THE GOOD OLD DAYS: ONE (OLD) UU’S VIEW OF HISTORY

March 23, 1997

Opening Words - Unitarian Universalist congregations are dedicated to the proposition that behind all our differences and beneath all our diversity there is a unity which makes us one and binds us forever together. We pause in silent witness to this unity.

Responsive Reading 461 - We Must Be Saved

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime;

Therefore we are saved by hope.

Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;

Therefore, we are saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone;

Therefore we are saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;

Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which forgiveness.

Reinhold Niebuhr

“In modern culture, everything is relative and nothing is absolute. We have no first principles, no ultimate values, no unshakable commitments, no conviction that there is any final meaning to life. As a result, our homes are without discipline, our schools without clear purposes, our foreign policy weak and spineless. There is cynicism in our personal moralities, opportunism in our politics, and a general sense of aimlessness and drift in our daily lives.”

Do these words sound like the latest fulminations of Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, or others on the Religious Right? Actually, they were written in 1955 in a book published by Beacon Press, the publishing arm of the Unitarian Universalist Church. The book challenged the positions of several thinkers who were critical of liberal religion at the time. The section quoted was a paraphrase of these positions. Besides showing that some things never change, it reminds me of what led me into Unitarian Universalism.

What I want to talk about in this sermon is the enduring importance of some of the basic principles of our liberal faith which attracted me then and which still provide guidance and inspiration. The title is sarcastic; we all know by now that the 1950s were anything but the good old days. I think what I itch to know and what most of us itch to know is “Has there been any progress in the last 50 years?” Whatever differences we UUs may have, its fair to say that as a denomination, we don’t put a lot of emphasis on an afterlife as a time of redemption and fulfillment. We are concerned with what is happening in the here and now, and a sense or philosophy of history is imperative, at least for me.

I’m not going to come to any conclusion about whether there has been progress or not overall in the past 50 years. There have been some small victories that I will mention, but most important are the principles by which we come to a sense of history and which underlie our view of reality and human nature.

The first principle is that there is no absolute truth. Fifty years ago the cry that the lack of widely held absolute truths was leading humankind down a disastrous path came from such thoughtful critics of liberalism as Jaques Maritain, a French Catholic writer who took up residence in the United States. I must say that the debate in those days seemed much more polite and restrained than it does today when religious fundamentalists of all stripes lash out in the nastiest terms at those of us who refuse to accept any dogma as absolute.

It is much clearer now at the end of the 20th century than 50 years ago that science cannot provide absolute truth in its realm. This fact was brought home dramatically to me toward the end of my geologic career with the U.S. Geological Survey. I was working on the science of nuclear waste disposal and attended a conference on the subject in Las Vegas. One of the main talks was by a scientific elder statesman who had worked on the atomic bomb and had contributed substantively to solving the nuclear waste dilemma. You might think he would have gone before the assembled utility-company executives, nuclear engineers, and other supporters of nuclear energy and extolled the power of science to solve this problem. His talk was entitled “Limitations to Scientific Prediction” and explored eight fundamental ways in which science comes up short when we try to predict the outcome of a particular action in a complex system.

There is not time here to discuss all 8 of these limitations on scientific predictions. They are not the topic for this morning, but I will mention two of them. The first is chaos theory which I talked about in a lay sermon back in the fall of 1994. This concept emphasizes the enormous differences that result in complex systems from very slight changes in their initial conditions. Much of the optimistic outlook of the enlightenment extending up to the decades before the first World War stemmed from the idea that given the laws of science, which were fast being discovered, and given the initial state of a system, we could confidently predict how the system would evolve. - basically Newton’s view of the solar system. Thomas Jefferson held this view and, significantly, he and others thought it could be applied to human behavior. Social problems eventually would be relics of the past. As I said in 1994, we can be glad that its not that simple; the complexity and unpredictability, not only of many natural systems, but also and especially of the human mind and human nature should be causes for great delight.

A second limitation on scientific prediction is called one-sided hypothesis testing. In simpler terms, this means that truly scientific assertions must have the potential to be disproved but can never be proved true once and for all. This is why much of so-called creation science is not science. If God made the world a few thousand years ago but made everything look like it was created much, much earlier, there’s no way to disprove such an assertion.

