What To Do About Confirmation Bias

Tribe, part 3

Our ancestors may have needed confirmation bias. Without that mechanism for fostering group agreement, maybe our ancestors would not have survived. Today, however, we have the resources to live together without intertribal hate and violence. The biggest obstacle remaining is the way our own brains are built.

Today, across the news and social media, we see tribal loyalties trump any serious attempt at objectivity. "Objectivity" might not be the right word -- I don’t know if there’s really such a thing as objectivity. So let me put it this way: re-confirming the bias of one’s own group is much more motivating for a lot of people than trying hard to see another’s point of view.

The demonstrators against police violence have a strong confirmation bias for seeing things one way. Police officers have a strong confirmation bias for seeing things another way. And so the tribal lines are drawn, and getting past them is not going to be easy. That’s the dark side of tribes.

We’ve built a society of disconnection. Our veneration of privacy and autonomy were very helpful for some things, but left us with work that often lacks meaning and relationships that are disposable. In the absence of healthy tribal connection, we take refuge in less healthy tribal forms -- for some kind of tribe is a human need. Without the kind of ongoing connection with our neighbors that now comes out only when we respond to disasters, we have sought more insular, vicious tribes.

For our ancestors, reaching agreement was more important than whether the conclusion was data-based, but for tribes today coalescing around political candidates, that kind of selective attention ignoring large parts of reality may be disastrous. For the members of police communities and the members of protest communities, inability to see the other with empathy will make the conflict intractable and never-ending.

We have to start with ourselves – knowing that each one of our brains was built for powerful confirmation bias that takes work to manage – manage, not eliminate.

#1. Don't believe what you think.

You were made to have confirmation bias, and to think that your own beliefs are true. Even suggestions you don't believe have a way of directing your attention and action to seek their confirmation. Now that you know this, you can partially counter it just by noticing it at work.
When you notice it, say to yourself: "There goes my brain just wanting to confirm. I can't entirely stop it from doing that, but I can deliberately withhold cognitive assent from what it finds."

If you’re a fan of a sports team, then sports might be a handy place for you to start practicing. Notice how you think the world is a better place if your team wins. Righteousness has prevailed, right? Notice how you can't really believe that -- but you cheer for your team anyway, just because it's fun. Can you consciously bring the same attitude to other things that you think?

#2. Cultivate negative capability.

"Negative capability" was John Keats' term for "capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Work on being comfortable not knowing. As the Korean Zen master Seung Sahn often repeated: "Only don't know." Cultivate awe and wonder and mystery -- which depend on the absence of a satisfying story/explanation. In fact, refuse, to the extent you can, to let any story/explanation satisfy.

#3. Cultivate play.

Use play to switch around your images and metaphors. Your brain is built to latch onto stories, images, metaphors. You can't help that, but you can loosen the grip of any one story by playing around with other stories. People who expose themselves to a great multiplicity of stories – whether through traveling, reading novels, or cultivating diverse friends -- are less in the grip any one bias.

#4. Plunge in.

This one may seem counter-intuitive since it amounts to heightening your bias. There is, however, something true about every bias. Plunge in and see what you can learn about yourself from stories woven from random events. The lines on your hand, the Tarot cards that happen to come up, your zodiac sign -- explore what meaning can be made out of such coincidences. So you might actually try paying a visit to a palm reader, or Tarot psychic, or astrologer, and let them tell you the detailed story they make up.

You actually will learn something about yourself. Even if it isn't any more true of you than it would be for anyone else, it's still got some truth for you. It brings attention to an aspect of yourself. You can then better notice when that aspect is asserting itself. When you notice, you can then decide whether that's really the aspect that you want at the fore just then. The metaphors, images, or stories that most insidiously influence us are the ones that operate largely unconsciously. Fleshing out the details helps us be more conscious of them.

These four suggestions are all individual work. What we need is communal work. We need tribal connection not just with our self-selected tribe. We need tribal connection with all the people we see and interact with on a daily basis.

