Love and Fear

Gary Bennett

July 24, 2011

I was originally thinking of some sort of cosmic smack-down between love and fear. In one corner, we have Machiavelli, Hobbes and a few others who thought fear essential to running a society. But the Beatles assured us that all we need is love, and they are not alone; how many pop songs, religious homilies and greeting cards say the same? Simple enough. But not really. I’m into love, but I’m also full of fears, from nuclear war to phone calls at 2 am to walking in tall Texas grass in summer, even botching a sermon. At best, I try to keep the fears to things I can do something about, or at least reasonable. I can’t help worrying about government default, but can pass on worrying about whether Casey Anthony’s verdict was an outrage.

Fear is pervasive among all living beings and keeps us alive, the great-granddaddy of all emotions. Once there was no freedom in the universe but quantum uncertainty; but as organic molecules proliferated, those that best avoided danger were likeliest to replicate. And that’s still what it’s all about for one-celled creatures. But life over time became more complex. Colonies of single-celled creatures; then multi-celled. Symbiosis. Sexual reproduction and protecting mom and the kids. All kinds of social species. Ecosystems, up to and perhaps including the Earth itself. Something has been driving this ever greater complexity; call it the ancestor of love. Love is what seeks to find completeness outside, a possible definition of agape . Romantic love probably fits in there somewhere, but that involves jealousy, which brings us back to fear. From amoeba on up the chain of life, somewhere you get to the emotions of love and fear as we know them, rather than just tropisms or instincts.

Human nature was primarily shaped in the hundreds of millennia of hunter/gatherer tribal life. Fears were directed outward, particularly in the earliest days, toward predators, natural disasters and starvation; I doubt much time was spent determining alpha males. The chief survival asset these tribes had was their internal unity, their willingness to work together for the common good; and because survival is what natural selection is about, traits that made us better tribespeople flourished. We developed language for conversation, stories and ritual, and to simplify teaching the next generation; we learned to flirt, and to make art and music together. We even developed a taste for questions which, surprisingly, only tribal lore could answer. Love was the principal tribal glue, but fear was also used to build unity: we were frightened of being ignored, censured, barred from mating or worst of all, exiled. A funny thing happened because we were so successful as tribes: external threats shrank in importance, and with it our sense of “tiger reality,” the urgent need to acknowledge the existence of that tiger within striking distance, diminished; it was far more important for our minds to focus on the group’s shared version of reality. If you are impressed by the Social Darwinist view of pre-social man struggling for survival against other humans, think about this: there would be a strong survival advantage for those who saw the world most clearly; but instead we are far better at rationalizing than reasoning, because our status within the group has been more important than out thinking others.

Very late in our existence came farming and herding, and the ability to hoard wealth came with it. Nomadic desert tribes in the Middle East were patriarchal; some men ended up owning large flocks, many wives, children and slaves and of course enough hired goons to keep it all. Then came cities, and mind-boggling extremes of wealth; states with priest-kings or god-kings and despotic rule followed. For a while there were other, more balanced societies around too, but the fear-based states came to dominate in all the world’s major civilizations.

Not unopposed. The prophets of Israel from the 7th century BC on denounced inequality and injustice. “Woe to those who are at ease in Zion,” said Amos; and “Hear this, you who trample the needy and bring ruin to the poor of the land.” Christianity began as a religion with a radical emphasis on love, as even a casual reading of the Gospels reveals. St. Paul’s letters to young churches focus on trying to bring back to earth starry-eyed hippies waiting for Jesus’ return; but he could get in the spirit from time to time: “Now abide these three things, faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love.” St. Augustine was even more succinct: “Love God and do whatever you want.”

But the rebellions in the end failed. Within a few centuries after Jesus, Catholicism was about rigid obedience to the Church; punishment was persecution in this life and eternal torture in the next. Later the Reformation Protestants threw out much, including the authority of the Pope and some beliefs about the sacraments; but kept fear, in the idea of heresy, in demanding obedience to authority and even more anxiety about Hell. Those few who did go further, such as the Quakers – or several centuries the Universalists – were persecuted by every other religious group.

So what’s with Machiavelli? He’s talking government, not religion, and any government as last resort uses force on individuals. But there are repressive regimes and free ones, and legitimate or not. The Prince is written for the ruler who comes to power illegitimately; that ruler, if he relies primarily on charisma and popularity, will be in trouble when these fade. Better to rely on terror from the beginning, given the changing tides of public approval. You might be able to relax the reins a bit later; at least that’s what they tell beginning classroom teachers.

Though he wrote the best primer ever for dictators, Machiavelli’s true loyalty was to democracy; after all, he was a high ranking diplomat for the Republic of Florence before dictator Lorenzo di Medici came along. His masterwork was Discourses on the Histories of Livy, looking for historical patterns to help preserve republics. One lesson was that republics should rely on citizen armies; hiring mercenaries always backfires. How much was I influenced by Machiavelli? A few years later I must have been one of the few people in the United States of my age, gender and draft status who consistently opposed ending the draft. Forty years after Nixon ended it I believe more strongly than ever that is dangerous and possibly fatal for our middle class to be so detached from America’s wars and government policy. “A republic,” said Benjamin Franklin, “if you can preserve it.”

European settlers brought their fears to America with them, and added a few new ones. Forget the myths: with few exceptions, the colonists were interested in religious freedom only for themselves. Most of them came to get rich quick and go home, or to stay one step ahead of the law. The natives very quickly became enemies, as Europeans kept encroaching on their lands. Plentiful land and scarce labor led them to human slavery, and the more slaves they brought in, the greater the fear. And the march west led also to dangerous encounters with the French and Spanish Empires. Texas was the center of a maelstrom of all fears, as colonists dealt with the Mexican Army, their imported slaves and the Comanches; and in their folly, Texans took on the United States a generation later. They were tough enough to win most of these struggles; I can’t imagine America as a continental power otherwise, for what that is worth. But in winning, the core fear-based personality and culture predominated then, and by cultural inertia, it continues today.

Elsewhere in America and Europe changes were happening. In the 1600s New Englanders bred a patriarchal, tyrannical, even theocratic culture second to none. Massachusetts Puritans persecuted differences ruthlessly, driving out dissenters to create many nearby colonies; they tortured and lynched supposed witches as late as 1690 and manned stomach-turning slave ships even into the 19th century. Their clashes with the natives led to one of the worst of all such conflicts, King Philip’s War, in the 1670s. But life gradually got a bit softer after that, less dangerous and with fewer non-tribesmen to fear, and so the rough edges began to smooth over. The Middle Colonies also began to diverge from the slave revolt-fearing Lower South. Enlightenment ideas began to drift in from Europe, and without class extremes or a powerful church, took root faster than in Europe itself. The Revolutionary generation created the Declaration of Independence, followed by 200 years or so of trying to live up to it. These changes have shifted the over-all American culture more to the love end of the love/fear axis.

Transmitting the cultural values of love and fear is partly a matter of upbringing, and partly a matter of what the external world hands you. One psychologist breaks parenting styles into four types. Two of the four are the permissive and the non-involved; though quite different, each merits near-universal disapproval in the larger culture, because they tend to produce unpleasant children and dysfunctional adults. The other two, which have huge bases of approval, are the authoritarian and the authoritative.

The first and probably commonest of these, the authoritarian, emphasizes obedience without understanding, otherwise known as “because I said so.” Authoritarians believe routine harsh physical punishment is the only way to beat good behavior and good manners into kids; they will look at you blankly if you try to distinguish between discipline and whippings. Children come to take pride in the punishment they have endured; as adults, they believe it is responsible for their own highly-developed character, so as good parents they must repeat the pattern. Papa, as the strongman in the house, is naturally the unquestioned head of household, and the obvious source of punishment. Morality becomes confused with power, and their cultural heroes tend to be physically powerful, arrogant and underhanded, from John Wayne or Sylvester Stallone action movies to wars waged by the United States against weaker nations. The Founding Fathers’ documents, in particular the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they believe to be perfect and infallible in the same way they believe the Bible is; and they are equally unlikely to read any of them. God is the ultimate strongman Papa, and His infinite power must be shown by rewarding those who obey him and exacting infinite punishment on His enemies, the sinners. The only escape from Hell is obeying the Church’s teachings without question, from the particular 16 out-of-context Bible verses that make up its theology or, all too often, whom to vote for in the coming elections. Authoritarian adults tend to be hard-working and successful. But they are subject to an inordinate number of fears, which can be exploited by those who know which buttons to push. They have exaggerated fears of the likelihood of being crime victims, of foreign attack or of having their children seduced away from them by enemies within.

Authoritative parenting emphasizes democratic virtues. Unlike permissives, parents set limits on behavior and expect obedience. But within the limits of a child’s understanding, reasons are given; as the child matures, she or he is allowed more say in family matters generally and in personal behavior especially. Discipline is enforced, but with as little harsh physical punishment as possible. Because the rules make sense and the child is listened to, the world comes to be seen as fair and moderately benevolent. Culture heroes are judged as much by their sense of fair play as for their power and skill. My cousins, for example, adored the bullying John Wayne and imitated his strut; I preferred a straight shooter like Roy Rogers, who never cheated, bullied or did more harm than necessary for self-defense.

From this kind of childhood a self-confident adult can develop, capable of being economically successful, but also able to look past self-interest. These adults can certainly be frightened, for fear is intrinsic to life; but endless fear-mongering by politicians and media tends to become less and less effective. They are also more persuadable through fairness and compassion; when Martin Luther King’s marchers did not trade violence for violence, this made a much greater impact on this group than on authoritarians. When I was growing up in the 1950s and Ô60s, these were not liberal or conservative but the commonly accepted values of good citizenship.

