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We let our big male cat outside sometimes. Once or twice a year, he catches a bird and brings it in the house and displays it proudly in the middle of the kitchen floor. I coo approvingly, while my wife is aghast. She imagines the bird’s pain. I imagine the cat’s satisfaction, and wonder at nature’s ways.
My daughter has two daughters. She has learned some of the modern, stricter styles of childraising from her conservative church. She occasionally resorts to the belt or threat of the belt. Once I brought this up with her. I told her what I was learning from studies of how children grow up to be ethical, and that threatening with a belt did not bode well. She said, Dad, I hear what you’re saying, but I’m raising my kids my own way….Period. In my caring for my daughter, embedded in a long history, I want her to have the full space needed to raise her kids in her way. I care for my granddaughters too, and their future capacity to live out of desire and hope rather than out of fear. I hold both of these cares together. I have to stretch my inner caring space in order to do so.
You’re home during the day. You hear a dog barking. You look outside. There are no prowlers, just the dog barking. You know this dog, and he’s gotten to know you a bit. His bark sounds plaintive to you. He’s tied up on a 15-foot leash in your neighbor’s back yard. Your neighbors are gone all day. You feel a tug at your heart. You should do something.
You’ve gotten to know the owners of the dog too. They moved in about a year ago. It’s taken them a while to warm up to you. They’re a young family with skin colors that make them stand out from the dominant white culture they live in. Your neighborhood is 70% white. This new family no doubt has personal reasons of its own for being cautious in dealing with their new white neighbors. You could foolishly, ineptly, say or do something that would mean one thing to you but another thing to them, something that would seal a barrier of distrust. Gradually, relations have become more cordial. Crazy things happen. Once, a thief, in broad daylight, walked into their garage and took off riding one of the kid’s bikes. Mom started running after him, yelling at the top of her voice. Another neighbor in a car saw what was happening and chased the thief in her car. The thief dropped the bike and took off running to escape. That incident caused some ripe neighborly conversation for a while. Their kids have gotten to know your kids and have played outside with them recently. For the very first time, Mom came into your house a couple of weeks ago, as you shared stories about furnaces and cats. You’re coming to regard this family as good neighbors, and as good people.
Now what should you do about the tied-up dog? Is this an ethical issue? When I put myself in your place, and look inside myself, I do not detect any whiff of an Ethical Principle demanding to be upheld. I’m only aware of my feelings for the dog. I have a sense that he is not happy, frustrated in his natural urges, and I feel an urge in myself to do something. Countering these feelings are the feelings about the neighbors and the impulse to continue nurturing the relationship and not accidentally ambushing it.
Caring is not free of conflicts. When we care, we develop our capacity for caring, for giving full vent to the caring even when different cares are creating cognitive dissonance or tearing our heart apart. You could learn to stop hearing the barking, and so stop caring in that way. Or you can honor the feeling you have, and put your mind to work, checking for possible cultural biases in the way you’re reacting to the barking, searching for a creative solution to what to do, or reconciling yourself to living with your own inner conflict.
Is this an ethical issue? To me, it is. It’s about caring. Every day there are opportunities to expand and strengthen our caring capacity, or to diminish and weaken our caring. Yet for thousands of years, this is not what philosophers and moralists and religious teachers have meant by ethics. Ethics has meant the establishment of supreme rules of moral behavior, and the judging of behavior as either in accord with these rules or not. And what makes a man or woman good or bad? If they regularly act in accord with ethical rules, then we say they are
good, moral people. What an external, abstract, impersonal way of apprehending the worth of people! Yet this is the traditional approach.
Oh, caring was always somewhere in the neighborhood. Generosity, charity, lovingkindness, gratitude were all regarded as virtuous qualities. But the real thrust of ethics always seemed to deal with how we treated people for whom we didn’t care. Did we still treat them fairly, respectfully, without favoritism, ethically? Traditional ethics meant judging people by supreme moral principles.
Well, if ethics meant supreme rules of behavior, where did these supreme rules come from? For some, they came from God. For others, they came from the need for social order and control. For others, they didn’t come from anywhere; they just are.
Let’s look at these three. You tell your little boy to stop biting his baby sister. He says Why. You say, Because it’s wrong. He says Why. You repeat this exchange several times. Finally, you say, with a booming voice, Because God says so! Your little boy finally gets it, apparently. Actually he probably shuts up because of your booming voice or tone of exasperation. Now there’s a real psychological advantage to this approach. The little boy gets a sense of hugeness and power attaching to this word God; he can picture God in any way that his mind is currently capable of picturing, and he can invest enormous feeling into the picture, putting everything he can imagine that God must be if his parents defer to it and if God is so everywhere and so concerned about everything that a little boy’s biting his little sister counts for so much.
Let’s try another approach. You tell your little boy to stop biting his baby sister. He says Why. You say, Because it’s wrong. He says Why. After several rounds of this, you get to your booming voice proclamation, Because I say so! He finally gets it and shuts up. This approach too has power. In fact, that’s what it has — power. It asserts power and teaches power. When you are the butt of exercises of power, the most usual thing is to begin to want to reverse the roles and have the power yourself. This is the origin of real-politick. Machiavelli becomes your patron saint. This approach to ethical principles, all boiling down to self-interest, generates a lot of passion in its followers too, glorifying the joys of conquest, victory, one-upmanship, superiority, and having more than others. You don’t need a supernatural religion to promote these values — just social structures that give them loose rein, and cultural mores that glamorize them.
These two approaches — the approach of “God Says So!” and the approach of “I Say So!” — result in two large worlds of people at odds with each other, or two large social forces at odds with each other: the vast world of religious devotion to supreme moral values invested with personal meaning, and the vast world of secular politics and economics where hard-boiled realities of self-interest, power, and expediency hold sway. Of course, these two get mixed up and contaminated with each other in many interesting ways throughout history.
But let’s look at the third approach that has also been tried. Your little girl bites your baby boy. You say Stop. She says Why. You say Because it’s wrong. She asks why and why again, and you boomingly proclaim, Because it’s just wrong! She stops asking why, stops biting her baby brother for the moment, but what’s going on inside? Probably not much. Perhaps a little puzzlement, but most likely nothing more that a realization that it’s time to stop asking why and move on to something else. Without any concrete image to attach to this abstract notion of Wrongness, it probably just evanesces into thin air. The approach of calling in God as source of right and wrong invests ethics with vast cosmic significance, personalized according to the young one’s imaginative abilities. The approach of simply asserting one’s own authoritative power as parent invests the notion of right and wrong with the power-hunger of the oppressed. The third approach of asserting the intrinsic values of right and wrong in themselves generally fails to take much root at all. The exceptions, people who heroically attain a passion about pure ethical values, prove the rule by being exceptions. There have been philosophers and moralists who have valiantly labored to give ethics its own footing and source of passion, from Plato and Aristotle to John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, and our own founder Felix Adler, but so far without great effect. The world still moves jerkily along on its two muscular legs of supernatural passion and secular self-interest.
Just when it seemed as though it would ever be this way, necessarily so, along comes something actually new in the world. At least this was my reaction when I read Nel Noddings book, Caring, published in 1984. I shook my head in wonder, and thought, “This is completely new. It’s the insight that’s been missing. We may yet be able to develop a full, rich, passionate human ethics!” The full title of Nel Noddings book is Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Do not let the phrase “a feminine approach” put you off. This work could not have been written without the powerful intellectual ferment provided by the feminist movement of this century. It is what allowed her to think differently, and to dare to put forward something altogether untraditional, altogether new. But by “feminine” she does not mean off-limits to men. She means, rather, in her words, “feminine in the deep classical sense — rooted in receptivity, relatedness, and responsiveness.” “Feminine,” she writes, “does not imply either that logic is to be discarded or that logic is alien to women. It represents an alternative to present views, one that begins with the…longing for goodness and not with moral reasoning.” (p.2)
An ethics that starts with the longing for goodness. Feel the difference in that starting point. It leads to a new answer to the question, “Where do supreme moral principles come from?”
They come, Noddings says, from the human experience of caring. In fact, moral principles are not supreme after all. Caring is supreme. Moral principles that can be articulated as rules are derivative from the imperative to care. The rules and their exceptions must be always firmly rooted in a conscious caring, else they are not ethical at all, just expressions of fanciful supernatural beliefs or rationalizations of self-interest.
What we’re doing here is demystifying ethics. In doing so, we find that we are humanizing it. We start with natural caring. That’s a given. I mean really given. Not given like some assumption in a system of metaphysics. Not given as like an axiom at the start of a mathematical proof. Natural caring is given to us, concretely, as we enter the world, experientially. Yet it’s not an absolute either. Sometimes the gift is not there. A baby is unwanted. Or the mother has lost the capacity to care. Sometimes a new human being must be heroic in order to attain to ethical caring. Sometimes, without the original gift, ethical caring is never achieved. But we start with where we actually start. We don’t just pop into the universe as an individual atom of being. We are born into a relationship with the woman who gives birth to us, a relationship that pre-existed our birth. This relation is constitutive of who we are. And most times, the gift is there: the relationship is one of natural caring.
From the outset, this caring is inclusive and reciprocal. We have to learn how to exclude, through traumas and vicissitudes of living, where the injury is not tended to by one-caring and the pain absorbed back into inclusive caring. What we are given is natural inclusive caring.
Now this new human baby is not passive. It responds with appreciation of care, and with care itself, and it evaluates. It looks the gift horse in the mouth. The new one recognizes in bones and sinew and gut, before brain has a chance to translate anything into thought or to get distracted, that this is the highest good, this is what life is all about at its best, this is the meaning of the good life. Not a life without pains, but a life in which the pains and the crying and screaming and thrashing about are held in a context of caring. Noddings puts it this way: “The relation of natural caring [is] the human condition that we, consciously or unconsciously, perceive as ‘good.’” Wow! This is the line that most made my head spin, made me giddy with revelation. The relation of natural caring is the condition that we, consciously or unconsciously, perceive as good. It is the summum bonum, to borrow a phrase from medieval philosophers, the supreme good. The supreme human good must contain both joy and purpose, and that is what caring does. Joy, notes Noddings, is precisely “the special affect that arises out of the receptivity of caring.” (p. 132) As for purpose, Noddings brings to our awareness that “In caring… there is aroused in us the feeling ‘I must do something.’” (p. 14) This is the obligation side of caring. But this is not an externally imposed or externally arriving obligation; it is self-generated. It comes from me and is part of me.
Next comes the recognition that life is not always like this. A seed of desire arises that says, Life should be like this. This seed develops into what Nel Noddings calls our “ethical ideal.” The ethical ideal is a picture of myself as a being embedded in the joy and work of inclusive caring relationships, both as one-caring and as one cared-for. Perhaps this internal picture, this ethical ideal, is what religions have meant by “conscience.” Maybe it’s what Freud meant by “superego.” But neither of these ring true to one who cares. My ethical ideal is a combination of my affirmation of the caring relationship as the ultimate human good, my longing to restore, maintain, and enhance such caring, and my intention to care even when not easy. Nel Noddings writes:
It is this ethical ideal…that guides us as we strive to meet the other morally. Everything depends upon the nature and strength of this ideal, for we shall not have absolute principles to guide us… Since we are dependent upon the strength and sensitivity of the ethical ideal — both our own and that of others — we must nurture that ideal in all of our educational encounters… We are dependent on each other even in the quest for personal goodness. How good I can be is partly a function of how you — the other — receive and respond to me. Whatever virtue I exercise is completed, fulfilled, in you. The primary aim of all education must be nurturance of the ethical ideal. [pp. 5-6]
Our circle of caring grows more complex, as we discover there are more people in the world than mom and me. Our mind stretches to universal principles that express the inclusiveness we felt from the beginning. But these principles must ever be fueled by actual caring. When severed from the source of ethics, universal principles become excuses for uncaring acts, or mere pretenses for one’s behavior.
How does one behave ethically? Isn’t this the practical question that newcomers to our Movement bring to us? Isn’t this the question that long-time members still want an answer to? How does one behave ethically? Not by consulting a book of rules of moral conduct. Not by subscribing to some universal principle and then trying to figure out how to apply it to the current one-of-a-kind situation we’re actually facing. Not by imagining a father-figure or king or judge in the sky looking down on us, perhaps sending us signs or clues about what to do, and then judging whether we act ethically or not. No. How do we behave ethically? We behave ethically by behaving caringly. Noddings’ caring ethics gives content to Ethical Culture’s abstract principle to elicit the best in the other and thereby in oneself. The content of ethics is caring, in all its magnificent manifestations and transformations. Ethics is in us. Ethics is our caring, both in the joy of caring and the work of caring, the joy and work that together lead to our deepest and broadest fulfillment.
We tell the truth not because of any abstract principles but because we care about the people to whom we are talking. Or sometimes we do not tell the truth, or the whole truth, because we care about the people to whom we are talking. Or we tell the truth because we care for our own ethical ideal of inclusive relation. The motivation is the same — caring. We do not kill because we care about the people whom we would kill. Or we kill because we care about people who will be killed if we don’t. We care too for ourselves, without whom we would not be part of any caring. These carings do not necessarily provide simple answers. What if I care more about my group than about yours? Caring has to remain always rooted in the real, and the real is more real when close at hand, concrete, brimming with specific memories and perceptions. If I care more for my family and close friends, does that mean that it is ethical to treat others with less care, less respect, or even with contempt? No, but it does mean that we have to rethink and revitalize our concepts of universal respect and fairness. We devise general rules as guides. But they are guides only, not absolutes. In any real concrete situation, in the real practice of living, what should be done ethically can only be worked out through an upsurge of the caring attitude. This does not make things easy. Or efficient. Or neat and clean. Not practical in those senses. Only practical in the sense of being absolutely real. There’s a lot of work to be done in our ethical understanding, now that we know where to start.
In a wonderful book called Ethical People and How They Get To Be That Way, by Arthur Dobrin, Leader of the Ethical Society in Long Island, published in 1998, Arthur cites empirical research that shows that the kind of discipline of children that assists their growing up to be ethical people is the discipline that presents empathic reasons for the parent’s demands. For example, you want Johnny to share the toys, and you say ‘Sharing makes other children happy.’ Such a statement, Arthur says, is more likely to be accepted and internalized by the child than a statement that appears to be a reason but really isn’t, such as ‘It’s good to share.’” (p. 78) In other words, empathic reasons build on the natural caring relationship that the child already knows about and values.
Your little boy bites his baby sister. You say Don’t do that. He says Why. You say, “Because it hurts her, and it hurts me to see her hurt. And it makes me smile to see you smile.” With this answer, if there has been a nurturing of the caring relationships in the family all along, the little boy doesn’t need to ask Why again. You’ve reached an ultimate, and he knows it’s an ultimate from his own experience.
Felix Adler, founder of the Ethical Culture movement, wrote in one of his later essays:
The first idea animating the Ethical Movement is the idea of moral progress in the ascertaining of new moral knowledge, as well as better moral behavior. Matthew Arnold said in effect: “We have the moral knowledge we need; all that is necessary is that we apply the principles we already possess.” The very opposite is the main contention of this movement of ours. We do not possess the moral knowledge which we need — far from it. [pamphlet publ. in May, 1945, The Meaning of an Ethical Society.]
In this spirit, I think we now have the opportunity to begin to open up the wondrous and complex human dimensions of ethical living. We can move from reliance upon a supreme ethical principle, to reliance upon a supreme ethical attitude. The caring attitude. When I care, I am open to the reality of the other, and the other can sense whether I am authentic or not. It’s not so much that “I” have empathy as that I allow empathy to have me. I experience his or her life as though it were my own, and experience an urge to do something, as though it were my own life that was in peril, or my own life that had an opportunity of joy, if the moment be seized. There is natural caring, in which we are simply always ready to be open to the other’s experience, as mother with infant, and infant with Mom. And then there is developed ethical caring, in which we stretch, strengthen, and inform our caring capacity. Here is the concrete palpable meaning of our principle of treating everyone as having intrinsic worth. To treat another human being as having intrinsic worth is precisely to regard him or her as being worthy of being experienced by you from their inside. No contempt, no disdain. I could be you, and I would be no less worthy of being cared for and no less worthy or entitled to care. The ultimate good for humankind is in our hands.
There’s an idea that has been a lifesaver for me. Without it I would have gone off the deep end of life. It has to do with that tension in life between wanting to achieve something, and on the other hand just wanting to enjoy the delight and joy of being. Somehow I got stuck on one of those sides.
Isn’t there a similar tension in our own movement? You know, Felix Adler, our founder, was a great one, a leader, in facing up to sorrows and pains, suffering, of life. But did he sufficiently build in a bridge for us back to just the joy of being?
I believe that Ethical Culture does give us a way to fully express both sides of the tension: living with purpose, and surrender to joy. For Adler was a romantic as well as a sober moralist. Horace Bridges even described him as “mystic and man of action.” His name, “Adler,” in German means “eagle,” and when Felix went off to Germany to study for a Ph.D., his fellow doctoral students called him “Der Amerikanische Adler” — the American Eagle! A premonition for someone who founded a movement on the 100th anniversary of the American Revolution. The name is also fitting in another way. The eagle soars on two wings, and there are two sides to Adler’s founding intuition — his romantic side and his purposeful side — his experience that somehow life is a perfect joy, and his equally strong experience that life is a matter of supreme moral striving. These two sides are the two wings we all need to soar.
For many years I tried to fly on one wing, the wing of Purpose. Now you can do that for a long time, and many of us do, especially if hoisted up by a string of successes. My most recent success at the time was being awarded a full NDEA fellowship toward a Ph.D. in philosophy. But the trouble with all-purpose flying is that failures are inevitable, and even small ones can deflate all the air you need to fly. I met with some failures of not turning in final papers on time. So I quit. I quit graduate school. I went from the refined world of abstract intellectualizing to the concrete world of working in a restaurant and dealing with the hungers and thirsts of real live people. Unfortunately, the solution to over-purpose is not sabotage of purpose, is not under purpose. As the years rolled by, I found myself becoming lonelier, more depressed, more at odds with my own inner self, which from an early age had said, “There’s some mission I want you to accomplish.” I reached a low point one night about 3 am, in the morning — nothing good was on television. It was quiet and dark in my apartment. I basically gave up trying to analyze what was wrong. And it was as if I heard a voice saying to me, “Read some philosophy.” It wasn’t me, speaking — but of course it was me, in some way. Well, I had already given away most of my philosophy books by that time. Thought I’d never have need for them again. But on my bookshelf there was still one book remaining, by the American philosopher William Hocking, professor at Harvard and Yale for many years. It was called The Meaning of God in Human Experience. I wasn’t so sure about God, but I did believe in human experience. So I started reading the book, and it was like reading a novel. It was like Shakespeare to me. I read it night after night after night, hardly any sleep, until about 2/3 of the way through that book, I remember, standing up, jumping up, and exclaiming to the world–I knew everyone was listening—My God, he has actually done it! He has accomplished what Descartes was trying to do! –That was my philosophical self commenting, but what I meant was that Hocking had managed to take me through his portrayals of human experience to a place where I sensed — I didn’t just think as a logical conclusion — I sensed the reality of the world as something that stretched far beyond my own isolated ego, and I was a real person in that world and that world was great and wonderful, and I was a part of it, even if I never amounted to anything, and that was a liberating experience. Just a few years later, I found the Ethical Society, and sensed that it could support and advance this liberating experience.
Now Ethical Culture has an idea that we call Intrinsic Worth. And latent inside this are some amazing ways of thinking about reality. It carries a whole new outlook about religion itself, about the deepest impulse to experience life to the full, both on the achievement path, and on the path of just wanting to enjoy life. You know, sometimes you have to stop to smell the roses. And other times you have to wake up and smell the coffee.
What is this Intrinsic Worth? A while back, my wife, Kathleen, called me at work. She had the Monday blues. Not because she was back at her 9 to 5 job, but because she wasn’t at a job. Still unemployed. She was feeling low and blurted out, “I’m worthless!” I wouldn’t have honored her frustration if I had argued with her and pointed out all her considerable talents. Sometimes, despite being the guy in the relationship, I say the right thing, and I said to her, “You have intrinsic worth.” She paused and then said, “Yes, I have intrinsic worth.” Just like that, she shifted her entire attitude. In the very next moment she started talking about our cat Moon, who had been there all along, but not noticed in all his majesty. What happened was a shift in the way of thinking. It’s much like the shift from a serious to a humorous frame of mind. You lighten up, loosen up, chill out, relax, reconnect.
Intrinsic Worth — a shift in attitude. I observed some of the inner dynamics of this shift last January, when I watched the Super Bowl. I loved it. (The St. Louis Rams won, you know.) When the game ended, a TV interviewer went to the sidelines to get the victory reaction of one of the wives. She gushed that the Rams owed their victory to their religious faith in God and Jesus. She added, “He really kept us in suspense. God is so dramatic, isn’t He?”
I must admit, I cringed. What about the Tennessee Titans, the team that lost the Super Bowl? Did God make them lose? Are they out of favor with God? Are they just a bunch of Ethical Culturists? I don’t think so. And what if the Rams had lost? Ah, there’s the question. Would a loss have dented their religious faith?
Of course not! They would have said that it wasn’t their time, or that God wanted them to learn some lesson. Thus there’s an inconsistency. God is to be praised for helping the Rams win, but not to be cursed for helping the Titans lose.
We could just stop here and chalk this up as another case of human irrationality. But if we did, we would miss something vital. There’s something that makes their religious faith a living support of their passion for life. It gives them the confidence and the assured capacity to be able to shift between two different ways of experiencing reality — the same two wings we have begun to talk about: Purpose, and the Joy of Living.
You normally cannot be in both of these modes of experiencing at the same time. Abraham Lincoln once said to an aide, holding up a cup of liquid, “If this is coffee, bring me tea….But if this is tea, bring me coffee!” Being the one thing excludes being the other.
The one attitude is that of simple acceptance of whatever is as perfectly all right, as marvelous, as having Intrinsic Worth, no matter how bad it might seem to us in our limited perspective. This is the attitude that the Tennessee Titans needed to shift to after they lost the Super Bowl. There is a health-promoting time to make the shift. The time to not make the shift is in the middle of the game. We could call this the sense-of-humor frame of mind, because of the way it takes the anguish out of the need to succeed, but actually humor is just one variation of this mode of experiencing. A philosophical name to call it is Intrinsic Worth. A broader name to call it is simply Acceptance, and this has the advantage of being a common-language term that can resonate with people’s experience. Acceptance can range in mood from simple resignation to philosophical stoicism to humor to a joyous ecstasy. We need to be able to shift into Acceptance at appropriate times, and we also need to develop our capacity to experience higher forms of it.
The other attitude is that of Non-Acceptance: non-acceptance of things as they are, the attitude of setting goals and engaging in efforts to achieve those goals, the attitude of striving to perform with excellence — that is, in ways that are better than other ways. I just call this Purpose. Here, too, there is a broad range of emotions, from frustration and defeatedness to self-confidence to the experience of what is called Flow, when all one’s efforts synchronize into one focus, to finally triumphal exultation in achievement. Just as with Acceptance, full human development involves not only being able to shift into Purpose mode when appropriate but also to become more and more skillful in the various ways of being purposeful.
