Progress: “Onward”? “Upward”? Yeah, Right.

Sunday service by Chris Edwards, Nov. 14, 2010

Chalice Readings:

“The progress of mankind onward and upward forever.”
– Unitarian Rev. James Freeman Clarke, 1885

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. – Ecclesiastes

“Knowledge will lead to the absolute perfection of the human race.” -Nicolas de Condorcet

Trying to control the future
Is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place.
When you handle the master carpenter’s tools,
Chances are you’ll cut your hand.
–The Tao

Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers. – Socrates

At least the past is safe. . . Because it’s in the past; because we have survived. – Susan Sontag

The past is never dead–it is not even past. – William Faulkner

The guns will all be silent and the flags will all be furled
When we tie a yellow ribbon ‘round the world.
–Utah Phillips

Don’t look back. Something may be gaining on you. – Satchel Paige

***

In 1885, Rev. James Freeman Clarke outlined his “Five Points of the New Theology,” a predecessor to our 7 Principles that’s engraved in some old Unitarian churches:
“The fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and . . . the progress of mankind onward and upward forever.” Aside from theological and gender language, what else here might be outdated?

Today’s Hymn 143 appears in a section in the UU hymnal of onwardy, upwardy hymns, mostly penned in the Victorian Age. Our tradition is strong on this. The first UU service I recall attending, in the late 60s, had a discussion of whether human progress happens. One man kept insisting the question was ridiculous: “We have plastics, my wife fixes TV dinners, we’re putting a man on the moon!”

Yes, we humans are stunningly clever at devising technological stuff. But how much have we learned about how to live? Bringing the question back today, I’ll leave out lofty metaphysics and just think of a line from that song, “The Kindergarten Wall”: “Don’t hurt each other and clean up your mess.” Are we getting better at that?

I was born in 1945, a month after Hiroshima. Times were optimistic as long as nuclear war held off. Living in the Virginia suburbs near the Potomac, my father, an engineer, said if Washington was hit we’d die instantly. A fatalistic comfort. Somehow humanity survived 40 years of standoff. We’ve stopped thinking about Armageddon much . . .even though nukes now are more accessible.

Remember the “Peace Dividend,” when the Cold War was ending? The late Alexander “Sandy” Peaslee (a UU in Charlottesville who ran in a primary for Congress) said that would be the No. 1 issue: how to use the great windfall that wouldn’t be needed on weapons. Well?

Growing up, I rarely heard a foreign language spoken. Gays were deep in the closet, though an alleged lesbian couple lived across the street. We’d hear about incidents of spouse or child abuse or date rape, but authorities almost never got involved with those.

Bus drivers always made people of color move to the back. That was culture shock for my parents, who had moved from New York. They were liberals, but they thought it would be at least 100 years before black and white children in the South attended school together.

Subdivisions required home buyers to sign a Restrictive Covenant, pledging never to sell to “Negroes, Orientals or Hebrews.” I fought with my parents about that when we moved. I was in 9th grade – the year, 1959, that my geography class studied the new state, Hawaii. The state where two years later, Barack Obama would be born.

Fast forward to Nov. 2008, when a headline in The Onion read, “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.”

When I was maybe ten, a movie-short had shown a little girl my age in her Kitchen of the Future, where everything would get cooked, served and cleaned by her just pressing buttons. It didn’t say what she’d do outside that kitchen.

I went to a women’s college, a creative and intellectually lively place, where I sensed an unspoken rule that talking about careers would be tacky. In 1967, when I was looking for a job the summer after graduation, the Washington Post classifieds were divided into a “Help Wanted, Men” section listing professional and blue collar jobs, and “Help Wanted, Women” for mostly secretarial work.

A century ago, idealists had believed we were the nobler sex, who, once granted power, would bring world peace. If they could see some of the cable and political figures now who have two X chromosomes, they might cry. But what if the suffragists could see today’s bigger picture – everything from dads changing babies’ diapers to women outnumbering men in medical schools? I rejoice that my kids and grandkids live in a much more open, diverse society.

Remember fearing we might one day have to eat algae? Overpopulation is still a crisis, but a little-known, hopeful truth is that the worldwide fertility rate has declined from an average of nearly 5 children per woman in 1950, to 2 ½. This change has mostly happened not by force but by women around the world gaining some autonomy.

Think of how infinitely more comfortable our lives are, to our ancestors’ 200,000 years ago. Foraging for grubs to eat and a hollow log to sleep in, wary of predators. We’re so much better off … except, if I had to be homeless, I’d rather live in the Stone Age. The Stone Age might not be much different from foraging in trash cans, looking for a park bench to sleep, still wary of predators — except for not being a pariah.

