Freedom and Speech

There is an utterly silent but totally effective power by which alone a nation finds redemption.

Two Washington Post editorials on October 29th, one by Dana Milbank and one by Huge Hewitt nicely capture the dilemma currently at the heart of our nation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/?nid=top_nav_opinions&utm_term=.890704dbf1fe.

On one hand there is surely a link between accepting anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews and violence against Jews. On the other hand it isn't a strict causal link. America is full of anti-Semites. I know quite a few. But they would never murder anyone. And America is full of haters - and again at least some appear on my Facebook pages. But they aren't mass murderers. I know lots of people that deplore Ted Cruz, I'm one of them, but I came into the same room I'd just ignore him.

(This is best with any politician. Their egos feed on notoriety, so calling attention to them, even making their lives miserable, just throws gasoline on the fire of their egos. They'll be the first to tweet what happened in happy self-satisfaction while the votes and donations keep rolling in. The problem with the Maxine Waters strategy isn't merely that it degrades political discourse, it's fundamentally ineffective as a political maneuver. The only way to hurt politicians is to vote against them. Otherwise they only care if you spell their name right.)

Mass murder is a lot like forest fires. 99.9% of the time the hot exhaust pipe, the dropped cigarette, the flying ember from a campfire just cool down and burn out. It's the .001% of the time when they just catch the dried leaves that they cause the conflagration.

With some of these correlations between constant causes and rare effects there are individual causes we can legislate. Take our various smoking bans, or those related to food additives. But when it comes to speech the problem is tricky: 1. because we believe that freedom of speech is of such superlative value that only a direct and demonstrable cause of violence justifies curtailing it. 2. And because we still live in the macho fantasy of "sticks and stone may break my bones but words will never hurt me." The first provides a legitimate reason to be wary of restricting speech. The second simply provides verbal bullies an excuse to blame those whom they harm for being hurt.

As an American society we still haven't negotiated between the reason for free speech and the excuses for its abuse. And the only way that we can negotiate between these two is to so marginalize hateful speech in the public realm that no politician would dare use it. But we don't.

A significant portion of the American public across the political spectrum not only embraces hateful speech it valorizes it, seeing it as a way of speaking "truth to power." And as listeners when we are confronted with hateful language we double down on the power of hate by posting and reposting words we ourselves would never say. Does it all seem a little vicious? We cheapen the value of free speech by dismissing those who name the viciousness as PC whimps and snowflakes. "Sticks and stones" we chant like 5 year olds, "if you can't stand the heat. . . " we sing.

Whether its the mockery of religion by Bill Maher and the late night comedy shows, or the Islamophobic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of the alt-Right we've become a nation of exorcists: shouting out the religious demons we think we see in public life and public persons while our supporters stand by and applaud our performance with shouts of "Amen!"

I'll let you in on a secret. The demons aren't out there. Not out there beyond our borders and not out their among our political opponents. They aren't out there in the political parties or out there in the politicians, or the media.

The demons are within us. We are a nation of the demon possessed. We can shout our mockery and curses and our condemnations at others all we want, but the demon simply burrows deeper into our hearts. It feeds on our anger and outrage and grows with our curses and our taunts. And if we think that we personally, because of our righteousness or our innocence, are not possessed then we are fools. Neither Sin nor Satan have a political ideology: they will possess any who live by anger, arrogance, or hate and draw them toward their doom. And they love to chant, "and words will never hurt me."

It may be, of course, that our nation can limp forward, muttering its curses under its breath with each labored step, while its relative freedom of religion is merely damaged but not destroyed by its freedom of speech. But not as long as we hold on to the fantasy of sticks and stones. That fantasy will destroy us as those with bigger verbal sticks and harder verbal stones gradually take over our society, and having subverted the freedom at the root of our freedom destroy the freedoms that are left.

Or we could vote them out of office, using that utterly silent but totally effective power by which alone a nation finds redemption.

Religious Freedom

Opening and Closing Remarks to the First DFW Summit on Religious Freedom

We live in society more diverse and complex than was imagined by the founders of the United States. And this isn’t just a matter of demographics over the entire nation. We each personally experience this diversity and complexity in what appear to be ever accelerating forms. Moreover this experience is becoming a global human experience. Almost no one in the world lives in a monoculture any more.

It's worth thinking about this diversity as it is manifest in the public spaces in the United States.

