Mr. Trigg Takes Mr. Singer to Wall St

"To challenge my students to think about the ethics of what we owe to people in need, I ask them to imagine that their route to the university takes them past a shallow pond. One morning, I say to them, you notice a child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. To wade in and pull the child out would be easy but it will mean that you get your clothes wet and muddy, and by the time you go home and change you will have missed your first class. I then ask the students: do you have any obligation to rescue the child? Unanimously, the students say they do. The importance of saving a child so far outweighs the cost of getting one’s clothes muddy and missing a class, that they refuse to consider it any kind of excuse for not saving the child. Does it make a difference, I ask, that there are other people walking past the pond who would equally be able to rescue the child but are not doing so? No, the students reply, the fact that others are not doing what they ought to do is no reason why I should not do what I ought to do. Once we are all clear about our obligations to rescue the drowning child in front of us, I ask: would it make any difference if the child were far away, in another country perhaps, but similarly in danger of death, and equally within your means to save, at no great cost – and absolutely no danger – to yourself? Virtually all agree that distance and nationality make no moral difference to the situation. I then point out that we are all in that situation of the person passing the shallow pond: we can all save lives of people, both children and adults, who would otherwise die, and we can do so at a very small cost to us: the cost of a new CD, a shirt or a night out at a restaurant or concert, can mean the difference between life and death to more than one person somewhere in the world – and overseas aid agencies like Oxfam overcome the problem of acting at a distance. At this point the students raise various practical difficulties. Can we be sure that our donation will really get to the people who need it? Doesn’t most aid get swallowed up in administrative costs, or waste, or downright corruption? Isn’t the real problem the growing world population, and is there any point in saving lives until the problem has been solved? These questions can all be answered: but I also point out that even if a substantial proportion of our donations were wasted, the cost to us of making the donation is so small, compared to the benefits that it provides when it, or some of it, does get through to those who need our help, that we would still be saving lives at a small cost to ourselves – even if aid organizations were much less efficient than they actually are. I am always struck by how few students challenge the underlying ethics of the idea that we ought to save the lives of strangers when we can do so at relatively little cost to ourselves."
- Peter Singer, New Internationalist, 1997 Apr

In 1975, the year young Meredith Garmon -- who then went by "Steve" -- turned 16, the national high school debate topic was, "Resolved: That an international organization should control the development and allocation of scarce world resources."  Some affirmative teams chose to focus on food. There's enough food in the world for everyone, they argued, so let's set up an international organization to distribute it so that starvation would be eliminated.

Some time in the fall of that year his debate coach set Steve up to participate in a "public debate" for the edification and possibly amusement if not amazement of the local Rotary or Lions or some such civic club. This would be different from the usual debate competitions to which Steve was accustomed. For one thing, it was a one-on-one affair as opposed to the two-on-two debates of tournament competitions. Steve would be squaring off against Paul, the classmate who was Steve's partner at said tournament competitions. For a second thing, this audience, unfamiliar with the technical jargon and fast talking of competitive debate would require Paul and Steve to adopt a style that was considerably slower and that spent more words (as well as time) explaining each argument.

Steve was assigned the affirmative, and, drawing on evidence researched in preparation for the national debate topic that year, he argued that starvation was significant and that, in terms of the quantity of food on Earth, ending it was possible. Therefore, we ought to, indeed, distribute food so as to end starvation. Paul shrewdly countered that this would mean food producers (which included some of the stalwart citizens in the room) would either get less than the market value they were now getting, or that we would have to all be taxed to pay the food producers the market value for their crops. And either way we'll all be taxed to pay for the distribution.

Steve thought, and argued, that surely the compelling need of 10,000 premature deaths a day from starvation outweighed these concerns. It was clear to him that we would not begrudge the costs to save our neighbors. The fact that the great mass of the most hungry are overseas doesn't matter, he said. We have obligations to help others when we can. A human life is a human life, and our obligation is not limited only to fellow citizens of the same country as us. A life doesn't stop mattering just because it's on the other side of a national boundary.

At the end of the debate, the audience applauded appreciatively. They were not polled as to who they thought won the debate, but somehow Steve had the impression that, had they been polled, he'd have lost. The audience was implicitly patriotic and would have included a number of WWII veterans. Steve suspected that he had not persuaded very many that people far away counted just as much as fellow Americans.

Lake Chalice believes that, like the students in Peter Singer's classes, we know that saving a life is saving a life whether it's someone a few yards away or on the side of the globe. Lake Chalice believes that we know that saving a life is the right thing to do even if it causes us some inconvenience and sacrifice. It's just that when the dying person in need is far away and out of sight, it's easy to push out of our minds. Steve Garmon, age 16, clearly understood that lives should be saved wherever on the globe they may be. But, as with most people, time passed and he allowed other matters to command his attention. Lake Chalice is grateful that Peter Singer has been relentless in not letting us push from mind a truth that we know but prefer to live as if we didn't: that neither distance nor nationality are morally relevant.

Other philosophy professors have picked up Singer's thought experiment, and pose to their own classes the hypothetical drowning-toddler scenario. The discussion sometimes hits students as a revelation. The revelation is not that all lives are equal, entitled to equal concern and respect. Students have all been told as much since grade school. And most teens are able to follow this out to at least a fleeting thought that overseas deaths are every bit as tragic as those close at home (which is why Singer is able to so readily elicit classroom consensus that distance and nationality make no moral difference). But the typical young person then looks around, notices that neither their peers nor the grown ups they know show any concern for this point. All around them is the general Jeffersonian agreement that "all are created equal," combined with near-total negligence when it comes to living that truth. As these teens are almost always still dependent on their parents by the time their minds mature enough to draw logical moral inferences, they confront, consciously or unconsciously, a cognitive dissonance between the equality principle and the benefit they derive from the fact that their own parents ignore that principle (i.e., their parents regard the care of their own children as much more important than caring for the youth of urban slums throughout the Third World). The revelation, then, is not the idea of equality. The revelation is that there actually are grown ups who take it seriously. Some at-least-moderately clear-thinking adult has stood in front of them and stated out loud a moral inference which, in their experience up to that point, is as universally avoided as it is undeniable. That's the revelation. It's suddenly clear that their own dim and buried realization of that moral truth is not, after all, crazy.

Jason Trigg

Occasionally, such a student will re-orient her or his life because of such a 15-minute discussion in a philosophy class. One such student was Jason Trigg. Jason was the subject of a wonderful piece in the Washington Post a few days ago. Impressed by the inescapable inference which most of us know but in forgetfulness of which live -- and of which Singer so boldly confronts us -- Trigg set out to save as many lives as he can. The way to do that, he calculated, is to make a lot of money and give it away.

"Jason Trigg went into finance because he is after money — as much as he can earn.
The 25-year-old certainly had other career options. An MIT computer science graduate, he could be writing software for the next tech giant. Or he might have gone into academia in computing or applied math or even biology. He could literally be working to cure cancer.
Instead, he goes to work each morning for a high-frequency trading firm. It’s a hedge fund on steroids. He writes software that turns a lot of money into even more money. For his labors, he reaps an uptown salary — and over time his earning potential is unbounded. It’s all part of the plan.
Why this compulsion? It’s not for fast cars or fancy houses. Trigg makes money just to give it away. His logic is simple: The more he makes, the more good he can do.
He’s figured out just how to take measure of his contribution. His outlet of choice is the Against Malaria Foundation, considered one of the world’s most effective charities. It estimates that a $2,500 donation can save one life. A quantitative analyst at Trigg’s hedge fund can earn well more than $100,000 a year. By giving away half of a high finance salary, Trigg says, he can save many more lives than he could on an academic’s salary.
In another generation, giving something back might have more commonly led to a missionary stint digging wells in Kenya. This generation, perhaps more comfortable with data than labor, is leveraging its wealth for a better end. Instead of digging wells, it’s paying so that more wells are dug." (Dylan Matthews, "Join Wall Street, Save the World." Washington Post, 2013 May 31. Click here.)

