Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
February 17, 2002

Practicing Humanism: Pluralism

Two weeks ago, in the first of this series of sermons on Practicing Humanism, we explored the mistaken notion that humanism means believing whatever you want, as opposed to the discipline of believing what the evidence of human experience indicates is true. Humanism affirms the sufficiency of human experience; the great questions of life are to be answered on the basis of our own fallible perceptions and reason, and collective knowledge. Today, as we welcome the newest members of the covenant community that is the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, I want to suggest that this commitment to human experience requires of us that we become pluralists and systems thinkers. The practice of humanism includes the recognition that we are each unique parts of an interrelated natural universe, that we are by nature simultaneously both different and connected.

Many religious systems stress the ways in which human beings are alike, and it seems clear that we are cut from the same cloth in many respects, from the scientific similarity in our DNA to the philosophical idea that each of us is entitled to the same rights as everyone else. Yet it is possible to see much of the sweep of human history and the development of human culture, especially religion, as an ongoing struggle with the problem of difference. We are genetically coded to be social animals; our survival has always depended, and still depends, upon our ability to live together in cooperation, and yet our instinctive programming is minimal. Where beetles and birds and fish and even many mammals are born with explicit instructions about how to conduct their lives hardwired into their very cells by the pressures of evolution, our advantage lies precisely in our ability to improvise, to be creative in responding to the changing situations in which we find ourselves. We must make it up as we go along. These two characteristics, the imperative of cooperation and the paucity of biological programming, mean that we both can and must create the structures of human community. For most of the long millennia that we have been about this project, it has been easy to assume that it would work better if only all of us would do things right -- in the same way, by the same rules, the way everyone else does. And it would be easier to get everyone to do things right, if they would only all think correctly, which is to say, in the same way as everyone else, so that we would all agree.

And yet, perversely, individual human beings persist in having their own unique thoughts and ideas, in perceiving the world from differing perspectives - in short, no matter what techniques or strategies we invent to try to avoid or erase differences, people simply disagree with each other. We disagree about trivial things, like what food tastes good, and about significant things, like how relations between the sexes should be conducted. We prefer different hairstyles and types of music; we have differing capacities for risk, for intellectual attention, for enduring cold. Since moving to Minnesota, I have found that if I ever need to remind myself of the fundamental diversity of the human race, I have only to realize that some people actually think that building a tiny house on a frozen lake and drilling a hole in the ice in order to irritate fish is a good idea for a fun time.

In fact, as Ronald Cram suggests in the first of his four assumptions, differences may be what we have most in common - and for the religious naturalist, this makes perfect sense. If we begin with the assumption that the human race got here by the process of evolution and natural selection, rather than having been purposefully designed by a single creator, then we must recognize that difference is what drives the whole enterprise. The tiny variations that give one individual a reproductive edge over another, multiplied a million different ways over thousands of generations, have resulted in the richly interdependent bio-diversity of our planet earth. And if we have learned nothing else from the experiments of the past century, surely we have recognized that that diversity is not only amazing and beautiful, but that no part of it is ultimately separable from the whole, or dispensable. What we do to the oceans affects the cities; for every powerful antibiotic there is a subtle mutation among infectious bacteria; to eliminate a predator may be to fatally disrupt an entire food chain. Not only was difference fundamental to how we came into being, it is also essential to our continued being. No one - nothing - can thrive alone in the profoundly connected web of life that sustains us; we must be different from others, and they must be different from us, or we will all perish.

