The title of my sermon this morning, "Do the Right Thing" was the title of a 1989 Spike Lee film about racial tension in a Brooklyn neighborhood. "Do the right thing!" is what an elderly African-American man tells the Spike Lee character as tension builds in the inner city, during the hottest day of summer. But, of course, what is the right thing? In the movie, the right thing is never clear to the characters - or the audience - as the drama moves to the seemingly-inevitable, destructive climax.
If doing the right thing were always, or even usually, clear and straightforward, ethics would be a cinch. Ethicists and moral philosophers would be out of business, ministers and rabbis would have so much less to say and newspaper articles would all be black and white - instead of shades of gray.
All of this came to mind as I first began to think about doing a sermon on conscience. My first thought was to title this sermon "Let your conscience be your guide." But, I dropped that idea as I began to think of the complexities of following your conscience.
As I began to gather my thoughts and mull over this subject, I thought also of the fifth Unitarian Universalist Principle: "The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations (our Unitarian Universalist congregations) and in society at large." At first glance, that seems like an apple-pie statement. Who could disagree - or find too much to say about such a statement? Except - that it seems to contain two slightly different varieties of apples - One - conscience, and Two - the democratic process. What links them together? Why did the committee that wrote most of the Principles lump together these two different things? Certainly democracy provides a fertile environment for the exercise of conscience and calls for us to use our individual consciences, where a more rigid and dictatorial form of society or government suppresses conscience. It seems pretty clear that the democratic process is important for supporting the right of conscience, but is the exercise of conscience important for supporting the democratic process? I began to wonder, is there a mutuality, an interdependence, between these two?
Let me begin by exploring conscience. When we use the phrase, "It’s all in your mind," we point to our heads. (At least we do here in the Western world. When I was in Japan, I discovered that when people talk about mind, they point to a more centrally located or more inclusive part of the body. Their sense of mind and body seems to be less dualistic than ours. But we in the West point to our heads.)
However, when we say, "Follow your conscience," where do we point? Conscience is like soul. It is intangible. A logical positivist would probably say that conscience simply doesn’t exist. Yet, our rational religious movement includes "the right of conscience" in one of its principles and, for most of us, conscience describes something very real. But what?
My American Heritage Dictionary says that conscience is a noun and defines it as: "The faculty of recognizing the distinction between right and wrong." A faculty is an inherent power, such as the faculty of sight. Is conscience an inherent quality of being human? Is it something in our genes? If it is inherent, why are there murderers and others who commit unconscionable acts, individuals who seem to have absolutely no conscience? Or is our conscience simply a projection of our feelings, our desires, our preferences?
In this last decade of the Twentieth Century, "the right of conscience" sometimes seems to mean the freedom to "do your own thing." In a very individualistic way, it seems to mean that no one’s values are any sounder than anyone else’s. This isn’t a new idea. Over two hundred years ago, Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote, "What I feel is right is right, what I feel is wrong is wrong."
Certainly, the right to follow our consciences is important and the preservation of individuality is a legitimate concern. Even the freest of societies can stifle individual uniqueness and squash us into conformity, making each of us less than we could be and smothering creativity. We may wish that more people were ruled by their consciences but, if the only guide is to do what feels right, how can we or they judge what course of action is best? If the only guide is to do what feels right, on what basis do I judge that a Martin Luther King’s conscience is more true than that of an Adolph Hitler?
Obviously then, conscience must be more than just what feels right to me and what I am inclined to do. This intangible word, conscience, suggests some test of behavior that is more critical than simply how I feel. Conscience is a sense of right and wrong. Conscience is sometimes referred to as a "still, small voice" within that gives us guidance.
We say, "My conscience is bothering me" or "My conscience is clear." It is as if conscience actually had a physical reality. But, there is no place where we can point to it, so we use metaphor and speak as if it had physical existence. Conscience does have reality for us yet we have to remember that conscience is a metaphor. Otherwise we might begin to think that our consciences are infallible.
But, as we look around us, we see that each person’s conscience is different. Some people’s consciences lead them in one direction and other people’s consciences may lead in very different directions. Some people’s consciences are more strongly developed than others. For several years I did Income Tax work to supplement our family income. As I prepared taxes for people, I might work with one person who has a very strong conscience and be very scrupulous about claiming only legitimate donations and medical expenses. They would refer to their records as they reported the amounts. The next person who sat down at my desk might seem hardly to have a conscience at all and keep all of their records on the ceiling. When I would ask, "How much did you donate to charity?" they would stare up at the ceiling for a moment or two and respond, with great precision, "$760." (I hope that all of you have a clear conscience about your charitable donations when it comes time to pay your taxes.)
According to Vincent Ryan Ruggiero, the author of a book titled The Moral Imperative (1973), what we call our conscience seems to be the result of several different factors. One is the capacity for reflection on what we are about to do or what we have done, the context of our life and its relationship to others, its relationship to the earth, on which we stand and to Ultimate Value or God, in which we are enmeshed.
