being mindful of the big picture

Even when I was working as an ordained minister, I was more interested in the discipline of theological reflection as a way of framing questions than of providing answers. It seemed to me that the primary value in a lot of serious theology (as opposed to ordinary folk theology) was that it provided something other than easy answers. I didn't ignore the extent to which official theological doctrine was about maintaining power over people. I have to admit that I wasn't above using my arcane knowledge of theology to augment the power I had over laity. Nonetheless, I was mainly interested in theology as a body of work that could be mined for helpful resources. It was less about the content than it was about the search itself.

So I don't believe that becoming trained to think theologically was a total waste of time. Being practiced in posing big questions is somewhat rare these days. Almost everybody is a specialist. Few know or even much care about how each specialty fits into the big picture. Theology, prior to the scientific revolution, used to have the role of determining how everything fit together. Today, it is the physicists who are the most serious contenders for the role of probing the biggest questions that can be imagined. They have the most sound knowledge about cosmology. They are the ones who are working on what they call, in all seriousness, "a theory of everything".

I have my doubts about the possibility of formulating a theory of everything, not because of the limitations of human beings, but instead because the ultimate secrets of life are probably not reducible to a single theoretical construct. It seems to me that the attributes that are most helpful in the search for answers to life's deepest and most challenging questions are open-mindedness, honesty, humility, and being prepared for mind-blowing, life-changing surprises. I'm not wanting to go back to the mystification within which theology has traditionally been shrouded; however, I do believe that we would do well to restore mystery to a position of centrality. 

humanizing democracy

There is more to freedom of speech than individuals having the right to express themselves without being persecuted. While personal freedom is important, the main point of freedom of speech is democracy's need for a diversity of perspectives. We especially need the viewpoints and the active participation of those who are systematically excluded because of their socio-economic status, their ethnic background, their race, their gender, their sexual orientation, their religious beliefs, their lack of religious beliefs, or their outside-the-mainstream political views or because their farsighted, visionary ideas are not yet widely understood and thus might seem to be "out in left field".

The challenge is not just about how to overcome the stupefying effects of the herd instinct; it is perhaps even more about how to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. Most of our inability to hear distinct voices amidst the din of the crowd has to do with information overload. Democracy was far simpler when the criterion to be fully enfranchised was being a property-owning, educated white male. And actually, it is questionable whether the governmental design we inherited from the brilliant but hardly representative group of individuals who originally pioneered the basic idea of democracy is adequate to meet the needs of a fully representative democracy.

We have three options. First, we can just carry on with what we've been doing and thereby continue getting the results we've been getting. Second, we can create work-arounds whereby an activated citizenry can overcome the limitations of our current governance model. Or third, we can go back to the drawing board and invent democracy 2.0. In a perfect world, option three would be best, but obviously, we don't live in a perfect world. And actually, in order to get to option three, we would have to go through option two in order to institute the necessary reforms. Our work is cut out for us. 

humanizing civilization

Civilization inspires a lot of ambivalence. Some even believe that we would be far better off without it. Others just believe it is a necessary evil. It supposedly prevents us from the ideal, which is to live in a natural state; however, what that natural state would be is usually not especially informed by actual evidence from anthropology and evolutionary biology. 

What we call civilization was made possible by the Agricultural Revolution, which is thought to have occurred about 12,000 years ago. While that seems like a long time ago, it is not long enough ago for what has happened since then to have had much influence on human evolution. During the vast majority of the time between the emergence of the human species and now, our ancestors lived in hunter-gatherer bands, so having some understanding of what life was likely to have been like for those ancestors from whom we inherited our genetic predispositions would provide the insights into what our natural state might be. 

Evidence about hunter-gatherers past and present demonstrates that even before anything that would be considered civilization, human life was not what seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes called “a war of all against all”. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is far from ruthlessly individualistic. The very survival of hunter-gatherers depends on cooperating with each other. They might be suspicious of and even hostile toward outsiders, but they are deeply bonded with and intensely loyal toward members of their own tight-knit group. And while they might be “uncivilized”, they aren’t without culture. 

