democracy – Dan Harper

A Religious Liberal Looks at the Economy

Opening words

from “To His Newborn Great-Grandson,” by W. E. B. DuBois

The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you, and the world’s need of that work. With this satisfaction, and this need, life is heaven or as near heaven as you can get. Without this — with work which you despise, which bores you, — with work which the world does not need — this life is hell.

Readings

The first reading comes from the New Revised Standard Version of the Christian scriptures, the Book of Mark, chapter 10, verses 17-26:

“As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: “You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and ”’ He said to him, ‘Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.’ Jesus, looking at him … and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ When he heard this, the man was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

“Then Jesus looked around and said to his followers, ‘How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!’ And his followers were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, ‘How hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’ They were greatly astounded and said to one another, ‘Then who can be saved?’”

The second reading comes from Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, from the first chapter, titled “Economy”:

“For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. I have thoroughly tried school-keeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade; but I found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil. I was actually afraid that I might by that time be doing what is called a good business. When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living, some sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do, and its small profits might suffice, — for my greatest skill has been to want but little, — so little capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, I contemplated this occupation as most like theirs; ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and thereafter carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks of Admetus [add MAY tose]. I also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or carry evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, even to the city, by hay-cart loads. But I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.”

Sermon — “A Religious Liberal Looks at the Economy”

Back in 1992, Jim Carville was a strategist working in the presidential campaign for the Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton. To help his campaign workers promote a uniform message, Jim Carville posted a sign in the Clinton campaign headquarters with the three main points he wanted to convey to voters. Using Carville’s exact wording, those three points were as follows: Don’t forget healthcare; Change versus more of the same; The economy, stupid.

Well, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Thirty-two years later, these points could still be used by either of the major presidential campaigns. The last two points — Change versus more of the same; The economy, stupid — remain especially relevant. Indeed, I’d argue that the last point — “The economy, stupid” — probably motivates more voters than anything else.

Because the economy continues to be so important in our democracy, I thought it made sense for me to devote a sermon to the economy. However, I’m not an economist. Nor am I adept at talking about American politics. So this won’t be a political sermon. Instead I’m going to try to talk, from my point of view as a religious liberal, about some of the moral implications of economics.

To begin with, let’s consider the New England approach to doing business, as I experienced it growing up in a New England town during the late twentieth century. In those days, before the big box stores and multinational conglomerates took over, and before people bought everything online, many businesses were still local or regional. The most reputable of those businesses had a guiding philosophy of doing well by doing good. So, for example, during the 1980s I spent seven years working for a family-owned lumber yard. The family which owned the lumber yard went into the lumber business to make money. At the same time, they knew they had to provide goods and services that were needed in the community. They also felt it was their duty to provide stable middle class jobs that allowed their employees to buy a house and raise a family.

I don’t mean to romanticize those New England businesses from another day. The lumberyard where I worked, for example, was pretty sexist, and worker safety wasn’t always at the top of their list of priorities. But the best of those businesses did their best to follow the ideal of doing well by doing good; and there are still some businesses today that still follow that ideal.

Keeping that ideal in mind, let’s consider the story told about Jesus of Nazareth that we heard in the first reading.

The story opens by telling us that Jesus was about to set out on one of his travels through the countryside around Jerusalem. A young man approaches him, and asks this famous spiritual teacher what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus lists some of Moses’s teachings from the Torah: don’t murder anyone; don’t have sex with someone who is someone else’s spouse; don’t steal, lie, or cheat; take care of your parents. Upon hearing this, the young man feels complacent, for he has in fact done all these things. To puncture his complacency, Jesus tells this wealthy young man that there’s one more thing he must do: he must sell everything he owns, give it to the poor, and join Jesus on those travels through the countryside to bring teaching of spirituality and justice to all people. Upon hearing this one last requirement, the rich young man walks away grieving. As he walks away, Jesus turns to his followers, and tells them how difficult it will be for wealthy people to enter the kingdom of God.

Let me pause for just a moment to consider what Jesus meant when he spoke of the “kingdom of God.” Today’s mainstream Christians are sure they know exactly what the kingdom of God is. They assure us that the kingdom of God is some kind of afterlife where human beings get to go if they are good Christians. By “good Christian,” they mean people who belong to their Christian denomination, and profess belief in the orthodox dogma of their denomination. However, theirs is an anachronistic understanding of Jesus’s words. Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian. Nor did Jesus profess belief in any kind of Christian orthodoxy; there was no Christian orthodoxy until a couple of centuries after Jesus had died.

