Evolving Religion

"Church! Huh! What Is It Good For?" part 3

Religion came to early humans as both a blessing and a curse. Faith community provided a feeling of connection, of at-home-ness, of being with our people, and in a world that made sense, just where we belonged. This blessing made early communities cohesive, and that cohesiveness proved essential to survival.

We need the blessing today as much as ever: overcoming alienation with community belonging and overcoming stress and greed with greater spiritual awakening. We need moral grounding today as much as ever, and we seem to be losing it.

At the same time, we need forms of religion that don’t do what religions often have done: inculcate intolerance and distrust of outsiders. The future holds to us the possibility of expanding the circle.

We can learn to take our sense of US-ness that evolution wired into us, and keep expanding it until it takes in, well, everything. Expand US until there is no THEM. All beings are US.

Just as nature wired into us a need for faith community, so it wired into us a propensity for going further with that capacity. Our inherited structures that made us able to bind together for war are available to be appropriated to connect us to live in peace and justice, without domination, or mastery, or hegemony. What evolution created for one purpose can now be put to a new purpose.

This is the method of transcendence that nature has often taken. When we think of evolution of abilities, we think of incremental improvements in serving a given purpose -- like the eye, starting with a layer of photosensitive cells and slowly getting better and better at seeing. An important part of evolution, however, lies not in incremental improvements of a function, but the abandoning of the original function and appropriating the capacity for a completely different purpose from the one it originally served.

• Mammalian forelimbs turned into bat wings – or, going another direction, into dolphin fins -- though the original purpose of forelimbs had nothing to do with either flying or swimming.
• Insect antennae turned into mandibles, with a function completely different from antennae.
• A jaw bone in dinosaurs, fish, and reptiles emerged for reasons that had nothing to do with hearing, but, in mammals, that small bone was appropriated and made into a part of the auditory system.
• An ancestor of wasps and bees had an ovipositor (egg-laying tube). It was there to lay eggs, not to sting with -- yet it was appropriated and made into a stinger.
• Before there were land animals, certain fish developed a swim bladder, which they could fill with gas, usually air. This allowed the fish to stay at a given depth without expending energy on swimming. The swim bladder evolved into the lung of the earliest lungfish – and from there into the lungs of land animals. This device for staying at a given depth in water turned into the essential step for moving onto land -- which was entirely different from the purpose for which it originally evolved.

Structures that served one purpose get put to very different purposes. It happens all the time. The fact that we evolved with a given structure or tendency does not obligate us to continue the purpose for which that structure or tendency evolved. Evolution has never been under any such constraint; if it were, then swim bladders would never have turned into lungs, and we’d all still be fishes. (It's easy to miss just how radical a point this is. Through millennia of Western civilization we have been making moral arguments "from nature": that certain actions -- for example, certain sexual actions -- were "unnatural," and therefore wrong, because they violated the purpose of, for instance, reproductive organs. It turns out nature herself repurposes organs.)

Building upon its inheritance, the lungfish transcended that inheritance and became a new thing on this earth. Bats and dolphins, mandibular and stinging insects, mammalian auditory systems -- and, one way or another, ultimately every complex feature of every species -- built upon its inheritance to transcend that inheritance and become a new thing on this earth.

We, too, may transcend our inheritance: put the wiring that enabled cohesive war-fighting to a new use, building peace. The wiring that finds such comfort and delight in the company of friends, gets active during spiritual experience, and orients us to live in peace within our group, is available for being universalized beyond our group. In this case, we don't even need any further genetic evolution. We already have the necessary neural structures of social orientation. With the appropriate training of those neural structures, we can teach ourselves to expand our perceived circle of "us" until there is no “them.”

Building upon our inheritance, we can transcend that inheritance and become a new thing on this earth. Our spiritual perception can plumb more deeply, can see more than just what selective pressures once needed our ancestors to see. My awareness can be trained to know, more thoroughly than cognition alone can know, that all humans are I, all sentient beings are I; all bugs and plants, all amoebas, paramecia, bacteria, and fungi are I; all rocks and dirt, rivers and oceans; air and fire; sun, moon, and stars are I.

