Words and LGBTQ Justice: Introduction

LGBTQ: Language and Justice, part 1

Words, words, words. Loving words! Fighting words! Words both reflect and form the world we live in. Just to say something as simple, straightforward and objective as “the cat is on the mat,” is to endorse picking out from the flow of experience certain objects to call “cats” certain objects to call “mats,” and that the relation of “on” is something to which attention is worth paying attention.

The meanings are always changing. I’m going to talk a lot about words today as we celebrate LGBTQ people and their lives among us. If we grow more comfortable with the fact that words are always shifting around on us – sometimes rather slowly and sometimes with dizzying speed – then maybe we can use them better in creating a welcoming world of care and respect.

So let’s look at the nature of words.

Did you ever notice that every time we learn something, it changes the meaning of words? "Learn something,” this might be discovering something about the world. When we discovered that water was H2O, it changed the meaning of water – and of hydrogen and oxygen. These three terms were now interconnected as they hadn’t been before.

“Learn something” can also mean deciding to adapt some way of talking and thinking. Two of my favorite examples are from the history of science. "Planet" originally meant wandering star. Mars is in Capricorn right now, and Venus is in Gemini. In another month or so, Mars will have drifted over to Aries and Venus will be in Cancer. They are stars – but they wander.

Then we learned that Mars and Venus -- and Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn -- aren’t stars. Can we still call them wandering stars if they aren’t stars? We could have said, “OK, we have learned that there are no such things as planets, as wandering stars. Those things we thought were planets aren’t stars, so we have to call them something else.” We didn’t do that. Instead, we changed the definition of the word “planet.” And not just a little. We changed the essence of the definition: "planet" had been a STAR that wandered. We decided we would still call them planets, even though they aren’t stars.

As we learn, we redefine our words to reflect what we know.

Another example is the word “atom.” It means “indivisible – cannot be divided.” Whatever else we might know or learn about those tiny objects, that they could not be divided was their one essential attribute. Then we found out we could split them. Did we say, “Oh, those things aren’t atoms. They aren’t indivisible, so we can’t call them atoms”? No. We did not say that. We kept right on calling them atoms, and just changed our definition – changed our understanding of what the word meant.

I mention these examples to say that sometimes it isn’t just peripheral connotations of words that change – the way that, in my lifetime, the word “clown” changed from being something not at all scary to, now, something that is often scary. No: these are cases where the central essence of the thing was re-defined right out of it.

And no one – as far as I’ve been able to find – cared. If Galileo was ever met with outraged voices saying, “You can’t redefine planet,” I haven’t been able to locate an indication of it. When scientists announced they had split the atom, no one protested they were violating the sanctity of the language. There was some concern that they might have been violating the sanctity of nature, but no worries about language.

Actually, I did happen to witness one case of an objection to a tweak that scientists made in the meaning of a word. The word was “accelerate,” which Dr. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of 1755 defined as “To make quick, to hasten, to quicken motion; to give a continual impulse to motion, so as perpetually to increase." But scientists needed the word to refer the rate of change in velocity, whether speeding up or slowing down. My mother, a physics and chemistry professor, posed a question to my sister and me one evening at the dinner table when I was, maybe, age 12. “If you throw a rock into the air, straight up – perfectly vertical – it will reach its topmost point, and then start to come straight down. At that instant at the top, is the rock accelerating?”
My father, an English professor, interjected, "No. For just an instant it's not moving at all."
“At that instant it is stopped,” agreed Mom. “But it’s still accelerating. Acceleration means that its velocity is changing, and the rock’s velocity is changing throughout its trajectory – on the way up and on the way down.”
“No,” said my father, “that is not what 'acceleration' means. You scientists don’t get to change the English language.”

So, OK, yeah, sometimes there’s some objection along the way. Yet the process rolls along -- words change their meaning as we learn more about the things they point to. As we learned more about motion, we saw that all regular changes in velocity were mathematically describable, and we needed the word “accelerate” to refer to all such changes, not just to speeding up. So, my father notwithstanding, scientists changed the language.

When it isn’t just science, but central institutions of society that are at stake, there’s liable to be more uproar over definition shifts.