If you read the Book of Mark with an open mind — that is, if you do not cloak Jesus in anachronistic religiosity, but consider him as a spiritual thinker of depth and insight — you can see that when Jesus says “the kingdom of God,” he was not referring to an afterlife. Jesus felt that the kingdom of God is happening here and now, all around us. Nor is the kingdom of God limited to human beings, for Jesus tells us that not a sparrow falls but that God is aware of it. The Kingdom of God is, to use the words of theologian Bernard Loomer, nothing less than the “world conceived of as an indefinitely extended complex of interrelated, interdependent units of reality” — those of us who are not theologians call this the Web of Life, and it includes both the human and the non-human worlds. When even a tiny bird like a sparrow dies, that death affects the whole kingdom, because each being is connected to every other being.

To return to the story: When the rich young man approached Jesus, he faced a dilemma. Jesus and his followers hung out with people from a wide range of social classes, ranging from well-to-do merchants, to destitute beggars. Jesus saw that all persons were equally a part of the kingdom of God, and so Jesus maintained equality of relationships with all persons. The rich young man, on the other hand, liked his wealth, and he liked the high status his wealth gave to him. He followed all the teachings of the Torah to the letter, but his wealth prevented him from completely following the spirit of the Torah; or to put in contemporary terms, his love of his wealth prevented him from participating fully in the interdependent web of life. Seeing this, Jesus challenged him: Would the rich young man sell all his possessions and come follow Jesus? How attached was he to his wealth and possessions? Was he more attached to his wealth than he was to the interdependent web of life?

The followers of Jesus somehow manage to miss all these undercurrents. They are baffled by what Jesus says. If a rich person who has followed all the teachings of the Torah can’t enter the kingdom of God, then who can? Jesus tries to explain to them using a vivid metaphor to describe an almost impossible task. He says it will be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to become part of the kingdom of God.

Henry David Thoreau took up exactly this question in his book Walden. In this book, Thoreau describes how built himself a cabin a mile from the nearest house, and lived off the land. Walden is full of passages like the one we heard in the second reading, which ends: “I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.”

Because of passages like this, many people believe that Thoreau was telling us that we should all go off into the woods, plant a field of beans like he did, and stay out of the money economy. These same people then take great delight in pointing out that Thoreau did not in fact live completely on his own. They love to tell us that his mother did his laundry, and that he would often eat dinner with his family. Because of this, these people dismiss Thoreau. But these critics of Thoreau gloss over some key facts showing us that Thoreau’s actual message was more complex. Thoreau’s cabin was a station on the Underground Railroad, and one reason he went home to dinner was to attend gathering of anti-slavery activists. And Thoreau was also an important part of the family business of manufacturing pencils; he had to go home regularly because his work made an essential contribution to the family income.

Nor did Thoreau say that everyone should go build a cabin in the woods. He used his two year sojourn in the cabin at Walden Pond as an experiment. He wanted to that we could detach ourselves from our possessions; for when we allow ourselves to be governed by our money and our possessions, we lose sight of what Thoreau called “higher laws.” He was especially sensitive to the way that slavery in the United States warped the morality of the national economy. New Englanders liked to pretend they had nothing to do with slavery, but the Mexican American War showed him how northerners were happily complicit with southern slaveholders. Thoreau put it this way: “It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.” Jesus used the image of a camel trying to get through the eye of a needle to illustrate how attachment to wealth could disconnect people from the interdependent web of existence. Thoreau used a different metaphor, a metaphor of enslavement, and he talked of “higher laws” rather than the “kingdom of God.” But he was making the same point: too much wealth can disconnect us from the web of life.

This brings us to the present day, and to the present election cycle. When we listen to politicians talking about the economy — when we ourselves talk about the economy as it relates to the election — what exactly do we talk about? Are we talking about what Thoreau called “higher laws,” what Jesus called the “kingdom of God,” what we might call the interdependent web of existence? Or do our political conversations somehow fall short?

