It has come time for Unitarian Universalists to admit that we have honored free thought over love as an institutional commitment, and to consider the possibility that our obsession with personal freedom of belief has caused our organizations spiritual harm. We have developed a congregational culture that honors intellectual dominance over love and tenderness. We are brilliantly conversant when voicing opinion, but do not know how to engage each other as vulnerable persons in need of hope, grace and healing, leaving it to the self-identified victims in our congregations to motivate and then control most discussion of what it means to love, to welcome and to accept.

There are probably less than 700,000 “UUs” in the United States today (I among them), and not much more than a million in the entire world, and the denomination has soul-searched over the last several decades to find the missing keys to significant growth. The denomination has particularly struggled to gain adherents beyond its white Anglo-Saxon Protestant roots into communities of color. UUism is often criticized as a religion of the head rather than the heart, and thus of limited appeal to most people.

From the Wikipedia article on “Unitarian Universalism”…

Unitarian Universalism is a religion characterized by support for a “free and responsible search for truth and meaning”. Unitarian Universalists do not share a creed; rather, they are unified by their shared search for spiritual growth and by the understanding that an individual’s theology is a result of that search and not obedience to an authoritarian requirement. Unitarian Universalists draw on many different theological sources and have a wide range of beliefs and practices.

Historically, both Unitarianism and Universalism have roots in the Christian faith. Contemporary Unitarian Universalists espouse a pluralist approach to religion, whereby the followers may be atheist, deist, theist, polytheist, or have no label at all.

My Take on the Essence of UUism

As a white male UU who does not believe in deities but believes that consciousness continues from life to life (so not your conventional atheist either) I agree that UUism at its best is a mix of both heart and head. But I disagree with Weinstein that, “Love is more important than freedom”. I see these two concepts together as being at the essence of what UUism is all about, at least for me. My dear friend Toni, who led the service when my partner Sally and I married, embodied that essence in a poem she had written that she read at the conclusion of the service, “Love that holds close with open arms”.

Some of us fall short in our humanity because we fail to embrace our fellow people with love and respect, we fail to hold them close. But then many (if not most of us) who participate in that positive embrace do so with closed rather than open arms. We expect and even demand that the people we love believe and behave the same as we do.

“Love that holds close with open arms” to me is the best of UUism, and our denomination’s “ministry” perhaps to the larger human community. It is having the love and forbearance to give each other the liberty to be who we are, with the hope, but not the expectation, that we will find common ground and community together. It represents a true commitment, in both head and heart, to egalitarianism and moving beyond any sort of “us and them” hierarchical thinking.

Not that we UUs always succeed at practicing this egalitarianism, this love with liberty, that we preach! We tend to be uncomfortable with people who don’t define themselves as political progressives or liberals, at least implicitly creating a “Republican free zone” with our attitudes.

But to our credit, like the Quakers, UUs are big proponents of democratic process in society at large and in how we run our own congregations. A longtime joke about UUs in this regard says that when a good Christian dies they go to heaven, but when a good UU dies they go to a discussion about heaven. Behind this joke is the fact that to a truly observant UU (like the Quakers), a well-run meeting (that encourages the active participation of all participants as a circle of equals) is a sacrament and essentially a sort of worship service.

UUism at Its Best with Its Older Youth

In my opinion, nowhere is that commitment to egalitarianism and “love that holds close with open arms” more evident than in my own experience of the YRUU older youth camps and conferences that my own kids participated in at the UU deBenneville Pines facility north of Redlands CA and other Southern California UU venues. (See my piece, “Camps, Cons & Compasses” for more details.) I cannot think of another older youth program that allows young people such freedom to govern their own events and their own community. I can think of no other denomination that has more egalitarian “right relations” between adults and youth.

Subject to Elitism

But as Reverend Weinstein points out in her piece, UUs can suffer from an intellectual elitism while at the same time championing egalitarian ideals.

Being a small denomination that many people have never even heard of, we UUs tend perhaps to have a bit of an inferiority complex (the underside of elitism) and are quick to note famous Unitarians include key figures of the white mostly Protestant intelligentsia of Britain and particularly the U.S. Four U.S. Presidents – John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams and William Howard Taft – plus America’s second First Lady Abigail Adams (a women’s rights advocate in her own right) and even our current President’s mom, Stanley Ann Dunham. Great writers and figures in the arts like Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, E.E. Cummings, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Pete Seeger, Rod Serling, Frank Lloyd Wright and Paul Newman. Philosophers and social commentators like John Locke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, John Dewey and Buckminster Fuller. Other social activists and scientists like Paul Revere, Horace Mann and Clara Barton, Linus Pauling, Joseph Priestley, and Albert Schweitzer.

UU Roots in the Life and Work of Michael Servetus

Perhaps there is no better embodiment of the strengths and weaknesses of UUism, than in the life and work of the man credited as the progenitor of the Unitarian side of UUism, Michael Servetus. He was a brilliant scholar, Renaissance man and challenger of conventional wisdom about God and religious authority. Here is a paragraph from his extensive biography in Wikipedia…

Michael Servetus (also Miguel Servet or Miguel Serveto also Miguel De Villanueva or Michel De Villeneuve; 29 September 1511 – 27 October 1553) was a Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer, and humanist. He was the first European to correctly describe the function of pulmonary circulation. His interests included many sciences: mathematics, astronomy and meteorology, geography, human anatomy, medicine and pharmacology, as well as jurisprudence, and the scholarly study of the Bible in its original languages. He is renowned in the history of several of these fields, particularly medicine and theology. He participated in the Protestant Reformation, and later developed a nontrinitarian Christology. Condemned by Catholics and Protestants alike, he was arrested in Geneva and burnt at the stake as a heretic by order of the Protestant Geneva governing council.

