An email went out a few days ago from our sister Georgia Mountains congregation letting other Unitarian universals know that they had organized a reading of the entire United States Constitution and its 27 amendments during the annual Fourth of July festivities in the Dahlonega Square. How many of you have been to Dahlonega? Flags up 365 days a year. To be precise, it was to be conducted on the west side of the gold museum as Dahlonega was the site of the very first gold rush in this country in 1839.
The main body would be read right after the traditional patriotic ceremony ended with a break in the reading for the annual Independence Day Parade. This UU congregation in the tiny town 60 miles north of us is home to Georgia’s military college and an army ranger training camp.
So they prominently emphasized in their publicity the fact that all members of the armed forces take a solemn pledge to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, creating in the words of the church president, palpable excitement in the community. The Constitution plus the amendments, all 27 amendments, would be read by 25 members from the surrounding community, some who signed up in advance and others who they hoped would sign up on the spot.
The president of the UU congregation would be the emcee and lead off the reading dressed in an Uncle Sam suit. The mayor, the chairman of the county commission, and the local Georgia state representative would also be featured. 180 pocket copies would be handed out to the audience so they could read along, either out loud or silently. We are presenting this within the context of the fifth UU principle, and which is? The notion of democracy in our congregations and in the nation at world at large, the president told me, in order to share some of our core liberal religious values with the community, I expect, he added, that this will be our congregation’s major recurring social action event of every year. How remarkable, I thought, to be carving out some very public time in the midst of what has become like Memorial Day, just another three or four day weekend and corporate barbecue, to focus attention, to actively lift up our foundational American documents, though not the Declaration of Independence, whose date of publication was actually being celebrated, to be reminded of the rational thoughtfulness, the intellectual heritage of the founders of this American nation, more than half of whom were college educated or, like Benjamin Franklin, self-educated, world renowned scholars, whose research for this document drew on many books, including a shipment of books from France, founders whose work was done in the shadow of what has been called the second great awakening, the struggle between a liberal religious and free thinking world view that embraced new secular knowledge and which valued even revered reason, and a rigid strain of American faith and culture, an emotional fundamentalism that looked backwards to biblically grounded certainties. These men created the documents and underpinnings of our American democracy against the backdrop of what has been called a permanent national fault line over not only religious belief, but what is the ultimate source of truth. This fault line that has continued to this day, one side calling the other blindly faithful, the other rational infidels, and you can decide which line you’re on. How slyly courageous to put on this very public event in a religiously and politically conservative corner of our state, especially in light of the policies and behaviors put forth by the current federal administration, highlighted in a half-page ad in the New York Times the day before the July 4th holiday by the People’s Campaign for the Constitution, who cite egregious violations of the letter and spirit of our foundational principles, arbitrary usurptions of power, suspension of laws and treaties against torture, and the imprisonment of thousands of lawful immigrants without charges, calling upon Congress, the courts, and the press to reassert their constitutional functions and restore the promise that was and is America. Hear, hear. How appropriate, how very unitarian to have a great deal of faith, as one of our former ministers here at UUCA, David Rankin, has suggested, in the guidance of reason and conscience, faith in the power of intellect and the necessity of using it if this country is going to survive at all and survive in dignity. After all, Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence and one of the drafters of the Constitution, and at least claimed by us as a Unitarian, wrote towards the end of his life that if a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. Or Ralph Waldo Emerson, transcendentalist and one-time Unitarian minister, whose Phi Beta Kappa Day address before new graduates of Harvard College in 1837 was a bluntly scathing description of what he saw as the overwhelming disinterest in original thought in 19th century America. His indictment was not only aimed at the privileged scholars who stood before him, but to the broader public as well. The mind of this country, he declared, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. I want to say that one again. The mind of this country, he declared, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. The study of letters, he told the students, shall no longer be a name for pity, for doubt, and sensory indulgence.
