An Imperfect Introduction to Unitarian Universalism

There's a long story (that you don't really need to know) about how this came to be, but suffice it to say that a draft of a book I once titled Unitarian Universalism 101 (I'm not sure what got into me) has been sitting on my hard drive since 2008, waiting for me to rewrite it the way it really ought to be.

The problem is that my new ideas for rewrites run faster than my actual writing, so I get continually further and further away from finishing my ideal intro-to-UU book. I have lots of "improved" chapters and other fragments in other folders on my hard drive, but 2008 is the last complete draft that has some kind of internal consistency.

In the meantime, friends have found out about the existence of this draft, and one of them talked me into letting my congregation's Coming of Age classes use it for the last two years. They seem to like it.

And that has made me realize how silly I'm being with my dreams of perfection. This morning I fixed some simple things (like making the page numbers in the Table of Contents match reality) and uploaded a PDF to the web.

It's here. Also here. Look at it. Use it in classes if you want. Show it to that cousin who thinks you've joined a cult. Denounce it on your blog if that seems appropriate. If you find mistakes, or just think you've got a better way to explain something, post a comment here. Who knows? If I ever finish another complete draft, maybe I'll do it your way.

The Web of Privilege

a talk given at the annual men's dinner at First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor, Michigan on March 30, 2013

As Pat mentioned in my introduction, I'm a writer, which means that I work with words. Words, to me, are like nails and two-by-fours are to a carpenter. They're my tools, what I build things with.

Now, I don't know whether carpenters dream about creating new tools, but I know that writers love to coin words. It's a power fantasy, really, and it goes like this: I'm going to notice something that people should think about more and talk about more, but they don't because it doesn't have a name. So I'm going to come up with a nice catchy word or phrase for it. I'll start using that term and other people will hear it and they'll say, "Wow, I've never had a name for that before." And they'll start using it and thinking about it and telling other people about it. And in some small way the world will be different.

When I was a kid, somebody invented a new use for the word environmentalist. Before that, an environmentalist had been like a behavioralist, somebody who thought that your social environment determined what kind of person you became. But somewhere around 1970, environmentalist started to mean somebody who cares about the natural systems that support life, and wants to keep Nature from being bulldozed by Civilization.

Now, this wasn't a new idea. From civilization's earliest days there must have been people who felt that way. But since there wasn't a good name for them, a lot of those people probably just thought they were quirky.

Suddenly, though, they became environmentalists, part of a worldwide movement of environmentalists. And people who had never thought about it much before began asking themselves "Should I be an environmentalist?"

Coining a new word or usage like that is a tremendous fantasy if you're a writer, right up there with seeing your name on the best seller list or having Oprah interview you about your new book: You're going to coin a new term, and it's going to catch on and change the way people think.

Every now and then I indulge that fantasy and invent some new word or phrase. It's a little like buying a lottery ticket, because usually nothing comes of it. I'll invent a term and blog about it, and maybe a few hundred people will see it -- a few thousand if I'm really lucky. A handful will comment about how apt or useful it is. But after a week or two that little ripple has dissipated and nothing has changed.

A couple years ago I came up with something I really thought deserved to catch on, and I push it again every April when people are doing their taxes. The phrase is work penalty*. Your work penalty is the extra income tax you pay because you get your money by working rather than by collecting dividends or capital gains.

Now, lots of people know at some level that the tax code works that way. Suppose, say, that you're a single guy with $40,000 of taxable income. If that money comes from dividends and capital gains, you're going to owe Uncle Sam $6,000. But if that $40,000 comes from having a job and making wages, you're going to pay the same $6,000, plus $36 more.** 

So that $36 is your work penalty, an extra little fine that the government imposes because you have a job. (And I'm not even talking about Social Security and Medicare taxes here, which would make the difference even bigger. Even if you restrict yourself to talking about income tax, there's a work penalty.) 

Maybe $36 doesn't sound like much, but it gets bigger the more you make. Suppose our two single guys start doing better and make $100,000. Now the man of leisure pays $15,000, while the man with a job pays that same $15,000, plus a work penalty of six and a half thousand more.

The tax people call this a "preferred rate" for dividend and capital gain income. But I just don't think that captures the full outrageousness of the situation. If you work, you pay more tax than somebody who makes the same amount of money without working. There's a work penalty.

I had real hopes that would catch on, but so far it hasn't. I'm going to blog about it again on April 15, but it's a long shot, like the lottery.

Last summer, though, I wrote a piece called "The Distress of the Privileged" and got closer than I've ever gotten before. The term I coined there was privileged distress. Privileged distress is that sense of persecution you feel when you start to lose an unfair advantage that you have always taken for granted. You're still getting an unfair advantage, but it's just not as big as it used to be, so you feel persecuted.

An example helps bring the idea home. Think about that girl in high school who just looked perfect. You know the one I'm talking about. She had the face and the hair and the skin and the figure, and it all came together flawlessly. So imagine one morning she goes to the mirror and sees a bright red pimple right in the middle of her cheek.

What goes through her mind? "That is so unfair. Why does God hate me?"

Now, objectively, her hardship is that for the next week or two she's only going to look perfect from certain angles, while the rest of us don't look perfect from any angle. But that's not how it feels. It feels like, "What does God hate me?"

That's privileged distress. It's a real feeling. She's not making it up. Being slightly less beautiful for a few days really does feel like a persecution.

I invented that term for a reason. I was blogging about the Chick-fil-A boycott. I don't know if you remember, but it started when Dan Cathy, the second-generation CEO of Chick-fil-A, went on Christian talk radio and said some annoying things about people who support same-sex marriage -- that we're "prideful" and "arrogant" and we're "inviting God's judgment" on America.

That caused people to look at him a little closer, and it turns out that Dan Cathy is a very generous guy. Over the years he has given millions of dollars to what he would call "pro-family groups" but that other people might call "anti-gay hate groups".

So there was a backlash and a boycott and a lot of bad publicity for Chick-fil-A. The conservative Christians who identify with Dan Cathy were shocked. Mike Huckabee called the criticism of Cathy -- not the criticism he dished out, but the criticism he received -- "vicious hate speech and intolerant bigotry".

To grasp why they were shocked, you need to understand that some people have a bigger Bill of Rights than the rest of us. We're talking about fast food, so let's call it "super-sized". My freedom of speech, for example, means that the government can't put me in jail just because I say something controversial. If the doors burst open and federal agents haul me away because I express the wrong opinions, that would violate my freedom of speech.

Similarly, freedom of religion, for most of us, means that the government can't treat us badly because it doesn't like our faith. So, it's fine (constitutionally, at least) to put a work penalty in the tax code, but if there were a UU penalty -- some higher tax rate that only applied to us -- that would violate our freedom of religion.

But the super-sized rights go way beyond that. If you have super-sized freedom of speech and super-sized freedom of religion, then at any time in any place you should be able to blurt out any opinion you have. And no matter how bigoted or stupid or crazy it is, everybody else should just let it pass. There should be no blow-back, no consequences. 

As I say, most of us don't have that. When you write a letter to editor, say, you have to think about what will happen if it gets published. How will your neighbors react, or your co-workers, or your boss, or your customers? If you're writing as an atheist or Muslim or some other unpopular faith, it would never occur to you that everybody would let it slide. Or if you admit that you're gay or polyamorous or transgendered -- of course you think about the possible consequences. 

But Dan Cathy isn't like everybody else. He's a CEO who's the son of a CEO. He's not just Christian and straight, he's also white and male and rich. He's grown up with that super-sized Bill of Rights, and then suddenly one day he's treated just a little bit like the rest of us; people listen to what he says and they don't let it pass, some of them take offense, and some of them decide that they don't want to deal with this guy and they don't want their lunch money going off to support some hate group. And to Dan Cathy, that feels like persecution. It also felt like persecution to Sarah Palin, who complained that the Chick-fil-A boycott had "a chilling effect on our First Amendment rights."

And while that isn't true in any literal sense, it feels true if you think you're supposed to be covered by the super-sized First Amendment, the one that just applies to people who are powerful or express popular views. If you think you're supposed to have that privilege, and then you discover you don't, it can be very distressing.

Once you understand privileged distress, you see it all over the place. Native English-speakers are offended by bilingual signs, because they shouldn't have to be reminded that there are other languages in the world. Rush Limbaugh believes that when people call him a racist or a sexist, that's a bigger injustice than actual racism or sexism. Employers think their religious freedom is threatened when they can't control how their female employees get contraception. Whenever we talk about raising rich people's tax rates back to where they were 15 years ago, they ask why we want to "punish" people for being successful.

But my personal favorite is the War on Christmas. When Christians aren't allowed to take over the public square for the entire month of December, they feel persecuted. (Because, of course, the town green is totally decked out on Buddha's birthday or Mohammed's birthday. And in the malls in February you can't even hear yourself think for all the Darwin carols.) OK, that's silly. But Christians are used to having an unfair advantage over everybody else, so when that advantage slips just a little bit, it really does feel like oppression, like suddenly everybody hates them.