Acceptance. Purpose. Acceptance. Purpose. Sometimes you’ve got to stop and smell the roses. Other times you’ve got to wake up and smell the coffee.
Now the genius of the Judeo-Christian faith — and here we get back to it — what gives it its positive hold on people and its staying-power, is that it provides strong support for full development of both of these attitudes. When you’re in Purpose, you can call on God and the saints and angels to help you achieve your goals. This ability to connect your personal intentions and energies with those of the universe lends great strength to your focus and your determination. Then, when it’s time to switch to the mode of Acceptance, your faith in God allows you to more easily let go, to shift more readily to that state wherein you can catch a glimmer of the exquisite worth of being, just exactly as it is, independent of all your achievements or failures.
These two attitudes are as different from each other as night and day. How can they be related to each other? How can they coexist alternately in the same person? How can they do anything but cancel each other out?
A brief example from physics can help us here. It turns out that at the tiniest levels of physical reality, something very strange is going on. What we find are quanta. These are bizarre little devils. Sometimes they’re one thing; sometimes they’re just the opposite. They can be particles, or they can be waves, but not both at the same time. Particles are, well, particles — just what any well-behaved bit of matter ought to be: distinct bits, localized (that is, in only one place at a time), separate from other particles. Waves are non-localized and spread out, blending and merging with other waves, connected and connecting beyond any clear boundaries. How can the same thing, whatever it is, these quanta, manifest in two different ways, each of which is incompatible with the other? We don’t know. Physicists have not figured that one out yet. But it’s reality.
We humans also live in a world of double aspect, and we alternate between two utterly different kinds of states. Some of us get stuck in one mode or the other, and never get back. Others get stuck in low-grade forms of one or both modes of experience. It’s also easy, too easy, to imagine that these two modes of experience refer to two different worlds: Heaven and Earth, or a world of spirit and a world of body, or soul and body, and that the two are alien to each other, so that you need to cast your lot with one or the other. Adler ended up using the terms “ideal” and “real” and while these are fine to a philosopher who has penetrated to Adler’s unique meanings for them, they don’t help the average intelligent person, because they inevitably sound like a total separation. So the next insight for us to gain, after first getting clear on the two fundamental modes of experiencing, Purpose and Acceptance, is to discern that there is a secret connection between the two.
What is the Christian or Hindu or Muslim doing when he calls upon God to help him win a contest, or get a job, or save his marriage, or cure his disease? The cry to God is from someone who is in the mode of Purpose, the mode of wanting things to be different, and fearing that it can’t be different or won’t be different. The cry to God is actually a cry from within the purpose orientation to that other state of self in which everything can be experienced as already all-good. It’s as if each of these orientations carries seeds of the other within itself, as though in the end they cannot be utterly incompatible with each other, since, after all, they are alternating states of the selfsame self.
Let’s look at a simple everyday example — waking and sleeping. Even though there are fuzzy lines in between, when you’re awake, you’re awake, and when you’re asleep, you’re asleep. This is a biological form of the shift between Purpose and Acceptance. A couple of months ago, my wife and I had a disagreement that left us considerably upset. You know the old saying, Never go to bed angry? Well, we did. We “slept on it.” In the morning, Kathleen’s mind was so clear that she was able to tell me precisely the ways in which I was wrong. But I had slept on it, too! My mind had clarified to the degree that when I heard what she had to say, I could recognize instantly that she was right. And I was glad. So now, whenever I have a problem, I’ll have Kathleen sleep on it! These kinds of little transmissions happen all the time in our lives, if we let them, ask for them, remove obstacles to them — gifts from the Acceptance frame of mind to our lives of Purpose.
Beauty and art and music are other examples of getting into Acceptance/Joy. Sometimes a sunset can catch you in just such a way that it takes your breath away, and for a moment you forget your cares, or return to your cares with better care, or better purpose. Humor is another important way in which we shift into Acceptance mode. In fact, have you noticed that one of the hallmarks of members of Ethical Culture is a good solid sense of humor? This is no accident. Humor is something to be taken seriously! How is that people with a lively sense of humor get attracted to something with such a serious name as “Ethical Culture,” a movement whose founder wrote a book called The Religion of Duty? What makes humor a leading quality for members of something so serious? Because humor is one of the genuine forms of shift to an attitude of affirming Intrinsic Worth. Yes, Ethical Culture affirms serious ethical living, but it also affirms, as a primary intuition, Intrinsic Worth. When we shift to the Acceptance/Joy wing, the Intrinsic Worth wing, and we are in touch with the cosmic humor, the joy of being, we include within that the joy of human being. We do not have ethics because human beings are bad. We believe in Original Worth, not Original Sin. We have ethics because, and here is the great breakthrough of Adler, because when you give full scope to both wings of experience, when you allow each to penetrate the other, ethics is what appears. Ethics — that is, thoughts and sensibilities about what ought to be done — precipitates out of that mysterious point of creative exchange where Purpose and Joy come together.
Adler the Eagle talked about ethics, but you know what? He didn’t talk much about codes of conduct. He never came up with his own list of 2, 10, or 20 commandments. He talked about ethical energy! He was pointing us in the direction of the source of the creation of codes of conduct.
There is power in the Ethical Culture insight. It is the same power that religions of the world tap into. You know, we talk about the common ground of ethics. But our common ground is not a lowest common denominator. It is not formed by listing all the rules of conduct of all religions of the world, keeping those that are unanimous, and calling that our list of ethical principles. No, our claim to have discovered the common ground of religions is much deeper. It’s our claim to have found what the genuine religious impulse is, and to have cleared away the rocks and the debris. The common ground is the hallowing of the experience of the goodness of being, and the call to enter into that experience so deeply and so receptively that it echoes back into our other mode of experience, where we purposefully deal with the challenges and frustrations of living.
Algernon Black, renowned in our Movement as a great pragmatist, great anti-theorist, great social activist, wrote with total conviction: “The Ethical Movement is a religious movement.” I would like to find a word different from “religion,” because of its association with sectarianism and anti-science, but I haven’t yet. We may have to take the offensive and claim the word “religion” as more proper to us than anyone else! Algernon Black wrote that we “endeavor to meet the needs which have given rise to religions in the past.” Whatever then meets those needs most truly is most truly religion, whether it bears any resemblance to the old religions or not!
As Ethical Culturists, we are to hallow the experience of the goodness of being. The more powerfully we can experience life on the wing of Acceptance/Joy, the more we find that we have renewed energy and sharper insights about what ought to be done when we shift back to the wing of Purpose.
So when life puts us in a tight spot, painful, dark, on the brink of failure, or despairing at injustice in the world, Ethical Culture tells us to make a shift to the other wing, the other mode of experiencing. How do we do that?
Actually, it’s not complicated. We do it by remembering to do it. And we increase our ability to remember to do it by practicing. This is why religion of old has always been associated with dancing and music and words of beauty and incantations and community and overall an atmosphere — an atmosphere that people sometimes refer to as “otherworldly.” But the religious atmosphere is not really or properly otherworldly; it’s other-than-purpose. We create times and spaces for shifting into the Acceptance/Joy mode, both for its own sake, and to practice for the times it won’t be so easy.
For we do get stuck in that purposeful striving. We get tunnel vision and tunnel feelings. That is when we need to draw on our faith. That’s why it’s called faith. Faith, Ethical Culture has discovered, is not belief in something based on someone else’s authority. Faith is believing that you can shift to your other wing. When you’re stuck, when you’re in pain and suffering, it may be hard — seemingly impossible — for you to imagine that you ever had a laugh in your life — forget about imagining that you could experience joy even now. But that is your faith — that the worth of being is real and it is within your capability to experience, not denying pain, but including it and somehow transmuting it, somehow integrating it into a larger meaning and a larger truth.
One way of putting this is that you reach the ability to make a shift by your whole self. No part of you gets left behind; no part in pain gets repressed or denied. When you have had a time of hell in the Purpose mode, when you are in pain, suffering, anguish at the suffering or cruelties of others, and none of this pain has relented, and you shift anyway, that is when the shift deserves the name “religious” — the Religious Response. Religion at its best is the institutionalized cultivation of this response. All of our lesser, easier shifts into Acceptance — through sleeping or humor or beauty — become ways of practicing for the big one.
The movie Life Is Beautiful, powerfully portrays this heroic shift. In the first half of the movie, the hero, Guido, has a gift of making life seem magically wonderful for all those near to him. But circumstances were good. In the second half, circumstances changed. He and his family found themselves in the hell of a Nazi concentration camp. What did Guido do? He still found ways to give his family windows of access to the Acceptance/Joy mode. In Purpose mode, look for ways to survive, to escape. But also cultivate your ability to shift your frame of reference, to see things with a wry eye, to shift into the mode of Intrinsic Worth.
In real life, horrible things happen. In the news in St. Louis, a woman stopped by a store to pick up a quick sandwich. She left the motor running. Her 6-yr-old son was in the back seat, in his seat belt. Just as she was returning, a carjacker jumped in her car and took off. She was close enough to open the back door and start pulling on her son. But he got tangled in the seatbelt and couldn’t get free. He was dragged for miles to his death. A tragedy and horror of this extreme degree cannot be made fun of. It is here, and in such cases, that one must have the capacity to go beyond the humor version of the Acceptance mode, all the way to the full religious response. When Hinduism or Christianity or Islam or other faith helps someone to do this, we should be glad. Through lenses however distorted, they are coming deeply into contact with Intrinsic Worth.
Sleep lies at one end of the spectrum of experiences of Acceptance. At the other end would be the experience of a disciplined, conscious, intense communing with being, and a consequent reception of some message or of some mission to accomplish in the world, just as happens with us sometimes in sleep. This, it is fair for us to surmise, was the experience of Moses when he went up the mountain. He went up to be away from the crowd, away from the stresses of leadership in his highly developed Purpose mode. He went into the alternate state — Acceptance, Joy, Wave, whatever it may best be called, the Worth-Perfection of Being. He came down with a message that changed a people. All such messages will be tainted with quirks of personality and biases of culture, but that does not mean that no creative exchange takes place between the two modes. And we can expect that the more developed, intense, and conscious the two modes, the more the spark of transmission between them may approach the power of lightning.
Ethical Culture brings to us the primacy of Intrinsic Worth! It calls us, urges us, to cherish and develop the Acceptance wing, both for its own sake and for the sake of the other wing of Purpose. Then ethical living will creatively flow.
Let me introduce you to a very special person — a very special poet. Let me introduce you to Sam Walter Foss. He was born June 19, 1858, and he died February 26, 1911, at age 52. Most of his collections of verse were published in the 1890’s. So Foss was in a situation similar to ours, in the transition from one century to another. We think of our century as a time of massive wars and of technological creation. We face the new century hoping we can do better next time around.
But the nineteenth century was also a time of wars around the globe and especially of the American Civil War, which took the lives of tens of thousands of American men. One of Foss’s books was entitled Songs of war and Peace, published in 1899. However, he too urged the theme of optimism. The last newspaper column he wrote, while in hospital awaiting an operation that would fail to save his life, was on “Optimism.” A boisterous faith in humanity characterized his poetry, even though he had a sharp eye for human foibles and failings.
The first Foss poem I met was a poem read at the memorial of Clayton Chism, who was a member here at the Ethical Society. It was his favorite and is the poem by Foss most frequently included in anthologies of poetry. You can find it in One Hundred and One Famous Poems, edited by Roy Cook. It is called, “The House by the Side of the Road.” This is how it goes:
THE HOUSE BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD
He was a friend to man, and he lived
In a house by the side of the road — Homer
There are hermit souls that live withdrawn
In the place of their self-content;
There are souls like stars, that dwell apart,
In a fellowless firmament;
There are pioneer souls that blaze their paths
Where highways never ran —
But let me live by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.
Let me live in a house by the side of the road,
Where the race of men go by —
The men who are good and the men who are bad,
As good and as bad as I.
I would not sit in the scorner’s seat,
Or hurl the cynic’s ban —
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.
I see from my house by the side of the road,
By the side of the highway of life,
The men who press with the ardor of hope,
The men who are faint with the strife.
But I turn not away from their smiles nor their tears,
Both parts of an infinite plan —
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.
I know there are brook-gladdened meadows ahead
And mountains of wearisome height;
That the road passes on through the long afternoon
And stretches away to the night.
But still I rejoice when the travelers rejoice,
And weep with the strangers that moan,
Nor live in my house by the side of the road
Like a man who dwells alone.
Let me live in my house by the side of the road —
It’s here the race of men go by.
They are good, they are bad, they are weak, they are strong,
Wise, foolish — so am I;
Then why should I sit in the scorner’s seat,
Or hurl the cynic’s ban?
Let me live in my house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.
Why do I speak of Foss as a minor poet? Judging poetry can be very subjective, but there is clear evidence that the literary experts are not taken with Foss. I searched my own collection of reference works. There was no “Foss” in:
- Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature
- Cambridge Biographical Dictionary
- Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia
- Foerster’s American Poetry and Prose
- Standard Book of British and American Verse
- Oxford Book of American Verse
- Louis Untermeyer doesn’t include him in Modern American Poetry
- and he’s definitely not in the Mentor Book of Major American Poets
With the help of a librarian, Mary Johnson (a friend of mine in Alton), I did find him in two places: American Authors 1600-1900 rather patronizingly calls him a “verse writer,” but the Dictionary of American Biography honors him as “poet, journalist, humorist, and librarian.”
Foss was a country boy from New Hampshire, worked on his father’s farm, went to school in the winter, lost his mother at age four, graduated from Brown University in 1882, then got into writing as publisher, editor, and journalist. He was the librarian of the Somerville Public Library in Massachusetts from 1898 till his death in 1911. He married a minister’s daughter and they had a daughter and a son. The son died in World Was I on the fields of France. He attended College Avenue Methodist Church in Somerville, Massachusetts, which is a church still in existence and active.
Methodist though he was, he could have been versifying Ethical Culture philosophy. This is Foss’s idea of “The True Bible.”
THE TRUE BIBLE
What is the world’s true Bible — ‘tis the highest thought of man,
The thought distilled through ages since the dawn of thought began.
And each age adds a word thereto, some psalm or promise sweet —
And the canon is unfinished and forever incomplete.
O’er the chapters that are written, long and lovingly we pore —
But the best is yet unwritten, for we grow from more to more.
Let us heed the voice within us and its messages rehearse;
Let us build the growing Bible — for we too must write a verse.
What is the purport of the scheme toward which all time is gone?
What is the great aeonian goal? The joy of going on.
And are there any souls so strong, such feet with swiftness shod,
That they shall reach it, reach some bourne, the ultimate of god?
There is no bourne, no ultimate. The very farthest star
But rims a sea of other stars that stretches just as far.
There’s no beginning and no end: As in the ages gone,
The greatest joy of joys shall be — the joy of going on.
He liked to poke fun at sanctimonious ritual, and here is one of his humorous verses, called “An Informal Prayer,” or “The Prayer of Cyrus Brown.” Throughout the poem he quotes from different religious characters.
AN INFORMAL PRAYER — THE PRAYER OF CYRUS BROWN
“The proper way for a man to pray”
said Deacon Lemuel Keyes,
“and the only proper attitude
is down upon his knees.”
“Nay, I should say the way to pray,”
said Reverend Dr. Wise
“is standing straight with outstrecthed arms
and rapt and upturned eyes.”
“Oh, no, no, no.” said Elder Snow
“Such posture is too proud
A man should pray with eyes fast closed
and head contritely bowed.”
“It seems to me his hands should be
astutely clasped in front.
With both thumbs a pointing toward the ground.”
Said Reverend Hunt.
“Las’ year I fell in Hodgkins well
head first,” said Cyrus Brown,
“With both my heels a-stikin’ up,
my head a-p’inting down,
An’ I made a prayer right there an’ then;
Best prayer I ever said;
The prayingest prayer I ever prayed,
A-standin on my head.”
And Foss noted the anger that religious debate can bring out. This is a poem called “Odium Theologicum,” which is a familiar word for the hatred produced by theology.
ODIUM THEOLOGICUM
I
They met and they talked where the crossroads meet,
Four men from the four winds come,
And they talked of the horse, for they loved the theme,
And never a man was dumb.
The man from the North loved the strength of the horse,
And the man from the East his pace,
And the man from the South loved the speed of the horse,
And the man from the West his grace.
So these four men from the four winds come,
Each paused a space in his course
And smiled in the face of his fellow man
And lovingly talked of the horse.
Then each man parted and went his way
As their different courses ran;
And each man journeyed with peace in his heart
And loving his fellow man.
II
They met the next year where the crossroads meet,
Four men from the four winds come:
And it chanced as they met that they talked of God,
And never a man was dumb.
One imagined God in the shape of a man.
A spirit did one insist.
One said that nature itself was God.
One said that he didn’t exist.
They lashed each other with tongues that stung,
That smote as with a rod;
Each glared in the face of his fellow man,
And wrathfully talked of God.
Then each man parted and went his way,
As their different courses ran;
And each man journeyed with wrath in his heart,
And hating his fellow man.
The title of his last book of poems, published in 1907, and republished in 1911, with eight additional poems, expresses what Foss was all about. He called it, Songs of the Average Man. (Remember he’s speaking long before the feminist revolution, so when he says “man,” he does intend “man and woman.” And also, as poets know, “man” is a much easier word to rhyme with than “human”.) But for Foss an “average man” was an extraordinary person, for each of us, in his view, is special.
Here is his poem, “The Man From The Crowd.”
THE MAN FROM THE CROWD
Men seem as alike as the leaves on the trees,
As alike as the bees in a swarming of bees;
And we look at the millions that make up the state
All equally little and equally great,
And the pride of our courage is cowed.
Then Fate calls for a man who is larger than men —
There’s a surge in the crowd — there’s a movement — and then
There arises a man that is larger than men —
And the man comes up from the crowd.
The chasers of trifles run hither and yon,
And the little small days of small things go on,
And the world seems no better at sunset than dawn,
And the race still increases its plentiful spawn.
And the voice of our wailing is loud.
Then the Great Deed calls out for the Great Men to come,
And the Crowd, unbelieving, sits sullen and dumb —
But the Great Deed is done, for the Great Man is come —
Aye, the man comes up from the crowd.
There’s a dead hum of voices, all say the same thing,
And our forefathers’ songs are the songs that we sing,
And the deeds by our fathers and grandfathers done
Are done by the son of the son of the son,
And our heads in contrition are bowed.
Lo, a call for a man who shall make all things new
Goes down through the throng! See! he rises in view!
Make room for the men who shall make all things new! —
For the man who comes up from the crowd.
And where is the man who comes up from the throng
Who does the new deed and who sings the new song,
And makes the old world as a world that is new?
And who is the man? It is you! It is you!
And our praise is exultant and proud.
We are waiting for you there — for you are the man!
Come up from the jostle as soon as you can;
Come up from the crowd there, for you are the man —
The man who comes up from the crowd.
From some lines in that poem, we see that Foss didn’t like the dead hand of the past to hold the present to ransom. The other most quoted poem by Foss, after “The House by the Side of the Road,” is a humorous satire that bears on that theme of letting precedent overrule the present. (It is a poem that has recently seen revival among motivational speakers.)
It’s called “The Calf-Path” and this is how it goes.
THE CALF-PATH
One day, through the primeval wood,
A calf walked home, as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail as all calves do.
Since then two hundred years have fled,
And, I infer, the calf is dead.
But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.
The trail was taken up next day
By a lone dog that passed that way;
And then a wise bell-wether sheep
Pursued the trail o’er vale and steep,
And drew the flock behind him, too,
As good bell-wethers always do.
And from that day, o’er hill and glade,
Through those old woods a path was made;
And many men wound in and out,
And dodged, and turned, and bent about
And uttered words of righteous wrath
Because ‘twas such a crooked path.
But still they followed — do not laugh —
The first migrations of that calf,
And through this winding wood-way stalked,
Because he wobbled when he walked.
This forest path became a lane,
That bent, and turned, and turned again;
This crooked lane became a road,
Where many a poor horse with his load
Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And traveled some three miles in one.
And thus a century and a half
They trod the footsteps of that calf.
The years passed on in swiftness fleet,
The road became a village street,
And this, before men were aware,
A city’s crowded thoroughfare;
And soon the central street was this
Of a renowned metropolis;
And men two centuries and a half
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.
Each day a hundred thousand rout
Followed the zigzag calf about;
And o’er his crooked journey went
The traffic of a continent.
A hundred thousand men were led
By one calf near three centuries dead.
They followed still his crooked way,
And lost one hundred years a day;
For thus such reverence is lent
To well-established precedent.
A moral lesson this might teach,
Were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf-paths of the mind,
And work away from sun to sun
To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,
And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.
But how the wise old wood-gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf!
Ah! many things this tale might teach —
But I am not ordained to preach.
Foss’s works are unfortunately all out of print. But somebody put me on to Barnes and Noble website on the Internet. You pick “out of print” and you bring up Sam Walter Foss. Through that source I have gradually collected all his five volumes of poems, all neatly bound and from the 1890’s and this last one from the first decade of this century.
I could keep you here an hour or two sharing Foss’s delightful characterizations and caricatures of people. He tells of the young woman who discoursed endlessly and in scholarly fashion about philosophers while doing crochet. Her lover can’t get a word in and eventually goes out and shoots himself. The poem ends: “Unshocked / She talked and talked and talked and talked.”
He pictures an old blind man who fiddles and sings, and people form a ring around him and there is “laughter choked with teardrops” for the listeners know that “every life’s a blind man’s tune that’s played on broken strings.”
He tells of a little girl talking with his father and she says, “Daddy, did God make me?”
“Yes, of course,” Daddy says, “God made you.”
And then she looks up at her rather plain haggard old father and says, “And Daddy, did God make you?”
“Oh yes,” says the father, “God made everybody.”
So then the little girl looks in the mirror and sees how pretty she looks and she looks up at rather plain Daddy and says, “Daddy, I think God is improving at his trade.”
He was hard on his own profession of journalism for its muck-raking: “Run we through our printing press / Myriad miles of nastiness,” he wrote in a poem called, “The New Journalism.” But in the poem “The Press,” he saw the importance of the newspaper that (as he put it) “writes our history while we are waiting.”
I’ll close with two poems. One, called “The Coming Century,” shows Foss’s remarkable imagination, as he sees us drawing energy from the core of the earth (where volcanoes get theirs) and power from the wind (we’ve done a bit of that), building with solidified air (I’m not sure we know how to do that), and flying back and forth over the Atlantic. Remember as you hear this, that he was writing within a few years of the Wright Brothers’ first lift-off in flight, when many other distinguished people were saying that there was no future in air travel. He also had a faith in psychic energy, that we haven’t been able to tap yet.
This is how “The Coming Century” goes:
THE COMING CENTURY
If the century gone, as the wise ones attest,
Exceeds all the centuries before it,
Then the century coming will better its best
And tower immeasurably o’er it.