A nation of men will, for the first time, he said, truly exist because each believes himself inspired by the divine soul, which also inspires all men, responsible, each one of us, for self-cultivation, for study, for engagement in the civic life, and for using reason and pursuing rationality. This, in light of surveys recently conducted by the National Constitution Center that while Americans still hold the Constitution in high esteem, they are essentially unaware of its contents. Young people, I hate to say more so than their parents and grandparents, asked whether they could recall any of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, the majority could only name freedom of speech. Less than half named freedom of religion. One out of three remembered freedom of the press.
Forty-two percent think that the Constitution states that the first language of the United States is English, and a quarter, it’s sad, and a quarter that Christianity was established in the Constitution as the official government faith. As columnist Bob Herbert has labeled this collective ignorance, we are clueless in America. I so wanted then to be there, to participate in this reading of our Constitution in the square, by a tiny band of our fellow Unitarian Universalists, to hear others, to observe whether the weekend tourists who come to pan for a little bit of gold and browse in the quaint shops that ring the square, or the town folk who like town folk all over America on the Fourth of July, gather to eat grilled burgers and watermelon, would actually stop and listen, become engaged, or would they walk by?
My curiosity and the compelling call to social action and solidarity were outweighed by considerations familiar to many of us these days. The cost of gasoline, the hesitation, especially in light of our Care of Earth initiative, to not make unnecessary carbon footprints, and then honestly the desire to stay closer to home, attend a block party in my own neighborhood, and relax a little on a holiday. There was, however, mentioned in the email, a reference to a website, www.dalanaga.org, where more details were promised. Given the sophisticated and omnipresent use of internet technology at our own UU General Assembly recently in Fort Lauderdale, I was at least half expecting to find a way to stream the public reading in real time, or at least view rapidly uploaded digital photos, or scan a sprightly blog with snippets of commentary.
Surely, in other words, there would be a way to Google my way into this experience without actually being there. After all, after all, what I found when I clicked on the site was a calendar of events. In this case, I could not substitute cyberspace connection for actual physical presence. The information highway bypassed this small gathering in a small town in Georgia on the 4th of July, so I was unable to power browse to get what writer Nicholas Carr has identified as the quick win, the nearly effortless efficiency and immediacy of information, and even experiences navigated through internet search engines, ways of learning and being in the world that are rapidly becoming the primary means, not just an occasional substitute, for other channels of inquiry and encounter.
“Is Google making us stupid?” he asked, in an article promoted on the front cover of the most recent Atlantic magazine, its annual ideas issue. What in fact is the internet doing to our brains? Remember how? What is it doing indeed to our faculties of reason and conscience and to the notion of conversation and democratic dialogue in the public square?
Are we becoming literally incapable of leisure reading, slow and concentrated thought, and complex introspection previously thought of as essential to real insight and genuine wisdom? Are we aware that we are living in the age of American unreason? is the proposition by and title of a recent book by author Susan Jacobi, who calls herself a cultural conservationist, someone concerned with saving society from destructive influences and preserving life and health in the face of an escalating erosion of civic literacy and growth industry in what she calls junk thought. She worries, and she worries a lot in this book, that we are a country adrift in willful and even arrogant anti-intellectualism, living in a culture of distraction, buoyed in part by dependence on the internet and its infotainment and the videozation, as she puts it, of virtually everything. She is convinced that America’s tendency to what she calls semi-conscious anti-rationalism is feeding on and being fed by what she describes as an ignorant popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic.
These two very alarmed writers about American culture are joined by Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English here at Emory University and the former director of research and analysis for the National Endowment for the Arts, who argues that we have raised up the dumbest generation. Adolescents and young adults who, despite more schooling, more money, more leisure time and more news and information than previous generations, spend most of their time downloading and uploading, posting, chatting, networking, watching television and playing video games two to four hours every day. What they don’t do, he maintains, is read, even online, follow politics, maintain a brisk work ethic or vote regularly. He doesn’t mean to say that today’s young people are natively less intelligent. I’m going to say it again.
