The Decline of Rationalism
in Unitarianism-Universalism
by Dino Drudi
Service at UUCSS on September 2, 2001
Reading
Critique of the Language Paradigm
What is the English language but an irrational hodgepodge of arbitrary and ad hoc pronunciation, where phonemes typically may have any of several sounds simply based on arbitrary practice: "through", "though", "thought", "tough", etc are among the most widely-cited examples. Is it any wonder that maintaining logical consistency in other matters so challenges those who think in this language paradigm, or that mathematics so often proves so daunting to them?
What are English's rules of pronunciation? Are there even really any, or are they so riddled with arbitrary exceptions as to mock their existence? Some languages have academies to maintain lexical order. But, in the absence thereof, what is to prevent linguistic anarchy? Is it any wonder libertarianism is a phenomenon most prominent in Anglophone societies?
Upon what principle is an English word's pronunciation based, other than on how comfortable its speakers "feel" with a particular sound? Thereby different subsets of Anglophones utter a given phoneme even in the same word in different fashions depending upon the preference of the speaker or the consensus of the locale rather than any rules of the language: a double "e" in "been" is short in Illinois, and long in England; the "a" in half gets rounder the farther west it goes and is pronounced either (or is it "either") way in some places; the second "c" in "connect" is hard, but in "Connecticut" is mysteriously silent. Is it any wonder that those who speak this language are so prone to act based on how they "feel", rather than based on what makes sense?
How far has the English language strayed from its mother tongue that actor is first, and then action, and only finally, as sort of an afterthought, the why and the how? Is it any wonder that why and how questions are dismissed as mere trivialities? Or that so much in such societies is ad hoc and haphazard, or that the pinnacle of cultural logic, its laws, draw their meaning not from what they actually say, but rather from what the adjudicators "feel" they should mean at any given moment?
What is English but the quintessential multicultural language? Who needs Esperanto when English will suffice in its stead? What language draws its lexicon from so diverse an array of other languages? Is it any surprise that virtually every place that speaks the English language evolves into a polyglot or devolves into incoherence? English is the perfect lingua franca, but does that very quality disqualify it as an appropriate mother tongue?
How much of our present circumstance is inherent in our English language paradigm?
Meditation
Summer Scarlet
Among a meadow filled with mostly worthless seedlings, stands a tree with bright crimson apples of exceptional quality — medium to large, shining red, firm, crisp, with fine-flavored juice — which ripen in July even in cool northern temperate climes.
Such a wonder did not happen by accident; rather it took careful breeding and much discrimination. For every cultivar worthy of introduction ten thousand crosses had been made. What became of the meadow filled with mostly worthless seedlings: All except the one were plowed under.
Why is it that we as modern humanity can readily distinguish a superior breed of apple from an inferior one, but cannot bring ourselves to distinguish superior and inferior breeds of humans?
Why is it that we as modern humanity can plow under an entire field of "mostly worthless seedlings", but ban doing likewise with humans?
Today's apple is far superior to that of a century ago because we have thoughtfully, intentionally improved it. Has, however, our morality made impossible improving humanity?
Reading
Television: Opiate of the Masses by Wes Moore
http://www.disinfo.com/pages/article/id1149/pg1
see also Brainwashing by J Hanson at
http://www.aloha.net/~jhanson/page24.htm
Introduction and Charge
The Unitarian and Universalist Churches are a product of negative
thinking. Unitarianism arose as a reaction to unbiblical doctrine of
the Trinity. Universalism rejected the unfairness of a loving God torturing
his own creations. Our religion, built on the solid values of the Enlightenment,
subjected religious doctrines to tests of logic and rationality. In the
1830s we began to apply this negativity to social doctrines, and the
results - emancipation, universal suffrage, public education - transformed
the nation.
At the time I became a UU in the early 60s (uh, the 1960s) this tradition of rational negativism was still very strong. The heroes of my youth risked their lives to negate unequal treatment among races, and the backwoods fundamentalism which justified that inequality. Some men and women in my church rode with the Freedom Riders. Others reacted just as negatively to the waves of phony piety and patriotism which endangered freedom of speech and religion. I grew up admiring the boldness with which my elders advertised their views among hostile populations.
