One hundred seventy-four years ago William Ellery Channing, minister of the Federal Street Church in Boston invited all his Unitarian colleagues to a conference in the vestry of the church which had its door opening on Berry Street. The Conference at Berry Street has been held annually since that time except for one year during World War II. The Federal Street Church is gone — for all I know Berry Street is gone — but the Conference is held at 3 pm on the day of the ministers annual meeting wherever that may take place, and is still called the Conference at Berry Street. It consists of an essay and usually a couple of responses to it, and if there is time some discussion. The essayist is chosen by an elected committee, and still has the same purpose mandated by Channing that it be on a serious topic which would enhance the participants' ability to minister to their congregations.
I have listened to a lot of Berry Street Essays and have known most of the essayists. Most have been excellent, some have been mediocre, a couple of them have infuriated me. I must admit that the ones I remember best are the ones that have infuriated me. This year was exceptional. The essayist was Bill Schulz. If you would like to read it it is on line at uuma.org.
I will confess that I wasn't expecting a lot this year. Any of you who have been around Unitarian Universalism for any length of time know that name. Bill was executive vice president of the association when Gene Pickett was president and then was president himself for eight years. I was not one of his supporters. He was very young and he had always been part of the bureaucracy, never having served a congregation. I thought that he had not paid his dues, that he was too eager for power — even such trivial power as resides in the office of Unitarian Universalist President — and that he was willing to be manipulative and a bit heavy-handed In getting that power. It's not that I didn't like him — you couldn't help liking him. He was good-looking, bright, competent, charming, but somehow he brought out the nasty in me as no one else ever has. Usually I am at least polite, often going out of my way to be kind. With poor Bill, not only could I think of unkind things to say to him, given the smallest opportunity I would say them. It wasn't just to his face, either. I remember I spent a whole newsletter column once poking fun at his using the word conciliatory to characterize the Universalist concept of God — not that the Universalists were conciliatory, but that God was. It was a vastly amusing column, and I still think I was right that although one may think of a whole range of adjectives to describe God, depending on your view of what God is, conciliatory would not be one of them. My conscience always smote me when I had planted a barb — he always reacted with such gracious indifference — but given another opportunity I would do it again. When he left the presidency of the Association he accepted an appointment as president of the United States Chapter of Amnesty International and was its president for twelve years.
Well, I don't miss the Berry Street Essay whoever is giving it, so I went. It was utterly overwhelming. It was about what he had learned from his contacts with torture in his years with Amnesty. It was not so much what he talked about that was so awe-inspiring. Many of his reflections were similar to my own, although he has actually seen and experienced what I have only heard about. What made it a transcendent experience was seeing someone I had never particularly admired become so wholly admirable. If he were running for president now — president of anything whatsoever — he would have my enthusiastic support.
What Bill was doing in his essay was reflecting on human evil and calling into question the idea of the inherent worth and dignity of every person which the first principle of the Unitarian Universalist Association states that our congregations affirm and promote. This summer I was preaching at a new congregation, Mosaic, which is meeting in DeBary at present. They are part of an experimental program that trains a congregation for some months before they hold their first service. They were encouraged to have monthly themes for their services, and I was told that their theme for July was the inherent worth and dignity of every person. I responded that although I might be able to promote that I wasn't at all sure that I could affirm it and I knew for a certainty that I didn't believe in it. That doesn't mean that I don't very strongly believe in the original purpose for including that statement, that people are not to be dismissed as unworthy simply because of their color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, education level or class. That was its original intent, but we have tended to think that it means that everyone is essentially ok, and we just have to celebrate that fact. Clearly this is not the case.
Classical humanism, the humanism of the first Humanist Manifesto, made several problematic errors. It may be that its too optimistic notion of human nature was the worst one. Even today many people when asked will say that they think that everyone is born good. I am no more immune than others to the essential adorableness of babies, but they cannot be called good (or bad, for that matter) in any meaningful sense. A good baby is one with a placid temperament who learns early to sleep through the night, takes its food well and is not susceptible to colic. This is not a moral statement. Every human being is born with the potential both for good and evil and most of us remain mixtures of them all our lives. There are few true saints, but most of us do manage to follow the dictates of conscience much of the time. We want to believe in essential human goodness, but sometimes when we look at the selfishness and greed that abound, the cruelty and vindictiveness that we evidence, the violence and revenge to which we are prone, it is hard to continue to believe.
