A (really) new kind of politics
Okay, okay. OKAY! I keep getting a drip drip drip of emails asking me to weigh in on Obama ‘s decision to invite pastor Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation.
At first I thought it was a strange and galling. Warren is awful on several issues, though admittedly good on several others. Then, with the help of several smart commentators on the left, I began to see it very differently.
It began with the benefit of doubt. The more I observe him and learn about him, the more my opinion climbs regarding Obama’s intellect and values. Since it started quite high, that’s saying something. So when I find myself thinking he’s done something stupid, I have to take a moment to see if he’s actually figured something out that I haven’t yet.
I’m convinced that’s the case with the Warren invitation.
Most of our left-wing chatter about “change” — let’s be honest — has really meant “doing things our way for once.” But Obama and his team are thinking on a whole new level. The answer to the favorite caustic headline on progressive blogs since the Warren invite — some snide version of “THIS is Change We Can Believe In??” — is Yes, dammit, it is!
Every President-elect talks about reaching across the aisle after an election, of “healing the divisions that plague our nation,” blah blah blah. Until now they haven’t been all that serious. Oh, they’d meet with leaders from the other party to repeat their platitudes, appoint a member of the opposing party as Secretary of Feng Shui — but it always stopped at such window-dressing. Until now.
Those of us who’ve obsessively studied this man for the past two years should have seen this coming. When Obama joined the Harvard Law Review, the organization was bitterly divided between a conservative faction called the Federalist Society and…well, everyone else. From his first days on the Review, Obama (in the disbelieving words of a fellow progressive on the Review) “spent time with [members of the Federalists] socially — something I would never do.” And when he became president of the Review, Obama appointed not one, but three Federalists to top editorial positions.
Did he do this because he agreed with them? Hardly. He did it because, as the inelegant but spot-on proverb puts it, he’d rather have them inside the tent pissing out. He was in charge, but he had the confidence to allow everyone a real voice. A real voice. And it’s not just for show — as many of those in his inner circles have noted, he genuinely wants and needs to hear everyone.
Now consider the whole fracas over Obama’s expressed willingness to talk to our enemies, including Ahmadinejad. Conservatives hooted with derision: You’d be endorsing evildoers!
No, liberals replied. It’s essential to build relationships and keep communication open, especially with our enemies. Isn’t that obvious?
But now that our own issues and enemies are involved, we seem not to be able to see the same principle at work. Instead, we liberals hoot: You’re endorsing evildoers!
For all his wrongheadedness on key issues, Rick Warren has shown a willingness to reach across the aisle, to open lines of communication when others have refused, often angering his team in the process. Obama has seized this opening despite their differences. In so doing, he may help moderate evangelical attitudes toward him. By co-opting one of their generals with a gracious gesture of inclusion that goes beyond the usual tokenism, he has quite possibly made it easier to move forward on several fronts. And progress on those fronts matters much more than the opportunity to pack the inaugural moment with partisan purity.
So before we declare ourselves utterly betrayed, let’s at least consider the possibility that the us-vs.-them politics we’re angrily demanding is less helpful in the long run than Obama’s longsighted approach. If the operative root of progressive is progress, I think Obama just may be more progressive than those of us who elected him.
More on Obama’s tenure as president of the Harvard Law Review
An outstanding column by E.J. Dionne on the Warren choice
Follow the bouncing meme!
As y’all know, on December 6, a number of nonreligious parents gathered at Harvard’s Fong Auditorium to get some ideas about raising kids without religion. Greg Epstein also led a discussion about how best to form a more lasting community to serve the needs of nonreligious parents in the Boston/Cambridge area.
Washington Post reporter Robin Shulman spent the day with us and wrote an article about it for the December 21 edition of the Post. Aside from one previously-noted misquote and one eyerollingly cheap shot ( “someone sneezed, and there was a long silence — no one said “Bless you” or even ‘Salud’ or ‘Santé'” ), it was a lovely and fair piece.
Early in the article, Robin used the word “congregation” to describe the intended parenting community. It wasn’t her word choice but that of Greg Epstein, who favors staking a shared claim in such language rather than retreating allergically from it. It was that single word that set off a memetic devolution of the article’s message.