If we don’t figure out a way to come together as if a disaster has struck, then we will be coming together because a disaster has struck.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Tribe"
See also
Part 1: Left Alone
Part 2: Why Humans Reason

Why Humans Reason

Tribe, part 2

When we don't have strong connection to others in our tribe, it's bad for us. At the same time, there’s a dark side to our inherent tribalism. To unpack, a bit, the risks and the downside of our tribal need, I want to call attention to a curious feature of human reasoning: confirmation bias.

We all have a “tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms [our] preexisting beliefs or hypotheses” (Wikipedia). Thucydides observed, some 400 years BCE, that

"it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy."

Dante's Divine Comedy notes,

"opinion—hasty—often can incline to the wrong side, and then affection for one's own opinion binds, confines the mind."

Thomas Jefferson said,

"The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.”

We look for – and we see everywhere – support for our own theories.

And it goes even deeper than that. We tend to start noticing support for mere suggestions! Suppose your friend mentions that a mutual friend was born in middle-third of summer, which makes her a Leo. He mentions this by way of categorizing some tendency of hers. Or suppose he mentions that she was born in 1959, which was the year of the Pig, and uses this as a meaningful category for describing some aspect of the type of person she is. Even if you are quite sure that you believe in neither the Babylonian nor the Chinese form of the zodiac, the mere suggestion creates an unconscious filter at least temporarily increasing your attention to the person's lion-like or pig-like qualities.

A cousin of confirmation bias is the behavioral confirmation effect – also known as the self-fulfilling prophecy. What you think will happen influences how you act, and your action makes it happen. Typically you don’t notice the role that your own behavior had in making the result happen.

I mention all this because I want to raise this question: Why do we have confirmation bias? Why is there a behavioral confirmation effect? Whenever we reason – that is, whenever we advance a claim and seek to support it with evidence – we’re likely to be under the sway of confirmation bias. Why is that?

If the evolutionary function of reasoning – supporting claims with evidence – were to better discern the truth, or to make better decisions – then natural selection would have weeded out confirmation bias and the behavioral confirmation effect a long time ago. In fact, they never would have arisen. This tells us that the evolutionary function of reason is NOT to discern truth or to arrive at better decisions.

So what is the evolutionary function of human reason? Scholars Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that the function of human reason is in order for us to persuade one another. That is, in human evolutionary history, it is typically valuable for a group to agree on its viewpoints and theories. It is typically less valuable that those viewpoints and theories be true, or correspond to reality. As long as the decision-making isn't terrible but only a little bit less than optimal, then group agreement is more valuable than a marginal increase in good decision-making.

We are deeply social animals, and having a shared view of things helps us like each other and get along. Very often that’s more important than whether the shared view of things is true. If the objective is to produce conclusions supported by the most careful examination of the widest possible range of evidence, then confirmation bias is a significant obstacle. But if the objective is to produce conclusions that the group collectively endorses, then confirmation bias is quite handy: it keeps us focused on the evidence we can point out to each other to reinforce our consensus and bring lagging skeptics on board.

We evolved not only in a context of dependency on others within our tribe, but also in a context of recurring conflict with other tribes. In other words, we really needed to get along with our own people and also really needed to be able to fight against outsiders. Tribal survival depended on being able to defend our stuff (our turf, our food, our males' access to our reproductive-age females), and, when times got tough, survival sometimes depended on being able to conquer a neighboring tribe and take their stuff.

Shared viewpoints would have been doubly useful. First, shared viewpoints functioned to strengthen the bonds within our tribe. Second, shared viewpoints also functioned to facilitate a useful hatred of neighboring tribes who had different viewpoints. We needed to have viewpoints that were OURS – that were a product of tribal conversation – and we also needed those viewpoints to NOT be terribly closely determined by reality -- because then the other tribe would arrive at the same conclusion, and we wouldn't be able to hate them for their corrupt beliefs. Confirmation bias suits the need with amazing efficacy.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Tribe"
See also
Part 1: Left Alone
Part 3: What To Do About Confirmation Bias

Left Alone

Tribe, part 1

When you’re married to someone who likes disaster movies, then you end up watching a lot of disaster movies. The appeal of disaster movies is the appeal of actual disasters: we get to all get along. We become united – and by something clearly important. When 9-11 happened, when Superstorm Sandy hit, New Yorkers pulled together. Whenever a flood or a tornado or a tidal wave hits a community, you hear the same story: how nice it was that we were all working together. And we needed each other.

