What ‘Ol Abe Saw

Moses, Jesus, Paul, et. al. as motivator. Their words as marching orders for how to live and what is right to do.

Sounds good. Yet, as he watched the bloody carnage justified on both sides by Christian theology, Abraham Lincoln perhaps said it best:

“I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.”

Which side is the Lord’s side? Or is it that God plays for both teams? Or is it that human beings are condemned to action that may or may not be “right” until God (or Satan?) sorts it out?

Cherry-Picking and Sound-Biting

This contrast came home to me during the recent fight over gay marriage in the state of Minnesota, where I live. Progressive religious leaders took a long look at the reign of the religious right in politics and decided to counter it. We took the Christian message of love and inclusion to the statehouse. I knew that we had accomplished the goal when a conservative state senator said, “This is about more than religion.”

The worm had turned. And, indeed, the right to marry is now guaranteed in the state of Minnesota.

Many of my religious sisters and brothers believe that the loving and inclusive message of their faith traditions prevailed. Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for loving and inclusion. It’s the message of Moses, Jesus, Paul, et. al. that bothers me a bit.

Weren’t we progressives cherry-picking and sound-biting as crassly as our conservative opponents?

Where were the real Moses and Jesus and Paul in all this?

Perhaps our hearts were telling us things. Perhaps our sense of right and wrong was talking, on both sides. But these sacred thinkers weren’t saying anything new that the scriptures weren’t telling Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis back in their days of choosing who to slaughter and why based on those old writings.

Using Our Own Little Heads

This gives me pause. Are we really best served as we make decisions in the Twenty-First Century by referring to old texts and deities that pretty clearly don’t do a whole lot of clear talking?

Or might we be better served “using our own little heads”?

That’s a phrase I learned from my fundamentalist Christian mother: “Use your own little head.”

By it, she meant for teenage me to “listen to my raisin’,” another catch phrase, rather than my peers. My mother was cautioning me to use my own head. Further, at least to my future-humanist ears, she was saying that reason, not the religion in my gut, should determine my actions.

Shouldn’t reason, not the religions of our various cultural backgrounds, serve as the arbiter of public discourse and our efforts at realizing a just society?

As a multi-faith leader, I spend a lot of time saying and showing that people of diverse religious faiths can find common ground. I believe in that work.

I’m also convinced that our common evolution as cooperative and rational animals trumps the overlays of religion and culture made since our common trek from the Rift Valley began.

We are rational animals.

After all, which would you prefer as a physician, someone who feels your pain or someone who knows how to stop it? Listening to the heart is a fine thing to do. And, there’s no doubt scriptures make great soundbites.

Listening to our own heads is the hard part.

Wolf!

The Aesop fable about the boy who cried wolf has long been viewed as a cautionary tale about lying. The boy knowingly cried “wolf!” merely to disturb the villagers. The boy eventually pays the price in dead sheep when the villagers stop responding.

There is another and more dangerous way of crying wolf, however: continually calling “wolf!” because there might be one but there might not.

In this way of crying wolf, the boy is expressing his fears—his own psychodrama. He may even be utterly convinced that a wolf is threatening and nearby. He may even be imagining what a wolf attack might look like. Still, despite the boy’s true alarm, there is no wolf, and the villagers are wasting their time running to help the boy. Wasting time that would be better taken with other ventures.

It’s Not About Not Deciding

As an agnostic, I’m very aware that we agnostics are often seen as fence-sitters—the tepid ones choosing neither hot nor cold. Why can’t we just buck up and admit that we’re atheists? Or why can’t we admit that we have a soft spot for one god or another? Why can’t we just cry wolf or shut up?

Contrary to the cliche, agnosticism isn’t about not deciding. It’s about honestly facing what we know about knowing itself. It is, as the Victorian biologist, T.H. Huxley, who coined the term, said, “not a creed but a method.” (Athiesm is a creed because it is a belief, like theism.)

Agnosticism is a method that is, I believe, a spiritual practice like Christian Centering Prayer or Buddhist meditation.

When Huxley first used the word in print in 1889, he contrasted his confidence in human knowledge with that of the convinced believers. He said,

They were quite sure they had attained a certain “gnosis”—had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble.

So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of “agnostic.” It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the “gnostic” of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant.

Knowing and Thinking We Know

Gnostic in Greek means “knowledge.” In the Western world we know the term best from the early Christian movement called Gnosticism, which claimed esoteric knowledge of the workings of the universe. Such knowledge, Huxley pointed out, can be neither proven nor disproven. The Gnostics claimed to have “solved the problem of existence.” Huxley, however, wasn’t so sure of their untestable opinions. (Neither, it might be mentioned, was the Church so sure of their solution.)

In other words, Gnosticism wasn’t about knowing, it was about belief. Agnosticism is about how and what we know.

Boiled down to its simplest formulation, the way of agnosticism according to Huxley is: “do not pretend conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable.”

No matter how convinced you are that the wolf is near, don’t cry wolf until you see one.