David Brooks, writing in the New York Times, suggests the missionary approach would be preferable. Better to go dig the wells yourself than to pay others to do so. Why? Apparently because the Wall Street life is liable to corrupt you.

"Every time you do an activity, or have a thought, you are changing a piece of yourself into something slightly different than it was before. Every hour you spend with others, you become more like the people around you. Gradually, you become a different person. If there is a large gap between your daily conduct and your core commitment, you will become more like your daily activities and less attached to your original commitment. You will become more hedge fund, less malaria." (David Brooks, "The Way to Produce a Person." New York Times, 2013 Jun 3. Click here.)

Brooks is certainly right that we become what we do. It's not clear, however, that financier-who-gives-away-half-his-wealth is not a sustainable identity. Is that not indeed the identity that Trigg is reinforcing with every week at the office and every consequent fat check he puts in the mail? There is no "gap between [Trigg's] daily conduct and [his] core commitment" if, from the beginning, his daily conduct is in the service of -- is the manifestation of -- his core commitment (as, in Trigg's case, it appears to be).

On what else would Trigg spend his money? A large house? A fleet of Italian sports cars? Why should we think that what he spends it on must somehow compete with how he earns it? If Trigg's wealth went into a large house, we wouldn't worry that over time he would become more hedge fund, less mansion. If  his wealth went into sports cars, we wouldn't worry that over time he would become more hedge fund, less Ferrari. Such worries would be silly. Isn't it equally silly to worry that Trigg will become "more hedge fund, less malaria"?

Perhaps it's not the work itself that is corrupting but the company Trigg keeps. He'll "become more  like the people around" him. But Lake Chalice is not sure that applies to what he does with the money. Trigg's coworkers' attitudes will surely reinforce the core value that making bucketloads of cash is a wonderful thing. But his coworkers will have different projects for the spending of it. Some will want a yacht. Some will want the earliest possible retirement. Some will want trophy lovers. Some, perhaps, will want to reinvest all earnings until they have a enough to conquer the world. Lake Chalice's guess is that Wall Street culture is pretty flexible about leaving plans for the spending up to individual taste while holding adamant to the proposition that nothing could possibly be better than acquiring. We could be wrong about that, but the honored place of wealthy philanthropists among the monied class suggests that giving it away is acceptable within Wall Street culture.

Brooks offers:

"Second, I would be wary of inverting the natural order of affections. If you see the world on a strictly intellectual level, then a child in Pakistan or Zambia is just as valuable as your own child. But not many people actually think this way. Not many people value abstract life perceived as a statistic as much as the actual child being fed, hugged, nurtured and played with."

True enough. Not many. But a few -- and Trigg, it seems, may be one. To say that not many actually think this way is only to say that not many people are able to do what Singer shows us morality requires. It is not to claim, let alone argue, that morality does not require it. OK, most don't. But should we all?
Brooks continues:

"If you choose a profession that doesn’t arouse your everyday passion for the sake of serving instead some abstract faraway good, you might end up as a person who values the far over the near. You might become one of those people who loves humanity in general but not the particular humans immediately around. You might end up enlarging the faculties we use to perceive the far — rationality — and eclipsing the faculties we use to interact with those closest around — affection, the capacity for vulnerability and dependence. Instead of seeing yourself as one person deeply embedded in a particular community, you may end up coolly looking across humanity as a detached god."

Brooks then invokes the Buechner quote that we have ourselves so often invoked:

"When most people pick a vocation, they don’t only want one that will be externally useful. They want one that they will enjoy, and that will make them a better person. They want to find that place, as the novelist Frederick Buechner put it, 'where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.'"

It's a fair enough point that one might end up valuing the far over the near, etc. Might. That's true for any of us. Also, might not. But, yes, it's worth keeping an eye on. Lake Chalice hopes that young Mr. Trigg's passions are, in fact, aroused by the challenges of the job and the prospect of making money to fight malaria. We hope that he finds his work fun and enjoyable. If it's possible for someone to enjoy being a hedge fund manager for the sake of buying vast tracts of real estate, then it would seem possible to enjoy being a hedge fund manager for the sake of buying vast flasks of malaria medicine. It is, of course, always a good idea to check in with oneself and ask whether one is sufficiently loving to the particular humans immediately around as well as to those far away. Trigg would appear to be in no greater danger of emotional detachment from friends and family than anyone else. It's a good question for all of us.

From the briefest of glimpses afforded into Jason Trigg's life by Dylan Matthews' article in the Washington Post, we have no basis for supposing that the job he's in isn't the place where his "deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." As an MIT computer science graduate, it may well be that he enjoys solving the sorts of puzzles involved in writing "software that turns a lot of money into even more money."

That said, at the end of the day, we actually have considerable sympathy for Brooks' point. Our souls do require work that is intrinsically rewarding rather than merely extrinsically.

"Taking a job just to make money is probably going to be corrosive, even if you use the money for charity rather than sports cars."

Yes, it probably is. We notice, however, that this objection applies to anyone working on Wall Street. To work in the financial sector is precisely to work "just" to make money -- that's why they call it "the financial sector." Money is the only product of that industry, and if we encourage people to choose work that is valuable for its own sake, then we must always discourage them from Wall Street jobs, since money is the one thing that, by its nature, cannot be valuable for its own sake. Its value necessarily lies only in what can be done with it. If Jason Trigg shouldn't be on Wall Street, no one should. And if the making of money the Wall Street way can ennoble any soul -- because said soul holds a sincere and undeluded belief in the good that money can do -- then Jason Trigg's soul is eligible.

Human Nature and Liberal Religion

I've been turning over in my mind the question of liberal religion's view of human nature.

Nadia Bolz-Weber

The issue came up a few weeks ago when I was at the 2012 Festival of Homiletics in Atlanta. (See my reflections about that here.) One of the speakers I heard was Nadia Bolz-Weber, a young minister of a Lutheran "Emergent Church" in Denver. (Her blog is: "Sarcastic Lutheran: The Cranky Spirituality of a Postmodern Gal.") I have since found a profile piece about her that ran in the Denver Post last year:

"I left church for 14 years. I wouldn't have anything to do with it," she said. "I hated Christianity. I didn't like the anti-gay stuff. I didn't like the hubris." As a young adult, she was a hard-drinking ne'er-do-well. Clean and sober for 19 years, she said, one awakening led to another. She tried out the Unitarian Universalist Church, where they have "a high opinion of humans" that didn't fit with her experience. People are flawed, she said.
"It's dark in there," she said tapping her chest over her heart. ["Pastor turns heads by blending tradition and irreverence," Denver Post, 2011 Apr 23]

In the talk I heard, Bolz-Weber recounted some of this autobiography, mentioned that her path had led her briefly to Unitarian Universalism, and quipped,

"Unitarians are so cute. They have this high, high view of human goodness. It's like they never read the paper."

As I was listening, I was trying out the technique of taking notes by tweeting (posting on Twitter) every sentence that captured my attention, while also following along the tweets of other attendees (and a few off-site folks who chimed in). So I tweeted her quip. Others also tweeted the same line, and still others re-tweeted my tweet. This is as much twitter-verse buzz as I have ever been a part. (My colleague from down the road in Orlando, Rev. Kathy Schmitz, was also in the audience for Bolz-Weber's talk. Her reflections on the experience are in her sermon here.)

In fact, Unitarian Universalists read the papers more than average. And we have a pretty clear sense of human capacity for evil. Just ask a typical UU how much she trusts the board of Monsanto to do what's best for workers, consumers, or the planet.

As I listened more to Bolz-Weber's account of her unfolding religious and spiritual development, I had the growing sense that the issue wasn't the goodness of human nature versus the darkness of the human heart. It was about religion with a closed canon (for Christians, the 66 books of the Bible -- with a special emphasis on the last 27) versus religion without a canon.