The times, as we used to sing, are a changin'-have changed, and rational humanism is old hat. Readers of the World will find hints of a quiet schism in our denomination. Many rational humanists still sit in the back pews of our congregations. They see candles and stones and bowls of holy water at UU altars, and hear directions called and spirits invoked from UU pulpits. We have enumerated and sanctified our principles into a catechism. Every faith tradition, however redolent of superstition and injustice, is spoken of with polite reverence. Our by-passed rationalists are mostly silent. What can their feelings be? Anger? Resignation? Amusement?
I come from a scientific and mathematical family, and these uncomfortable UUs are my people. But I have long dabbled in — shall I say it? — the liberal arts, and have forfeited any right to speak for them. In any case it is usually redundant for one UU to speak for any other. So I call upon Dino Drudi, our bravest and most outspoken member, to give them voice.
We know Dino primarily as the iconoclast-in-residence of UUCSS, but his accomplishments extend beyond tweaking our sensibilities. He is an economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a published author, a safety and health expert, and a union representative. He has served five terms as president of his neighborhood citizens association, and has served seventeen years on the board of the city-wide federation of neighborhood citizens associations, including two years as president. He serves on the board of the National Association of Railroad Passengers. In 1996 the DC Republican Committee chose him to fill a committee vacancy, and in 2000 Republican voters elected him to a full term. Despite his leanings toward the R side of the ballot, Dino is a full-fledged religious liberal who has trod the same path as many of us to get here, starting life as a Catholic, and considering atheism, agnosticism, Nietzschianism, and mainline Protestantism along the way. It may shed new light on Dino's character if I reveal to you that he once rewrote Dante's Inferno so that, in his own version, he could consign his most boring acquaintances to Heaven.
Therefore, I now call upon Dino to bring his powers of observation and analysis to bear on our congregation and our denomination. Have we gone overboard in our truce with faith and emotion? Have we lost our historical bent toward negativity? What is the place of rationalism and free-thinking in our denomination today?
Sermon
The Decline of Rationalism
in
Unitarianism-Universalism
by Dino Drudi
The condition Larry describes is a very real one. UUism is not a creed, but a collection of miscellany ranging from strict unitarian and universalist Christianity, through variations of theism and deism, to mysticism and rational humanism. Culture, moreso than theology, is what unites us. UUs are on the whole better educated than members of any other denomination and in income second only to Jews. But, thus was it ever. Sydney Alstrom's Theology in America quotes from Lyman Beecher's autobiography:
When Lyman Beecher came to the American Athens in 1826 as a crusader for revivalistic orthodoxy [Puritan Congregationalism], he was appalled by the prestige and power of the phalanx that confronted him: "All the literary men of Massachusetts were Unitarian; all the trustees and professors of Harvard College were Unitarians; all the elite of wealth and fashion crowded Unitarian churches; the judges on the bench were Unitarian…."
The question then is what has happened to have shaken us from our confident command of our society, reducing us to today's miniscule anomaly. The answer to this question is inextricably bound up in the fate of rationalism within our denomination, and the fate of rationalism within our denomination is inextricably bound up with the fate of rationalism within the society at-large.
Emotion and ignorance are powerful forces. Harnessed and manipulated shrewdly they can overcome rationalism, and over a long period in our country's history that is what has happened. The religious right is a prime example, a political force that emerged from nowhere based on such phenomena as speaking in tongues and other intense emotionalistic religious expressions transmuted into a political movement that is one of the dominating forces in the country's majority political party. American soldiers are so brave in part because they are too stupid to adequately assess the dangers they confront in the face of an enemy and take risks—risks that pay off militarily—that more intelligent, rationalistic people would not.
Mathematics, after all, is a strict discipline with a deterministic result. A mathematical mindset translates into an authoritarian paradigm. We need but look at the places we associate with mathematical achievement, such as Germany and Russia, to see this paradigm played out.