One area where the political conversations of our own day usually fall short is that we reduce the economy to jobs. If everyone has a job — so goes this rhetorical turn — then the voters will be happy with the politicians. But it is not just jobs that we human beings want and need. This has been true since ancient times. The Torah tells us, “one does not live by bread alone” [Duet. 8:3, NRSV]. Yes, we want work that allows us to put bread on the table. But we humans need more than that; we need to know how we are connected to the rest of humanity, and to the entire interdependent web of existence.

Furthermore, not every job brings us that sense of connection to something larger than our selves. In my seven years working in the lumberyard, and five years working for a carpenter, I was lucky enough to have decent jobs that allowed me to bread on the table. But those jobs didn’t provide much opportunity for attending to “higher laws.” So I was grateful for the hour each week when I could attend a Unitarian Universalist worship service. Maybe I didn’t always pay much attention to the sermon, but the service as a whole gave me a time and place to reconnect with something greater than myself. The social hour following the service was equally valuable as a time when I could talk with others about something besides my job. This may sound trivial, but spending a couple of hours once a week thinking about something other than carpentry helped me to stay connected to what Thoreau called the “higher laws.” We all have a spiritual need to feel connected to a greater whole.

The political conversations of our own day also fall short if they fail to make a strong connection between the economy and justice. This was true in Thoreau’s day, too, as some politicians chose to ignore the fact that at that time the economy of the entire United States depended upon race-based chattel slavery. While many free White northerners may have found slavery to be reprehensible, they too were held in thrall by an economic system which was rooted in slavery. Their comfort and their relative wealth kept them from ending slavery — kept them from paying attention to the demands of the higher laws, kept them from a full awareness of the interdependence of all human beings.

This helps us better understand what Jesus was trying to tell the rich young man who wanted access to the kingdom of God. That rich young man was not in control of his wealth and possessions; he was controlled by them. His highest duty was to his wealth, not to his higher self. Because of this, even though he lived a seemingly moral and blameless life, divinity was not easily able to stir within him.

Or perhaps Thoreau and Jesus both set higher standards than most of us can live up to. Selling all our possessions and following an itinerant preacher is not possible for most of us. Building a cabin a mile from the nearest neighbor and growing all our own food is not possible for most of us. This is especially true if we are responsible for other people — children, elders, spouses. But we should not get caught up in the specifics of these stories. Both Jesus and Thoreau stated their case in extreme terms to grab our attention. Each of them, in their own way, wanted us to fully understand the truth of that old saying from the Torah: human beings need more than food to live; we need a higher life as well. They wanted us to reflect on how we are disconnected from the higher laws. What is keeping us from realizing our essential connection with the interdependent web of existence?

Somehow we all need to find ways to remember that we are connected to all other people; that we are connected to something greater than ourselves; and that we have it in ourselves to make this world a better place. Thus when we say that it’s only about “the economy, stupid” — when we make it sound like the economy is a matter of selfish gain for each individual — we are doing a disservice to ourselves and to our whole society. The economy is more than just a job for you and a job for me. The economy should also be a means for helping all persons to lead better lives. We do not live by jobs alone. The economy should be a means for making this a better world. We should realize that our economic policies need to be governed by “higher laws,” that is, by high moral standards and by the ideals of justice.

Not that we’ll always agree among ourselves. Nor will we agree with every politician’s moral standards, or their notions of justice. But we can demand that whenever we as a people consider economic policy, we must always consider morality and justice. We must always consider higher laws. We must always understand that economics means we are connected to the vast web of all existence.

Photo of a whiteboard hanging in an office. — A photo allegedly taken of a white board in Bill Clinton’s campaign headquarters in May, 1992, showing Jim Carville’s now-famous saying, “The economy, stupid.” Good campaign strategy, maybe, but there’s more to the world than “the economy, stupid.”

Global Problems, Local Actions

Readings

The first reading is from an essay titled “The Evolution of My Social Concern” by James Luther Adams. Adams was a Unitarian Universalist minister and professor at Harvard. In the 1930s, he studied in Germany where he experienced the rise of Naziism. In a 1977 essay, he reflected on those experiences:

“The German universities, supposedly independent entities, had been fairly easily Nazified…. Hitler has also liquidated the trade unions…. The Masons were forbidden to hold meetings. Repeatedly, I heard anti-Nazis say, If only 1,000 of us in the late twenties had combined in heroic resistance, we could have stopped Hitler. I noticed the stubborn resistance of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I observed also the lack of religious pluralism in a country that had no significant Nonconformist movement in the Christian churches. Gradually I came to the conviction that a decisive institution of the viable democratic society is the voluntary association as a medium for the assumption of civic responsibility.”