Somewhat to my surprise, privileged distress has started to take off. "The Distress of the Privileged" has been the most popular thing on my blog almost every week since I posted it. Other bloggers have linked to it, people have shared it on Facebook, and by now that post has gotten nearly a quarter of a million hits, almost four times as many as anything else I've ever done.

One of the reasons I think the term took off was that I didn't just toss it out there for people to use. I went on to consider the tricky question of what to do with privileged people in distress. What do you do with the Dan Cathys or the Rush Limbaughs or that girl from high school?

What you want to do, what would really feel satisfying, is to wap them upside the head and say, "Get over yourself. Some people in the world have real problems, and you're not one them."

But the more I thought about that, the more it seemed like a bad idea. Privileged distress is a real emotion. As strange as it may look from the outside, the distressed privileged really do feel persecuted. And if you're feeling genuinely persecuted, and then someone waps you upside the head, you don't snap out of it, you feel more persecuted.

And the really dangerous thing about the privileged feeling persecuted is that they are privileged. Even if their status is starting to slip, they still have rights and powers and resources that the rest of us don't have. If they really get galvinized around their sense of persecution, they've got what it takes to launch a counter-revolution and get their unfair advantages back.

That's kind of what the Tea Party is. You have white people and straight people and native-born English-speakers and fundamentalist Christians, and they all feel their privileges starting to slip away. Those privileges are far from gone; there's still a considerable advantage to being a white, straight, native-born, English-speaking Christian. But it's not what it used to be, so it feels like persecution. So they get together in rallies and money magically appears from billionaires and corporations and they say, "We need to take our country back."

I don't think telling them to get over themselves is going to work.

As soon as I realized the complexity of the problem, I knew I couldn't just focus on Dan Cathy. Because real life is messy. Real people and real situations are never quite as simple and clear-cut as you need them to be to make your point. So I thought back through pop culture, looking for a paradigmic example, a poster boy for privileged distress.

And I found one.

The character I have in mind comes from a popular movie of the mid-90s called Pleasantville. Maybe you remember it: 

It's the one where a teen-age brother and sister get hold of a magic remote control and are zapped into a 1950s TV show that is sort of like Ozzie and Harriet or Father Knows Best. Suddenly, they are the son and daughter of the Parkers, a perfect TV family living in the perfect TV town of Pleasantville.

Naturally, their arrival starts to infect Pleasantville with 1990s notions, and soon characters are asking the kinds of questions that never used to come up, like "Do I like my life?" and "Why do things have to be this way?" In particular, Mrs. Parker discovers that being the perfect housewife is not really what she wants out of life, or at least it's not all she wants. 

Her husband can't hear what she's saying or grasp why anything needs to change, and that sets up this scene:

George Parker, the father of the perfect TV family, comes home from work. He opens the door, hangs his hat on a hook like he always does, and announces, "Honey, I'm home", expecting his beautiful, smiling wife to come out of the kitchen and his perfect children to bounce down the stairs to greet him, like they always do.

Today, though, the house is dark and silent but for the thunder of a storm outside. And George is slow to catch on. He has said the magic words, but he's still waiting for the rabbit to appear in his hat. 

So he says them again, "Honey, I'm home." Nothing.

He wanders through the house, and into the kitchen where nothing is on the table. "Where's my dinner?" he wonders. He looks in the oven, inside the kettles. "Where's my dinner?" 

Uncomprehending, he goes back outside, into the rain, and pleads with this suddenly unsympathetic universe: "Where's my dinner?"

One of the reasons I like this scene as a paradigm for privileged distress is that George Parker is not a bad guy. At least he never wanted to be a bad guy. He never thought he was a bad guy. He's somebody's image of the perfect Dad. There's no malice in him. No cruelty. Society gave him a role to play, and he played it to the best of his ability. That's how he thought life was supposed to be: I play my role, you play your role, and it all works out.

I don't think it ever occurred to him that his role was maybe more pleasant than the  other roles in Pleasantville, that maybe other people had to sacrifice more to play their roles than he did to play his. Maybe they didn't used to think much about it either, but now they are and they're starting to change things.

And poor George. He has no dinner.

In my blog post I consider the question of what should happen to George, and to all the other people suffering from privileged distress. How should the liberalizing forces of the world look at them?

And I come to the conclusion that the two obvious ways are wrong. The first wrong way to deal with George is for all the other characters to say, "Poor George. We're so sorry you're feeling distress. We'll get back into our subservient roles and everything will be OK again."

Because even though privileged distress is real, it just isn't on the same scale as the distress that the other characters are trying to overcome. I'm sure many straight people are genuinely upset by all the advances in gay rights, but gays going back into the closet would suffer at a different order of magnitude. I'm sure many white parents were sincerely frightened and worried when their children's schools were desegregated, but sending black children back to their segregated schools would inflict suffering of a whole other order. There is no going back in this; the unfair advantages have to come down.

But I also think it's also a bad move to villainize George, at least not until he does something actually villainous. Up until now, he has just been clueless and oblivious to his privileged role.  And right now he's feeling hurt and confused. But if he gets villainized, if other characters look on him as a proper object for revenge, if they say, "I'm glad you have no dinner, George. I'm glad you're unhappy" then I think something in him starts to harden. That hurt and confusion can become self-justification and a determination to take his privileged role back.

What I recommend instead (and I link to an example of a gay blogger doing his best to stay in this kind of dialog with some of Dan Cathy's fundamentalist defenders), is a balance between firmness and compassion -- a firmness about not going back, not taking up subservient positions again, but also the kind of compassion that does not rejoice in anyone's distress, even the distress of the privileged.

In any kind of struggle over human rights and dignity, there are going to be a certain number of people who really are villainous, who do have malice, who take pleasure in cruelty, and who enjoy taking unfair advantage of others.

But I also think that if you look at the people today who are drifting into counter-revolution, at the people who wander past a Tea Party rally and find themselves thinking, "Yeah. That's right!", you'll also find a lot of George Parkers. You'll find a lot of folks who grew up wanting to be good people, and who by the standards of the society they grew up in thought they were good people. And now they feel villainized. They talk the way they've always talked, and now people tell them they're racists. They do the kinds of things they've always done, and now they're sexists, they're homophobes, classists, jingoists; they're some kind of -ist or -phobe they never heard of before, but it sounds bad.

And they worry that maybe there is no way for them to be good people in this new world that seems so different from the one they were raised in. They hear comedian Bill Maher proclaiming "New Rules", and that's exactly what they're afraid of: that people who despise them have acquired the power to make new rules. Because if that's true, then the George Parkers can never be good people in this new world, because someone will constantly be rigging new rules against them, rules that they have been breaking all their lives without knowing what they are.

And so when the speaker at that rally says, "We need to take our country back" it sounds right. "Yeah. Take our country back."

That's why I don't want to try to slap the privileged distress out of them. I think they do need to hear a message of firmness. They do need to hear that the world is not going back, that gays are not going back into the closet, that women are going to be equals in the workplace, that America will soon have a non-white majority, and that we're not just a country of Christians and maybe a few Jews, but also of Muslims and Hindus and pagans and Buddhists and even atheists. They need to hear that message expressed with firmness.

But I think they also need to hear another message, one that says that they don't have to be villains, that the new game is not rigged against them, that it is still possible for the formerly privileged to be good people by the standards of this newer, fairer world. It will not be easy. They will need to learn to see people who were once invisible to them. They will have to develop sensitivity to kinds of suffering that in the old world were not their problem. It will not be easy, but their own faith and the principles they were brought up to respect call them to make that effort. And if they answer that call, they can succeed. They can once again see themselves and be seen by others as good people.

I believe that if they get that vision in their heads, then they won't want to jump up and cheer when somebody says, "Take your country back." Instead they'll say: "No. My ancestors came from another world, and sometimes on holidays with drinks in their hands they would dream of going back to a land where things make sense and the people are all like us. But come morning, they wouldn't go back, because there is no going back. We are here now. This is America."

When I was writing this talk, I thought, "This is America. That would be a good line to end on."

But you know, if I stop here, there's a hole in the talk. Maybe you've noticed it: Here I am -- white, male, straight, educated, healthy, able-bodied, American -- and I'm talking about the privileged as if they're out there somewhere.

I've been talking about what to do with those George Parkers. But what do you do when you look in the mirror and see that you are George Parker? 

What if you want to be a good person and try to be a good person and maybe even sometimes convince yourself that you are a good person, but other times you notice that all your alleged "goodness" happens inside a system that gives you tremendous unfair advantages, and you have been oblivious to the suffering that the system imposes on other people. You've been tempted into thinking "I play my role, you play your role, and it all works out." But you never payed enough attention to the fact that your role is much easier than some of the roles that have been assigned to others.