We Unitarian Universalists do not have a canon. This is not because we think we are all so intrinsically good and wise that we can get along without it. Rather, just the opposite. We UUs know that political and personal self-serving agendas and a propensity to be self-deceived are never very far from the human heart -- including the hearts of those who establish canons. We know a little bit about the intrigue and in-fighting among the early Christian bishops that went on for 300 years before one faction was able to get enough power to lock down the New Testament to its present list of 27 books, excluding at least as many other texts that had also been beloved and sacred to some early Christian communities.

It's not that Unitarian Universalists have a high opinion of human nature. Rather, we don't have a high enough opinion of human nature to trust anyone to limit our scripture to one unchangeable canon. We can't even stick with one hymnal for 20 years without needing a supplement.

This is not a question of "deferring to an authority" instead of "figuring it out for yourself." I do believe that there is just as much "figuring it out for yourself" in Bolz-Weber's present Lutheran church as there was in her erstwhile Unitarian Universalist congregation. The Christian canon may be closed, but it is infinitely flexible.

A canon – that is, a specified set of narratives to which a community agrees that its teachings, however creative and new, must appear to be tethered – does have some advantages. Canons provide an illusion of definiteness. This illusion of a definite scriptural anchor often helps new or younger members of canon-based communities keep themselves moored long enough to grow into the community’s interpretive tradition. That interpretive tradition, rather than the canonical texts themselves, provides the real anchor.

Unitarian Universalists also stand in a relation of accountability to an interpretive tradition. It’s just that, without a canon, learning our interpretive tradition is a bit different. As UUs today, we are the latest participants in a 200-year-long conversation in America (450-year-long if we go back to our European roots), and we are continually bringing new insights from physics, biology, economics, psychology, current events, other religions, fiction, and poetry into the conversation. Our interpretive tradition -- our anchor and the grounding of our identity -- is in the ways we weave together our history, the values that have emerged through that history, and these new insights.

We are well aware that it's "dark in there" (tapping chest over heart). We know that the heart is dark when it is closed. Therefore, our calling is to open our hearts to all the light of the world.

My tweet of Bolz-Weber's quip about Unitarians having "this high view of human goodness" was also posted on my Facebook, where my colleague Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle was prompted to reply:

Here's what I have to say about that:
The Good News
by Thich Nhat Hahn:

They don't publish
the good news.
The good news is published
by us.
We have a special edition every moment,
and we need you to read it.
The good news is that you are alive,
and the linden tree is still there,
standing firm in the harsh Winter.
The good news is that you have wonderful eyes
to touch the blue sky.
The good news is that your child is there before you,
and your arms are available:
hugging is possible.
They only print what is wrong.
Look at each of our special editions.
We always offer the things that are not wrong.
We want you to benefit from them
and help protect them.
The dandelion is there by the sidewalk,
smiling its wondrous smile,
singing the song of eternity.
Listen! You have ears that can hear it.

Spiritual But Not Religious

Dear SBNR (Spiritual But Not Religious) person,

Lillian Daniel, the minister at First Congregational Church (UCC) in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, has gotten some attention for waxing somewhat snarky about you. Have you seen her remarks? Her briefer, snider piece is here, and the longer piece is here. Give them a look and see what you think.

I, too, sometimes meet you, and you tell me you are "spiritual but not religious." One difference between Rev. Daniel and me is that she runs into you on airplanes -- which, for me, seems to be the place for running into Baptist assistant pastors, Presbyterian organists, and Methodist youth directors. I run into you more often in church. It doesn't occur to me, as it does to Daniel, to suppose that you think you are sharing "some kind of daring insight . . . bold in its rebellion." I think you know that you're part of a hefty crowd. Daniel is encountering SBNRs who, apparently, don't go to church (or synagogue, temple, mosque, sangha, etc.), whereas my SBNRs are often in church. When you've told me you were "spiritual but not religious," you might have meant to convey to me any of a number of highly variable possibilities: (a) "You might have noticed I don't attend that often. Don't expect me to." or (b) "I disagreed with something in your sermon." -- or, sometimes, most perplexingly, (c) "I just love being a Unitarian Universalist; I'm so glad to be a part of this thing that isn't a religion."

Also like Rev. Daniel, I hear regularly from folks who say they see God in sunsets, or experience the divine in the woods, or on a beach. I think that's great. In fact, ecospirituality is central to my spirituality, and I offer a service of Ecospiritual Practice -- usually outdoors in a wooded setting -- once a month (check it out: click here.) I have to tell you, though, I think Daniel is right to point out that we need to have a community of accountability if we're going to learn, grow, and deepen our spirituality.

At the same time, I also think you're right to be wary of the kind of religious institution that demands uncritical acceptance of authority, where "faith" means "just believe what the authority figure tells you to believe, and pray what the authority figure tells you to pray." This sort of religious institution is nothing like my church -- and it's nothing like Lillian Daniel's church. (I've heard her preach, and she described something of her congregation -- plus, I went to a UCC seminary myself where we were taught that the function of authority is to guide critical engagement, not demand uncritical allegiance. Indeed, the joke I heard from a UCC fellow seminarian was that UCC stands for "Unitarians Considering Christ." Of course, I wouldn't tell Daniel this joke lest I become the subject of a sarcastic column about how tired and bored she is of UU ministers who tell that joke thinking they're saying something devastatingly witty.) Indeed, fewer and fewer churches match the picture of a church that you seem to carry around in your mind.

You're right to recognize that truth is within us. You're right to reject anything that would turn over the authority of your individual conscience to an external source.

But that's only half the story. The truth is within you all right. It's in all of us. And so is a lot of self-deceived ego.

We don't need authoritarian, ask-no-questions, do-as-I-say church. We do need communities of accountability for sharpening and deepening our religious insights, for calling us on our stuff, for holding up the mirror so we can see ourselves when we hit those places -- as we inevitably do on the spiritual path -- where we can't tell the difference between genuine wisdom and the ego's love for deluding itself with a story about how wise we are. As Daniel put it:

Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn't interest me. There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself.

If I'm serious about spiritual depth, I need the humility to place myself in a relation of accountability to a long and rich tradition -- a tradition of many people who have wrestled with what I'm wrestling with, who have, like me, been fooled into thinking they "got it" and "had arrived" and "were as holy or enlightened as it's possible to be," but who eventually came, through connection with a community of fellow spiritual travelers, to see through that delusion to a deeper wisdom.

In the longer piece, Daniel tells about a man who tells her:

"I worship nature. I see myself in the trees and in the cicadas. I am one with the great outdoors. I find God there. And I realized that I am deeply spiritual but no longer religious."

Number one: If being in the woods is a spiritual experience for you, then please do make sure you get out in the woods a lot. Maybe you do. But I have met people who say the "great outdoors" is their religion, and when I ask them when was the last time they were out in it, they have to think, and then they say something like, "about six months ago." Ecospirituality is wonderful, vital, and important. But like every spirituality, you've got to practice it. Daily, in some form. Weekly, in a more extensive and immersive form.

Number two: If nature is your grounding, where are you going/growing from that grounding? As Daniel asks:

"God is in the sunset? Great, I find God there too. But how about seeing God in cancer? Cancer is nature too."

Daniel doesn't mention what her own theology of cancer is. But if you're using spirituality to turn your back on pain and suffering, or numb it with the aesthetic bliss of sunsets, then not only are you not religious, but you're only half spiritual. The spiritual path calls for facing and embracing the cancer too. If you find beauty, wonder, and divinity in the woods, that's a wonderful starting place. Now use that grounding to move toward seeing beauty and wonder in people, buildings, kitchen appliances, traffic jams, toxic waste dumps -- and cancer. Spirituality is about working out our peace with all of life, not just the pretty nature scenes. For that, you need the resources of a community that embodies a tradition of practices and texts and the habits of using them to make meaning.

