Something is sacred, but what is it? - What's Next? - religion and science - Brief Article

Whole Earth,  Spring, 2002  by Betty Sue Flowers

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Identity Shifts in an Interconnected World

I think it's a decade not to solve problems but to start thinking in a new way. There are many signs that point to that. We are having a big debate now about the identity of human beings and who we are. It's playing out in this country around the stem-cell issue. That goes much deeper than just proabortion; it's more complex than that. What are human beings? What is our relationship to each other? And to the unborn and born? Our whole sense of identity is shifting in the same way that the identity of human beings shifted in the nineteenth century when we realized we were descended from the apes. That is a huge change in human identity....

In the past, almost all cultures have developed two different sets of ethics: ethics for the citizens and ethics for the barbarians. You can murder your enemies, but not your family or friends. The sense of identity, the whole issue of who are our neighbors and our kin is beginning to come up in a new way again. Every time there's a shift in ethics, there's a shift in the answer to that question and you can no longer define some people as outside the circle.... So as the circle of inclusion gets wider, you have to behave differently. If the circle of true, developed humanity is widened to include women, slaves, and others, your behavior will be different, and that has economic consequences. That was the case with slavery. The economies in the North and the South were built on slavery. What our economies are built on is based on who we think our neighbors are--we haven't even begun to articulate that.

Beyond that, we are beginning to see that Earth itself is an "other." Plants and animals are part of our survival, too. The idea of saving species at some economic cost would have never occurred to the Victorians. But now it occurs to us that some species deserve to be here on this Earth just because they are, not for any function or purpose that serves us. That is a different inclusion in a circle.

Now we see that this whole definition of the "other" is getting problematic. What really is "other"? It's all one big system. If we can't make something "other," how do we get by in the world? We have always been able to do that--it's how we've defined ourselves.

The Search for a New Spirituality and Religion

One of the hallmarks of a new religion is that it allows people to talk about something that was maybe only dimly intuitive before. We don't have language for the phenomenon of emergence. We don't have ethics around it; we don't even have a descriptive language. So it would take a lot of people who come together feeling free to talk about some of the experiences they have had for the language to be developed. Then you might have what might be a new religion. It's far from that at the moment; it's almost like a groping sense. When you talk to people about a new spirituality that is different from religion, most people will nod their heads yes. But I don't think we can articulate yet what that is.

What is the Truth?

The religious truths are truths for all time, so they are not open to change. Scientific truths are true until someone comes up with a better truth. They have a methodology whereby people can change their minds. That's the beauty of the scientific myth, that it operates in a contingent space. It is completely true as long as there's not a better truth. There are rules to making a better truth. It's not who has the most money, or who is most powerful, or who is the American. You can, however, make sociological arguments that would dispute every one of these points, at least in the scientific paradigm. That is why you don't have to go to war over a change in scientific truth, even a change as fundamental as Einstein's.

Scientists aren't comfortable in the realm of the sacred, but here is where I am disappointed in religion. At the moment, there are not any new voices of wisdom saying, "What is sacred?" In other words, to simply say, "it is sacred," "it is not," "it is so"--that kind of debate doesn't get us anywhere. Religion has it right that something is sacred, but what is it that is sacred? That's where the redefinition of who we are has to take place.... I see people groping and yearning for it. I rather doubt we'll get the full articulation in ten years, but a lot of people are trying.

Betty Sue Flowers is the director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. She is the author of nine books, including several collaborations on myth with Bill Moyers.

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