TOWARD A HUMANIST
VOCABULARY OF REVERENCE
by David Bumbaugh
Boulder International Humanist Institute
Fourth Annual Symposium
Boulder, Colorado
February 22, 2003
It was seventy years ago that a group of scholars issued the “Humanist
Manifesto”, a document outlining a new religious vision, more
adequate to the challenges and the opportunities of the twentieth
century. The Manifesto was not the product of some whimsical enthusiasm.
Rather, it was the culmination of a complex process which had its
roots in the thought of Theodore Parker and other Transcendentalist
thinkers of New England, as the implications of that radical religious
vision had been worked out in the Western Unitarian Conference,
and within the Ethical Culture movement, by some elements of Reformed
Judaism, and among a variety of other religious liberals. To these
philosophical, ethical, religious concerns were wedded the insights
and imperatives of those who advocated the scientific method as
the appropriate means for understanding the world and humanity’s
place in that world.
It is ironic that increasingly over the decades, humanism has been
identified as a secular ideology. Indeed “secular humanists”
is the common term by which the spiritual descendents of the original
signers of that document are currently known. As I read the original
Manifesto, however, it is clear that the signers did not define
themselves as “secular” or as the enemies of religion.
The Manifesto affirms the ongoing importance of religion for human
life. It defines religion as “the quest for abiding values”
and it insists that while fashions in theology may shift the shape
and form of religion, the religious quest for abiding values is
a constant of human experience.
The Manifesto did not seek to abolish religion, but rather to set
out some imperatives by which to structure and revitalize religion
so that it might more adequately serve the human community in the
modern. The signers of the Humanist Manifesto were concerned to
challenge the various dualisms which fractured the human community--the
dualisms defined by body and mind, by humanity and nature, by sacred
and secular, by knowledge and faith, by reason and revelation. They
envisioned a radical unity out of which might emerge a truly moral
and ethical social structure.
The Manifesto was issued in a highly problematic context and the
years have not been kind to the dream that it sought to advance.
The catastrophe of the First World War was still reverberating around
the globe. A continuing worldwide depression had served to lay bare
the brutal injustices of the economic and political systems under
which humanity labored. And, of course, the premonitions of an even
greater catastrophe on the horizon haunted the troubled dreams of
many.
Confronting this reality, much of mainstream religion declined
the invitation to dialogue that the Manifesto presented, and retreated,
instead, into neo-orthodoxy. From that position, theologians were
able to distinguish between “moral man and immoral society,”
to decry the social iniquity of the times, but to offer little hope
for any effective corporate response to growing evil. The optimism
and confidence in human capacity that under-girded the Humanist
Manifesto, tempered though they were by a realistic estimate of
the human condition, were radically out of fashion. The consequence
was that religion and humanism quickly ceased to encounter each
other outside the vital, but admittedly local dialogue within Unitarian
and Universalist and a few other self-consciously liberal groups.
Overtime, Humanists began to accept as home the ghetto to which
they had been consigned. Humanists accepted the charge that they
were secularists, materialists, rationalists and the implacable
foes of the spiritual and emotional qualities that romanticized
religion emphasized. Living under this imposed definition, Humanism
gradually lost the vocabulary of reverence that I believe had been
the native tongue of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto. Over
time, Humanism came to be understood by many as an artifact of a
by-gone, dated, slightly quaint era and its advocates were seen
as aging dinosaurs who did not yet realize that their era had ended,
and that they had been replaced an upstart, irrepressible spirituality.
I am keenly aware of this development within my own religious movement.
Every survey taken indicates that the majority of Unitarian Universalists
still think of themselves as Humanists in their theological/philosophical
attitudes. However, there is a growing sense that Humanism, even
within this most liberal of religious movements, is on the defensive,
that it is identified with an older generation, that younger, smarter,
more with-it people are now engaging a new language, the language
of spirituality, and to a large degree, the common theistic dialect
of the conventionally religious. There is a growing sense that the
future belongs to those who can be comfortable with god-talk and
who embrace or at least tolerate the cultural attitudes that language
reflects. As a consequence, fundamental religious assumptions from
the traditions of the peoples of the Book are gaining renewed currency
and often an uncritical acceptance among us.
Watching this development, I have found myself wondering why Humanists,
who once offered a serious challenge to traditional religion now,
find that increasingly we are engaged in a monologue. I would submit
to you that to some degree at least we are talking to ourselves
because we have allowed ourselves to be defined by the opposition.
We have dismissed mainstream religion as an atavistic aberration.