• First there is greater ethnic diversity than ever, and it is more and more evident in the public space. 
• There is more religious diversity than ever, and it is more and more evident in our shared public spaces. 
• There is more ideological diversity that we have known, with the traditional binary of conservative and liberal being fragmented into different groupings that only partially claim or own the legacy of those names. 
• And finally there are new forms of diversity as humans re-imagine what it means to be human. Most notably the sexual differentiation of male and female is being reimagined in terms not just of sex, but gender and sexuality as well. So that individuals may identify Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, Trans-sexual, Queer, Twin-Spirited and other. 

This last form of diversity reminds us that in our post-enlightenment culture the centuries-long consensus in the West of a divinely mandated order bound by golden chains beneath God’s feet has been largely obliterated by the reality of cultural difference. The imago Dei is contested in both its meaning and substance.

One may wish to blame the rise of materialism and science for this, but the critiques of the Western conception of humanity and thus human diversity would as inevitably come from the Islamic world, or the world of Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and various forms of animist thought. What Christians have thought to be foundational to civilization itself is really just one possibility for organizing concepts of the human person in what may be not so much civilization as an unusually well-armed and organized barbarism. 

This diversity of diversities brings forth new religious options, and new ways of being religious. And all of those who adopt these options wish to exercise their freedom to express their particular religious beliefs and ethical mandates in public along side the older more recognized forms of religion. 

This means that we live in a period of constant negotiation between conflicting narratives of religious expression, and conflicting narratives between religious expression and public rights. And importantly, we live in an era in which governments at every level are called upon to mediate these conflicts. 

And so we call upon the establishment clause of the 1st Amendment for guidance in law, and ultimately as the arbiter in disputes. And that is why we need to talk to one another. All social progress depends on dialogue between competing understandings of the common basis of our social imagination. The greatest danger we face is any effort to delegitimize voices in our public discourse, to push anyone away from the tables at which we negotiate our future. 

Perhaps that is why right after the 1st Amendment restricts Congress from prohibiting the free exercise of religion, the 1st Amendment forbids Congress from prohibiting freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. We are here in Southern Methodist University because SMU understands its mission is to uphold those freedoms the responsibility they entails. 

Closing Remarks:

After a full day of workshops, speakers and panels it is becoming clear that the foundational documents (the US Constitution in this case) have their own foundations. What lies beneath our constitution are sets of ideas more complex that we usually realize.

So when you have a dispute over what it means to be human in society, and which rights adhere to our humanity the question arises: who decides and what basis? 

The Enlightenment basis of the US Constitution understood what it meant to be human largely on the basis of the Jewish and Christian traditions laid over those of Greek and Roman philosophy. This logically followed the Renaissance of classical learning that helped spur the Enlightenment. A brief quote from the US Declaration of Independence shows this.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.  

Let’s begin with the final line fo the first paragraph, “A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires. . . “ This is a statement thoroughly rooted in the Enlightenment ideal of rational discourse as the basis of human decision making. Individuals and societies do not undertake to act without having and declaring their rational reasons for doing so. To fail to do so is indecent, an offense against humanity and the human mind. 

In the preceding line we can see how the classical Enlightenment understanding of humans is built on the Western theistic tradition. It refers to "The Laws of Nature and Nature’s God" as if they are indivisible, which seems only logical. Yet it is now contested. 

The Enlightenment opened the door to a new way of understanding what it means to be human, one based on the scientific exploration of what it means to be human. And that exploration, in order to realize its own integrity and freedom, disestablished nature's law from any purported lawmaker. And with this we find the rise of evolutionary, biological, medical, anthropological, sociological, and psychological definitions of what it means to be human that are not only incompatible with those of the Western Theistic tradition, but deny its relevance entirely. There is only nature, no God. 

But there is something else implicit in these short paragraphs. The Enlightenment pushed us toward concepts of human persons as free to choose their own company and destiny. They may dissolve political bonds and forge new ones with the blessing of Nature’s law and even God. But there is more than that to their autonomy. It is personal, all are equal and endowed with inalienable rights. The new citizens of the United States were no longer tied to their old hierachires, the old-world ethnic identities, clans, and religions. They could choose their personal identity and the social groups they wished to relate to. Eventually they would claim the right to choose their own sex and sexuality as well as to upend all established views of gender. As they continue to do. 

So as we discuss religious freedom we do so in an American culture that accepts three different authoritative basis for understanding the human person: 1. the classical Western tradition, 2. science, and 3. individual choice. And these three both assert themselves, are called upon in public debate, and come into conflict in our time. And all three are in fact being continuously re-negotiated. We don't agree with our founding fathers about what Scripture teaches about human nature. Science has and is changing continuously with regard to its normative understanding of the human. And even what it means to be an individual is in question as we try to understand ourselves as essentially social beings.