Church, huh? What is it good for? “Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.” And strength that joins our strength to do the work of building a peaceful and just world. What is it good for? Could be everything.

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This is part 3 of 3 of "Church! Huh! What Is It Good For?"
See also
Part 1: Where Religion Came From
Part 2: Religion and Social Health

Religion and Social Health

"Church! Huh! What Is It Good For?" part 2

“People who frequently participate together in religious rituals achieve a feeling of community that enhances their ability to cooperate and avoid conflict. Even though they may not be conscious of it, they also are able to monitor one another for the sincerity of their commitment, thus making participation in religious rituals a credible signal of commitment.” (William Irons, 2001, 364)

That's where religion comes from. Shared rituals would have included music, drumming, and dance, and a variety of ritual behaviors to perform and watch others perform. Sacred stories supported the group's moral code and reinforced the group's identity.

And a third thing: Early humans attributed a stronger sense of agency than most modern humans do to trees, rivers, mountains, animals, sky, and, perhaps, "reality as a whole." They understood these features of their world to have beliefs, desires, and various means for effecting their desires. They understood trees and rocks and sky to be watching them. This probably triggered the same parts of the brain that account for gossip's effectiveness. Feeling watched made them more likely to "stay in line."

Through the rituals, the stories -- and this sense of being watched and accountable even when other people aren’t around to see -- religion is a cohesive power.

This shows up in studies of communes – communities that hold property in common. Communes often do not last long: if you were a young adult in the 1960s, you may have some direct experience of that. They tend to fall apart because the level of trust and cooperation required is just so difficult to maintain. Studies have found, though, that “communes that base their existence on religious ideals tend to last roughly four times as long on average as do those that base their existence on a secular ideology.” Groups with shared rituals and sacred stories cohere better. Marxist or Skinnerian Behaviorist communes could have benefited from some good hymns -- as well as other features of religion.

So here’s the upshot: Religion is an adaptive strategy fostering group cohesion in larger groups than can be managed by gossip alone.

Religion gives us a sense of US. The corollary is that it also gives us a sense of THEM – a feeling that those who don’t participate with us in our rituals and story-telling are different, are other, and dangerous.

So here’s the further upshot: We have religion because we had war. War places a premium on group cohesion, and “religion” is the rituals and stories that produced what was needed. War! (Huh!) Church! (Huh!) What are they good for? Each other!

It’s no wonder that human history is filled with wars over religion. This fact once seemed to me ironic and perverse. Why do people have wars over religion, when the religion on both sides teaches peace? But it's hardly surprising that an adaptation for succeeding in war would play a role in prompting us to go to war.

Part Two: What Religion Does Today

Faith community meets real human needs. It feeds people spiritually. But it has also facilitated war, from its very beginning. And, more often than not, it is related to social problems. A recent study in The Journal of Religion and Society did a large-scale cross-cultural comparative analysis, taking into account key indicators of societal well-being for 800 million people in the U.S., Japan, and western Europe. The study found that higher levels of religiosity correlated with lower levels of social well-being. The U.S., where church attendance is high, has had more school shootings than all of Europe and Japan combined. The study found:

“in general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion. The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is . . . almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so. The view of the U.S. as a ‘shining city on the hill’ to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health.” (Gregory S. Paul, “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies,” The Journal of Religion and Society, 7, 2005. View complete article: HERE.)

Europe scores lower than the US on measures of religiosity and higher than the US on measures of social health and well-being. In Europe, a lot fewer people are in prison -- and a lot fewer people are in church.

Religion reinforces a moral code, binds members into community through ritual and story, and triggers our brains to perceive a transcendent, interconnected whole beyond and more deeply satisfying than the concerns of personality and ego. But at what social cost? Is there a way for religion to be more pro-social? Yes, there is.

