purposes. He mentions the Spanish Inquisition (a period of time when thousands of people were imprisoned or executed for heresy) as an example of how violent and cruel human beings can be. The demons of Hell give Crowley praise for the Inquisition, but Crowley didn’t actually have anything to do with it—it was all humanity’s doing. With this, Crowley offers a distinctly pessimistic view of human nature: in his opinion, human beings are crueler than even demons can be. And this is largely because people tend to use their creative potential to harm others in ever crueler and more elaborate ways.
In contrast to this cynical view, the novel also shows that people have a shocking and profound capacity for goodness and kindness. For instance, one of the novel’s minor characters, Madame Tracy, always makes Sunday supper for her rude and cantankerous neighbor, Mr. Shadwell. The novel seems to imply that, over the years, the neighbors have come to a comfortable understanding and have developed a sense of companionship, despite the insults Mr. Shadwell hurls at Madame Tracy. This is only one of many instances where human characters demonstrate kindness and a willingness to help others. A major subplot of the novel focuses on Anathema Device, who spends her life interpreting her ancestor Agnes Nutter’s book of prophecies, which culminates with predictions about how Armageddon will play out. Since Agnes was the only prophet in all of history to actually come up with correct predictions, her descendants have spent the last several centuries trying to decode her strange prophecies (as a 17th-century prophet, Agnes didn’t understand what she was seeing when, for instance, modern cars or alien spaceships featured in her premonitions). While it’s possible to argue that Anathema helps stop Armageddon and the destruction of the world for selfish reasons (she believes that she, like everyone else, isn’t supposed to survive Armageddon), saving the world is also a fundamentally selfless endeavor. It helps everyone on Earth, no matter how kind or how cruel they might be—and this selflessness is a testament to humanity’s capacity for goodness.
Overall, Good Omens suggests that the capacity to learn, grow, and make conscious decisions between good and evil is what defines humanity more than anything else. Adam, the Antichrist, is the clearest example of this idea. Adam isn’t aware that he’s the Antichrist (he’s switched at birth with a human baby)—but as the son of Satan, he’s responsible for bringing about the end of the world, so he might very well be innately evil. But Adam grows up like a typical human child would: he learns right and wrong from his parents, he fears punishments from his father, and he has only a loose grasp of how the wider world works. In other words, Adam isn’t innately evil and cruel, as one might expect of the son of Satan. Rather, he’s a normal kid who, in the course of his day-to-day life, makes choices about whether to behave kindly or not as he learns new things about the world around him. So eventually, when the time comes for Adam to lead the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and bring about the end of the world, he chooses not to. The reason why Adam believes he has this choice at all is because he’s grown up as a human child and knows that he can choose to be good rather than evil. This drives home the idea that people are both good and evil, but human nature is defined by the capacity to make moral decisions between the two.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Human Nature ThemeTracker
Human Nature Quotes in Good Omens
“I tied up every portable telephone system in Central London for forty-five minutes at lunchtime,” he said.
There was silence, except for the distant swishing of cars.
[...]
What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves.
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
And just when you’d think they were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course. It was a bugger.
Aziraphale had tried to explain it to him once. The whole point, he’d said [...] was that when a human was good or bad it was because they wanted to be. Whereas people like Crowley and, of course, himself, were set in their ways right from the start. People couldn’t become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.
“Don’t tell me from genetics. What’ve they got to do with it?” said Crowley. “Look at Satan. Created as an angel, grows up to be the Great Adversary. Hey, if you’re going to go on about genetics, you might as well say the kid will grow up to be an angel. After all, his father was really big in Heaven in the old days. Saying he’ll grow up to be a demon just because his dad became one is like saying a mouse with its tail cut off will give birth to tailless mice. No. Upbringing is everything. Take it from me.”
They’d come up with some stomach-churning idea that no demon could have thought of in a thousand years, some dark and mindless unpleasantness that only a fully functioning human brain could conceive, then shout “The Devil Made Me Do It” and get the sympathy of the court when the whole point was that the devil hardly ever made anyone do anything. He didn’t have to. That was what some humans found hard to understand. Hell wasn’t a major reservoir of evil, any more than Heaven, in Crowley’s opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind.
“You see, it’s not enough to know what the future is. You have to know what it means. Agnes was like someone looking at a huge picture down a tiny little tube. She wrote down what seemed like good advice based on what she understood of the tiny little glimpses.”
Now, as Crowley would be the first to protest, most demons weren’t deep down evil. In the great cosmic game they felt they occupied the same position as tax inspectors—doing an unpopular job, maybe, but essential to the overall operations of the whole thing. If it came to that, some angels weren’t paragons of virtue; Crowley had met one or two who, when it came to righteously smiting the ungodly, smote a good deal harder than was strictly necessary. On the whole, everyone had a job to do, and just did it.
“I don’t see what’s so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin’ upset ‘cos they act like people,” said Adam severely. “Anyway, if you stopped tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive.”
Everyone found their eyes turning toward Adam. He seemed to be thinking very carefully.
Then he said: “I don’t see why it matters what is written. Not when it’s about people. It can always be crossed out.”
He couldn’t see why people made such a fuss about people eating their silly old fruit anyway, but life would be a lot less fun if they didn’t. And there never was an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.
