"Sombunall: Antidote to Illiberal Liberalism"
A Sermon delivered at
The Unitarian Church
Rockford, IL
by David R. Weissbard
October 30, 2005
A Quiz
from The New Inquisition
by Robert Anton Wilson
1. Water boils at 100° Celsius. T F
2. Pq equals qp. T F
3. The infamous Dr. Crippen poisoned his wife. T F
4. The Nazis killed 6,000,000 Jews. T F
5. Marilyn Monroe was the most beautiful woman
of her time. T F
6. There is a tenth planet in our solar system
beyond Pluto. T F
7. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. T F
8. Francis Bacon wrote Hamlet. T F
9. Lady Chatterly’s Lover is a pornographic novel. T F
10. Lady Chatterly’s Lover is a sexist novel. T F
11. The pope is infallible in matters of faith
and morals. T F
12. Beethoven is a better composer than Mozart. T F
13. Ronald Reagan wrote Hamlet. T F
14. God has spoken to me. T F
15. The following sentence is false. T F
16. The previous sentence was true. T F
17. All human beings are created equal. T F
18. Capitalism is doomed by internal contradictions. T F
19. My spouse has always been faithful to me. T F
20. I am probably not as smart as I think I am. T F
THE SERMON
[prefatory note]
Last Sunday I delivered a sermon on a topic chosen by Allen Penticoff, the winning bidder for that opportunity in last year’s service auction. Allen wanted me to address the difficult experience he has had in trying to hold conversations about religion and politics with people who have very different perspectives from his.
This morning’s sermon, which I first delivered on September 19,1991, addressed one of the prerequisites for holding successful conversations of the type about which Allen was concerned. Since almost half of our present members have joined since I first delivered this sermon, since I consider it among the most important I have delivered, and since it adds an important dimension to what I said last week, I offer it for your consideration this morning – as a reminder for those who heard it before, and as something possibly new for those who did not.
[illiberal liberalism]
Many of us have encountered ideas in our growing up that capture our imagination - ideas to which we return time and again.
For me, one of those problems I can't let go of, or that won't let go of me, is the challenge of illiberal liberalism. We are told that our Pilgrim ancestors came to the new world seeking religious freedom because they were so badly discriminated against in the Old World. They, we were not taught, did not come to create a free place, but rather a place where they would be on top and could treat those whose ideas differed from them as badly as they were treated. How is it that people turn around and do to others exactly what they criticized others for doing to them? Is it some kind of fatal flaw, Original Sin? The real question is, does it always need to be that way?
Ninety per cent of us are people who came to Unitarian Universalism from churches that they found oppressive. Freedom of thought was not encouraged because there was a proclaimed truth. We are, from time to time, charged with the sin of being just as illiberal, just as intolerant, as the churches from which we came. That kind of accusation troubles me.
[Wilson]
It is in the context of this ongoing concern that I was delighted when I encountered Robert Anton Wilson's book, The New Inquisition. It is a difficult book, or was for me, and I read it twice. The ideas he presents are complex, and they are challenging - they shake the status quo. On top of that, the book includes some stuff that I am tempted to reject out of hand - thus supporting his central thesis. As I read the book, I kept having faces in this congregation pop into mind - Oh how [blank] would hate this! - Hate it because it is true, or sort of true. This morning I want to tell you a bit of what I got out of Wilson's book, and then to look at what I see as the implications of his ideas for us as Unitarian Universalists.
Wilson's central attack is not on religious fundamentalism but on scientific fundamentalism, and that hits closer to home for most of us.
There is a sense in which we, of course, already know what Wilson demonstrates with the following diagram:
We know that our perceptions of the world are highly processed. It is, however, disconcerting to deal with the fact that we can't be sure about things, and so we pretend that we have certainties that we do not have. We live in what Wilson calls "reality-tunnels" that make sense of the world for us by leaving out a whole lot of what is really going on. We make the assumption that what we perceive [stage V in the diagram] is identical to stage I – the event that took place – and we even go so far as to be willing to fight to the death to defend our perception of reality. It was this problem that the Buddha attacked with the story of the Blind men and the elephant. We know a little about the world and we generalize from that little and insist that our creation is a reliable picture of something "out there."
