Who’s In and Who’s Out of Institutions (and the immigrants between)
The British social anthropologist Mary Douglas had this to say about institutions:
Inside a religious body you get sects and hierarchies, inside an information network you get bazaars and cathedrals, it is the same, call them what you like. They survive by pointing the finger of blame at each other.
That about sums it up, doesn’t it?
Douglas is most famous for her theory of dirt: She claimed that human groups form solidarity by what we consider disgusting. For example, if your group considers eating sheep’s eyes disgusting, you’re unlikely to become very intimate with the group next door that considers sheep’s eyes a delicacy.
Douglas claims that human groups, or “institutions,” allow those inside the institution to point fingers at those outside the institution. As we stand inside and point fingers, we develop group cohesion: there’s an inside and an outside.
But, it doesn’t stop there.
Douglas thought that first we off-load responsibility for our actions onto an institution, then we begin to allow the institution to think for us. As a matter of fact, Douglas believed that our institutions operate exactly opposite from the way we generally think they do: we think institutions make small, rote decisions for us; but, actually, we allow institutions to do the big thinking for us, and we stick to the small stuff (–you know, such as consuming too many calories and avoiding exercise. Stuff like that.)
Because . . . it’s not easy bearing personal responsibility for the things that institutions such as government do. Yet, if we intend to lead an examined life, we must look in the mirror and ask ourselves what benefits we get from those things we off-load onto institutions.
Let’s think about government . . . oh, say, the United States government: bad immigration policy; institutionalized racism; millions of working poor; gun “freedom” that kills thousands per year, and poorly regulated industry, to name a few problems. Now, ask yourself, What benefits do I get by being in that group?
It’s disturbing.
It’s disturbing because Dr. Douglas is not saying, human beings form institutions and then wag their fingers at outsiders when they aren’t thinking about it or when we get lazy or when we fail to change wrongs. She isn’t saying those other people do that. She’s saying that’s what ALL institutions do. It’s disturbing because a basic fact of human nature is that we form groups, then we lose any ability to act morally concerning those things we have given away to an institution. Then we benefit from the immoral actions.
Now, you can say, “Oh, well, she’s just a crazy leftist feminist postmodernist, so, you know how THEY are!”
Or we can say, “hmm, that’s interesting! How can we use that human propensity both to better understand institutions that we don’t like, and those we do?
How can we use that idea to create institutions that encourage the sort of human action that we see as positive, rather than the sort that we see as negative?
I know you’re already way ahead of me on this . . . ideally, Unitarian Universalist congregations are places where people are not only encouraged, but required to question assumptions. Places where we encourage finger-pointing at systemic injustices, not at the people who may or may not be perpetrating the injustices, for whatever reasons . . .
If we look at Mary Douglas’s ideas from this perspective, they aren’t quite as crazy. Or quite as ivory tower!
Take, for example, immigration.
Consider for a moment that, as nations go, Mexico is not a a poor one. As nations go, the average Mexican is somewhere in the mid-range of income and social well-being for human beings on the planet. It isn’t that Mexico is poor, by international standards, but rather that the income disparity between Mexicans and North Americans is large–as a matter of fact, the disparity is the largest of any two bordering nations on earth.
That goes a long way toward explaining why people might consider crossing a border. To me, anyway, it’s hard to point my finger at a group of people trying to do that.
How have we–and let’s listen to Mary Douglas and include all of us–how have WE—the institution called the USA–responded to the immigration issue? Rather than facilitating the flow of people back and forth across the border, we have tried to stop the flow–we are still following that policy.
Now, I’m old enough to remember when the border was porous. People came here for summer work, then went back to Mexico–they went back home–for the winter. People can’t do that anymore. Because we have spent billions of dollars to stop them. They’re stuck here.
What would you do, if you found yourself stuck in a foreign country, no way out?
First you would go to the embassy, right?
Then you would start calling on your support network . . . family and friends.
Then you would get out your credit cards . . . see if throwing money around might help . . .
What if your loved ones were across the border?
How long would it take before you just took off walking . . . ?
I have a challenge for you: listen to Mary Douglas and get outside your comfort zone. Call yourself on one of your prejudices . . . . Call your own bluff on one of the “institutions” where you sit comfortably and point fingers from . . .
Maybe it’s the institution called race. Maybe it’s the institution called social class. Perhaps it’s the institution called education. Perhaps you wag your finger at close-minded people.
Whatever.
