You Have Heard It Said

You Have Heard it Said: 15 October 2021

 On the way to school, Jack and I are listening to the podcast Learning How to See, addressing the question: How do we transform and transcend our biases?  The 13 biases are considered more fully in Brian McLaren’s book Why Don’t They Get It?, but the podcast is a great introduction and the conversations are honest, unsettling, convicting and hopeful. To give you a flavor, here are the first two biases with their brief explanations.

Confirmation bias: It’s easy for us to see things that fit in with what we already think.

Complexity bias: We prefer a simple lie to a complex truth.

You can see how these work together to keep us safe in a reality we’ve already constructed for ourselves—usually with a lot of help from our communities, families, and national stories. We generally seek to confirm our belief in the way of the world and make the assumption that if everyone else would just go along with our version, then everyone else would be as happy/safe/content as we are—or as we seek to be without them interfering in our reality.

It’s the well-worn-welcome into a church or neighborhood or a school which considers itself open and eager for new members. We are so glad you are here to worship/live/learn the way we do. But once someone really feels settled in and speaks up with some new idea, that welcome morphs into: listen, this is the way we do it and we don’t appreciate your coming in here and changing things. You’re welcome to come be like us, but we are not interested in learning to be more like you. Alternately, you’re welcome to be you somewhere else as long as it doesn’t threaten what we believe or the way we do things or the power we’ve had for so long we feel entitled to keep it.

Not hard to see how easily this can lead to red-lining in housing, separate and unequal schools, poverty and gentrification, blacks in the balcony, women submitting gracefully to their husbands, silent LGBTQIA communities and a plundered, desecrated Garden of Eden.

And that has led me back to this marvelous, if indicting, paragraph that Wendell Berry penned in 1969. It is sadly still so true:

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us... We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.  

The safety and ‘good’ our small selves crave, well, it’s not universally good. We like to think that our choices are categorical imperatives—each one could be universally applied with good result. This is folly. For those of us who benefit from society the way it is, it is really hard to see someone else’s legitimate challenge to the way it is.  However, refusing to give up any power or benefit cannot possibly be a universally benevolent solution. Show me where Jesus preached that the powerful should amass more power, where the weak should remain disparaged, where inequity should be protected, where the circle should not be drawn larger.

On the contrary. Jesus always counsels inclusion. He’s always, ‘you have heard it said….but I tell you’ something bigger. Something with grace for all. Something about choosing community over personal gain, choosing the spirit over the letter of the law. Or as physicist Niels Bohr once said in a different context, “No, no, you’re not thinking, you’re just being logical.” Jesus is teaching us to think with our hearts, and to see beyond the logic of our biases.

I’ve been holding these thoughts while reading The Invention of Nature, a fascinating book about Alexander von Humboldt, the German scientist and explorer who was the first to observe and describe the natural world as an interconnected system. It was a shocking, thrilling, inspiring observation that rippled through the scientists, poets, artists and philosophers of his own time (1769-1859) and continues to inspire today. But have you ever heard of him? Humboldt is a victim of his own brilliance—the understanding of a connected web of life, a planet that must be considered as one whole ecosystem—it’s now too obvious to be remarkable.

And yet, his observations and theories form the basis of how we understand the world today. Everything from meteorological explanations of temperature and pressure bands to vegetation zones to the interconnectedness of scientific disciplines to the influence of climate on our world—and, as early as 1800, human responsibility for influencing the climate. It’s remarkable!

With his meticulous measurements, keen observation, relatable lectures backed by precise science, he was able to get past people’s natural confirmation and complexity biases to see the world in a whole new, clearer way. That deserves to be celebrated!

In his day, Humboldt was a celebrity. There are more places named after him than any other person. In North America alone there are rivers, parks, bays, lakes, mountains, a university, four counties and thirteen towns. There are astronomical features, species, schools, lecture series, minerals, ships…lists that go on and on. He influenced Thomas Jefferson, Simon Bolivar, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Louis Agassiz, Charles Darwin, John Muir, William Wordsworth, Friedrich Schiller, Henry David Thoreau, George Catlin...lists that go on and on.

All this against a backdrop of political upheaval across the globe. Dying monarchies, burgeoning republics, brutal revolution and brutal retaliation. But Humboldt believed that science transcended political boundaries. I believe that, too.

When I was a child, our family had a set of Compton’s encyclopedias. (You youngsters go Google ‘encyclopedia’.) I once asked my high school boyfriend how he knew so many things on so many subjects and he said that when he got in trouble his mother’s punishment was making him copy encyclopedia articles out by hand—the worse the infraction the longer the article. Often, he said, he finished writing but kept reading. I aspired to be that mother, but Wikipedia is not exactly apples to apples.

My favorite encyclopedia entry, maybe because it also felt a bit scandalous, was in the very first volume: anatomy. There was a regular page with a generic human outline and then a series of clear overlays, each adding a system.  Digestive, endocrine, respiratory, circulatory, skeletal. I was fascinated to see how it all worked together. I still am.

Humboldt’s theories did the same thing—layering all of the complex systems into one integrated whole, each dependent upon the other. It was a totally new way to see. And once you see it you can’t unsee it.

That’s why learning to see beyond our biases feels so threatening. It unsettles our sense of place and belonging; it makes us understand our interdependence upon people and systems that we might not like.

Jesus challenged the biases of his day, and his teachings made sense to those living on the margins of the Jewish and Roman power structures. It also made sense to the men in charge, who conspired to kill him. Still, Jesus’ followers continued to preach his new way of seeing. Unfortunately, once Christianity became its own institution, it generated biases that preserved its power and way of seeing. We tend to protect what has given us life.

The true message of Jesus is to open, and open, and open ourselves to the God that is bigger than institutions. The church should challenge us to see in that new way, to see beyond itself. To show us that Love is the interconnectedness that loves all of life. Even them. Even us. God loves and is the love connecting all of God’s creation.

Three years and one week ago I walked out of my yoga studio (how nostalgic, to remember a yoga class) and observed the stump of a 100+ year old tree, recently cut, surrounded by fragrant sawdust. Somehow without hesitating I took off my Keds, stepped onto the stump and stood still, eyes closed, for a full minute or more, honoring the life of this tree, feeling the breeze, pondering the changes the tree had seen and weathered. When I stepped down, feet still tingling from sharing the last heartbeats of this God-cherished giant, there was a leaf in my shoe. Quercus alba. It felt like an offering.

I got in my car, took down the sunshade and looked across at the West Greenville Baptist Church sign. It read, “We wait in Hope for the Lord. He is our help and shield.  Psalm 33:20” That felt like an offering, too. A reminder that the Lord is Love, and that Love loves all of creation. Do not be afraid to see as Love sees.