Are You Stupid, or Just Unsure Which Jeans You Want?
BY SCOTT TAYLER, PARISH CO-MINISTER, FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF ROCHESTER, NEW YORK
With a sermon title like this, I suppose I’ve got some explaining to do.
Let me begin with the growing consensus about the number one cultural misfit in America today: the Intellectual. Simply put, smart people are rare. On this point agreement could not be stronger. Al Gore argued it in his recent best-selling book The Assault on Reason. Bill Moyers regularly calls attention to it on his TV show and in essays with titles such as “The Delusion is No Longer Marginal.” Cultural critics bemoan it in best-selling books like The Age of American Unreason, The Dumbest Generation or What’s the Matter with Kansas?
These thinkers differ in a thousand ways but on this issue they speak with one voice: Computer screens rather than the classics have our attention. TV rather than conversation takes up our time. Ideology—conservative and liberal alike—has our loyalty, rather than logic or evidence. They point out that we’ve lost the ability to pay attention; fifteen second sound bites and two paragraph newspaper articles are about all we can handle. They cite surveys which show that a majority of us believe that the Bible is literally true, with an astounding sixty percent of us believing that the bloody predictions of the Book of Revelation are a certainty—with Jesus coming down soon to personally take out atheists, Jews, Muslims, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. Tons of us believe evolution is a hoax. A frightening number of citizens still say Saddam Hussein helped plan 9/11. Very few of us can name the number of justices that sit on the Supreme Court. But maybe even more unsettling, most of us can quote names of mistresses of Tiger Woods or Jesse James.
Simply put, our minds are closed and our heads are full of fluff. That’s the consensus.
Which brings me to my sermon title—or at least the first part of it: Are you stupid?
Now don’t worry, I’m not going to make any of us answer that! But it is a serious question, for two reasons. First, these cultural critics aren’t talking about everybody but Unitarian Universalists. Make no mistake; they mean us too. No matter how highly we think of ourselves and our big brains, very few of us would withstand their assessment of what counts as an adequate American intellectual. They most certainly see us infected with the dim-witted disease as well—pseudo-intellectual is the pot in which we are put.
So that’s the first reason it’s important to wrestle with the “stupid” question. But the second is just as, if not more, important: our answer to this question has significant implications for who we are as a church and how we define our most critical task. You see, if stupidity really is the major affliction of American souls today, then how can our highest calling be anything but the encouragement of deeper thinking? How can our task be anything but reclaiming our once proud identity as America’s reasonable religion?
But on another level, I’m not sure it’s all that simple. So before we rush head-long into making the creation of smart people our sacred cause and into declaring dim-wittedness to be the devil, I think we need to take a step back from all the “stupidity is a crisis” talk and ask the more fundamental question: Is stupidity really the thing we are looking at?
And here’s where that second part of my sermon title comes in this morning: “Or are you just unsure which kind of jeans you want?”
Bear with me—this will all come together in a moment!
In his book The Paradox of Choice: How More is Less, Barry Schwartz writes of a traumatic day at the jeans store which left him face to face with what he called “a new problem that needed to be solved.” He went shopping for what he thought of simply as a pair of jeans, and was confronted with a store clerk who confronted him with a dizzying array of choices: “Do you want them slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit, baggy, or extra baggy?” she asked. “Do you want them stonewashed, acid-washed or distressed? Do you want them button-fly or zipper-fly? Do you want them faded or regular?”
And what was new about this conundrum? It was a problem rooted in the overwhelming amount of choices and information confronting him, an overwhelming number of choices and amount of information that he says led him to feel “no small amount of self-doubt, anxiety and dread.”
Notice not one word in there about stupidity! And yet if we hadn’t let Barry explain his problem for himself, if we had instead, let’s say, interviewed the jeans salesperson, I can practically guarantee you we would have heard the word “stupid.” Because, of course, Barry is sadly stupid about jeans. What a lack of awareness! What lack of knowledge! What lack of ability to clearly articulate and think through all the complexities and various perspectives about the world of blue jeans!
Indeed, Barry isn’t just stupid. Worse than that—he’s become an easy fit ideologue!! He’s retreated from the debate and put the rest of the jeans options out of his head. He won’t even consider the relaxed fit or stone washed perspectives—even though it is very likely that easy fit may not be the logically best fit for him.
You see where this is taking us, don’t you? Poor Barry’s not a dummy. Not at all. He’s protecting himself. To listen closely to Barry is to understand that what appears to be stupidity and narrowness of thought is really a strategy to ward off the experience of being overwhelmed. Barry isn’t dim-witted: he’s holding on for dear life, trying not to drown in what he fearfully calls a sea of “self-doubt, anxiety and dread.”
Ok, so that’s a bit dramatic, especially since we are talking about blue jeans. But of course we’re not just talking about blue jeans. Barry’s day at the jeans shop echoes just about every area of our life where choices are involved—be it political choices, personal choices, moral choices or spiritual choices. THERE’S JUST TOO MUCH!!
Too many options. Too many perspectives. Too many dimensions to consider. Sure, we’ve always been intimidated by the complexity of social and personal choices, but today the thing that stands out is not the complexity as much as the sheer volume. It’s one thing to tackle the early 20th century choice between Catholicism and Protestantism; it’s quite another to knowledgably sort through the 21st century options of mainline Christianity, evangelical Christianity, reformed Judaism, conservative Judaism, Sunni Islam, Shiite Islam, Theravada Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism, Hinduism, New Age, Spiritual UUs, Humanist UUs, Atheists who believe in Grace...and the list goes on.
