Paving the road to Hell?

Andy Gerhart
July 24, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

We know that knowledge is power, and in our UU faith we emphasize the free search for truth. But what does it mean when answers lead to new questions and new forms of ignorance? How do we cope with our ignorance and simultaneously act in good faith? We’ll discuss our current climate crisis as we explore how uncertainty might ground our theology to inspire us and offer a basis for moral action.

Call to Worship

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical.
It is the power of all true art and science.
He to whom this emotion is a stranger,
who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe,
is as good as dead.
To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists,
manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and
the most radiant beauty,
which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms-
this knowledge,
this feeling,
is at the center of true religiousness.

Albert Einstein
(As quoted in Philip Frank, Einstein: His Life and Times, 1947)

Readings:

“Physical science has historically progressed not only by finding precise explanations of natural phenomena, but also by discovering what sorts of things can be precisely explained. These may be fewer than we had thought.”
-Steven Weinberg (Nobel laureate in Physics, and Austinite)

“If you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience.”
-Al Gore, 2008

“Responsible action does not mean the certain achievement of desired ends but […] the creation of the conditions of possibility for desired changes… What improbable task, with which unpredictable results, shall we undertake today?”
-Sharon Welch, UU theologian, and Provost, Meadville Lombard

Sermon:

Good morning-

So, you all know our esteemed intern minister here at First UU, the honorable Susan Yarborough, right? And you also probably know that when she gives a sermon, often on a major holiday like fourth of July this year, she never fails to declare not only that it is a “seminarian Sunday,” but that they have brought out the B team. Well, I want to declare this a “pre-seminarian” Sunday! And I want to acknowledge the stark reality that if Susan is the B team, then I’ll be very lucky to be considered the C, D, or E team!

So… Shall we pave the road to hell? That is my question today.

Hopefully it brings to mind for you the popular maxim, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” This is the observation that the world is a far more complicated place than we generally imagine, and that a lot of bad stuff is done with the hope of improving it. Examples litter our lives. In fact just the other day, I had a moth breakout at home, and at a complete loss of how to protect my favorite sweater, I read that I could put it in the freezer while I went out of town, and that that would kill the wool moths. So I did, and when I returned, somehow my precious sweater had been pulled through the ice maker! Not only could I not extract it without cutting the sweater, but I broke the ice-maker.

Other examples are really familiar to us. We pour antibiotics into our agriculture in order to feed ourselves, yet in the end create new superbugs with antibiotic resistance. We burn fossil fuels to enable development that is supposed to increase people’s standards of living, but that same energy ends up trapping heat in our atmosphere. And now we are teetering on the edge of using very novel climate technologies, called geo-engineering, in emergency efforts; but these technologies may likely have even more disastrous consequences.

So we must underscore the amount of ignorance we confront whenever we try to do anything.

The photo on the cover of the order of service is of a courageous alliance of citizens putting themselves in front of bulldozers to protect Utah lands from a Canadian firm that the US has recently permitted to extract tar sands. And yes, we are literally paving ourselves, with fossil fuels, into the only type of hell I’ve ever been aware of, one here on earth. We just finished another record breaking June, which followed 13 months that each broke their respective month’s record. And it won’t stop. We are all drenched in oil, as our entire socio-economic system is built on it. We are heating our earth at a rate of 250 trillion joules per second, which is equivalent to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima bombs a day, 365 days a year. And in May, in Karachi, the Pakistani government began digging anticipatory mass graves to prepare for the deaths they expect from this summer’s heat wave.

We face incredible anxiety when we contemplate taking moral actions that may confront these seemingly impervious realities. And no matter which actions we are considering, we confront different types of despair that are commonplace in our society. There’s that we’ve just touched on, the fear of acting because you may make things worse, which underlies the precautionary principle. Another is what I’ll call existentialist despair: the near certainty that no matter what, all of humanity is one day destined for extinction. Either a superbug will get us in the next thousand years, or the sun will explode in a few billion; this is what Bertrand Russell called “unyielding despair.” And then there is a kind of despair, which is so common that I think I confront it in myself or others almost every day. This is perfectionist despair: that dread voice in our minds that dictates that unless we do something perfectly, there is no point in doing it at all. In the case of climate change and reducing carbon emissions, I can’t simply make a choice to do some action that seems good for the climate. Unless I stop eating animals, and stop driving a car, and then stop eating dairy, and then only adopt children who have already been born, and then raise them as vegans, and buy carbon offsets for their extra impacts, well, then there is no point.