NEXT: Evolving meanings of "marriage"

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This is part 1 of 3 of "LGBTQ: Language and Justice"
See also
Part 2: What Changed the Meaning of Marriage
Part 3: Gender Identities: Continua and Ambiguities

The Price We Pay

Who Are These People? part 3

There’s Jeff Foxworthy joke, and he can tell it because he identifies himself as a redneck. He says the last words of most rednecks is “Hey, y’all. Watch this.”

Those who whose vision and courage wholly guides them are essentially saying that, too. "Hey, y'all, watch this." Socrates, Jesus, Joan of Arc, Francis of Assisi, Michael Servetus, Katherine Vogel, Harriet Tubman, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Che Guevera, Rigoberta Menchu, Mother Teresa, Stephen Biko. Hey y’all. Watch this.

If we do watch -- if we take a careful look at what they are doing and represent -- we are likely to be awakened to new depths and possibilities of human life. We are likely, thus, to be redeemed from a life constrained into more narrow concerns. All our many failures to be all that we wish we were may be atoned for by the knowledge of what we can be. “Lives of Great [ones] all remind us, we can make our lives sublime,” wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

So, yes, I believe in Universal atonement. The doctrine as I accept it has certainly evolved as the conversation rolled from Ballou's time to ours, but I see an essence there that is the same doctrine. It’s like poetry. The poetry of the early 21st century is different from the poetry of the early 19th century, or of the 17th or 15th centuries, or of the ancient Greeks. Yet we can see the poetic truth in earlier forms and styles. Theology isn’t science. It’s more like poetry. Theology can certainly be informed by science – just as poetry can -- as when our sense of transcendence, of wholeness, and interconnection is triggered by reflections on scientific findings in their very broadest context of meaning. We can see the poetic truth in earlier forms and styles of theology too – if we are willing to lay aside dogmatic axes to grind, stop being literal and superficial, and see through to the deeper truth behind, say, a 19th century account of atonement.

So I read Ballou at two levels, both for the significance he had to his own time and for the meaning he still offers to ours. And the former paves the way for the latter, for Ballou altered the course of Universalism forever. He did so in two ways.

First, he was a unitarian: “unitarian” with a small u, since Unitarians had not yet formed a separate denomination. Saying Ballou was a unitarian means that, in addition to believing in universal salvation, another one of his doctrines just happened to be that the trinity idea was insupportable. Prior to Ballou, Universalists were trinitarian universalists, but Ballou agreed with Unitarians that God was one, not three. Before the 1961 merger of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church in America could happen both sides had to be ready. And the Universalists had been made doctrinally ready a century and a half before by Hosea Ballou.

Ballou’s other major contribution to Universalist thinking was about hell. For prior Universalists, everyone goes to heaven – but not right away. There was a hell, though it was temporary. We endured a purgatory period of punishment of duration proportionate to wickedness -- before passing Go, collecting $200, and advancing to the pearly gates. For a few years Ballou waffled on that question, but he finally came to the view that heaven was immediate for everyone.

This was a big controversy. People within and outside the Universalist church said: if there were no punishment at all, we’d have complete licentiousness. If there is no price to be paid for sin, you will have total moral anarchy. Without fear of retribution, people will sin freely, wild sex, drunken orgies, social decay, “cats and dogs living together” (that’s a line from the movie Ghostbusters).

The story is told that Ballou “was riding the circuit of the New Hampshire hills with a Baptist minister one afternoon. They argued theology as they traveled.”

The Baptist minister said, “If I were a Universalist and feared not the fires of hell, I could hit you over the head, steal your horse and saddle, and ride away, and I’d still go to heaven.”

Ballou replied, “If you were a Universalist, the idea would never occur to you” (Richard Gilbert, Building Your Own Theology: Introduction. 2000. 64)

What Ballou was saying – what we still say – what I learned as a child at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta – is not that we don’t pay the price for our sins. We do. We pay the price for small-souledness. We pay the price for every thoughtless deed that diminishes the light from the spark of divinity within us. We pay the price for not loving ourselves, and our neighbor as our selves. We pay the price for not recognizing kinship, and we pay the price for not accepting difference. We pay the price. But that price is paid here. It is paid in this life. Hell is an earthly phenomenon, and it is those who cannot see beyond themselves and their own narrow self-interests who are imprisoned in the hell of their own making.

