Paradigm Shift and Prophecy
Delivered by the Rev. Wendy Jerome-Stern for the Unitarian Universalist
Church of Minnetonka, MN
January 6, 2002
Readings:
from Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
1962 ed. p. 77
James Luther Adams' essay The Prophethood of All Believers in
GK Beach, ed. book of same title. pp. 102 and 103.
Sermon:
In the next minutes this morning, I want to give you a Unitarian Universalist
context for what we've endured over the last 4 months. I expect everyone
of you to disagree with me on some points because our ground rules are
Unitarian Universalist ground rules: we think for ourselves; we expect
and cherish diversity of thought and belief.
You know that wonderful bit of Jewish humor, the comment that if there
are 4 Jews at a table, there will be 5 opinions? I'd like you to go
for 6 opinions - or more. The world can only be a better place for it.
In fact, it may well turn out that our model of healthy pluralism
is the gift that we religious liberals can give to this warring world.
6 opinions? I'll ask you to do more than that, because you can. Everyone
of us can hold at least 2 concepts in our heads at the same time. These
2 concepts can be in opposition. That keeps us ready to integrate new
information as it comes and keeps us ready to embrace the future. We
can do it.
"United we stand"? Not if that means we're a line of Epsilons
with cookie cutter-same thinking. Achtung! Ausgespielt!
But, we are united in maintaining a democratic atmosphere, in honoring
the worth of every one of us, and in encouraging each one of us to express
our angle on the truth so that ultimately and collectively we have the
best chance of creating a better world for everyone.
Pundits have been telling us that the world is forever changed since
September 11, 2001. Maybe our understanding of heroism has changed:
from months of focusing on celebrities like Donald and Ivana Trump,
Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Chandra Levy and Gary Condit, we remember
again that ordinary people choose to be heroes: airline passengers,
police officers, firefighters, coworkers, passers-by on the street.
That heroism was always potentially there, is always potentially there.
How good to be reminded!
But what hasn't changed? Three things haven't changed, scoundrel behavior,
a pandering media, and life for most of the rest of the world.
Scoundrel behavior? In 4 months, we've seen it bubble up from the
nether world like grey and knobby Orcs from the pit - if you're into
Lord of the Rings imagery. Through September and October, so-called
"stimulus packages" slipped fast and unchallenged through
Congress. The Senate unanimously passed $60 billion funding for a missile
defense program that no one believes can hit a target. The tax bills
are tremendous giveaways to the top 5% of individuals and corporations,
while ordinary employees, the same sorts of people who were our heroes
in New York and are our neighbors here in Minnesota are left jobless.
Fundamental civil liberties have been taken away. The selected President
has, on his own, and without Congressional vote or even consultation,
thrown out the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a legally questionable,
not to mention highly dangerous maneuver, which should send shivers
down the backs of every US citizen. The so-called "US Patriot Act"
erasing some of our fundamental Constitutional rights materialized overnight
and glided through House and Senate in half an afternoon.
These measures will vastly enrich a few and raise them above legal
scrutiny, while others are left in the cold and have lost - and that
includes us - fundamental civil rights. Scoundrel behavior always waits
its chance, and, in the last 4 months, it has been given the whole,
undefended flank of a stunned and grieving nation for its profiteering.
The media has not changed either. Our news sources, television, radio,
and - under recent maneuvers by Colin Powell's son, chair of the FCC,
it looks increasingly as if- also newspapers can be owned by the same
companies. Those companies merge, own each other. We've arrived at the
situation in which most of our news sources are owned by only 10 conglomerates,
who are in this cut-throat business, frankly to profit. They pander;
they provide what will raise their ratings. Lowest common denominator
infotainment is what we get.
The US government blocks journalists from getting information about
the bombing in Afghanistan. Journalists get even less access than they
were given during the Gulf War - and contrast that with the coverage
we had in the Vietnam War. Then, our for-profit media self-censor so
that we are all left in a sort of Kafkaesque no-person's land of ignorance
and -if we have any ideas of our own, the news we get just doesn't fit
with what we think so that we suffer cognitive dissonance. If we have
any independent intelligence, the lack of news, the utter nonsense
with what we know makes us doubt our own minds, makes us wonder "Am
I the only one?" makes us feel isolated.
Example: we took civics in high school. We know the definition of
"war." A nation declares war on a nation. It doesn't dignify
a band of outlaws, even a band of outlaws it itself armed, with the
word "war." A nation doesn't declare "war" on Evil.
Who defines "Evil?" It doesn't declare "war" on
"Terrorism" Who defines terrorism?
Yet, every TV station has devised a red, white and blue color format
and some logo to dramatize the selected President's martial resolve.
This is "war" they blare at us over and over. . This does
not jibe with what I'm feeling....
