The Trap of the Anti-Creed and the Vision of the World City:
Rediscovering the Humanist Imagination
Doug Muder
Sunday, January 28, 2007
A Thought to Ponder at the Beginning

You will say that I too am a dreamer; I admit it, but I do what the others fail to do, I give my dreams as dreams, and leave the reader to discover whether there is anything in them which may prove useful to those who are awake.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Opening Words
King Solomon wrote, “Without vision, the people perish.” And thousands of years later, Spinoza responded with this vision: “Wherever justice and charity have the force of law and ordinance, there is the kingdom of God.”

Reading from Unitarianism and Humanism by John Dietrich
John Dietrich was the leading Unitarian Humanist of the 1920s. It is hard to do Dietrich justice by just reading his words. You almost have to perform them, because he preached Humanism in the style of a gospel evangelist. He did not aim his sermons only at the educated elite, and wasn’t shy about trying to raise enthusiasm. He saw Humanism as a revolution in religion, one that would channel the energy and passion of religion into the service of humanity rather than the service of God.
People responded. Dietrich’s sermons had to be moved to a local theater, because he could draw a thousand people or more.

The part I'm going to read you comes near the end of the sermon, after Dietrich has laid out the fundamental principles of Humanism and described the perfect society he believed it could establish. I offer it with a question: Why don't Humanist sermons sound like this any more?

This is indeed a faith that should put fire into the bones of every man who loves his kind. ... This faith will give volume and power to our Unitarian movement, and it is this faith that will conquer the world if only we carry it to the world in such form as to make men despise things as they are and passionately long for things as they should be. ... This grand faith ... the popular religion has not given us and apparently has no aim of giving us. Its dream of a perfect social order has its accomplishment somewhere else and has no relation whatever to this actual order in which we now live. ...

Therefore must come with passion and with enthusiasm our humanistic religion – not preaching acquiescence and submission to the present order,but holding up in contrast to what we see about us
an era in which reigns perfect peace, perfect justice, and perfect good will – and declaring unto men that in this idea alone is there any sacredness and authority ...

This is the faith that the world needs today. It does not need ... more priests and prayers and holy books, it does not need literary essays on academic subjects; but it does need the never-ending voice of the prophet
going up and down the land, crying, not as of old, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord,” but “Prepare ye the way of mankind, and make its way straight.”

Sermon

I became a UU because of the Fourth Principle: A free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Because by the time I became a UU I had been on such a search for some time already.
I was raised as a fairly conservative Christian, revolted against that in my teens, and then after a lot of searching, became a Pagan. I was attracted to Paganism because it valued experience and encouraged experimentation. If you meditate, what happens? If you chant and drum, what happens? If you visualize a particular god or goddess and talk to that deity in prayer, how does that experience change you?
I got so far away from my original Christianity that if you had asked me whether I believed in Jesus, I’d have said, “I don’t know, let’s tell his stories and perform his rituals and see what happens.”

I joined First Parish in Lexington and became active on a national UU email list because Unitarian Universalism seemed like a good place to continue my searching and experimenting. And mostly, it was.
But I kept having run-ins with one particular kind of UU. They were mostly men, usually older than me. They called themselves Humanists, and as best I could tell their main spiritual practice was to ridicule other people’s spiritual practices.

Other than that I couldn’t figure out what they believed or what they valued. If I challenged them to say something positive about Humanism and not just criticize somebody else, they had trouble grasping the question. The positive thing about Humanism, one of them told me, is that “you don’t have to believe a lot of mumbo-jumbo.”

Now, up to a point I could sympathize with that attitude. During my teen-age rebellion against Christianity, the world had seemed full of people trying to make me believe something ridiculous, and I was just not going to. I loved to hear somebody really smart tear into Christianity. Bertrand Russell wrote some essays that were incredibly snide and cruel, and I thought they were wonderful.

Because at that time I had a negative religious identity: I was an anti-Christian, and I believed in an anti-creed.
Do you know what an anti-creed is? It’s where you list all your disbeliefs. Somebody asks you about your religion and out comes your list: “I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in prayer. I don’t believe in miracles. I don’t believe in an afterlife.” You’re reciting an anti-creed.

Now, I know some of you are thinking: “What’s wrong with that?”
I’ll answer that question with this one: What ever happened to the anti-communists? Remember them? Not so long ago, a politician could make a whole career out of anti-communism. What happened? Did something go wrong with anti-communism?

No. Something went wrong with communism. And when one fell apart, so did the other.
You see, when your identity is based on an anti-creed, you are tied to your enemies. You depend on them. If you’re an anti-Christian or an anti-fundamentalist or an anti-theist, then you depend on the Christians, the fundamentalists, and the theists. If they become irrelevant, you become irrelevant.
Long-term, a healthy religious identity needs positive content. You need to affirm things, not just deny things.