I like to think that Unitarian Universalism can be a good home for those for whom love and compassion, not fear and unquestioning obedience, represent ultimate values. But we are not alone in holding these values; given our size, that’s a good thing. Other religious faiths, both Christian and non-Christian, also espouse them. According to a recent Pew Foundation study, most Christians in this country, even among Evangelicals and conservative Catholics, have moved away from the traditional beliefs about salvation and Hell; in overwhelming numbers they either do not believe in Hell at all, or believe that it will be reserved only for the truly wicked. Universalism, far from having withered away, has in some ways permeated Christianity. In a country where the media have been pouring fear into people’s living rooms incessantly in recent decades and where preachers and politicians successfully run political campaigns on fear alone, that is very good news.

So here we are. We need fear; we cannot survive without fear. But fear is not easily governed by reason. If the crowd around seems to be calling me to fear, I might find it stirring without ever passing through the rational critic in my head. Fear begets fear, and none are more compelling than those ingrained in us as children. All of these characteristics have been ruthlessly exploited since the beginning of civilization for the benefit of power and wealth; they have also been spontaneously generated by news events and even by the stress of living with those we consider as being “not from our tribe.”

And we have another need as well, love. It was an integral part of what made us human in the first place, even if limited to our own tribe; so we need it to remain human in the face of fear. We also need it to align ourselves with a cosmic principle that has moved to ever greater levels of complexity, cooperation and integration for billions of years, perhaps not so much shaped by a pre-existing God as shaping toward becoming God. And we need it right now most urgently for the survival of the human race, with its ever bloodier wars fought with ever more terrible weapons. Let W.H. Auden have the last word: “We must love one another or die.”

What Do Fundamentalists Know About Religion That Unitarians Have Forgotten (and Need to Relearn)?

Gary Bennett

Member, First Unitarian Church of Austin

Sermon, delivered Sunday, July 25, 2010

The title of this sermon is a bit deceptive.  Today I wouldn’t use the term “fundamentalist” to mean evangelical, conservative or traditional, and these are the religious groups I really want to talk about.  Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Saudi Arabian government are fundamentalist, as are Pat Robertson, various recent presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention and a host of others who have done such outrageous things as praise terrorist attacks on Americans, plot political takeovers in church services, foment the murder of abortion providers, spit on mourners at funerals for fallen soldiers and advocate revolutionary violence against the United States.  They are a recent phenomenon, a cancer on most major world religions, an attack on all modern thought and values; they are Fascists who masquerade using traditional religious language.  In contrast, the denomination I was raised in, Southern Baptists before 1979, was by basic principle apolitical; members tended to be politically conservative, but people like Jimmy Carter, Bill Moyers and my parents had no trouble fitting in.

Why should we be interested?  These are, after all, the traditions that many of us feel we outgrew; if anything, we think we have a bit to teach them.  Perhaps we do, but demographics have not been kind to us in recent decades.  We are grouped with liberal or “main line” Protestant groups, which also include the Episcopal, Methodist, Lutheran and Presbyterian churches.  We all share one problem today:  we can’t convince our own children that what we do is worth preserving.  UUs have mostly made up for these losses with adult conversion, which has so far kept us out of the other denominations’ apparent race to extinction; but we are still in trouble.  Politicians have taken notice, of course; and where in 1960 it was main line Protestant voices that they used for moral cover, today it is usually conservative Catholics, evangelical Protestants or Mormons, even outright Fundamentalists, that dominate the public forum.  It is not that  these groups are especially successful at proselytizing our children, who mostly become unchurched and thus invisible as far as the political culture goes; but the conservatives at least are keeping most of their own children.  For some groups, like the high birth rate Mormons, that alone would be enough for rapid growth.  If these changes in American culture and politics bother us, and I think they should, we have lots of serious ‘splainin’ to do.  We think that we have a better approach to religious experience, but it is they who do the better job of convincing the children that what they have is important.

From the beginning, human beings have been bonded into groups by all believing in the same “six impossible things before breakfast.”  Once these groups started stepping on one another’s toes by living together in cities or traveling to far places, religion began to be something distinct from the overall  culture; religion was where you met with your support group.  You would still prefer to shut up those fools who disagreed if you had the power to do so, but the religious group helped you to endure if you could not.  Christianity by the 4th century had its own share of crazy ideas and also the power of the Roman state to shut up everybody who disagreed.  Despite the fall of the Western Empire, this state of things persisted in Europe until a century of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants ended in the 17th century in a peace of exhaustion; neither group had been quite able to exterminate the other.  By the late 18th century in places like the English colonies in America, toleration came to be seen as a virtue in itself; the idea was that different religious groups could scream all that they liked, but had to leave the swords, battle-axes and torture chambers at home.

Today UUs profess not to feel threatened by all these competing ideas, believing that our ideas are strong enough to survive out in the marketplace.  Our advertising campaigns try to persuade the unchurched that they are very much like us; we are at one with the larger intellectual world, with science, human reason and American moral values.  But traditional religious groups feel more alienated from the overall world of ideas.  Their beliefs are quite distinct from those of the larger world and from those of each other.  Small doctrinal differences are assumed to be important.  For us Baptists, we asserted our lack of a creed, but at the same time accused other Christians of getting the rite of baptism all wrong.  We, like most traditional Christians, believed that salvation was by the grace of God, rather than by good deeds of human beings; but I and my Church of Christ cousins, little lawyers all of us, went round and round on whether Grace was enough or whether participation in the rite of Baptism by the One True Church — that was them — was also necessary.  What, said I, if you are saved by grace on Monday, but die before you are safely baptized in church the following Sunday?  I will spare you various other Great Ideas Seminars we conducted.  The point is,  if the UU view of matters is pretty much the same as that of most of the secular world, why bother with church at all?  Why not sleep in Sunday mornings, read a good book, go to a public lecture?  If you are blessed to move in an academic environment or live in a cosmopolitan city of great cultural offerings, why do you need a UU church at all?  But if you are an Evangelical,  you will not get much reinforcement of your “six impossible beliefs” except in your own church group.  You will need to spend a lot of time there, perhaps attending every time the church doors are open; and at other times, you might want to limit your socializing to other church members.

Then there is moral behavior.  For UUs, ethics is about helping others:  helping the poor, the sick, the elderly, children and other victims of social injustice; when we collect “pennies for peace” and try to build schools for girls in remote Asian villages, we are acting in the great ethical tradition.  We have support in the teachings of Jesus, of the Hebrew prophets, of Mohammed, of Confucius and of many other seminal religious teachers.  But for evangelical religions, most of these things are not so much morals but political issues on which good Christians can differ.  As a young Baptist, most of my time in church and Sunday School seemed to be spent in being warned against various “gateway” evils:  gambling was wrong because it led to playing cards, promiscuous sex was wrong because it led to dancing and smoking marijuana was wrong because it led to tobacco.  There were never any lessons on the evils of racial discrimination, poverty in the midst of wealth, unjust wars, the rape of the world’s resources or other environmental disasters. Religious morality was about individual perfection, about keeping the temple of your body pure for God.  UU moral positions tend to integrate us into the larger society in which we operate; evangelical Protestant positions tend to separate us into little self-absorbed clusters.  And these all become more reasons to structure your life around other church members,  people you can socialize with and not imperil your immortal soul.

Traditional religions require constant work on the part of their members.  Orthodox Judaism has seemingly an endless list of requirements of diet, clothing and other rituals.  Jewish friends have tried to explain to me how the laws of kosher are perfectly sensible; it seems the bans on eating pork, shellfish and mixing meat with dairy products were all put together by ancient nutritionists, protecting people from trichinosis, oysters out of season — do Hebrew months provide any rules comparable to r’s being safe?  —  and we all know the grim truth about eating fast food bacon cheeseburgers.  Stuff and nonsense:  the lawgivers wanted people to have to think about their religion every single day, in even the most trivial actions, just as my Baptist morality was designed to remind me of who I was, not to accomplish good.  For Jews the result was a tough faith that people preserved in even the most extreme circumstances, for thousands of years of living in isolated ghettos surrounded by hostile societies.  Few things have threatened Jewish identity more than living in religiously tolerant America over the last generation or so, where their declining numbers are similar to those of liberal Protestants.  A rabbi once told me he considered UUs the greatest threat to Jewish survival, as we gave shelter to couples in mixed Jewish/Christian marriages!   In an old fable, the sun and the north wind bet on which is the more powerful.  The north wind tries to blow a traveller’s cloak off, but he only wraps it ever more tightly about himself; then the sun comes out, warms the land, and the traveller  removes the cloak voluntarily.

Other religions have also found ways of making life tough for members.  Devout Moslems have to stop whatever they are doing five times a day to humble themselves before God; the fasting month of Ramadan and the required ultimate pilgrimage to Mecca are also hard.  Mormons require two full years’ missionary work from every young member as a rite of passage into adulthood.  I have seen firsthand how much more serious and religiously committed a person can become after that experience.  And then there are the Amish, who make their religious beliefs central to everything that they do in daily life.

And let us not forget the early radical Protestants.  Medieval Hell might have been a terrible fate waiting after death, filled with every juicy torture and humiliation a fevered imagination could come up with; but at least Catholics could feel safe as long as they remained obedient to and in good standing with the Church.  These Protestants took upon themselves the burden of finding the way to avoid Hell, without ever being sure they were right.  They became puritanical, self-denying, hard-working people who, by all work and no play and by avoiding idle hands, the Devil’s own workshop, might hope to escape damnation.  There was of course no room for compassion in this — if other people were mostly bound for eternal torture after death, any extra suffering they encountered in this life was trivial anyway — so it tended to generate a lot of excess wealth that came to be called capital by economists and ultimately to our rich modern society, all as a trivial side effect.  Children brought up in such hard faiths knew the seriousness and importance of what was going on, and usually continued to practice them in adulthood.