What do you do with that?

It's amazing how different a situation looks when you picture yourself on the other side. Words and phrases that seemed totally adequate for describing other people are way too simple when they start applying to you and me.  Privilege is a whole different concept when you realize that you are one of the people inside the citadel, trying to decide whether to defend what you have or open the gates. Privileged distress is a whole different concept when you understand that you also worry that your unfair advantages may be going away faster than you are learning to live without them. 

When the privileged were Dan Cathy and Sarah Palin and the target audience of the Tea Party, I felt so magnanimous when I recommended viewing them with compassion. How generous I was, to visualize a path for their redemption.

But when it's my redemption we're talking about, that vision doesn't seem quite so generous. In fact, I resent the idea that I have to depend on the magnaminity of others, or that people are doing me a favor when they don't villainize me. 

Concepts that aren't good enough to describe me probably are good enough for me to use on others either. So let's start over from the beginning and see if we need to describe privilege in a new way.

When I am forced to think of myself as privileged, the first thing that bothers me is how binary that judgment is in comparison to the multi-faceted nature of my life. I have many advantages in my life, but also the occasional disadvantage.

I was in college in the Seventies, during an era of feminist consciousness-raising. So naturally, I was often lectured by female students about my male privilege. And they were right, I did get unfair advantages from being a man. I still do. 

But I was also part of the first generation in my family to go to college. At times I felt overwhelmed there and out of place, and I often wished there was somebody back home I could call and ask for advice. The daughters of college professors and engineers and lawyers -- they had that and never thought twice about it. So it grated on me how easily they could focus on my unfair advantages and be so oblivious to their own.

The same pattern occurs on a larger scale. When we picture privilege as a binary thing, like a line in the sand, or a wall between the oppressors and the oppressed, all the various kinds of privilege seem like different walls, and the struggles to tear them down like different struggles, rather than a single struggle for a fairer world.

Throughout history, the real villains, the people who work to make the world less fair rather than more, have taken advantage of that fragmentation, playing off the suffragettes against the abolitionists, the union hardhats against the hippie peaceniks, the churches that mobilized for racial justice against the justice movement for gays and lesbians. 

So if I'm going to apply the notion of privilege to myself, the first revision I want is that we stop thinking of it as a wall that divides, and instead think of it as a web in which we are all embedded and all implicated. Of course some of us have more advantages than others, and I have more than most. But as I look around, I don't see many pure villains or pure victims. All of us get some unfair advantages and all of us suffer some injustices.

When that much is acknowledged, then I find that I am willing to accept my place in the web, to acknowledge that a disproportionate share of the unfair advantages flow to me, and that most of the changes needed to make the world fairer will work to my personal disadvantage.

When I think of privilege as a web whose strands of advantage and disadvantage pull in many directions, I feel a stronger sense of solidarity with all the justice movements. Because all the isms -- racism, sexism, classism and so on -- are just the same web of privilege viewed from a different angle.

When we see our place in the web, advantaged in this way, disadvantaged in that, it becomes clear that it's not enough to campaign for justice for people like ourselves, or even to make restitution for the particular privileges that benefit us. In one particular time and place, one dimension of that web may be especially important, and then everyone who seeks justice needs to come together in solidarity, even if that dimension of the web not usually their issue.

Once I accept my place in the web, the next question that matters to me is: What kind of guilt or responsibility should I feel in response to my unfair advantages?

The easiest kind of responsibility to assess is outright villainy, when people act out of cruelty or malice or greed. They get unfair advantages over others because they seize those advantages from people who are not powerful enough to stop them.

That's easy to assess because the guilt is entirely personal, and the traditional messages of personal redemption apply: Go and sin no more. Make restitution. Seek forgiveness.

But other unfair advantages don't fit that model. I once read that taxis are much less likely to stop for black passengers than for whites. I have never come up with any personal action I can take to remedy that. I don't drive a cab. When I take cabs, it doesn't help anyone if I let the first one go by in solidarity, or if, when I get my unfair advantage of a quick and easy cab, I feel bad about it.

That's the trap that is sometimes called "white liberal guilt", and it happens whenever you try to take personal responsibility for a systemic injustice whose benefits flow to you through no effort of your own. Personal redemption just doesn't work here. There's no sin you can stop committing, and no individual who can accept your restitution or offer you forgiveness.

But if you're not going to indulge in white liberal guilt -- or male liberal guilt or straight liberal guilt or any of the other varieties -- what's the alternative? It's a cop-out to say, "It's not me, it's the system" and go merrily on your way.

Instead, I think we need to develop a more effective sense of systemic guilt. The value of personal guilt is that it motivates efforts towards personal redemption. In the same way, systemic guilt should motivate efforts towards systemic redemption.

But of course, systems don't feel guilt; people do. So it's up to us to make the connection. We need to condition ourselves to notice our unfair advantages, not so that we can wallow in personal guilt that can't lead to any personal acts of redemption, but so that we can bank up a sense of systemic guilt that can motivate us to work to change the system.

When I'm sitting in the back of my easily-flagged cab, I shouldn't feel bad as a person, but my awareness of that unfair advantage should add fuel to my determination to work against the racism that gave it to me.

Most of us don't have a well-developed and effective sense of systemic guilt yet. But some do, and they're easy to spot. They're the people who don't avert their eyes from injustice, but aren't depressed by it. Quite the opposite, their awareness of injustice and of their own unfair advantages gets them out of bed in the morning and sets them to work.

Systemic guilt isn't an idea that you learn by hearing a speaker or reading a book, it's a sensibility that you pick up by hanging around with people who have it. That's an important reason to participate in a justice-seeking community like a Unitarian Universalist congregation. If you look around, I'm sure you'll be able to identify people who have that effective sense of systemic guilt. Help them do what they do, and you'll probably pick it up.

And finally, there's George Parker's kind of guilt, where the personal and the systemic overlap. George wasn't a villain, he was just oblivious. The people around him were suffering and he let himself not notice. He didn't create the unjust system. But he accepted the advantages it gave him and didn't think too much about them. And when others began to rebel against those injustices, all he noticed was that he had no dinner.

When it comes to systemic injustice, ignorance is not a defense. We are all personally responsible for breaking through our obliviousness.

Nothing brings this point home more clearly than a type of privilege we don't talk about very often: American privilege. Even if you are struggling in America, even if you are relatively poor, people all over the world are risking their health and even their lives to bring you cheap products.

Last fall, over 100 workers died in a factory fire in Bangladesh, partly because there were no outside-the-building fire escapes. Those deaths could easily have been prevented, if the factory hadn't been under so much pressure to keep costs down. It was making clothing for a number of American retailers, including Walmart.

Now, the poor and working-class Americans who shop at Walmart did not mean those Asian workers any harm. They did not demand that Walmart squeeze that last quarter, that last dime, out of the price of its shirts. They did not push that low-cost mandate onto the factory or insist that the factory meet it by cutting corners on safety. In short, they did not kill those workers. 

But part of the benefit of that systemic evil flowed to them, and they were oblivious to it. 

Nearly all of us are oblivious to the human costs of the products we buy. Our whole retail establishment conspires with our desire to remain oblivious. Each marvelous product seems to appear on the shelf by magic. All that matters is whether you want it and what it costs.

In reality, though, that product is the result of a process that may stretch around the world, affecting countless people as well as the global environment. When you buy the product, you become part of that process. Your purchase ratifies the decisions that were made all the way up and down the line.

What kind of guilt does that give you -- personal or systemic? Well, until you make an effort to overcome your obliviousness, you won't know. Maybe you can find a personal path to redemption by buying something else or doing without. Or maybe there is no personal redemption, and whatever choice you make will thrust suffering onto someone. Then you have acquired systemic guilt, and your knowledge of it and your profit from it should motivate you to work for systemic change.

I got here by asking what vision of privilege I would be willing to apply to myself. And I rejected the temptation to view privilege as a wall or a series of walls between villains and victims. Instead, I envisioned privilege as a web in which we are all embedded and all implicated. Unfair advantages flow up and down the strands of that web, and everyone gets some of each.

But some of us get more advantage than disadvantage, and some of us get a lot more. I think the first responsibility that puts on us is simply to awaken, to shake off our comfortable obliviousness and see just how much suffering is necessary to keep that flow of advantages coming. 

Next, I think we need to sort out how much of our guilt is personal and how much belongs to an unjust system that channels advantages to us without our asking and sometimes even without our consent. Personal guilt should lead to personal redemption by changing our ways, making restitution, and seeking forgiveness. But systemic guilt defies our attempts at personal redemption; we can only discharge it by working for systemic change.

I want to close with the words President Johnson spoke to a joint session of Congress as he was introducing the Voting Rights Act, one of the great achievements of the civil rights movement. He was talking specifically about racism, but I believe that what he had to say applies more widely to all forms of privilege. I love this quote, because it expresses both the universality of injustice and the commitment to take it on.

