This is not a new conversation for me. Over my years in the Unitarian Universalist ministry, I have heard the charge repeatedly that liberal religion is not only too optimistic about human nature, but that we have no response to the depth of evil which exists in our world. This morning--a day set aside to honor the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.--I would like to continue what has been for me an ongoing exploration of the problem of evil.

Let me begin by suggesting that evil is not the same thing as pain, suffering, tragedy or death. The natural world is replete with pain and suffering, with tragedy and death, and nature seems ingenious in devising gruesome ways to achieve its ends. There are wasps who paralyze their prey but do not kill them. Instead the wasp lays eggs on the immobilized prey so that when those eggs hatch into larvae, they may eat their host alive. There are water bugs floating in clear water of beautiful streams, creatures which swim up under small frogs and inject a virulent poison--a poison which dissolves the living frog from the inside, allowing the bug to suck out the nutrients, leaving only an empty skin floating in the clear, cool water. There are plants which trap insects into hollow places from which there is no escape, and then secrete fluids which slowly digest their living guests. There are birds whose nestlings regularly kill each other or force each other out of the nest until only the strongest is left to survive. And, of course, there are innumerable microbes who are ingenious in destroying the immune systems of host animals, killing the host so that the microbe may survive. These are only a few of the ways in which pain, suffering, death, are used as survival strategies in the natural world. Had such mechanisms been devised by a deliberate, reasoning, rational mind, they might well be called demonic and evil. If, for example, there were a God who deliberately fashioned such a world, it would be difficult to distinguish that god from a demon.

The point I would make is that suffering and pain and death are real, but not necessarily evil. Evil is the consequence of a conscious and clear moral sense. It cannot exist except there be the capacity for feeling empathy for the other and the ability to choose between alternative strategies. One cannot fault a water bug for the way it kills and consumes its victim. It has neither the ability to put itself in the place of the frog, nor does it have any other mechanism for survival. Evil comes into the world when the capacity to feel for the other exists and is ignored, when there are alternatives to be considered and they are ignored. In other words, evil comes into the world only when life has reached a level that is human, or very like human. This is not to suggest that evil is unnatural. Human beings are part of the natural world; within humanity, an ethical sense arises from out of the natural world, and with it, the possibility of evil.

No one can look at the century now drawing to its close and doubt the reality of evil in human experience. Indeed, the entire century can be seen as a metaphor for the emergence of evil in the human community. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the western world proclaimed that this would be "the Christian Century"--the era which would see the ultimate vindication of western values and morality--an end to sin and suffering and the emergence of a world of peace and plenty. Little more than a decade into the Christian Century, the world erupted in an orgy of pointless violence and destruction which threatened the cultural suicide of the Western world. From that moment on, the century has been defined by revolutions, pogroms, holocausts, genocides, mass murders, starvation, plague and suffering, most of which is traceable to human activity and human responsibility. It may be argued that the twentieth century invented none of these horrors, but though the nature of the violence and horror we have perpetrated upon each other in this century is not new,the scale of evil is without precedent. If, indeed, this is the Christian Century, the logical culmination of that great global faith, then Christianity has a great deal to answer for.

I am old enough to have observed the manner in which we have coped with the emergence of evil among us. For the most part, we have sought to find a scapegoat upon which to unload all the horrors visited upon the human community, and to turn the struggle with evil into a war of extermination against that personification of human wickedness. I spent my childhood in a world in which all the evils of the world were the responsibility of Germans and Japanese, and especially the leaders of those two enemy nations. We were taught to believe that with enough effort and self-sacrifice we could defeat these incarnations of evil, and by destroying them end the evil they represented.

They were defeated, but the blessed kingdom did not arise out of the ashes. I came of age in a world in which the evils besetting the planet were the work of a global communist conspiracy, directed from the Kremlin and executed by treacherous minions who had infiltrated our schools, our churches, our government, our entertainment industry, the entire social fabric. We dealt with evil by ferreting out these wicked servants of a foreign ideology. In recent years, our conspiracy theories suddenly collapsed along with the unexpected sundering of the Soviet Union, and we found found ourselves in a world in which evil continues to exist, but the global scapegoats are hard to find. For a brief moment, we thought we had one in Saddam Hussein. While wicked enough in character, however, he proved to be too small a player to carry all the blame for the unnecessary suffering in the world. Having lost the great satans against whom to wage unremitting war, we have turned our attention to the emergence of evil in our little local universe.

