Unitarian Universalists and the Guidance of Reason

When I joined a brick and mortar UU congregation in 1996, I loved the UU emphasis on reason.  I was especially inspired by the fifth source: “Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”
In 2007, a fly appeared in the ointment of reason.  UUWorld published “Eating Ethically,” telling UUs to eat organic food.  The article omitted organic farming’s lower yields and the fact that organic food costs more and not all UUs would be able to afford it.  Shades of Calvin, who thought you could discern the worthy because they were rich.
Local food was likewise recommended. Do UUs believe in the interdependent web of existence but not in an interdependent economy?  Don’t out of town people have the same inherent worth and dignity as locals?  Also, the article dismissed the Green Revolution (advances in plant breeding and agricultural technology) as unsustainable. Shouldn’t UUs celebrate a billion people saved from starvation?
The article admonished UUs  to shorten their food miles, yet the food miles concept is  fallacious because the significant variable is not the distance the food travels, but how much fuel is needed per pound of food transported.   I calculated that it’s more efficient in terms of pounds of food transported per gallon of gasoline to ship it long distances in big trucks compared to short trips to a local farmer (which the article recommended) to buy a week’s worth of produce for the family.
The official UU magazine was wrong! What a disillusionment!  If they were wrong about food miles what else would they be wrong about?   However, we haven’t heard much about food miles for the last five years.  Other people besides me must have done the math.
Historical logic likewise flies out the door. According to Susan Frederick Gray, newly elected Unitarian Universalist Association president:  “Global climate disruption is a direct result of the paradigm of dominance that also perpetuates racial, social, and economic inequities,” she writes, “as well as systemic violence of against women, indigenous communities, people of color, and the poor.”  The two other UUA presidential candidates submitted similar statements.
Their reasoning is specious.  The “paradigm of dominance” perpetuating racism, economic and social inequities, enforced by violence, has been around for the last 10,000 years of human history. For instance, the Bible says, “Slaves, obey your masters.” So why has the climate changed only in the last 150 years since the Industrial Revolution with its increased carbon dioxide emissions?   Moreover, violence -- against women, indigenous communities, people of color, and the poor -- has been decreasing during the same time the climate has been warming.  In the US, the slaves got freedom, women got the vote, and gays got marriage.
As Steven Pinker explains in The Better Angels of our Nature 2011, modern communications technology allows people to empathize with each other, thus reducing violence.
When UU leaders make pronouncements, I wish they would follow their own venerable traditions of logic and reason.

The Conservation of Virtue

“The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right,” said Henry David Thoreau in Resistance to Civil Government 1849.  Ever since Thoreau, who refused to pay a tax supporting slavery, people have continued to break laws in the name of a higher good.
In the late fifties, Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus; African American students held sit-ins at white lunch counters.  These protesters, whose cause was equal treatment for all, broke contemporary laws, but did not endanger anyone.
The Civil Rights movement was followed by the Peace Movement against the Vietnam War.  Most of us can agree that peace is better than war, although some felt the dangers of world Communist domination overrode the evils of war. Most of the protesting was peaceful.
“The nice ways always fail,” sang Malvina Reynolds in1964.  But the data shows they don’t. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan in Why Civil Resistance Works 2012 showed that nonviolent campaigns to be more than twice as effective as violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals.  Nevertheless, some antiwar protesters went so far as to bomb facilities supporting the war, killing innocents who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A statement by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg in How Not to Be Wrong 2015 applies to activists as well as pious people.  “We become like those pious people who, over time, accumulate a sense of their own virtuousness so powerful as to believe the bad things they do are virtuous too,” -- what I call the Conservation of Virtue principle.
A just cause may justify civil disobedience, but does an act of civil disobedience mean the cause is just?  For instance, in 2015, Kim Davis defied a Federal court order and refused to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples.  Correspondingly, in math speak, the fact that all primes greater than two are odd does not imply all odd numbers are prime.
Al Gore understands the value of making a political cause a moral cause: “The climate crisis also offers us the chance to experience a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause . . .”  An Inconvenient Truth 2006. Hence, climate activists can presume the conservation of virtue.
In the case of the Valve Turner action in October 2016, climate activists blocked transport of Canadian tar sands oil to US refineries to prevent burning fossil fuels that contributes to climate change.  Never mind their action endangered people at the present time.  Carl Weimer, executive director at the industry watchdog Pipeline Safety Trust, said  "Closing valves on major pipelines can have unexpected consequences endangering people and the environment.” http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-canada-pipelines-idUSKCN12B26O
Other pipeline operators and safety experts said shutting off valves was extremely dangerous and that activists underestimated the risks.  “Pipelines can be heavily pressurized depending on length and altitude variation, and shutting off a valve could cause ruptures that are ‘catastrophic’ for the environment,” said Paul Tullis of Tullis Engineering Consultants.  http://business.financialpost.com/news/energy/bolt-cutters-expose-vulnerability-of-north-americas-oil-pipeline-grid
Valve Turner Leonard Higgins, applying the Conservation of Virtue principle, says his actions were necessitated by the immediate danger that climate change poses to his family, his friends, and every other human on earth.  Given the responsibility to protect innocent people from the ravages of climate change, he had no choice but to take illegal action
"It's an act of desperation," Higgins says. "I don't think that there's a direct cause and effect that my taking this action will carry the day, but it contributes, just as in other acts of civil resistance in other movements in the past.”  Does Higgins see himself taking Rosa Parks’ seat?
So if I truly believe genetically engineered food endangers human health, biodiversity, and the planet’s ecosystems, should I attack Safeway?  Would my Unitarian Univeralist congregation hold a fund raiser for my legal defense as several congregations did for the Valve Turners?  I don’t think so.

