Religious Power

February 7, 1982
Lakeland

Nietzsche: “Whenever I found the living, there I found the will to power.”

Power is the theme of this month’s Sunday services. The subject is so wide and deep that any treatment of it can be but partial. Power is an inescapable arc in the circle of all human affairs. When one interacts with political and governmental institutions, one must wrestle with power and who has it; when one attempts to confront and interpret human emotions, healthy or unhealthy, one meets feelings of power or powerlessness; when one deals in dollars one comes up against the power of money – who has more and who has less; communication is universal but the nature of what is communicated is determined to a formidable degree by the power to imprint or broadcast a message or attitudes, not necessarily true; when one enters the formal educational process, the power to prescribe curricula and control teachers will influence the values and principles of the learners. History, political science, psychology, economics, communication, pedagogy are predicates for which power is the subject.

What is power? (CJW note: Dict:) The ability whether physical or mental or moral to act. It is the possession of controlling influence over others. But to think of power only as a Machiavellian manipulation is to ignore power as a virtue, a necessary ingredient in the makeup of the autonomous person. Without power, we are not persons in the dimension of what persons can be and ought to be. I like the way Rollo May put it (POWER AND INNOCENCE, p. 20): “Far from treating power only as a term of abuse, one which is applied to our enemies (i.e., they are power driven, but we are motivated only by benevolence, reason, and morality), I use power as a description of a fundamental aspect of the life process ... if we neglect the factor of power, as is the tendency in our day of reaction against the destructive effects of the misuse of power, we shall lose values that are essential to our existence as human.”

At the beginning I quoted Nietzsche, “Wherever I found the living, there I found the will to power.” It has been said that in Nietzsche, Hitler found his philosophical justification for his cruel crusades and lust for power. This is a bad rap for the philosopher because he did not mean that the strong need have any compunction for the weak, but rather power is necessary to self-fulfillment and self-realization.

As Emily Dickinson put it with the poet’s compression and depth:

“To be alive is power,
Existing in itself,
Without a further function
Omnipotence enough.”

What then of religious power? (CJW note: to which I limit myself today) Whether religious power has been a cynical control of human sensibility or a prime ennoblement depends on where we fix the focus of appraisal. For religious power has been both imposed cynical control and prime ennoblement.

I have a personal reminiscence. Many years ago I was in an audience where a Christian minister described the Christian church as the “Power House” transmitting the power of God. He used [as] an extended metaphor the central power plant of a public utility. He was passionate and eloquent, thoroughly inspiring almost everyone in the large audience: Go into a dark room and turn the switch of prayer and the room will be lighted with the power of God. Partake of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper and you will be electrified by the reminder of Jesus’ sacrificial, atoning death which saved you, because you cannot save yourself. Read the Bible and there you will feel the current of God’s eternal and unchanging Word. Follow the Ten Commandments and your life will be illuminated because it is God’s revealed way for you, and so on.

Intrigued as I was by this extended, skillful, homiletic metaphor, I reflected in my incorrigible way, then and now, that all metaphors break down. There is not one power-house, but many. When I lived in Lake County, the power came from Sumter Electric; now living here, it is Lakeland Utilities; when I had an office in New York City, the power and light came from Con Edison, and so on, wherever I have lived.

The varieties of power-houses had different fuels to generate power – oil, coal, water, and now nuclear, and to a small degree, solar and wind.

Furthermore, the power houses are subject to human error and natural disaster: power failures, short circuits, blackouts. People die accidentally and on purpose because of the power house, from downed lines to the executioner’s electric chair.

Quite apart from the metaphors, religious power has been, and always will be, both a disaster and a superb quality in the human venture.

For thousands of years, particularly since the beginnings of organized agriculture, “Religion was central in the shaping of early cities and city states. People did not work primarily for their own ends. They obeyed the commands of kings who, in due course of time, become gods themselves.” (Pfeiffer, p. 21) One scholar comments that the role of authoritarian religion was to validate the ever more ambitious plans of those in authority. Rollo May wrote (p. 225), “Gods are, culturally speaking, symbols of our ideal yearnings and visions.... God is the symbol of the power human beings yearn for but do not have.”

Religious organization at its best empowers persons to work together, to sacrifice, to endure in order to make living worth-while and to stand together to establish and maintain human freedom and human dignity. Church, synagogue, congregation – these have been notable examples from the most remote reaches of recorded history.

Moses and his people struggled to move from Egyptian slavery to freedom – the Exodus. [CJW note: Bounded by their religion.]

Churches and monastic institutions led the way in caring for the sick and protecting the travelers – inspired by the ethical precepts of their religion.

The Methodist Church sparked and organized the abolition of slavery in England – united by the call of religion for a more humane order.

On confronting tyranny, persecution, and prejudice, the religious organization has made many gains for the human family.

Learning and education was valued and promoted by synagogue and church.

A free pulpit, where wrong can be condemned and good upheld, represents power to inform and to search for the true. A free pulpit is a privilege achieved at great cost by organized religion.

The ceremonies of religious institutions have provided persons with the power to find meaning in, and to celebrate the great passages of, life – birth, mating, death.

Religious power at its worst contrives to channel that yearning, that vision into unquestioning obedience. Gibbon’s famous aphorism about Roman religion applies widely, “Religions were all considered by the people as equally true, but the philosophers as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.”

The frequency with which such cynicism has been recorded in history is a perennial warning about the perversion of religious power.

Emperor Constantine accepted, organized, and enforced a particular version of Christian orthodoxy in order to strengthen his power and command over the Roman Empire.

The medieval alliance between church and state which suppressed non-conforming beliefs – Joan of Arc, John Hus, Latimer, Ridley, many others – were burned at the stake. [CJW note: 5 names among uncountable thousands]

The Inquisition committed heinous crimes not only to punish accused heretics but also to confiscate property and consolidate power.

There was [the] theocracy of John Calvin at Geneva where control of civic affairs by the religious authority led to the execution of Servetus.

The crimes of Henry VIII, and his daughter Mary, leave bloody pages on English history, although each monarch persecuted a differing set of alleged heretics. [CJW note: The father executed Catholics, the daughter executed Protestants.]

Consider colonial New England where the Puritan theocracy hanged Mary Dyer, a Quaker, on the gallows, and banished Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams.

Thus the wisdom of Lord Acton, based on his painstaking and scholarly studies of history has never ending application: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.... Suspect power more than vice.”

There is the other side of the coin, just as important to us as persons, as citizens: absence of power corrupts also. The dictionary lists antonyms to power: weakness, impotence, feebleness, infirmity. Resonating to Lord Acton’s dictum, Edgar Z. Friedenberg wrote, “All weakness tends to corrupt, and impotence corrupts absolutely.”

If a generalization can be offered, is this not the goal of the physicians of the self to restore power to the individual. By whatever method or school, Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian, transactional analysis and many other varieties, the object is to get us to understand ourselves in order to achieve the power of self. We are helped to restore the power that enables one to say, “I count; I’m a significant being; I’m a person of worth; I may not have the power to change all the world about me, but I have the power within me to deal with the world about me – and not let it change me for the worse.”

Then, too, consider how persons in the worst of times have possessed spirit – a strength from within.

That inner power, or spirit, is not limited to any particular religion, place, or time. Think back on some of the persons you have known, who had the power to see things through in the face of grievous loss, disheartening setback, or catastrophic event.

When I think back on such persons I have known who had that power of inner strength, there is no one outward religious label – Christian, Jew, Hindu, that is a common characteristic. I remember Christians, Jews, Hindus, who possessed that power in the face of outward trials and difficulty. But then, too, one of the most valiant spirits I have ever met was a reverent agnostic.

In the Jewish scripture of Isaiah, that part scholars believe written in the period of Babylonian captivity of the Jews (586-537), the writer is among the exiles who weep for a lost Jerusalem. About them were the temples of other gods – Marduk, Shamash, others. The Temple in Jerusalem, that holiest of places, had been destroyed. Amid such .... Praising his God, the prophet, Isaiah, writes, “He giveth power to the faint and to him that hath no might he increaseth strength.” [Editor’s note: ending year of Babylonian captivity should be 538]

[CJW note: Not the power to physically overcome the great Cyrus or his armies or his god, but the power to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land, preserve the Jewish heritage, and wait, and hope. It had to be inner power.] [Editor’s note: Rev. Westman may have meant Nebuchadnezzar, for Cyrus was the Persian ruler who overthrew the Babylonian Empire and permitted the Jews to return to their land]

Jesus – whether you believe him the incarnated God, the Messiah, or a prophet for humanity – he embodies power from within in the face of imperial power from without. The Kingdom of God is within us all, he taught. Regardless of theology, Pilate spoke for the ages, although that could not have been his intention, when he proclaimed to the crowd, Ecce Homo, “Behold the man.”

Now I am not testifying for the God of Isaiah or the God of Jesus. Insofar as I am able to understand, their God is not my God. But I am saying that when one holds to the highest he/she knows; when a person, in the face of terrible odds, or hum drum routine, holds to that which is of supreme worth, personal power is incorruptible.

The nature of power – in the world that humans have built and changed – is a pageant of integrity and corruption, of home and dread, of courage and cowardice, of power and powerlessness. There will always be ambiguities and pressures. Frequently we do not do what our best self calls us to do. Yet in our stronger moments, Martin Buber’s advice seems ever-new and freshly demanding: ....

[Editor’s note: quote missing, source unknown]

The source of religious power that will not corrupt internally or externally is found in those lines.

Addendum: Notes from Lord Acton’s writings

“Now liberty and good government do not exclude each other: and there are excellent reasons why they should go together. Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society and of private life.” - ESSAYS ON FREEDOM AND POWER, “The History of Freedom in Antiquity,” p. 51.

“There is no liberty where there is hunger... the theory of liberty demands strong efforts to help the poor. Not merely for safety, for humanity, for religion, but for liberty.” - RENAISSANCE TO REVOLUTION, Intro, xv.

“Most assuredly, now as heretofore, the Men of the Time are, in most cases, unprincipled, and act from motives of interest, of passion, of prejudice cherished and unchecked, of selfish hope and unworthy fear.
“History is not a web woven with innocent hands. Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and the most active.” RENAISSANCE TO REVOLUTION, Intro, xvi.

