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.

Why I've Turned Chartreuse: Part I. Let them eat organic cake

Yes, it’s true.   I’m no longer Green. I’ve turned chartreuse.  I’m going to explain my transformation in three sections:  I. Let them eat organic cake.  II. Go Local, Go Medieval.  III. Doom and gloom are what’s unsustainable.  

I.  Let them eat organic cake!
It all started with an article in the Spring 2007 UU World  called “Ethical Eating” by Amy Hassinger. The article advocating eating local organic veggies.  I pictured Mom, Dad, Dick, and Jane piling into their vehicle for a trip to a family farm to purchase their week’s veggies.  How idyllic. Then a nagging voice in my head said, how come veggies from California sometimes cost less than local Oregon veggies?  Wouldn’t the price reflect the shipping cost?
I did some math.  It’s cheaper in terms of pounds of food transported per gallon of gasoline when the food is moved in loaded semitrailers (despite their longer miles and fewer miles per gallon) compared to the family car because the family car carries food by the pound,   whereas the semitrailer carries food by the ton. [climatesanity.wordpress.com/2008/07/04/energy-cost-for-shipping-food-is-minor/]  Instead of believing we’re saving the planet by eating local, let’s think of local organic food as a luxury like hand-made custom shoes.
Since ethical eating involves paying more for comparable  food, Unitarian Universalists are saying that in order to be ethical you have to be rich.  How can Unitarian Universalism be a multiclass movement when it tells people that to be good Unitarian Universalists they have to spend more for their food?  Ethical eating is not only irrational but classist.
I see the shade of John Calvin, he of the elect and the damned, in the ethical eating movement.  Calvin, the man who condemned our Unitarian martyr Michael Servetus, believed in predestination, the belief that from all eternity most people were damned to hell and there was nothing anybody could do about it.  His views were diametrically opposite from the later  Universalists and from current Unitarian Universalist principles.
The above is more than arcane theological speculation.  In the real world, you could tell who were the elect because God favored the elect by making them rich. The elect started out morally good and became economically good.  Therefore the rich were the morally good.  Quite a change from Jesus’ idea that a rich man couldn’t get to Heaven any more than a camel could fit through the eye of a needle.  I can hear John Calvin cheering ethical eating from his 16th century grave.
Sure, fresh local food tastes better, and the family farm is a romantic ideal.  However, nostalgia’s not all it’s cracked up to be.  That bygone family farm involved isolating, back-breaking labor, much of it performed by unpaid children.  The article advocates growing your own food as the purest way to eat locally and ethically.  It’s fun to farm as leisure, but when your life and livelihood depend on a successful crop it’s not fun any more. Not everyone finds it a spiritual experience to hoe and weed in the hot sun.  And what about the fossil fuel farmers need to get to town every week?
Hassinger poo-poos the Green Revolution (crop breeding, chemical fertilizers and pesticides) that prevented famine in India and Pakistan in the early 70s.  She says, “The dramatic increase in crop yields has been credited with relieving famine in some regions of the world, most strikingly in developing countries like India and Pakistan.  The Green Revolution had a huge unintended consequence: an increasingly unsustainable agriculture system.”   Should the starving eat organic cake?
The organic movement smacks of ideology – suffering now for the sake of the glorious future.  From The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker p 328:  “Most of us agree that it is ethically permissible to divert a runaway trolley that threatens to kill five people onto a side track where it would kill only one.  But suppose it were a hundred million lives one could save by diverting the trolley, or a billion, or – projecting into the infinite future – infinitely many.  How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good?  A few million can seem like a pretty good bargain.”   By opposing the Green Revolution we’re not letting a few peasants starve now for the future health of the entire planet, are we?

Doctrine of Discovery, Part III: Who's indigenous, who's a colonizer?