I haven’t talked as if the theological content mattered much in the success or failure of these religions.  Not entirely true:  some things obviously do matter a great deal.  The doctrine of Hell tends to grab one’s attention; for an imaginative child who has been exposed to it, anxieties can last a life time, even if he has rejected the idea of it in his head.  Heaven is more like an afterthought for most believers, whether it is supposed to be souls singing hymns for eternity — a prospect mercilessly satirized by Mark Twain — or if is supposed to be filled with the reward of 40 virgins — which can double as the place bad virgins go to be punished, some suggest.  Anyway, whatever goodies await, it is all kind of a bonus to go along with the biggie of avoiding Hell.

Above all, successful religions demand the belief that there is something that is greater than us, something before which we must humble ourselves.  Arrogance is the opposite of real religious sentiment, something to remember the next time you encounter a swaggering televangelist with an obvious financial or political agenda.  That we humble ourselves is more important than what we humble ourselves to.  Our own tradition is mixed.  Universalists supposedly thought God too good to condemn humanity to Hell, and Unitarians, that humans were too good to be condemned.  If I have to choose, given what I have seen of human behavior, I really, really hope the Universalists were right.

I started by asking what traditional religious groups know, and what we can learn from them.  Some lessons we will reject out of hand.  I cannot imagine UUs declaring war on science and reason.  Nor do we want to limit our concept of morality to keeping our bodies healthy while ignoring the world’s problems, and some of us even believe that “purity’s a noble yen, and very restful every now and then.”  But I think we do need to make the practice of Unitarian Universalism more difficult, if we want to survive.  We need an integrity about our lives, a sense that we are the same people, with the same values, on weekdays as Sundays.  We need to be in covenant with one another, so that our disagreements may be resolved without injury to any, and so that members always feel that being here or being with other UUs in any situation is a safe place.  We MUST give more; it’s hard to believe your faith is important to you when your giving is so embarrassingly poor compared with conservative churches, so low that they have severely crippled the mission of your church.  I know how hard my Baptist parents struggled to tithe — that means 10% of gross income, if any of you are in doubt — in what were often very grim circumstances.  Our own household falls far short of that standard.  But Jesus’ words are still relevant:  where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.  Contribute to the church’s mission AND to charities AND to just political causes that the church itself cannot involve itself in; contribute money AND time.  If Moslems can stop to pray five times a day and Orthodox Jews can expend the effort to keep kosher at every meal, can we UUs not require ourselves to do at least one thing every day that reminds us who we are?

And we must also make religion harder for our children. How we strive to keep them entertained; it would be unthinkable to require them to sit through a boring old church service, or so we believe.  Nonsense.  Most children will live up or down to consistent adult expectations.  Consider family discussions of moral issues; the “pennies for peace” project would seem a perfect opportunity to talk about what the problems are, and what Greg Mortenson is arguing in Three Cups of Tea are solutions.  The long term feedback will come in part by what happens in rural Asia, but also by what part of you your children decide in adulthood is worth carrying forward.  And that, above all,  is what UUs must learn once again about religion, or die.

Bryan and the Social Darwinists

William Jennings Bryant and the Social Darwinists

Gary Bennett

December 27, 2009

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Reading

BRYAN, BRYAN, BRYAN, BRYAN – Vachel Lindsay

In a nation of one hundred fine, mob-hearted, lynching, relenting, repenting, millions, There are plenty of sweeping, swinging, stinging, gorgeous things to shout about, And knock your old blue devils out.

I brag and chant of Bryan, Bryan, Bryan

Candidate for president who sketched a silver Zion,

The one American Poet who could sing outdoors,

He brought in tides of wonder, of unprecedented splendor,

Wild roses from the plains, that made hearts tender,

All the funny circus silks

Of politics unfurled,

Bartlett pears of romance that were honey at the cores,

And torchlights down the street, to the end of the world.

There were truths eternal in the gab and tittle-tattle.

There were real heads broken in the fustian and the rattle.

There were real lines drawn:

Not the silver and the gold,

But Nebraska’s cry went eastward against the dour and old,

The mean and cold.

It was eighteen ninety-six, and I was just sixteen

And Altgeld ruled in Springfield, Illinois,

When there came from the sunset Nebraska’s shout of joy:

In a coat like a deacon, in a black Stetson hat

He scourged the elephant plutocrats

With barbed wire from the Platte.

The scales dropped from their mighty eyes.

They saw that summer’s noon

A tribe of wonders coming

To a marching tune.

Oh, the longhorns from Texas,

The jay hawks from Kansas,

The plop-eyed bungaroo and giant giassicus,

The varmint, chipmunk, bugaboo,

The horned-toad, prairie-dog and ballyhoo,

From all the newborn states arow,

Bidding the eagles of the west fly on,

Bidding the eagles of the west fly on.

The fawn, prodactyl and thing-a-ma-jig,

The rakaboor, the hellangone,

The whangadoodle, batfowl and pig,

The coyote, wild-cat and grizzly in a glow,

In a miracle of health and speed, the whole breed abreast,

The leaped the Mississippi, blue border of the West,

From the Gulf to Canada, two thousand miles long:-

Against the towns of Tubal Cain, too cunning for the young,

The longhorn calf, the buffalo and wampus gave tongue,.

These creatures were defending things Mark Hanna never dreamed:

The moods of airy childhood that in desert dews gleamed,

The gossamers and whimsies,

The monkeyshines and didoes

Rank and strange

Of the canyons and the range,

The ultimate fantastics

Of the far western slope,

And of prairie schooner children

Born beneath the stars,

Beneath falling snows,

Of the babies born at midnight

In the sod huts of lost hope,

With no physician there,

Except a Kansas prayer,

With the Indian raid a howling through the air.

And all these in their helpless days

By the dour East oppressed,

Mean paternalism

Making their mistakes for them,

Crucifying half the West,

Till the whole Atlantic coast

Seemed a giant spiders’ nest.

And these children and their sons

At last rode through the cactus,

A cliff of mighty cowboys

On the lope,

With gun and rope.

And all the way to frightened Maine the old East heard them call,

And saw our Bryan by a mile lead the wall

Of men and whirling flowers and beasts,

The bard and the prophet of them all.

Prairie avenger, mountain lion,

Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,

Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun,

Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West,

And just a hundred miles behind, tornadoes piled across the sky,

Blotting out sun and moon,

A sign on high.

Headlong, dazed and blinking in the weird green light,

The scalawags made to moan,

Afraid to fight.

II

When Bryan came to Springfield, and Altgeld gave him greeting,

Rochester was deserted, Divernon was deserted,

Mechanicsburg, Riverton, Chickenbristle, Cotton Hill,

Empty: for all Sangamon drove to the meeting-

In silver-decked racing cart,

Buggy, buckboard, carryall,

Carriage, phaeton, whatever would haul,

And silver-decked farm-wagons gritted, banged and rolled,

With the new tale of Bryan by the iron tires told.

The State House loomed afar,

A speck, a hive, a football,

A captive balloon!

And the town was all one spreading wing of bunting, plumes, and sunshine,

Every rag and flag, and Bryan picture sold,

When the rigs in many a dusty line

Jammed our streets at noon,

And joined the wild parade against the power of gold.

We roamed, we boys from High School,

With mankind,

While Springfield gleamed,

Silk-lined.

Oh, Tom Dines, and Art Fitzgerald,

And the gangs that they could get!

I can hear them yelling yet.

Helping the incantation,

Defying aristocracy,

With every bridle gone,

Ridding the world of the low down mean,

Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,

Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,

We were bully, wild and wooly,

Never yet curried below the knees.

We saw flowers in the air,

Fair as the Pleiades, bright as Orion,

-Hopes of all mankind,

Made rare, resistless, thrice refined.

Oh, we bucks from every Springfield ward!

Colts of democracy-

Yet time-winds out of Chaos from the star-fields of the Lord.

The long parade rolled on. I stood by my best girl.

She was a cool young citizen, with wise and laughing eyes.

With my necktie by my ear, I was stepping on my dear,

But she kept like a pattern, without a shaken curl.

She wore in her hair a brave prairie rose.

Her gold chums cut her, for that was not the pose.

No Gibson Girl would wear it in that fresh way.

But we were fairy Democrats, and this was our day.

The earth rocked like the ocean, the sidewalk was a deck.

The houses for the moment were lost in the wide wreck.

And the bands played strange and stranger music as they trailed along.

Against the ways of Tubal Cain,

Ah, sharp was their song!

The demons in the bricks, the demons in the grass,

The demons in the bank-vaults peered out to see us pass,

And the angels in the trees, the angels in the grass,

The angels in the flags, peered out to see us pass.

And the sidewalk was our chariot, and the flowers bloomed higher,

And the street turned to silver and the grass turned to fire,

And then it was but grass, and the town was there again,

A place for women and men.

III

Then we stood where we could see

Every band,

And the speaker’s stand.

And Bryan took the platform.

And he was introduced.

And he lifted his hand

And cast a new spell.

Progressive silence fell

In Springfield,

In Illinois,

Around the world.

Then we heard these glacial boulders across the prairie rolled:

“The people have the right to make their own mistakes….

You shall not crucify mankind

Upon a cross of gold.”

And everybody heard him-

In the streets and State House yard.

And everybody heard him

In Springfield,

In Illinois,

Around and around and around the world,

That danced upon its axis

And like a darling broncho whirled.

IV

July, August, suspense.

Wall Street lost to sense.

August, September, October,

More suspense,

And the whole East down like a wind-smashed fence.

Then Hanna to the rescue,

Hanna of Ohio,

Rallying the roller-tops,

Rallying the bucket-shops.