Science particularly strives to "be objective," but the problem is that physicists have learned that it is virtually impossible for us to measure anything without affecting it. And we inevitably interpret the data we find. And we tend to reject any data or ideas that are not congruent with what we already believe - and that behavior includes scientists.
Copernicus was not only opposed by the church, but by other astronomers who were convinced that the earth did not move. Some physicists have still not really accepted Einstein's proof that a rod will have a different length at different speeds - that the physical quality length is relative - not absolute. And yet, even today, scientists have replaced the church's old "Revealed Truth" with its own metaphors which are called "Objective Truth." Wilson says, "In both cases, human linguistic structures - complicated primate chatterings - have in effect become Gods, and whoever questions them is considered a blasphemer and the priests seek to destroy the impiety."
[Sombunall]
We tend to make a lot of dogmatic statements about what "is." Wilson suggests Sombunall as a help to us. Sombunall is short for "Some, but not all." What a difference it would make if, instead of saying "All modern music is junk," one were to say, "Some but not all modern music is junk." How much better still it would be if one were to say, "Some but not all modern music seems like junk to me." The first sounds like a pronouncement - the second, an opinion that might be discussed.
[the quiz explored]
Our approach to the world, in our culture, tends to center around the principle that everything is either true or false. We don't think in a lot of grays. Hence, some but not all of us have little trouble marking many of the quiz questions true or false. It is, of course, not quite so easy.
1. In question 1, it is true that water boils at 100 degrees celsius at sea level on this planet. But true without those qualifications is overreaching a bit.
2. pq equals qp is true in most algebra, but in fact, it is not true in an algebra developed by William Rowan Hamilton that works in quantum physics. (Don't ask me to explain.)
3. Dr. Crippen was, according to Wilson, the first man arrested by wireless telegraphy. It is true that he was found guilty in accordance with the rules of our legal system, but by saying he was actually guilty of killing his wife, we are making the assumption that the jury could not have been wrong.
4. We know that there are people out there who do not believe that the Nazi's killed 6,000,000 Jews. People who hold that view reject all the commonly accepted rules of evidence. If we buy that stance, we probably can't know anything, including whether those people exist.
5. Was Marilyn Monroe the most beautiful woman of her time? By whose standards? This is an opinion masquerading as a statement of fact. It is not capable of being proven either true or false.
6. There is vigorous debate about whether there is a planet beyond Pluto. We do not know at this time. How can we choose? [And now there are those who question whether Pluto, discovered by a Unitarian Universalist, is a planet.]
7. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." is a sentence designed by Noam Chomsky to prove that we can recognize a correct grammatical structure even when the sentence has no meaning. Could you prove it false?
8. Some people believe Bacon wrote Hamlet, some believe not. Many people feel the proof is inconclusive so we don't know for sure.
9. Lady Chatterly's Lover was judged by courts to be pornographic - then they changed their mind - the book didn't change, just the judgement - it stopped being pornography in the minds of some people - to some it still is.
10. Is it sexist? Some people think that is self-evident. Others aren't so sure. How do we decide?
11. The Pope is infallible in matters of faith and morals" could be considered unprovable or just an opinion statement, "To me the Pope is infallible," but actually it is more than that - it is what is called a "Game Rule." If you want to play the game of being a Roman Catholic, one of the rules says you will believe that the pope is infallible in matters of faith and morals. [Of course, many Roman Catholics, like my friend Sr. Joan Chittister deny that.]
12. Beethoven better than Mozart goes back to the Marilyn Monroe question.
13. Ronald Reagan writing Hamlet -well, he could have written a Hamlet, but clearly he did not write the Hamlet attributed to Shakespeare because that predated him.
14. Wilson suggests that "God has spoken to me" might be understood as "I have had such an awe-inspiring experience that the best model I know to describe it is to say that God spoke to me." Someone else might say, "I felt at one with the universe."We certainly can't prove it true or false.
15. 15 and 16 are fun to wrestle with. They present what is called a "strange loop."
[a complex world]
The point of this exercise is to suggest that things are much more relativistic than we choose to acknowledge most of the time. We get by in the world by editing out most of the complexity and settling for a bland approximation that works for us. According to Wilson we receive 10,000 bits of information on our senses per minute (in another place he says per second) and we edit out 99% of them.
