A New Normality: A Culture of War

The events of September 11, 2001, turned the world upside down – at least from the American perspective. Almost immediately, commentary asked, when would there be a return to normality; or would there ever be normality again? Normality of course, referred to the relative halcyon days of our common life before that fateful day.


Ten years ago, I remember thinking about this hoped for, so-called return to normality, in part, because normality is one of those words I stumble on. Back in the day when I studied history, I learned about one of the great linguistic faux pas by an American president. In his 1920 inaugural speech, President Warren G. Harding coined the phrase a “Return to Normalcy," referring to the way things were before the first world war. At the time normalcy wasn't an accepted word.  Through the years, for some perverse reason, I haven't been able to keep the two words straight, though that distinction no longer matters, because normalcy has become an acceptable word alongside the normality.

The decade of the 1920s – the decade of the lost generation; of women's suffrage, short skirts, and bobbed hair; of jazz, prohibition, and speakeasies; and, of course, the great crash – established new standards of what was normal.  There was to be no returning, rather a radical reordering.

History, for the sake of convenience, often breaks time into decades.  In an ironic sense, the “Return to Normalcy” is sometimes used to describe the 1920's.

I wonder, what will the decade of our new millennium be known as?  It surely seems a significant decade.

After a sober review of the past 10 years, the decade 2001-2011 appears to be, at the very least, a time, of transition, relative to the narrative arc of the American experience. That arc is comprised of a number of bands. There's a social/cultural component. There's an economic component.  There's a political component, including human rights. There's an international component, also including human rights. Most, if not all of these components, can be interpreted as converging in the decline of America.

There are clear nodal points: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; wars with Afghanistan and Iraq; hurricane Katrina, the perfect storm, and the tragedy of New Orleans; the bursting of the housing bubble and with it the meltdown of the US economy; the melancholy years of what is now known as the “great recession;” and a populist response against all aspects of government known as the tea party movement, that aggravated a red and blue divide in American politics, as well as highlighted what is now being called class warfare.

With all this in mind, rather than a return to pre-9/11 normality, we have a dramatically reformed normality.  Bill Schulz mentioned aspects of this new normality in his Christian Science Monitor piece, that includes the acceptance of the term American gulag, the humiliation and torture of prisoners of war, a pre-emptive war, and the assassination of an American citizen deemed to be a terrorist. 

And of course, the new normality includes the tacit acceptance of war.  It was decade of varied wars.

Commentators generally agree that the term “the war on terror,” from the outset promised to be protracted, against a nefarious enemy, with, at best, vague objectives.  Rashly, uttered, the “war on terror” almost as quickly lost most of its cachet.  Though they are being drawn down, we continue to wage hot wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to mixed reviews.

History will emphasize the Bush administration's policy of war (and the Obama administration continuing it), from the immediate rhetoric of September 11, 2001, including the open-ended declaration of war against terror, beginning with attacking the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan; through the propaganda against Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction that resulted in the invasion of Iraq; to the surges that sought to counter the insurgents first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan.

At the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, there is a program named the Eisenhower Research Project.  The Eisenhower Research Project is a new, non-partisan, non-profit, scholarly initiative dedicated to studying the effects of militarization on U.S. society, democracy and foreign policy. The Project derives its purpose from President Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address, in which he warned of the 'unwarranted influence' of the military-industrial complex and appealed for an 'alert and knowledgeable citizenry' as the only force able to balance the often contrasting demands of security and liberty in the democratic state.

The Eisenhower Research Project assembled a team that included economists, anthropologists, political scientists, legal experts, and a physician to do this analysis—to determine the “cost” of ten years of war. 

Here are the project’s findings:

While we know how many US soldiers have died in the wars (just over 6000), what is startling is what we don’t know about the levels of injury and illness in those who have returned from the wars.  New disability claims continue to pour into the VA, with 550,000 just through last fall.  Many deaths and injuries among US contractors have not been identified. 

At least 137,000 civilians have died and more will die in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan as a result of the fighting at the hands of all parties to the conflict.

The armed conflict in Pakistan, which the U.S. helps the Pakistani military fight by funding, equipping and training them, has taken as many lives as the conflict in neighboring Afghanistan.

Putting together the conservative numbers of war dead, in uniform and out, brings the total to 225,000.

Millions of people have been displaced indefinitely and are living in grossly inadequate conditions.  The current number of war refugees and displaced persons -- 7,800,000 -- is equivalent to all of the people of Connecticut and Kentucky fleeing their homes.

The wars have been accompanied by erosions in civil liberties at home and human rights violations abroad.

The human and economic costs of these wars will continue for decades, some costs not peaking until mid-century. Many of the wars’ costs are invisible to Americans, buried in a variety of budgets, and so have not been counted or assessed.  For example, while most people think the Pentagon war appropriations are equivalent to the wars’ budgetary costs, the true numbers are twice that and the full economic cost of the wars much larger yet. Conservatively estimated, the war bills already paid and obligated to be paid are $3.2 trillion in constant dollars. A more reasonable estimate puts the number at nearly $4 trillion.

As with former US wars, the costs of paying for veterans’ care into the future will be a sizable portion of the full costs of the war.

The ripple effects on the U.S. economy have also been significant, including job loss and interest rate increases, and those effects have been underappreciated.

While it was promised that the US invasions would bring democracy to both countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, both continue to rank low in global rankings of political freedom, with warlords continuing to hold power in Afghanistan with US support, and Iraqi communities more segregated today than before by gender and ethnicity as a result of the war.

Serious and compelling alternatives to war were scarcely considered in the aftermath of 9/11 or in the discussion about war against Iraq.  Some of those alternatives are still available to the U.S.

There are many costs of these wars that we have not yet been able to quantify and assess.  With our limited resources, we focused on U.S. spending, U.S. and allied deaths, and the human toll in the major war zones, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.  There is still much more to know and understand about how all those affected by the wars have had their health, economies, and communities altered by the decade of war, and what solutions exist for the problems they face as a result of the wars’ destruction.