“... liberality toward the weak in social life, corresponds to that respect for the minority in political life, which is the essence of freedom.” - RENAISSANCE TO REVOLUTION, p. 33.

“... the state that suffers neither limit nor equality, and is bound by no duty to nations or men, that thrives on destruction and sanctified whatever things contribute to increase of power.
“This law of the modern world, that power tends to expand indefinitely, and will transcend all barriers, abroad and at home, until met by superior forces, produces the rhythmic movement of history. Neither race, nor religion, nor political theory, has been in the same degree and incentive to the perpetuation of universal enmity and strive. The threatened interests were compelled to unite for the self-government of nations, the toleration of religions, and the rights of men. And it is by the combined efforts of the weak, made under compulsion, to resist the reign of force and constant wrong that, in the rapid change but slow progress of four hundred years, liberty has been preserved, and secured, and extended, and finally understood. RENAISSANCE TO REVOLUTION, “Beginning of the Modern State,” p. 51.

When Individualism Becomes Neurotic

January 1982
Lakeland

Surely he jests! Perhaps that occurred to you when my title suggests that unshackled individualism could be anything other than the apex of a human mind that is searching, logical, free of the coercions of creed or culture.

We shared Channing’s enduring words on the Free Mind as we have on many occasions, and have been shared countless times by Unitarian Universalists gathered for worship. I know of no other brief passage which so broadly and so deeply expresses the need for, and power of, the inquiring spirit. How could such a spirit of search and independence of spirit become neurotic?

It is the opposite of the spirit of the free mind which squelches human reach and the blossoming of the human spirit. A writer, Dorothy Lee, in FREEDOM AND CULTURE, writes of her experience visiting her child’s seventh grade classroom on a Parent’s Open Night, “I went first of all to my son’s room, the seventh grade. The teacher showed me a mural, covering all the walls, depicting the life of the ancient Egyptians. It was a group project, and the teacher pointed out the part for which my son was responsible. The painting depicted a war scene: some pinkish, sleek, placid, fat, lifeless horses. These were nothing like the horses I had seen my son draw at previous times – skinny, elongated beasts, full of straining movement and savage life. I protested that these lifeless horses could not be my son’s doing. The teacher explained that my son had not been allowed to paint his own unique horses; they were too different. Since this was a group project, uniformity was essential, so the children had all copied illustrations from a history textbook. As I turned away, appalled and only half-convinced, I spotted the tiny figure of a bird, of no known genus, scraggy, leering, menacing, and I knew that my son’s uniqueness had not been entirely mown down in the drive for uniformity; it had burst through, however irrelevantly and illicitly. It reminded me of the mushrooms which push up a cement pavement, cracking and disrupting the even surface. I was happy to see it.”

Emerson too would have been appalled at the teacher’s imposition of uniformity. Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps more than any other, imprinted on many of us the need and glory of the free mind in his most well-known essay, “Self Reliance.” His enduring influence has drawn many persons to our religion because in Unitarian Universalist settings, his superb expression of independence of mind resonates among us without apology, without deference to outworn creeds or institutions. In “Self Reliance” almost every sentence is a familiar quotation.

He begins the essay quoting Beaumont and Fletcher:

“Man is his own star; and the soul that can render an honest and perfect man commands all light, all influence, all fate; nothing to him falls early or too late. Our acts, our angels are for good or ill. Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”

Then some of the superb sentences:

“In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts.”

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

“I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.”

“Your goodness must have some edge to it – else it is none.”

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after one’s own; but the great man is he, who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

In April, Emerson will have been dead 100 years, but his influence persists. I hope to do at least two presentations of his life and thought.

Emerson’s thought has reflected, like light through a prism, in many ways.

Freud, that pioneer in understanding our strange emotions and mental stresses, wrote, “Man must educate himself to face reality and to do so he must overcome the infantile fixation of being a child in his father’s house. We must grow up and think for ourselves.” (Quoted by Spinks in PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION, p. 89).

There have been many departures, refinements, and different therapies since Freud’s revolutionary insights and methods. But few, if any, would challenge the sentence, “We must grow up and think for ourselves,” variously termed self-actualization, self-realization, self-fulfillment, I’m OK, You’re OK, and on and on.

But can the free mind, the self-reliant person, the self-actualized one become neurotic? At first glance, this seems absurd. Is there anything more valuable, clearly logical, and good for the individual and society than the Free Mind, the uninhibited inquiring spirit?

Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “Seek simplicity and distrust it.” Or, can there be light without shadow? There is a philosophy called Solipsism which asserts that we have no contact with the world outside of self except through the ideas in our minds. Therefore, the only reality exists in my mind, my neighbor’s and their ideas are not real – only my perceptions of them, my ideas are real. Each person is shut up to himself, herself, alone. [CJW note: subjective idealism]

Now, while I do not entirely grasp this philosophy let alone hold to it, it does point to a state where free individualism can become neurotic.

Anticipating a question, I ought to state what I mean by neurotic, as it seems that there is some disagreement in the mental health profession as to the meaning of neurotic. Neurosis seems to involve only part of the personality [CJW note: as contrasted with psychosis] and will exhibit certain behaviors in response to a situation – phobias, depression, obsessive or compulsive acts, or a rigidity of reaction.

The late Karen Horney, an analyst, provides the context for today when she wrote (THE NEUROTIC PERSONALITY OF OUR TIME), “By rigidity in reactions I mean a lack of flexibility which enables us to react differently to different situations.”

I believe that the free individual can have a neurotic reaction when he/she is so convinced of the truth he/she hold that in effect he/she becomes a fortress self, seeking no wisdom beyond the boundaries of present convictions; persuaded that there is no light which could alter a fixed focus; no situation which could call for the admission, “well, I guess I don’t know it all.”

There was a folk-song (Anna Russell, do not have the tune available) which parodied some psychiatric methods. The song went like this:

“At three I had a feeling of
ambivalence toward my brothers,
and so it follows naturally
I poisoned all my lovers.
But now I’m happy; I have learned
the lesson this has taught;
that everything I do that’s wrong
is someone else’s fault.”

The basic reality this parody illustrates (for me) is that the free mind – the autonomous individual – must also be the responsible self.

Ernest Becker wrote, “No one is strong enough to support himself alone.”

I cited Emerson as a prime example of the free individual, the independent and comprehensive mind. Jefferson also comes to mind as a hero of this stamp. Yet Emerson was dependent on the thousands who bought his books and attended his lectures. Jefferson, whom I admire more than almost any other American, depended on slave labor to build Monticello and maintain his plantations, and depended on the good-will or bad judgment of his creditors, for he was heavily in debt most of his life and died bankrupt.

This inter-dependence of all of us is much more than economic. We depend on each other for almost every good experience. Do we not value the experience of happiness? Rarely is happiness experienced in isolation. Someone wrote (?) “Man’s greatest happiness is experienced in those moments when his perception of himself as a separate individuality is at its lowest. All happiness is a little death, in which the individual abandons for the moments of its duration the conglomeration of desires, sentiments, and ambitions which go to make up his personality.” [Editor’s note: it is from Erich Fromm].

I read to you the fable from the preface of Philip Slater’s book THE PURSUIT OF LONELINESS describing the loneliness of the self-centered man. This book can be strongly recommended (published some years ago).

Slater suggested that in our American emphasis on “free enterprise” (incidentally a condition which does not exist, if it ever did), the Horatio Alger theme that anyone can go from rags to riches with pluck and luck, can frustrate three deeply imbedded human desires:

1)The desire for community – the wish to live in trust, and cooperation with one’s fellows in a total and visible collective entity.
2)The desire for engagement – the wish to come directly to grips with social and interpersonal problems and to confront on equal terms an environment which is not composed of ego extensions.
3)The desire for dependence – the wish to share responsibility for the control of one’s impulses and the direction of one’s life.

The writer D. H. Lawrence put these ideas of social theory more plainly when he wrote (quoted by Van Wyck Brooks, FLOWERING OF NEW ENGLAND, p. 528):

“Men are free when they are in a living homeland – not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep inward voice of religious belief from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized, purpose.”

Lawrence eloquently summarized the ideal of human fulfillment – autonomy and dependence. One without the other is neurotic – that is rigid.

Nothing I have said dilutes my belief in the free inquiring mind and the right and necessity to march to a different drummer. Even then, there is dependence – a drummer as well as a marcher.

There is still the necessity, for some of us, at least, to remember what Stefan Zweig, the biographer of Erasmus, said of that striking Renaissance non-conformist (p. 17): “He refused to pay homage to an opinion he considered erroneous. He refused to champion a dogma that was alien to his mind.”

Truth marches on, is refined, tempered by new discoveries, enlightened by fresh perspectives on the human condition. As Chas. Francis Potter wrote (CLF Nov. 1981),

“The story of religion has not yet been told. When we chronicle all the evidence in the history of religion, even to the present hour, we have not told the story of religion, for that story is still in the making. Only the first chapter has been written.”

Whether from unyielding skepticism or from blind faith, the ... the story of religion has been fully told, that rigidity can be a formal obstacle, a neurotic wall to new ventures to understanding one’s self and one’s relationship to persons, situations, and new experience.

Addendum:

The Program Committee’s theme in this month, the first of the New Year 1982, is health of body and mind.

The Janus god of the Romans had two faces – looking back, looking forward. If we look back in anger or unwarranted guild we will blur the vision of a forward look. If we look forward with a cynical vision, all that we see will be wrongly lighted.

Accepting the past, even though its brand upon (us) is deep; keeping the future open, even though many options may be limited, these are wise attitudes for any of us.

But backward looks and future anticipations are secondary to the Now – the immediacy of the Now – the present moment can be our only direct experience. Past lessons and future hope are the stage setting for life’s drama where we play our roles in the NOW.