This is not fence-sitting or vacillation. It is, rather, a commitment to the active search for what we can know. In this way it is much like the spiritual practice of via negativa, a method of removing those things that are not “god” in order to discover god.

Huxley, however, saw his method as a positive rather than negative path. He wrote:

. . . Agnosticism is not properly described as a “negative” creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle, which is as much ethical as intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. That is what agnosticism asserts and, in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism. (“Agnosticism and Christianity”)

It’s About the Questions

Huxley made it very clear that scientific materialists don’t have the answers either. No one does. All of us find ourselves improvising with as much information as we can scramble together—as have all people for all of human history. Agnostics are committed, however, to the common human project of learning more and more. Of knowing what is actually here, not what we only imagine. This commitment requires us to have active minds engaged in continual searching.

As psychologist Ellen J. Langer puts it in her book Mindfulness, “Just as mindlessness is the rigid reliance on old categories, mindfulness means the continual creation of new ones.”

The method of agnosticism is a way of being mindful. A way of being in the present moment and making that moment an open and creative matrix.

Agnosticism is a commitment to only crying “wolf!” when such a cry will do real good.

I have to admit that the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri have triggered mostly cynicism for me. In the US we have periodic paroxysms of piety triggered by events that happen every day but occasionally “go viral” in the media. Then, the outrage subsides . . . and nothing changes.

Allow me to relate an example that went viral for a few weeks.

I was born across the river from St. Louis, on the Illinois side, the industrial side of the river where African Americans and EuroAmericans have lived since the late Nineteenth Century. The fortunes of that swath of river bank have gone up and down over the years, depending upon armament manufacture, but for the most part the region has been poor and race relations tense.

The people—black and white—who moved to the area have been mostly from rural Southern backgrounds, and the culture has long reflected that reality.

If anyone is looking for a great place to film a documentary about US poverty, I would suggest East St. Louis. But then I know that every city in the country has the scenes available there. It’s just that East St. Louis is a small town.

On July 2, 1917 an event occurred extreme even by the standards of the southern third of Illinois. As the style was at the time, the event was called the East St. Louis Riot. It was, in truth, the East St. Louis Massacre. It was a pattern replicated all over the United States—an incident occurred; whites saw the incident as a perfect excuse to teach blacks a lesson; violence ensued; outrage about the violence ensued; calls went out for change; things went back to normal; nothing changed.

But that’s my cynicism speaking, isn’t it?

This appears to be what happened: after a triggering incident, whites gathered at the edge of an area called Black Valley, the neighborhood where African Americans lived. Whites turned off the water leading into the area so that fires could not be extingushed. Then, they set fire to houses and stores.

As blacks escaped from the fire, whites shot, beat, or lynched as many people as they could.

The Illinois governor ordered the National Guard to occupy the area. When they arrived the troops aided the rioters, joining in the setting of fires and using their superior firepower to kill more blacks. (I know this bit because a member of my family was there and told the story when I was a child, in the early 1960s—I heard many such stories.)

The massacre eventually stopped because the rioters got tired and went home.

No one knows how many people died, since Black Valley was left to bury its own dead. The death toll was probably around 200.

As in the case of Ferguson, marches of solidarity with the victims spread across the US. One political cartoon from the time says it best, perhaps. A black woman is pictured imploring President Wilson—famous for his insistence upon making the world safe for democracy—”Mr. President, why not make America safe for democracy?”

Good question. And a question that echoes down the years. Why is it that we don’t make America safe for democracy?

The methods of oppression used in the East St. Louis Massacre—which continued into the 1950s—do not play well on TV, so in the television era lynchings and mass murders stopped.

Notice that when similar pictures appeared from Ferguson, Washington got busy talking about at least perhaps maybe talking about the wisdom of selling military-grade hardware to local police. (This might even change, if a sufficient number of Americans remember the images long enough to continue talking about the problem.) Remember: my forebear used his government-issued rifle to kill the people he was sent to protect.

In the television era, oppression has been for the most part more isolated—a shooting here, a Rodney-King-style beating there. Sudden, overt, isolated, and constant.

And usually not displayable on TV.

The smartphone, however, may change that. The new technology brought about the Arab Spring, and it might—it could—begin to dismantle the current US system of black oppression.

Violence against this systematic oppression is not the answer. Neither is a brief paroxysm of national outrage. The violence will stop only when we the people catch the acts and put them on television and across the web.

Racists don’t like to see themselves in action on TV. (Or, rather—they don’t like to be seen by liberals on TV.)

I can’t speak for the people across the river in Missouri, but this white guy, a descendent of Confederates and white supremacists, would like to see an end to the violence and oppression.

Marcus Garvey, commenting on the East St. Louis Massacre, perhaps said it best:
“This is no time for fine words, but a time to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy.”

It seems to me that the outpouring of emotion on the death of Robin Williams was not only for a beloved celebrity, although goodness knows he was that and more. His struggle with mental illness and addiction became an opportunity for the rest of us to talk about our struggles—with our own illness, or the illness of those we love, with our thoughts of suicide or our experiences of the aftermath when someone we love has taken their life. It all hits so close to home, and there are so few opportunities to talk about the pain that so often remains hidden.

