Credo Part II: Win-win gets us to the Omega point

Last year I discovered a book that articulated and extended much of what I had been pondering about increasing complexity and win-win in human affairs.  The Better Angels of Our Nature; Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker was worth spending $24 for a hardback copy.  Moreover, for a nerd like me, figuring out the mathematical, statistical, and philosophical patterns in the book was as much fun as figuring out the patterns in a sudoku puzzle.  Pinker establishes, unequivocally in my mind, that all kinds of violence have been decreasing over the ten thousand years of human history.  
At the beginning of our history ten thousand years ago, we all lived as hunter gatherers.  According to Matt Ridley [blog 1-28-13 Mind and Matter WSJ] almost one-third of people in such societies die in raids and fights, a higher proportion than the people in worst hit areas during World War II.
Fast forward seven thousand years to the Near East world of three thousand years ago.   The society that produced such wisdom as “Love justice and do mercy”  was rife with slayings, smitings, and stonings.  The Bible tells us so.
By the turn of the 20th century, slavery and cruel and unusual punishments had been outlawed in the civilized world, but there was still a lot of violence in everyday life toward those who didn’t really matter: racial minorities, homosexuals, women, children, and animals.
When I was a young adult in the 1960s, spanking children, jerk and pull dog training, and gay bashing were still part of everyday life.    Fifty years later, time outs, clicker training, and marriage equality have replaced these hoary customs.

When people challenge my contention that there is less violence in the modern world, I tell them to imagine themselves in front of our local courthouse.  What will they not see?  Lots of things:  a stake to burn witches, a pillory, a stocks, a gallows, a slave market, a debtor’s prison in the basement.  What they might see: same sex or mixed race couples strolling arm and arm without fear of being attacked.
Pinker sees the process of declining violence as a consequence of more and more win-win systems. Win-win is a non-supernatural process that can be analyzed using game theory, although for me it evokes awe and wonder.  Although he identifies as a Jewish atheist, Pinker says his views are compatible with a theology that makes God inherent in the nature of the universe. Maybe that’s what God is – where win-win wins.  Win-win wins gets us to the Omega point.

