Unitarian
Universalist Fellowship of Corvallis
Corvallis,
Oregon
Good Things Come from Unexpected Places:
Why UUs Can and Should Be Optimists
December
4, 2005
Sheila
Smith
Sermon:
“Good Things from Unexpected Places”
Sr Cecelia is still alive at age
98 and has never been sick a day in her life.
Sr Marguerite died of a stroke at age 59......
From Martin Seligman’s book Authentic
Happiness, one of today’s sources.
The example I just read of the nuns shows that individual
optimists are better off. I’ll expand on that idea a little, then I’ll show
that members of traditional religions tend to be optimists, and why. Although we UUs don’t accept the
fundamentalists’ reason for optimism, I’ll give reasons based on game theory
and evolution for UUs to hope. And what better time to celebrate Hope than this
season of Advent.
Many studies show that optimists are healthier, live longer
and are more successful than pessimists. The more optimistic presidential
candidate won 85% of the elections in the 20th century. For example, in 1952
Stevenson was full of doom and gloom while Eisenhower exuded can-do optimism.
One group of optimists we’re all familiar with is members of
fundamentalist religions. Seligman and
Sethi did a study that showed Orthodox Jews, fundamentalist Christians and
Muslims markedly more optimistic than Reform Jews and Unitarian Universalists. The more fundamentalist the religion, the
more optimistic its adherents. The authors suggest the reason for the increased
optimism is that fundamentalist religions teach hope.
For example, the Christmas story teaches hope. Let’s look at the images in the Christmas
story. A Divine child is born, not in a
palace where you’d expect such a being to be born, but in a stable. The people
around him are ordinary working people: a carpenter, shepherds. He’s the child of an unwed mother and the
family is homeless. But angels announce
him and wise men visit. The story tells
us good things can turn up in the most unexpected places. And whether you
believe the story is literally true or not, it still spells hope.
Now, some UUs reject such stories altogether. UU minister John Nichols quoted the song we
began with this morning when he preached about those who “take the route that
is highly critical of religious beliefs generally...they will believe and
accept only what is forced upon them by rational inquiry.” I enjoy reason and fact as much as the next
person, but I always chuckle when I hear those lyrics because I know there’s
not much comfort and joy in the kind of reason and fact that debunks. If all UUs can do is rail against what
other people find meaningful, our movement will die.
Going back to Sethi and Seligman, do liberal religions fail
to teach hope, or do pessimists select liberal religions? I think we UUs, especially our activists,
have accepted too much of the Puritan heresy. Rebecca Solnit points out the
connection between activism, pessimism, and puritanism:
Sometimes these bad news bringers
seem in love with defeat, because if they are constantly prophesying doom,
actual doom is, as we say in California, pretty validating. But part of it is a personal style: I think
that this grimness is more a psychology than an ideology. There’s a kind of
activism that’s more about bolstering identity than achieving results, one that
sometimes seems to make the Left the true heirs of the Puritans. Puritanical in that the point becomes the demonstration
of one’s own virtue rather than the realization of results. And puritanical because the somber pleasure
of condemning things is the most enduring part of that legacy, along with the
sense of personal superiority that comes from pleasure denied......Another part
of the Puritan legacy is the notion that no one should have joy or abundance
until everyone does, a belief that’s austere at one end in the deprivation it
endorses and fantastical in the other since it awaits a universal utopia.
Rather than puritanism and pessimism, we UUs need stories that engender hope. I have come to offer you such a one this
morning. A story that has the added
advantage that it’s probably true in the scientific as well as the metaphorical
sense. First I’ll go over the problems inherent in the traditional view of God,
held by those who believe literally in the Christmas story.
Adherents of traditional religions believe in a supernatural
God who is omniscient, omnipotent, all good, and created the Universe. They also
believe in free will for humans. With those beliefs and a promise of a blissful
afterlife who wouldn’t be an optimist?
But many UUs see logical flaws in this concept of God. An all powerful all good being would
probably have prevented the Holocaust and definitely have prevented Katrina
from destroying New Orleans. If he’s
not in charge of political systems, he should at least control the weather.
