Godless? Come Out and Mess with a Stereotype or Two

Posted on February 26, 2009 by Valerie Tarico

My brother, David, is gay. You can’t tell by how he walks or talks or dresses. You wouldn’t know who he loves and why unless you know him. The only clue, maybe, is that he happens to be nicer than the rest of my mother’s offspring, including me. Several years ago, I said to David: All you have to do to mess with people’s stereotypes is be out and be yourself. Whatever the ugly expectation might be: self absorbed, hedonistic, promiscuous, debauched, unable to relate to kids, whatever. . . David isn’t it.

One time my mother was driving my tween-age nephews and their friends home from the Christian school they attended. Like boys often do, they were sneering about fags as a way to deal with their own budding sexuality. After dropping the other kids off, my mom said to my nephews, "You do know your Uncle David is gay, don’t you?"
"Yeah."
"But you were just saying you’d never hug a gay or take a gift from them or . . ."
"We didn’t mean, David! He’s our uncle!"

The boys are older now, and grade-school prejudices haven’t survived their repeated contacts with Uncle David.

———–

I’m godless. You can’t tell by looking at me. And yet, like David, I belong to one of the most despised and least electable minorities in America. Yes, disbelief is arguably volitional — arguably — in contrast to sexual orientation which is not. But consider the following:

From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in "sharing their vision of American society." Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry . . . today’s atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists have played in the past — they offer a symbolic moral boundary to membership in American society.

An Oklahoma court had to sift through jurors to find some who thought they might be able to trust the word of an atheist against a Christian. This is despite the fact that belief is the norm among American criminals but not among scientists who rise to the tops of their fields. Hemant Mehta, on his blog, Friendly Atheist, offers this tongue-in-cheek list: atheists are evil, angry, militant, baby-eating, unfunny, insensitive, immoral. Note: To go with angry and militant, they’re also young and male.

Do you think of yourself as an atheist? Agnostic? Freethinker? Humanist? Spiritual Nontheist? Take a look at the links. If you don’t fit the stereotypes, you’re in luck. Probably all you have to do to start messing with people’s categories is:

1. Find a kind, matter-of-fact way to let people know you lack a god concept.
2. Be yourself.

If you do fit the stereotypes, please — get some help. And try to take a little break from kicking puppies between now and that first therapy appointment.

Seriously, a key quality of stereotypes is that the more dramatically wrong they are, the easier it is to violate them. When a panhandler says, "Thank you." I make a point to say, "You’re welcome. Since I don’t believe in gods I think it’s important for us to take care of each other." For most of the self-avowed atheists I know, all they need to do is put on a "Friendly Atheist" hat when they take their grandkids out for ice cream.

 

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Praise the Lord for Fred Phelps and Nadya Suleman

Posted on February 13, 2009 by Valerie Tarico

Every once in a while someone comes along who makes us see ourselves in a new way. Through their behavior, they hold up a mirror to our own impulses. For many of us, Barack Obama, through his words and actions, calls to the surface yearnings and energy we thought had died. On the other hand, we watch Fred "God hates Fags" Phelps or Nadya Suleman and think, ooh, that’s nasty.

What do they have in common with Barack Obama?!

Here’s what: they push us up against some of our deepest values and strongest feelings. They ask us what we stand for and what we’re going to do about it.

If we’re honest, the revulsion we feel toward Phelps and Suleman is partly because they confront us with our own darkness. Ordinary Evangelicals–decent loving people who are bound to homophobia by bibliolatry–cringe at the horrid, hateful signs that Phelps waves in the name of their God. And for some, a wonderful thing happens.  Sanctified alienation from gays gets overwhelmed by alienation from gay-haters.  Love wins out.

For many people, a Phelps encounter offers a first visceral experience of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of such loathing. In the same way that Hollywood takes sex and violence over the top so that we can get those adrenaline surges from the comfort of our couches, Phelps purifies and refines homophobia into such a vile spew that, even across our laptops and televisions, we can’t help but feel it in our own bodies.

It is the intensity of Phelps that gives him the power to call us out of our armchairs. This week—in an incident that rippled across the country–Kansas high school students rallied around their gay friends, holding signs of affirmation and love. What’s the matter with Kansas? Maybe not so much as some people think.

Suleman’s biomedical exploits also have rippled across the country. She hit a nerve we didn’t know we had. Lurid curiosity, revulsion, indignation, child-empathy, nurturance and outrage – these are powerful emotions, and they’ve raised powerful questions about right and wrong. How many is too many? Who is responsible? What do those children -with their likely disabilities–deserve in terms of care? What do all children deserve in terms of care? Who decides?