Next: Evolving a Better Religion

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This is part 2 of 3 of "Church! Huh! What Is It Good For?"
See also
Part 1: Where Religion Came From
Part 3: Evolving Religion

Where Religion Came From

"Church! Huh! What Is It Good For?" part 1

In 1970, in the midst of the Vietnam war, Edwin Starr made the charts with a protest song: “War (What is it Good For?)” “Absolutely nothing,” was the song’s answer.



“Church” – or any sort of faith congregation: synagogue, mosque, temple, sangha, vihara – actually is good for quite a lot, though it turns out religion and war have a shared origin.

As Starhawk said:

“Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our power.”

Don’t we need that? In these times of political turmoil, of social conflict and apparent chaos in our national government, we need more than ever a way to come together so that “I” can become “we”; “me” can become “us.” We are wired to have this need.

I want to look today at where this need came from – so we can understand it better. Religion was an adaptation to the conditions of early humans. But how adaptive is religion to modern conditions? The role of religion in modern society is problematic. Let’s ask whether there is a better way to adapt our wiring to modern conditions so we have more faith and more community and less war and conflict.

Part One: Where Religion Came From

The emergence of coherent society begins with reciprocal altruism. My survival chances were enhanced if I did favors for associates who would later do favors for me – although, if I went too far, allowed myself to be taken advantage of by doing favors for associates who would never reciprocate, then my survival odds diminished. In order for a reciprocity system to work, we had to have brains “capable of carefully tracking the behavior of the other organisms with which [we] interact.” (W. Irons) So there was selective pressure to develop the capacity to track and remember others’ behavior.

A second force in the emergence of society was the need for groups to cooperate in order to out-compete other groups. Bands of primates, generally males, competed violently with other bands for food, for territory, for access to females. We see that going on in chimps today – and on campuses. This group-group competition was a powerful force driving us toward formation of larger and better-united groups. Social cohesion required rules, and some method of communicating and enforcing them – keeping most of the members more-or-less in line most of the time. These selective pressures turned our ancestors into the sorts of beings with a facility for learning moral rules.

Reciprocal altruism gradually turned into a system of moral rules. Language allowed us to keep tabs on more and more of each other, which let us maintain a larger group, which allowed a more cohesive and larger fighting force and a better chance of defeating rival groups. Our ancestors learned a technique that we readily recognize and still use, though sometimes we say we don't like it: we call it gossip. Our ancestors met in small groups to monitor others' behavior and moralize about it.

Gossip emerged among early humans because it worked. It tracked who was trustworthy, reinforced the social ties of the gossipers, and strengthened the moral rules of the tribe. There are solid evolutionary reasons why we humans are attracted to gossiping. It’s a part of the system of maintaining the social order.

There is, however, a limit to how far gossip can go. Researchers find that moral rules reinforced through gossip can maintain unity up to about 150 members. Indeed, gossip magazines today maintain a list of no more than 150 celebrities that they keep up with the gossip about. More than that, and it’s too much to keep up with – the gossip just doesn’t pull us in. Larger groups need to be held together with something else. That's where religion comes in.

Religion facilitates cooperation among a group's members by serving to reinforce commitments to each other in a recognizable way. Participating in a group's rituals psychologically reinforces your actual commitment to the group and also lets the group know you're committed to them.
Indeed,

“participation in a ritual tends to alter individuals' brain states and to cause them to feel emotions of identity with a group more strongly and to hold this feeling more firmly in memory.” (Eugene Aquili, The Spectrum of Ritual, 1979)

Reciting and listening to sacred stories works the same way: it bonds us to the group with which we share the story.