[Essay dated 1977, reprinted in Voluntary Associations: Socio-cultural Analyses and Theological Interpretation, ed. J. Ronald Engel (Chicago: Exploration Press of the Chicago Theological Seminary, 1986).]

The second reading is from “You Are Responsible,” in the book Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principle and Practices by Peter Drucker.

“Self-development is very deeply meshed in with the mission of the nonprofit organization, with commitment and belief that the work done in this church or this school matters. You cannot allow the lack of resources, of money, of people, and of time (always the scarcest) to overwhelm you…. Paying serious attention to self-development — your own and that of everyone in the nonprofit organization — is not a luxury. Most people don’t continue to work for a nonprofit organization if they don’t share, at least in part, the vision of the organization. Volunteers, particularly, who don’t get a great deal out of working for the organization aren’t going to be around very long. They don’t get a check, so they have to get even more out of the organization’s work. In fact, you don’t want people who stay on with the organization just because that’s what they’ve always done but who don’t believe in the organization any more. … You want constructive discontent. That may mean that many of the best volunteers or paid staff come home exhausted after a big meeting, complaining loudly about how stupid everybody is and how they don’t do the things that are obvious — and then if someone asks why they stay on respond, ‘But it’s so important!’

“The key to building an organization with such a spirit is organizing the work so everyone feels essential to a goal they believe in.”

Sermon: Global Problems, Local Actions

James Luther Adams, probably the greatest Unitarian Universalist theologian of the twentieth century, spent most of his brilliant career studying voluntary associations. A voluntary association is a group of people who have freely joined together, with no profit motive, to pursue a shared goal or interest.

The stereotype of the theologian is someone who writes unreadable books on how many angels can fit onto the head of a pin. Thus it might seem odd for a theologian to study something practical like voluntary associations. But that’s where James Luther Adams’s brilliance comes in. He realized that here in the United States, the primary location for religion was in local congregations, which were voluntary associations.

Another of Adams’s great insights was that one of the first things authoritarian governments do is to weaken, destroy, or take over all voluntary associations. Adams came to this realization during the 1930s while he was studying in Nazi Germany. One of the first things the Nazis did when they got into power was to take control of voluntary associations. The Nazis abolished many groups, from the trade unions to the Masons. They got rid of any youth movements such as Scouting that were already in existence, and instead imposed their own Nazi youth movements. They took over the churches, and ran the churches as a part of the Nazi state. Obviously, then, voluntary associations are crucial to a functioning democracy, and a critical bulwark against the authoritarian governments that would abolish them.

By combining these two insights, Adams helped us understand that here in the United States, religious congregations help support democracy. In fact, religious congregations are more important than some other voluntary associations, because congregations are groups that aspire to make a better society. The local soccer club is a voluntary association, but it has no aspirations beyond providing soccer games for its members. There are many such groups which exist primarily for the pleasure of their members. By contrast, a religious congregation is a voluntary association which exists not just for the pleasure of its members, but which also has higher goals: a vision of the earth made fair and all her people one.

When Adams returned from studying in Germany, he confronted an unpleasant realization about himself. Everyone in a democracy has a role in supporting that democracy. But after living for a time in an authoritarian state, Adams felt that he wasn’t doing enough to support democracy. In a 1966 essay titled “The Indispensable Discipline of Social Responsibility,” Adams wrote:

“…I had to confront a rather embarrassing question. I had to ask myself, ‘What in your typical behavior as an American citizen have you done that would help to prevent the rise of authoritarian government in your own country? What disciplines of democracy (except voting) have you habitually undertaken with other people which could serve in any way to directly affect public policy?’ More bluntly stated: I asked myself, ‘What precisely is the difference between you and a political idiot?’”

His answer, of course, was to increase his participation in voluntary associations. He participated in a number of racial integration movements in the 1940s and 1950s. He was active for many years with the American Civil Liberties Union. He participated in a number of professional associations. And he was always active in his local Unitarian Universalist congregation. He not only studied voluntary associations, he lived voluntary associations.