This is the teaching that comes to us from father Ballou.

He saw for himself. And he helped our other forebears see for themselves, and they helped intellectual descendants see for themselves, so that we here now can help each other in the ways that we do to see for ourselves. “Our own lives expanding, our gratitude commanding, his deeds have made immortal his days and his years.”

Who are these people? Who are we? We are the inheritors of a long and a deep and a rich tradition of free and thoughtful people making together religious community.

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This is part 3 of 3 of "Who Are These People?"
See also
Part 1: Hosea Went Universalist
Part 2: Atoning For Us All

Atoning for Us All

Who Are These People? part 2

Hosea Ballou came to a moment when his resistance to universalist arguments finally crumbled -- a conversion experience that may have started as intellectual and grown into a commitment of the heart, or may have started as an niggling inchoate intuition for which intellectual rationale subsequently developed.

Many Unitarian Universalists today can relate to what that moment must have been like. Most current Unitarian Universalists reached a time in their adult life when they said, “That’s it. There are things I am still struggling with; my quest, my spiritual journey, does continue, but I am a Unitarian Universalist. It’s what I am. My lot is cast with these people.”

For many of these UUs, the very next thought was: “Oh, my, how do I tell my parents?”

Here’s a telling story:

“One Sunday afternoon as young Hosea sat in the corner of the kitchen, Maturin his father asked, ‘What is that book you are reading?’
Hosea answered, ‘A Universalist book,’
‘I cannot allow a Universalist book in my house,’ declared the father.
So Hosea walked out to the woodshed,” and, knowing his father would be watching him, in plain sight hid the book “in the woodpile. After Hosea had gone to bed Maturin went to the woodpile, and discovered that the forbidden book was the Bible.” (Scott 61)

Hosea scrimped and saved his pennies and, at age 19, bought himself one term at Chesterfield Academy.

“He got his money’s worth, absorbing so much from his studies that at the end of the term he was granted a certificate that declared that he was prepared to teach school.” (Scott 61)

In September 1791, at age 20, he attended the General Convention of Universalists in Oxford, Massachusetts. Universalism had gained a foothold in communities on the Atlantic coast, and Hosea had the chance to hear those preachers speak.

Hosea heard the call, took to preaching. In his day there were many preachers who earned most of their living doing something else. Hosea would teach all week and preach on Sunday. His fame spread. He got ordained.

At age 25 some colleagues began to be a little concerned. He showed no signs of getting married. As far as anyone could tell, he had never had a love affair. His colleague universalist minister Caleb Rich explained to Hosea the hazards of an unmarried minister, and even produced a woman for Hosea: Ruth Washburn – amazingly both intelligent and willing. The marriage was long and happy and produced eleven children. (Perhaps eleven was the quota in those days?)

Through his preaching and his writing, Ballou reshaped Universalist doctrine. Ballou’s 1805 book, A Treatise on Atonement, is a major landmark in the development of our thought. His editorship of the Universalist magazine – creatively titled The Universalist Magazine – gave us our identity for more than a generation.

In addition to being Unitarians, we today are Universalists. We are Universalists, walking in Hosea Ballou’s footsteps, not to try to be like him, but to be who we are – to let each of our unique little lights shine. We are Universalists not because we believe what Hosea Ballou, or any other predecessor, believed. We are Universalists because we are the latest participants in the conversation that is Universalism – the conversation that Hosea Ballou reshaped with his powerful ideas. It is as participants in that unbroken dialog, that continuous conversation which in this country extends back 240 years, that we are who we are, not by adherence to any article of belief advanced in that conversation. We are Universalists because we today speak with each other continuing the ongoing conversation in which Ballou in his time so eloquently spoke. And we understand ourselves by understanding how we got here, how this conversation came to constitute us. We learn to see for ourselves, more independently and more confidently, by hearkening to the echoes of voices from our past.