[Editor’s note:

In recent sermons, say since about 1980, Rev. Westman began to add “and women” whenever a reference is made to “men,” even when “men” clearly refers to mankind in a universal sense. When it is his own words, the present editor is including this addition. However, he also made such insertions in quotations. In this sermon, for example, he inserted “and women” after “men” three times in the D. H. Lawrence quote. It is the opinion of the present editor that such inclusiveness, while laudatory as an attitude, is inappropriate when quoting a person if a false impression is given about the words said by the person being quoted. As a result, such insertions will not be included in these transcriptions when the insertion is in a quote.]

The Cost and Value of Free Religions

1980 (Probably December)
Lakeland (Probably)

When someone attempts to compare the cost and value of free religion, one is also attempting to contrast the tangible with the intangible – a difficult if not impossible task. You know from your checkbook or wallet what it costs you to be a member of friend of this Fellowship. There is much more difficulty in assessing the value you receive. The Fund Drive Committee (Nelson Burgess) has asked Committees and officers to provide a dollar figure for various portions of the 1981 budget to the end that everyone will know the dollar cost of this Unitarian Universalist Fellowship for 1981. Every member has the opportunity to state his/her priorities today. In the Annual Meeting in January, members will adopt a budget based on what members have stated as their intention to contribute (which is what a pledge is).

A cartoon in a church magazine depicted two glum-looking clergymen, probably the senior and associate minister, gazing at a rather sparse sum of money. One says to the other, “Inflation seems to have hit everything but the collection plate.”

What is of value to you in this Fellowship? A few years ago when I was in the New York City area, there was a news story about a saloon which had to move because the building in which it was located was taken for some urban renewal project. There was argument between city and federal authorities as to whether or not the historic tavern was a “social institution worth saving.” Then after a period, the decision was made, the saloon was valued as a social institution and would be permitted to rent space in the new project when the building was completed. Meanwhile, temporary quarters across the street would be rented. The happy, regular customers helped move bar stools and tables across the street. One of them was quoted in a most interesting comment, “If it wasn’t for this place, God knows, I’d have to go to church to find any of the boys.”

What do you value in this fellowship? An out-distanced runner-up to a convivial pub, or some other place you enjoy or cause you support? Only you can answer that. There is no startlingly imaginative proposition I, or anyone else can make, that will answer that for each of you, individually. Mark Twain once wrote that “Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before him.” But the point is, it is not what I say, but what you value.

The members and friends of the fellowship provide the only substantial flow of funds. The Fellowship is the assembly of persons, members, and friends, held together by a common rule. We gather to share convictions, to attempt mutual persuasion, to set direction for actions. We see a fellow Unitarian Universalist not only as another person whose beliefs are not limited by an imposed creed, but also see him/her as a person whose convictions represent interdependency as well as independence. The Fellowship knows itself not only in the lateral profiles and the back-of-the-neck views of our chairs arranged in rows. More vitally, we know each other in face-to-face mutual involvement.

We are a community. Community is a necessity, not an option. “To be is to be with.” (Gabriel Marcel). Community is not a contrived social invention of some ancient Neanderthal, Egyptian, or Mayan culture but the universal necessary condition required to be human. The distinguishing human mark is personhood. Essential to human living is a self-image. This image of self emerges in community – family life, religious group, school, occupation, civic life. The person, the “I” develops by the variety of relationships that are encountered from birth onward.

Paul Tillich understood this when he wrote (SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY, Vol. 3, pp. 40/41), “Personal life emerges in the encounter of person with person and in no other way. If one can imagine a living being with the (human) psychosomatic structure complete outside any human community, such a being count not actualize its spirit .... Therefore the self-integration of the person occurs in a community within which the continuous mutual encounter of centered self with centered self is possible and actual.”

The persons in our Fellowship who consider, decide, commit, and act represent no permanent line of portraits in an unchanging gallery. Thornton Wilder’s play, OUR TOWN, superbly presented the temporary nature of individual lives and the permanence of the human family. Wilder captured the glory and pathos in the lives of average persons in Grover’s Corners, not much different from you and me.

The persons in our Unitarian Universalist Fellowships and churches are like the people in OUR TOWN. A child is born; with gladness he/she is welcomed and the group counts one more. Man and woman choose to walk together henceforth and we are glad for their union. A man or woman dies in bed, or far from home. We count one less and know the tug of sorrow. Our minds are anxious with unanswerable questions when tragedy strikes; our roster is lessened by an aching omission. A family moves – we are glad when theirs is a more rewarding assignment, but sorry that a needed family has gone beyond the immediate circle of our Fellowship life. A new family or individual arrives. We are glad because we need talent, interest, influence, support. We need the bracing, yeasty ferment of new ideas and fresh strength. We need the added happiness created by new friends.

The persons in our Fellowship are a moving, changing pageant, never the same today as yesterday, and no tomorrow will be just like today. We journey together on the road to an unknown future. Sooner or later, every one of us will drop out along the line of the human march. But if we have walked together with good-will, understanding, and mutual help, we will have been stronger individually and a happier company in our journey together.

But to keep that quality, we must keep organization and support effective. In the fine series of books, RIVERS OF AMERICA, Henry Beston described the geography and culture of the areas bordering the great St. Lawrence River. Beston wrote of a unique quality of life in rural, devout French Canada, “like an old room warmed by an open fire, the little society was warmed by that sense of human oneness and ultimate equality which the religious temper alone can give.”

Our treasurer, Dolly, told the Board two weeks ago that we are behind about $600 this year, comparing receipts with expenditures. We started the year with a possible shortfall of almost $2300 comparing voted expenditures with pledges. Some might say we’ve had a poor year, financially. But I like to think of the remark made by the late, famous show-man Mike Todd, who said once, “I’ve never been poor, only broke. Being poor is a frame of mind, being broke is only a temporary condition.”

An Annual Fund Drive is planned because business-like procedures are required. Now there are always those who feel some sensitivity when money matters explicitly intrude on their life in the Fellowship. But there is nothing awry or gauche in an orderly, informed campaign to raise money for the Fellowship. I still remember a scene from a musical I saw on Broadway some twelve years ago or so, ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER. One of the more amusing characters is a Greek multi-millionaire shipping magnate, who in the unfolding of the plot, visits the clinic operated by the hero and his brother, both psychologists. The millionaire keeps referring to “who runs the business here?” The psychologist, sensitive to his professional qualifications, keeps assuring the rich man, “this is not a business, this is a psychological clinic.” The shipping magnate stares and asks, “You take in money?” “Yes.” “Well, it’s a business.”

In a similar frame of reference, this Fellowship is a business, too. Money is taken in because when a button is switched, you expect the bulb to light. You expect to be warm or cool depending on the weather, to be untouched by falling plaster or rain from a leaky roof. That’s what rent is for. You decided to have me visit you on a twice-monthly basis because I have been trained for the profession of ministry. That costs money – the largest item in your budget, principally because of the distance I travel. The government requires postage on mail. Paper costs money. The Fellowship supports our Unitarian Universalist Association, our Florida District, our cluster.

For this and more, your commitment of money is asked. It’s a business. Don’t give until it hurts. Within your means, give until it feels good.

But remember that in this “business,” you, the members, are the management. In the Annual Meeting, members make the binding choices for the allocation of money from the pledges members have made. You make the choice.

A few days ago (Christian Ministry, Nov. 1980), I noticed this comment in a quote from the author of the study of the Duke of Wellington. “I had an advantage over earlier biographers. I found an old account book in which I discovered how the great man spent his money. It was a better clue than reading letters or speeches as to what the Duke really thought was important in life.” That may not be a complete observation or appraisal, but it is true in part.

Because we believe that the person is more than a molecular sequence or a bio-chemical conglomeration, we covenant together to maintain the value of the person, to seek the ways individually and together, to support the issues which will create increasing recognition of the surpassing need to labor for freedom, fellowship, and human dignity. This is our purpose as a Fellowship. We differ among us as to how we shall worship together, how we shall describe God or whether we shall even attach any meaning to the idea of God. We interpret the experience of religion variously. We seek to deepen our faith by openness to the convictions of others, whose witness for religion may be based on differing intensities of experience and unlike interpretations.

Yes, raising money is a business – when there is good response to the efforts the Fund Drive committee is making, we will find that [we] have enhanced the depth, joy, fun, and good feeling together:

The joy of an old story or new child
The vibrating sensitivity of human empathy when we embrace the grief-stricken or the joyful
The zest of fine conversations
The delight of a shared meal
The remembrance of things past
The hope of new and good experiences to come
The celebration of the great high-tide events of the human family

This I believe is our total worship – our worthship. Quote (somewhere) “It is not the wind which is lacking, but the hoisting of our sails.”

(Clipped from Georgia Universalist)[:]

While it is true that my experiences mean the most to me,
It is also true that you cannot know me unless I share my experiences,
And I need to know you buy your sharing.
Together we may find a direction valuable to us both.
Together we may find the courage to understand to accept our differences,
Together we may discover the reason to be a community.

Family Foundations – On Shifting Sands?

December 1981
Lakeland

If one takes at face value much of the invective and hyperbole of the “New Right,” the Moral Majority, and similar self-appointed moral judges, the trouble with our nation is that liberals, humanists, and other assorted sinners have undermined the traditional family. The Program Committee has scheduled “Family” as our December theme. The timing is correct. The last days of November and the month of December seem appropriate for this theme. Family consciousness is at its high point of celebration ... cooking delicacies, shopping for family presents, decorating home and hearth, re-unions of family members, and a priority for family activities. Except for religious festivals, organizations have learned not to schedule many meetings in this period.

Let’s look at the family, the misdirected focus of the New Right, the family idea in history, the family today, the reality that there are different strokes for different folks, and lastly the undergirding values which support the emerging varieties of family. The perspective from which I speak is that primary principle in the constitution of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the worth and dignity of every human being.

When the Moral Majority and their ilk pound us with their insistence that traditional family must be restored, I tend to agree with Martin Marty that is is a fundraising invention. As I will discuss, I doubt whether any one traditional family pattern was ever widely established or deeply ingrained. I will mention one attitude of the Moral Majority that seems thoroughly inconsistent – [that] Christian religion should be taught in the schools [but] teaching of sexuality must be kept at home. If sexuality education can be trusted only to parents, why should religion be delegated to teachers who would be constrained from illuminating the manifold differences in religious thought and practice? Normal Lear reported in the June 1981 issue of People for the American Way that one branch of the Religious Right, named the Family Protection Lobby, blocked a bill [in one state] that would have permitted school nurses to answer students’ questions about venereal disease, pregnancy, and drug and alcohol abuse. That’s protecting the family??