What we do not have is a social consensus expressed in legislation regarding the relative values for decision making of these three independent authorities. And given that, we rightly suspect that the courts that ultimately arbitrate real cases may be more influenced by the ideological commitments of the judges than existing laws.   

But if this creates conflicts, some of which Judge Starr referred to in his lecture at lunch, it also creates the demand that we continue to talk together and work together. Because only through dialogue that we reach a consensus on what is essential to our humanity, and thus the meaning of human freedom and human dignity. 

Our American English language is promiscuous to a superlative degree. As we have interacted with new and different cultures over centuries our language has continuously become enriched with new ideas and re-constructions of the world. We aren’t unique in this regard. The most basic of human actions is speech, and since the dawn of humanity we humans have spoken with one another until a common language emerges. I’ve seen this first hand as children in my granddaughter’s preschool, who speak German, English, Turkish, and Chinese at home manage quite nicely to work out how they can both communicate and work together. You can see this process in where youth gather in Europe mixing English with German, Spanish, French, and different Slavic languages. The idea of linguistic purity is as nonsensical as that of racial purity. That which humans universally can do they will universally do with one another; whether it is speak or procreate. 

To create new languages that better express a shared experience than any one older language is our greatest gift. But it only comes to us through speaking to and listening to one another across cultural, linguistic, and experiential boundaries. And more, it almost always comes about in face to face engagement that allows the full richness of our abilities to express ourselves. 

And that is why, to repeat, we are here in a university, have been here today, and will come back. Because our university is dedicated to that process of creating the language by which the Americans of the 21st century will understand themselves as humans together, and continue to defend their freedom of religion.

The Proper Product of Humans is Humanity

The most important story of humanity up to the present day has been the story of socialization; humans creating ever larger and more complex societies. 

Social anthropologists, historians, psychologists, sociologists, and economists may study this process from many perspectives, but the underlying object of study is the same: the long and continuing emergence of the humans as a social creatures in the widest sense. The emergence of humanity.

There is another perspective, however, one that emerges in the modern era and is closely linked to the self-understandings of modern humans. This perspective understands humans primarily in terms of production and consumption of things. Humans are tool makers, makers of art, makers of ritual, and builders of villages, towns, and cities. And they are consumers of the same.

This focus on production and consumption can lead us to forget that production initially served only one human purpose: the creation of societies. The earliest tools were used not merely to obtain food, but to obtain enough food to share. Plastic arts, rituals, stories, and the earliest shelters were all produced to draw people together even as they provided the means for doing so. Even weapons and war were products with the distinct purpose of protecting or allowing for the expansion of societies; and were often a direct means to the end of creating stronger social bonds.

The rise of the industrial age has obscured the relationship between production and the creation of the social human, or properly humanization and thus humanity. As production reaches new levels of sophistication individual products become less directly related to human uses, much less socializing uses. The final assembly of a automobile or a mobile phone both uses and obscures tens of thousands of component products with no apparent relationship to humans or humanity. And it obscures the fundamental purpose of both for communication between humans. 

An almost inevitable result is that more and more humans, perhaps the vast majority, are valued and value themselves not as producers of humanity, but as producers and consumers of artifacts. Add to this the fact that our products, which should serve to allow us the leisure for greater and greater human interaction, also provide the means for greater and greater isolation and we have the phenomenon of humans products implicitly supporting and even forming anti-social, anti-humans.

For those of us who are religious, that includes our products. The ritual worship we produce and the teaching we offer doesn’t necessarily support the creation of greater and more expansive societies and the deeper and deeper humanity of those within them. It can as easily reinforce tribal and even clan structures, or even (as it often does) isolate humans from their fellow humans - particularly when the focus is on personal salvation and personal success. 

My notes above clearly offer a way of attaching value to those things we humans produce: they have value only so long as they humanize. But such valuation and re-evaluation isn’t our greatest challenge. We are quickly coming to a time when more and more of what humans produce will be produced by machines. And I don’t just mean the things humans produce, although in that realm alone the dislocation humans as producers will be vast. 

Take a typical artistic product, something we humans believe is pretty exclusively our realm. 

This last few months I decided to produce a series of educational videos. In the old days of just a few years ago I could hardly have produced anything worthwhile on my own. Even if I possessed a video camera the process of editing, copying, and distributing video involved a host of professional video producers; each an artist with their own expertise. It would have been impossible without a community.