In his Treatise on the Atonement Ballou addressed Christ’s act of atoning for our sins by dying on the cross. The Calvinist doctrine proclaimed limited atonement. Christ’s act atoned for only a few – the great majority of humankind was doomed to hell. This included, the Calvinists felt sure, all the nonCalvinists and even probably most of the Calvinists. Ballou’s point, like the other Universalist preachers, was that Christ’s atonement atoned for us all.

And I can agree with that.

Insofar as Jesus knew what he was risking, and did it anyway, insofar as Jesus saw for himself and dared to speak of what he saw despite the danger, then his brave compassion, which earned him crucifixion, redeems us, all of us. Insofar as Socrates’ saw for himself and refused to shut up about what he saw, insofar as he continued to urge others to also come take a look, then his civil disobedience for the cause of a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, which earned him a bowl of hemlock, redeems us, all of us. Insofar as Katherine Vogel in the sixteenth century saw for herself and spoke out saying God was one and not three, insofar as she would not recant, knowing the penalty, then her theology, which earned her fiery death at the stake, redeems us, all of us. For every act of imagination and vision and courage redeems the species that is capable of producing it. By such acts we are lifted out of our petty, small-minded, mean tendencies and we are shown of what we, too, are capable. Such acts speak to us, if we will listen, and they say, “Hey you, human being, look what your humanity has in it to do.”

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This is part 2 of 3 of "Who Are These People?"
See also
Part 1: Hosea Went Universalist
Part 3: The Price We Pay

Hosea Went Universalist

Who Are These People? part 1

I grew up Unitarian Universalist. I grew up in the Southeast: in Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia. In adulthood, I lived in Atlanta, Georgia; Waco, Texas; Charlottesville, Virginia; Nashville, Tennessee; Rochester, Minnesota. That was all before I became a minister. However strange a new town might feel, however adrift in unfamiliar streets and customs I might be, I would look up the local Unitarian Universalist congregation in the Yellow Pages. (You remember Yellow Pages? It’s what us old timers used to use before there was the internet.) I would show up on Sunday morning and there I would be among my people. I would be home.

Yet even I, born and raised Unitarian Universalist, would occasionally have a certain experience. It must be even more common among the many people who do not come to Unitarian Universalism until adulthood. I’m talking about those times of looking around the room – around the sanctuary on a Sunday morning, or at a committee meeting, or a potluck dinner – and thinking: "Who are these people? They kinda seem like ordinary people, but there's something a little different about them."

Unitarian Universalists today are the inheritors of a long and a deep and a rich tradition of free and thoughtful people making together religious community. That's who we are.

Heaven, hell, and sin are big concepts. Many of those who do find themselves landing at a Unitarian Universalist congregation in adulthood after growing up in some other tradition have journeyed through significant evolution of their concepts of what heaven and hell and sin are. The individual journey that many Unitarian Universalists have taken recapitulates the journey of Unitarianism and Universalism. The liberal religious movement in this country went through stages, just as some current Unitarian Universalists individually did. Before we could come to a place of affirming both heaven and hell as experiences in this life, we started by saying there was no hell of eternal afterlife punishment.

To illustrate this evolution, let’s look at the life of an early Universalist: Hosea Ballou, born in 1771. His father, Maturin Ballou, was a preacher in Rhode Island before American independence. Then he headed out for that harsh New Hampshire wilderness for a new life. It was a tough life. With the tools they had, and the stony ground, and the short growing season, only the scantiest of living could be wrung from the land. And on Sundays, Maturin “preached without pay in the plain little meetinghouse where the members of his own household provided a large portion of the congregation” (Scott 58). Hosea was Maturin and Lydia Ballou’s eleventh child – so that congregation wasn’t quite so small as might have been supposed. When Hosea was two, his mother Lydia died, worn out and without medical care.

It was a life of arduous toil. Hosea was 19 years old before he first went to school. And the only reading matter in the house was one Bible, one old almanac, one battered dictionary, and one pamphlet about the Tower of Babel.

Maturin was a strict Calvinist Baptist. He preached that God willed eternal damnation for most of the human race. As Hosea was growing up, gradually the hamlet near the Ballou farm, Richmond, New Hampshire, grew. There were more people in the church.

