GENES, ORIGINAL SIN AND THE HUMAN PROCLIVITY TO EVIL

Stephen J. Duffy Loyola University, New Orleans

ABSTRACT

Theologians have long recognized that the Augustinian formulation of the doctrine of original sin, based on a historicized reading of Genesis 3, is at odds with biblical scholarship and with what science has established concerning our evolutionary origins. Setting aside Augustine's anti-Gnostic Adamic myth, some attempt to recast the doctrine within an evolutionary worldview by developing an an­thropology within the framework of genetics and sociobiology, now evolutionary psychology. This essay argues that a wholly biological explanation of the human tendency to evil is inadequate, even re­ductionist, and it attempts a constructive reformulation of the doc­trine that, while incorporating insights of evolutionary psychology, appeals also to ontological, psychological, and social dimensions of humanity that must also be considered if we are to retrieve the central, still valid point of the doctrine, that deep within human being there inheres a proclivity to evil.

/. Introduction

Theologians have for some time recognized that the traditional formulation of the doctrine of original sin, based on a literalist and historicized reading of Genesis 1-3, is at odds with biblical scholarship and with what science has established about our evolutionary origin. In rewriting the story of our still evolving universe, science expanded our horizon through eons of time and a limitless sea of interstellar space. A healthy antidote to theological myopia, an evolutionary worldview challenges us to take a longer view and a more humble, less exclusive approach in all areas of theology, especially in anthropology, christol-ogy, ecclesiology and eschatology. The stage is far larger than we thought, the drama more complex.

Nevertheless, while we may set aside the trappings of the tradi­tional formulation of the doctrine of original sin, we would be the poorer were we to fail to retrieve Augustine's valid insights and the

Stephen J. Duffy is professor of systematic theology at Loyola University, New Orleans (LA 70118). A previous contributor to Horizons, he is the author o/The Dynamics of Grace: Perspectives in Theological Anthropology and The Graced Horizons: Nature and Grace in Modern Catholic Thought and of numerous journal and encyclopedia articles. His interests are theological anthropology and the theology of religions.

HORIZONS 32/2 (2005): 210-34

Duffy: Genes, Original Sin and the Human Proclivity to Evil 211

central point of the doctrine he bequeathed us. Though not all of Au­gustine's answers remain persuasive, his questions and many of his insights remain perennials. Every doctrine strives to articulate a central point. This is the heart of the matter, a truth grounded in our tradition and in human experience that cannot be abandoned but must be main­tained, protected, and reformulated to render it intelligible as cultural horizons shift, lest it be lost. To reflect on a doctrine's meaning is to deconstruct it by analysis of its intention so as to retrieve the central meaning it intends and to unearth its motivation. Intentional analysis moves from pseudo-history and pseudo-rationality to lived experience. The polemical anti-Gnostic and anti-Pelagian myth based on the Ad-amic myth that Augustine constructed, with its mixed juridical and biological categories, and then used to frame the essential meaning and function of his concept of original sin, is dispensable. The point of the doctrine is not. And that is that deeply rooted within the human being is a proclivity to evil that conduces to a moral impotence which leads to personal disintegration and social disorder and can be healed only by grace. That proclivity, while it may be triggered, intensified and channeled by one's cultural environment, is not simply due to the impact upon us of forces that remain wholly external to us. Rather, the basic tendency to sin inheres in us, as the Council of Trent taught, and lies deep within our hearts of darkness.1

Paul Ricoeur further elaborates the point of the doctrine as the assertion that evil is not nature but will, that sin has a past and a communal dimension not reducible to individual responsibility, that consciousness is not the measure of our sinfulness.2 Our attention, therefore, is drawn not to a sinful human act occurring at the dawn of time, as Augustine's anti-gnostic myth would have it, but to an inherent inclination to sin woven into the fabric of our humanity since its arrival on the scene with its ability to say "no" to the God of the evolving planet and to undo what God has wrought. Mindful of the central point of the doctrine, we find shelter from superficial and naïve optimism about our humanity. On the other hand, because Christianity tells the story of our humanity not only in terms of fallibility but also in terms of redeemability, it shelters us from an excessively brutal view of our nature and despair concerning it. In John Donne's words, "Looke, Lord,

aDS 1515. 2On the doctrine's central point, see Paul Ricoeur, "Original Sin: A Study in Mean­

ing," trans. Peter McCormick, in Don Ihde, ed., The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 269-86. See also Langdon Gilkey, "Evolution, Culture and Sin: Responding to Philip Hefner's Proposal," Zygon 30 (1995): 299-300.

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and finde both Adams met in me."3 The sinful self and the graced self coexist.

What original sin symbolizes is an uncomfortable truth for the easy conscience of many today for whom the words "evil" and "sin" have all but vanished from their vocabulary, as have the symbols that once articulated our experience of evil. The distinction between good and evil may be eclipsed by behaviorist and therapeutic views. "Bad" be­havior may be treated pharmacologically, or subjected to behavior modification techniques, or its perpetrators "put away" when they are a threat to society. This changed somewhat with the crushing events of 9/11. "Evil" reentered our vocabulary, but now, only to categorize oth­ers, not ourselves in any way, though the doers of horrendous evils are ourselves writ very large. The wall between righteous us and malevo­lent them is a Manichaean illusion.

There are, therefore, two extremes to be eluded. One is the naïve historicism of fundamentalism and its blindness to the problems con­nected with a precriticai reassertion of the traditional formulation of the doctrine of original sin and to the biblical criticism and theological revisions that have occurred, especially since mid-twentieth century, in light of modern science. The other extreme is the bloodless moralism of rationalism with its trivialization of evil and rejection of the doctrine out of hand. This facile Panglossian optimism, often buoyed up by hollow talk of a "modern day spiritual revolution" and sustained by the "sweeteners being peddled in society and the church,"4 rings hollow in face of the ambiguity of the human condition and the massive public suffering that we daily see but do not see in our media. It was we enlightened moderns who made of the century past the bloodiest of centuries, a slaughterhouse. But how explain the gulags, the genocide, the ethnic cleansing, and the carnage of war, the Abu Ghraibs, or the greed and violence of our corporate world and of individuals, or the widespread apathy in the face of evil? What is it about our species that makes us prone to destructive behavior?

In seeking to answer this question one soon learns that an inter-3John Donne, "Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse", in The Complete Poetry

and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. Charles M. Coffin (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 182-83.

4Karl Rahner, "Utopia and Reality," Theology Digest 32 (1985): 143. On the loss of a sense of sin and evil and of the symbols that articulate experience of them, see Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995). Many dismiss the symbol of original sin because they mistakenly identify its central point with the precriticai framework in which Augustine and the tradition cast it, an historical state of perfection at creation's dawn, an historical first couple and their sin, followed by universal transmission of a fallen nature changed to a flawed condition. A better course is to remove the central point from this framework and articulate it in terms of the analyses of human experience provided by philosophy, psychology, the social sciences and evolutionary biology, the course we will pursue.