Apparently, Servetus was as insufferable as he was brilliant. From what I’ve read he felt that no one was his intellectual equal, including his theological nemesis John Calvin. Calvin’s theology is arguably one of the key threads of American culture. (See my piece “American Calvin”.)

A great book on Servetus’ life (that reads at times like a Dan Brown novel) is Out of the Flames. Episodes from his life included talking his way of a guilty plea in his first trial for heresy. The second time he was caught, tried and convicted, but he end up escaping from prison, going underground, and reemerging with a completely new identity to become a renowned cartographer and doctor under that new identity. Finally, tempting fate with his usual chutzpah, he decided to drop in on a service being led by his arch nemesis. Calvin recognized him, had him arrested, tried and burned at the stake, with the heretical text he had written tied to his leg.

In the simplest terms, Servetus challenged the conventional Christian belief that Jesus Christ was an aspect of God and essentially believed that he was a regular human being like the rest of us. Jesus was not our “lord” in some hierarchical sense, but more an egalitarian exemplar of what all human beings could aspire to be. Even today, such a belief would be considered by many Christians to be very heretical.

Here’s Wikipedia on Servetus’ legacy…

In recent years Michael Servetus has also been credited with being one of the modern forerunners of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience in the Western world. A renowned Spanish scholar on Servetus’ work, Ángel Alcalá, identified the radical search for truth and the right for freedom of conscience as Servetus’ main legacies, rather than his theology. The Polish-American scholar, Marian Hillar, has studied the evolution of freedom of conscience, from Servetus and the Polish Socinians, to John Locke and to Thomas Jefferson and the American Declaration of Independence. According to Hillar: “Historically speaking, Servetus died so that freedom of conscience could become a civil right in modern society.”

That freedom of conscience is what I see as the synergy of love and liberty embodied in “love that holds close with open arms” and the ministry of Unitarian-Universalism at its best.

Time was that in many if not most cultures, women were essentially owned by their husbands and children were owned (particularly the female ones) by their fathers. Even today in some traditional cultures around the world the protocols of women and children as “chattel” still hold the force of tradition or even law. But for the most part human culture has transitioned away from the idea of adult ownership of children to something closer to the broader meaning of “stewardship”.

The Concept of Stewardship

From the Wikipedia article on “stewardship”…

Stewardship is an ethic that embodies responsible planning and management of resources. The concept of stewardship has been applied in diverse realms, including with respect to environment, economics, health, property, information, and religion, and is linked to the concept of sustainability. Historically, stewardship was the responsibility given to household servants to bring food and drinks to a castle dining hall. The term was then expanded to indicate a household employee’s responsibility for managing household or domestic affairs. Stewardship later became the responsibility for taking care of passengers’ domestic needs on a ship, train and airplane, or managing the service provided to diners in a restaurant. The term continues to be used in these specific ways, but it is also used in a more general way to refer to a responsibility to take care of something belonging to someone else.

It’s that last general meaning that speaks to the way the relationships between custodial adults and the youth in their custody are framed today in cultures like ours that have moved beyond the concept of children as chattel. Parents and guardians do not own their children, but do have a responsibility to care for them and not mistreat them (however “mistreat” is defined in that cultural or societal context). Other adults with more temporary custody of young people – including teachers, counselors, child care workers or babysitters – are deputized to assume a comparable stewardship role in lieu of the parents.

Stewardship & Adult Privilege

In order for these custodial adults to exercise that stewardship they are granted a certain degree of privilege by law and by convention, to make decisions on behalf of youth, including decisions contrary to what the young person might decide for themselves.

From the Wikipedia article on the “law of privilege”…

A privilege is a special entitlement to immunity granted by the state or another authority to a restricted group, either by birth or on a conditional basis. It can be revoked in certain circumstances. In modern democratic states, a privilege is conditional and granted only after birth. By contrast, a right is an inherent, irrevocable entitlement held by all citizens or all human beings from the moment of birth.

In practice much of the privilege given to custodial adults by convention (beyond what is explicitly given by law) is extended to (or at least assumed by) adults generally in respect to all youth, whether or not the adult is a legitimate custodian and performing that custodial role. There is a general assumption that “age has its privileges” and adults tend to back each other up in this regard relative to young people.

Adults as “Superiors”

As I see it, the basic convention is that children should treat adults as “superiors” in every sense, deferring to them, minding them, obeying them, and accepting the punishment meted out by the adult if they fail to obey. Traditionally, that deference included young people not speaking to adults unless invited to do so first. Also traditionally, punishment followed the conventional wisdom of “spare the rod and spoil the child”, based on the belief that children lacked a moral sense and could only develop that sense by being physically punished when they misbehaved.

Though corporal punishment is practiced by a diminishing number of families and is no longer allowed in schools, still custodial adults are allowed and even expected to exercise authority over young people without the advice and consent of those young people, as long as those adults stay within parameters that don’t cross the line into what is considered abuse.

I have not been in a classroom in a few years, but my understanding is that the protocol is still generally practiced that young people raise their hands and are called on by and adult before they are allowed to speak. Some adult gatherings also follow this protocol, particularly the larger or more formal ones. But that said, most less formal adult groups, even the size of a typical school class, can operate perfectly well by just speaking when one has something to say, as long as you are not interrupting someone else.