Try reminding yourself this week that, as psychologist Steven Pinker puts it,
“Our minds are organs (like the lungs), not pipelines to the truth.”
Our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth.
Try it. Actually realize that your brain is an evolved organ and has its limitations. And your brain is NOT an institution.
This week, call yourself on one of your prejudices. Call yourself on one of the things you get away with because of an institution you belong to. Step outside your comfort zone. Actually listen to someone who your prejudice tells you can’t have ANYTHING valuable to say.
Instead of pointing a finger and even wagging it a little, sit back and listen.
Try it.
Bombing Again? But It’ll Work This Time!
There’s really no need to refer to specifics. When you’ve been a citizen of the United States as long as I have, you’ve heard it all before: national security; stopping this or that madman; ending drugs or terror or Communism; honor. Whatever. The point is always the same: now, in this situation, violence will actually work to fix the problem. Unlike all those other times! And the United States, like an abusive spouse, swears this time is not like all those other times.
But it is.
A few years back I worked with a group of committed Unitarian Universalists on what we call a “statement of conscience” concerning war. Oh, the squeals. The Unitarian Universalist movement is not, after all, a “peace church” like the Quakers or Mennonites. As a matter of fact, Unitarians and Universalist have been complicit with, if not instigators of, most of the violence in the US since that civil war referred to nowadays as “the Revolution.”
And so the well-meaning and committed group attempting a statement of conscience concerning the violence of nation-states sank into the weeds of “Just War Theory” and other bromides.
Pacifism has never done well among Unitarians or Universalists. The list of pacifist ministers is short, though the prominent Universalist Clarence Skinner and the prominent Unitarian John Haynes Holmes are on it. (The pacifism of Holmes led Theodor Geisel, pen name Dr. Seuss, to write, “If we want to win, we’ve got to kill Japs, whether it depresses John Haynes Holmes or not.”) Another name on the list is John H. Dietrich, a predecessor of mine at the congregation I now serve. It’s a short list, but I’m proud to be on it.
No, the present situation is not like the First or Second World Wars. Fortunately. And, yes, there were some good excuses for killing people, at least in the Second one. Still, the human propensity toward violence and its manifestation in the violence of nation-states is odd, to say the least. It doesn’t serve much of a purpose, either, does it? The human propensity toward violence does appear to be innate, though the fact that murder rates vary from one murder per hundred thousand people in many European nations to twenty murders per hundred thousand in the US argues that violence has a large cultural component. The US is a violent culture, and that violence spills out across the globe.
Will it ever end? Probably not. In the present kerfuffle, pacifists like me will have to bow our heads once again and wait for the inevitable results. But we aren’t required to like it. And we can keep calling it what it is–silly, silly, silly.
Dancing The Real
photo by David Croker
You danced once, there, in those rocks.
It meant something. It all did—you,
your love, the beautiful stones. You
danced there, happy. It meant something.
Those things, they were as real as
the cotton in the threads of your scarf.
You danced there again, there, in those
rocks. Many things meant something—
your love was there. You danced, looking
to the horizon for meaning.
Those things, they were as real as
the thread in what you had lived for.
Still you dance, in those rocks,
there, wet in the rising tide. Your
love. Your happiness. The stones
cry out. Yet where is the strength
to turn? Even a bow is too much.
Those things. They were as real as,
as real as . . . Those things were real.
Naming the Ultimate, Part Two
A quick peek at www.godchecker.com gives some indication of the sheer number of times humanity has attempted to name The Ultimate.
At this point philosophers–and even most theologians–have given up on a proof of god and left the battlefield. For some, a god or gods is there, for others, not so much. We can debate the existence of a god or gods, but finally all we are debating is a subjective feeling, and the argument boils down to pretty much the same thing as arguing over whether a particular dish is too salty or too sweet. It’s subjective.
So, for much of humanity, belief in a deity or deities is like a taste for boiled shrimp: some are born loving them, some are born hating them, and some acquire a taste or lose the taste along the way.
What indubitably is here, there, and everywhere, is the universe that surrounds us—the whole enchilada—“everything that is, seen and unseen,” as the Book of Common Prayer would have it.
Of this thing we can say that everywhere is the center; nowhere is the center. Of this thing we can say that it is expanding, ever faster. We can call it the universe. The multi-verse. The Whole Enchilada. Yet, ultimately, we can be assured that this everything is one big something. And it’s a huge and marvelous mystery.