So, dear SBNRs: Let me say that you are off to a wonderful start. I'm delighted with the spiritual satisfactions that you are finding. I suspect you'll find that your "S" won't be very deep, won't extend very well beyond its immediate stimulus, and won't equip you so well for the hard times of grief and loss and stress, without some "R." I hope you're on a path that will eventually lead from "SBNR" to "S and R," whether the "R" is Christianity, Hinduism, or Religious Humanism. You're off to a great start. Whenever you're ready to think about a little more depth and critical engagement in your "S," come talk to me. I can help. In fact, come talk to me anyway. I like hearing about how great it felt to be on that beach watching that sunset. I know that a number of religious leaders, like Rev. Daniel, are bored and irritated with you. Sorry about that. As my colleague, Rev. Kathy Schmitz, has said:

Snarky, derisive behavior and eye-rolling may sell better, but it does not represent our best selves and it does not represent either community or religion at its best. It certainly doesn’t represent religious community at its best. (click here)

I have to warn you that, whatever religious community you may hook up with, it's going to spend a lot of its time not being "religious community at its best." That's part of the challenge, part of the practice ground for working out your peace with all of life, even the difficult parts. It's worth it. For all their flaws and pettiness -- indeed, partly because of all their flaws and pettiness -- they'll help you see yours. My congregation continues to help me see mine.

Yours faithfully,
Meredith

Memorial Day

I am remembering and offering my heart's thanks to those who made it possible for me to be, and to be here.

The poster says, "There are only two words that describe the meaning of Memorial Day. 'Thank you'." I know that our backgrounds in connection to the US military are highly varied, and our attitudes about Memorial Day are diverse. If the idea is to remember in gratitude the soldiers who fought and died in wars because they gave their all for our freedom, some of us are really on board with that. Others of us have a hard time seeing US war-fighting as having any connection with any freedom other than the freedom of US companies to make exorbitant profits.

Indeed, our Unitarian Universalist faith entails commitment to Peacemaking. We selected “Peacemaking” as our Study action issue at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in 2006. We select only one issue every two years. After four years of study and action and reflection on that action, crafting and revising a statement of where we stand, we approved a Statement of Conscience titled “Creating Peace” at our General Assembly in 2010. We committed ourselves to address the roots of violence, support mediation and reconciliation, and to create a culture of peace.

One thing that grows really, really old and wearisome really, really quick is carnage and killing. In our sadly belabored world of war, most of us yearn for laying down all swords and shields, and studying war no more. Even as we commit our words to the value of peace, and even as we commit our time, energy, and resources insofar as we are able to the cause of building peace, let us be mindful that our hearts are pulled in other directions, too. This isn’t about us good-guy peaceniks versus those bad-guy war mongers. The dividing line runs right through each of our hearts.

I would bid my fellow peaceniks to consider the plot of the 2010 science-fiction novel, Peace Warrior, by Steven Hawk.

“Hundreds of years have passed since Earth’s last war. The planet’s citizens are tranquil laborers who have achieved a utopian existence. Peace and harmony are the norm. Into this perfect world descend the Minith, a vicious race of planetary invaders. Their goal: to ransack Earth’s resources and enslave its population. Unable to defend themselves from their alien oppressors, Earth’s leaders, and a small group of scientists, labor to resurrect a fallen soldier from an earlier time — someone who can rid their planet of the Minith and save the human race.”

What do you think? Yes, that’s a highly unlikely scenario. If the danger of space aliens were the only reason for keeping armies and arsenals around, any rational assessment would say get rid of them. The heart doesn’t care about rational assessments. It blows risks out of all proportion. Even so... Does the heart (or is it the gut?) not react that way because it senses that if we really did become an utterly peaceful species, something would be lost? I don’t know. Would something be lost?

Let's look not to an unrealistically imagined future, but to an actual past. This example was presented in my seminary "Old Testament" class. We had been reading the parts about the Israelites marching off to war, most of the class was tut-tutting about this belligerence from a tribe calling themselves "God's people." Our professor slipped a cassette tape into the a tape deck. She told us: "This is 'Sweet Honey in Rock,' an African American women’s a capella ensemble. You’re going to hear them singing words that Sojourner Truth wrote, using the same tune that Julia Ward Howe used for 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic.' Sojourner Truth wrote these lyrics for a colored regiment from Michigan that fought in the Civil War."

We are the valiant colored Yankee soldiers
Enlisted for the war
We are fighting for the union
We are fighting for the law
We can shoot a rebel further than a white man ever saw
As we go marching on.

Look there above the center
Where the flag is waving bright
We are going out of slavery
We are bound for freedom’s light
We mean to show Jeff Davis
How the Africans can fight
As we go marching on.

We are done with hoeing cotton
We are done with hoeing corn.
We are colored Yankee soldiers
Just as sure as you are born
When the Rebels hear us shouting
They will think it’s Gabriel’s horn
As we go marching on.

(Hear it: click here)

In the stunned silence when the song ended, I realized I felt entirely supportive of what these soldiers were doing. I realized that this peacenik’s heart is not so hard that I didn’t want them to fight.

Peace and justice must go together, and where there is no justice, the only peace there can be is the temporary peace of suppression and enslavement. When it comes to oppressed peoples fighting against an unjust system, my heart is stirred with support for them. A campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience was not an option -- it wasn't something that US blacks in 1860 would have had any way of conceiving or organizing. Could victims of more modern genocide have responded with Ghandi-like civil disobedience? Maybe sometimes. Always? I only know I don't have the heart to blame an oppressed person for fighting back with the only means they can think of: violent force.

So thank you. Thank you, fighters. Thank you for being unwilling to accept domination passing for peace. You died or risked death because you feared death less than you loved hope. Your example shows the rest of us that we, too, can risk self.

Abstractions like “country” and “freedom” are the terms we hear from people far from the battlefields when they talk about what the fighting was for. Those in the midst of such battle have little thought of such abstractions. They are motivated in the moment by concrete and immediate loyalty to the mates fighting beside them, not to the large ideals they will later invoke, if they survive. Thank you, fighters, for embodying the value of concrete connection to the people around us right here and now.

We today are what we are because of fighters. Just as the comic says, "I'm in favor of sex. I come from a long line of people who had sex” – so, too, we must also acknowledge that we come from a long line of victors in battle. The victors generate more descendants than the vanquished – and even the vanquished are around to be vanquished because they succeeded as a people in previous fighting. Thus each of us has an ancestry made up of those able to fight and win. We all come from a long line of warriors – and we wouldn’t be here without their ability and willingness to fight.

Thank you, fighters. You entered situations more fearful than anything permanent civilians like me can imagine, yet you did not let your fear control you. You showed us what courage is, that we could bring courage to our peaceful pursuits.

The phrase “warrior mind” refers to a state of being concentrated yet relaxed, smoothly sizing up a situation and deploying strategies to overcome obstacles and challenges. Every time we confront difficulties rather than fleeing from them, we are drawing on the skills of our warrior ancestors – skills which today’s warriors continue to embody. Thank you, warriors.

Let us also remember this on Memorial Day. If Memorial Day can be described in two words, "thank you," it can also be described in another two words: "I’m sorry." Some of the deaths in war were not much about nobility and courage, let alone freedom. Sometimes politicians and generals made unfortunate choices when better alternatives were available. Some of that killing and dying served no purpose at all. Good people died, familes were bereft, and I’m sorry.

Beyond the gratitude, beyond the regret, Memorial Day is simply remembering. Ultimately, the meaning of Memorial Day is described not in two words, but in one: Remember. The dead say: “We are young. We have died. Remember us.”

For all who died in warfare or as a consequence of the war, tears.

Getting It Wrong

This info arrived in my inbox a couple days ago: cases of getting it way wrong:

"Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy!" -Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859.

"Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction." -Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872

"The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon." -Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873.

This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." -Western Union internal memo, 1876.

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." -Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

"Everything that can be invented has been invented." -Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, US Office of Patents, 1899.

"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value." -Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre , France .

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" -David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.

