David Breeden is speaking all week about the issues with liberalism.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden and the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is coffee and wisdom starting at a new week. And this week we’re going to be looking at the idea of embodied cognition because this has been very much a hot button issue through hundreds of years in the Western tradition and kind of got us into a place where we’ve been a little bit confused over ideas. This, of course, is a very silly sci fi movie called “They Saved Hitler’s Brain”. But it is part of a folk idea that somehow the brain contains all of our personality and consciousness. And couldn’t we just keep Hitler’s brain in a jar and then put it in someone else and they would act like Adolf Hitler? It’s a good question and we don’t really know the answer, but there are some fairly good clues from science as we work through this. This ties back to last week and what we just discovered and talked about. We talked about the idea of liberalism last week, how it starts out in one particular place that we call classic liberalism that’s about individual freedoms and then moves towards something else. This week, we want to look at the Western idea of individuality because these are two very tied together ideas. So to set the scene, we go back to the Protestant Reformation in the fifteen hundreds and that underlined the idea that faith was about personal struggle rather than group ritual or tradition.

That is what Protestantism is really based in from the beginning, is that it is between one person and God. Therefore, the individual becomes this place of the cosmic struggle and therefore the individual becomes much more important in the Western mind. So this is this central to understanding several things that are going to be coming together. So it’s much more about the personal. During that time, translations of the Bible into local languages allowed people to interpret scripture for themselves. We should discuss the fact that nationalism was very much a part of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther couldn’t have survived if he hadn’t been protected by various of the German states during his time from the Pope and his minions. The mandate to read the Bible expanded literacy, especially here in the US. That becomes absolutely central, but it becomes important all over Europe as well. And of course, the printing press exploded publication of various kinds of things. And really, that’s one of the arguments for how the Reformation could not be stamped out because all these printing presses were creating all of this Protestant propaganda all over Europe. So in classic liberalism, there arose this set of values. The individual was the locus of the cosmic battle between good and evil. This individual must then have some kind of divine sanctions, and that would include some kind of individual worth and autonomy.

And then the idea that God granted these rights of man that becomes central to the American and in the French revolutions. So the divine deist God, as we’ve discussed before, would somehow grant these rights and therefore the individual had them, not suddenly the monarch as much as once they assumed. Well, then what I want to think about this week is the difference between these two statements. “I think therefore I am” and “I am because we are”. Very different statements from very different parts of the world, very different social systems. And that’s part of what we need to think about as we explore the idea of a brain in a jar is not really being reflective of how reality a...