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.