We may grieve the harm caused by people who blunder through life at extremes. But we should also thank them. Because most of the harm done in the world isn’t done by Phelps’s or Sulemans. It’s done by people like you and me with our ordinary fears and blind spots and pursuit of what we want. And they help us change.

—From the dedication page of Lon Po Po, A Red Riding Hood Story by Ed Young: "To all the wolves of the world for lending their good name as a tangible symbol for our darkness."

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Darwin and Lincoln: Two Peas in a Pod

Posted on February 12, 2009 by Valerie Tarico

What did Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin have in common besides their February 12, 1809 birthday?  Both men transcended the self-centered thinking so characteristic of our kind, allowing them to see the unity of life in a new way.   By self-centered, I don’t mean selfish.  I mean our incredible tendency to perceive ourselves as the measure of all that is:  My tribe, my religion, my nation-state, my gender, my "race", my species–all else is here to serve us.

This bias is totally built in.  During my graduate student days, I worked with an industrial organizational psychologist seeking to improve personnel interviews.  One problem with interviews is what psychologists call a "similar to me" bias.  Someone who is similar to me on completely irrelevant characteristics–same home town, same hair style, same musical tastes, same ethnic heritage–is seen as more competent as a result. Since interviews seek genuine competence, this is a problem, and interviewers are trained to resist it. Unfortunately, the similar-to-me bias shows up in ordinary life, where we often have no idea how powerfully it is shaping who we care about or whose ideas we take seriously.

At a time when many of his compatriots saw dark skinned peoples as less than human, Darwin methodically mapped universal human emotions:  surprise, disgust, anger, fear, and happiness.  He defined us within a broader web of life that brought into sharp focus our human similarities in a way that old dogmas had not.  Why?  Because he brought a scientist’s mind to the task – a painstaking process of gathering data, obsessing over small details, brooding over what he had found, and following the data where they lead.  Lincoln, the politician, looked at those universal human emotions and thought about individuals and society.  He brooded, not over details of bone and sinew, but over tensions and ethics:  What does our basic humanity imply about how we should live in community with each other?  

The scientific mind and the mind of the ethicist/politician are a great pair.  We grow best and flourish best with the two informing each other.

The work of Darwin and the work of Lincoln is ever unfinished–each represented a point of consciousness in a broader human endeavor.  Even in their own day, they were not alone.  Wallace independently discovered the process of natural selection.  Wilberforce fought to end slavery in the British Empire.  Today, scientists have established that at a genetic level "race" is a falsehood, an artifact of the human mind’s tendency to take shades of gray–or in this case brown–and break them into oversimplified categories.  

And yet, even today, with a brown man in the White House, the front page of my local paper today was dominated by a story of racial violence.  My generation is plagued by a self-centered tendency to spend more than we earn–to borrow against future generations who have no voice or vote.  Our religions continue to be plagued with self-centered claims of exclusive salvation.  The American nation state is plagued by a self-centered mission to rescue our oil from under their sand. Our citizens are plagued by a self- centered habit of asking what our country can do for us.The work of Darwin and Lincoln is yours and mine to continue.  Only with a thousand points of insight and a thousand bodies living for change, will we get to the point that we can use our knowledge and power for the good of all.

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What Should Obama Ask of Us, the American People?

Posted on February 11, 2009 by Valerie Tarico

Barack Obama’s campaign wasn’t a campaign to get elected.  Yes, that was front and center in most of our minds and, I’m sure, his for the last year plus.  But he said from the beginning that the end goal of this campaign was to create a movement for change.  That means the campaign isn’t over. 

More interesting, it isn’t over in the minds of millions of people across America who helped in one way or another to put Obama in office.  People are waiting for the next big ask.  In a recent meeting with Senator Patty Murray, in a gathering of progressive donors, even in my dentist’s office, I’ve heard people saying:  What’s next?  They are saying it with their sleeves rolled up.  What do you want me personally to do about the economy?  What do you want me personally to do about the future?

Obama gets one big ask.

Some have said that the ask is being made already.  Valuable data files are now accessible to progressive organizations across the country.  Campaign workers recently were urged to get together and decide what they want to do on a more local level.  Star volunteers and staff have been recruited into state level efforts.  And we all got email about house parties to support the stimulus package.