Wilson says:
Each nervous system creates a great art-work which it usually considers the "real" "reality" in the philosophical sense and projects outward. These reality-tunnels, assumed to be "realities" and experienced as "realities," are not only as varied and imaginative as the paintings of Rembrandt and Van Gogh and Picasso, etc.; they are as marvelously creative as the musics of Vivaldi and Beethoven and Wagner and Harry James and Rock and Indian raga and Polynesian chants; they are as miscellaneous as the novelistic styles or frames of Jane Austen and James Joyce and Raymond Chandler and Leo Tolstoy and Lewis Carroll and Samuel Beckett.
And every social reality-tunnel perpetuates itself by basically the same techniques as advertising, of which the chief is repetition.
[selection]
We do not realize or appreciate the extent to which we protect ourselves from having to deal with ideas that challenge the assumptions with which we live, the realities we have created. I was startled by Wilson's suggestion that:
... most of us are annoyed frequently by the daily newspaper. "News" or alleged news that we don't want to read gets printed; heathenish and heretical opinions appear on the letters page, and sometimes in the columnists; politicians (of the opposition camp, of course) tell the most outrageous lies, which also get printed. With modern computer technology, all of this can soon be avoided. Just fill out a simple questionnaire and mail it in. The computer will print a slightly different version of that day's paper for each reader, and your Personalized copy will come to you in the morning containing absolutely nothing but what you want to know. [Doesn't that sound great?] After a year, or maybe five years, you will have forgotten entirely all the "alien" and uncomfortable signals that once got through to you and caused you distress.
[The President of the United States has told us, publically, that he finds newspapers confusing and that he, therefore, reads only the news summaries prepared for him by his loyal staff of the things they want him to know.]
Most people do the best they can, and manage fairly well to edit out what they don't want to know. When they get together in groups, this is aided by ...group reinforcement. Everybody tells everybody how reasonable the group reality is and how wicked and perverse are all the alien groups with alternative group realities.
Does that sound at all familiar? Here we sit, a minority in a community which holds beliefs very different from many of the beliefs that some but not all of us hold, and we reassure each other that we are really ok and its those other folks who have a problem. Since that touches specifically on the area of my concern, I'm going to come back to that point in just a minute.
[agnosticism]
I do want to be clear that Wilson is, at heart, somewhat of an optimist. He, in fact, suggests that the reason why there is so much negativity and pessimism today is that accepting the supposed "Real Universe" out there that the fundamentalist materialists sell, leaves people mechanical and passive, and that's depressing.
Wilson advocates an agnostic approach in which we recognize the limitation of our own reality-tunnels and try to open ourselves to ideas and experiences that may not fit the left-brain rational model. He cites an example given by Timothy Leary, whom he considers one of the martyrs to the current orthodoxy. In the dominant way of understanding the world, its like we are sitting passively at a tv set, complaining about the rubbish on the screen. We forget that we have the opportunity to change the channel – there is choice available. Wilson believes that we are not limited to one reality-channel and that people who are determined to stay open and alive can do so.
[UU reality tunnels]
Let's look at Unitarian Universalists and their/our reality tunnels.
I know, from experience, that there are some - but not all of you who are excited by new ideas, like I am, and who look forward to my utilizing sermons to share ideas from books that I've encountered. I know also, from experience, that there are some, but not all, of you who immediately groan, "another book report," and do not consider this a sermon in their reality-tunnel, and will complain about it over coffee.
The fascinating thing about a UU church, in the context of Wilson's suggestion about group reinforcement "Everybody tells everybody how reasonable the group reality is and how wicked and perverse are all the alien groups with alternative group realities." is that we are so individualistic, so chaotic that it sometimes seems like we have almost no group reality. There is no authoritative statement of what our group reality is. We have some shared realities, but the fact is that we are so individualistic that everyone considers himself or herself the prime expert on what Unitarian Universalism is or ought to be. There is often, therefore, the perception that the minister is remiss if he or she does not make his or her reality conform to the conflicting and often mutually exclusive reality-tunnels of each of the members.
The bottom line of our shared reality is that in this church one does not have to believe what one does in other churches. Now, some people would prefer to have us believe more of what other churches do than would others, and that gets a little tense sometimes.
