This Above All

February 21, 1960
Akron

This world will never be destroyed by the bad people who plan and execute infamous schemes. If the world ends, or good ways perish, either with a "bang or a whimper," it will be because good people have failed to think and act on those clear judgments which are the foundations of a world fit for human beings. When the critical Armageddons of humanity are fought, the harm good people do is not the result of cowardice or stupidity, but because of their absence from the field of struggle. Above all, we must remember the supreme worth of human personality; be on hand when the issues are reckoned.

In this traditional week when most American religious groups attempt to review and restate the basis and implications of the brotherhood of man, I would like to propose the centrality of personality and the results which follow unalterably from the premise. Because we are persons, there are historical inevitabilities resulting from our attitudes and actions toward all other persons -- particularly those persons who are the victims of discrimination and prejudice.

The centrality of personality is the point of agreement among those who comprise a non-creedal religion. Universalists have long agreed upon the religious priority of the brotherhood of man. Our later statement affirmed our belief in the supreme worth of every human personality. The statement of purpose of the proposed Unitarian-Universalist Association re-affirms the obligation "to affirm, defend and promote the supreme worth of every human personality, the dignity of man, and the use of the democratic method in human relationships."

Religious liberals neither created this value nor are they the only groups to support it. 5000 years ago in the ancient city of Memphis, an Egyptian scribe noted "life is given to him who does what is loved, and death is given to him who does what is hated."

The Greeks treated the Olympian gods with respect, but eventually the great thinkers and eager students in Athens and Miletus turned to man in order to discover a basis for reasonable living. When Greece foundered, one reason may have been that they turned to oriental superstitions and turned their backs on the great reality they had sensed for a time: the centrality of human personality in the world of experience. As Gilbert Murray said, they had a "failure of nerve, and put their trust in the goddess of chance and Babylonian numbers."

The Judeo-Christian heritage continues to be a rich source of inspiration of the value of human life. No one can study the superior writings of the Old and New Testaments without being confronted with the uncompromising proposition that although ritual and prayer are expressions of reverence, the great message of religion is the appeal to relate our whole existence to the worth of every person, whether Jew, Samaritan, Roman, Greek.

There have been other powerful influences which have developed the assumption of the "Supreme worth of every human personality." The Renaissance, the Protestant religious Reformation, the growth of political democracy in England and France were all elements in the total influence. Then, too, our American frontier economy, which, because of the hardships of pioneering concurrent with lush opportunities in black soil, great trees and wealth-laded rocks, both reduced European class distinctions and offered opportunities to improve human living with enough food, warmth and education.

Personality is not just an item among many products of history. It is the main fact -- the total ability to receive and interpret experience that is the bridge between the knowing and the unknowing. There are ideas; there are things. But only the mysterious, organic whole we call the "person" can construct the bridge that unites them. The creative center of all activity is the body-mind-emotion-spirit that we call "I." We are a totality. The whole person integrates feeling, experience, memory, thought, expression. The happy child dancing his glee illustrates vividly the way experience captures us completely. Consequently, when we advocate a person-centered religion, we are not excluding history, situations, ideas, theologies or ideals. We are saying that the person is the communications center which receives, interprets, retains and broadcasts experience. The basic assumption of any way of life that advocates brotherhood is that we are not only promoting a theory of the way that humans relate to each other through the receiving, translating and broadcasting of experience, but also that every person, endowed as he is with the gift of life, is of worth and dignity, an incarnation of the highest human value.

It follows, that basic to the value of the person is the "Golden rule" -- the way persons must relate to each other, because life is a corporate affair. We are obligated to extend to others the worth we interpret for ourselves. The poet, Alfred Noyes caught this spirit, when in a hymn to humanity, "Song from the Mermaid Tavern," he challenged the right of Deity to save some and burn others because such damnation violates human dignity:

"Well, if God saved me alone of the seven,
Telling me you must be damned or you.
This, I would say. This is Hell, not Heaven.
Give me the fire -- and a friend or two."

The poets and prophets have captured a daring vision of one human family, created by one Universal Creator. Not only in glorious ideal, but also in sober logic, we have a right to assume that all people are children of a common origin. No group, race, ethnic enclave, or however we may describe units of people, has any inborn superiority or a prior right to monopolize human privileges.

The differences between people are the differences in their experiences, their interpretations of experience and their response to those interpretation.

Not only are all peoples kinfolk in this dimension of personal experience, but also the present nature of this relationship insures a common destiny for all peoples of the earth. This has become glaringly obvious in the ghastly light of nuclear bombs. ON THE BEACH, the novel that has been made into a movie, is a modern scripture which with a curious strength of understatement emphasizes the shared nature of the fate of the peoples of the earth. In that story, the peoples of the earth all die as a consequence of nuclear war. Those in Australia, because of geographical location, are the last to die. Die they do, however, as the relentless winds bring the poison of radiation.

George McLeod, the Scottish preacher who re-established the ancient Iona religious community, concluded a sermon this way as he spoke of atomic warfare, "Inasmuch as ye drop it on the least of these my brethren, ye drop it on me."

The second assumption, then, is that the alternative to brotherhood is death to the human race with some varieties of horror in prospect.

These lines by Moshe David appear in the CIRCUIT RIDER, newsletter of our Belpre Church:

"We cannot deny even to those who are closest to us their right to be different.
Love does not give us the right to build a barrier
between ourselves and someone else
over which he cannot climb; to demand
something of a person he cannot be.
The act of love is to help the loved one fulfill his own needs.
It is the same with the family of man.
We cannot meet any men, today, as strangers.
There are no strangers left on earth.
We must give them more than their rights.
We must share with them our liberties."

