UNITARIAN SOCIETY OF NORTHAMPTON AND FLORENCE Order of Meeting -- Summer Service "Just Pretending" David Mix Barrington 24 August 2003 Welcome and Announcements Prelude: Dream Lover Darin Karl Drumm, piano Lighting of the Chalice *Opening Words Stories ought not to be just little bits of fantasy that are used to wile away an idle hour; from the beginning of the human race stories have been used --by priests, by bards, by medicine men-- as magic instruments of healing, of teaching, as a means of helping people come to terms with the fact that they continually have to face insoluble problems and unbearable realities. Joan Aiken *Hymn: #304 A Fierce Unrest Meditation *Community Greeting Readings: Dawkins, Tenner, Steinbeck Offertory: Take Five Brubeck Sermon: "Just Pretending" *Hymn: #17 Every Night and Every Morn *Closing Words Just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't true. Tim O'Brien Postlude: Brush Up Your Shakespeare Porter *********** Please join us for lemonade and conversation following the service in the parlor. Thanks to Karl Drumm for the music, Karen Shelley for her assistance, and Jennie Barrington for ideas and inspiration. **************************** Meditation Reading for Summer Service of 24 August 2003 The following reading is from _Telling Your Own Story_ by Sam Keen and Anne Valley Fox: "So long as human beings change and make history, so long as children are born and old people die, there will be tales to explain why sorrow darkens the day and stars fill the night. We invent stories about the origin and conclusion of life because we are exiles in the middle of time. The void surrounds us. We live within a parenthesis surrounded by question marks. Our stories and myths don't dispel ignorance, but they help us find our way, our place at the heart of the mystery. In the end, as in the beginning, there will be a vast silence, broken by the sound of one person telling a story to another." **************************** Readings for summer service of 24 August 2003: The first reading is from _The Selfish Gene_ by Richard Dawkins, where he famously argues that all organisms are "survival machines" designed by evolution to maximize the chance of propagating their genes to future generations. Here he speculates on when and why it might be practical for a survival machine to deal with what is not real: "One of the most interesting methods of predicting the future is simulation. If a general wishes to know whether a particular military plan will be better than alternatives, he has a problem in prediction. There are unknown quantities in the weather, in the morale of his own troops, and in the possible countermeasures of the enemy. One way of discovering whether it is a good plan is to try and see, but it is undesirable to use this test for all the tentative plans dreamed up. [...] It is better to try the various plans out in dummy runs rather than in deadly earnest. This may take the form of full-scale exercises with 'Northland' fighting 'Southland' using blank ammunition, but even this is expensive in time and materials. Less wastefully, war games may be played, with tin soldiers and little toy tanks being shuffled around a large map. [...]" "If simulation is such a good idea, we might expect that survival machines would have discovered it first. After all, they invented many of the other techniques of human engineering long before we came on the scene: the focusing lens and the parabolic reflector, frequency analysis of sound waves, servo-control, sonar, buffer storage of incoming information, and countless others with long names, whose details don't matter. What about simulation? Well, when you yourself have a difficult decision to make involving unknown quantities in the future, you do go in for a form of simulation. You _imagine_ what would happen if you did each of the alternatives open to you. You set up a model in your head, not of everything in the world, but of the restricted set of entities which you think may be relevant. You may see them vividly in your mind's eye, or you may see and manipulate stylized abstractions of them. [...] Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. Simulation is both safer and faster." "The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology." ******************** Our second reading is a message posted by David Tenner to the Usenet discussion group soc.history.what-if on 9 August 2003, just after the Reverend Canon Gene Robinson was confirmed as the first openly gay Episcopal bishop in the United States. "You might say that it is none of my business, since I am not a Church member. I disagree. The Church is a matter that concerns all Americans, whatever their religion. It is by the Constitution itself a part of the US government, the archbishops being ex-officio members of the Senate; and the famous 'unamendable article five' of the Constitution specifically forbids Congress or any state to 'make any law tending to disestablish the Church of the United States.'" "Some of us do regret that this is the case. But after the Civil War of 1786, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that America needed a strong centralized authority 'not only in matters of Government but of Religion as well; for there hath been no source of Discord, Sedition, and even Civil War, both in this Country and in England, half so dangerous as Religious Divisions.' (*Nationalist Papers* No. 10) In any event, the Church has withstood numerous