Monthly Archives: May 2010

“No UU culture there is….”

In an article titled “Can Unitarian Universalism Change?” published in the spring, 2010, issue of U[nitarian] U[niversalist] World magazine, Paul Rasor made this statement: “Unitarian Universalism has its own cultural tradition, one that is rooted in European-American cultural norms and ways of being in the world.” That simple statement has unleashed a torrent of verbiage, both in print and online. The summer, 2010, issue of UU World magazine offers seven different responses to the question, “What is UU culture?” and Unitarian Universalist bloggers have gone at great length trying to articulate what “UU culture” might be.

A closer reading of Paul’s article offers a pretty good definition of what he means by a Unitarian Universalist culture “that is rooted in European-American cultural norms.” More specifically, Paul mentions the norms of European-American modernism: “Unitarian Universalism has for the most part adopted the core values of modernity, including its emphasis on human reason, the autonomous authority of the individual, and the critical evaluation of all religious truth claims.” Paul goes on to make a modest-sounding but very radical statement: “We cannot reason our way into multiculturalism.” That means that the usual tools of reason — debate, argument, reasoned essays and articles, thoughtful conversation — won’t create multiculturalism. I would offer a corollary to Paul’s argument: if you want Unitarian Universalism to remain white and uni-cultural, stick to reasoned debate.

Following immediately upon Paul’s article in that same spring, 2010, issue of UU World, was Rosemary Bray McNatt’s article, titled “We Must Change.” She says it’s not just that “UU culture” encompasses more than race: “We… underestimate the reality of resistance [to multiculturalism] in our congregations, a resistance rooted not so much in racism as in matters of class and culture.” Those who are continuing the conversation in print and online have picked up on Rosemary McNatt’s article, and they keep trying to have reasonable discussion and debate about “UU culture” — does it include listening to National Public Radio stations, and not listening to hip hop? — and then try to reason how we might get change that culture.

Reasonable debate, however, turns out to be a fairly useless strategy. You can reason it out this way: Social systems can be modeled as multi-loop non-linear feedback systems, which means their behavior will be counter-intuitive. Therefore, if the majority of Unitarian Universalists stop talking about National Public Radio, and start listening to hip hop music, that only affects one feedback loop within the complex multi-loop system; the equilibrium of the overall system will not change. If we want to change and become multicultural, reason is the wrong tool for the job; reason is simply inadequate for developing a sufficiently accurate mental model that would adequately guide us into multiculturalism.

How then are we to change? It will be messy. A decade and a half of experience with congregational social systems has led me to believe that true change happens in one area when you are working on something that is only tangentially related. Want to grow your children’s program? Don’t bother with advertising aimed at new families, pour your energy into teacher training and youth ministries. Want to increase worship attendance 10% in a year? Ignore your membership committee, and instead teach your congregation how to sing lustily. Want to become multicultural? Don’t effusively welcome the people of color who actually do show up at your church, but instead claim your congregation’s identity as an introverted church (or your identity as an extroverted church, if that’s the case).

Not that it’s that simple: there is no step-by-step checklist that will lead to multiculturalism — that would be too reasonable to work. Throw out your checklists and your reasoned arguments. If I might quote Yoda: “No UU culture there is. Only people who are UU, there are. Hmmmmmm.”

Hmmmmm, indeed.

Saturn: sense of wonder

This evening, Carol and I attended a Baycon presentation on the Cassini mission to Saturn given by Bridget Landry, deputy systems uplink engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Not only was Landry an excellent presenter, she also gave away Saturn moon trading cards and Saturn stickers (I took the cards, Carol took the stickers). Landry recommended the Cassini Equinox Mission Web site — as she said, your tax dollars paid for these fabulous photographs, you might as well use them in your Christmas cards next year.