Credo, Part I: To the Omega Point

When I was in high school in the 1950s, I fell in love –  with biology, a relationship I’ve maintained all my life.  During the genetics unit, I quivered on the edge of my seat because it combined biology with my last year’s favorite subject, algebra. [I was born a nerd, one who rests at the intersection of three sets of qualities:  social ineptitude, intelligence, and obsession.]  I remained glued to the blackboard during the next unit, evolution.  Kingdom, phylum, order, family, genus, species arranged themselves on a tidy tree.  At the time, I believed the Catholic God created the glorious panoply of life.
College biology centered around Darwin’s theory of natural selection and evolution, the unifying paradigm of biology. All the factoids in my head now fit into a pattern that made sense.  The evolutionary process was presented as mindless and purposeless, but I still believed God steered the process.  Besides, at least one species in the universe had opposable thumbs.
In my twenties, I discovered Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who seemed to reconcile science, evolution, and Catholic dogma.  The Phenomenon of Man was philosophical rather than scientific, so there wasn’t data to back up his conclusions. Teilhard believed the Universe was evolving toward an Omega Point, defined by Teilhard as a convergence with the divine.
Liberal arts were, in my callow mind, just intellectuals’ opinions with no basis in the real stuff, the physical world.  History was about a bunch of dead white guys fighting stupid wars.  Learning history meant remembering which event went with which four digit number.  It wasn’t until fifteen years out of college that I had the epiphany that dates let you order historical events in a sequence.  
By that time I’d fallen away from Catholicism.  I raised a family, worked as a lab tech, mostly in microbiology labs.   After a few years meditating at a Quaker meeting, twenty years ago, I became a Unitarian Universalist.  
Our first Unitarian Source affirms “direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder.”  We can draw inspiration from the Great Story of our glorious origin from stardust and our overall increasing complexity, as preached by Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow.  This couple mostly focuses on our marvelous past, rather than the future of our species.  Our glorious past inspires awe and wonder, but we need a faith that looks to the future.
About a dozen years ago I came across Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, a physiologist, ornithologist, and environmental scientist. When scientists do history, it gets interesting. Diamond found patterns in historical data to show why things happened the way they did over the long haul. He traces the development of political organization from band to clan to tribe to chiefdom to nation-state.  Complexity increased in human history as it did with organic evolution. Complex organisms and societies are consistently more successful than simpler.
I continued my nerdy reading habits with NonZero by Robert Wright. He points out that both organic evolution and human cultural evolution have proceeded in the direction of greater complexity and win-win systems, meaning when opposing parties cooperate, everyone wins.  Also, given enough time, complex intelligence will emerge.  Then across history and the world, human social systems have grown more complex from savage to barbarian to civilization, the same process that Diamond traces.  I was reminded of Teilhard’s Omega Point.
Evolution, a bottom up process, is a messy affair that generates a lot of garbage along the way.  It’s not all up, up, up.  The ichneumon wasp is fiendishly cruel and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire should never have happened.   Wright uses the image of a balky horse, three steps forward, two steps back.  A world that produced tapeworms along with formations of flying geese looks as though it was designed by the Native American deity Coyote.
I delved into psychology, found books by psychologist Martin EP Seligman, who writes about the joys and benefits of optimism.  Seligman ends his book Authentic Happiness with a chapter on finding meaning and purpose in life, essential to authentic happiness.  Seligman summarizes the theology inherent in a win-win process and demonstrates there can be meaning in life without the Supernatural:
“Where is the principle of win-win headed?  Toward a God who is not supernatural, a God who ultimately acquires omnipotence, omniscience, and goodness through the natural process of win-win.  Perhaps, just perhaps, God comes at the end.”   Again  Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point.  Seligman continues:
“A process that continually selects for more complexity is ultimately aimed at nothing less than omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness.  This is not of course a fulfillment that will be achieved in our lifetimes, or even the lifetime of our species. The best we can do as individuals is to choose to be a small part of furthering this process. 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.”  

Belonging, Part II: Who Acts for the Church?

Sunday used to be a special day. My partner and I looked forward to hearing the welcome greeting each week, “Whomever you love, you are welcome here.”  I’d beam at Diana, feeling all warm and fuzzy about our Unitarian Universalist congregation. If people don’t like us, it’s not because we’re lesbians, but because we’ve been jerks.  
“Whatever body you live in, you are welcome here.” We provide special meals for those who abstain from animal products or gluten. We have a hearing loop so all can hear the sermon and music. We have reserved parking and wheelchair ramps for those who roll in.  Our congregation is rightly proud of its accessibility and welcome policies.
Diana and I sat near the window safe from the scent of people’s grooming products and detergent residues. The dome shaped sanctuary, with its minimal air circulation, has always been a problem for me because I have multiple chemical sensitivity [http://www.uua.org/accessibility/chemical/26971.shtml].   If I breathe certain chemicals or dusts, I get a hacking cough, a condition I developed analyzing Superfund waste at the EPA.
About six months ago, attendance at Sunday services doubled thanks to our dynamic interim minister and the concerted efforts of the membership committee.  For me, it’s a mixed blessing.  Now there are so many people crowding the sanctuary that I can’t escape their scents by sitting near the window.  
Sometimes I retreated to the Social Hall to listen to the service through the sound system, but being isolated from the community made me feel like an orphan with my nose pressed to the window, watching the real families feast.
To address the air quality in the sanctuary, I earmarked 20% of my pledge for air quality improvement, asking someone from that committee to contact me.  I attended the Environmental Committee’s healthy building audit, which recommended increased air circulation in the sanctuary.  I showed the minister there was no setup for moving the air in the sanctuary other than the furnace vents and the cold air return.  I asked the cleaners to use a HEPA dust filter when they vacuum.  So far nothing has come of any of these efforts, although the ladies of the Caring Connection ask me how I feel.
Lord knows I tried to go through proper channels.  I met with the Building Committee chair, but he got transferred to the Ministerial Search Committee before he could take any action on the ideas we generated.  A representative from the Building Committee told me the furnace fan had been adjusted so it ran during services, but that’s all they could do.  (It didn’t help.)  I emailed the new Building Committee chair that a Heat Recovery Ventilator and a smooth floor to replace the thirty-year-old carpet would make the sanctuary environment pleasant and healthful for all, but there has yet been no reply.  
I was getting the run-around, as though I were a fussy old lady with princess and the pea issues.  By now, others, including the minister, are complaining of the rank air in the sanctuary along with sleepiness, sore throats, or headaches.  All in all, getting something done at the congregation, which has the inertia endemic to volunteer organizations, has turned out to be more frustrating than getting something through the bureaucracy at the EPA, where I had to remind myself of the four T’s: These Things Take Time.  
 I was tempted to slam the door on the congregation. Though if I did, I would lose friendships with people I’d known for years and would be cutting off my nose to spite my face.  To maintain my connections, I participate in activities that don’t require going into the sanctuary.  I prepare checks for the bookkeepers in the office, I lead a discussion on World Religions in the library, and sometimes I attend Coffee Hour in the Social Hall.
Diana misses worshiping with me.  I miss worshiping with her and the community that was my family for almost twenty years. I find spiritual sustenance through the Church of the Larger Fellowship whose services I watch on-line religiously every Monday morning.  I’m grateful for the virtual community, but it’s not the same as being at church.
“Whatever body you live in, you are welcome here,”  means all persons, including those with an invisible disability, deserve accessibility.  Wheelchair users aren’t expected to bring their own two-by-four's for ramps, nor should those with multiple chemical sensitivity have to provide their own respirators.