But last week I recorded my lectures, by myself, with two cameras (and two perspectives) in front of a green screen, using a teleprompter and with three studio lights. Old fashioned increases in theproduction of things, largely created by eliminating human workers and using automation, made the equipment available to me for less than $500.00. And instead of a human community, the final video could be created on my computer using smart technology that replaces, or allows me to replace, all of those artists who would have edited, color balanced, audio balanced, created backdrops and sets, etc.

Of course the final product lacked something. It was acceptable, but missed what is inevitably added by community. Its easy to forget there would be no Picasso without Paris, no Van Gough without Arles, no Rembrandt without Leiden. 

But most of us aren't them. So what about replacing me? Almost trivial given my acting skills. Computer programs exist already that could have created a digital lecturer giving my lectures in a digitally created environment. They are expensive now but they won’t be in the future. And writing the lecture? Without doubt computer algorithms are already absorbing everything written on religion into vast data banks and will be able to create not only sensible but even brilliant lectures. 

So if I value myself as a producer of lectures apart from the learning community that gathers around them,  then mine is a rapidly diminishing value. 

Do you value yourself as a salesperson? You are already being replaced by an algorithm that specifies where a computer will place products in a digital world, or a robot in a de-humanized store. 

Do you value yourself as a politician? Get serious. At any level above city councilman you could be replaced by a sophisticated Max Headroom whose image is entirely the product of marketing surveys. And those marketing surveys are increasingly surveys of digitally reproduced and refined versions of imagined humans. Why do you think a poll of only 1200 people can be accurate within 5%? Because a smart machine recreates an entire population of voters with its algorithms. And like you, but more efficiently and with no feelings of remorse or ethical distractions, Max would also vote for whatever attracts donors and insures reelection. 

Do you value yourself as a voter? A decider? Without a community of diverse humans and their views and interests you are a puppet of machine-driven marketing algorithms that know your habits and desires better than you know them yourself.  

And you marketers? Yeah, you are gone too. The focus group of the future will be an artificial intelligence evaluating the interactions of algorithms representing market segments and determining which product most appeals to them. And the product will be designed by a computer that observes consumption trends, analyzes them, and proposes new products. 

No matter what you produce, if you derive your value from production of things you are doomed to be valueless in the coming age of smart machines. With one exception, and only one exception. 

The only way to produce human society and thus full humans is through human interaction and relationships. Our true human value is manifest when we come together we make one another into a community, a society. These relationships may be mediated by things we produce - all forms of art, ritual, religion, teaching, therapy, and media come to mind. Yet the value of those things is derivative of and directly linked to our human engagement with each other. Producing things has human value only in so far as they are useful in the work of creating humanity.

And the corollary, the use of products has value only when they are used in the work of humanization. 

The reader can imagine the revolution in economics that is coming when most of us have no work producing things and all human activity must be re-valued. We will either begin to offer compensation to the humanizing, but largely uncompensated tasks now done by volunteers in their spare time, or have most of the population living idly on the dole. 

We will either begin to offer compensation for the kind of art that humanizes or see it disappear while smart machines create all the decorations and entertainment we could possibly want. 

We’ll either recognize that every human person has the capacity to humanize the rest of us, even if only by the demand on us to be humane. Because if we evaluate those who cannot efficiently produce stuff as worthless we will very soon join them in being worthless. 

Doctors, lawyers, politicians, computer programmers, CEO’s, CFO’s, pundits, and academics. All you thinkers. Do you think you are on the right side of Ayn Rand’s objectivist political philosophy? Well in the future you’ll just be a second-hander like everyone else because machines will out-think you. 

Schools and universities? We’ll either turn away from training producers of products back to the study of, and work producing, humans in human societies or we’ll be rendered irrelevant. We’ll either create humanizing communities around service, learning, and the arts or we’ll be rendered irrelevant. We’ll either serve the human task of producing humanity or we’ll disappear.

And the church? We are not immune. Many of our pastors and much of our worship will be replaced by computer algorithms and intelligently created animations. After all, a pastor who knows only a tiny fraction of the congregation face to face, and who is known only through an image on a screen will be as easily replaceable by an advanced Max H. 

The best worship leadership in the world, from choir and organ to praise band and laser light show, detached as they usually are from their audiences, will soon be created and streamed by smart machines. Indeed, most of the music coming from the major Christian publishing houses is so formulaic as to almost demand automation, and the look and feel across thousands of churches varies so little as to be negligible. 