Rabbi Harold Kushner in When Bad Things Happen to Good
People interprets the story of Job to mean if Job and God are both good,
God can’t be all powerful. Kushner concludes God can’t be all good and all
powerful at the same time. Even God can’t prevail against Chaos, personified in
the Job story by the sea serpent Leviathan. But God, in Kushner’s view, remains the
source of goodness. But if God cured your mother of cancer, how come he didn’t
cure mine?
So what’s a UU to do?
How can we be optimists like the fundamentalists and thus make our
movement successful? I want to examine
one more aspect of the traditional God, then I’ll tell you how we can be
optimists without invoking the supernatural, by extrapolating from a dog
training story into game theory and then back to evolution and God.
The traditional God is also the Creator of the
universe. God laid everything out in
six days, species by species of plants and animals. Then humans were created by
an additional divine intervention. This
last phenomenon is a vital point to traditional believers. They claim that human life has meaning
because God created us.
But that task is lost to the traditional God because the
universe and life most likely arose naturally without the intervention of a
supernatural creator. Darwin
established in 1859 that natural selection creates new species. Some of these species are downright
outlandish like giraffes and duckbilled platypuses.
Solnit suggests God, rather than presiding over a static
Newtonian universe, is more like the Native American deity Coyote “who is
indestructible, lecherous, hilarious, and improvisational.” Coyote sounds like a metaphor for evolution
to me!
For the last century and a half, the conservative religious
establishment has been fighting evolution. Even now they want to teach
creationism in the schools as an alternate to the “theory” of evolution. I think the reason evolution is so
threatening to believers in a Creator is that they feel that if God did not
make us and evolution did, then our lives are meaningless. Big logical gap there for me. In my opinion,
the reason and facts of evolution are the key to hope. Why?
First I’ll tell you a dog story, then we’ll take a side trip
into game theory, finally we’ll see God and evolution in a new light.
One afternoon I headed for the couch with my magazine, but
the dog I’d had adopted a few months back had settled in the good spot
first. I reached for his collar to pull
him off, but Bozeman, possibly wary of my abrupt reach and my magazine, gave me
a glassy eyed stare and a soft growl.
Uh-oh.
This was the first time Bozeman had growled at me. I needed to stop this behavior before he
learned that he could control humans with growls and/or his growls escalated to
snapping and biting. I lured him off
the couch with a treat and installed myself in the good spot to ponder my
options.
I could sit on the floor, but it is my couch. Luring him off the couch amounted to
bribery. What if Bozeman decided he preferred resting on the couch to eating a
treat? Or I could take umbrage at
Bozeman’s defiance – no dog of mine is going to growl at me -- and flatten him
with a magazine (thereby confirming his
fear of literature) or yell, hit, or jerk his collar. Then again, Bozeman might flatten me with a bite. Also, punishment might teach him to skip
growling and go directly to biting.
I phoned a trainer.
She suggested that Bozeman lose
couch privileges. But I’d have to lay
the dining room chairs on the couch when I was gone; besides my other dog (who never growls) is allowed on the
couch. In addition, losing couch
privileges would only manage the problem, not teach Bozeman to get off the
couch when I asked him to – which is what I really wanted.
Once I began to think in terms of what I wanted Bozeman to
do (get off the couch when asked) rather than what not to do (defend the
couch), the solution appeared. Why not teach him to switch between on and off
the couch on command? He’d earlier learned to switch between “Take it” and
“Leave it.” That way he’d understand the concept of “Off!”
To teach the behaviors, I’d
use my trusty clicker, a hand held noisemaker that tells the dog he did
it right and will get a treat. I’d already successfully clicker trained Bozeman to enter his crate on command.
The next day, in the presence of the clicker, Bozeman perked
up, ready to learn. I patted the couch, clicked and treated when Bozeman jumped
up onto it. Then I pointed to the floor
with a treat in my hand, and clicked and treated when he jumped off. After a few repetitions, I named the
behaviors “Up!” and “Off!” I repeated
the Up!/Off! sequence a dozen times;
phasing out clicking and treating in the last few repetitions. In five minutes, Bozeman had learned to get
on and off the couch on command.
Ever since that one short training session, neither of us
has threatened the other. When I want to sit on my couch, I tell Bozeman “Off!”