So, the new normal includes a permanent war culture, out of sight and out of mind of most Americans.  I believe these wars were ill-advised and ginned up.  (Remember the so-called neo-conservatives’ line of rhetoric ten years ago?)  They have had questionable positive affect.  (I’m of the mind they have had many and varied negative consequences.)  They have cost us a treasure and will continue to do so, at last 3.2, perhaps 4 trillion dollars.

The Eisenhower Project recommends that it’s not too late to implement more beneficial policies. 

Remember the Chinese proverb from an earlier reading:  “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” …  The second grave is ours. We dug it ourselves. The question now is: do we have to lie in it?

The Gannets: Excellence in Our Common World 2011

I & M Canal, Morris

Some years ago I offered a yearly sermon series called “the annual vulgarity awards.”  I would rant a little about four or five egregiously ugly or corrosive aspects of our common culture.  But I tired of that series; and I also felt, I was, ironically, contributing to a negative social climate.

So I flipped the series 180 degrees and developed a yearly sermon series on what I find to be excellent in our common life.  I immediately named this new series The William Channing Gannett Awards in honor of the first minister of this congregation, whose signature phrase “domestication of the infinite” suited my sense of the source and result of excellence.

Mr. Gannett was a remarkable man with an impeccable Unitarian pedigree.  His father, the Rev. Ezra Stiles Gannett, was the first President of the American Unitarian Association, 1825.  Ezra Stiles Gannett was also the associate minister at the famed Federal Street Church in Boston, where the saintly founder of American Unitarianism William Ellery Channing was for senior minister.  Dr. Channing was William Channing Gannett’s godfather, hence the middle name Channing.

Mr. Gannett was a modernist compared to his godfather and father, who were Christian Rationalists.  Young William was influenced by Transcendentalism’s more expansive vision of religion; and when he made his way west, he joined the Unity Men of the Western Unitarian Conference, whose motto “the unity of all things” summarized their broad view of religion.  The Unity Men also promoted ethics as the proper focus of religion, in which character (ingenuousness) blended with what we now call social justice.

William Channing Gannett wrote the great compromise, “The Things We Hold in Common” that allowed the Christians and the emergent not-just or more-than Christian liberals to stay in one Unitarian denomination.    His essay, “The House Beautiful,” inspired the magazine of the same name thanks to the efforts of his good friend Frank Lloyd Wright.  And his plan for our Church-Home has shaped generations of Hinsdale Unitarians over one hundred, twenty years.

Before I present this year’s awards, I want you to think about Mr. Gannett’s signature phrase “domestication of the infinite.”  The ideals we recognize (and you might see them in terms of the great categories of the good, the true, and the beautiful), if they are our ideals, are necessarily compelling—so compelling that we must implement them in our self and our world.  This is a process of domestication—of household and home infusing our larger world.  The doors open in and welcome the worthy; the doors then open out and infuse the world with the warmth, intimacy, and values of the home and the home-like.

I’ve been greatly influenced by William Channing Gannett, through his writings and through his sculpture in wood, brick, and stone, this Church-Home, that he was instrumental in designing.  In his honor and memory I once again lift up the excellent in our common world.

The I and M Canal

I have neglected an obvious choice, The Illinois and Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor.  Here’s a summary of the Corridor from the official website:

The Illinois & Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor is a 100 mile long cultural park between Chicago and LaSalle/Peru. It is a geographic area of about 322,000 acres within the counties of Cook, DuPage, Will, Grundy and LaSalle. On August 24, 1984, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation establishing the region as the nation's first National Heritage Corridor. It thereby recognized the historic importance of this region and the waterway that connected Lake Michigan and the Illinois River. The goal of the Corridor is to preserve, protect and interpret its rich natural and cultural history while fostering economic growth in the region. The Corridor is not owned or governed by a single authority. Its creation involved the partnership of federal, state, and local governments in cooperation with private industry and interest groups. The corridor is an on-going partnership between the public and private sectors created to achieve a successful mixture of preservation, public use and industrial activity.

I've known about the I and M national historic corridor from its onset, thanks to a church member, Stan Johnson, who died a few years.  From its outset, Stan was deeply involved with the civic authority that joined the various municipalities along the old canal’s hundred mile length.

The history of the I and M Canal is integral to the history of Chicago. It was constructed from the early 1820s through the late 1840s, beginning in Bridgeport on the south side Chicago, reaching ever-further West to Lasalle/Peru, connecting Lake Michigan to the Illinois River and eventually the Mississippi. It helped Chicago become, what one historian has so aptly described, Nature' s Metropolis.  I recommend that you review the canal’s history – an easy Internet search.

And with the history and perhaps lore of the canal in your imagination, visit a remnant stretch of it. The most accessible stretch is within a few miles on Willow Springs Road near Archer Avenue.  But even more, I recommend a very beautiful stretch of the old canal that's in Morris – a pleasant drive of the some 60 miles. Today is a good day to stroll the towpath, because you can also take in the last day of the Grundy County corn Festival in downtown Morris, a remnant shire town along the Illinois River. (The Corn Festival is one of my favorite agricultural celebrations. I'm especially fond of the roasted ears of corn.) You can follow a towpath from the foot of Morris's main street and walk southwest. Within a half mile or so, you'll enter a serene section of the canal, towpaths on either side, canopied by graceful trees, and with mirror like water. This time of year, autumn-painted leaves float and slowly eddy, while the water reflects those on the trees. When I'm there, I like to imagine the convergence of nature and history.

A good day trip, or perhaps weekend trip, would follow the course of the canal (along blue highways, of course) with visits to surviving sections. For example, at canal’s end in LaSalle you can board a replica towboat pulled by a mule from the towpath. 

Joliet Public Art

I award my second Gannett to the city of Joliet for its public art. I have a perverse fondness for Joliet – one of America's many aching post-industrial cities. Perhaps Joliet reminds me of my 5 1/2 years in Youngstown, Ohio before I came to Chicago. Joliet is a city supported by the notorious penitentiary, Statesville, two casinos, and a regional hospital. It has a history of corruption. Like many other struggling cities it tries all sorts of things to keep it viable – creating, if only an illusion, of vitality.