Rain

It rained three days this week. As Debra in the church office said, it always rains in late May and usually on Memorial Day weekend; maybe this year we got the rain out of the way before the long weekend. After three days of rain, you’d expect a nice crop of mosquitoes to hatch out. But not in the Bay area. The few mosquitoes that do come around whine listlessly around your ear, and when you swat at them, and miss, they apologize for bothering you and fly away. If you go hiking up into some of the undeveloped canyons and ridge tops around the Bay area, it’s a different story. As you dodge the poison oak branches that actively try to swat you in the face, fast little iron-gray mosquitoes fly at you while you’re distracted, and drill their red-hot proboscises into your arteries.

When those vicious iron-gray mosquitoes attack you, you believe the stories of the early residents of Palo Alto, who complained that the town was a vile place to live: every time it rained, the streets turned into a muddy mess, and the fleas and mosquitoes made life miserable. There are credible stories of children getting sucked down into the mud and lost forever. As for the mosquitoes, they were much bigger back then: two working together could pick up a small dog and carry it off, and four could drain enough blood out of a big man to leave him ghostly pale and unconscious. In San Mateo County, mosquitoes were among the first registered voters back in 1856 when the county split from San Francisco. The county had only 2,000 human residents; women and children weren’t allowed to vote, yet 1,600 votes were cast in the first election, many by mosquitoes. It is said that the only reason San Mateo County politics eventually got cleaned up was that the swamps got drained, and the mosquitoes mostly died off.

Three useful acronyms

LULU (loo’ loo) — acronym for “Locally Unwanted Land Uses”; a LULU is something that a developer or land owner wants to build in, but abutters and other neighbors don’t want. LULUs can include prisons, toxic waste dumps, wind turbine farms, high-speed rail lines, halfway houses, churches, etc.

NIMBY (nim’ bee) — acronym for “Not In My Back Yard”.” Both developers and environmentalists use the acronym pejoratively to describe persons who fight to keep a project out of their neighborhood. Environmentalists may call opponents of the Cape Wind projects NIMBYs; developers call environmentalists NIMBYs on a regular basis.

PIBBY (pib’ bee) — acronym for “Put It in the Blacks’ Back Yard” or “Put It in the Browns’ Back Yard.” Used to explain the high incidence of LULUs in communities of color, based on lack of political access for those communities, blindness of mainstream environmentalism, job or economic blackmail, etc. Example: “NIMBYism leads to the PIBBY syndrome.”

One possible test

One possible way to test the extent to which a given group is predominantly politically liberal, white, and middle class is to look at that group’s attitudes towards environmentalism:

“The evidence suggests that most mainstream environmentalist groups have traditionally had little interest in issues faced by poor, minority, urban people…. Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that at least some observers have had harsh words for mainstream environmentalism. For example, in his book Environmental Quality and Social Justice in Urban America, James Noel Smith has argued that mainstream environmentalism is ‘a deliberate attempt by a bigoted and selfish white middle-class society to perpetuate its own values and protect its own lifestyle at the expense of the poor and underprivileged.’ A similar view was expressed even earlier by Richard Hatcher, then mayor of the city of Gary, Indiana. ‘The nation’s concern with the environment,’ Hatcher said, ‘has done what George Wallace had been unable to do: distract the nation from the human problems of black and brown Americans’ (“The Rise of Anti-Ecology,’ 1970)….” [Environmental Justice: A Reference Handbook, David E. Newton (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO), pp. 15-16.]

If a group is predominantly concerned with the siting of hazardous waste disposal sites and incinerators, heavy metals in the soil, high cancer rates due to environmental toxins, environmental hazards concentrated in communities of color, food security, etc., you can safely predict that that group has few liberal white middle class people in it. If, on the other hand, a group is predominantly concerned with carbon footprints and alternative energy, preservation of non-local wildlife and natural spaces, “locavore” issues, and the like, it is more probable that such groups are dominated by liberal white middle class people. (And if a group believes that the best solutions to hypothetical environmental problems will be created by businesses and the free market, there’s a good chance that those groups are dominated by more conservative white middle class people.)

Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction Department

Andy Pakula, minister of the Newington Green and Islington Unitarians in London, tells an interesting story in a recent blog post:

I received a very interesting email the other day:

“I am going to be in London over the summer with my girl friend Amy and we are interested in your fellowship. The issue is we are both people in the arts and grew up in conservative churches .. me Roman Catholic, she Protestant fundamentalist and we really got hurt. We found a Unitarian fellowship in America and this was healing for us both. Would we fit with you? We are ‘out there’ in terms of style. I (Chad) wear short skirts and tall boots and Amy goes bra-less and wears very very short dresses. We have been rejected in our home churches and wonder if we would be welcomed dressed as we are in your church. — Chad Bradford”

The message came through the British Unitarian Association’s web site contact system. My intention was to contact these folks and find out more about them. There are certainly people who are biologically men and identify as women and I would and do welcome them completely. This didn’t sound like that at all though. The story seemed – well – more than a bit odd.

And if you read the rest of Andy’s post, you’ll find out that the true story is indeed odd.

You are welcome to leave your thoughts and comments as to the motivation behind all this. Is it someone baiting religious liberals as Andy contends? Is it an in-the-closet transgender Canon as some of Andy’s commenters imply? Or is it a combination of northern New England inbreeding and cabin fever, which I find plausible?

See the first comment below: it’s all about Manny Ramirez!

Early Unitarians in Nevada

Virginia City, Nevada, was a Far Western mining town that came into being c. 1859, soon after silver began being mined from the famous Comstock Lode. After the Comstock Lode ceased producing profitable ore in 1898, Virginia City’s population declined precipitously. During the 1870s, there was a small Unitarian organization in Virginia City.

Mary McNair Mathews, in her memoir Ten Years in Nevada: or, Life on the Pacific Coast (1880; reprint 1985, University of Nebraska Press, p. 194), wrote: “There are churches here [in Virginia City] of every denomination, except the Universalist. All have their own churches except the Unitarians or Liberalists, as they term themselves. They hold their services at the National Guard Hall….” Mathews lived in Virginia City from 1869 to 1878.

This Virgnia City Unitarian congregation predates the organization of the Reno Unitarian Church under Revs. Mila and Rezin Maynard in 1893 by some twenty years.

How did Unitarianism come to Virginia City? Continue reading →

Yet another obscure Universalist x 2

I’m reading An Editor on the Comstock Lode, a book Virginia City in the 1870s, and the author mentions that Ethan Allen Grosh and Hosea Ballou Grosh are often credited with finding the Comstock Lode. If he was named “Hosea Ballou Grosh” after the great Universalist theologian, I thought to myself, he had to have been a Universalist. And it turns out he was.

A 2008 Associated Press article, “Letters from Gold Rush era are themselves a treasure,” by Martin Griffith, has more information:

Brothers Hosea and Ethan Allen Grosh were jubilant after they discovered a “monster ledge” of silver in the parched mountains of present-day Nevada in the summer of 1857.

The sibling prospectors never prospered from the find, however. In fact, both went to early graves without realizing they were on the verge of locating one of the world’s greatest bonanzas: a massive, underground pocket of silver and gold know as the Comstock Lode, about 20 miles southeast of Reno….

The sons of a Universalist minister in Marietta, Pa., the Grosh brothers arrived by ship in San Francisco in 1849 to find a tent city “growing like a mushroom,” full of grog shops and gamblers. But they faced problems from the start in the West, suffering from dysentery soon after arriving, and both were ill off and on until the end eight years later.

Just when their hopes were highest, Hosea Grosh died in September 1857 of an infection after striking his foot with a pick. That winter, his brother died near Auburn, Calif., of complications of frostbite after being caught in a Sierra Nevada snowstorm. Hosea Grosh was 31 and his brother 33.

More information about the Grosh brothers can be found in various books about the Comstock strike. Papers of the Grosh brothers from 1849-1857, including many letters, are in the Nevada Historical Society in Reno.

Update: More on the Grosh brothers — Continue reading →