Reading from the Global Scripture
Young Minds in Critical Condition, The Stone a New York
Times Opinion Feature, Michael S. Roth, President of Wesleyan University [1]
It happens every semester. A student triumphantly points
out that Jean-Jacques Rousseau is undermining himself when he claims “the man
who reflects is a depraved animal,” or that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call for
self-reliance is in effect a call for reliance on Emerson himself. Trying not
to sound too weary, I ask the student to imagine that the authors had already
considered these issues.
Instead of trying to find mistakes in the texts, I suggest
we take the point of view that our authors created these apparent
“contradictions” in order to get readers like us to ponder more interesting
questions. How do we think about inequality and learning, for example, or how
can we stand on our own feet while being open to inspiration from the world
around us? Yes, there’s a certain satisfaction in being critical of our
authors, but isn’t it more interesting to put ourselves in a frame of mind to
find inspiration in them?
Our best college students are very good at being critical.
In fact being smart, for many, means being critical. Having strong critical
skills shows that you will not be easily fooled. It is a sign of
sophistication, especially when coupled with an acknowledgment of one’s own
“privilege.”
The combination of resistance to influence and deflection
of responsibility by confessing to one’s advantages is a sure sign of one’s
ability to negotiate the politics of learning on campus. But this ability will
not take you very far beyond the university. Taking things apart, or taking
people down, can provide the satisfactions of cynicism. But this is thin gruel.
Sermon
In this morning’s Reading from the Global Scripture, Dr.
Roth describes some of the problems of current trends in American higher
education, and by extension, those of us who were trained in it.
This sort of clever, critique as pithy weapon is not
limited to those who have advanced degrees or age. Bart Simpson, the eternal 10
year old, has a small arsenal of phrases used to dismiss those things that he
finds challenging or confusing. These phrases, such as “Don’t have a cow, man”
and others helped to make Bart the break-out character of the Simpsons when the
show debuted in 1989.
Though few people that Michael Roth has in his classes
quote Bart Simpson with any regularity, indeed most of them were born AFTER the
debut of the cartoon show, there is a similar, easy dismissal shared between
cartoon character, 10-year old Bart and many adults.
It seems that few have the time and patience to really
delve into a problem. If a question brings up uncomfortable triggers in
oneself, the more helpful way to respond is “why does this make me feel this
way?” not “iAy carumba!”
Thoughtful engagement, the very thing that Roth is
encouraging, is in fact the way to change ourselves and the world around us.
I would go so far as to suggest that the very divisive
politics we have in this country right now are due in part to those who
critique and see critique as their primary or sole contribution to the
conversation.
Often you hear these words from me, or some variant
thereof: We are a liberal faith, not necessarily aligned with liberal politics.
To be a liberal faith by definition is to be open to self-reflective
examination.
How this plays out, hopefully, in our spiritual lives is
that we are open to and willing to engage in the hard work of examining why
believe what we believe and if we’re really working hard, we ask ourselves if
what we’ve believed before is still serving us well.
Imagine with me that you’re holding a large bunch of helium
filled balloons. Not so many as to make you fly away though.
We don’t want people worrying about being carried off this
morning…
Each of the balloons represents an idea in your life. Take
a pin, and pop the one that said you were going to be a ballerina. Now pop the
one that said you were going to be a firefighter. Now pop the one that said you
would find true love at 18 and be with that person forever. One by one the
ideas and ideals that you had when you were younger, many of them get popped by
your own looking at your life.
If you don’t bring new ideas into your bouquet of balloons,
soon you’ll have nothing left but a bunch of strings, nothing to boost your
spirits, nothing, to literally, give you a lift in your life.
This is sort of what this rabid criticism that Dr. Roth
writes about does.
Critique is a powerful and useful tool, but if it used
alone, it creates nothing, and leaves nothing but cynical people and a drab
world.
Critique alone is not a useful tool for navigating life.
Critique must have a companion, and that companion is
creativity.
Now Creativity alone, left unbridled by critique, would
leave us uninspired, unchallenged, and would likely lead to a life of artistry
that lacks development.
If the first time I honked into a clarinet, everyone told
me I was a virtuoso, why would I have been inspired to practice and develop
until I became a pretty good clarinet player? If critique didn’t exist in the
world at all, there would be no mechanism by which I would have been inspired
to grow.
Alternately though, if all I ever heard was “You stink at
that,” why, also, would I have been inspired to grow?
I worry that critique, without the balancing companion of
creativity, has become our cultural default. The world is full of arm-chair
quarterbacks and arm-chair politicians. Each of them are equally effective at
changing the world in a manner that would be more to their goals.
This is also a common church problem. Not just here at the
Fellowship, but also in churches across many denominations and national
boundaries.
I’m all about the mixed metaphors today.
I’m going to use a sport analogy right now, and I wanted to
warn you in advance. This may be the only sports metaphor I ever use from the
pulpit, so I don’t want to shock you too much.
In football, when a player does something they shouldn’t…
yes they, women play football, too… the referee, the person in the stripped
shirt, can do something called “Throwing a flag.” When a flag is thrown, the
game stops, because someone is about to get a penalty.
The referees never tell the players what they might do next
time to avoid the flag. They never pull them aside and say “So next time, you
don’t cross that line before the ball is snapped up, because that’s against the
rules, next time you should wait until the ball is snapped, and I won’t have to
penalize your team 10 yards.”