Family – home? Do you recall the dialogue between the farmer and his wife in Robert Frost’s poignant poem, The Hired Man? The hired man, a drifter, tired and sick, has come to the farm.

"Warren," she said, "he has come home to die:
You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time."

"Home," he mocked gently.

"Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail."

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in."

"I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve."

The Unabridged [dictionary] gives several definitions of family which reflect the way the meaning of “family” has changed through many centuries:

1)The body of servants of a house or the retinue of a person of state or authority
2)The body of persons who live in one house and under one head or manager; a household including parents, children, and servants and as the case may be, lodgers or boarders. For census purposes sharing a common dwelling and table, between and including the extremes of a person living alone and the inmates of a hotel, prison, poorhouse, asylum.
3)Those descended from a common progenitor – the group formed by parents and children, the fundamental social unit of civilized societies.

One scholar of the family (Chas Rosenberg, THE FAMILY IN HISTORY) writes,

“The family is a primary reality not only in terms of individual emotional development but in terms of social and economic development as well. The family functions as a mode of structuring sexual relationships, kinship, relationships and child-rearing – but also as a source of labor and capital accumulation, as a mechanism for the transmission of property and the imposition of social control.”

That is too abstract. What would you think of the system in medieval times (See Philip Aries, CENTURIES OF CHILDHOOD, p. 365) and taken from an account by an Italian after a visit to England: “The want of affection in the English is strongly manifested toward their children; for after keeping them at home til they arrive at the age of seven or nine, they put them out, both male and females, to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them generally for another seven or nine years. And these are called apprentices, and during that time they perform all the most menial offices; and few are born who are exempted from this fate, for everyone however rich he may be, sends his children into the houses of others, whilst he, in return, receives those of strangers into his own.” The Italian writer insinuated that the English took in other people’s children because they thought in that way they would obtain better service than they would from their own offspring. In fact, the explanation which the English themselves gave to the Italian observer was probably the real one: “In order that their children might learn better manners.”

Any reading of social history will reveal that while the family is a primary social foundation, the ways of the family have changed again and again under the pressure of economic, political, and social realities of a given period and place. The nurture and nature of rearing children has been a requirement, but the methods and assumptions have huge variations.

Incidentally, I like what novelist Peter deVries said, “the value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.” I must be a slow learner because I need to get the hang of it.

What of the family today? There is a rosy image and idealized stereotype that persists. The “ideal” American family is Father and Mother – daddy breadwinner, mother housewife, two children, and probably Rover the dog, Tiger the cat, two autos in the garage attached to the suburban split level with a barbecue in the backyard and a copiously notated social calendar hung over the kitchen telephone. That pretty picture applies to about one of every sixteen families in our nation today.

At least 1/3 of marriages end in divorce. Indications are that it will rise to 50%. That is an alarming statistic to many. But it is one of my observations reiterated often enough so that it has become one of my cliches, that just as there are bad divorces and good marriages, so there are good divorces and bad marriages.

Within [the past] few weeks, I attended a wedding celebration in my family. At the family dinner the night before the wedding, the party included the groom’s parents who had been divorced, the mother accompanied by her second husband, the bride’s parents who had been divorced, her father accompanied by his second wife, the bride’s sons by a prior marriage, the groom’s son by his prior marriage, the groom’s sister who has been married twice. There was one couple who had been married only once, the groom’s younger brother and his wife. Now while the location of the placecards had been rather carefully planned out, there was still a general joviality and festivity with no observable hostilities or recriminations. And in today’s world I do not believe that was a particularly remarkable gathering, [nor an] uncommon arrangement of family life today.

Divorce can be expected to be a substantial experience for many – difficult, traumatic, and divisive but nevertheless an intrinsic aspect of our culture. One cause, not usually noted, is our increased life expectancy. The historian Hugh Thomas writes (p. 407) “At the time when statistics began to have any meaning at all, in the 16th and 17th centuries, early death mean that few marriages lasted more than 15 to 20 years (many marriages last longer than that today). In the past, marriages were shortened by death; today, divorce.”

Another inescapable fact – about 1/3 of the 44 million school-age American children have mothers who work full-time. A Department of Labor study predicts that 70% of women will be working outside the home by 1990.

What is the family today? There is the rosy image of the lawn-encircled, mortgage-burdened suburban ideal – one in 16 families as I said. There is also the single-parent family, the mother, usually, who rears her child or children amidst a circle of heavy pressures – working, child care, taking care of the home after work, trying against odds to find moments for social life and some measure of individual fulfillment.

There is the single parent, usually father, who lives alone except for the limited times he may have the children – a night a week or a Saturday. When he is ethical about it, he has heavy financial burdens paying for child support and, perhaps, alimony.

Then there is the married couple, each of whom may have had children by a prior marriage. Sometimes the children in the home are hers, his, and theirs. Anyone who dismissing the probability of sticky problems in this and other similar situations is just naïve about our human emotions, human egos, and human needs.

Consider also the man and woman who live together without the certificate of legal marriage. There may be as many as ten million such persons in this nation, sometimes with child or children in the home.

Also, in considerable number are persons of the same sex living together, homosexual and lesbian relationships – or platonic. Many of the households have ... stability, mutual affection, sharing of goals and goods, not unlike the traditional male/female married couple.

I would surmise also that there are many who have separate domiciles but in all other respects have the quality of a family living under one roof.

I’m sure that you could add other varieties to the many arrangements which in terms of the living qualities involved can be called family, even though not “traditional” family. But as I have indicated, the idea of family has not fixed or certain dimensions and probably never has had.

[CJW insert: Mentioning a few weeks ago that I was going to say something about family in Dec., [a] person – [who] knew more about TV programs – Archie Bunker, Dallas, Three’s Company, One Day at a Time, The Odd Couple, Harper Valley PTA ... any soap opera, realities and wishes and large numbers of people would not be on air if the programs were not identifying with millions]

Thus as in politics, occupation, economics, the idea of family has different strokes for different folks. The options for family are assuredly going to increase. There are communes where a number of people live together for ideological, religious, or economic reasons.

We are certain to see more congregate living, where persons will share one roof for a variety of reasons. The increasingly burdensome cost of housing will demand this. There are many houses where there is unused living space where persons will share a roof, meals, expenses and social interaction. Maggie Kuhn, that feisty, bright, determined Grey Panther, is both a practitioner and advocate of homesharing. The Washington Spectator reports that because of her leadership there are now nearly 100 programs across the country that promote homesharing. “In Seattle, for example, there is homesharing for seniors. You are a young couple looking for a place to live. The office matches you with a couple whose house is too large for their own needs. A three week trial period gives you a chance to see whether the arrangement will work.” I predict that in this decade alone, the number of persons choosing some form of congregate living will increase much more than any present estimate. Good reasons for such arrangements will provide the impetus – economics, the wiser use of presently available housing, fuel and energy, combining of personal resources, our need for human relationships, security, and new experience.

It will be an opportunity to develop not patriarchy or matriarchy, but share-archy (if I may coin a rather clumsy word). Share-archy of course is the best base for families with a certified marriage license or any other arrangement.

In all this, as I indicated at the beginning, there must be a religious base – the worth and dignity of every human being. Those who are greedy, immature, insensitive, exploitative, conniving, and their victims will experience failure. But is this not also just as true as those couples who go into legal marriage?

Martin Buber maintained that there is no community without a common center – that common center for any variety of family in the present and in the future will revolve around a nucleus of loyalty, love, trust, sharing, self-esteem, and respect for others.

A book extensively reviewed in the New York Times is MOTHER LOVE (Myth and Reality) by Elizabeth Badinter, a French writer. It has causes a furor in her native country and probably will here too, as it becomes known.

Mother love, she maintains, is not a gift, but learned. But what fits as a conclusion to this talk is her response to her children when they were “teased by their friends, who said, ‘See, your mother doesn’t love you.’ She had prepared them, beforehand, by telling them, ‘Love is not automatic. We built it together. I choose to love you.’”

Such is the foundation value of family, whatever super-structure it may assume.

What’s your view?

War and Peace – Is a Genuine Survival Ethic Possible?

October 1981
Lakeland

Updated and revised from October 15, 1967, Plainfield

“Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men touch that unknown thing?” That was the protest of the good Bishop in LES MISERABLES after his visit with a man condemned to death. But I guess that’s one of the differences between fact and fiction – even great fiction. In fact, men have always pre-empted the right to assign their fellows to death. War is the most terrifying and formidable of the ways men and women of the human family willingly, even eagerly, accept death in war as necessary to accomplish goals labeled patriotic, or named as the war to end wars, or because it is God’s will.

War and Peace? Is a genuine survival ethic possible? In attempting to wrestle with the question, inevitably there is repeated the old cliché that there always have been wars, there always will be. In all candor, most people in this nation seem to support the current escalation of money and the use of most of our technical and scientific talent for war preparation, the current euphemism for which is to “close the window of vulnerability.” What is presently projected for the next few years is 1½ trillion dollars! That enormous sum beggars our imagination. But the consequence seems inevitable. There can be no steady, substantial gains in housing, productive employment, new sources of energy, nutrition, medicine and health under any economic system when our treasure and talent is so hugely channeled to prepare for a war, the outcome of which most probably will be the extermination of life on this planet.

Two weeks ago I raised questions about violence on our streets and in our homes – one possibility was not mentioned. Since then, I came across these sentences written by a Jesuit priest, Richard McSorley:

“The taproot of violence in our society today is our intention to use nuclear weapons. Once we have agreed to that, all other evil is minor in comparison.” That statement is not demonstrated social theory, but an intuition, and I have a hunch there is more depth to such an intuition that we might easily concede.