Adams died in 1994. Six years later, in the year 2000, the sociologist Robert Putnam published a book titled “Bowling Alone” in which he detailed how Americans were less and less involved in voluntary associations. That trend has continued to the present day: we Americans no longer join bowling leagues, we have stopped attending religious services, we don’t belong to the Masons or the Order of the Eastern Star. Putnam concluded that the two primary reasons for Americans’ decreasing involvement in voluntary associations were electronic entertainment — primarily television in those days — and generational change.

A quarter of a century later, the decline in voluntary associations seems to be continuing. In 2019, researchers at the University of Maryland wrote a report titled “A Less Charitable Nation” in which they said: “Immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11, the volunteer rate surged to a peak level and stayed there for three straight years. After this record high in volunteering, the national rate of American volunteering declined and continued to slide throughout the decade from 2004 to 2015….” (1)

In my limited observation, this trend may have grown more pronounced during the pandemic, as people stayed safely at home with their electronic entertainment. Nor has the end of lockdown done much to change lure us Americans back into the public sphere. We continue to prefer staying at home with our electronic entertainment.

Not surprisingly, this trend of staying at home — this trend of becoming disengaged from face-to-face groups and voluntary associations — has been accompanied by a surge in loneliness, depression, and anxiety disorders. The evolutionary development of human beings did not include an adaptation to sit at home in relative isolation while staring at screens. This epidemic of loneliness and depression has become the major spiritual crisis of our time. I’ll say more about this spiritual crisis in a moment.

Also not surprising: this is combined with an increase in demagoguery across the political spectrum. Civic engagement through voluntary associations remains a critical part of democracy. As we Americans spend more and more time with electronic entertainment, and less and less time in face-to-face groups and voluntary associations, we’re actually weakening our democracy. Indeed, it feels like we’re facing a major crisis in our democracy.

These two crises — the spiritual crisis of loneliness, and the democratic crisis of demagoguery — both have at least some roots in the American withdrawal from voluntary associations. Robert Putnam called it “electronic entertainment,” and today we might call it “screen time,” but it amounts to the same thing. We all do a lot of staring at screens. And it appears that all that staring at screens isn’t very good for us, and it isn’t very good for democracy.

I say this as someone who has spent a good part of his life happily staring at screens. Since the days of Usenet, back in the 1990s, I’ve lived way too much of my life online, and enjoyed almost all of it. But this summer I started noticing how much time I spent staring at screens. I didn’t count time at work, since I have to use email and videoconferencing for my job. But I realized I might spend 8 hours a day, outside of work time, staring at a screen. As a spiritual experiment, I decided to reduce my screen time by (say) twenty-five percent, and see what happened.

Not surprisingly, I found I had more time to do other things, like taking walks, or engaging in face-to-face activities, or practicing the ‘ukulele (and I was pleasantly surprised at how much better my ‘ukulele playing got). But the real surprise was on the spiritual side of things. I felt better. Cutting twenty-five percent of my screen time meant cutting out almost every social media outlet. I stopped reading Facebook and the like. I stopped doomscrolling through the endless clickbait bad-news stories that dominate online news sites. The result was that I felt happier and more hopeful. To put it spiritually, with less screen time, I was no longer bogged down in minutiae and details. This seemed to strengthen my connection with something larger than myself.

And here’s another thing I noticed: now that I’m not obsessively tracking every last detail of the presidential election, I can pay more attention to local issues. We have quite an array of local issues that need attention paid to them. The local issues on the South Shore include food insecurity, housing insecurity, an epidemic of mental illness, and maybe even a decline in good governance in our local governments.

These local problems sometimes get put to one side when we spend most of our time worrying about the clash between the two national presidential candidates. This is coupled with a tendency to believe that if only our political candidate wins the presidential election, all our local problems will be solved.

This brings me to the famous saying, “Think globally and act locally.” This saying is often attributed to the biologist René Dubos, but people were saying similar things long before Dubos said it in 1977. I’d argue that Jesus of Nazareth lived out that saying in everything he did: he always considered the big picture, up to and including God; but at the same time he was always focused on the needs and concerns of the individual people immediately in front of him. We could say the same of the Buddha and other great spiritual thinkers.