Threatening drouth and death,

Promising manna,

Rallying the trusts against the bawling flannelmouth;

Invading misers’ cellars,

Tin-cans, socks,

Melting down the rocks,

Pouring out the long green to a million workers,

Spondulix by the mountain-load, to stop each tornado

And beat the cheapskate, blatherskite,

Populistic, anarchistic,

Deacon- desperado.

V

Election night at midnight:

Boy Bryan’s defeat.

Defeat of western silver.

Defeat of the wheat.

Victory of letterfiles

And plutocrats in miles

With dollar signs upon their coats,

Diamond watchchains on their vests

And spats on their feet.

Victory of custodians,

Plymouth Rock,

And all that inbred landlord stock.

Victory of the neat.

Defeat of the aspen groves of Colorado valleys,

The blue bells of the Rockies,

And blue bonnets of old Texas,

By the Pittsburgh alleys.

Defeat of the alfalfa and the Mariposa lily.

Defeat of the Pacific and the long Mississippi.

Defeat of the young by the old and silly.

Defeat of tornadoes by the poison vats supreme.

Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream.

VI

Where is McKinley, that respectable McKinley,

The man without an angle or a tangle,

Who soothed down the city man and soothed down the farmer,

The German, the Irish, the Southerner, the Northerner,

Who climbed every greasy pole, and slipped through every crack;

Who soothed down the gambling hall, the bar-room, the church,

The devil vote, the angel vote, the neutral vote,

The desperately wicked, and their victims on the rack,

The gold vote, the silver vote, the brass vote, the lead vote,

Every vote?…

Where is McKinley, Mark Hanna’s McKinley,

His slave, his echo, his suit of clothes?

Gone to join the shadows, with the pomps of that time,

And the flame of that summer’s prairie rose.

Where is Cleveland whom the Democratic platform

Read from the party in a glorious hour,

Gone to join the shadows with pitchfork Tillman,

And sledge-hammer Altgeld who wrecked his power.

Where is Hanna, bulldog Hanna.

Low-browed Hanna, who said: “Stand pat”?

Gone to his place with old Pierpont Morgan.

Gone somewhere… with lean rat Platte.

Where is Roosevelt, the young dude cowboy,

Who hated Bryan, then aped his way?

Gone to join the shadows with mighty Cromwell

And tall King Saul, till the Judgment day.

Where is Altgeld, brave as the truth,

Whose name the few still say with tears?

Gone to join the ironies with Old John Brown,

Whose fame rings loud for a thousand years.

Where is that boy, that Heaven-born Bryan,

That Homer Bryan, who sang for the West?

Gone to join the shadows with Altgeld the Eagle,

Where the kings and the slaves and the troubadours rest.

Sermon

The scene is frozen in our consciousness, one of the defining moments of Modern America: Clarence Darrow heroically defending Science and Intellectual Freedom by placing the champion of the forces of darkness and ignorance on the stand, forcing William Jennings Bryan to show to all the world that he believes absurdities, defends the indefensible, and uses his power to force others to do the same. You’ve seen the play: this yokel believes Adam and Eve were the first human pair, doesn’t know or care where Cain got a wife; believes some sort of whale or fish swallowed Jonah; in short the whole enchilada, whatever the Bible says, however absurd, however much in contradiction of science or even of itself; coming soon to your local school district to punish teachers for teaching biology, geology, physics or history. The Dragon, having been metaphorically slain by St. Clarence, obliges by dying on the Spot, presumably from shame at having been publicly exposed as a charlatan.

I’m afraid I’m going to make several demands on you today, and the first is to suggest that things are not always what they seem, that we have in fact merely caught a man of great and noble character at a bad moment. One of the rarities of Bryan’s career was that, before the Scopes Trial, he had in thirty years lost many political races and crusades, but had steadily gained in esteem through them all. More than almost any other American politician, Bryan had the knack of losing the battles, but winning the war. His causes were adopted, one by one, by people who had originally seen him as a dangerous radical. But in Dayton, Tennessee, he as prosecutor technically won the case, while in the great court of public opinion, in the major newspapers of his day and in the play Inherit the Wind a generation later, he lost the reputation he had gained over a lifetime.

A biographer suggests mitigating factors in Bryan’s behavior after 1920. The diabetes that claimed his life shortly after the Monkey Trial may have been diminishing his mental faculties and clouding his judgment. And we know that he disapproved of laws of the Tennessee model which included punishment for disobedience; he believed strongly in the power of moral persuasion and disapproved of the use of force in most cases. Bryan was not after publicity; rather, as the most revered Christian statesman in America, he was steadily pushed by others, first into a position of national leadership in the fundamentalist movement, and then into helping prosecute a violator of a law to which he had objected. In the end Bryan saw his faith on trial, and he could not back down.

But this is not all there was to William Jennings Bryan. He was one of the greatest men of his time, and it is doubtful that any other American has ever made such a great positive impact upon our public life and then been so thoroughly forgotten.

For the rest of the story, we go back to the year 1896, a turning point in American political history. After the Civil War, American cities and industries and railroads had blossomed, but the wealth created was concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Prices were jacked up by high protective tariffs and the spread of monopolies; labor conditions were abominable, with extremely long work weeks, widespread child labor, unsanitary and dehumanizing sweatshops; company towns that sucked workers’ wages away faster than they could earn them; wages depressed by seemingly endless stream of immigrants fleeing even worse conditions abroad. Attempts by workers to better themselves were bludgeoned to death by management-hired private thugs as well as regiments of public thugs called up by governors beholden to the rich. One of the grandest of these grand larcenies was the adoption of the Gold Standard in 1873. By removing silver as currency while withdrawing paper money from circulation, the plutocrats who ran the government systematically shrank money supply over the course of two decades, even as the population and real wealth of the country exploded. The result was one of the greatest deflations in world history. Debts incurred in the 1860s and ’70s became far larger and harder to repay as time went on. The massive deflation in the US housing market over the last two years, where houses are in many cases worth far less than what is still owed on their mortgages, may give us a sense of what it was like to live in that time, especially for Western farmers. Since prices of monopoly-controlled goods did not share in the price reductions, farm prices fell all the faster.

Both major political parties were owned body and soul by the rich. We think of Democrats as the Party of the Left, more or less, but for half a century before 1896 that had not been the case. The Democrat Grover Cleveland cleaned up some governmental corruption by creating the Civil Service, but had nothing to say about the growing economic inequities, and fittingly lost control of his own party after doing nothing about the suffering engendered by the Depression of 1893.

With the deepening poverty and despair, radical movements began to flourish, particularly in the West and South. The Populist Party grew in the 1880s, but like all American third parties, it was ultimately doomed to irrelevance and extinction. By the way, regardless of what the media might proclaim, there are not now nor were there ever “conservative populists” any more than there are “conservative progressives” or “conservative liberals.” The Populists were angry, but they were also as intelligent, well-read and principled as were the radicals who had made the American Revolution; they even managed to bring Southern blacks and whites together in a party of common interest, something demagogues have not tried to do in any era. In the Democratic Convention of ’96, radicals of this stripe were in control; they nailed together a platform calling for a progressive income tax, control of monopolies, and a return to silver coinage as a way of halting deflation. Then they waited for a candidate.

Bryan, the final speaker on platform issues, became man of the hour by delivering a speech for the ages. Once this was a treasured statement of progressive American principles in much the same way as the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg Address; perhaps it should be again. These are his concluding remarks:

I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty – the cause of humanity ….

Mr. Carlisle said in 1878 that this was a struggle between “the idle holders of idle capital” and “the struggling masses, who produce the wealth and pay the taxes of the country”; and my friends, the question we are to decide is: Upon which side are we, “the idle holders of idle capital”or upon the side of “the struggling masses”? This is the question which the party must answer first, and then it must be answered by each individual hereafter. The sympathies of the Democratic party, as shown by the platform, are on the side of the struggling masses, who have ever been the foundation of the Democratic party. There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class that rests upon them.

You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country …. Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor the crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

The campaign was far and away the most scandalous in American history. Republicans owned most of the newspapers then as now, and they painted Bryan in the most pejorative terms imaginable. A Jacobin, an Anarchist, a Socialist (there were no Communists yet, or he would have been one of those too), a demagogue. Mark Hanna extorted from frightened businessmen a war chest which in real terms was in the range of $200-$500 million, in a nation far smaller and poorer than our own; Standard Oil’s contribution alone almost matched the entire Democratic campaign fund. Teddy Roosevelt made plans for a last military stand if the “Reds” won, and John Hay made plans to rendezvous with other emigrŽs in Paris. A number of bosses told their employees not to bother to show up the next day, should Bryan win.

That all this should be the reaction to a candidate who brought back the words and ideas of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, illustrates better than anything else the death grip which wealth had gained on America in 1896. In the end the popular vote was close, the electoral vote less so, but Bryan lost.

A pattern had been formed for Bryan’s career. In 1900, new and massive gold strikes in the Klondike and South Africa temporarily eased the vice grip of deflation. But in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, we had become an imperial power in a world mad with colonialism; Bryan dared to campaign against imperialism, saying it was unworthy of America’s ideals and suggesting that we should begin preparing our new colonies for self-government. He lost again, but in 1901 accidental president Teddy Roosevelt became the first of Bryan’s former political enemies to begin adopting his policies, now rechristened the “Square Deal.”

A third principled defeat followed in 1908, but after Woodrow Wilson won in 1912 in a close three-way election, Bryan was appointed Secretary of State. Wilson was another former enemy, but he now called for a New Freedom, also straight from Bryan’s platforms. Aside from his foreign policy responsibilities, Bryan was instrumental in shaping several of the key domestic reforms, most importantly the creation of a new way of banking called the Federal Reserve System.