And, if miracles now are coming to pass
Right here in your and my time,
Why, miracles then will be thicker than grass
And as common as flies are in fly time.
We will send down our pipes to the Earth’s burning core
Where the smithy of Vulcan is quaking,
And the fires that make the volcanoes outpour
We will use for our johnny-cake baking.
And then we will bridle and harness the tide
And make the pulse beat of the ocean
Provide the propulsion when Baby shall ride
And keep his small carriage in motion.
We will hitch the East wind to the crank of our churn
And make us a butter to “brag on”;
By projecting a psychical impulse we’ll turn
The wheels of a furniture wagon.
We’ll make yellow squashes from nice yellow dirt
Scooped up from our pastures and beaches;
On Sahara some chemical compound we’ll squirt,
And the sand will evolve into peaches.
And a hundred strong men by concentring their will
Ride straight to one point, like a plummet,
Will turn upside down a respectable hill
And spin it around on its summit.
Our buildings we’ll build of solidified air
‘Way up from the sill to the skylight,
With trimmings of brownstone surpassingly fair
Of solidified air of the twilight.
We will fly through the air from New York to the Rhine,
Through Germany, Lower and Upper,
Stop off, if we like, in Geneva to dine
And come back to New York for our supper.
If we don’t wish to fly we will throw our own thought,
Yes, each throw his thought to his sweetheart,
By a kind of a mental telepathy shot,
A method by which heart can meet heart.
We shall learn of the beings who people the stars
And add to the cosmical mirth, then,
By telling new jokes to the people of Mars
And hear then laugh back on the earth, then.
Ah, many trans-cosmic debates shall be whirled,
And long be the parleys between us;
One end of the dialogues fixed in this world,
And the other located in Venus.
Finally, his poem, “The Trumpets.” Foss went into hospital after grappling with some indeterminate illness for two years in the Christmas of 1910, where he wrote his article on “Optimism” and where he wrote his final poem, just before the operation. The operation did not save him and he died on February 26, 1911. So this is his swan song.
I have shared Foss with you because, first off, I found him so fascinating myself; secondly I was so concerned that this poet who has so much to say has been so neglected and none of his work reprinted, other than one or two poems in anthologies; and because I believe that the optimism that he shared is an optimism needed during this transition for us. Lionel Tiger, in his book, Optimism, The Biology of Hope, tells us that optimism is a survival mechanism of the human race. You have to have faith — faith in your future — personally and nationally.
And so I give you Foss and his final poem, “The Trumpets.”
THE TRUMPETS
[This was Mr. Foss’s last poem, and was written just before Christmas, 1910, when he thought he might have to submit to an operation. The end came February 26, 1911.]
The trumpets were calling me over the hill,
And I was a boy and knew nothing of men;
But they filled all the vale with their clangorous trill,
And flooded the gloom of the glen.
“The trumpets,” I cried, “Lo, they call from afar,
They are mingled with music of bugle and drum;
The trumpets, the trumpets are calling to war,
The trumpets are calling — I come.”
The trumpets were calling me over the Range,
And I was a youth and was strong for the strife;
And I was full fain for the new and the strange,
And mad for the tumult of life.
And I heard the loud trumpets that blew for the fray,
In the spell of their magic and madness was dumb;
And I said, “I will follow by night and by day,
The trumpets are calling — I come.”
The trumpets were calling and I was a man,
And had faced the stern world and grown strong;
And the trumpets mere calling far off, and I ran
Toward the blare of their mystical song.
And they led me o’er mountains, ‘neath alien skies,
All else but their music was dumb;
And I ran till I fell, and slept but to rise,
Lo, the trumpets are calling — I come.
The trumpets are calling, I’ve come to the sea,
But far out in the moon-lighted glow,
I still hear the trumpets, they’re calling to me,
The trumpets are calling — I go.
And lo, a strange boatman is here with his bark,
And he takes me and rows away, silent and dumb;
But my trumpets! my trumpets! they peal through the dark,
The trumpets are calling — I come.
This talk is part of a series, interestingly enough. Three years ago I spoke about Albert Einstein, as one of my ethical heroes. What has evolved is an ethical heroes series, and last year I did Albert Schweitzer, and this year we have Bertrand Russell. So I find it so interesting to go back into these folk’s lives and find out not only what they think about life and their achievements in terms of their world view. How do they view the ethical dimension of life and how that view speaks to us as Ethical Society members?
Recently my friends Lynn and Todd came into town Thursday to teach relationship building on Saturday, Todd said to me, “Do you know that Bertrand Russell is in Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of this century?” So I went to the magazine to see a summary of Bertrand Russell in two paragraphs — and I’m going to read that to you.
Bertrand Russell
In more than 50 books, penned over 74 years, Bertrand Russell set the terms of the debate in logic and philosophy in the first part of this century — most notably with Principia Mathematica, written with philosopher Albert North Whitehead.
He also married four times, lost three elections to Parliament, founded a school and led the movement for nuclear disarmament. He was twice jailed and dismissed from three jobs for his pacifism and unconventional views on sex. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950 and died two decades later at 97, a humane rationalist to the last.
So with that kind of framework, I’m going to spend a little more time than two paragraphs talking about Bertrand Russell. Russell’s personal life, as for all of us, shaped and influenced who he was not only as a thinker, but as a feeler, as a father, and as a husband. He was orphaned at an early age and raised by his grandparents, who were quite strict and Victorian. This of course was sensible because at this time England was held in the sway of Victorianism.
He spent a very lonely childhood with governesses and nurses — little contact with children his own age — and at the age of eleven began studying Euclid and he called this “one of the greatest moments of my life, as dazzling as my first love.” From that moment until he was thirty-eight years old, and finished Principia Mathematica, mathematics became his chief interest and source of happiness. As an adolescent he says his interest was divided between, math, religion, and sex. He studied languages and literature and philosophy and in one of the most profound paragraphs of his autobiography, he says he became an atheist at the age of fifteen, and abandoned the God concept. “I found to my surprise that I was quite glad to be done with the subject.”
He went to Cambridge and says that upon entering it he was a shy prig but by the fourth year he had become a gay and flippant student. He learned the virtue of intellectual honesty and absolute freedom to speculate about anything and everything. He finished his fellowship in 1897 and wrote the Foundations of Geometry and in 1901 wrote yet another book on mathematics, but continued to stay with his wife and supported her suffragette causes, even though he had very mixed feelings about her at this point.
Russell’s humor was always present in whatever he did. He had many colleagues, including Whitehead at his professorship school. Russell’s friend Hardy, who was professor of mathematics at Cambridge, once told him that if he could find a proof that Russell would die in five minutes time, he would naturally be very sorry to lose him, but the sorrow would be quite worthwhile for the pleasure of the proof. Russell, wise in the way of mathematics professors, observed, “I entirely sympathized with him and was not at all offended.
The period from 1910 to 1914 was a time of deep transition for Russell. He says, “I felt as sharply separated from the people of England as Faust’s life before and after he met Mephistopheles.” The great war shook him out of his prejudices and made him think afresh on the fundamental questions of life. Back in Cambridge, living with high emotional tension, he could not emotionally face the disaster the war would bring to his people. He was appalled that 90% of the population were excited and energized about the war and he said, “It caused me to review my own thoughts about human nature.”
However, love of England was his strongest emotion. He was tortured by wanting to be a patriot but abhorred the violence of war. Ostracized for his pacifist views, he wrote in 1915, Why Men Fight, and it was a huge success. His pacifism, however, causes him to lose his job, and he’s sent to jail for writing anti-war articles. He writes in prison that he actually enjoyed the experience. It was a holiday from responsibility and therefore it was delightful.
He emerged from that experience, no longer just an academic, deciding that he needed to write a broad range of books. He became less rigid and less prudish, remarried, and his first child was born in 1921. He and his wife decide to found their own school, to school their own children and he found his ambition to write books revived.
In 1938 he became a professor at UCLA and CCNY, and completed his History of Western Philosophy, which he cites as the major source of his income. Russell was to struggle throughout his life with financial trouble — especially during the first half of his life.
He would often travel between England and America and in a poignant section called “Christmas at Sea,” written in 1931, he says:
I am learning much about growing old. Thirty-five years ago I was lately married, childless, very happy, and beginning to taste the joys of success. Family appeared to me as an external power hampering to freedom: the world, to me, was a world of individual adventure. I wanted to think my own thoughts, find my own friends. … I felt strong enough to stand alone. … Now, I realize, [this is just due to my vitality and youth.]
Time, they say, makes a man mellow. I do not believe it. Time makes a man afraid, and fear makes him conciliatory, and being conciliatory he endeavours to appear to others what they will think mellow. And with fear comes the need of affection, of some human warmth to keep away the chill of the cold universe. When I speak of fear, I do not mean merely or mainly personal fear: the fear of death or decrepitude or penury. … I am thinking of a more metaphysical fear. I am thinking of a fear that enters the soul through experience of the major evils to which life is subject: the treachery of friends, the death of those whom we love, the discovery of the cruelty that lurks in average human nature.
During the thirty-five years since my last Christmas on the Atlantic, experience of these major evils has changed the character of my unconscious attitude to life. To stand alone may still be possible as a moral effort, but is no longer pleasant as an adventure. I want the companionship of my children, the warmth of the family fire-side, the support of historic continuity, and the membership of a great nation. These are ordinary human joys, which most middle-aged persons enjoy at Christmas. There is nothing about them to distinguish the philosopher from other men; on the contrary, their very ordinariness makes them the more effective in mitigating the sense of sombre solitude.
And so Christmas at sea, which was once a pleasant adventure, has become painful. It seems to symbolize the loneliness of the man who chooses to stand alone, using his own judgment rather than the judgment of the herd. A mood of melancholy is, in these circumstances, inevitable, and should not be shirked.
But there is something also to be said on the other side. Domestic joys, like all the softer pleasures, may sap the will and destroy courage. The indoor warmth of the traditional Christmas is good, but so is the South wind, and the sun rising out of the sea, and the freedom of the watery horizon. The beauty of these things is undiminished by human folly and wickedness, and remains to give strength to the faltering idealism of middle age.
He goes back to Cambridge to teach, comes home, and fame and fortune and his career flourishes. But he is always beset by money problems that still pile up even as his income increases, and social ostracism for his radical views. Russell says that traditional religion is the source of much evil and he viewed it with scorn and concern for its negative effect. Needless to say, he is attacked for these views and had to defend his position. He talks about fear in religion, yet again another theme in his writing.
Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly on fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown, and partly the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing — fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion go hand in hand.
When asked about evidence for an all-powerful and loving God in 1947, Russell became sarcastic.
There is a rather repulsive smugness and self-complacency in the argument that man is so splendid as to be evidence of infinite wisdom and infinite power in his creator. Those who use this kind of reasoning always try to concentrate our attention on the few saints and sages; they try to make us forget the Neros and Atillas and Hitlers. … And even what is best in us is apt to lead to disaster. Religions that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass destruction.
I can imagine a sardonic demon producing us for his amusement, but I cannot attribute to a being who is wise, beneficent, and omnipotent, the terrible weight of cruelty, suffering, and ironic degradation of what is best: that has marred the history of man in an increasing measure as he has become more master of his fate.
His humor shows up in the area of religion too. “How would you describe Hell, Lord Russell?” “Hell is a place where the police are German, the motorists French, and the cooks English.”
And then someone said to him, “Lord Russell, have you missed anything by not being religious?”
I don’t feel I’ve missed anything through not believing in religion. I think, on the contrary, that the religious people have missed a very great deal. They’ve missed the kind of pride that stands upright and looks at the world, and says, “Well, you can kill me, but anyway, here I am. I stand firm.” And they miss that. And I think that’s a very valuable thing that a person should have.
I shouldn’t like at all to go through life in sort of a creepy-crawly way, full of terror, and being bolstered up all the time as if I were a fainting lady being kept from sprawling on the ground … because no human being whom I can respect needs the consolation of things that are untrue. He can face the truth.
What about death then? How would you view death if you don’t have a religious context for it?
I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man’s place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a spender of their own.
Still being attacked for his pagan views and his failure to subscribe to the traditional religions, Bertrand Russell in protest, wrote his own ten commandments. He called them a “Liberal Decalogue.” And he said, “Perhaps the essence of the liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue, not intended to replace the old one but only to supplement it. The Ten Commandments that as a future I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:”
A Liberal Decalogue
1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that is happiness.
These are taken from a New York Times article called “The Best Answer to Fanaticism — Liberalism,” in 1951.
Then I thought, well, if Russell was so anti-religious, how does he view humanism? It would be interesting to know his point of view about that.
Those who attempt to make a religion of humanism, which recognizes nothing greater than man, do not satisfy my emotions. And yet I am unable to believe that, in the world as known, there is anything I can value outside human beings. … Not the starry heavens, but their effects on human percipients, have excellence; to admire the universe for its size is slavish and absurd; impersonal non-human truth appears to be an delusion. And so my intellect goes with the humanists, though my emotions violently rebel.
Then Russell was asked to comment on human beings, on human nature, and character values. How does he view those kind of things?
I don’t know human nature is supposed to be. But your nature is infinitely malleable, and that is what people don’t realize. If you compare a domestic dog with a wild wolf you will see what training can do. The domestic dog is a nice comfortable creature, barks occasionally, and he may bite the postman, but on the whole, he’s all right; whereas the wolf is quite a different thing. You can do exactly the same thing with human beings. Human beings, according to how they’re treated, will turn out totally different, and I think the idea you can’t change human nature is silly.
What traits then would an ideal character have?
Four characteristics seem to me jointly to form the basis of an ideal character: vitality, courage, sensitiveness, and intelligence. I do not suggest that this list is complete, but I think it carries us a good way. Moreover, I firmly believe that by proper physical, emotional, and intellectual care of the young, these qualities could all be made very common.
But then, since you are a rationalist, Mr. Russell, how can love and rationality be reconciled?
I regard love as one of the most important things in human life, and I regard any system as bad which interferes unnecessarily with its free development. Love, when the word is properly used, does not denote any and every relationship between the sexes, but only one involving considerable emotion, and a relation which is psychological as well as physical. It may reach any degree of intensity. Such emotions as are expressed in “Tristan and Isolde” and in accordance with the experience of countless men and women. The power of giving artistic expression to the emotion of love is rare, but the emotion itself, at least in Europe, is not.
The three main extra-rational activities in modern life are religion, war, and love; all of these are extra-rational, but love is not anti-rational, that is say, a reasonable man may reasonably rejoice in its existence.
Now, as you know, Russell was a pacifist. It was a major thrust of his life. He founded the Bertrand Russell Foundation, for the purpose of promoting world peace. And it is important to him that we look at war’s destruction and find it unacceptable. He says about peace:
Our own planet, in which philosophers are apt to take a parochial and excessive interest, was once too hot to support life, and will in time become too cold. After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it has generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, I believe is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.
After the founding and formation of Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, Russell received a letter from U Thant, who was Secretary General of the United Nations. He said:
It is good to know that it is proposed to start a Foundation in the name of Lord Russell, to expand and continue his efforts in the cause of peace. Lord Russell was one of the first to perceive the folly and danger of unlimited accumulation of nuclear armaments.
When we look at Russell’s life and what he strived for, what we see is a degree of excellence which he endeavored and strived for and accomplished in so many fields — whether it was philosophy or mathematics or world peace or looking at the structure of religion and what it can mean to us as human beings. So he’s always looking at what is excellent, and he says:
It would be necessary to the creation of [a society of excellence] to secure three conditions: first, a more even distribution of the produce of labor; second, security against large-scale wars; and third, a population which was stationary or very nearly so.
Until these conditions are secured, industrialism will continue to be used feverishly, to increase the wealth of the richest individuals, the territory of the greatest empires, and the population of the most populous nations, no one of which is of the slightest benefit to mankind. These three considerations have inspired what I have written and said [in terms of how to strive for excellence in our society.]
But then what would you hope to see the world achieve? What is your ideal for it?
I think I should put first, security against extreme disaster such as threatened by modern war. I should put second, the abolition of abject poverty throughout the world. Third, as a result of security and economic well-being, a general growth of tolerance and kindly feeling. Fourth, the greatest possible opportunity for personal initiative in ways not harmful to the community.
All these things are possible, and all would come about if men chose. In the meantime, the human race lives in a welter of organized hatreds and threats of mutual extermination. I cannot but think that sooner or later people will grow tired of this very uncomfortable way of living.
He said one of the Nobel Prizes was for his book Marriage and Morals, interestingly enough — it even surprised him — in 1950. What is the essence of a good marriage? It only took Russell four wives to come to this conclusion.
The essence of a good marriage is respect for each other’s personality combined with a deep intimacy, physical, mental, and spiritual, which makes a serious love between man and woman the most fructifying of all human experiences.
Russell’s fame continued to grow and he lectured around the world. He was constantly pursued for interviews as he grew older. At one point in China, he had a serious illness and he refused to grant interviews. A resentful press decided to carry the news in Japan that he had died. Russell appealed to them but they refused to retract the story. On his way home he stopped in Japan and the press again sought to interview him. He had his secretary hand out a printed announcement to the reporters that said, “Since Mr. Russell is dead, he cannot be interviewed.”
In his harvest years — his senior years — he was asked, “What has given you the greatest personal pleasure?”
That’s rather a difficult question, isn’t it? Passionate private relations perhaps would come first of all. I get immense pleasure from natural beauty. And intellectual pleasure, understanding something that has been puzzling, and the moment comes when you understand it, that is a very delightful moment.
Russell’s relevance today I think is quite obvious. He challenges us to face and destroy all false beliefs and illusions, that keep us from being free in thought and action and capable of self-responsibility. He challenges us to think about war, to stop nuclear proliferation, and create a safe, peaceful world. He begins his autobiography with a foreword, which I think really sums Russell up.
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, the unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy — ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy.
I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness — that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss.
I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it may seem too good for human life, this is what — at last — I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I try to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
I think Marx was premature. Not Marx as a thinker. He accomplished about as much as one person possibly can. He penetrated to the underside of capitalism. But revolution was premature. The idea that Marx had said it all, and, therefore, that massive action could proceed, was premature. The world is still recoiling from that.
In contrast, our Ethical Culture movement has been cautious and slow to fix its seal of approval on any concrete economic plan. This has been perhaps the better part of wisdom and valor. But it is in our tradition to take an ethical stance toward economic realities, and toward the system as a whole. My effort today is to contribute to this tradition, and to our ethical stance.
The first song we heard speaks about revolution. The next song takes us back to verse from the Old Testament, as a historical document, to remind us that human suffering at the hands of other humans goes way back, antedating even capitalism.
Only in the last 30 years or so have anthropologists, building on all the prior work of excavation, dating, measuring brain sizes, and categorizing artifacts, been able to start drawing conclusions about the quality of life of our distant ancestors. Homo sapiens, our species, emerged about 300,000 years ago. These ancestors of ours, people like us, used to have to work for their survival a total of 2 to 3 hours a day. The rest of their time was spent inculture, that is, in relating to other people, in storytelling and listening, in music and song, in carving and painting, in drumming, physical movement, and dance. Today we hardly have time to squeeze in a movie. Fathers are routinely castigated for being absent from their families. Both parents work — 40, 60, 80 hours a week, counting work at home. Two months ago my daughter called to make anappointment with me to have lunch for my birthday. She called a monthahead of time!
Our ancestors lived qualitatively better lives.
How did we get into this fix? Broadly speaking, it’s a story of changes in ownership. To understand capitalism, we have to know the story of ownership. This is a big part of the story of the human race.
In the beginning, the world belonged to everyone, and everyone belonged to the world. It was a culture of universal ownership. If you took something from the land, you had to use it to promote life. If you killed an animal, you had to carry out a ritual of compensation. These things taken had not beenyours to simply do with as you wished, arbitrarily. This culture of ownership lasted, amonghomo sapiens, about 300,000 years. Then came the crucial shift. It was probably inevitable. Population growth and overcrowding in the most bountiful areas led tocompetition among bands of people. The earth seemed less bountiful and mothering. Other peoples seemed less like kin.Security of food became more urgent than leisureliness of life, and agriculture and settling in one place was begrudgingly adopted. Ownership became a matter of Us versus Them, and Us versus It. Universal ownership shrank to common ownership. Among ourselves, we hold things in common, butwe no longer belong to earth and nature. We own bits of it.Our tribe owns this land and these animals, and your tribedoesn’t. Our religions rewrite our myths to tell us we have dominion over the earth and the right to war against peoples with other gods. So we will go to war with you andtake your land and your animals, and claim them as our own.
The next big shift in ownership was to centralized ownership. It was a natural progression. If the tribe owned everything in common, it was convenient to localize the ownership in a person who symbolically represented the tribe — an elder or shaman or chief. In time, the tribe’s ownership became invested in the person who actuallycontrolled the tribe — the warrior-king. The pharaoh. The monarch. The quality of life of the people then became determined not only by the long hours of back-breaking agricultural labor to survive, but also by whether their ruler was benevolent or tyrannical. This centralized ownership, or ruler-ownership, became the dominant pattern all over the world. It’s the King’s land, the King’s highway. You use them by his leave. It’s the King’s harvest. You get what’s left over. The golden rule prevails. He who rules owns the gold.
Then in Western Europe, in Medieval times, there began another shift. Up to now, ownership primarily referred to land — and to the buildings, crops, animals, and peopleon that land. Buttrade was growing more important. It was increasingly possible to accumulate wealth without land. For example, a tent and a wagon and a horse to travel to a fair in a foreign land might be all you needed to accumulate gold or other valuables. Certainly a sailing ship. All of these things acquired a new name: capital. Capital is simply anything except human labor itself that helps in producing a good or service. The traders, who used capital but not land, wanted free and clear title to their profit, but there was little law to back them up. Law was all tied up with land ownership.
Meanwhile, the landed aristocracy was going through its own struggle to change the law. The Magna Carta was a sign of the times. In the year 1215, King John of England was forced by a group of barons under him to sign a document that, in effect, handed over some of his ultimate ownership to them. From now on, ultimate say over some properties would belong to the barons, not to the king. Ownership became distributed, but it was still “ruler ownership.” There were simply more rulers per land than one king. I call it “distributed-rule ownership,” or “multi-ruler ownership.”
The nobles, to justify their claims to this ownership, generally used universal language, language that meant thatany man could have ultimate ownership of property or capital, and to the produce, or profit, from that capital. This was the kind of legal language that traders needed. Within a few centuries, a new culture of ownership had arisen. Priests and poets of the new culture called it individual ownership or private property, but it truth it was still ownership by the few. You no longer had to be a noble, lord, or aristocrat to have a share of the king’s former ownership. You could be a merchant, a businessman. But the identical shape of ownership continued, with the few owning all the land and capital, and the many struggling to survive, whether as serfs, as conscripted soldiers, or increasingly as paid laborers. One-ruler ownership had become multi-ruler ownership. Capitalism is a multi-ruler system of economic ownership. I like to call it “multiplicitous monarchy.”
