Hi folks, thanks for dropping by. This is an essay about a topic that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and the more I think about it, the more important it becomes in my mind. It’s so important that I’ve decided it deserves both a paper, which you can find a link to in the show notes, or and its own episode. The topic is reverence. I know—it’s kind of an odd subject. But trust me—you’ll be glad you read this (or listened to the Podcast version at the Natural Curiosity Project). More than a few listeners have told me that this is the most important program I’ve written since I started the Podcast.

I recently read Hans Christian Andersen’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” in which a couple of con men come to town and proceed to fool everyone into believing that the cloth from which they tailor fine clothing is so special that only exceptionally intelligent people can see it. Stupid people see nothing, so when the con men hold up “clothing” made from this magical material, no one actually sees anything, but at the same time no one wants to look stupid, so everybody oohs and aahs about the beauty of this fine, fine cloth—up to and including the emperor, who can’t see it either. But he orders a suit made from the stuff, which he then displays, publicly. Everything is going fine until a small child asks, “Why is the emperor walking around naked?”

This story has a lot to teach us about modern society. The child wasn’t being courageous when he asked why the emperor was naked, but he was being curious, making an observation that only the truly innocent can reasonably make. But adults? When they toss common sense and critical thinking to the winds and agree with their equally myopic neighbors that the emperor’s new clothes look quite fine indeed, they do no one any favors, least of all the emperor. 

If you’ve read my book, the Nation We Knew, then you know that I have a love-hate relationship with social media that leans more toward the hate than the love. In today’s society, this drive to act, do and think like everybody else—this groupthink—is dangerous. I deeply believe that social media—and I mean virtually ALL platforms—drive this behavior, making us all feel more important than we actually are, while at the same time mentally and emotionally driving us to feel inadequate in the face of all those people we see online who are CLEARLY head and shoulders better off, richer, more important, happier, better adjusted, better traveled, better fed, and more respected than we are. I’m sorry, but that’s just awful, and it’s patently false. Social media does something to us that is destructively ironic: it creates the illusion that we are special, that we stand out from the crowd, but it does so by actually making us indistinguishable from the crowd, while simultaneously punishing us when we don’t play along. Every time we get a thumbs-up or a like, we take that as subliminal, endorphin-driven confirmation of our individual value. The result? “Look at me-look at me-look at me” becomes the mantra of society. 

We call our contacts on social media our friends, yet we couldn’t pick most of those people out of a lineup. We base our self-worth on the number of electronic responses we get from a system that is carefully designed to feed our ego, instead of basing it on the number of people we made smile today, or gave hope to, or opened a door for, or helped carry a heavy package to their car. 

In our ‘uber-polarized’ world, whether we’re talking about politics, or science, or medicine, or education, or any other topic that only seems to exist in a binary form—usually best described as “my way, or wrong” —people who have grown weary of the intransigence on both sides often pull out the phrase, “Let’s seek common ground.” But like so many things, that phrase has lost its meaning. 

Common ground doesn’t just exist; it isn’t just out there, ready for two or more people or groups or ideologies who fundamentally disagree to simultaneously stumble across it and shriek, ‘Eureka!’ Common ground—let’s just call it what it is, ‘agreement’ —has to be actively sought out, hammered together, fought over, and deliberately created, with all sides actively listening to all the other sides. Think about it: If common ground freely existed, then we wouldn’t have the intensity of disagreement that has paralyzed so many processes today. So, in my mind, ‘seek common ground’ is about as useful as ‘hopes and prayers.’ Lots of smoke, but no heat, and even less motivation for action that creates meaningful change.

I just finished reading, “Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue,” by Paul Woodruff. Woodruff defines reverence as “The well-developed capacity to have feelings of awe, respect, and shame, when these are the right feelings to have.” He defines awe as that overwhelming sensation we have when we’re in the presence of something bigger than ourselves, like the Grand Canyon or the Pacific Ocean, or when we’re standing in the nave of a medieval European cathedral, or watching a magnificent sunset, or when we hear a poem or a piece of music that brings us to tears. Awe defines a transcendent moment.