"There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom." -Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923

"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." -Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University , 1929.

"The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives." -Admiral William Leahy , US Atomic Bomb Project

"I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper." -Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in "Gone With The Wind".

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." -Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949

"Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances." -Dr. Lee DeForest, "Father of Radio and Grandfather of Television."

"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." -The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

"The super-computer is technologically impossible. It would take all of the water that flows over Niagara Falls to cool the heat generated by the number of vacuum tubes required." -Professor of Electrical Engineering, New York University

"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." -Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

"I don't know what use any one could find for a machine that would make copies of documents. It certainly couldn't be a feasible business by itself." -The head of IBM, refusing to back the idea, forcing the inventor to found Xerox.

"But what is it good for?" -Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

"A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make." -Response to Debbi Fields' idea of starting Mrs. Fields' Cookies.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." -Bill Gates, 1981

"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this." -Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M "Post-It" Notepads.

"The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible." -A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)

The moral of this tale might be something like: dare to think big, dream the impossible. Look at all these cases where people thought small, failed to boldly envision a future different from their past. Missing from the list, though, are all the "big" ideas that someone believed in but didn't pan out. When I was a kid, quite a lot of people, apparently, thought we'd all be getting around on jetpack by now. The dot.com bubble that burst in 2000-01, the housing market collapse that began in 2007, the big bank failures, and various other economic consequences of over-reaching are all negative consequences of thinking too big.

Facebook's Initial Public Offering of stock was 2012 May 18. It opened at $38.00/share and closed at $38.23/share. So a lot of people were wondering whether it the Facebook boosters or the Facebook doubters will end up on some future list of people who got it way wrong.

At this point, then, I might conclude with something like: Think big but build slowly. I might bring up that Henry David Thoreau quote:

“If you have built castles in the sky, let not your dreams go to waste. Just build the foundations under them."

Well, that's OK. Sure. Build foundations under your sky castles. Why not? What else you gonna do?

But I just want to ask: Is that sky castle really going to make you -- or anyone -- better off than you are right now?

It turns out that we can get oil by drilling for it. And has this improved human joy or flourishing? Remember our past and on-going oil wars to support the economy that emerged as a result of oil drilling? Telephones, airplanes, radio, copy machines, home computers, chewy cookies, post-it notes, and FedEx deliveries: were the people who dreamed these things better people, more present to joy and love, as a result of their dream? Do the developments they brought and wrought help others be more awake, more wise, or more compassionate?

Two of the examples pertain to advances in medical care: Pasteur's germ theory, and surgeries of abdomen, chest, and brain. Pasteur didn't so much have a dream, or a sky castle. He had a guess. What he was doing is better described as detective work than as big dreaming or even foundation-building. And surgeries gradually expanded into abdomen, chest, and brain (significantly assisted by Pasteur's germ theory which told us to sterilize the surgical instruments) through small increments rather than any particular big dream.

My heart goes out to all these people who "got it wrong," but had just as much reason for their position, and probably just as many "big dreams" as the ones who happened to get it "right." My heart goes out to all of them. (Well, except for Decca records. Boy, did they blow it by not signing the Beatles.)

So, my friends, carry on. No need to get carried away. Just be awake to beauty and carry on. Having a "passion" for what you're doing is fine. Also fine is having a less passionate, gentler love for the place you happen to be, the beings around you, and the activities in which you find yourself engaged. That, you cannot get wrong.

A Merry Unitarian Christmas

Christmas is, after all, you know, our holiday. Unitarians made this season what it is.

Consider: what does Christmas mean? It means, of course, the mass of Christ, the celebration of the birth of a Palestinian prophet named Yeshua, or Jesus. But what exactly does that mean? Historians have no idea what time of year Yeshua was actually born. The early Christian church celebrated his birthday in April at first, and then in June for a while, before settling on a strategy of co-opting yule and solstice. The first December Christmas wasn't celebrated until around 380 CE.

In the last 200 years, Christmas has been radically transformed -- and Unitarians were at the forefront in most of the transforming.

Christmas now means we put a tree indoors, and we decorate it. It was a practice in Germany, brought to the United States in the early 1800s by Charles Follen.

Charles Follen was a Unitarian.

Christmas means dashing through the snow, one-horse open sleighs. It means bells that jingle, and it means laughing, all the way. That’s the song “Jingle Bells,” by the James Pierpont.

James Pierpont was a Unitarian.

Christmas means music. In addition to "Jingle Bells," other Christmas songs include "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Watchman Tell Us of the Night," by John Bowring, and "Do You Hear What I Hear?" by Noel Regney.

Henry Wadsworth Longgellow, John Bowring, and Noel Regney were all Unitarians.

Additionally, "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," is by a Unitarian minister. More about that one later.

The instantly recognizable Ebenezeer Scrooge

Christmas means Old Ebenezeer Scrooge’s heart opens up to compassion and joy. Charles Dickens, in 1843, published A Christmas Carol, and Christmas has never been the same.

Charles Dickens was a Unitarian.

In Dickens' tale, Scrooge confronts his past, when as a young man, his need for money -- that is, we suppose, his need for security or status -- caused him to lose his fiancee, Belle. He is shown the present reality of joy in gatherings of families, whether they are poor like Bob Cratchit's or relatively well off like Scrooge's nephew Fred. Then he is brought to an awareness of his own impending death. It's not that Scrooge had explicitly believed himself immortal. It's just that he had pushed the fact that life is temporary out of his mind. In pushing away death, he had pushed away life, for the two are the same.

Dickens' novella received immediate popular and critical acclaim, and almost as immediately shifted the way that Victorians celebrated Christmas. Over the next years, Dickens received hundreds of letters from complete strangers

"writing all manner of letters about their homes and hearths, and how the Carol is read aloud there, and kept on a very little shelf by itself."

A Christmas Carol was regarded as a new gospel. Critics noted that the book was, in their experience, unique in that it actually made readers behave better.

A Christmas Carol remains the most widely read-aloud book. It is still theatrically performed in various venues around the country every year. It has been made into numerous movie versions. Other popular Christmas tales such as It's a Wonderful Life and How the Grinch Stole Christmas are but re-workings of Charles Dickens' Unitarian gospel. "According to historian Ronald Hutton, the current state of observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday spearheaded by A Christmas Carol."

The Christmas gospel of generosity, gratitude, and the joy of family gathering is fundamentally Unitarian. The Christmas social gospel is also Unitarian.

Edmund Hamilton Sears
1810 - 1876

Christmas means the message of Peace on Earth, to all goodwill. In 1849, just a few years after Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, a Unitarian minister, Edmund Hamilton Sears, wrote the words to "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear." With the war in Europe and the US war with Mexico weighing on his mind, Rev. Sears wrote a carol that urges us to hear the angels sing of peace on earth, to all goodwill.

The Gospel of Luke tells of angels proclaiming Peace on Earth -- but for most of the history of Christendom, that has been taken as referring to a private, personal peace. Few imagined that peace on earth actually meant we should stop killing each other.

Rev. Edmund Hamilton Sears, however, was at the vanguard of a movement to understand peace on earth in social, community terms – instead of merely a personal, private peace. He called us to task for not heeding the angelic call to peace.

"Beneath the angel strain have rolled two thousand years of wrong,
and man at war with man hears not the love song which they bring,"

he decried.

His lyrics raised objections from a number of Christian conservatives of the time. Many people said, contemptuously, that Sears’ hymn was just the sort of thing you would expect of a Unitarian.

Yes, it is.

If Christmas season today is a time when our hopes turn to ending war and truly bringing peace on earth, it is because a Unitarian minister wrote a song inviting us to imagine the day:

"when peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors fling,
and the whole world give back the song which now the angels sing."

This is our holiday. From the Christmas tree, to the jingling bells, to the Scrooge story, to the message of peace on earth, Unitarians made Christmas what it is today.

November 11: Armistice Day

Eleven! Eleven! Eleven!

