Ministry

September 13, 2009

The Myths That Move Us Reverend Don Vaughn-Foerster

There is a story about a man on a subway in New York City.  The man was visiting from the Midwest and didn’t know what to expect.  But, by and large, people on the subway went about their own business, ignoring one another and not creating a bother.  He was just getting adjusted to this kind of public anonymity when a man and two small boys got on the subway.  The father's face was expressionless as he took a seat and began staring out the window.  The two boys, however, were tense and excitable and their father let them run wild.  Soon, the Midwesterner could take it no longer and said to the man, "Sir, your children are disturbing a lot of people.  Couldn't you control them a little more?"

The man seemed to become conscious of the situation for the first time and said quietly, "You're right.  I suppose I should do something about it.  We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago.  I don't know what to do right now, and I guess they don't know how to handle it either." 

Suddenly, the Midwesterner saw things differently.  His irritation vanished.  He became sympathetic and offered to do what he could to help.

Why did everything change?  It changed because the Midwesterner suddenly knew something about the father and two sons that affected his assumptions about what had been going on.  This was not an insensitive father; this was a hurting father.  Those were not misbehaving boys; they were disturbed boys.  The Midwesterner's whole system for evaluating behavior and attitudes had shifted. 

This is something that can happen to any of us when, suddenly, we realize that what we had assumed is not the case.  When we realize this, the way we look at things can be quickly turned on its head. 

Each of us has a fundamental way of looking not only at others but at ourselves and all of life as well.  We have assumptions about who others are, about who we, ourselves, are, and about what life is -- assumptions so deeply embedded within us that, usually, a new piece of information is not likely to change them.  Rather, these assumptions are likely to filter that information instead -- allowing through only that which reinforces them.  If the Midwesterner had not already had a view of life that included sympathy and compassion, then learning of the death of the man’s wife would not have changed his irritation.  However, sympathy and compassion were principles in his life, so he could shift his response the way he did. 

Our attitudes and our behavior, and, certainly, the quality of our lives are determined by the assumptions to which we are committed.  One way to say this is:  we are creatures of the paradigms we hold.  The word "paradigm" stands for "a frame of reference" or "a model."  It is "the way we see the world -- not in terms of our visual sense of sight but in terms of perceiving, understanding, interpreting."  Our paradigm is our map of reality.  It tells us what attitude to adopt and how to behave.  If our "map of reality" is close to the way reality really is (superfluously to use a redundant adverb, as one might unnecessarily say), then we can function effectively as human beings. 

Actually, I like the word "myth" better than "paradigm" because it makes even more apparent that our notions about reality are more creatures of our past than of our present.  And, because myths come from the past, they have to be able to change (to evolve with us) if we are not to wind up in an evolutionary blind alley -- frozen into a place both emotionally and intellectually where we can work with others only if they share our fantasies.  Not to be able to change our map has been called "paradigm paralysis."  Actually, I see it to be blind, uncritical faith in an outmoded myth.  Either way it means to lose touch with where the world is going; it means to expect the world to stay where it seems always to have been. 

A striking example of this is the modern history of Swiss watch making.  The Swiss perfected the mechanical watch and, for many decades, they controlled the watch making market.  Then, an innovative watchmaker discovered that digital quartz would make an even more accurate and less expensive watch.  He tried to get the Swiss industry to adopt his discovery; but the Swiss thought it was too dramatic a departure from the way watches should be made, so they ignored him.  The result:  he took his idea to the Japanese, who took control of the watch making industry with their digital quartz watches.  The Swiss were so mired in myths about watch making that they did not keep up with the times. 

Our myths (our paradigms) have enormous power in our lives.  They have the power to make us both efficient and effective when they are in tune with the real world, i.e. with what is actually the case confronting us.  But also, they have the destructive power to trap us in outmoded assumptions.  Just look around at the millions of people trapped in yesterday's myths.  There are those who, because they cannot see beyond their own dogmas, believe they can make the world always be the way it was or can make it over according to a political, or social, or economic, or religious preconception of their own. They really believe they can impose essentially dated dogmatic attitudes onto what has become an irreversibly secular and pragmatic society. 

As major instances, Al Qaeda and other Islamic fundamentalists are sucked into terrorism by such outmoded thinking.  So are many elements of the religious and political right groups in this hemisphere, groups who neither acknowledge nor respect the profound pluralism that modern democracy generates.  That we have our own home-grown terrorists was brought sharply home to me last May 31st when Dr. George Tiller, the medical director of the Planned Parenthood Clinic in Wichita, Kansas, was assassinated by a “right to life-er,” so-called.   This act of terrorism is particularly distressing to me since I was the organizing president of the Planned Parenthood Chapter in Wichita of which Dr. Tiller had been the long time medical director.  His murder shows just how fanatic some folks are.  Obviously, we on this continent have our own home-grown terrorists.    Along with yesterday’s myths, but perhaps on a less violent but still severe scale, there are those who are so caught up in a myth of individual rights and privileges that they have lost touch with the imperatives of negotiation and compromise on which social cooperation must be built.  Whether they are conservative or liberal, to them, personal meaning involves following "their own bliss" regardless of whether others stand or fall beside them.  Solipsism (the view that everyone else is irrelevant and only "I" matter) is still alive and well in both the liberal and the libertarian sectors of our society as well as in the conservative, which are still as much out of touch with the urgency of social cooperation as ever. 

