Cascadia's Fault, Not Ours

The movie, “Shock/Wave” shows what will happen when the Cascadia Fault off the northwest coast of the United States slips and causes a magnitude eight or nine megathrust earthquake and up to one hundred foot tsunami waves.  Such a disaster could kill thousands and cause billions of dollars of damage, more damage than Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy combined.
Local communities are preparing for this eventuality with earthquake safe buildings, evacuation routes, and tsunami drills.  We don’t know when this Act of God/Nature will happen, but we’re getting ready for when it does.  More important, nobody is being blamed for earthquakes.   Saving human lives is the highest priority.
Another imminent disaster on people’s minds is climate change.  We can’t even predict whether this will really be a disaster; the latest [2013] IPCC report omits tipping points, climate refugees, increased storms and droughts, and accelerated sea level rise.  However, much argument and name calling has ensued.  Millions of dollars are being spent on costly mitigation schemes.
Unlike the Cascadia Big One, Climate Change has become politicized and moralized.   When an issue is moralized, someone is to blame.  Actually increased carbon dioxide is blamed for climate change, but since humans and their activities produce the demon gas, they are ultimately to blame – an ugly Malthusian subtext.
It’s unfortunate that we can’t look at climate change in the same way we look at the Cascadia Big One.  Unlike the Big One that will do untold damage in less than an hour, Climate Change will happen gradually.  We have plenty of time to prepare if we don’t waste it arguing, moralizing, and blaming.  

The Inherent Worth and Dignity of Selfishness

What is sin?  Where does sin come from?  Will we ever be able to totally eliminate sin and evil from the world?   Do bad people have inherent worth and dignity?
Let’s fast forward to the 23rd century and hop aboard the Starship Enterprise.  In an episode called “The Enemy Within” in The Original Series, a transporter malfunction splits Captain Kirk into two parts, his bad side and his good side.  We see the bad Kirk, pupils dilated, prowling about the Enterprise, grabbing whatever he wants. And he wants it now.  He forces the doctor to give him a bottle of medicinal brandy and gulps it down. Then he wants a pretty female officer so he assaults her.  He fights with all who try to subdue him.  This Kirk is totally selfish.
As we’ve all noticed, there are people everywhere who sometimes are like the bad Kirk, in that they do what they want regardless of other people. They range from the merely annoying like my neighbor who has a noisy heat pump under my bedroom window to downright dangerous like sociopathic killers.  Not to mention political despots like Hitler.   In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker calls predation, dominance, revenge, and sadism our inner demons, which make us act like the bad Kirk.
It’s difficult to reconcile our observation that there are bad people whose inner demons take over with our Unitarian Universalist principle of the inherent worth and dignity of every person.  One deceased member of our congregation used to say he didn’t believe a person as bad as Hitler had any inherent worth and dignity.  Another congregant says people like Hitler have used up their quota of inherent worth and dignity.  Which leaves some people, the bad ones, without inherent worth and dignity and seems contrary to our first principle.
However, there is an idea that reconciles the Unitarian Universalist principle of the inherent worth and dignity of every person and our observation there are bad people everywhere. That’s the idea that our selfishness is a necessary part of who we are, although it’s essential to keep it in check.
Back to the 23rd century and the Enterprise.  As we observed, the bad Kirk is selfishness personified.  Spock, always the rationalist as is his nature, says, “What makes one man an exceptional leader?  We see indications that it's his negative side which makes him strong, that his evil side, controlled and disciplined, is vital to his strength.”  Elsewhere on the ship, the good Captain Kirk shows signs of weakness.   He loses his ability to give orders and commands.  He no longer has the power of decision. The good Kirk says, “Somehow, in being duplicated, I have lost my strength of will.  Decisions are becoming more and more difficult.”
Then Spock speaks directly to the good Kirk, “Your negative side removed from you,
the power of command begins to elude you.”
So we see just as Kirk’s bad side made him a strong leader, we all need some selfishness to make a difference in the world.  We can do it constructively by starting a business, courting a partner, working for a cause, writing a memoir that will inspire others.
If, like the bad Kirk, we  focus only on ourselves and separate ourselves from the community, we’re acting like sociopaths who cannot manage their will to selfishness.   That’s what I define as sin. Obviously, some acts are more wrong than others.  Catholics, I think, make a useful distinction between serious mortal sins that affect others in a big way and petty venial sins.
In the 23rd century, Spock muses,  “We have here an unusual opportunity to appraise the human mind, or to examine, in Earth terms, the roles of good and evil in a man – his negative  side, which you call hostility, lust, violence, and his positive side, which Earth people express as compassion, love, tenderness.”  Spock continues: “Being split in two halves is no theory with me.  I have a human half and an alien half at war with each other. I survive because my intelligence wins, makes them live together.”  Spock reinterprets Steven Pinker’s list of our four better angels:  empathy, self-control, morality, and reason.
As the 23rd century Star Trek allegory concludes, the transporter gets fixed, Kirk’s two halves are reunited, and Captain Kirk is able to make the decisions necessary to rescue the crew members stranded on a frozen planet.  Watching the show, 20th and 21st century viewers learn about the benefits and drawbacks of selfishness.  
  Now we can answer the questions we posed:   Where does sin come from?   Sin, I propose, comes from the selfishness we all have, and which is essential to our functioning.  Will we ever be able to totally eliminate sin and evil from the world?  Probably not, because we can’t eliminate all selfishness without disastrous consequences.   Do bad people have the inherent worth and dignity of every person?  Yes, but they haven’t used their reason to balance their selfish and compassionate selves.
Meanwhile, what do we do with sinners? Marilyn Sewall, minister emerita from First Unitarian, Portland, believes that we need to remove or sequester bad people for the sake of the larger community.  She states, “Tolerance of harmful behavior is not consistent with our principles, for it is in violation of the law of love and healthy respect for the larger community.”   Prisons accomplish this function.
How does the Star Trek allegory relate to our own lives?  Selfishness dwells within each of us and since we can’t function without it, it must have inherent worth and dignity.  We have to be sure to keep selfishness in its place and use it for the service of the good.  We can’t let our selfishness dominate.  Remember,  our reason allows us to keep a correct balance between selfishness and weakness.
As the great Rabbi Hillel, who died about the time Jesus was born, said, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I?"