For those who think, the experience is cognitive dissonance, isolation.
If this is "war," where is the war reporting? Where are the
war pictures? Where are the battle statistics? Television gives us computer-generated
color maps, "nice" interviews with a returning airman or two,
a shot of collapsed walls, little word of the civilian casualties -
who are fashionably called "collateral damage" these days.
Yet, we know there are civilians wounded and killed. In fact, the Star
Tribune carried a long article last week in which I found the figure,
3,800 Afghani civilians wounded or killed. That's a large figure. That's
getting up towards the figure for the number killed in New York. That's
large enough that we might almost stop now and call it even, if you
like that sort of Neanderthal tit-for-tat score-keeping.
But we aren't given numbers much, so we think we are the only ones
wondering. We're given plenty of interviews with "experts,"who
have included a remarkable preponderance of former secretaries of state
and military leaders,(see Extra update, Dec 2001. -pp 1,3), and some
talking heads from conservative-funded "think-tanks." We're
given polls of the American people that purport to tell us that an overwhelming
majority of us are gung-ho for this so-called "war."
The polls are presented in such a way that we feel intimidated in
thinking for ourselves. We're meant to feel we are in a tiny minority.
We aren't. Sure, in polls that gave respondents the choice between a
military response to the Sept 11 attacks or no response at all, an overwhelming
majority did prefer military response, but when respondents were given
the choice between military assault or pressing for extradition and
trial of those responsible, a Christian Science Monitor poll reported
September 27, showed 30% preferred extradition and legal procedures
over military response and fully 16% were undecided. That makes 46%
of us not so keen on this bombing.
Poll results are mislabeled. Here is the title of a lengthy Washington
Post story of September 29, 2001, "Public Unyielding in War Against
Terror; 9 in 10 Back Robust Military Response". These poll results
were buried in the last 2 paragraphs: 48% of women "said they wanted
a limited strike or no military action at all." (cited in Extra
Nov-Dec, 2001 p. 15).
We don't get good information and we are left feeling isolated or
crazy. We want balanced and reasoned conversation, even-handed statistics,
but these don't sell news. Media corporations know that if kept in an
anxious frenzy, the public will stay glued to their TV screens, like
deer in the headlights, all panic, no think. 10 corporations control
most of our news; they want to sell it. They may fire their own anchor
persons, reporters, and editors for questioning this "war".
They don't tell us that. They'll pander for the profit. The media has
not changed.
What else hasn't changed? Scoundrel behavior, a pandering media, and
- what else hasn't changed is life for most of the world. How many of
us thought, when we heard the numbers of deaths in New York, in Pennsylvania,
and at the Pentagon, why it's happened to us now! Because we know that
horrible and stupid and equally inexcusable human-made terrors have
been happening all over the world for years now, to people in what was
Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, in Somalia, in Eritrea, in Palestine and Israel,
and we could go on. And for us, all of those unthinkable, human-made
disasters were tragic too. They hurt, even though we were less likely
to have personally known people who knew people in those places. Those
tragedies still hurt us..
The big number of dead in New York was startling, but it was never
the number that haunted us so much as it was the nearly unbelievable
fact, shoved in our faces each time we heard of massacres or mass starvations,
that human beings could do this. It has hurt every time. It has hurt,
all of it, from the Holocaust, which humans let happen, right on through
the wiping out of ethnic groups in jungles, on deserts, on flooding
islands, everywhere over the globe today. Life for most of the world,
especially for the most of the world who live in underdeveloped nations
and in the vulnerable and "debt restructured" more developed
nations, like Argentina, or Pakistan, life has not changed for them.
On this globe, 1.5 billion of us have no access to clean drinking
water, 1.3 billion of us live in absolute poverty, and 1 in 3 of us
is malnourished or actually starving. That has not changed. Since September
11, life has not changed for most of the world.
Now, what has the Unitarian Universalist response been to the events
of Sept 11? I want to start with insightful comments I heard in the
sanctuary of the Minnetonka congregation, on Wednesday night Sept 12.
They are happily printed in my memory, perhaps, because I felt unusually
open that night, more likely because these comments were sharp and have
been proven true over the last 4 months. Yes, we have prophets here!
I will share just two comments. One of us said, I'm concerned that our
freedoms are going to be eroded in upcoming months.
Another of us said, we may discover that, finally, our only security
will lie in justice, and he meant global justice, for all the world's
peoples.
How prescient!
On December 2, at the First Universalist Church in Minneapolis over
250 Unitarian Universalists and a few others gathered to learn what
they could about terrorism. What struck me through out this afternoon
with UU's and there were Catholics from St Joan of Arc and some Protestants
of various sorts with us, as well, was that so many people were neither
defensive nor locked into their conclusions, but, instead, were concerned
with the larger global context of terrorism and the longer range welfare
of our planet.