It's a day we call Veterans Day. It began as Armistice Day -- commemorating the armistice that ended World War I on 1918 November 11. Armistice: A cessation of hostilities as a prelude to peace negotiations. On the first anniversary of the WWI armistice (1919 Nov 11), President Woodrow Wilson announced:

"To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country's service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations."

Notice the double purpose of Armistice Day: (1) to honor the veterans, and (2) to show our "sympathy with peace and justice."

World War I was thought -- hoped -- to be the "war that ends all wars." No such luck, it turned out. Still, the idea of ending war, of governing our world nonviolently, of spreading peace and justice across the globe should not be forgotten.

In 1954, the US government changed Armistice Day to Veterans Day. The motive to honor all veterans, not just the World War I vets, was nice. But in the process, the other function of Armistice Day was lopped off. Attention was diverted away from "armistice" -- the laying down of arms, the ending of hostilities, the commitment to peace.

The hopes that lifted the hearts of North Americans and Europeans 93 years ago at the end of WWI may have seemed, by the 1950s, sadly deluded -- perhaps even a cruel hoax. The US had been through the carnage of WWII, and then embroiled itself in a Korean War for three years. The notion of ending all war seemed hopeless and unrealistic. The attitude was: war is going to go on, and on, for as far into the future as imaginable -- so let's just commemorate the courageous ones who fight our wars for us.

The building of peace is much tougher than many Americans in 1918 knew -- the skills of peacemaking require much more development. But the task of peace and justice (for no peace will be lasting, or worthy, without justice) should not be abandoned. Unitarian Universalists committed to that task with a 2010 Statement of Conscience, "Creating Peace." On this November 11, please re-read and re-commit to that statement -- click here.

So today I am celebrating Armistice Day. I honor the fire of youth -- the energy, the camaraderie, the commitment to a cause, the way they can fling themselves so passionately into harm's way. I acknowledge that it has been a while since our country has actually deployed that fire to protect the freedom of US residents, but I honor the effort and training and bravery that our veterans have displayed nevertheless. I also take this day to recommit to armistice; to lay down all instruments of violence; to promise again to myself and my world to forego thoughts, words, and deeds that treat a being as an object or diminish any being's sense of value or security; to truly walk the path of nonviolence.

* * * *
It's November 11, it's 1918, it's Armistice Day, and I,
I would have no arms.
I would have no legs.
I would live in Europe, Asia, America, south and north, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and all the wide deep blacken blue oceans.
I would have no Western front.
I would name myself Peace Among the Nations.
Finally undisappointable,
Hanging over the beleaguered of nations like a happy gracious fog, I would
Penetrate everywhere.
I would weigh you down with uplifting serenity.
I would double you four times, Woodrow Wilson World War.
All ate of you, consumed by love, would have a thousand arms each reaching and embracing every dying soldier every wailing mother every broken-legged horse, enfolding them in doesn't-change-a-thing compassion.
I would have no arms.
* * * *

Shaken And Stirred, 007?

We are 007 -- that is, Oh! Oh! Seven billion! According to the UN, the world population has reached 7 billion. That's a lot of people.

To put this in historical context: In 1350, estimated total world population, following a number of years of famines and the Bubonic plague, was down to 370 million. A mere 661 years later, it is 2011, and we have almost 20 times that number of people.

(Interesting aside: 661 years is about 30 generations. The folks living in 1350 were my 28th-great-grandparents. Since the number of my ancestors doubles with each generation, then I have slots for over 1 billion 28th-great-grandparents. Each of the the 370 million people on the earth in 1350 would appear in an average of three slots on my family tree -- and that's true of each of the 7 billion of us alive today.)

In 1804, world population reached 1 billion.

123 years later, 1927, we reached 2 billion.

The next billion took only 33 years to add: in 1960 we reached 3 billion.

And the fourth billion took us only 14 years: 1974: 4 billion.

We reached 5 billion in 1987, and 6 billion in 1999.

We've been adding an additional billion people every dozen years since 1987. The total numbers are going up, but the rate of growth is declining. From 5 billion to 6 billion is a 20 percent increase while 6 billion to 7 billion is a 16.7 percent increase -- yet both the 6th and the 7th billion took 12 years.

In fact, the growth rate peaked in 1963 at 2.2 percent per year. Does 2.2 percent per year seem mild? During the 1960s, Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, attracted a lot of attention, yet 2.2 percent per year might not seem very explosive. If the economy is growing at only 2.2 percent per year, that's regarded as sub-par: average US economic growth was 3.8 percent per year for the first 27 post-war years (1946 - 1973), and has averaged 2.7 percent per year since then (1974 - 2010).

However, it takes only a constant growth rate of 0.45 percent per year to get from 370 million to 7 billion in 661 years.

Here's a breakdown of that 0.45 percent overall Average Growth Per Year (AGPY):

AGPY for the 454 years, 1350 - 1804: 0.22 percent

AGPY for 123 years, 1804 - 1927: 0.57 percent

AGPY for 33 years, 1927 -1960: 1.24 percent

AGPY for 14 years, 1960 - 1974: 2.08 percent

AGPY for 13 years, 1974 - 1987: 1.73 percent

AGPY for 12 years, 1987 - 1999: 1.53 percent

AGPY for 12 years, 1999 - 2011: 1.29 percent

So the population growth rate is slowly coming down from its peak -- but is still higher than the AGPY  between 1927 and 1960 -- or any period before that. In fact, a growth rate of 1.29 percent per year would still produce a population doubling every 54 years. If the AGPY of the last 12 years were to continue, we'd reach 14 billion (twice the current population) by 2065, like so:

YEAR  WORLD POPULATION

2022    8 billion

2031    9 billion

2039    10 billion

2047    11 billion

2054    12 billion

2060    13 billion

2065    14 billion

Fortunately, this is not  likely. The growth rate has been declining since 1963 and is expected to continue to decline. The US Census Bureau projects that we'll reach 8 billion in 2027 (rather than 2022), and 9 billion in 2046 (rather than in 2031). Most of the studies predict the growth rate to reach zero around mid-century. World population would then flatten out around 9 or 10 billion, and may even begin to decline a bit.

Education -- particularly the empowerment of women is a crucial variable. The more we can accelerate empowerment of  women, then the sooner we'll see a variety of positive developments, including faster declines in the population growth rate.

Can the earth support 9 or 10 billion of us? Can it even support, sustainably, the present 7 billion of us? If all 7 billion people consumed resources at the rate of the average US lifestyle, the answer is clearly no. It would take 5.3 earths to supply 7 billion people with what the average US resident gets. 

So. One of  the following must occur:

1 - Sharp population declines. We'd have to get down to less than 1.5 billion if the one earth that we have were to supply us all at a level of the average US citizen; or

2 - Substantial reductions in consumption for the wealthy. Those who consume at or above the US average will need to adopt lifestyles consuming less than a fifth of what we now consume; or

3 - Massive poverty for the majority. We might try continuing to let a few people consume vastly disproportionate shares of the resources by forcing 90 percent or so to live in poverty; or

4 - Some combination of #1, #2, and/or #3; or

5 - We'll run out of earth -- with attendant massive famines, resource wars, etc.

Your assignment, Agent 007 -- the assignment of the oh, oh, seven billion agents on the planet -- is to avoid #5. We also need to avoid #3 as much as possible. The risk of instability, unrest, and violence -- not to mention the moral wrong -- of #3 should be avoided. #1 ain't gonna happen -- unless #5 happens first, thereby causing #1. So that leaves #2 -- or some form of #4 that consists mostly of #2.

That's what we gotta do. It's enough to leave us shaken. But will we be stirred to accept this assignment?

Start by learning more:
Good introduction to the population issue: here
Ian Angus and Simon Butler argue that enviornmental crises come much more from the wealthiest 1 percent than from the rest of the 7 billion: here.
Article about Bill McKibben's take on climate change and population: here.

Deportations: Getting Our Money's Worth?