Respect is exactly that—a deep feeling of admiration. And shame? Shame is the hard one among the three, because we typically associate it with guilt. But that’s not what it means here. Woodruff defines shame as the ability to look inside ourselves and feel remorse for having done something that we’re not proud of. Shame is the force that drives us to be better. 

Woodruff also draws a strong connection between reverence, community, and ceremony, in the sense that ceremony without reverence for what the ceremony represents is just a meaningless ritual, and does nothing to create a sense of shared community purpose. A good example is religion. Different religions believe different things, and while a reverent Christian will disagree with the fundamental beliefs of a Jew or a Muslim, reverence says that the Christian can still show reverence for Judaic or Muslim beliefs. 

This made me think about the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington, DC, one of our most sacred national monuments. The reverence displayed at that ceremony makes it stand for something—something profoundly important. And if someone giggles, or talks, or in any way shows disrespect for the ceremony, a soldier walks over and in no uncertain terms gets in the offender’s face and makes it crystal clear that their behavior will not be tolerated. Why? Reverence. 

This is important, because the instant we lose reverence for what this ceremony and others like it represent, is the moment that democracy begins to fail. When reverence is lost, the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is reduced to a theme park display, and the soldiers might as well be replaced by animatronic characters. Ceremony becomes mere ritual, a process of going through meaningless motions.

When I look at the ongoing political turmoil that plagues any number of countries today, an idea strikes me. Think about the extreme right and left wings’ actions in the US over the last few years. The extreme right attacks the recent presidential election as being fraudulent; they attack the voting process as being corrupt; they attack opposition candidates for any number of venomous and usually half-baked reasons; they physically attack the national capitol. 

Meanwhile, the extreme left attacks organized religion; often vilifies national pride; declares capitalism to be irretrievably corrupt; paints the police with a generalized brush of undeserved evil; and declares entire industries to be like great plagues. All those behaviors are uniformly awful. But after reading Woodruff’s book, it occurs to me that what they’re actually attacking, and attempting to destroy, is the reverence that we as a nation hold for all of those ceremonial symbols of our democracy. In other words, they’re not attacking the voting process; they’re attacking our reverence for the voting process, one of the underpinnings of a free, democratic society. Because if they succeed in doing that, they destroy our reason to fight for it as a powerful symbol of national community, the sanctity of national self. You don’t have to like the outcome of an election, but you do have to accept the results with grace because of our shared reverence for the election process, which has been in place since the beginning of the nation, and which has proven to work, properly, time and time and time again. About this, Woodruff says,

Voting is a ceremony. It is an expression of reverence—not for our government or our laws, not for anything man-made, but for the very idea that ordinary people are more important than the juggernauts that seem to rule them. If we do not understand why we should vote in this country, that is because we have forgotten the meaning of ceremony. And the meaning of ceremony is reverence.

And power? Woodruff says this:

Power without reverence is aflame with arrogance, while service without reverence is smoldering toward rebellion. Politics without reverence is blind to the general good and deaf to advice from people who are powerless. 

More than a few bells are going off in my head as I read those words. 

As I think about this theme of secular reverence, and how it is being attacked, the ghost of poet W. B. Yeats is whispering his poem, “The Second Coming,” in my ear:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre 

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; 

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst 

Are full of passionate intensity. 

If you’re a regular listener, you know that one of the themes I return to repeatedly is the battle between tribe and community. With that in mind, I offer this hypothesis. The application of group wisdom and the practice of reverence lead to a tight-knit, functional community, whether we’re talking about town, country, nation-states, or a business. On the other hand, groupthink, the worship of the status quo which all forms of social media harness as they strive to fuel the flames of confirmation bias, together with the worship of unfounded secular beliefs as opposed to facts (vaccine resistance comes to mind), lead to tribalism. The difference between the two is profound. Community leads to courage; tribalism leads to recklessness. Community is about inclusivity; tribalism is about exclusivity. Community unites; tribalism divides.

Processes, like technologies, come and go as the times change. That’s the sign of a vibrant, evolving society. What must be protected at all costs, however, is reverence for the drivers behind those processes. Whether we vote with a paper ballot, or by raising our hands in town meeting, as we often do here in Vermont, electronically, or by mail-in ballot, doesn’t matter. What matters is why we do those things. Therein lies the priceless and precious essence of living in a free society.