He hops off with no objections. I
nestle in by the pillows, then I invite Bozeman “Up!” to cuddle.
I didn’t realize it at the time but this whole incident can
be analyzed in terms of game theory, first articulated by von Neumann and
Morgenstern in 1944. The options I didn’t choose are zero-sum games. I sit on floor, Bozeman wins, I lose. I
bribe Bozeman, he wins, I lose. I put
chairs on couch, Bozeman and I both lose.
I punish Bozeman, he loses, I lose too if he bites me then or next
time. I clicker train, we both
win. Clicker training is shorthand for
applied operant conditioning.
Karen Pryor, the foremother of clicker training, doesn’t use
game theory language but she shows how clicker training is a win-win
system. She also illustrates Seligman’s
claim that good feelings are the hallmark of win-win games. I quote from Pryor:
Instead of trying to fix the dog
and stop the problems, owners began looking for good behavior and rewarding
that; and the problems usually went away by themselves....The attitudes of the
dogs changed too. This person with a
clicker who perhaps used to be largely an impediment to what ever the dog
wished to do, now became an exciting and even valuable acquaintance. A dog that had discovered ways to make the
owner click became much more focused on the owner, much more interested in what
the owner wanted. Two beings that often
had been at odds with each other now became partners learning together.
Now back to evolution.
Although evolution is a random process, some traits are selected for
more than other traits. Look out the
window and you will see green trees, grass, and shrubs, multicellular plants
(not single celled algae) with chloroplasts in their cells that might have been
free living organisms once, but played a win/win game by incorporating
themselves into plant cells. Robert
Wright in his book Non Zero contends that organic evolution selects for
greater complexity and more win/win systems. One reason is because more complex
life forms are able to fill previously vacant niches. This is a purely natural
or material process that does not require supernatural intervention.
Wright likewise claims that intelligence is selected
for. For instance, intelligent
predators catch more prey leaving their genes for intelligence in the pool.
With our big brains, humans, despite our slow legs and weak jaws, have spread
over every continent on the planet.
Not only organic evolution, but cultural evolution has moved
in a similar fashion. Jared Diamond in Guns,
Germs, and Steel gives historical-anthropological examples of increasing
complexity in human societies. Forty thousand years ago all humans lived in
bands of a few dozen members of an extended family. Even now I think, we recreate groups within our complex state
societies small enough so that everyone knows everyone else, The UUFC is such a body where we all know
each other and can make decisions in
town meeting fashion.
Over the past 13,000 years, bands have combined into tribes which coalesce into chiefdoms which
then become highly organized states with 50,000 or more population. An evolutionary reason drives the amalgamation: “Societies with effective conflict
resolution, sound decision making, and harmonious economic redistribution can
develop better technology, concentrate their military power, seize larger and
more productive territories and crush autonomous smaller societies one by
one.” The fate of the Greenland Norse may be the exception that
proves the rule. The Norse were better
organized politically but the Inuit’s superior Arctic technology won out.
To sum up, greater complexity and win/win systems are both selected for in both organic and
cultural evolution.
Nobody has to be nice for win/win systems to prevail. Listen to this example from The Godfather
Returns by Mark Winegardner. This is a novel about career criminals, very
unpleasant people you wouldn’t want to have over to dinner or meet at a
restaurant for that matter. Geraci,
whom the reader saw earlier carrying out a mob execution, muses:
Killing Michael Corleone would
have been another option, and like killing Narducci, a satisfying one. But where would it have led? Mayhem, war, millions of dollars in lost profits. Even if they won, they’d lose.
So even a cold blooded killer can see there’s something in
it for him not to be violent. Also, by this point in the story, the Mob has
formed a nationwide network of operations.
Peace just works better when systems get more complex.
At the conclusion of Authentic Happiness, Seligman,
paraphrases Wright. “He knows of course
that history is checkered with one horror after another. Progress in history is not like an
unstoppable locomotive, but more like a balky horse that often refuses to budge
and even walks backward occasionally.”
But in Seligman’s words, Wright insists, “The broad movement
of history, not ignoring such backward walks as the Holocaust, anthrax
terrorism, and the genocide against the Tasmanian aborigines, is, when viewed
over centuries, in the direction of more win-win.”