In that broad and open sanctuary the Rev. Victoria Safford spoke,
then Mark Ritchie, member of First Universalist and president of the
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, and then Dr. Khalid Adeeb
of the Carleton College History Dept.
Victoria reminded us of our liberal heritage of pluralism, that we
have never needed "to think alike to love alike." Mark described
the grossly unfair imbalances in trade which now favor the style of
living we have in the United States at the expense of lost human rights
and poverty in many countries. Mark did not make blanket condemnation
of international trade structures today, but he outlined how they were
conceived at Bretton Woods merely as the best that the best economists
could devise at the time, as works in progress, which those same economists
( surviving) believe still need modification and tuning.
Dr. Khalid asked us to consider the definition of "terrorist".
It is a word used for emotive power, and the word's meaning depends
on who uses it. He named car bombers and exploders of bridges the US
government has supported for years, whom our media and government do
not call "terrorist." Rather than fussing over who is or is
not a "terrorist", we help ourselves more if we learn about
the economic and political situations associated with violent, suicidal
actions.
My job that day was to gather the audience questions. The questions
from those who attended the forum showed concern for global economics.
For example, I must have handled 20 written cards asking about US dependence
on oil. Most of the cards asked practical questions, What do we do now
to help Muslims in the US? How do we move the US ahead on the Palestinian-
Israeli deadlock? One that haunts me asked, Don't we need to have a
lot more resources and a higher standard of living in this country so
we can keep on giving the world the inventions and innovations that
will help everyone?
Some would say that question was missing humility and historic accuracy
about who invented what, and skipping right over the old truth that
it is not overabundance, but necessity which spurs invention, but I
liked this question because it was a soul-searched question. It was
honest. I've asked it myself, and it puts out there for its writer and
for me, some of common unquestioned assumptions about the US as the
deserving center of the world.
I thank this writer for stating some assumptions, which now, I can
examine and see are not based on fact, but on custom, on the status
quo, on what has gotten comfortable for us to not even think about.
Now we can begin the questioning that may break us through into a new
paradigm.
The problem is that we don't see our own assumptions. As in the refusal
to accept counter evidence Thomas Kuhn describes happening before a
paradigm shift in the scientific world, so in the social world. Often
the more evidence others bring us against seeing the world as we do,
the more anxious we become and thus we become more hostile and repressive
of new evidence. We fight the discrepancies that don't fit our way of
framing the world hardest just as our assumptions are crashing around
us as falsehood so that a new way of framing reality can prevail.
Historically, Unitarians and Universalists have both stood for new
paradigms and thrashed about on the losing side of failing paradigms.
Take the slavery question. Counter evidence mounted. England outlawed
the inhumane trafficking in human beings. Nevertheless, in this country
while Thomas Starr King, Theodore Parker, William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia
Maria Child and other brave individuals argued against slavery, a good
number of their fellow Unitarians and Universalists stood stoutly for
slavery. The old pro-slavery paradigm said, We can't not have slavery.
Our whole economy is dependent on it, South and North. Besides, there's
never been a civilization on Earth that hasn't had slavery! You abolitionists
are crazy!
As you recall, when William Ellery Channing came out against slavery,
half his Unitarian congregation abandoned him. Which half would you
wish to have been in? An open conversation would have exposed the assumptions
of the pro-slavery establishment; it, could have saved some people some
embarrassment later and a lot of people heartache later. The pro-slavery
side put up their hardest fight, the pro-slavery mobs were most vicious
just before their old paradigm gave way to the new. Today, we can't
imagine legally-supported slavery at all.
How does a paradigm shift happen? Evidence that doesn't feel right
accumulates. ("I hear the English think slavery is barbaric")
This becomes increasingly unsettling for everyone. ("Those slaves
don't look happy, Mabel.") Some parties take it upon themselves
to conceal this non-fitting evidence from others. ("We'll just
shut down that pesky radical newspaper".) Some provide diversions.
("Let's invade Mexico!") They silence questioners, anything
not to let that good old "truth that makes us free" out.
As tensions increase, the disempowered choose desperate measures.
(Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and John Brown organize spectacular revolts).The
empowered dig in their finger nails, play nastier, and hold on for dear
life, (All captured revolt participants receive harsh sentences). but,
ultimately, the empowered see the light and join the crowd in the new
paradigm.
Are paradigm shifts good? They are neither good nor bad; they just
are. We evolve socially through taking in and comprehending more information.