"It is not just Negroes," he said, "but it is really all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome."

* When I googled the term later, I discovered that Andrew Tobias had already thought of it. But no matter, I'd still love to see it catch on.

** More yet if you figure in payroll taxes, which I thought was a little bit too much for a talk without visual aides.

The Web of Privilege

presented at First Unitarian Church of Athol, Massachusetts
December 9, 2012

Opening Words

"What you believe depends on what you’ve seen, -- not only what is visible, but what you are prepared to look in the face." -- Salman Rushdie

Meditation

from Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina:

Levin had often noticed in arguments between the most intelligent people that after enormous efforts, an enormous number of logical subtleties and words, the arguers would finally come to the awareness that what they had spent so long struggling to prove to each other had been known to them long, long before, from the beginning of the argument, but that they loved different things and therefore did not want to name what they loved, so as not to be challenged.

He had often felt that sometimes during an argument you would understand what your opponent loves, and suddenly come to love the same thing yourself, and agree all at once, and then all reasonings would fall away as superfluous; and sometimes it was the other way round: you would finally say what you yourself love, for the sake of which you are inventing your reasonings, and if you happened to say it well and sincerely, the opponent would suddenly agree and stop arguing.

First Reading

In Sacred Ground , Eboo Patel quotes Jesse Jackson saying this to a Muslim group in the wake of 9-11: 

You have a choice to make right now: You can talk about an America where your people don't get sent to the back of the bus, or you can talk about an America where no one gets sent to the back of the bus.

Second Reading

Last summer, Wayne Self's Owldolatrous blog suddenly went viral because of a series of posts about the Chick-fil-A boycott.

Chick-fil-A had long supported "family values" organizations that not only work against gay rights in this country, but also try to make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment or even death in countries like Uganda. The company's policies finally came to public attention when their president, the Founder's son Dan Cathy, went on a talk-radio program and said that supporters of marriage equality for gays have a "prideful, arrogant attitude" and are "inviting God's judgment on our nation". That led to a boycott against Chick-fil-A, which Wayne Self, a gay man, wanted to promote. 

Now normally, the way you promote something like that is you stand on the barricades and yell about what evil bastards the people on the other side are: We're the good people; they're the bad people.

But Self did an unusual thing: He didn't just try to rally the troops who already agreed with him. He decided he wanted to convince people who either hadn't been involved in this issue, or maybe even had been leaning the other way.

So he didn't write rants. He wrote fables, he told stories, he had heart-to-heart dialogs with the commenters on his blog. Most important of all, he did not put himself on a pedestal and demonize his opponents.

Instead, in this post, he talked about an attitude we all have to struggle against,which he called supremacy and defined as "the habit of believing or acting as if your life, your love, your culture, your self has more intrinsic worth than those of people who differ from you." And he focused not just on denouncing heterosexual supremacists, who think their relationships have more intrinsic worth than gay relationships, but also on his own struggle to overcome supremacist attitudes:

I grew up in the rural South. I never hated African-Americans. I never knowingly said or did or voted in any way that hurt African-American people. I even had African-American friends. But I’d be lying to you if I didn’t admit that some white supremacy seeped into my thinking at a very young age. This is a painful thing to admit. Even now, I find I can’t go into specifics, from sheer shame. ...

Some people turn supremacy into an over-arching philosophy. For most, it’s just a habit of mind. As a habit of mind, supremacist ideas can spring up in anyone. Being liberal doesn’t make you immune. Being gay doesn’t make you immune. Being a minority doesn’t make you immune.

You don’t have to hate people to feel innately superior to them. After all, what kind of threat are your inferiors to you? You may be annoyed by them, from time to time, or you may even like them. You can even have so much affection for them that you might call that affection love.

The dangerous thing about a supremacist point of view is that it can accompany even warm affection. [But] supremacy turns to hate when the feeling of innate superiority is openly challenged. 

Like many habits, supremacy can be unconscious. Sometimes you don’t know you’re doing it until someone points it out. ...

I’m 43 years old now, and I’ve had time to change my supremacist habits of mind. I did it by knowing more African-American people, by listening instead of talking, by humbling myself and not demanding that I must agree with everyone in order to support them,and, most importantly, by admitting that other people’s real lives were more important than my mere beliefs. 

Sermon: The Web of Privilege

I went to college in the Seventies, when feminism was raising women's consciousness about all the ways that traditional gender roles work against them. So naturally, I heard a lot from female classmates about my male privilege. And I couldn't very well argue, because they were right, I did get unfair advantages from being a man. But all the same, those lectures used to annoy me, so let me try to explain why. 

I grew up in a working class family. The factory my father worked in was loud and dangerous and full of nasty odors that stuck to him when he came home. 

He had that job because he didn't go to college. But he had graduated from high school, and he was proud of that, because his father had only graduated from eighth grade. And grandpa was proud too, I imagine, because it probably wasn't that many generations back that the Muders were all illiterate.

My sister and I were the first generation in our family to go to college, and eventually I would be the first to get a Ph.D. I will never forget meeting my parents after the graduation ceremony and seeing my father go misty-eyed. "Dr. Muder," he said, as if only a miracle could have brought those two words together.

So while I was getting that education, even though I recognized the injustice of discrimination against women, it still grated on me that daughters of professors and daughters of millionaires could only see my unfair advantages.

 

Now, I'm not trying to start an argument about whether classism or sexism is harder to overcome, or how either compares to racism or religious prejudice or some other variety of unfairness. Quite the opposite, I think we've already had too many of those arguments. Throughout American history, it's been way too hard to get people united against unfairness in general, and way too easy for the Powers That Be to play one disadvantaged group off against another.  

Before the Civil War, for example, the abolitionist movement split over whether or not women could hold leadership positions. And after the war, the women's suffrage movement split over the 15th amendment, which gave the vote to black men. (Two famous Unitarian suffragettes parted ways on that. Lucy Stone supported the amendment and Susan B. Anthony didn't.)

As best I can tell, there has never been a widespread movement to treat everyone more fairly, and to battle unfairness wherever it appears. Instead, we typically look at privilege one dimension at a time -- as racism or sexism or some other Ism. That simplifies things by letting us draw sharp lines between the privileged and the disadvantaged: white and black, native and immigrant, straight and gay, men and women.

But today I'd like to suggest that the Isms oversimplify our notion of privilege. Once you have drawn a line, it's easy imagine a wall there. On one side are the victims, and on the other the oppressors. 

Packaged with that metaphorical wall is a complete set of emotions for each side. On the victim side you're supposed to feel resentment, anger, and envy. On the oppressor side, guilt, but also fear of all those angry people, and anxiety about the possibility of losing a privilege that you have had all your life and may not know how to live without.

Fear and anxiety can tempt a person to adopt the attitude that Wayne Self called supremacy. You can start to rationalize that the wall is good and natural, and I deserve to be on this side of it, because I am more important or more deserving than the people on the other side. Nothing personal, but there's a very rational reason why I have to be here and they have to be there.

Today I want to use a different metaphor for privilege and unfairness, one that I think better captures its multi-dimensional nature. 

Privilege isn't a wall, it's a web. 

We all have a complicated relationship to privilege. Everyone, in some aspect of life, is treated unfairly. And everyone also, in some other way, benefits from unfairness. There are many ways to cut that web in two. But depending on who makes that cut and what kind of unfairness they single out, any of us might find ourselves on either the disadvantaged side or the privileged side.

 

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not claiming that it all evens out. I stand here today as a straight, white, American male. I am able-bodied, happily married, well educated, and over six feet tall. It would be ridiculous for me to claim that it all evens out, just because I face an occasional disadvantage here or there. No, all I'm claiming is that privilege is a subtle issue. 

And while I believe nearly everyone -- even people like me -- could be happier in a fairer world, that progress will not come for free. We're not going to get to a fairer world just by claiming our rights in the situations where we are treated unfairly. We'll also have to raise our consciousness about the ways that we benefit from unfairness.

 

One problem with thinking of privilege as a wall comes from the villainous stereotypes we have of the people on the oppressor side: Simon Legree driving his slaves; Scrooge, asking why the poor can't be sent to prisons or workhouses; or even hotel magnate Leona Helmsley saying, "Taxes are for the little people."

If that's how we picture the privileged, then how are we going to react when someone draws the line in such a way that we wind up on the privileged side? 

Not well, probably. You know you don't get up in the morning planning to be a villain, so if someone seems to be saying that you are one, your instinctive reaction is going to be: "No. That can't be right." 

Stung by the charge, it's tempting to turn the whole thing around, to point back at the people who are pointing the finger at you and say, "They're the ones who are being unfair. They're persecuting me with these vicious accusations."

And so, Rush Limbaugh feels terribly persecuted by the people who say he's a racist, and by all the "feminazis" who say he's sexist. They're the villains, not him.