We have given up the hope of a constructive dialogue. We have manned
the ramparts of reason and are prepared to defend the citadel of
the mind against this new superstition until the very end. But in
the process of defending, we have lost the vocabulary of reverence,
the ability of speak of that which is sacred, holy, of ultimate
importance to us, the language which would allow us to enter into
critical dialogue with the rest of the religious community.
The sad thing is that Humanism, with its emphasis on the ongoing
search for truth and understanding, with its insistence that revelation
is not sealed, with its conviction that all truth is one, with its
commitment to “truth, known or to be known,” has an
inherited vocabulary of reverence implicit in its underlying assumptions--a
vocabulary of reverence which is drawn from and depends upon the
ongoing scientific enterprise, the enlarging exploration of the
universe and humanity’s place in the universe.
The key to the recovery of a humanist vocabulary of reverence is
to be found, I believe, in the second affirmation of the original
manifesto. After affirming that the universe is “self existing
and not created,” the manifesto went on to insist (in the
language of the time), “Humanism believes that man is a part
of nature and he has emerged as the result of a continuous process.”
If we take that assertion seriously, then it becomes clear that
our growing understanding of the nature of the universe is, in some
sense, also a deep anthropology--a source of continuing revelation
concerning our own nature.
I would suggest to you that the history of science in the twentieth
century was the history of an enlarging understanding of the universe,
its evolution, its history, and its structure. We have engaged the
universe at the very limits of our capacity. We have explored the
world of the microcosm and the world of the macrocosm. We have found
at both extremes incredible complexity.
In high energy, subatomic physics we have encountered a reality
that can only be fully explicated in the language of mathematics
and that, when translated into our common discourse, confounds all
our settled conventions. We have discovered a world in which particles
emerge from and return to the undifferentiated void, a world in
which particles oscillate in time, between past and future, a world
in which particles appear to be in constant communication with each
other across vast distances and at speeds greater than the speed
of light, a world which, incredibly, is changed and altered by the
very process of observing it, a world in which the distinctions
between subject and object disappear. We are not sure what all of
this means, but it becomes clear that at this fundamental level
of reality, there is no distinction to be made between you and me
and the tree and the rock. Ultimately, the more we understand of
our universe at this level, the more we are driven to reverence
before the mystery of the invisible, ineffable reality in which
our quotidian existence is rooted.
At the other extreme, the macrocosmic world, we discover a universe
that is larger than we can encompass in our imaginations. Throughout
the past century, our estimates of the age and the expanse of the
Universe have proven over and over again to be far too modest. As
our ability to measure and observe has improved, we have found a
universe that is many billions of years old, most recently, we are
told, 13.7 billion years old, give or take a few months. As our
tools have enabled us to look further and further back into the
history of that universe, we have been able to write the story of
its emergence to within a few seconds of the beginning. We cannot
say much about those first few seconds, and we cannot say anything
at all that is more than speculation about the time before time.
But this much seems clear: The universe, beginning from an unimaginably
hot and dense singularity, evolved through a series of stages, each
producing the conditions necessary for the succeeding stage. Our
sun, our solar system, our planet, our own beings are all late stages
of this evolving universe. And curiously enough, much of our insight
into the early history of the universe emerges from and resonates
with our insights into the interaction of subatomic particles--suggesting
a strongly recursive universe in which patterns repeat and recur
over many different scales. The more we understand about the macrocosm,
the more reason we have to stand in awe and reverence at the process
which shaped and structured its evolution, our evolution.
Nor has this been a matter of intellectual satisfaction only. The
insights of cosmology and theoretical astronomy have served to tie
us ever more tightly into the emerging story of the universe itself.
Just as the processes of the subatomic world underlie and ground
our daily existence, so the history of the emerging universe continues
to work itself out in our ongoing lives. We now understand that
the heavy elements--iron, carbon, oxygen, and all the others--were
not present in the earliest stages of the evolving universe. In
fact, all of those heavy elements were created in the incredible
heat and unimaginable pressures at the heart of massive stars. As
those stars died in gigantic super-nova explosions, all of these
elements so essential to the creation of our planet and to our own
existence were scattered as dust across vast reaches of space. Eventually
that dust coalesced under the force of gravity, and planets were
born. And on some of those planets, life emerged and evolved into
more and more complex forms. The history of the universe is our
history; we are all of us recycled stardust. In the words of Robert
Terry Weston, “out of the stars have we come.” Our very
existence is rooted in the fundamental processes of the universe
itself. How can we not stand in awe before the fact of our emergence
as a consequence of those same vast processes that created galaxies
and suns and stars and planets?