Duffy: Genes, Original Sin and the Human Proclivity to Evil 213

esting trait of modernity is the tendency to "naturalize" scientifically whatever ideologically motivated assumptions about human nature happen to be riding the winds of the day. Often, a "science" of human nature is invoked to legitimize reigning political and economic re­gimes: in totalitarian regimes, dissent becomes a mental abnormality; in apartheid regimes, interracial interaction becomes unnatural; in free markets regimes, the myriad human motivations melt down into Hobbesian self-interest, which is genetically hard-wired. And now come the important branches of "the new science of human nature," which combines cognitive science, neuroscience, genetics, and evolu­tionary or Darwinian psychology, the successor of sociobiology.5 On the face of it, the "new science of humanity" appears purely scientific and ideologically neutral. It is beyond question that human nature is rooted in biology. Biology runs deep down. But a persistent question remains. To what extent can biology adequately explain all of human life and behavior? No doubt, the neglect or even denial of biology's importance has led to warped anthropologies: the Blank Slate (first articulated by John Locke, though his tabula rasa was part of an epis­temologica! theory), the view that mind and behavior have no inherent shape and are wholly formed by whatever particular culture they hap­pen to download;6 the Noble Savage, the roseate Rousseauian myth that humans are by nature good but go corrupt under society's influence; the Ghost in the Machine, the Cartesian view that deep within us re­sides a nonbiological agent that alone controls behavior and can change our nature if it wills. These forever-reappearing anthropologies are woefully inadequate in their failure to give due attention to the influ­ence of our biological heritage on our behavior.7

II. Evolution, the Proclivity to Evil and Human Transcendence Now, however, the pendulum has swung again. In this fifty-second

year of the genetic revolution that Crick and Watson, and Wilkin and Rosalind Franklin with her photo 51 ushered in when they unlocked

5Edward O. Wilson defined sociobiology in rather imperialistic terms as "the sys­tematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior. One of the functions of so­ciobiology is to reformulate the foundations of the social sciences in a way that draws these subjects into the Modern Synthesis" {Sociobiology: The New Synthesis [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975], 4). A decade earlier, Nobel laureate Francis Crick went beyond biological reductionism: "...the ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry" [Of Molecules and Man [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966], 10). For a discerning rebuttal of such reductionism see John Haught, Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation (New York: Paulist, 1995), eh. 4.

6See the sociobiological critique of the blank slate view by Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002).

7Obviously, the above spectrum of anthropologies presents a range of ideal types that concretely appear in weaker and stronger versions put forward by various thinkers.

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the secret of the double helix structure of DNA, scientists have an­nounced that our biological cartography is more than ninety-nine per­cent complete. It is not surprising then, that given the dramatic turn to genetics in the last half century, some have attempted, in varying ways, to reformulate the doctrine of original sin by developing an anthropol­ogy from within an evolutionary framework.8 They are correct in as­serting that we no longer find intelligible Augustine's historicizing of the myth of Genesis 3 and his reading into it that the first couple were to live in an idyllic state, immune to pain and moral struggle and gifted with physical immortality. There is no end of difficulty in explaining the fall at the dawn of creation of this gifted pair, alleged progenitors of us all.

Hence, rather than parroting the Augustinian formula or cavalierly ignoring the dark underside of our humanity, some among the revi­sionists have dauntlessly set out not merely to reframe the doctrine of original sin, but "to solve the problem of evil," to fit together the pieces of "the jigsaw puzzle" by an appeal to the data of science which tell us how the natural world works.9 More specifically, some turn to studies of animal behavior, where we find a world "red in tooth and claw," filled with aggression, deceit, theft, exploitation, infanticide, cannibal­ism, political intrigue, serial murder, and war. "There is no known human behavior that we call sin," it is claimed, "that is not also found among non-human animals." These behavior patterns mark humans and other animals because they are inherited from common ancestors, and the patterns common to humans and the other animals are said to be homologous. Such behaviors exist "because they promote the sur­vival and reproduction" of those who perform them. They persist be­cause natural selection for survival favors them. We ought, therefore, to view these behavior patterns "in an objective, non-psychological and non-pejorative sense as selfish. . . (simply) the price of survival and

8See, e.g., the diversity of approaches in Daryl Domning, "Evolution, Evil and Original Sin," America 186 (2001): 14-21; Jerry D. Korsmeyer, Evolution and Eden: Bal­ancing Original Sin and Contemporary Science (New York: Paulist, 1998); Patricia A. Williams, Doing Without Adam and Eve: Sociobiology and Original Sin (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001); Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, The Fall to Violence: Original Sin in Rela­tional Theology (New York: Continuum, 1994).

9I have drawn on Domning's "Evolution, Evil and Original Sin" as exemplifying a strong tendency to a biological reductionism that is less than adequate for reformulating the intent of the doctrine of original sin. His article illustrates the pitfalls that accompany attempts at reformulation wholly in terms of genetics. Citations in this paragraph, unless otherwise noted, are from Domning. Williams (note 8) tends in the same direction: "The theory of evolution applied to human nature through sociobiology can answer each of these questions (Are we free? Whence sin? Can we fulfill the law of love? Is suffering a punishment for sin?), offering scientific replacements for dubious theology" (142). Du­bious some theology certainly is, but some "scientific replacements" appear even more dubious.

Duffy: Genes, Original Sin and the Human Proclivity to Evil 215

self-perpetuation" of the genetic line. Even altruism is, perhaps, "ex­plainable in terms of selfishness and individual advantage." For geneti­cally rooted selfishness is the basic condition of the human animal. Sociobiologist Richard Dawkins, as is well known, has contended that humans are "survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes," which are source and archetype of all human behavior. The real agent is not the individual but the personified genes driven to their own reproduction. Individuals and groups pass away; "the genes are the immortals." They are, says Dawkins, like "successful Chicago gangsters" who survive in a highly competitive world, thanks to their "ruthless selfishness."10 Our deep-seated proclivity to selfishness, therefore, far from being a consequence of a primal fault of a putative first human couple, is largely, if not wholly, the genetic legacy of a long evolutionary development leading to the human animal with its moral responsibility for control of its physiologically encoded proneness to selfishness that can be im­mensely damaging to oneself and others. Our free will, however, for those who posit it is able only sporadically and with difficulty to rein in our selfishness, which is reinforced by learned behavior and the impact of culture. Francis Crick's "astonishing hypothesis" clearly ar­ticulates this reductionist drift: " . . . You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. . . . You're nothing but a pack of neu­rons. This hypothesis . . . can only be called astonishing."11

Efforts to reconcile "theological data" with the data of biology and to account for moral evil within an evolutionary worldview are com­mendable. But something goes awry if Darwinian natural selection is made the iron law of the universe and genetically rooted selfish behav-

10Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), ix-x, 2-3, 36-42. See philosopher Mary Midgley's critique of Dawkins in her Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), ch. 15. To speak of genes as selfish is to employ the language of conscious motive and, therefore, to resort to metaphor. Whatever use such a metaphor may have, it limps very badly. Worse yet, metaphorical attribution of conscious motive to genes is the only thing that permits Dawkins to move from saying genes are selfish to saying people are selfish. See Midgley's "Gene Juggling," Philosophy 54 (1979): 439-58. Dawkins' point is that natural selection acts at the level of competing genes not organisms. The properties we see in organisms maximize gene survival, not the welfare of organisms. Stephen J. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2002) champi­oned the idea that natural selection operates at every level in the biological hierarchy, genes, species, whole ecosystems. Debate long ensued and in time Dawkins, as will be noted below, would modify his selfish gene view, although it remains for him a powerful if not necessarily privileged viewpoint and an orthodox view in evolutionary biology.

"Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Scribners, 1994), 3.