Richard Watt (Christian Century, 4/8/81), who has been co-ordinating a pilot project in a peacemaking ministry in Northeast Ohio, writes, “The starting point for peace education is consciousness-raising, for most church people, like American citizens generally, are simply unaware of the awesome nuclear mathematics and of the strategic doctrines that make nuclear war unthinkable. Nonetheless, people are remarkably open to the message that the arms race must be slowed, stopped, and reversed, and that the time to begin is now. If, as we are told, some 75% of the populace supports increased military spending, I argue that this is a very fragile consensus responding to very limited information. Let the people learn a few basic facts:

that a single Poseidon submarine can destroy every large and medium sized city in the Soviet Union (and we have 41 Polaris and Poseidon submarines);

that a mere 400 to 500 nuclear bombs could destroy two-thirds of the Soviet Union’s industry and 40 million of its people; we possess some 11,000 strategic nuclear bombs;

that from 1971 to 1977 the U.S. sold $56 billion worth of arms, three times the total of the preceding 20 years, and that over 70% went to developing nations;

that in the mid-70s, the Shah of Iran was our number one customer for arms, spending nearly a third of Iran’s gross national product on the military by ‘75-’76;

that if one handed the Pentagon a $1,000 bill every hour of every day, it would take over 200,000 years to hand over what we will spend on the military during the 1980s.

And Richard Watt wrote that prior to the recent mammoth increase for B1 bombers, MX missiles, and hardened silos.

War has always been cruel. 2500 years ago, the Hebrew farmer killed by a sword-thrust by the Assyrian invader who swept down like a wolf on the fold, was just as dead as the Japanese children incinerated at Nagasaki. Atomic deaths are quicker, perhaps. But we must remember that any geographically-confined war, such as such as Iran and Iraq, or Afghanistan and the Soviets, can spread. Destruction can become global. Lives not destroyed by the fusion blast or radiation may die from germ or chemical weapons. At stake are not just armies, navies, and air forces, but the planet itself. The powers of the world have available the forces of fire and fever to destroy people and planet and possibly every living organism.

I’m not sure that listing the potential terror items stir us to change our ways of thinking and behaving about war. But Abraham Maslow reminded, “To be untroubled when one should be troubled can be a sign of sickness. Sometimes smug people have to be scared into their wits.” (p. 196, TOWARD A PSYCHOLOGY OF BEING)

What is a genuine survival ethic? This is not a time to discuss ethical theories. Therefore, a terse definition: by a survival ethic, I mean one that will provide a political, economic, and communications climate in the world which will prevent the exchange of missiles, fire, and poison on a scale that will destroy the peoples of the world. By genuine, I mean an ethic which does not require that any nation or culture be deprived of the values it cherishes and believes necessary. In our country, for example, no genuine survival ethic would provide for the end of our individual liberties and civil rights. No 1984, “Big Brother” overrule could constitute a tolerable survival ethic for us. But we must not assume that our choices must also be adopted by other nations. Some nations will, as some have, choose varieties of communism. Other systems will evolve which will not fit into the political/economic definitions of today.

A genuine survival ethic for our world will tolerate many choices in the framework of world peace through world law. Our ability to reason must be applied to problems; we must open our feelings to the pain of people’s needs everywhere; and we must never stop re-evaluating ongoing efforts in the light of experience and consequences.

This is not to say that we should be naïve in this world where the struggles for power will continue – a contest to win markets, regional, or continental influence; where opposing ideologies are reluctant to make concessions that might be interpreted as weakness; where the grim contests between the have and have-not nations will increasingly add to the dilemmas of who gets what, how, and when. Realism dictates that governments are seldom if ever generous much beyond their own self interests.

Sidney Harris wrote in a recent column,

“While it is true that those who take a hopeful view of matters often accomplish more than those who take a dismal view, it is equally true that optimism can betray us into more follies than pessimism can.

“What is rare and valuable in any person is a combination of these two attitudes, which might be summed up in the Old West maxim, ‘Trust everybody and cut the cards.’

“If you are going to trust everybody without cutting the cards, you are going to be badly cheated sooner or later; contrariwise, if you trust nobody you are going to deprive yourself of more opportunities than you will avert losses.”

In such a stance of cautious effort, there are at least two areas of information/communication where we can be more alert to what is happening, otherwise we may find ourselves so far down the road to global war that there can be no turning back. We must penetrate the jargon, and [we must] understand the forces that are a hazard to world peace.

Abraham Lincoln’s philosophy has been summarized, “In any great public crisis, find the truth and put it into plain words before the people. Then give them time and they will vindicate you.” When obscure phrases and terms are used which fail to indicate the devastating nature of military proposals, then there is need for each of us to translate into plain words in order to test proposals with clearer reason and deeper feeling. There is a need to penetrate the jargon of the military establishments (see UNESCO COURIER, Aug-Sept 67).

Examples: the atomic bomb which destroyed Hiroshima has been called a “nominal bomb.” Somehow the impression is given that nominal is minimum or almost a light touch of explosive. But Hiroshima was hit by a bomb with the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT. The military describes this as a 20 kiloton bomb – and the dimension of 20,000 tons of TNT seems to have become blurred.

This also becomes obscure when talking about megaton bombs. The first test H-bomb we set off at Bikini atoll was 15 megatons. The U.S.S.R.'s H-bomb (1961) was 60 megatons. Megaton sounds scientific and technical, but a megaton is the equivalent of 1 million tons of TNT. When one comprehends that our experimental bomb at Bikini atoll was a force of 15 million tons of TNT and the Russian-tested H-bomb was the equivalent of 60 million tons of TNT; and contrast that with the history that the Allies dropped a total of only 1.2 million tons of explosives during the 6 years of war and destroyed cities, industries, population and railway systems. Today there would be no place on any continent to hide when the great powers exchange their nuclear missiles on some future doomsday.

We need to penetrate the jargon in other instances:

Much is said of “tactical battlefield atomic weapons.” But the most of those are as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb, and romantic names such as the Davy Crockett should not lead us into overlooking their power to destroy persons in wide areas, not just gain tactical advantages in wars limited to soldiers.

When one reads military staff talk about “counter force strategy,” does one always understand that this means the destruction of enemy cities and the eradication of populations?

Or that “counter-value strategy” is the policy of “directing strategic nuclear attack not on military targets but on centers of population and industry?”

Or that “bonus kills” refers to those who die as a result of radiation poisoning from fall-out as compared to those who are immediately killed by blast and firestorm?

One megadeath is the death of a million people; megacorpse, one million dead bodies; “overkill,” the power to destroy the entire population of any enemy country more than once.

The neutron bomb has been given the go-ahead by our President and his advisers. “Neutron” somehow seems a harmless word. Of course neutron is a term in atomic physics – but also, somehow, it doesn’t sound so terrible – neutron hints of neutral or a neutered cat which no longer is potent.

But even though the blast impact of a “neutron” bomb may be less than a Titan missile, the deadly, spreading radiation will not be, cannot be limited by the boundaries of a battlefield in East Germany or Poland.

We need to understand the jargon.

Secondly, we must try to understand the forces, deliberate and unwitting which combine to continue the enormous build-up of military power and consequently, reducing to a trickle, comparatively, available resources for great needs on the civilian domestic scene.

When President Eisenhower delivered his last speech as President, January 17, 1961, this General-President whose entire career (other than a brief term as President of Columbia University) was in the military, warned against a new development in American political life which never before had existed to such a degree. He identified it as the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry ... the total influence is felt in every statehouse, every office of the federal government.” He further said, “only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can so manage this complex that security and liberty may prosper together.”

By and large we have not been alert and knowledgeable as Eisenhower advised.

In 1963, then-President Kennedy remarked that defense, space or atomic activities absorbed about 2/3rds of the trained people for exploring our scientific and technical frontiers.

Eighteen years later the war budget has ballooned – what is it annually, $142 billion? $170 billion? The military-industrial complex has increased its strength and power over both the political and economic nature of our nation.

The conversion of jobs to peaceful products and services has never been planned seriously. Yet this is an issue that cannot be avoided permanently. But it has been avoided since World War II.

It is in these such circumstances – the difficult jargon and the forces we fail to understand completely (and there are many such forces) – that there must be progress to world peace through world law and treaty. One may argue with various plans; or criticize harshly the United Nations. But the UN has not been trusted with machinery to stop disputes before they explode – machinery for negotiations, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement and more use and sanction of the World Court. But plainly needed is much more trust by the large nations in such an international peace-keeping process – or a better one if it can be planned and used.

There is a story of the wars between the Royalists and the Cromwell Puritans in 17th century England. A Royalist general before fighting at the battle of Edgehill prayed this way, “O Lord thou knowest how busy I shall be this day; if I forget thee, do not forget me. March on, boys.” This is rather typical – not only in prayer but in reference to such organizations as the U.N. “If I forget thee, do not forget me.” Well, a world of peace through law won’t work if we expect it to remember us while we forget the responsibility to take the hopeful risks of peace rather than the fatal chances of war.

Some of us remember the growth of totalitarianism in the 20s and 30s. The dictators ruled by force through obedient military establishments whose responsibility it was to carry out orders, regardless of what those orders might be. This was shown clearly in the Nuremberg trials. But the dictators acquired and held power because they had the explicit support or the silent acquiescence of the largest segment of people – the middle and upper classes, people like ourselves, by and large.

We, too, will be silent or acquiescent unless attitudes change. There can be no growing influence of public opinion for peace unless public opinion exerts its force. How [can we] change attitudes? There are many ways. But I would like to speak of just one attitude change which would help build a world of law, not war – we to accept and communicate an expanded idea of patriotism.

Patriotism is attributed to the Armed Forces, the Marine, the Air Force pilot, the men and women in uniform, volunteers and draftees alike, who carry out orders in the face of danger, suffering wounds, imprisonment, death, to fulfill volunteer or imposed obligation to the country in time of war. Nathan Hale, courageously going to the gallows, John Paul Jones, Andrew Jackson, U.S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, Sgt. Alvin York, the millions of unsung men and women – those awarded medals of honor and Purple Hearts – these have been called the patriots and rightly so. Honor to them.

Patriotism is also more loosely used to designate those in organizations hewing to the military line and criticizing all varieties of dissenters. “My country right or wrong, right or wrong my country.”