Not long ago I was browsing in the New Age section of the bookstore and came across a volume which contained, according to the dust jacket, a scientific proof for the existence of God. It was about creation and the Omega Point and such things, all expressed in thousands upon thousands of words. I just didn’t have time to read it all. The point ,however, is that if it truly is a scientific proof of the existence of God, then it must be potentially capable of being disproved. It might catch on and be widely accepted and then 20, 30, 40 years from now, new evidence or new interpretations might come along to disprove the theory and render it obsolete. It sort of puts God out on a limb.

If science can’t provide us with absolute truths, what hope is there that religion can? Religion of course draws on many sources besides science or rationalism and that is as it should be. I recognize that some of the deepest human experiences are beyond rational analysis. But the experiences of each of us can be quite different, and my own experiences have been different form one point in time to another. Whose experience and whose vision then gets anointed as absolute truth? We have no choice but to recognize and tolerate a variety of religious views.

The second principle that religious liberals emphasize in considering history is a negative one - opposition to the centrality of the notion of original sin. At the opposite pole to original sin is the notion of human perfectibility. While I want to talk more about what is meant by human perfectibility later on, some of the excesses brought on by the idea of original sin are worth noting. The idea may have originally been a reminder to humans that we are fallible and have limits, but like so many religious ideas, it seems to have taken on a life of its own and been taken to extremes.

The Unitarian minister Jack Mendelson recalls that one of the most painful experiences in his ministry occurred when a young couple that had just lost a small child came to him, having been told by the minister at their church that the child would not go to heaven since it had not been baptized. For a couple who have experienced one of the most devastating things that can happen to humans to be told as well that their child is in hell or at best forever in some way station, borders on the barbaric. We can thank our Universalist tradition for the fact that such occurrences are rare in mainline churches today.

For someone seeking a philosophy of history, the notion of original sin is a ready explanation for why things seem to have gone so wrong after the earlier optimism of the enlightenment. In the 1950s, one of the loudest voices expounding original sin was Reinhold Neibuhr, whose words provided the brief responsive reading that we read earlier. Mr. Neibuhr championed many social programs in the 1930s and 40s; he was a staunch supporter of what was called the “social gospel.” But like many serious and sensitive thinkers after two world wars, a depression, and the holocaust, he saw in all the suffering and terror a reflection of the ultimate sinfulness of all humans. And what are we to say now 50 years later? After Korea, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Bosnia, Rwanda, the Middle East, Zaire, now Albania, to say nothing of the waste and misbegotten expenditures of the cold war. The list could go on and on.

Surely, we need to be deeply aware of the dark side of human nature. In coming to grips with my own dark side, I, along with many others in the 1990s found the ideas of Jungian psychology to be especially helpful. I was introduced to them by Craig Coleman, the first minister that our congregation had on a regular basis. Jungian psychology talks about the shadow, which represents the reverse of our higher aspirations to goodness and progress. But it also speaks about the “hero within” and the “heroic journey”. That is the struggle each of us faces with alienation and despair, which people like Reinhold Neibuhr say is the essence of original sin. The fact that most of us try to overcome means we are all heroes. I find these formulations much more helpful than the blanket condemnations of original sin.

But what about the charge that our downplaying of original sin leads to much inflated expectations for progress? What happened to the idea of human perfectibility? Like Reinhold Neibuhr, critics of liberal religion constantly chide us that if only we didn’t have these outmoded views of human nature, we wouldn’t go off on wild flights of utopianism. The latest such critic is Robert Bork, the nominee for the Supreme Court in 1986 who was denied confirmation in a bitter battle - one that seems to have presaged the no-holds-barred type of fights we see more and more of. At the time of the confirmation fight, I thought Bork had been treated unfairly, although I probably would have voted against him. His latest salvos, however, seem to have gone over the edge, rejecting almost everything in the modern world. This wouldn’t matter too much, except that his book was on the New York Times bestseller list for several months. I had to sign up and wait to get it from the Loudoun County library.