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This is Part 1 of 3 of "Church! Huh! What Is It Good For?"
See also
Part 2: Religion and Social Health
Part 3: Evolving Religion

Protecting Faith While Preventing Discrimination

Washington State began recognizing same-sex marriages in 2012. In 2013, Barronelle Stutzman, owner of Arlene's Flowers in Richland, WA, refused to provide flowers for the wedding of Robert Ingersoll and Curt Freed. Ms. Stutzman

"knew that Mr. Ingersoll and Mr. Freed were gay and had sold them flowers for years, but then refused to provide flowers for their wedding. Her Christian faith, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman, created a line, she said, that she could not cross." (NYT, Feb 16)

Wait. If her faith defines marriage as between a man and a woman, then, in the eyes of her faith, the event for which Ingersoll and Freed were requesting flowers was NOT a wedding. The couple may have called it a wedding, and the State of Washington may have recognized the result as a marriage, but Stutzman is not being asked to recognize it as a marriage. She can say, "My faith doesn't recognize this as a real wedding. I am simply providing flowers for this social occasion that, in form, resembles a wedding." For her, it's just one more sale of many she had previously made to Ingersoll and Freed.

Recognizing legitimate marriages is required of, say, insurance companies who offer policies that protect one's spouse. If there are any rights or benefits afforded to married couples but not to unrelated friends, then same-sex married couples are as entitled to those benefits as opposite-sex married couples are. But recognizing the legitimacy of a marriage is not required of florists. Florists only have to sell flowers without discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. As long as the florist avoids offering any benefit -- a special discount, say -- to couples who prove they are married, she can have any opinion she wishes to have of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of any "marriage." So Stutzman could have sold the flowers while at the same time, in her own mind and heart, in accordance with her faith, regarding the "wedding" as fake. In this way, Stutzman would remain true to her faith and the couple would get their flowers.

But Stutzman didn't do that. Instead, she refused to sell the flowers. Ingersoll and Freed then sued Stutzman for violating the Washington Law Against Discrimination, which added sexual orientation to its list of protected characteristics in 2006. Currently 19 states -- and Washington is one of them -- ban discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. In the 31 other states, Ingersoll and Freed might have had a tougher case to make.

In the case, State of Washington v. Arlene's Flowers, Stutzman's attorney argued that flower arrangement is artistic expression and is thus protected as free speech. Speech? OK, then what would the florist supposedly be saying by providing flowers? According to Stutzman's side, providing flowers would say Stutzman endorses the wedding.

"She believes that participating, or allowing any employee of her store to participate, in a same-sex wedding by providing custom floral arrangements and related customer service is tantamount to endorsing marriage equality for same-sex couples." (Washington v. Arlene's Flowers)

This is nonsense. Businesses such as restaurants, bakeries, and florists may deny service to unruly customers, or to any customer that doesn't follow a set procedure for ordering -- as in the Seinfeld episode where the Soup Nazi denies service to Elaine. They may not, however, deny service on the the basis that service signals approval when, in fact, the service does not signal approval (a point I argued HERE). Does hiring a person indicate approval of the person's particular or general non-work-related habits? No. Does renting housing to a person indicate approval of the person's particular or general habits? No. Does producing and selling a cake (with no message on it, or with only a generic message like "Congratulations") indicate approval of the context in which it will be displayed or eaten? No. Nor does providing flowers for an event signal approval of the event.

"The decision to either provide or refuse to provide flowers for a wedding does not inherently express a message about that wedding. As Stutzman acknowledged at deposition, providing flowers for a wedding between Muslims would not necessarily constitute an endorsement of Islam, nor would providing flowers for an atheist couple endorse atheism." (Washington v. Arlene's Flowers)

The only "statement" Stutzman would be making by selling the flower arrangements is that Stutzman is a florist.

It's pretty clear-cut. The lower court ruled in the couple's favor, and the 9-Justice State Supreme Court ruled unanimously in upholding the lower court.

David French, writing for National Review, characterizes the court's ruling as meaning

"a florist was bound by state law to use her artistic talents to design floral arrangements to celebrate what she viewed as an immoral event: a gay wedding."

But, of course, (1) said florist is not bound to celebrate anything. She only has to provide her business services without discrimination. Selling flowers to an event does not constitute celebrating that event. (2) Her faith says that same-sex weddings are nonexistent. Again: since her faith defines marriage as between a man and woman, then a wedding-like ceremony between two men is not a real wedding -- even if the couple, their families, and Washington State happen to regard it as real. As the Court's opinion notes:

"Stutzman is an active member of the Southern Baptist church. It is uncontested that her sincerely held religious beliefs include a belief that marriage can exist only between one man and one woman." (Washington v. Arlene's Flowers)

It's not that Stutzman believes same-sex marriage to be wrong or immoral. Rather, her faith belief is that no such marriage can exist.