The next major development in the story of ownership was that some social philosophers saw through the myth of individual ownership. They saw the underlying power relations. And they thought that the antidote was to take ownership from the controlling elite and give it to the state, which would manage the capital and labor of the country in the name of the people and for the people. This was state ownership. The one all-out experiment along these lines, the U.S.S.R., failed — whether for intrinsic or extrinsic, relevant or irrelevant reasons. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the world is undergoing another major shift in ownership — from state-ownership to private ownership.
Jeff Gates writes in a recent issue of The Humanist, “We live in the midst of the most dramatic shift in ownership in history.” [July-August 1998, p.9] Ninety-five different nations are in the throes of shifting from state ownership to private ownership. Yet, just like the kings of old, they are not transferring ownership from the state to the people, in equal shares, even though the ideology was that they were holding ownership for the people. Instead, they are basically selling industries to the highest bidder — i.e., to those already high up in ownership holdings. We are strengthening and consolidating the multi-ruler system of ownership. In politics, we have a government in every nation. In economics, we have a king on every corner, and the rest of us working for them.
Ten years ago, only 1 billion people lived in capitalist or market economies. Today,five billion people do so. The President of the World Bank, Jim Wolfensohn, points out that more than 3 billion of them live on less than two dollars a day. He warns that if we do not achieveinclusion of all people in this global ownership shift, we are heading toward a world of extremes. In his 1997 book,The Challenge of Inclusion, he writes:
One does not have to spend long in Bosnia or Gaza or the Lakes District of Africa to know that without economic hope we will not have peace. Without equity we will not have stability. Without a better sense of social justice, our cities will not be safe…Without inclusion, too many of us will be condemned to live separate, armed, and frightened lives.
The world is being turned over to capitalism, a multi-ruler system of ownership. End of the story of ownership, so far.
Ownership is a matter of values, and a matter of agreements, and a matter of enforcements. I want to share with you a personal experience with ownership. When I was 19 years old, I joined a monastery. I took the 3 vows that every monk must take: the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. These vows are deemed to besacrifices that one must make for the sake of the religious life. Chastity means giving up sex. Obedience means giving up personal freedom. And poverty means giving upownership. But let me tell you what the vow of poverty really meant, in practical terms. It meant that I would never have to worry about money again for the rest of my life! It was a blessing in disguise. Similarly, the vow of obedience meant that I would never have to worry about finding a job again. Job and career — all that would be assigned to me by people in my religious community who knew me probably better than I knew myself, who could give me a life-work well-suited to bringing out my best. Another blessing in disguise. As for the third vow, chastity — well, I’ll admit, thatdid have some bite.
I lived there for two years. In that idyllic world, no one’s worth was determined by their income. And no one’s income was determined by market forces measuring some narrow aspect of their contribution to the community. Instead, each person was granted intrinsic worth. We worked the same number of hours as each other, prayed and played the same number of hours, took meals together and slept at the same time. This equalitarian infrastructure — equal hours of work, and equality of intrinsic worth — enabled each of us to be completely individual. There was no lack of motivation to be innovative or creative, to push one’s own boundaries toward higher levels of excellence. It wasn’t paradise; there were plenty of interpersonal conflicts, plenty of power plays. Money is not the root ofall evil. But neither is money the root of all motivation to be innovative or to take risks. People don’t need the lure of money to want to do well in the eyes of each other, or to risk failure in the hope of seeing some cherished conception of theirs get born into the real world.
Five years later, my life had radically changed. I was the unmarried father of two children, about halfway through a Ph.D. program, and working in restaurants to help support my daughters. Their mother scratched out a meagre subsistence for herself and her children through her confused and intimidated dependence on the welfare system. Inthis world I was keenly aware that a person’s worth was proportional to his income or wealth. It was an affront to me that my daughters should be regarded as having inferior worth because of their near-poverty status.
I have worked in many restaurants, and one common refrain I hear among waiters is “At least we put in an honest day’s work.” There’s pride in that statement. It means, “I may have a low-status job, but I am proud that I work hard for my money.” There’s an intuitive sense of working as hard as any human being ought to work, or maybe harder, so that we have done our share, or more than our share, of the work that needs to be done. Maybe it’s working so closely with people and food that brings up this intuition in waiters. Maybe it’s some remnant from our ancestors’ culture of universal ownership. It’s archetypal: we go get food, you eat.
An honest day’s work — what would that be? A narrow answer is that it is doing the amount of work agreed to in your contract. But that is an artificially defined meaning, at least partially colored by unequal power relations. We want to know what is fair, universally speaking. So let’s look at the earth as a whole. There are 6 billion people on earth, and let’s say there are 2 billion who are of working age and health. How much total work would need to be done each day by those 2 billion people in order to provide a good life for everyone on the planet? If we take that amount of work and divide it by 2 billion people, wouldn’t that give us an honest day’s work for each person?
Some analysts of the future predict that in 50 years machines by themselves, with zero workforce, will have the capacity to produce all the goods and services we need for an affluent lifestyle for all!
Sometimes, though, I have the feeling that our economic system is this huge apparatus that is designed toprevent affluence for all in order to keep itself going. For if machines were producing everything, and workers were superfluous, how would workers get the money they need to buy the things the machines produced? And if there was no one to buy the products, why would the owners keep the production lines running? If we simply made everyone contentedly affluent, the system would crash.
Why? Because our system as currently structured is fueled by competition. It’s not every man against the other. But it is every king and his fiefdom (owner and his company) against every other. A company can go out of business for being too generous with its employees. This sentence practically says it all. A company can go out of business for being too generous with its employees.
Suppose we have two companies producing basically the same product. One of these companies, Nice Guys Inc., decides to give a $1 an hour raise to its 2000 hourly wage employees. That’s over 4 million a year. Where’s this extra money going to come from? If Nice Guys raises the price of its product, consumers will switch to the competitor, Self-Interest, Inc. Soon, Nice Guys is going out of business. Another way to cover the raise is to lower the pay of its top executives. So you cut your CEO’s pay from 3 million to 2 million a year, making it easy for Self-Interest Inc. to pick him up for the bargain price of only 2 _ million. Assuming that your CEO was really the most talented person you had for the job, you’re left with less talented people running your business, and performance declines. You might be lucky and your executives-in-waiting turn out to be just as talented as the ones you lost,and share your ideals of having a higher paid workforce, thus resisting offers from outside companies trying to lure them away. But don’t count on it.
Nice Guys could also cover the raise with the money reserved for depreciation costs. Trouble is: equipment starts to wear down or become outdated, and product quality declines.
Finally, another way for Nice Guys to cover this raise is for the workers to be so appreciative that their work improves, the product improves, market share grows, and the increased income covers the raise.
Can this happen? Sometimes itdoes happen. Unfortunately, it’s usually only a short-term effect. People become habituated to their new pay; their work effort falls back to a more natural rhythm, market shares equalize, and Nice Guys has to reduce the hourly wage back to where it started. And it could be worse. Nice Guys could become excited by its initial increase in market share and decide to increase production, hire more workers, or start construction on a new plant. Then when productivity returns to normal, it finds itself overextended, and it may simply collapse or be eaten up in a hostile takeover.
To sum all this up: Companiesmust treat employees competitively. To compete, to survive, they must increase productivity, and they must pay workers as little as possible. What is “as little as possible?” Companies learn that they’re paying their workers too little when they quit, when they’d rather not work at all than work for that wage. When does this happen? When what you pay is not enough for them and their families to simplysurvive. Why work if the amount earned is not enough to survive on anyway? Workers will endurehorrendous conditions if they can thereby eke out an existence, if no better means of existence are at hand.
So the force that determines what a company pays its lowest-paid workers is competition and company survival. It has nothing to do with any humane or ethical considerations. It has nothing to do with any feelings of empathy an owner might have. It has nothing to do with any intrinsic worth on the part of the laborers. It’s solely set by survival. How much does it take to barely survive? That’s the amount you’ll get.
What if you have so many workers that you need some people to manage them? Can you just ask a few of them to manage the others, at the same pay? No, because it takes more hours to manage than to simply work. Your bottom-level laborers are already living at the edge of survival, and most of them are probably scrambling to make a few extra bucks on the side, when not on the job. A worker who becomes a manager and works longer hours loses some of his opportunity to make extra bucks on the side, so he has to be compensated. Managers, then, are paid more than the workers they manage, but, on the whole, are equally living at the point of survival.
When do you get above this survival mode? Generally, never. Each time you move to a higher income level, you raise the bar of survival. Only now it’s not a matter of physical survival. It’s a matter of survival aswho youare. Each higher level of income requires you tobe in a different way. You may have to start wearing suits and ties. You may have to wear suits and ties that are in fashion. You may have to wearnew suits and ties every year, or every season. You may have to buy insurance, then all kinds of insurance, then lots of all kinds of insurance. You may have to go to school — literally or figuratively — to learn proper etiquette for you level of survival. You have to live in the right kind of neighborhood and send your kids to the right kind of schools for your level. Otherwise, you do not survive as who and what you are. It’s a matter of survival, for most people, all the way up.
Where’s the joy in all of this!
An anxiety of slipping back to an inferior level haunts us. Capitalism, in a static analysis, is the system of multi-ruler ownership. But in a dynamic analysis, capitalism is the system of economic production based on stringing people out on the edge of survival.
Exceptions abound. A given company, or a whole industry in a given land, can sometimes hold off the requirement to pay workers as little as possible. Workers can start to feel secure, hopeful, prosperous, worthwhile — as when the Big 3 American auto-makers monopolized the market. But an underlying relentless pressure erodes away this good fortune. Workers in other nations become competitors for jobs. Labor unions become weaker. Conditions change. The edge of survival returns.
This means adrenalin stays at higher levels in our bodies than they were biologically designed for. It means operating by fear, operating by anxiety, operating by inhibition and restriction. Depression, not a natural phenomenon, occurs in some 20% of our population. On the edge of survival as who we are, we live under the constant threat of self-worthlessness.
The threat takes its toll. Depression. Weariness. Anger. Sadness. Poor physical vitality. Escape by way of drugs or artificial excitement. Escape by way of passive entertainment. Or finally, escape by buying into the win-lose mentality of capitalism and playing it as a game.
To sum up so far: Capitalism, as we currently have it, is a system of ownership by a few, each of whom is like a monarch in his own domain. This system is now spreading like wildfire all over the world. Dynamically speaking, the system requires its lowest-paid workers to be paid at bare subsistence levels, while it induces a psychological mentality of anxious survival even at higher levels of pay. We are close to being able to produce affluence for every person in the world, but the system does not allow it. Qualitatively, our lives are far from what human lives ought to be, potentially and ethically.
What is to be done?
The first thing to do is to staunch the flow of blood. That is, find ways to alleviate the worst effects of capitalism — the worst inequalities, the worst drudgeries, the most dehumanizing conditions of work. A study of the 1998 book by economist James Kenneth Galbraith,Created Unequal, could help us here. He argues powerfully that the increased inequality in our own country in the past 20 years, and the loss of community that follows inequality, has been caused by a change in national policy. We need to return to a national goal of full employment, aided by low interest rates, instead of using high interest rates to fight inflation and protect the wealthy.
The second thing to do is to realize that multi-ruler ownership is not necessarily the final chapter in the story of ownership. Pathways to a more humane system of ownership have already been developed by some pragmatic thinkers, and have already been implemented by some lawmakers and some companies. Here the 1998 book by Jeff Gates,The Ownership Solution: Toward a Shared Capitalism for the 21st Century, is worth study. The idea here is to achievedemocratic ownership — that is, ownership by every person of some capital. The saying goes, that capitalism has been good at creating capital, but not good at creating capitalists. Ninety-eight per cent of us living in capitalism aren’t capitalists — that is, owners of capital. The next step in the story of ownership could be democratic ownership. ESOP’s, or Employee Stock Ownership Programs, are one excellent way to help this along.
Third, we can begin to develop an ethical attitude about our economic systems and set a national and worldwide goal, such as: Democratically ordered economies based on ethical values elaborated by elected representatives in a non-corrupt electoral system.
Fourth, we can be more keenly aware of how overpopulation is a root cause of the culture of competition that drives our current systems, and more vigorously push for programs to stop human population growth.
Fifth, we can begin to develop ethical principles of fairness. For example, fairness can be regarded as the outward expression and manifestation of the inner principle of intrinsic worth. For example, each person’suniqueness is of equal worth to every other person’s uniqueness. Having a particular skill is no reason to have a higher share of desirable goods and services than anyone else. Having a particular skill is a blessing in itself; and its exercise and development is something to be grateful for. Skills are for exercising, not for elevating oneself over others. Leadership is needed in any group endeavor, but leadership is a set of skills that are to be regarded as any skills — as talents to be exercised, not to be used for self-promotion. Conversely, leaders should be chosen on the basis of their skills, not appointed or forced by virtue of ownership position.
Sixth, after full debate and discussion, we can begin to assert more specific ethical economic guidelines. Perhaps they would sound something like the following:
- There should be aworldwide minimum wage, one that puts peopleabove bare-survival level.
- There should be a worldwide maximum income.
- There should be a worldwide maximum workweek — probably starting at 35 hours per week and eventually going down to as few as technologically possible, perhaps 10 hours per week.
- There should be a worldwide minimum individual ownership share. And a worldwide maximum ownership share.
- Ownership share should be at least partly a function of proximity and use. E.g., people who live in a house on a street, walk on the street, pick up paper in the street, drive on the street, and look at the street, should own the street more than people who only drive on the street. Another application of this would be for those people who live in areas of greatest environmental impact by the activities of a company should own the greatest percentage of that company and have most power in decisions about what the company does and how it does it.
Other ideas for practical action will present themselves as we commit ourselves to the goal of understanding, influencing, and then transforming our economic system to a more fully humane one. Thank you.
This spring I found myself in a classroom at St. Louis University. I was invited by a professor of social work who wanted his graduate students to have a broader religious perspective (than Catholicism) when working with clients.
I explained the Ethical Society with my usual fervor and enthusiasm. I stated what we are: humanists dedicated to ethical living. We teach character values and comparative religion to our children. We consider social action–building a better world–central to our making ethical living real. We honor the worth and dignity of every individual.
A young man raised his hand after I spoke and said: “This is so good to hear. My mom used to drive me by the Ethical Society every day on my way to school and she would say: ‘See that building down there; it’s a place for wayward heathens and pagans and that spire there is a witch’s hat!'”
I reacted in my usual calm, cool way: smiled and said I appreciated his comments, that the spire was actually there to inspire people to seek the highest ideals in their lives, that our founder, Felix Adler said, “Where all come to seek the highest is holy ground.” However, inwardly I felt like someone had shot an arrow into my heart. If this young man had thought that way, then many others don’t understand or appreciate us.
In the past we have been called “black devil secular humanists,” “heathens,” “faithless,” “godless,” “a religious cult,” and “intellectual elitists.” No wonder it is so hard for us to claim and take a stand for our humanistic, ethical identity.
I’ve seen us try: Sometimes some of us are difficult and negative and scornful. “Traditional religion makes people into sheep–followers with no brains.” We are thinkers and certainly not followers. Or, we say, “We are godless atheists and we’re proud of it.”
Sometimes we are unsure: “Well, it means one thing to one person and another thing to another. Since we don’t have a creed or dogma then everyone thinks differently.”
Sometimes we’re desperate: “Well, you’ll just have to come some Sunday–it’s hard to explain.”
Sometimes we’re wise and careful: One member here carries our Statement of Purpose in her purse and pulls it out to explain us.
I want us to move forward in claiming our Ethical Society identity and heritage clearly and with pride and certainty. I think it’s difficult for us because it is so precious and vital to us–often claimed with pain and with the misunderstanding of our loved ones.
But I also think we claimed “an outside the mainstream of society” place for ourselves when we joined and we don’t see how strongly we “fit” into the arenas of society that so desperately need our participation and our values.
We, to this day, offer the “middle ground” that speaks for an ethical evaluation of all decisions and behaviors as to their relevance to personal good and the greater good for all. But it’s more personal than that. By claiming our ethical identity we affirm who we are. We declare our own worthiness and our right to dignity and respect. When we truly experience our own worth–our life potential for joy and service expands tenfold! Our view of those around us comes from the prism of self-worth we own within.
No greater gift in life than to experience: I am OK–regardless of what my boss says, my spouse says, my children say. I am OK–regardless of my lack of money, my divorce, life’s unfairness, my job changes, my illness, my age.
Seneca the Stoic said, “If you see a man who is unterrified in the midst of danger, happy in adversity, peaceful amid the storms of life, who looks down at men from a higher plane, and views the gods on a footing of equality, will not a feeling of reverence steal over you?” That’s the kind of human being we strive to be and experience in our lives.
Therefore we must vigorously claim our humanistic heritage because it is so relevant and critical to our troubled times today and to affirming our own self-worth.
In a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article, “Humanists a Beacon” by William Edelen, he says:
Perhaps the most ludicrous and asinine charge made by those ranting against “humanists” is that they are “godless.” A list of brilliant humanists, who were also deeply religious and spiritual people in the most profound sense, would be endless: Plato, Aristotle, Erasmus, Montaigne, Sir Thomas More, Paracelsus, and one of the greatest thinkers of the 15th century, Nicholas Cusanus, Sir Francis Bacon, Goethe, Albert Schweitzer and practically all of our major founding fathers, from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln.
The motivation of the humanistic movement in the 4th century was to produce a fully cultivated human being. Educational programs were upgraded and refined. The inner needs of the religious life combined with a classical education became the ideal.
It was the cultivation of manners that one needed to become a fully civilized human being. Would to God that we could revive this humanistic concept, of what it means to be a fully developed person.
Humanists, schooled in the humanities and other liberal arts, combining the needs of the spiritual life with a classical education–whether theist, deist. Christian, Buddhist, Taoist or Hebrew–could very well be the bright hope of this nation.
We can take pride in our humanist heritage. Today, could we not use an emphasis on “developing a fully cultivated human being–one with manners?” As Ethical Society members, we practice what we believe in our daily actions. Ethical relationship challenges abound on a daily basis for each of us.
The story is told of Winston Churchill, who faced a most difficult diplomatic challenge. When attending a dinner, his distraught hostess came to him and said she had observed one of the guests pocketing one of her best salt and pepper sets. She asked if he could think of some way to get her property back without causing an unpleasant scene. Shortly he went to the other end of the great dining table and pocketed the other set of shakers and sidled up to the thief. He opened his pocket just wide enough for the chap to see the shakers inside, and whispered, “I think they’ve seen us, we’d better put them back.”
Churchill created a humble partnership with the hostess and the thief that quietly without embarrassment achieved the right action and result. Yes, ethical challenges do abound!
Ethical life challenges can only be met by the use of reason and reverence. As humanists and Ethical Culturists, we use reason as our primary resource for evaluating and acting on the world around us. Knowledge brings us wisdom while recognizing the paramount importance of good, ethical living with reverence for all living creatures. This combination, when reason and reverence meet, will produce the most powerful human beings in the world as it has in the past.
Felix Adler, our founder, understood this. I often envision a young man is hunched over a desk in a study in Heidelburg, Germany: It is 1875. Books surround him, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Plato, the Bible, and Emerson, to just name a few. All of a sudden, what he has been searching for comes together in his mind.
All religions have a thread of profound truth in them. However, their major flaw lies in their insistence on being the one truth! Therefore religion must be based on the search for truth based on reason (as outlined by Kant in his writings) and in tandem with that, reverence for life and all living things through honoring their worth. Moral codes of conduct for ethical living based on rational thought would ride side by side with a profound respect, deep joy, and appreciation for the eccentricities, flaws, and complexities of human beings.
Traditional Western religions have been based on God and his laws. What abut a religion based on faith in human worth? The next step in religious history would be a religion based on human “good” or worth and grounded in humanistic and philosophical perspective, centered in “right living” today as a reward in and of itself, filled with reverence for one’s self and others.
Achieving such a “religion of the future” would not be easy because our founder, Felix Adler, realized that one wouldn’t be using old parameters of religion so it would be built philosophically and structurally from the ground up.
He drew from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called “for a new church based on moral science and moral faith.” He drew from Immanuel Kant, who stressed the centrality of ethics and practical reason that could be separated from theology. He drew from his Jewish heritage with its emphasis on social action and reform. He drew from humanist writers down through the ages.
He recognized that by founding this Ethical Culture movement and the first Ethical Society, he would be making some daring life choices. He took an unknown career path rather than retain his mainstream Jewish faith, thereby choosing to be an “outsider” rather than an “insider.” He became a creator of his faith and his life, rather than a follower. He chose the hard way–an uphill path of unfamiliarity and uncertainty.
He was constantly asked: “What is an Ethical Society?” “Are you folks heretics, intellectual elitists, rebels?” “Why make it hard on yourself?” “Why not hedge your bets and have a heaven for eternal reward, and comfort?”
And to this day we humanists, we Ethical Society members are asked these questions! Over one hundred years later–in these dark and turbulent times–we, as Adler did, can be lights for ethical living. We must come out of the dark and claim our identity or die.
Putting Ethical culture and the Ethical Society on the religious map of New York City, spreading it across America and around the world, was Adler’s dream and he did it! Over 100 years later it is our turn. Being as clear as Adler was about who we are–our unique identity–being proud of it and sharing it with others is our mandate. For forces in our society today demand that you and I step forward and claim our place in history.
For I an deeply concerned about trends in our society that are strongly counter to the well-being of all free thinkers and those concerned with the character of our national heroes and leaders.
We are surrounded by ethical/moral dilemmas constantly as this whole judicial/congressional process, our President and congress are mired in moral, mortal combat. I don’t condone Clinton’s actions with Monica Lewinsky but I think the issues are much broader than a philandering president, with regard to privacy and the right to a fair judicial process.
Our Ethical Society is the place where we can speak and act to end the destructive trends in our culture today. We say here that our faith is in honoring the worth and dignity of all, yet our country has strong groups that would deny this basic human right. The religious right attacks gays, women’s rights and other people and issues that do not fit their narrow worldviews. Yet they are ever more powerful in promoting religious views in Congress, blurring the lines between church and state.
Other destructive trends are the ever-increasing influence of materialism and consumerism that tends to obscure what is truly important in life for Americans. We have a shallow culture when appearance and wealth determines success in a human being!
These trends promote an ever-diminishing emphasis on character values, the true strength of and foundation for a successful human being. You ask kids today what constitutes success and they use a very different yardstick–money, athletic ability, career status, to just name a few.
We need heroes like baseball’s Mark McGwire, who captured our attention for his home run hitting prowess, but in his actions around his achievements he role modeled: love of family for his son, sharing of honors for his fellow athlete, forgiveness for his ex-wife by bringing her and her husband to the big game, and honoring the past by saluting Roger Maris’ family.
Outside Busch Stadium there’s a sign that says, “Superheroes are put on pedestals, but real heroes bring us up with them.” We need heroes of good character in every part of our society.
So an Ethical Society community does its work and has as its mission to give another view of life that is character-centered while demonstrating a strong faith in the power of community. Here we support each other in handling life’s unfairness and unreasonableness, its crazy tragedies and hurts.