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ior is simply the price of survival and progression. Echoing Leibniz, one may find this not only the best of all possible worlds, but the only possible world.12 Christ, incarnate divine altruism, becomes in that reconciling effort a kind of radical biocultural mutation in the human animal and shows us how to transcend our original selfishness and our self-interested altruism as well. He is a model for successful adaptation in our future cultural evolution. Such a grand "explanation" in terms of genetics is taken by Domning to show that in the end, the so called problem of evil is really a pseudoproblem, an illusion arising from outmoded philosophical and theological understandings of the world.13

This "solution" and the scientific views it draws upon do provide important insights into the truth about our humanity and its behavior that must be incorporated into any revision and development of the doctrine of original sin (would that we could jettison this ambiguity-riddled phrase). There is indeed a "reptilian core" in the human brain, a kernel of savagery surviving in us and tilting us toward subtle and not so subtle forms of selfishness, even violence, if not controlled and channeled. Nevertheless, a wholly biological "solution" is reduction­is ts in its parsimonious simplicity. As I will argue below, the ontology and the moral life and struggle of the human animal cannot be whittled down to a genetic program. "Elephants are not to be caught in jam jars." With a subject as complex as human behavior there is need for a variety of conceptual schemes.14 They need not compete. We can learn from and use all of them. Where a naturalistic and fatalistic anthropology goes wrong, is not in its recognition of the crucial role of biological "causality," more specifically, of the drive to gene replication and sur­vival, but in making it a monocausal or privileged explanation that ignores or underestimates other factors in play (personal, cultural, in­tellectual) in the complex, multidimensional entity that the human animal is. We cannot understand an economic system by reducing it to the currency it circulates. Neither can a narrow focus on gene survival

12Domning, "Evolution, Evil and Original Sin," 21. 13Ibid. 14Mary Midgley, "Rival Fatalisms: the Hollowness of the Sociobiology Debate," in

Ashley Montagu, ed., Sociobiology Examined fOxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 35. We are immersed in a scientific culture that fosters the assumption that questions about all organisms can or will find answers from big science delving into small mol­ecules. But there is no reason to think all questions about biology, much less human nature, meet answers in molecular mechanisms. See biologist H. Allen Orr, "What's Not in Your Genes," New York Review of Books 50 (14 August 2003): 38-40.

Duffy: Genes, Original Sin and the Human Proclivity to Evil 217

do justice to the full range and complexity of human motivations, nor to the impact of mind and culture on behavior.15

Our rejection of reductionism does not arise from any conflict be­tween religion and science but from a conflict between religion and scientism, or scientific materialism, an unwarranted metaphysical re­ductionism that goes beyond a quite legitimate methodological reduc­tionism that analytically breaks things down to their constituent parts to understand them at that level, although without claiming that the deep-down physical and chemical components completely explain their reality. Metaphysical reductionism, on the other hand, not only breaks organisms down into their basic chemical and physical building blocks but contends that a complete understanding of them can be found in those most basic constituents, the molecular structure and behavior of cells or the neurophysiological activity of the brain in the case of animal life and human life and mind. This is a contention resting on the unwarranted premise that scientific analysis reigns supreme over all disciplines since it alone is able to comprehend the totality of reality, a premise that cannot itself be scientifically grounded. Thus, reality is flattened out, made one-dimensional, and diminished. What is wrong with reductionism's approach is not its quest for a parsimonious and aesthetic explanation that brings out the ultimate unity of all reality but its shallow atomistic vision that misses the diversity and complexity of reality. But wholes are more than the sum of their parts, especially in living, thinking beings, whose reality is grasped only by a holistic approach that considers the overall patterns of their structure and behavior in pursuit of goals peculiar to them, and not by a reductive approach that myopically attends only to their chemical and neuronal elements and their behavior, thereby blinding us to or underestimating the rich complexity of life and mind.

Nonetheless, theological anthropology must be open to what en­lightenment molecular biology can offer about life's chemical bases and neuroscience about the mind's physiological dependence. Life and mind rely upon physical and chemical processes and ought not be separated from this material basis by any simplistic dualism. As life and mind emerge in the evolutionary process, there is no spectacular suspension or violation of the laws of chemistry or physics. Any appeal to such dramatic interruptions only brings back the sporadic incursions of the god-of-the-gaps that theology does not find credible. Ironically, this is the god reductionism looks for and not finding this god, then

15Stephen Pope, "The Order of Love and Recent Catholic Ethics: A Constructive Proposal," Theological Studies 52 (1991): 273; Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: the Roots of Human Nature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 123.

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argues to the non-existence of God. But the immanence of God in evo­lution's march does not necessitate any disruption of physical laws.

Emergence of the Moral Sense

It appears that the three-pound human brain has capacities that evolved over time to meet various environmental challenges. The ca­pacity for reason was a spontaneous evolutionary emergent. Minds emerge from neurons and genes make neurons. With the capacity for reason came the storehouse of memory, a wide range of desires, aspi­rations and needs, as well as the ability to generalize, to imagine alter­natives, to anticipate and plan the future. Nonetheless, reason remains informed by the premoral valuations of instinct. And precisely because the human animal experiences so many competing instinctual tenden­cies, desires, and needs that cannot all be harmoniously fulfilled, rea­son must be invoked to guide and prioritize conflicting motivations. And thus the "ethical primate" emerged. Moral values are not hard­wired into the human organism. Biology is not morality; genes cannot program moral norms and codes any more than they can program a particular language, though admittedly we are endowed with a genetic capacity for language. But our biology does inform us of the premoral needs and tendencies that set parameters for moral reflection, which re­flection may lead different cultures to varying moral norms and codes.16

But the moral sense is not above distortion. The Christian tradi­tion, with its doctrine of human sinfulness, recognizes the instability of the moral sense and the easy corruption of moral reasons and reflec­tion. We are well practiced in using reason to universalize falsely and rationalize our selfish purposes. Reason often fails to balance self-regard and kin and tribal preference with the needs of others who dwell beyond the pale of our limited social circle and our inordinate loves. Hence, even granting reason and free will, thorny questions remain: why do we freely yield to genetic impulse? And why does noble reason itself go corrupt to do our selfish bidding in betrayal of what is true and good? I can only sketch here some other dimensions of the human animal that, along with our genetic heritage, undergird the human pro­clivity to sin and that must be taken into account if we are to arrive at a more adequate anthropology.

To begin with, while acknowledging that we are not disembodied 16Midgley repudiates in her writings the idea that our biology hardwires moral

values into the brain but stresses that it does inform us of premoral needs and tendencies that moral reflection must attend to (see Beast and Man). See also Peter Singer, The Expanding Social Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981); George Pugh, The Biological Origins of Human Values (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

Duffy: Genes, Original Sin and the Human Proclivity to Evil 219

moral agents and that, genetically, we are bent toward selfishness, we must immediately qualify this. The human animal is also a self-transcendent spirit. As Reinhold Niebuhr noted decades ago, it will not do simply to attribute to the biological realm what experience recog­nizes as deriving from an interfusing of nature and spirit, of genetic impulse and rational freedom.17 The human animal is not, however, a two-layer composite, the two layers juxtaposed, each layer hermeti­cally sealed off from the other. The varied dimensions of the human interlace to form an integral unity. Hence humans experience no bio­logical impulse in its pure form. Integration into the realm of mind and spirit transforms all biological elements constituting the human per­son. Mind and will do not peer out in isolation from a conning tower where they are locked in but, nonetheless, quite able to quell mutinous genetic movements toward selfishness, greed and violence down below by appeal to a moral sense and tradition that are hardly the work solely of genes. Rather, mind and will range throughout all dimensions of our being, so that natural impulses are altered and imprinted with an au­tonomy unknown in other animals. Sexuality in the human, for ex­ample, is not what it is in the other animals. Nor are human selfishness and aggression simply homologous with behavior we observe in other animals; they are analogous.18

Here, two observations are in order concerning any appeal to our moral sense and the ethical traditions of our culture in reining in bio­logically implanted impulses. First, such an appeal may imply one of two possible positions, mind and culture against biology or mind and culture fulfilling biology. Both positions are freighted with anthropo­logical implications since they concern the two streams that feed into our humanity with its possibilities and its limitations. The mind-culture versus biology position is radically dualistic, setting allegedly altruistic culture, including religion, over against selfish genes. One difficulty with this lies in explaining how altruistic culture could sur­vive as a successful adaptation, since it contravenes the evolutionary process that has produced us and the very roots of mind and culture themselves. Further, how did authentic altruism, not just selfishness

17Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 1 (New York: Scribners, 1941), ch. 2. On the human person as a spirit in transcendence see, e.g., Karl Rahner, "Experience of Self and Experience of God," Theological Investigations 13, trans. David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1975): 122-32.