Certainly a facilitator or moderator of any group is granted the privilege and is given deference to call on people before they speak. But in a group of adults, that facilitator or moderator has generally been granted that privilege by the consent of the group.

Exercising Stewardship without Abusing Privilege

So getting back to the original point of this piece, the challenge for adults – as parents, teachers, etc. – is to exercise their legitimate role as stewards without crossing the line into a kind of corruption of privilege that I and others are describing by the term “adultism”. Adults mostly exercise their stewardship under conventions that generally allow them to act in an authoritarian manner, not requiring them to get the consent or even take the advice of the youth under their custody. And as we know from looking at human history and the exercise of authority without advice or consent, “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

How can adults as a privileged group police themselves as stewards of youth, without sufficient advice or consent, when the overwhelming evidence of history is that unchecked privilege invariably leads to corruption? Am I violating some code of adult solidarity by even asking the question?

Two hundred years ago perhaps excessive adult privilege was not such a big deal, since the world was awash with the exercise of all sorts of privilege – including race, gender, class and economic. But now that all those forms of privilege are at least being called into question if not ended, the remaining mostly unexamined adult privilege and its excesses as “adultism” are still mostly unexamined.

A Needed Dialogue between Adults & Youth

I think it is a very interesting and needed discussion between all groupings of adults and youth. What is the appropriate stewardship role for adults in respect to youth and what kind of privilege is it appropriate to give to adults so they can effectively exercise that stewardship? What then crosses the line into “adultism” and abuse of that privilege? I’m sure young people in a family, classroom or other entity would have a lot to say on these questions though they might be a bit shocked to be asked!

I think it is a profound source of misunderstanding and mistrust between adults and youth that this question is not put forward more often and fully discussed. It seems to me it is so often the elephant in the room where young people and older people interact with each other. Again, is there some fundamental violation of adult sovereignty and solidarity to even ask?

In my thinking, as the abuses of privilege have been challenged in so many other areas, in the name of fairness and shared human development, is not now the time that we challenge “adultism” and the abuses of adult privilege in this new Information Era when our youth have the tools of ubiquitous and far-reaching electronic media to develop a level of personal and cultural sophistication perhaps more quickly than they have in prior eras?

So you have probably already been “ism’d” within an inch of your life and may be ready to roll your eyes if I attempt to direct your attention to another one! Seems the 20th Century was full of positive movements and negative systems being coined as “isms”, including “feminism”, “progressivism” and “environmentalism” on the one side and “sexism”, “racism” and “militarism” on the other. Some might make a good argument that we should leave all those “isms” behind with the last century and turn our focus forward and reframe the way we look at liberating movements and the restricting systems that hinder human development.

Given those disclaimers I want to look at one more “ism”, “adultism”, that has been defined by and comes out of the milieu of thoughtful people, youth and adults, working in the democratic education and youth empowerment movements. One of my colleagues in the newly formed Institute for Democratic Education in America (IDEA), Adam Fletcher, has compiled information calling out this negative system on his website (Freechild.org) page titled “Challenging Adultism”.

On his site is a link to a very comprehensive piece defining adultism, “Understanding Adultism: A Key to Developing Positive Youth-Adult Relationships”, an article written by long-time youth worker John Bell of YouthBuild. Though I don’t agree with everything in Bell’s article, its definition of “adultism” does resonate with me as a useful calling out of a negative system that I would urge all progressive people to think twice about and keep in mind in our relationships (as adults) with youth.

Defining Adultism

So “adultism” is basically the disrespect and discrimination against young people (simply because they are not adults) that exists beyond the legitimate responsibility of adults – parents, teachers and others – to provide guidance and a developmentally appropriate environment for young people to mature to adulthood.

In the article Bell writes…

As children, most young people are told what to eat, what to wear, when to go to bed, when they can talk, that they will go to school, which friends are okay, and when they are to be in the house. Even as they grow older, the opinions of most young people are not valued; they are punished at the will or whim of adults; their emotions are considered “immature.” In addition, adults reserve the right to punish, threaten, hit, take away “privileges,” and ostracize young people when such actions are deemed to be instrumental in controlling or disciplining them.

So if you parse Bell’s paragraph, some of what he’s talking about is the legitimate role of parents, teachers and other adults to set limits and ensure kids take responsibility for their actions, have proper nutrition and an otherwise enriched environment to grow.

But like all human social endeavors, there are at least two profoundly different ways of doing things. One involves the “pecking order”, a hierarchy of acknowledged “superiors” using acceptable forms of coercion necessary to exercise power and control over acknowledged “inferiors”. The other involves a “circle of equals” (without categories of superiors and inferiors) where power is not defined as control over but facilitation of a group of people. To the extent that adults relate to young people (including exercising their legitimate responsibility towards them) within the “pecking order” paradigm; that is what is being defined as “adultism”.

The last 5000 years of human history is a parade of various “pecking order” forms of social organization – masters over slaves, lords over serfs, whites over people of color, Aryans over non-Aryans – all eventually repudiated (though not yet eliminated) by human culture as morally unsustainable and grave hindrances to human development. That these forms of social organization still exist, is a legacy of patriarchy, an ancient ideology of domination, which is still alive and well in the world.