And Maturin stepped down from the pulpit before Hosea was baptized at age 17. By full immersion. Out of doors. In a New Hampshire river. In November.

About that time, Hosea began to think about

“the reasons for the faith he had accepted. There was no use asking his father questions; he already knew what the answers would be. So he went to the Bible” (C.L. Scott, These Live Tomorrow 59-60)

He went to see for himself what the Bible really said. What he saw was disturbing. What he saw were a lot of passages that seemed to contradict what he’d been taught all his life. What he saw didn’t say anything about most of humanity being condemned to hell forever.

Then, as if on cue, as if to compound Hosea’s uncertainties, word started to drift over from Warwick, New Hampshire, about six miles away, that there was a minister there named Caleb Rich who was preaching a strange doctrine called Universalism. And occasionally some cohorts of Caleb Rich came and visited Hosea’s church just for the purpose of raising embarrassing questions. “How could a good God be responsible for endless suffering in hell of creatures of his own making?” And what about this passage here, Romans chapter 5, verse 18:

“Therefore as by the offence of one [i.e., Adam] judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one [i.e., Jesus] the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life." (KJV)

All men, it says – all people, to use a better translation. What’s up with that?

These universalists were starting to get a following in Richmond, New Hampshire. The Calvinists resisted strongly, but some substantial Baptists were won over. A whole family of Ballous – cousins of Hosea – went over to the universalist side. This universalist threat had to be countered! Hosea went to the Bible to find the refutations that would confound these wrong-headed universalists once and for all.

Instead, he found himself forced to yield more and more ground. Hosea really struggled.

“Could it be that his father missed important passages in the Bible? Is the doctrine of ‘election’ really true? Is the great majority of humanity doomed to endless suffering?” (Scott 60)

Hosea felt like: “Hey, if it were up to me, I’d let everybody into heaven. It’s not like it’s going to get too crowded – it’s infinite. Could God be less kindly than I feel?”

Finally, Hosea Ballou came to resolution of that struggle. He let go a part of his inheritance. Yes, there were still parts of the Bible that did raise questions that he could not answer, but a basic clarity came to him. Certain clouds rolled away, and he said, “That’s it. I am a Universalist.”

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This is part 1 of 3 of "Who Are These People?"
See also
Part 2: Atoning for Us All
Part 3: The Price We Pay

Cultural Appropriation: Hard Cases

There are some social debates raging on questions to which I don't know the answer -- in particular, debates in which charges of cultural appropriation are levied.

This is not to say that there aren't some relatively clear-cut cases. A white American wearing a Native American war bonnet as a "fashion accessory" was once universally acceptable among white Americans, and now a growing number of us see that as a social and moral mistake.

Cultural appropriation involves adoption of elements of a minority culture by members of the dominant culture. In contexts where it might not be clear which culture is dominant, or whether a given other culture is minority, cultural appropriation is difficult to assess. For the most part, however, 21st-century America has a more-or-less readily identifiable dominant culture, and, though there is fuzziness at the edges, the minority cultures in the US are also recognizable. Only members of the dominant culture can commit this appropriation, and only minority cultures can be appropriated from, and that's because the imbalance of power is the crucial dynamic at play in cultural appropriation.

Understanding the imbalance of power requires awareness of the long history of colonialism. Inaugurated with Columbus's voyages, European colonialism grew to Africa, India, southeast Asia, and the Americas, and was characterized by conquest, genocide, subjugation and exploitation of people, and appropriation of resources. Colonialism depended on white people's belief in the superiority of white culture, for according to colonial ideology, they were doing a favor to the colonized peoples by "modernizing" them. Such modernizing usually turned out to be highly selective: usually amounting to little more than efforts to train indigenous people to be more serviceable to European profit. Colonizers cited "economic development," while in practice, typically, the only economy that was developed was the export economy: thus funneling resources and goods into wealthier countries and further impoverishing the colonized host.

Given this history, its not surprising that minority cultures catch whiffs of usurpation, exploitation, and arrogance when white Americans continue -- consciously or not -- the habits and assumptions of colonial superiority.

