“We shall overcome,” said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

Consider with me a bit of human history. Archaeologists, looking back at the oldest humans, tell us that one in seven of those primal people died by violence.

Later on, with the development of cities, the rate of violent death dropped to one in 50. An improvement, yes, but it did not mean that wars were any less terrible. The Hebrew Bible is explicit on this. As one example, it describes the Israelite army that destroyed Jericho as follows: “Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword.”

“Through much of human history,” says my colleague the Rev. Ken Reeves, “people lived in fear of a sail on the horizon, or marchers in the distance bringing destruction. To assuage their fear, people would celebrate an alpha god who smites their enemies in miraculous victory.”

Even so, it’s the argument of scholar Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, that over the centuries humanity has continued becoming less violent and more peaceful. According to the World Health Organization, the current rate of death from war or other violence is one in 7,000. Every one of these deaths is terrible, of course. Yet, the tragedies occur less often, and that is the silver lining. 

For sure, what has become clearer and clearer over time is that the costs of war are not worth it. William Tecumseh Sherman, American Civil War general on the Union side, suggests what only some of these costs are, when he said: “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.” 

That war is something best avoided is the teaching of no less than the West Point United States Military Academy. On its Modern War Institute website, I found an article (by Christopher Blattman) that says, “The fact is that [war] is ruinous, and so, nations do their best to avoid open conflict. The costs of war also mean that when they do fight, countries have powerful incentives not to escalate and expand those wars—to keep the fighting contained, especially when it could go nuclear. This is one of the most powerful insights from both history and game theory: war is a last resort, and the costlier that war, the harder both sides will work to avoid it.”

Nevertheless, despite the incredible costs, war continues to happen. Russia and Ukraine are at war. War is a reality right now in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Libya, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and dozens of other places. 

Now we must add renewed warfare between Israel and Palestine. On October 7, the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas breached a border security fence and indiscriminately gunned down Israeli civilians and soldiers. Other Hamas militants stormed beaches in Israel in motorboats, and still others swooped in on paragliders and shot people from above. More than 1,400 people were killed in Israel, including children, and more than 4,500 people were injured. Approximately 150 folks were taken hostage. Hamas did this with hopes that it would trigger a “permanent state of war” that ends any pretense of coexistence among Israel, Gaza, and the countries around them. 

Said Tom Dannenbaum, an expert on humanitarian law, “There is no question that the Hamas assault involved multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity…. Those are not close calls.” Israel’s military response was, in part, to disallow electricity, food, water, and fuel into the 25 mile-long Gaza strip of land that is home to more than two million people (approximately half of whom are under 18.) To Dannenbaum, the expert on humanitarian law, this is also a war crime. Starving civilians as a method of warfare is a violation of international humanitarian law and a crime against humanity.

The war between Israel and Hamas is looking like a clash of competing war crimes. 

And it is but one war in a world that, right now, is enduring 31 other ongoing conflicts, ranging from drug wars, terrorist insurgencies, ethnic conflicts, and civil wars.

So: is the human race making progress? 

Are we becoming more peaceful and less war-like? Really? 

Does the moral arc of the universe continually bend towards justice? Or does it just flop and flail around like one of those inflatable tube people you see at car dealerships and other stores?

(They’re called “air dancers,” BTW.)

The impression that the moral arc of the universe is not continually bending towards justice but, in fact, flops and flails about like an air dancer is something that we heard biologist and science writer Stephen J. Gould speak to, through his idea of the “Great Asymmetry.” “The tragedy of human history,” said Gould, “lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people. Complex systems can only be built step by step, whereas destruction requires but an instant. Thus, in what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by ten thousand acts of kindness, too often unnoticed and invisible as the ‘ordinary’ efforts of a vast majority.” 

And that’s the problem right there. The world appears to be an increasingly dangerous place, whereas in reality, the vast majority of people act in ways that are kind, decent, and good, and their actions far outnumber the single, visible, infrequent, yet powerful acts of destruction.

One of the main reasons we must bring careful awareness to the Great Asymmetry is that spectacular instances of evil—of which war is a prime example—can cause good people to despair. It can cause good people to feel helpless and give up. 

Katsushika Hokusai, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”

Single, terrible, tsunami waves of evil can even cause good people to do bad things. It happens when someone is not a formal part of the conflict and can’t act directly to address it, yet they care tremendously, they hurt about what’s happening, and they want to do something. But the thing they end up doing only spreads more war. 

One example of this is what happened to a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy in Illinois who was stabbed 26 times by his Jewish landlord. It happened this past Oct 14. The Washington Post reads, “For the past two years, relatives recalled, Joseph Czuba was kind to the Palestinian mother and her young son who were renting part of his house in Plainfield, Ill., about a half-hour outside of Chicago. The 71-year-old landlord built the boy a treehouse, let him use a swimming pool and bought him toys, the child’s relatives said. But over the past few days, according to the family, “something changed,” and Czuba had grown hostile to his Arab tenants.” “Detectives were able to determine that both victims in this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslims and the on-going Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis,” the statement said.

Do you see how Joseph Czuba brought the war in the Middle East to Plainfield, Illinois? Because he just wanted to do something. 