Evidence that patriarchy is alive and well can be found in the fact the “pecking order” of men over women, though challenged by progressives throughout the world, is still conventional practice and official policy on much of our planet. The superior position of men over women is so fundamentally woven into much of human culture that the 19th and 20th Century efforts towards sexual equality have led, I believe, to much of the violent expressions of religious fundamentalism that many describe as the “ism” of “terror” today.

At the bottom of the patriarchal “pecking order”, still cloaked in general respectability and conventional wisdom, is the superiority of adults over young people. Just as for centuries feudal lords justified their indisputable authority over their serfs as necessary stewardship, adults today throughout the world justify their absolute authority over young people.

One justification of the “pecking order” of adults over youth is that it is transitory, that once young people are properly trained and come of age, they move from the inferior to the superior group (adults). But as Bell points out in his article, the impact of “adultism” is much more pervasive. Young people raised in a paradigm where they are the acknowledged “inferiors” and adults are the acknowledged “superiors” grow up to become adults themselves more willing to accept other “pecking orders” that still have power in the adult world, not the least of which are continuing racial, gender and sexual orientation inequality. Further, young people who internalize their inferiority to adults, can grow up to be adults who are more willing to participate in business paradigms of “superior” bosses and “inferior” worker bees.

We who believe in the progressive ideals of the inherent worth and dignity of every human being need to be cognizant of these vestiges of patriarchy and “pecking order” in the conventional wisdom of our relationships between adults and young people. If we adults continue to give ourselves near absolute power over youth, won’t this lead to increasing corruption and disrespect for our charges?

Think of some of the common statements that reflect the conventional wisdom of the superiority of adults, and when examined show that fundamental disrespect for youth and their developmental process…

* “You’re so smart for fifteen!”
* “When are you going to grow up?”
* “Don’t ever yell at your mother like that!” (yelling)
* “It’s just a stage. You’ll outgrow it.”

Most telling of all, in my opinion, is the oft hurled epithet, “You’re behaving like children.”

The Dimensions of Adultism

The essence of adultism is when a person treats a child or youth disrespectfully in a way that they would not treat an adult in similar circumstances. This mistreatment is reinforced by social institutions, laws, customs, and attitudes and can include:

1. Assuming that adults are superior and more important than young people

2. Assuming that adults are entitled to act upon young people without their agreement

3. Assuming that young people are not as intelligent and their feelings are not as important as adults

4. Not taking young people seriously, including not giving them significant participation in decisions that impact them

5. Being physically, verbally, or otherwise psychologically abusive to young people

Bell says that if this were a description of the way a group of adults was treated, we would all agree that their oppression was almost total. However, for the most part, the adult world considers this treatment of young people as acceptable because most adults were treated in much the same way when they were young, and internalized the idea that “that’s the way you treat kids.”

According to Bell, adultism appears in abnormal and normal behavior towards young people in a broad spectrum of societal activities, institutions and issues. Here is an overview of the scope of what he cites…

Physical, Sexual or Psychological Abuse

Much abusive behavior by adults toward young people can be attributed to adultism, to the extent that the adult would not treat another adult in this way. These would be cases where adults feel they can “get away with” expressing their own anger or frustration in the form of abuse because the object of that abuse is “only a child”, an “inferior” in patriarchal “pecking order” terms, and does not merit the level of respect they would give another adult.

Punishment and Threats

There is also a whole range of nonphysical punishments or threats that can be considered adultism, that adults would not inflict on other adults but are comfortable doing so with young people, including…

1. Routinely criticizing, yelling at, invalidating, insulting, intimidating, or making them feel guilty

2. Arbitrarily or unfairly “grounding” or denying “privileges”

3. Doling out additional punishment when young people protest against what they legitimately consider mistreatment, simply because they are questioning what the adult considers to be their absolute authority

Denied Control

Young people are denied control and even influence over most of the decisions that affect their bodies, their space, their possessions and even their self-definition. For example, most adults think they can pick up little children or kiss them or pull their cheeks or touch their hair without asking or without it being mutual. Adults can often be seen grabbing things out of children’s hands without asking.

Verbal Interactions

Adultism can be found in many verbal interactions between adults and youth where adults:

1. Talk down to children, as if children could not understand them

2. Talk about a young person with the young person present as if they were not there

3. Give young people orders to do things or lay down rules with no explanation

4. Not really listen to young people, but demand young people listen to them all the time

5. Not take the concerns of a young person as seriously as they would an adult’s

6. Not appreciate the thinking of young people as worthy of adult respect, let alone on a par with the quality of adult thinking

7. Automatically side with other adults when they have a disagreement with a youth

In Schools

Any community or institution needs rules to live by, but the rules in most schools are imposed on young people without their consent and represent a high level of control, the severity of which exhibiting adultism, including:

1. Hall passes and detention

2. Occasions where teachers yell at students with impunity, but students are disciplined if they yell back at those teachers

3. Occasions where students are punished unfairly because adults feel frustrated.

4. Students being continuously evaluated, graded and ranked – to the point of internalizing a view of themselves as either “smart”, “average” or “dumb” — with profound impact on many aspects of their lives

5. Students generally not being given the corresponding opportunity to evaluate their teachers

6. Young people having no real power in the important decisions that affect their lives in school

Throughout their education, most students have no voice, no power, and no decision-making avenues to make significant changes to an institution where they are one of the significant stakeholders. While society’s motivation of providing education for all it’s young people is laudable, the school system as an institution perpetuates adultism.