In this morning's news, I learned that 396,906 people were deported during the year that ended September 30, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This is the highest single-year total for deportations in ICE's history -- 3.4 times the 117,000 total deportations in 2000. Fifty-five percent -- the highest proportion in a decade -- of last year's deportees had felony or misdemeanor convictions. More than 180,000 were deported without any conviction.

These record-breaking deportation rates cost US taxpayers last year over $9 billion: $23,000 per individual for a complete deportation process. What are we getting for our money?

1. Pointlessness. Undocumented immigration rates have plummeted since 2007, the undocumented population is down substantially, and violent crimes are at their lowest levels in 40 years. If deportation was ever necessary, it is less so now.

2. Destruction of families. Deportations wreak devastation on Latino communities across the US. Millions live with the prospect that a simple traffic stop could lead to the breakup of their families.

3. Harm to our economy. Undocumented immigrants purchase goods and services, contribute labor, and pay taxes. Our country is spending over $ 9 billion just to be able to shoot itself in the foot.

4. It makes us meaner and sadder people. Compassion, however, brings joy to those who give as well as receive it. As Bob Hope once said, "If you haven't any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble."

The Unbearable Tediousness of Denial

Denial is so tedious, isn't it?

I know, I know: there are times when someone says something outrageously false, and it's important to point out that it's false. If someone says that tax rates reached their highest under Clinton, it may very well be worthwhile to point out that during 1944-45, income tax ranged from 23% to a top rate of 94%. OK, that was war-time. But under Eisenhower, income taxes were close to that -- ranging from 22% to a top bracket at 92%. Nixon, Ford, and Carter maintained the same tax brackets from 1971 to 1981: from a low of 14% to a top bracket taxed at 70%. Under Clinton, the top tax rate was 39.6%.

I can see how correcting factual inaccuracies has a place.

At other times, though, it works better to embrace the language rather than keep on tediously denying it. For instance, who wants to put energy into denying the claim that homosexuals are possessed by demons? It's ever so much more effective (and fun) to embrace the claim -- and give it new spin. Like these folks do:

Awesome!

The name "Unitarian" was originally a pejorative term hurled at those who read the Bible with thoughtful attention and didn't find the doctrine of the "trinity" supported. When we decided to go ahead and embrace the term, we took the sting out of it.

The cross, as used in crucifixion, was a symbol of disgrace in Roman-occupied Palestine. The early Christians embraced the cross and turned it into the symbol of the identity they were proud of -- thereby rendering it unavailable as an insult.

You might be concerned about the way that evangelical, fundamentalist religion uses claims about God to promote exclusion, hate, violence, and injustice. So what's the best way to resist?

Strategy 1: Take the stand that there is no God.

Strategy 2: Take the stand that God calls us to love and justice.

Notice that the guy with the sign isn't locked in to a commitment to the independent objective existence of demons. He's just going with the metaphor. You may think that God is a fictional character. Fine. Fictional characters say and do a number of things: Oliver Twist asked for more gruel, Scarlet O'Hara coped with the Civil War, and Beowulf fought Grendel. Those are all true. Maybe you want to say that "God calls us to love and justice" is true in the same way, and maybe you want to say it's true is some other way. Either way, it's true.

Moreover, consider the set of things that are all fairly close to the center of what "God" has meant in Western religious traditions:

• a source of beauty and mystery;
• a power inspiring gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe;
• an ultimate context and basis for meaning and value;
• the widest reality to which our loyalty is owed;
• a basis of ethics.
• a person-like entity (person-like insofar as having knowledge and desires);
• an entity with supernatural powers

Even if we were to dispense with the last two items, we may still want to refer to the source and context from which we experience beauty, mystery, gratitude, humility, wonder, awe, meaning and value. "God" is the traditional word for so referring. We don't all have to have exactly the same conceptions of "cat" or "water" in order to say things to each other about cats and water.

Better to take the language that's out there and go with it. It's more rational, more effective, more creative and fun.
(Isn't "Demons of awesomeness" a lot more alive than "Humbug. There are no such things as demons"?)

Sometimes Identity gets in the way of rational and effective. Some folks have built an identity for themselves as "a person who denies the existence of God." Strategy 2 would feel like a betrayal of the identity in which they are so heavily invested -- no matter how ineffective and even irrational that identity may be. I understand that identity isn't about rationality. The very tediousness of denial can become a point of pride. It may be creatively stultifying, but it offers a kind of security in identity.

I don't mean to disparage strategies of identity. I, too, need to know who -- and whose -- I am. I'm not suggesting pretending to be identity-less. I'm suggesting that we take on the identity as "those who affirm that the ultimate context and basis of meaning and value inclines toward love and justice" instead of the identity as deniers.

Blogarhithmic Expressions: What Do Christians Know?

Blogarhithmic Expressions: What Do Christians Know?

Thoughtful Christian blogger Lyn Robbins (who I knew when he was an undergrad on the Baylor debate team while I was a graduate assistant on the Baylor debate coaching staff -- though I won't say I coached him since I learned more from him than he from me) is right to suggest that we sometimes interpret the gap between "believe" and "know" in a way that unduly mutes advocacy. To have a belief is to believe that it is true. In general, with few exceptions, to have a belief is also to believe it is justified. If it is justified and true and a belief, then it's knowledge. (This is Plato's long-standing definition of knowledge: justified true belief.) So if you believe it, then you think you know it: you think it's knowledge. If you don't think you know it, you don't believe it.

Of course, you could be wrong about what you believe (what you think you know) -- and this is true in any area of human belief. We could be wrong about a scientific belief (turns out Newton was wrong about some of what he believed about motion, and Einstein was wrong about quantum mechanics). We could be wrong about a belief in a defendant's guilt (preponderance of evidence at trial may establish "proof" in some sense, but it isn't infallible proof -- as we have been recently reminded by reports of new DNA evidence exonerating prisoners convicted before DNA testing was available). We could also be wrong about our faith assertions. We can even be wrong about highly poetical assertions. (Imagine T.S. Eliot, toward the end of his life, saying, "I was wrong. It is not now and never was the case that I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas." It might be an interesting exercise to imagine a rationale by which Eliot would reach that conclusion. My point here is just that such a conclusion is comprehensible and possible.) We could be wrong about any of our beliefs -- and since "proof" is inherently fallible in any field of inquiry -- then proveability (or lack thereof) is irrelevant.

Lyn writes: "We are too quick to retreat to a position that says something like this: 'Faith is inherently unproveable. If it were a scientific formula, it would not be faith. Therefore, since we cannot prove matters of our faith in a laboratory or a courtroom, it would be presumptuous of us to say that we know them."

If "proof" means "infallibly establishes certainty" then there's no such thing -- not in laboratories, not in court rooms, and not in faith professions. And if "proof" means that we have some evidence and reasoning we can draw on in support of our claim, then there is proof in faith claims as well as in science and criminal law.

Acknowledgment that we could be wrong -- about ANYTHING -- is appropriate humility. It's not just, as Lyn says, that "It is impolitic to be certain of anything that smells religious." Rather, it is ultimately life-denying (for life means growth and change) to be too rigidly closed-minded on any subject, regardless of its smell. The practical realities of life, the overwhelming size of libraries and other sources of information, the smallness of our brains and the largeness of the number of our beliefs combine to mean that we will always have to take many of our beliefs "for granted": we haven't the world enough and time to investigate more than a small percentage of them in any detail. Still, there's a big difference between "practically off limits to revision for now, given my life's projects, purposes, and commitments" and "necessarily off limits to revision forever."