18Again, Midgley, "Gene Juggling," correctly cautions that nuance is called for in predicating of non-human animals selfishness, cruelty, competition, etc. and motives that seem needed and operative in beings capable of understanding, calculation and will. This is all the more true for personification of scraps of animal cell tissue and for meta­phorical talk about the physical action of genes in terms of conscious motive. The sole real unit of selfishness is a self and in DNA there are no selves.

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simulating altruism, arise in the first place if not through biological emergence? The mind-culture fulfilling biology option, on the other hand, which is more holistic, sees human nature as a profoundly com­plex biocultural reality rather than as a gene machine steered from without by culture. What are tagged "culture" and culture's moral val­ues form the worlds that humans, endowed with a capacity for self-transcendence construct, not to stifle or suppress the biological, which would be a denial of the self, but to stretch it in pursuit of goals that mind and culture envision as fulfilling our humanity and thus to inte­grate it as a vital dimension of human being. To set mind-culture and the fires of passion rooted in our biology against each other in a kind of war would be to extinguish the light and warmth of civilization.

Second, we do well to remember that along with the potentially destructive impulses of selfishness and aggression, there evolved in us as well a steady undertow of instincts to sociality, sympathy, and co­operation that draws us out beyond the in-group.19 One might conclude from this, as sociobiology has, that the moral sense we appeal to so as to bridle our destructive impulses is itself wholly a product of our evolution. Certainly, early sociobiologists viewed all human behavior solely in genetic terms. A second wave considered culture along with genes, yet generally saw culture itself as expressive of genetic influ­ences rather than as an independent variable. Reductionism perdured. Cultural and religious values are considered reasonable and justified solely on sociobiological grounds.20 But the crude moral sense that evolution produced does not seem adequate to explain why kings once had rights but not blacks or women, while now, blacks and women do, but kings do not. Nor does it seem adequate to explain why our moral horizon has expanded out from kin preference to tribe, to nation, to all of humankind.

Still, one might argue that trans-kin expansion of the moral sense is also due simply to the dynamics of evolution. For, claims sociobiol­ogy the inner circle's expansion is governed by the principle of recip­rocal altruism. And altruism, for sociobiologists, is behavior that ap­pears to sacrifice one's reproductive advantage but, over the long haul, contributes to it. Kindness is extended among unrelated individuals and groups. Growing networks of reciprocity are woven and main­tained by trade, cultural exchange, and people-to-people interaction, because such networking and extension of the social circle are ulti-

19Mary Midgley, The Ethical Primate (London: Routledge, 1994), ch.10, shows that Darwin noted this undertow of instincts, which Herbert Spencer's "social Darwinism slighted in its stress on "survival of the fittest."

20See Stephen Pope, "Sociobiology and Human Nature: A Perspective from Catholic Theology," Zygon 33 (1998): 281-82.

Duffy: Genes, Original Sin and the Human Proclivity to Evil 221

mately conducive to fostering reproduction of the inner circle's DNA through more successful adaptation to the environment and to inter-group competition. Biology may predispose us to selfish predatory be­havior and competition but culture, itself genetically rooted, advises altruism. A "conspiracy of doves" is better adapted to survival and gene replication, the purpose for which life is designed by natural selec­tion.21 The pressure of evolution to maximize reproductive fitness is what leads to the expanding social patterns that natural selection fa­vors. For sociobiologists, such behavior patterns are not elicited by conscious decisions but arise from a readiness to act on shared, innate dispositions caused by natural selection.22

But these fundamentally genetic explanations are inadequate to account for the complexity of human moral development. Men had "people to people" contact and frequent exchange and reciprocity with women, yet unaltruistically bound them in second-class citizenship. And more so than abolitionists, slaveholders had constant interaction with slaves yet unaltruistically counted them chattel and devoid of rights. Should we assume that there was a point where the networks of reciprocity became so tightly drawn that the demands of reciprocity, with an eye to reproduction, inexorably determined us to grant slaves freedom and women the rights of full citizenship? And can morality that draws us to care for society's weakest and most defenseless and unproductive members be expressed simply in terms of calculated reci­procity in aid of reproduction? It is certainly plausible that a calculated reciprocity did factor into the expansion of the moral sense. Grace does presuppose nature. But there is a point where morality develops and expands only because of the selfless reasoning that is born of self-transcendence, which may cut against the grain and lead to political, legal, and religious struggle to meet the felt claims of justice and love. Grace perfects nature.23 Egoism can become altruism, and self-regard

21Talk of a "conspiracy of doves" leads Richard Dawkins into some inconsistency when he asserts the human possibility of transcending selfish genes: "We alone on earth can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators" [The Selfish Gene, 215). In his recent work, A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science and Love (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), Dawkins fires at his usual targets, pseudo-science and religion (a virus like smallpox, but harder to eradicate), defends his selfish gene view in modified form as he did in The Extended Phenotype (San Francisco: Freeman, 1982), and presents a polemic against genetic determinism and social Darwinism. Dawkins is known not only for his selfish gene view of evolution but also for his selfish même view of cultural evolution.

22 A danger lurking here is that the sociobiologists' position may be taken to imply that in view of the iron law of natural selection, the moral norms to be favored are those fostering the best genetic gains, since that is what led to the evolution of moral norms in the first place. This kind of thinking could be invoked to justify eugenics, racism and ethnic cleansing, which most, including sociobiologists, find reprehensible.

23Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (hereafter, ST) I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2; q. 60, a. 1,

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other-regard, and trans-kin reciprocity universal benevolence and 04. agape.

Biological perspectives do furnish insight into the natural well-springs of human affection and love that all other-regarding love builds upon and transforms.25 Innate proclivities are not determinative but open programs. This explains the variations in language and moral codes throughout history and across cultures and the variations in giv­ing expression to kin preference. But biological predispositions have also met with repression, redirection, and sublimation, all in deference to some other or higher good. The human animal, given its transcen­dence of nature with its science and technology, rather than merely adapting to its environment continues to adapt biology and environ­ment to its own goals. To be sure, evolution has, as Stephen Pope has pointed out, so shaped human nature that the conditions necessary for the emergence of moral ideals appeared. Not surprisingly, these ideals follow the lead of nature, e.g., in parental care of children, loyalty to and defense of community, reciprocity. Yet humanity's capacity for transcendence makes possible as well the emergence of moral claims that contravene or soar beyond biological predispositions and the favor of natural selection, ideals such as agapaic love, non-violence, love of enemies, asceticism and a preferential option for the marginalized. Our forms of life inevitably reflect our evolutionary history as a species. But we are also capable of transcending the agenda of natural selection.26

For our genetic endowment alone is unable to guarantee our comfort­able adaptation to the environment that spawned us. Our emotional, intellectual, and cultural horizons are forever expanding. Non-human organisms appear more at home in their biological niche than does the restless human animal. Indeed, the alienation of humans from nature and from members of their own species is something of an anomaly.

ad 2. The argument advanced here is indebted to biologist H. Allen Orr, who develops it more fully in "Darwinian Storytelling," New York Review of Books 50 (27 February 2003): 17-20.