Might Stutzman regard it as immoral to simulate a wedding? If so, she would have to regard every play or movie with a wedding scene in it as immoral. That is not a position that Southern Baptists have taken. In any case, Stutzman did not argue that she found it immoral to engage in what she regarded as a simulation of a wedding.

A distinction between actual marriage and apparent marriage is familiar to us from the concept of annulment. Catholic doctrine holds that a marriage is annulled when it is determined that the marriage, despite initial appearances, did not actually exist. Annulment occurs when a diocesan tribunal decides that no marriage covenant was created because the wedding was conducted under false pretenses. Pretenses which might later be discovered to have been false include: openness and honesty, maturity, emotional stability, full consent, and appropriate motivation. Thus, faith organizations sometimes determine that a "wedding" wasn't a real wedding. Similarly, Stutzman may take the position that, in the eyes of her faith, there was no real wedding.

Looking at the Catholic list of grounds for annulment, raises the question: May a florist refuse to provide flowers for a wedding in which the florist has strong reasons to believe that the parties lack emotional stability, haven't given full consent, or aren't appropriately motivated? Proprietors may, as mentioned, refuse service for a variety of reasons -- generally having to do with the customer's behavior on the business premises. It would certainly be highly unusual to refuse service for a wedding on these grounds, and I don't know how the courts would end up ruling. On the one hand, sale of flowers does not endorse, or approve -- or "celebrate" -- the wedding. On the other hand, if the parties to the marriage (or "marriage") are not in a protected class, perhaps the courts would allow that denial of service. There is no Washington law forbidding discrimination against people planning to wed under false pretenses -- but there is a law forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. My point is that annulment has been around a long time, and it is based on a distinction with which we are accustomed and familiar: between apparent marriages and actual marriages. When it comes to whether a wedding, same-sex or opposite-sex, is apparent or actual, churches and individuals are free to have an opinion differing from the state's.

The sincerely-held religious belief in question denies the existence -- not the morality -- of same-sex marriage. (By contrast, that same religious belief does deny the morality, and not the existence, of sexual relations between members of the same sex -- though this moral judgment had not previously prevented Stutzman from selling flowers to a couple she knew to to be gay.) Ingersoll and Freed were asking Stutzman to sell flowers for what she was religiously bound to regard as a simulation of a wedding -- which her religion does not forbid. The Washington Supreme Court's opinion, alas, does not make this point. That's too bad. Allowing for individuals to make faith-based determinations about which marriages are "real" -- as long as those determinations do not result in denying a benefit that would otherwise be provided -- protects faith while also preventing discrimination.

I Don't Deserve a Donut

"The Desertless Life" part 3

In the last post, I concluded, "The idea of deserving something positive can be replaced, in some cases, with policies creating entitlements. In other cases, desert can be replaced with notions of reward, or of celebrating appreciation (or a mix of the two)." What about deserving something negative? For instance, we say a criminal deserves punishment. Again, does the notion of deservingness help? Reasons for punishment might include:

• Society needs to protect itself by removing dangerous people.
• Punishment might serve as a deterrent for others.
• Punishment might also help a person become less likely to commit subsequent crimes.

None of those reasons requires a concept of deservingness, nor does desert add anything helpful. What would you gain if, for this year’s Imbolc cleaning of your conceptual garage, you decided to throw away that musty old idea of deservingness, despite your sentimental attachment to it?

First, one thing you’d gain is freedom from thoughts about what you deserve. No more stewing about “I deserve this” or “I deserve that.” You can still stew about what you think you’re entitled to, but entitlement is created by some specific institutional structures, rules, procedures – so, at least, it’s a little more objective whether you really are entitled or not. When I stop thinking about what I deserve, I become more open to grace.