The recent history of Joliet's public art has an interesting parent, joining local artists – many of them women, if not feminists, – with public money, is now driven by a not-for-profit organization known as Friends of Community Public Art, organized in 1996.  Their website offers this narrative: FCPA is dedicated to the creation, planning, promotion and preservation of public art increase the awareness of the communities rich historical and cultural heritage. FCPA was formed to the an artist run, multiracial, intercultural organization that represents the economic diversity.. F CPA captures communities history and culture through site-specific, audience responsive art work.

FCPA specializes in murals, mosaics and sculpture…

The FCPA traces its origin to 1975, when a group of women painted the first mural on a concrete viaduct, titled " Downtown is Our Town." This was followed by a major project, a large mural painted in the then recently renovated railroad station downtown, circa 1991. Between 1994 and 1997, 42 original works of art were created on walls around the Joliet area, using public funds set aside for viaduct beautification. The friends of community public art, founded in 1996 and incorporated in 1998 as a not-for-profit corporation, embarked on an ambitious program of painted murals, mosaics, and sculptures. Many of sculptures were placed on column-like, mosaic decorated pedestals distributed throughout the city of Joliet.

I like these sculptures a lot. They are didactic – sculptures with clear messages, lifting up collective values. Here are a few examples: Planting The Seeds: Children And Education;  An, Informed Mind Make Better Choices;  History Clings Like Ivy;  Education Is The Window To The World; A Teachers Gift.

You can spend an interesting day visiting the various pieces of public art in Joliet. (The Friends of Community Public Art has an informative website with images of the art and their locations.)  You might plan to eat lunch in the downtown Renaissance Center restaurant operated by the Joliet Junior College.  Nearby is the Route 66 Museum. And if you drove to Joliet via Archer Avenue, you will pass through Lockport, where you can visit a peaceful of stretch of the I and M Canal and one of the better restaurants in the area, the Gaylord Building.

Minor League Baseball

Joliet has another gift for our common world – a minor-league baseball team, called the Slammers. The city, a few years ago, built a downtown stadium, White Cross Field, not far from Union Station in the old downtown. The stadium seats nearly 6000.  Parking is close and free. Libations are relatively inexpensive. The best seat in the house costs only $10.

I long ago lost my interest in major league baseball; the Cubs and the Sox in my quarter-century here have only occasionally captured my interest. So when I get an urge to watch a game, I now go to Joliet to watch aspiring, young athletes play what used to be called America's pastime.

Joliet's Slammers are typical of the minor-league baseball's revival that's taken place across the country in the last couple of decades.  In these venues, the atmosphere is family centered; the kids always seem to have a good time in a fan-friendly atmosphere. The games are entertaining and between every inning is entertainment.  By the way, the Slammers, two weekends ago won the championship of the Frontier League.

So my third Gannett goes to minor-league baseball, especially my champion Joliet Slammers.

The Contrary Farmer

Last year I presented a sermon based on a curious novel, Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food, by Gene Logsdon.  Gene bills himself as The Contrary Farmer.  A former editor of the Farm Journal magazine, for the past 30 years or so, he's operated a small farm in Sandusky, Ohio region and has written prodigiously. His passion is the small family farm; his farming philosophy incorporates responsible environmentalism and traditional values, along with a progressive outlook.  He has a host of qualities of what I call a wise elder.

I read his blog, The Contrary Farmer, with every post.  (I recommend it to you, if you have an interest in rural life, as well as provocative ideas.)

He recently wrote something in his blog that I adored.  He advocated small family farm of 300 acres over the industrial farm of 5,000 acres as a partial solution to our national economic crisis.   I’ll let him tell the economics as he sees it:

The 5000 acres of industrial corn, which is employing two people, could be providing jobs and homes for about 17 family farmers and their wives and children. Run all the figures and all the farmland out to a logical mathematical conclusion and the number of new jobs created by restructuring agriculture is unbelievably awesome. There are about 90 million acres in corn this year. That would make 300,000 family farms of 300 acres each. That means 600,000 parents would be fully employed and let us say two teenagers who are trying desperately right now to find part time jobs,— a total of 1,200,000 new jobs. If we take into account industrial soybean, wheat, and cotton acreages as well and divide all that land  into 300 acre family farms, the number of new jobs created rockets to somewhere in the three to five million range.

Gene’s line of reasoning fascinated me.  Not feasible, I first thought.  But then, I wondered, why not?   What a wonderful combination of traditional, down- to-earth-thinking and radical, out-of-the-box-thinking.   (This combination reminded me of his advocacy of manure, including human excrement, over chemical fertilizers, that he wrote about in his recent book Holy Shit.)

For his humane and reasonable advocacy of the small family farm, Gene Logdson receives my fourth Gannett this year.  I’ve begun to think of him as a national treasure, along the likes of Pete Seeger or Wendell Berry.

Tony's Breakfast Cafe

I usually have one food oriented Gannett to give each year. I don't like to think of myself as foodie, in part, because of my contrary nature. I'm drawn not to the trendy and expensive, but to the honest and simple, and, yes, the off-the-beaten-track, if not obscure.

Surrounded by choices, last Sunday, Ellie and I considered many possibilities of where to have Sunday dinner –either sit down or take out.  Not that we go there often, we decided to go to a smallish family restaurant in Brookfield on Ogden Avenue called Tony's – the sort of place that has a seven or eight page menu with inserts, including a senior citizen’s insert.

The place suited our criteria: fast and efficient service, friendliness, a big menu with comfort foods, and just enough busyness to make for a cozy feeling.

We each ordered a complete meal from salad to desert with beverage included. I could only eat half of my plate, Ellie too.  So we took our leftovers home in Styrofoam boxes-- dinner the next day. And the total bill was under $20.

There still are plenty of such family restaurants, sometimes I call them greeky spoons, because their often run by Greek families, in the Chicago area.  Tony’s, “over-the bridge” in Brookfield, is one of the type, but better than most. And Tony’s certainly seems to try hard with basic food and attentive/fast service, and even a certain cheerfulness.