It started at the Post. Reporters rarely write their own headlines. Whoever wrote this one apparently saw an opening in the word “congregation” and wrote the following head:
Humanist Parents Seek Communion Outside Church
Like “congregation,” communion has a general meaning and several specific ones. In the general sense ( “a joining together of minds or spirits”), the headline is perfectly accurate. But comments on the article, in blogs, and elsewhere show that many readers read the specific meaning ( “A Christian sacrament commemorating the Last Supper of Christ”) and went ballistic. And well they might, since the reference to “church” does indeed narrow the meaning.
Equally interesting is the syndicated life of the meme. Robin’s unchanged article appears today (Dec 28) in newspapers and online columns around the U.S. Sometimes the headline is unchanged (as in the Loveland, Colorado Reporter-Herald, for example), but more often, the copy editor or columnist in question has his/her way with the meme, often revealing his/her own biases or intentionally stirring the pot.
Here’s a sampler of headlines currently running across the U.S., including some less wobbly than the Post headline…
Humanists Want Community, Too
(Atlanta Examiner)
(No surprise that one of the simplest, most accurate headlines of all was hat-tipped from the Friendly Atheist.)Humanists look to form parenting group with no religious elements
Organizers of a Boston seminar wanted to reach out to parents looking for guidance
(Wichita Eagle)Humanist families find guidance, rituals without religion
(Santa Fe New Mexican)
…some with the same wobbly c-words…
Humanist parents seek communion, support
(Canton Repository)Humanist parents consider their own congregation
(Winston-Salem Journal)
…some that I’m sure must mean something, but who knows what…
Parents seek life without religion
(The Tennessean)
…and some that are just plain silly or willfully ignorant:
Atheists trying to replicate church
(Reformed Chicks Blabbing at Beliefnet)Teaching Children How to Go to Hell
(Covenant News)
For those of us trying our best to articulate a clear and consistent message about what humanism is and isn’t, the key to a peaceful inner life is truly giving up the illusion of control — making peace, once and for all, with the perpetual mutilation of our carefully-crafted memes.
Add that to my resolutions.
This Is Only a Test
ERIN (10): Dad, I’ve been thinking.
DAD: I’m telling Mom.
ERIN: Dad, seriously. Okay — If God is real, I think I figured out why he would mix really bad things in with good things in the Bible.
DAD: And why is that?
ERIN: It’s to see if we can use our brains and figure out what’s good and what’s bad, then only do the good things…or if we’ll just do everything it says, like robots. It’s a test to see if we’ll think for ourselves.
(CORRECTION: I wrote this conversation down without attribution shortly after it happened. When I added it to the blog a week later, I credited it to Delaney (7). I have since learned that it was Erin (10) who said it. Mea culpa.)
“Getting” belief
A final P.S. to the Santa discussion — The post I linked to last time (by philosopher and PBB contributor Stephen Law) just reminded me of another benefit of doing the Santa thing, one I’ve spoken of but may not have written about. Stephen puts it like so:
[Allowing kids to believe in Santa, etc.] gives them an appreciation of what it’s like to be a true believer. Even after the bubble of belief has burst, the memory of what it was like to inhabit it — to really believe — lingers on. The adult who never knew that is perhaps kind of missing out.
I think it even goes beyond missing out. I’ve found that adults who never “inhabited belief” of any kind often (not always) exhibit utter bafflement when it comes to religious belief. You can see this in countless blogs and essays and comment threads — I just can’t understand how anyone could believe abc, Why can’t they just wake up and realize xyz, ad infinitum. A natural lack of empathy ensues.
Bafflement is not good. It’s a kind of incomprehension. I don’t want my kids baffled by any major part of the world. If Stephen and I are right, Santa belief is an opportunity that can be drawn on for a lifetime — a source of empathy for those who willingly immerse themselves in belief even when the evidence against that belief is overwhelming. Not a bad thing at all, that empathy. In fact, it’s a precondition for dialogue.
Even if my kids never get religion, I at least want them to “get” religion — and being a true believer for a little while just may be the ticket.
Empathy symbol courtesy EmpathySymbol.com.
Pants-on-fire parenting
Give me the fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.