To practice humanism, then, is to welcome diversity, which is easy enough to say. Indeed, as Anthony David points out, religious liberals have historically been advocates for the tolerance of minority theological viewpoints - primarily because we traditionally always were one. From King John Sigismund of Transylvania, with the first edict of religious toleration in western Europe, to Thomas Jefferson's statute of religious freedom in the commonwealth of Virginia, the ancestors of today's Unitarian Universalism have been defenders of the rights of conscience and free thought in general, and of religious liberty in particular. This is a heritage in which we rightfully take pride, for it was often maintained at the risk of peoples' lives and livelihoods and well being. In times and places where it failed, there was great oppression and suffering, wherever the forces of dogmatism have tried to coerce human consciousness into conformity. You would think the lesson would be well learned by now, that this is ever a losing proposition, and yet the temptation is always strong, whenever one of us believes we have found a right answer to some vexing human problem, to try to make everybody else see it our way. Still, the evidence is clear; it can't be done. And wherever it is tried, not only is pointless suffering caused, but the process of cumulative human learning, which takes place only when differences are examined and explored, is brought to a grinding halt. Whether it is the church or the state or the academy or the military trying to enforce opinion, the result is forever the same; tyranny and intellectual stagnation.

However, there is a wide space that lies between the kind of tolerance that condescendingly declines to punish other people for being wrong, even though it thinks they are very silly, and the pluralism that genuinely welcomes and values the diverse possibilities of human understanding. Humanists, being themselves human beings, cannot always operate at the diversity-welcoming end of that spectrum; nevertheless, that is the place to which we aspire, and the place where we belong. It is not enough to merely to defend our own right to think as we think in peace, without having orthodoxy poured down our throats even if we are a minority; that isn't necessarily always easy to accomplish, but it's easy to want. In fact, everybody wants the right to think as they themselves think; that's the easiest thing in the world to defend, and I will gladly stand up for your right to agree with me, any time! What is far more challenging is to defend the principle of pluralism, and the essential right of others to disagree with us. And harder still is to actually welcome and engage that disagreement, and to see in it the necessary diversity that makes the world whole. But that is the practice of humanism.

Mere tolerance, the discipline of putting up with wrong-headed people because, after all, any of us might turn out to be wrong about a thing or two ourselves, is an attitude that is only available to people in positions of power. When you are a member of the dominant group in a community, then you can decide whether or not you will tolerate others who disagree with you. When you are in the minority, or without power, then you have no choice; you have to put up with the majority, the only question is whether they will put up with you. And don't we all know when we are being tolerated? It's very easy, from that side of the equation, to know whether someone is merely enduring you, or encountering you with genuine interest and respect. In fact, tolerance can be the way in which we defend ourselves from the demands of genuine encounter. To really engage someone, to find out how they think and why, to understand their mindset, is a risky enterprise. It means giving that other person the opportunity to measure our own convictions, and perhaps to find them wanting. It means really seeing someone else's otherness, and honoring that by not attempting to turn them into a clone of yourself. Paradoxically, when such an encounter happens fully and well, it can actually serve to deepen our own self-understanding and identity, by helping us to know better who we are, and why. And it is also true that the encounter of diversity happens most easily and naturally among people who are confident of their own boundaries, and not anxious about their own identity. When we know with assurance who we are, it is easier to let other people be who they are, and to find in our differences richness, beauty, and strength.

This is part of the goal of any faith practice; to help us find a way of being in the world with assurance, depth, and self-knowledge. Our intuitive fear wants to find that confidence in the reinforcement of knowing that we are just like others, and they are just like us - even if we have to do violence to them or to ourselves in order to achieve that sameness. But fear is not wisdom, and the practice of humanism calls us to overcome our fears in the service of wisdom, and to look not for sameness, but for connection. Along with the understanding that difference is necessary for the interdependent web of existence to function, goes the equally necessary implication that everything is connected, that it is as a system of dynamic balances and feedback loops that we must envision our universe, not a top-down hierarchy controlled by some ultimate power - either gods, or really smart people like us. As humanists, we are called upon to take a systems perspective, to look for relationships of mutual response, both in the organic world, and in the structures of human community.