If you’ve ever caught yourself secretly hoping for a disaster just because it would be something significant and real, well, you’re not the only one. So much of our lives seem insignificant and unreal because we don't have to work together with others to deal with threats to the tribe’s very survival: coming together to care for each other in a way that feels real, solving problems that feels real, addressing threats that are real. When we’re not doing that for a short period of time it feels like a welcome respite. When we’re not doing that ever, it’s hard for life to feel real for a social species like homo sapiens.

Millions of years of evolution selected out just the traits that were oriented to being social, caring for and protecting the tribe. Sebastian Junger wrote a book called, Tribe. He says:

“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it. What they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”

In the 1700s, the European colonists and Native Americans were never far from each other. The colonists, we know, were commercial and industrious. The indigenous peoples were communal and tribal. Colonial society was wealthier, more advanced. The Europeans had more stuff, more powerful tools, could do more things, and they were always working on getting still more. They were making "progress" happen.

Yet something weird was happening. From time to time a European would “go native” – defect from white society and go live with a native tribe. This never happened the other way around. Not that our European ancestors were terribly welcoming overall, but there were some attempts, say, to welcome Indian children into colonist towns and homes. They never wanted to stay. In 1753, Benjamin Franklin wrote:

“When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.”

Through the colonial period, there were, the history books tell us, occasional wars and skirmishes between the settlers and the First Nations. With war comes prisoner taking. What probably wasn’t mentioned in your school history text is that the Europeans taken prisoner by the Americans often came to prefer life with their captors. When released, they would sometimes ask to stay. When colonists rescued them, they would escape and hide from their rescuers. This made prisoner swap agreements rather awkward. To honor their side of the swap, the natives had to forcibly return colonists, and still some colonists refused to go.

“In one case, the Shawanese Indians were compelled to tie up some European women in order to ship them back. After they were returned, the women escaped the colonial towns and ran back to the Indians.” (David Brooks, NYTimes, 2016 Aug 9)

In 1782, six years after the colonists had declared their independence from Britain, Hector de Crèvecoeur wrote,

“Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those aborigines having from choice become European.”

What’s going on? Is our cultural tradition, so good at domination and progress and doing more and getting more, foregoing what really gives people fulfilling lives?

I understand that evolution has reasons for making us the sort of beings that aren’t ecstatically or contentedly happy all the time. A certain dissatisfaction with things as they are is a necessary motivator to stir us from complacency. But did Western culture take that drive way, way too far?

I know there’s a tendency to romanticize tribal peoples. Tribes did war with each other. Life was often difficult. They were not, by and large, what we would call environmentalists – they, too, deforested and overhunted, and gave little thought to sustainability. But still Sebastian Junger’s description haunts me. These sentences don’t sound like romanticizing:

“They would have practiced extremely close and involved child care. And they would have done almost everything in the company of others. They would have almost never been alone.”

Almost never alone. We traded that for more individual autonomy and choice and privacy, for being left alone – being left . . . alone. Was it a good trade? We gained wealth. We lost our strong tribal connectedness. We pay the price in that loss and in higher rates of depression. The World Health Organization reports that people in wealthy countries suffer depression at up to eight times the rate of people in poor countries.

The millennial generation – people who are now between about 15 and 35 years old – may be in some ways choosing community over autonomy more so than previous generations. Millienials are more likely to turn the office into a source of friendships, meaning and social occasions, with less professional distance. Some millenials are trying to reclaim neighborhood hospitality – not as an accidental product of necessity, as it was 100 years ago – but as an intentional choice that requires effort. That feels like a good thing. Humans are built to live tribally. We need our tribe. When we don't have one, it's bad for us.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Tribe"
See also
Part 2: Why Humans Reason
Part 3: What To Do About Confirmation Bias

More Than Words Can Say

Covenant, part 3

A contract, whether oral or written, consists of words. There may be disputes about the meaning of those words, but the words are the contract. Covenant is different. Covenant is ultimately beyond words.

