[Delivered at UUCC on 15 March 2009. See previous entry for two of the readings.]


Two thousand and fifty-three years ago, on this day, the Roman leader Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by a group of senators. This group called themselves "the Liberators"; their justification for killing Caesar was that he had amassed far too much power as the dictator of the republic, and they had concluded that removing him was the only way to save their country from tyranny. According to Plutarch, a historian writing about 130 years after the event, the senators openly marched to the Capitol of Rome after Caesar was dead, "not like fugitives, but with glad faces and full of confidence, summoning the multitude to freedom."

They thought they were heroes, and while the rest of Rome didn't respond with wholehearted approval, neither did it immediately condemn them as criminals. Some people who hadn't participated in the plot even claimed that they had, in hopes of reaping some of the glory they anticipated the "Liberators" would receive. When public opinion turned against the killers, some were hunted down and executed, some committed suicide, and some ended up on the losing side of a civil war that ultimately led to Caesar's great-nephew Octavian becoming established as the first emperor of Rome.

Julius Caesar was a charismatic figure who was popular among the middle and lower classes, and he has had his admirers and defenders throughout the centuries. George Bernard Shaw thought he was "the greatest man that ever lived," and Caesar's assassins have been portrayed as aristocrats clinging to an outdated hierarchy of privilege rather than statesmen truly acting on behalf of the public good. Caesar also had opponents and detractors, both during his lifetime and in the centuries since: he was responsible for the deaths and enslavement of thousands of people, and he's been characterized as a shameless demagogue whose priorities were less about improving Roman society and more about acquiring and holding onto absolute power.

Depending on the texts you might have read, or not, the plays or movies you might have seen, or not, and the classes you might have taken, or not, it would be very easy to conclude that Julius Caesar was either a power-mad tool or a would-be reformer mowed down by his political rivals. How you register labels such as "dictator," "conqueror," "cult figure," and "victim" might also skew your assessment of Caesar toward one direction or another, as would words such as "murderers," "conspirators," and "patriots" with regards to the men who killed him. Teachers, historians, storytellers, and preachers aren't always conscious of our biases, the limits of our perspectives, or the loadedness of our language, even when we're striving to be fair and neutral.

Put another way, we don't always know what we don't know, or what we haven't been told. There's an ancient folktale about eight blind men who were asked to describe an elephant, and each came up with radically different descriptions of the creature because they each had access only to what their hands could reach from where they were standing. So the person who placed his hands on the elephant's trunk pictured an animal that considerably different from the one whose hands felt the elephant's ears, vs. the one who pressed his palms around one of the elephant's legs, vs. the one whose fingers encountered the top and the sides of the elephant's back, vs. the one who ran his hand up and down one of the ivory tusks. Now imagine each of those men then going to their friends or children or students, and describing what it felt like to touch an elephant. How likely would it be to occur to those friends or children or students to ask about the species of the elephant, whether it was a baby or an adult, or about the other seven men's conclusions?

And even if such questions did occur to them, would they necessarily ask them? I have a reputation in some circles for being mouthy, and it's not un-deserved, but I actually frequently hold my peace, for a variety of reasons. I have too often witnessed questions deployed not as questions but as weapons and would-be harnesses, where the person posing the question already has one correct answer in their mind, and heaven help you if you don't provide or affirm that answer. I have witnessed the flip side of that, where someone is posing a question out of genuine curiosity or bewilderment, but get treated as if they're asking the question in bad faith, because the person they've asked to answer it has experienced it being asked with malice or other ill-intent, or because their previous attempts to address the question were treated with contempt, dismissiveness, or a willful continuation of ignorance.

I am far from immune to any of this: I have gone ballistic over rhetorical questions that were not aimed at me, and I tend get very bristly very quickly whenever I realize I'm in the presence of leading questions, even ones being used to promote lessons or causes I fundamentally agree with: I've clashed more than a few times with teachers -- some of them extremely well-meaning -- who struck me as utterly intent on eliciting a specific interpretation of texts or data that struck me as incomplete or insufficiently fair, so that's a hot button for me. That said, I have also been present in debates and forums where I've felt that someone was intent on hijacking the discussion for something I considered to be either out of scope, out of the ordinary, or irrelevant, or illogical. I have been accused of being that person, and I have seen friendships implode over conflicting perceptions of scope and agenda. So, as I so often do, I am aware that I am speaking from a glass pulpit: in my generalizations today about the limits of perception, I speak as someone who's aware there's more to the elephant than what I've seen or touched, but who has both blind spots and preconceptions that affect which other descriptions of the elephant I'm even willing to consider, let alone believe.

One of the challenges in discussing leaders, teachers, and other authority figures is discerning the distinctions between admiration and idolization, and being respectful of people who don't arrive at the same conclusions regarding someone about whom we've developed deeply-felt opinions, be they positive or negative. There are quite a few UUs -- including some of the people in this room, I would imagine -- who have stories about the pain and isolation that can come with being a heretic. When you are the one person you know of among your peers who cannot stand a popular teacher or other public figure, be it because they've treated you or someone you care about disrespectfully, or because, no matter how hard you look, what the emperor is wearing doesn't look like clothes to you, you may choose to say so, at which points odds are uncomfortably high that you may be accused of prejudice, of sour grapes, of unrealistic expectations, or of being deficient in logic or character because you are not part of the consensus on how wonderful this person is. Some of you may have privately agreed with heretics here and there, but felt compelled not to side with them in public, perhaps because they were actively burning bridges you could not personally or professionally afford to destroy, or because you found them too righteous or too toxic for your taste, or because you disagreed with them on methodology or goals, or because the battle appeared to you as one you could not help to win. I have inhabited both of those roles, but I have also at times been part of management, or "the establishment," or an "in crowd," and I have encountered people who automatically, reflexively blame "the powers that be" for anything that doesn't go their way, and who are incapable of imagining that anyone could disagree with them on what constitutes the greater good of community, or that their personal preferences could possibly be in conflict with that greater good.