That said, here are three recent cases that, to my mind, aren't clear-cut. I think these are hard cases.

1. In 2015, Diep Nguyen, a Vietnamese freshman student at Oberlin, objected to the Banh Mi sandwich offered at the Dining Hall. The student newspaper, The Oberlin Review, reported: "Instead of a crispy baguette with grilled pork, pate, pickled vegetables and fresh herbs, the sandwich used ciabatta bread, pulled pork and coleslaw. 'It was ridiculous,' Nguyen said. 'How could they just throw out something completely different and label it as another country’s traditional food?' Nguyen added that Bon Appétit, the food service management company contracted by Oberlin College, has a history of blurring the line between culinary diversity and cultural appropriation by modifying the recipes without respect for certain Asian countries’ cuisines. This uninformed representation of cultural dishes has been noted by a multitude of students, many of who have expressed concern over the gross manipulation of traditional recipes." The item was pulled from the dining hall menu. Should it have been?
 
2. In 2016, Dana Schutz, a white woman, painted "Open Casket," which hung at the Whitney Biennial exhibition in New York in 2017. It is a portrait of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old boy who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955. African-American artist Parker Bright protested the painting, demanded that Schutz's painting be removed and destroyed. He wrote: "it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun." Others joined in Parker Bright's objection, including another African-American artist, Hannah Black, who wrote, "The subject matter is not Schutz’s. White free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go." Schutz and museum curators defended the painting and its inclusion in the exhibit. Who was right?
 

3. A couple months ago, on April 22, Keziah Daum, a white high school senior in Utah, wore a Chinese-styled dress -- a red cheongsam that she found at a vintage store in Salt Lake City -- to her school prom. She posted on social media pictures of herself in the dress alongside her friends. A number of people posted objections. Jeremy Lam, for intsance, wrote, "My culture is NOT your prom dress." He went on to say, “I’m proud of my culture, including the extreme barriers marginalized people within that culture have had to overcome those obstacles. For it to simply be subject to American consumerism and cater to a white audience, is parallel to colonial ideology.” Lam's tweet was retweeted 42,000 times and spurred an onslaught of similar criticism of Daum's sartorial choice. Daum replied: "I don’t see the big deal of me wearing a gorgeous dress I found for my last prom. If anything, I’m showing my appreciation to other cultures and I didn’t intend to make anyone think that I’m trying to be racist. It’s just a dress." Who is right?

My answer to all three questions posed by these cases is: "I don't know." In general, the "not knowing" stance has much to recommend it. Opinions tend to be pricey and high-maintenance, so it's wise to have no more than are necessary. Not knowing has been encouraged by diverse thinkers from British poet John Keats (who, in 1817, praised "negative capability" -- the capacity to be "in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason," able to be comfortable leaving matters ambiguous, indeterminate, or unknown) to Korean Zen master Seung Sahn (1927-2004, who frequently told his students, "only don't know," to encourage them to set aside their conceptions).

But not knowing does not mean not engaging. In fact, in many ways it is just the opposite, for what we "know" may entice us to view a situation only through the lens of prior knowledge and thus miss details that make the case at hand unique. The not-knowing stance is one of openness and curiosity. It begins by resisting impulses to exclaim, "That's ridiculous!" and continues into training ourselves in how to articulate (even if only to ourselves) the most sympathetic possible version of other viewpoints.

Before we get to the question, "Who is right?" (and if we never get to that question, perhaps that's OK) let us ask: Who is hurting? What is their pain? What skillful and compassionate response to that pain is possible? What's needed is listening and understanding.

Some social issues need us to jump into the fray; others don't need any additional combatants, but do need attentive empathy and understanding. The hard cases where cultural appropriation is charged fall into the second category. These situations call for people who are attentive to the issues raised (neither withdrawing from the subject nor dismissing it) and empathetic to the hurt that's being manifested.

How would you attend to the pain and bring empathy to each of the three cases?
What more would you need to know?