Yes, we generally do make attempts to articulate the covenant in words, but the words aren’t the covenant. A poem can articulate the love the poet feels for the beloved, but the poem isn’t the love. The covenantal reality is much more than what can be spoken. A marriage covenant, for example, can never be wholly and fully expressed by the vows made at the wedding, no matter how carefully or extensively those vows might be crafted. The promise is more than what can be said.

Love rings the bells of wanted birth and wedding day --
Love guides the hands that promise more than words can say. (Brain Wren, "Love Makes a Bridge")

This is not to say that articulating vows is unimportant.The words matter – but they matter not because they capture and constitute the whole promise, but because they serve to point to the promise that is deeper and wider than words can say.

As a people of covenant, we cannot grasp all that this covenant means – we can only live it. We cannot articulate all that our commitment to each other means – but can articulate a few aspects that will help us stay pointed in the direction of being the people we want to be: we promise to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person, or being, to respect the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part, to nurture each other in our spiritual journeys and engage in service. The words are merely the tip of the iceberg of the covenant as it is lived.

The great Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams speaks of the community-forming power – this mysterious thing that, like God promising Abraham, lifts us out of our separate, small lives and forms us into community, a great nation. Covenant is the name of that mystery, that community-forming power, the promise and commitment to be together, bear witness to one another, to be for each other what we cannot be alone. As Annie Dillard says,

“Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but we notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.”

We are surrounded by a culture that emphasizes individualism, heroic separation. The covenantal theology that Unitarian Universalism has inherited and shaped in its own way teaches that there is another way.

Our flourishing lies in the promises we make to and with each other. That flourishing happens through the keeping of those promises, and maybe even more it happens through the repairing of the promises when they are broken. For under-girding our covenantal promises to each other is the covenantal promise to the promise of covenant itself – our promise to do the work of re-connecting when we find ourselves divided. We forgive ourselves and each other and begin again in love. When we think someone isn’t doing enough, when we find someone annoying, when we think someone isn’t listening to us, is doing things wrong, in that very moment: forgive ourselves and each other and begin again in love.

That’s the covenant, and the covenantal tradition of which we are today the latest manifestation. Of course we try to keep our promises, and often we do. But it’s when we don’t that we confront the task of repair, of beginning again in love, and that’s when our lives meet the holy. As Rev. Gretchen Haley writes:

“Let me tell you right now, sometime in the next year, maybe in the next few minutes, the people you most believe in and care about are going to disappoint you. Your church is going to disappoint you. This world is surely going to disappoint you. Like, all the time. We all are walking wounded and weary from the way this world can – and does – break our hearts. And what our faith asks of us, what our faith imagines for us, is that somehow, right at that moment when our hearts break, we will find our way to see through that heartbreak. We will stay put – not close off, not run away, not hurt back – but keep on being in relationship, doing what we can to repair the world and each other, keep on opening our hearts with greater love. And, right then, our covenantal faith says, we are most whole and most at home.”

We are promise-making, promise-keeping, promise-breaking, and promise-repairing animals. And here we are. A group of people who happen to be in a room together looking for meaning and belonging -- the most recent embodiment of a tradition that shows us how to do that. For we are a covenantal people -- and our lives do not play to an empty house.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Covenant"
See also
Part 1: The Covenantal Tradition
Part 2: What Makes a People

What Makes a People

Covenant, part 2

When this tradition of ours reached a branching point, and one of the branches called itself Christian, these new Christians characterized themselves as recognizing a "New Covenant." At the last supper, Jesus says, “this cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” There’s a promise. Those who promise to dedicate their lives to the new community and its teachings are promised “life everlasting” – which essentially means meaning and connection – a realization of the you that is more than the set of your ego defense mechanisms.

Some centuries more go by, and the Protestants split off from the other Christians. Then the Unitarians and Universalists became distinct branches of Protestantism, and our branches gradually dropped the expectation that members were Christian. Each of the many branches of Western religion has evolved in its own way, but we all have this covenantal tradition in our roots.