This everything is One, as the Hindus and the Buddhists would have it. This everything is The Way, as the Taoists would term it. Remember those words from the Ashtavakra Gita:
One believes in existence;
Another says, “There is nothing!”
Rare is the one who believes in neither.
That one is free from confusion.
This wholeness, in all its mystery and contradiction, has been a tough thing to grasp for the Western brain. Though the idea of the oneness and wholeness of all existence is at least six thousand years old in Hindu thought, we Westerners have built our cosmology and our language around polarities such as black and white, up and down, in and out, I and other, existence and non-existence, secular and religious.
In the West, the earth sat on pillars; had corners; and heaven was up there, hell down there. Our spirits went to those places. Our gods and demons lived in those places.
It’s not easy to get outside those understandings. Often we can’t, except by logic, with some anti-logic thrown in, and hard work. Or in those rare, amazing mystical moments when all feels like one and everything is A-OK. In our everyday lives, the earth sits, rock solid, and the sun and moon go up and down.
Yet none of this is “true.” We Westerners often think that thought is the only way to truth. And it is, for some forms of truth. Yet that sort of truth leads us to being “lost in our forehead,” as Hindus put it. “All up in our head.”
We can enter the space of oneness only by thought, then the letting go of thought. Why do something so foreign? Hang on. I hope to show you why . . .
Naming the Ultimate, Part One
I suspect that we think about the ultimate because we can’t manage to see ourselves as ultimate. Or infinite. Or eternal. Or all-knowing. And that hurts! It hurts to be a too, too solid, limited, fragile creature.
So, we think about the Spirit of Life. God. The gods. The Ultimate Concern.
Search the internet for the names of God. Besides the ninety-nine that Sufis chant, just start with “A” and work through time and geography. Or read Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods. I’ll bet you don’t know them all! Furthermore, you probably only believe in one or two or five at the most.
Always, human beings have pinned names on the absolute.
We call those who do not believe in the gods not a word of their own choosing but “a-theist.” Everyone is defined by the naming of the ultimate. We human beings take this quite seriously.
Alan Watts called this ultimate thing, “the which of which there is no whicher.” That about sums up the idea, doesn’t it?
Inevitably, with the naming comes the assignment of attributes: “Omnipotent.” “Omnipresent.” “Omniscient.” I learned to chant these long, hard words as a child in Sunday school. It’s what God was— Everything. Everywhere. All the time . . .
Walking to school? Yes! In the bathroom? Yes! Watching dad working at the factory? Yes!
The thought was reassuring. And frightening. And threatening. This was the Big Guy in the Sky, who had walloped the world in a flood and made Noah a sailor. The Big Guy who waxed the Egyptian kids and drowned—again with the drowning!—hard-hearted Pharaoh’s army.
This was the Big Guy who would wipe out the world with fire next time. And He really, really didn’t like human nature.
“But wait!” I said. “What about . . .” And so it went, ‘round and ‘round in my little primate brain. I was wrestling with the which of which . . .
Naming the ultimate. Assigning attributes to the absolute.
“The which of which there is no whicher.”
Always this ultimate was about what we—poor farmers in the Midwestern United States—weren’t. And this exhausts at least one avenue of inquiry: we limited creatures want some “whicher” out there that keeps an eye on the (clearly dangerous) machinery of the universe.
But then my little primate brain realized just how blatant a case of wish-fulfillment this was. And so off I went, searching for another “which.” About that . . . next week.
Weathering
When the storm comes in
a bird sits on a limb in the
suddenly solidly still
humid air. I watch
weather radar, listening
to a child scream nearby–
is it joy or fear?
I raise a glass of ale
brought to me
all the way from London.
I read the storm
warnings with interest,
large hail; damaging winds . . .
Is this another storm
that I will weather?
Sometimes yes;
sometimes no;
prognosis: probable.
I raise a glass of ale
all the way from London.
It’s always storming somewhere.
There’s always a glass
of ale somewhere.
And the screaming.
And the screaming.
Free Will, Fate, and Destiny: A Humanist Perspective
Human religions have always been built upon foundations of the best available science of the time. Sometimes that science said that the middle earth sat in a large tree. Sometimes science said the earth sat on a turtle’s back. Ezekiel knew that the earth had four corners and was held up by pillars–heavens above, Sheol below. Upon these foundations, human beings built views of how the world worked.