24On the whole issue of the evolution of morals, see, e.g., Stephen Pope, "The Evo­lutionary Roots of Morality in Theological Perspective," Zygon 33 (1998): 545-56; Fran­cisco J. Ayala, "The Difference in Being Human; Ethical Behavior as an Evolutionary Byproduct," in Holmes Rolston III, ed., Biology, Ethics and the Origin of Life, 3d ed. (London: Jones and Bartlett, 1995), 113-35.

25Stephen Pope, The Evolution of Altruism and the Ordering of Love (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1994) shows that insights into the biological roots of kin, reciprocal and group altruism help to refine the traditional Catholic ordo amoris [ST II-II, q. 26, a. 1) and reveal God's moral governance. Again, grace presupposes nature. From another angle, Peter Singer, The Expanding Social Circle, sees ethics emerging when reason assumes a life of its own and can run against the dictates of calculating reciprocity to extend the affections of parents and children to those outside the family circle.

26Pope, "Evolutionary Roots of Morality," 553.

Duffy: Genes, Original Sin and the Human Proclivity to Evil 223

The tribal selfishness and favoring of kin that are part of our biological baggage became increasingly ill-adapted to the ever-widening horizons of human need, desire, and possibility. A human world transcends the purely biological.

Psychic Tensions and the Moral Struggle

None of this is to say that our vital genetic impulses are easily managed. They are not, and they are not precisely because unlike those of the other animals, they are no longer totally implanted within a predetermined, natural instinctual regimen. Thus physical impulses in the human, loosed from the complete hegemony of nature, become apt to make their own unruly clamor. This Paul called epithumia (e.g., Gal 5:16-17) and Augustine and the tradition following labeled concupis-centia. While there are significant differences between the two, con-cupiscentia is somewhat akin to Freud's id, that cauldron of uncon­scious libidinal energies and cravings that spontaneously erupt and are in service of the pleasure principle. Try as it may to govern these unruly energies, the conscious ego with its moral sense, the censor aligned with the reality principle, is not always master in its own house. Hence we experience a rift in our being, a kind of psychic dualism: the conscious and the unconscious, the voluntary and the involuntary dimensions of our being.27 These energies and cravings are not evil in themselves, but part of God's good creation. The pleasures of bed and board are blessings of our finitude. Nonetheless, gone awry, the psychic tension makes of us divided selves to the point of bondage. And divided selves make for divided societies. Yet, our task is not to suppress these libidinal stirrings. Rather, our task is the integration of the will and its choices of authentic good with these spontaneous ap­petites so that we become unified selves.28 To over-spiritualize our being at the expense of these, wrongly termed, "lower" appetites is to

270n Sigmund Freud's structural theory of personality, see his The Ego and the Id, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961). For an attempt to use Freudian theory in reformulating the doctrine of original sin, see Sharon Maclsaac, Freud and Original Sin (New York: Paulist, 1974). See also Karl Rahner's seminal essay "The Theological Con­cept of Concupiscence," Theological Investigations 1, trans. Cornelius E. Ernst (Balti­more: Helicon, 1961): 347-82, which retrieves a fuller understanding of concupiscence, moving beyond merely associating it with sin. On the intertwining of the voluntary and the involuntary, see Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Invol­untary, trans. Erazim V. Kohak (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966).

28Aquinas, following Aristotle, e.g., Nich. Eth. I, 2, 5 and 6, distinguishes three kinds of good, the bonum honestum, an intrinsic good sought for its own sake, such as justice, truth, health; the bonum utile, a means to an intrinsic good, such as surgery; and the bonum delectabile, a pleasurable good, such as savoring vintage wine. Though distinct, the three are not necessarily to be separated, but should be integrated in one's life. Better, e.g., to do justice with pleasure than reluctantly (STI, q. 5, a. 6; II-II, q. 145, a. 3).

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make of ourselves half persons if indeed human persons at all. Pascal offers a sage caveat: "Who would make of man an angel will make of him a beast." Nonetheless, that said, the id remains a constitutive on-tological dimension conditioning human freedom.

Sociobiology, and its successor evolutionary or Darwinian psy­chology, offers insight into these evolved predispositions and the limits and conditions they impose on human agency and into the ambiguity of our motives. The struggle experienced in integrating our conflicting proclivities and motives into harmonious personal unity with heart and mind is less the result merely of nature's stubborn recalcitrance than of nature's now being incorporated into the realm of spirit and freedom. Nature's inertia is not in us purely biological, for it carries a spiritual coefficient. Thus myopic tribal loyalties in face of more uni­versal needs or destructive aggression, for example, are not due just to selfish genes seeking self-perpetuation, but even more to a freedom that can not only thwart any propensity to reproduction but can enable humans to transform nature's unities of family and tribe into vehicles of pride and greed. In a word, the evolutionary framework of our in­clinations and our actions is permeated by a transcendent freedom that grounds our striking grandeur and our appalling misery, our altruism and our egoism, and renders our species profoundly different from the other animals and, indeed, capable of far greater cruelty than other species. The human animal's infinite horizon may transmute the ani­mal drive to survival into a drive to power, hunger into lustful greed, selfish impulses into rationalized and organized group egoism. In this we see the confluence of genes, intelligence, freedom, and culture. Science gives way to wonder.

To sum up at this point, any assertion of an iron law of Darwinian natural selection or of selfish genes would appear, just as mythical as the iron law of the free market when we consider that human decisions can, and do manipulate both biology and the environment, as they do the market, to shape attitudes and behavior or to determine whether and which DNA will be replicated. With the development of culture, evolution becomes to a large extent what humans make of it. The hu­man spirit cannot be corralled within the confines of blind genetic programs nor to our regret, on the other hand, even within the dictates of reason's prudence. In its restless transcendence it can defy both nature and reason. Herein lies the source of its destructiveness and its creativity, its tragedy and its splendor.29

It should be clear by now that our quarrel is not simply with a reductionist genetic determinism or with the claim that human life is

'Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny of Man, 1:122.

Duffy: Genes, Original Sin and the Human Proclivity to Evil 225

completely comprehensible in terms of our genes but more impor­tantly, perhaps, with an obdurate dualism variously purveyed as genes versus freedom, nature versus nurture, biology versus culture, or evo­lution versus social constructions. Invariably, in cleaving these duali­ties into separate parts, one or other member of these pairs ends up being downplayed or marginalized. Both/and tends to become either/ or. More subtly, but falsely nonetheless, this annoying, never-dying, forever-reappearing dualism may be rendered as a juxtaposition of genes and freedom, which fails to see that the two form a fluid, com­plex interactive unity in which instinctive drives are no longer simply as they are in the non-human species of animal. It is not nature versus nurture, but nature via nurture. Genes are not puppet masters wholly in control and always seizing the initiative. Genes respond to experience and can often be turned off or on in response to their environment, which is personal and cultural as well as physical.