And there is enough there to keep us in horrified fascination. The papers, the magazines, the radio and the television all feed us a steady diet of stories detailing the existence of evil in our world. And in lurid fascination, we feast our minds on stories of young children sexually assaulted and murdered by quiet neighbors, of babies murdered by their mothers, of children killing children for their jackets or their shoes or because of some slight, or just to know what it feels like to kill. We consume stories of cultic brutality, of cannibalism,of sexual abuse, of disgruntled employees and religious fanatics acting out their fantasies of revenge and retaliation, of wives and ex-wives and lovers and ex-lovers brutally beaten and disfigured and murdered. We are compelled by stores of random, pointless violence unleashed against innocent people who simply happened to be there. There is an enormous industry at work in this country supplying our appetite for stories which describe the threat of evil which lies all around us. We feed upon it like carp in a small pond when a handful of food has been tossed into the water, and we scare ourselves senseless in the process.

Responding to the steady diet of horror with which our minds are fed, we feel everywhere threatened and beset, and cry out for some action which will protect us, which will defeat the minions of evil and make the world safe. The cry can be heard on all sides: Build more prisons; put them in jail and throw away the key; three strikes and you're out; mandatory sentences; warn communities of the presence of former offenders; and above all, reinstate the death penalty. Kill the incarnate evil among us so that the world may be safe again, or, at least, so we may be safe again. And the cries echo down the halls of legislatures and the congress, and the rage to punish, fed by the fascination with evil and violence, launches more campaigns of unconditional war.

What we seem to miss in all of this, what we have seemed to miss throughout the history of this century, is that evil is not an anomalous consequence of a single individual or group, and therefore, it cannot be destroyed by destroying the person or the group in whom it emerges. Rather, there is an ecology to evil, a structural relationship which involves the entire community. There is a sense in which the criminal, the perpetrator represents a response to the unvoiced, the unexamined, the repressed needs of the community. So long as we need criminals, we will continue to produce them.

Let me give you a minor example of the way this works. I was in a meeting several months ago, in which a local official was explaining why the town of Summit needed more police officers. He explained that with the opening up of Interstate 78 and Route 24, Summit's geographical isolation had ended, and criminals from other places--obviously, Newark and Elizabeth--now had easy access to our community, and are responsible for a steady increase in demands upon our law-enforcement resources. Our cars and our homes are not longer safeguarded by distance, and isolation; therefore, they must be protected by more police. When he was pressed on this subject, however, the official admitted that much of the increased demand on the police had little to do with pillagers from the cities to the east of us and much to do with how domestic violence is now handled by law enforcement agencies. As I listened, it seemed to me that we need more police because the police can no longer ignore domestic violence, but the need was being justified on the basis of a growing threat presented by those people out there who had designs on our property. There is a sense in which the police and we need to have criminals in Newark to justify the call for more police to deal with domestic violence in places like Summit.

I don't want to suggest that there are no robbers, murderers, thieves, abusers, psychotics in the world. Nor would I suggest that we have nothing to fear from such people. All I am suggesting is that robbers, murderers, those we regard as evil, play a role in our social ecology, and if we were to succeed in incarcerating or executing every one of them, that social ecology would raise up another generation to take their place. The question which fascinates me as I contemplate the existence of evil is what is the interplay of social forces which engenders a criminal class, and how might we change that social interaction so that our society might become less violent, less murderous, less dangerous?

Martin Luther King, Jr., seemed to understand the ecology of evil. Since his death we have made him a national hero and focused our attention on his struggle to end segregation and secure the civil rights of African Americans. But it seems to me that important as that effort was, it represented only a portion of the vision which Dr. King brought to us. I remember him insisting that seeking scapegoats to blame and to punish for the evil of segregation was not a useful strategy. Dr. King knew that you cannot triumph over evil; you can only hope to transform evil. He spoke about the fact that the system of segregation depended upon two related attitudes--the slave-owner mentality and the slave mentality. He suggested that it might not be possible to change someone else, but if we changed ourselves, that would alter the entire ecology of the system. Thus, he said, do not hate the segregationists and the racists; do not seek to punish them or destroy them; do not expect them to agree with you. Rather, refuse to play the game. Refuse to go to the back of the bus; insist upon being served at the lunch counter; demand your right to vote and by changing your behavior, you will make it increasingly difficult for the racists and the segregations to cling to the notion that you are less than human, that you are happy with your lot, that you do not have the ability to function as citizens. You do not have to change them. You have to change yourself and the role you play in the world and they will have no choice but to change in response.