There was a time when it all seemed clearer. Unitarian Universalist churches were left-brain, rational all the way, and had little room for non rational ideas or things as “meaningless” as myths and rituals. We operated pretty much in the Fundamentalistic Materialistic reality-tunnel which Wilson attacks in his book. If it wasn't scientific, it didn't fly. (My favorite example of this is the deletion of Mary's virginity in Silent Night in the Hymns of the Spirit - our 1938 hymnal.) The assumption was a thoroughgoing rationalism was the cure for all that ailed us. It didn't work. It failed to nourish adequately.
[a swinging pendulum]
The pendulum has swung significantly in the directions that Wilson advocates. We have tuned in a little more with our "right brains" and the result has been confusion. Some, but not all, are frightened by the breaching of the walls of the rationalist reality-tunnel, and some, but not all, want to do away with reason all together and have an ongoing love feast.
There are some, but not all, who come to church with the same expectation that Wilson suggested we have of our morning paper, namely to be reassured that whatever we believe is just fine, and please don't throw in confusing new ideas we haven't thought through already.
One of Wilson's suggestions is that we should read periodicals published by groups with which we do not agree, just to keep us honest and dealing with other ideas than our own. In fact, for most sermons, I conscientiously turn in my research to discomforting sources. For a sermon I did on gun control, at least half of my research was in NRA publications, and many people commented on how "fair" it was - but nonetheless, two families that were NRA members have not darkened our door since because I did not ultimately share their reality tunnel. They did not come to church to hear ideas with which they did not agree. I often research in Christian sources, and some members take me to task because their perceptions of what Christians believe differ from what I say some but not all Christians believe.
I confess that I fear we may all sometimes fail to be as clear as we should about Sombunall - we generalize carelessly and imply that we take unanimity for granted. We do not clearly say, "Some but not necessarily all of us believe today is Sunday,” or,. More to the point, “Some, but not all of us, believe the war in Iraq is a tragic mistake.”
[accepting of others]
The truth is, I believe that this congregation is relatively accepting of people with other reality-tunnels -- the question often is, are they as accepting of us? What if they cannot tolerate the ambiguity? What if they cannot handle the challenge? In order for someone to feel that we are really liberal, really open to all perspectives, do we have to avoid addressing any issue with which anyone might disagree? Some people, but not all, frankly feel it would be better if we did.
Robert Wilson suggests that:
It seems that when "god" or "nature" or "evolution" presented us with a human brain, we were not given instructions on the operation of this marvelous device. As a result, most of our history has been an attempt to use it. In learning that this involves taking responsibility and being involved, we seem to be learning, also, lessons that are not merely technological but aesthetics and moral.
To use the brain efficiently - to be aware of where one is and what one is doing and what is going on around one, and to take responsibility for one's bets or choices - seems to increase "intelligence" and "creativity."
The week when I first delivered this sermon, 14 years ago, the then Rockford Police Chief had suggested to the Greater Rockford Clergy Association that what we should be doing is helping people learn respect for human life. I believe that is what we do here. What Robert Anton Wilson suggests is that in order to be most fully human, we need to continue to critique the reality-tunnels in which we live by celebrating not only what we know, but by exploring new ideas and challenging ways of viewing the old realities. I believe that is why we are here and what we do here. That is certainly what we try to do.
[Difficult Discussions]
In the sermon I delivered last Sunday on Creative Interchange, I cited a book on Difficult Discussions which I highly recommended. I was delighted to discover this week that the President of my alma mater, St. Lawrence University, had made that book required reading for his staff. A fundamental requirement for dialogue, according to the authors of that book, is entering into a conversation with a genuine openness to learning from the other. There can be little communication when both parties go in with the intent of converting the other to what they know is “the truth.” When even one party has genuine humility, an openness to the possibility that the other knows something he or she does not, then the likelihood of genuine dialogue is greatly increased. Awareness of the inherent limitations of our own reality tunnels is central to such a humility and opens the door to communication with and learning from those whose perspectives differ from ours.
The British Unitarian Minister John Andrew Storey has written:
The star of truth but dimly shines
behind the veiling clouds of night,
but every searching eye divines
some partial glimmer of its light.
The certainty for which we crave
no mortal ones can ever know;
uncharted waters we must brave
and face whatever winds must blow.
Though for safe harbor we may long,
we must not let our courage fail,
and though the winds of doubt blow strong,
upon the trackless ocean sail.
From honest doubt we shall not flee,
nor fetter the inquiring mind,
for where the hearts of all are free,
a truer faith we shall there find.