On most foreign policy issues, the President and Secretary of State thought alike. Their guiding principles were distaste for imperialism, respect for the autonomy of other countries, a desire to spread American values of democracy and human rights, and the attempt to create an international structure of law to curb war and other primitive national atavisms. As is the case today, some of these principles came into conflict with one another; as a result, the level of intervention in the Caribbean and Central America was almost as great as in the “We stole it fair and square” days of Teddy Roosevelt. Still they laid a foundation for a future Good Neighbor Policy to the south and for supra-national organizations to mediate disputes elsewhere.

Only in one area did Bryan and Wilson disagree, and that finally led to the Secretary’s resignation: he was a pacifist who rightly believed that Wilson’s policies toward Germany would lead us into war. Who was right? Without American intervention, Germany would have won, and the result would have been an unpleasantly authoritarian Europe. But given the way events actually played out, the imposition of a draconian peace treaty on Germany, which enraged its people while keeping their economy weak and its democratic government unpopular and the withdrawal from European affairs of the only state capable of controlling it or resolving its grievances peacefully, all of which pretty much guaranteed some variant of Hitler and World War II, it would probably have been better for America to stay out of World War I. Finally, at the end of the war, Bryan’s last failed political crusade was attempting to persuade Americans to join the League of Nations.

While he despaired of his failures, meanwhile, items from Bryan’s agenda continued to be adopted: direct election of senators; progressive income tax; women’s suffrage; prohibition; moving colonies to self-government. And a number of states were adopting Populist reforms such as initiative, referendum and recall. Franklin Roosevelt, coming to power after the Nebraskan’s death, abolished the gold standard, established a principled foreign policy in Latin America, and helped create the United Nations as what Bryan hoped the League of Nations would be. In short, much of the decent middle-class, internationally respected America he campaigned for had come into being by the time some of us were coming of age in the mid-twentieth century.

But we are back to that strange period of his life, starting in 1921, when Bryan abandoned the world of politics and began to champion the teaching of bad science in the schools. It mystified his contemporaries among liberal reformers and has continued to baffle those who know enough about him not to be satisfied with Elmer Gantry / Pat Robertson-type caricatures. We mentioned his illness and pressure from followers as possible reasons. But we also know that he had come to believe that the evils he had been fighting his whole political life had been caused or exacerbated by the influence of one man. For the malefactors of great wealth, the monopoly-seeking capitalists, the gold standard purists, the imperial expansionists continued to expound a world view in which what they were doing was natural and right and inevitable, as they invoked the name of Charles Darwin.

Darwin was a scientist and his theory of evolution through natural selection, first explained in Origin of Species 150 years ago last month, is one of the great documents in the history of science; but his achievement did not exist in a vacuum. The 19th century, particularly in England, America and a few other countries, was a time of rapid change without parallel in world history. The development of industrial capitalism, huge corporations and what seemed a widening distance between wealth and poverty, resonated with the notion that progress in the world came through savage competition; the very phrase “survival of the fittest,” though appropriated by Darwin, was actually coined by the English political philosopher Herbert Spencer and meant to apply to human culture. His basic premise was that government should stay out of the way and let human beings compete for survival as the only path to evolutionary improvement of the species; if the strong survived and the weak failed, then that was what nature intended. It was a very popular idea among the new industrial barons, and both Darwin’s and Spencer’s ideas were pushed and funded by them. Spencer’s ideas did not survive him long in England or Europe, but lived on in the United States and were later pushed by intellectuals like Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman.

In Europe, Darwin’s name was invoked to push other ideas, such as that of German Premier Otto von Bismarck, that affairs among nations are ultimately settled by “blood and iron;” Marxists saw competition as between economic classes. And everywhere Darwin was used to push racism. The economic and military supremacy of the West was seen as proof that its peoples were more highly evolved and were natural masters of the world; all other races were natural selection’s losers, destined to be slaves. We can group these assorted ideologies under the banner of “Social Darwinism.” Though some were ideological support for actions that would have taken place in any case, others were the direct result of popular beliefs about evolutionary biology. There was the pseudo-science of eugenics: legislators, judges and juries were persuaded to disregard their natural sentiments and authorize sterilization of the unfit. Many of the frightened Republicans who were terrified of Bryan considered his followers to be subhuman; the Darwinist H. L. Mencken was only a particularly skillful writer among the many who habitually used images of apes and subhumans to describe Bryan’s followers and most other liberal politicians and political groups.

Thus it was that Bryan, who as a young man had been open-minded about the origins of humanity, came to be convinced that Darwin’s theory was responsible for much that was wrong with the modern world. “The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate,” Bryan said, “Evolution is the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.” He believed that the Bible countered this merciless law with “the law of love.” It was not any principle of Biblical inerrancy that motivated him, but a desire to cut off a poisonous political philosophy at its root, to promote a national myth that would motivate the young to high ideals. He prepared himself as a prosecutor not to defend the stories of Genesis, but to present to the court and world the image of Jesus as “Prince of Peace.”

He completely misunderstood his political adversaries, of course. In a Monkey’s Paw sense, his wish for the defeat of Darwin in the political arena came true, in that challengers to the teaching of evolution are strong in much of the United States. But I’m not sure he would appreciate the victory. We might say Social Darwinism has simply evolved, adopted protective camouflage, or mutated. Much of modern fundamentalism shares the same policies at home and abroad as did the Social Darwinists, but uses the language of evangelical Christianity, though there are usually very few teachings of Jesus himself in their dogma. Those Christian groups which preached social justice and were open to the findings of modern science, on the other hand, have declined in numbers and influence. Secular culture in the West has also changed. The horror of Social Darwinist moralities finally climaxed in the 1930s and ’40s when perhaps 100 million human beings were murdered in Nazi and Communist atrocities and in the battles of World War II. There has been a massive reaction in the West since then; for much of the second half of the last century, it was impolite in intellectual circles to imply that any human characteristics beyond eye, hair and skin color might be due to genetics. In general, secular culture in both Europe and America has promoted policies far more progressive than have today’s fundamentalist Christians.

At the same time, the popular understanding of evolutionary biology is better grounded. Natural selection never involved “survival of the fittest” within hunter/gatherer tribes, but pushed trust and cooperation to form cohesive groups that could protect and educate children. Since individuals never had to survive on their own, they were able to carry a much wider variety of genetic traits, and this in turn has given the human species much more flexibility in adapting to different environments; genetic variation has been one of the greatest strengths of humanity, not as eugenicists asserted a weakness. And until recent times, there was very little or no competition for survival between tribes, which were scattered too thinly to interact at all; nationalism and racism could never have been factors in human selection. Thus the major tenets of Social Darwinism have no basis in actual human evolution; it was an ideology that emerged from a particular culture and economic system, not from any insight into the reality of human nature. Bryan too was a product of his time, but one worthy of our highest respect. I would like to end with these words of historian Henry Steele Commager:

. . defeated candidates are usually forgotten and lost causes relegated to historical oblivion, but Bryan was not forgotten and the causes which seemed lost triumphed in the end. He refused to acknowledge defeat, not out of vanity or ambition, but because he was sure the causes which he championed were right, and sure that right would triumph in the end. And, right or not, most of them did. Few statesmen have ever been more fully vindicated by history. ltem by item the program which Bryan had consistently espoused, from the early nineties on into the new century, was written onto the statute books – written into law by those who had denounced and ridiculed it. Call the list of the reforms: government control of currency and banking, government regulation of railroads, telegraph and telephone, trust regulation, the eight-hour day, labor reforms, the_ prohibition of injunctions in labor disputes, the income tax, tariff reform, anti-imperialism, the initiative, the referendum, woman suffrage, temperance, international arbitration. These were not all original with Bryan, but it was Bryan who championed them in season and out, who kept them steadily in the political forefront, who held his party firmly ‘to their advocacy ….

For Bryan was the last great spokesman of the America of the nineteenth century – of the America of the Middle West and the South, the America of the farm and the country town, the America that read the Bible and went to Chautauqua, distrusted the big city and Wall Street, believed in God and the Declaration of Independence. He was himself one of these people. He thought their thoughts, and he spoke the words that they were too inarticulate to speak. Above all, he fought their battles. He never failed to raise his voice against injustice, he never failed to believe that in the end justice would be done. Others of his generation served special interests or special groups – the bankers, the railroads, the manufacturers, the officeholders; he looked upon the whole population as his constituency. Others were concerned with the getting of office or of gain; he was zealous to advance human welfare. And when the [rest] . . . are relegated to deserved oblivion, the memory of Bryan will be cherished by the people in whom he had unfaltering faith.

In Search of Freedom

Gary Bennett

May 17, 2009

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

READING:

What persons great and not so great have to say on the subject of freedom. All but the last two quotes from Dr. Laurence J. Peter, Peter’s Quotations , 1977

Will Rogers – Liberty doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in speeches.

Mark Twain – It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and the prudence never to practice either of them.

Theodore Roosevelt – Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.

Abraham Lincoln – The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty.

Albert Camus – Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.

Ernest Benn – Liberty is being free from the things we don’t like in order to be slaves of the things we do like.

B. F. Skinner – By a careful cultural design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave – the motives, the desires, the wishes . . . we increase the feeling of freedom.

Eric Hoffer – When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

Adlai Stevenson – A free society is one in which it is safe to be unpopular.

Abe Fortas – The story of man is the history, first of the acceptance and imposition of restraints necessary to permit communal life; and second, of the emancipation of the individual within the system of necessary restraints.

Bernard Malamud – The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.

Virginia Woolf – To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

Edmund B. Chaffee – The majority of us are for free speech only when it deals with those subjects concerning which we have no intense convictions.