I’m sure there are many more types of despair. But regardless of which type of despair you do battle with when you think of doing something inspired, and which type you lose your battle to, let’s face it, all forms of despair become a justification for inaction. And for many, including me, they are comfort. Bertrand Russell and all the existentialists love their despair. And I have at times as well. Despair lifts the burden of hope off of our shoulders, and what a burden that is! Despair frees us to worry about nobody, including ourselves. It helps us cope. In many ways, despair is a religion.

UU theologian Sharon Welch, in her book A Feminist ethic of risk, talks about how we can tackle these anxieties by working toward what she calls “the creation of the conditions of possibility for desired changes.”

But what are these conditions of possibility? For Welch, they are formed when we act in communities, which she believes tend to hedge against bad ideas and actions, but more importantly, have much greater resilience in the face of failure than individuals do.

I agree with Welch. But there is an individual step that must occur well before we build active communities. This is especially true in our increasingly more isolated and isolating culture.

We each individually must decide to join a community, before we can actually act as one. And this individual and radical decision to participate with others, in inspired moral action, for me, this is where the magic is. I don’t really feel like I understand how this happens very well at all, but for me the critical move begins by acknowledging our ignorance in the face of our uncertainty.

In his introductory essay to the new Norton Anthology of World Religions, Jack Miles states that “the discovery of ignorance” may have been the greatest human discovery of all time. As he puts it, “until our prehistoric but anatomically modern ancestors could tell the difference between ignorance and knowledge, how could they actually know they knew anything?”

Miles continues by noting that religions throughout time can be considered not as privileged forms of knowledge, as is commonly thought, but as “ritualized confessions of ignorance.”

Seeing religion in this way is, he writes, easily overlooked, for “the world harbors many a quiet believer and many a shy practitioner, reluctant to undergo cross-examination about a confession of inadequacy that defies ready articulation.”

“a confession of inadequacy that defies ready articulation”… Indeed, I feel that this is at the heart of religions the world over. And I feel that this is at the heart of inspired moral action.

I myself cannot make a special claim to religious knowledge, either affirming or disaffirming deities. I can however, confess my inadequacy, communally, and ritualistically.

I believe that science is a profoundly deep method for doing this. In fact I believe it is a religion. Science inquires passionately into the nature of reality, and confesses a great deal of ignorance, loving the questions it asks so much that it discovers kernels of reality along the way. Things literally become real through the scientific process. To me it is much like the story of the Velveteen Rabbit. As that wonderful straw-filled toy becomes real through the tried and true testing and constant love of a boy at play, knowledge is revealed to us by the scientific community’s persistent and rigorous inquiry into ignorance by the testing of our world. In this sense, science is a form of real and intense love.

And one of the great misconceptions of science is that scientists are perfectly rational dispassionate actors! Quite the opposite, they love mystery as much or more than any religious actor, and pursue their passions with irrational love and intensity. And thank the dickens that they do, for through such passionate exploration comes most of the knowledge we have to work with in our daily lives. Not just in our daily hum and drum, but as we confront realities like climate change.

And as we just heard in the readings, true science does a great job of acknowledging ignorance. Even Steven Weinberg, our local Austinite Nobel Laureate in physics, as we just heard, wrote that fewer natural phenomena can be precisely explained than physicists originally thought. And as Jack Miles puts it, “Scientific progress is like mountain climbing: the higher you climb, the more you know, but the wider the vistas of ignorance that extend on all sides. The result is that our ignorance always exceeds our knowledge, and the gap between the two grows infinitely greater, not smaller, as infinite time passes.”

