Human Kindness

In the story of Christian orthodoxy that is told in the western world, the central element is the lostness of humanity which has been overcome by evil and sin and is now "totally depraved." Human beings are powerless and hopelessly lost. They are incapable of good and unable to help themselves. They need salvation from the outside and without that they are doomed. But there is another story. It is an opposite, or the "flip side to this orthodox coin." Seeing the world this way may even correct the crushing impression of humankind's total depravity and inertia. In the end, this may be the only part of the larger story of human experience that is utterly true. Here it is succintly told by Vasily Grossman:

It is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man.... Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.