In Praise of Searching

My talk at Unitarian Fellowship of Houston, March 9

Our UU seventh principle tells us that  “We covenant to affirm and support: The free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”

There are lots of good words there: free, responsible, search, truth, meaning. I could do a talk about freedom and responsibility, or about truth and meaning. Either one would probably be pretty interesting. But I’m not doing either, because if you look at our principles, you see that Unitarian Universalist congregations covenant to affirm and support some thing. For the 4th principle, what we affirm and support is searching. The rest of the principle is about what we search for, or how we go about searching. But first, we need to think about why we even want to search.

In the late 1400’s, China had the largest naval fleet in the world, which routinely made trips past India and to the middle east. Then, abruptly, they stopped sending the fleet out. When I first learned this a couple of decades ago, the conventional reasoning is that the Chinese emperor simply decided that there was no need to because China, in it’s magnificent glory, already knew everything that was worth knowing. Then western Europe began it’s own renaissance, and China’s glory remained only within their own minds. That reversal is one that modern china is still working to overcome. While later scholarship shows that there more reasons than simply imperial fiat, it is still definitely true that they quit traveling and turned inward, and then they were passed by.

More recently, look at the example of physicists in the early 1900’s. After several centuries of working with Newtonian physics, they had, they believed, answered all the important problems. There were only a couple of pesky aberrations left, which would be soon taken care of. Then Einstein came along and presented some theories which we still haven’t reached the bottom of a hundred years later. Unfortunately, for them, many many scientists of the time simply had too much invested emotionally in their belief in Newtonian physics, and they were simply unable to let loose of their pet theory and move to a new one. Instead, they went on attempting to prove Einstein wrong until they died. Despite their best efforts, however, Einstein turned out to know better than they did.

UU’s have a tradition of being in favor of lifetime learning, and those of a more theological bent sometimes frame the discussion by saying “Revelation is not sealed.” In other words, there is no set of beliefs or magic book which contains all the answers, if only we can decode it properly. There is always more to discover. As the examples above show, it may well be that the moment we are most certain we do know “the answer” is the moment we are most likely to be wrong. For hard economic reasons as well as the psychological need to continue growing or face dying, we must always continue to search for something new - to keep up with what is happening around us and how it differs from what we have long thought.

If we accept that we need to search, then we can get to the other parts of our 4th principle: what should we search for, and how? Our tradition tells us that the what is in two parts: truth and meaning.

UU’s are all over truth. We love truth, we love proof. We are not nearly as comfortable with meaning, because it tends to be slippery and fuzzy. Frequently it edges over into feelings, and we’re not real happy about that either, because feelings can’t be quantified and proven to be correct. The problem is that facts or truth are great as abstract statements, but they don’t really do anything for us until we put them in terms we understand from our own experience. It is one thing to say “anyone can live without caffeine” but quite another to live with someone who is having to live through the transition to decaf. Truth is important because it gives us some structure to hang on to, but meaning is crucial because that’s what tells us how we ought to act given the truth that we find around us. We need both, even when one or the other is rather uncomfortable. Perhaps that’s when we need them most!

Consider the example of the Cheney family - when faced with the fact that one daughter was a lesbian, we have seen very different reactions from her parents and her sibling. All were faced with a decision as to whether family love or love of a belief set was more important - each decided according to the meaning they derived from the truth they saw.

So, on our search for truth and meaning, what should we do? Here too the principle gives us some guidance: we want a free and responsible search. Freedom is easy. UU’s are all over freedom. We will demonstrate anywhere, anytime, for any reason, as long as we think it increases freedom. But the problem with freedom is that it’s free. There are no boundaries, so we can do whatever we like, or do nothing at all. In fact, the easiest way to fail at a search for truth and meaning is simply not to bother to do it. After all, there are always plenty of other things we could be doing. So freedom has a downside - we may choose not to act. We may also choose to only do things that are easy or comfortable, even though that eliminates from our search anything that’s more work or that causes us doubt.

That’s where the responsible part comes in. We owe it to ourselves to do the right thing. First we must make the effort. Secondly, we must follow the search where it wants to go, and not stop just because it seems not to be supporting our beliefs or because it’s getting into territory we find troubling. Some of our journey may be through rocks rather than down an easy path, but that is how we find the hidden gems which are far from the usual tourist destinations.

So at the end, what does this principle tell us? That we must always search, because to give up learning is to die. That we must welcome both knowledge and meaning, because neither by itself can give us a path through the uncharted waters we call life. And finally, that we must be free to search wherever we want and come to whatever conclusions we reach, but we must also be responsible to ourselves to make sure we *are* searching, and to search where we need to rather than just where we’re comfortable.

We’ve noted that the seven principles seem to flow from that universal ethical principle which every culture has had a statement of: the golden rule. In this case, the 4th principle tells us that we personally must search as vigorously and rigorously as we would expect everyone else to.

To close, I ask us to remember the words of Sherlock Holmes, who said “when you have eliminated everything that is impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth.”