Economist VILFREDO PARETO, referring to the errors of Kepler
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In 1847, around the time Pareto was conceived, an obstetrician by the name of Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that pregnant women in his hospital were much more likely to die if their babies were delivered by doctors than by midwives. He then noticed that doctors whose patients died had usually come straight from autopsies. Semmelweis asked the doctors to humor him by washing their hands before delivering a baby. Maternal mortality in the hospital dropped below two percent.
It took another generation for the medical establishment to accept germ theory as fact — but once they did, the average human lifespan in Europe nearly doubled overnight.
Fast forward to the early 21st century, where we’ve overlearned the message. Thanks to air filters, airtight homes, and antibacterial everything, our environments have been so thoroughly scrubbed that our systems are losing the ability to deal with the germs and irritants that abound in the world outside our doors.
Among other things, the result has been a spike in serious childhood allergies and infections. According to an NPR story on studies supporting this conclusion, “An emphasis on hygiene means we are no longer exposing children to enough bacteria to help trigger their natural immune systems.”
With the best of intentions, we so thoroughly protect our children from an admittedly bad thing that we do them a disservice.
See where I’m headed?
I think the same idea applies in many areas of parenting — among them the careful scrubbing of all exposure to “nonsense” from our children’s lives. I’ve heard the assertion that “we must never lie to our children” from many nonreligious parents, always intoned in the kind of hushed voice usually reserved for sacred pronouncements.
Actually, I think it’s terribly important to lie to our children.
(N.B. That tongue-in-cheek sentence appeared in the initial draft of Raising Freethinkers until my editor protested that what I advocate isn’t really lying. Spoilsport. So I changed it to this:) Though I don’t advocate outright lying, the playful fib can work wonders for the development of critical thinking.
Many nonreligious parents, in the admirable name of high integrity, set themselves up as infallible authorities. And since (like it or not) we are the first and most potent authority figures in our kids’ lives, turning ourselves into benevolent oracles of truth can teach our kids to passively receive the pronouncements of authority. I would rather, in a low-key and fun fashion, encourage them to constantly take whatever I say and run it through the baloney meter. To that end, I sprinkle our conversations with fruitful errors, bursting with their own corrections.
When my youngest asked, “How far away is the Sun?”, I said, “Twenty feet,” precisely so she would look at me and say, “Dad, you dork!!” When my kids ask what’s for dinner, I say “Monkey lungs, go wash up.” When the fifth grader doing her homework asks what seven times seven is, I say 47, because she should (a) know that on her own by now, and, equally important (b) know the wrong answer when she hears it.
Yes, I make sure they end up with the right answer when it matters, and no, I don’t do this all the time. They’d kill me. But pulling our kids’ legs once in a while is more than just fun and games. For one thing, if every word from my mouth was a reliable pearl of factuality, they would get the unhelpful message that Authority Always Tells the Truth.
Now don’t instantly whip over to the cartoon extreme of Dad lying about whether a car is coming as we cross the street ( “All clear!! Heh heh heh.”) I’m talking about fibs of the harmless-but-useful variety — and yes, I firmly include Santa in that.
Knowing that Dad sometimes talks nonsense can prepare them to expect and challenge the occasional bit of nonsense, intentional or otherwise, from peers, ministers, and presidents. The result in our household is this: When I answer a question, my kids don’t swallow it without a thought. They take a moment to think about whether the answer makes sense. By seeing to it that their childhood includes nonsense, I’m building their immune systems for a lifetime swimming in the stuff.
An interesting and related post on lying by philosopher (and PBB contributor) Stephen Law
Humanist Parents Seek Communion Outside Church (Wash Post)
By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 21, 2008; Page A10
BOSTON — They are not religious, so they don’t go to church. But they are searching for values and rituals with which to raise their children, as well as a community of like-minded people to offer support.
Dozens of parents came together on a recent Saturday to participate in a seminar on humanist parenting and to meet others interested in organizing a kind of nonreligious congregation, complete with regular family activities and ceremonies for births and deaths.
“It’s exciting to know that we could be meeting people who we might perhaps raise children with,” said Tony Proctor, 39, who owns a wealth management company and attended the seminar at Harvard University with his wife, Andrea, 35, a stay-at-home mother.