Is the Beloved Community Like a Toastmasters Club?

At Toastmasters clubs, you pay your dues for the privileges of attending the programs and associating with people who also want to become better speakers, but there’s no loyalty expected to or from the club.  In fact, I’m going to drop out of my club for a month because I want to take a Spanish class that meets at the same time.  At Toastmasters clubs, there’s no reason for the organization to concern itself with its members’ lives.  
In Unitarian Universalist congregations, you likewise pay for the privilege of attending the programs and associating with people with similar goals.  Except in our congregations we hear the phrase “The Beloved Community.”   Doesn’t this phrase imply some kind of loyalty from the members to the institution and from the institution to the members?  Shouldn’t a church organization be different from a booster club?
Christine Robinson’s blog (http://iminister.blogspot.com/2013/05/beloved-community.html) points out that some people object that only one’s family is beloved, not one’s fellow congregants.  The latter are merely like neighbors.  
But who is my neighbor, the young man asked Jesus?  Jesus replied with the story of the Good Samaritan who acted as neighbor to the man who fell among thieves.  The Good Samaritan, whom the Jews despised, went the extra mile for a stranger.  Can members of a congregation be that kind of neighbor to each other?  

Training to Generalize

“New Yorkers are rude and pushy!”  “Catholics believe suffering is good for you – no pain meds in their hospitals!”  Sounds like trash talk from ignorant bigots, yet I’ve heard these remarks at my Unitarian Universalist congregation.  However, everyone there has learned not to make rude remarks about Londoners or Jews.  Why are some groups subject to verbal abuse and others not?
The answer lies in a dog training principle. Dogs need to learn a cue in different contexts before they can generalize. After I taught my dog Maggie that the cue “Wait!” meant wait for permission to exit at the back door, I had to teach her “Wait!” meant the same thing at the front door.  Dogs can’t abstract and generalize as well as people, who have language, can.
I’ll still have to teach Maggie not to bolt out the gate, even though she knows to “Wait!” at the front door and the back door.  Also, some members of my congregation need to learn that the cue, “know about a group”  means to wait before making prejudiced comments about that group.

Climate Crisis Movement: Grandson of Eugenics Movement!