Back to my story.
So, other than those run-ins with Humanists, I was doing well as a UU. I joined committees, taught classes. I came here and preached a sermon, called “Is There a Western Path to Enlightenment?.”
Eventually I got email from someone who read my sermon on the Internet and wanted to publish it in his journal. The name of the journal was Religious Humanism. This guy had read my sermon and thought I was preaching Humanism.
Imagine my surprise.

So now I’m curious, and I start reading about Humanism. You know how that goes: You read one book and it tells you to read five other books. I kept drifting back in time, reading older and older authors. And I discovered something: The Humanist tradition has a lot of positive content.

People like Dietrich, Paine, and Spinoza talked not just about the flaws in traditional religion, but about the world that could be built if the spiritual enthusiasm of humankind could be directed at human problems. Humanism in their day was not an anti-creed. It was not seeking The End of Faith or stamping out The God Delusion. It had vision; it balanced its critical thinking with imagination. It was idealistic, forward-looking, visionary.

Who knew? How could I have been an active UU for a dozen years without hearing about this passionate, enthusiastic brand of Humanism?
And more important: What happened? Dietrich thought that Humanism would conquer the world. Why didn’t it? And how did we get here from there?

Let’s start with: What happened? The short answer is that the 20th century happened. It didn’t go according to plan.

In retrospect, turn-of-the-century Humanists were naively optimistic. Unitarians of that era affirmed “the progress of mankind, onward and upward forever.” Robert Ingersoll, a popular 19th century lecturer known as “the Great Agnostic” – picture that; people used to turn out in droves to hear somebody called the Great Agnostic – he said, “The future will verify all grand and brave predictions.”
Imagine how it would feel to believe that.

Instead, the future brought two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Holocaust. The Russian Revolution was particularly disappointing to Humanists, because it promised so much and turned out so badly. By the middle of the century we had the H-bomb, the Cold War, and McCarthyism.
The second half of the 20th century saw its own cycle of idealism and disillusionment. I’m sure many of you know what I’m talking about. Despite the Civil Rights movement, we still have racism. We fought a War on Poverty, and lost. Fundamentalism did not fade away with the advance of science. Instead, eighty years after the Scopes Monkey Trial, evolution is still under attack. And the United States, which Thomas Paine thought would lead the world into an enlightened new era of openness and human rights, is playing games with the definition of torture and looking for loopholes in the Geneva Conventions.

No wonder the Humanism I ran into when I became a UU was so demoralized, and remains demoralized today. Embarrassed by the idealism of its youth, it too often retreats into criticism. It defends Reason, but shies away from Imagination. Imaginary things – that’s what other people believe in; we stick to the cold, hard facts.

And that’s a problem, I think. Because man does not live by facts alone. “Without vision, the people perish.”
Too often, UU-Humanists have fought a rearguard action, not evangelizing a positive Humanist vision, but complaining that our churches and seminaries attract too many Pagans, too many Buddhists, too many Christians, too many people who want to talk about God and lead the congregation in prayer.
But why is that? Why aren’t the divinity schools filled with inspired young Humanists? Why aren’t new people coming through those doors clamoring to hear the Humanist message? We can’t blame that on the Buddhists and the Pagans and the Christians.

The answer is not to attack other religious traditions but to revitalize our own. Not to debunk the passion and enthusiasm of other people, but to reclaim ours. We need a rebirth of the Humanist imagination.
The prophet Joel said, “I will pour out my spirit on all humanity. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. Your old people shall dream dreams, and your young shall see visions.”
Dreams. Visions. That’s what we need. That’s where passion and enthusiasm come from.

Now you’re probably wondering: What kind of visions can Humanists have?
In the time remaining, I thought I’d remind you of one of the oldest and most important Humanist visions: the World City.

Humanism didn’t have a founder like Jesus or Buddha or Mohammad,but you can make a decent case that Humanism started the day that the Greek philosopher Diogenes coined the word Cosmopolis, the World City. From that came cosmopolitan, citizen of the world.

You need to understand, that when these words were coined they did not correspond to any objects that the Greeks could see. Even Alexander did not manage to achieve a world government, and his empire splintered when he died. No. From the beginning, the Cosmopolis was a city of the imagination.
You were a cosmopolitan, because you recognized a bond with all people, wherever they came from. They too were citizens of the World City. They might not know about their citizenship or recognize yours. They may never have imagined the World City themselves. But they were your fellow citizens all the same.
Centuries later, the vision of the Cosmopolis combined with Spinoza’s vision of an impersonal God. The result was Deism, the religion of people like Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin. “My country is the world,” Paine wrote, “and my religion is to do good.”

Unlike the gods of other religions, the God of the Deists played no favorites. All people were his creations, and they had been endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Your cosmopolitan citizenship now entitled you to claim freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of religion.
But these rights, when they were first conceived, were as imaginary as the Cosmopolis itself. No government recognized them. No court enforced them. To practical people, people who only believed in cold hard facts, this was all nonsense. You might just as well tell sharks and wolves that you have a right not to be eaten.
The rights of the Cosmopolis became real – at least in some parts of the world – because people were willing to live for them and in some cases to die for them. Why did they do that? Why risk your life for an imaginary city and its imaginary rights?

