First, let me preface my remarks by saying that while it is not my intention to offend anyone with ideas and beliefs different from my own; I think that in this place at least, it must be possible to propose new ideas and visions, and in so doing, demonstrate what may be the flaws and vulnerabilities of prevailing wisdom. This is the Unitarian way, as it is the Humanist way.
Comfortable?
Well hang on… because we are going places. Despite our preferences, there is no such thing as a homebody. We are better traveled than we know!
At this very moment, each of us is going off in at least 5 different directions at the same time. Were it not for our curious attraction to the stabilizing illusions of gravity, we might be somewhat unnerved to discover that we are not only going off in many directions at once, but we are doing so at tremendous velocities.
Consider:
We are rotating with the Earth on its axis at 1040 miles per hour. This axis wobbles to create the seasons, and tilts back and forth at a pedestrian 1/3rd mile per hour. But hold on: we are moving around our star at 65,000 miles per hour. And old Sol is moving around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy at the breakneck speed of 486,000 miles per hour, carrying us along for the ride.
This is only the twentieth time the sun has completed this trip on the galactic merry-go-round. Meanwhile, the Galaxy itself has traveled a distance of over 12 billion light-years since it’s explosive birth at the big bang. But for all the distances we have covered, we have only gone from one empty point in space to another – not very satisfying.
Indeed, it is not the length, speed, or even the destination of our journey that contains the heart of human meaning; rather, it is what each of us does in our short segment along the way. Many of us started with certain illusions about the ends to which our life’s energy might be spent. For many, this goal is realized in what some believe to be… the good life.
What makes a good life? What makes life good?
Let’s begin with the basic functioning organism. There are two essential things an organism must do; keep itself alive, and reproduce. In doing so, it’s particular and peculiar morphology contributes to keeping the ecological niche the organism occupies, by virtue of its feeding and mating habits, in proper balance. It’s biological, chemical, and behavioral presence in the world forms the connective tissue that truly binds, in an intimate way, the web of all life.
At the substantial risk of being accused of being a dreadful specieist, I am going to say that of all the animals and plants known to us, we are the most significant. We are the one organism that is capable of knowing about everything else; and creatively acting upon that knowledge. But though we may be as Shakespeare phrased it , “the paragon of the animals” we may yet ask, who are we, or better, who am I, to belong to such a company? One observable fact is that we act as great cognitive filters, swimming against the onrushing stream of experience. And always learning, knowing and remembering. As the late Carl Sagan realized so passionately, “we are the universe knowing itself.” This is our ecological job, our niche; the realization of our potential.
And while the enfeebled imagination of many religions would have us believe that our qualified destiny consists of an infinite state of passive, drug-like euphoria; an intoxication with the vision of the deity, I find such a vaporous immortality to be the antithesis of what it means to be human.
We are not the pets of some bemused god, whose summary end is an infinity of stroking. As the exalted species, we have the potential to be ourselves, the creator of new worlds. Ours is not merely a voyage of discovery, but a laboratory for the creation of new variations on the theme of what it is to be.
In what way are we this most exalted species? We see all around us everyday the evidences of discontent, desperation, and disquietude even unto war. More than half the world’s population lives out their brief lives in disease, squalor, ignorance, and general wretchedness that on the whole seems to give the lie to our vaunted political ambitions.
There are those among us who regularly point to our communal short sightedness, our greed, our propensity to gullibility, our vulnerability to the cry of the jingoist and the appeal of the charlatan. The world’s governments too often give ample testimony to the success of opportunists, and the uncritical acceptance of pernicious nationalism and authoritarian regimes. But knowing these things as most here do, is not to allow ourselves to be won over to paralyzing cynicism. Only a long view of history will disclose that the cause of enlightenment, the advance of knowledge, and the refinements of a sharpened sense of ethical morality have just begun to play a role in our world.
Politics can be defined as the attempt to answer the perennial question, how shall we live. It is the vehicle that allows us to make real the vision of the good life; the vision that begins with each of us, and ends with all of us.
It is not enough to notice the comparative improvements wrought by historic struggle; we must also come to praise our intelligence, our love of beauty, our capacity for understanding, and the empathy that enables us to be social animals. We as individuals may bask in the immortal glory of our collective accomplishments, even as we too often avert our eyes from the destructive consequences of our collective disunity.