Its easy to imagine a future where Pandora or Spotify will deliver to thousands of churches 3-D holographic worship leadership tweaked to the personal preference of the worship committee - assuming the committee isn’t replaced by careful surveys of congregational taste created for and evaluated by smart machines to maximize attendance and giving. 

The reality is that offering motivational entertainment for a market share already drawn to the higher production values of Hollywood will be literally worthless. The Christian church will either create community and foster humanity or have no value. It will be entirely our choice. Because the only proper product of humans is humanity. 

And the Gospel? The story of God’s love for the world is the greatest humanizing story ever told. But only when it is delivered in person. And that is the future of the church, or it has no future.

We are not Freaks

This weekend I was in a different city, and spent my usual time walking in a mall, because of rain. The community I encountered was ethnically diverse, and as is often the case in malls, represented a fair cross section of class, physical ability, and even degrees and types of aging. When you have a Target, a Nordstroms, and a movie theater opposite a major hospital complex all kinds of people are there.

All kinds of very normal people. People like all the people I meet on the university campus where I work, at the church where I worship, and the boat club where I waste my time. Or engage in worthwhile recreation as you wish.

I didn’t meet a single freak. I don’t think I’ve ever met a freak.

But when I turn on the TV, or read the Washington Post, or the Dallas Morning News, or look at Facebook I see freaks. Pop-eyed men and women with contorted faces. Red-faced bawlers, robo-cops with steel covered faces, bizarre avatars, shadows branded by political tattoos, distorted limbs carrying hollow cheeks with hollow stares. Hour after hour, page after page of freaks. Right wing freaks, left wing freaks, conservative freaks, progressive freaks, evangelical freaks, Pentecostal freaks, freaks in clerical collars, freaks in suits, freaks in haute couture, freaks in kitchens. Supermodel freaks, super ugly freaks. But still freaks.

All the normal people I meet every day never seem to be make it to either the major media outlets or even their alternative doppelgängers. All those people in the malls, the churches, the clubs, the civic service groups, the schools: they don’t seem to make the news or social media reposts. Or maybe its just that face to face no human is a freak.

Now its easy to blame the media for this, accusing them of running a freak show. But they wouldn’t run the freak show if we didn’t line up to step inside the tent. And at least on social media we, the facebookers, instagramers, tweeters, whatsappers are running the show.

Its an interesting question why we want to represent ourselves as Americans to ourselves as Americans this way. Why, given our vast normalcy, normalcy in many shapes and forms and interests and loves and fears for sure, but still normal, do we focus on the extremists and the extreme moments?

Part of this may be human nature. We have evolved to notice extremes because this is where danger and need are greatest. Turn someone into a freak and it gets our attention, like violence, and thus draws us in to the places where products are being sold.

But Christian preachers have played their own role. I was raised on gospel preaching that consistently raised the emotional temperature by calling on the human extremes. It reveled in the conversion of murderers, adulterers, drug addicts, and gang members. It rejoiced in the pathos when the physically disabled were displayed for healing. The spectacle of tortured souls in hell, twisted with their well-deserved pain was always on call as a warning to the unrepentant, as were vividly described scenes of a violent and sudden death that might transport even the youngest straight to those fires.

And I was raised in the Methodist and then UMC. But in the South that old time religion, that feeling-fueled effort to get an equally emotional response, was everywhere, including Methodist churches.

Preaching, especially revival preaching was frequently its own kind of freak show. And it helped create, maybe still creates, the cultural taste for freaks that the media feeds. Certainly it validates it.

Its time for Christians to put a stop to that, indeed to resist from all sides the media/social media freak show. I’ve started in my own little way. Does the TV news lead with a freak? I turn it off. Does someone repost a freak on facebook? I turn them off (30 days first, then permanently). Does the Post, or the Times, or the DMN show humans contorted with outrage or anguish or grief? I skip to the next story. I don’t need bludgeoned in order to know that there are injustices to be righted and hearts to be healed. People don't need to be displayed as freaks for us to get it. They don't need to be dehumanized to inspire us to be humane.

And then I walk out of my house, out of my office, out of my car and look around at the mall, the church, the scout troop, the boat club, the library.

Because that is where we are and who we are.

Recently I’ve been block-walking to get out the vote for local political candidate. Made me nervous because I’ve heard so much about our “highly charged” political environment. But guess what? I've now talked to more than 100 people, and knocked on way more doors. I meet some supporters of my candidate. I meet a few who support the other guy. No one has shouted at me, yelled obscenities, or even objected to my knocking at their door. Last week three supporters of our opponent thanked me for my service to democracy.

We are not freaks.