Exponents of original sin, like Neibuhr and Bork, have little understanding of the background and essentials of the idea of human perfectibility. The philosophers of the French enlightenment who first used the term were as convinced as any critic of liberal thought that human beings had their limitations and would in most cases seek their own ends and power. In the phrase indefinite perfectibility, the term “indefinite” is just as important as the word “perfectibility,” which might be better translated as improvability. Of course there are limits to the extent to which we can improve our human condition, but we can never know what those limits are. That was one of the points in the first part of this talk.

How many times have we heard defenders of the status quo argue against this or that reform on the grounds that “you can’t change human nature.” Liberal believers in progress and the improvability of humankind do not say that you can always change human nature, or that such change will go on and on; we do intend to put the status quo on the defensive and refuse to decide in advance that any given problem is beyond the power of human beings to solve.

I would be the last person to deny that there are serious and severe problems in our society with regard to opportunities for minorities, especially African Americans. Yes, there are racism, sexism, ageism, etc. However, I do believe that genuine progress has been made in the past 50 years. My own experience in the Army illustrates the point. President Truman integrated the armed forces by executive order in the late 1940s. By the time I entered the army there were no all-white units, but there were still some all-black units. To complete the integration in the early 1950s, the all-black units were broken up and the personnel distributed among the already integrated units. My unit, an engineer water supply company, was slated to receive a contingent from an engineer construction battalion. Among white soldiers, the construction battalions were often referred to with disrespect - overt language as well as rolling the eyes, smirking. There was talk about how this sort of social engineering was bound to fail because of the limitations of human nature.

Our First Sergeant, Sergeant McBee, was from Mississippi. He was an outstanding soldier, a role model, and a fair disciplinarian. He said nothing against the impending transfers but his body language and intonation made it clear that he thought it was a bad idea. Still, for Sergeant McBee an order was an order and he proceeded to do his job in effecting the transfer. I drove out to the construction battalion on my own before the transfer to try to make it go smoother. It did go smoothly with no incidents. Soon after, Sergeant McBee rotated back to the United States. We first tried a new first sergeant who had been with the unit before the transfers, but he didn’t work out. Then we placed Master Sergeant John Smith who had come over in the transfer in the job. He proved to be an outstanding soldier, a role model, and a fair disciplinarian.

Not long after that, I rotated back to the United States, having decided not to make the Army a career. I found myself on a college campus in the mid-1950s as the first stirrings of the civil rights movement began to be heard. One day I went to a seminar on civil rights issues. One speaker emphasized the importance of what we see in the world around us. If we see blacks and whites together, doing the same things, interacting, being treated as equals, we will be more apt to treat everyone as equals. I thought that this observation meshed well with my experience in the Army. The integration of the armed forces has to be one of the success stories of the last 50 years. This, of course, was also the great hope for school integration which one would have to say has not worked out so well as public accommodations.

Which brings me back to the first principle of the two that I have talked about. - the unpredictability of the behavior of complex systems. If at the time when the measures that came to mark the Great Society were first introduced in the 1960s, we had had some of the knowledge we now have about the causes of poverty; if the proposed laws had been carefully thought out; if time had been taken to try to gauge the consequences; - if all this had been done, still no one could have predicted the outcomes of these sweeping changes. But none of these things happened, the legislation was cobbled together like all legislation with something for this group and something for that. Of course, these programs have not worked the way it was hoped they would, but that is no reason to give up the effort to bring about a fairer and more just society. Its never time to give up.

History will doubtless not deal very kindly with Lyndon Johnson, under whose presidency much of the Great Society legislation was crafted. However, his words in a speech given in 1964 at the University of Michigan still ring true with me. “We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society where society serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community...It is a place where men and women are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”

I don’t know if we are any closer to a Great Society now than in 1964 when these words were spoken. I do know that the effort to achieve it is worth making.

Closing Words - Let us go out into the world balancing the uncertainties that come from a lack of absolutes with the need to take action, balancing our awareness of human limitations with our awareness of what is noble in all of us, remembering that “What we choose is what we are and what we love we yet shall be, the goal may ever shine afar - the will to reach it makes us free.”