Indeed, such disunity is the source of nearly all conflict in the modern world. Our lack of empathy or even knowledge, of the extremities of the human condition on a global scale, our inability to find ourselves in the lives of others; these are the motors that generate terrorism and the inevitable repressions that follow.
Let me revisit that phrase – to find ourselves in the lives of others. What does it mean? It means that as with the Roman orator, Cicero, no human life is alien to us. From the best of us to the worst, all human beings participate in the spectrum that encompasses humanity. Hitler, Stalin, Ted Bundy, and Osama bin Laden are as much part of who we are, as Albert Einstien, Harriet Tubman, and Jimmy Carter. It does us no service to pretend that some people are strange “evil ones” who cannot be understood. We must understand them, if we are to prevent the malicious damage they do to us.
Other people are held up to us as “role models” by virtue of some great accomplishment. Often these are sports figures, or military heroes. But these are accomplishments too often created by passing fashion, or the inflammations of a patriotic moment. But we must eventually come to recognize that we are ourselves both the heroes and villains of our own life. The peculiar historical circumstance that created the vicious dictator, or the heroic savior are but the extended vices and virtues that exist in all of us.
Notice the pathetic fate of the once swaggering Saddam Hussein, trapped in his rabbit hole, full of fleas, heavy of beard, childlike in his confusion and fear. Here is the beast now fallen. He is at once contemptible and the object of sympathy. But the success that was once his was predicated entirely on the human vulnerabilities that are the ground of every tyranny and that exist in every life. There are no exemptions; we could find ourselves living in the same conditions, unless we fully engage the critical thinking that must underwrite the success of every democracy. The authoritarian temptation lies forever in the future of every unwary people.
Why do we, and I mean here we, humanity, not just Americans, find ourselves complicit in such a regime? Perhaps it is because the world has not made as much progress in political and social life, as it has in the extraordinary scientific and technological revolutions that have catapulted us into the commanding heights of ability in manipulating the natural and material world.
For as much as we have lovingly traced the orbits of electrons around protons, and unraveled the alphabet of life, we still have little or no agreement on the nature of our most intimate asset, our own humanity.
The meaning of humanity
Humanity is not a thing we are born with, but rather an acquired state of being. Our species was born of a long, painful, evolutionary struggle to become human; for without it, the naked ape, possessing no claw, nor length of tooth, nor speed of escape, would surely die. In a world of hungry predators, we are as animals, poorly equipped to be anything other than prey.
But by virtue of our social nature, and the historically developed structures and institutions that perpetuate it, we have come not only to survive, but to dominate the natural world. To be a member of the human family is to be only partially human at best. Our basic animal is not human, but we are made so by the process of humanization, enculturation, and education that transforms us almost invisibly into what we are at this moment. It is only the deceit of memory that allows us to think otherwise.
Our eyes have seen out almost to the edge of time, and inward to trace and manipulate individual atoms. We have rearranged the very topography of the earth; turning deserts to gardens and too often, vice versa.
And for what reason do we do these things? For many of us it may be defined simply as the quest for happiness – the realization of the good life. But for so long as the “Good” life remains only an individual attainment rather than a social condition, than the existence of such a state will diminish into the distant horizon of unrealized possibility. For how can the fullness of happiness be possible in a world of anxiety and dread nourished by terrorism, war, repression, and exploitation? It cannot. It cannot.
How do we resolve this dilemma? A famous philosopher once said that humankind poses no problems for itself that it cannot solve. We already know what we must do. The contradictions and incompatibilities between our habits of life, and our aspirations has sharpened our awareness of the social and economic inequities which gave them birth.
Of one thing we may be certain; the survival and the triumph of our species is utterly contingent on our ability to fall in love with it. Through all the sadness, the regret, the joy, and the unreserved energy thrown into a thousand misbegotten causes and enduring struggles for justice, we may come to see the infancy of our humanity finally cross the threshold of maturity into the dawn of self knowledge.
There is not much that single individuals can do to immediately ameliorate the conditions that that degrade our present and limit our future. But one thing all of us can do is to consciously undertake to cultivate and popularize what I call, Humanist love. A love that is not a command from a deity, nor an ethical duty; but a love that arises spontaneously from an educated appreciation of the experience of our species. Literature, art, film, and especially music carry in their narratives, the common threads that allow us to unite with people in every place, and in every epoch. This experience resonates with our own innermost feelings, and together with an understanding of science and history, allows us to embrace as our own, the struggle of our people, of our precious humanity, and to make that struggle truly our own.
Thank you.