Here we hold a faith that in community we can build a better world–one free of pollution, hunger, and violence. Today we will hear of “Domestic Violence Awareness Month” and what we can do to support this worthy cause. We must act to build a better world for all on our planet. I’m proud of our Society. I urge us to take an even stronger stand against the trends in our society that encroach on basic human rights and distort what constitutes a good human being.
We cannot be complacent in these times. We must take a stand for our unique identity as humanist beacons of light and reach out to like-minded groups, then spread the word to our families, friends, co-workers and those we meet in daily living. Be able to say with pride and confidence, “Yes, I do belong to the Ethical Society,” and “I want you to come see if it is for you.” Only then can we affirm ourselves as Ethical Culturists.
Why is this so? Because when I claim deep down inside of me–its central principle–to honor the worth and dignity of everyone including myself, I know and experience my rights and my place in this world as a person to be respected, honored and loved. And by the most difficult person of all–myself.
1. Cultural Relativity is a method that directs anthropologists to suspend judgment while investigating the beliefs and practices of peoples in other cultures. The assumption being, that base-line knowledge, as well as understanding, comes from assessing the other in light of her own environment and historical logic.
2. Cultural Relativism is the practice of this method.
I was raised in a small Mormon town in northeastern Utah. Ever since I started college, in far off southern Utah, and befriended a kid from Chicago, I have been a culturally challenged person. My formative adult years, from 17 to 50, were spent reconciling successive onslaughts of unavoidable oppositions in my life. At 17, how was I, a devout, and therefore celibate, Mormon youth, to sustain a friendship with an Irish Catholic Chicagoan, the only “foreigner” and the chief sexual activist on campus. How could I relate to Irish Chicago vs. the mass of Mormon youth, without choosing sides but also without loosing my own identity to the middle?
At 21, a missionary leader in Brazil, how could I reconcile the competitive sales strategy used to gain converts, with the radical communism I had been taught was the true order of God? Twenty-three years old, reading anthropological archaeology and studying Book of Mormon archaeology at BYU, was a fact-supported synthesis possible? One year later, 24, and a new graduate student majoring in archaeology with a bioanthropology minor at Indiana, I encountered the urgent business of emerging whole through the creation-evolution labyrinth. In that hall of smoke, genes, and mirrors, I devoted at least half-time my first year of graduate school coming to grips with the Mormon teaching on race. Each discovery doubled back on others, culture being the amazing marbled layer cake that it is.
The reconciliation of opposites was not always possible. From 17 until now, many choices were made. Despite good will, some conflicts cannot be ignored. Eventually, an anthropologist encounters the limitations of the open-mindedness of cultural relativism and begins to wonder how it really works.
In 1983 I read my first monastic literature, Thomas Merton’s Mystics and Zen Masters, a fascinating cross-cultural examination of contemplative mystical practices, where people work at the interface (reconciliation) between God (ultimate reality) and human. In 1984 I visited a Trappist monastery and met my first monk face to face. In 1990 I began looking for a monastery for ethnographic field work. By 1992 all requests had, politely, failed. In May I booked a flight to Utah to visit my octogenarian mother. I was aware of a Trappist monastery in Huntsville, possibly the quintessential Latter Day Saint town in late 20th century Mormon cosmology. I called the Abbot, explained my purpose and requested a conference.
In January, 1993, I entered Holy Trinity Abbey and did not leave the property for 30 days, the duration of an observership, the time when a would-be monk tries the community on for size, just as cloister life tests him for all to see.
The abbot assigned me to feed pregnant cows with one of the brothers and gave me a place in the choir beside a lean old rosy-cheeked brother who appeared taller than I, though he is actually a little shorter. The cow feeding brother took me, a total stranger with no pretense of becoming a monk, reluctantly, from obedience to the abbot. But I had been raised feeding cows and performing every kind of ranch job. A self-described introvert and loner, he started talking with me the first morning, as we brushed the snow from the pole fence, crawled into the stockyard, and set to work feeding bales of hay to hungry cows. We talked and laughed and shared many things non-stop for two weeks. After that the abbot granted me a fairly free reign in the enclosure, and my feeding companion prevailed on me to quit feeding cows, an all-day job in winter, so I could get acquainted with the other men, for the sake of my research. I consented, reluctantly, and he returned to silence. When I returned that spring he took me to visit the hermitage, where he goes overnight for recollection each month. When elections were held, in 1995, to choose a new abbot, he asked if I would feed cows so he could participate without them having to go hungry. As with the hermitage visit, he had secured the abbot’s consent before asking. Since then, we’ve spoken once or twice, though I have spent more than 100 days in the abbey.
On the same day that I started feeding cows, I took my place in choir. The brother who remains to this day my choir mate, greeted me with a toothy, glad smile — no obedience to the abbot required with this guy. He was glad to have me. He guided me gracefully, and in silence, as a Trappist can do, through the dozens of liturgical books, leaflets, and single sheets of paper required to participate in their daily, bi-weekly, and annual liturgical cycles.
One day after Sext, the middle prayer among the seven that make-up the daily Office of the Hours, I turned to him and whispered, “Will you teach me lectio divina?” Lectio, as monastics call it, is a kind of text-based contemplative prayer.
The next morning at 11:00 we met in the small chapel at the rear of the church. I was empty-handed, not wanting to scare him off with mixed messages about my intent to learn lectio. He carried a book by the late Karl Rahner, a Jesuit theologian who taught at the University of Innsbruck. On a piece of scrap paper he had written the word ANTHROPOLOGY vertically, in capital letters. In single words he had broken it down into its classical definition. But he had also written such words as GOD, CHRIST, EUCHARIST, and MAN. He intended to teach me the meaning of anthropology. I felt amused and amazed at the same time, and decided I would remain open.
Our formal meetings generally lasted exactly one hour. Occasional unplanned encounters, in the building where Monastery Fresh Eggs were inspected and packaged for commercial distribution, or in the tailor shop, for he worked both jobs, our discussions ran longer. Sometimes, on warm days when it was not too hot, we went for walks or met on the shaded lawn in front of the church. At rare times other lay people or a junior monk were with us. Our talks were intense, varied, but unswerving in their purpose, which was to come to a mutual understanding of the meaning of Anthropology and of Benedictine Christianity .
Slowly we became fast friends, as our discourse ranged across theology, scripture, the writings of the sitting Pope, life stories, but never a word of gossip, and the ever increasing vulnerability of mutual self-disclosure. There were regular disagreements over seemingly superficial but truly serious matters. He chided and cajoled me to forget about these prepared questions. “Get to the meat of the matter, brother!” Sometimes I got the Benedictine treatment, little notes left in my choir stall with sparely written fraternal corrections, intended to twist my thinking. I reminded him, a good Trappist imitation, firmly, unbending, that I too am under a vow of obedience to my university which had funded the research and to my professional, which held me to fairly standard research methods. Doggedly, but enjoying the hell out of each other, we persisted. I read the Pope’s “Encyclical on Evangelization,” snippets from Rahner, and a little of von Balthazar’s theology of anthropology. He talked about Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, Muslims, Mormons, Atheists, Men, Women, universal discourse, mutual respect, the nature of man, the love of Christ, the fertility of self-sacrifice, immanence, transcendence, his monastic approach to sexuality, about brotherhood, sisterhood, and humanhood. I talked with him about anthropology; its assumptions, methods, and discoveries, ranging from paleoanthropology to humanistic anthropology. With a growing history together, we can now tap into our shared discourse at an infinite number of jump-off points.
At the end of December, 1996, I took two students with me to the monastery, one to do research on power and the other on health and aging. I asked my choir mate to help out, which he did with characteristic grace. Toward the end of their stay he pulled us into a side office in the Guest House, and once again we set to work, the two young people like the proverbial privileged flies on the wall. He had come across an article written by one of the Church’s envoys to an international women’s conference in Scandinavia, in which she spoke with clarity and urgency about the need for a non-judgmental, cross-cultural discourse on the pressing humanitarian and communication issues of our time. He, in his inimitable style, set the article inside a story that contextualized it by establishing mutually understood coordinates that cut through a large potential hubris, pointing excitedly at paragraphs and phrases in the text, which I read as I talked.
Five to ten minutes into the discussion, I don’t know, it was not tape recorded, he said, and I paraphrase, “Don’t you see brother. This is anthropology. It is all about seeing Christ in the Other.” The concept, “cultural relativism,” appeared in my mind, and I spoke the words out loud, “Cultural Relativism.” I started talking, explaining the concept of cultural relativity as also the practice of cultural relativism and seeing Christ in the other meant the same thing, in our discourse. When I had finished talking and stopped for his response, he bent before me, a modest, intentional Mother Theresa of Calcutta bow, and said, “Wow. ” It was in the first days of January, 1997, he was approaching his 80th birthday and me my 50th. We tried to talk a little, but we were eager to get away from each other. I needed time, and space to process, and for taking notes, a powerful tool for maintaining balance in the field. For the field is a place where cosmologies clash, mingle, separate, recombine, and synthesize — perilous stuff for a social scientist.
This past late December into January I returned and took up the question of the meaning of seeing Christ in the other with 6 more monks. I was familiar with the term and knew quite a bit about its practice, but had never addressed it systematically. Before even tentatively suggesting that I might be on the verge of extracting convergent concepts and practices from the murky waters of anthropology and religion, I wanted to make sure that I knew where my ducks were located on a scattergram. I asked each monk the question: What meaning does the phrase, “seeing Christ in the other,” have for you? Later questions, except for routine ones to verify its place in Benedictine monasticism, were adapted to their responses, to allow me to find out what the phrase means both conceptually and as a practice.
Five of the six monks said that it did have meaning to them, though each described it quite individually. The sixth monk said that he prefers the usage, “Christian Charity,” over “seeing Christ in the other,” though he acknowledged that the two are overlapping approaches to the same thing.
One of the five monks roots the concept in scripture and in very carefully defined and codified terms. His understanding is highly intellectualized and somewhat legal and his application designed to make communication possible. His is, in social science terms, a good case of applied theory. On a scale where the intellectual understanding and practice occupy the right and mystical and spiritualized occupy the left, I would rate him quite far to the right.
The second monk integrates Old and New Testament scripture with psychological theory in his interpretation and practice. He is very Old Testament law-like in an almost zero tolerance for intolerance approach to the issue. Christ leaves no alternative but to see Christ in the other, regardless of the objective evidence available to condemn the person, as we, left to our own nature would do. In real life this monk must apply the concept well, because he is a well-used confessor for many lay people, men and women alike, and is used for the same purpose by some of the monks. He is not as far right as the first monk.
The third monk used Mother Theresa as his model to explain the phrase and its meaning, and the Rule of St. Benedict to establish its precedent as a monastic imperative. He provided examples from daily monastic life to explain how the concept, when applied as a method, enables people who live in an enclosure, a delicately balanced form of community life, to make sense out of, and otherwise mediate, conflictual situations and issues. Of the 25 men in the community, he meets the vagaries of his life with greatest equanimity, if I can be judge. I rate him as having a well-developed synthesis of the spiritual, intellectual, and applied use of the concept, though I position him just a little to the intellectualized right on a sliding scale.
The fourth monk approaches it in a radical, almost pacifistic way. He uses the term “docile,” to describe the attitude and the requirements for action that a monk must take in avoiding judgment so as to meet people where they are. This way, he can serve others without condemnation, even when faced with someone whose attitudes and behaviors are in grave violation of his own sense of goodness. In leadership roles he is able to take stands, sometimes with determined commitment in the face of stiff opposition, with but rare appearance of emotional discomfort. He is a stalwart of the community, with a reputation for contemplative silence and evenness. I rate him a little past midway between the center and the spiritualized left.
The fifth monk is my choir mate, and I’ve already described him. He is described by the other men as a mystic. He is intellectual without intellectualizing. He seems, perhaps to keep himself above the fray and connects best with the bigger picture, not the small. He is called to see the Divine, the Image of God in the Other. When this happens, we become a sacrament to each other; we have the potential of becoming Eucharist to each other. He is far left on the spiritualized side of the scale.
The sixth monk, who is wary of using the phrase “seeing Christ in the other,” prefers the usage, “Christian Charity,” because he thinks it is too much of a practical stretch to see Christ in the other when you know what is going on. Nonetheless, a monk, as with any Christian, is under edict not to judge when it comes to a person’s salvation or any of the existential and eschatological issues related to it. This is a hard-nosed man who wears leadership well, though not without interior and interpersonal conflict. He is fearless in calling men to task, and until last summer I mistook his frank, often blunt, assessments as blanket condemnations of those who crossed him. In August of 1997, however, I had occasion to travel by automobile with him for 6 days, and from that intense interaction I learned that he has a remarkable and highly developed ability to harshly criticize specific behaviors without it spilling over to a judgment of motives, value, or a man’s contribution. He is the hardest one to position, and so I would tentatively place him dead center on the scale. He appears unspiritualized and unintellectualized equally, yet he applies the concept, by a different name, with a remarkable clarity. I am sure the ones he crosses do not immediately see it that way.
All six monks agree on one thing: a monk and a Christian must develop a discipline, call it a method, that sustains an openness in relations with other individuals and groups. This is rooted in the theory that judging the human value of others, no matter how different or strange, is beyond the ability of any human to assess. Judgment is God’s, and people condemn themselves and their endeavors when they do not learn to successfully apply this. As a theory, with predictive value, they are convinced of the tangible and spiritual benefits of the approach. There is, however, no expectation of agreement, no assumption that all beliefs and behaviors are of equal value, and there is the need to act and judge in temporal matters affecting community responsibilities and individual human rights. The applied concept of seeing Christ in the other, is a theoretical construct that predictably makes for the broadest possible inclusion of humankind within one single conceptual community. In practical matters it enables inclusion, whenever this is possible, but enables separation, when this is necessary, without condemnation at the level of a person’s human identity, value, or even the logic of their position. It is possible to misapply seeing Christ in the other, by taking it too literally, as if because a person always has value it follows that what he does always has value. This creates the same conundrum that Paul Schmidt identified in assessing the behavior of Nazis, in his 1955 selective critique and exoneration of cultural relativism, reprinted in Manners and Kaplan, 1968.
Cultural relativity, it seems to me, accomplishes much the same thing, with the same pitfalls. Cultural relativism and Benedictine Christianity may seem strange bedfellows, but the convergence seems clear. Even the benefits and variety of ways in applying the two seem to describe ourselves. If, anything, however, I wonder if anthropologists are not more prone, being a newer discipline than monasticism, to apply the concept uncritically and in the process to dehumanize the people we want to understand, humanize, and elevate. One of the monks [described] St. Bernard, the greatest Cistercian, for me. He said that the hagiography of the Saint made him superhuman and, thus, unreal and unhuman. It was, he said, Bernard’s humanity that made him great. To ignore his humanity, in all its smelly parts, is to dehumanize and, in the end, to make him uncredible.
Relativity, like Christ in the other, is the indispensable methodology of anthropology, we may agree. But it is also a core predictive theory. By applying it, we have learned seemingly unlearnable things about other people. When we apply it critically, and deeply, as many anthropologists do, and as some monks endeavor to do with their own concept, we may discover that we are talking the same language as other people, at some deep cultural level.
Is this a real convergence? If yes, are there others that converge with cultural relativism? If there are, what are they? Are they common across cultures? If so, how do they vary, and how are they symbolically expressed and nuanced? If they are not common, what does this mean? Of course, in my eagerness to understand monks and to find common ground for discourse and relationship, I may have missed the mark completely, in which case I want to know, so I seek your feedback.
I invite you on a trip with me this morning, as I share some of my memories, and the teachings of others, on borders crossed. Not so much a linear progression or a well developed political analysis, this is more of a meditation, and I hope some of it resonates with you, and I hope other parts push you a little, across borders where you haven’t been.
1. The First Border
The first border I crossed was one that everyone crosses, from womb to world, from being protected from the world to setting about discovering it, from being a part of someone else to being on my own. It was the coldest November night at the end of a tumultuous decade. The taxi couldn’t make it down the hill to our house because of the ice, so my mother was pushed up the hill with me inside. I came into the world in the middle of the night at Western General Hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland. Though I remember nothing of this time, it was a difficult one for my family. My mother contracted tuberculosis, and my father fell into depression. Without moorings, we moved from Scotland, to Holland, to the States, finally setting in Iowa City, where my memories begin.
In his recent novelThe Last Song of Manuel Sendero, the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfmari describes a fantastic proposition. During the reign of the Dragon Pinchot there is a great revolt-a rebellion of the unborn. For six weeks, they hold to their rebellion and refuse to come out into the world, refuse to be born into a world of injustice. One never comes out, and he tells his grandfather, Manuel, to pass on his words to the Caballero: “TelI him, Grandfather, don’t be afraid, when we can come out into the peaceful night… without five men knocking at our door… when nobody will be born without a heart, Grandfather, [when] it’s guaranteed that you’re born with a double heart so that injustice will hurt us so much we’ll have to do away with it once and for all… tell him, Grandfather, proclaim it even if nobody listens to you… even if they call you an idealist and a romantic and a socialist and an anarchist and a stubborn dreamer, it’s worth it just to say it… it’s worth it to be faithful to the joy that conception brings, it’s worth it to love history the way other people have loved a woman or a man… Tell him he doesn’t exist, that he has all the power and none of the love, tell him we’re being born all the time.” In the end, despite the disapperances and injustice in Chile under Pinochet, Dorfman says that it’s better to be engaged in the world for all its pain. It’s better to try and change things, to create something new, to feel and to live deeply, It’s better to have a heart and be wounded than to become numb, and that being born, having the hope to bring life into this world, is in itself a political act.
2. Selective Borders
My mother came to the United States in the mid 1950s to work for a year as an au pair. Her father warned that if she left Holland, she would never come back. She said she’d be there just for a year. When the year was up, she bqan to take classes. She ended up going to nursing school, and then met my father, had a few children, and never did get back to Holland. It took the next generation to return. My sister, who is a cellist, is now a Dutch citizen and lives in Holland. My father came to the United States to do his medical residency. As a doctor, it was easier for him to get in the country than for many immigrants. When it came time for him to apply for a green card, he was given a choice. Either he could apply from outside the United States, in which case he couldn’t come in for 2 years, or he could apply from inside the US, in which case he would have been drafted right away to serve in Vietnam, because he is a psychiatrist and they needed psychiatrists. My parents disagreed with the war, and they left the country, which is why I was born in Scotland. Two years later, they were granted permanent residency and returned to settle. Though my parents did their share of hard work, they came to this country knowing English. They didn’t have to support family back home. They could have had good lives in their home countries, but the opportunity to come here presented itself and they took it.
“Crisis of identity, anxieties born of expulsion, ghosts that haunt and accuse: exile sows doubts and raises issues not necessarily faced by those who live far away by choice. The outcast cannot return to his country or to one he had taken as his own. When you’re washed up on foreign shores, your soul is bared to the storms and you lose your habitual frames of reference and shelter. The distance is greater when there is no alternative,” writes Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano, describing political exile. For the economic refugee, it’s a different situation yet. Desperate to provide for his family back home, he comes to the United States illegally, toils in our fields and meatpacking plants, sews in our sweatshops, serves us in our restaurants, and is constantly held hostage to the fear of deportation. He will never be able to call this place home. He is not wanted, except to do our dirty work. For some Central American and Caribbean countries, one of their main sources of foreign exchange is the money sent home by family members working in the United States. Why was the statue of liberty there to greet my parents, but not these? And do we have any responsibility when we have helped create some of the conditions which push people out of their countries? Supporting death squads in Central America and Haiti, prescribing neoliberal economic policies through the World Bank and NF which have widened the gap between rich and poor, presiding over a staggering transfer of resources from the South to the North through debt? What role does our country’s foreign policy play in pushing migration?
3. New Borders
In the spring of 1947, my father was part of one of the largest migrations in recent history, what he calls “the most tragic moment in the history of India.” From the age of 3, he had lived in Karachi. One of his best fiends, Ibrahim, was a Muslim. But when he was 11 years old, he boarded a freighter with his family and headed into the Arabian Sea to Jamnagar. His father stayed back to close out the business. They worried for him, since he always dressed in the simple cloth of a Hindu. My father was one of the lucky ones. Going by ship, they managed to avoid the murder, rape and torture which greeted migrants from both sides traveling by land. At least 600,000 people were massacred. Although Gandhi had pleaded for a united India, my father saw partition as inevitable and as the natural outgrowth of the British policy of divide and rule. And yet my father says that despite hatred and mistrust between Hindus and Muslims, between India and Pakistan, Indians must recognize that some of the goriest periods of Indian history were tider Muslim leadership, I grew up hearing stories about Akbar, the great Moghul emperor, and the way in which his wisest servant Birbal would trick and advise him.
In 1944, over seventeen days of conversations, Mohandas Gandhi pleaded with the president of the Muslim League, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, against the partition of India. At one point, Gandhi said: “You can cut me in two if you wish, but don’t cut India in two.” His pleas were in vain. Days before his assassination, he asked at his daily prayer meeting for each Hindu and Sikh in the audience to bring along at least one Muslim to prayers thereafter. He read from the Koran, and announced that his next journey on behalf of peace would be to Pakistan. Fifty years later it was Muslims in the Bosnian government who would argue that Sarajevo should remain an undivided city, a city for all faiths and ethnic groups, that Bosnia – Hercogovina shouldn’t be divided into ethnic Serb, Croat and Muslim enclaves. Now Ibrahim Rugova’s calls for a nonviolent solution to oppression of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo are being drowned out by militants from both sides. Must ethnic borders become national borders? Can we find a way to maintain our identity and rights within a nation of many cultures? While people should have the right to self-determination, wouldn’t we prefer to find ways build healthy multicultural nations?
4. Breaching Borders
I grew up when the nuclear age had already begun to mature and people were used to living with the bomb. Still, when the movie “The Day After” came out, every school child’s fears were raised. I was certainly more afraid of nuclear bombs than I was afraid of Russians. It didn’t matter where the bomb would come from, it could come as easily from a crazy leader or an accidental launch or a response from a US attack. The Russians weren’t the problem, I thought, the bomb makers were. In college I studied Russian, and spent the spring of 1990 in Moscow, in the late days of perestroika. It confirmed my feeling that the Russians were not our enemies, though they had managed to create a language that felt as difficult to learn as cracking a code. Even so, trust was difficult to build.
I witnessed relationships between Americans and Russians fall apart when the American accused the Russian of using them to get to the US, or of being part of the KGB. Trust is not easy to build, especially when there are inequities between the sides. I knew it was important if there were to be peace between Russia and the US to be able to understand Russians. There were many things about the Soviet system that I would never understand. On one early evening, suddenly we heard fireworks. They had already celebrated May Day and Victory in Europe Day. We wondered that they could possibly be celebrating now. We learned finally that it was National Border Guard Day. It also, by coincidence, happened to be the third anniversary of the date when German Mathias Rust piloted his Cessna into Red Square, managing to escape detection from the Soviet military, Perhaps the Border Guards had been so busy celebrating, that they didn’t notice this breach of their border.