Indeed, after so much physical inquiry, when we fit our mathematical formulas to find out that more than 90% of the mass in the universe is what we call dark matter, and is completely undetectable, our universe becomes a completely new mystery to us. And so do our lives within it.

The worst part is that we cannot even admit it. We are an arrogant species. And the last thing we want to do is relinquish our fundamentalist beliefs, whether they are quote unquote religious or, quote unquote scientific. The last thing we wish to do is admit how little we know.

The notion of ignorance has indeed taken on a very unique, and complicated, valence when it comes to climate change. This is because instead of acknowledging ignorance, many people today actually celebrate it when it comes to climate change. These days there are very few scientists that deny human-caused climate change, and those that do are paid handsomely to do so, as historian Naomi Oreskes makes very clear in her book Merchants of Doubt.

To my mind, the critical reason we must acknowledge our ignorance, is because it enables us to recognize what we actually do know. I do not know what God is, or who she, he, they, or it is or isn’t; I do not know what dark matter is, or whether what lays beyond our universe are parallel universes through infinite space. Just as I do not know how to speak the Basque language (or any other language other than English and some Spanish for that matter).

I don’t know the mystery of the world, and it terrifies me. But I do know that I am alive. And in the same instant that I recognize my vitality I also recognize that I am, simultaneously, grateful for my life. This is the essential recognition. Gratitude for living, to my mind, is the natural result of a confession of ignorance. And it is the seed from which grows inspired actions.

I don’t know exactly how climate change will play out in what remains of my lifetime, but I do know that it will play out most disastrously for those who cannot afford to cope with it, and that we will have many reenactments of what happened in the 9th ward of New Orleans during the flood that many call Hurricana Katrina. I don’t know all the places this will happen, but I do know that many, many more of them will happen in Bangladesh, in Vietnam, in China, in India, and along the coasts of Africa. For those who are impoverished on the coastlines of this world, I do know that sea level rise will mean refugee status. And I now know, that people in large cities in deserts like Karachi will be preemptively digging mass graves.

I don’t know who will set aside the money to help these people, and I don’t know how our energy economy will transition from fossil fuels. But I do know we need hundreds of billions of dollars set aside to help them, and I know that we need to change our fossil fuel lifestyles.

Those who deny climate change are not acknowledging ignorance. They are not loving anything. They are closing their eyes, and their hearts, out of tremendous fear for old livelihoods. They come in many forms, but all are putting their heads in the sand. But its not just sand, it is sand along a beach, at low tide.

Still, the problem isn’t so much them, it is the rest of us, standing right next to them. Our heads may be out of the sand, and we may see the tide rising. But we are in despair, and we are paralyzed.

So how do we act amidst uncertainty? How do we collectively pull our heads out of the sand? How do we open our eyes to inquire into mystery and ignorance? And once we have done that, how do we open our bank accounts, and our homes, to environmental refugees.

Well, I don’t know. I too tend to despair. And I don’t think that is going to end anytime soon. I just want to learn to do it with more humor. I’m going to seminary, as an agnostic, because I yearn to know, why exactly, do certain people act courageously in a world full of mystery and uncertainty, and often at great personal risk, in such inspiringly ethical ways? Because it does happen. I am particularly wondering about why a village in the Netherlands, called Nieuwlande, so courageously hid Jews during the Holocaust; and so quietly, without even talking about it. They just automatically began doing it, at exceptional personal risk. There are many other types of examples. Yet often folks who do these things describe their actions in a double negative, as having “acted when they simply could not not act.”

But what grounds such moral action? An article by the ethicist Bill Greenway recently introduced me to the Jewish philosopher Emmaneul Levinas. Levinas, a holocaust survivor, characterized these types of actions as being passionately taken hostage, by the “face” of the other through a type of love. This is the same love that Jews and Christians might call agape love. Seized by the suffering of another, we are compelled to act not out of some a priori dispassionate rationality, but precisely the opposite. Our moral response takes priority and comes first as we grapple with the reality of the suffering before us.