And what about your social consciousness? I mean, what’s your position on the war? Are you a neo-con? A Cindy Sheehan peace-nik? Or an old school pacifist peace-nik? A just war advocate? Or a real politik liberal? A soft-power convert? Or a hold out for realistic Wilsonianism?
And it’s not just your position on the war, but you should know your position on the environment as well. Not to mention the other essential social issues of our time: globalism, free-trade, health care, immigration, peak oil (not just global warming), campaign finance, world poverty, Israel’s right to statehood, privatization of jails, etc., etc.
Again, do you see where I am going? What is it exactly that we are looking at? Is it really simple stupidity, or a bunch of people acting out the experience of it all being too much?!
Later in his book, Barry Schwartz writes this:
When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable. As the number of choices increase, the autonomy, control and liberation this variety brings is powerful and positive. But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negative consequences escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choices no longer liberate, but debilitate.
I don’t think that word “debilitate” can be emphasized enough. Human beings simply can’t function without a clear sense of identity—a clear sense of knowing who one is, what one believes, and what needs to be prioritized in one’s life. In a world of ever-changing and overwhelming information, establishing and holding on to this clear sense of identity is no small task. In other words, the massive volume of perspectives and priorities competing for our attention doesn’t just threaten to overwhelm us, it threatens to cripple—even prevent—our sense of self. As one social activist said to me recently, “I knew who I was in the 60s. A lot was happening, but somehow it felt like things were more focused. The war and the Civil Rights Act were ‘my things.’ People disagreed about the war and civil rights, but everybody was talking about them. Today, it’s a different thing each week. And it’s hard not to get sucked into the next newest thing. Issues come and go too quickly for me to figure out what ‘my thing’ should be. It just keeps changing and nothing really sticks.”
My friend and I kept talking. That line of his, “nothing sticks,” seemed important. I asked him to say more, which led him to this sad but important comment: “I’m having trouble sticking together myself. So I’m beginning to change my approach. I’ve decided my new mantra’s gotta be ‘Hold on tight!’ When I settle on something, I’ve got to dig in. Shut everything else out.”
Let me answer my own question this morning: we’re not stupid. We’re just a bit overwhelmed by all the options and arguments. It’s not about lacking intelligence as much as it’s about the struggle to hold on to our identity—about feeling overwhelmed and giving into the temptation to shut out the other voices so that, for more than just a moment, we can experience the feeling of hearing and knowing our own voice. Rightly or wrongly, we just need a break. We don’t want to hear the other side. We don’t want to see it from the stone-washed or straight-leg point of view. Just give us those easy fit jeans like we asked. We’re tired of walking around without any pants on, for god’s sake! Please, we just want to finally be able to put on a pair of pants!
But of course the problem is that once we get those pants on, it’s awfully easy to get comfortable. And because we are human, it’s easy to fall into the trap of clinging tightly to that comfort. And that, friends, in my book, is the understandable but dangerous core crisis facing us today. And so as much as I admire and respect Al Gore and Bill Moyers, I think, on this one, they and all the rest have got it dead wrong. What we lack in our culture today is not smart people as much as people willing to hold on lightly.
One more important thing about the modern mass market of information and choices whirling around us today: That volume of information doesn’t just drive us to hold on tightly to our ideas, it also enables us to hold on tightly to our ideas. With such a well-developed and easily accessible smorgasbord of ideologies out there, nobody has to be a misfit anymore. The endless and easily-accessible options enable us to easily find “our people.” There was a time when a baby-boom, just-war Democrat with pantheist spiritual leanings and a love of bluegrass would have had to settle for her dog being the only one who got her. But today there are not only three dozen websites devoted to the pantheist baby-boomer babes for bluegrass, they also have their own magazine and radio show! Simply put, in the world of niche markets, Internet and mass media, misfits no longer really exist. Nobody has to be a loner anymore. Everybody can find people who will affirm them just the way they are.
What it means is that the true modern misfits are those who are willing to step outside of their echo chambers and listen—not so much to one’s own inner voice as much as to voices other than one’s own.
And not just the true misfit, but our misfit. This is the misfit that UUs are most called to reclaim. That’s why my sermon title this morning is not as silly as it might first appear. With our strong commitment to reason, it’d be easy for us to offer the world something that is close but ultimately misses the mark. What people need most—what we need most—is not reminders and encouragement to think better, but to get outside of our comfortable thoughts.
In a swirling and overwhelming world, it can feel necessary to hold on tightly. But holding on too tightly and shutting out all of the new views that daily knock on our door ultimately ends with us hurting what we treasure most as Unitarian Universalists: the pursuit of truth.
There is no doubt that part of pursuing the truth involves careful and complex thinking, but it’s just not that simple. Again, it’s also a matter of having the courage and wisdom to get outside our comfortable, easy fit thoughts—the courage and wisdom to hold on lightly.
May that be the kind of misfit we help each other to be.
Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF), 25 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108-2823, U.S.
or
Phone: 617-948-6166; or for international callers, use 00-1-617-948-6166
Fax: 617-523-4123, or for international faxes, use 00-1-617-523-4123
