Sermon: The Greenest House

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In 1961 Hannah Arendt went as a reporter for The New Yorker to the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was a Nazi lieutenant colonel who had been responsible for the operations side of the project of forcing millions of Jews into concentration camps and later deporting them by train to places like Auschwitz. If there were ever an example of a psychopathic monster – grand evil incarnate – Adolf Eichmann should be it. But Arendt published a series of articles about the trial that she later turned into a book subtitled, A Report on the Banality of Evil. In it she made the argument that Eichmann was actually not psychopathic, not exceptional in his propensity for violence, not particularly hateful or malicious. What he was was unintelligent, rule-oriented, and insecure, with a desperate need to belong. He was a joiner who wanted to be part of something. He wanted to advance his career. He wanted respect and a good life. He often spoke in clichés. While he was in prison in Israel awaiting his trial, five different psychiatrists interviewed him and found no evidence of any pathology. He was a psychologically stable, normal person.

 

Arendt wrote, “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”

 

Arendt got a lot of pushback for this view and in fact some of her claims were recently debunked, but the book changed the conversation about the nature of evil forever. For a holocaust to be carried out on a grand scale you don’t need a battalion of sinister bad guys. You maybe need a few bad guys, but what you need even more are thousands of ordinary people who want badly to fit in and advance themselves and their careers. You need people who will accept the moral standards of their social environment. You need people committed to being normal relative to their place and time, whatever that entails.

 

Such people don’t think they’re participating in something horrific, because – how could something really horrific be accepted by everyone around me? Surely my career and my way of life can’t be that bad if everyone else is doing it too. If it were, somebody would have stopped it already. Right? On this People’s Climate March Sunday, you can probably see where I’m going with this.

 

We’re facing an environmental cataclysm that is endangering all life on this planet. I’m not going to spend time here defending the science – I think it speaks for itself and I’m happy to point you to resources if you want them. What I’m interested in today is that this is happening and yet there are virtually no bad guys in the game. There are a few, probably, at Monsanto and in oil and gas companies, and a few in public office. But even they are not sitting around tables in the evenings smoking cigars and plotting the extinction of the polar bear. Most of them don’t have malicious intent. They’re just following the prevailing logic and ethic of our culture – the logic and ethic of commerce. They’re just being smart business people doing what they’ve been raised to do. The banality of evil. In Arendt’s words, “terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

 

And then there’s the rest of us. Not one of us in this room is evil and yet we are all semi-knowingly participating in creating this global catastrophe. Most of us eat meat and dairy products that require massive quantities of water, fossil fuels, and pesticides, and destroy forests and jungles in their production. Most of us live and work in buildings that are burning fuel 24/7 for lights, computers, appliances, heating and air conditioning systems. Most of us rely on products shipped from far away, made of plastic, wrapped in plastic, or delivered in plastic bags, most of which cannot be recycled, cannot biodegrade, and sit as pollution on our earth forever. Most of us watch TV shows and Hollywood movies whose production creates more air pollution than almost any other major industry. Most of us, when using a public restroom, will dry our hands with paper towels made from trees. Then we throw them in the garbage where they will be transported to a landfill for all time.

 

This is all normal for our culture. Terribly and terrifyingly normal. “I’m going to go watch a movie.” Normal! “I’m ordering us a pizza.” Normal! “Remember to pick up a crate of bottled water at Costco for the picnic.” Normal! Some of us try to not do some of these things – I don’t use paper towels, for example, I don’t eat much meat. But I still participate in the system as a whole and accept the basic premise of what’s okay in our culture. I just took one of these online quizzes to find out the carbon footprint of the way that I eat. It was not good. I personally generate the equivalent of 3 tons of CO2 each year through my food choices. And I think of myself as someone who makes a reasonable effort.

 

The madness of the way we live is largely invisible to us because it’s simply the water we swim in. It’s hard to really believe that our banal, day-to-day activities are creating devastation. It’s hard to really imagine that a “reasonable effort,” like the one that I and so many of us make, is just not going to get the job done.

 

Here’s a story that illustrates how our cultural lens makes it so hard for even the best-intentioned of us to see the connection between what we do and the natural world. This is from one of our members here, Jess Sasko: It was Thanksgiving a few years ago. Her grandfather was cooking. He’s a great cook, famous especially for his stuffing. He loves to talk about food and share recipes. Knowing that she was a vegetarian, he told her that day that he had prepared a special stuffing just for her that had no turkey in it. She told him how grateful she was for this. As she was helping him cook in the kitchen, she looked for a pot on the stove with the vegetarian stuffing and didn’t see one. She asked him where it was and he said, “Oh, your stuffing? It’s inside the turkey. I put it in there to give it some flavor.” She graciously ate the stuffing, it was delicious, and then later, tactfully said, “You know, grandpa, people who are really serious vegetarians wouldn’t even eat stuffing that was cooked in a turkey.”