The Truthiness Abyss

Truth? part 3

I’m feeling more need to respect convergence than I did 20 years ago. Then I thought of truth as rather an empty notion, but I never imagined that it would be replaced by truthiness, which Stephen Colbert introduced. Truthiness is “truth that comes from the gut, not books” or: “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.” Colbert the character extolled going with your gut, ignoring facts, evidence, serious inquiry, and published authority.

When Colbert stepped out of character for a moment, in an interview, he explained:

“truthiness is tearing apart our country, . . It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty.”

Celebrating diverse perspectives is important – but we also need respect for facts – for the convergence of thoughtful people, carefully examining the evidence and coming to consensus on what it means.

Truth and trust have a similar etymology – both deriving from a root that means “be firm, solid, steadfast.” What’s true is what’s worthy of trusting. In our divided times, we’ve lost truth – it’s been replaced by truthiness – and we’ve lost truth because we lost trust. We don’t trust normal professional journalists, so we turn to sources even less trustworthy who spin tales about a deep state at work. We don’t trust scientists, so we turn to websites and social media who tell us what we’d rather believe about climate change. We’ve lost respect for facts because we’ve lost trust in other people – the people whose considered consensus gave us, at least, provisional facts.

But – good people – despair not. This view of our ills is – well – a part of the elephant. It’s the part that our hands are on when we take in the national political scene. The bleak trench warfare of national politics, however, obscures what else is going on. At more local levels, good work is happening.

“Only 36 percent of Americans thought the country as a whole was headed in the right direction. But in the same poll, two-thirds of Americans said they were satisfied with their own financial situation, and 85 percent said they were very or somewhat satisfied with their general position in life and their ability to pursue the American dream. Other polls in the past half-dozen years have found that most Americans believe the country to be on the wrong course—but that their own communities are improving.” (James Fallows, Atlantic Magazine

And apparently, they aren’t just fooling themselves. James Fallows, writing an extensive piece this week for Atlantic, finds that local progress is real and widespread. He finds that America is remaking itself, for the better, except at the national level.
Trust in civic governance at the local level is high. Immigration – so despised in national politics – is really fairly calmly absorbed in the placed where immigrants actually show up.

This makes sense. Truth depends on trust, and we trust people when we see them face to face and have the chance to get to know them. It’s in gatherings – like this one, as I’ve said before – where we get out of our house and meet some other people – that are our salvation.

If you seek the truth, you are sitting in its midst. It’s not "somewhere over the rainbow." It is, as Dorothy realized: right here in this home.

“If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there I never really lost it to begin with.”

This is part 3 of 3 of "Truth?"
See also
Part 1: Elephant Truth
Part 2: The Convergence Theory of Truth

The Convergence Theory of Truth

Truth? part 2

Twenty years ago, in 1998, before I was a minister, and was still mostly the philosophy professor I had been, I gave a sermon on truth to a small fellowship in Clarksville, Tennessee. The gist of that sermon went like this:

When conservative temperaments talk about the Truth – as if with a capital T – it just makes me shrug. I want to say, look, if we have different beliefs about something, and we're having a dispute, let’s look at the best evidence we can find. That’s all we have to guide us – all we ever could have. But even the best evidence is never perfect, and is always incomplete, so calling any conclusion “true” is just a sort of rhetorical flourish.

The Commendatory Use

“Truth” is just this word we use to commend a belief, like when we say, “Oh, yes, that’s true.” The notion of “true” is rather empty. It doesn’t add anything – it’s merely a general way to say, “Oh, yeah, I agree with that.”

The Cautionary Use

The other way we use the word “true,” – less common than the commendatory use – is in a cautionary way. When we remind ourselves (as we probably don’t do often enough) that even though a certain belief is well-justified and fits all the evidence we have, it might not be true – then we are using “true” in this cautionary way. It’s a helpful caution to remember that no matter how strong the evidence seems today, it’s always possible that we, or our children, will grow to have incompatible beliefs instead.

So “true” and “truth” are merely these rhetorical devices for blandly commending, or sometimes cautioning. Not really much there. Certainly nothing that warrants a capital T. If there’s a claim at stake, let’s examine the evidence. "Truth" is merely a grandiose abstraction that is no help at all in the real work of finding of interpreting evidence.