Belonging, Part I: Who Speaks for the Church?

I’d been attending Unitarian Universalist services for several months when our congregation hosted a District wide UU University.  Eager to learn more about my new faith, I signed up with Sonia, one of the congregation’s respected leaders.  Participants could order a catered lunch, but since I couldn’t afford the extra money for lunch on top of the tuition, I packed my food.  At lunch time, I carried my brown bag to the Social Hall where the catered lunch was being served.  I sat down at a table eager to get to know the other students.
I crinkled open my brown bag, but before I could take a bite of my sandwich, Sonia, the organizer of the event, swooped down on me with a clipboard and a frown.  “You can’t sit here,” she said.  “These tables are reserved for those who paid for their lunches.”
I slunk out of the Social Hall, my brown bag clutched to my chest.  Who did Sonia think she was anyway, keeping me out of her stupid lunch? Why didn’t I stand up for myself and refuse to leave? There were plenty of chairs.  Most important, did Sonia’s attitude represent just one person or the whole organization?
When I spoke to Sonia later, it turned out that she assumed those who didn’t buy lunch would go out to a restaurant.  Sonia, secure in her upper-middle class status, seemed unaware that not everyone would have money to spend on a prepared meal.
If Sonia represented the congregation, I was out of there.  I consulted the minister.  She assured me that Unitarian Universalism as a whole is aware of class issues and aspires to include all income levels.  
I decided to give the congregation another go.

UU Guilt

There’s Catholic guilt;  there’s Jewish guilt.  Many of us became Unitarian Universalists to get away from religious guilt.  But after you’ve been UU awhile, you realize that Catholic and Jewish guilt have nothing on UU guilt.
  Catholic and Jewish guilt are merely about saving your immortal soul and maintaining charitable relations with your fellow humans.  UU guilt is more.  UU guilt is Green.  UU guilt is about saving the entire planet for all future generations.  Let’s trace the opportunities for guilt in a UU’s day.
Our prototype UU starts the day with coffee, orange juice, toast, and eggs.  Each of those menu items is fraught with guilt.
  The coffee.  It wasn’t local, but was it fair trade?  Our UU could have drunk a brew he concocted from roasted, locally raised grain.
Orange juice.  Also not local in most of the United States.  Our UU could have an orange tree in his greenhouse, but then there’s the fossil fuel to heat the greenhouse.
Toast.  Did our UU grow the wheat in her kitchen garden?  Did she take the time to harvest it, thresh it, mill it, bake it?  And then our UU has the temerity to use extra electricity to make toast.  Most electricity is generated from coal.  The process of extracting coal either buries miners alive or devastates environments.
Those eggs. Were they bought at a co-op or farmers' market?  Was the hen who laid the eggs veg-fed?  Did she have the freedom to roam with her fellow hens?  Was she content?  For that matter, couldn’t our UU raise chickens in the backyard and gather his own eggs?
And that’s just breakfast.

