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A recent article in Science News (http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/64465/title/Massacre_at_Sacred_Ridge) has noted extensive archeological evidence of human violence dating back thousands of years. Groups not usually associated with extensive violence, such as Native American communities in the Southwest during the 1300s C. E., were guilty of brutal violence against groups of people. This should be no surprise to Christians, who believe that, whatever happened to humans historically in their evolution, in some real sense they are “fallen.” G. K. Chesterton once said that the doctrine of original sin was the only Christian doctrine that could be empirically verified. At the very least, the notion that people are not what they ought to be, and haven’t been as far back as archeological evidence extends, is true. Violence, brutality, and genocide are part and parcel of the human condition. No group is immune to evil. The attempt by some multiculturalists and Marxists to set aside some groups (such as Native Americans) as nonviolent and virtuous and other groups (such as Europeans) as violent and genocidal is true only to the extent that the Europeans were more thorough in their violence and genocide. There is absolutely no excuse for the near-complete genocide of the Native American tribes of the U. S. But that does not imply that the Native Americans were totally innocent and without original sin (in the sense of having a propensity to do wrong, not in the Augustinian sense of being born with guilt). No culture, no race, no society can avoid the scourge of having evil people in its midst. To exclude any group from the general human condition really dehumanizes them, putting them in a status that they cannot possibly reach by their behavior. The higher the pedestal, the harder a group falls. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” said St. Paul in Romans, and he was surely right. We have every right to condemn violence, mass murder, and genocide where it has occurred. But we do not have the moral right to place some groups in a status so that they could not be possibly guilty of such crimes themselves. Archeology and historical evidence may come back to bite ideologues who neatly divide human groups into the oppressors and the oppressed. Such ideologues ought to study history and realize what happens when the so-called “oppressed” take power–the old Soviet Union, Maoist China, and North Korea come to mind. Every one of us is capable of hurting our fellow man. May God give us the grace to realize that when it comes to violent people, “but for the grace of God were I.” Then we may realistically and with humility do our part to lessen the violence that so mars our world.
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