We don't have certainty. We do, however, have knowledge. I can believe something without certainty, but if I don't think I know it, then I don't believe it. How shall we conceive of knowledge in a way that doesn't imply certainty? The American Pragmatists (William James, John Dewey, et al) offer an epistemology that allows for having knowledge yet also allows for our knowledge to grow and change and that recognizes that nothing is exempt from the possibility of revision. Knowing is intimately tied to doing: knowing is effective doing. Ignorance, then, cashes out as ineffective doing. We act, and our action's effectiveness is the embodiment of what we know. One's knowledge is displayed in all one's doing. Religious knowledge, in particular, is manifest in a way of living, community connections, participation in rituals, values, an ethic, and the cultivation of such qualities as care, lovingkindness, compassion, justice, peace, and equanimity.

Still, there are two ways that we draw a distinction between "belief" and "knowledge" -- though the second is dubious.

(1) In talking about other people's beliefs. I meaningfully distinguish between what "Jo believes" and what "Jo knows" to reflect the distinction between "what Jo and I disagree on" and "what Jo and I agree on."

(2) In talking about my own beliefs when my uncertainty about them is particularly high -- that is, when I am hesitant to act on that belief except insofar as I might want to be taking the gamble.

In the second sort of case, what is at issue is more a pretend belief than a real belief. For example, I might say, "I believe that OJ killed Nicole, but I don't know it." I might say it, but I don't say it often. I live my life, as much as possible, in a 'no opinion' sort of way on that question, and will venture a belief-without-knowledge-claim only if pressed for my guess. It's more a pretend belief than a real one. In a similar way, Pascal's Wager asks us to believe there's a God without believing that we know there is a God -- thus drawing a divide between one's own belief and one's own (believed) knowledge. And that's why the argument of Pascal's wager is so unsatisfying: What we want in matters of faith (as in matters of science, criminal law, etc.) are beliefs that are real beliefs (that are believed to be justified and true and therefore constitute knowledge) rather than the sort of "pretend beliefs" that Pascal's argument recommends.

Hope.

I also appreciate Lyn's distinction between hope and wishing. His favorite quote, he says, is Peter Kuzmic:

"Hope is the ability to hear the music of the future; faith is the courage to dance to it today." 

Nice. What hope is NOT is the ego's desire for the world to be different from how it is. That's what Lyn calls "wishing." My own favorite quote on the subject of hope is from Vaclav Havel: "Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the understanding that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."

In sum. Christians have knowledge-claims and truth-claims to make. I think some forms of some of the claims of some self-identified Christians are false -- but Lyn's right that Christians might as well be willing to say that they're claiming knowledge and truth. He's also right to remind them to be polite about so claiming.

What the World Needs

I was chatting over the December holidays break with one of the less-than-immediate relatives that I encounter only around the holidays, and that I have a certain difficulty understanding and feeling understood by. Perhaps you have some folks like that in your extended family. As she told me about her new job, which was going well, I said, “It sounds like you’ve found that place where your deep joy and the world’s deep need meet.”

“Joy has nothing to do with it,” she shot back. She added that she did feel joy on occasions when her children, now grown, visit, but that the rest of life was simply about doing one’s duty. She concluded with a rebuke: “Pursuit of personal joy is one of the most selfish acts known.”

I do believe in cultivating joy, or else we won't be able to bring it to others. At the same time, she may be right about the "pursuit" bit. Dogged chasing after it only makes joy run away from us even faster. So I think in terms of cultivating joy rather than pursuing it – nurturing gratitude for life just as it is rather than being consumed with the pursuit of more, better, different. Cultivating joy means cultivating a capacity to be present to each situation without thinking "how do I get out of this situation what I want?" and instead approaching the situation with the deep knowledge of being well provided for, ego defenses able to stand down, and the ego's fears not inhibiting the natural flow of compassion. Joy, after all, doesn't come from getting what we want. It comes from wanting what we've got.

Howard Thurman said: "Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." Thurman recognizes that different people are called to different roles. Yes, there are duties. There are universal virtues -- patience, courage, kindness, prudence, wisdom, reverence, etc. -- that all of us do well to exercise and strengthen. There’s also your uniqueness: the particular gifts (and shadows) that you and no one else are called to bring to the world: the enterprises that make you come alive.

The early Hasidic sage Rabbi Zusya once said: "When I am called before the almighty to account for my life, God will not ask me, 'Why were you not Moses? Why were you not Abraham? Why were you not David?' He will ask, 'Why were you not Zusya?'" Some duties we all have; others are unique to you becoming you. Meeting both brings joy, and joy, in turn, fuels your further blossoming into who you are, your further coming alive – which is, indeed, what our world – and you – most need.

Repealing "Don't Ask Don't Tell"

Moving and important words from our Vice-President and President today.

You can read the remarks here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/12/22/remarks-president-and-vice-president-signing-dont-ask-dont-tell-repeal-a

Or watch the video:


http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/12/22/president-signs-repeal-dont-ask-dont-tell-out-many-we-are-one

I'm very happy about this development -- even though it is tinged with just a hint of ambivalence. The ambivalence most comes to the fore, in my mind, when the President said:

"As one special operations warfighter said . . . .'We have a gay guy in the unit.  He’s big, he’s mean, he kills lots of bad guys.'  (Laughter.) 'No one cared that he was gay.'  (Laughter.) And I think that sums up perfectly the situation. (Applause.)"

Yes, this is a good day.  Yes, it is an important step toward justice, fairness, consideration, and cooperation.

An even better day will be the day that we stop dividing humans into "good guys" and "bad guys."An even better day will be the day we stop imagining that killing lots of anybody is a commendable thing.

The real "dawn of eternal peace" to which Biden (quoting Eishenhower) refers will come when we don't have militaries at all: when neither gay men nor lesbians nor straight men nor straight women serve -- openly or otherwise -- in the armed forces.

"Force can protect in emergency," said Eisenhower, re-echoed by Biden. Yes, it can. But real peace, just as Eisenhower went on to say, requires justice, and, as Eisenhower did not go on to say, real justice requires all of us to develop the skillful means ("upaya," as the Buddhists say) for tending with care and concern to all human needs so that those "emergencies" that require violent self-protection never arise.

Some part of human aggression -- I don't know how large or small a part -- does seem connected with ultimately unhealthy notions about masculinity and sex roles and sexuality. Insofar as we now allow straight women, gay men, and lesbians to fight next to the straight men, maybe those old unhealthy notions about masculinity, etc., are eroding. And with that erosion, maybe we are becoming a people less eager to fight wars. That would be nice.

Is allowing gays to serve openly in state-sanctioned violence a step toward fairness? Yes. Is it a step toward eventually ending such violence? I don't know, but I would like to hope so.

I would dearly love to hope so.

Meditation as a selfish thing?

Minnesota native Jim Reynolds became a Theravada Buddhist monk in the Thai tradition. Now known as Ajahn Chandako, he is the abbot of a monastery near Aukland, New Zealand. Recently he was visiting his home state giving a series of talks. About his physical and spiritual journeys, he said:

“I could have gone off to the Amazon and become an ecoterrorist, blowing up bulldozers that were ruining the rainforest. But I knew that would potentially harm other people, and it wouldn’t come from a peaceful mind. If one is practicing meditation correctly, it naturally leads to a reduction in anger and selfishness and greed. It very directly affects the people around us, our family and friends, the people we know best. Ripples start to go out in unseen ways. Immediately, the idea of meditation as a selfish thing doesn’t make sense. It has immediate effects.”

Friends, this struck a chord, because, frankly, those un-blown-up bulldozers really are wreaking an atrocious toll on the rainforest, and, yeah, I’ve got some anger about that. I can see the appeal of taking direct action to equalize the ratio of blown-up bulldozers to not-yet-blown-up bulldozers. Ah, but the good Ajahn is right. Such playing with incendiary devices is not the product of a peaceful mind. Not to mention that it would harm other people.

Compassion and understanding toward the downtrodden – the people and ecologies bulldozed by injustice and greed and fear and consumerism and ignorance – is easy. The trick is to bring compassion and understanding to the bulldozers, too. In the end, only this can effect real and permanent good.

Does spiritual practice help you feel better?
Sure.
It also cultivates the peace and compassion that our world so desperately needs.