Why I've Turned Chartreuse, Part III: Gloom and Doom Are Unsustainable

“I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage,” said John Stuart Mill [1828 speech on Perfectibility].    Pessimists continue to get credence, despite their track record.
The Times of London predicted in 1894 that every street in London would be piled nine feet high with horse manure in fifty years.  And they would have, had things gone on as they were.  However, things don’t go on as they always have. Just like we can’t forecast the weather more than about ten days out, we can’t predict human ingenuity. The automobile, although not invented for that purpose, kept manure off the streets.
Eminent historian Arnold Toynbee in 1950 predicted the imminent onset of World War III, but obscure meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson did the math and said, “A long future may perhaps be coming without a third world war in it.”   [Steven Pinker The Better Angels of Our Nature pp 189-190].  Toynbee didn’t account for the fall of nationalism, the revulsion toward war, and a world increasingly interconnected by communication and trade.
Ken Olson the founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation said in 1977, “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”  Who would when they weighed a ton, took up a whole room in the house, and cost a fortune?  Olson didn’t account for the human ingenuity that shrank computers and their cost.
The Greens are really good at pessimism.   Here’s one example from the Club of Rome from the rear cover of their massive bestseller Limits to Growth in 1972: “Will this be the world that your grandchildren will thank you for? A world where industrial production has sunk to zero. Where population has suffered a catastrophic decline. Where the air, sea and land are polluted beyond redemption. Where civilization is a distant memory. This is the world that the computer forecasts.” [Quoted by Matt Ridley at Angus Millar lecture 10/31/11 Edinburgh] To stave off the predicted disaster, the Club of Rome recommended strict controls on population and no more economic expansion.
Forty years later, grandchildren have been born to those who were young adults in 1972.  World population has doubled to seven billion, who still breathe the air and drink the water.  With World Gross Domestic Product almost twenty times the 1972 figure, industrial production and civilization have continued. Poverty and war are on the decline.  Women’s lot is improving. [Christian Science Monitor 12/26/11].  The world didn’t follow the Club of Rome’s advice, yet their dire predictions turned out dead wrong. I guess the computer made a mistake.
The only pessimistic prediction I’ll believe is this one:  Imagine Thor, a hoary Viking, saying in 1000 CE, “Yo, Greenlanders, listen up. This warm weather pattern won’t last, eventually supply ships from Norway won’t be able to get through the North Atlantic ice and the Greenland colony will collapse.” Thor would have been right. The Greenland colony did collapse –  not because humans couldn’t survive in Greenland but because the Greenlanders spurned the ingenuity of the native Inuit who knew how to cope in the Arctic. [ Jared Diamond Collapse]
The reason dire predictions don’t come true is because things don’t go on as they always have.  Something unforeseen happens. New ideas crop up as human beings exchange ideas in the process of specialization and trade.  These cross-fertilizing ideas form a collective brain.  That collective brain has kept our species flourishing for thousands of years. [Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist] May it continue to do so.