III. Further Elucidating the Proclivity to Evil

Now, briefly, to suggest four other dimensions of our humanity that, along with our biological heritage, any attempt to elucidate our dark underside with its proclivity to evil must incorporate, for they play upon all the registers of our lives and loves and in so doing, condition our freedom for good or ill. First, paradoxical disproportion marks our humanity. We are torn between infinity and finitude. Hamlet captures it well: "Ó God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, yet count myself king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." Though transcending nature, history, and self, we yet remain tethered to nature and history. But of the parentage of transcendence and fini­tude is born angst. We are either tortured by concern for our mortality and our failure to actualize our possibilities to be more than we have become, always more, or, fearful of those possibilities and the risks and costs entailed in realizing them, we become preoccupied with our limi­tations and flee freedom.30 In Kierkegaard's words, "Angst is the diz­ziness of freedom . . . when . . . freedom gazes down into its own pos­sibility, grasping at finiteness to secure itself."31

This fissure in our being we manage neither wisely nor well. There 30Martin Heidegger speaks of Sorge (care) and its double connotation, our restless

concern in our freedom to become what we can become, to realize our possibilities, and our anxious concern about our contingency in being at the mercy of our vulnerability and mortality. [Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [New York: Harper and Row, 1962], 241-44).

31S0ren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Prince­ton University Press, 1946), 55, 83. On the disproportion in human being and angst, see also Heidegger, Being and Time, 228-35; Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theo­logical Perspective, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985), 96-

226 HORIZONS

is for us no steady state. Balanced integration of the two polarities, openness to our infinite horizon and loving acceptance of our finitude, is difficult, if not impossible, because angst is the price of our freedom and a tragic dimension of existence. To deaden the pangs of angst we may, in an effort to secure ourselves, over-weight our freedom, and veer toward destructive hubris in defiance of our finitude. We sin not sim­ply because we are animals but because we are the animals who reach for the stars. On the other hand, we may over-weight our limitations, be unwilling to "set out into the deep." Fearfully surrendering our free­dom in exchange for the bread of a false security, we veer toward self-destructive acedia, sloth, lack of self-realization, even despair at our finitude. Shrinking from our possibilities and resting content with the "good enough" of mediocrity may parade as humble selflessness, whereas in fact it may be a failure ever to become a self.32 Nonetheless, angst, a constitutive ontological dimension conditioning our freedom, remains a non-necessitating precondition for sin. Far from being evil in itself, it is the condition of the possibility of our creativity as well as our destructiveness. Without it, we would never build a home, found a city, or seek a cure for illness. Yet it may also give rise to hubris or acedia, both destructive of the self and others.

Second, and closely linked with Freud's id, our genetic heritage is another component of the human personality, the superego. If our par­ents' first legacy is our genes, the second is the superego, which shapes us psychically. Unconsciously, we internalize and make our own the values and disvalues, the attitudes and viewpoints, good and bad, of our parents. This legacy settles in the sediment of the unconscious. The superego, one more involuntary given in the human make-up, is a powerful pre-reflexive, pre-volitional moral orientation for our weal or woe. So there is choice but also legacy, the legacy of genes, the id, and the superego. The voluntary and the involuntary cohabit; we are cul­prits but also victims. Like the other involuntary elements, the super­ego is, in one sense, a natural developmental facticity in the human person. But we may through the history of our choices connive with it and thereby reinforce it. Facticity meets with complicity, much as it

107. Above all, see Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man, trans. Charles Kelbley (Chicago: Regnery, 1965).

32Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin and Grace: Women's Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1982), brings this out in contrast to the traditional emphasis of male theologians, who have focused on the radicality of sinful pride and self assertion. Valerie Saiving, "The Human Situation: A Woman's Perspective," Journal of Religion 40 (1960): 100-12, made the same point earlier. This in no way implies that a dividing line can be drawn clearly, men identified with hubris and women with acedia. Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" in The Brothers Karamazov (pt. 2, bk. 5, ch. 5) dramatically portrays the disturbing surrender of freedom for bread.

Duffy: Genes, Original Sin and the Human Proclivity to Evil 227

does in the Greek tragic hero who, finding himself in a situation not of his making, brings down upon his head his own undoing by the exer­cise of his freedom. We are forever caught in a dynamic process of exchange between the unconscious but active sedimented past that conditions our freedom and the calls that beckon us from our present world and from the approaching future. The past is never finished, the future never wholly new.

We turn next to a third factor, one discussed above in another context, culture. Our culture is external to us, yet somehow inheres in us. Though our freedom has emerged from our genetic evolution, it is correlative with culture, which is the locus of larger frames of meaning and the second stream of influences that shape our behavior and us. Coming to freedom is not just a personal adventure. It is as well a communal journey. Our behavior ceased to be genetically immediate when the brain became large enough to arrive at a capacity for wide-ranging memory, imagination, and foresight. We then became flexible and open to alternatives. New models for the direction of behavior were needed. The creation of culture ensued in response to human need and understanding of reality. Functioning with all the force of a religion, it provided a redirection of human life by constructing a social world that with its narratives, rituals, and images, commands systems of informa­tion and meaning, that supplement our encoded genetic information. Our cultural world discerns and reveals to us what is real and of value, albeit a world constructed in line with our broad, open genetic predis­positions. Culture is the locus of freedom's exercise and it shapes that freedom for the creative and adaptive behavior of social organization and cooperation that is necessary for survival. We are an ambiguous species, often split by an inner tension between the genetic disposi­tions that draw us to selfishness, competition, aggression and hedo­nism and cultural influences, on the other hand, calling us to self-discipline, cooperation, and expanded social bonds. Individually and collectively our fallible freedom rests uneasy within the tension of this duality.33 And the ambiguity is compounded by the fact that the roles can be reversed, with genetic dispositions moving us to sympathy, cooperation, and altruism and culture luring us to self-interest, greed, endless pleasure-seeking, and sustaining institutions of systemic injus­tice. Sin is a compound deriving from the symbiosis of genetic and cultural influences. Genetic beastliness is not alone its source. Nature

33On the ambiguity of our humanity, see Gilkey, "Evolution, Culture and Sin." Sig­mund Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, trans, and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961) is most insightful, if not wholly acceptable, concerning the tensions be­tween the individual and culture.

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and nurture alike spawn good and evil. Nor is our capacity for self-transcendence without its role.

Because we are a symbiosis of genes and culture, it is not surpris­ing that evil has social and historical dimensions. Evil as well as good­ness becomes incarnate in our culture's symbols and institutions and spreads like a parasite, a contagion infecting each and all. There is a serpent within, but a serpent without as well, the already-thereness of evil lying in wait when we enter our culturally shaped world. As Paul expressed it, sin is a demonic power, it enters the world, inhabits us; it abounds, it reigns (Rom 5). Paul's language is mythic, struggling to say what is unsayable in discursive discourse. Paul sees sin as a mythic suprapersonal and ubiquitous power whose magnitude extends beyond the figure of Adam or any individual or group. Together we are en­tangled in a circuitry of psychosocial forces that pervade and energize all the spheres of life, personal and social. And the currents of our culture flow through our being, not around us. We bear the encum­brances of our communal past. Through the sinful synchronicity of familial, social, political, economic, educational, and ecclesiastical in­stitutions, in which we are all complicit, evil becomes systemic and sin becomes social sin, organized sin, the sin we do together, something more than the sum of our individual sins.34 To the extent that the various spheres of life are not governed and oriented by moral and spiritual values, corruption and exploitation fast become the common coin of society.35 Evil becomes mechanized, bureaucratized, so that it becomes difficult to assign responsibility for it simply by employing the usual categories of the evil will and intention. For systemic evil arises less from conscious intention and choice than from blindness, lies, and the masterful self-deception of ideology which presents value judgments as empirical facts, social constructions as natural, and the interests of the few as the interests of all. All this conduces to rendering the suffering of the innocent invisible and makes possible our self-righteousness as anonymous sinners who participate in evil without intending to do so. The chic dresser, e.g., never sees the faces of ex­ploited Salvadoran seamstresses. Relevant here, and central to the con­cept of original sin, is what Ricoeur calls "the realism of sin." By it he means that consciousness is not the measure of our sinfulness because consciousness itself is infected by sin, hence is often blind to sin and quick to rationalize it. Sin is our true situation "before God," coram

34In this connection, see Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribner's, 1932).

35Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) suggests that society's "life goods" (e.g., autonomy, equality, universal beneficence, etc.) can be sustained over the long haul only if grounded in "constitutive goods" transcending self and society (e.g., theism, Christian agape).

Duffy: Genes, Original Sin and the Human Proclivity to Evil 229

De.ö. Personal and social sin are more a mode of being than specific acts.36

In terms of our present situation, we live in a time when the eco­nomic institutions are our culture's pivotal institutions, masters of our world, and we cannot storm the palaces of the corporate oligarchy or vote them out. Indeed, we collude with them. There are corporations that raise great hopes. Think of the pharmaceuticals with their vast potential for good, but also with their pitch-dark underside sustained by corporate cant and greed, fed by society's creation of ever new "sick­nesses," people's dire needs and willful conveniences and luxuries, and protected by politicians the corporations co-opt. The good turns demonic when institutions good in themselves are driven by an arro­gant egoism and the lust for power and profit.

The crucial point in all this is that while consciousness precedes cultural structures, structures in turn shape consciousness. We make with our freedom a culture; the culture in turn remakes us and our freedom and spawns a collective superego that skews our freedom with a powerful pre-volitional slant by teaching us what to love and value, which is not always the authentic good. In Augustine's physics of the heart, "My weight is my love" [Pondus meum amor meus).37 Our cul­turally saturated desires easily become the weight that draws us to choose what the culture has taught us to love. And, as Augustine noted, we become what we love.38 Our identity and the goods we love are inextricably linked. If the seductive siren call of the culture and its systemic social sin had their way, the culture's value would become the all-encompassing horizon of our lives, for its logic is totalistic. No one makes clean escape. We cannot live without the blessings of culture; neither can we elude its constriction of the horizon of our freedom.

We should not, therefore, as noted above, be overly optimistic about culture as a second stream that will counter selfish genes with altruistic behavior. Such naïveté is blind to the ambiguity of both cul­ture and genes redolent of social Darwinism and the myth of progress. Culture, in its network of institutions, is often the purveyor of systemic injustice and oppression, and in its ideologies, religious and secular, the spinner of rationalizations of injustice through symbol, myth, and ritual. Sin arises from a concrescence of genes, culture, and human transcendence. In this light, trans-kin altruism, like all else human, appears an ambiguous advance. A group's selfishly motivated altruism may contribute to the social life necessary for human well-being but also to the in-group's egoism and the harm it does to human and plan-

36Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations, 282. 37Confessions, 13, 9. 38En. Ps. 81.6; Ep. Jo. 2.14.

230 HORIZONS

etary flourishing. Moreover, what remains the foundational truth in all of this is the theological tradition's contention that humans are created not only in a relationship to nature and culture but also to God. We experience ourselves not merely as the interface of genes and culture, nature and history, but also and even more so, as related to and drawn by the transcendent. It is our relationship to God that finally deter­mines the creativity or the destructiveness of our nature and our cul­ture, which are meant to be the agents of divine purpose. The most creative dimensions of our humanity, our intelligence, moral sense, and religion, our sense of individuality and our social nature, our ca­pacity for memory and foresight, become sources of destructiveness when our relation to the transcendent goes awry. Sin stems not only from the interface of genes and culture but even more from our failed relation to God, which in turn retards the project of bringing nature toward fulfillment of divine purposes.

Evolution, then, has arrived at the point where nature, culture, and history's sweep of human actions and choices are now intertwined. History arose as the product of nature's evolution and now nature is caught up in the history of human freedom. How humans use their freedom to a large extent determines the future of nature. We still share much of the nineteenth century's facile optimism and its progressivist hope for our humanity. Though we may now speak as much of history's evolution as of progress, that dynamic duo progress and inevitability are with us still as the great religion of the West, the belief that our manipulation of human and non-human nature will surely provide existence with prosperity and meaning. But clouds threaten this blue-sky optimism when we ponder our history past and present and our clever capacity for and inclination to evil and even savagery.39

Now, to the fourth and final factor disposing us to evil. We stand at an epistemic distance from God, the supreme good, who is veiled in incomprehensibility. This is a God who does not overwhelm or com­pel, but lets be, a God the blinding incandescence of whose presence does not incinerate our freedom. All our God-talk strains, reaches a breaking point and cannot bridge the abyss that yawns between the Absolute Mystery and ourselves. And our world offers ambiguous evi­dence of God. Feeling the sting of life's negativities and indifference in the face of our best efforts to pursue the good, we grope our way in a night of faith and hope, etsi Deus non daretur. Cynicism, despair, even

39Along with Karl Rahner's dark essay "Utopia and Reality," see his "Christian Pessimism" in Theological Investigations 22, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Cross­road, 1991): 155-62. See also the possibly bleak future that Margaret Atwood foresees in her recent novel, Oryx and Crake (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 2003), which is remi­niscent of Orwell's 1984.

Duffy: Genes, Original Sin and the Human Proclivity to Evil 231

nihilism are never far off. Meanwhile, the very palpable and alluring loves of our life-world call us, engross us and nudge into oblivion the comprehensive good, God. Or worse, these relative goods are made absolute, objects of ultimate concern, and our gods. Such idolatry, both at the individual and the social levels, is the forfeiture of our freedom and easily becomes a soft despotism that is corrosive of our humanity.

IV. Conclusions

The Gestalt emerging from the above array of biological, psychic, and social elements points up the conditioned and situated character of our vaunted freedom and the ethical impotence that dogs us. Those elements serve to reformulate and articulate in contemporary terms the central intent and motivation of the traditional doctrine of original sin.40 Ours is not a freedom of absolute indétermination. There is a structural instability and fallibility in the human being, who exists at the intersection of freedom and nature, consciousness and body, the voluntary and the involuntary, the individual and the social. Seduced by dark psychic tensions within and ensnared in a history of evil with­out, we are unable wholeheartedly to pursue the great good that lures us. In the will itself there is a kind of quasi-nature, a strange involun-tariness residing at the heart of the voluntary. Our inborn desire for the good meets with a wall of ineptitude. Again Augustine: "Our hearts are not in our power . . . there is a miserable darkness in the human mind that knows well how to tame a lion, but does not know how to live." Like Paul's construct in (Romans 7) and the middle-aged Augustine, we feel the awful chasm between "I ought" and "I can." And even when we do pursue the good, our motives often, if not always, carry a coef­ficient of ambiguity. Augustine was right to see even faithful believers

40Tatha Wiley, Original Sin: Origins, Developments, Contemporary Meanings (New York: Paulist, 2002), drawing on Bernard Lonergan, identifies original sin with sustained inauthenticity and explains this in terms of Lonergan's appeal to interiority and the exigencies of the dynamics of conscious intentionality in experience, understanding, judgment and decision, whose transcendental imperatives, if faithfully observed, lead to self-transcendence and authentic humanity. But egoistic individual and group bias im­pede fidelity and lead to inattentiveness, obtuseness, irrationality and irresponsibility, hence personal disintegration and social disorder. This is certainly most helpful but needs to go a step further to an analysis of the often unconscious genetic, psychological and social factors that render intellectual, moral and religious conversion difficult and "basic sin," contraction of consciousness, common, even inevitable, then to metastasize throughout the social body. Perhaps to Lonergan's three conversions we should add a need for psychic conversion (see, e.g., Robert Doran, Psychic Conversion and Theological Foundations: Toward a Reorientation of the Human Sciences [Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1989]).

