Seeing injustice is an ethical obligation

As ethical humanists, we talk about injustice and its many faces and the choices we have to correct it.  As humans, we bog down on priorities and strategies and "getting it."

In the past weeks, I have been much involved in these discussions--observing, listening, talking, and writing.  My correspondence has grown substantially, and now it is time to come back home to the Hoedown to work it out in my own mind, at my keyboard.  The weeks have been full.  St. Louis for the 101st AEU Assembly. The Mountain near Highlands, NC, for the AEU's 2016 Lay Leadership School. Family.  Adventures in travel.  Making connections with other ethical societies and with the roots of the movement.  Throughout all this busy-ness have run the threads of social justice--specifically racial justice, criminal justice, and the occasional stray mention of feminism/womanism.

Where do we start to act?  Why, indeed, must we act at all, especially when our own lives are not affected by these conflicts but rather by others, perhaps based on economics or age or some other damned thing?   Here's a thought:

As ethical humanists, we commit to making the world a better place so that in and by that process we make ourselves better humans.  We are, then, obliged to look at the world around us--our home, our neighborhood, our community, our country, our world--with eyes that appreciate what is good and just but also identify what is corrupt and unjust. 

The first step in fighting injustice, I would say, is first to see it.

We often wear blinders in our daily lives, protecting ourselves from pain, getting in ruts with our comfortable routines, not seeing the suffering of others unless we are slapped with one of those late night commercials about hunger or animal abuse.  I change the channel, so much do I resist feeling that pain. But there is injustice all around us, begging to be seen. 

• Why does my neighbor keep having broken bones, falls, bruises, depression? 
• What does this article I am reading about black people being shot by police mean for my community?  Does it happen here?  
• If water scarcity and drought is a root cause of the violence in Syria, can such a thing happen here?  
• I am doing a good thing by serving meals at the homeless shelter, but why are these people homeless?

Simply being aware of the signals that something might be wrong can be a start.  If we cannot see injustice, then we can do nothing to overcome it. Seeing the signals and recognizing them as signals, we can then begin learn more about it and the problems that are being signaled.

"Black Lives Matter"--tee shirt, button, statement--is a signal that something is wrong--not only in the black community but in the white community that surrounds it.  When someone cannot understand that signal, cannot see that it is communicating something important, that too is a signal of something wrong.  It becomes a problem ignored, a wrong unrighted.  Worse, it becomes a problem prolonged and increased.  

How do we see?

Well, we look.  We scan our environment for threats--this isn't safe, that could be hurtful.  We look for anomalies--something is out of place, not right. We look for balance--the fairness that may be the most fundamental of all human values. Maybe we should expand our search beyond ourselves and our families to others in our community/world, even including strangers in our protective vision?

We interpret what we see.  That's the part about "getting it."  We tend to interpret the signals around us in personal terms.  Personal would include ourselves, our family, our friends--and moving out beyond the circle of known persons to larger entities, still "circles" to which we "belong."  We use familiar words and concepts and experiences and knowledge to interpret the signals we get so that we can read them in terms that we understand.  Not everyone uses those words or shares those experiences.  Seeing injustice will sometimes include a new perspective on what we are looking at.  That new perspective may include active study of an issue to learn more or something as simple as listening so that we can see things better.

Here's a fairly mundane example.  It's about wallpaper, but "wallpaper" eventually became a code word with my late husband that stopped a budding conflict because one of us remembered what happened when we shopped for wallpaper for the bathroom.  Well, it was a matter of taste.  I wanted the foil with butterflies (this was in the 80's!) and he wanted the stripes.  Things got tense.  We were starting to get a little more heated and a little louder and realized that our "discussion" not going well in the wallpaper/paint store.  We decided to take it over to the McDonald's across the street and try to work it out with some ice cream. And so we did, finally reaching the dumbfounding realization that he was talking about the master bath and I was talking about the guest bathroom.   We were arguing over nothing, since I was fine with stripes in the master, and he was fine with butterflies for the guests. From then on, for more than thirty years, one of us could say "wallpaper," and the other would stop to make sure that we were actually talking about the same subject. 