There is yet another myth that has immense negative power in our world today that I would call a position of "extreme moderation."  There are man y people whose myth holds that the middle way is the only way and that the worst thing anyone can do is "rock the boat." 

The main similarity between such extreme myths -- the extreme right, the extreme left, and the extreme middle -- is that these myths are outside assumptions or frames of reference that are superimposed on the individual.  Their destructiveness comes from having been codified into laws or attitudes to which one must assent no matter what one's inner voice may say.  In the sense of “para” meaning faulty, I would call them “para-dogmatisms” (if I may create my own word) which are not worth a “pair-of-dimes” (if I may make a pun on another) because a person is to believe merely because he or she has been told by someone else to believe.  Truth is  not really the issue here; conformity is. 

Even many who are immersed in their own "individuality" often get that particular dogma from someone outside themselves -- from some guru or preacher or political demagogue who found this doctrine to be a subtle but effective way to control others.  They preach individualism but they define that individualism in exclusivistic terms that make the individual an estranged unit in a collective rather than a participating member of a community.  However, a great truth of life is that the more an individual experiences the reality of that individual's own self, the more important society becomes -- the clearer the reality of others becomes.  Truly to experience one's authentic individuality is to be able to grasp (and respect) the authentic individuality of others.  Rules, laws, codes, and the like can easily obstruct such clarity by trying to press a person’s experience into preset molds.  Such coercive myths and paradigms squeeze out our natural critical reason and enslave us so that we cannot "shift" from them without great trauma.  But it is only as we can shift from outmoded paradigms to more realistic ones, it is only as we expand and deepen our myths, and perhaps create new ones, that we can grow and keep pace with the evolving reality of a changing world. 

For me even the myth of Pandora suggests this.  The story usually focuses on Pandora trapping Hope in the box after her curiosity had let out the plethora of evils that continue to plague humankind.  The hope that is kept usually is then taken to be a combination of expectation and desire that helps us endure the evils we must face. 

Actually, I think hope is more than such mere expectation and desire that help us endure.  I think hope is the first intentional step we take to challenge the "evils" we face.  I think it springs from an intrinsic human respect for the new and the challenging.  It is what moves us to step onto a rocky path that seems to lead only out into deep water with the intention of walking as far as it will take us and swimming the rest of the distance if we must.  Hope is the awareness that the journey is more to be engaged than its difficulties are to be feared. 

I suspect that what Pandora actually kept in the box was the awareness and the energy we need in order to get ourselves out of the tangled world into which old myths and outmoded paradigms lead us.  That makes hope, for me, the very basis of paradigm change. 

Our task is to take our perceptions, our understandings, and our interpretations as valid in their own right and to melt them down to their elements, to winnow out the chaff and the dross -- until we arrive at some crystalline principles that we not only find in ourselves but can see in others -- principles such as human dignity, integrity, honesty, fairness, service, excellence and spiritual commitment to understand life as profoundly as we can.  There are more we could identify, but these give you an idea of what I mean.  Our task is to arrive at principles within our own character that enable us to treat one another – and all of life – in human and humane ways.  Our own paradigm -- our own myth -- is to be built from our deepest experiences and affirmations of life.  We are, after all, more than merely what we do and how we behave toward one another.  We are even more than our attitudes, healthy or unhealthy, as they may be.  We are what we perceive to be real because it is on that which we base our thoughts and behavior and our hopes – regardless of what ma actually be the case. 

We must not forget that others are part of reality, too, and that life is a dialogue in which the participants together confront what they take to be reality.  Of course, others may try to tell us what to think reality may be and they may insist that we agree with them.  I’ve been to enough Unitarian discussion groups to know that even some Unitarians tell other Unitarians some such thing.  But only we, ourselves, can know such things for ourselves.  This is a most difficult task because, too often, we work harder at getting others to think like us than at clarifying our own thoughts.

When we come to terms with this for ourselves, we, then, have a basis on which we can grow and change as our understanding of reality changes.  We can modify our own myths because we are not locked into a rigid structure or a controlling authority that would make us behave unrealistically on its own terms. 

I will conclude with a story about a battleship that was on maneuvers in heavy weather.  Shortly after dark the lookout reported, "Light bearing dead ahead."  The captain called out, "Is it steady or moving astern?"  The lookout replied, "Steady, Captain,” which meant the battleship was on a collision course with another ship.  The captain had the signal man advise the other ship, “We are on a collision course, advise you change course 20 degrees.”  The signal came back, “Advisable for you to change your course 20 degrees.”  The captain said, “Send:  I’m a captain, change course 20 degrees.”  The reply was, “I’m a seaman second class.  You had better change your course 20 degrees.”  By then the captain was furious.  He said, “Send:  I’m a battleship.  Change course 20 degrees.”  Back came the flashing light, "I'm a lighthouse."  The battleship changed course. 

Today the world is filled with battleships that refuse to change course because their captains do not acknowledge the reality of the actual signals they get.  They cannot shift to a more realistic paradigm or modify their myths according to new experience.  Our greatest strength as Unitarians is that we know (or say we know) that we need to pay attention long enough to find out what the lights we think we see coming at us really mean.  Sometimes even we change our course.