A few weeks ago, I woke up early to a mental image of concerned citizens. They were well-dressed, white, and intense as they marched for their cause.  They carried signs, “The science is settled!” “Disaster looms by the end of this century!” “For our great-grandchildren!”  I figured they were marching against the climate crisis.
I turned over for more sleep.  The image wouldn’t go away, but it shifted.  The women’s clothes changed to cloche hats and dropped waistlines; the men wore three piece suits – early 20th century styles.  Maybe the concerned citizens were marching for the eugenics cause.
I gave up on sleep, turned on my computer, and nosed around the Internet. Sure enough, I found historical and ideological links connecting the eugenics and climate crisis movements by way of the conservation and population control movements.  Except for conservation, all these movements are plausible, pessimistic, and people-negative.
As a Unitarian Universalist who affirms the inherent worth and dignity of every person, I’m highly suspicious of anything people-negative.  I’m also suspicious of ideologies that demand sacrifice now to avoid doom in the future.  Whoever said (attributed to Stalin), “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,” should have stayed in the kitchen.
Formulated by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, the eugenics movement that began just before the turn of the twentieth century stated that the qualities leading to success or failure in life were inherited.  Therefore the fit should breed and the unfit should not. Eugenics was championed by those representing the elite upper classes such as the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, Margaret Sanger, Theodore Roosevelt, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, a nominal Unitarian.
The ideas were plausible enough to be supported by the science of its day and Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities. However, lack of fitness was never really defined.   Often it meant epilepsy or “feeblemindedness”;  sometimes it meant poverty or promiscuity.
Eugenics was pessimistic.  If the “socially inadequate” didn’t quit reproducing themselves, they would outnumber the productive and the human race would decline irreversibly.  Better the elite should produce the future generations.
The eugenics movement was people-negative.  Take the case of Carrie Buck and her family. Carrie’s “feebleminded” mother was institutionalized for being “shiftless” and syphilitic.  Carrie had also been institutionalized for feeblemindedness although it’s probable that she was sent away when she became pregnant after she was raped by a nephew of her foster parents.  Carrie was an avid reader all her life and her daughter was a star pupil until she died of an infection at age nine.  But Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, voting with the Supreme Court majority (Buck v Bell) that allowed Carrie’s sterilization in 1927, said, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
All together, more than 60,000 people in the United States were sterilized from 1927 into the 1970s without their consent.  Worse, eugenics “science” became the intellectual justification for the Nazi race theories, hence indirectly responsible for the deaths of nine million people in the Nazi Holocaust.
Besides having spawned the Holocaust, eugenics is now dead in the water for a couple of more reasons. Unnoticed and unexpected, although already going on during the twentieth century, was the Flynn effect, the phenomenon of rising IQ.  Hence, the number of “feebleminded” in the population has decreased.  The Flynn Effect, everybody getting smarter, means the human race has improved without selective breeding.  Too bad for those who suffered and died in the name of the junk science of eugenics.
Also, the circle of empathy has expanded – as President Obama said in his second inaugural –  “from Seneca Falls [women] to Selma [African-Americans] to Stonewall [gays].”  The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law in 1990, giving all humans full rights. People who used to be labeled feebleminded, unfit, or defective are now considered fully human.
Interestingly, some supporters of the eugenics movement, concerned about overpopulation, initiated the conservation movement.  Preserving scenic natural areas for all to enjoy is neither pessimistic nor people-negative, although in the early 20th century when few could afford travel, the early conservationists may have felt they were creating parks as elite preserves.   Henry Fairfield Osborne (1857-1935) who helped found the Save the Redwoods league in 1918 is a case in point.  In his paper at the Third International Conference of Eugenics in 1932,  Osborne said, “The outstanding generalizations of my world tour range from Over-destruction of natural resources, now actually worldwide; to Over-population beyond the land areas, or the capacity of the natural and scientific resources of the world, with consequent permanent unemployment of the least fitted.”
Although Osborne and some of his contemporaries worried about overpopulation, the population control movement didn’t become a popular cause until about forty years later with the publication of The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich in 1968.  Ehrlich is plausible, applying the idea of ecological carrying capacity to human populations;  that is, too many people will use up the limited resources of the planet.  He’s pessimistic, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.  In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.”  He’s people-negative.  “It is absurd to be preoccupied with the quality of life until and unless the problem of the quantity of life is solved.”
The climate crisis movement is likewise plausible, based on contemporary scientific findings that the planet warmed during the 1980s and 1990s.  The climate crisis movement says too many people (overpopulation again!) have been pouring carbon dioxide that warms the planet into the atmosphere by means of burning carbon-based fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas.  This movement is even more pessimistic than the population control movement.  Some examples of impending doom include Al Gore’s predictions of massive sea level rises, droughts, famine, spread of tropical diseases, and species extinction. [An Inconvenient Truth 2006]  And Sir James Lovelock’s prediction, "By the end of this century climate change will reduce the human population to a few breeding pairs surviving near the Arctic." [Revenge of Gaia 2007].   Lovelock has subsequently (2012) admitted he exaggerated, “We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now, [but] the world has not warmed up much since the millennium.”
Although the climate crisis activists claim to be saving the planet for their grandchildren, the climate crisis movement is nevertheless people-negative.  That’s because the cure for the climate crisis is to reduce use of carbon-based fuel with a carbon tax.  “Think about $5-a-gallon gas; consider $500-a-month power bills if you stick with your current electric-baseboard heating.  It sounds rough, financially, on the little guy. But advocates say that if gas were $5 a gallon, for instance, we'd see many fewer SUVs on the road. We'd see much more innovation in how to produce that winter heat on a way-slimmed-down energy budget – more weatherstripping, better insulation and so forth. The basic principle is that the economic pain of a carbon tax would spur all kinds of innovation to conserve fuel.”  http://www.thedailygreen.com/living-green/definitions/carbon-tax
Despite the disclaimer that a carbon tax could be structured not to be regressive, it can’t help but be rough on the little guy.  With $500-a-month power bills, who could pay for insulation?   The well-off activists I saw in my vision can afford expensive gasoline but what about a struggling single mother who can’t afford a Prius?  Not to mention developing countries, who need cheap energy to lift themselves out of poverty.
The eugenics movement, the population control movement, and the climate crisis movement, all ideologically and historically linked and based on Malthus’ postulate there never can be enough for everyone, are plausible, but pessimistic and people-negative. The difference between the movements is the eugenics and the population control movements strove to eliminate the poor, whereas if the climate crisis activists succeed in taxing carbon-based fuel, they will create more poor.  