I do not, for instance, ever deserve a donut. Sometimes, to my delight, the opportunity to have one presents itself. When it does, I have to weigh whether to take it. Donuts aren’t very good for me, but, on the other hand, they’re very tasty. If I do take one, it isn’t because I deserve it. I don’t have to have desert in order to have some dessert. (A desertless life is not a life without ever having dessert.) I take my donuts as blessings of grace rather than as something deserved. Isn’t that a more joyful attitude?

Even if I get in the car, drive to a donut shop, stand in line, and pay for a donut, I don’t deserve that there should be such things as donuts or donut shops. If I pay for a donut, then, per the established institutions of commerce, I am entitled to get one. And we could say I'm entitled to the car and the currency in my pocket – because I did certain things that, per instituted practice and procedure, afforded them to me – but I didn’t create any of those institutions, so those are also a grace. Everything is ultimately grace, at its foundation – a fact I can see much more clearly when my vision isn’t obscured by ego’s conceits of self-deservingness.

Second, there are thoughts about what other people deserve. Could we do without those ideas? Perhaps we could. The reasons for rewarding or punishing – or for celebrating or condemning other people’s actions – can stand or fall on their own without notions of deservingness.

If dropping the notion of my own deservingness helps me be in touch with grace, dropping the notion of other people’s deservingness helps me be a grace to others. So maybe I put a quarter in someone else’s parking meter, or pay for the order of the person behind me at the, um, donut shop, or I go to kiva.org and fund a loan that can drastically improve some perfect stranger’s life, or I google “pay it forward” and get more ideas for wonderful, kind things I can do.

In all those cases, it’s not about whether the recipient deserves it. It’s just about the joy of being an instrument of grace in this world of tragedy and of beauty. In fact, if you’re thinking about who deserves what and why, it only gets in the way.

So my suggestion to you this month, with our theme being grace, is that you honor entitlements, where they pertain, and that you treat people as fairly as can, but that you try throwing away the concept “deserve.” For your Imbolc cleaning this mid-winter, try sweeping that concept away. If it turns out you really do need it, you can bring it back later, but for the next few weeks, at least, try living desertlessly – expunging the word “deserve” from your vocabulary. Try it.

Here in the US, we have this rather unusual custom of consulting a groundhog in mid-winter – or a hedgehog, or nutria, or desert tortoise. Strange as this seems to people of other lands, our custom offers to us a lesson. You see, there’s never any suggestion that the groundhog is passing judgment on whether we deserve a long or a short winter. There’s no suggestion we can in any way control our nonhuman guide. Long winter or short, it’s all grace. May we open our hearts to receive desertless groundhog grace.

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This is part 3 of 3 of "The Desertless Life"
See also
Part 1: Mid-Winter Groundhog Grace
Part 2: Shedding Desert

Shedding Desert

The Desertless Life, part 2

Grace is a mix of concepts. Grace is unearned, undeserved. So it’s luck. Serendipity. But not just that.

Grace is also a name for the fact that the best things in life are free. They are just given.

Further, grace includes overtones of providence. No matter what, you are provided for.

Also wrapped up in the idea of grace is our response to it. Grace compels gratitude (a connection more obvious to Spanish-speakers, who have the same word, gracias, for both graces and thank you). In that gratitude, grace bids us, receivers of grace, to become instruments of spreading grace to others. When all the blessings we receive and the blessing that we are to the world merge into one thing – one thing in which giving and receiving are indistinguishable – that one thing is grace.

Central to the concept of grace is that it is undeserved. So I want to focus today on the concept of desert – that is, deservingness.

Desert theory is not about theoretical models of the effects or benefits of having something sweet after a meal. Desert theory has to do with deservingness – who deserves what – as in the old phrase “just deserts,” meaning something justly or fairly deserved.

It’s common for us to invoke desert. We say a hard-working and productive worker deserves a raise -- a vicious criminal deserves a harsh penalty – or someone who has suffered a series of misfortunes deserves some good luck for a change. This is a casual, loose way of talking. Does it really hold up?