Every new member who joins this congregation today, or any other day, brings into this community unique perspectives, and makes it a different place. We who invite and welcome them have offered this as an institution where diversity is valued, where we will not attempt to stamp our minds or thoughts upon newcomers, but meet them in their differences with openness and authentic engagement. By the same token, new members, be warned - and the rest of us, be reminded - this is not a place to look for the comfort of sameness, or the pleasant feeling of always being agreed with. Don't come here to get cozy in the company of the like-minded, but rather to take on the risks and challenges of encounter, with people different from you, and ideas other than your own. What we hope and believe is that a sense of community grows out of that challenge; that as we are learning and growing together, we will come to appreciate the people who take those risks with us, that we will find encouragement and support for the hard moments because others have been there before us, and know that if we are willing to persevere, we can find the connections and need not try to erase the differences. To live in a genuinely pluralistic community requires effort, discipline, and the willingness to accept discomfort. It is an ideal, and we are not always up to it all the time. But we can keep before us the vision of the community we seek to build; the community of memory and promise, founded not on our implicit similarities, but on our explicit covenant with each other.

It seems to me that the whole notion of covenant becomes crucial to the community that would embrace real pluralism. For if we do not come together with assumptions about what we can all agree on, or with the agenda of creating uniformity out of our diversity, then how are we to come together at all? I want to suggest that it is by virtue of the explicit promises we have made to each other, and the loyalty we have consciously and intentionally given to a shared vision, that we are able to do the demanding work of encounter and dialogue that allows us to learn and grow and be transformed. That is why the mission statement of this congregation is printed on the cover of our order of service every week. That is why we invite our new members to speak the words of commitment about making this place what we hope it will be, and greet them with our own pledges taken from the mission statement. These are our covenant promises to one another; these ideals and endeavors are what membership consists of. Do we each have our own understanding of what those statements mean? Of course; and that is always an illuminating conversation to have with someone here - what does our mission statement say to them? What are the covenant promises that they have made, to this place and to each of us? What promises do they understand us to have made to them?

The one thing we are surely not here to do is to turn other people into copies of ourselves. Just as my work in this pulpit is not to create little mental replicas of me, but to offer out of my own experience ideas and examples that might be useful to others in your unique journeys, so our collective task is to make humanism useful to the world, not the make the rest of the world into humanists. Part of the reason I love these great windows is not only that they let us gaze out over the city with its beauty and its illustration of human ideals and human accomplishment, but also that they let the city in to our gatherings - the city with all of its diversities and connections, with all its people and their stories, people who are different from us in so many ways, both trivial and profound. It would not be a better city if they were all more like us; I have no vision of 'winning this city for humanism' as some people would like to win it for Jesus, or any other convictions of their own. Neither would it be a better city without us, without the unique voices and perspectives that our existence here on Lowry Hill represents. We are, after all, an essential part of the dynamic system that is this city, and our practice of humanism calls us to see that system, and to embrace its many differences in the radical dialogues of a faithful pluralism.

The first discipline of this faith path is the discipline of evidence; to believe not whatever we want, but what we have cause to know is true. The second discipline is pluralism; a recognition of the fundamental differences and fundamental connections among us as human beings and throughout the entire universe. It is to understand deeply, down to our very bones, that there is little good to be achieved from making others into copies of ourselves, but must virtue in learning to see the system of connections that hold us in one living interconnected web. To practice humanism is to do the risky work of encounter, with people who are authentically different from ourselves - not seeking to make them more like we are, not in search of some essential similarity, but rather in the hope of elucidating our connections and our interdependence, and of being transformed together by what we learn.

Here in this beloved community, we have made promises to one another about the vision of a world we hope to see, and about our freedom to be who we are, and to be met in the genuine encounters that honors our differences and uniqueness. Here we have the chance to practice with one another in the safety of an explicit covenant, the risks and skills of radical dialogue, the new vocabulary and theology that goes beyond tolerance to genuine pluralism. It is a discipline we cannot sustain all the time, and yet it is a practice to which we are called. The richness and transformation of our own lives wait for it, and the well-being of the web of all creation depends upon it.