The key insight articulated in the stories that took form among Hebrew slaves in Babylonian captivity is with us still: Our relationship to each other, to our world, is constituted by promises, by agreement.

The word covenant also appears in some legal contexts. In legal contexts a covenant is "a type of contract in which the covenantor makes a promise to a covenantee to do or not do some action.” In real estate law, “covenant” refers to conditions tied to the use of land. That’s not what I'm talking about – although a real estate covenant does relate to how we use the ground on which we come together – so there is a metaphorical connection.

The origin of the word covenant means both “to agree” and “to meet.” You see that in the similarity with the word “convene.” A covenant is the ground of agreement on which we meet, the agreement that makes convening possible. It’s the agreement that makes us a people, instead of isolated individuals. Covenant is what brings us together; it convenes us.

A contract stipulates conditions that can be objectively determined to be violated or not. If the terms are violated, then there’s recourse or remedy: you can go to court to have the contract enforced, or there are terms in the contract itself that apply if one party fails to do their part. Covenant doesn’t work like that at all. Unlike a contract, a covenant doesn't generally stipulate conditions that can be objectively determined to be violated or not, and, even when its conditions are clearly violated, covenants are unenforceable and afford no remedy or recourse.

The function of a covenant is not to work the way a legal contract works. The function of a covenant is to remind us of our shared aspiration for how we'd like to be together. Covenants express the sort of general principles that we honor and uphold yet also sometimes fail to honor and uphold.

The content of the covenant that convenes Unitarian Universalists, and that, before 1961, convened Unitarians and Universalists, has been articulated in various ways through the years and centuries. In the mid-1980s, we articulated it in the words of our seven principles:

“We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote

• the inherent worth and dignity of every person;
• justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
• acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth;
• a free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
• the right of conscience and the use of democratic process;
• the goal of world community with peace liberty, and justice for all;
• respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.”

In addition, Community UU, White Plains, is also convened by our agreement that we gather on behalf of our mission

“to nurture each other in our spiritual journeys;
foster compassion and understanding within and beyond our community; and
engage in service to transform ourselves and our world.”

The shared agreement to embody these words convenes this congregation – it is part of how the covenant is articulated. References to the covenant are invitations for each of us to reflect on how we might better follow its principles. Judging others on how well they're following the covenant is not how it works. Rather, the terms of the covenant are a promise that we each individually make to ourselves -- but within a context of knowing that all the others in the group are also making that promise to themselves.

The stories of our tradition speak of the covenant with God – which is a way of evoking the commonality of a shared higher self with which we commit ourselves in promise. Instead of triggering specified consequences after which it is then null, as a contract would, each breaking of the promise is the occasion of recommitting to the covenant's ideals.

There’s a hymn that we sing here with words by Rumi:

Come, come whoever you are,
Wonderer, worshiper, lover of leaving,
Ours is no caravan of despair,
Come yet again come.

But our hymn leaves out one line of the original Rumi poem:

“Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come.”

With a contract, if you don’t live up to your side, I don’t have to live up to my side either. With a covenant, breaking it doesn’t weaken the power the covenant has. However much or often we may fail – and we all sometimes fail at our covenants – the covenant calls us back to try again to live up to and live by our promise – for the promise convenes us, makes us a people, and constitutes our promised land.

Come, yet again, come.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Covenant."
See also
Part 1: The Covenantal Tradition
Part 3: More Than Words Can Say

The Covenantal Tradition

Covenant, part 1

Hey, thanks for reading. What I write here is an expression of the tradition that informs me -- and by reading it, you, too, take a step into the stream of that tradition.

Those who gather at Unitarian Universalist congregations for worship on Sunday morning (or during another time of the week) keep alive a tradition. Our being together is not just a group of people who happen to be in a room together looking for something meaningful – something that will help us make a little more sense of our lives – something that will connect us and ground us and reveal to us the abundance of what we are and what this world affords us – something that will strengthen us to face the week ahead a little more bravely and maybe a little more cheerfully and kindly.