In the Law

There is a different set of laws for young people. They do not have the same rights as adults. Of course, some laws specifically protect young people from mistreatment but other laws unduly restrict their life and liberty, including:

1. Some curfew ordinances unduly restricting young people beyond considerations for their safety

2. Treating young people as adults when they commit serious crimes but not when they behave appropriately

3. In divorce cases, until a recent landmark custody case, not permitting young people to have a voice in deciding which parent, if either, they wished to live with

Moving Beyond Adultism & Disrespect for Youth

It is stunning to me the “adultism” demonstrated by the disrespectful ways many adults still treat children and youth, particularly their own kids. I think it is one of the last vestiges in our society of pure patriarchal “power-over” protocol that is still considered acceptable by many adults in dealing with their children and youth. That protocol involves the assumption that the “superior” adult/parent has the absolute command and control over the “inferior” young person/child, such that any inappropriate behavior by the “inferior” reflects on and is highly disrespectful to the reputation of their “superior” and must be forcibly modified to save face.

My daughter Emma shared an incident with us a while back that occurred at a family gathering of one of her friends that Emma had attended. One of her friend’s young cousins was bored and began literally climbing the wall by where Emma was seated. Emma told the young boy politely that he really shouldn’t be doing that, concerned mostly that he might fall and hurt himself.

The kid’s mom saw this happening, came into the room and grabbed her son, and in front of everyone dressed him down, saying that he should have listened to what the nice young lady had told him and that he should now go back over to her, smile, and apologize. When he resisted, she marched him over to Emma and again told him to smile and apologize.

Emma was mortified by the mom’s behavior, but being a guest at a friend’s family gathering, was not sure what to do other than do nothing. The mom continued to scold her son until he finally apologized to Emma.

I’m sure that same woman would never have done this to an adult, even one she was responsible for or somehow supervising. But she felt it was appropriate and even demanded by the situation because this was “her” child and his behavior was profoundly disrespectful and cast aspersions on her and the entire family in front of an honored guest. As I said, it was very patriarchal and “adultist”, even though it was a woman enforcing the “code”.

In case you are not familiar with term “adultism”, it is defined as the disrespect and discrimination against young people (simply because they are not adults) that exists beyond the legitimate responsibility of adults – parents, teachers and others – to provide guidance and a developmentally appropriate environment for young people to mature to adulthood. (See my posts on “Defining Adultism” and “The Dimensions of Adultism”.)

It is also a perfect example of the sort of power-over command and control of patriarchal practice, which remains strong in many families, particularly in the political dynamics of the relationships between adults and children. (See my posts on this topic starting with “Defining Patriarchy”.) Our civilization has come along way to move away from treating other adults as slaves or chattel, but the way we treat our youth may be the last bastion of this 5000-year-old social order of hierarchy, domination and control.

Even though the kid’s behavior was inappropriate, the mom should have showed this younger human being some basic human respect. If he had been an adult, she most likely would have talked to him in private and not humiliated him in front of Emma and everyone else within earshot. But in this incident the parent felt it was appropriate and even necessary to subject him to this ordeal.

It is interesting how these patriarchal customs perpetuate through hundreds of generations from their roots in militaristic pastoralist tribes that invaded “Old Europe” from the Eastern periphery, several thousand years before the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) emerged. (This is at least as it is theorized by archeologist Marija Gimbutas and documented in Riane Eisler’s book, The Chalice and the Blade.)

200 years ago these protocols were still considered appropriate by white Europeans for dealing with their adult chattel, including their wives and black slaves. Two centuries of struggling for racial and gender equality have challenged and invalidated the concept of adult chattel, at least from Western civilization, though remnants of this form of patriarchal control certainly still remain in continuing racial and gender bias.

But it is still considered okay for parents to treat their children as chattel, within certain legal limits enacted during the 20th Century for child protection. It is still built into our laws that parents (or their surrogates, like school teachers) are considered completely responsible for children under their charge. And though corporal punishment is no longer legal in schools, last I heard it is still legal at home, as long as it doesn’t cross the legal line of “child abuse”.

So how much longer before this archaic power-over protocol is finally and completely driven from our egalitarian culture? How long before it is generally accepted that the relationships between adults and children can be mutually respectful, and based on the partnership protocols of power-with facilitation rather than patriarchal power-over command and control?

I have to acknowledge that redefining the political dynamics of the relationship between adults and youth is difficult. Within the concepts of liberty, justice and equality that our contemporary Western society was founded on, complete adult equality is the obvious progression. But adults have a legitimate role of stewardship vis-à-vis young people, and youth aren’t considered capable of full citizenship, so isn’t “youth equality” (with adults) an oxymoron?

This seems to me to be one of the major challenges of this new century. To create new generally accepted protocols for relationships between adults and youth that are based on liberty and mutual respect, but acknowledge the legitimate stewardship role adults play assisting youth with coming of age.

I think it can start with dialog between parents and children, teachers and students, counselors and campers, etc about the dynamics of the relationship and each party’s stake in that relationship.

As to existing models of this approach, I believe the greatest aspect of the Unitarian-Universalism that I embrace and my own kids have grown up within is the way that UU camps, conferences and other events for older youth are almost completely youth led, with adults playing as minimal a role as is legally possible (See my piece “Camps, Cons & Compasses”). In my opinion, this governance model could be applied to many more of the institutions in our society where adults as stewards work with youth, including our schools.

If these ideas seem like the path forward to you as well, you might check out the website of the Institute for Democratic Education in America (IDEA), an organization recently established by people I know that is trying to bring the principles of democracy and youth empowerment to our education system.

