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

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden. I’m senior minister, First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is coffee and Wisdom. And this week we are looking at the idea of embodied cognition. That is the difference between “I think therefore I am” and “I am because we are”. Talking about cultural difference and how we perceive the world and what the implications of that really are. I refer often to a quote from Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist, he lived 1926 to 2006. And he said this: “The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.” So you get the idea here from an anthropologist who has been studying the interpretation of cultures and how cultures socially see the world and as the difference between groups and individuals that the Western conception of the individual, which we just discussed last week, is really the basis for the idea of classic liberalism and then democracy that develops out of that idea and then also the Protestant Reformation idea of the individual. Those are very cultural specific, even though they may seem like the way it has to be to individuals who are living in the social constructs that come out of those traditions.

So a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures. Yeah, do your thing. It wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense to a lot of people in our world. Going on with this idea, Charles Taylor is a Roman Catholic philosopher. He lives in Canada. His book, “A Secular Age”, is considered by many to be absolutely central to our understanding of theology in this new era. It came out in 2006 and is usually referred to when we talk anything about secularity, individualism, and in how our social systems are working today. He has this to say. “This frontier of self-exploration has grown, through various spiritual disciplines of self-examination, through Montaigne, the development of the modern novel, the rise of Romanticism, the ethic of authenticity, to the point where we now conceive of ourselves as having inner depths.” His argument is that, guess what? In the Middle Ages, people didn’t see themselves as having inner depths. Again, they saw themselves as much more a part of a social matrix or system, not as individuals. But since the Protestant Reformation, this keeps getting underlined, until we have what he calls an ethic of authenticity that really is pushing people toward feeling authentic, when, what would that even mean? He goes on to say, “The dark side of individualism is a centering on the self, which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer in meaning, and less concerned with others or society.”

There’s the idea, and as I’ve been talking about, and go back to Monday, this Decartesian dualism, this mind-body split, that’s going on, is a very Western post-Greek philosophy idea that goes directly into the Christian ideas of body and soul and get embedded within Western cultures and seems to have gotten even more extreme here in the United States, in our cultures and in our religions. So the mind body problem: here’s a good New Yorker cartoon that pretty well sums it up. “Get up”, says his brain. “No”, says his body.