Why I've Turned Chartreuse, Part II: Go Local, Go Medieval

If we limit ourselves to local food, our diets are limited to what can grow locally.  No more coffee or bananas.  We’d adjust to drinking roasted barley brew and eating apples, but what if our local crops fail? And fail they will.  Although locavores argue that local food staying in the local economy ameliorates local food insecurity, when there isn’t any local food, interdependence adds food security.  Looking at the larger geographic area, more food miles are a good thing.
  We are likewise told to only buy local because local dollars stay local. We’re told to boycott WalMart, the store that brings low prices to poor people.  Support your local bookstore rather than that big bad Amazon.com.  But someone living where there’s no local bookstore can buy any book from Amazon and local bookstores can’t stock the volume Amazon does.  Buying in a bigger market gives us more choices.  Moreover, the workers in a big box store are local who will spend their wages locally especially if there’s a local low price WalMart.
In the United States, very small businesses that do less than $500,000 worth of business and engage in no interstate commerce are exempt from labor laws, leaving their employees subject to exploitation. In contrast, employees at Amazon.com and WalMart must be paid federal minimum wage and overtime.
The eat and buy local movement implies that local people are more worthy than outsiders. “You’re not from around here, are you?” is hardly a hospitable greeting.  Keeping our food and purchases local sets up an invidious distinction between local (us) people and non-local (them) people. What about the inherent worth and dignity of every person?  I eat Corvallis food, but not that dreck from Eugene or Salem. Who knows where it’s been?
When groups of people compete, it’s win-lose, but when people trade it’s win-win.  Everyone can be a foodie when Oregonians trade their marionberries for California artichokes!
The world the locavores want to return to sounds like the 14th century medieval manorial system.  We imagine bucolic villages where everyone knew everyone else growing their own organic food. But what happened when local crops failed?  From The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley: “the price of wheat approximately trebled in 2006-8, just as it did in Europe in 1315-18.  At the earlier date, Europe was less densely populated, farming was organic, and food miles were short.”  Just what the locavores advocate.
Let’s examine the 14th century stats.  “Europe was less densely populated.” The population of Europe was approximately 70 million in 1300;  it’s increased ten fold – to about 700 million  today [2012].  “All farming was organic.” Crop lands had to lay fallow some of the time to replenish their nutrients and feed had to be grown for the draft animals, taking up crop land that couldn’t be used to feed people. Yields were small, 10% of what they are now.  The potato, which flourishes in Northern Europe and produces more than twice as many calories per acre than wheat, hadn’t been introduced from the New World yet.  “Food miles were short.”  They had to be.  There wasn’t the technology to ship food in the 14th century.  No trucks, freeways, railroads, steam engines, or airplanes.  During the famine, this meant food couldn’t be moved from the unaffected Southern European regions to the famine regions.  
A short digression: remember the story of Hansel and Gretel, the children who were left in the woods to fend for themselves when food got scarce?   That story originated during that Great Famine of 1315-18 when the adults would abandon children and the elderly.  By 2008, we’d forgotten the grim reality behind the story;  Hansel and Gretel are just fairy tale figures.
The frequent famines demonstrate there was no sustainability in the manorial system.  When times and weather were good, population grew exponentially, but available arable land grew arithmetically.  Until new sources of energy in the form of fossil fuels were discovered, Malthus was right.  Fossil fuels also help capture nitrogen for fertilizer from the air and thus preserve land to grow food for humans.
  After Europe recovered from the famines, the Black Death or plague decimated the  undernourished population.  One-third to one-half of the population died.  Other contributing factors were the overcrowding, lack of hygiene, and prevalence of rats. Neither the church nor the government could address the problem.  Superstition was rife.  People blamed the lepers and the Jews for the plague, so they killed them. The 14th century locavore’s world was a violent one.
In the 21st century the plague organism Yersinia pestis is still extant.  A dozen people a year are infected in the US, but we bathe, wash our clothes, keep rats out of our dwellings, and eat well, factors making an outbreak unlikely.  If there is one, we have antibiotics, laboratories, communication to stop a pandemic in its tracks.
Our sixth Unitarian Universalist principle counsels us to commit to the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all. We likewise value the life of the mind.  The 14th century was an eat local/buy local world.  Was there culture?  Not when most people were illiterate.  Was there peace?  No, there was almost constant war among competing fiefdoms. Was there liberty?  Not for the 95% of the population who were serfs.  Serfs were one step up from a chattel slave – they couldn’t be sold individually, but they had to stay with the land.  Was there justice?  Not if you recall the grisly public torture-executions for offenses that aren’t even illegal today.
We Unitarian Universalists need to dig to the root of issues like the buy and eat local movement.  A movement whose end result is a return to the 14th century medieval manorial system is not just nostalgic, it’s reactionary.