But the definition should be wider, not only those who die in war, but also those who work for peace are patriots too. The values we prize, the very existence of human life in our world now depends more on peacemakers than it does those overaged politicians who plan the deployment of our young warriors. Jean Giraudoux, in his play “Tiger at the Gates,” has Andromache (Hector’s wife) say to Demokos, the passionate nationalist, “But which is the worse cowardice? To appear cowardly to others, and make sure of peace? Or to be cowardly in your own eyes, and lose a war?”

Demokos answers, “Cowardice is not to prefer death on every hand, rather than the death of one’s own native land.”

The warrior’s wife replies, “Everyone dies for his country. If you lived in it well and wisely and actively, you die for it too.”

How can we fail to recognize in this age where instantaneous death for most of the world is the wired button near the finger of the Chief Executive of at least two nations, each hostile to the other? Can we perceive that patriotism is keeping the peace as well as struggling valiantly in war? Such is an attitude change which would move us toward growing insistence on a world governed by law with rights guaranteed.

In the October 15th issue of The Washington Spectator, [there] appears a news item that I did not see in our newspaper. Near Amarillo, TX, is a place where nuclear weapons are put together.

This summer, Catholic Bishop ... asked the 2400 employees of Pantex [quote...]. Who is the patriot?

Historian Sir Arthur Bryant wrote of the Celtic pioneer-freeman of Britain before the Norman invasion, “He was wont to speak his mind out freely in the court of the village or shire – for among this simple people, the man who spoke the truth fearlessly was as honored as the man who fought bravely.” (MEDIEVAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND, p. 18).

I have tried to say that a genuine ethic of survival in this world where war can demolish and exterminate everything living requires:

that we must be critical of jargon which blurs the horrible realities of war;

that we must understand the forces that by definition need a constantly intensifying war machine;

that we must give increasing sanction to world peace through world law, with a strengthened U.N. as the most obvious and available instrument through which the process can move;

that before this can happen in any substantial degree, public opinion must gather much more strongly in favor of replacing war with law through international peace-keeping.

Is this dreaming the impossible dream? I don’t know. But when gloom is heavy upon me, when I consider the insensibility of so many to the horror of war and the beauty of peace, there are times I pick up a paper with some words written by a friend of mine, who for many years has dreamed that impossible dream. He too became discouraged often, but also he wrote:

“There are no ‘great men.’ Those of the ‘great men’ whom I have observed directly were just men into whom the people, the mass of people, had poured their dreams. Some of these men were big enough to shoulder their load of dreams and become ‘great’ and some have been so small that there was no discernible relation between the true man and the public image of the man.

“But whether the man was ‘great’ or a pygmy, hidden behind an image of greatness, the thing that really made for “greatness” was the great dream that people dared to dream. When millions of people dared to hold the faith that people need not starve in the midst of plenty, great new leaders appeared and the depression was licked. When millions and millions of people dared to abide by the faith that a ‘master race’ was a myth, a false god, then great leaders emerged and Hitler crawled into his bunker.

“And if we look to great men to save us, we are lost. But when you and I, many of us, each of us, stand up and say out loud, ‘War in an atomic age is suicide,’ then from somewhere as has always happened and always will happen, a great leader will appear.

“There are no great men. But great men (and women) always appear when the people dare to dream great dreams. It is the little people who dream and will not stop dreaming who are the heroic men and women.”

Liberal Principles In An Increasingly Illiberal World

September 1981
Lakeland
Port Charlotte

January 1982
Cocoa

A fault I find in myself is a tendency to be complacent when I should be alert; to take my ease in a naïve optimism when I should be uneasy about threats to liberal principles and practice; to believe that hard-won gains are forever safe, when they are not. Because I believe that my condition is not singular, but shared by many who hold to similar guiding rules, the subject is “liberal principles in an increasingly illiberal world.”

What are liberal principles? There are many ways to phrase these, and would be stated differently by others. Liberal principles do not represent an array of particular truths or an established philosophy. To use Duncan Howlett’s analysis in THE CRITICAL WAY IN RELIGION, liberal principles are critical inquiries (either positively or negatively) about issues and ideas. The goal is not to conform or adapt attitudes to pre-conceived beliefs but to examine and see if assertions be true. Claims that have an important effect need validation on the basis of history, experience, reason, and compassion. Thus the vindication of “truth” is not found etched on stone tablets toted down from a mountain or forever contained by what may or may not be said in alleged sacred scripture. Rather “truth” is ongoing, subject to modification in light of new discoveries, new insights, revised interpretations. The value basis of liberal principles is the essential worth of every human being on a planet for which, like it or not, we are stewards and ought to be caring, competent stewards.

Thus, “faith” as articles of belief handed down from someone else is not to be accepted without critical inquiry and constant examination. Arthur Koestler wrote, “Faith is a wondrous thing; it is not only capable of moving mountains, but also of making you believe a herring was a race horse.”

The old German legends of Dr. Faustus, dramatized b Goethe, Marlowe, and others, may be suggestive because like so many stories sifted through the emotions and folk-lore of the human family, there is basic wisdom. Faust, an elderly student who has been a life-long seeker for knowledge and insight into the meaning of life, becomes weary and abandons his quest for learning and understanding. He sells his soul to the devil, giving himself up to sensual pleasure. Perhaps this old folk story was saying that Faust lost his soul, not because he couldn’t find all the answers, but because he gave up the search. We humans, because we are human, are spiritual wanderers seeking ever more fulfilling answers in the midst of living choices we must make.

Also asserted in the title of this talk is that the world is increasingly illiberal. I surmise each one could make a long list. Let me illustrate with a few of our current, and to me, disturbing, events.

Our international posture toward other nations seems to be based not on mutual desire to improve the living conditions of hungry, deprived people, not on a common desire to build cooperation and human development, but rather, [we ask,] is another nation for us and against the Soviet Union? [CJW note: they do not have to be for us – just against the USSR]

President Reagan, with his captivating humor may have unintentionally created a modern parable when, commenting to a fund-raising audience that he “didn’t need to be waked up after two Libyan jets were shot down by our Navy fliers. If ours were shot down, yes, they’d wake me right away. If the other fellow is shot down, why wake me up?”

If this is symbolic of our national attitude, then we may be mighty in armaments but not in sensitivity or generosity. If we live in a world where we are oblivious to the “other fellow” being shot down, we may be in more authentic trouble than may seem obvious.

The Moral Majority and like groups spend millions to lobby for their stands, spend millions flashing images on our eyes and pronouncements on our ears to pound us with their political objectives. They are intolerant of differing views, do not allow critical examination of their ponderous proclamations, claiming that they are privy to God’s will and speak for that deity.

If you had predicted to me in 1964 that I would live to praise Senator Barry Goldwater I’d have scoffed “you’re out of your gourd.” [CJW note: almost ever issue, took a different position] This week he again struck out at Moral Majority leaders saying (quoted 9/15 Miami Herald), “I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers ... telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ and ‘D.’ Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?

“And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate.”

Amen – Amen – I say to that crusty old hawk; and have written to praise him for his candor and courage. He surely will be deluged by religious reactionaries with pompous pieties, windy rhetoric, and condescending castigations.

There are other illiberal trends – more bombs for the Pentagon instead of food, legal assistance, and general concern for the deprived and disinherited. [CJW note: Doonesbury: OK to let poor suffer, “they’re used to it”]

I have mentioned issues in our nation. The same trend seems to be world-wide; I see no sainted nations.

What are guides for the liberals who believe in critical inquiry, however much we may part company on specific issues? There are varieties in the way the principles can be stated. This is my way today:

THE GOD THAT FAILED is a singularly important book published in 1950. Six well-known persons described their entry into Communism and their sad, disillusioned departures. [CJW note: DARKNESS AT NOON, YOGI AND THE COMMISSAR] Arthur Koestler, novelist and essayist, writes of the last speech he wrote before his resignation from the Communist Party in 1938. He wrote (p. 73), “The theme of the speech was the situation in Spain; it contained not a single word of criticism of the Party or of Russia. But it contained three phrases, deliberately chosen because to normal people they were platitudes, to Communists, a declaration of war. The first was, ‘No movement, party or person can claim the privilege of infallibility.’ The second was, ‘Appeasing the enemy is as foolish as persecuting the friend who pursues your own aim by a different road.’ The third was a quotation from Thomas Mann: ‘A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.’”

First: “No movement, party or person can claim the privilege of infallibility.”

Much of the bloodshed, many of the cruelties, most of the injustice that one can find wherever one looks in history can be attributed to a false claim of infallibility. Such false claims have surfaced again and again. Caesars, Popes, monarchs, Mohammed. Peter the Hermit ... claimed God’s authority in arousing mean and greedy passions for the Crusades, surely some of the most infamous pages in the history of Christian culture. Tsar Nicholas I said to the Russian people, “Do not question me! Know that I am your father; that is enough.” (Quoted by Richard Sennet).

The noted church historian Adolf Harnack wrote “study history in order to intervene in history.... To intervene in history means that we must reject the past when it reaches into the present as hindrance; it means further that we must do the right thing in the present; and it means finally that we must prepare prudently for the future.” (quoted Martin Marty, A NATION OF BEHAVERS, p. 51 ff)

A skeptical view of claimed infallibility is always a need, not less now than other times. Whether a claim to infallibility is based in Biblical literalism or a particular economics or morality or one solution to war and peace, there are no infallible authorities ... wearing the mantle of government, the uniform of the Pentagon, the robes or religion, brandishing the charts and graphs of a particular economics.

To the extent any one of us yields to infallible claims without critical examination, to that extent we lose something of the autonomous self which is the best expression of the human personality. It follows that we must grant the same rights and privileges to others, even, particularly when we disagree. Margaret Fuller, that remarkable 19th century woman, author, editor, and a key figure in the Transcendentalist movement, a liberated woman before the term was coined, wrote (and I shall not change the gender of what she wrote), “Most men, in judging another man, ask, ‘Did he live up to our standard?’ To me, it seems desirable to ask, ‘Did he live up to his own?’”

That brings into sequence the second of Koestler’s phrases, “Appeasing the enemy is as foolish as persecuting the friend who pursues your own aim by a different road.”