The work that has been done in biology during the past century
has magnified that sense of reverence and awe. Building on Darwin’s
work in the middle of the nineteenth century, biologists have presented
us with a powerful understanding of who we are and how we are rooted
in fundamental processes. Thus we know that the evolutionary processes
which produced the universe, the galaxies, the stars, and planets
continued on this earth changing its landmasses, its oceans, its
atmosphere, its climate. Early--and recent investigations place
the date closer and closer to the formation of the planet itself--in
tidal pools, or in clay beds, or in volcanic vents, life emerged.
And from that first life, all living things on this planet emerged.
All that lives or ever has lived derives from a single source.
That itself would be cause for awe and reverence, but recently
the earth sciences hint that the tale may be even more complicated.
Scientists like James Lovelock suggest that life did not simply
emerge on earth, but that life is a defining artifact of the earth,
that the earth became a self-regulating, living entity—Gaia--that
we do not live on earth, but must be seen as elements in earth’s
living system. Biologists like Lynn Margulis have suggested that
the evolutionary concept of the descent of humanity from earlier
life forms obscures the incredible complexity and interwoven nature
of life. Evolution, in her view is the result of the complex interaction
and integration of organisms with their total environment. She argues
that we did not descend from earlier forms, but rather that our
existence is the result of the cooperative, symbiotic merging of
earlier life forms to produce greater and greater complexity. Margulis
would have us understand that those earlier life forms, in many
if not all cases, continue to exist, within us as well as apart
from us.
Margulis reminds us that within every cell in our bodies there
is a life form called mitochondria. These small entities are absolutely
essential to our existence. Mitochondria are the processors that
transform chemicals into usable energy for our bodies. Without mitochondria
our lives would not be possible. And yet, mitochondria exist quite
independently within our cells. They have their own DNA; they have
their own reproductive processes; they have their own life cycles.
They have an existence significantly separate from the host cell.
Margulis speculates that early in the evolution of life, some primordial
bacterium ingested mitochondria. Rather than being digested, however,
the mitochondria set up housekeeping within the cell and in a remarkable
symbiotic relationship began supplying energy to the host, allowing
for new forms and possibilities to emerge. In these ways, earlier
life forms were not overcome, defeated, out grown, cast off as new
forms emerged. Rather, the evidence suggests that in some cases
at least, the earlier forms are incorporated in and an integral
part of the life of more complex forms. Margulis reminds us that
the bacteria from which life emerged were here before we were, continue
to be here with us now, and undoubtedly will be here after we have
been replaced by some new emergent life.
More recently, we have been reminded of our rootedness in the natural
processes of life by reports of the results of the human genome
project. The mapping of the human genome has demonstrated anew how
clearly we are part of the Gaian system of life. Not only do we
share more than ninety percent of our genes with other primates,
our genome structure is not markedly different from fruit flies
or mustard plants. Our beings are intimately related to every living
thing that creeps, or crawls or flies, to every living thing that
is rooted in the earth and reaches for the sun, to every living
thing that inhabits the dark depths of the oceans. We are but one
form life has taken, one expression of Gaia’s living process.
It is difficult not to speculate that if the universe is truly as
recursive as it seems, perhaps we are to Gaia as the mitochondria
are to us.
Nor is this continuity with the past true only of our relations
with other living systems. In a curious way, we carry with us in
our bodies the very environment in which we evolved. The heat of
our bodies is the heat of stars, tempered to the uses of life. The
salt in our blood and in our tears is the salt of ancient oceans,
encapsulated and carried with us, generation upon generation, into
strange and distant places and circumstances. The past is not dead.
It lives in us even now. The evolutionary universe, the ancient
environment, the emergence of complex life—all are recapitulated
in every moment of our existence.
When the Humanist Manifesto declared that we are part of nature
and we have emerged as the result of a continuous process, it not
only denied the creation stories of the western religious traditions,
it gave us an immensely richer, longer, more complex history, one
rooted in a system which invites not blind faith but challenge and
correction and amendment, one which embraces “truth, known
or to be known.” It also gave us a language of reverence because
it provides a story rooted not in the history of a single tribe
or a particular people, but a history rooted in the sum of our knowledge
of the universe itself. It gave us a doctrine of incarnation which
suggests not that the holy became human in one place at one time
to convey a special message to a single chosen people, but that
the universe itself is continually incarnating itself in microbes
and maples, in humming birds and human beings, constantly inviting
us to tease out the revelation contained in stars and atoms and
every living thing. A language of reverence for Humanists begins
with our understanding of this story as a religious story--a vision
of reality that contains within it the sources of a moral, ethical,
transcendent self-understanding.