One of the hardest lessons I've had to learn as a leader -- one I frankly haven't mastered yet -- is to get over myself. That there are times I'm going to be judged unfairly, because the people doing so have inaccurate information, limited memories, or an entrenched agenda, and that odds are that they will never revise their conclusions about me. Being a manager or any other sort of authority figure means that, at some point, someone will categorize you as an enemy and an oppressor, and will attribute to you powers you do not have or project onto you motives that do not correspond in any way to your understanding of reality. I have colleagues who were born with thick skin, and who have understood from the get-go that being popular or being understood doesn't always correspond with doing the right thing or with being right. Intellectually, I get that. Emotionally, however, I am often still twelve years old and I want all my friends to reassure me that I'm not the one being a jerk.

I also want to be right all the time, and I'm not. Sometimes I am the jerk. And when my friends and allies are in that position, or worse yet, in conflict with me, or each other, I sometimes find myself torn between principle and strategy. When someone is feeling hurt and defensive, or hurt and outraged, or unfairly judged, or unfairly dismissed, they are often not in the mood for shades of gray, or justifications, or nuances. They are desperate for affirmation and for support, and they crave proof that you are on their side. And this is a point where people too often get characterized as heroes who can do no wrong or villains who are capable of no good whatsoever, because we want to be right about the sides we choose. We don't want to think that we're hurting good people or enabling bad ones. We don't want to end up as the people portrayed in history textbooks as shortsighted, cowardly, or blind to their own biases.

And this where things get tricky, in my opinion -- where figures such as Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln, and Barack Obama are concerned. When I visit the New Testament, or when I read about our country's past wars, I marvel at people who are certain that they would have supported the side of the prophets and the efforts of the winners. If a young man were to wander into my neighborhood with a bunch of groupies, lecturing to me in riddles and then kicking over tables in my church, I'd be calling the cops. I suspect that, depending on which newspapers actually had access to -- if I had been someone who was even literate to read -- and what my friends and neighbors had been saying, I might well have backed the Tories in the American Revolution or the Confederates in the Civil War or the appeasers of Hitler in the 1930s, because I would have been seeing only part of the elephant, and envisioning it as all trunk or all tusk or all foot, and that would have steered my decision-making accordingly. I could see myself rooting for the wrong movement based on my interactions with its representatives: my ideal version of myself would transcend personal issues without a second thought, but the reality has been that when I find someone offputting, or their followers offputting, I start looking for excuses to categorize as them as "wrong" and "not worth my time," even if I was originally sympathetic to their mission and goals. And if the leader enjoys a significant amount of popularity, the temptation is seek out like-minded heretics, and to dismiss everyone in the majority as delusional, thought-impaired members of a cult of personality, blinded by the person's charisma and manipulative powers.

It is bracing to read the Wall Street Journal these days. It makes for a very interesting counterpoint to the rock-star status that Barack Obama currently occupies among many of my friends, and some days I feel like I'm standing between two stereo speakers, with one proclaiming, "Yes, we can!" and the other blaring out, "What is the matter with you people?" I endorsed Obama during primary season, and I found it really annoying to get denounced as a mindless groupie given that I'd pulled an all-nighter reading both his and Clinton's healthcare plans and researching their stances on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." My Christian friends who do believe in evolution are likewise tired of being lumped in with the proponents of intelligent design.

I don't have global, one-size-fits-all answers for you on how to be good heretic, a good follower, or a good leader. I can't even advocate the Golden Rule, not just because of the whole glass pulpit thing, but because one person's "being friendly" can be another person's "being intrusive"; one person's "being informative" can be another person's "being patronizing"; someone's "just letting off steam" is someone else's "inexcusable breach of manners," and on the other side of that coin, "calm and soothing" translates to some folks as "not outraged enough." And it can be extraordinarily hard to realize that there's even a disconnect of translation or context, and it's also sadly true that there are quite a few people who don't want to acknowledge such disconnects can and do exist, or when they do, see it as a win-lose, zero-sum equation. "You're for us or against us." "No sane person could possibly believe ..." "How can you not love so-and-so?"

Part of our mandate as Unitarian Universalists -- our first two stated principles -- are to recognize that other people are people, and to treat them with fairness and compassion. There is not a out-clause for when they're being disagreeable, or when they disagree with us, and to list just some of the ways I personally end up trying to wriggle out of this on a regular basis would fill up another service. The elephant is enormous. People are complex. I urge you to strive to recognize and honor the complexity -- even when someone isn't treating you in kind, and even when no meeting of the minds is possible. It can be so easy to generalize and to demonize, especially when that's being done to us. Our religious mandate is to do our best to be better than that. Amen and alleluia.