So my final Gannett of 2011 goes to Tony’s in Brookfield a truly traditional, old-school restaurant, a good example of all the warm, fragrant, embracing, comfort-food places you’ve been in throughout he years—the sort of place you might hope to find in a small town along a blue highway when you want to be in the midst of real people and never have your coffee cup be empty.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

I like and recommend David Brooks, a syndicated op-ed columnist of the New York Times. He's a conservative who holds traditional values. I like him because he's value rich and draws his information from the best of contemporary thought, including various realms of science, even the somewhat fuzzy social sciences.

This week he wrote about the amorality of young adults, 18-23 year olds that seemingly do not have a moral center.  They lack ethical grounding, according to a recent study and new book by a distinguished Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith.  Here's part of what Brooks wrote in a column titled “If It Feels Right.”

 Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.

It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.

The interviewers asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life. In the rambling answers, which Smith and company recount in a new book, “Lost in Transition,” you see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do so.

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.

The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”…

He concluded with this paragraph: In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.

Postmodernism

What Brooks is talking about is nothing new. It is a reflection of the postmodern era in Western civilization that includes the erosion of a culturally traditional Christian point of view and the ethical grounding it long offered. Here's my quick understanding of postmodernism.

I’ve long argued that the modern era was petering out in the late 19^th century and was finished by the utter horror of World War I. There were a number of thinkers who anticipated and realized the end of the modern era, such as Nietzsche who by the mid-1880s had proclaimed the Death of God. (This really meant that a long prevailing Western Christian worldview/value system no longer prevailed.) My favorite voice/prophet of postmodernism is Albert Schweitzer. (I'm so glad that Ron Solberg presented Albert Schweitzer's magnificent life in his summer service.")   Among his extensive accomplishments, Schweitzer was an eminent Christian theologian of the transitional, modern-to-postmodern, era. At the turn of the 19^th into the 20^th century, Schweitzer declared that the great organizing principle of Western Civilization, what he summarized as the will-to-progress, was no longer valid. And so he set about to find a new organizing principle. After much striving and a mystical intuition on an African River while gazing upon a herd of hippopotamus he settled upon the powerful notion of Reverence for Life.  (Incidentally, it's that point of view which is now inspiring the Animal Ministry movement within Unitarian Universalism, especially within our own congregation.)

The postmodern dilemma, including the deconstruction of values, has been magnified by what is generally called globalism: the shrinking of the world and an ever increasing pluralism, playing out as a clash of cultures.

One of the most apt expressions of a postmodern world comes from a celebrated poem: by William Butler Yeats, written at the conclusion of the First World War. It's called “The Second Coming.” You probably know the chilling opening stanza:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Over the years I've returned repeatedly to Schweitzer's Reverence for Life Ethic. I find it, and the story of its making, compelling. But it's not an easy sell for a variety of reasons. And so, like Schweitzer a century ago, I've striven to come up with an organizing principle for the 21st-century sensibility -our brave new millennium.

In recent years, I've considered the ethic of the Golden Rule and the notion of Compassion, as organizing principles – the basis of an effective new world ethic that takes into account the conjoined realities of pluralism and an ever-shrinking world. I've spoken to each in recent years, particularly as expressed in the recent movement known as Charter for Compassion which uses Compassion to edge toward the Golden Rule. The leading voice for this movement is Karen Armstrong, former nun and now popular writer on religious concerns.

Now, I like Charter for Compassion. Compassion, I maintain, emerges from a natural instinct; it’s not surprising then, that Compassion is a principle embedded, explicitly and implicitly, in many world religions, notably Buddhism. And I appreciate the relative simplicity, as well as the obvious universality, in time and across cultures, of the Golden Rule. But as I monitor their conjoined progress, that is, their contemporary appeal, I see them as deficient. (For example, I don't think Compassion can be easily compelled. Additionally, Karen Armstrong has been strongly criticized as a Muslim apologist; and there’s considerable anti-Islamism.  The proof, arguably, of an underwhelming response is a relative paucity of signatures on Charter for Compassion web site, only 77,000 signatures of affirmation in 22 months—hardly viral.)

I've been thinking, there has to be a more effective organizing ethical principle.

This summer, with fewer obligations, I've reflected on such an organizing ethical principle. And in late August my musings cohered, thanks to CNN. On an idle Sunday morning during the Labor Day weekend, I saw four pieces of news that converged in a theme. 

First, there was a tape showing a high school football game in Sarasota, Florida, a melee following a questionable call by a referee. It ended with one of the 14-year-old players running across the field and tackling the referee, throwing him to the ground.

Second, speaker of the house John Boehner, second in succession to the presidency, had refused the original date that Pres. Obama proposed for speaking before a joint session of Congress regarding unemployment creation of jobs—crucial issues for the nation.  It would interfere with House business and a televised debate of Republican presidential hopefuls.

Third, one of our Illinois Representatives (8^th District), the Republican Joe Walsh, justified his intentions in calling Pres. Obama an idiot. Representative Walsh protested," what I meant was Obama is not an idiot but his policies are idiotic." Rep. Walsh announced he was intending to stay home during the special joint session of Congress.

Fourth, an African-American comedian Katt Williams defended his 8 min. rant against Mexicans that spewed forth in the middle of his Phoenix comedy club act. He'd been heckled and that was his response. Of course, the act had been videotaped by someone in the audience.

These four news items brought to my mind the theme of respect, really a lack of respect each incident illustrated.

The Notion of Respect

The notion of respect has been percolating in my thoughts for a couple decades, at least. When I started out in the Ministry it is commonplace to talk about three signatures of historic Unitarianism: 1) reason in religion, 2) complete freedom of belief and of conscience, and 3) broad and generous toleration of one another and of other religions.  From the beginning the signature of toleration disturbed me; it seemed condescending. So I began to substitute the word acceptance for toleration. But acceptance seemed patronizing. I finally settled upon the word respect, that respect is an historic signature that we strive to emulate and perpetuate today.

Of course, whenever I think of respect what always pops into my mind is the song of that name, an American pop anthem, made famous by Aretha Franklin:  "r-e-s-p-e-c-t, find out what it means to me/take care of TCB."