I’d also argue that this is exactly what our congregation has been doing for the past three centuries. We consider the big picture, up to and including whatever each of us call the universal. But we also focus on the needs and concerns of the people in this congregation, and the people in our immediate community. We continue to do that today. We take care of each other, as best we can. We address food insecurity in the wider community by maintaining a drop box for the Cohasset Food Pantry. We’re in the process of addressing housing insecurity here in Cohasset, as some of us work to establish a community fund that can help people with short term needs, such as meeting a sudden rent increase. We address the epidemic of mental illness in children and teens by supporting the families who come here, and by providing religious education programs that nurture our children and teens and build their social-emotional skills.

We also serve as a crucial training ground for democracy, and the skills associated with democracy. Democracy — especially local democracy — needs people who can speak in public, and we provide opportunities to practice that skill. Democracy requires an understanding of how to work with others towards common goals, even when you disagree, and we provide opportunities to practice that skill. Democracy needs people who see the big picture but who can focus on the immediate needs of the people right in front of them, and we all practice that skill here in our congregation.

I also believe that a functioning democracy needs people who are spiritually grounded. By “spiritually grounded,” I mean people who think deeply about the human condition, people who consider who they are in relation to the universe and to universal values, people who ponder how to make the world a better place. Spiritually grounded people are also people who have a community where they can feel grounded, such that they don’t sink into despair or disperse their energies in unwonted optimism.

This turns out to be one of the key functions of a good congregation. The brilliant management theorist Peter Drucker said that nonprofits can make everyone feel in the organization feel essential to a shared goal they all believe in. Drucker gives a perfect example of how that can play out, which we heard in the second reading: “That may mean that many of the best volunteers or paid staff come home exhausted after a big meeting, complaining loudly about how stupid everybody is and how they don’t do the things that are obvious — and then if someone asks why they stay on, respond, ‘But it’s so important!’” The strength of a shared vision carries us through the inevitable frustrations of working together with fallible human beings who have come together in an imperfect community.

We tend to feel most spiritually grounded when we find ourselves working together with others towards a shared vision for a better world. This is the greatest of spiritual practices: to come together in community to shape a better world. May we each contribute to this great spiritual project in whatever way we can; and in so doing may we each find ourselves spiritually grounded.

Note:

(1) “A Less Charitable Nation: The Decline of Volunteering and Giving in the United States,” Nathan Dietz, Senior Researcher, Do Good Institute, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, Robert T. Grimm, Jr., Levenson Family Chair in Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland

Freddie Green and Spiritual Leadership

For the reading this morning, we heard a poem [“Inward Music” by Everett Hoagland, 2014] that retold a story that happened to a fellow named Tom Stites. Tom Stites is a journalist, now retired, who served on the editorial staffs of the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Kansas City Times. At the end of his career, Stites served as the president of The Banyan Project, a nonprofit devoted to starting new news outlets in so-called news deserts. Stites has described himself as a journalist who has “a passion for strengthening journalism, democracy and justice.”

Stites started his career editing a small magazine called “Jazz” that was (not surprisingly) devoted to coverage of jazz. So Tom Stites’s career path led from jazz, to strengthening democracy. You might keep that in mind while I talk with you about what Stites thought about Freddie Green, about the leadership style of jazz guitarist Freddie Green, and how Freddie Green might serve as a model for leadership in our currently polarized democracy.

Freddie Green played in Count Basie’s big band for fifty years, from 1937 until Green’s death in 1987. Count Basie’s big band was one of the most important jazz ensembles in the world through the mid-twentieth century. To better tell you about Freddie Green’s leadership style, let me describe what Count Basie’s big band looked like.

Let’s take for a representative example an online video of Basie’s big band performing the tune “Corner Pocket” in Stockholm in 1962. At stage right, Basie himself sat behind his concert grand piano, which was about eight feet long. The bassist, playing an upright bass, stood in curve of the piano, and the drummer sat on an elevated platform behind the bassist and to his left. Then to the drummer’s left sat the horn players: four trumpets in the back, another trumpet and two trombones in the middle rank, and then five saxophones — alto, tenor, and baritone — along the front. When a horn player took a solo, he would step out front and center and stand in the spotlight while he played.