They did it because they had seen the vision. And they believed, not in some heavenly power, but in the beauty of the vision itself. They had faith that other people would see the World City in their minds and fall in love with it, just as they had.

Today, the Cosmopolis is still only half real. And that’s why it is so important to keep visiting the half that is still imaginary. To see, for example, that everyone is respected in the Cosmopolis, that the hungry are fed, the sick are cared for, and the ignorant are educated. There is justice in the Cosmopolis, there are institutions for resolving conflicts peacefully, and so there is never any cause for war.
And if that vision seems ridiculously naïve and impractical to you, you need to remember that not so long ago the whole city was imaginary.

Now, if you’re going to help bring this imaginary city more fully into reality, you need to know what you’re up against. Because there are competing visions. Many people who sound like cosmopolitans, people who talk about rights and freedom and democracy, are really talking about something else.
The World City's two main rivals are the Tribe and the Empire.

In the Tribal Vision, humanity can never really be united, because our people and their people (however we define those terms) are just different. We may be able to get along, but we will always be separate. A black man in the Jim Crow South, for example, might be a good Christian, might be educated, and might even be rich – but he still can’t sit in the front of the bus. Because blacks and whites are just different. Like Sunni and Shia are different. It’s a fact of life and there’s nothing to be done about it.

In the Imperial Vision, humans start out in separate tribes, but they can be unified by an Empire. You can join an Empire, because an Empire has some unifying principle that you can make your own. If you surrender to the Empire and adopt its unifying principle, you can be assimilated.

The unifying principle can be almost anything – political, economic, religious, philosophical, cultural. Gaulsjoined the Roman Empire by fighting in the legions. Japan joined the empire of Democracy by accepting a constitution and holding elections. China joined the empire of Global Capitalism by recognizing the international property system and submitting to the rules of the WTO.
Surrender, convert, and be assimilated – that’s the Imperial pattern.

Like the Cosmopolis, the Empire is a unifying vision. But there is one important difference: In the Cosmopolitan Vision, the World is unified at this very moment. All people are my fellow citizens already, right now. But in the Imperial Vision, people will become my fellow citizens when they submit to the Empire.
Human unity, in the Imperial Vision, is millennial. When everyone accepts the Empire, the World will be one. When everyone converts to Christ or becomes capitalist or democratic or pro-American – then the millennium will have arrived and all people can live together in peace.
But not until then.

Where the Cosmopolis sees only citizens, the Empire sees three kinds of people: citizens, outsiders yet to be converted, and enemies who have rejected the Empire and must be defeated.

Cosmopolitans and Imperialists view their enemies very differently. A cosmopolitan sees them as citizens with rights. Thomas Paine wrote, “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”
Imperial logic is completely different. Rights exist only within the Empire. Those who reject the Empire are practically demons: They stand in the way of the millennial paradise that the Empire will bring someday. Whatever the Empire needs to do to defeat them is justified.

This conflict of visions is playing out very clearly in the current debate about terrorism. In the rhetoric of the Bush administration, our opponents are demonic. They “hate freedom.” They are, in the President’s words, “fighting a war against humanity.” If you don’t belong to a nation that has signed the Geneva Conventions, its provisions don’t protect you. If you behave in ways we consider barbaric, we can treat you barbarically. “Terrorists” can be held without charges and imprisoned indefinitely without trials. Rights belong only to the good guys. And if torturing the bad guys helps keep you safe, you should be happy about it.
But we’re not happy. Because we are citizens of the World, and so are our enemies. Our rights are not secure while their rights are being violated.

In the Imperial Vision, though, that statement is gibberish. Imperialists can’t even make enough sense out of it to disagree properly; they just know that you said something ridiculous.
The Vision of the Cosmopolis has gotten so co-opted that many imperialists do not even know about it. When they use terms like freedom and democracy and human rights, they honestly believe that they are talking about the same things we are. Because they’ve never seen the World City.
There are many failures in America these days, but most of them stem from this failure of vision. The Cosmopolis is every bit as beautiful today as it was centuries ago, but if you’ve never seen it, you don’t know that. Those of us who have seen it should be spreading the vision, because that’s the first step in making this imaginary city more real.

I’ve been talking a long time now, so let me sum it up. Humanism and Unitarianism can’t survive on criticism alone. We can’t be an anti-creed. People will not flock to us to share our disbeliefs. To be a vital religion, we need to balance critical thinking with imagination. We need vision.
But fortunately, vision is not foreign to us. It is our heritage; it is in our tradition. And the World, I believe, still needs the visions that we have to offer.

Closing Words
Lawrence of Arabia said: “All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.”