Our natural state is to be participants in a culture that fosters caring, generosity, and cooperation. The basic idea of being civilized ought to be to enlarge the group with whom we are caring, generous, and cooperative. The stakes are much higher. War is no longer fought with bows and arrows against the neighboring tribe. We’ve now had two “world wars”, and the next world war would likely mean the end of human civilization as we know it. Nonetheless, we can’t go back to some mythical natural state. Our best option is become more civilized. That is the only path to the recovery of humanity. 

reframing dissatisfaction

A central question in being human is what to do with dissatisfaction. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but the best strategy is usually a blend of finding satisfaction when it's possible and practicing patience when it's not immediately available. I might not always be able to directly scratch the actual itch I'm feeling, but I can always find something that provides some degree of satisfaction. If satisfaction is elusive, I might need to shift my focus, dig deeper, or go further.

Potential satisfactions might be right under my nose, or I might need to put some effort into breaking out of whatever it is that is limiting my search. There is a good chance that I'm making it more complicated than it needs to be. Human beings are more intellectually and psychologically complicated than other animals. Our power of imagination can be an affliction as well as an asset. Sometimes our restlessness is of our own making. We often don't really know what we want, or what we want is incapable of providing any actual satisfaction.

Distinctively human attributes have enabled us to enjoy significant success in the Darwinian survival game, but they can also create problems for us. It is possible to have an overly gloomy view of this. The Christian doctrine of original sin is not the only example of that. A thoroughly secular and objective assessment of the human capacity to do great harm to other living things, to each other, and to ourselves can easily lead to the belief that the planet would be better off without us. However, since eliminating the human menace through collective suicide doesn't feel like a very good solution, we are morally obligated to do what we can to improve the situation. But how do we do that?

Some would say that our only hope is divine intervention. They might argue that the main problem is that society has moved away from God and from traditional morality, even though there is no chance of ever finding agreement on just what society returning to God and to traditional morality would even look like. Or they might believe that the best path is to hasten the apocalypse. Thus increasing the likelihood of human demise through nuclear annihilation or radical climate change seems like a good idea to them. For the rest of us though, such talk leads away from rather than toward an actual solution.

There is a reason that society has become increasingly secular in modern times. As the world has grown smaller and cultures are bumping up against each other, often leading to pointless and devastating wars, it has become more and more clear that the global public arena needs to be a space that is judiciously neutral with regard to religion and matters of private morality. That doesn't mean that society would become amoral. It is just that we make a distinction between, on the one hand, morality that is in the public interest (like "thou shalt not kill") and, on the other hand, morality that falls strictly into the realm of personal values.

What we have in common with each other is our humanity. That has to be the basis of public morality, and while some don't have a lot of confidence in the human capacity for good, it is our only hope. Only if we are able to feel empathy and act compassionately can we make any progress toward peace and general wellbeing. It is also the most reliable way to still our restless hearts, since much of our dissatisfaction is caused directly and indirectly by our repressed awareness of troubling realities. We can't solve the problem of human suffering, but we can each find what is in our hearts that can contribute to its mitigation.

rebirth

If being born again is good, why would we limit ourselves to a once-and-for-all experience of it? Why can't we be reborn every day even? Every new day requires a renewal of outlook so that we don't limit ourselves to old beliefs about ourselves and about what we are capable of. Being open to new possibilities requires that we make active choices to be welcoming when opportunities present themselves. Allowing inertia to make choices for us is to be asleep and barely alive. We need to bestir ourselves. We need to disrupt the status quo. We need to question what we've been told. We need to question inadequately examined beliefs we have adopted. 

If being born again is to have any meaning at all, shouldn't it introduce something new instead of merely leading to compliant acceptance of an outdated belief system? We celebrate the new life that children bring into our midst, so why is it often so hard for us to embrace that gift of new life and see it for what it is? If being born again would actually resemble literal birth, shouldn't it be bursting with new possibilities instead of merely being about becoming obedient to authority?