An important reason that I became a Unitarian Universalist many years ago was the movement’s tradition of incorporating reason and science into religious understanding. When science finds that the earth moves, Unitarian Universalists don’t have to deny science. We say, “Hmmm. That’s interesting!” That’s why I’m a humanist and religious naturalist, standing in awe inside the great cosmic show.
Nowadays we know that our fate lies within the unfolding of the Big Bang. We still don’t know whether that fate lies in a universe that will expand forever, eventually succumbing to heat death, or if there might be a Big Crunch in our future, one that might even lead to another Big Bang. Whichever way the future may pan out, our ultimate fate is sealed in forces considerably larger than primate consciousness.
Similarly, carbon-based creatures have a predictable trajectory, from our constituent elements created in the explosion of stars, to the momentary cohesion that we call life, to our decomposition, and, eventually, that aforesaid fate at the end of the Big Bang.
So, what of this consciousness we experience now, in this fleeting moment we call human life? What better way to spend those brief moments than in awe and gratitude?
Is there free will or fate? Whether or not there’s a deity that has the hairs of our heads numbered, bad things keep happening to very good people. Observation indicates that a lot of chance is involved. After all, for each of us, our genetic material has more immediate and local origins than that birth in the explosions of stars. We arise as individuals in hemispheres, nations, regions, tribes, genders, and economic situations, all at specific times, all with measures of power within us and over us.
For example, a recent study shows that where I was born, in the Southern United States, only four percent of people become professionals. Four out of one hundred. That’s fate . . . Created not by the gods, but by very human decisions. (Don’t get me started on the sequester!)
Is there free will? Yes–it’s all up to us. Except when it’s not. A fact of our realities is that the fate of each of us belongs not only to you or me, but ALL of us. All of us.
That’s why I’m a humanist. In this very human world, it’s all up to us. We create problems; we can solve them, if we work at it. That’s the beauty . . . and the challenge . . . of how it is, according to science and reason.
It’s just how it goes in the backwash of that really Big Bang . . .
America’s God (a lullaby)
“It was all God’s plan.” George Zimmerman
In the United States, God
loves white and violent, it
seems; loves what’s inhuman,
it looks. Look at His plan
working as it does. In the
US, God loves those laws
that fill the jails, that fill
the pockets of the rich,
it appears. Just look. He–
yes, must be a He–gives
a vindictive wink and nod
to the violent, as long as
it’s Christian.
In the United States, God
likes the way Florida does it.
Loves the way Texas does
people in. Likes his women
on a short leash; his people
poor; likes violence and guns
a lot. In the United States, God
loves his guys white. Just look.
See how things are in the plan.
In the United States, God likes
many of his children murdered.
Some in prison. Most poor. Just
look at the justice. It’s some
God’s plan.
My Covenant with All That Is
I pledge to follow
The earth’s gentle curve
As I go;
I pledge to breathe only air as I am able;
I pledge to breathe often;
I pledge to eat of the earth;
Nothing other shall pass my lips.
I pledge to wend along the ways,
Trodding earth, never air,
Clouds and sun above,
What rocks are there under foot.
I pledge to see as best I can in bright sun;
I pledge to squint as I am able in dark;
I pledge to remain
Upright at times
When I am able;
To lie prone when the need arises.
I pledge to find flames hot;
To find snow cold;
To find water according to its fashion;
I pledge to love as best I can;
To hate sparingly;
To mock seldom;
To judge not;
To jump to few conclusions;
To subscribe to few illusions.
I pledge to be
As I am able
And to cease
As the rules require.
But Where’s the Woo-Woo?
“Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books; / Or surely you’ll grow double,” said the early-Nineteenth Century British poet William Wordsworth: “Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife.” He continues,
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
Ah, yes. Romanticism. They headed for the woods for their woo-woo.
And Romanticism hit US shores in Transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson asked, “why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?” Experience. It was all about experience. Emerson began his great Transcendentalist manifesto, Nature, this way:
“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
Whatever else this tradition accomplished, it convinced New England Unitarians that books were fine and necessary on Sunday morning, but mystical experience, the woo-woo of worship, would happen elsewhere. On that hike through the mountains perhaps. Or on the seashore. Only accidentally within the walls of a church.
Emerson’s children hold onto this tradition, remaining mistrustful of the technologies of woo-woo: rhythmic music; glossolalia; shouting and such. Yet, if we take up those leaves called the Norton Anthology of American Literature, we find that there have been a few literary and intellectual movements since Transcendentalism. Perhaps it’s time to move on and, as sage old Emerson said, “demand our own works and laws and worship.”