Ruggiero sees this capacity as a given, as "largely ‘in the genes.’" I disagree!
Certainly we all know people who seem to be naturally unreflective. These are people who just do not think about the consequences of what they are doing. And all the rest of us are probably not as reflective as we might be. Perhaps the capacity is innate, but undeveloped and always subject to greater development. Meditation, contemplation and prayer as well as all of the various spiritual pathways from journal writing to Zen Buddhism are ways of nurturing and developing the capacity for self reflection and awareness of one’s place in the cosmos.
According to Ruggiero, the most important source for our consciences is conditioning, moral conditioning. We are conditioned first by our relationship with our parents, not only by what they overtly teach, but by their example. We are more apt to internalize the way that our parents live and behave, than how they tell us we should behave. We are conditioned, as well, by our interactions with sisters and brothers, relatives and friends, teachers and school environment, and the teaching and example of church, synagogue or temple. Our conditioning goes on throughout life as we learn and grow and gradually internalize ideals such as fairness and compassion and tolerance.
I know that it is true for me and I believe it to be true for others that my conscience, my sense of right and wrong, has continued to grow throughout my life. Many of the prejudices I learned or developed early in life have broken down. I have become more accepting, more open to differences. At the same time, I have become more intolerant of insensitivity and destructiveness and I expect that this process will continue. Some of this change is the result of rational learning processes. More of it has resulted from getting to know people as individuals who are different than I. Change may begin with the intellect or with experience, but it only becomes real by the living of it.
The final element of conscience is to put into use the grounding and moral development in the free exercise of our own conscious moral choices.
Ruggiero writes, "We must follow our conscience: the only alternative is to violate it, and that would be worse. It would, at the very least, lead us to neurosis. But we cannot just follow it. To do that is to remain, in part, prisoners of circumstance. True freedom, true individuality, and real moral growth lie in questioning conscience, evaluating its promptings, purging it of bad influences and error, guiding it with searching ethical inquiry and penetrating ethical judgment."
The true exercise of conscience is very different from simply "doing your own thing" or doing what you happen to feel is right. The true exercise of conscience is based in our relationship to others. "No one is an island," isolated from the rest of humanity. Everything we do affects others. As Joseph Fletcher, best known as the author ofSituation Ethics, points out, "…true responsibility is always a response to a call from others, an answer." This is at the root of much of our current frustration with American democracy. It seems to me that this is the relevance of the combination of "The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large." Not only does the democratic process support the right of conscience, but the responsible use of the right of conscience is essential to the health of democracy.
In an article in the "The Atlantic Monthly," (March, 1996) Michael J. Sandel writes: "In recent decades the civic, or formative, aspect of our politics has given way to a procedural republic, concerned less with cultivating virtue than with enabling persons to choose their own values. This shift sheds light on our present discontent. For despite its appeal, the liberal vision of freedom lacks the civic resources to sustain self-government. The public philosophy by which we live cannot secure the liberty it promises, because it cannot inspire the sense of community and civic engagement that liberty requires."
In the past half century we have come to see liberty, not as an opportunity to exercise our consciences responsibly in relationship to one anther, but as freedom to do whatever we wish. So today, we have a society of unenlightened self-interest, a society where many are determined to get as much as possible for themselves without regard to the needs of others, a society where violence is rampant and the exercise of values is in short supply, a society where liberty is lessened in the name of personal freedom.
When democracy encourages a fragmenting individualism, it undermines the ability of its citizens to build a sense of commonality, mutuality and community upon which democracy depends for its success. Our schools and we as parents must encourage responsibility and the common values of a diverse and democratic society. Our business institutions need to become once more responsive to the needs of those who staff them as well as to customers and shareholders.
"The use of the democratic process within our (Unitarian Universalist) congregations" has suffered the same problem of fragmenting individualism, of lack of mutual responsibility which is true "in society at large." We need to recognize that mutual responsibility and recognition of our interdependence is what builds the sense of community within our congregation which can reliably fill our mutual needs for support in creating meaningful lives and which can reliably speak to the brokenness of the larger society.
To let our consciences be our guide - first we must cultivate the capacity for reflection - on what we might do, on what we are about to do, on what we have done. Second we must seek and expand moral grounding to nurture the development of our consciences and the consciences of children, not only our own children, but those others we influence by our example and through the explicit and implicit teaching of this congregation. Finally and constantly, we must follow our conscience to do the right thing! And then we close the circle by reflecting on what we have done in order to continue the lifelong task of growing a conscience.
We live in an increasingly diverse society and join together in an increasingly diverse congregation. We must exercise our consciences responsibly, learning to respect the very real differences among us and responding to the uniqueness of each other, in order to build the community which will bring us the benefits of democracy within our own congregation and in society at large.
AMEN