Next I think of a term more recent: to diss or to be dissed.  Diss of course is urban lingo for disrespect. 

My point here is that respect and its opposite disrespect are popular terms, commonly and widely understood. (Compassion and Reverence, to which I’ve already referred, are more difficult and even obscure concepts, too elitist.) Respect and disrespect involve both a doer and a receiver—a subject and an object.

One of the better Internet references is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  The SEP has a lengthy article on Respect that begins with a popularized prelude to more scholarly thoughts.

Respect has great importance in everyday life. As children we are taught (one hopes) to respect our parents, teachers, and elders, school rules and traffic laws, family and cultural traditions, other people's feelings and rights, our country's flag and leaders, the truth and people's differing opinions. And we come to value respect for such things; when we're older, we may shake our heads (or fists) at people who seem not to have learned to respect them. We develop great respect for people we consider exemplary and lose respect for those we discover to be clay-footed, and so we may try to respect only those who are truly worthy of our respect. We may also come to believe that, at some level, all people are worthy of respect. We may learn that jobs and relationships become unbearable if we receive no respect in them; in certain social milieus we may learn the price of disrespect if we violate the street law: “Diss me, and you die.” Calls to respect this or that are increasingly part of public life: environmentalists exhort us to respect nature, foes of abortion and capital punishment insist on respect for human life, members of racial and ethnic minorities and those discriminated against because of their gender, sexual orientation, age, religious beliefs, or economic status demand respect both as social and moral equals and for their cultural differences. And it is widely acknowledged that public debates about such demands should take place under terms of mutual respect. We may learn both that our lives together go better when we respect the things that deserve to be respected and that we should respect some things independently of considerations of how our lives would go.

… Although a wide variety of things are said to deserve respect, contemporary philosophical interest in respect has overwhelmingly been focused on respect for persons, the idea that all persons should be treated with respect simply because they are persons. Respect for persons is a central concept in many ethical theories; some theories treat it as the very essence of morality and the foundation of all other moral duties and obligations.

I'm just beginning to appreciate the practical possibilities and wide range implications of respect as an ethical organizing principle. And throughout this coming church year, now again, I will touch upon aspects of respect.

For now, I ask you to think often, when you are out and about, navigating your larger world, in terms of respect.

Be aware of what you respect and why. Recognize when you behave in respectful ways, as well as disrespectful ways.  Muse about the motivations and source of the respect you offer.

I urge you to be intentionally respectful, monitoring the effect on yourself as well as the results on others. The focus of course, is respect for other human beings, our fellow women and men. But there's so much more that we respect in the common course of our lives beyond human kind, even beyond the natural world. (One of our treasured UU principles speaks “to respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are all a part.)  We respect traditions, institutions, ideas, places and so much more.

Also think about self-respect in terms of your first nature (instincts) and your second nature actions (nurture).

I'm of the mind that respect is transformative; it makes you a better person and our world a better place.  It should be our default attitude.

Here's a little consciousness raiser to begin: sign your e-mails or your letters Respectfully or Respectfully Yours, and mean it.

The Sexual Politics of Meat

[I fashioned this sermon 20 years ago, June, 1991. It transformed me. I became a complete non-meat eater. It's interesting to return to this book's provocative critical feminist perspective, the linking of vegetarianism and feminism. I particularly like Ms. Adams' identification of vegetarianism as a reform movement. My predictions two decades ago regarding the ethical frontier of animal rights, may be coming true, as evidenced by UCH's emergent Animal Ministry initiative.]

Prove All Things

A critical attitude is one of Unitarian Universalism's distinctive traits. The first Unitarian sermon (Channing, 1819) used the text, "Prove all things, hold fast to that which good." For nearly two centuries, we Unitarians have examined, through the twin lenses of reason and experience, whatever has been presented to us as truth. In part, this critical attitude is fueled by a belief in progress – that revelation is ongoing, that knowledge is ever increasing, and that the individual and society may improve through advancing information and ongoing inspiration.

Within Unitarianism, it began 200 years ago, when Enlightenment reason looked critically at Puritan dogma and tradition, as well as the Bible. Within a generation, Idealism, taking the name of Transcendentalism, looked critically at first-generation Unitarianism based solely on a rational reliance on Scripture. Next, at mid-19th century, abolitionism looked critically at the prevailing social and political structure and declared slavery a great evil. In the latter years of the 19th century, evolution and science looked critically at supernatural assumptions and proposed a new naturalism. As this 20th century began, a modern humanism, motivated by the social and physical sciences, asserted a new naturalism over an old supernaturalism. In our own era (the latter days of the 20th century), feminism has significantly challenged thousands of years of cultural patriarchy, reestablishing the order of relationships and seeking to recast social structures of access and power.

Through two centuries of "proving all things, holding fast to that which is good," there has been real advancement of insight and understanding, resulting in new realizations. I even say there has been movement toward perfection, though our reach will always exceed our grasp regarding absolute perfection.

Ethical Vegetarianism

This morning, I'm going to talk about vegetarianism as a critical outlook and the beginning of a reform movement, potentially as important as any that has moved Unitarianism toward the twin purposes of perfection of character and perfection of society.

My remarks draw from a recent book, The Sexual Politics Of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol J. Adams. Perhaps I was waiting for such a book to come along. I was certainly ready for it. Every chapter brought consciousness-raising insight.

Before talking about the contents of the book and how the contents affected my outlook, I will review my own relationship with meat:

· When I was young my parents raised and harvested chickens. My father chopped off the chickens ' heads with a hatchet. The expression "like a chicken with its head cut off" always had vivid meaning for me. I can still see in my memory’s eye, headless birds careening about with blood spurting from severed necks. My mother cleaned them. I watched the plucking of feathers and smelled the distinctive aroma of eviscerated intestines. These were unforgettable formative experiences.

· Raised Catholic, Fridays were meatless; and since I wouldn't eat fish, one day each week, until I went off to college, I was vegetarian – perhaps, a bowl of potato soup or breaded zucchini.