Tags: adultism, privilege, education, family, youth rights

The electronically induced technological extensions of our central nervous systems… are immersing us in a world-pool of information movement and are thus enabling man to incorporate within himself the whole of mankind. The aloof and dissociated role of the literate man of the Western world is succumbing to the new, intense depth participation engendered by the electronic media and bringing us back in touch with ourselves as well as with one another. But the instant nature of electric-information movement is decentralizing — rather than enlarging — the family of man into a new state of multitudinous tribal existences.

McLuhan called this transformation “retribalization”.

In my mom and dad’s generation the norm of professional “knowledge work” in the U.S. was to have a hierarchy of “bosses” who actively directed your activities within “siloed” groups and departments. Your coworker peers were typically white males of northern European ancestry, with women supporting professional work as secretaries. Most collaboration with those coworkers was done face to face and most written communication was done (by secretaries) using a typewriter to produce written memos & other documents that flowed from person to person in a time frame of days or even weeks. Diagrams, charts and other visual documents were painstakingly built by graphic specialists well in advance of presentations.

But the work world I plunge myself into these days is nothing like that.


Yes upper and middle managers still launch projects, but they do so by assigning a project manager who then assembles a team of analysts, solution designers, and SMEs (subject matter experts) from multiple groups and departments. The project manager generally does not so much direct as facilitate the work of the team, which follows an egalitarian process of informal consensus to decide on the path forward for project completion. Depending on the nature of the project and the skill or experience of the various team members, it could be an analyst, a solution designer or a SME that emerges as the project “lead”. There are generally no secretaries involved, every project team member is responsible for their own coffee and written communications.

That communication and the necessary collaboration is done in my work place more often than not through electronic media rather than face to face. The communication tools include telephone, email and instant messaging, with phone and Internet conferencing allowing collaboration across the country. Internet conferencing tools let important project documents be reviewed and even created or updated online during the session. In this electronic work environment there is really little difference between working in an office or from home.

Having been in this milieu for a number of years now, I have developed a specialty in facilitating such conference calls and “web meetings”. With my phone headset (hooked to either my work phone or my cell when I’m working from home) allowing me to talk and listen while leaving my hands free to use my laptop computer to update a document online real-time that is perhaps the main objective of the virtual session. When everyone else in the meeting or work session is similarly participating in front of their various computers and/or from their various phones (rather than being in some sort of meeting room on a speaker phone) there is a certain intimate egalitarian presence of all the voices in this audio space. There are no visible “power suits” in this acoustic-only environment.

Such a collaboration can even operate at several communication levels at the same time. Documents can be distributed real-time during the session as needed. Other people with an important bit of information who are not able to attend this session because they are in another virtual one can be “pinged” (instant messaged), be queried for and provide that needed information. Using instant messaging, meeting participants can even have one on one “side bars” (like passing notes in the classroom but undetectable) while the group discussion is happening over the phone.

When I facilitate these sort of sessions, I tend to actively keep the conversation on the agenda, breaking in as needed when I think it is getting off topic, long-winded, or certain session participants have not been heard from on a particular item of discussion. I jokingly call this “Samurai Facilitator”, and even meeting participants that may be one or two levels up the “food chain” (org chart) from me get the same treatment including admonitions to keep on topic and speak concisely. In this sort of circumstance good facilitation is like a Quaker meeting, bringing out the varied wisdom of all the group members and helping move the group to a more complete and expeditious consensus.

Given my cell phone and its very discrete headset, I have participated in work meetings while riding the train, the bus, or walking from one place to another, though usually in those instances not as the facilitator. I’ve even done a couple meetings while riding my bicycle to or from work. Given that I can work from anywhere with a cell tower and wi-fi in range, I have mostly full control of my schedule to be in the office or “remote” as I choose.

Then when I’m not in meetings, I’m generally either building some kind of presentation or other documentation or sending, reading or replying to emails. Using email effectively, I have learned to gather information from and provide information to other people without having to actually meet with them, either in person or virtually. This is very useful because, with key people generally being booked in so many meetings, it is often impossible to find time on their calendars. Email exchanges with well crafted comments and questions can be a completely “asynchronous conversation” that achieves the same information exchange as a meeting, phone call or work session.

I detail all this to make the point that perhaps 90% of the work I do is done completely through electronic media with no physical proximity at all. Something that would be inconceivable to the work world of my parents generation!

The interviewer in 1969 introduced the ideas of the “metaphysician of media” as follows…

McLuhan contends that all media — in and of themselves and regardless of the messages they communicate — exert a compelling influence on man and society. Prehistoric, or tribal, man existed in a harmonious balance of the senses, perceiving the world equally through hearing, smell, touch, sight and taste. But technological innovations are extensions of human abilities and senses that alter this sensory balance — an alteration that, in turn, inexorably reshapes the society that created the technology.

I am no longer swimming in the communication technology waters of the industrial age. For better or worse, I’ve become a Retribalized Corporate Knowledge Worker in the Egalitarian Information Age.

We are most fully realized as human beings if we take responsibility for our own actions, adult or youth, and given that, are best able to do so when we have the liberty and agency to rise to that challenge.

I still resonate strongly with this statement, though my writing in the past three years has focused particularly on the concept of “agency”. With activism in my family and social DNA, I resonate with people who get things done more so than others who bear witness that things need to be done (while acknowledging that the latter is important as well). I resonate with the idea of a “free agent” or “change agent”, and think that achieving that sort of agency is an important milestone in human development. It is unfortunately an achievement that in our adultist society we often deny our young people for fear perhaps of losing our control as elders.