Those who gather at Unitarian Universalist congregations for worship are a group of people who happen to be in a room together looking for meaning and belonging, but we are not just that. We are also the current embodiment of a tradition. Thousands of years of people getting together, telling stories and singing songs and lifting up their heart’s yearnings and their souls’ anguish in prayer – millennia of people developing a practice and a shared understanding of their place in the universe and passing that down to subsequent generations -- has split into many branches, each branch still fed by the nutrients from the roots.

Every time we gather we are creating the next incarnation of who we are. We create the next version of “we” – and this “we” has a history, whether we know it or not, that gives shape to who we are. So let’s talk about that.

The Hebrew people, following the conquest of Judah in 598 BCE, were marched out of their homeland into Babylon as slaves. The period of Babylonian captivity, Babylonian exile, lasted 60 years until Persia in turn conquered Babylonia, and the Persian king, Cyrus the Great, gave the Jews permission to return to Palestine.

During those 60 years, these Hebrew slaves of Babylon began to do something remarkable, something of world-historical significance. Faced with the extinction of their existence as a distinct people, they began to collect, re-tell, and elaborate upon old stories. Fragments and snippets of legend were expanded and woven together along with oral history of the people of Israel. Most of what we know as the Torah – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy – and much of the rest of the Tanakh, which Christians call the Old Testament – took form and was first brought together and written down during the Babylonian captivity. Somehow these slaves, in their desperation to know who they were, found ways to solidify their story.

A central thread running through that story is the centrality of promises: promise-making and promise-breaking. The world makes us a promise, we make promises to our world, and to each other. Promises get broken, they get repaired and restored. Our lives have the meaning that they have in and through promises – promises made to us, promises we make to others, promises kept, promises not kept, promises kinda kept.

An early episode in the story concerns Noah, whose ark carries the promise of life’s continuation into a world where most of life is destroyed. The episode ends with a promise: God promises never again to destroy all life on Earth by flood, and creates the rainbow as the sign of this "everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth."

Three chapters later in Genesis, there’s another promise.

“Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you,...so that you will be a blessing....And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." (Gen 12:1-3, NRSV)

It’s a promise. You – lonely, isolated and puny – are transformed into a great nation by the blessing of promise.

A few centuries go by, and there’s Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai, saying, “have I got a deal for you.” We are promised a land – and in return, in order for us keep our land and be a people, we have to not kill, steal, lie, get envious of our neighbors’ stuff. We need to honor our parents and uphold the exclusivity of marriage. Also, no graven images, because that way we won’t have different ones and we can feel like we’re unified in worshiping together what is holy. This is the promise we need to live by. If we live by these promises to be decent to each other, the promise to want to feel our hearts connected, then we get this promised land. Indeed, the promise of the promised land is the promise we make to each other that makes us a people.

Moses was fulfilling – filling more full – the Noah covenant; for our promise to each other is what assures us that the flood of our greed, anger, and delusions will not destroy us again. It fills out the Abrahamic covenant; for our promise constitutes Abraham’s great nation.

A few more centuries go by, and the people have their own land, and their own king, David. The promise of land that you will get becomes a promise of land that you will keep:

"And I will appoint a place for my people Israel and will plant them, so that they may live in their own place, and be disturbed no more; and evildoers shall afflict them no more,...and I will give you rest from all your enemies. Moreover the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house....I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever....Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever." (2 Sam 7:10-16, NRSV)

That promise -- the Davidic covenant -- would seem to have been broken, though interpreters have found ways around the apparent violations. But promises define us even when they aren't kept.

This is the basic story line that emerged in the Babylonian captivity: a story about being a people of covenant: the Noahic covenant, the Abrahamic covenant, the Mosaic covenant, and the Davidic covenant.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Covenant."
See also
Part 2: What Makes a People
Part 3: More Than Words Can Say

He Got the Optimism, Not the Humility

Going Into Labor, part 3

The story of George Pullman is of particular salience to us Unitarian Universalists. This story -- the story of the industrialist who owned an entire town, ruled over it, sparked a national strike, and then brought in the Army to violently break that strike -- is our story, quite specifically. You see, George Pullman was one of us in a very direct sense.

George Pullman was a Universalist: born, raised, and lifelong.