Humanism is both a formal movement and an informal identification of people who promote values of reason, compassion and human dignity. Although most humanists are atheists, atheism is defined by what is absent — belief in God — and humanists emphasize a positive philosophy of ethical living for the human good.
The seminar’s organizers wanted to reach out to people like the Proctors — first-time parents scrambling for guidance as they improvise how to raise their daughter without the religion of their childhood.
“I’m often told that when people have kids, they go back to religion,” said John Figdor, a humanist master’s of divinity student who helped organize the seminar. “Are we really not tending our own people?”
Across the country, religious observance hits a low for people in their mid-20s and steadily increases after that, “in conjunction with marriage and children,” said Tom Smith, of the General Social Survey at the University of Chicago, which has polled people about religious affiliation and practice for decades.
Religious congregations are good at supporting parenting, said Gregory Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard who organized the seminar. Although most humanists may not believe in God, he said, they do believe in sharing their lives with others who share their values.
“Why throw the baby out with the bath water?” Epstein asked.
Most Americans are religious and believe in God, but a growing number of people have no religious affiliation. In 1990, 8 percent of respondents in the General Social Survey said they identified with no religion. In 2006, the last year for which statistics are available, the figure had doubled to 16 percent.
In recent years, the chaplaincy at Harvard has hosted humanist speakers such as novelist Salman Rushdie, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen and U.S. Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.). Student interest is booming. But something happens when those students graduate, marry and become parents.
For the Proctors, especially for Andrea, who grew up in a Catholic household, arriving at the seminar took a lifetime of questioning.
Growing up, she attended church each Sunday, took Communion and was confirmed. She became disenchanted after a sex scandal at her parish was poorly handled, she said. Then in college, she was “exposed to a lot of different beliefs in religions and science. It causes you to question.”
Tony grew up fascinated by his neighbors’ ability to find community at church, which he sometimes attended with them. “Every Sunday they would go to church and see friends. That was a neat thing,” he said.
The Proctors found themselves making decisions about religion when they had a daughter last year. Andrea said her parents asked, “Of course you’re going to baptize her, right?” She answered, “Actually, no.”
Instead, Andrea did a Google search for someone who might perform a nonreligious ceremony to mark Sienna’s entry into the world and found Epstein, the Harvard humanist chaplain.
Epstein officiated at the ceremony, while both sets of grandparents spoke about their hopes and dreams for the child, Andrea said. The Proctors named “guide parents” instead of godparents.
By the time they got to the Harvard seminar more than a year later, they were ready to organize a larger community of families like themselves.
A room full of concertedly nonreligious people has its idiosyncrasies. At the seminar, someone sneezed, and there was a long silence — no one said “Bless you” or even “Salud” or “Santé.”
For sale were T-shirts saying “98% Chimpanzee” or showing a tadpole with the words “Meet Your Ancestor.” There were also children’s games from Charlie’s Playhouse, a Darwinian toy company, illustrating the process of evolution.
A recent study found that many Americans associate atheists with negative traits, including criminal behavior and rampant materialism.
People often ask, “How do you expect to raise your children to be good people without religion?” said Dale McGowan, the seminar leader and author of “Parenting Beyond Belief.” He suggested the retort might be something like, “How do you expect to raise your children to be moral people without allowing them to think for themselves?”1 He advocates exposing children to many religious traditions without imposing any.
At the seminar, Andrea Proctor was thrilled to meet another mother who would like to start a group of parents and children meeting weekly or biweekly.
“We just put a huge pool in our back yard,” Tony Proctor said. “We might have to start humanist barbecue pool parties.”
(Read and comment online. Caution: Many of the comments, as usual, are tending toward the vicious at the moment, so have some eggnog before you read them.)
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1Robin did a nice job on this article, but this is not quite what I said. The quote above assumes that all religious parents do not allow their kids to think for themselves, a false and ridiculous assumption. For the record, my suggested reply to the question, “How are you going to raise your kids to be moral without religion?” was this: “Calmly reply, ‘Why, by avoiding moral indoctrination, of course, which research has shown to be the least effective way to encourage moral development. And what’s your plan?'” Oh well. I’m a silly, oversensitive monkey to even point it out.