Harold Ickes – Freedom to live one’s life with the window of the soul open to new thoughts, new ideas, new aspirations.

Gertrude Himmelfarb – Liberty too can corrupt, and absolute liberty can corrupt absolutely.

C. Wright Mills – Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and the best man winning than the man who inherited his father’s store or farm.

Norman Thomas – After I asked him what he meant, he replied that freedom consisted of the unimpeded right to get rich, to use his ability, no matter what the cost to others, to win advancement.

Daniel Webster – Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint.

Kris Kristofferson – Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

Gary Bennett – America is 100 million people going to the same place at the same time to do the same thing, but traveling in 100 million different cars.

SERMON:

I really wanted to give this a title like Freedom: For and Against, but chickened out. After all, if there is any point on which pretty much all 6 billion of us are agree, it is that Freedom is a Good Thing. But deciding what it is exactly that we are for, that is a harder matter. I want us to think about the Tea Parties on April 15. Not the politics, which bothered me a lot; but what I would have to say shouldn’t come from the pulpit. But there were some serious moral issues that drew people to protest. There’s the legacy of debt we are still piling up for the future. The bumper sticker, “We’re spending our children’s inheritance,” isn’t so funny any more. And there’s the idea that taxes are an evil thing, because they take away our freedom.

“No taxation without representation,” the patriots of 1776 said, and for some the British tax on imported tea was such a dangerous matter, it justified dumping perhaps a million dollars worth of tea (10,000 at the time) into the harbor in a monstrous act of vandalism. “Liberty” was the word they used, a little more narrowly political than “freedom.” At the dawn of history we meet the Egyptian Pharaohs and the Sumerian priest-kings, gods or agents of gods who could not be crossed; there was only enough liberty for one. Actually wealthy nobles were there to fight for power with them from the beginning; and they established rules and boundaries over time. The Code of Hammurabi is the oldest set of written rules we know about; and from it we get that rudimentary concept of justice, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” As far as liberty goes, though, there still wasn’t much left over for anybody else. A similar struggle took place in England thousands of years later, leading to the Great Charter between King John and his barons, still considered the birthplace of our written law. One bullet point was the idea that new taxes could only be imposed by the King acting in Parliament; and some four hundred years later that was the wedge that led to the English Civil War and the transfer of ultimate power to Parliament. So it is no wonder that the idea that taxes were only just with the consent of the governed still was magic over a century after that.

But Americans today do have representative government; there’s nothing in the catchphrase that says that your party has to win for taxes to be legit. But the Libertarians who have been doing these tea parties for a number of years cite a different tradition, one in which taxes even with representation are pretty sketchy. Englishmen, including those of us on this side of the Pond, in the 18th century were actually pretty uncomfortable with the English Civil War as a model. It was bloody, filled with religious arguments, culture wars we might say, pretty dangerous to the propertied classes; a king was beheaded and even a primitive sort of democratic socialism (the Levellers) began to stir. So good Enlightenment thinkers preferred to talk about the Glorious or Bloodless Revolution of 1688. King James II was the sort of ruler who, by combining dangerous ambitions, ruthless means and incredible stupidity, manage to give despotism a bad name; and in short, he managed in three years to unite the whole country against him, went into exile and left everybody feeling that this was the way things were supposed to be done. The Revolution was popular, and so was its chief apologist, John Locke. Inspired by the example of Sir Isaac Newton, he proposed to show that the right to revolution arose from human nature itself. “Man in a State of Nature” is isolated from all other human beings, surrounded by the infinite bounty of the world; but those riches are worthless except insofar as he invests his own life force and liberty into shaping some of them into what then becomes his property. This leads naturally to trading with others, which requires contracts; and ultimately it becomes useful to having some impartial body around to interpret and enforce the contracts. That’s the government; just a bunch of hired hands, as easily dismissed as any unsatisfactory lawn mowing service. No Divine Right of Kings, no superior racial bloodlines, no sacrosanct traditions. And it was nothing like Thomas Hobbes’ assertion that human nature was so depraved and evil that only a crushingly oppressive force could keep people from destroying each other. So Locke’s ideas gained a great deal of favor from the progressive, secular-minded thinkers of the Enlightenment.

But the argument had a force of its own, and some of the conclusions were troubling. Locke agrees that voting is a good way to put governors in place, but he does not think it gives any special moral authority for robbing people of life, liberty or property; only impartial findings of breach of contract by a judge or jury could do that. So taxes, even for proper government services, really were an unjustifiable seizure of property. This has not been a popular idea for governments, not even revolutionary ones. The Declaration of Independence drops the word “property” and talks of “the pursuit of happiness” instead as an inalienable right; the Preamble to the Constitution states that “to promote the general welfare” is as basic an aim of our government as “to provide for the common defense.” Even Locke himself, a practical man, seems not to have taken the idea seriously. But it has taken on a life of its own, with the implicit promise that somewhere down the road all government should just wither away. And so modern Libertarians are inspired by the goal of absolute individual freedom.

But as inspiring as Locke’s words have been to generations of Americans, there are problems. You have to say that his argument is flawed at its most basic: his Man in the State of Nature has no navel. He has come somehow to full-blown civilized English manhood without being born, nourished or educated by the society of people around him; otherwise his absolute moral autonomy would be disappear in all these obligations to others. Any inherited wealth cannot be property created by his own labor. And if you take him out of the woods and put him into a modern American city, invested with the accumulated capital of technology and industry of earlier generations, then his property loses all relationship to Locke’s idea of property; at the same time, the notion that resources are infinite becomes more and more absurd. Perhaps people do have the right to vastly unequal amounts of wealth, but you will have to find a different way of grounding that right from Locke. Try Social Darwinist arguments about “survival of the fittest,” perhaps.

We also see that insisting on an absolute right to wealth will undermine other basic human values, and in the end undercut freedom itself. If you are at the bottom of the economic ladder, you cannot negotiate fairly with giant, immortal corporations; nor is there any good way of providing for the sick, handicapped or elderly in our anonymous cities. And no matter what your skills, you may find yourself in economic trouble if you exercise your freedom of speech, as many people discovered as a result of the McCarthy Era blacklists, or your freedom of religion, as many Moslems found out in the last seven years. So there is a completely different strand of liberal tradition summarized by Franklin Roosevelt in his Four Freedoms Speech: not only should all human beings have freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but also freedom from want and freedom from fear.

So freedom is not just a relationship between the individual and the state; it also involves relationships of individuals with one another, and of entire peoples with one another. In the West we have tended to forget this in the last few centuries, as we have been obsessed with Individualism. In ancient and medieval times it was different. For example, the Greeks prized freedom above all things, but they measured it in the independence of their city-states, regardless of how they were governed; they considered inhabitants of empires to be slaves, even the relatively benevolent Persian empire. Let’s take another look at America in 1776. What did the British do that justified bloody red revolution? Taxes on stamps and tea? Really? Restricting settlement west of the Appalachians to protect the Indians? Oh, nasty. And of course they passed some punitive laws after the Boston Tea Party. Even so, it never added up to the level of abuse that a revolution should demand. And then there’s the question: what would the disgruntled Americans have done if they had gotten representation in Parliament? Would it have quieted them down? Probably not. The real beef our forefathers had was they wanted to govern themselves, and had come to think of us as a different nation. But nobody in the 18th century said that empires were wrong, or that nations had the right to be independent; so we borrowed the vocabulary from very different struggles in 17th century England. We still don’t seem to understand this deep need for national independence. After World War II, Americans came to believe that there was no more urgent moral cause in the world than the struggle for democracy, capitalism and freedom against Communism; we were drawn into struggles in places like Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Cuba and Vietnam, assuming these peoples would share our values. We didn’t see that for many of them, distaste for American armies of occupation or puppet regimes would be a much stronger emotion than anti-Communism; they were traditional cultures that thought in terms of freedom for the whole people rather than for expanded individual opportunity. For them, the magic word was “anti-colonialism.” I will leave it to you to judge whether our past several decades of Middle Eastern policy have suffered from the same blind spot.

I think there’s another problem in our idea of freedom: if everyone does everything he or she can, not just in terms of what’s legal but of what we can do without being punished, can ours or any nation survive? Maybe I could get along, taking short cuts in my job, cheating on taxes, stepping out on my wife and, in the wonderful words of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, stealing the change from blind men’s cups. Some people do, and we probably even know a few. When Amy and I lived in Philadelphia, the story we heard was that whenever a city bus was involved in any kind of accident, more people filed whiplash lawsuits than could ever have fit on the bus. Even in Philadelphia, only a small fraction of people push the envelope this way; and no, if everybody did it, we could not remain free. There aren’t enough enforcers, and more importantly we don’t want for there to be enough enforcers, to have eyes everywhere at once. We just expect that most people will try to operate at a higher standard. So what is the point of individual freedom, if it only works when most people are careful not to use it? Perhaps thinking and speaking freely are always good (except for shouting FIRE in a crowded theater). Other nations disagree with us on this; democracies like Britain, France and Germany clamp down much harder on what they consider hate speech and libel. You can make similar arguments for freedom of religion, of assembly, and of the press; and certainly for all sorts of freedom FROM government intrusion. But in practice, we allow a great deal of freedom of action, including many actions which are not good for us or for society as a whole. Perhaps freedom is a precondition for moral behavior; I get no brownie points for not cheating on the test if the teacher is watching closely the whole time I take it. The Puritans who in the 1600s were arguing politically for the rights of Englishmen, even as they also pressed religiously for the priesthood of believers, must have taken this attitude. Just as a priest cannot assume responsibility for my ultimate salvation or damnation, so the state should not block me from going to hell in my own fashion. Only by being free to sin can I be virtuous in not sinning. Thinkers from Zeno and Epicurus to the Buddha saw liberation in self-denial. Doing what came naturally was to act in a subhuman or bestial fashion; the opposite of freedom was slavery to one’s appetites. Whenever government forces us to good things, such as using our tax money to provide for society’s victims, perhaps it robs us of the chance to aspire to virtue by choosing to contribute of own own free will to charity.