When the Left Turned Green

At college in the mid-fifties, a Pete Seeger concert opened my mind to non-Republican ways of thinking –  about working people getting their just due and everyone getting a share of the pie.  I loved the lyrics of  “Roll on Columbia” by Woody Guthrie that advocated technology bringing wealth to all the people.
And on up the river is Grand Coulee Dam
The mightiest thing ever built by a man
To run the great factories and water the land
So roll on, Columbia, roll on
Your power is turning our darkness to dawn. . .
I was proud to identify with a Left that advocated a better world for all.
During the 60s, a couple of books were published, initiating the environmental movement. Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, making DuPont’s phrase “better living through chemistry” a joke. Carson’s book inspired much needed citizen action to clean up pollution of our air, water, and land.
In 1968, an ugly side of the environmental movement emerged when Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb.  This book representing the radical, people-negative branch of the environmental movement, implies consumption [not the TB kind] is bad, because there are only so many resources to go around, and the best thing to do is have fewer people using them, else humanity will crash like a neglected fruit fly population in a milk bottle.   Ehrlich didn’t take into account that human ingenuity creates resources by finding new uses for existing materials.  In the Stone Age, iron ore was just dirt.  And the Stone Age didn’t end because they ran out of stone.
Ehrlich stated:  “India where population growth is colossal, agriculture hopelessly antiquated, and the government incompetent will be one of those we must allow to slip down the drain,” in other words, die.  Despite his callous recommendations, Ehrlich became the guru of the radical environmental movement.   However, Black Panthers and Catholics, unlikely bedfellows, understood the problem was one of distribution, not finite resources.  
Pete Seeger climbed onto the environmental bandwagon writing songs about the population explosion, species extinction, and pollution in general with such songs as “We’ll All Be A’Doubling” and “The Last Whale” in 1970, and “Garbage” in 1977.   These songs focus on people’s relationship with the earth rather than with each other.
As the concern for the planet increased, concern for the ordinary people on it decreased.  We all need a healthy planet for our own survival, but there are those, such as Ehrlich and the Club of Rome, who believe humanity is a cancer on the planet.  

Belonging to the Beloved Community

When I signed up for the annual Canvass Dinner, I explained that I needed to eat in the Social Hall because I have to wear a gas mask in the sanctuary to filter out the allergens in that room and I can’t eat wearing a gas mask.  No problem, they said.  I confirmed my need to eat in the Social Hall twice more.  Not to worry, they said.
That day I arrived at three to help set out brats and buns for the dinner.   After we separated out special foods for the gluten-free, the dairy-free, the pork-free, the meat-free, and the all animal products-free diners, I laid my raincoat on a chair to reserve my place in the Social Hall.   Then around five someone asked me to welcome the arrivals and I went out to the parking lot with an umbrella.   Half hour later, when I came into the Social Hall to eat, my coat had been moved and the table was full. Nobody claimed to know why the coat was there or whose coat it was although my name was printed prominently on it.   One person at the table said, “Everybody knows you were supposed to reserve a place by drawing on the newsprint.”  The others at the table laughed.
  I was so furious I couldn’t speak. My mind flashed back to middle school Mean Girls.  Wasn’t my need to simultaneously eat and breathe as important as the needs of the voluntary vegans?  
I took my plate of food and went home.