Rationalism was preserved in early America by an aristocracy of merit and virtue. Three of our first six presidents were Unitarian—Jefferson (who coined that phrase) and both Adamses. This aristocracy presided over a golden age in our country's history, and it took care to govern rationalistically. It did not for an instant delude itself into thinking that the hands that pick cotton could pick our leaders, because the vote of one cotton-picker could cancel that of an aristocrat, and the votes of a field of them could pick a Marion Barry (former member of All Soul's Unitarian Church in Washington who left when his legal troubles began) or some other charlatan. Thereby rationalism was held in place by a fiercely oppressive system, slavery in the South, and its more subtle northern equivalent. Although a segment were abolitionist, the elite of wealth and fashion knew only too well where that fine cotton clothing came from and who picked the cotton that ended up in their New England textile mills. That frigid New England wall of resistance that Channing confronted, after belatedly and tentatively becoming a moderate abolitionist, drove him prematurely from the Federal Street pulpit.
Instead, New England Congregationalism became the common Yankee's bulwark against the New England elite and the driving force behind New England abolitionism. I challenge those who are fond of clothing emblazoned with the names of Unitarian and Universalist historical figures to find how many there are from the Civil War period as a fraction of the total of the historical figures of that time; they will find us underrepresented. The Harriet Beecher Stowes and Abraham Lincolns were not of our religion. But be assured, their opponents were. The great orator John C Calhoun, whose defense of slavery is still studied by American school children today, is one of the founders of All Souls' Unitarian Church in Washington. The hand that held the pen that signed the Fugitive Slave Act was that of Unitarian Millard Fillmore. This so inflamed the northern "Conscience Whigs" they blocked his renomination to their ticket, and in so doing destroyed their party, deserting it then en masse to join the newly-forming Republican Party. The Whig remnant, however, fused with anti-immigrationists and four years later nominated Fillmore as their candidate. In the Lincoln election four years after that, the fading Whig remnant chose the noted Unitarian writer and philosopher Edward Everrett as their vice-presidential candidate against Lincoln's ticket.
The common Yankee may have borne arms against the southern plantationers, but his real intended victims were his northern, largely Unitarian overlords. For once the southern aristocracy was smashed, they turned with a fury on the northern aristocrats. Mark Kurlansky's Cod: Biography of a Fish That Changed the World said this of them:
Their image as Revolutionary War leaders faded and, for all their aristocratic trappings, they were simply remembered as a haughty people who had once made a lot of money from fish…. The term "codfish aristocracy" was now used by an emerging working class to remind the establishment they had gotten rich in lowly trade and, therefore, for all their airs, were simply nouveau riche.
The next body blow rationalism suffered came in the aftermath of WWI in the form of the enfranchisement of women. Traditional data from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator showed that in this society 60% of men were "thinkers" and 40% "feelers", while the shares were reversed for women. But recently the methodology was revised; the new results show the same for men, but 75% of women show up as "feelers". Emancipating women into the electorate, and by implication into decision making in other spheres such as the church, tipped the balance against rationalism. This was a Woodrow Wilson initiative against which William Howard Taft, whom Wilson had unseated in the election, spoke out, condemning it as the assault on rational public policy it proved to be. Taft uttered this bon mot in the interim between being President of the United States and Supreme Court Chief Justice; at this juncture he was doing public service as the president of the American Unitarian Association. Thus we see today a "gender gap" in the way people vote.
Those who grit their teeth at candles and stones might do some quick math and note that women are now the majority among our clergy and comprise two-thirds of UUCSS's membership. I jest with my religious right friends that the Ten Commandments are God's sole instructions, with all the rest that comprises the sacred scriptures being merely commentary, the ancient equivalent of journal articles written by religious scholars. Nevertheless, when the prophet uttered his patriarchal injunction to "never let a woman have authority over a man", he perhaps intended to preserve rationalism's primacy.
