So here we are. Our computers still work. The world didn't end. The world's terrorists are waiting for another day. Until the day after we die, tomorrow will always come, just like this day before it did. Day after day, the world plays in traffic and we hope we don't get hit. A new millennium is here and almost none of us got hit. Is there a lesson here, a millennial lesson, something we didn't know before, but just learned, with a thousand balls dropping over twenty four hours to remind us of what we hope we yet might learn about life together on this planet?
Our second Lifecraft series begins a week from Thursday. Again we have a stunning group of speakers, each taking his or her area of specialization and asking, What's Next. From the electrifying Geoffrey Canada who will ask what's next for America's Inner Cities to Faye Wattleton on What's Next for American Women, from Floyd Abrams on First Amendment Rights and Frank Rich on American Politics, to Patrick Shea on the Environment and Jonathan Schell on the Fate of the Earth, some of our leading writers and thinkers will share their thoughts on the future in hope of provoking and shaping our own.
In this same spirit, and prompted by a request to offer my thoughts on world peace in the new millennium for a sermon collection to be published this spring, this morning I too shall be asking what's next? Since nothing happens in a vacuum, I shall begin by going back fifty years to the man whom I believe to be person of the last century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In his address to Congress on January 6, 1941, Roosevelt memorably and lastingly sketched out a global vision based on the attainment of four essential freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor-anywhere in the world....
This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is in our unity of purpose.
When Roosevelt finished dictating this passage, he invited comments from the staff members present in the Oval Office. Harry Hopkins, one of the president's principal advisors, questioned the phrase "everywhere in the world."
"That covers an awful lot of territory, Mr. President," he said. "I don't know how interested Americans are going to be in the people of Java."
Roosevelt's reply proved prescient. "I'm afraid they'll have to be some day, Harry. The world is getting so small that even the people in Java are getting to be our neighbors now."
In 1945, rising from the ashes of World War II, representatives from around the globe met in San Francisco to begin working on a charter for a new international peace organization, the United Nations. Among them was another famous liberal, Franklin Roosevelt's wife, Eleanor. Tireless champion for the poor during her husband's thirteen years as president, she went on to serve as a delegate to the United Nations, chaired its Human Rights Commission, and coauthored the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For her, the United Nations represented "the greatest hope for a peaceful world.... We must use all the knowledge we possess all the avenues for seeking agreement and international understanding not only for our own good, but for the good of all human beings."
Both a small and a large "d" Democrat, Eleanor Roosevelt also possessed a liberal Christian temperament. An Episcopalian in the tradition of George Washington, in following Jesus she centered her practical faith on the second great commandment, to love thy neighbor as thyself "Denominations mean little to me," she said in an interview shortly before she died. "If we pattern our lives on the life of Christ and sincerely try to follow His creed of compassion and love as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount we will find that sectarianism means less and less.... To me, the way your personal religion makes you live is the only thing that really matters." Her favorite passage in the Bible was I Corinthians ~3: "Now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three, but the greatest of these is charity."
Hard-headed pundits argue that one cannot cobble together a program for society on the basis of charity, compassion and neighborliness. They fail to notice one thing. The world is changing. Our founders' ideals, drawn from the scriptures and the laws of nature's God, are less fanciful today than ever before. Today, as Franklin Roosevelt predicted, we are challenged by a new paradigm, far more encompassing than that suggested by White House policy moguls. Its symbol is the shrinking globe. For the first time in history, all who live on mother earth are united in four ways.
We share a common nuclear threat, common environmental threat, global economy, and global communications system. One world is no longer only a vision; it is a reality.
The Chinese have an ideograph for the word crisis that might serve as the emblem for our time. It is comprised of two symbols, word-pictures for danger and opportunity. In the crisis we face today, everything we do has global consequence. If the danger is obvious, the opportunity for a new way of living together as kin is equally promising.
One cannot overemphasize the importance of this paradigm shift. Historically, certain basic tenants of liberalism, especially those with ethical connotations, have been dismissed as idealistic. This is true even of the liberalism of Jesus, who taught us to love our enemies and our neighbors as ourselves. Throughout history, the realist could have responded, and often has, with tough-minded and not completely inappropriate derision. For centuries, in political or societal terms, the practical translation of Jesus's saying, "If he asks for your cloak, give him your coat also," might well be, "If you let your enemy have an inch, he will take a mile, and soon your children will be in thralldom to him."
Such opinions are based on solid experience. Competitive virtues such as fortitude were initially not individual but community virtues. Valor in protecting one's family, tribe, or state from enemies across the river or across the world was essential for the survival of one's own people and culture. But today this same argument is rendered obsolete by the shift brought about by our shrinking globe. Whether one is speaking of war or the environment, to protect our families we must now struggle to protect our erstwhile enemies' families as well.
The old idealism is therefore the new realism. The new idealist dreams about Star Wars deterrence, indulges in nostalgia for the 1950s, carps about the dangers of letting down our guard, and fights to lower taxes regardless of the long term cost to society. The new realist is busy painting out the boundaries between peoples, investing in the next generation, caring for the environment and beating swords into plowshares.