As his thought matured, Dr. King extended this insight into other arenas of social concern. He saw an inescapable link between injustice in the United States and an unjust war in Southeast Asia. He believed that resisting that war was part of the effort to transform the injustice he witnessed in the United States. Challenge the conventional wisdom, refuse to play the game; change how you behave and the changes will ripple through the system. At the time of his death, Dr. King was in Memphis, supporting striking garbage workers and was organising a poor people's march on Washington. He saw the struggle to end racism as inseparable from the demand for economic and social justice. Change how you behave within the system, and you change the system. There is an ecology to evil and unless you change the underlying relationships which evoke evil, no change will ever be more than cosmetic. That is the message from Dr. King that gets little attention as we transform the revolutionary into the hero. Dr. King taught me that the arena where real social change occurs is in your own life and and it begins when you assume responsibility for how you interact with the world.

There is real evil in this world. The murderers, the abusers, the torturers are real and they cannot be ignored or excused. They have failed to exercise their capacity for empathy and their freedom to make other choices. But they are also the manifestation of a deeper ecology, one which involves us and the role we play. We feed ourselves on fantasies of fear and violence because it justifies our determination to spend our energies protecting ourselves and our property, and it excuses us from accepting responsibility for a world in which resources are more equitably distributed. As we expend our energies living behind locked doors, our houses and automobiles bristling with warning devices, and as we spend our common resources on police and prisons, we can feel self-righteous anger, and need not think carefully about the fact that most people who commit the crimes which outrage us, are poor people, society's throw aways, lacking in education, without any real stake in the larger world or in a common future. We can wallow in mounting resentment and need not think carefully about the relationship between the level of crime and violence and a growing disparity between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have nots. We can be shocked by egregious brutality and not have to reflect on the fact that the evil they do, we call mindless crime, while the evil which characterizes our communities, we call domestic violence.

I was sitting in the Chinese restaurant some time ago, finishing a good meal. The waiter, smiling, refilled my water glass, and then brought me the check, along with a fortune cookie. I broke it open expecting to be told that this was the first day of the rest of my life, or some such sentiment. Instead, I read these words: "The community prepares the crime; the criminal commits it." The gospel according to the fortune cookie! Is there evil in the world? Oh yes, indeed there is. It is rooted in the fact that we have the capacity to empathize and refuse to exercise that capacity. It is rooted in the fact that we can see the discrepancy between what is and what ought to be and fail to act upon the imperative that vision implies. Some people oblige us by expressing that evil overtly, unmistakably, viciously and directly. These we call criminals and since we are not like them, we use them to demonstrate our virtue. The rest of us function through social structures and customs and conventions which allow us to avoid our own complicity in a social structure which accepts as normative an unjust distribution of resources and opportunities. Each of us plays the game, fulfills the role which is necessary of the ecology of evil if not to be disrupted.

We cannot destroy the evil by mounting campaigns to jail and kill those who make the evil obvious and explicit. We might transform evil if we were to take seriously our own complicity in the processes which engender and sustain it. As Dr. King knew, that process of transformation begins when we refuse to play the game, to fulfill the role assigned to us. I cannot help but wonder what would happen if we had the courage and the insight and the strength to extend our empathy and our concern to those whose behavior outrages us most and refuse to play the vengeance game, seeking, instead to understand. I doubt that we would eradicate evil, any more than we can envision a world in which the lion and the lamb, the water bug and the frog, the wasp and its prey live gently side by side. But I suspect that we might create a world in which we could live with less fear, with greater mutual respect, greater understanding. Of course, we who benefit from the ecology of evil would have to refuse to play the old game, be willing to surrender some of the privileges which define our lives; be prepared to see the tax system used to redistribute wealth; accept a continuing responsibility for bringing hope to the hopeless. It seems to me small payment to lessen the unnecessary violence and gratuitous pain, the persistent evil which shadows our lives.

Will it happen? Probably not. It is only a dream, a dream with a long pedigree. It is part of the vision which, at the beginning of the century, led people to hope that this would be the Christian century. It is, of course, a liberal dream, and therefore much out of vogue today. Today, we are loudly determined to play our part in the old game: To build prisons, to execute offenders and to destroy evil in all its obvious manifestations. But when the dust is settled and the rhetoric is stilled, nothing much will have changed. Dr. King knew that change must be systemic and that it begins when we see that each of us plays a part in sustaining the system in which evil emerges. We cannot build enough prisons, execute enough people, hire enough police officers to contain the evil which an unjust system engenders and needs. What we can do is refuse to play the game; withdraw our support from vindictive solutions which fail to resolve any issues; make a determined effort to understand, and to see that evil is always a possibility awaiting transformation.