By the 80s we started seeing many homeless people. Poverty is one social wrong that isn’t getting overcome. The U.S. Census says the gap between rich & poor is the widest ever. The mid-20th Century seemed to bring unheralded security and prosperity to a growing American middle class, who started happily buying homes and sending their kids to college. Is that going away?

Meanwhile, over 22,000 children worldwide die each day from hunger and preventable disease.

I don’t believe in geezing. Geezing (if that can be gender neutral) is when us old geezers grumble that people now don’t have the character, and kids don’t have the manners, of back in the day, when no one locked their doors, etc. Maybe every generation hears that, back at least to Socrates’ time. I suspect it’s mostly bull manure.

But we do have unique challenges. We feel helpless to make a difference, and swallowed up by big institutions. Call either a government agency or a business and you might wait almost endlessly on hold to get your question not answered. A book, “Your Call Is (Not That) Important To Us,” says customer service is neglected because it doesn’t really pay.

We have more security devices than ever, and life might not really have gotten more dangerous, but we feel less safe.

We make institutions to serve us; then they control us. Banks get “too big to fail.” Congress, too dysfunctional to fix itself. We admire the Iroquois tradition about looking out for the 7th generation, but our institutions train politicians and business leaders to look no further than the next election or earnings report.

Some of us have started walking more, driving less, spending less, eating locally grown, organic foods and giving homemade gifts. These things are very good for us, and for the planet – but what if a critical mass started doing them? I asked an expert that once, who said it won’t happen, but if it did, our economy would crash and burn.

You can find nice people up and down this lovely Valley whose politics are crazy. They go by slogans. PRO LIFE – so they want the government to make abortion a crime; but GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM, NOT THE SOLUTION – so they don’t want to be taxed a penny for food stamps or preschools that might help children born to 12-year-old mothers, or into homeless families. Yet these voters are often good, salt-of-the-earth people who if you drove into their ditch would cheerfully pull you out, and who’d send checks for a child in the 3rd World.

Some anthropologists say humans aren’t hard-wired to interact in the complex world we’ve made. In the Stone Age we might not have met 100 people in a lifetime. We meet thousands, even if we’re introverts. Maybe we just can’t cope with all these strangers. We fall back on tribal suspicions, resentments, rigid ideologies.

The poet, Yeats, wrote “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Mark Twain attributes the worst human behavior to “moral sense.” Chris Hedges, the war correspondent, blames ideologies. Meaning world-views – even good ones – when we white-knuckle them and try to squeeze the wider, richer reality into their boxes. We get frustrated with those who won’t get with our program. We start wanting them out of our way.

Fundamentalism has been making a worldwide comeback; Karen Armstrong says that goes with disruption. We know of the mayhem done through history in the name of religion…and how the Enlightenment offered hope. Nicolas de Condorcet, a philosopher and French Revolution leader, wrote that “the perfectibility of man cannot be reversed” … and “knowledge will lead to the absolute perfection of the human race.” Sadly, soon after writing that, Condorcet was put in prison by fellow-Revolutionists, and died there.

There were more revolutions that never quite turned out as expected. Now, the ideology that most rules the developed world seems to be market fundamentalism. “Greed is good!” The profit motive is the ultimate value, everyone fights for themselves, no one and nothing deserves protection from the markets.

Another Onion story had the last two mega-corporations on earth merge, while the world’s governments declared themselves irrelevant and dissolved.

This summer Robin and I got to travel through a few of the most wild, beautiful places left in our land. In the indescribable, old growth redwood forests, we learned that our recent forebears logged 96 percent of those giants. Can the ones still standing remain protected? The story of how America created national parks is about a cooperative mission undertaken for future generations. The visionaries who led it included a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt. Could such action for the public good happen now?

We also saw remnants of hydraulic mining. Our ingenious forebears pumped monstrous torrents of water at a hillside through a huge cannon-like hose, rigging up sluices to filter gold from the mess. Everything else would just flood whoever lived downstream. You can still see the scarred hills. . .and be impressed by the ingenuity it took to do such damage with such early technology – along with the carelessness.

The idea of humans damaging the world by using science and technology to try to “improve” it goes back to at least to a visionary, early-19th Century novel. Young Mary Shelley’s brilliant, ingenious, careless Dr. Frankenstein makes that famous creature, whom he then runs from in horror.

By mid-20th Century we had interstates, enormous cars, DDT, and Mickey Mouse as “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Eventually, towns like Harrisonburg started collecting recyclables, while consciousness began growing of what damage we were doing to the earth and odds on undoing it.