The next, and most deadly, body blow rationalism received was in WWII. One set of contenders represented the most literate societies in the world. They defended classical art forms against irrationalistic modernizing tendencies that emphasized individual feeling rather than classical form. They championed Victorian values. They recognized coherent societies are more likely to behave rationalistically than incoherent societies. They stood in decided opposition to dysfunctional ideologies that posited the uneducated masses of workers as the society's value setters, ideologies whose modus operandi in extremis led to mass murder of educated persons in various countries, Cambodia most notably. Their defeat vitalized a Marxist movement our society felt forced to accommodate.
I must respectfully disagree with our minister who asserted someone cannot be both a nazi and a UU. The nazis were, after all, into paganism. Where in all of American religion would such a nazi feel more comfortable than in a CUUPS circle? And they were Darwinistic, and was not Darwin a Unitarian? They favored eugenics-"purifying the race" Hitler-style. In the 1920s, birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger sought to "assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit" (Birth Control Review, Vol. 3, No. 2). Born a Catholic, Sanger converted to Unitarianism. Perhaps belated anxiety about these parallels led to the UU Principles & Purposes adopted in the 1980s.
The dominant paradigm in the American South was little different from that in Central Europe during the WWII period. Had the South perceived this kinship between segregationism and nazism, its legislatures might have demanded the Congress rescind its declaration of war against the Axis. The South, instead, in joining the rest of the country in warring against Central Europe, effectively discredited its own governing paradigm. It should, therefore, be no surprise that it was in short order prevailed upon to give up its centuries-old paradigm, or that it did so in the space of a generation.
It is undeniable that Southern segregationism was a logical absurdity, the most poignant example being Unitarian Charles Drew succumbing to injuries from his automobile accident in the Carolinas after having been denied, because of his race, the very blood plasma he discovered. But so rationalistic a basis was not the one upon which Southern segregationism was outlawed, and those who joined that cause for that reason were merely useful idiots abetting Marxism. Martin Luther King welcomed the assistance he received from the American communists, and gradually came to see the world in their paradigm. Incrementally his crusade become more Marxian—focussing more on the underprivileged than on segregationism—until our government abruptly ended it in Memphis. Nevertheless, civil rights had stamped upon it an indelibly Marxian character, which in short order led to quotas and allocations to each based upon his or her need. The first place to note the nexus between political correctness and Marxism was no less than Sigma: The Journal of Conservative Unitarian Universalists.
Two Unitarians stood up against these trends: The first was Adlai Stevenson who, as the Democrat presidential candidate, ran against Dwight Eisenhower who ordered troops to enforce integration orders in the South. For all his progressive tendencies, Stevenson hedged on integration, thereby carrying the South which had deserted integrationist Democrat Harry Truman. Another was William Turpinseed, George Wallace's campaign manager.
In the 1960s, an intelligent generation raised in this milieu, nevertheless embraced emotionalism with phrases like: "If it feels good, do it!" and "Get in touch with your feelings." The final installment in the decline of rationalism then commenced in the American living room, brought about by the ubiquitous television. This device not only anesthetizes the brain's left hemisphere where mathematical and rational thinking takes place, over time, it causes the left hemisphere to atrophy due to limited use. The electronic baby-sitter has done this subtle damage to an entire generation of American youth, and they are now raising their children on it.
Unitarianism has fought valiantly against these trends, but it has always been a losing battle. Because UUism is a social religion—one that assimilates into society (as contrasted with those such as the Shakers that isolate themselves from society)—it ultimately succumbed to the dominant emotionalistic paradigm. We would be hard-pressed to find any religion nowadays that is predominantly rationalistic. Ethical Culture, perhaps, but it has only five thousand members nationwide.
In describing how we have reached our present state, no doubt many of you have acquired a new appreciation for emotionalism in religion, having seen the places rationalistic Unitarians would have led us. Those of you who yet long for a revival of rationalism, let me first warn you that you are struggling against powerful forces. Whether or not you regard such an endeavor as worth waging, rest assured that many have gone before you and that they have left their mark within the denomination. As you are gritting your teeth over candles and stones, rest assured: there is no more viable sanctuary for rationalism in American religion today than in Unitarianism-Universalism.
F I N I S
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