An even better example is Dan Cathy of Chick-fil-A. I don't doubt that he sees a good, Christian man in his mirror. He creates jobs. He generously supports what he calls "family values", but what gays like Wayne Self see as heterosexual supremacy.

So when gay-rights supporters boycott Cathy's restaurants, that just proves to Cathy's allies how oppressed Christians are in this country. Mike Huckabee sees the boycotters unfairly trying to punish Cathy for doing nothing more than speaking his truth and living the values of his faith. A wall of privilege separates Christians from secular society, and to Huckabee it's secularists like Wayne Self who are on the privileged side. Dan Cathy -- that straight, white, male, Christian, millionaire CEO -- is oppressed.

 

Today I'd like to suggest a different stereotype of privilege, something a little less villainous than Scrooge or Simon Legree. It comes from the movie Pleasantville, which some of you may have seen. 

In this movie, a teen-age brother and sister get hold of a magic remote control and are zapped into a 1950s TV show, one of those family comedies like Ozzie and Harriet or Leave it to Beaver. Suddenly, they are the son and daughter of the Parkers, a perfect TV family living in the perfect TV town of Pleasantville.

Naturally, things start to change all around. The teens learn a few things from their new experiences, and the people of Pleasantville start asking the kinds of questions that characters on such shows never asked, like "Do I like my life?" and "Why do things have to be this way?" In particular, Mrs. Parker discovers that being the perfect housewife is not really what she wants out of life, or at least it's not all she wants. 

And that sets up this scene:

George Parker, the father of the perfect TV family, comes home from work. He opens the door, hangs his hat on a hook like he always does, and announces, "Honey, I'm home", expecting his beautiful, smiling wife to come out of the kitchen and his perfect children to bounce down the stairs to greet him, like they always do.

Today, though, the house is dark and silent but for the thunder of a storm outside. And George looks like a magician who has said the magic words, but is still waiting for the puff of smoke and the rabbit to appear in his hat. 

So he says the magic words again, "Honey, I'm home." Nothing happens.

He wanders through the house, and into the kitchen where nothing is on the table. "Where's my dinner?" he wonders. He looks in the oven, inside the kettles. "Where's my dinner?" Uncomprehending, he goes back outside, into the rain, and pleads with this suddenly unsympathetic universe: "Where's my dinner?"

 

Remember: George Parker is somebody's idea of the perfect Dad. He never intended to be a bad guy. All his life he has tried to be a very good guy, and he thought he was doing a decent job of it. Society gave him a role to play, and he played it to the best of his ability. That's how he thought life was supposed to be: I play my role, you play your role, and it all works out.

Now, if you could sit George down and make him think about it, maybe he'd realize that his role as a professional-class husband and father is a little easier and more pleasant than some of the other roles in Pleasantville. 

But he doesn't think about it, because he doesn't have to. He's never had to plot with the other professional-class husbands to oppress his wife or the characters who do Pleasantville's menial jobs. That's just how the social roles work out. And he assumes that because he's happy in his role, other people must be happy in theirs.

George's example points out several aspects of privilege that may make our own privileges easier to see. First, the privileged are usually not evil, they're just oblivious.

Saturday Night Live brought that home in a skit a few months ago: Geeks on a technology show are picking apart the flaws of the new iPhone 5, when the host unexpectedly brings out three workers from the iPhone factory in Shenzhen. 

Suddenly, all the complaints dry up.

"We understand," sympathizes one of the Chinese, who makes a tiny wage for doing debilitating work in unhealthy conditions. "Apple Maps, it no work. You want Starbucks, it take you Dunkin Donuts. Must be so hard for you."

 

You probably don't think about it very often -- I know I don't -- but every time you walk into a store, you are playing a privileged role as an American consumer. All over the world, underpaid people are breaking their backs or even risking their lives so that you can pay $10 for a pair of jeans or have fruit in the middle of winter.

It's so easy to forget that. 

The whole retail environment conspires with our obliviousness.There's no workshop in the back where you can see production happening. You just see a product and a price. The product doesn't come from anywhere. No one makes it. It just appears on the shelf by magic. 

 

And that points up a second way in which our privilege resembles George Parker's: It's more systemic than personal. 

If you've ever bought clothes at WalMart or Sears, they may have been made at the factory that burned down last month in Bangladesh. Over 100 workers died in that fire because there were no outside-the-building fire escapes. Those deaths were easily preventable if the factory hadn't been under so much pressure to keep costs down.

Now, you didn't want anything bad to happen to those workers. You didn't demand that WalMart squeeze that last fifty cents out of the cost of your shirt. Like George, you just played your role in the system.

George never wanted his wife to be unhappy. He just wanted dinner. And there's nothing actually wrong with wanting dinner, just like there's nothing wrong with wanting an iPhone or a Chick-fil-A sandwich or a good deal on a pair of jeans. What's wrong is that attitude of supremacy, that feeling that our needs, our desires, our inconveniences are so much more important anybody else's.

And because privilege is so systemic, even if you manage to overcome your obliviousness and root out that attitude of supremacy, it's not always clear what to do. 

Last January, a series of articles called attention to the abusive conditions in those Chinese factories that make Apple's gadgets. I paid attention because I have an iPad and a MacBook that might have come from there. In a year or two I might want a newer model.

But what should I do? Throwing my iPad away accomplishes nothing. Buying a competing product accomplishes nothing, because they're all made in similar factories that treat workers no better. And if people like me forgo electronic gadgets entirely, the workers won't be treated any better, they'll just lose their jobs.

If you want electronic gadgets, and are willing to pay someone a livable wage to make them for you … the market doesn't offer you that option. In the comments on the online versions of those articles, many people wondered: Why can't Apple -- or somebody -- make an "ethical iPad" and charge a little more to recover the higher costs?

But of course that would break the spell of the Apple Store. If the ethical iPad were displayed next to the "unethical" iPad,everybody who chose between them would have to think about where these products come from. 

The magic of retail would be lost.

So the market doesn't offer that option. With only a few exceptions -- like Fair Trade coffee or vegetables at the farmers' market -- it rarely does. The workers are treated the way they're treated, and you either want the product or you don't. No personal choice you can make will solve the problem. And if you feel guilty about it, that doesn't change anything either.

 

So far what I'm describing is more tragic than malicious. So of course it can't be the whole story, because the history of privilege and oppression is full of malice. It's full of wars and riots and lynchings and beating up people who try to organize the underprivileged. Where does all that come from? It starts with how you react when your obliviousness gets challenged, when the under-privileged begin to raise their consciousness and tell you that this is unfair, or when they stop cooperating and disrupt the system of privilege. 

When that happens, I imagine that everybody's initial reaction is the same: We notice our own inconvenience first. George may eventually learn to empathize with his wife, but the very first thing he notices is that he has no dinner. Dan Cathy notices that his restaurants are getting bad publicity. I notice that people are making me feel guilty about owning an iPad.

And because we never planned on being villains, there's a strong temptation to deny everything to tell each other stories that make us feel better. After the fire in Bangladesh, Fox News told us how happy those workers were to have those jobs. People have been telling stories like that for generations: The slaves were said to be happy on the Southern plantations, and 19th-century women were content to let their husbands worry about difficult issues like voting or owning property.

Sometimes the stories even say that the victims deserve what they get, like those evil gays and lesbians who break God's law, or those pushy women and uppity blacks who insist on going where nobody wants them. As Wayne Self wrote: "Supremacy turns to hate when the feeling of innate superiority is openly challenged."

Even when you have to admit that you've been benefitting from privilege, it's tempting to hold up your own inconvenience, your doing-without-dinner, as if it were equal to other people's lifelong oppression. 

In another post, Wayne Self shoots down the idea that Dan Cathy's public-relations problems are in any way equivalent to the problems faced by gays: "This isn’t about mutual tolerance," he writes, "because there’s nothing mutual about it. If we agree to disagree on this issue, you walk away a full member of this society and I don’t."

Yes, the privileged suffer too, but on an entirely different scale. "Men," Margaret Atwood observed, "are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them."

 

So, to sum up, you were born into an unfair society, just like everybody else. But it's not unfair in just one way. The ways that unfairness works against you are usually pretty obvious. But it's easy to remain oblivious to all the ways it works for you. 

You're not responsible for where in the web of privilege you were born, but you are responsible for whether or not you remain oblivious to it. And you're responsible for how you respond after you become aware. Do you make amends where you can? Do you work for systemic change when personal change isn't enough? Or do you make excuses for your privileges and blame the victims for the inconveniences you suffer when they try to improve their lot? When you are treated unfairly, do you regard those who are privileged over you as villains who don't resemble you at all?

It would be pleasant to think that once you see the light, there's a simple way to go and sin no more. But very often there isn't, because your privilege is baked into the system and you can't just give it back. 

