Matt Alspaugh
Sermon – “Every Person Counts”
Introduction
Years ago, I took a pottery class at a local park. We learned the basics of throwing pots, of smashing a lump of clay down on the center of the wheel, then gradually bringing the wheel up to speed as we pushed the lump into a more or less hemispherical blob, perfectly centered on the wheel. That was the first hard thing – get it wrong and nothing else would go right.
Then the next step was to somehow push down in the center and with your other hand on the outside, begin to draw up the wall of a pot. Keeping your hands wet, always keeping your hands wet, moving over this wall, you could gradually elongate and thin the material and give it a graceful form.
Or maybe it would buckle and cave in — as it did for me, again and again. I think I was cursed with genetically too-dry hands. Or my sense of center was off. Or something.
Others in the class seemed to get it, and over time, produced larger, lighter, more beautiful pots. My products remained small, heavy, clunky. If they were worth putting through the kiln, they too often came out of the firing cracked or flawed.
I decided I’d better keep my day job.
If my worth, my value as a human being, depended on my ability to make pots, I was in trouble.
Our Meritocratic Culture
We live in a culture that has become increasingly meritocratic. Our land is one where a person is valued less and less for who they are than for what they do. More and more, we have become our jobs and professions, instead of individuals with stories and relationships and human lives. Our incoming president is ‘Example One’ of our willingness to celebrate great wealth, however it is acquired, and to disregard other qualities and virtues.
It wasn’t always this way. In the early years of the republic, the virtues of democracy and equality were celebrated. Economic equality was much higher in colonial America than it is in America today[1]. — at least for free white people. Back then, the top 1% richest households took in less than 9% of total income, today they Hoover up about 20%.[2] Clearly we’re moving in the wrong direction.
The Scene Today
In the book, “Hillbilly Elegy”, J. D. Vance, now an investment banker in San Francisco, describes growing up in the rust belt town of Middletown Ohio. He writes of growing up in a family left behind in the failing economy, to struggle with poverty, domestic violence, honor violence and drug addiction.
Vance describes the parabolic arc of the American Dream in those families he grew up with: the ancestors worked as sharecroppers, then their children became coal miners, their children became steelworkers, and then, as the jobs disappeared, the arc bent downward, leading to what he calls a “hillbilly culture”. This culture celebrates honor violence, calling it “hillbilly justice”. This culture mixes blind patriotism for god and country with a hostility toward government and a willingness to game the welfare system. Vance says,
“I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him on Facebook complaining about how the “Obama economy has affected his life.”[3]
Vance concludes,
“There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.”[4]
Vance ultimately explores the politicized blame game around the controversial question, “Why are people poor?” On one side, people blame poverty on outside economic forces, such as trade and globalization. On the opposing side, people blame cultural factors, such as poor family values or lack of motivation.
But as Joshua Rothman notes in the New Yorker[5] there’s something deeper. He says,
“The choice between these two explanations has long been racialized. Working-class whites are said to be poor because of outsourcing; inner-city blacks are imagined to be holding themselves back with hip-hop. The implicit theory is that culture comes from within, and so can be controlled by individuals and communities, whereas economic structures exert pressures from without, and so are beyond the control of those they affect.”
I simply wish to highlight something that Vance lightly touches — that race is an underlying part of the whole situation. As I expect to explore next week, race and slavery are bound up deep in the American collective conscious. Race divides us. White supremacy, now out from its slumber, points to a nation in which some people don’t count, or count less.
Youth Gathering
Our youth had a lock-in last night, and part of their time was spent learning about Unitarian Universalism. I taught them a bit about UU history yesterday, and last night and today they are exploring, not so much what we believe as UUs, but what we value.
For as Unitarian Universalists, we are not creedal, we don’t have a faith statement or a doctrine of beliefs. Instead we use our values to guide our choices and lead us to living good lives. We use the Principles we read earlier as a good starting point for articulating those values, even while we realize that each person may interpret or understand these Principles in different ways.
Two Ways to Look at the First Principle
When we think of the First Principle, when we talk of the issue of inherent worth and dignity of every person, we often get focused on individuals. Do we really have to affirm the worth of those “obnoxious, obstreperous, overbearing” people, as our reading suggested? Indeed, do we have to include people like Hitler or Pol Pot, or other people who have done horrible things — people many would label as evil?
We have come to realize that while we can affirm them as people, we do not have to affirm their actions. In fact, we are called to oppose those who behave badly, who bring harm to others.
But while focusing on individual people is important, it is only part of the complex value questions bound up in that First Principle. I think a larger question is this: How do we create a society, a world in which the inherent worth and dignity is best affirmed for all people?
The Children’s Story
If you listened closely to Becky telling our Wonderbox story, about Yammani and the Soji[6], it might have sounded vaguely familiar. That story is in fact a retelling of the story of the Good Samaritan. That story, from the book of Luke in the bible, has become so distorted that people miss the point entirely. We forget that the Samaritans, like the Soji, were despised people. They were treated like some would treat Muslims, or blacks, or immigrants, or gay people today.
We also forget that the story is not merely about the kindness of one individual, but about the brokenness of the larger society — a society broken into an “us” and a “them”, broken into the People and the Soji, broken into the Jews and the Samaritans. It’s easy to miss the point. It’s easy to create an “us” and a “them”, and create all sorts of reasons why “us” are so much better than “them.” It happens in the secular world — think white supremacy — but also in religion too. We might look to our church history.