George’s father, raised a Baptist, and his mother, raised Presbyterian, converted to Universalism, drawn to the “God is Love” message of the Universalist minister Thomas Eaton. George's Dad often led the services when no preacher was available. The Pullmans were a devotedly, devoutly, Universalist family. Both of George’s two older brothers became Universalist ministers and were prominent figures in our faith. Late in his life, George Pullman had a Universalist church built in his hometown, Albion, New York, as a memorial to his parents. Industrialist George Pullman was born, lived, and died a Universalist.

Something of the Universalist outlook may be detected in his life and actions. He believed his workers deserved decent accommodations. He saw that education was a win-win: it made workers lives better, and made them more useful workers for businessmen like him. "I have faith," Pullman told the press, "in the educational and refining influences of beauty, and beautiful and harmonious surroundings."

Pullman had a kind of Universalist hope that different denominations could come together and worship together in one church. There is a certain idealist, utopian strain of thought in the planning of his town. Shortly after Pullman's death in 1897, courts ordered the homes sold to individual homeowners.

Liberal religion is characterized by an optimism about human possibility. From our beginnings 450 years ago, Unitarians and Universalists have been peoples who rejected Calvinistic conceptions of humankind’s total depravity. That optimism about human capacity is displayed in Pullman’s vision of a company town where every one was happy and productive. So what went wrong?

It's not hard to see that what went wrong was that Pride and Control took over. Yes, people can get better -- can learn, can grow -- but they have to do so in their own way. Growth, learning, and development cannot be all planned out with precise outcomes determined in advance.

Pullman believed in human improvability, but didn't believe in people enough to let them work out their own growth, awakening, salvation, in their own way -- even if they used their freedom to go backwards for a few years -- or a few generations -- and even if, left to their own devices, they drank, or listened to speeches from agitators, read independent newspapers, gathered and discussed unsavory ideas.

Pullman wouldn't listen to his workers' needs. We can’t ever be so arrogant that we won’t meet and talk and consider where other people are coming from.

For Labor Day, remember George Pullman, the industrialist whose meanness sparked the events that led to the creation of the holiday.

Remember George Pullman, the Universalist who got the optimism but didn’t get the humility – because we Unitarian Universalists today follow in his footsteps in more ways than it's comfortable to admit. When has your voice of “let’s make it better,” come out as "fix it my way or I will treat you as evil obstructionist"? When have your own ideals made you cruel? I think we do that every time we think someone else is wrong.

Then let this be our Labor Day prayer: to find the courage to talk to the people we think are wrong, and stay at it until we get over ourselves. “God rejoiced at our disobedience,” said Rabbi Kushner, “and then wept with joy that we could feel our estrangement and want to return home.” We feel the estrangement.

For Labor Day, as we consider our theme of the month for September, covenant, I ask you: Will you covenant -- will you commit -- to the labor it takes to return home? That labor, we cannot outsource to China. To go into the labor of giving birth to ourselves -- to go into the labor of giving birth to community -- we can’t get surrogates in India. It’s up to us.

My challenge to you – and to myself -- is to talk, face-to-face, with someone you think is wrong. It’s election season – it’s not hard to find them. The hard part is talking to them, and keeping a civil tongue even if they don’t.

And that is hard. Over the summer LoraKim and I went down to southern Virginia for a short visit with her brother. My brother-in-law and I did have a conversation about matters – political matters – on which we disagreed – and I failed to be a sympathetic listener. It’s very clear – to me – that he’s wrong. I wasn’t able to stay at it, get over myself, my conviction of rightness, stay pleasant. He didn’t either, but our challenge is to be better – whether the other person is or not. Next time we see each other, I’ll try again – chastened by how badly I failed at in July.

We feel our estrangement – so many of our fellow citizens, we are suddenly realizing, have such anger and fear – it’s easy for us to get angry at, and a little afraid of, them. The labor of returning home, one small step toward one small mend in one small relationship at a time, is ours to do. May we take it up.

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This is part 3 of 3 of "Going Into Labor"
See also
Part 1: Labor Day, Holy Day
Part 2: Why We Have Labor Day