A 2010 Arizona law, SB1070, criminalizes offenses against federal immigration rules and requires police to ask anyone they stop for papers proving their legal status. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio enforces the law in draconian ways. Ironically, Arpaio was himself born to Italian immigrants and wouldn’t have had his successful life if his parents hadn’t come to the United States. Sounds like Joe Arpaio was an anchor baby!  Churches and civil rights groups have been protesting SB1070 and its harsh enforcement.
After they were both arrested in 2010 for protesting SB1070, the Rev Colin Bossen, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland, interviewed his cellmate Tupac Enrique Acosta, an invited guest at the Unitarian Universalist 2012 General Assembly.   Acosta is a founding member of the UUA’s Arizona partner organization Tonatierra.  The Acosta quotes are from a blog by Bossen.
According to Acosta, “The purpose of SB1070 was to consolidate the perceptions of some white Americans around an America that is white in a continent that belongs to them.” Yes, the law is racist, since Latinos are more likely to be stopped.
Acosta further states, “SB1070 would not exist without the Doctrine [of Discovery].”  The Doctrine of Discovery was a series of papal bulls issued between 1452 and 1493 stating that when Christians discovered a land inhabited by non-Christians, the Christians had the right to kill or enslave the native inhabitants and seize their land. Not only does the Doctrine of Discovery take the fall in some eyes for the sorry state of today’s Indians, Acosta’s notion that it’s responsible for  SB1070 is specious, along with the remainder of his logic. The desire to restrict jobs and government benefits to those who are legal citizens is reason enough for such a law.  If the United States repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, would SB1070 be repealed?  I think not.
Acosta explains how the bill penalizes native indigenous people: “SB1070 is designed to enforce a border that divides not only the United States and Mexico, but the indigenous peoples who belong to the Uto-Aztecan language group.  They have been moving back and forth between what is now the US and Mexico long before either country existed.  SB1070 criminalizes their traditional freedom of movement.” However, modern nation-states have defined borders in contrast to nomadic hunter-gatherers.  Bills, unfortunately so far unsuccessful, have been introduced in Congress to make all enrolled Tohono O’odham tribal members United States citizens.
Doug Muder of the UUWorld quotes Acosta: “indigenous people are not immigrants.”    Can indigenous people ignore borders because they’re just migrating from one part of their territory to another?
“The struggle against SB1070 is the continuing indigenous struggle against colonialism.”   For Acosta, the Mexican and Central American migrants are also indigenous, although many Mexicans and Central Americans  are descendants of the Spanish conquistadores, hence aren’t truly indigenous. Moreover, citizens of the United States aren’t mounting a colonization campaign into Mexico, which has its own immigration restrictions. Finally, the Doctrine of Discovery assigned land to Spanish Christians who proselytized the Mexicans.  We now have two semi-Christian nations and according to the Doctrine of Discovery, you shouldn’t steal from other Christians.
“We didn’t come to legalize ourselves before the state of Arizona.  We came to legalize Arizona; colonization is illegal,” says Acosta. “If we’re going to legalize Arizona we have to decolonize Arizona.” Does decolonizing Arizona mean all non-indigenous (per Acosta’s definition?)  people have to leave?  I hear an echo of ethnic cleansing. Giving the country back to the Indians would cause more injustice than it would fix.  Similarly,  reparations to the slaves who were likewise victims of the Doctrine of Discovery is a nice idea in theory, but after five generations, impractical as well us unfair to carry it out.
It takes a lot of resources to pursue and punish migrants, even though they’re kept in tents and fed only twice a day.  Rather than squander resources on a futile goal to keep “them” out of  “our”  country, why not use those resources to help migrants become contributing, legal citizens?
Because Acosta connects SB1070 with the Doctrine of Discovery, Bossen lauds him as a theologian. On the contrary, Acosta comes across like a politician.
Acosta’s calling attention to the Doctrine of Discovery focuses attention on injustice committed in its name, and that’s good. But rather than concentrating on the Doctrine of Discovery itself, it makes more sense to think of the Doctrine of Discovery as one expression of a meme, an idea, concept, or cultural norm that’s passed along from person to person. The Doctrine of Discovery meme says powerful people have the right to take land and resources from weaker people.  The meme itself is what we need to repudiate, not the Doctrine of Discovery.
A second meme is buried in the Doctrine of Discovery.  The Doctrine of Discovery separated Christians [worthy people] from non-Christians [unworthy people].   Acosta reasserts this separation meme when he separates indigenous from colonizers.
We Unitarian Universalists affirm the inherent worth of every person and justice for all.  We are all one human race.  Todos somos una raza.