crises--the 'Ritualist' or 'Americo- Catholic' dispute of the nineteenth century being an obvious example--and so it is easy to say that of course it will survive the controversy over Bishop Robinson." "But we have to remember that the American Communion is far broader than the United States; it has millions of communicants in former American colonies such as Hawaii, Central America, Cuba, and the West African Republic. In these countries, polygamy is still not culturally or legally acceptable, and Bishop Robinson's four husbands are (as one West African bishop remarked) 'three too many'. (Of course if the Ritualists had prevailed it would be 'four too many'; and if the ultra-Ritualists had prevailed there would be no women bishops at all.) We have had polygamous priests before, it is true, but most of them agreed to refrain from sexual activity with all but one of their spouses. It was only a few years ago that it was actually considered a scandal when Canon William Blythe was found to have broken his pledge to that effect. Have we forgotten so soon?" "Bishop Robinson and her husbands are charming people. No doubt about that. But I just don't see how they can lightly take the burden on themselves of helping to tear apart a great Church." ************************ The third reading is from _Travels With Charley_ by John Steinbeck "In Spanish there is a word for which I can't find a counterword in English. It is the verb _vacilar_, present participle _vacilando_. It does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere but doesn't greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction. My friend Jack Wagner has often, in Mexico, assumed this state of being. Let us say we wanted to walk in the streets of Mexico City but not at random. We would choose some article almost certain not to exist there and then diligently try to find it." **************************************************** Sermon for summer service of 24 August 2003 "Just Pretending" David Mix Barrington I often spend time in worlds that are not real. The pages of a book can take me to the deck of a sailing ship fighting against Napoleon, or to a distant planet in the far future. The television can take me to a New York police station or the halls of the White House. This summer I put on eighteenth-century clothes and pretended to be a country curate on the stage. And with a small circle of friends on the Internet I work to create an imaginary world with a history that diverged from ours two centuries ago. I want to argue that these are all examples of a single phenomenon -- the creation of community through shared imaginary experience. I should first, I suppose, say a word about a perfectly good sermon that I'm _not_ going to deliver today, about the dangers of imaginary worlds. Like anything that brings pleasure, imagination can bring addiction. More generally, there is a good argument to be made that Americans' imaginary experience, through sports, reality shows, tabloid journalism, and all the rest, keeps them, keeps us, from living authentic lives. Marguerite Sheehan reminded us two weeks ago about what Jesus said on the subject of leading an authentic life, and televised sports didn't enter into it at all. But that is a topic for another day. _My_ life includes imaginary worlds, and very likely yours does as well. What are they good for, and where can they lead us? It's an interesting question why evolution should have endowed us with the capacity to create and experience imaginary worlds at all. It seems at first glance like a waste of time. But Richard Dawkins reminds us of the hard-headed practicality of imagining the world as it is not, in order to better prosper in the world as it is. Sometime in the evolutionary past, animals who could hold some kind of simulation of reality in their brains outcompeted those who couldn't. Now we, their descendents, have this capability. Sometimes we use it for its original purpose. The "visioning exercise" is a staple of contemporary management practice -- in fact my sister the minister is not here today because she and her church's lay leaders are "visioning" their desired future and planning how to get there. Somewhere along the line, though, people started using their imaginations for more than practical planning. Richard Dawkins speculates that this might have led to the origin of what we call consciousness. In any event imagination is an important part of being human. We make up stories, and tell each other those stories. We create communities by sharing imaginary experience. One way to create an imaginary world is to write a novel. At its best the novel can be one of the highest expressions of human art. A Jane Austen or a Patrick O'Brian can create worlds and characters that cause us to experience the human condition in new ways. Even the vast majority of novels that may not rise to the standard of high art may teach us about a real place through the vicarious experience, or grant us a pleasant escape. But do they create community? Well, some millions of Oprah Winfrey fans are reading _East of Eden_ together and watching discussions of it on television. Neighborhood reading groups seem to be a growing phenomenon, with suggested discussion questions starting to appear at the backs of books. And of course there is Harry Potter. Millions of children and adults read the latest Harry Potter novel the week it came out, all sharing the same imaginary experience. My daughter is part of the