Governments create borders of fear between their nation and so-called enemy nations. During the Cold War, it seems that many more Americans bought the US propaganda about Russia than Russians buying Soviet propaganda about us. Russians knew their press wasn’t free. They knew their government didn’t have their interests in mind, and they didn’t trust what was told to them. While many Americans opposed Red Scare tactics, a larger percentage bought it, because they believed that we live in the freest nation on earth. The late Martha Gellhorn, a journalist who covered wars from the Spanish Civil War to the wars in the 80s in Central America, writes: “After a lifetime of war-watching, I see war as an endemic human disease, and governments are the carriers, Only governments prepare, declare and prosecute wars. There is no record of hordes of citizens, on their own, mobbing the seat of government to clamor for war. They must be infected with hate and fear before they catch war fever. They have to be taught they are endangered by an enemy, and that the vital interests of the state are threatened. The vital interests of the state, which are always about power, have nothing to do with the vital interests of the citizens, which are private and simple and are always about a better life for themselves and their children. You do not kill for such interests, you work for them.”
5. Crossed by the Border
A few years ago, I visited a friend in Tijuana. He worked in Tijuana for about six years at the YMCA, where they operated a Home for Migrant Youth and were part of a coalition monitoring rights along the border. He took me to the Mexican side of the border at night. An eerie quiet hung over the area. Hot search lights shined upon the small Tijuana River. He explained that what we couldn’t see was the command center of the Border Patrol where they used infrared technology to search for people crossing illegally and where they took people they found and sometimes interrogated and beat them. What I could see were a few vendors who were there to sell the last meals in Mexico to people trying to cross.
Roberto Martinez, the director of the U.S. Mexico Border Program for the American Friends Service Committee in San Diego describes his life in struggle as a Chicano. He says, “My great, great grandparents came from Texas and they lived there before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed. In other words like we say a lot ‘we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.’ They broke the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo right from day one. Lands were taken away, people were chased into Mexico. As settlers swept across the country they took away land, took over mines, took over everything. We basically ended up, our people, my great grandparents, more like indentured servants working for people on the land that they used to own.” While NAFTA makes it easier for capital and merchandise to cross the border, the militarization of the border is making it more difficult for people to cross. For the first time since 1848, when the war with Mexico ended, we now have U.S. troops face to face with Mexican troops on the border. The INS has conducted exercises for its “enhanced border control plan” in the event that the Mexican economy completely collapses. Practiced in the desert with advice from the Pentagon, they rehearse for rounding up immigrants into temporary collection points of fenced-in corrals and identify prisons, county jails and military bases where they could detain and question immigrants who refuse to return immediately. Free trade, free markets, and fenced-in people.
6. An Illegal Border Crossing
This past December, I traveled to Iraq with a group called Voices in the Wilderness. I spoke about this trip at the Adult Forum here in February. I traveled there in direct violation of US laws, which requires State Department approval for US citizens traveling to Iraq. While there, our group delivered $40,000 worth of medicine to a children’s hospital in Baghdad, in direct violation of the economic blockade of the country, which requires licenses for the distribution of essential food and medicine and which prevents Iraq from buying and selling except in the very controlled framework of the Food for Oil Deal. I went because I wanted to see for myself what the conditions were under the sanctions and be able to report on those conditions back in the US. I also went to try and be a good will emissary from the United States, to be able to say to Iraqis who were suffering, that I stood with them and not with my government, or their government, that I didn’t think it was right for the innocent people to be put in the middle of this situation, Like I had found in Russia, the Iraqis immediately understood this. They themselves said, time after time, that they had no problem with the American people, that they saw us as brothers and sisters, that it was the US government’s policy, though, that was killing them.
And I saw the sorts of people our policies were killing: Alla Hammad, a three year old with leukemia, was hooked up to a monitor which would continually emit high pitched beeps. The doctor said she could die at any moment. Radiation therapy, available in Iraq before the Gulf War, has now ceased because of sanctions. Three year old Hattan Karim was suffering from kwashiorkor, acute malnutrition, which had been unknown in Iraq for decades before sandions. Ali was a 45 day old newborn with pneumonia, the smallest child I’ve ever seen. His mother was strikingly beautiful and I sat with her and looked at her tiny baby, which she would rotate into a defective incubator every once in awhile. Five month old Sara Karem, weighed less than half of normal body weight. Her father had glaucoma, for which there was no treatment available. Mustafa Azawi, a young boy with leukemia, clutched his finger, which was black from gangrene. They didn’t even have the facilities to amputate his finger to stop the spread of the gangrene because they didn’t have enough sutures, anesthesia, blood and IV bags, and other instruments to conduct regular surgery. And in this in a country which had the most sophisticated public health care system in the Arab world before 1990. As I talk about these children I saw six months ago, I wonder how many of them are still alive.
One of the first things we did after crossing the border back into Jordan, was to call the US Embassy in Amman to request a meeting. The Jesuit priest in our group made the phone call. They said that they were short staffed because it was around New Year’s and they wouldn’t be able to meet with us. So Simon told them briefly of our concerns about what we had seen, of the lack of food and medical care, and the disrepair of the infrastructure, caused by the sanctions. He then said that we were aware that our trip was in direct violation of a travel ban and the sanctions, and he asked the man to write down our names. He carefully spelled out the names of the five of us and said: “Write them down and say that we violated the sanctions, because when the Day of Judgment comes, our names will be written in the book.”
For me, crossing borders is at the heart of what peace work is, going to the other side to meet the enemy face to face. Sometimes that enemy is another nation, sometimes just an individual, or it could be people of a particular race, ethnicity or religion. Most of the time, I think, we realize that the biggest enemies are fear and prejudice. Crossing these boundaries forces us to confront these fears and then, hopefully, set about the more productive work of defining where true differences or inequities lie and trying to right them.
It was only two months after I was in Iraq that papers were carrying the Pentagon’s plans for bombing. And now I had been there and I bad met people who might have been killed or maimed in such a bombing. I had seen results of the previous war, the Amiriyah Shelter which was hit by two precision guided missiles on February 12, 1991, killing hundreds of civilians, I talked to Um Reyda, who lost 9 family members in that bombing. I saw the health effects of bombed sewage and water treatment facilities and of Depleted Uranium, What interests could I have that would be served by more of this? Many people will call me naive, but what did one war, pinprick bombings and sanctions accomplish? Democracy in Kuwait? A free Kurdistan? A stable Middle East? To be sure, UNSCOM has had success in ridding Iraq of some of its weapons of mass destruction, but without a
corresponding attempt to demilitarize the region, this is a fleeting victory-unless we plan to keep starving the Iraqis for the foreseeable future.
The structural reasons that have caused instability have not been addressed. For instance, one of Iraq’s aims in both fighting the 8 year war against Iran and invading Kuwait was to get unimpeded access to the Persian Gulf. Four days after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, US Ambassador Thomas Pickering asked the Jordanian ambassador to pass on a message to the Iraqi government: “We acknowledge your need for an opening to the Gulf, and the issue of access to the islands (Warba and Bubiyyl) is one that we could look on favorably.” The issue has yet to be resolved.
7. The Borders of Identity
I’ve been arrested on several occasions (mostly for things I’m proud of), and automatically, the police officer marks W under race. They ask me to check over the information, and I say, I’m not white. What are you, they ask? I’m half Asian and half European. We don’t have a category for that. You have to be one or the other. Can I be Other? Nope, we don’t have an Other category either. So the conversation goes back and forth. Why don’t you have a category for Other? Why can’t you mark both White and Asian? Am I supposed to choose between my mother and father? Eventually, they choose one or the other, and the charges get dropped in less time than it takes to figure out what my race is. Several years ago, I went to the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, a week long gathering out in the woods of women only. I found myself in this discussion group of biracial women, talking about our experiences. There were some similarities, there were some nice people there, but for the most part we had very different experiences, and I didn’t feel like I connected automatically with them because they were biracial women. And I thought, I don’t need to segregate myself like this. How much better to find people I have common values and common interests with.
There is an enormous need for people to categorize themselves and others. For those who fall between the cracks, this is difficult, whether it be biracial people, bisexual, androgynous or transgendered people. Many people, especially those who have been oppressed on the basis of their race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, base much of their identity on their “otherness.” This is understandable for people’s whose lives have been about struggle. But it is the people in the crack who can hopefully crack open the conventional notions of race, gender and sexuality that, as Maria Root points out “have been constructed in the eye of the beholder of power.” She further writes: “There are different ways of experiencing, negotiating, and reconstructing the border between races [which] have implications for thinking about borders in similarly co-constructed dualities of masculine versus feminine and heterosexual versus homosexual identities… Many of us bring with us multiple perspectives, multiple loyalties, and an optimism that we can transcend race in our discussions of similarities and differences… Whereas Du Bois insightfully forecast that the problem of the 20th century would be the color line, my hope is that the boundaries among and between races will be the new frontier for changing the direction and structure of race relations as we begin the new millennium.” Struggles based on separatism or a biological essentialism just reproduce the structures which gave rise to oppression. We must look for allies among every category of people, and we must not assume that just because someone has the same skin color or reproductive organs as ourselves, that they are committed to overcoming oppression and prejudice.
8. Borders at Home: The City and The County
When I first moved to St. Louis, my mother told me not go into Forest Park alone. Ever. All through my first year of college, I obeyed her, and then summer came and I felt like exploring, and there was the park, big and beautiful, full of people running and playing sports, the peaceful lakes to sit by, museum treasures to explore. And I did. Next I was told not to go north of Delmar. It was actually written in a student handbook, that one should not look for apartments north of Delmar in the hp. But that’s where the cheapest apartments were, so I moved there, and lived for six years in the neighborhood, helping to start a neighborhood organization and community gardens. I loved living in the Loop, Then about two years ago, I started organizing a housing cooperative. We came up with a name, a vision statement, a development plan, we incorporated, looked at other models and began searching for a building. We finally found one of a suitable size and price for sale in the Fox Park Neighborhood, near Jefferson and Russell. All excited, I talked to a friend of mine who warned that he had lived in that neighborhood for a month, and then he and his wife moved because they felt it was too dangerous. We bought the building, and the empty lot next door for a garden, and have been living there while we rehab it. Slowly we are getting to know some of the neighbors. I was talking to the woman across the street, who confessed that she can’t remember my name because everyone refers to me as “Friendly Jane.” She asked what exactly we were doing and I explained briefly the idea of the coop, to live in community with others, to share meals, and she said: “You probably don’t even see me as Black, do you? I’ve lived here for 17 years and I ain’t seen nothin’ like it.”
While going to Iraq may be difficult for most St. Louisans, going into the city is not. For me, it’s become a moral imperative to live in the city. We live in an increasingly divided region, divided by race and class! The disparities are striking, In St. Charles County, the fastest growing county in the metro region, 98.2% of the residents are white. 72% own their own homes, 75% earn over $25,000 a year. In St. Louis City, one of the fastest declining population centers in the US, 51% of the residents are white, 38% own their own home, and only 40% earn over $25,000 a year. Over half of young people in St. Louis City grow up in poverty. As the population spreads out, providing services to city residents becomes more of an issue. Bus fares are about to go up, and many city residents rely on buses to get them from their homes to new jobs in the county. The infant mortality rate has seen a sharp rise since Regional Hospital closed. As suburban style housing takes up more and more land, older city brick homes go to waste. In a striking turn about, there are areas in the city which are more spacious and quieter than in the county since they’ve been abandoned. As we become more segregated by race and class, we lose perspective. We have trouble really envisioning what people’s lives are like. We live in different realities that become harder to bridge. Over the past two months, I’ve lived without a car in the inner city and that has changed my perspective about as much as traveling to Iraq did. I’ve started to realizing the great amount of planning that comes with relying on public transportation, the restrictions on freedom, the difficulty shopping. And yet, I’ve also enjoyed the camaraderie that comes with riding the bus and Metrolink. If more car owners would ride the bus, we could get rid of some of the transportation problems this city faces.
When people talk about racism or classism, they usually seem to be talking about overt cases of bigotry, of racial slurs and racist jokes, denial of jobs or promotion to ethnic minorities. But racism and classism in this city is not primarily perpetuated by out and out bigots. They are perpetuated by people like you and me. People who move to the county because they want their children to go to a better public school, People who want to live in a neighborhood where they’ll feel safe, and they think they’ll find that in the county. These aren‘t bad things, of course, they are everybody’s concerns. But when 300,000 people who have the means all leave the city in 25 years, the result is a huge redistribution of resources, a pulling out of investment, a reduction of services, an increase in poverty, a defunding of schools. It’s going to take a huge migration back into the city, a huge crossing of the border between suburb and city, in order to turn things around. The city can continue to offer its tax breaks to companies, to build stadiums for sports teams, but this won’t keep investment where it matters. It is going to take people investing in residential neighborhoods, maintaining their property, getting involved in their neighborhood associations, and living in racially and economically diverse areas, for things to really change. Otherwise that border between city and county will loom larger than the border between the US and Canada and be much harder to cross.
9. Psychological Borders
The border I keep bumping up against is fear. I was told not to go to Russia because I’ll have nothing to eat. I was told that the best that could happen to me by going to Iraq was spending 10 years in prison–the worst, death, of course. I’ve been told I’ll get raped or attacked by living in the city and by walking at night. I’ve been told that the omnipotent IRS will give me no peace by resisting to pay war taxes. These fears are not totally without basis, though I think the likelihood of getting killed in a car accident probably tops all the others, and nobody’s telling me not to drive. Fear is a method of social control. Eduardo Galeano, in his address to the hundreds of artists who stood against the Chilean dictatorship, says: “We say no to fear. No to the fear of speaking, of doing, of being. Visible colonialism forbids us to speak, to do, to be. Invisible colonialism, more efficient, convinces us that one cannot speak, cannot do, cannot be. Fear disguises itself as realism: to prevent realism from becoming unreal, or so claim the ideologists of impotence, morals must be immoral… To say no to the suicidal egotism of the powerful, who have converted the world into a vast barracks, we are saying yes to human solidarity, which gives us a universal sense and confirms the power of a brotherhood that is stronger than all borders and their guardians.”
As I’ve worked to confront these fears, I realize that what I fear more is being on the wrong side, of contributing to injustice and war. What I fear more is living a boring, humdrum life, empty of meaning and purpose. What I fear is getting too comfortable and too complacent. I hope that life will keep pushing me on into unexpected territories.
And so, as this meditation comes to a close, I’ll argue for borders which are easily crossed, borders of shifting sands, and changing names, borders that are difficult to define, borders that can hold in some kind of identity and culture and yet not exclude, as in the desert. Michael Ondaatje, a novelist of Dutch descent who grew up in Sri Lanka, writes: “The desert could not be claimed or owned-it was a piece of cloth carried by the winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East. Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember…. I was walking not in a place where no one had walked before but in a place where there were sudden, brief populations over the centuries–a fourteenth century army, a Tebu caravan, the Senussi raiders of 1915. And in between these times–nothing was there. When no rain fell the acacias withered, the wadis dried out… until water suddenly reappeared fifty or a hundred years later.” And a new oasis sprung up around it.
Imagine the day you turn 45 — or have turned 45 for some of us — as the infancy of a new life. Sounds odd but a woman 50 today and free o cancer and heart disease can expect to see her ninety-second birthday. Forty or fifty more years can stretch out ahead for many of us.
Aging then, has become a longer, more fluid process in the nineties, but our hearts and minds have not caught up with our dramatic life expectancy! Society has a life plan to the mid sixties, but what about beyond? Where’s the plan for those years? I need to know more!
For a long time, I have wanted to come to an understanding about aging. No one ever explained to me how this most basic process of life would occur! Aging was not real for me until my mid thirties when I looked in the mirror and saw my first wrinkle. I thought I certainly was seeing things, for aging happened to everyone else — not me.
I remember a slight sense of panic and a rush of denial. A wave of rationalization came next — maybe I just needed more sleep or a better moisturizer. I’m too young for this to occur! So what that everybody grows older — there must be a way out of this one!
Well, twenty years later I haven’t found one. In fact, I have had to deal with ever increasing signs of aging and I have bravely tried to cope with “each new wrinkle.” — if you will pardon the pun — of the aging process. Indeed, aging signs have been part and parcel of my past two decades, and they usually come to you and to me with no notice, don’t they?
ll of the sudden without warning, you can’t read the small print in the phone books, your clothes mysteriously don’t fit, and certain peculiar aches and pains occur out of the blue! Some days my mind jumps out of bed while my bones and rest of my body think it over. And then friends, relatives, and members die and the facts of aging really face you down. You notice you read the obituaries more often!
Some days I find myself studying the obituary page with more than passing interest, as if the ages of the deceased carry a clue to my destiny. No wonder I laughed out loud when I saw the New Yorker cartoon showing a man reading the obituary page on which the headlines over the death notices say: “Two Years Younger Than You.” “Twelve Years Older Than You.” “Exactly Your Age.” “Five Years Your Senior.” “Your Age on the Dot.”
Many have written about aging and the passing of time. Ecclesiastes says: “There is a time to be born and a time to die.” Plutarch said: “Be ruled by time, the wisest counselor of all.” Benjamin Franklin warned: “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time.” Dylan Thomas wrote: “Do not go gently into the night!”
Some write with humor. Eda LeShan — “It’s better to be over the hill than under it!” Gypsy Rose Lee — “I have everything I had ten years ago, only it’s a bit lower.”
Some write with humor. Judith Viorst says in one of her poems:
It’s hard to be devil-may care
When there are pleats in your derriere.
It’s hard to surrender to sin
While trying to hold your stomach in.
Then there are the jokes about aging:
“You know you’re getting older when the person you sleep with refers to your water bed as the Dead Sea.”
“Middle age is when you finally get it all together and you can’t remember when you put it.”
Trite sayings about aging abound:
“You’re not getting older — you’re getting better.” I say,
“Better at what?” “Better than whom?”
“Fifty isn’t old — for a tree! Very funny.”
Some say we must see ourselves aging gracefully. Clearly an oxymoron — just try getting out of bed on a cold day! I must confess — I am aging disgracefully — at times complaining, moaning — noting each new wrinkle and gravity drop.
I remember reading the feminist literature in past times where they said: “Welcome aging — and there’s power and nobility in being the older female. We should view ourselves like fine wines, better with age.” Amen to that I said — just so it isn’t me! What a great idea for other women.
But inevitably we do age and new concerns develop. The truth is aging is at times quite difficult for us! We gain weight, wrinkles and potbellies, while we lose hair, body flexibility, endurance, energy and teeth! And time — well in the supreme irony of life — time seems to speed up while we are slowing down. We say, where did the time go?
Yes, aging gracefully as a concept, seems amusing and outrageous at times, but we are growing older and with any luck we can, with many of the current medical advances, overcome some of our physical issues. But what about our mental changes? For those of us who do not consider ourselves beautiful or handsome, and relied and counted on how smart we are — what towering intellects — what academic achievers we can say about ourselves! It’s a great leveler when the mind starts to slip like everything else, as mine did. Last week, I found myself standing in my walk-in clothes closet with my cordless phone in my hand with not a clue as to why I was there! Yet these moments — although exasperating — don’t reflect the real good health and mental strength that I truly have in my fifties and those around me in their sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties.
Yet I know I am aging far better than past generations — yet I wonder why. It’s hard for my generation, which is aging so well, to celebrate its achievements regarding age. We are, in fact, the healthiest, fittest, longest-lived people in history. We’re an astonishing experiment in species-wide self-improvement, a phenomenal mammal whose life span has nearly tripled in the blink of an evolutionary eye.
Let me explain: according to the National Institute on Aging, in 1900 the average American was dead by age forty-nine; fifty was considered old age, and only one person in ten survived to sixty-five, which was thought of then as extreme old age. But today, if you’re fifty, you can expect to live an additional thirty-three years (incidentally, thirty-three was just about the whole human life span in 1400), and if you’re sixty right now, chances are you have a quarter of a century left. Think how astounding this is. In less than a hundred years, the average life expectancy has increased by well over 50 percent. What’s more, in today’s world the longevity prognosis for older people is even better than it is for babies. In other words, the longer you live, the longer you will live. The average infant born in 1995 has a life expectancy of seventy-five, but those of us who have made it to middle age — and who manage to avoid addictive substances and random gunfire — will more than likely survive well beyond that!
Yet we don’t celebrate and appreciate the great age we live in. We fight age, and as a society we do not respect or revere it. Internalized attitudes about youth being better and old worse are rooted deep in our psyche and our society’s persona. Standards of beauty and attractiveness reign, that either directly or indirectly scorn or reflect the “aging with grace and dignity” ideal.
Where do these attitudes come from? When we were young, we internalized dreadful ideas about old people. As a kid — let’s face it — fifty was old. My own Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa were viewed by me as old by their middle years, and these ideas, I believe, are still our mental measuring stick for our own aging. Thus we don’t think well of the age group we’re in now as we pass into the fifties and beyond.
Psychologist Ellen Laugh says that when she constructed consciousness raising experiences to improve the physical and mental capacities of elderly people, the greatest obstacle she had to overcome “were the premature cognitive commitments about old age that people make in their youth!”
In Letty Pogrebin’s book: “We live in a society that places high premiums, on beauty and often reduces every woman to her appearance and men to being physically strong.”
Studies confirm this: Rutgers University psychologist Jeannette Haveland’s study of adolescent girls found: “being attractive at the top of average female’s concerns from age ten on.”
The Oregon Research Institute study of youths found “girls as young as twelve to be in a serious state of depression because of their negative body image.” This is why bulimia and anorexia are illnesses connected to this belief.
Tandem to that has been the growth of the “youth” culture, and beauty as ideal has lead to a boom in the cosmetics industry, with such products as age defying cream. Men too have joined the pursuit of youth. Men account for 28% of facial plastic surgery done in this country.
Arthur Marwich, a British professor and expert on beauty, claims physical attractiveness is more important today in terms of how a person feels successful than any time since the Renaissance.
For women it’s a lifelong psychological problem because the desire to be beautiful runs deep in the psyche; also because it is rooted in the tender praise of our parents who placed value on pretty girls, and irrigated by male admiration, we can become buried beneath the top soil of our society’s beauty propagandists.
We struggle with authenticity and artificiality as our bodies age. We ask ourselves these questions: Do I have worth if I am not attractive? What price would I pay to stay young? Plastic surgery? Where do I draw the line and accept my body the way it is?
Facing aging means — letting go of high beauty and handsomeness standards that define who we think we are — our success as human beings. We need to relax and deal with the basic challenges of aging!
Each stage of aging is difficult and unique. Each stage of aging for all of us has different challenges and possibilities:
- Childhood — Our challenge is to master physical world and begin formal education, “deal with being too little or young.”
- Adolescence — Our challenge relates to body changes, intellectual pursuits, autonomy from parents, continuing education, and social skills.
- Twenties — Our challenge lies in career preparation and success, mate finding, and family founding.
- Thirties — Our challenge is to create a solid base for family, career, and financial success.
- Forties — Our challenge lies in dealing with signs of aging showing up, more body changes, children leaving home.