Doctrine of Discovery, Part II: The Ideology Issue

Did the Doctrine of Discovery cause or justify greed and exploitation of native peoples? It’s unlikely the Pope received a flash of spontaneous illumination telling him to initiate colonization. Given the timing, it appears the Europeans created the Doctrine of Discovery as a religious justification or a divine mandate for the colonization process.   The Vatican used religion to justify a political purpose, a misuse of religion.
Moving from the 15th to the 21st century, in our Unitarian Universalist world, does our religion inform or justify our politics?  Do we take Unitarian Universalist  principles and apply them to political issues?  On the other hand, are our minds made up and we cast a divine mandate onto our politics?
Philocrates, actually Chris Walton, editor of UU World, says, “The danger is not that Unitarian Universalists derive their political values from their religious commitments, but that they sometimes dress up their political values in religious clothing . . . It’s a way of claiming extra legitimacy for a political opinion by treating it as divinely or at least religiously mandated.”  Blog 12-26-02
For instance, we affirm the goal of world community.  Some may believe the best way to achieve world community is via free markets and globalization.   Others may feel open borders are the best way to go.  Still others may think the United Nations is the best way to achieve world community.
But what if people who had already decided the United Nations was a perfect organization joined a Unitarian Universalist congregation to make sure nobody questioned whether the UN was the best and only way?  Now we have an ideology: politics joined with religion.  “The . . . danger of a political ideology that pretends to be religiously motivated is that it demonizes its political opponents,” says Walton. Not a way to respect the inherent worth and dignity of others.
Another feature of ideology is that one must use any method to further one’s cause. The end justifies the means.  Ideologues use propaganda. They cherry pick facts to fit the case.  They use emotional appeals rather than reason.
Returning to the Doctrine of Discovery issue, the Unitarian Universalist Association apparently believes the Doctrine of Discovery caused oppression of indigenous people, therefore repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery will end it.  There is a video on the UUA website, supposedly a grandfather explaining to his grandchild the evils of the Doctrine. The video illustrates that repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery has become an ideology because the video is propaganda rather than a free and responsible search for truth.  One piece of evidence for the persistence of the Doctrine of Discovery the video cites is that the early settlers in the northeast named streets and towns Canaan. This proof rests on the dubious assumption the early settlers recognized a connection between the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites and the exploitation of the Indians.  However in the United States, there are 11 cities named Canaan (representing conquest), 25 named Salem (representing peace), and 49 named Greenville (representing prosperity).   Proving the United States is four times more interested in prosperity and twice as interested in peace as in conquest?  Or since the Canaanites invented the alphabet, the settlers were vested in universal literacy.
When we Unitarian Universalists remember the free and responsible search for truth and meaning, we won’t need to stoop to propaganda.  Facts speak for themselves.
“You need not think alike to love alike,” said early Unitarian Francis David.  We Unitarian Universalists love alike, that is, what unites us is working together for social justice. Social justice, Tikkun olam or repairing the world in the Jewish tradition, has two parts, helping the victims of injustice – charity – or modifying systems – political action.
Charity, acts of compassion, such as feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, visiting the sick,  the corporal acts of mercy are the proper province of churches.  We take care of those in our own congregations and extend our charity to the wider community.
The problem with acts of compassion is it’s one act at a time.  It’s a lot more efficient to tackle injustice from a political perspective.  Legislation like food stamps and rent control address the problem of hunger and housing for the many, not just one at a time.  Political change is infinitely more efficient because it fixes a whole system.
Hence, we Unitarian Universalists often enter the political arena. We work for immigration justice, water justice, environmental justice, food justice.  (Whatever we work for we call it justice.)  We rail against injustice but we don’t have clear goals or strategies to get there, which is bad politics.  Moreover,  politics divides people.  There’s more than one right way to accomplish a goal.  Politics attracts people who are angry at injustice, that is, it attracts angry people.  Also political work is like women’s work; it’s never done.  There’s always more injustice to fight against.
We have only a finite amount of energy to work for a better world.  Spending time and energy to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery is not a good use of it, because the Doctrine of Discovery never caused oppression in the first place.  An analogy:  Christine Robinson on the glass ceiling for women ministers. “That letter to Timothy which says that women can't preach, and how it trumps Jesus' evident attitude towards women seems to be the cause [of inequality among female ministers], but we all know that the cause is much deeper than that, and that Timothy is only an excuse.”  Iminister blog 8-26-08
I suggest we keep our political arm separate from religious life. We could take a lesson from the Quakers.  The Quakers worship in silence, but they have a separate political arm, the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
To honor those who work for a better world, I suggest a Heal the World ceremony.  Participants add stones to a hollow globe representing earth.  Each stone represents a good deed or progressive political action.  This ceremony respects different ways and avoids wrangling over the best way.  Tikkun olam.