 

He was a little surprised to hear that, but he took it to heart and the next year at Thanksgiving, he said, “Guess what? I’ve made you a stuffing and there’s no turkey in it and it’s not in the turkey. Jess told him how grateful she was and went into the kitchen to help him cook. There was her vegetarian stuffing cooking on the stove, separate from the turkey as promised. And because he loves to talk about recipes, she asked him how he had made it. He started listing the things in it: celery, carrots, parsley, a chicken bouillon cube, thyme, sage… Jess graciously ate it, it was delicious, and later she tactfully said, “You know, grandpa, people who are really serious vegetarians wouldn’t even eat something cooked with a chicken bouillon cube.” He looked dismayed and protested, “Well then it wouldn’t have any flavor at all.”

 

Here was a loving grandfather trying as absolutely hard as he could to fulfill the bewildering requests of his granddaughter. And to him, because of the culture he’s been part of his whole life, chicken is a substance, not a bird; it’s a flavor that’s essential in cooking good food for the people you love. And this is what makes this whole thing so hard. The very things that we will need to change in order for this earth to be safe for our children and our children’s children are the things closest to us, dearest to us, most rooted in our warmest, oldest traditions. They will sometimes be the things we buy and do to express love. They will often be things that make us feel successful and good about ourselves. They will frequently be things that help us feel “normal.”

 

The changes we need to make will not be sexy or dramatic or heroic or generally very much fun. Because the corresponding truth to Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” is the “banality of good.” I don’t believe, as some do, that political pressure alone will save us. I’m all in favor of participating in the Climate March today and it’s crucial to make global accords and regulate industry. But as long as we keep buying the products, they will keep being made. I don’t believe, as some do, that green technology alone will save us. Wind and solar will certainly help, but as long as we keep using energy like we do now, the problems will just pop up whack-a-mole style somewhere else. The banal, inconvenient truth is that what will save us is radically downsizing the way we live. The things we will have to do will mainly entail not doing things.  The generations represented in this room will have to make real sacrifices. The greenest car is the one you don’t drive. The greenest air conditioner is the one that’s off. The greenest house is the house that’s never built. The incessant, frenetic buzz of our world has to subside. We have to let the earth rest.

 

Here’s a convenient truth: We are in desperate need of some kind of other context outside of the cultural waters we swim in – some other vision for the world to equip us to make the hard changes. Well, it just so happens, conveniently, that we are sitting right now in the one place, the one context that can possibly give this to us. I don’t mean just First U, but progressive religious communities in general have the ability to combine ancient spiritual wisdom with poetry and art and the insights of today to create full-color, three-dimensional alternative visions of human life on this earth. We are not beholden to modern culture in the same way that the commercial world is. We have the freedom here to imagine another way.

 

Ecological consciousness, it turns out, is not new at all – there are long traditions of religious teachings charting this territory. Native American traditions call for every decision to be made with consideration of the impact it will have seven generations out. The Torah calls for a yearlong Sabbath, called the Shmita year, once every seven years. During this year, all year, humans are to rest, animals are to rest, and the earth is to rest. It says, “The land shall have a year of ceasing.” Interestingly, the next Shmita year starts this Wednesday. Our own Unitarian Universalist tradition has inherited this consciousness, mixed it with science, and offers a simple way of saying it: we are part of an interdependent web. This means that we depend on everything in it and everything in it depends on us. To be loving stewards of our earth is to be loving shapers of our destiny. It is, in the words of one of our dharma flags, to “live and thrive in balance with nature.”

 

From a spiritual perspective, scaling back our “lifestyle” is not a deprivation — it’s an opportunity. Eating less meat and more vegetables – so good for the earth – turns out to be really good for our bodies too. It’s healthy for us to walk more, bike more, connect with our local communities, and watch less TV. It’s kind of fun to make lists of all the things we can do that don’t extract anything from the earth: conversing, going for walks, reading a used book, having sex (assuming you don’t make any more humans in the process), playing acoustic instruments, playing pickup soccer with an old ball. You’ll notice that most of these activities actually connect us more closely with others while at the same time shifting our culture to create a more sustainable world. These are going to need to become the staples of our lives.

 

Some people believe that it’s already too late to save the earth from devastation. That we’ve already gone too far. Call me a Pollyanna optimist, but I don’t believe that’s true. I believe passionately in our power to change. To change our culture, to change what’s “normal,” to embrace the banality of good, and heal the earth. But it has to be now. We cannot wait another year, another month, another day. Starting with today’s Climate March and in the years to come, we will need to begin making profound changes. This is our moment, in the words of one of the organizers of the march, “to stand with each other, to stand for the sacred dignity of living things, the awesome beauty of a diverse and evolving world, and to celebrate the power of collective life affirming intent.”