And right in the middle of everything sat Freddie Green — right in front of the drummer and next to the middle rank of horns. He sat there playing his big acoustic archtop guitar, occasionally glancing at Count Basie at the piano. It’s hard to hear Green’s playing on this video, but given where he sat, every other band member would have been able to hear him.

As I sat there watching this online video, I asked myself, who kept this ensemble together? Who kept the rhythm going? Who transmitted the subtle harmonic shifts to everyone else? Count Basie, the ostensible band leader, sat at his piano at stage right. But the speed of sound is relatively slow, so if you’re way over on stage right, the musicians playing way over on stage left would have sounded as though they’re playing about a quarter of a beat behind you; which makes it hard to keep everyone in time. Nor did Basie do what many band leaders do, and conduct with his hands or a baton — his hands were busy on the piano.

Here’s what I think happened: Count Basie was playing the piano, setting the tempo, and sketching out the basic harmony. The drummer echoed Basie’s rhythm, mostly on his high hats (those little double cymbals that drummers operate with a foot pedal). The bass player rooted the most important notes of the harmony. But it was Freddie Green, sitting right there in the middle, who really picked up both the rhythm and harmony from Count Basie and communicates it to the dozen or so horn players. Count Basie was the band leader, but Freddie Green, sitting in the center, was the one who everyone together, was the one whom they called the heartbeat of the band.

Jazz is one of the most democratic of all musical forms. Theoretically, anyone in a jazz band can take a solo; thus there is equal opportunity for everyone in the band, depending solely on their individual abilities and talents. But unlike other guitarists of the swing era — Charlie Christian, for example — Freddie Green almost never took a solo. He found a different role for himself, the musically satisfying role of ensuring that all the other players stayed together. This is the other way in which jazz is one of the most democratic of musical forms — anyone can take a solo, yet at the same time musicians can choose to devote themselves solely to supporting the whole ensemble. Jazz balances individual achievement with the needs of the whole, coming down neither on the side of hyper-individualism nor faceless collectivism. This balance is exactly what we hope for in a democracy.

So far, I’ve mostly been talking about the mechanics of jazz, and by analogy about the mechanics of democracy. Now let me speak with you about the spiritual dimension to all of this.

In this morning’s reading, the poet has his fictional narrator ask himself, “What [or] who guides my riffs on the / arrangements life plays out for me? How do I harmonize with / my own Higher Power?” Part of the poet’s answer lies in the title to the poem, “Inward Music.” You can think of this inward music as a literal phenomenon, or as a metaphor for something else. But it is this inward music, which we may not consciously hear, but which keeps us in time and in tune with a greater purpose. It is this inward music that connects us with something larger and better than our individual selves.

The Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau famously wrote: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” Thoreau wrote this passage in 1854, a decade before the Civil War, at a time when our democracy was facing perhaps the greatest threat to democracy we have yet faced, when we as a country faced up to the immorality of race-based chattel slavery. Although Thoreau’s image of the different drummer is often interpreted today to support a philosophy of hyper-individualism, in fact Thoreau was saying that in his time too many people did not listen to the inward music that comes from something larger than ourselves. Too many people in Thoreau’s day allowed chattel slavery to continue. By so doing they ignored the call of humanity, of ethics, of a love greater than individual gain. That is, the supporters of slavery listened to their own desire for personal gain, rather than an inward music which demanded an end to slavery.

This brings us back to the problem of leadership. It is dangerous to allow leadership to remain solely in the hands of the soloists who stand in the spotlight. If the only leaders are those soloists, we can get into trouble if they stop listening to the inward music, and instead start playing solely out of a desire for personal achievement, for personal recognition. The soloists may be the most prominent leaders in a big band, but it’s the musicians like Freddie Green who keep the band going through the changes in the soloists.

You can see where I’m going with this. Think about American democracy today as being a little like Count Basie’s big band. American democracy does in fact need the kind of leaders who can serve as soloists, using their unique talents to inspire and move the rest of us. But American democracy also need many more leaders who keep us working in harmony with each other. That is, we need leaders who help remind us of the inward music that holds everything together. Right now, American democracy has plenty of people who want to be soloists. There are many in our current crop of politicians who want to be soloists. They want to be the person who gets out in front of the rest of the band, with the spotlight shining on them, while they show off their chops. It’s not just politicians, it’s also a great many ordinary people who want to be the one who has the spotlight shining on them. We have plenty of soloists; now e need the leaders who will keep us all together.