· The first time I found meat truly repulsive occurred when I was in my early 20s. While living in Ottawa, Ontario, we were invited to a summer cottage along the Ottawa River for a Canada Day pig roast. When we arrived, a suckling pig was impaled on a spit, slowly turning above a bed of glowing coals. The flesh proved to be soft and sweet, pink and moist. It was remarkable and not in a good way. (I flashed Jonathan Swift's famous satire, "A Modest Proposal.") Served on a platter, its snout agape, I had a difficult time eating the exceedingly young, roasted flesh sliced from the carcass.

· Several years later, circa 1973, while viewing an autopsy as part of my ministerial training, standing a safe distance from the cadaver's chest being opened with a spinning saw, from the corner of my eye, I watched a lab assistant meticulously cleaning fat from a human liver. From that moment, I never ate liver again. It was also the beginning of an ethical realization that I shouldn't be eating meat at all.

· A dozen years ago, circa 1978, during my first year as a minister, I stopped eating red meat. And while I continued to eat chicken and fish, I began to avoid those so-called white meats, too.

· It was also early in my ministry that I began to read seriously Albert Schweitzer’s, finding his reverence for life ethic – “that which enhances life is good, that which destroys life is evil “– especially congenial to my own progressing way of knowing and doing.

· A couple of years ago, Ellie and I spent an afternoon on a fair sized Wisconsin dairy farm. It was a bad day for the farmer. The night before, a cow had strangled itself, when it twisted its neck in a stanchion. It was lying in the muck behind the barn with blood still draining from its nostrils and its eyes staring blankly. The renderer’s truck arrived, full of contorted carcasses, to winch another dead cow aboard. During the afternoon milking, a young cow being milked for the first time after giving birth broke free and rampaged through the barn; the farmer, taking no chance, shot it. The rifle shot resounded while we bottle-fed his calves soon to be slaughtered for veal. This experience started me thinking about dairy products as I had years earlier begun to think about meat.

· I'm not a true vegetarian, since I've continued to eat animal flesh, though only white meat and even that meat infrequently. Yet my progressing consciousness hasn't allowed my conscience to rest. I don't think a moment of eating any animal flesh has passed in the last dozen years without an accompanying awareness that to do so was probably not morally right.

The Sexual Politics Of Meat is a book I am ready for. It is propitious and will probably change my behavior. Carol Adams' reasoning is compelling – hard for me to ignore when processed by my own power to reason and through my life experiences.

A Feminist Critique

The thesis of The Sexual Politics Of Meat is provocative. Ms. Adams maintains that the same cultural attitudes and hierarchies of power that oppress women also oppress animals. As women have been and continue to be objectified – not respected for their spirit of being – similarly the spirit of being of animals is not respected; therefore the animals are objectified. In her book Ms. Adams presents vegetarianism as not a fad but as a valid and valuable reform – a logical extension and application of feminist criticism.

Ms. Adams' analysis of the meaning of meat is an exercise in demythologizing symbolic language, revealing how language masks reality and enforces patriarchy. She writes:

"From the leather in our shoes, the soap so we use to cleanse our face, the down in our comforter, the meat we eat, and the dairy products we rely on, our world as we know it structured around the dependence on the death of the other animals. The death of the other animals is an accepted part of life, either envisioned as being granted in Genesis 1:26 by a human-oriented God who instructs us that we may dominate the animals or conceptualized as a right because of superior rationality. For those who hold to the dominant viewpoint in our culture, the surprise is not that animals are oppressed (though that is not the term they would use to express human beings relationship to the other animals), the surprise is that anyone would object to this. Our culture generally accepts animals' oppression and finds nothing ethically or politically disturbing about the exploitation of animals for the benefit of people. Hence our language is structured to convey this acceptance.”

She makes a compelling argument regarding meat in terms of what she calls an absent referent. What is meat, really? Meat is the flesh of a dead animal. In every instance, when you say meat, the absent referent is a once living animal. You eat a hamburger, well, the absent referent is cow. How did that cow die? It was slaughtered – stunned and bled, thereby killed, then dismembered and ground. But rather than think of meat in this manner, we obfuscate and distance ourselves from the reality through symbolic language.

Ms. Adams correctly points out that for most of us, suburbanites and urbanites, our major interaction with animals is through meat, though we don't often think about it in such a manner. "We eat them. This simple fact is the key to our attitudes to other animals, and also the key to what each one of us can do about changing these attitudes." She suggests when you eat meat, think, how am I now interacting with an animal?

Saying that probably makes you uncomfortable. I know that it makes me uncomfortable. Adams knows this, too, observing:

"On an emotional level everyone has some discomfort with the eating of animals. This discomfort is seen when people do not want to be reminded of what they are eating while eating, nor to be informed of the slaughterhouse activities that make meat eating possible; it also is revealed by the personal taboo that each person has toward some form of meat: either because of its form, such as organ meats, or because of its source, such as pig or rat, insects or rodents. The intellectual framework of language that enshrouds meat eating protects these emotional responses from beginning examined. This is nothing new; language has always sided with us in sidestepping sticky problems of conceptualization by obfuscating the situation."

Ms. Adams asks, do you see yourself as eating a succession of chops, burgers, and steaks? Real food for real people? Or do you see yourself consuming – as does the average American in a lifetime – 43 pigs, 3 lambs, 11 cows, 4 calves, 1107 chickens, 45 turkeys, and 861 fish?

She further points out that language is not just male-centered but also human-centered. We generally use the word animal as though it did not apply to us, too. Our language is structured to avoid our essential biological identity with non-human animals.

Here we squarely face the real issue of the relationship between human animals and non-human animals. Is it moral to use animals – to turn them them into things, to objectify them? Indeed, a deeper issue involves what we UUs call the interdependent web of existence, specifically our place in an intricate web of life where life form is connected to life form. What does it mean when we say we have respect for the interdependent web of existence? What is that respect for, if not for life in all forms, what Ms. Adams calls the spirit of being. Throughout her critical analysis, Ms. Adams observes that much of the protein we eat comes from the female of the species – what she calls feminized protein.