Education

I have written more pieces under this banner than any of the other six, with Context as a close second. The two themes (Education & Context) have become related in my mind, because formal educational venues (like schools) are where conventional wisdom generally imagines the majority of our development as young people takes place. Unlike the institution of the family (the other main societal institution where adults and youth interact), which seems to be constantly evolving in a more egalitarian direction, schooling continues to be accepted by most as an authoritarian institution. As such, I find it an interesting microcosm of the remnants of old (I’d say outmoded) hierarchical thinking about the need for “us” (adults) to continue to control “them” (children).

What I also find intriguing is that my own life’s experience as both a youth and later a parent tells me that so much of my own development, and later my kids’, happened outside of schools. This institution of formal education that our U.S. society seems so fixated on (as a political football among other things) has become something akin to an emperor with no clothes.

Transcendence

Three years ago I wrote…

There is a synergistic, creative tension between trusting your own inner judgment and being connected to something transcendent and larger than yourself, whether civic, religious, energetic, magical, spiritual, universal, or ecological.

I still like my word-smithing of this sentence, but have not written about this theme of Transcendence perhaps as much as I originally intended when I launched my blog. That said, transcendence is so developmental! And human development is my passion and the driving overall theme of Lefty Parent.

Still many analysts say the U.S. economy hasn’t fallen of a cliff. Whether it will depends on how American consumers react to the latest market turmoil because consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of economic activity… “The key is whether consumers keep spending and don’t make sharp cutbacks as they did in 2008,” said Dean Maki, chief economist at Barclays Capital in New York.

It is sobering to contemplate the statistics on world consumer spending versus statistics on total world spending and see the importance to the U.S. and the entire world economy of U.S. consumer spending. With only five percent of the world’s population, the roughly $10 trillion spent in 2009 on consumer spending represents 71 percent of the U.S. economy and 16 percent of the total spending in the world! Particularly sobering is what percentage of that $10 trillion that could be considered one form or another of unsustainable overconsumption.

I’m concerned about that U.S. overconsumption, what it says about our society, and whether it is healthy or not going forward, for the U.S. to even try to go back to the level of consumer spending we have been at for the past sixty plus years (probably since the end of World War II). Overconsumption in a world where more and more parts of the world are trying to emulate the American materialistic lifestyle is unsustainable and becoming more and more problematic.

I see the Great Recession as an opportunity to get off that train headed towards a world living beyond its means, before our American addiction spreads to the emerging economies throughout the world. But to do so, I think Americans need to do an honest assessment of our economic behaviors and realize that it does us no good to continue to “shop ’til we drop”, “eat ’til we drop” and finance those addictions by working “’til we drop”.

A Society Motivated by Fear

We Americans are routinely accused of being materialistic and narcissistic workaholics. I think there is a lot of truth to that, so what’s it all about? The secular Calvinist ideology that still seems to be at the foundation of much of our conventional wisdom says that human beings are by nature profoundly “depraved”, which is exhibited by sloth, greed, immorality and selfishness. I certainly see that attitude in many of the adultist things I hear adults say, particularly about older youth that many derisively call “teenagers”.

I don’t believe this dour Calvinist view of humanity to be true! I instead believe that when we see most sloth, greed, immorality and selfishness, what we are seeing are expressions of anxiety motivated by an underlying fear. An underlying fear perhaps that we are somehow unworthy as the Calvinist conventional wisdom paints us. Rather than facing those fears and maybe exorcising this Calvinism from our world view, we instead attempt to prove our worthiness by working too hard (’til we drop)… to the point of risking our health and beyond.

How many discussions have I had over with the years with coworkers where the topic becomes calling out how late they worked and how little sleep they get! And how many others with fellow parents complaining about how lazy kids are.

Our own adult narcissistic materialism (expressed as “shop ’til you drop” and often “eat ’til you drop”) can then be seen as a sort of self-medicating addiction, perhaps justified in our minds because we are working so hard beyond our psychic capacity to really balance it.

Here’s my friend Ron Miller’s take on this American angst from his book What are Schools For?…

American culture… has not encouraged true self-reliance in a moral or spiritual sense, because it disdains nature and so mistrusts an unconverted, uncontrolled, undisciplined human nature… Believing that human beings are cut off from the divine, and are instead moved by innate evil impulses, American culture has become highly moralistic; it is commonly believed that a rigorous moral code, and vigilant enforcement of social mores, standards of behavior, and civil laws are all that stand in the way of social upheaval and anarchy.

Miller sees this conventional wisdom expressed by behavior that goes against our natural instincts as human beings, thus the anxiety and fear that begs to be medicated…

Despite the emphasis on “liberty”, “freedom”, independence”, and “individualism” in the American myth, the dominant worldview actually does not trust the spontaneity and self-expressive creativity of the individual. The proper beliefs and proper ways of acting which lead to social and economic success are predominantly moral, rational, entrepreneurial, and “professional”; in short, they impose rational discipline on the deeper, more impulsive, intuitive, mystical, and emotional aspects of human nature… The standards for measuring success are overwhelmingly materialistic; whole realms of human experience, notably the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual, do not count as qualifications for the job market or as emblems of achievement… Practicality and productivity are more important than contemplation or inner questing; meditative practices are disdained as “contemplating one’s navel.”