The point of the wallpaper story is that interpretation of data, including signals about injustice, can depend upon point of view.  "Getting it" always includes knowing the point of view from which you are "seeing."  It usually includes recognizing that more than one point of view is looking at the problem.  It should include sharing points of view until everyone can really see the same thing.

Seeing injustice, I have said, is an ethical obligation.  I also think that it is an ethical action.

What are you seeing?

Black Lives Matter . . . to Me

That's the inaugural "Compassionate Pen Writing Prompt" for the New York Society for Ethical Culture's Ethics for Teen Leaders "invitation to express."  Teens are asked to use that writing prompt to express what the Black Lives Matter movement or concept means in their own lives.  The expression may be an essay, a poem, a short personal letter, a short story, or a graphic.

Audrey Kindred, children's program director at NYSEC, explains the invitation in these terms:

"Black Lives Matter"  is a modern civil rights call of a kind, over half a century after Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech.  This call at this time indicates that we might need to be ever more attentive of unmet needs, caring of continued inequalities and vigilant about outstanding harms occurring within the very "American Dream" Americans have been creating since King.  

Her words caught my attention, especially:  unmet needs, continued inequalities, outstanding harms.  And then I found this music.


The album came from the fortuitous meetings of Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou and Jay-Marie Hill at Black Lives Matter protest in Cleveland.  Once they decided to collaborate musically, they wrote 11 songs in 6 days.  This is both "movement music" and "healing music" that deals with issues of equality for gender, sexuality, and race.  It also raises unmet needs, continued inequalities, and outstanding harms.

Worth a listen.  Worth a thought--what is there in our everyday lives that contributes to unmet needs, continued inequalities, and outstanding harms? How should we address these issues in our everyday lives?

Shall we sing?

Every Sunday, someone asks: "What are we singing today?" or some variation thereof.  We only seem to sing one song, and the songs are, well, weird.  At least, that's what I thought when I attended my first meeting of the Ethical Society of Austin, and everyone stood up to sing "Circles."  (No, I had never heard of Harry Chapin, and, yes, I know now that that is a major gap in my life.)  I was frankly a tad surprised to find out that we even had a songbook, apparently operating under the impression that humanists didn't have any music (like feminists don't have a sense of humor?).

Since then, my mind has been opened to a new world of music.  I have always loved music, both singing and listening, but I didn't always seem to pay attention to the lyrics (singers do not always enunciate, y'know).  While everyone else was hearing a message, I was hearing tone and rhythm.  Awkward.  Now, as never before, I look at the lyrics to hear the message as well as the melody.  Songs that I had listened to are now songs that I can sing.

It is also clearer to me why a constant thread in Felix Adler's Founding Address was music and its importance as an adjunct to our meetings,  He said that music would serve as "a pleasing and grateful auxiliary" to the lectures and would "elevate the heart and give rest to the feelings."  A little later in the Address, he speaks of the "public teacher," one who would be presenting one or more of these lectures:

And what he fails to express, what no language that was ever spoken on earth can express--those nameless yearnings of the soul for something better and happier far than aught we know of--Music will give them utterance and solve and soothe them.

Yea, verily!

My own musical history is somewhat complicated and probably irrelevant here, but I do need to say that the musical aspects of The Ethical Society of Austin do elevate my heart, do give utterance to my yearning for a better, happier world. When we sing "Ode to Joy," my cup runneth over.  I do think that Adler was personifying Music and thinking in broader terms than simple "messages," but I am content that beauty can also be practical (but doesn't have to be) and that a message can also come with a good tune (just enunciate, for garden seed!).

Meeting by conversation

One form of meeting for the Ethical Society of Austin is called a Colloquy.  This is an old Middle English word, more used in the 19th century than the current one.  It comes, of course, from a Latin word, colloquium.  In my mind, colloquium has a more academic feel; colloquy, apparently, has a more religious connotation.  Both words mean "conversation" (of the more formal sort), but each seems to have found its more favored niche of use.

In ESOA, the Colloquy is actually a formal conversation.  The format is deceptively relaxed, given the very defined structure under which the conversation occurs.  The moderator (these days that would be Adam Gravois) introduces the topic and lays down the ground rules.  This conversation involves, he always reminds us, our listening skills.  We are not to interrupt or respond to what is being said, although we may respond at the end of the session during the discussion period.  One person, any person who wants to volunteer, begins.  Then the person to his/her right speaks, following counterclockwise around the circle until everyone who wants to speak has had a turn.  At that point we take a moment to think about what has been said.  If there is time, we can all then discuss one point or another that has been raised in the circle, validating, expanding, countering.