Ethical vegetarianism joined to an animal rights movement challenge long held attitudes of oppression and violence by human animals on non-human animals. In the Sexual Politics Of Meat Ms. Adams joins the feminist cause to the cause of ethical vegetarianism – challenging the attitudes of the patriarchy, that are oppressive (not respectful of life) and do violence (hurtful of life). At the very heart of her argument for feminism and vegetarianism is reverence for a spirit of life no matter what form a life may take. Life is sacred. Ms. Adams recommends that an effective personal strategy to undermine the patriarchy with its violent and death-dealing ways is to, in her poetic phrasing, "eat rice have faith in women." In this regard, vegetarianism is not a fad, but is a serious and potentially powerful reform movement.

I've been long pondering the meaning of meat within my own life. This book galvanizes years of thinking and leads to these personal conclusions:

1. The distinction between human and nonhuman animals continues to dissolve into a swelling naturalism. It's clearer and clearer to me that the spirit of being in me identifies with the spirit of being in all creatures. I am more and more loath to do violence on other creatures, as well as on fellow human beings.

2. There is not just an ethic but also an aesthetic in vegetarianism. Vegetarianism transforms what is a social obsession – eating – into a more thoughtful and graceful act. And when eating is so, it enhances my whole pattern of living.

3. That being an ethical vegetarian is indeed a powerful personal political act challenging a dysfunctional and dangerous existing order, as well as giving ongoing persuasive witness to a more fitting and beneficial order.

4. Vegetarianism fits into a "seamless garment" scheme of reverence for life, pushing my humanism into the deeper spirituality of what I call Natural Religion.

I've left out big pieces of Carol Adams' analysis, particularly regarding the cultural identification of meat eating with maleness, superiority, and power. Though her book is only 190 pages, the reasoning in those pages is dense and rich. The book is part cultural history, part moral philosophy, and part literary criticism. (For instance she deals with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a significant vegetarian text.) It's a tough but good read.

And What About You?

I suspect that many of you have felt discomfort this morning – a dis-ease. Some images have been gory and other images have been discomforting. There's good cause why you should find them so. Examine your responses, particularly the visceral feelings. And then examine the arguments of ethical vegetarianism, as presented by Ms. Adams. Ponder the practical meaning of meat (the missing referent) and how that meaning permeates your life. Think about the reform – the perfection – of your character and of society that vegetarianism may offer.

At the very least, prove to your satisfaction through your abilities to think and experience that meat eating is right and good. ("Prove all things." and as always, "hold fast to that which is good.")

How Free Are We, Really?

Sorry, Your Soul Just Died

One of the more important essays of our era comes from Tom Wolfe, novelist and student of the American Experience. It dates from 1996 and was originally published in Forbes Magazine—“Sorry, Your Soul Just Died.” In it, Wolfe reported about and riffed in his inimitable way on the astounding new discipline of neuroscience that was drawing on tools, such as MRI, magnetic resonance imaging, to view, in actual time, the firing of the brain. In reviewing the new brain sciences and related evolutionary studies, Wolfe considered the timeless dialogue between Nurture and Nature. This dichotomy is one facet of the philosophical/theological debate regarding determinism and free will. He predicted a new determinism that would undercut both liberal humanism and traditional theology regarding the notions of free will and the human soul. In this essay Wolf was both provocateur and seer. Wolfe wrote:

Here we begin to sense the chill that emanates from the hottest field in the academic world. The unspoken and largely unconscious premise of the wrangling over neuroscience's strategic high ground is: We now live in an age in which science is a court from which there is no appeal. And the issue this time around, at the end of the twentieth century, is not the evolution of the species, which can seem a remote business, but the nature of our own precious inner selves.

… [T]he new generation of neuroscientists are not cautious for a second. In private conversations, the bull sessions, as it were, that create the mental atmosphere of any hot new science—and I love talking to these people—they express an uncompromising determinism.

They start with the most famous statement in all of modern philosophy, Descartes's "Cogito ergo sum," "I think, therefore I am," which they regard as the essence of "dualism," the old–fashioned notion that the mind is something distinct from its mechanism, the brain and the body. (I will get to the second most famous statement in a moment.) This is also known as the "ghost in the machine" fallacy, the quaint belief that there is a ghostly "self" somewhere inside the brain that interprets and directs its operations. Neuroscientists involved in three–dimensional electroencephalography will tell you that there is not even any one place in the brain where consciousness or self–consciousness (Cogito ergo sum) is located. This is merely an illusion created by a medley of neurological systems acting in concert. The young generation takes this yet one step further. Since consciousness and thought are entirely physical products of your brain and nervous system—and since your brain arrived fully imprinted at birth—what makes you think you have free will? Where is it going to come from? What "ghost," what "mind," what "self," what "soul," what anything that will not be immediately grabbed by those scornful quotation marks, is going to bubble up your brain stem to give it to you? I have heard neuroscientists theorize that, given computers of sufficient power and sophistication, it would be possible to predict the course of any human being's life moment by moment, including the fact that the poor devil was about to shake his head over the very idea. I doubt that any Calvinist of the sixteenth century ever believed so completely in predestination as these, the hottest and most intensely rational young scientists in the United States at the end of the twentieth.

Now, I remind you that our Enlightenment Religion, Unitarianism, departed from The New England Calvinist church over the notion of free will. It is our founding tenet, that each of us is free and responsible to determine the course of her or his life. We hold our destiny in our own two hands. In human experience this leads to individual character (and so we are saved) and to progress in society (ever onward and upward).

This morning, I consider free will not only as a personally important consideration, but also as the hottest/most important intellectual debate of our day.

First and Second Nature

When I woke up on Monday, May 16, I didn’t expect that I’d be thinking about the notion of free will, one of the great philosophical/theological questions. But a NY Times article about the so-called housewives reality shows that plague the contemporary television landscape nudged me in that direction.

Critic Neil Genzlinger wrote, “’One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on,’ the great religious scholar P. J. O’Rourke wrote in Rolling Stone in November 1989. ‘And when you do find somebody, it’s remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver’s license.’

“We are faced with two possibilities. One is that there is no free will, which means that God actually planned for there to be a 'Real Housewives of New Jersey ' and for people to watch it. Contemplating a universe built on that premise can lead only to collective insanity, and therefore the notion must be rejected.