He doesn’t mean to say they are natively less intelligent. They are, however, he believes, stupefied by digital technology. If they don’t change, he charges, they will be remembered as the fortunate ones who lost our great American heritage forever. These are bold and bordering on curmudgeonly allegations put forth in at least two out of three instances by baby boomers at various ends of our generation spectrum, but not exclusively for the eyes and ears of the generation younger than us. I admit that I find myself reactively bristling at the notion that uniformly media, especially mass media, including the internet, is to be held so hugely responsible for what is being called the dumbing down of America. As a former reporter, commentator, critic, and enthusiastic partaker of popular culture who watches American Idol regularly, as someone who has taken delight in the knowledge economy that has grown up in my lifetime, browsing, chatting, even buying and renting things, books from Amazon.com, vintage movies from Netflix, I found myself pushing back and pushing back hard on these notions, pushing back on the premise that the advantages and growth in media have not only bypassed or disengaged us from intellectual progress, but perhaps have hindered it, that the internet has not imparted adult knowledge and information to the next generation, but in fact has crowded it out, that video games and cell phones and blogs don’t foster right citizenship, they hamper it. What these authors all most worry about is what Mark Bauerlein declares as a brazen disregard of books and learning, what Susan Jacobi mourns as an epidemic alliterateness, what Nicholas Carr, the mildest of the three, points out as the troubling inability to really immerse himself in a book or lengthy article. The potential loss of quiet spaces of what he calls the intellectual vibrations, words set off in our own minds if we give them the chance, the deep reading that is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
What one essayist described as the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the instantly available, the loss perhaps of what we once called full consciousness and conscience. Has this technology that has been a godsend to so many of us, shaving hours off research time, reading and writing emails, connecting us to our friends and our loved ones and our colleagues all over the world, watching videos, listening to podcasts or as one writer put it, just tripping from link to link, been a bargain with the secular devil? Is the way we think actually changing from the capacity to make rich mental connections to becoming only efficient decoders of information, largely disconnected and disengaged? Has it with the exception of a few hugely popular books like the Harry Potter series? Perhaps I am like so many of us in a state of defensive denial, but as far though so far I am not convinced that it is an either or predicament, either engaging in the E-world with its innovations and possibilities, that’s one thing, or preserving two millennia of literature and other markers of civilized society. Do we really have to make a choice? Not that we shouldn’t be darkening our television screens more often, plugging from our iPods and our blueberries and logging off our computers, not that we shouldn’t be reading more and talking about what we read with other people, holding real face to face conversations, reasoning together. I still believe, perhaps foolishly, that we can have full bookshelves and full wireless access. The book ABC’s For UU Newcomers, A Brief Introduction to Unitarian Universalism, saves the letter R for reverence, the awe that we feel when life seems so sacred it makes our hearts kneel. Regardless of our belief systems or our theological leadings, we can all find points of reverence in our life, rationalists alike. Nonetheless, I would have also liked to see reason in our living faith alphabet, as central as it has been historically in our history of rational Christianity and in our inclusion of humanism as a valued source. Our humanist source, as I said earlier, implores us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science and warns us against idolatries of the mind and the spirit, idolatries that are spun out of ignorance and lack of engagement with ideas. The humanist presence among us, religious and secular, has been a reminder that we are called to support each other in spiritual growth, which means intellectual growth as well. From our earliest years, Unitarians have been prominent in the fields of letters and humanity and science.
They have lectured and published and taught. Our congregations have been hubs for self-cultivation, for teas and conversations, for book readings and lectures and forums. This very place has been for more than 50 years a center for intellectual growth, for courses on great books of many stripes and great decisions in many eras. Just as we come together for worship, we also have always come together for mutual learning. Our library and our bookstore, our used book sales, our book signings are not disconnected from the core of our liberal faith tradition. They are the flowering of it. We are rebooting our adult education program this fall with new possibilities to explore our theological groundings and our history and our spiritual practices. Many of these will be based in text, in books that we actually have to join together and read, and all of them will invite conversation and dialogue and even debate. I borrow the words of the mission statement of our sister congregation, the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Azalia, which I found on the internet. It is here where freedom, reason and tolerance create a sacred space.
May it be so.