I believe September 11 was an inexcusable and tragic event, but only
one event in the rapidly accumulating heap of evidence that human beings
are not treated fairly on this planet, when it is within our power to
treat them more fairly. Certainly our issues are more complex than that
and they include the rise of fundamentalisms in three major Western
religions, cultural differences between European-oriented and other
peoples, militarism and its profitability, natural resource scarcity
- including fossil fuel limitations. These large underlying problems
are certainly part of the world in turmoil we are feeling. Their causes
and effects beg to be teased out. As do the effects on oppressed peoples
of seeing healthy models, like the success of democracies as a most
secure and lasting form of government, the success of open markets,
of industrialization, of modern medicine. These healthy models are now
demonstrated realities and goals to which everyone in the world aspires.
All these factors beg study. Answers are not simple. Yet, for me one
big piece of evidence looms as a factor behind September 11's events,
this statistic: 86% of the world's resources are being consumed by 20%
of us. That makes me uneasy.
My grandparents and yours could have lived with that. Our grandparents
were good-hearted people, by and large, but they didn't know. They didn't
have television photos of street children in the Philippines to haunt
them as we have these photos today. Our grandparents also had the same
life expectancies as Philippine grandparents then, but that is no longer
true today.
Now, what does all this mean for us as Unitarian Universalists? Ever
since that Edict of Toleration, we have stood for tolerating, even encouraging,
but always expecting variety of belief and thought. We have stood for
the use of reason in religion, and, of course, in human affairs. Thus,
Transylvania welcomed religions persecuted in the empires of Europe
and, protected by a ring of mountains, even today, Transylvania embraces
a mix of faith traditions, an achievement that happened no where else
in Europe peaceably and consistently over centuries.
Crushed in Poland, Unitarian teachings of freedom, reason, and tolerance
found a foothold in the independent cities of the Netherlands and then
in England, where English Unitarianism flowed among the many new religions
"dissenting" from the state church. Dissenters were imprisoned,
beaten by thugs, hung, burned, and when that didn't work, they were
intimidated, misrepresented and, co-opted by the state. The most dissenting
among the Dissenters, did not allow themselves to be intimidated. They
did not shut their mouths because they were told they were in the minority.
Minority or not, they put principle and belief first.. Joseph Priestly's
laboratory was wrecked and burned by a mob because he dared to say what
England's government did not want said, that maybe the Revolution in
France was not such a bad idea. For saying what he felt, he was driven
to North America. And today, where is public opinion? Does anyone think
France didn't need a big change?
We stand in the tradition of the Dissenters. We Unitarian Universalists
are the most dissenting of the Dissenters. We've inherited and chosen
this uncomfortable tradition that challenges us to encourage dissent,
to cherish it as the healthy life blood of democracy.
"United" we don't choose to stand because "united"
like that, we'd dissolve into smarmy meaninglessness and blow away as
so much confetti. I choose to be more uncomfortable, to surround myself
with others who will differ from me in their views - because we need
each other to differ. I choose to raise my dissenting voice and to encourage
others in raising their dissenting voices so that humankind has a chance
not to be blind sided by the future.
So are we still, the "prophethood of all believers" as Adams
calls us? Will we lose our nerve, conform, be bullied because we are
not the majority? Or will we continue to speak in our Dissenting tradition?
Prophethood sounds like a lofty name, but diversity of ideas isn't
lofty, it is practical. No human progress has come without dissent,
without someone's daring to say, "I can think differently. We can
think differently We can see this another way!"
Of course, seeing the world a different way, framing the issues another
way may mean something as big as a paradigm shift. Perhaps what is around
the corner for this planet is something as big as a paradigm shift,
but, as Thomas Kuhn warns, "the decision to reject one paradigm
is always simultaneously the decision to accept another...." People
won't let go of the old way of seeing, until someone's painted for them,
in some detail, the new way of seeing. So, if it's to be a paradigm
shift, then our job would be to talk and write about that new way of
seeing, to elaborate a possible new world of which we are not the all-deserving
center, a new world based on valuing creativity and life rather than
on hoarding and slow, polluted death.
As James Luther Adams writes, " The prophetic liberal church
is the church in which all members share the common responsibility to
attempt to foresee the consequences of human behavior...with the intention
of making history in place of merely being pushed around by it. Only
through the prophetism of all believers can we together foresee doom
and mend our common ways."
If the name for speaking our values is prophecy, if this is what it
is to be a prophet, I will accept it. I am not after the historic status
of Amos or Hosea any more than I want to be stoned or jailed like Jeremiah.
I don't want to have to be as brave as Priestly or Parker, really, unless
I have to be. Like anyone else I am afraid, but I will have to speak
because I have simply been "spoiled" by the company of persons
who believe in speaking truth as they see it and who respect their own
minds and hearts so that they speak and cherish the speech of others
as the only ultimate hope for humankind's finding a way to the future.
They did it for love, and I will do it for love, and as that choice
to prophesy comes before you, as you choose it, may you choose it for
love.