I know about the Karachi graves thanks to a direct action a few weeks ago that Tim DeChristopher and Karena Gore staged so that we would know it amidst the hell-on-earth we’ve had closer to home. Tim, a UU seminarian, and Karena, the daughter of Al Gore, and a bunch of other ministers were arrested for lying in a ditch being dug for a fracking pipeline in Boston. And as Tim put it in an interview with Democracy Now, when he heard of the anticipatory mass graves in Karachi, “…it just broke my heart in a whole new way… it just really weighed on me and wouldn’t let go…You know, it was one of those things that just settled deeply into my heart, and I felt really compelled to take action. Tim did not ask the question, “Why act morally?” because the question never even surfaced for him. And when we act, like mad scientists, we do not do it so rationally either. Often, we have either already acted, without free will, taken hostage by the faces of the other; or we have hardened our hearts and not acted all. It is only from this last place that that dispassionate question “Why act morally?” arises.

I agree with Levinas about the hostage taking that happens. Inspired moral action is indeed doing that which one cannot not do. If a confession of ignorance amidst mystery is the soul of religion, and that confession provokes deep gratitude, then simply living with your eyes open is at the heart of the religious experience. It really is a form of witnessing.

So what are the preconditions of possibility for inspired moral action that Welch talks about? I believe they begin with acknowledging our inadequacy, such that when the sensation of gratitude for our existence arises in juxtaposition with the uncertainty of our universe, we’ll see Levinas’ faces, and a few among us spontaneously, passionately, and rather irrationally will make risky and responsible moral actions.

As Jack Miles puts it, “even the most reasonable among us must close the gap between indecision and decision, paralysis and action, not with knowledge but with something else. I expect the darkness of ignorance to continue to surround me until my dying day. In a sense, that darkness is my enlightenment.”

True despair, or paralysis in grief or fear, is a severance from our acknowledgement of mystery and uncertainty. It is a rejection of the gratitude and awe that such uncertainty provokes. Frequently that rejection takes the form of certainties, of know-it-all fundamentalisms, built almost exclusively on fear, like those of some climate deniers. Fundamentalist certainties are the opposite of the kernels that make up the steps on our small mountain of knowledge. They are the opposite of inquiry, and of love. They are more like the Dementors in Harry Potter, sucking all questions, and with them, all reality and love, away from us.

A huge problem with the way climate issues are discussed is through their negativity, through their apocalyptic tones. Talking about it in apocalyptic tones doesn’t help us address it. Hearing that it will make humans go extinct only creates an incredible amount of fear, despair, and more paralysis. Humans are like deer in the headlights in front of these kinds of headlines. And the denial these headlines produce is exactly the same denial that climate deniers have. David Sobel calls this ecophobia. The inability to psychologically process the dread.

I am not interesting in dread, or apocalypse, or hell at all. Instead, let us acknowledge what we do, and what we don’t know. We don’t know that humans will go extinct from climate change, in fact, it seems very unlikely since we do know that the rich are very likely to adapt with little trouble. We do know that the poor are the ones who will bear the brunt, and may experience massive devastations. So let’s own up to it, and take the attitude of David Byrne of the Talking Heads, the writer of the song our musicians just rocked out to, and find some joy amidst doom on our Road to Nowhere.

Instead of being paralyzed by grief, let us acknowledge our grief-stricken state while we come up with good ways to cope with our changing climate. Let us actively grieve, and listen amidst our uncertainty, refusing to deny what we do know.

There are many good avenues available to us. If you want to empower our youth, the ones who face the greatest burden amongst us, and are often willing to take the greatest risks, support the UU Young Adults for Climate Justice, organized by Aly Tharp based here in Austin, and join Commit2Respond. They are on fire. If you are interested in affecting policy, get involved with the Citizens Climate Lobby. If you might like to take direct, peaceful actions, which are often the most powerful: join Peaceful Uprising, Karena Gore, Tim DeChristopher.

But whatever you do, please don’t do it perfectly, and please do it in community.

I’ll conclude with the question Sharon Welch so brilliantly asks us to consider: “What improbable task, with which unpredictable results, shall we, shall we, undertake today?”

“Will you join me in paving the road to hell?”

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