Now we’re about to get cars that drive themselves (while we have cars accelerating or decelerating when they shouldn’t). Research to make a drug that will eliminate the need for sleep (while police fight the methamphetamine trade). We have medical miracles to save injured soldiers’ lives (but no solution to war). Author Jonathan Franzen thinks the Internet breaks us up into a “trillion little bits of distracting noise.” I find old friends on Facebook, and hope no one steals my identity. Twitter and YouTube showed us last summer in Iran how they can prevent a government totally cutting off its citizens’ contact with the world, but showed us this summer in Florida how they can give the most obscure extremist more than 15 minutes of fame.

We’re seeing global warming, species extinctions, declines in drinkable water and in the easy-to-access nonsustainable fuels. And forecasts of deeper trouble from the messier ways of access: hydrofraking, mountaintop removal, deep sea oil drilling.

Human beings have such incredible ingenuity, but can we stop hurting each other and clean up our messes? Do we have the collective will?

A philosophy professor, Kwame Appiah, wrote a thought-provoking essay, “How The Future Will Judge Us.” He says it takes an evolution in consciousness before humanity gives up a bad habit. He listed four that our descendants may abolish: environmental destruction, factory livestock farming, criminal justice abuses, and neglect of the elderly. On the blog posts about that column, some wished he’d included eating meat; others (no surprise), abortion. I was surprised he didn’t mention severe poverty, or war, but I hope his assumptions are right. How future generations judge us depends both on whether they’ve made progress, and whether humanity survives.

Optimists cite the elimination of slavery as evidence we could eliminate war. For hundreds of years slavery was taken for granted – then that changed. It’s illegal around the world. But it still happens. Up to 27 million people on the planet today are enslaved—as trafficking victims, child soldiers and in other ways.

A friend who admired animals more than people used to sometimes describe the cruelest tortures and massacres perpetrated by humanity. She’d ask, “Would a wolf do that? NO—only people!” She was right, except for not mentioning that only people will travel across the world to help strangers in an earthquake or famine, or to save endangered species other than our own. We’re complicated! Capable of the best and worst.

François La Rochefoucauld said “Hypocrisy is an homage that vice renders to virtue.” I’ve always hated hypocrisy, but it may point to moral progress that back when Genghis Khan or William the Conqueror saw the chance to invade someone’s land, they just did; but later, invaders started feeling compelled to make excuses (however bogus). Remember racism in the old days? Once, racists were very out front with their attitudes. Now, if you take most public discourse literally, there ARE no racists left in America.

What wonders might our ingenuity provide next?

Some futurists look forward to computers becoming people. . .and our highest court has given corporations the status of people.

Conventional wisdom says any technology that CAN be used to make a profit WILL be. Will a time come when parents order the genetic characteristics of their children the way we can order the specs of our new cars? The film, “Gattaca,” which some scientists call fairly realistic, shows a genetically-engineered elite dominating a naturally-conceived underclass.

Some expect to become immortal, physically. Jonathan Weiner asks in Newsweek, (what) “if a cure for aging became available to the rich before the poor, which is the way the world always turns. . .if the haves lived for a thousand years while the children of have-nots went right on dying hungry at the age of 5? And what would happen to the rest of the living world?”

Even without such a breakthrough, what if the present trend in disparities continues until a few people live in fine, robot-cleaned, heavily guarded homes, while the rest — ragged, unschooled, malnourished — huddle outside their gates? Some of our great-great grandkids would make the elite group . . but if we believe in the “interdependent web of all existence,” how would such a way of life affect them, socially and spiritually?

Is it consolation that the future is never quite what’s imagined? I remember from childhood an illustration of a typical American family in that spacy year 2000, kids, Dad, Mom still with apron and high heels; stepping from their suburban door into their own flying hovercraft to go shopping. And a NY Times article from 1900, expressing grave concern over a possible consequence of automobiles: what damage might it do to the human body to be moved at very high speeds, like 35 mph?

So: Can we expect to go onward and upward?
Or must that happen after our world is first destroyed? Some people wait for the Rapture; others, for the return of some mythic golden age.
I’ll share two hopes, and a fear.
• One hope: A fable my mother told, comparing humanity to a monkey climbing up out of a well –up three steps, falling back two, up three, back two.
• Another hope: A hunch that we’ll just keep muddling along. It’s not much of a slogan, and has no logical defense – it’s just what I’ve known so far.
• A fear: Tragedy. Tragedy in the classic-theater sense of a story rolling toward disaster no matter what might be done or foreseen. Tragic figures are admirable, maybe larger-than-life heroes and heroines, whose tragic flaws bring them down. Is humanity a tragic figure? Is it our tragic flaw that our ingenuity and inventiveness run at faster speeds than our wisdom, cooperation, motivation for not hurting each other and cleaning up our mess? If we caught up, would it be too late?

***

Benediction:
If we were logical, the future would be bleak indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope.
– Jacques Cousteau