COMMON HUMAN DECENCY

AN INTRODUCTION

And, let's face it--I write for a living, which means I tend to feel that if I'm putting words on paper, somebody ought to be paying me for them. It's been a long time since I've sat down to write something without a contract in hand and a little up front money to get me started. There's a nagging voice at the back of my head telling me that I shouldn't make this a habit. The mortgage does not get paid by blogs on the Web.

On the other hand--well, yes, there's always an on the other hand. In my case, the "on the other hand" has to do with the National Memorial Service held in Washington, D.C., after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. You remember the one. There was a Protestant minister and a Catholic priest and a rabbi and even a Muslim to pray for the dead, but not one single member of the secular/humanist "community" to say a word on behalf of those people who do not believe in God. Then there were all those endless repetitions of "God Bless America," as if it had replaced our actual national anthem in the middle of the night when I was too thoroughly asleep to notice. There were points, in those long days before the end of that September, when I thought I was never going to hear our real national anthem again.

It was the Memorial Service that sent me out on the Web to do something I'd done before and abandoned several times--to seek out secular and humanist organizations, full of people who (theoretically) would be like me and upset about the same things in the same way. I came away from that experience much as I had come away with it the times I'd tried it before. Half the time, I was frustrated. Half the time, I was furious. All the time, I was exasperated by the phenomenon of tight little groups of insular people smugly declaring their superiority to the outside world while being careful never to leave the rigidly controlled confines of "moderated" discussion lists and members-only posting forums where everybody agreed with them and nobody challenged their ideas.

That doesn't mean I think that all atheists, agnostics and humanists are insular and smug. Quite the contrary. Most of the ones I've known in my life have been among the most open-minded and intellectually honest people on the planet--but then, most of them haven't belonged to secular organizations, and probably wouldn't under threat of death.

Nor do I mean that religious people are inevitably less insular and more open-minded than people who don't believe in God. Hardly. Too many organizations of "Bible-believing Christians" are not just insular, but nearly psychotic in their divorce from reality. Don't try to confuse them with facts, and don't tell them you don't think that every word of the King James Version of the Bible is literally true. They'll stop talking to you.

However--and this is a big however--two of the people I admire most in my life right now are a Catholic priest and a cloistered Benedictine nun. And two of the people I admire least are an atheist web columnist and a humanist magazine editor. I have more in common with the Christian evangelicals on Marshall Fritz's Sepschool discussion list than I have with most of the writers who get published in The Humanist. I think the members of the American Humanist Association have more in common with the fans of Dobson's Focus on the Family than they'd like to admit. I am a libertarian-liberal atheist, but you could not predict from that the political or religious convictions of my friends, or my enemies.

The more I look at it, the more I think about what it was about that Memorial Service that bothered me and what it is about secular and humanist organizations that continues to bother me, the more I realize that none of this has anything to do with what I (or you) think about God or politics.

I think there is an American character, but it's not defined by a Christian engineer raising his family to believe in Faith and Freedom or a Birkenstock-shod agent for social change picketing the Bush administration for refusing to pay up at the UN. It's defined by those of us who refuse to barricade ourselves against the reality of our fellow citizens with a force-field of our own sense of superiority and self-regard, and who truly want to find ways to live together, as messy and exasperating as that can be. Needless to say, living together means giving up our ardent wish to make everybody else do what we think is right, whether they agree with us or not.

So, for the record--I am an atheist liberal, but I don't think atheist liberals are automatically more intelligent, rational, educated or worthy than religious conservatives. I would have liked to have a secular speaker at that Memorial Service, because I would have liked an acknowledgment of the fact that atheists are also Americans, but if such a speaker had been asked I wouldn't have wanted the Service to go without the prayers. It doesn't bother me when people pray for me. When I know they mean well, I'm grateful for their concern. I don't get offended when people send me religious Christmas cards, and I don't expect them to get offended when I send them season's greetings for the Winter Solstice. I don't want officially led prayers in public schools or town meetings, but I have nothing against a moment of silence as long as nobody cares if I read through it. I can get along with almost anybody, as long as they don't want to legislate their ideas of what is "good" or "right" or "proper" for the rest of us.

In the end, then, what this section of essays is about is people--all the people out there without the common human decency to respect their fellow citizens and the choices and ideas and beliefs those citizens make and hold. Most of the examples that will appear in these essays will be of people in the secular and humanist movements, because those are the people I'm most familiar with, but take my word for it--the personality types exist in every known ideological variety. Go out on the Web for a while, and you'll meet millions of them.

In fact, go to your town's next PTA meeting and you'll meet a few there, too.

I suppose what I'm hoping for is this: maybe, if we can get past the labels, those of us who sincerely believe in liberty of speech and of conscience can counter the weight of those who lust for control at any cost, whose fear of their fellow human beings is so deep and so vast that they'd rather see the death of the Bill of Rights and the entire tradition of liberty it stands for than allow people to make their own decisions about their own lives.

Essays

• The Trouble With Nicole (November 5, 2002)
• Why The Democrats Lose Elections (November 11, 2002)
• Absolutely The Only Thing I'm Going To Say About 9/11 (November 20, 2002)
• Why I am not a Humanist (December 22nd, 2002)
• Why Intellectuals Love Marx (February 7th, 2003)
  • Part 1
  • Part 2: The So What Factor
  • Part 3: The Crisis in the Humanities
  • Part 4: All Power To The People...Not (February 23rd, 2003)
  • Part 5: The Americanization of Everything (March 20th, 2003)
• Why I Don't Vote Republican (May 18th, 2003)
  • The God Thing
  • The Money Thing
  • The Stupid Thing
• Jane's Rules of the Road - A guide to debating (August 1st, 2003)
• A Secular Prayer for the Election Year (June 15th, 2004)
• Ersatz: An Essay Concerning Good Ol' Boys (June 15th, 2004)
• Sex (June 23rd, 2004)
• E Pluribus Unum: An Essay in Response to Jennifer (July 27th, 2004)

Copyright © 2002-2004 Jane Haddam. All rights reserved.

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