But none of these match the depth of the question itself.  People are wanting to be a part of something bigger than policy change and harder than a house party.  This is about Change with a capital C in the middle of a capital C Crisis.  We want guidance—sharp, focused, smart leadership–for not only DC policy making but for the broader campaign that we signed on to:

  1. Phase Two of this campaign, just like the electoral phase, needs a tangible, specific set of objectives set by movement leadership. 
  2. These objectives need to come from Obama and his proxies.  Any movement has a shared vision at its center, and we are hard wired to want this vision embodied by a charismatic leader. Demagogue, demigod, or ordinary human, Obama is the guy who has our attention.
  3. As in the electoral phase, objectives must scale to the power of each person involved.
  4. The campaign leadership needs to provide a set of tools or processes that enable people to do their part

Dreaming Big

Our current crisis and the highly sophisticated Obama campaign structure together create a once-in-a- generation opportunity to build lasting community infrastructure for the common good – not government based, not faith-based, not politically based.  Community based.

What might this look like? Here’s mine:

The ask:  “I’m asking you to take care of each other through this financial crisis in some very specific ways.”

Active ingredients: elevates communal barn raising archetype over cowboy archetype (see The True Patriot); commitment is time limited; leverages crisis urgency; has middle class relevance

The structure: Each precinct gets a community organizer (possibly the Democratic pco) who is responsible for managing a set of online assets, events, and community activities.

Active ingredients:  taps Obama organizing model, is place based, scale fits size of traditional social networks, if Dem branded then Dems get credit as in DemocratsWork.

The content:

          Skill bank (relevant models: timebucks.org; http://www.brightneighbor.com)  The skill bank uses new web tools to create a non-monetized informal economic exchange like that internal to tribes, churches, pioneer communities. Within each precinct people make their skills available to each other on a trading rather than donating basis. People also can donate skills, which get banked and allocated on a needs basis by organizer or committee or simply via request to donor. 

Active ingredients:  people asked to do what they do best vs stuffing envelopes, builds relationships and thus other kinds of social support, mildly offsets decline in monetized exchanges, increases personal relevance for unemployed or underemployed, turns idle time productive, decreases isolation (all of which decrease mental health costs). Skill banking is reciprocity-based vs the one way flow down advocated by D’s or one way flow up advocated by R’s.

          Real Time Rides. Planned and spontaneous ride sharing via interactive web w/ precinct community filter. Cellphone based.

Active Ingredients:  builds relationships, decreases CO2, decreases need for transport infrastructure. 

          Events and Activities, misc.: (relevant models: www.brightneighbor.com; Lake Hills Liberals)  Annual social.  Welcome committee.  Soup brigade.  Community garage sale day. Idea templates for Friday Night at the Meaningful Movies or book club or exercise group as volunteer hosts emerge based on their interests.

Active Ingredients:  broadens & deepens social bonds; taps the Applebee’s America phenomenon, taps instinctive recession-related desire to retreat into a better past, decreases “ stuff”, increases community safety, increases Gross National Happiness. 

          Tools.  Campaign central provides web based tools for managing contacts, skill bank, real-time rides, and events as well as technology for tabulating/showcasing community outcomes (relevant model: Zazengo.com) both locally and nationally.

Active Ingredients:  Taps new technologies, creates community role for tech savvy young people. 

Additional Rationale:

Right wing ideologues have been successful in moving our political dialogue in part because they tapped existing affinity groups such as evangelical churches, business organizations, and gun clubs.  Members don’t join these groups for political purposes, and most of the benefit they receive has little to do with party politics.  Rather, these groups are woven into the fabric of a member’s individual identity and sense of community.  These groups have electoral and policy influence in part because they create sustained, multifaceted relationship among people. 

Those of us who value the common good often have been frighteningly narrow in our attempts to engage people.  Not only are we bound to the election cycle, but we reach out specifically in a political role for a political conversation—often in the absence of any deeper relationship.

Trends among young people suggest increasingly that they solicit information through trusted social networks.  If we really care about the common good, our best hope – perhaps our only hope—is to nurture social networks that embody these values and for whom political priorities and civic engagement are simply one manifestation of these broader values.

What do you think the ask should be?

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The Morality of Eight Babies or, Sometimes, Even One

Posted on February 2, 2009 by Valerie Tarico

Most Americans who have any media access whatsoever know that last week a California woman with six prior children gave birth to octuplets.  The details surrounding the birth (six prior kids, solo unemployed parent, in vitro implantation of eight or more embryos, probable millions in taxpayer expenses) are so extraordinary that they have provoked a normally taboo public conversation about whether childbearing can be immoral.

 Progressives rarely use the words moral and immoral.  We’re too sophisticated for that.  If some poor sod starts talking about truth and virtue or right and wrong or– gods forbid– good and evil, we get nervous and become, ahem, tolerant.   It’s like bring up spirituality in a room full of atheists  (who otherwise might be perfectly willing to talk about ethics and love and service and finding some meaning that transcends the boundaries of our small individual lives.)