That's why it's so important that when you have an opportunity to make the world fairer, you do something with it. And when suffering people come to you with a plan to change the system, listen hard and give them a little benefit of the doubt, even if their issue seems distant or their plan seems unlikely to work. Because the system does need to change. A lot of the unfairness in the world isn't going to be fixed just by individuals deciding to do the right thing.

And finally, it's important not to forget either side of the experience of privilege. When we benefit from unfairness, it's important to recall how it feels to be taken advantage of. And when we suffer from unfairness, we need to remember how shocking it can be to suddenly recognize a privilege that you never thought about and never asked for. 

Holding both those experiences in mind can help us stay in dialog with those whose privileges are different, and make us more effective in working with them for ever more fairness.

Closing Words   

The closing words are by President Lyndon Johnson. 

In March of 1965, after violence in Selma had killed a number of civil rights demonstrators, including the Unitarian minister James Reeb, Johnson convened a joint session of Congress and asked them to pass the Voting Rights Act. 

Johnson was never known as a great speaker, and many Northerners had trouble believing that anything worthwhile could be said in that rural Texas accent he had. But that day he gave a remarkable speech, and it built up to this conclusion:

"It is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome." 

Whence Cometh My Hope?

In September, I went back to my hometown (Quincy, IL) to speak at the UU church there, as I have several times before. I didn't know about that church when I was growing up Lutheran in Quincy, but in recent years I've arranged to speak there at times when I knew I was going to be in town anyway to visit my parents. Since it's the church where I speak most often (sometimes twice in a year, which I know sounds like nothing to ministers), it tends to be the place where I try out new stuff.

I used to publish the texts on this blog, but the Quincy UUs do such a good job putting up texts (and even audio!) promptly that I've started just linking to the uuquincy.org site.

The talk I gave there September 30 (text, audio) was called "Whence Cometh My Hope?", which is a play on "Whence Cometh My Help?" from Psalm 121. It's sort of a sequel to "The Story of Our Deaths", which I gave there in April, 2011. (It later got expanded into "A Humanist Approach to Death" for the Concord Area Humanists.)

"The Story of Our Deaths" is about the problems that can arise when you conceive your life story as ending (or just possibly ending) in death rather than going on to a glorious, eternal afterlife. Stories are an important way that we motivate ourselves to do things that are not pleasant in the moment (like get out of a warm bed when the alarm clock goes off on a cold and dark winter morning). Through stories, our experiences acquire a aura of meaning that is larger than the immediate sensations. (I'm not just driving through monotonous traffic; I'm on my way to something really important or cool. So I'm not bored, I'm excited.)

Just as the moment gets an aura of meaning from its place in the story of your day, the day gets meaning from its place in larger and larger stories, all the way up to the story of your life. But if the story of your life just ends in death, what kind of motivation can it provide? If you obsess unskillfully on that ending, all your stories can collapse like a row of dominoes, until even the current moment (which may not be threatening death at all, and may even be pleasant) can start to seem meaningless. What's it all for, if I'm just going to die anyway?

So "The Story of Our Deaths" is about that problem of meaninglessness, and how to imagine the story of your life in a more skillful way, so that the prospect of death does not unravel all the meaning in life. It comes to two conclusions: First, the fortune-cookie-obvious notion that you have to appreciate moments as they come; if your life is actually finite, you can't keep pushing the meaningful part off into the ever-shrinking future. And second, you have to find a role for yourself in a story that won't end when you die. If you're totally self-centered, then the end of your life might as well be the end of the Universe. But if you have a role in a larger story, your actions can continue to be meaningful right up to the moment you die.

The example I give is from Martin Luther King's "Mountaintop Speech", delivered the night before he died. In that speech he anticipated that he could die soon, but said "I don't mind, because I've been to the mountaintop". King saw himself playing a role in the story of his people's march to freedom, which would go on even if he died.

The obvious objection is: "Well, that's fine if you're Martin Luther King." Most of us can't write ourselves into history that way; the world will little note nor long remember us after we're gone. In "The Story of Our Deaths" I mention this objection and suggest that we can find meaningful roles in the stories of our loved ones, our communities, our professions, and other stories smaller than the kind of history that will appear in textbooks. But I didn't say much more about it.

That's where "Whence Cometh My Hope?" picks up. This talk is more personal; it centers on my own effort to write myself into a larger story. It's about my political blog, "The Weekly Sift", and the story I hope to play some small role in: the battle between journalism and propaganda, which I think is key to whether or not democracy will continue to be feasible.

A number of problems come up, which I'll let you read in the text. But I save the most interesting one to the end: the problem of failure. This turns out to be remarkably similar to the problem of death, in that it threatens to unravel all meaning. How meaningful would Martin Luther King's story be if Jim Crow had come back in his lifetime? What happens to my story if propaganda wins and democracy is effectively over in my lifetime?

Traditional religion offers multiple levels of faith-based responses to this problem: (1) You won't fail because God will help you. (2) Even if you should lose this battle, you can identify with the ultimate victory of Good (as in King's "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice").

I find (1) to be like the afterlife solution to the problem of death: It works fine as long as you can believe it, but I just lack that faith. I almost have the faith required by (2), but it tends to desert me at the worst possible times. (What if the long-term bend towards justice is just a wrinkle in the even longer bend towards injustice?)

Both of those are optimism-based solutions: They explain why the future is going to turn out well. I end up going for a hope-based solution, in which I don't pretend to know whether the future will turn out well or not, but I believe that trying is better than not trying.

Hope, I recognize, also requires a kind of faith. But it turns out to be a faith I have, so I don't have to constantly gin it up or talk myself into it. And that, I suppose, is the ultimate message of the two talks together: Every solution to the problem of meaninglessness requires some kind of faith. But I would rather look into my soul, find the faith I have, and build on that, rather than accept some external authority's description of the faith I'm supposed to have, and try to talk myself into it.

My latest UU World column went up today. It contains my reflections on the Justice GA we just had in Phoenix. You can find it here.

Framing as a Martial Art

With almost all of this year’s GA workshops focusing on techniques of activism, I am hearing a lot about frames. Each thing I am hearing makes sense in its context, but I’m having a hard time making a Big Picture out of it.

Friday, at a workshop sponsored by Starr King Divinity School, I heard Helio Fred Garcia (who is usually given credit for framing the “Standing on the Side of Love” campaign) say that “you have to meet people where they are”, talking in terms and metaphors and frames that make sense to them. When you talk only in your own terms and use only your frames, you are preaching to the choir, or perhaps just talking to yourself.

Former UUA President William Sinkford used almost the same phrasing in “The UU Social Gospel” workshop in the next time period. So many of our potential allies use theistic and specifically Christian imagery that we would be foolish to avoid it or protest against it, even if we do not entirely agree with it. Reclaiming our Christian heritage and asserting our own right to quote and interpret the Bible gives us access to this powerful language and the frames that go with it.

In these two talks, I began to picture the ideal activist having the adaptability of water, able to flow into the available spaces in the worldviews of the people s/he needs to convince. And I thought: People who can adapt and flow like this must have a tremendously strong sense of their own identity. Otherwise they will enter into other people’s worldviews and get lost there.

And that leads to this question: We can teach techniques of framing and reframing. But what are we doing to help UUs build a correspondingly strong sense of their own identity?

Then today (Saturday), in the “Ten Elements of the Doctrine of Discovery” workshop, I saw Tupac Acosta demonstrate the power of not meeting people inside the frames that make sense to them. He refused to acknowledge that Arizona’s controversial S.B. 1070 is an immigration law. “Indigenous peoples are not immigrants,” he said plainly.

I feel like I’m learning a martial art. You have to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. And somewhere in the background is a know-when-to-hold/know-when-to-fold wisdom that no one has yet managed to put into words that I understand.

A Humanist Approach to Death

[a talk presented to the Concord Area Humanists on May 2, 2012]

 

A few weeks ago I found myself at a funeral where no doctrine of the afterlife was preached. No one assured us that the deceased was with Jesus now, or in a better place, or had moved on to another incarnation. No one promised that we would meet her again someday.

Instead of speculating about where she is now, the service celebrated the life that she had led, the kind of person she was, and the effect she had on those who knew her. 

I came away from that funeral with two impressions: First, that this woman had really lived. And second, that living a human life is a pretty cool thing to be able to do. 

In short, that funeral was an inspiring, upbeat event.

Now, that description may sound familiar to you, and in fact it has become familiar to me too. But it isn’t what I was brought up to expect. One of the first things my mother told me about “unbelievers” was that their funerals are dark, dismal affairs. I don’t think she had attended many Humanist funerals, so I imagine that she came to this knowledge by deduction: If there is no Heaven, no salvation, no afterlife, then how can a funeral be anything but a bleak confrontation with the fact that death is the pointless end to a pointless human life?

It’s amazing how widespread this view is among the general public, and even more amazing how compelling it seems to people who have little or no experience of Humanism.