I think that Bill was right when he pointed to torture as the thing that makes us question whether humans have any humanity at all. The pleasure of causing pain is an idea that fills us with revulsion, yet it may lurk within us all. Small children are often cruel to animals, and if the bullying which is rife at certain times in children's development is not a kind of torture I don't know what else it can be called. War elicits atrocities from people who at home are perfectly kind family members and citizens, and it cannot be denied that they take pleasure in the pain they cause.
Although because of the outcry it caused we have heard little recently of the justification for torture that began to be mooted in dealing with terrorists one of the most appalling things members of our present government has done was to condone and arrange for torture of terrorists. It was argued that torture can be justified in the attempt to get information. It can never be justified, but it has been shown again and again that torture is never a source of reliable information. The person being tortured will say anything — anything at all — to make the torture stop. Such extorted information is entirely unreliable. And think of the torturers! Surely it was imagined that good human beings could do this act for good consequences and not have it on their souls. In some ways I think that would be even worse — to without passion cause continuing agony to another human being. George Bernard Shaw once wrote, "Never strike a child except in anger, or he will never forgive you." That sounds paradoxical, but I think it's true, and it would apply, I believe, to the idea of cold-blooded, instrumental torture. It doesn't make the hideous torture from anger or ignorance or innate cruelty any less horrible, but it is far more inhuman.
Evil done by human beings is human. It is a part of the kind of animal we are and lurks within each human soul. It is the natural — and as it becomes twisted and distorted as it often does, the unnatural — consequence of our instinctive need to survive. It is based on fear. In order to make ourselves feel secure we have to be in control, to have no one more powerful than we able to make life and death decisions for us. We need to have enough to eat and clothes and shelter to make our surroundings safe. It is the underlying fear of want or loss of control that makes us violent, greedy and even cruel. It is why violent crime is most often seen among the poor and the ignorant. That is where fear abounds. That neither justifies nor excuses it, but it will still be there without justification or excuse.
It is not the whole story. It can be plausibly argued that human goodness is also an evolutionary trait. Since we are safer, more likely to survive within groups, we have developed traits that enable us to live together in kindness. I believe that true altruism is a product of that sort of evolution. The act that puts our own lives in danger to rescue another is an instinctive reaction. It's also sometimes foolish as when several people set out in a boat to rescue one and all are drowned — foolish, undoubtedly, but also heroic. I believe, though, that it is more than that, that moral agency is more than the quest for survival of the species beyond the survival of the individual. We cannot call an animal good or evil in any kind of moral sense, as we cannot hold a baby morally responsible. If our own sense of justice, of pity and compassion, of generosity and kindness, are simply survival characteristics, we cannot truly speak of goodness or evil in men and women either.
I think, though, that this reductionism is unjustified. Goodness is learned — can be learned — as evil is not. The technology of evil can be learned, of course, such as more sophisticated ways to kill or maim or rob or destroy, but the motivation to do evil is as natural as hunger, An infant is entirely self-absorbed. The first cry for fairness is only for fairness for oneself. Children's cruelty is unconscious because there is simply no awareness that others may feel pain or sorrow. Generosity, pity and compassion are all learned emotions. The conscience develops through teaching. In some few people it does not. Sociopaths and psychopaths, people who revel in hatred and bigotry, tyranny and torture, stand outside of humanity. Although I believe in the possibility of redemption I have learned that there are some people who cannot be redeemed. There are those who must, at least through DNA testing, be defined as human who are not fully human, who have no conscience, no mercy, no love, who find joy in the sufferings of others, and who cannot and will not change. Can we speak of their inherent worth and dignity? I, at least, cannot, but neither can I speak of them as fully human.
Although there is some evil in everyone, there is also goodness, and it seems to me, despite so much of what we see and read, the goodness mostly outweighs the evil. Children learn kindness and practice it when it is learned. When we have done evil repentance and redemption are possible — and even likely. Even I no longer have any desire to cast arrows at Bill Schulz. Human beings are in fact strange and wonderful beings in their moral nature. With all the reasons for fear, yet most of us are more likely to concern ourselves with what is true and right than to grab and tyrannize. We have done wonders with our minds throughout the generations, building physical, mental and social structures of strength and beauty; if we can find ways to cast out fear, our own and that of others, we can build structures of the soul creating a world of peace and love. I don't always know that I believe that, seeing the evil that we continue to do, the destruction we have caused, the hatred we have felt for one another, hatred based on such artificial realities as religious differences and tribal names, but I will never cease to affirm it. We can choose goodness and in that choice will find redemption.