Freddie Green’s leadership role in Count Basie’s band can serve as an analogy for other human institutions. Groups of humans do seem to need a few people as visible leaders, the people out in the spotlight. Just as important are those people who keep everything going without stepping out into the spotlight. Just so, Freddie Green connected the members of Count Basie’s band together, first by listening to those around him. The first step is always listening. Then based on what he heard, Green helped everyone else stay together by spinning out rhythms and harmonies the others could easily follow. The soloists are important, but it’s the rhythm section that really keeps the band together.

Why is it that in today’s American society we have so many soloists, and so few people in the rhythm section? Perhaps we of the American public are at fault. We, the American public, pay most attention to the handful of leaders, especially the most prominent elected leaders — the U.S. president, Supreme Court justices, congresspeople, and so on. But the president is only person, and as such can only do so much; far more important than the person of the president are cabinet members, aides, researchers, advisors, diplomats, civil servants, bureaucrats, and others who serve in the executive branch. Many of these people continue from one administration to the next, which is actually a good thing. Not only would it be too disruptive to bring in hundreds of new civil servants every four to eight years, but if we did so the rule of law and the stability of the country would be at risk.

Celebrity culture and social media have trained us to see the few people who live in the spotlight. We admire Taylor Swift, but ignore the other musicians she plays with, ignore the fashion designers and producers and technicians who make her performances possible. We forget that the person in the spotlight is merely one miniscule part of a vast interconnected web of humanity.

Yet it seems to have always been like this. The medieval Persian poet Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi took notice of this same phenomenon. In ghazal 1195, Rumi wrote about how we humans forget to listen to the inward music. A popular translation of this ghazal puts it this way: “We rarely hear the inward music, / but we’re all dancing to it nevertheless” [Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi, p. 106] But I prefer a more literal translation, which goes like this: “In every heart there is a different note and rhythm, all stamping feet outwardly, the musicians hidden like a secret.” [trans. A.J. Arberry, Mystical Poems of Rumi, p. 168] We are all individuals, yes. We all have our own notes and rhythms. And it is the “musicians hidden like a secret” who keep us connected. They may be hidden in plain sight, but it is those hidden musicians who tie us all together, we maintain our essential interconnection. Those hidden musicians — whatever Rumi means by that — they are the cosmic version of Freddie Green. Just as Freddie Green was the heartbeat of Count Basie’s band, those cosmic musicians are the heartbeat of humanity. From that musical heartbeat arises the concert of all being.

We have to listen to that which transcends our individual selves; listen to that music which is larger than our limited individual beings. We can hear this universal music inwardly, not through our ears, but through our souls, whatever we might mean by the words “souls.” And whatever we might mean by “universal music.” Perhaps it would be better to say that we hear this vast connective power, not as music, not through our physical ears, but as something we sense with our intuition. We can somehow feel it when we are moving in rhythm with that which is larger than our selves. And then when we are not moving in that cosmic rhythm, life feels discordant and unpleasant.

Like the young Tom Stites in the reading, maybe we could criticize the cosmic band leader for failing to sufficiently amplify the cosmic rhythm guitarist. Because it is actually quite difficult to listen to the cosmic musicians who are supposed to keep us in harmony and in rhythm. We are constantly distracted by the demands of daily life. This is the struggle our leaders face. They are supposed to stay in harmony with the universe, but how can you listen for that inward music when you are distracted by all the day-to-day tasks that simply must get done? This is true of all of us. How can we stay in harmony with the universe, when we are constantly distracted by the demands of our jobs, our families, our volunteer responsibilities, all the endless tasks that somehow seem to fill our days, leaving little time to listen?

Yet we must try. We must remind ourselves constantly that there is something larger than our individual lives. We can remain part of the universal wholeness, if we would but listen: listen to the heartbeat of humanity; listen to one another.

Screen grab from a video showing musicians performing. — Screen grab from a 1965 BBC television show, “Show of the Week,” featuring Count Basie and his orchestra. Freddie Green is seated at left, playing his big archtop guitar.