- Then what I call the harvest years arrive.
- Fifties and sixties — Mid century mark hits us, we may have dependent parents. We are not climbing the hill of life; we are on top or heading over. Retirement, medical issues surface as we approach these years.
- Seventies on — Many of us are financially secure. Yet we worry, do we have enough for retirement? We may still be taking care of dependent parents. The fifties on provide the master test for creatively engaging aging.
The fact is no plan has been prescribed by society for these years other than retirement However, each stage of life asks us to rise to its challenges! At each stage, attitude is everything! At each stage, we have common laws of living that can help us!
Experts in gerontology make a clear distinction between passive aging and successful aging. To engage in successful aging you have to make a career choice at each stage. Your job is to revive and maintain your life energy as you age. People who have a positive outlook about the future and marshal their energy to engage that future, live longer. We need new ambitions, interests, and passions. The decision to renew ourselves from the sixties on, requires a real investment of faith, risk, and physical discipline.
Here’s a good story about attitude: Two women turn seventy years old. One “knows” that her life is coming to an end and starts winding up her affairs. The other decides to take up mountain climbing. For the next twenty-five years, she devotes herself to this new adventure in mastery. Now in her nineties, Hulda Crooks has become the oldest woman to ascend Mount Fuji. It’s not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what these events mean.
When Eric Ericson and his wife Joan were in their eighties, they co-authored a book, Vital Involvement in Old Age. They said:
“The life cycle does more than extend itself into the next generation. It curves back on the life of an individual allowing … a re-experiencing of earlier stages in a new form. Like climbing a mountain, it’s finding something vital and important for you to write on the blank slate of your life.”
We need a new ambition or purpose that we grasp passionately! For Jimmy Carter it was being ready to drop everything and offer his skills as a political wise man to mediate world conflicts. For many grandparents it is caring for and supporting their grandchildren, some financially support and see them through college or others take them into their homes to raise. For others it’s climbing mountains, running marathons, working on a Ph.D., or painting — volunteer work that makes a difference. Finding your passion is imperative as we age. Society has no script — we must write it!
At eighty-eight, William Fulbright, founder of Fulbright scholarships and former chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, wore a button — “Aged to Perfection.” I would say aging to perfection for as the years fly by, the world presents us with a rich cornucopia of events, interests, and opportunities. Are we going to say, “We’re too old for that,” or are we going to create our own Mount Fuji experience?
Thus we see ourselves “as a work in progress!” With that attitude I see many wonderful things to do and be: caring about loved ones and oneself, deep friendships, and meaningful work; appreciating solitude, nature, and reading and writing — all ways to experience life intensely.
Aging gracefully appeals to me and with luck and strong intuition we can grow smarter and stronger and more creative in the process of life as we are engaging aging. My experiences can benefit others as they age.
- The challenge for us is to maintain control, confidence, and a sense of humor in the face of creeping or galloping body and mental changes! Face each day anew, using all the modern technology we know about aging such as vitamins, exercise, stress management, and other means to support our aging well.
- Maintaining a strong sense of dignity and self-worth in the face of the “youth culture” orientation of our culture is essential.
- Experiencing a sense of hope and joy and acceptance in the face of mortality and death. Developing the ability to see it as yet another part of life’s process.
Although death is inevitable, the way we age is not!
First, by maintaining the discipline of daily mental exercise. Maintaining the spiritual discipline of forgiving and forgetting others and enriching the lives of those around you. Maintaining physical discipline — getting those bones moving even when we don’t want to is essential.
Second, by cherishing where we’ve been — both in terms of the good and the bad experiences of life. We can let go of the bitterness and anger that can age us quickly.
Third, viewing life with no regrets, for our life history can’t be altered. Strive to live in the present and accept our physical limitations. (No Boston Marathon for me!) Value what we have and keep ourselves open to learning and new experiences. Our river of life will flow joyously and we will cherish the future with all its uncertainties for its sweet unfolding of life events.
Fourth, by being part of an Ethical Society Community where shared experiences of aging with others can help us and where the deeper values of life such as “honoring the worth and dignity of each individual” (no matter what their age) are cherished and experienced. Aging alone is tragic — aging in community is revitalizing.
Now I reap the harvest of my years before. Grandchildren — springing up like flowers — number seven on the way. A loving marriage and a beautiful home and work that is deeply satisfying and gives me the opportunity to creatively engage aging.
Yes! Living well can be the best revenge.
As we pass through the fifties, sixties, seventies and on:
- Let self-denial up till now become self-indulgence as we travel on down the path of life.
- Let us pursue our chosen delights and relish special moments.
- Let us have new experiences that enrich the mind, such as travel, new interests and hobbies, or service to others.
Willa Cather, the writer, saw the task of every life to be to fashion an existence that would free the expressive self, so that we focus on marking our moments instead of focusing on time running out. The present never ages. Each moment is unique and filled with possibilities. Each moment is an opportunity to love or be loved. Life purposes then seem clear: To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth!
If every day then is an awakening of love and self, we never grow old — we just keep growing!
The Millennium is a human artifact and we can make what we want of it: Computer gridlock, the Return of Christ, the rise of the Beast from the Abyss, an alien/earthling encounter, big time party time, or a time to take stock. I’m choosing the last, and asking for a check-up on Ethical Culture. What’s the diagnosis on our growth potential?
NUMBERS
When we face it without denial, the answer is a shocker. Our growth potential over 120 years had been almost nil. Compared with other religious bodies that date from the 19th century, we are minuscule. Consider some comparisons:
- Unitarians (1825) — 1,000 churches; 140,000 members
- Mormons (1830) — 4-6 million members, 10 million globally
- Seventh Day Adventists (1844) — 775,000, with schools and hospitals worldwide. (One of my children was born in an SDA hospital in Guyana.)
- Ethical Culture (1876) — 20 societies; 3,000 members
- Jehovah’s Witnesses (1878) — 700,000 members
- Christian Science (1879) — 2,400 churches. No membership figures since 1936, when they claimed 250,000 members.
There are contemporary churches that could hold all of Ethical Culture — active members, shut-ins, friends — in one morning service! What may help us deny this colossal failure is that our top five Societies are thriving, and any denomination would be proud to have any one of them as a flagship in their area. But even they don’t show much growth over a test period of, say, 25 years. In 1977, St. Louis had 452 members, and in 1993, 430 members.
And there is little proliferation: In 10 years, Alder’s movement spread from New York to Chicago to Philadelphia to St. Louis. St. Louis (and the Statue of Liberty) date from 1886. In the 110 years since, there has not been one satellite in the vast mid-west. On the map, we find one 500-strong dot in St. Louis, in a Metropolitan area of 2 1/2 million, and one 100-strong dot in Chicago, in a Metropolitan area of 8 1/2 million. And that’s it! We don’t care enough to share enough. Or have what it takes.
The Ethical Movement has failed to claim more than a handful of people in a century of history. The issue has been addressed repeatedly by many of our thinkers and marketers. Adler tried in 1925. We sometimes claim that our message is a hard one, with no blandishments and religious comforts. We say it’s rarefied and doesn’t appeal to the masses. The latest twist is that the Meyers-Briggs cohort most characteristic of us is a minority group in the larger population. Of course, a lot depends on what we mean by a hard message. Ours is, comparatively, not hard in its requirement of commitment and discipline. My family once lived two doors from a family of Mormons, their eldest daughter a good friend of one of our daughters. We would see them driving their children to church school weekday mornings before taking them to high school! We took their daughter with us to Barbados for a vacation, and she had a Mormon church available to attend on the Sunday we were there. Further, in a recent survey of church giving, Mormons topped the list with 7% of their income, the Unitarians drew bottom place with 1%. Ethical Culturists give less than Unitarians, but were not listed.
Why, some ask, should we consider numbers important? They are not important, if you are part of a small group with a high profile of influence: A Fabian Society, a literary group at the Algonquin Hotel, or one of the famous salon groups that met in the Paris of Victor Hugo. They needed to be small. But we claim to be a religion to help all humanity live lives of greater compassion and justice. We have hardly made a dent. Numbers are important because we need to cross a certain critical mass, a certain threshold of membership, to have the resources to do outreach, to create organizations (schools, hospitals, retirement homes, camps), to produce publications. Even if we limit our mission statement to being educational, we have little to show for that.
And there is the matter of intensity. We dismiss those who get worked up about an eternal salvation or damnation. We supposedly have a more real and relevant message. But there is no urgency to it. Our kids are not going to devote 2 years post-high school to take it to the ends of the earth — or even to the corner of the block. We don’t have a hospital in Guyana or a church in Barbados on our outreach agenda.
WHY?
I have a controversial theory as to why we have gone nowhere. It does not address strategies for growth, or marketing technology. It has to do with message. I believe that where rational humanism preponderates, there is no message for people at large. Those who embrace it as their predominating culture, become an intellectual ghetto.
This is not because rational humanism is bad in itself. I count myself a rationalist. I count myself a humanist. I bring a sizable skepticism to my processing of life, religion, and philosophy. But rationalism is inadequate by itself. It has no metaphysic of meaning, no cosmic consciousness to convey, no message of hope for those who suffer and mourn and are afraid. Despite the enormous and earth-transforming influence of modern science, from which rational humanism draws its Weltanschauung, rationalists have not been able to translate that worldview into an encompassing, morally transforming faith that teaches us a meaningful way to face life and tragedy and death, and to deal with the passages of life. The kind of thing that religion has provided.
A NEW QUEST
Some years ago I took a large share in our search for common philosophical ground among our Leaders. We produced a concept-map of Ethical Culture. Now I would call for a new quest: To build a
metaphysic or alternative metaphysics based on Adler’s insights into reality. To do
philosophy in the arena where Adler said it belonged: In face of sin, sorrow, and
suffering.
I think we are afraid to do this for two reasons: (1) Because we are
not sure that the mental grid of our prevailing philosophy will allow us to achieve validity in
any other way than by scientific processing; and (2) Because anything that smacks of the transcendent and the metaphysical and the spiritual evokes such a knee-jerk opposition from the rationalists among us, still fighting Ingersoll’s 19th century battles, that we back away. But I believe that while rationalism prevails, Ethical Culture is going nowhere. Rationalism can debunk New Agers and Fundamentalists, but it has no answer to the major questions of life and death. It sees us as little more than cheerleaders for a good life (on which we have no monopoly), on our way to extinction.
I will not enlarge on the failures of rationalism. Suffice it to say, that (1) Freud noted that much reasoning is the rationalizing of feelings, that (2) reason is but one of the “7 kinds of smart” (Thomas Armstrong) that characterize human personality, that (3) the primal experiences (as Whitehead claimed) are emotional, that (4) thinking needs creative non-logical leaps to advance (as Edward de Bono and others have shown), and that (5) science, so successful elsewhere, is still lagging in helping us to develop our higher powers, to shape our cultural evolution, and to understand the role of imagination and religion in human survival.
What I am working on is an Ethical Culture metaphysic for the 21st century. And this means going forward. In the late 1940’s just before his death, Horace Bridges, a prolific writer on behalf of our ethical faith, claimed (in The Standard, 1949) that Ethical Culture was formed as an alternative within religion, not as an alternative to religion, and that the succeeding generation of Leaders had betrayed that purpose. He closed his article with a return to theistic faith: Credo in unum deum. Henry Neumann countered by saying that Adler had always allowed a diversity of philosophical positions. For myself, I do not want to turn back, as Bridges did, but I think he is right that Adler’s philosophical position has gotten the shortest shrift among us.
Adler broke away from a monotheistic concept of God, broke away from creation and immortality as thus grounded, broke away from the religion of a God modeled on the V.I.P.’s of patriarchal times (king, judge, general, patriarch), and sought to democratize the concept of reality: To each, respect and encouragement; from each, their best — so that the whole may thrive. He posited a universal unity, encompassing each individual in their unique particularity. A network not broken by death! (More on this later.)
MENTAL GRIDS
To approach such a reality, we need to recognize, as Beatrice Bruteau said in The Psychic Grid, that we all belong to “conviction” or “consensus communities”, formed by the Mental Grids by which we process reality. To move forward we need to take a look at our mental grids.
I start with William James:
“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”
Consider two testimonies, to enlarge on James’s assertion, and to illustrate the shift in mental grid that I am promoting.
(A) My wife Karen had told me of an incident in her life, in which she found her way through a blizzard. This was before I met her. I asked her to write up the incident for me. Here it is:
It was the last week in November 1961, I was 6 months pregnant and only had a Springer Spaniel for company.
I had moved to New Hampshire in Sept. 1960, had never been north in the state. Was asked to join my husband on a hunting trip. Followed him several days later driving independently. Stayed for 3 days and then came home with my following him in his car. We were returning by the same route I took going up. It began to snow heavily. At an intersection just outside of Laconia on Lake Winnipeasaukee I lost sight of his car, but assumed he’d kept to the right. (In actuality the route we were taking veered to the left.) The snow got heavier, and heavier. There was almost no visibility. It was past 5:00 p.m., and, with early evenings that far north and the blizzard, I could only see an indentation, which was the side of the road. I kept my eyes on that indentation so that I wouldn’t move into the ditch. I felt that I just had to keep going until I could get to a village, or spot another traveler. I saw no one else on the road, passed no villages and had no idea where my husband was, or where I was going. I just knew that to stop would strand me and be life threatening. I drove for a little over 3 hours. At last I saw on each side of the road tall hedges. I thought to myself at last I’ve found some place to stop. I had, it was my own front yard! The drive, in normal conditions, would have taken a little over an hour. I have no idea what roads I traveled. I had seen no signs. It was a different route than I’d taken going up and I had never traveled any other routes in that direction. In looking at the map it was just a network of small roads. The direction in which my husband drove was the highway. As I walked into the house, the telephone was ringing. It was my husband. He had stopped at a friend’s in Laconia and they had considered taking a four-wheel drive vehicle to look for me but felt I must have just stopped someplace. Besides there were only small local roads and many of them winding in and around the lakes. It would have been hard to know where to start. They had just kept calling, thinking that I might somehow h ave made it home.
There is no need to claim supernatural guidance here, to substantiate what I am driving at. We have to rule out visceral memory, since she had not traveled that route. We could postulate that under the awesome experience, some homing instinct, present in pigeons and dolphins, kicked in. Or we could put it all down to incredible chance. But one thing is certain: There is no sense of rationality being at work, but she found her way home.
Nearly two years later, the baby she had been pregnant with now grown to a 16-month old toddler, Karen and her child were at a Unitarian conference, she at a lecture and he left with the child care group. Normally too polite, even when bored, to get up and leave a lecture, she suddenly felt an urge to leave the meeting. Emerging from the building, she saw, 50 yards away, her toddler, by himself, descending a slope to the dock. He loved water, and there were 40 feet of it awaiting him, and no one in sight. She intercepted him. The embarrassed child care attendants were unable to account for how he had escaped their control. Once again, there was no rational explanation for the urge that overcame her.
Dr. Leslie Weatherhead, one of my English mentors, studied many instances of this kind, and came to the conclusion that we have access to powers that normally we do not tap into.
(B) My other example — lest you think that Karen, as a Unitarian, was vulnerable to “spiritual” experiences that no self-respecting rationalist would countenance — comes from Bertrand Russell, patron of 20th century rationalism, the Ingersoll of this century.
In his Autobiography, Russell tells of an occasion when he was staying with Whitehead, whose wife was seriously and painfully ill:
FROM HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Chapter 6, Principia Mathematica):
During the Lent Term of 1901, we joined with the Whiteheads in taking Professor Maitland’s house in Downing College. Professor Maitland had had to go to Madeira for his health. His housekeeper informed us that he had “dried hisself up eating dry toast,” but I imagine this was not the medical diagnosis. Mrs. Whitehead was at this time becoming more and more of an invalid, and used to have intense pain owing to heart trouble. Whitehead and Alys and I were all filled with anxiety about her. He was not only deeply devoted to her but also very dependent upon her, and it seemed doubtful whether he would ever achieve any more good work if she were to die. One day, Gilbert Murray came to Newnham to read part of his translation of The Hippolytus, then unpublished. Alys and I went to hear him, and I was profoundly stirred by the beauty of the poetry. When we came home, we found Mrs. Whitehead undergoing an unusually severe bout of pain. She seemed cut off from everyone and everything by walls of agony, and the sense of the solitude of each human soul suddenly overwhelmed me. Ever since my marriage, my emotional life had been calm and superficial. I had forgotten all the deeper issues, and had been content with flippant cleverness. Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless; it follows that war is wrong, that a public school education is abominable, that the use of force is to be deprecated, and that in human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that. The Whitehead’s youngest boy, aged three, was in the room. I had previously taken no notice of him, nor he of me. He had to be prevented from troubling his mother in the middle of her paroxysms of pain. I took his hand and led him away. He came willingly, and felt at home with me. From that day to his death in the war in 1918, we were close friends.
At the end of those five minutes, I had become a completely different person. For a time, a sort of mystic illumination possessed me. I felt that I knew the inmost thoughts of everybody that I met in the street, and though this was, no doubt, a delusion, I did in actual fact find myself in far closer touch than previously with all my friends, and many of my acquaintances. Having been an imperialist, I became during those five minutes a pro-Boer and a pacifist. Having for years cared only for exactness and analysis, I found myself filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty, with an intense interest in children, and with a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to find some philosophy which should make human life endurable. A strange excitement possessed me, containing intense pain, but also some element of triumph through the fact that I could dominate pain, and make it, as I thought, a gateway to wisdom. The mystic insight that I then imagined myself to possess has largely faded, and the habit of analysis has reasserted itself. But something of what I thought I saw in that moment has remained always with me, causing my attitude during the first war, my interest in children, my indifference to minor misfortunes, and a certain emotional tone in all my human relations.
Note three kinds of human experiencing in this episode: (1) aesthetic, as Russell listened to Murray’s poem; (2) analytical, his habitual mode; and (3) mystical. As often noted in mystic experiences, the subject senses the experience not as something predominantly emotional, but as a way of cognition. Truths are “seen”. Russell speaks with caution as to what happened, but he has no doubt of a profound, life-changing experience, whose effects were to last a lifetime. Also, note the legacy of religious teaching to which he related what he was sensing.
The above are examples of mystical experiences that over-pass rationality. I have chosen them for their shock value to rational humanism. But one could also cite numerous everyday experiences in which humans relate to their world by channels other than reason. A Paul Kurtz will speak glowingly of “imagination”, but for him imagination is aesthetically decorative, not heuristic, not probing and probative of the nature of reality. Yet imagination has created our culture.
For Ethical Culture to claim the attention of humanity, and persuade people that we have an encompassing approach to reality that can create meaning and offer significance in face of all that challenges it, we need to be able to present a religion that draws on this broad spectrum of human experience. My outline follows.
An Ethical Metaphysic for the 21st Century
Premise One
There is one cosmic energy, at work throughout the universe. Science says so. Adler’s multiplicity in unity says so. We must learn to recognize, celebrate, and cooperate with that energy. Religion differs from science in this that science objectifies, studies, and applies force. Religion connects personally to it.
Let’s call it The Force. In its manifestation in nature, Henri Bergson called it the élan vital. But I prefer the Star Wars version. (Obi wan Kenobee would have sounded odd telling Luke Skywalker, May the élan vital be with you!)
Let me illustrate my point about personally experiencing the Force by an exercise with regard to gravity, one of the incarnations of the Force. Go to the riverfront in St. Louis and watch the mighty river flow by. What moves it? Gravity. Why don’t we fly off the face of our planet? Gravity. Our hearts have to pump against it. We need to maneuver around it and utilize other forces in order to fly — which birds learned to do millions of years ago. To sin against gravity is to step beyond support and fall and hurt oneself. And there are ways of consciously and deliberately working with gravity. For example, practising good posture is making good on an evolutionary step in our relation to gravity. (The Alexander technique is based on using our skeletal posture to promote our best relation to gravity.) And as we grow older and weaker, a gravity-conscious person will lose weight so that there is less of it for gravity to pull down. Science can calculate the effect of spatial curvature around a body of mass and use those calculations in sending a space ship to the moon and back. But a gravity conscious individual relates personally and experientially to the force field in which he or she walks. A force field ordered in part by gravity.
And so with the other manifestations of the Force. There are manifestations of the Force that impact us through sunlight converted into carbohydrates and reaching us as food. (The Quaker bows and blesses each meal.) Manifestations of the Force create the electro-chemical cell communication that we call brain activity. And so on. A religious metaphysic will be aware of these forces, will celebrate them, will seek personal and collective connection with them.
Premise Two
The cosmic energy manifests itself in myriad forms. Big Bang forces are still with us. Particles created millions of years ago recycle through us. The Force is in rocks and in the sea. It was in dinosaurs. It’s in DNA. It is in protoplasm and in animal and human consciousness. Menstrual cycles in women are physiological activities generated over the course of evolution in response to the force of that planetary body we call the Moon. (Mens (Latin) = moon.) They are really moon-cycles.
These different forms are created by the operation of what Daniel Dennett in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea calls Algorithms (after a 6th century Arab mathematician in Baghdad). Algorithms are step by step procedures for solving a problem or accomplishing an end. Computers are good at using them, as Deep Blue demonstrated. Dennett underscores the point that they operate mindlessly in nature and evolution, as much as they do in physical and chemical processes. He does not want us to read any cosmic purpose into the process of Natural Selection. There are, as he puts it, no skyhooks to draw the process along, only earth cranes. But he does not explain where algorithms come from. The scientific enterprise assumes that as we explore the universe we will find the algorithms that generate the data studied, like a rock face climber who assumes that there will be footholds and piton opportunities to take him or her to the top.
But as I see it, the process is less one of skyhooks or earth cranes than one of discovering the rungs of a ladder hitherto hidden — a ladder like the one in Jacob’s dream on which angels (i.e., message-bearers) ascended and descended between earth and heaven. Take, for example, the Fibonacci mathematical series, where each next number is the sum of the previous two: O, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, etc. Leonardo Fibonacci discovered it in the early 13th century. But, of course, it did not come into being on discovery by a human. Without the help of Fibonacci, sunflowers had been producing whorls in their flower heads according to the series, and sea creatures had been using it in generating shell patterns. It’s part of the universal ladder. Once discovered, we can use it, but we did not invent it.
This, I think, is what, in part, Adler meant by the reality-producing powers of the mind. Our minds are products of universal algorithmic processes and at the algorithmic level of consciousness, they can understand the algorithms that formed them and other parts of the universe. Part of my scheme, developed below, and echoing a Hebrew approach to reality, would focus on the role played by paradigm figures, giving us access to the Force via personal consciousness. Even non-theists have their Buddha.
Premise Three
The Force manifests as “ethical energy”, as Adler called it. When the Force appears as human consciousness, it creates a sense of choice. And that’s what ethics is about. Adler also called it a “consecrating” energy. It is the commitment of the mind to make a difference, to go along one path rather than another. It is a creative force. And this relates to what I think is the other aspect of the “reality-producing powers of the mind.” It is my belief that Adler got that phrase not only from Kant but from the English Romanticism of the late 18th and early 19th century, an influence that also helps to explain Emerson. Listen to Wordsworth as he speaks (in Tintem Abbey) of:
all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, — both what they half create,
And half perceive.
