Sermons by Rev. Don W. Vaughn -Foerster
The Myths that Move Us
Rev. Don W. Vaughn -Foerster
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
September 17, 2006
There is a story about man on a subway in New York City. The man was visiting from the Midwest and was quite uneasy. He did not know what to expect. But, by and large, people on the subway went about their own business, ignoring one another and not creating a bother. He was just getting adjusted to this kind of public anonymity when a man and two small boys got on the subway at one of its stops. The father's face was expressionless as he took a seat and began staring out the window. The two boys, however, were tense and excitable and their father let them run wild. Soon people in the subway car began showing signs of irritability with the man for not taking responsibility for his sons. He was acting very insensitively. Finally, the Midwesterner could take it no longer and said to the man,
"Sir, your children are disturbing a lot of people. Couldn't you control them a little more?"
The man seemed to become conscious of the situation for the first time and said quietly, "You're right. I suppose I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don't know what to do right now, and I guess they don't know how to handle it either."
Suddenly, the Midwesterner saw things differently. In an instant everything changed for him. His irritation vanished. He became sympathetic and offered to do what he could to help.
Why did everything change? It changed because the Midwesterner suddenly knew something about the father and two sons that affected his assumptions about what had been going on. This was not an insensitive father; this was a hurting father. Those were not misbehaving boys; they were disturbed boys. The Midwesterner's whole system for evaluating behavior and attitudes had shifted.
This is something that can happen to any of us when, suddenly, we realize that what we had assumed is not the case. And, the shift can happen in reverse if someone we have been helping turns out to have been using us rather than needing us. Then, irritation and anger can quickly replace sympathy and concern, and the way we look at things is turned on its head.
Each of us has a fundamental way of looking not only at others but at ourselves and all of life as well. We have a set of assumptions about who others are, about who we, ourselves, are, and about what life is. These assumptions are so deeply embedded within us that, usually, a new piece of new information is not likely to change them. Rather, these assumptions are likely to filter that information instead -- allowing through only that which reinforces our assumptions. If the Midwesterner had not already had a view of life that included sympathy and compassion, then learning of the death of the father's wife would not have changed his irritation. However, sympathy and compassion were principles in his life, so he could shift his response the way he did.
Our attitudes and our behavior, and, certainly, the quality of our lives are determined by the assumptions to which we are committed. One way to say this is: we are creatures of the paradigms we hold. The word "paradigm" stands for "a frame of reference" or "a model." It is "the way we see the world -- not in terms of our visual sense of sight but in terms of perceiving, understanding, interpreting." Our paradigm is our map of reality. It tells us what attitude to adopt and how to behave. If our "map of reality" is close to the way reality really is (to use a redundant adverb), then we can function effectively as human beings. If our map is off in any way, then what we do and what we think can get us into a lot of trouble. Sometimes we are so locked into our maps that we will not revise them to represent what is really there - even when we find out that what we think is not the way things really are. Then we are doomed to live according to notions that may have worked yesterday but do not work today.
Actually, I like the word "myth" better than "paradigm" because it makes even more apparent that our notions about reality are more creatures of our past than of our present. And, because myths come from the past, they have to be able to change if we are not to wind up in an evolutionary blind alley -- frozen into a place both emotionally and intellectually where tings work with others only if they share our fantasies. Not to be able to change our map has been called "paradigm paralysis." Actually, I see it to be blind, uncritical faith in an outmoded myth. Either way it means to lose touch with where the world is going; it means to expect the world to stay where it seems always to have been.
A striking example of this is the modern history of Swiss watch making. The Swiss perfected the mechanical watch and came to be the best watchmakers in the world. For many decades they controlled the watchmaking market. Then, an innovative watchmaker discovered that digital quartz would make an even more accurate and less expensive watch. He tried to get the Swiss industry to adopt his discovery; but the Swiss thought it was too dramatic a departure from the way watches should be made, so they ignored him. The result: he took his idea to the Japanese, who took control of the watchmaking industry with their digital quartz watches. The Swiss were so mired in myths of their own making that they got lost in their own assumptions. They thought they were being hardheaded business people but they were only paralyzed by an old watchmaking paradigm. Their map no longer represented the real world. Pretty much the same seems true of Detroit these days - again to the advantage of the Japanese.
Our myths (our paradigms) have enormous power in our lives. They have the power to make us both efficient and effective when they are in tune with the real world. But also, they have the destructive power to trap us in outmoded assumptions. Just look around at the millions of people trapped in yesterday's myths. There are those who, because they cannot see beyond their own dogmas, believe they can make the world always be the way it was or can make it over according to a political, or social, or economic, or religious preconception of their own. They really believe they can impose what are essentially rural or dogmatic attitudes onto what has become an irreversibly urban, secular, and pragmatic society. Al Qaeda and other Islamic fundamentalists are trapped in this outmoded position. So are many elements of our own religious and political right, who neither acknowledge nor respect the profound pluralism that exists in this country. As with Al Qaeda, there is power in our own folks' literal, fundamentalist, authoritarian myths. It is a power that, although it aims for social and political homogeneity, destroys that spontaneous personal impulse toward cooperation which is the base on which humane social cooperation must be built. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, there are those who are so caught up in a myth of individual rights and privileges that they have lost touch with the imperatives of negotiation and compromise on which social cooperation also must be built. Whether they are conservative or liberal, to them, personal meaning involves following "their own bliss" regardless of whether others stand or fall beside them. Solipsism (the view that everyone else is irrelevant and only "I" matter) is still alive and well in both the liberal and the libertarian sectors of our society which are still as much out of touch with the urgency of social cooperation as ever.
