On this particular day, we had been talking about the emergence in main-line protestant bodies of a militant feminist theology--the so-called Sophia movement which has recently challenged the conventional language and symbolism of traditional Christian liturgy. I had smiled smugly and suggested it was time that main-line religion began to recognize its inherent sexism and made room for the other half of the human race. He chided me for offering a simplistic response. "It is not just a matter of language," he said. "It is far more a matter of how one understands human nature. Feminist theology, and the Sophia movement simply underestimate the depth of human depravity. They trust too much in the ability of reason and compassion to control the brute qualities in people." I responded that perhaps traditional theology has underestimated the capacity of human beings for good, that by expecting human beings to be bestial, it creates the very depravity it decries.

And so the conversation went, as we munched away at our sandwiches and sipped our coffee. In the end, as we were preparing to head back to our respective offices, my friend looked at me and said, "The difference between you and me is not so much theology as it is anthropology. We have profoundly different understandings of human nature." That comment has stuck with me over the intervening months, and I have found myself, at odd moments, seeking to define what I believe about human nature and its relation to religious visions. This morning I would like to share with you some of this on-going reflection.

Let me begin by assuring you that I have no illusions about the evil potential which resides within the human soul. I came to conscious awareness in a world which was torn apart by the brutality of the Second World War. My earliest memories include black-and-white newsreel scenes of cities pummeled and burned and razed to the ground, of children picking their way through the rubble that had been their homes. I remember as if it were yesterday, the films recording the discovery of the death camps, with the naked bodies piled like cord-wood.

I watched as war ended, but violence and brutality did not. I am a living witness to the bombing of churches and the killing of children in the American south, the unleashing of water-hoses and police dogs against peaceful protesters who sought civil rights. I know about homes burned in northern middle-class neighborhoods to keep African Americans out. I know about the atrocities of Idi Amin and the Khmer Rouge. I know about My Lai, and Jonestown. I know about Haiti and South Africa and Palestine and Northern Ireland. I know about the violence and evil of places like Anacostia and Cabrini Green and hundreds of other urban neighborhoods all across this country, where gunfire and sudden death are a feature of the daily environement. I know about wife beating and gay bashing and the abuse and murder to which innocent children are subjected day in and day out. And I know about the policies of governments, businesses and industries which regularly sacrifice the common good to narrow interests. I have lived through the horrors which have defined the last half of the twentieth century, and I know that human nature has the capacity for vast evil and violence and destruction. No one need instruct me in this area.

The question does not focus around the capacity of human beings for evil. Rather, the issue is whether this capacity for evil is normative, a defining characteristic against which fragile human institutions--church, state, school, family--must forever contend without hope of doing more than mitigating our natural tendency. That, of course, is what traditional theology taught with its doctrine of original sin: that human beings are fallen creatures, born wicked and depraved, with no power in ourselves to change our nature. Only the intervention of God can suffice to overcome our in-born depravity. This doctrine of original sin has undergone various iterations over the course of time but it continues to exercise a strong hold on our imaginations. Even after we ceased believing the theology which engendered it, we have allowed ourselves to believe that nature is red in tooth and claw, and we have embraced an understanding of evolution, with its doctrine of the survival of the fittest, which described a world defined by the war of each against all. More recently, sociobiologists have explained all of human behavior as the consequence of the selfish urge of the genes to perpetuate themselves at any cost.

The result has been a view of human nature that is peculiar at best, a self-fulfilling prophecy at worst. By this view we are selfish and destructive creatures, given over to base and vicious impulses, driven by violent urges that are rooted in our genes, and even when we exhibit altruistic and self-sacrifical behavior, it is motivated by a deeper and more hidden selfishness.

It is regarded as a badge of sophistication and wisdom to expect the worst of human nature, and those who dare to affirm human goodness are regarded as foolish. In a book entitled THE BRIGHTER SIDE OF HUMAN NATURE, Alfie Kohn captures the situation in these words:

Consider this curious set of facts about our culture: Someone who thinks well of himself is said to have a healthy self-concept and is envied. Someone who thinks well of his country is called a patriot and is applauded. But someone who thinks well of his species is regarded as hopelessly naive and is dismissed.