Our UU History and Universality
See, Unitarianism emerged in part as a response to the Calvinist teachings of the Puritans. You may remember the Puritans with their funny hats, their stocks and scarlet letters. Quintessential early Americans.
Now a core belief of the Puritans was that God had pre-determined who was going to heaven and who was bound for hell. While no one could tell for sure who was in each category, the Puritan church leadership was pretty sure that the tiny group of folks pre-destined for heaven were, upright, god-fearing, churchy folks, — well, just like themselves!
Now the Unitarians rejected this idea as not biblical. For denying this and other doctrinal ideas, the early Unitarians found themselves “othered”, rejected, pushed out of the Puritan or Congregationalist churches. Consequently, the Unitarians formed their own Association of churches in 1825. And as a result, our Unitarian forebears developed a keen sense of moral discomfort with any practice that created a binary “us” and a “them.”
Now the Universalists went even further, and declared that not only had God not predetermined who was going to heaven, God welcomed everyone into heaven, no exceptions.
The Unitarians and the Universalists merged in 1961. By then, both groups had let go of much concern about heaven, and we focused our attention on how we could improve this world. How could we treat everyone well. How do we avoid dividing humanity into an “us” and a “them”? Our First Principle is our attempt to remind ourselves of the importance of our universal humanity.
Claiming the inherent worth and dignity of all people, we have found ourselves out front in so many social concerns. Women’s rights and racial justice, which we will consider next week. Peace and world community. LGBTQ rights, as Hunter mentioned in his Chalice Lighting. Immigration rights. Disability and mental health issues.
Meritocracy
But let’s return now to the issue I raised earlier, that of our increasingly meritocratic and plutocratic society. We have a society where your worth as a human is defined by what you do. What you do could put you in a very small, very prosperous minority, or more likely in a large, increasingly impoverished majority.
What’s paradoxical is that our society doesn’t offer a clear economic division of “us” and “them”. It’s not as simple as the old white collar versus blue collar divide. Nor is it as simple as the 1% versus the 99% divide that emerged from the occupy movement a few years ago. Things feel unfair, but it’s hard to tease out.
Rawls and the Veil
The philosopher John Rawls proposed a kind of expanded rule of fairness in his 1971 work, “A Theory of Justice.” He suggests this thought experiment whenever you were making a decision about how society would be organized.
Assume you are building a society from scratch, from the ground up, kind of like the old Simcity computer games. As in the game, you design your city, your society. You get to choose all the rules, all the details.
But there’s a catch. After you are done designing, you will be dropped into the society, as one of the Sims, the characters in that society. But the catch is this: you won’t have any control which character you get assigned. It is random. You are, as Rawls put it, “behind a veil of ignorance.” You know nothing of your race, your gender, your orientation, your citizenship status. You know nothing of your abilities, your skills, your position in society.
So, knowing you could be dropped in as anyone, what do you do?
You might try to create a fair society, with equality for all. That seems pretty obvious.
But you might also want people to work hard, though, and be creative, and really build up the society, so you might want to reward hard work and creativity. But how much?
Do you want to risk being dropped into this Simcity society as a Sim that is ill, unable to work, and barely scrapes by? Or as a Sim that ends up in Vance’s “hillbilly” culture that discourages education and advancement? Or for that matter, as a Sim that just ends up in the wrong zip code.
I lived in St. Paul, Minnesota for a few years. If you were born in a neighborhood near mine, your life expectancy would have been 13 years lower than if you were born just a few miles down the Interstate, in Minneapolis.[7] Is this the kind of Simcity you’d want to design?
I hope that in this conversation, we begin to see just how hard it is to apply the concept of inherent worth and dignity for every person at the large scale, on the scale of society as a whole. Yet this is what our first principle invites us to do.
Conclusion
I hope my message has made you think about how challenging this simple little phrase, our first principle, is. And it is just one of seven principles!
Here are my takeaways:
First, Everyone does have inherent worth and dignity — no exceptions. But they don’t have the right to behave badly.
Second, The principle calls us to question all forms of binary “us” versus “them” thinking.
Third, The principle compels us to work toward creating a more just society, one in which the vagaries of circumstance do not diminish the worth and dignity of anyone.
This is hard work, this ethical way-finding we do together. We are guided by such high ideals. The path has never been easy, and the way looks even more treacherous ahead. But let us not lose hope. Let me end by reading from the Diary of Anne Frank:
It’s really a wonder
that I haven’t dropped all my ideals,
because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out.
Yet I keep them because
In spite of everything I still believe
that people are really good at heart.
I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation
consisting of confusion, misery, and death.
I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness,
I hear the ever approaching thunder,
which will destroy us too,
I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet,
if I look up into the heavens,
I think that it will all come right,
that this cruelty too will end,
and that peace and tranquility will return again.
In the meantime, I must uphold my ideals,
for perhaps the time will come,
when I shall be able to carry them out.[8]
May we go and do likewise.
Notes:
1 http://voxeu.org/article/america-s-revolution-economic-disaster-development-and-equality
2 ibid.
3 J.D. Vance, “Hillbilly Elegy”, p. 193
4 ibid. p. 1945 http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-lives-of-poor-white-people
6 Ken Collier, “Our Seven Principles in Story and Verse”, p. 20.
7 http://www.rwjf.org/en/library/infographics/minneapolis-map.html
8 Harold Bloom, Robb Erskine, “Literature of the Holocaust”, p. 166 https://books.google.com/books?id=WOFvRrD7vfgC&pg=PA166#v=onepage&q&f=false