There is an unfortunate attitude toward children that often accompanies traditional religious beliefs. That attitude takes many forms, but at its essence it is about caring more about getting them to fit in than about truly appreciating who they are and the freshness their lively presence introduces. Some Christians talk about the necessity of breaking the will of their children. That approach to parenting is consistent with the doctrine of original sin, which teaches that human beings are born sinful and that our only chance for being saved from our sinfulness and its consequences is through the grace God.

I have all kinds of problems with the idea of original sin, but the point I want to make here is that we should be less concerned with taming children and more with fostering their giftedness. We have more to learn from them than they have to learn from us. We can teach them how to do some things that are generally helpful, but they keep us on our toes and remind us of what is most important.

Left to our own devises, most of us as adults naturally choose what we are used to over disruptive change. We equate wisdom with prudence. We get more conservative as we grow older. I find that rather sad. It feels like acquiescing to a so-called life that is dead to itself. How wise is that? How smart is it to deprive ourselves of the best of what life has to offer? What do we gain by avoiding risks at all costs if the main result is dying a thousand figurative deaths before arriving at the literal death that we fear so much.

However, rejecting the life that comes with each present moment in order to protect a life that we will never really live is less about conscious choice than it is about seemingly innocuous (and perhaps even ostensibly sensible) failures to show up. Which brings me back to the theme of being born again. Most of us would benefit from being born again if that is understood as a return to a childlike relationship with life in all its fullness. 

toward a warmer secularism

Many secular-minded individuals are rather hypocritical in the way they demand tolerance but often don't practice it themselves. Religion per se is not the enemy. Making religion the enemy only adds to the problem. The problem is that modern society tends to be inhospitable. Its being inhospitable is the inevitable byproduct of cultural collisions. We are thrust together with people we don't understand. Many of their values are alien and even contrary to ours. It is hard to be sympathetic toward cultures that condone so-called "honor killing" for example.

Secularists obviously don't want to make de-conversion a mirror image of conversion. What we can do though is provide viable alternatives. Secularism tends to be relatively impoverished emotionally. It is easy to understand why so many otherwise quite sensible people feel drawn to religion. I believe that if there were more emotionally warm secular alternatives, religion would lose much of its draw.

We are heirs to a splendid legacy that we have inherited from brave pioneers who were guided by a vision of a world that would be guided by reality-based reasoning. Many of those pioneers underestimated the difficulties their successors would encounter. They had their own difficulties with their superstitious contemporaries, but they believed that reason would eventually triumph once enough people began to get a taste of freedom. Theirs was a worthy vision that can still inspire us even though we seem further away from its realization than ever. 

The revolutionary thinkers whose legacy is constitutional democracy understood some of the inherent dangers and thus put safeguards in place, but who among them could have imagined their baby growing up to choose Donald Trump as its president. We seem to have made a wrong turn somewhere along the way, but I don't think we did it on purpose. Perhaps the greatest factor in our ending up where we are is backlash.

It might seem strange that there are a lot of people who honestly believe that political correctness is the source of all our problems, but it is not so strange if we view it in context. It is a solipsistic conflation of feelings and beliefs. They feel put down, and they, not wholly without warrant, believe that their being put down says everything about the extent to which democracy has been undermined.

Their (solipsistic) inability to imagine democracy as anything other than people like them getting their way creates a no-win situation for everybody. They would rather steer the ship into the rocks as one big "f*** you" than accept the imperatives of a culturally pluralistic democracy, and everybody is paying the price now and probably will for years to come.