Deathbed conversions. If you are a Humanist who was brought up to believe in an afterlife, chances are at some point in your young adulthood you had this conversation: An elderly friend or relative says to you, “Those notions are all well and good at your age, but when you get older, and death starts staring you in the face, then you’ll come back to the Church.”

They’re very confident about this, because they know that Humanism can’t handle death.

Supporting that view is an entire mythology of deathbed conversions by famous free-thinkers or skeptics -- Spinoza, Charles Darwin, Thomas Paine, and many others. A few days before Christopher Hitchens’ death, an article in The Daily Caller asked “Is Christopher Hitchens about to convert?” 

In case you’re wondering: No, he didn’t, and as best we can tell neither did any of the others I listed. But an interesting circularity keeps such stories going: On the one hand, they are offered as evidence that Humanism can’t handle death. And on the other, they are believable because, of course, everyone knows that Humanism can’t handle death.

Sometimes, though, the anecdotal evidence goes the other way. James Boswell wrote this account of David Hume’s final illness:

I had a strong curiosity to be satisfied if he persisted in disbelieving a future state even when he had death before his eyes. I was persuaded from what he now said, and from his manner of saying it, that he did persist. I asked him if it was not possible that there might be a future state. He answered it was possible that a piece of coal put upon the fire would not burn; and he added that it was a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist for ever. 

Boswell, a believer, concluded: “I left him with impressions which disturbed me for some time.” 

But Hume’s friend Adam Smith didn't find Hume’s peace of mind disturbing in the least. He wrote to another friend:

[p]oor David Hume is dying very fast, but with great cheerfulness and good humour and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God.

A more recent case is that of Randy Pausch, the Carnegie-Mellon professor whose “Last Lecture” in 2007 has been downloaded on YouTube more than 14 million times. “If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as you think I ought to be,” he says as he describes his terminal cancer, “I’m sorry to disappoint you.” He then goes on to give one of the most inspiring talks I’ve ever heard.

Anecdotes like this are not science. But until I see some objective data on the question of who dies well or which beliefs hold up as death approaches, all I can say is that my own experience does not support the idea that a Humanist death is unusually horrible. Elderly or dying Humanists that I know personally do not seem to be softening their positions or returning to traditional religion. Elderly or dying believers do not seem noticeably more serene about their fate.

So I am left with a mystery: Where does this notion come from, that Humanism can’t handle death? What would it mean to “handle death” in a humanistic way?

Living without an afterlife. Now, I anticipate some of you resisting that turn of phrase, because what about death needs “handling” anyway? You just die. Everybody does it sooner or later. Some people do it in their sleep. Infants do it. Dogs and cats do it. Even amoebas manage to die. It’s not particularly difficult.

And yet, for some reason, human beings have never found it that simple. Cultures all over the world, in many different eras of history, have postulated some kind of an afterlife. The society we are living in was built largely by and for people who believed in a particular vision of the afterlife. 

We live in that society, but we don’t share its traditional view of what happens after death. How do we manage?

If you have been living as a Humanist for decades, and especially if you were raised as a Humanist, you may still have trouble grasping the question. “What do you mean manage?” You breathe in, you breathe out. You eat at mealtime, sleep at night, and go to work in the morning just like everyone else. Living without an afterlife is like being a fish without a bicycle. It never occurs to you that you should have one, so you don’t feel the lack of it. What’s the problem?

But when believers look at us from the outside, they imagine a tremendous lack and a huge problem. Much of their world would come unglued if they lost their belief in Heaven and Hell, and so they imagine that we must live in an unglued world.

How do we manage?

The unspoken questions. Let me give a simple example. The first time my father realized that I wasn’t expecting us to meet again in Heaven, he asked: “So you think we just die and that’s it, like animals?”

Like animals. I was fascinated by that, as if the soullessness of animals was a fact observable by any five-year-old.

But then I thought about who I was talking to. Dad has been a farmer all his life. He has killed, seen killed, or sent to be killed countless chickens, pigs, and cattle. And yet, I don’t believe he has ever murdered a human being.

That’s one of the fundamental questions any meat-eating farm culture has to answer: Why is it OK to kill animals but not people? My father’s Christianity answers by putting a great metaphysical gulf between animals and humans: We have eternal souls and they don’t.

There are dozens, maybe even hundreds of issues like that. They aren’t the first questions that come to mind when you think about death, but once the conceptual infrastructure of the Christian afterlife is in place -- once you have souls, salvation, Heaven, Hell, Judgment Day, and so on -- people use it to answer all sorts of questions.

And when you challenge that vision of the afterlife, all those other questions come open again.

So when a believer asks, “What do you think happens when we die?” that spoken question is just one bird in a flock of questions that are unspoken and perhaps even unconscious.

Now think about how Humanists answer questions. Humanism is heavily influenced by science, and so we tend to answer questions the way scientists do: We narrow them down, get the terms defined very precisely, and then answer exactly what was asked.

What happens when we die? Our bodies get buried and they rot.

And while that answer is true as far as it goes, it leaves our questioner thinking that we have somehow missed the point, or that we are shallow people who deal with life’s deepest issues only in the most superficial ways.

Toughness and bleakness. Another aspect of the Humanist character adds to this misunderstanding. Many Humanists glory in the image of mental and psychological toughness: We are the people who have the courage to live without any fairy tales. We face the cold, hard truth, whatever it turns out to be. As Julian Baggini wrote about atheism in The Guardian a couple months ago: “Life without God can be bleak. Atheism is about facing up to that.”

Bleakness. That’s a selling point. Where do I sign up?

Hearing this kind of rhetoric, a believer may picture Humanists living a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max kind of life: Everything is bleak, hopeless, and purposeless, but we can take it. Only a special kind of person can live in the rubble of the old worldview, but we’re up to it.

No we aren’t. Maybe we’re tough, but most of us are not that tough. We don’t live in the rubble of the old answers. We cleared that rubble a long time ago and started to rebuild. And if we can’t support our new structures by attaching guy-wires to Heaven, that just means we’ve had to dig our foundations deeper into the Earth.

That’s where we need to take the conversation. When believers ask us what happens after death, we need to look past the obvious question and unpack some of the assumptions behind it. Perhaps like this: “I have no confidence in any particular vision of an afterlife. But life confronts me with the same issues you face, and I have found other ways to deal with them.”

Answers that don't assume an afterlife. From there the conversation might go in any number of productive directions. Think about all the life-centered questions that traditional religion answers by reference to Heaven and Hell. Yes, those questions come open again when you stop counting on an afterlife. But do Humanists really live without answers to them? Or do we just answer them differently?

Here are some of the most important issues that open up when a believer starts doubting the afterlife.

• Morality. Without the rewards of Heaven and the punishments of Hell, why be good?
• Justice. In this life, people often do not get what they deserve. Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. If that injustice is not balanced in the afterlife, how do you make peace with it?
• Anger. If the people who wrong you are not going to be punished by God after death, how do you let go of your desire for revenge? 
• Guilt. If you are not going to be punished after death, and if you have no second chance to make up for the ways you have failed people who are now dead, how do you forgive yourself?
• Purpose. Heaven provides a goal that orients the believer’s life. Without that, don’t you just flounder around?
• Grief. If you are never going to see your loved ones again after they die, how do you come to terms with losing them?
• Meaning. If death is the ultimate end, what’s the point?

If I were talking to a non-Humanist audience, I might feel obligated to start at the beginning of that list and work my way to the end, because some people genuinely doubt that these questions have answers.

I don’t think that’s necessary here, and it would even be a little insulting to explain to you how it is possible for a Humanist to be moral. You might find it interesting to have discussions among yourselves about how you answer these questions. But I doubt you need a lecture.

I will say a few words about grief and meaning, though, because I’ve had some trouble with them myself, and a lot of the usual answers didn’t help me very much. So I think that as a community we need to do more work on these questions, and I’d like to give that work a nudge in what seems to me to be the right direction.

Grief. Let me start my discussion of grief by telling a story: Years ago I knew a woman who thought that I understood money much better than she did. So whenever she had a financial decision to make, she’d ask my advice.

But one time she didn’t ask when I expected her to. So I wondered how she figured out what to do. She said that when she thought about asking me, what I would say just popped into her mind. So she did that.

Now, one way to interpret this story is that I have a spiritual double who (unbeknownst to me) goes around giving financial advice to my friends. For all I know, that spirit might be immortal, and might go on talking about interest rates and credit card payments long after I’m dead.

But a more reasonable explanation is that my friend had projected a part of her own intelligence onto me. As she got to know me, she shaped a piece of her own mind to think and talk like me, until eventually she could converse with “me” even when I wasn’t there.

I suspect most of you recognize this phenomenon. Most of us have entire communities of people living in our heads -- parents, siblings, spouses, children, bosses, teachers, friends, and acquaintances of all sorts. When I wonder what my wife will want to do when she gets home from work, I don’t deduce it logically like Sherlock Holmes. Instead, I talk to her in my mind. 

