I am back in Northern Virginia after having spent nearly a week in Salt Lake City attending the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association. I am glad I went. Never have I packed so much learning and fellowship into so short a time a time. I probably cannot afford to attend every year, but I suspect I will be back periodically.
One recurring theme I heard during my five days was that Unitarian Universalism (UUism) might be the religion of the 21st century. UUism is hardly new. The Unitarian aspects of the faith go back to the Apostic Age of Christianity. Unitarians asserted that there was only one God, rather than God manifested in a Trinity. While I do not think UUism is very likely to be the major growth faith of the 21st century, its time could finally be right to grow rapidly here in the United States. UUs comprise no more than half a million people, making us a minor religion. However, the United States is becoming more educated and increasingly secular. For those secular Americans who yearn for a sense of community (which is increasingly hard to find in our wired and impersonal world) and yet need to embrace a faith, UUism may be an answer.
For many, you cannot be both rational and have faith. UUs overall are a very left brained lot, but most are still comfortable with the notion of faith, and do not necessarily see a conflict between the two. Reason and science do not answer all questions. Science will probably never fully reveal our universe, simply because there are realms too small or too large for us to plumb.
Emotion is certainly part of being a human. Faith may also be hardwired into us. Faith does not necessarily have to be about accepting whole cloth teachings passed down by a particular religion. As the Rev. Galen Guengerich pointed out at his excellent seminar I attended called “Theology for a Secular Age”, one does not have to move from belief to an understanding of reality based on that belief. Rather it can work the other way around. We can learn a lot about the world through education and experience and then decide what we want to believe. This is the essence of UUism. With no creed to anchor the faith, the faith we find is revealed increasingly to us individually over time as we learn and as science reveals. Faith becomes a journey of the soul, rather than an anchor for a soul.
Some months back, I railed about the failure of Objectivism as manifested in the economic policies of libertarians like Alan Greenspan. Objectivism is an allegedly rational philosophy that glorifies individuality and always puts “me first”. UUs understand that the truth of its opposite: all things are interconnected. It is one of our principles and purposes. As Rev. Guengerich pointed out, we are all utterly dependent on each other. You would not long survive if you could not drink water or eat the food provided by nature. Those who try to glorify utter independence and disconnect themselves from society grow up abnormal. Theodore Kaczynski, the Unibomber who will spend the rest of his life in a Supermax prison, shows how twisted and destructive a human can become trying to deny this reality. Interdependence is our reality and is manifested in our need to be social. To the extent that we try to assert otherwise, we become self-destructive.
Unfortunately, because we are all interdependent, when one of us becomes self-destructive, it affects all of us. This is borne out in among other things global warming. By looking out for our selfish needs first (such as the freedom to drive a car) we implicitly affect all other living things. To a UU, Einstein’s theories of general and specific relativity are not at all surprising. This is not just because they reveal the natural world, but also because it proves that we really are all naturally interconnected in this very real matrix called space-time. We are all glued together whether we choose to be or not. Many of us cannot see the glue that connects us, but it is always there. Perhaps string theory, to the extent that it can be revealed, with add more evidence of this interconnectedness.
In Rev. Guengerich’s view (and mine), faith is a leap of moral imagination, which looks at the world as it is, imagines how it can be and asserts that even though achieving it seems impossible, by the force of our actions we will evolve the world to the way it should be for our mutual interconnectedness to flourish. In doing so we will bring about a world where love truly is at the center of all things. In his view, the purpose of religion is to sustain us in this seemingly impossible quest. This is facilitated by the regular practice of coming together in worship services. During services, we use the established communal forms and forces of words, song, stories and symbols to move us toward that reality. By coming together in worship and working through the church on areas like social outreach, we find not only inspiration but the means to demonstrate the necessary commitment in what would otherwise seem a hopeless fight. In moving forward through an act of what seems like crazy faith, we actually manifest the change needed in the world. By doing things like feeding the poor, sheltering the homeless and fixing the environment, we slowly turn society into the way it should be rather than the messy and discordant way it is now.
President Obama seems to understand this. Faith and hope are necessary not only to realize a better future, but also to sustain the soul in this life. Perhaps President Obama is a Unitarian Universalist in spirit and does not know it yet. Since he is still shopping for a church, he should check us out. Maybe in doing so he will inspire many other Americans shopping for a faith to check out this religion ready for the 21st century. He can find ready fellowship and kindred souls by venturing up 16th Street N.W. and attending services at the All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church. There he will find plenty of people like him willing to be a positive force for change.
July 1st, 2009 at 07:46pm
Posted by
Mark |
Sociology |
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Is Objectivism dead? Objectivism, in case you are unfamiliar with it, is a philosophy created and articulated by the writer and philosopher Ayn Rand, who died in New York City in 1982 at the age of 77. I became acquainted with the philosophy in my early adult years when I read her novel, The Fountainhead. It told the story of a brilliant but eccentric architect named Howard Roark. Much like Number 6 in The Prisoner, Roark lived life on his own terms. He would not compromise with this encroaching thing called the real world. I have to admit that for a while I liked the novel and the character, although Roark was so preachy he would put most ministers to shame.
