David Breeden is speaking all week about the common task.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation, and this is coffee and Wisdom. This week we are considering the idea of a common task. Yesterday, I was talking a little bit about how many people of a religious bent argue that it’s impossible to have a common task if we don’t have a common religious heritage within a country. Well, that’s not going to work out here in the US for various reasons. One, there’s a whole lot of religions here. And, two, there are a lot of us also who are secular people who don’t buy into a particular religious bent. So is there a common task? What can we look at outside of the traditional way of seeing this? I do want to mention Nikolai Fedorov, 1829 to 1903, a futurist, a Christian mystic, a friend of Leo Tolstoy. He famously wrote a book, “What was Man created for? The Philosophy of the Common Task.” And you’ll find him pretty easily if you begin to do a little Web search on this idea of a common task. Again, he’s coming out of a Christian viewpoint, and so he thinks that Russia would do well to follow a common Christian path, in his case, certainly Eastern Orthodoxy. And his friend Leo Tolstoy and he eventually fell out because Leo Tolstoy became less conventionally Christian as his life progressed. Eventually, Tolstoy says, “In affirming my belief in Christ’s teachings, I could not help explaining why I do not believe and consider as mistaken

the Church’s doctrine, which is usually called Christianity.” Leo Tolstoy later becomes a pacifist, a Christian pacifist, and much more of a Christian socialist pacifist than was popular during his lifetime. He was reading some Unitarian and Universalist writers from the U.S. to get at these ideas, famously. But back to Fedorov, who says this about the common task: “Must man be the exterminator of his own species and the predator of nature, or must he be its regulator, its manager and the restorer to life of his own kin, victims of his blind unruly youth, or his past – that is, of history as fact?” As a futurist, Fedorov thought that we could be good stewards of the land and take care of ourselves, but we would have to face up to historical wrongs that had been going on within various national states. And that brings me to the current cover of the Atlantic Monthly: “Return the National Parks to the Tribes,” an article written by David Treuer. This is called, by the way, “vicarious intergenerational moral responsibility,” a Fedorov term translated from Russian, but a vicarious intergenerational moral responsibility. That is what Fedorov was talking about people needing to take up. And that indeed is what The Atlantic Monthly is talking about this particular month. David Treuer has written a book called “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America 1890 to the Present.” And he was recently interviewed on National Public Radio. “No one’s seriously just suggesting, why don’t we just grant the entire country back? But what I am saying is that this kind of reparation is a chance for the country to put into practice its best ideals, its noblest impulses.

America needs to be reminded of its capacity for justice, fairness and compassion. And so for that reason and even that reason alone, I think this is an idea worth considering.” That is, returning the national parks to native peoples. And if you’re interested, do find the Atlantic Monthly from this month. But “vicarious intergenerational moral responsibility,