In the loosest sense Colloquy might be considered, as it is in religious circles, to be a conversation regarding theological questions or to resolve religious doctrinal differences, but only in the sense that the concepts and ideals under consideration deal with some of our deepest values and are approached by each of us from a different perspective. Colloquy functions to direct our thinking on fundamental concepts--love, tolerance, success, family, etc.--so that we define, as we may not have before, the concept in our own lives at the same time we are allowed to hear how others define and experience the concept.  In the welcoming fellowship of ESOA, deep emotions and intimate secrets are sometimes shared, adding to the sense of community--even family--that the society provides for its members. While not the purpose of Colloquy, this latter function might be considered a benefit.

I do not know the history of Colloquy in ethical culture.  Felix Adler proposed that society meetings consist primarily of lecture.  This is in keeping, I think, with the times.  Pre-electronic, certainly.  But also toward the end of the lyceum movement, which, for a while, provided venues for adult education from various public speakers.  Rhetoric and oratory provided intellectual entertainment as well as education in nineteenth-century America, and "conversation" would likely have been less valued as a means to consider the High Ideas that Adler intended to be the focus of ethical culture.  The concept of colloquy was certainly available, but its then context--religious discussion, especially for resolution of doctrinal differences--may have made it seem inappropriate for someone who asserted the importance of "Deed before creed."

However formal conversation might have crept into the repertoire of meeting types for ESOA, it does seem an appropriate tool for getting to the core of our values and ideals.  In the days and sometimes weeks before a Colloquy, knowing the topic, the audience/participant is already thinking about the concept. Knowing that he/she will be called upon to speak--preferably briefly--in real terms as the topic relates to one's own experience--the audience/participant is already thinking of what to say.  That entails reexamination of the concept as an abstraction:  What does this word really mean?  Then one begins to recall, to think about, to experience once more the events and people who have been a part of one's life.  This can be painful.  My own comments in Colloquy are often prefaced by "I didn't want to come today," "I really hate this topic," "This is hard."  The abstraction of "family" may present itself as a Norman Rockwell painting in our minds, but the reality of our own lives may include death, divorce, anger, abdication of roles, neglect, abuse, money issues, distance (emotional and physical)--and on through the seemingly endless list of how birth families can become weapons of mental destruction.  Or, if we are lucky, we do find love, closeness, marriage (or remarriage), children (grands and greats as well), comfort, joy--and on through the happily endless list of how birth--and chosen--families can become treasures of great worth.  In this effort, we re-examine our lives through the lens of the Colloquy's topic to get at its meaning in  the reality that we live.

Once Colloquy begins, we listen carefully as our fellows talk.  We talk about tolerance (and intolerance) in terms of limits and focus, revealing to ourselves those points of friction in society that demand boundaries or deserve our forbearance or which are mere historical artifacts that need to pass away quickly. We talk about love in terms of its sources, its types, its quantity, its presence or absence and find for ourselves new understanding of the value of this emotion in our own lives.  We talk about success and find that common definitions may not suit us, may indeed harm us, and learn of more ethical ways to define success in our lives and our world.  In the Colloquy format, the audience/participant becomes the speaker, and it is the thinking of the audience/participant that is reflected in the conversation.  The group produces the outline (albeit unstructured) of talking points and draws its conclusions about the meanings presented.

The first ESOA meeting that I attended was a Colloquy on cycles.  I had never seen this type of meeting before, not as a means to enlightenment, but I do love to talk.  Listening was harder in that meeting, because I had to think of what I might say to all these strangers, right?  As the conversation moved around the circle, I learned a little bit about these very human humanists and saw that--just maybe--I might fit in.  I have great fondness for these Colloquies now.  Yes, they have made me feel closer to the others in the Society, something I cherish.  They also made me think about some really hard issues in a more thoughtful and systematic way.  And they still do.  Long after the initial conversation is over, I am more aware of these concepts, looking at them with new eyes, thanks in part to the perspectives gained from other participants in the conversation.