I purchased but never finished Rand’s most seminal work: Atlas Shrugged. Not that I did not try. I plodded through it for several hundred pages then gave up. To call it a novel was charitable. Instead, it was a philosophical screed, which detailed Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. If Howard Roark was excessively preachy, John Galt was an Objectivist supernova. I suspect most readers were like me and simply could not find the patience to endure its 1368 pages. However, a few key intellectuals of the 20th century did make it through the novel and absorbed it whole cloth. Sadly for America, two of them turned out to be prominent economists. One was Milton Friedman, who won a Nobel Prize for Economics. The other and far more important one was Alan Greenspan, who until a few years ago was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and very possibly the most influential monetary guru on the planet. Markets trembled with every nuanced word that came out of Greenspan’s mouth.
I can see the appeal of Ayn Rand and Objectivism with certain economists. Economists by nature are enamored by numbers are less enamored with squishy artifacts like religion. Rand, an atheist, gave voice to the secular capitalists of the world. They latched onto her key idea, immortalized in the words of the fictional Gordon Gekko and spoken by the actor Michael Douglas in the 1987 Oliver Stone movie Wall Street, “Greed is good”. The “greed is good” mantra, formally sanctioned by President Reagan in the 1980s has been the philosophical cornerstone of the last few decades. Its unchecked version called Objectivism has now been proven bankrupt, much like many of us Americans.
In short, Objectivism became something of a sanction to charge forward with the reckless accumulation of wealth by all means, fair and foul. It is a “Me First” philosophy that really could care less about anyone other than “Me”. According to Wikipedia:
Objectivism holds: that reality exists independent of consciousness; that individual persons are in contact with this reality through sensory perception; that human beings can gain objective knowledge from perception through the process of concept formation; that the proper moral purpose of one’s life is the pursuit of one’s own happiness or rational self-interest; that the only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual rights, embodied in pure laissez-faire capitalism; and that the role of art in human life is to transform man’s widest metaphysical ideas, by selective reproduction of reality, into a physical form—a work of art—that he can comprehend and to which he can respond.
As a practical matter then, Objectivism is individuality gone amok, i.e. without boundaries. It does not care about the consequences of extreme selfishness. Embracing pure capitalism is more important than minor things like whether as a consequence we also wreck the planet, or impoverish whole other classes of people.
As we watch our economic house of cards dissolve I am also seeing, in part, the pure philosophy of Objectivism, articulated in policies by its rabid followers, proven utterly and catastrophically incorrect. This is to the detriment of nearly everyone, including Objectivists. For at its core Objectivism is in denial about the way things actually are ordered. It is in denial that we really are all connected to each other, and that what affects you in fact really does affect me, everyone else, the planet and even the universe. In fact, consciousness does change reality and when it does, it affects everyone else who lives because we too are inextricably tied to reality. Consciousness and reality are not wholly separate domains, as Rand postulates, but intimately connected. If you mess too much with reality by trying to change the way nature ordered it, the consequences can be dramatic and not very pretty. See it in global warming. See it today, for example, in Las Vegas neighborhoods where you can drive through neighborhoods where most of the houses on the street are in foreclosure.
Wall Street barons, worshipping the almighty dollar, emboldened by extreme forms of laissez-faire capitalism promoted relentlessly through the monetary policies of Alan Greenspan and by the Bush Administration, promoted policies that took our money and effectively threw it down rat holes. With a pure (or close to it) laissez-faire capitalism, where new financial instruments could be created without government intervention, all the predictable things happened. We were caught in our own greed and were purposely mindless of the cost our unchecked greed and unregulated financial instruments would have on the economy. In particular, extreme capitalists like Alan Greenspan, through policies like making money artificially cheap to borrow, created a financial chasm. We were encouraged to overextend our financial lives, living in the moment and remain largely heedless to the long-term consequences of our actions.
Fortunately for me, it did not take me more than a few years of pondering before I realized that Objectivism was unworkable. Little did I know though that this philosophy would gain critical traction among an elite number of economists who could actually put it into practice on a large scale. It turns out that when this is implemented the philosophy, rather than enabling self-actualization, has the effect of moving much of our national wealth to better-run countries overseas. Before Ronald Reagan was elected, the United States was the largest creditor nation. Now, we are by far the world’s largest debtor nation.
Our Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was recently in China. She deliberately downplayed our concerns about their miserable human rights record, but did speak up about the need for China to keep buying our U.S. Treasury bills. They have cash that we need to execute our economic recovery plan.
Atlas Shrugged should go on the shelf with the other lunatic books like Das Kapital and Mein Kampf that have proven unworkable and destructive to humanity and the world. Communism does not work. Fascism by Aryans does not work. The extreme capitalism articulated in Atlas Shrugged does not work either. Objectivists should never again be allowed to control the levers of our financial system.
Ayn Rand died surrounded by admirers with a big dollar sign above her bed. I kid you not. This devotion to unbridled selfishness even on her deathbed helped inspire men like Alan Greenspan. Instead, her life ultimately proves how meaningless the obsessive pursuit of self-interest actually is. It destroys rather than helps us see the connections between each other. It is the vitality of these connections between us that builds the kind of wealth that matters: peace, tolerance, mutual understanding, healthy relationships, harmony and love. These are the true measures of a healthy world and a healthy person, not the number of dollars in your bank account.
March 8th, 2009 at 03:08pm
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2009, Sociology |
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