The conventional wisdom has it that no one could look hard at the particulars of human behavior and be pleased with what he sees. So deeply held is this view that if some extraterrestrial intelligence were to talk about us the way we talk about us, there would likely be an interplanetary war. Think, for example, of the expression 'I'm only human.' The emphasis is on the middle word: it is what we fail to do or be that seems to us most noteworthy. The phrase 'human nature,' meanwhile, is reserved as if by some linguistic convention, for what is nasty and negative in our repertoire. We invoke it to explain selfishness rather than service, competition rather than cooperation, egocentricity rather than empathy. On any given day we may

witness innumerable gestures of caring, ranging from small acts of kindness to enormous sacrifices, but never do we shrug and say, 'Well, what did you expect? It's just human nature to be generous.'

From Kohn, Alfie, THE BRIGHTER SIDE OF HUMAN NATURE, Basic Books, 1990, p. 3.

As we have suggested, the argument is presented that our entire history is the story of the triumph of the strong over the weak and of the violent over the peaceful. What is more, as we understand the role of genes in human behavior, science is brought to bear with ever greater force upon our understanding of who we are and what is possible for us. The story we tell about ourselves, whether couched in religious myths, or historical accounts or genetic theory is the story of a vicious, dangerous, brute only lightly restrained by cultural and legal and religious constraints.

I would insist, however, that the story we have told about ourselves for all these years is a fiction which denies the fundamental truth about human nature. Logically, it makes no sense to believe that it is in our nature to be violent and destructive creatures. Think for a moment about our emergence on the African savannas millennia ago: A small, bi-pedal creature, weak and relatively unarmed, confronting a world of enormous threat without any specialized strengths--having neither the speed, nor the strength, nor the claws, nor the teeth, nor the agility, nor the size of the animals against which it must measure itself--a creature whose young is born only half-formed, requiring years of careful nurturing if it is to survive. How is it that this anomalous animal not only survived but thrived? Such a creature must have had, as its single most important specialized strength its ability to cooperate, to assist, to aid, to care for and nurture its own kind. If human beings were genetically programmed to be vicious, selfish, combative, destructive animals, the human species would never have survived its first venture out on to the grass lands. Logic dictates that we have one very special strength and that is our ability to engage in altruistic behavior, to cooperate, to care for each other. And that special strength is revealed every moment of every day as we live together in vast communities and small towns and villages all across this globe and regulate our lives so that we live together in relative peace and security. Even in the midst of war and violence and destruction, most people have found ways to express and sustain this drive for cooperation and mutual support. Despite the stories we tell about ourselves, we are a remarkably cooperative and compassionate and empathetic animal.

In a recent book entitled THE MORAL ANIMAL, Robert Wright, exploring the new science of Evolutionary Biology, attempts to ground the human penchant for altruistic behavior in the genetic code of the species, arguing that such behavior must be the consequence of natural selection and the genetic drive for survival. He argues that if we take the notion of genetic inheritance seriously, then all behavior, of whatever kind, must be traceable to the genes. However, he cautions that the genes always function in terms of a specific environment. Changes in that environment may transform any given genetic inheritance from beneficial to neutral to destructive or vice-versa. Then Wright goes on to offer a profoundly important insight. He suggests that the dominant environment in which human genes now function is cultural and social. In other words, there maybe, and probably is a fundamental human nature which is rooted in our genes, and if Wright is correct, is shared by all people, but how that human nature is expressed, and whether it results in beneficial or destructive behavior and consequences may very well depend on the social and cultural environment in which that genetic nature is played out.

What this suggests to me is that the story we tell about ourselves, the way we define ourselves is powerfully important in the evolution of our species on this planet. If we tell ourselves that we are a failed and fallen creature, destined from birth to sin and error, to greed and corruption, to violence and destruction, we create a social environment in which that kind of behavior is expected and reinforced. If, we tell ourselves that we are creatures called to cooperation and responsibility, to empathy and love, is it not likely that we will create a social environment in which those behaviors will be expected and reinforced? In a curious way, within the very broad limits imposed by our genetic endowment, what we choose to believe about ourselves shapes what we are and what we shall become. And therefore, to quote Sophia Fahs, "It matters what we believe."

