(from Queen Mab, Percy Bysshe Shelley)

Fear not that the tyrants shall rule forever,
Or the priests of the bloody faith;
They stand on the brink of the mighty river
Whose waves they have tainted with death…
And their swords and their scepters I floating see
Like wrecks, on the surge of eternity.

(from Rosalind and Helen, Percy Bysshe Shelley)

It has been said that:

Philosophers exist to describe how life works.

Theologians exist to attach meaning to life.

Politicians exist to control how life works.

Priests exist to control the meaning of life.

The philosopher and the theologian seek to understand and interpret, while the politician and the priest seek to control. The politician and the priest often form an alliance, and out of that alliance comes power - the power of the one true way.

I had begun thinking about this topic some time ago, and I put it on my mental list of future talks to prepare for you magnificent people. Then September 11th happened, and I watched along with the rest of the world, trying to make sense of it. I felt a little like a procrastinating incarnation of Nostradamus, expecting something like this to happen, but failing to speak up, based on what I saw as the fundamental nature of humans coupled with the current state of the world.

If I had to pick one of the four categories of people I listed at the start to describe myself, I think everyone who knows me would expect me to choose "philosopher." So, I'm going to put on my philosopher's hat and talk about some things I've observed in human behaviors. I want to talk about our need to form tribes, and what happens when our tribes interact with one another.

You may not think of yourself as belonging to any tribes, so let me help you to visualize this. The philosopher's mandate is, "know thyself", so I'll use myself as an example.

Last weekend, I was in Galveston to be with a tribe that closely matches my sense of self, a tribe of transgendered persons. Almost all people see themselves as belonging to the tribe of men or the tribe of women, but I don't feel as if I belong to either of these. My tribe gathers twice a year to share our stories of coping with living among the bulk of humanity, since we are a small band, and scattered to the corners of the earth. We are a peaceful tribe, though other tribes make that difficult at times. Most people are only vaguely aware of our existence, if at all, since most of us keep our membership secret. We mostly guard our invisibility, allowing others to assume we belong to their more common tribes.

This is not my only tribe. Like the rest of you, I belong to many other tribes. I recently joined this tribe of Unitarians, since I share similar views about spirituality with many of you. I also belong to the tribes of Penn State, Texas Tech, and Marshall Mavericks football fans, since I attended all those schools and cheered our warriors on to victory. We all know that tribes form around sports teams, with many fiercely loyal members (fan is short for fanatic, after all!). I also belong to the tribe of Marshallites, the tribe of Texans, and the tribe of Americans. Since I spend a third to a half of my waking hours at work, I belong to tribes there as well. I even get to be a leader of one such tribe - my department. Right now, my company is trying to split itself into two tribes. The leader of the Eastman tribe wants to excommunicate some of us and send us on our way as the Voridian tribe. Spurned as we've been, we say "good riddance," and we've already come up with a secret sign for members of the new tribe. If you promise not to tell, I'll share it with you - it looks like this. (make "live long and prosper" Vulcan sign from Star Trek) Unfortunately, my hands aren't good at it. Some have said that people like me may have to be assigned to a sub-tribe called the "Branch Voridians."

I think you can follow the trail now. For every tribe I count as my own, I can think of a time when I described myself to someone else as belonging to that tribe.

Tribes begin to form any time two or more humans come together. Our tribes exist for many purposes. When those purposes are different, they are not in competition for anything, and it is likely that the tribes will coexist in harmony. Eventually though, it is inevitable that tribes with similar purposes will encounter one another. This is when we first hear the instinctive alarm go off in our brains, which signals us of impending competition, of the need to define "us" and "them." At this point, the priest and the politician usually enter the picture, advising the tribe on a course of action.

Now you may think about some of those tribes I mentioned earlier, and protest that they don't all have priests and politicians. Let's think about that for a moment. How do you identify a tribe's priest and politician?

All you have to do is look for the power.

For nations, states, municipalities, and such, the politicians are easy to identify. Unfortunately, they make darn sure we know who they are. They control how we live our lives, usually with the threat of punishment if we disobey. If you don't believe that, here's an experiment. Try driving down Gilmer Road at 70 miles per hour when you go home today. See for yourself how free you are to decide how fast to drive.

What about the priest? Remember our definitions. The priest in a governmental body is the person who controls the meaning of life. When you are swept up in a fit of nationalism, there are priests behind that curtain over there guiding your emotions. They may have left a latent effect many years ago, as priests are wont to do, but someone taught you to feel patriotism. Why do you suppose school administrators require students to recite the pledge of allegiance to the flag every day? Why do you think some folks get so riled up about flag burning? Why do you think some people want to require prayer to their God in all our schools?

Sometimes the priest and the politician are one and the same, a duality. We have a president who seems to want to fulfill both roles when he speaks. He is passionate about his belief in the power of faith, based on his own life experience, and he wants the rest of us to find that same meaning. This duality of roles occurs to a greater extent in religious tribes. The pope is the ultimate source of power in the Catholic Church, divinely guided, telling his tribesmen both how to live their lives and what meaning to attach to them, and expecting their unquestioning compliance. In times past, the pope was the most powerful person on Earth. When the power of the dual leader is this strong, we call it a theocracy. Leaders of other religious sects, like the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, are perhaps not quite as powerful. Unlike the pope, he can be removed from power by his tribesmen. But he definitely wears the dual hat of power as much as he can get away with it.