“Enemy” is too strong a word for those with whom we may disagree. If we pursue the method of critical inquiry, and make known our findings there will be expressions of wrath and occasionally at least unflattering labels. Yet, silence is appeasing those who believe e.g., there can be a winner in a nuclear war, who contentedly maintain there can be a better quality of life by diminishing basic necessities, who self-righteously proclaim their notions are God’s will. It is painful and at times, costly, to speak out. It’s convenient to take refuge by saying, “Well, I don’t know enough about it.” One some key issues, we may never know enough about it. But we can know enough to break silence. Clarence Darrow once commented on being a partisan, “You have at least one chance in two of being right. If you are neutral, you have no chance of being right.” (Bio – p. 293)

Then, too, there are allies. They may not be our religion or our particular party. There are coalitions standing together on particular issues – such as the RCAR where many religious organizations write to advocate pro-choice. Should I worry if among the allies there are those who follow the Methodist discipline, or the Westminster Confession, or the Gospel formula? On the issue of the Moral Majority, I’m glad for Senator Goldwater’s declaration even though I’m sure we’d be on different sides on almost any other issue. On particular issues, opponents of my opponents are allies.

Koestler also quoted Thomas Mann, “A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.” On that I had to do some thinking for there are several conventions we seem to follow. [CJW note: How are you? Looking well!] Mayor Koch of New York has acquired much publicity by asking everywhere, the passerby on the street, the trash collector, the clerk in the store, or the political followers, “How and I doing?” I wonder how many candid answers he gets.

But the matter is deeper than innocuous social conventions. For example, one of the formative competitive religions to Christianity in the early centuries was Gnosticism. In times of persecution, people were tested by the Roman [Imperium?] being required to throw incense on a pagan chafing dish and acknowledge that Caesar was Lord. Many Christians committed to their Lord refused such obeisance and went to their death as a consequence.

Basilides, a leader of the Gnostic movement, advised his followers that it was permitted to throw the incense in the dish and mutter a prayer of mental reservation. The historian wrote, “Thereby Gnosticism sealed its doom” - a religion with reservations could not persist. The history of any movement is much more complex than any single cause and effect, but the incident is instructive.

If too many hold liberal principles with reservations, or silence, doom, too, is sealed.

In conclusion, these days when often enough I am pessimistic, there are sufficient moments of optimism to believe that liberal principles and the value base of persons will prevail.

Easy? No way. Oscar Wilde commented on the socialist movement when it captured the enthusiasm and idealism of many, “the trouble with socialism is that it would take too many evenings.” (quoted by Sennet, p. 152)

Wilde speaks to us still on important issues. Effort is required and we do value our leisure and contentment. [CJW note: who wants to dedicate time?]. But what would you? Writing in the American Scholar an educator noted, “Everything in education springs from ‘Why?’” I would amend that slightly by adding “What?” “What” - that is, what are the obtainable facts? Why? What is the purpose? - can be raised many times. Letter to the editor (praise be that there are a number among us who do that). Raising the questions in our informal gatherings. Even the discouraging task of writing our legislators may have effects of which we are not presently aware.

This month we have sharing our dreams. One of mine is that the future is still open if we keep it open. Unknown source: “The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths to it are not found but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.”

Van Wyck Brooks (FLOWERING OF N.E., p. 252) tells a story that can be a parable for some of us. In the 19th century, Concord, MA, had no seaport, no trade, little water-power, no gold, lead, marble, oil. Ralph Waldo Emerson advised his fellow-townsmen to manufacture school teachers and make them the best in the world. Years later, a French scholar was sent to study American education. He discovered that wherever he went, nearly all the school teachers came from Connecticut and Massachusetts. He asked the then-famous Edward Everett Hale to explain. Hale went to Concord and asked a leading citizen how many of his townspeople, when they left school, became school teachers. “Why all of them, of course.”

I suppose that’s one of my dreams, that more of us, if not all of us, quietly or assertively, will become teachers or models of liberal principles.

Listen

June 1981
Lakeland

[Editor’s note: this sermon is available on MP3, not as given at the time, but as read into a recorder by CJW several years later. Contact editor if interested.]

Have there been times in your life when you have said, “I wish I’d listened to her or him or to my mother or to my father” ? We learn at an early age to talk, but seldom to listen.

In this period when we will not be gathering here for services for awhile, I’m suggesting to you and me that we listen to many voices. William James once wrote that the world to the new-born infant is a buzzing, blooming confusion. Then in the process of becoming human, we develop filters to screen out, to focus on one sound at a time.

Listening seems to have been a constant part of the mythology and history of religions. There is the well-known legend of the prophet Elijah (1st Kings 19-9 ff) where the prophet, trying to escape from Queen Jezebel, went into the wilderness and to a cave on Mt. Horeb. He heard strong wind, and an earthquake shook the mountain and shattered rocks, then a fire. But he could not discern the voice of Yahveh in this storm and fury. Then came the still, small voice. Out of that experience, Elijah regained courage enough to go back and continue his struggles against the corrupt rulers, Ahab and Jezebel.

Joan of Arc listened to her voices rather than the authority of the church and state. She was executed for that, but had saved her nation.

I am not saying that if we listen, we will hear supernatural voices. But we might hear natural wonders and human fears and hopes.

There is a story about two men walking around a crowded city sidewalk. Suddenly one of them remarked, “Listen to the lovely voice of that cricket.” But his friend could not hear the sound. He asked his friend how he could detect the sound of a cricket amid the roar of traffic and the sounds of people. The first man, a zoologist, had trained himself to hear the sounds of nature – yet he did not explain this. He simply dropped a half-dollar onto the sidewalk, whereupon a dozen people began to look about them. “We hear,” he said, “what we listen for.”

One of John Dewey’s famous educational maxims is that “we learn by doing.” Few people today would argue with that. But also, we learn by listening. Every one of us is aware that we tune in, tune out conversations, sometimes making a desperate effort to catch up and fill in the spaces where we tuned out. That’s human enough. But there is a need to guard against such filtering out another person’s cries for help which might be concealed in verbose or confused conversation.

Anyone who had attempted to counsel two persons who are at odds, a [married] couple, for example, is aware how much anguish is caused by failure to listen. Two people, each of whom may be hurting and confused, but their words are launched like parallel arrows – never meeting. We seem to be driven more often than not to more talking and less listening.

Norbert Weiner once wrote, “speech is a joint game between the talker and the listener against the forces of confusion.”

Listen! Do you know the John Holmes poem, “The Eleventh Commandment?” [CJW note: TRAPP p. 78]

Some of you are aware that one of the adult program series of the UUA deals with listening – how to listen. More than 30 agencies of the Federal Government have had listening training.

Some years ago, the psychologist Carl Rogers based his method of therapy on listening. In order to make sure he had listened and heard accurately, he would repeat in different words what he had heard his client say. The reality of the client knowing that he/she had been heard, understood, was in itself a healing process for troubled minds and fractured emotions.

So, Listen. As I have been thinking for a couple of weeks of the services this morning, I have tried to block out the obvious from time to time and listen to sounds I usually do not hear so well. Instead of the radio or tape player, I listened to the turbulent water in the dish-washer, the hiss of the tea-kettle, the whisper of the breeze, the thrumming sound of the blessed rain on the roof, the surly matter of distant thunder, the slippery squeak of my bare feet on wet grass, the mystic melody of lapping water on the shores of the lake, the snick of the axe clearing wood.

Perhaps you might comment, “so what.” But as I brought into primary listening those sounds which are usually background, there came home to me, keenly, the order and beauty of the universe – the world and its multi-scale notes, harmonies, and percussions.

[CJW note: Simon and Garfunkel – sang about it, “The Sound of Silence” - signal for tape]

There is healing and fellowship when we listen to one another as I*Thou (not I*it). There can be restoration of the human spirit when we respond to the sounds of earth, sea, sky, women, men, children.

One thing more: in our world of international suspicions and misunderstandings, we need to listen for the voices which are advocates of reason, announcers of fact, prophets whose priorities are humane, who sing a song of human fellowship the world over. We need to listen for those voices for there are also the war chants born of fear and greed, the dissonances of narrow self-interest.

How many times have you said, or heard, “Listen to reason.” That’s a still small voice amid the emotions sparked by the anxieties of our day. But reason is a voice that if heard might make us more aware of what is and what might be.

May I repeat: Norbert Weiner once wrote, “speech is a joint game between the talker and the listener against the forces of confusion.”

In one of the regions of Polynesia, the statues of their gods were found sitting in a circle. Each of the god-figures had a hand cupped to his ear, as though to say, “Go on, I’m listening to you.”

I do not know if the god or the gods listen or not, but we humans have the capacity to listen, and when we do, our understanding and caring for our fellow woman and man will be a joy to us and a source of strength for them.

We have the senses to hear the voices of the sky, sea, and land. There is a healing for us and perception in us too deep for adequate expression. Perhaps e.e. cummings glimpsed this poetically (and I’ll close with this) (p. 22, MODERN RELIGIOUS POEMS) ....

Addendum:

The Moldau – Smetana, from the record jacket:

A symphonic poem describes the great river from its source in two springs in a Bohemian forest, “one warm and gushing, the other cold and peaceful.” They join and run through the forest to become a gentle river flowing through the peaceful valleys. Now the river grows into a mighty torrent, while nearby the sounds of hunters and a wedding feast are heard. Now it plunges through the St. John Rapids, foaming and fierce, finally to end as the broad placid waters that flow through Prague.

Personal And Social Ethics In An Interdependent World

May 1981
Lakeland
Port Charlotte

What ought I to do? What moral principles should be reflected in my behavior? How should I deal with that explosive word, “conscience?” In one sense, this is a follow-up of my talk “Too Many Saviors.” In that talk, I suggested that we are responsible persons who do not need special saviors, whether religious, political, economic. But as some of you suggested, such a proposition is easier to assert than fulfill.