232 HORIZONS

as "convalescents" in whom two loves are still at war, caritas and cupiditas.41 Thus too the wisdom of Luther's simul iustus et peccator. Ours is the experience of a will that escapes from itself and serves another than itself. Small wonder that Thomas could say that the re­creation of persons by grace is God's greatest work, greater in itself than creation ex nihilo, and greater, we might add, because the stubborn contrariety and collusion of the voluntary and the involuntary within our being offer a resistance to God that nothingness cannot.42 The poet W. H. Auden caught this well: "We would rather be ruined than changed/ We would rather die in our dread/ Than climb the cross of the moment/ And let illusions die."43 In the end, as Karl Rahner has noted, the Christian is a realist, but a "pessimistic" realist, for faith "obliges us to see this existence as dark, bitter and hard and as an unfathomable and radical risk." Only the grace of God prevents our eros for the good from being swamped, drowned by our propensities to destructiveness, a truth grounded in our tradition and in our experience.44

All this said, there can be no doubt that one residual in us of our long evolutionary past is a genetically encoded proclivity to self-interest that if not controlled and properly channeled, may make of us clever savages capable of great harm to others and to ourselves. But that is not the whole story. A genetic predisposition is just that, a predis­position. Biology is not destiny. Our genetic baggage does not doom us to oppression, violence and greed. Nor can it explain our noblest achievements. Perhaps there is a gene for art making, selected to im­press potential mates. But it is a long way from there to the Bard's Othello or to Wagner's Parsifal. And could we predict Einstein's ab­stract equations about space and time if we had knowledge of his neu­robiology and biochemistry, his psyche and culture? If we could, would we not be more colleagues than oracles? The dynamics of hu­man thought and motivation are far too complex to be pared down to a mindless swirl of molecular stuff which, in a bit of a stretch, we per­sonify as "selfish." The roots of our motivation lie not merely in a set of blind genetic impulses, but in a complex reflexive interrelation be­tween the power of our self-transcendence and the genetic, psychologi­cal and cultural factors that shape our being. The egoistic behavior that is destructive of human and ecological well-being does not spring

410n our hearts escaping us, see De Dono Persev. 13; C. Jul. 3.57; De Nat. et Grat. 40.47; on the two loves, see De Civ. Dei, XIV. On the ambiguity of our actions, Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, trans. William Dych (New York: Crossroad, 1978), 109.

42See, e.g., Martin Luther's Disputation Concerning Justification, LW 34, 152, and Against Latomus, LW 32, 232, and ST HI, q. 113, a. 9.

43W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety (New York: Random House, 1947), 134. 44Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 403.

Duffy: Genes, Original Sin and the Human Proclivity to Evil 233

solely or ultimately from innate genetic selfishness but from freedom's self-restricting betrayal of the good that draws it and alone fulfills it. Betrayal is not freedom's inevitable consequence but its alogical and tragic reality.45 How simple it would be if we could explain our atti­tudes, choices and actions by pointing to our genetic map as our de­fining essence. But it is not that simple, for our DNA is even stupider than we are. We are not condemned to vanish without remainder into the circumstances of our lives, our genes and our culture.

Two closing observations. First, we should note that all anthro­pologies slide easily from descriptive to normative discourse. Anthro­pologies bring with them moral agendas. With the egoistic selfishness that sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists detect in our genes comes a moral point. Aristotle made use of our ego concern to urge our own personal and intellectual development. Hobbes used it to insist that members of the social contract hold their government accountable. Nietzsche, when he was in his egoist mode, appealed to it to proclaim self-sufficiency and self-fulfillment in a salvo against the self-abnegation urged by Christianity.46 And of late, because we are born selfish, sociobiologists, somewhat inconsistently, have been heard urg­ing us to strive for generosity and altruism. And yet, the limited altru­ism we and the other animals do attain is, they tell us, only a deceptive cover for the underlying selfishness of our genetic dispositions, and a means to achieving genetic replication over the long run. But personify genes as you will, these scraps of molecular stuff are incapable of mo­tivations in the strict sense. If people have survived till now, one reason is that they had the genetic equipment to cope with what challenges they have met up to now. Competition, self-interest and pugnacity, as Mary Midgley has noted, had their place. But so did cooperation, so­ciality and empathy. Today, pugnacity becomes itself an ever-larger danger. Does a fatalistic anthropology proclaiming that genetically we are "like Chicago gangsters" and that ultimately all our motivations are suffused with "ruthless selfishness" ring true in light of the sweep of our existence as a species? Does it nourish our hope and sustain our innate, unrestricted quest for truth and goodness? Does such an anthro­pology not breed cynicism when our striving for decency is doomed, since our best efforts always reduce to the hypocrisy of selfishness in the guise of altruism? Sadly, there are probably many who in their flight from freedom and in bad faith would willingly embrace this excuse-making fatalism.47

And finally, far from being a puzzle to be solved, evil is a terminal 45Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny of Man, 1:121. 46Midgley, "Gene Juggling," 127. 47Ibid., 128-29.

234 HORIZONS

aporia, a perplexity or surd to be lived with and striven against. Despite our unrelenting efforts to make complete sense of the dark tragedy of evil and suffering and of the misuse we make of our freedom, much like Job's three friends, who thought they had perfectly understood the mystery of suffering, evil retains an impenetrable opacity, for it is ir­rational. As failure, moral vacuum, and absence of due good, moral evil points to no efficient causes, only deficient causes, as Augustine ob­served. At best, our discourse may illumine the preconditions of moral evil, or how not to explain suffering, for example, by contending that all evil and suffering are the punishment of God's retributive justice for sin. Painful as our lack of explanation may be, in light of the astonish­ing creativity of our universe across almost fourteen billion years of struggle against all odds, and especially in light of the crucified and risen One, Christians have a reason for their hope and can live and cope with their unanswerable queries about the mystery of evil and the mystery that we are. In via, we walk by faith, not sight. Reason stumbles. Our gnawing need to square the "is" of existence with the "ought" of reason and the heart is inescapable but unfulfillable. We cannot understand through our science and theology all the twists and turns in the plot as the drama of our still emerging universe and our­selves unfolds, nor its final outcome, if indeed there is one. But we do detect enough of a pattern in the story line to trust that it is not a story of divine indifference to but of divine empathy with our lot, and that though evil reigns, all the more grace abounds (Rom 5:21) in heights and depths yet undreamed and manifests itself in a mystery even deeper than the mystery of evil, the mystery of human goodness. We glimpsed its radiance on 9/11 in the heroic altruism of so many who showed us a grandeur in the human species that is immeasurably dif­ferent from what we find in our fellow animals.

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