There is yet another myth that has immense negative power in our world today, despite its satirical roots. Its primary representative, one Professor Franz Bibfeldt, was probably a fanciful creation of a seminary student in the late 1940s -- at least that's what Martin Marty, a church historian at the University of Chicago, whose tongue seems permanently stuck in his cheek, would say. But satire or not, Professor Bibfeldt epitomizes the great complacent middle in our world. He is reputed to have been a shadowy German scholar who was the master of accommodation theology. It is a position quite like that which characterized much of the Democratic Leadership Committee until recently (at least I hope they are currently moving beyond their extreme accommodationism.) Bibfeldt propounded a religious approach (as over against the political approach) that develops positions of "extreme moderation" that are inspired by the "indomitable spirit of appeasement." For instance, after reading Soren Kierkegaard's "Either/Or (an uncompromising volume on faith), Bibfeldt wrote a reply entitled "Both/And." When this book was panned in review, Bibfeldt produced a revision entitled "Either/Or and/or Both/And." Bibfeldt's motto is said to be, "I dance to the tune that is played."
There are many people whose myth holds that the middle way is the only way and that the worst thing anyone can do is "rock the boat." And they are being sourly serious, not satirical. Most of the time, this is the blind faith that cannot see that what is said to be there may not really be there.
The main similarity between such extreme myths -- the extreme right, the extreme left, and the extreme middle -- is that these myths are outside assumptions or frames of reference that are superimposed on the individual. Their destructiveness comes from having been codified into laws or attitudes that must be assented to no matter what one's inner voice may say. In other words, they are "para-dogmatisms" (if I may coin a word) which are not worth a "pair-of-dimes" (if I may make a pun of another) because a person is to believe merely because he or she has been told by someone else to believe them.
Even many who are immersed in their own "individuality" often get that particular dogma from someone outside themselves -- from some guru or preacher or political demagogue who found this doctrine to be a subtle but effective way to control others. They preach individualism but they define that individualism in exclusivistic terms that make the individual an estranged unit in a collective rather than a participating member of a community. However, a great truth of life is that the more an individual experiences the reality of that individual's own self, the more important society becomes -- the clearer the reality of others becomes. Truly to experience one's authentic individuality is to be able to grasp the authentic individuality of others. Rules, laws, codes, and the like can easily obstruct such clarity by trying to press a person's experience into preset molds. Such coercive myths and paradigms squeeze out our natural critical reason and enslave us so that we cannot "shift" from them without great trauma. But it is only as we can shift from outmoded paradigms to more realistic ones, it is only as we expand and deepen our myths that we can grow and keep pace with the evolving reality of a changing world.
For me even the myth of Pandora suggests this. The story usually focuses on Pandora trapping Hope in the box after her curiosity had let out the plethora of evils that continue to plague humankind. The hope that is kept usually is then taken to be a combination of expectation and desire that helps us endure the evils we must face.
Actually, I think hope is more than such mere expectation and desire that help us endure. I think hope is the first intentional step we take to challenge the "evils" we face. I think it springs from an intrinsic human respect for the new and the challenging. It is what moves us to step onto a rocky path that seems to lead only out into deep water with the intention of walking as far as it will take us and swimming the rest of the distance if we must. Hope is the awareness that the journey is more to be engaged than its difficulties are to be feared. I suspect that what Pandora actually kept in the box was the awareness and the energy we need in order to get ourselves out of the tangled world into which old myths and outmoded paradigms lead us. That makes hope, for me, the very basis of paradigm change.
Our task is to take our perceptions, our understandings, and our interpretations as valid in their own right and to melt them down to their elements, to winnow out the chaff and the dross -- until we arrive at some crystalline principles that we not only find in ourselves but can see in others -- principles such as human dignity, integrity, honesty, fairness, service, and excellence. There are more we could identify, but these give you an idea of what I mean. Our task is to arrive at principles within our own character that enable us to treat one another in human and humane ways. Our own paradigm -- our own myth -- is to be built from our deepest experiences and affirmations of life. We are, after all, more than merely what we do and how we behave toward one another. We are even more than our attitudes, healthy or unhealthy, as they may be. We are what we believe is real because it is on that which we base our thoughts and behavior and our hopes.
And we must not forget that others are part of reality, too, and that life is a dialogue in which the participants confront reality together. Of course, others may try to tell us what to think reality may be and they may insist that we agree with them. [I've been to enough UU discussion groups to know this.] Even some UUs may tell other UUs some such thing. But only we, ourselves, can know such things for ourselves. This is a most difficult task because, too often, we work harder at getting others to think like us than at clarifying our own thoughts.
When we come to terms with this for ourselves, we, then, have a basis on which we can grow and change as our understanding of reality changes. We can modify our own myths because we are not locked into a rigid structure or a controlling authority that would make us behave unrealistically on its own terms.
I will conclude with a story about a battleship that was on maneuvers in heavy weather. Shortly after dark the lookout reported, "Light bearing on the starboard bow." The captain called out, "Is it steady or moving astern?" The lookout replied, "Steady, Captain," which meant the battleship was on a collision course with another ship. The captain had the signal man advise the other ship, "We are on a collision course, advise you change course 20 degrees." The signal came back, "Advisable for you to change your course 20 degrees." The captain said, "Send: I'm a captain, change course 20 degrees." The reply was, "I'm a seaman second class. You had better change your course 20 degrees." By then the captain was furious. He said, "Send: I'm a battleship. Change course 20 degrees." Back came the flashing light, "I'm a lighthouse." The battleship changed course.
Today the world is filled with battleships (our national leadership appears to be one of them) that refuse to change course because their captains do not acknowledge the reality of the real signals they get. They cannot shift to a more realistic paradigm or modify their myths according to new experience. Our greatest strength as Unitarian Universalists is that we know we need to pay attention long enough to find out what the lights we think we see coming at us really mean. Sometimes even we change our course.