“Thus we must embrace the other possibility: that there is free will, and that the enablers who make “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” possible could transform the show from the lame caricature it is, if only they — in Mr. O’Rourke’s formulation — looked at their driver’s licenses. That they have not done so suggests a need for some forcible action.”

Though tongue-in-cheek, this article led me down the Unitarian Universalist path of freedom and responsibility.

Personally, I don’t put God into the free-will equation. I am a Religious Naturalist and frame my musings by the insights of evolutionary biology and neuroscience. From these perspectives, I see both determinism and free will. For some years, I’ve mused about a First Nature and a Second Nature.

Our First Nature is our creatureliness—what has evolved over billions of years to become the Human Species that bends us toward generally shared behaviors that seem determined. (Anyone who has ever been sexually attracted to another knows how powerful First Nature influences are.)

Our Second Nature emerges from the workings of our incredible, highly evolved mind—its consciousness and self-consciousness. Through reason, we make choices that counter our First Nature instincts, and can be called a result of free will. (Though sexually attracted to another person, we might choose not to act on the urge for a variety of reasons, including a vow of exclusivity to another.)

Metaphorically, human nature describes a realm somewhere between angels and animals. The phrase “angels of our better nature,” speaks to what I understand as our Second Nature possibilities.

In the end, I maintain that each of us is responsible for her or his actions. O’Rourke has it right. When we begin to assess the source of our problems, the place to begin is one’s self. Yes, look at the face on your driver’s license. Or remember Michael Jackson’s reflections about the “Man in the Mirror.”

I'm starting with the man in the mirror
(Ooh!)
I'm asking him to change his ways
(Change his ways-Ooh!)
And no message could've been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
(If you wanna make the world a better place)
Take a look at yourself and then make that...
(Take a look at yourself and then make that...)
Change!

The Soul Is Dead, But the Spirit Lives On

I always read David Brooks’s op-ed pieces in the New York Times. His politics are too right of center for my own point of view; however, he’s always well-reasoned and even more importantly draws upon much of the scientific research that I find authoritative, regarding the human condition. Brooks has an interest in morality, as do I. He often cites evolutionary biologists and psychologists, as well as neuroscientists who explore the landscape of the mind.

I’ve long been convinced that these areas of science have successfully challenged traditional philosophy, ethics, and theology. The popular writer Tom Wolfe, relatively early on, recognized the impact the new sciences, neuroscience, in particular, would have in a 1996 essay “Sorry Your Soul Just Died.”In it he wrote, “Thereupon, in the year 2006 or 2026, some new Nietzsche will step forward to announce: ‘The self is dead’—except that being prone to the poetic, like Nietzsche, he will probably say: ‘The soul is dead.’ He will say that he is merely bringing the news, the news of the greatest event of the millennium: ‘The soul, that last refuge of values, is dead, because educated people no longer believe it exists.’”

On Tuesday, May 17, Brooks posted an op-ed piece “Nice Guys Finish Last” in which he makes a case, based on recent scientific thought that human beings are intrinsically moral, though programmed by evolution to be selfish. Is this an oxymoron? No. Because evolution also involves complex equations to be cooperative and part of a community. If the group benefits, so the individual benefits, reasons Brooks.

Brooks continued, “In his book, ‘The Righteous Mind,’ to be published early next year, Jonathan Haidt joins Edward O. Wilson, David Sloan Wilson, and others who argue that natural selection takes place not only when individuals compete with other individuals, but also when groups compete with other groups. Both competitions are examples of the survival of the fittest, but when groups compete, it’s the cohesive, cooperative, internally altruistic groups that win and pass on their genes. The idea of ‘group selection’ was heresy a few years ago, but there is momentum behind it now.

In the end, Brooks makes a conservative pitch for religion/ethics, saying, “[T]he big upshot is this: For decades, people tried to devise a rigorous ‘scientific’ system to analyze behavior that would be divorced from morality. But if cooperation permeates our nature, then so does morality, and there is no escaping ethics, emotion and religion in our quest to understand who we are and how we got this way.

If I could question David Brooks, I’d ask him to name the “people” who sought a scientific system divorced from morality. Sounds a bit like a straw man to me. I’ve never seen science (scientists) wanting to diminish morality—or religion or God. Such a judgment comes from the religionists or traditionalists who become defensive.

My bottom line maintains that we human beings, by virtue of millions of years of creaturely evolution are hardwired to be moral. Morality has been a linchpin in a scheme that has allowed the human species emerge, survive, and yes, thrive.

A few years ago Jonathan Haidt, a leading evolutionary psychologist, described five moral colors, which he describes on his web site’s home page as

1) Harm/care, related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. This foundation underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.

2) Fairness/reciprocity, related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. This foundation generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. [Note: In our original conception, Fairness included concerns about equality, which are more strongly endorsed by political liberals. However, as we reformulate the theory in 2010 based on new data, we are likely to include several forms of fairness, and to emphasize proportionality, which is more strongly endorsed by conservatives]

3) Ingroup/loyalty, related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. This foundation underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it's "one for all, and all for one."

4) Authority/respect, shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. This foundation underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.

5) Purity/sanctity, shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. This foundation underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).

Previous remarks regarding First Nature and Second Nature have relevance here. To my reckoning Second Nature is the rationalization and application of First Nature instincts, including the five moral colors. To these five instincts, I certainly add the mammalian bonding instinct which has resulted in a cornucopia of the various nuanced expression of love.

To return to Wolfe and the soul, the soul may be dead, but the human spirit is more vibrant than ever—a source of awe and wonder. We are one in the sense that our desires and drives are essentially the same, coded by the complex wonder of our shared DNA. We are many in the sense that we develop a second nature that modifies our first nature and makes each unique. In this context we have plenty of free will and in our own life span create the character we choose to become.

When we speak of such notions as transcendence, soul, even human spirit, we are really talking about second nature qualities. I’d say that our second nature is a sublime imperative. Every conscious deed we do presents us with choices. Each choice forges our character.