Nope, they just throw the flag, blow the whistle and
everything comes to a screeching halt.
We are not a football game, and yet people engage in this
behavior. They throw the equivalent of a flag, and never offer any helpful
advice. The whistle blows, progress is stopped and nothing is learned.
Sometimes this happens in a church, too.
People have a lot of flags to throw around during a church
service. For some, it’s the use of certain words, like prayer. For some it’s a
lack of a word like prayer.
But what would happen if, instead of throwing a flag up on
the play that uses, or doesn’t use, the word prayer, we sat and talked about
what that word brings up for us.
And then sat together and worked out how we might be able
to find a way to have most of our needs met around hot topics like “a language
of reverence.”
As Roth wrote, in school, a critical mind is what is most
valued. It demonstrates something that school values, that you’re paying
attention to what you see, and while Roth doesn’t say this, I think part of
what critique is supposed to teach you is that your mind and opinion have
value.
But Roth also says
The skill at
unmasking error, or simple intellectual one-upmanship, is not totally without
value, but we should be wary of creating a class of self-satisfied debunkers —
or, to use a currently fashionable word on campus, people who like to “trouble”
ideas. In overdeveloping the capacity to show how texts, institutions or people
fail to accomplish what they set out to do, we may be depriving students of the
chance to learn as much as possible from what they study.
In campus cultures
where being smart means being a critical unmasker, students may become too good
at showing how things can’t possibly make sense. They may close themselves off
from their potential to find or create meaning and direction from the books,
music and experiments they encounter in the classroom.
Once outside the
university, these students may try to score points by displaying the critical
prowess for which they were rewarded in school, but those points often come at
their own expense. As debunkers, they contribute to a cultural climate that has
little tolerance for finding or making meaning — a culture whose intellectuals
and cultural commentators get “liked” by showing that somebody else just can’t
be believed. But this cynicism is no achievement.
Liberal
education must not limit itself to critical thinking and problem solving; it
must also foster openness, participation and opportunity. It should be designed
to take us beyond the campus to a life of ongoing, pragmatic learning that
finds inspiration in unexpected sources, and increases our capacity to
understand and contribute to the world — and reshape it, and ourselves, in the
process.[2]
As people on a path to fully realizing our potential, it is
good to listen to Roth’s advice.
In November of 2012, I gave a sermon called “A More Perfect
Union?” In it, I used the phrase “the messiness of democracy.”
Later today the congregation will engage in some democracy
of our own. Our fifth principle, quoted on the front cover of today’s order of
service, reaffirms our belief in the democratic process.
The democratic process is not helped forward by critique
without it’s counterbalance of creativity.
If someone says, in any meeting of people, “I don’t like
that rule or this change,” but can offer nothing to replace, not a helpful
suggestion or even a half of a suggestion, it is the same as these freshman
students of Dr. Roth’s pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, and yet
offers no clothes for the emperor to wear until a better solution can be worked
out.
The easy, safe thing to do is to throw the penalty flag,
high in the air. The more challenging
thing to do is to roll up one’s sleeves and get to the work of figuring out how
another solution might be brought forward.
For all of our time together, I have been trying to
encourage healthy growth and healthy interaction between members of this
Fellowship. Today, as we consider several by-laws changes and a budget, I hope
that you will keep in mind the hours of hard work that people, your very
fellows here in the congregation, the hours of hard work they have done to
bring forth changes that they recommend to the whole Fellowship, because they
feel the Fellowship will benefit for the changes.
I know that there has been some talk on facebook about the
recommended changes to membership requirements here. I have not spoken or
written a single word about the changes until now.
I have heard people use phrases like “poll tax” and
“penalty.” The truth of the matter is this: to be a voting member of the
congregation, the membership committee is recommending that you pledge the
amount of money that the Fellowship expends to the UUA and District on your
behalf as a voting member. If someone in our midst does not have those kind of
resources, they can approach your minister and ask for a waiver.
This is exactly the same system that is in place now, for
people who are low on resources. There is no change in this, except instead of
having a donation of record, there must be a pledge of record.
In either case, if one of our members doesn't have the
resources for that, they can do exactly what they have been doing all along,
talk to the minister. The minister, who by the way, will not tell anyone else
about this, but simply inform the administrator that said person is to be
listed as a voting member.
There is no penalty, no discrimination, no recrimination.
There has only been an attempt by the Membership Committee
to clarify the kinds of memberships we have here, so that our records are more
accurate, so that we are paying our fair dues to the UUA and the district and
nothing more.
During our meetings, at first there were several members
who threw up a flag at the thought of making an expectation of a member. It
went against our whole ‘free church’ ideal they said. And then the committee
spent the better part of 3 or 4 months trying to straighten out the records of
who we should be paying for, and who we should no longer be paying for.
This process is what Dr. Roth recommends. Yes, be a mindful
person, make room for critique, but don’t stop at critique, also grow.
I agree with him. Be a mindful person. Let there be room
for critique, but let that critique be a responsible one, one that is also
willing to learn and grow.
May I keep this lesson in my own heart as well as
attempting to teach it to others.
Amen.
[1] http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/10/young-minds-in-critical-condition/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1&
[2] ibid.
Critique in the Service of Democracy
© The Rev. Joseph M Cherry
Written for and delivered to
The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County
May 18th, 2014.