Ethics is the code of principles or statements about what my conduct, my goals, ought to be. Although I hesitate to use the word “ought” in connection with anyone but myself, usually ethics is applied also to what the conduct of others ought to be. We speak of ethical behavior, usually meaning an adherence to ... standards that have been proposed as necessary or beneficial for transactions between people, for the survival of the human venture or the proper functioning of a profession. [CJW note: or unethical behavior as a disregard of such standards]

This is an attempt to deal with ethics as impinging on us personally, as impacting on us in wider social contexts, what is conscience, and the need for transpersonal ethics in an interdependent world.

Personal ethics is a necessary part of all our lives. We observe certain rules of behavior in relationship to others in our immediate and closed circles. We do not deliberately cheat a friend; we try to achieve fair-dealing with those we know. If we contract a financial debt, we attempt to pay it and on time. Civil behavior is the standard of our conduct to those we know.

Of course there are those who violate such trust. Perhaps they acquire “guilty” feelings or have a “bad” conscience. But on the whole, the experience of most of us is that we deal ethically with our family, friends, merchants, employers, employees, and expect a like response.

But in the field of social ethics there is uncertainty, deep division of opinion and perils to the human family. Now while all personal ethics are social, I am using “social” in the sense of the wider community with which we have little or no immediate personal contact or close relationship. Social ethics, in this sense, applies to such questions as crime and punishment, issues of national importance (such as I cited two weeks ago), and the sensitive and hazardous nature of our dealings with other nations.

I assume that I shall not have to argue at length that this is an interdependent world. The Detroit automakers are alarmed about the number of automobiles Japanese manufacturers are selling in the United States. Should a social ethic deal with this? Canada is unhappy with the amount of smog and pollution which winds bring to their land from the large industrial centers in the United States, in the Midwest, particularly. What is a proper attitude, a social ethic, which will grapple with this? American fishermen complain that the huge factory ships of the Soviets and Japanese are depleting the fishing grounds which are in proximity to our shores. What is the proper ethic to understand and deal with these questions and many others? Perhaps it would be more pointed to speak of the need for a world ethic.

Can we be content to trust conscience? There are many who would say that if we obey conscience, we will do the right thing, behave ethically, whether personally or in the wider areas of social relationships, decisions, and actions. Would [that] this were so! But it is not! In the more complex areas of problems and issues there is no consensus of conscience. One illustration: before the South Sea Islands came under Western influence, “The Fiji Islander who killed his aged parents had the same good in mind as we who support our aged parents. Parent-killers and parent-protectors are at one in seeking advantage or happiness. The Fiji-Islander happened to believe that persons carry their infirmities with them into the spirit world, and so the aged parent is assured of greater happiness after death if he/she dies before becoming decrepit. Americans do not hold this belief, and so they think that the prospects of happiness are increased by caring for parents instead of killing them.” (See P. C. Sharp, ETHICS, p. 177). [CJW note: “Honor thy father and mother” - two applications]

So if “the voice of conscience is the voice of god,” then there are many gods with differing voices.

The formation of conscience is more likely attributable to upbringing than some pure force innate within us. As children, “good” is that which is praised; “bad” is that which is punished or frowned upon. Emotions, wishes, desire for approval, repetition, and verbalization in childhood plays a large role in forming what is called “conscience.” As one social scientist observed, (ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, “Morals”), “Virtue or morality consists of conformity – right conduct is not commanded because it is good – it is good because it is commanded.” In the second verse of his poem, “London,” William Blake wrote,

“In every city of every man,
In ever infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles, I hear.”

There is an old story about a U.S. Senator who visited one of his elderly constituents. The Senator talked to him about some of the great things that had come to their state during their life-time. The old man listened and then said, “Yes, they all came, and thank God, I was agin all of them.” The mind-forged manacles!

Yet, why is there change at all? At least two reasons – I believe the mores and manners implanted in us to not clearly indicate what we should do in novel situations – new situations where ingrained customs do not help. For example, all the customs of the ways of living and the ways of war can not deal effectively with atomic bombs because they have brought a new condition and terrible dimension to the price for warfare.

Secondly, the human animal (at least) possesses or has the capacity for intelligence. Other persons would include intuition in the power we have to criticize, to re-examine and revise principles, ways, attitudes, either because of something new, or a fresh look at policies that could not and should not have been maintained. The institution of human slavery is an example. [CJW note: Hamlet - “There’s nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so” - not amoral relativism; key word is “thinking” about values, consequences] Imagination, intuition, intelligence, are the forces that substantiate something John Dewey once wrote, “Morality is a continuing process, not a fixed achievement.” (MORALS AND CONDUCT)

These faculties are a heavy burden. As one observer (Yonker, p. 12) noted, “Because our basic beliefs give us psychological security of one kind or another, we tend to become dogmatic about them.” But such dogmatism may mean destruction of the fragile world in which we live.

The ethical question that will be with every one of us til our dying days, and with our children and our children’s children, is “can there be a trans-world ethic which will be embraced by enough persons to allow human life to survive with ever-increasing self-realization?”

Right here is where the ethical question has always become confused and awry. What we may be unwilling to do on a basis of personal ethic, we acquiesce in larger, more confusing situations – national and international, for example. This is one of the insights that Reinhold Niebuhr contributed in his classic study, MORAL MAN AND IMMORAL SOCIETY: (as summarized by Mason Olds, THE LIFE OF CHOICE, p. 15): “Groups and institutions behave differently from individuals; that is, the morality of groups is different from the morality of individuals. In the case of the individual, appeals to reason and a commitment to justice might work, but these appeals seldom work in the case of groups. The reason is that groups almost universally defend their economic interests. Seldom will rational persuasion change them; thus they have to be challenged....”

What then shall we think and do? Immanuel Kant proposed a moral imperative in two parts: a) So act as if you would be willing for everyone in the world to act in the same circumstances; b) act so as to treat humanity always as an end, never as a means.

There are flaws in this – many criminals and dictators would be willing for everyone in the world to act the same in the same circumstances.

The 20th century philosopher W. T. Stace (RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND) proposed three common human purposes which are the source of universal rules of conduct:

1)Self-preservation. The survival of life. Who does not share that value?
2)Physical health.
3)Happiness - “This may also be called by such names as welfare, richness of living, self-realization, health of the soul.”

There is a corollary question, I believe, in any consideration of ethical behavior in this small, shaky world of ours: the question is not only what should we do – the prior question is “What is going on?”
We will not break the mind-forged manacles unless we know what is going on. Khoren Arisian writes in a paper, “Ethics is like the (physical) sciences, it begins with problems. Problems to be solved.” There can be no solution without knowledge; No ethics without knowledge.

For many, knowledge of the world and its tensions and problems is confined to the short eruptions of encapsulated news fitted in between commercials on the tube. I do not know of anybody who would argue that knowledge on which to base ethical decisions can be acquired in such abbreviated form. When we are uninformed, we will be unimpressed with the scope and complexity of issues, and be unable or unwilling to take a stand. Pre-packaged answers handed to us are likely to be biased and self-serving on the part of someone who has an interest to protect.

There are many who are willing victims of ignorance. Thus, it seems to me that there is an ethical obligation to secure information. To be informed. The usual sources are not enough. We, fortunately, live in a nation where a free press is one of our safeguards. Newspapers are free to print, and also free to omit. Adlai Stevenson once said, “Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.” I’m sure now, Stevenson had a twinkle in his eye when he said that. But the point remains – if we wish to become informed we will use several sources and compare what is presented as fact, look for axes being ground and judge for ourselves whether what is asserted fits our sense of ethical values.

But in so doing, again, we must look at ourselves. What do we insist on knowing – finding out? Did you ever say, or hear someone say, “If it’s bad news, don’t tell me?” Abraham Maslow, the late humanistic psychologist wrote (quoted by Marilyn Thompson, THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY, p. 146), “fear of knowing is very deeply a fear of doing because of the responsibility inherent in knowledge.”

None of us can be completely informed on everything. But all of us can know about something important. [CJW note: Ethical assertion is a large step away from futility and frustration.] In sharing, in pooling our assessment of a situation, we can attempt to discover if the problem conflicts with our ethical standards. Then make that contradiction known to the decision makers. Can fatal blundering be avoided? One necessary condition is that the quality of our free interchange of information and discussion must improve.

Earlier I said that the world is interdependent. Another way of conveying the same idea is, “the whole world is our moral environment.” Therefore our ethical obligation is just as planetary. Easy? No way! As John Bennet said in THE RADICAL IMPERATIVE, “Living with a sense of wrongs to be righted and with full knowledge of the complexity involved in finding ways to right them is our fate and our responsibility.”

Before opening this subject for your discussion, two quotes, one from 19th century playwright and one from an historian of today.

In Ibsen’s PEER GYNT, the self-centered Peer Gynt is confronted at the end of his life (as Erich Fromm puts it) with his unrealized potentialities: [CJW note: impersonal objects, forces]

The Threadballs (on the ground)

We are thoughts;
You should have thought us;
little feet, to life
You should have brought us!
We should have risen
With glorious sound;
But here like threadballs
We are earth-bound

The Withered Leaves:

We are a watchword;
You should have used us!
Life, by your sloth,
Has been refused us.
By worms we’re eaten
All up and down,
No fruit will have us
For spreading crown.

A sighing in the air:

We are songs,
You should have sung us!
In the depths of your heart
Despair has wrung us!
We lay and waited;
You called us not
May your throat and your voice
With poison rot.

Broken Straws:

We are deeds
You have left undone
Strangled by doubt
Spoiled ere begun.
At the Judgment day
We shall be there
To tell our tale;
How will you fare?

Barbara Ward [CJW note: died two weeks ago] (quoted by Washington Spectator) wrote a couple of years ago in a Canadian newspaper:

“I can conceive of a religious ethic that regards it as essential to share. That might mean clean water for the world; it would certainly mean an agricultural policy for the world. We must stop our incredible waste....

“We must never contaminate the cradle of life.... What’s happened is that the planet is beginning to say, ‘Don’t abuse me. I’m not unlimited. I’m fragile. I must be cared for. I must be loved,’ which in a sense is a very religious approach, and the men of science are beginning to believe it.”

And one could add, more and more women and men, scientists, statesmen, corporate managers, and all the persons like you and me, “better believe it.”