Any balance sheet of the state of inter-group relations in our country would reveal dismaying deficits as well as encouraging assets. Slowly the Supreme Court decision of 1954 has had some effect. The so-called "massive resistance" to integrated schools has been weakening and a number of corrections made. Many more schools are integrated. Some states like Virginia, which have threatened decades of resistance to law, have come to terms with the world we live in. Since Christmas there have been a number of anti-Semitic outbursts in Germany, our country and other parts of the world. Serious and alarming ass this may be, there is no overcoming either the fact that a great deal of irrational prejudice against Jewish people has dissolved in a generation.

The deficiencies in human relations are still real, however. We do not have to travel south of the Mason-Dixon line to find segregated communities. Acts of discrimination against Negroes are constant and a reproach to our slogans about the one human family. In our own lives, we encounter evidence constantly, that brotherhood may not be achieved in time to avert disaster. Make no mistake about it, what happens here in the United States appears on the scoreboard of the world. Millions of people in the under-developed nations are emerging as persons with knowledge, the ability to make decisions and the power to form governments. They are judging democratic institutions less on our professions than on our conduct.

Consequently when a man with the money and other requirements cannot purchase a home of his choice in Akron or Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio or Deerfield Park, Illinois, the world looks and debates the sincerity of our claims. When a white person has many opportunities to swim in Summit County, but a Negro few, the dark-skinned person in Africa who is choosing the national governments which may represent the balance of world power in the next century, may look at Washington, as well as Cairo and Moscow and wonder whose ideals are real and whose are phony. But our correct motivation for brotherhood is not that it is the prudential thing to do, but the right thing to achieve. I would be affronting your intelligence if I should belabor the many ways of discrimination and segregation in our community, not to speak of more well-known trouble spots. You know that discrimination is real; you are aware of injustice.

If the value of the person is above all, then of course opportunities should be equal. Many times our own personalities get in the way. We have fears, deeply seated, which we are reluctant to exorcise.

The grand ideals of the prophets and teachers of the supremacy of personality has never been entirely submerged, even in the most troublous times. The ideal has been present always. What has happened is that many time we have neglected to apply the old ideals of brotherhood and peace to new situations. During the Civil War, the abolitionists fought courageously and vigorously for the end of human slavery in the South. Yet during the greatest intensity of abolitionist feeling, there were few jobs for free Negroes in the North. The transition was not made that hammering away the leg irons of the slave meant also that the gates of free opportunity should be opened. The old ideal was not applied to the new situation. It has taken 100 years and special legislation to begin to insure equality of job opportunity. Gunnar Myrdal in his classic study of our attitudes toward Negroes, THE AMERICAN DILEMMA, said, "If America in actual practice could show the world a progressive trend by which the Negro became finally integrated into modern democracy, all mankind would be given faith again."

But the fears are deep and the misapprehensions many. Martin Luther King, who once again seems to be victimized for his courage and leadership, remarked a few years ago, that the Negro wants to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law. Studies are increasingly demonstrating the natural equality of all human beings. There is no superior race, biologically.

A poster for Brotherhood Week has six words of advice about brotherhood, "believe it, live it, support it."

A belief in brotherhood harmonizes with the findings of the sciences and the arts. The anthropologist, the biologist, the psychologist and the educator find a common heritage of all humanity in the comparisons of ways of living in different societies; under the microscope, blood and tissue are human not racial; the clinic receives people of all races whose emotions are strengthened or weakened by similar experiences and tensions; the educators are beginning to document the fact that alleged differences in inborn capacities are a product of society, not nature. All persons are human; all humans are persons.

The support of the better ideals on the human frontier is more difficult than believing. The men who passed by on the other side may not have disbelieved in helping wounded travelers. We don't know what they believed. We know that they didn't support the ideal.

Not all the frontiers have been conquered. The list of brotherhood projects needing support include civil rights legislation in Congress (your letters to your Senators and Congressmen ARE important). Do we not have opportunities to speak a good word for brotherhood in the matter of real estate covenants which bar fellow-Americans from many neighborhoods? There will be at least a dozen conversations in which you will participate, wherein your opinion would count -- if you expressed it. Do not the old psychological burdens of arrogance and condescension we carry need forthright self-discipline?

In living brotherhood, we will find that we will come to believe it far more strongly and clearly. In the experience of supporting and living brotherhood ways, we will find that the vague ideals made clearer and immeasurably strengthened. We will find our personality in finer shape and our house in better order.

Mary Peabody Mann, sister to Elizabeth Peabody, moved in that notable Boston group during Civil War days which included Emerson, Parker, Hawthorne, Horace Mann and the transcendentalists. She was writing her sister Elizabeth one time about the Concord Fair which featured among other attractions the poetry of Robert Browning. She wrote how at the Fair, black men as well as white were featured concert artists. And she wrote, after participating in the affair, it did seem a new order of things. How delightful it is to be no longer ashamed of one's own country."

So we've got the task not only of the word, but the deed. The church has particular responsibility to at least keep motivation ethically high and practically progressive. I think it was Dr. Ralph Sockman who first used the illustration of the tide. There's only one way that brotherhood - recognition, honestly, of the supreme worth of human personality - can come in. It's got to come in like the tide -- on the level. When it comes in on the level, it's going to flood all the eroded caves of ignorance, fear and hate. When it does, we'll begin to catch the prophetic vision of what religion really is and what religion really does.