Which makes me think about how we respond to the horrors going on in Ferguson, MO. Now, I certainly live nowhere near Missouri—I’m culturally and geographically thousands of miles away, in the liberal, integrated, diverse San Francisco Bay. A handful of BART stops away from where Oscar Grant was killed not so long ago. So close to home.

Now, you may think that “those people” are asking for police in riot gear—they’re rioting, aren’t they? But if the phrase “those people” has floated through your brain, then it is time to sit down and think. Because it is entirely possible that you have never personally experienced the police as a threat to your safety, rather than the essence of those who create safety. It’s possible that you have never been followed in a store or pulled over while driving because of the color of your skin. It’s possible that you have never considered your skin color to be a factor in getting a job or hailing a cab or renting a house. And if, like me, you have lived in the world of that privileged possibility, then the rage of “those people” in Ferguson, MO might seem very distant.

One of the common threads that I have noticed in the discussions of depression in the wake of Robin Williams’s suicide has been people who are or have been clinically depressed explaining that if you haven’t been there, you don’t know. You don’t know what it is like to have the disordered thoughts, the black hole sucking you down. And so you might be tempted to cheer the depressed person up, or blame them for giving in when they have so much to live for. Because you haven’t been there, and you don’t know.

And if, like me, you live within the comfortable bounds of white privilege, you might be tempted to think that the folks in Ferguson, or the growing number of people who are supporting their protest, should move on, should behave better, should treat the police as the friends and community supporters that you know them to be. Because you haven’t been there, and you don’t know.

But, as with mental illness, the fact that you might not suffer from it personally doesn’t mean that it dwells only in some distant land. Of course, it is possible that you have no family members of color, no friends, no co-workers—although I would find it hard to imagine. Certainly, in any case, you belong to this human family that we are all called to love and care for.

If it doesn’t feel close to home—the assumption that Black men are armed and dangerous, the notion that Black people need to be controlled and subdued, the premise that police in riot gear are here to “keep the peace”—if the reality of racism feels like someone else’s problem, or even a “race card” that people of color use to cover up their own inadequacies, well then it might be time to sit down for a moment. It might be time to remember that what you personally have experienced is not all that there is. It might be time to listen. It might be time to remember that in a world that we all build together, every struggle for justice is close to home.

When a toaster keeps producing burnt toast, we don’t blame the bread—we fix the toaster.  When a dishwasher won’t wash the dishes, we don’t blame the dishes—we fix the dishwasher.

Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Ezell Ford (a young man in L.A. yesterday).  All African-American.  All unarmed.  And all dead.  The drum beat goes on.

In 2012, police, security guards, or self-appointed vigilantes extra-judicially killed at least 313 African-Americans.  In other words, at least every 28 hours, an African-American person was killed by someone purporting to uphold justice, but acting outside the legal process.

In a country where African-Americans and white people use and sell drugs at about the same rates, African-Americans are about 3 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and then to receive significantly longer sentences, compared to white people.  This difference in arrests and sentencing means that African-Americans make up only 13.1% of the US population, but 40% of the prison population.

In Ferguson, Missouri, African-Americans make up 67% of the population, but 5.7% of the police department.  Journalist Zoe Carpenter says, in “The Nation,” that, “in 2013, 92% of searches and 86% of traffic stops in Ferguson involved black people.”  She goes on, “The skewed numbers don’t correspond at all to the levels of crime.  While one three whites was found carrying illegal weapons or drugs, only one in five blacks had contraband.”

In 2014, open-carry white people can hang out at Chipotle with automatic weapons, but Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager, can have his hands in the air, saying, “Don’t shoot,” and he will still end up dead—one is seen as a threat, one is not.

Our country promises liberty and justice for all.  But we’re failing that standard.  It’s not one person, or one event.  It’s not even one police department, or one city.  We’re all part of it–my prayers tonight are with and for everyone in Ferguson, Missouri.  For peace and strength in the hearts of police officers, community leaders, clergy and teachers, mothers and fathers, children and teens.  This isn’t about who’s the bad guy and who’s the good guy–I’ve talked with enough police officers to know how stressful their jobs can be, and how the stories of how they help in the neighborhoods don’t make the news.  It’s about a statistically predictable pattern.  About a system across the country that’s been producing injustice: different outcomes for the same behavior, depending on the color of your skin.

This is hard for a white person to see.  Because, for people who look like me, things seem to work fine.  It’s my lived experience that the system is working, that things are fair, and that the difference is in individual behavior.  But we know that our individual experience of things is not the same thing as the facts of the world.  That’s why it’s important to back up and look at the patterns, the outcomes, that the system produces like clockwork.

As protests in Ferguson, Missouri go on tonight, a lot of my white brothers and sisters are focused on how, in the short-term, to restore order.  But the real question is how, in the long-term, to restore justice.

Trying to listen here.  Trying to learn.  Trying to see how I, and we, might help our country live up to its promise.