The Economic Expression of Fear & Anxiety

Healthy economic activity involves spending that adds real value to our lives and to our society as a whole. A healthy economic system produces lots of goods, services and infrastructure that create an enriched environment for everyone. But in my opinion most of the behaviors associated with fear, as drivers of economic activity, lead to a great deal of spending (and extra work to pay for it) that beyond getting us through stressful days is adding little or no real and lasting value to our lives!

The unhealthy economic activity driven by fear includes…

* As we lose faith in humanity, many of us with means lose our sense of charity and increasingly oppose public spending for a safety net for people who are economically disadvantaged

* As we attempt to keep our families safe, many of us with means pay a premium to live in communities that separate us from economically disadvantaged people, pay additional high costs associated with long commutes, security, and pay to send our kids to exclusive private schools

* To the extent we can afford to, we surround ourselves with an excess of material goods and technology to enrich our own homes rather than contributing to the enrichment of public venues that can be shared by everybody

* Feeling wounded and frightened, we are captivated by and live vicariously through shrill and angry voices in the commercial media, encouraging (with our ears and eyeballs) those voices to crowd out those who might be more thoughtful, loving and less angry

* Suffering from boredom and inertia we shop impulsively and pay to see movies and buy video games full of adventure and/or violence to perhaps make up for real lives that lack adventure and stimulation

* As we surrender our life balance, we increasingly “live to work” rather than “work to live”, and given the continuing prevailing Calvinist ethic, only feel we are worthy when we can demonstrate that we are getting little sleep and working ourselves to the brink of ill health or beyond

* Rather than arranging our lives so we naturally walk or bicycle for transportation or as part of our work routine for exercise, we pay for memberships in health clubs which often go underused because we struggle to find the time in our otherwise over-scheduled lives

Food & Drug Consumption as the Metaphor

I think the most powerful metaphor for the entire American economic system is the food and drug industries and the negative synergy between them. Perhaps half of our food production industry is about producing natural whole foods which we purchase and consume to develop and maintain healthy bodies and minds. This represents economic activity that is adding real value to us as individuals and therefor to society as a whole as well.

But the other half of that industry in my opinion is not at all about health, but about entertainment, self-medication and addiction to cope with the debilitating stress of “living to work” and other expressions of our fears. Dimensions of this part of the food industry include…

* Coffee-based beverages, fruit smoothies and soft drinks laced with caffeine and/or sugar to jack us up and prepare us for perhaps a stressful day of “living to work”

* Alcoholic beverages at the end of our work day to relax us and apply a needed social lubricant to our otherwise tightly wrought selves

* Anti-anxiety and anti-depression medications

* Endless tasty snacks and fast food full of fat, salt, sugar, unhealthy meat and dairy products, and “empty calories”

* And even when we have more thought, time and money to spend on our food, a diet full of even more fat, salt, sugar and cholesterol (on full display if you have cable TV and watch the Food Channel)

Since “you are what you eat”, all this unhealthy eating becomes the prelude to obesity and our “lifestyle” diseases and the need for an array of expensive medications and treatments to try and mitigate their debilitating symptoms. We pay a premium to consume unhealthy foods to excess and then a second premium for an expensive health care system to try and help us recover from our earlier purchases. Where is any real lasting value being produced?

The “GFP” (Gross Fear Product)

What percentage of the $10 trillion in U.S. yearly consumer spending is about mitigating and medicating fear rather than otherwise adding real value to our lives? Consumer spending represents 71 percent of American expenditures compared to a world average closer to 60 percent. Is that additional 11 percent a part of our “gross fear product”?

It is interesting that many of the nations in the world with a percentage of consumer spending higher than the U.S. are countries like Egypt and Afghanistan which live within a context of violence and fear.

A Difficult Move to a New Normal

I don’t think it is healthy for the U.S. consumer economy to return to where it has been prior to the Great Recession. Like other illnesses and cataclysms, an economic calamity has a developmental component and ideally spurs a new perspective leading to reassessment and thoughtful changes. If we are truly developing as a society and as a species we gather the most learning from our failures, and process and incorporate the lessons learned.

I feel as a society America has been running on psychic “fumes”, pushing ourselves to the point of disease and death to attempt to maintain an unhealthy, and ultimately unsustainable lifestyle. It is a lifestyle that has encouraged people of economic privilege (from the middle class on up) to over-consume while people lacking that privilege struggle to get what they need to survive. It is not about rich people so much (though they over-consume as well), but about those of us in the middle class and how we have been spending our money.

To get to a more sustainable society with more healthy lifestyles we of some economic privilege need to adopt the mantras of “doing more with less”, that “small is beautiful”, and finance our dialed-back expenditures by “working smarter not harder”. Smarter, by looking carefully at our economic activity, both what we do to make and spend money, and applying the metrics of what is really adding value to our lives and to others.

Is there more satisfying work we could be doing (done perhaps at home or a work site that we can commute to by some combination of walking, bicycling and mass transit) that may pay less than our current work but can allow us to cut back on the expenditures of the commute and mitigating and medicating for a life spent doing unsatisfying work?

Are there free or less expensive ways we can be balancing our lives by getting exercise, adventure and “play”, without expensive vacations, cars, home entertainment systems, and other expensive pass times (golf comes to mind, the sport of privilege)?

Can the U.S. become a country that moves beyond its current economic narcissism and moves to a consumer economy – like Belgium, Denmark or Ireland perhaps – that is closer to just 50 percent of overall GDP? Can we become a country that is more about building its shared public infrastructure and selling value added goods and services to the rest of the world?

I think we can and we will if we can figure out how to truly move beyond all this fear.