Internet Harry Potter fan community, reading and discussing fan fiction set in the universe J. K. Rowling created. The theatre is another place where we create and share an imaginary world, by literally pretending to be someone else. As a beginning actor, I'm learning some of the ways to create the illusion that I _am_ this other person. One way is to try to ask and answer questions that would be second nature to your character. For example, a stage direction in _Love's Labors Lost_ says that my character, Nathaniel, "draws out a table book" to write down the clever things his friend Holofernes is saying. It was easy for our stage manager to find a leather-bound notebook that looked at home in the eighteenth-century setting of our play. But what would he, or I, use to write with? It turns out the wood-covered graphite pencil _had_ been invented by Shakespeare's time, and that the Faber family in Germany was making them by the eighteenth century, just as they do today. But of course their pencils wouldn't have been bright yellow. As it turned out, there is a large community of people whose hobby is to impersonate people from the eighteenth century. You've probably heard of Civil War reenactors, but I was somewhat surprised to find hundreds of French and Indian War reenactors meeting at Fort Niagara, New York last Fourth of July. And of course one of the merchants there sold authentic-looking unpainted-cedar eighteenth-century pencils. Unlike a novel or a play, a television series has to keep setting stories in the same imaginary world week to week. When Aaron Sorkin wanted to write a series about the people who work in the West Wing of the White House, he needed to create an entire alternate political landscape. Thus was born President Jed Bartlet, an idealistic Democrat from northern New England. Bartlet and his staff deal with terrorists from fictional countries and a hostile but fictional Republican Congress. Fans of _The West Wing_ love the show for many reasons -- the dialogue that Sorkin writes, the wish fulfillment aspects of a president more upright than Clinton and smarter than Bush, and the many attractive characters. But for me and for many other fans, one of the greatest pleasures is _sharing_ Sorkin's complex imaginary world with other fans. There are Internet sites that track down inconsistencies in the scripts, for example. If you and a friend have watched the same show, you can talk about it over the water cooler at work the next day, just as you'd talk about the baseball game. I _think_ something similar must be behind the appeal of the new wave of "reality shows" -- people are watching them because their friends are watching them and they want to be able to talk about them the next day. I have to wonder, though, how many fans of _The West Wing_ are part of another emerging community, the one pushing the prospects of a _real_ idealistic Democrat from northern New England. Howard Dean has built an unusual organization and raised an unusual amount of money using the Internet. Could it be that shared imaginary experience will wind up changing the real political world? I want to conclude today by talking about an imaginary world in which I suppose I've been spending far too much time over the past year or two. One of my hobbies is "alternate history", the discussion of what might have followed from events in the past that didn't really happen. I read and contribute to a Usenet discussion group called "soc.history.what-if". In the readings today I included a piece by David Tenner, one of the most knowledgable and consistently interesting contributors there. It's an example of what we call a "double-blind what-if", where you pretend to be _inside_ one of the worlds that might have resulted from a different event in the past. Here David imagines the early United States with an established church like Britain's, and a parallel of the real gay-bishop controversy with larger resulting political consequences. Other contributors posted replies purportedly from the same world, starting to build up its background. Double-blind what-ifs are usually somewhat frivolous -- they tend not to be based on _plausible_ choices in the past, but entertaining ones that cast some kind of light on events in our own world. Actually _The West Wing_ is a perennial source of double-blind contributions. You see, somewhere there's this other world where Jed Bartlet is president, and George W. Bush is a character in a TV show. (How many people would like to move there?) The people claiming to be from there are always complaining how implausible their TV show is -- for example the latest plot twist with the bodybuilder actor running for governor, which simply recapitulates the wrestler-governor plotline from a few years ago. I've speculated that the other Aaron Sorkin invented the character of "Howard Dean" as a parody of Bartlet... The more "serious" writing on soc.history.what-if involves plausible changes in the past, and extended speculation on their consequences -- called "developing a timeline". Inventing one of these immediately means expressing an opinion about real history and how the real world works. Is there _any_ way the South could have won the Civil War given the North's larger resources? Was Hitler's Sealion plan to invade England at all feasible? The ensuing arguments involve real facts and real references. At their best, they lead to the condition Steinbeck calls "vacilando" -- going somewhere with a purpose, but