Occasionally we progressives indulge ourselves and apply such labels to grand collective actions—ones that are far removed from our day-to-day lives, like the situation in Gaza or Guantanamo.  But applying moral labels to our own behavior or, even worse, to that of our neighbors feels uncomfortably hard or sure or Republican. 

Maybe we’ve spent too much time in therapy. 

The reality is that our political agenda and personal priorities are every bit as morally rooted as that of the Right.  The roots may be different.  The research of psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests that progressives base ethics on an Enlightenment blend of fairness and harm avoidance, while conservatives get their moral sensibilities roused by a more complex blend in which these two compete for priority with purity, loyalty, and deference to authority.  But both conservatives and progressives have strong moral values, which undergird our political priorities.  Haidt says that one of our weaknesses as a movement is that we don’t get this.  I would argue that we walk the walk, but don’t talk the talk.   

Let’s take the  debate about abortion as an example.  Abortion opponents have no trouble saying that killing blastocysts is wrong.  Well, ok. They don’t say blastocysts.  They say people.  And then they attribute souls and personhood to fertilized eggs.  But to their credit, they apply a straight up moral filter to the abortion question, and they are honest about it.  They say, in public, that abortion is evil.

Most abortion proponents think that abortion averts evil. 

Yes, I’m using the “e” word.  And yes, we do.  We think that abortion increases wellbeing (goodness) and decreases suffering (evil) in the form of child abuse, depression, crime, and overpopulation—or simply the involuntary loss of a woman’s other precious life affirming and life-giving activities.   

A couple of years ago, I answered a pollster’s multiple choice questions about my abortion attitudes.  “In the circumstances under which a woman might consider an abortion, is abortion always acceptable, often acceptable, rarely acceptable, or always unacceptable? Press 1 for always acceptable, 2 for often . . .”   Huh?  Did you notice that there’s a whole half of the moral spectrum missing here?   

Three months into my first pregnancy and a few days after we went out to dinner and celebrated our first ultrasound picture of the fetus we nicknamed “Gecko,” my husband and I received a lab report that said I had acute toxoplasmosis.  If I’ve got it, it’s probably common and not a big deal, I told myself.  But we went to the university medical library to find out.   Turns out, first trimester toxoplasmosis is a big deal. It can result in congenital blindness and brain lesions.  It doesn’t always, but it can.  We spent the rest of the day walking and talking and crying. 

We both wanted a baby.  And yet for both of us, continuing this pregnancy felt immoral.  It meant taking a willful, known risk that the healing work I might be able to accomplish as a health professional would be aborted.  It meant taking a willful, known risk that our family would demand more from society than we could give back.  It meant taking a willful, known risk that we were committing any future children of ours to be responsible for a situation they hadn’t created.   We didn’t know then what we do now — that our wickedly smart, loving eldest daughter simply couldn’t have existed; she was conceived before that pregnancy would have come to term.  But the bottom line was, that as much as we wanted a baby, staying pregnant not only felt wrong.  According to the moral/ethical principles guiding our lives, it was wrong. 

It’s scary to open up talk about morality, because it gets done badly so often.  It so easy for judgment to turn into judgmental-ness, and for moral consternation to turn into something uglier.  But if you really believe that some things are good, you also have to believe that some things are bad.  If you really stand for something, you have to be willing to stand against something.  So I was taught an evangelical child—and it’s one the pieces of my evangelical upbringing that I still ring true.

During that telephone poll, I went through the options twice and then skipped ahead.  What I wanted a question that said, “In the circumstances under which a woman might consider an abortion, is continuing the pregnancy always acceptable, usually acceptable, rarely acceptable, or never acceptable?   That was the other end of the spectrum.  It wasn’t a part of the interview. 

In the circumstances. . .

The Right may have it easier, figuring out how to talk about morality, especially the Religious Right.  If you are convinced that the voice in your head is actually the voice of a god, a whole lot of things get clear and simple.  But just because we progressives don’t have that luxury doesn’t mean we should let ourselves off the hook.  Being progressive isn’t supposed to be about being comfortable.  It’s about moving toward a better future instead of clinging to a mythical Eden.  It’s about taking responsibility, knowing that our ancestors did the best they could, but sifting through their answers in the context of what we now know about ourselves and the world around us.  That means developing policies (and moral/ethical conversations) that reflect the real world complexities which govern our lives, and which will govern the lives of future generations. 

A while back, Amazon.com suggested a book called, The Wisdom of Abortion: Its Power, Purpose and Meaning.  I bought it for the title alone – what a radical conversation starter. 

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