Malthus + Thoreau = Green

Two streams of thought have contributed to the modern environmental movement and climate activism. Malthus, cited math and science, Thoreau waxed poetic about nature.
Thomas Robert Malthus originated the math and science arm of modern environmentalism when he stated in 1798 that population grows exponentially while resources to feed the population can only grow arithmetically. Therefore, population will inevitably outstrip the food supply. Doom awaits!
Malthus did not believe in philanthropy. “We are bound to disclaim the right of the poor to support.”  In the meantime, to get rid of the fast multiplying poor, “we should encourage settlements in unwholesome situations.”  Thus the overpopulation threat was used as an excuse to oppress the poor. The British used Malthusian arguments to justify not giving aid to starving Irish during the 19th century potato famine.
Later, in the 20th  century, writers like Paul Ehrlich revived the Malthusian argument. In the same vein as the mid-19th century British authorities, Paul Ehrlich stated that if India didn’t control its population, it “will be one of those we must allow to slip down the drain.”
By the late 20th century, not only was civilization going to end under its own weight as per historians like Arnold Toynbee, the environment, essential to our survival, was being destroyed because of too many people.   Doom continues as a theme of the environmental movement.
Malthus’ hypothesis was plausible; the math was correct, but what actually happened?  World population is now seven times what it was in Malthus’ time, but wealth per person is forty times as high, although it is inequitably distributed. Thanks to Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution, the famines Ehrlich predicted never happened.
Since his predictions didn’t come true, there must have been factors Malthus didn’t account for. First, he left out human ingenuity. By 1844, thinkers like Friedrich Engels, coauthor with Karl Marx of The Communist Manifesto, had already asked, “What is impossible for science?”  Ideas feed on each other and thus, like population, grow exponentially.
  Hence, too small or too dispersed a population has disadvantages.  The sparse aboriginal Tasmanians lost technology compared to what their ancestors had brought from Australia.  Once the last tool broke and the last person who knew how to repair it or make a new one died, there were no more such tools.
Malthus didn’t foresee fossil fuels’ gift of energy and the ensuing industrial revolution.  Also, neither he nor Ehrlich expected the Demographic Transition. With increased wealth, fewer babies die, hence women have fewer of them.  They prefer education and careers over motherhood.  In the real world, population growth has been slowing down.
Like Malthus, Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden, contributed to modern environmentalist thought. Unlike Malthus, he didn’t see the world as crowded or overpopulated. “Our horizon is never quite at our elbows.”
Thoreau saw nature in spiritual terms: “A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air.” Unlike Malthus, Thoreau was not of a mathematical mind, though his pronouncements sound like an advance example of mansplaining.   “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  How did he know?  Did he take a survey?  He claimed morning air a panacea for all ills. Where’s the evidence?  It didn’t cure his tuberculosis.  “We do not ride on the railroad, it  rides upon us,” meaning we don’t control technology, but it controls us.  What was his reasoning?
Malthus’ solution to poverty was to get rid of poor people; Thoreau thought they should just want less. “Simplify, simplify,” says Thoreau, hence workers should be content to live in packing boxes. “. .  a large box. . . six feet long by three feet wide . . having drilled a few auger holes in it. . “  while he enjoyed his snug cabin and had a mother a mile away who did his laundry and brought him cookies.  Voluntary simplicity for me; abject poverty for thee.
  Like Malthus, Thoreau rejected  philanthropy.  “Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. I saw it would be a greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole slop-shop on him.”
What Thoreau ate was very important to him.  He claimed eating meat and more than one meal per day to be self-indulgent.  Did he tell that to the Irish during the potato famine occurring during his voluntary Walden sojourn? Is it a surprise he died of tuberculosis (linked to malnutrition) at age 44?
Thoreau loved nature but he didn’t like much of anything else: not communication, not commerce, nor other people. As Steven Pinker explains in The Better Angels of Our Nature 2011, commerce and communication reduce violence because other people become more valuable alive than dead when you can trade your surplus for their surplus to the benefit of both parties.  Communication allows people to identify with each other, increasing empathy and reducing violence. Since the Middle Ages, a time of self-sufficient local farmers, homicide rates have fallen a hundredfold.
From Civil Disobedience: “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’,” yet government keeps people from settling their own disputes in a violent fashion.
Thoreau’s dislike of socializing and his strict routines made me wonder if he suffered from Asperger’s syndrome.  I found many hits on Google, suggesting others had had the same suspicion.  Hence he can be forgiven for his misanthropic views.
One thing we can take away from Walden is the value of retreats, short term opportunities to examine one’s life. In addition, we learn to appreciate nature. We set aside parklands. In the city, Zen gardens give us the serenity of nature.  Thoreau was correct in that spending your life trying to acquire more and more stuff does not bring contentment.
Modern Green climate activists combine ideas from both Malthus and Thoreau.  From Malthus derive the use of math and science and the dangers of overpopulation because the fewer the people, the fewer carbon emissions. From Thoreau come asceticism, moralizing food intake, dislike of technology, the love of nature, as well as the penchant for telling other people what they should do.
In the bash-the-poor tradition of Malthus and Thoreau, climate activists favor a carbon tax. Since the poor spend a greater proportion of their income on fuel than the rich, such a tax is more regressive than a sales tax on food. Picture the impact $10 per gallon gasoline would have on the budget of a struggling single mother who drives a gas hog and lives in a poorly insulated trailer miles away from her minimum wage job!