Here is another example. I quote from The New York Times: “Last week the literary association Litprom canceled a celebration for the Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s book Minor Detail at the Frankfurt Book Fair, one of the publishing world’s biggest international book fairs. The novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, was to be honored for having won the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, a German literary prize awarded annually to a woman from the developing world.” And why was the celebration canceled? Because “the Frankfurt Book Fair stands with complete solidarity on the side of Israel.” 

The Frankfurt Book Fair apparently thinks that it has to take an all-or-nothing stance–which means that a Palestinian author can’t have the celebration she deserves. She’s on the wrong side. 

Despair can make good people do bad things. 

Are there ways you have found yourself tempted to strike out at another who is innocent, because you just want to do something about some injustice or other?  

The worst part of the despair—triggered, remember, by the appearance that the world is totally and completely on fire—is that people “take their eyes off the ball.” The fact is, there are practical and effective things that can be done to reduce incentives to go to war. There really are. I learned about these from that article on the West Point United States Military Academy website, written by Christoper Blattman, who is a professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and author of Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. There are things that can be done. But despair takes its toll. To the despairing mind, the conditions that lead to war can seem insurmountable. 

One of these conditions is the existence of a national leader whose power is enormous and unchecked—they are incapable of being held accountable. So, when they want to go to war, war it is. It is this way in Russia right now. Some folks in America want the President to have this sort of power. You know the folks I’m talking about. 

Another condition that leads to war is when ideology abounds. An ideological national leader whips the people up into a frenzy until the ideology has possessed them too, and the costs of war pale in comparison to the glory of some grand vision becoming realized. Not too long ago, one of the worst people in human history, Herman Goering, at his trial in Nuremberg, was chillingly plain about this. He said, “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.” That’s Hermann Goering. Create an enemy, create an urgency, insist that patriotism means unconditional obedience to what the authorities say, and all of a sudden: the fog of war. 

Yet a third condition that leads to war is insulation from the truth. A national leader who surrounds himself with cynical yes-men politicians who, behind that leader’s back, laugh at him, think he’s stupid, yet they exploit their situation so as to gain power. And America and the world suffer because of their selfishness…. 

Insulation from the truth is also the result of the proliferation of “alternative” news sources. It’s the result of outlets like FOX News committed to telling certain groups of people only what they want to hear. Ignorance, cultivated, gets the masses on board for war. And to war the nation goes. It’s certainly what drove the January 6th insurgents to attack and take over the Capitol building in Washington. 

These are some of the conditions enabling war, and to the despairing mind, they are like an inescapable, onrushing tide. Tyrannical leaders, unchecked ideology, and “truthiness” combine to form a juggernaut that seems fated to win the day. 

We must counter this illusion born of despair with hope. 

Yes, right now, a tsunami-sized tragedy is unfolding in the Middle East, in the Ukraine, and in at least 30 other spots around the globe. But we must not lose sight of the long, moral arc of the universe, which history proves is constant and forward-moving towards less violence and more peacefulness. 

Hope must heal our despair. 

Hope must drive our actions in the political sphere. Here in America, we must vote for politicians who affirm democracy. The current Speaker of the House, Republican Mike Johnson, rejects democracy and has called for a “biblically sanctioned government.” He is not alone in this. We must say No! We must strengthen democracy. We must reinforce the Founding Fathers’ stance on the separation of church and state–which has been our Unitarian Universalists stance from the very beginning, 500 years ago! 

Inspired by hope, we must also find ways to deflate ideology with humanity. We must come to realize, as a friend of Mary-Jo Maish’s named Debra Hirshberg says, that “Solidarity is not born of empathy for a completely separate cause, but a recognition that all struggles are connected.” We must be suspicious every time a politician tells a boogyman story and wants to frighten us so badly that we are willing to demonize the opposition. We must also bring curiosity to those same politicians and wonder what the underlying suffering is that causes them to call for such inhumane action. What is the struggling that motivates the undemocratic radical right? What are the fears? 

Hope-lifted and sent, we must, third of all, defeat the proliferation of alternative news which is just a bunch of lies. We must become a country that demands the truth, and values the truth, and expects its entertainment to come from some other source than gossip and rumor about the state of our national well-being, or immigrants who just want a chance at the American Dream, or anything else that is about real people striving to make a life and whose blood is the same color as anyone else’s. 

Hope-grounded and hope-strengthened, it is critical that each of us becomes one of the worker bees for good in the Great Asymmetry. We must do the work that is ours to do, even if no one ever sees and no one ever knows. It is indeed a tragedy that ten thousand acts of kindness can be swept away by one giant tsunami wave of evil. I believe that human history—the arc of the moral universe—is slowly working away to reduce the number of times this will happen, but in the meantime, it’s up to you and me to keep the faith, press on, not to give up, to chip away at the conditions of war and build up the conditions of peace.  

Nir Avishai Cohen, a major in the reserves of the Israel Defense Forces, on route to the war in the Middle East, wrote this about peace. He wrote, “Israelis must realize that there is no greater security asset than peace. The strongest army cannot protect the country the way peace does. This current war proves it once again. Israel has followed the path of war for too long. At the end, after all of the dead Israelis and Palestinians are buried, after we have finished washing away the rivers of blood, the people who share a home in this land will have to understand that there is no other choice but to follow the path of peace. That is where true victory lies.”

Let the arc of the universe take us there. 

But folks, it won’t be done for us. The arc needs you and me.

Worker bees are needed. Working in your corner of the universe and in mine. 

Worker bees are needed.

Let’s get to work.