concentrating on the journey rather than the destination. The journey is through the world of real history and the things that have been written about it. A couple of years ago about a dozen of us on soc.history.what-if began a collaborative timeline called "For All Nails". We gave ourselves an enormous head start in creating our world by beginning with perhaps the most elaborate alternate history already created, a novel-length book called _For Want of a Nail_ by economics professor Robert Sobel. _For Want of a Nail_ purports to be a college-level history textbook, but the history is not our history. In it General Burgoyne _won_ the battle of Saratoga in 1777. The French never came in to the war on the Patriot side and the American Revolution soon collapsed. Britain reorganized the colonies into the Confederation of North America, and the diehard Patriots fled to the place we call Texas and they called Jefferson. A generation later the Jeffersonians under Andrew Jackson conquered Mexico and established the United States of Mexico, which expanded to include all of North America west of the Rockies. Sobel's history ends in 1971, when he wrote the book, at a time of Cold War between North America and Mexico. What we've done is to _extend_ that history, so far to about 1976, by writing short stories (or "vignettes") set in the world established by Sobel's book and the previous vignettes. There's a lot of background to fill in, since the book is rather vague on the world outside North America and ignores social history almost entirely. We've also decided that the book was written by a biased, somewhat sloppy historian, giving us liberty to change some of the "facts" that didn't meet our own test of historical plausibility. I invite you to have a look at our writing if you're interested -- the place to start is the Web archive, at "www.kebe.com/for-all-nails", which is linked to from my own home page "www.cs.umass.edu/~barring". There are as many different kinds of stories as their are authors -- more, actually, as most of us have experimented with various styles. We've taken characters from the book and invented many more of our own. I've created the current leader of North America and his staff, some astronauts, a medical student in a Catholic religious order, a pair of spies in the Caribbean, and a host of others including a teenager in Massachusetts who shares my name and birthday. The natural question to ask is whether it's worthwhile for me to put so much energy into this project, energy I could be putting into my work as a teacher and computer scientist. Well, I get something out of it, as I'll try to explain. The first thing I get out of it is the pleasure of creative writing. (It seems to be much more respectable to call this an "internet writing group" instead of an "internet role-playing game".) I haven't sat down and tried to write short stories since high school, and I've _never_ tried to work out the complex interactions of character and setting required to write a novel. Like many other writing groups, my friends provide an interested and critical audience for my creative writing. The second thing is the pleasure of being vacilando in the world of real history. I love learning more about the people and places of the past, and the temporary goal of researching an alternate history story serves the same purpose as Steinbeck's left-handed socket wrench in Mexico City. Every time we declare the name of a new place in the alternate North America, for example, we need to know how that place got its name in our North America, and most importantly _when_ it got that name. The World Wide Web makes much of this research easier -- for example, most sizable towns have a site giving the town history -- but I often wind up vacilando in my 1911 _Britannica_ or in a library or bookstore. But the most important pleasure of this project is the company I've made -- the community we've created through shared imaginary experience. Noel is a professor of economics in Mexico City, Matt is a very well-read and very Catholic undergraduate at Notre Dame, Jonathan is a lawyer in Brooklyn with a keen interest in Israel and Africa, Henrik is a retired soldier in England, and there are many others. I've met only a few of them in person, but they're my friends and partners in this enterprise. There is a school of religious thought called "process theology" that talks about how we "co-create the universe with God". Now, personally, I'm pretty much of an atheist -- I think the physical universe is what it is, and I don't worry too much about it got there. But there's a very real sense in which I agree that we "co-create the universe" with _something_. That's because the universe each of us lives in is a mixture of the real, physical universe and a subjective universe of our own thoughts, memories, and emotions. Our actions and choices affect the real universe, and our thoughts and feelings affect our inner universe. Those parts of the real universe called "other people" may be the most important factors in shaping our inner universes. In that sense they co-create our inner universes with us. And together we can make changes in the real universe, particularly the part of it that's made up of people and the relationships among them. Co-creation is serious work. It doesn't hurt to get some practice at it now and again, by co-creating some imaginary universes. Or even just by visiting some imaginary universes created by others.