An Excess of Understanding

March 17, 1968
Plainfield

An Excess of Understanding

"What the world lacks most today is, perhaps, understanding and appreciation of one another among nations and people." Most persons today would say, "amen" to those words spoken by Nehru, the late Prime Minister of India. We need understanding of the worship of other persons – what they adore and how they behave. We need understanding of the political aspirations of people everywhere – in the new nations of Asia and Africa where expectations are rising. We need to understand the need for power by those existing in the areas of human disadvantage and despair in our own country. As I discussed in the earlier service, the primary need is not the study of ghettos and the culture of Black America. The Black American has been studied to death, almost literally. We in White America need to understand how crucial our attitudes are in the peaceful happening of rapid social change.

As the old Hebrew proverb has it, "with all thy getting, get understanding." Understanding means to "judge not so that you will not be judged." An American Indian proverb has it that one should not judge another until he has walked in his moccasins for three days. Another favorite saying has it that to understand all is to forgive all. We understand when we grasp facts and the causes of facts; we understand when we perceive the emotional framework for intellectual opinions; we understand when we are able to comprehend more clearly the searching heart of others as well as their verbal statements, conventional or otherwise.

How then can there be an excess of understanding? My thoughts moved in this direction after studying the following quotation from the Journal of Andre Gide, the famous French writer (p.55):

"My torment is even deeper; it comes likewise from the fact that I cannot decide with assurance that right is on this side and wrong on the other. It is not with impunity that, throughout a whole lifetime my mind has made a practice of understanding the other person. I succeed in this so well today that the point of view it is most difficult to keep uppermost is my own .... What decides too easily is sympathy."

Have you not shared that feeling sometimes? Perhaps frequently? The point of view most difficult to acquire and maintain is your own? Many persons feel, but few admit, that they are vulnerable to suggestion. In a conservative gathering the insights of the Right seem persuasive. In a radical group, the logic of the Left seems difficult to refute. As Gide pointed out, the difficult labor is to maintain a mind of one's own.

The human is a strange but wonderful creature. Many theories of human nature and destiny have been proposed. There will be no end to such philosophizing. Today I have no intention of engaging in the age-old dispute as to whether or not we have free will, or whether our attitudes and acts are pre-determined by prior causes or experiences completely. But most of us, at least, have the feeling that there are areas of choice – that we do have some control over the decisions we make.

If knowledge and understanding are to have power, we must move from understanding to decision. What Gide was writing is also conveyed in an old folk tale which asserts that if two identical carrots are so placed that a donkey sees them in opposite directions, but equally distant, the creature will stand immobilized, unable to decide which carrot to for which to reach. I don't know anything abut donkeys, so I would have to see this to believe it, but certainly one of the troubles which frequently immobilizes people is the difficulty of making decisions.

We tend to suspend judgment on vital matters, hoping decisions will be made without the necessity of personal commitment. Years ago, I remember sitting in a Grange meeting when a certain vote was called for by a show of hands. The man sitting next to me failed to raise his hand either "for" or"against" the motion. When I lifted my eyebrows questioningly, he whispered to me, "if I don't vote at all, nobody can blame me, no matter what happens." This attitude is as old as the human adventure.
Why is it tempting to be indecisive on matters of importance? We may fear deep down that our security will be weakened, our status threatened or that our easy smooth highways may become difficult, rocky paths.

One of the great psalms of Hebrew scriptures is the 19th. Some may recall the 12th verse, "who can understand his errors? Cleanse thou me from secret faults." In the Goodspeed version, a modern translation, the same passage reads, "who can discern his errors? Of unconscious ones hold me guiltless."

Unconsciously, one may want to be suspended between the carrots, moving neither one way or the other. When one can justify inaction by accepting as equally truthful the force of both arguments when there are contrary views, deep within there may be a sense of relaxed comfort about not having to choose one side or the other.

Now I am not one to hold that we should feel guilty about unconscious errors. Such a state only creates anxieties. We should seek by self-searching, self-analysis to understand more fully ourselves and our attitudes. But when we find ourselves so tolerant of widely differing views that we make no choices on important issues, our excess of understanding may actually be a comfortable inertia.

To live detached from the joys and grief of the human experience is to be not fully human. Most joy and grief are the consequences of human choice – acting in the light of one's best understanding when decisions are demanded by time and events.

Belief that action is the proper religious consequence of understanding is a primary value in the Judaic portion of our religious heritage. Knowledge and understanding were never enough. The one God the Hebrews came to worship required much more than recognition or adoration. Micah asked, "what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God?" Believing that it was God's voice speaking from within him, Amos proclaimed, "I hate, I despise your feasts, but let righteousness pour down like a mighty stream." In their mythology and legends, God performed mighty acts and their worship of Him required that they act. When the child, Samuel, destined to become a great prophet, was brought by his mother to be dedicated to the Lord, Hannah sang a song which included the words, "The Lord is a God of Knowledge and by Him actions are weighed. " (1st Sam 2/3)

The ethical necessity to add action to understanding carried over in the early Christian traditions. Jesus asserted, "Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father."

