I also hope that even as I also fear the opposite. As something of an amateur theologian, I have some knowledge of both the depths and the heights of human behavior. As a student of history for longer than I guess you to have been on this planet, I’m also acutely aware of the thinness of our species’s civilized veneer. My late first wife told me of such abuse from her father and others who, according to her, belonged to a satanic coven of professional-level DuPont employees. Only since 1994 was she believed. Just so you know that I’m also acquainted with how a power structure (at least sometimes) maintains itself. Finally, when I was not quite three I saw the most diabolical grin on a human face I’ve yet seen even now. It was on the face of my dad’s boss who had got him staggeringly drunk and on top of a naked co-ed. And when I tried to tell my mother this and she realized what I was telling her, she kicked me across the kitchen like Macbeth being told Birnam Wood looked mobile. ‘Liar and slave!’
This came out in my therapy about 15 years ago. My dad subsequently hypnotized me and thereby installed a firewall between me and those images which lasted till I was just short of fifty. But now I realize ‘marks’ were still there. Civil animals? We can be; the question is, do we really want to be? Hardly any of us, I think, know how to handle our ‘inner savage’ while we make more space for God’s Light in each and all of us. And I further suggest we probably cannot handle that part of us without God’s Light.