God rest Unitarian Universalists

         No rest for Unitarians, the world’s in disarray
The climate still is changing, race is here to stay
So work for social justice, with meetings every day.
Loud tidings of passion and zeal, passion and zeal,
Loud tidings of passion and zeal.

With apologies to Christopher Raible
Happy Holidays to all!

Little Boxes

Humming along with Malvina Reynolds’ catchy tune “Little Boxes” on my internet radio, for the first time I really listened to the words. “Little Boxes made of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same.”   Not only are the boxes identical, but the individuals living in them are identical as well:  “Then [off] to the university where they are put in boxes and they come out all the same.”  But if you went inside the houses, everybody’s would look different because everybody is different – a unique valuable individual with thoughts and feelings.
I imagine the residents of the little boxes as people who have worked their way up from poverty.  Steven Jay Gould’s family is an example.  “Papa Joe, [Gould’s grandfather] who possessed extraordinary artistic talents that remained undeveloped and underutilized, lived an ordinary life as a garment worker in New York City. He enjoyed periods of security and endured bouts of poverty; he and my grandmother raised four children, all imbued with the ordinary values that ennoble our species and nation: fairness, kindness, the need to persevere and rise by one's own efforts. In the standard pattern, his generation struggled to solvency; my parents graduated from high school, fought a war, and moved into the middle classes; the third cohort achieved a university education, and some of us have enjoyed professional success.” “September 11, 1901"  http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/september_11_1901.html
Shouldn’t  those who sing for ordinary people in songs like “This Land is Your Land”  congratulate rather than sneer at the ones who make it into the middle class?

Wheezers, Geezers, and Gimps!

Unitarian Universalist congregations are becoming ever more oriented toward social justice, a trend that has been accelerating since Justice GA in 2012.  This trend is an advantage for the UU movement because being for something unites people more than being against something, such as in the past, traditional religious dogma.  Social justice activism grows congregations and growing congregations make ministers look good.
However, social justice crowds out other concerns.  For instance, some in my congregation want to forego remodeling our building in order to fight climate change.  This group  takes the moral high ground because they claim if energy and resources are focused on the building, the congregation will not have the energy to address the climate emergency. Those in favor of remodeling also take the moral high ground, claiming our current space decreases our ability to live our mission. Meanwhile, there are people in the congregation who are excluded from its programs because they can’t climb stairs or breathe the polluted indoor air.
As Carolyn Zaikoski points out, you have to be able bodied to be a good activist. http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/09/social-justice-activism-ableist/   Activists have to be able to go to events in inaccessible spaces and to participate in public protests.  So why should a congregation expend its limited  resources for the disabled if its mission is to be social activists?
Wheezers, geezers, and gimps!  Who needs ‘em?

Humans Extinct by 1900!

County Cork, Ireland, 1847, in a time of climate change:  Several wet summers in succession have allowed a blight, Phytophthora infestans, to ravage the Irish potato crop. These potatoes, propagated asexually, have low resistance to the blight since they have almost no genetic diversity.  Even though Ireland has continued to export meat, grain, and dairy products, the peasants live almost exclusively on potatoes.  Now that crop is failing and the peasants are starving.
This is just as the Rev Thomas Malthus predicted forty years ago in 1800.  The Irish, ignorant Roman Catholics, multiplied faster than their food supply.   As Malthus commented, “The population should be swept from the soil.”
There could be more far reaching effects.  As plague jumped from rats to people, P. infestans could affect other members of the Solanaceae family: eggplants, tomatoes, and tobacco.  Not only that, in half a century, it could affect all agricultural crops. We just don’t know what kind of Black Swan event might occur.   When world agriculture fails, so will humanity. Human extinction is possible by 1900!

Well, all that could have happened, but how much to worry about something depends on the probability of it happening. An asteroid could fall on my house, my house could burn down, or a tree could fall on it.  I get homeowner’s insurance, but not asteroid insurance, since there’s only an asteroid landing big enough to create a crater only every five thousand years or so.
Be reasonable!