One of the readings was from the letter of James, a document notable for the point of view that without action, knowledge and understanding became empty of meaning and deprived of vigor:

"But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who observes his natural face in a mirror, for he observes himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But he who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer that forgets but a doer who acts, he shall be blessed in his doing." (1/22 ff)

This attitude persisted. Some historians have commented that the eventual triumph of Christianity over its competitors in the Roman Empire in the first few centuries was not due to the reasonableness of Christian doctrine or to the superior organizational abilities of the Christians, although these were factors. Rather Christianity won out because of the stubborn acts of faithfulness to their religion on the part of Christian martyrs. (see e.g., Fran. Boaz, THE LIMITS OF REASON, p.68)

The scholar Seymour Lipset commented, ("Commentary", Jan. 61), "Apathy, a learned zoologist has written, is a characteristic response of any living organism to stimuli which are too intense or too complicated for it to cope with."

Gide put the same condition in the human framework with the words previously quoted, "the point of view most difficult to keep uppermost in my mind is my own." The late learned Israeli scholar-philosopher, Martin Buber, wrote, "A devil would not be one who decided against God, but one who in eternity came to no decision."

I remember a charming, learned man who always seemed to be present when controversial matters were being discussed. He always listened alertly, analyzed contending positions comprehensively but succinctly. He had a habitual conclusion to his observations, "There's three sides to every story, your side, his side and the right side." Which was of course a wise observation applicable widely. But sooner or later we all realized that this man never really offered a statement which would have indicated what side he believed to be the right side. So I had to conclude that he understood much but believed little.

I am not really indicting an excess of understanding but am urging an application of understanding. In truth, ample resources are available for understanding the bristly problems. You remember the imperative statement, "Just don't stand there, do something." That can and should be turned around, "Just don't do something, stand there." That is, to act impulsively without understanding may be correct sometimes, for our intuition may be a wise signal. But more often than not, we do need to "stand there' long enough to understand the facts and feelings involved in difficult issues.

If one is talking about open housing, one does have to understand fears. For fear is usually caused by ignorance and fear prolonged will create hate. One needs to understand that fears can be exploited by those who seek a fast buck. One needs to understand that there are fears of the poor on the part of those most recently uplifted from poverty and discrimination. While the feeling is irrational, the fear exists that those immediately below you on the social-economic ladder will grab your place. There seems to be a pecking order where the ones immediately below will be picked on by those immediately above. We can understand economic fears, can't we? Who is there without any concern for his salary, real estate, insurance, securities? We need to understand that great losses are caused by feelings of panic, not movements of people.

The same need to understand applies to all the conflict areas. We will fail to understand the antiquated bureaucracies of government unless we are aware of how many persons feel that their security depends on the continuation of the obsolescent institution. We need to understand such fears.

This is just as true in the issues of war and peace. My position of opposition to the Vietnam War should not alter my willingness to listen to the other side of the story. I have tried to understand those who speak of the complexities of the use of international power. But I have never been persuaded that there was either justification or promise in this wretched war which carries such an excessive cost in human misery and such a low expectation of resolution of real problems.

We need to understand ourselves, too. We are creatures with a physical-psychological heritage and development. Our good feelings and our bad feelings have origins in our personal history. Our aggressions and retreats, our activities and passivities are always related to our encounters with life as infant, child, young person, adult. Yet who can ever say with assurance that he fully understands himself? The self is more like a layered onion than a precise blueprint. Each peeling discloses another level.

Thus the proverb, "Just don't stand there, do something." Because we will never fully understand, we must act with incomplete knowledge. One cannot predict surely the outcome of measures which may alter the course of conflict in the cities. One cannot be sure that measures to overcome the glaring disparities in housing, employment, education will succeed. One cannot be sure that the cost will be supportable. We are required to act without full knowledge. To me these are the dimensions of faith – to believe without absolute certainty, to act in situations where the outcome cannot be known.

Kierkegaard once wrote, "life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards." This is the human glory and agony – to choose when the full consequences of choice cannot be known at the time of decision.

If studies of non-human life are accurate, one can say that insects and animals are conditioned to respond in precise ways. The life in the ant hill is orderly, predictable. The ants, by whatever ant processes prevail are conditioned to behave in determined ways through the cycle of birth, life, death.

As individuals, we may never fully understand why we tend to respond or behave in certain ways. Our inner conflicts may never be fully harmonized or sufficiently understood to be like an open page printed in large type and easy words. But unless we want to be the donkey immobilized between the carrots, we must act in spite of unknown consequences.

I think it was Alan Watts who used the analogy of the rainbow as the result of a triangular relationship of sun, moisture, and observer. There must be sun, mist, and an observer who will perceive the combination which creates the rainbow on the field of vision. Human life is like that too, To live is a triangular relationship of understanding ourselves, others, and what we must do in the light of our present understanding.