How about business tribes? Businesses are always structured along totalitarian lines, with a clear hierarchy of people who control what we do. Business politicians are always appointed - never elected. They are a special sort of politician, advancing by pleasing those who are above them in the hierarchy. But trust me, they are politicians to the core. Do businesses have priests? I think so. Look for people who work to inspire loyalty to the tribe. Usually this is done by reinforcing the common purpose of the employees, pitting the company against outside forces. A few years ago, my company held the functional equivalent of mandatory religious services to persuade members of management to see the evil of the Longview mayor. He was audaciously planning to tax company land, so the company PR guy, acting as the head priest, was given a mandate to whip the company tribe into a religious fervor, impressing the meaning of our corporate existence upon us. The mayor was soundly defeated.

This brings us to an important point about tribes. Since all of us belong to many tribes, we are bound to receive conflicting advice from the priests and politicians of each one. When this happens, we have to choose the tribe to which we feel the most allegiance. The pope was once the most powerful person in the world because there was a significant imbalance of power, with all other tribes very weak by comparison. Nowadays, that power has been tempered by the influence of many other tribes, which have all grown strong. The duality of priest and politician in one person has been effectively split, and most Catholics, like the rest of us, look mainly to their government politicians for control of how they live, and to their priest to control why they live.

When two tribes come into conflict, the members of the tribes have some important choices to make. They can live side by side. They can join to form a bigger tribe. Or, they can fight one another. The priest and politician, depending on their relative power and their goals, will attempt to decide for the tribe, using every tool at their disposal to persuade the tribesmen that their decisions are true and just.

The most powerful tool, used throughout history by tribal leaders, is the power of the one true way. If the members of the tribe can be convinced of this "one true way," they can be persuaded to fight against members of other tribes. "War" is the word we use to describe violent tribal conflict, when fighting is demanded by the politicians or the priests.

I've been keeping up with the "War on Terrorism" in Afghanistan, reading and watching news broadcasts as most of you have. Here we have the tribe of al-Qaeda, with its leaders, allied with the tribe of the Talban, with another set of leaders, fighting the tribe of America, with our own leaders. This conflict of tribes, which has been simmering for some time, escalated into "war" with an act of aggression on September 11th. The leaders of one tribe convinced some of their tribesmen that they should sacrifice their lives to carry out this act of aggression.

How is it that a human, whose most basic instinct is to ensure personal survival, can be persuaded to end his life in such a mission? Certainly, many humans have died in passion, avenging the personal loss of a loved one. But what if there is no such loss? A willing martyr must be convinced that the battle for the one true way is more important than his or her own life. An effective means to accomplish this is religious indoctrination.

In the case of the Taliban and al-Qaeda tribes, we find the roots of this indoctrination in schools that teach fundamentalist views of Islam, like the madrasas of neighboring Pakistan. Most children can be shaped like putty by skillful teachers when placed in such an environment. They can be turned into future killing automatons, believing that their highest purpose in life is to sacrifice themselves at the behest of their leaders. This call to sacrifice is enabled by the promise of an afterlife with rewards that exceed any which can be achieved in life.

This method is practiced anywhere we find a strong alliance of priest and politician. There are groups in places like Palestine who mix political control with religious meaning to inspire such martyrs. Is this practice limited to Islam? No; tribes aligned with Christianity have been using this method for hundreds of years. Remember the Crusades?

Do you doubt that fundamentalist Christians, or Jews, or any other religion could easily be turned to this purpose in our time? They certainly don't lack the religious passion, or the promise of an afterlife filled with rewards. If not for a superiority of weapons that allows our tribes to fight from a distance, the martyr approach might just as easily be used as a weapon by our own leaders.

When the empire of Japan found themselves outmatched near the end of World War II, they tapped this method. Under the leadership of the charismatic admiral Takijiro Ohnishi, steeped in the way of the bushido, the kamikaze squadrons were formed. Over a thousand pilots flew to their certain deaths in the defense of Okinawa in 1945, believing that there was no higher purpose than dying for their emperor. When defeat finally came, Ohnishi committed the samurai's suicide - seppuku, as his final act.

Hate is the mechanism used to draw the line between us and them. And learning to hate is not at all difficult. The seeds of hate are latent in all of us. All we need is a leader to inspire us to cross over into that darkness that calls when we feel threatened or mistreated. It is instinctive, and it is only by exercising self-restraint that we overcome our impulse to act on these feelings. Hate is too often what motivates the politicians and the priests who lead our tribes.

On September 13th, just two days after the suicide attacks in America, conservative religious leader Jerry Falwell spoke on Pat Robertson's 700 Club, a Christian fundamentalist television program. He blamed the attacks on everyone who harbors different social, political, and religious views from him and his tribe. Falwell proclaimed, and Robertson concurred, that God allowed this to happen to teach us a lesson, to punish us for our failure to do His will. Much to their surprise, calls for an apology and a retraction were swift and widespread. Even our president, who is closely affiliated with religious conservatives, knew he had crossed the line with his hate-mongering. Under duress, Falwell made several apologies over the course of the next few weeks. He discovered that most of us, at least at that point in time, felt an allegiance to the tribe of Americans stronger than to any other tribe we belong to. A few weeks later, a newspaper columnist asked him if he had taken more heat on this than anything in his long, controversial career. "Oh no," he said, smiling. "As a matter of fact, most of the heat I've taken has not been because of this statement. It's from people who are upset that I apologized. Thousands of people of faith in America unfortunately agreed with the first statement… They were incensed that I apologized."

These people are firmly committed to the rightness of Falwell's one true way. Jerry Falwell has been indoctrinating our young people for over 30 years at his "Liberty" University. Think about that.

Imagine
John Lennon

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

dm 12/09/01

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