So here we are. For some, freedom is a matter of absence of any external restraint, so that even taxation for good causes is a kind of slavery; for others, only in the absence of outside coercion can we act morally. And a far older tradition says that freedom is the right of your group, your tribe, your nation not to be controlled by others, and that the amount of coercion you personally feel is much less important. To the people at the top of the totem pole, it is about not being restrained from exercising power; to the people at the bottom, it is how effectively their bosses can be reined in. And yet, with all these conflicting ideas of what they are talking about, most people assume that they can bandy the term around and have everyone understand. Why? Perhaps because all of these are pieces of an intuitive feeling for freedom which is hard-wired. The True State of Nature for humanity is not what Locke postulates: it is the lives we lived and which shaped us over hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years, wandering in small hunter/gatherer bands. The early humans, even the protohumans had no strong sense of individuality, or of conflict between their own needs and the needs of the group; there were no police to force actions needed for the survival of the whole, yet the tribes survived. If a tribe did shatter through selfish behavior into individuals or even couples pursuing their own aims, the needs of the dependent, unskilled young would not have been met and the genes of the whole group would have disappeared; so natural selection pushed very hard against selfishness and for what we call altruism. Emotions, religious feelings and moral beliefs reinforced tribal identification; and a concept of freedom which was both tribal and individual became part of our wiring. In evolutionary terms, the last 10,000 years was the blink of an eye. Through all the despotisms and imperfect lives, the image of tribal freedom has endured, and visionaries have kept pressing for it. Confucius’ teachings center on the right relationship of self and society; the Hebrew prophets argued for social justice and compassion, as did Mohammed a millennium later. Jesus emphasized the spirit over the letter of the law. Augustine saw freedom in an all-consuming love for God; but Jesus reminded us that God is invisible and can therefore only be loved through our feelings and action for the people around us. So perhaps the ultimate statement of freedom is this: Love your neighbor, and do whatever you will.

The Religious Instinct and Modern Civilization- Gary Bennett

© Gary Bennett

October 22, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

SERMON

Imagine this: you are surrounded by loved ones, without inflated egos or scrambling for rank, wealth and power. Private property is limited to the decorative or personal. There is no “marrying or being given into marriage,” at least not as an economic unit. There is plenty to do, but it is meaningful. You labor until the task is done; then everybody rests or celebrates. You feel pleasantly tired, doing work your body was designed to do, without grinding you down. Fruits and nuts are there to be picked from the trees and bushes; game is plentiful. The land flows with milk and honey in Earth’s Great Garden. Best of all is the sharing with close friends of poems, stories, gossip, jokes; discreet flirtations and wild romances; mountaintop experiences of shared religious ecstasy or the serenity that comes from deep understanding.

This may not be your vision of Paradise, but it has commonly been so for peoples throughout the ages. Some, like the Jews and Greeks, had it as the Golden Age at the beginning of the world; others, like Christians, Moslems and Marxists, made it the outcome at the end of History.

The Greeks might insist Eternity is only for souls stripped of all human traits; Christians might fill up Heaven with activities that bore us silly on Earth. But there is a part of us that deeply craves a proper existence, one we never seem to get in this life, of intimacy, acceptance and meaning. This Heaven also resembles the reality of hunter/gatherer life for millions of years of our ancestors, at least “on a good day;” there were ups and downs, times when the game was scarce, the berries poisoned, the milk soured and the honey got you stung.

The Serpent in the Garden brought agriculture, starting about 10,000 years ago. It did not win because it was attractive to the tribes: the originally nomadic Hebrews called it the “curse of Adam;” and farming cultures have often lived in fear of having their own children “go native.” Agriculture won out nonetheless because it could support far larger populations.

Human nature was shaped in a fiery caldron. Without a strongly cohesive band of adults watching over the young and passing on skills and lore, humans were the most helpless of animal species; with such bonds in place, humans were so successful that they could think about other matters beyond survival. Our normal behavior does not make sense in a usual Darwinian model – why do we spend time gossiping with neighbors instead of foraging for dinner? – unless we understand that it is the result of ages of strong selective pressure for socialization. There were several different genetic adaptations toward this end, including a retooling of sexual behavior and a hard-wiring of language abilities. Religion was also part of this species makeover.

Part of our religious instinct reinforces group bonding. Religious cravings can only be satisfied by group participation. Have you ever wondered why you wonder?

All of us desire to understand our place in the scheme of things. Why am I here? What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything? How was the world created? How will it end? Why do evils like drought, scarce food, disease and dangerous animals exist? What are thunder and lightning? Tell me about death and what comes after.

The fact that we consider these questions important is rather odd. No other animals ponder such questions: they do not enhance survival. Yes, all animals attempt to avoid danger and death, but mostly by instinct. Thinking about death, fearing it, obsessing over it, does not make humans more likely to survive; brooding about death may even decrease survival chances.

But our questions cry for answers, and to get them we need other people, if only to reassure us – thus we bond to get something we need. The road to serenity is found in The Mysteries, rituals that promote secret and sure understanding. Today we claim to value scientific knowledge, but science is always tentative, and it does not satisfy the soul. You can’t make a religion out of science, as the content keeps changing, new explanations replace the old, and lack of absolute certainty leads to anxiety.

The Mysteries are sometimes physically addictive. We lose ourselves in them; the sights, the sounds, even the smells stimulate the senses. Sex and mind-altering drugs could enhance the mood of religious ecstasy. In America we have had Jim Jones, David Koresh, Philadelphia’s MOVE and the Comet Cult; each exercised psychic power over adherents to the point of mass suicide.

But for many, serenity itself is the sweetest gift, the “peace that passeth understanding.” And none of this makes any sense whatsoever in conventional Darwinian terms; objective knowledge of the real world should always beat fantasy and thus lead to higher survival rates, while the delusional self-destruct and do not leave progeny behind.

Let’s look at the underlying problem. Selfish behavior will always produce more progeny than unselfish behavior; so it should always be selected for, even in social species. Cheaters should out-breed cooperators; those who live to fight another day should inherit the earth, tearing it from the cold dead hands of the brave and self-sacrificing.

Sociability should be steadily undermined, until it pushes a social species to extinction. Bees and ants found one workaround: cooperation, hard work, altruism and self-sacrifice on the part of workers do not result in fewer progeny, because workers are always infertile; those traits are of value to the queen; so the queen which passes on the most altruistic genes to her workers will have an edge.

Our human ancestors took another path. Perhaps the original method of selection was simple: if your tribe got too anti-social, it would drop out of the gene pool, and leave a niche for tribes that hadn’t. But religion is a more elegant response.

We are wired to carry within ourselves an image of what society and pro-social behavior should be, idealized images from our childhood – unselfish cooperation and affection among members of the group. Some of us may be more tolerant and flexible than others, but all are wired to defer to “elders” who feel and express the “conservative images” most strongly. Reactions are triggered by extremely selfish or antisocial behavior; the group takes action against the deviant, through ostracism, exile or even death, but in any case exclusion from the gene pool. Extraordinary courage and sacrifice are also socially reinforced : “none but the brave deserve the fair,” we say. In hunter/gatherer society, these mechanisms kept human sociability, cooperation and altruism stable over vast ages.

In the change to herding and farming, there were many dramatic changes, but the fundamentals of relationships changed little: it took a village instead of a tribe to raise a child; there was still a rough equality of wealth and status; religion continued to be a shared monitoring for selfish behavior.

But by 3300 BC, cities had begun to appear in Mesopotamia, piling village on village, plus those bereft of any community; in this chaos, tribal mechanisms no longer worked. The first rulers were priest-kings, originally bureaucrats handling religious rites. Religious control became political control. Non-orthodoxy was treason; religion kept citizens obedient. Reciprocity of rights and responsibilities, an integral part of human society from its origins, was gone. Some people became tools to be used by others; and the earliest human governments were among the most despotic that have ever existed.

Thus began “status quo religion,” the use of human religious instincts for the benefit of an elite. Thousands of years later Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, hoping the piety of the Christians would shore up a decaying civil society. Before the American Civil War, Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian churches split nationally, with their Southern branches remaining loyal to slavery and the planter class. And then came the modern Religious Right.

Fundamentalism among evangelical Protestants dates to the early part of the 20th century as a reaction against Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. William Jennings Bryan might be a political liberal; but as the most respected Biblical literalist of his day, he was dragooned into being spokesman for that cause and became branded forever, not as one of our heroes, but as the foolish villain of Inherit the Wind. For all that, fundamentalism was still a fringe movement in my youth. In the “60s Nixon initiated the first “wedge issue” campaign, his “Silent Majority.”

His successors in the “70s brought modern business techniques to creation of a religious right machine: mailing lists were assembled; evangelical ministers and conservative Catholic clergy were courted and tempted with power; conservative denominations like Southern Baptists were hijacked by coups, engineered by new corporate style megachurches. Conservative Protestants and Catholics, whose predecessors had spent the last 400 years trying to exterminate each other, were forged into uneasy political alliance by Radical Right apparachiks. So began the modern campaign to use status quo religion to help forge an American Fascist Movement.

Where the religious instinct originally was used to monitor the behavior of people close to you, wedge issue politics today use modern advertising methods, mass media and coordinated attacks to arouse anxieties and feed off them by generating an endless succession of issues, each painted as a spontaneous reaction to some incredible attack on values. News and entertainment media have long been used to this end; they make grisly crime stories their meat, as the public can be entertained indefinitely in anticipating an equally grisly vengeance, while coming to fear their own communities.