Let’s do some philosophy on this – enter into the head-space of examining concepts. These are the concepts we live with, so it behooves us every once in a while to do some concept cleaning, and the Imbolc cleaning time seems the perfect time.

Do we need this concept of desert (deservingness)? For starters, let's notice a distinction between entitlement and desert. "Deserving of" doesn't mean "entitled to" and "entitled to" doesn't mean "deserving of." We would feel that a disrespectful and sometimes even abusive grandson didn’t deserve his grandfather’s inheritance, but if grandpa’s will says he gets it, then he’s entitled to it.

Entitlement isn’t the same thing as deserving, but they often overlap, and if we’ve got entitlement, maybe we don’t need a notion of deserving. So instead of saying that hard-working and productive employee deserves a raise, we could provide greater clarity for everyone involved by specifying the performance standards for a raise, thereby creating an entitlement when those standards were met. Entitlement can better do the work for which we sometimes lean on a concept of deserving.

Admittedly, the concept of entitlement is sometimes misused. Most concepts are. Neverthless, I would say we probably need to keep some concept like entitlement. Desert, however, we could maybe do without. Deserving is such a subjective, nebulous notion. It’s very hard to say where deservingness comes from. Entitlement, on the other hand, has to do with specified rules and procedures, so it’s easier to get a handle on when it applies.

Most of who we are and what we do is determined by a mix of native endowments, genetics, and by the circumstances into which we are born -- with perhaps some randomizing function in the way "nature" and "nurture" interact. I didn’t do anything to create my genes or the circumstances into which I was born -- nor have any control over the randomizing function. I didn’t create the universities that educated me. The extent to which I applied myself to my studies (middling, for the most part) came from sources which I also didn’t create: the mix of genetic predispositions and the habits and values instilled by my circumstances. So how can I deserve any of the consequences that come to me from who I am and what I do? Consequences certainly come, some positive and some negative, and they shape what I do going forward, but is there any point in calling some of those consequences “deserved” and other consequences “undeserved”?

Of course, entitlement isn't always a suitable substitute for deservingness. Sometimes setting up the rules and procedures of an entitlement would be deadly cumbersome. For example, suppose you want to do something nice for somebody named Bess. “Bess deserves it,” you say to yourself. It would kill the impulse if you tried to set up personal rules for yourself that dictated, for you, just what criteria someone could meet for you to do something nice for them. So, in this case, there’s no question of anyone being entitled to anything, under either a social institution or your own established personal policy. You just want to do something nice. Why? "Because she deserves it," you tell yourself.

But does the notion of deservingness add anything? Is there any content to what you’ve told yourself? You have a positive regard for Bess or for what she’s done, and either you want to reward it, to encourage more of it, or you want your relationship with Bess to be one in which the two of you simply celebrate your appreciations of each other. Neither of those two reason needs a concept of deservingness. For either of those reasons, or for a combination of them, you do something nice for Bess -- and those reasons are wholly sufficient. No notion of desert is needed.

The idea of deserving something positive can be replaced, in some cases, with policies creating entitlements. In other cases, desert can be replaced with notions of reward, or of celebrating appreciation (or a mix of the two).

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "The Desertless Life"
See also
Part 1: Mid-Winter Groundhog Grace
Part 3: I Don't Deserve a Donut

Mid-Winter Groundhog Grace

The Desertless Life, part 1

In the beauty and grace of winter the trees rest. Their bare branches let in the sky. The season’s table is set with ice and starlight. It is a time for bundling up, hunkering in, snuggling – a contemplative and spare time before the profligacy of spring. These are the graces of winter.

It is mid-winter now. The precise mid-point between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox was Fri Feb 3, at 5:36pm EST, though the midpoint is traditionally celebrated as Imbolc or Saint Brigid's Day (Feb 1), or Candlemas or Groundhog Day (Feb 2).