Like Art

Sentences – the ones we commend to each other, and about which we caution each other – are human creative products, just as art and music are. We produce beliefs to meet our own needs, and we will always be re-creating belief and knowledge as our purposes guide our inquiry and what we learn in turn leads us to redefine our purposes.

According to the elephant model of truth, our problem is that we all have only partial perspectives, only part of the truth, and we have a lot more to learn. On this model, more inquiry and learning will lead our beliefs to gradually converge closer and closer to reality. Certainly, more inquiry is a good thing, but the problem goes much deeper than the elephant model supposes. There is no elephant. The truth -- to contradict the tagline of "The X-Files" TV show -- is not out there, waiting for us to get our hands around it. Someone might say that for billions of years up until 1822 Beethoven's 9th symphony was "out there" waiting for Beethoven to discover it, but this would be an odd theory. Most of us would rather say that Beethoven invented or created his 9th symphony rather than discovering it. In the same way, the sentences that we commend as true are invented/created, not discovered (or rather not simply discovered). In fact, inquiry produces at least as much divergence as convergence.

Like Evolution

Think of inquiry like evolution. It’s our beliefs evolving. We don’t think of there being a gap between a species’ genes and its environment and of that gap as gradually narrowing as the species evolves. Rather, we say that genes are either successful at perpetuating themselves or they are not. Likewise, we may say that beliefs either succeed at perpetuating themselves or do not. And if a belief does persist, that doesn’t mean that it’s “close” to reality any more than a genetic tendency that persists through generations is “close to” its environment.

Both beliefs and genes survive by virtue of helping us cope, not by mirroring objective reality. While many beliefs fail this test and die away, the number of possible beliefs that could survive and reproduce is as infinite as the number of possible species that could.

For instance: what, after all, is an elephant exactly?

In India elephants have long been construction equipment – good for knocking over trees and carrying large loads. For some Hindus, elephants are gods, or represent the god Ganesh. For biologists, an elephant is a species occupying such-and-such a spot in a taxonomic system. We know the elephant as the symbol of the Republican Party, and also as a symbol of good memory. For poachers in Africa, an elephant is a source of ivory, and thus income. For others, an elephant is a living creature with a rich emotional life of its own and is therefore worthy of our concern and protection against poachers.

As we learn more and more of these perspectives on elephants, the picture doesn't look like a convergence, a gradual closing of the gap, between our beliefs and the reality of elephants. The picture looks more like an expanding diversity of possible points of view we become able to take.

Moreover, we are always inventing new meanings. Groucho Marx gave elephants a comic meaning when he said: "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I’ll never know.” Ask 100 poets to write a poem each about what an elephant is, and you’ll get 100 very different descriptions. Some of them will be startling insights, and we will learn from those poems new truths about what elephants are.

Inquiry does not converge slowly toward the one truth. Rather, inquiry accumulates more and more divergent perspectives. Learning expands rather than narrows the repertoire of responses available to us.

As John Keats said: Truth is beauty. And just as the beauty of art and music do not converge toward the one true painting or the one true sonata – just as species evolution does not converge toward the one true species -- human learning does not converge toward the one truth.

That’s what I thought was important to say about truth 20 years ago. I wanted, as I’ve wanted throughout my adult life, to celebrate the human capacity for diversity, for creativity, for spinning out new and different perspectives. That’s still important -- in some ways, more important now than ever.

What I took for granted 20 years ago was that learning and creating diverse viewpoints would be done in a conscientious way – with a certain integrity – that the motivation was to make beauty in a context that honored the different arts, different perspectives. I wanted to go beyond the elephant story to say, “let’s not be limited by the idea that there’s just one true elephant out there.” Acknowledging the worthwhile moral of the elephant parable, I wanted to go the next step.

Instead, we’ve seen public discourse go the opposite direction. A little humble recognition that one could be wrong, that one’s view is partial, that other people’s views, while also partial, have as much connection to reality as one’s own – would now come as a great breath of fresh air.

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This is part 2 of 3 of "Truth?"
See also
Part 1: Elephant Truth