But modern propaganda techniques have also managed to elevate to the highest levels of public importance such things as never ending wars on drugs, wardrobe malfunctions, celebrity peccadilloes, steroids in sports, taking the X out of Xmas, teaching science in science class or sex in health class, and in fact almost anything which might suggest that sex continues to exist and motivate human beings, yea even unto the current generation.

The Terry Schiavo case is wedge issue politics at its most obscene. Her higher brain cells were long dead, and she had been in the limbo of a persistent vegetative state for 15 years. An army of doctors supported this diagnosis; an endless array of judges supported her husband’s right to terminate medical intervention.

But what was the message delivered by television news coverage? Doctored video footage was played over and over, an endless stream of libelous attacks on her husband’s character were shown, all trying to persuade us that this was a vibrant young woman on the verge of waking up, yet subjected to a slow tortured death by inhuman secular liberals. Attacks on the Constitution, death threats against judges, laws riding roughshod over separation of powers and Federal/state divisions, laws aimed at specific individuals; most frightening of all, the total disappearance of any principled opposition in Congress, leaving judicial integrity as the only barrier against government gangsterism.

The roles played by news media and government officials would until recent times have been unthinkable; now they are routine, expected. Some believe the Right overplayed its hand because polls say three-quarters of the American public disapproved; but the experience of recent politics says that the frenzied faithful have long memories and turn out in elections, whereas most of the three-quarters would forget the whole business in a month.

In what was once the world’s premier democracy, these become the stuff of the news and of public discussion, replacing health care, job creation and disappearance, deficits in government budgets and in the balance of trade, Social Security prospects, war, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, climate change, population growth and the depletion of the world’s resources.

The point of wedge issue politics is not to solve problems, for a problem solved is an issue lost; it is to keep the passions constantly at a fever pitch and so overwhelm the democratic process. Rational discussion, even on areas of profound disagreement, is the lifeblood of democracy, but it is poison to status quo religion. Your opponents must be painted as deviants and perverts, not even fully human; their very existence fuels your outrage.

If status quo religion were all that remained of our instinct, we might conclude that religion had become a dangerous atavism, that we would be better off in a totally secular world. Many liberals seem to have reached such a position: for them, secular vs. religious means enlightened vs. troglodyte or even good vs. evil.

That’s pretty much what the fashionable blue state/red state thing is all about – people on both sides of the political fence who believe that wedge issue exploitation is the only way that religion can be part of politics. But status quo religion is a perversion, not the impulse itself. The standard by which hunter/gatherer humans judged each other was not just an idealized world of their own childhoods; it was an unchanging image of cooperation, unselfishness and intimacy. History is filled with prophets who judged their societies not by the desires of rulers, but against the ideal vision of life we carry within us.

When the power of a prophet’s voice matches the strength of his convictions, the world trembles, and sometimes it changes. The prophets of ancient Israel attacked their societies in times of social and economic injustice. “Woe unto those who are at ease in Zion,” said one; of others, it was said that they comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable.

Judaism gained a commitment to social action it has never lost. Jesus argued for a life built on love and compassion, sought out the company of losers, pariahs, lepers and prostitutes, and announced that it were easier “for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Early Christians often lived in other-worldly hippie-type communes. Much the same happened with early Islam; and social justice has been a central part of that religion ever since, even more so than in Christianity.

In America, the power of prophetic religion has produced major positive changes at least three times. In the years before the Civil War, most Bible-thumpers who tackled the issue at all were against slavery: some courageously faced death in delivering their message.

Two generations later, in a time disturbingly like our own, with both political parties owned by corporate money, with corruption, cynicism and despair everywhere, a young William Jennings Bryan – yes, he of the Scopes Trial – electrified the Democratic Convention of 1896 with a politically grounded, religiously impassioned keynote speech in which he pleaded that his countrymen not let Mankind be “crucified on a Cross of Gold.” He and his followers made common cause with more secular reformers and recreated the Democrats into a party of reform, arcing from New Freedom through New Deal to Great Society before finally losing their way in the last generation, when they stopped speaking to the needs of the whole nation and started seeing only voting blocs, electoral coalitions, corporate financing and a comfortable status quo.

The third example was the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and “60s, when Rev. Martin Luther King and others were able to share with America the vision of a great crusade for justice and equality that went beyond group interest politics. The Segregationist Deep South never got that support from its own ministers, and its cause was lost; even white Southerners understood at the deepest levels that their cause was wrong, and so the battle was already half over.

Would we then be better off without the religious impulse at all? It can be positive as well as negative in political impact. When it is a negative force, as in recent American politics, some other group is usually manipulating religious feelings for its own purposes.

But an equally important question: is there an alternative? We throw around the word “secular”: what does it mean? Is it a good or bad force in the world? The secular has probably been around from the beginning, making up our underlying personality traits, over which selected religious behaviors are superimposed. All of us, even the various kinds of saints, live in the mundane world most of the time, even if for saints, the context of that daily life is shaped by great religious life choices. And religion has in any case been more for ordinary folks than for elites, leading Karl Marx to his cynical comment about religion being the “opiate of the masses.”

But there are now whole cities, states, civilizations where public piety is exceptional and religious arguments unimportant in civil discourse. Some of America’s great cities may have reached such a condition. We can certainly see a sharp dividing line between blue tending Austin and surrounding small towns and rural areas of Texas; and similarly sharp lines could be drawn all over the country, as between Philadelphia and small town Pennsylvania.

Nobody questions that Europe has become quite secular. Europeans and Americans seemed to be on a similar path toward secularism after 1870, but have diverged rather sharply since World War II, perhaps because of our higher birth rates; having children around seems to correlate to stronger religious feelings. Are there consequences?

As a whole, European nations have made better political choices than the United States since 1945; most Quality of Life indices rank many of these countries above us and the gap widens each decade. These choices appear to be from secular moral systems. Yet an increasingly secularized Europe after 1871 was a seed bed for materialism, racism, Social Darwinism, militarism, fascism and communism, ending in slaughters running to the tens of millions in World War I, World War II, Nazi Holocaust and Stalinist purges. Like religious societies, secular ones can make good or bad moral choices.

While I am a “blue? in the present culture wars, I am uncomfortable that racist and Social Darwinist ideas from a dreadful past have slipped back into vogue among liberals. Many believe that the greater Kerry vote in blue states occurred because people in those states are intellectually superior. But demographic analysis shows that the most Republican tending groups were the richest and, in general, more educated groups, just as in every other election.

Neither religion nor a secular outlook automatically leads to doing the right thing. If you are concerned about wedge issue politics, as I am, then work to control big money spending, money that buys politicians in both parties, uses lying and manipulative advertising, undermines independent journalism with phony news channels and phony reporters – these corrupt political practices have much more to do with the decline of American politics than the passions of evangelicals do; and those who spend the money are consummate hypocrites. And if money is so out of control that the integrity of American politics cannot be restored in any conventional way – then perhaps we should all pray for a return of prophetic religion inspired politics – the only vision which cannot be bought or corrupted, cannot be lied to or manipulated, and which cuts through all pretenses, all humbug.

Much of religious evolution in the past 5000 years can be seen as an attempt to regain the certainty we enjoyed in tribal life. In the West, the first attempt was polytheism: every village religion was considered true; but where one story of deceit, seduction or cruelty by the god was a sacred mystery, a pantheon of such stories invited contempt and disbelief. So philosophers offered a God from reason; though their logic went unchallenged for millennia, common people never found it religiously consoling. Christianity brought the Infallible Church, which proved to be run by quite fallible human beings; then the Inerrant Bible, passages of which contradict not only science, morality and common sense, but each other.

If there is a religious instinct, is our knowledge of God also hard-wired? No such luck: look at the diversity of religions. On ultimate matters, we are always left with a leap of faith. Here is my own:I don’t know if there is a God, but I have staked my life on three bedrock beliefs: first, God cannot be a deceiver – if we have been given the ability to unravel the universe, it cannot be merely to trick us; secondly, God cannot be a cosmic sadist, condemning us to damnation; thirdly, God does not depend on our adulation. Deceit, vanity, torture: the worst of traits in human beings; they are unimaginable in what God must be. The patient and humble methods of science are a surer guide to truth than are sacred texts of primitive peoples or arrogant men who claim they are chummy with the Almighty. The universe is billions of years old, developing according to comprehensible laws; humans got the way they are over long ages of evolution by natural selection. Intelligent Design may lie behind it all; but this is not science.

If God doesn’t need our worship nor punish unbelievers, then our creeds may not be life’s most important religious task. If finding the right answer were crucial, we should have been born with the tools to find it, not left with as many dogmas as there are people to dream them up. What we must know is hard-wired: we are here to need, accept and embrace one another; there is no better way to love and honor God, Whom we have not seen, than to love and honor our neighbor, whom we have.

The prophets, including Jesus, have said this: “inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.” I personally do not wish to go back to the Garden of our hunter/gatherer origins. Western Civilization in the last 500 years has enriched human experience immeasurably by its emphasis on the Individual – and we would be diminished to be forced back into the simple life of the tribe. And competitive capitalist economies have unleashed great wealth and innovation, to which we have become rather addicted.

But if the end result of the path our economy, politics and society are on is to turn the whole world into nothing but a vast competitive arena, a war of all against all, with only buying and selling left as a bond between one person and another, then we are on a path to catastrophe, because we are warring against all that made us human in the first place. We shall see an endless succession of rebellions, fundamentalisms, random violence by the alienated, senseless rage everywhere. What our religious sense never stops telling us, the poet W.H. Auden said best: “we must learn to love one another or die.”

Gary Bennett 2006