It is this insight which makes all the more disturbing the story we are telling about ourselves at the present moment in this nation, and perhaps all over the world. We live in a time when our understanding of our own nature is dominated not by our personal experience but by the electronic media whose world view is a reflection of the most bizarre, the most terrifying, the most brutal events in any given day. Constantly the media besiege us with stories whose major purpose is to attract our attention, stories of human depravity, ranging from cannibalism to fiscal mendacity, from torture to terrorism to tyranny, from greed and corruption to violent abuse of all kinds, stories which are chosen precisely because they do not fall within the limits of the usual, the ordinary, the normal. However, because we are more intimately involved with television than we are with our neighbors and even our own families, we seem to have lost any alternative vision which would permit us to put those stories in any kind of realistic perspective. Increasingly we believe that the report is the reality.

Over and over we are being told the old story about the fallen creature, doomed by nature to selfish and destructive and sinful behavior and we have begun to believe it. We come to think of all strangers as potential brutes; we live behind our lives behind locked doors and barred windows; we install alarms in our cars; we convince ourselves that the world out there grows more and more hostile and dangerous with every passing day. And, as we isolate ourselves from that world, we have less and less basis for challenging the story we are telling ourselves. In time the world comes to resemble our fears and our nightmares.

We can see the consequences of the story we are telling in the election campaign which is occurring around us at this very moment. It is clear to me that there are few real issues being discussed anywhere. The campaign is characterized by a general distrust, by a narrow appeal to immediate self interest, by a willingness to believe the worst about humanity in general and a determined effort to exploit our fears. There is no appeal to the better side of human nature. Indeed, a candidate who insisted that public service is an honorable calling, that human beings will respond to an appeal to a vision greater than their immediate financial self-interest, that people are fundamentally good and have the ability to change society for the better would be ridiculed and driven from view. Increasingly, we have given up on any optimistic and hopeful view and have come to embrace the pessimistic vision which led Mark Twain to call us "the damned human race."

I believe it is time to tell a different story. I believe that human beings are, by nature, malleable beings, defined primarily by vast, unmapped potential. We have within us unmeasured possibilities. We know we are capable of enormous evil and destruction. The history of the past five thousand years, red with blood, has culminated in the holocausts of this century. But those same millenia also present a history of great achievement, and moral growth and deepened understanding and profound revulsion at unnecessary and unmerited pain and suffering. And that is the story I would tell.

I would tell the story of a creature who evolved on this planet in ways which used cooperation and empathy and altruism and love to compensate for physical weakness. I would tell the story of a species which, using its innate qualities, lived together in peace and security for thousands of years, sustained by its ability to adjust to the needs of community and the opportunities offered by a rich and gracious earth. I would tell the story of an animal in whom self consciousness emerged, and a thirst for knowledge and understanding and meaning, in whom a sense of responsibility for the world beyond the self took root and grew. I would tell the story of a being who, for uncounted millennia thought of itself as the favored child of a gracious world, and who lived with an intimate sense of involvement with that world, until about five thousand years ago when a new story began to be told--a story which depicted humanity as fallen from a previous state of grace, and crippled and morally bankrupt, unable to trust others or the world and driven by fear to violence and mayhem and murder. I would tell the story of a species, beginning to understand that even through those dreary times, the fundamental nature of humanity did not change. Even in the midst of violence and pain and suffering and death, most people remained cooperative and altruistic and empathetic and loving. I would tell the story of a people beginning to understand that the last five thousand years have been an aberration, not a normative state, and that it is time again to affirm what has always been the source of our success--our ability to care for and support and sustain each other and the community, to dream a world that is gracious and by the dreaming to bring it into being.

Is this a true story? Who can say? The stories we tell are important not because they are true, but because they suggest who we are and what we might become. If I tell the story of humanity, fallen, depraved, untrustworthy, selfish, brutal and held in check only by the threat of legal and religious retribution, the world which evolves logically from those assumptions will be a world very like the world in which we find ourselves at this moment. I would rather believe that human beings, by nature, are driven to care about each other. I would rather believe that human beings, by nature, are driven to cooperate with each other. I would rather believe that human beings, by nature, are driven to responsibility for each other. I would rather believe that human beings, by nature, are driven to understand self-interest in terms of the greater good. I would rather believe that human beings can be trusted. This understanding of human nature has the possibility of creating a world in which those qualities predominate--a world we have been dreaming all through the long night of human despair. I would tell the story of human promise, and trust that the social and cultural environment such a story creates will draw out of our vast genetic stores the behaviors which will reinforce that story.

Sitting together over lunch, my friend and I look at humanity and we see the same reality. We focus on different potentials. The nature of human nature is that what we believe we are, that we are most likely to become.