How do we recover from this cultural, social, and political crisis? How do we calm the storm created by backlash? How do we recapture a vision of a truly inclusive civil society? What is the message that we can put on the banners that we would raise high?

an open heart

The driving force behind Recovering Humanity is a desire to connect some seemingly random dots by being more aware and showing up emotionally, to generate some goodwill that can contribute to a meaningful and sustainable basis for coming together around common interests and goals, to tease out a more intellectually honest and viscerally rewarding set of understandings, and to articulate a coherent vision for what we can accomplish. It involves two moves. First, there is a move toward inhabiting that by which we know ourselves to be human, individually and collectively. That involves becoming mindful of and fully present to what is going on around us filtered through an awakened conscience, cherishing and nurturing what our awareness stirs inside us, even as though it can be disturbing, responding, and actively engaging. In other words, wake up, show up, and step up. The second move is to become concerned about efficacy, to do what we can to promote individual and collective well being, and to pay attention to the actual results of our efforts.

The common denominator is the heart. From the heart come not only the inclination to be compassionate and the inspiration for spontaneous generosity that is ennobling, enriching, and uplifting, but also psychological attributes that enable us to respond with rugged resolve, audacity, insistence on good faith participation in win/win solutions, mutual encouragement by which we bring out the best in each other and replace vicious circles with sustainable virtuous circles, painstaking attention to detail, adaptive responsiveness, and perseverance. Our words courage and encourage come from the French word for heart. To have courage or to be encouraged essentially means to be heartened. Recovering Humanity is about finding our hearts and unleashing creativity, confidence, fortitude, and the capability to respond constructively even though the ever present conflicting demands from multiple directions take a toll on us. It is easy to be discouraged or disheartened, but if we can look beyond the endemic confusion and rise above the inevitable clashes, we can bring our highest aspirations into sharp focus and do what it takes to see them through to their fulfillment. 

Our only impediments are our excuses, the blame games we play, the relentless equivocation and prevarication by which we deflect attention from the obvious and shift the focus away from what we don’t want to admit, our attempts to buy our way out of being inconvenienced by reality and to escape what we know in our hearts, and any of the other abundant, familiar defense mechanisms we so ingeniously construct, anything that gets in the way of radical self-actualization, everything we use to hide from the best that life has to offer, what we fearfully cling to, our favorite certainties, our core assumptions, our most cherished sources of identity, our most indispensable beliefs, that which we habitually rely on to provide meaning and purpose, anything that would prevent us from showing up with our shoelaces tied, ready for the time of our lives, willing to be transported into unimaginable possibilities. 

In short, it is even more deeply challenging than we might have initially imagined. We can achieve the kind of personal wellbeing that has been a central concern for philosophers at least as far back as Aristotle, but “the good life” (what Aristotle called eudemonia) is more philosophically and psychologically complicated than having a happy-go-lucky attitude and following the line of least resistance. It is a life that is not available to the faint of heart. There is no better life, but it comes with a price – vulnerability, exposure, risk, and perhaps being stigmatized with labels like “uncool”, “foolish”, “annoying”, “holier than thou”, “bleeding heart idealists”, and “dangerous radicals”. Transformational freedom, latent strengths, and deeper satisfactions beckon, but they will remain forever out of reach unless we can begin to experience the world around us with a welcoming spirit, however modest, tentative, and awkward the willingness to venture out of our cocoons might be. We miss the mark because our interest, our imagination, our sense of purpose, our passion, and our thirst for experiences that inspire us have gone to sleep and because we actively thwart and jettison opportunities directly and indirectly. 

Our default settings inure us to shutting down, shutting up, closing in on ourselves, walling out whatever makes us uncomfortable or that challenges us, being closed to different points of view, slamming the door on what doesn’t fit into our limited understandings, shutting out what we are afraid of, and locking away anyone who creates trouble for us. What all that banishing, shielding, blocking, and locking down amounts to is a lot of missing out on life simply because our habitually hopeless, defeatist mindset wards off any possibility for an awakening of that within us which is most vital, quintessential human qualities like curiosity, spontaneity, ingenuity, courage, inherent dignity, a sense of pride, and a capacity for joy. An awakening of all this and much more is inalienably ours if only we are willing to reopen, reexamine, and reconsider the forbidden, the unthinkable, the abandoned, and the forgotten and to re-approach with open minds, open eyes, open ears, open hearts, open lips, and open arms what we have rejected.