It is a religious story in that it calls us out of our little local
universes and invites us to see ourselves in terms of the largest
self we can imagine—a self which was present, in some sense,
in the singularity which produced the emergent universe, a self
which was present, in some sense, at the birth of the stars, a self
which, in some sense, is related through time to every living thing
on this planet, a self which contains within itself the seeds of
a future we cannot imagine in our wildest flights of fancy.
It is a religious story in that it whispers of a larger meaning
to our existence—a suggestion that in us the universe is grasping
for self-knowledge, for self-understanding, for insight. How we
participate in this process, or what the ultimate consequence of
this process may be, we cannot know. But if, as the Humanist Manifesto
suggests, we are not separate from nature and we are a result of
nature’s inherent processes, then our struggles with meaning
and purpose, our endless search for insight and understanding can
not be limited in their significance or consequence to the human
enterprise alone, but must be part of the emergence of the universe
itself.
It is a religious story in that it implies a broader ethic for
our lives. To understand the human race as related in the most intimate
of ways to all living things on this planet; to understand the earth
not as the platform on which life exists, but as itself a living
being, regulating its complex systems in such a way as to sustain
ongoing life; to understand our own physical beings as a congeries
of ancient living forms, quietly and unobtrusively contributing
to our ongoing existence while pursuing their own mysterious imperatives;
to understand ourselves as the incarnation of those same forces
and substances and circumstances which produced galaxies and stars
and planets is to enlarge our sense of responsibility and our definition
of moral living. In light of this enlarged revelation, the ethic
of the main-chance, the ethic of short-term benefit, the ethic of
immediate gratification, the ethic of tribal values and ethnic identities
so prevalent in our world are challenged in the most profound way
and found in every case to be inadequate.
We are driven to recognize the paradox that our individual well
being is rooted in the understanding that at heart we are one with
all things and our sense of separateness is ultimately an illusion,
while at the same time affirming that our individual separateness
is a consequence of the drive of the universe for differentiation
and complexity. We are driven by our story to seek an ethic that
respects the individual and the ground out of which the individual
emerges. This implies a deep concern for ecojustice that reaches
across class, racial, ethnic, even species distinctions and embraces
a vision that responds to the largest sense of self we are capable
of entertaining.
Brian Swimme has suggested that the religious story for our time
is the “Universe Story.” I would add that the human
story and the universe story are the same tale. If the Manifesto
was right when it insisted that we are part of nature, not separate
from it, that we represent a continuing natural process, then it
becomes clear that the challenges, the hopes, the dreams, the aspirations
which find expression in our lives are not separate from the context
in which we have evolved, in which we are rooted. We are not encapsulated,
separated, isolated beings. Whatever we are, the universe is. The
reality inside of us and the reality outside of us are ultimately
one reality. In us the universe dreams its dreams. In us the universe
struggles for a moral vision. In us the universe hopes for new possibilities.
In us the universe strives for self-understanding. In us the universe
seeks the meaning of existence. I do not mean to suggest that the
universe is limited to our expression of it, or that this is the
only place where this kind of complexity has arisen. Nor would I
suggest that humanity is the only avenue on this planet by which
the universe gropes toward self-awareness. I simply argue that our
existence, our struggles and our failures are lent moral significance
by the fact that they occur within a larger context--within the
largest context our reason and our imagination can conceive--within
a context grounded in a unified view of existence.
This is a religious story; it invites us to awe; it demands a vocabulary
of reverence. It is a story that is uniquely appropriate to the
Humanist tradition. It emerges from the scientific enterprise. It
seeks to overcome the ancient dualisms that, over the ages, have
diminished the human spirit. It offers a clear alternative to the
limited faiths and narrow fundamentalisms that compete for the allegiance
of the human community—one that does not have to deny the
categories and assumptions upon which our daily lives are built,
but can embrace the emergent insights and understandings which enlarge
our vision of ourselves and the context in which our lives are lived.
The Humanist Manifesto was an invitation to revision the religious
enterprise and to challenge the prevailing attitudes and assumptions
of the religious community. We are called, at this moment in time,
to renew that undertaking—to find or build a vocabulary of
reverence adequate to the vision which is emerging around us—a
vision which is the result of the drive by the universe to know
itself and understand itself—a vocabulary adequate to describe
a universe which regularly confounds our expectations, even as it
rewards our attempts to know, by revealing levels of meaning which
make contemporary faddish talk of angels and gods and spirits seem
trivial and irrelevant. We are children of, expressions of a universe
that is not only “stranger than we know, but stranger than
we can know.” It is incumbent upon us to challenge the parochial
and limited claims of traditional religions with the enlarging and
enriching and reverent story that is our story and their story:
the Universe Story.
Rev. David E. Bumbaugh
Associate Professor of Ministry
Meadville/Lombard Theological School
Chicago, Illinois
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