These internal voices keep talking even after death. For example, I know what my mother would think of friends I didn’t meet until after she died -- because her voice in my head continues to comment on them. 

That's a major way that we know other people: We shape pieces of ourselves to resemble them. And when they die, there is a period of confusion, where we don’t really know how far the death goes. Maybe that piece of myself is dead also.

Sorting that out is a big part of the grieving process. My mother is dead, but the piece of me that I shaped to resemble her is still alive. Her voice is in my head and I can continue to consult it for the rest of my life. Those conversations do not depend on her soul continuing to live in Heaven.

Humanists often say the dead live on in our memories, but that’s such an inadequate description of the reality. We don’t just remember people, as if they had been reduced to photo albums and souvenirs of things that happened long ago. We continue to interact. We carry them around in our minds as active presences. 

That isn’t the same as having them in the room as flesh and blood. But day-to-day it is not actually that different from believing they watch us from some etherial realm.

Meaninglessness. Traditional Christianity teaches that meaning comes from God, and that a life cut off from God and the hope of Heaven must be meaningless.

One of the most powerful expressions of this view is a speech that Shakespeare puts in the mouth of MacBeth. At this point in the tragedy, Lady MacBeth is dead, MacBeth’s schemes are coming apart, and given all the things that he has done, he can only hope that there is no afterlife, because if there is, he must surely face some terrible punishment. So this is how he views the human condition: 

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more.

It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

This is what believers hear when you say, “We Humanists are tough. We don’t need fairy tales about the afterlife.” They think you have steeled yourself to deal with meaninglessness on a MacBeth-like scale.

But is that really what a Humanist life is like?

Death and meaninglessness. This issue of meaning first became real to me when I was about 16. I was working at my hometown newspaper -- this really dates me -- carrying typewritten pieces of paper from the newsroom to the composing room where the stories were set into metal type.

I used to read as I walked. One stormy day, the story in my hand was about a man who had been killed in his front yard when a branch blew off a tree. 

I had never thought about that kind of death. I grew up watching westerns and cop shows on TV. People died left and right on those shows, but they died inside plots that made sense. Their deaths were heroic or tragic or the result of their own foolishness. And I had known relatives to die after long illnesses, but those illnesses themselves were a kind of story in which death was a logical conclusion.

But this guy in his yard -- I had never heard of him before, but I was convinced that this branch blowing down was not the climax of any story he thought he was living. He must have been in the middle of a million other things, and then suddenly he wasn't.

Out, out, brief candle!

Here was a guy who literally died in the middle of sound and fury that signified nothing. When the storm came, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Something about that kind of death seemed to threaten the whole meaning of life, and it took me decades to put my finger on what it was. 

Meaning and stories. When we talk about meaning, what are we talking about? What kind of answer are people looking for when they ask, “What’s it all about?”

I think they’re looking for a story. I think they want somebody to frame what’s happening to them as something other than just a random sequence of events.

“What’s it all about?” I might ask as I battle traffic on the MassPike. But if I’m battling traffic because my wife is in labor and I’m trying to get her to the hospital, then I don’t ask what it’s all about. I know what it’s about. This scene is part of an important story, and my actions are turning the plot in a better or worse direction.

That’s meaning.

When people say they want to “make a difference”, that’s what they mean. They want their actions to move the plot of some important story. They want that story to reach a better conclusion because of what they did.

We live inside stories, sometimes dozens of them simultaneously. And when our stories are working, life is good -- even when life is bad. If you’re exhausted and in pain, life is bad. But if you’re exhausted and in pain because you just won the Boston Marathon, life is good.

The story creates the meaning.

But sometimes our stories fail us. Sometimes the conclusion you’re working towards seems so unlikely that it doesn’t inspire you. Sometimes you forget why you even wanted it in the first place. Sometimes you get so alienated from your story that you feel like an impostor in your own life. “Yes, I look like a success, but that isn’t really me.”

That’s when you have a crisis of meaning.

Meaning and the afterlife. Death throws a monkey wrench into our stories. Usually our short-term stories get their meaning from the longer-term stories they fit into. Studying at 2 a.m. is meaningful because it’s part of the story where I ace tomorrow’s test. But the test is only meaningful  as part of the longer-term story where I pass the class. And that matters because of the story where I get my degree, and so on.

But what if the longest-term story I can tell is the one where I die? Doesn’t that undercut all the others?

The fact that I might die at any moment means that the stories I think I am in the middle of may never conclude in any satisfactory way. And even if my life is not cut off prematurely, then eventually I arrive at decrepitude and senility. What kind of climax is that?

So you see the problem. It’s not just that I will die. As I said at the beginning: That’s easy; everybody does it. But given that I am going to die, how can I tell the story of my life in a way that engages me and motivates me and gives me a sense of meaning?

The afterlife is clearly an attempt to solve this problem. If there’s an afterlife, then our stories don’t just cut off. We get to finish them in Heaven. And old age is just a temporary hardship on the way to a glorious eternity.

It’s a fabulous plot device. For Humanists, though, it has just one problem: It’s too transparent to be believable. Of course I want to believe that I will live forever in bliss, that all my questions will be answered someday, and that all my relationships will work out perfectly and then continue forever. Who wouldn’t want to believe that? It’s a wonderful fantasy.

The problem is that I can’t believe it. It’s like the story that tomorrow will be a good day because I’m going to win $10 million in the lottery. Good as it sounds, that story doesn’t motivate me or give me a sense of meaning (no matter how many times I repeat it to myself), because I just can’t believe it.

By the way, I think that’s why I’m not seeing a lot of old-age or deathbed conversions among my Humanist friends. Yes, the approach of death makes us want to believe in an afterlife. But wanting was never the obstacle. Everybody already wants to believe that story. The problem is that it’s not believable, and the approach of death doesn’t make it any more believable.

Meaning without an afterlife. So that’s where we Humanists are: The afterlife plot device isn’t working. What are we going to do?

Personally, I found a solution in a surprising place: The final speech of Martin Luther King, the Mountaintop Speech.

Now, this doesn’t read like a Humanist speech at all, because it isn’t. King was a Baptist minister. The Mountaintop Speech talks about God, and the whole mountaintop image comes from the story of Moses. But don’t let that turn you off. The speech contains the trick that I needed to tell the story of my life in spite of the prospect of my death.

As I read this excerpt I want you to bear in mind that this really is King’s last speech. He doesn’t know it, but he is going to die the next day. It ends like this:

And then I got into Memphis. And some began to ... talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.

And I don't mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

And so I'm happy, tonight.

I'm not worried about anything.

I'm not fearing any man!

Did you hear it?

Let me explain what I learn from this passage: If the story I’m living in is purely about me, then my death may cut it off short of its conclusion.

For example, suppose the story that motivates me is that I am going to be rich and famous. Suppose I work for years at that, but I’m not rich and famous yet when the doctor tells me I have three weeks to live. Then what was my story all about? How does my life mean anything? It was all a waste.

The mere possibility that my story may turn out that way undercuts the meaning of the whole thing. At any moment, I might find out that it was all for nothing.

Now think about the story Dr. King is telling. I’m sure he also had plenty of personal stories, personal relationships, idiosyncratic tastes, and so on, just like we all do. But in addition to all that, he is living in the story of his people’s march to freedom. That is a collective story that did not begin with him and is not cut off by his death. The contributions he makes to that story do not become meaningless just because he dies before the story reaches its conclusion.

I’m not trying to take Dr. King away from the Baptists, and I assume he did believe in an afterlife. That’s not the point. The point is: If you can pull off the trick in the Mountaintop Speech, you don’t need an afterlife.

If you can become part of a collective story, a story that will continue beyond your death, and if you believe in that story and can find a role in it that gets you out of bed in the morning, then death will not undercut the meaning of your life. You can go on telling meaningful stories about your life right up to the moment you die.

Summing up. So that’s my message: The next time some non-Humanist asks you what you think happens after death, don’t just say, “They bury you and you rot.” Think about what he’s really asking. Think about the here-and-now issues that all people, no matter what they believe, have to address -- issues like morality, justice, anger, guilt, purpose, grief, and meaning. Traditional religion answers those questions by imagining an afterlife, but Humanists answer the same questions in other ways. 

That’s the interesting conversation to have, and it will give your questioner some insight into what Humanism really is.

I left most of those questions up to you, but I did say a few things about dealing with grief, and about how the prospect of death makes it harder to tell an authentically motivating story about your life.

And finally, I told you how I deal with that difficulty, the trick I picked up from Martin Luther King: Some important part of the story of your life needs to be bigger than you -- not because God demands it and not even because that’s how good people live, but because you need to be part of a story that will not end when you die.

If you can do that, I predicted that your life will stay meaningful right up to the moment of death. And I can predict something else, too: Your funeral will be an upbeat, inspiring event.