That, I think, is the definitive explanation of the “reality-producing powers of the mind.” We spend our time half in perceiving and half in creating. We perceive the algorithmic processes and then we create new realities, spun from our minds. We make truth, as James would say. And so our metaphysic would call for us to create the ethical realities for which Ethical Culture was named.
To cooperate with the Force in this manifestation, an Ethical Society has to live up to its name. Here should be a place where people find respect, care, kindness, peace, fairness, honesty, and goodness at work. Here we should have models of how love works. And for this, Adler said, we need to form the habits that go with experiencing the sacredness of binding ties. He called for spiritual evolution — and how tedious are our endless debates as to what “spiritual” means, as if it could be found at the end of an analytical probe! He said that discipline is necessary. The Societies will grow, he declared, as the Movement gives birth to personalities of abiding ethical faith, who are aflame with it. Such personalities will hand on the torch. This does not imply the absence of tension. When two or more persons share the same turf, there will be tension. Effective Societies are not based on the absence of tension, but on the way that tension is handled. When I was a Methodist, I was exposed to several books on the “path to perfection” — there was this notion, stemming from John Wesley, that a person should actually vigorously strive to bring all their thoughts and desires under the control of love. That Methodists often failed to so, like the rest of us, was true, but they were constantly exposed to the challenge of a higher way of living.
Premise Four
There need to be individual and collective channels to access ethical energy.
Other religions have channels like prayer and worship and ritual to access spiritual power. We need them too. Within our own tradition, we too need to learn methods of meditation and contemplation, to be inspired by symbolic ways of speaking not only to one another but to the depths of our minds within. But again we are too afraid to venture outside of the logical and the analytical. Drumbeats scare a rationalist! A collective song or statement makes us afraid we may lose out individuality. We mainly sit and listen. We fail to use our 7 kinds of smart.
It won’t be easy. Our paucity of numbers does not give us the benefit of great resources of music and poetry and art. But if only we could signal that it is all right to try, a beginning could be made. It won’t be easy because we come from different traditions, and generations. Maybe those who appreciate the kind of music generated for the Long Island colloquium would not appreciate the kind of metric, rhyming, hymn lyrics set to old folk tunes that I enjoy. But if we had enough experiments, we could vary the offerings. It won’t be easy because the people who come to us are often refugees from other traditions and have allergic reactions to anything that associates with their now rejected past.
We also need the inspired and inspiring story. We need an air of optimism to access resources. And spiritual figures help generate this. I recently did a series on paradigmatic figures for two Unitarian churches. I spoke of Amos, and Buddha, and Confucius, and Socrates, and Jesus. I believe that we can respect them for what they believed and also translate their influence into humanist terms. But oh, how powerful those stories are! Even secular humanists see the need to honor an Ingersoll or a Tom Paine or to create their own academy of thinkers. Unitarians, organized in 1825, claim Servetus, put to death for heresy in the 16th century, as one of their own; some Methodists have claimed the enthusiastic experiential religion of Montanus, from the second century.
In like manner, we might do well to look around and ask after our kinship through the ages. Or go one better and lay all human experience under contribution to advance the evolution of ethical living.
Premise Five
The experience of the Force as ethical energy creates insight into as yet uncharted dimensions of human life. It was Adler’s faith that his experience of moral striving for perfection was the best clue to the nature of reality. From that insight he extrapolated beyond this life. The Force creates a network that is not broken by death. He said our dead could be treated as real presences in our households. He said we could work with them as co-creators of a new reality. We have never been able to honor and explore that language! Today we would call it too New Age! Think of it: Protestants remember their dead, Catholics pray for theirs, Mormons get baptized for them, Eastern religionists expect to meet them again in the recycling of life through incarnation. Adler boldly declared that we could “work” with them! Now!
Death is the great value-eating monster. Humanists who hand death a too easy victory do not (as I see it) recognize how death cancels worth, if death means extinction. Humanists claim that there is enough internal validation of the good life for us to pursue it, even though the universe be meaningless and death be the end of personal existence. I think they are in denial, whistling in the dark. Evolution has brought forth a creature, namely ourselves, which has developed a consciousness that can look backward and forward, can value beauty, truth, and goodness, can accumulate experience and enlarge relationships, and then this same evolution consigns us to extinction — if humanism is right. To me that brutally challenges the idea that we have worth. As I said above, it makes Ethical Culturists cheerleaders for the good life, as we head for the cliff of extinction.
I have counseled families that suffered a tragedy: One involved a mother who drove a vehicle with several kids aboard, on a rainy day, hit the curb on one side of the road, hydroplaned across the road, and crashed into a truck. The collision killed her 10 year old and her 7 year old on impact. How would you counsel her about this terrible loss? Tell her to cherish their memories? She needs no urging. But what about the kids?
Draw on Bertrand Russell and Corliss Lamont and Carl Sagan and Herbert Fingarette and all you have to say is, They are no more. They have no further existence. They are not just dead, they are extinct. Gone, into a black hole of oblivion and non-existence. Where you too are headed and like them will soon be utterly gone. I find that an appalling nihilism. Even if there were no other answer, I would prefer to heed Dylan Thomas’s advice to his father: “Go not gently into that dark night/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
But on this issue I prefer to extrapolate with Adler and from the insights of those who have contemplated long on death and in every culture and in every time have believed with Robert Browning’s Rabbi ben Ezra: “There shall never be one lost good.” I prefer to go with Jesus’s statement, “Not a sparrow falls to the ground but the Father knows it”, and see that insight as a law of the universe, a description of the conservation of consciousness, that says, The smallest living event registers with the Force. There are algorithms for human continuity that transcend the here and now. As I once said in a long poem reflecting on death: “The universe created me/ Intent on reciprocity.” That’s my anthropic faith.
I have no map to that dimension. I do not need a heaven like a carrot to persuade me to be good, or a hell like a stick to force me into goodness. I appreciate Thoreau’s “One world at a time.” But I need a sense of meaningfulness that is not negated by death. Humanity has long imaged transcendence over death, even in non-theistic religions, and that imagery may well be important to our evolutionary survival. In the 70’s Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death) argued that all human culture is an illusion created to repress our sense of the terror of death, and now in the 90’s Barbara Ehrenreich (Blood Rites) argues that it is our terrifying sense of being victims that creates the urge to go to war. Arousing our sense of terror is a survival mechanism. I sometimes wonder if the dinosaurs in their bigness and speed and danger and overwhelmingness are the ultimate metaphor for death, and that is why they both frighten and fascinate us. We need symbols and experiences of transcendence to battle this terror.
CODA
Felix Adler’s ethical insight as clue to reality (“It is this ideal of the perfect life in which I seize the symbol of the utter reality of things.” 5/10/31) is not a non-rational and merely visionary projection. It is contexted in the philosophy of idealism, an idealism that has been embraced by some of the greatest thinkers of the human race, from Plato through Kant to Hocking to its contemporary exponents (e.g., Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, 1983). To find Adler a visionary but to think his philosophy outdated is simply to say that his philosophy does not pass muster viewed through one mental grid. I think Adler’s mental grid is defensible. I think Bob Greenwell (of St. Louis) is right when he says our common ground, to be consistent with Adler, would be belief in “the objective reality of the ethical ideal.”
Adler was no slavish follower of Idealism. He made his own pioneering contribution, through the notion of sociality as a characteristic of reality. For example, in his articles on “The Problem of Teleology” and “The Moral Ideal” (International Journal of Ethics, April, 1904 and July, 1910, respectively), he argues (1) for an understanding of purpose, not as externally imposed on life, but as created by the confluence of two separate causational sequences at their point of meeting, that is, ends are organismic, and serve not to explain nature (as in science) but to evaluate it (as in ethics): “There are no ends in nature, except such as ethically we read into nature.” And (2) that belief in a single divine Being was a necessary characteristic of a stage of human awareness, but must now be replaced by an ideal of reciprocity in a network of equals, each bent on contributing one’s best to a united whole — Reality as Democracy.
I would like to see an Ethical Culture Metaphysic discussed at all levels among us. Not given to some national committee, but explored in every Society and by our Leaders. Perhaps we can develop a metaphysic that will give us the energy to care enough to share enough in the 21st century to persuade a larger number to join us.
THE LOST METAPHYSlC OF FELlX ADLER (in his own words)
The Road Not Traveled
If what has been said regarding the ethical manifold holds good, then a genuine philosophy of life can only be reached by the ethical approach to the problems of life. This has never yet been consistently attempted.
The True Universe Is Spiritual
I am compelled to say once more at the last that the outcome and prize of striving is the assurance that the true universe is spiritual and that we and those we love are included in it. Behind the world of space and time lies the world of ideas.
Beyond The Rational
Feeling and impulse actually make up the major part of life, and can neither be left out of account nor compressed into intellectualist formulas. To describe our highest nature as the rational nature is perilous, since the word rational suggests intellectual. Either we must strain the significance of reason to include feeling and will, which is contrary to common usage, or we should select some other term such as spiritual, to designate that nature within us which operates in science and art and achieves its highest manifestation in producing the ethical ideal.
Ethical Insight Is The Clue To Reality
It is this ideal of the perfect life in which I seize the symbol of the utter reality of things. The world as we know it is itself the veil, the screen, that shuts out the interplay, the weavings and the interweavings of the spiritual universe. But at least at one point, in the ethical experience of man, is the screen translucent. I do not affirm immortality. I affirm the real and irreducible existence of the essential self. Or rather, as my last act, I affirm that the ideal of perfection which my mind inevitably conceives has its counterpart in the ultimate reality of things, is the truest reading of that reality whereof man is capable.
The Spiritual Task
The plan of life must exist before the deed, at least in the mind of the leader, the guide. The various acts recommended must be seen as so many attempts to spiritualize human relations according to the ideal plan. Spiritualize! Not: promote the empirical best, the natural best. Not: You can be a comrade in the Ethical Society irrespective of your philosophical or theological opinions. If this is taken literally, then there is chaos. Certain humanistic undertakings can still be pursued in common, but there is no integrality, no integrity in the movement.
The things of earth are to be used as instrumentalities by which we are to become aware of the spiritual reality.
The idea of organism in its spiritual sense is, for me, the beginning of ethics — the beginning and the end.
The problem is to see that the lost shall not be lost. That the connection be maintained. This can only be at the point of the eternal in each.
A year ago, I made a major life decision to leave the Washington D.C. area — my family and friends — and move to the Midwest. At the time I made this decision, my life was very satisfying and complete. I had raised my family well, had a good marriage and had achieved success in my career.
What motivated me to become Leader here at the Ethical Society of St. Louis was my deep commitment to building and nurturing ethical community. For I believe community, as Einstein said, “will be our salvation.” It is the answer to the growing trend of isolation and individualism that is now part of our society.
Its philosophy can guide us through life’s ups and downs and its people can give us the encouragement and support we need as we meet the challenges of living in a world that is often uncertain, stressful and frightening.
Felix Adler said it well: “Our mission is to give birth to personalities who have attained for themselves an abiding ethical faith and are inflamed with it.” Adler’s zealousness moves me and inspires me in this age of cynicism and disbelief. The challenge of his words are lived out in ethical community. For in ethical community, we meet, connect, share, disagree, learn and grow together; laugh, cry, argue, share deep experiences with one another, and build relationships that will endure when undergirded with a foundation of respect, truth and love. Hand in hand with these actions is a faith as understood by Adler, that he called “the religion of the future.”
All of this occurs, I believe, when we mutually understand and share what our philosophy of living is — our faith in an ethical community. Now faith according to the dictionary, means — and is used by me in this context, as “something that is believed with strong conviction,” rooted in the Latin meaning fidere — “to trust.” It is the opposite of faithless, which means “not to be relied on, untrue, unreliable.”
In the past, my own personal faith journey had left me disillusioned, disappointed, and faithless. The traditional religion of my childhood had made me leery and weary of the demands it made on my self esteem and its distortions of basic realities, that I deemed unreliable and untrue. But I missed the worldview — people as good; having a purpose — and life map that my former faith provided. I missed the community life that it provided for me and the opportunity to serve those in need.
Freed from the struggle to believe what I found unbelievable, as a college student I began to explore major world religions; but like a child once burned, I was determined not to fall into some belief system that couldn’t be validated in my experience. I wanted an intellectually responsible belief system, not blind faith. If I were to find this new faith, I wanted to commit myself to it with both my heart and mind, and ideally this faith would encourage me to embrace the search for truth within a loving community of free thinkers. This vision of mine was a tall order, I thought at the time.
Therefore, through college, I wrestled with the question of how worldviews and religious systems can be tested for validity. Interestingly enough I was quite taken with the writing of the philosopher, Immanuel Kant (who also inspired the thoughts of Felix Adler, our founder) who said there were three great questions in life: What can we know? What ought we to do? and, For what might we hope? These questions, to my way of thinking, were basic to any faith and any religious community. A community that explored these questions seemed right to me rather than residing in a creed-bound community faith that had all the answers.
I discovered in my “faith journey” that all worldviews of a faith nature are simply perceptual screens — “mind maps” if you will — through which we filter our experience of life. Kant called this the reality providing function of the mind. It differentiates us from the other creatures on the planet. For example, picture a football stadium and field in your mind. You can create that reality. A worldview then gives us the handles that allow us to grasp the baffling complexity of the world. They enable us to embrace the mysteries of life, and they provide the answers to questions that human beings feel an urgency to understand, given the mysteriousness of the universe. At their best, they give us an overarching purpose beyond ourselves, for all of them are viewed through each of our own perceptual screens. Let me give you an example of how different realities approach the same subject.
Imagine that three people are standing in a beautiful forest of tall, green pines, quite old, and the sunlight is filtering down through them to fall on the golden floor of the forest. The air is tangy with the scent of pines. The wind gently blows through the pines and they sway from side to side. The first person is a lumber contractor who views the pines in terms of board feet, jobs and how much profit can be made from them. The second person is a biologist with a scientific orientation who views the pines in terms of the history of the interaction of the pines with its environment and admires the intricate ecosystem of the forest. The third person views the pines with a religious or spiritual view. This person experiences the pines in a different way, feels awestruck by their beauty, feels a sense of gratitude for their calm, powerful presence and restorative powers to calm and nurture their soul. This person feels uplifted from daily cares by their presence. All three views have a different “take on life” — a distinct worldview. All three are within you and me, the business person, the rational thinker, the spiritual person that yearns for beauty within and without, who appreciates nature, uniqueness, and the spiritual elements of life.
All of us are looking for that third view — are looking for that transcendent experience that lifts us above our daily lives and gives fresh purpose and direction separate from our everyday thoughts, actions and experiences. That experience lifts us up and helps us endure life’s pain and uncertainty.
Bertrand Russell once said, “Life devoted only to living is incapable of preserving people from weariness and the feeling that all is vanity. Human life must serve some end outside human life. . . . Contact with this higher purpose brings a strength and a fundamental peace which cannot be wholly destroyed by the struggles and apparent failures of daily life.”
In terms of faith then, all of us who are self-responsible, and feel zealously about the pursuit of truth and reason, our perceptual screens of life must stake their claims about reality in a court of reason and yet honor this deeper, more spiritual dimension of human beings. Given there are no definite absolutes in our world map of life, what could be then, a faith that we could appreciate and live by that would hold sway within those boundaries, a faith that would give us the experience and opportunity to serve some end — some higher purpose?
Eighteen years ago, I came to the Ethical Society and was initially drawn to the bright, caring people within the community. I found myself hungering for more knowledge of what exactly does this community believe? What is the philosophical foundation for this movement and why does it seem to fit so perfectly into my own worldview? Could it provide a life faith for me?
I turned to the writings of the founder, Felix Adler, who had also left a traditional religion to build a new movement. Adler’s vision was clear: to build a “religion of the future,” that would unite believer and nonbeliever on “common ground” — that of ethical behavior, ethical living and exploration of truth. This Ethical Society would work toward the building of character values within a community setting. Uniting around ethical deeds, it would respect the worth of everyone, and leave what a person believes in terms of ultimate reality, private to them and be respected as their “filter” of reality.
As Adler said, “An Ethical Society cannot succeed by presenting lectures, doing rituals, establishing social action projects and good works, however indispensable these might be. The Ethical Society’s mission is to sustain an abiding ethical faith and be aflame with it.” How dramatic! An abiding ethical faith and be aflame with it.
He went on to say: “Those whom we love are not given to us merely for our joy and happiness. Their truest ministry consists in being to us the revealers of the divine. They quicken in us the seed of better thoughts; they help us estimate rightly the things that are worth trying for; they help us become more equal to the standard of our own best insight and grow into our truer selves.”
This vision was written over 100 years ago in the 1870’s. But how does this vision match the reality of faith today? How does it go over given the climate of society — a society where belief is out and disbelief is in? But then, isn’t one of the big problems of our times, that any time we take a stand for what we believe in, we are viewed with disdain and disfavor? Hasn’t religion as a center for character values and a haven for those who seek to understand life’s complex problems, taken a big hit in our society today?
U.S. church going has hit a ten-year low. Only 57% of Americans polled trust churches. Hasn’t it fallen into disfavor like so many other institutions within our society today? This basic cynicism and distrust, although often well deserved, carries a big cost. Because we’ve lost touch with what was important about having a religious community, this has resulted in all religions.
Ralph Reed, from the Christian Coalition, author of “Politically Incorrect,” a book about the importance of people of all faiths in being involved in our political process, says, “Gone is our understanding today of religion’s vibrant role in sustaining marriages, nurturing children and strengthening families. Gone is our appreciation for religion as a basis for individual self initiative and social quietude.” He calls for people of all religions to get involved in restoring a good sound moral foundation to our country. There are millions in our country today — unchurched — having fled their traditional religions and unconnected to any religious community. Burned like me, they stay away and pay the price of loss of the benefits of community.
Yes, it seems to me that within our culture today, being ethical is almost embarrassing, and being unethical is rapidly becoming a way of life. The decline of character values as a primary part of personality development has been one of the root causes of the social problems of our times. The media pounces on each piece of fresh evidence of this. No wonder cynicism and despair run rampant. Never has it become more urgent to become ethical agents in our society today. Belief in ethical values must replace disbelief in our culture. Ethical challenges confront us every day of our lives.
This summer, Les and I spent a week at the beach. Two thirteen year old boys were with us — a son of some good friends of ours and his friend. Russell and Matt loved crabs and that night when dinner time rolled around they wanted to buy crabs. One night, Russell bought two crabs for five dollars. When we returned to the house to eat, he discovered he had three. He asked me and a group of people at the table what he should do about the extra crab. What ensued was a great debate among the adults. “You’ll get the employee in trouble — don’t call.” “Too bad, they screwed up, you win, they lose.” “It’s not a big deal, just eat the darn thing.” He asked me and I said, “Russ, it’s not your crab until they say so. Call them up and ask them what you should do.” He called, and they said, “Go ahead and eat it — but,” with a tone of disbelief, “what on earth made you decide to call?” See, they didn’t expect ethical behavior. In fact I believe like most of us today, we expect unethical behavior. So anyway, they said, “Why did you call?” Russ said, “My mother made me do it!”
He was embarrassed about being ethical! Not proud, not pleased — embarrassed. This has to change.
That’s why it is so important to define what we believe and be able to speak to it and act on it. Liberal religions are the most serious offenders in this category. Burned by previous religious faiths, we are so afraid to state what we believe, that we prefer to talk about what we don’t believe. We say, for example, we don’t have a creed or dogma that you must adhere to. We don’t hold a belief in a supreme being. We don’t have a book of revelations or ten commandments. We don’t require that you believe in original sin or see yourself as evil. All good things to know, but we need to step up, take a stand and dare to define what we do believe!
Not just because we do have a strong underlying philosophical foundation, but because there’s power in conviction and faith as long as it is held under the lens of truth and rational thinking. And that’s what Ethical Culture is about. Our philosophy rests on some basic beliefs.
We do believe in human worth. It is indeed my foundation belief here at the Ethical Society. Adler said, “Every human being is worthwhile of their own account. Their personality is to be safe from infringement. By that we mean that human beings should attribute worth to themselves and others. The dictionary says that “worth” is the value of something measured by its qualities or by the esteem with which it is held. It contrasts with a view of myself that holds I earn my self esteem through my value to others. That’s right, within each of us is a center of self worth that should not be violated, that would be held with high unconditional regard, that should be treated with kindness, fairness, honesty and joy. This belief gives us a vision of humanity that allows you and me to find the best in ourselves by seeking the best in others. When we do this, there are direct, positive results.
Therefore, we do believe here in bringing out and fostering the unique talents within us and others. We see human beings as creative, capable and able to shape their own destiny. Rusty Berkus, a writer summed this ideal up: “There comes that mysterious meeting in life when someone acknowledges who we are and what we can be, igniting the circuits of our highest potential.” So we Ethical Culturists strive to cultivate the good in people by learning to appreciate the differences among us. This is what we mean by ethics in action. The great, spiritual moments of our times as we go through life, occur when you and I experience those moments of deep connection to others.
Therefore, for those of us who are members of the Ethical Society, ethical behavior is more than a social convention. Here we actively work to elicit the best in the human spirit. We are optimists, because we believe that human beings have a great capacity for good and we actively seek to build a better world for ourselves, for our children and families, for our community, and for the greater world. All parts of an Ethical Society work to this end, whether it be life span education, social action, community activities or Sunday meetings. All of these activities radiate from a foundation belief in each of us having intrinsic worth and dignity. This allows us to serve a purpose outside ourselves — to find a way to impact on the world and address the cynicism and despair of our times — our age of disbelief.
I love to talk about our work together here at the Ethical Society. I say we do believe in self responsibility and as a group of free thinkers, we are often characterized as a community of non-joiners who do believe in and love the pursuit of knowledge. We do believe in the creative interplay of a caring community. We do believe in working to end social injustice. We focus on building ethical relationships with one another and we honor everyone’s right to disagree without being disagreeable.
I believe this is essential given the challenges of society today. You and I live in turbulent, exciting, dangerous times. Facing such strong social issues as soaring crime rates, poverty, materialism and consumerism, we’ve become ever more acutely aware of the issues our society faces today and the kind of uneasiness it causes within in us.
I believe most Americans don’t want our government to fight about taxes, welfare, or deficits. What we want goes far deeper than these social issues. We believe in our country and think it’s gone awry and want it to start moving on the right track again. And our deepest yearning and need is to have communities around us that work, where people can feel safe, where kids can play outside, where school kids and teachers respect one another and use non-violent ways, where values such as watching out for the neighbors and pitching in to help each other are treasured, and where words like character and ethics have meaning. If these needs were met, then the social issues of our times could be resolved and Americans could sleep easy. A disciplined, compassionate society, grounded in good character values and caring community, is what you and I yearn for, and finding the pathway to that vision is the next step for our culture today.
Our Ethical Societies are role models for the future and will lead the way when we dare — you and I — to act on what we believe.