Look back only 45 years.
Solnit points out how much our world has changed since she was born in
1961. [It was] a world in which there
was little or no recourse – and often not even the words – for racial
profiling, hate crimes, domestic violence, sexual harassment, homophobia, and
other forms of exclusion and oppression.”
Now how can we UUs
make a meaningful life? The answer is
we can go with the evolutionary flow toward complexity and win/win
scenarios. If we see ourselves moving
the universe toward greater complexity and win-win scenarios, life is hardly
meaningless.
Think of the story of the three medieval stone masons. The first said. “I’m piling up rocks.” The second one said, “I’m building a
wall.” The third mason, eyes shining,
said, “I’m building a great cathedral.”
Me, I get to be a clicker trainer for dogs. And only a cockeyed optimist
of a dog trainer would persist long enough to make a therapy dog out of Bozeman
who when I adopted him leaped and nipped and hated to be touched.
Seligman identifies greater complexity with more connections
ie more power and knowledge, and more
win-win scenarios with greater goodness.
The design toward more complexity
[is] mandated by the invisible hand of natural selection and of cultural
selection that favors more win-win. I
think of this ever increasing complexity as identical with greater power and of
greater knowledge, as well as greater goodness, since goodness is about a
ubiquitous group of virtues all successful cultures have evolved..... A process
that continually selects for more complexity is ultimately aimed at nothing
less than omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness.
Note that knowledge, power, and goodness are the attributes
of the traditional God. Maybe the traditional God is more like a Platonic form
or a Jungian archetype. Or what the
French paleontologist, priest and mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
would have called the Omega point. I
think we get a Coyote-type God for now.
We have to wait till the end for an omniscient, omnipotent, all-good
God!
I conclude with a final quote from Seligman
This is not a fulfillment that
will be achieved in our lifetimes or even in the lifetime of our species. The
best we can do as individuals is to choose to be a small part of furthering
this process...
[We] can choose a life built
around increasing knowledge: learning, teaching, educating our children,
science, literature, journalism, and so many more opportunities. [We] can
choose a life built around increasing power through technology, engineering,
construction, health services, or manufacturing. Or [we] can choose a life built around increasing goodness
through the law, policing, firefighting, religion, ethics, politics, national
service, or charity.
This is
the door through which meaning that transcends us can enter our lives. A meaningful life is one that joins with
something larger than we are – and the larger that something is the more
meaning our lives have. Partaking in a
process that has the bringing of a God who is endowed with omniscience,
omnipotence, and goodness as its ultimate end joins our lives to an enormously
large Something.
Order of Service
December
4, 2005
9:30 &
11:00 a.m.
“Good
Things Come from Unexpected Places:
Why UUs
Can and Should Be Optimists”
Sheila
Smith
Welcome and Announcements
Light Chalice
Opening Words
#653,
Resurgence of Joy
Opening Song
“God
Rest Ye Unitarians”
God Rest Ye Unitarians, let
nothing you dismay
Remember there’s no evidence there
was a Christmas Day
When Christ was born is just not
known no matter what they say
O tidings of reason and fact,
reason and fact
Glad tidings of reason and fact.
Our current Christmas customs come
from Persia and from Greece
From solstice celebrations of the
ancient middle East
The whole darn Christmas spiel is
just another pagan feast.
O tidings of reason and fact,
reason and fact
Glad tidings of reason and fact.
There was no star of Bethlehem,
there was no angels’ song
There couldn’t have been wise men
cause the trip would take too long
The stories in the Bible are
historically wrong
O tidings of reason and fact,
reason and fact
Glad tidings of reason and fact.
Author
unknown
Reading
Seligman
on the nun study
Sermon
“Good
Things Come from Unexpected Places:
Why
UUs Can and Should Be Optimists”
Offering/Offertory
Verbal Response
Sung Response
#244,
“It Came Upon a Midnight Clear”
Candles of Joy and Sorrow
Meditation
#578,
“Olympia Brown”
Extinguish Chalice
Closing Song
#240,
“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” (verses 1, 2, 3)
Closing Words
#549,
“Teilhard de Chardin last 2 paragraphs
Closing Song
#240,
“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” (verses 4 & 5)
Greet your neighbor!