The new realist knows that today our own survival depends on our neighbors' survival. In a nuclear age, where global war is murder-suicide or genocide, the only way to win is not to war with one another. With a global environmental threat, none of us has discrete backyards any longer. Every person on this planet is in jeopardy, whether it be us, the Russians, or the Brazilians who are despoiling the environment. And, with the advent of a global economy, we are not strengthened but rather threatened by our neighbors' economic insecurity. For the first time in history, a market crash halfway around the world is like a tsunami, a great tidal wave that will surely come crashing down on our own shore.
In response to today's global realities, the old nationalism is beginning to yield to a new ethic, championed by,,Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and perhaps best expressed and understood by some contemporary feminists. It is a nurturing ethic based on the family model. Competition is replaced by cooperation, and hierarchical structures are supplanted by relational ones. The new ethic has as its cornerstone not the individual, sovereign and free, but rather the community.
In both geopolitical and national terms, to emphasize individual liberties at the expense of social relationships is increasingly dysfunctional. Our own freedom and liberty depend existentially and ontolozically on justice being done for and shared with as many others as possible, regardless of politics, or ethnic background. Not that we should sacrifice personal liberty; we should simply modulate it in such a way that our neighbors too are served. We must move from a foundation of atomic individualism to one of community and love.
With a global economy, global nuclear and environmental threat, global communications system, and the attendant breakdown of false barriers separating people from one another, today the old I win/you lose, tribal or individualistic model is dysfunctional, if not obsolete. A new model, based on the family and therefore especially familiar to women, suggests new metaphors for meaning: the earth as organism, the interdependent web, the kinship of all life. These metaphors are far more faithful to contemporary reality than the old, with God the Father, Lord, and ~ undergirding the patriarchy and invoked by priest and ruler alike to justify the hierarchical structures and competitive systems that sustain it.
In her modern classic, In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan defines community according to an "ethic of care."The concept of identity expands to include the experience of interconnection. The moral domain is similarly enlarged by the inclusion of responsibility and care in relationships. And the underlying epistemology correspondingly shifts from the Greek ideal of knowledge as a correspondence between mind and form to the biblical conception of knowing as a process of human relationship.
Biblically inspired and family-based, Gilligan's model for community offers a redemptive new metaphor for contemporary liberals. Those who speak in Gilligan's "different voice" form the potential vanguard of a new world, not a brave new world but a more compassionate one. Challenging the rough and tumble lift-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstrap ethic, they shift our attention from the atomic individual to the community of individuals, people who share common needs that can be fulfilled only through mutual nurture and support. To suggest that such a world could ever be born may seem utopian. We have a terrible time living with our neighbors' differences, whether of color, nationality, or faith. But that takes nothing away from the truth, even the practicality of such ideals. If we possess an instinct for survival, such tonics as relationship, nurturance, and mutual respect contain saving power.
Think of it in terms of enlightened self-interest. Once neighborhoods were insulated and prejudices functional for societal bonding. Today we are thrown, in all our glorious and troublesome diversity, into one another's backyards. We can attempt to convert or subdue our neighbors by imposing a dominant set of values, but this form of cultural or religious imperialism invites its own whiplash. As the world shrinks and populations mix, traditional world views, whether sponsored by the white men who brought us Western culture or the mullahs who wield the sword of Allah, will only continue to dominate at everyone's peril, including their own. In a pluralistic world, the fundamentalist or idealogue will either go the way of the dinosaur, or bring down himself as he brings down his neighbor. Though our penchant for division, tension, and destruction is manifested daily, if we possess an instinct for survival, over time we shall adapt to these new realities.
Reviving liberal values proves essential today for another reason. The world may be shrinking, but we will never be clones of one another. We can build community only by respecting differences, sometimes major differences. This means educating ourselves in the ways, traditions, and cultures of the other, who lives no longer across the world but right next door. It also means changing the way we live with and listen to one another, not as competing families but as members of a single, fascinating family containing a myriad of hues, customs, and beliefs.
This is not abdication. It is the promised realization of principles on which this liberal democracy was founded, principles inspired by the spirit of the scriptures and read in the text of creation. All are created equal, not alike but equal. All have certain inalienable rights. Among the freedoms we most avidly protect are the freedoms of religion and speech. And the only way to ensure our own liberty is to protect the liberty of our neighbor as well. In a pluralistic world, that means respecting, even honoring differences.
Perhaps the most powerful image suggesting interdependence and the kinship of all life is captured in that picture from space of the earth, blue-green and marbled with clouds, rising over the moon's horizon. This image is reinforced daily, as we become more cognizant of our inter dependencies. Each part, every individual, faith, color, and nationality is distinct, but one mother holds us all to her bosom, giving us life, providing us a home.
As Shug says of God in Alice Walker's The Color Purple, "My first step away from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. "What's next? Ideally this. We don't have to create it from nothing. In fact, .In America we have a name for it : E pluribus unum, out of many, one. It's a liberal epiphany Amen I love you. May God bless us - each and every one. Copyright AllSouls 2000.