Here at Community UU in White Plains, our folks were honoring and celebrating the mid-season "Days in Place" on Sat Feb 4. It was a fittingly chilly and gloriously bright and clear day.

Imbolc -- the mid-winter Gaelic festival marking the mid-way point between winter solstice and vernal equinox -- is a celebration which, in modern times, the neo-pagan movement has revived and spread. Imbolc began as the festival associated with the goddess Brigid, goddess of spring. In some traditions, the solstices and equinoxes are not the beginning of the seasons but the mid-points of the season, which would make the mid-points into the beginnings. According to those traditions, this is the beginning of spring now – and the March 21 equinox will be the mid-Spring point. The difference between the traditions raises the question: is it spring now, or do we have six more weeks of winter?

Imbolc is recognized by Pagans today as a time for purification and rededication – for cleaning, like spring cleaning. With the arrival of Christianity, the day came to be honored as Saint Brigid’s Day – the saint, some scholars suggest, being simply a Christianization of the goddess.

Candlemas is also an occasion marking mid-winter. Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans, Orthodox, and Catholics have a tradition of bringing their candles to their local church to be blessed for the rest of the year. An old English tradition of Candlemas had it that,

“If Candlemas be fair and bright: Come, Winter, have another flight.
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain: Go, Winter, and come not again.”

It was, perhaps an outgrowth of confusion about two different methods of defining the beginning of spring. Is it now, or is it in six more weeks? Folk traditions said it depends on the weather on February 2. In early-American folklore, this turned into the idea that a bright clear day would mean that a groundhog would see her shadow and be startled back into her den.

In this mid-winter contemplative time, time itself seems nonlinear. Maybe we’ll keep on looping through more of the same, and maybe, a new day will dawn. The mystical groundhog will reveal it to us.

This year Punxsutawney Phil said 6 more weeks of winter, while, closer to home, Staten Island Chuck said early spring. Some locales use alternative animals. In Portland, Oregon, this year Fufu the Hedgehog said early spring. In Louisiana, a nutria – also known as a coypu – named Pierre C. Shadeaux – seems not to have addressed the spring question, but did, on February second this year, predict an early summer. I guess it’s already spring beyond question in Louisiana. In Clark County, Nevada, they consult Mojave Max, a desert tortoise.

In the magical, mystery of mid-winter, we turn to mystical animals for guidance. Are we stuck with day after day of the same frozen-ness? Or is a new warm sunshine about to break forth?

The 1993 movie, “Groundhog Dog,” takes the question to its extreme. Weatherman Phil Connors, played by Bill Murray, literally faces the same day over and over. At first, he can’t stand this winter of the soul that he is stuck in. Blaming the mystical animal, he kidnaps the Groundhog, declaring,

“There is no way that this winter is *ever* going to end as long as this groundhog keeps seeing his shadow. I don't see any other way out. He's got to be stopped. And I have to stop him.”

But kidnapping the groundhog doesn’t work. He’s still stuck in February second.

Over many repetitions of the day – thousands, apparently – Phil comes to make his peace with perpetual winter. We see him at one point, a changed man, giving his report into the camera:

“When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn't imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.”

Which brings us to grace. Blogger Mark Lockard writes:

"Deep down, it's a story about grace. It's about Phil peeling back all the layers of his flawed self, seeing the raw deal and becoming more than he ever knew he could. It’s a story of self-forgiveness, healing and new life....He breaks his cycle by binding his wounds and finding a new way to live and be in the world." (ministrymatters.com, 2015 Feb 3)

For all the pain and disappointment, we can bring kindness to our life, face the hurt, heal.

“So when the clock hits 6:00 and Sonny tells Cher to put her little hand in his, we can put on our booties ‘cause it’s cooold out there’ with confidence. The chill will bite, but we will face the stark winter day wrapped warmly in the knowing that it’s OK to get it wrong; that’s part of the process....That’s what grace is all about.”

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This is part 1 of 3 of "The Desertless Life"
See also
Part 2: Shedding Desert
Part 3: I Don't Deserve a Donut