DOES THE END JUSTIFY THE MEANS?

One of the first cracks in my hero-worship of my first Unitarian minister came when he said something that led me to ask, “Then are you saying the end justifies the means?”

“Yes.”

This has always been a critical moral question and -- too often, I fear -- using dubious means has corrupted the action to the point of changing the end. I mean, if a person lies, cheats, steals, and etc. to get to be the president on grounds that then he or she will be in a position to make vital changes to save the world, will they even remember what the changes are? What they’re supposed to save?

I haven’t put this directly to Darrell Kipp, but we were talking along these same lines the other day. He was telling about conferences of nonprofits, organized to do good, who are now so massive and self-regarding that they crush their own ability to do good. Several important Indians with outstanding achievements were invited to a recent event but so many people who considered themselves MORE important had insisted on having time, that in order to make room for them the Indians were put on a panel together at the end of the day, reduced to a category.

He was saying that probably half of the people at the conferences he’s attended recently were well-dressed, attractive women between twenty and fifty who were clearly “on the make” -- while the rest were grassroots people, ordinary small-town, low-rent folks driven to do some good: food banks, credit counseling, housing. I’ve been suggesting for some time that when one goes to environmental roundtables the activists are often the tweedy, verbal, summer back-packers who suggest college professors and spend all their time tweaking agreements and regulations that no one else understands. Phyllis has sent me a publication by an organization called “Animal People,” who publish the budgets and incomes of humane societies (millions) and their directors (hundreds of thousands). They normally post these figures on their websites but the sites get hacked. I’ll blog more about this later.

Now I’m told that the Unitarian Universalist Association is advertising in the usual media ways to make the denomination grow. (The current president is an old advertising exec -- people are afraid to point out that he’s black or that he’s from Washington, D.C.) So what is the UUA point of salesmanship, their “means” argument? Religious freedom, which is the classic gathering point? No. Gay rights. I expect this is the result of some kind of survey to discover who is looking for a denomination, not a principled consensus. It’s “sexy” and media-worthy.

Darrell and I have been reflecting on the children of the Boomers, who were the children of the WWII generation. Because their parents had hard times, the Boomers were raised “easy” -- very little hardship in their lives, an expanding economy, the programs of the War on Poverty (as opposed to War on Terrorism), welcoming colleges, and so on. They didn’t have to learn how to tough it out, scrimp through a budget, or accept a rather lesser lot in life than they might have originally imagined. (The lesser lot being the great hardship of dorm life or work/study.) At the same time it was the Boomers who were the idealists, the ones who wanted to change the world, the ones Darrell remembers thronging to Billings to see JFK, Jr. and glory in his ideas. (As contrasted with Bush’s recent visit where the people must be filtered.) They were the hippies.

Now their kids totally reject traditional college life. They say their parents are square: NPR is dumb, nature trails are boring, symphonies are fossilized, “art” is corny, opera/dance/theatre are-you-kidding? and even the director of the gay and lesbian coalition in Montana has had to resign for lack of funds. Funding everywhere is thinning out. Maybe this is related to the changes we’re seeing in the nonprofit world: the professionalization and the bureaucratization of NGO’s, whether supposedly rebuilding Iraq or supposedly feeding the poor. A huge percentage off the tops of their budgets go to the staff. The Boomers’ kids know this. Part of the judgment of “square” comes from cynicism rather than awareness of newer and better ways. They’re saying, “All means are corrupt.” And -- I think -- to protect themselves from despair, add, “It’s not a worthwhile goal anyway. Nobody really cares about all this old moldy liberal do-gooders stuff. Just have a good day while you can, man!”

But the despair creeps in anyway. Darrell says that Father Ed, at Church of the Little Flower in Browning, said -- uncharacteristically, since he is not one to talk about himself -- “I came here with such wonderful ideas about what could be accomplished. And all I’ve done has been to bury young people.” Drugs, drink, fast driving, violence, “media meth” mainlining shock and risk... On a national level how do we expect anyone to turn around global warming, the death of the oceans, steadily increasing atmospheric pollution, crazed dictators with atomic bombs, and -- hell -- meteors striking the planet Earth? And who cares anyway? We’re just another kind of animal waiting to become extinct. Why deny yourself?

A strong tie between DRK (Darrell) and MHS (me) is our conviction that the pen is mightier than the sword, even if it’s a virtual fantasy sword on Gameboy. Ideas rule. Ideas rock. The best way to defeat a bad idea is with a good idea. The best way to forge a good idea is to collaborate with a community that simply will not let any among them get away with substituting means for Ends, will not let any among them forget the End or change the End to something else because corrupt means have damaged their vision. That’s what the college years used to be about. That’s why we wanted the high school kids to go to college. I thought that’s what churches were about.

If they aren’t, let’s get busy and figure out what can replace them. It’s Sunday. I can’t help preaching. Guess I won't bother to apologize since this is not a comfortably salaried pulpit on which I and my family are dependent. This is a great means, this blog thing.