Authors: Kurt Vonnegut
“Let’s talk about incompatibility between parents and children, which happens often merely because of genetic rotten luck. In a nuclear family, children and parents can be locked in hellish close combat for twenty-one years and more. In an extended family, a child has scores of other homes to go to in search of love and understanding. He need not stay home and torture his parents, and he need not starve for love.
“In an extended family, anybody can bug out of his own house for months, and still be among relatives. Nobody has to go on a hopeless quest for friendly strangers, which is what most Americans have to do.
“Massage parlors come to mind—bus stations and bars.
“You graduates here are leaving an artificial extended
family now. Even if you hated it here, you will find a nuclear family to be a very poor substitute for what you had here. As for those of us who have come to praise you for having graduated: we have fled here from loneliness, to be part of an artificial extended family for just a little while.
“And what we will all be seeking when we decamp, and for the rest of our lives, will be large, stable communities of like-minded people, which is to say relatives. They no longer exist. The lack of them is not only the main cause, but probably the only cause of our shapeless discontent in the midst of such prosperity.
“We thought we could do without tribes and clans. Well, we can’t.
“There was a time when I was avid to invent new religions and social orders. It has now penetrated my skull that such schemes will not work without the support of huge and gruesome police forces and prison systems, unless they are allowed to invent themselves. The emperor Constantine did not, after all, invent anything. He had many religions to choose from. He selected Christianity because it seemed to him to be the most refreshing.
“Hitler and Lenin and some others have also tried to refresh their people with ideas that had been around awhile. They chose abominably, as we know. It matters what we choose. And history and the deteriorating physical and moral environments are now telling us what we would rather not hear, what we would rather our children or grandchildren would hear: It is our turn to choose.
“At least we do not have to choose between various theories of magic, of ways to manipulate God and the devil and whatever, which is what our ancestors had to do. We no longer believe that God causes earthquakes and crop failures and plagues when He gets mad at us. We no longer imagine that He can be cooled off by sacrifices and festivals and gifts. I
am so glad we don’t have to think up presents for Him anymore. What’s the perfect gift for someone who has everything?
“The perfect gift for somebody who has everything, of course, is nothing. Any gifts we have should be given to creatures right on the surface of the planet, it seems to me. If God gets angry about that, we can call in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There’s a very good chance they can calm Him down.
“The new moral code we choose may already have martyrs. It is difficult to spot such things. One corpse tends to look pretty much like another one—until the historians sort them out with the benefit of hindsight.
“We shall see what we shall see.
“For two thirds of my life I have been a pessimist. I am astonished to find myself an optimist now. I feel now that I have been underestimating the intelligence and resourcefulness of man. I honestly thought that we were so stupid that we would continue to tear the planet to pieces, to sell it to each other, to burn it up. I’ve never expected thermonuclear war. What seemed certain to me was that we would simply gobble up the planet out of boredom and greed, not in centuries, but in ten or twenty years.
“Kilgore Trout wrote a science-fiction story called ’The Planet Gobblers’ one time. It was about us, and we were the terrors of the universe. We were sort of interplanetary termites. We would arrive on a planet, gobble it up, and die. But before we died, we always sent out spaceships to start tiny colonies elsewhere. We were a disease, since it was not necessary to inhabit planets with such horrifying destructiveness. It is easy to take good care of a planet.
“Our grandchildren will surely think of us as the Planet Gobblers. Poorer nations than America think of America as a Planet Gobbler right now. But that is going to change. There is welling up within us a willingness to say ’No, thank you’ to
our factories. We were once maniacs for possessions, imagining that they would somehow moderate or somehow compensate us for our loneliness.
“The experiment has been tried in this most affluent nation in all of human history. Possessions help a little, but not as much as advertisers said they were supposed to, and we are now aware of how permanently the manufacture of some of those products hurts the planet.
“So there is a willingness to do without them.
“There is a willingness to do whatever we need to do in order to have life on the planet go on for a long, long time. I didn’t used to think that. And that willingness has to be a religious enthusiasm, since it celebrates life, since it calls for meaningful sacrifices.
“This is bad news for business, as we know it now. It should be thrilling news for persons who love to teach and lead. And thank God we have solid information in the place of superstition! Thank God we are beginning to dream of human communities which are designed to harmonize with what human beings really need and are.
“And now you have just heard an atheist thank God not once, but twice. And listen to this:
“God bless the class of 1974.”
• • •
Six years later I would still be, outwardly at least, an unwobbled Free Thinker, for I said this at the First Parish Unitarian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on January 27, 1980, approximately the 200th anniversary of the birth of William Ellery Channing:
“This will be very short. There will be almost no eye contact.
“This is only a dream. I know that this is only a dream. I have had it before. It is a dream of cosmic embarrassment. I
stand before a large and nicely dressed audience. I have promised to speak on the most profound and poetic of all human concerns—the dignity of human nature.
“Only a maniac would make such a grandiose promise, but that is what I have done—in this dream.
“Now it is time for me to speak. I have nothing to say. Nothing.
“Dobedobedobedo.
“I will wake up at any moment now, and I will tell my wife about the dream. ’Where was it, honeybunch?’ she will ask me. ’In a Yankee church on Harvard Square,’ I will reply, and we will laugh and laugh.
“But every time I have had this dream before, I have been wearing nothing but olive drab, Army surplus under-shorts. That detail is missing today—so this just might not be a dream after all. Who can say for certain?
“In this dream, if it is a dream, it is the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of William Ellery Channing, a principal founder of Unitarianism in the United States. I wish that I had been born into a society like his—small and congenial and prosperous and self-sufficient. The people around here had ancestors in common then. They looked a lot like each other, dressed a lot like each other, enjoyed the same amusements and food. They were generally agreed as to what was good and what was evil—what God was like, who Jesus was.
“Channing grew up in what the late anthropologist Robert Redfield called a folk society, a relatively isolated community of like-thinking friends and relatives, a stable extended family of considerable size. Redfield said that we were all descended from persons who lived in such societies, and that we were likely to hanker to live in one ourselves from time to time. A folk society, in his imagination and in our imaginations, too, is an ideal scheme within which people
can take really good care of one another, can share fairly, and can distribute honors to one and all.
“Maybe so. That could also be a dream, but I do not choose to think so.
“Channing’s folk society, with Harvard at its center, was quite possibly the most intelligent and creative folk society the Western Hemisphere has ever known. I have to say ’possibly,’ since we know so little about the Incas and the Aztecs and the Mayans—and some other tribes. I am tempted to include the Indianapolis of my grandfather’s youth.
“But Channing’s folk society is gone now. It has been drowned by tidal waves of strangers from simply everywhere—people like myself. Channing’s folk society is now the American Atlantis, if you will.
“One of the most durable American legends has to do with the last days of the drowning of that Atlantis. It is the story of the arrest and trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti—of how the natives of Atlantis made war on the waves.
“That war on the waves came much too late. It happened only day before yesterday, practically. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in Charlestown Prison in 1927. This part of New England had ceased to be a genuine folk society, had begun to admit strangers with unfamiliar ideas and customs in large numbers, one hundred years before that—when William Ellery Channing was nearly fifty years old.
“Channing did not live long enough to see the truly towering waves of immigrants come crashing in. But he did see, in my opinion, that the narrow, ethnocentric sermons suitable to a folk society should not be preached here anymore. Sermons deeply rooted in local history and sociology and politics are by and large harmless, and perhaps even charming in a relatively closed and isolated community. Why shouldn’t a preacher in such a society raise the morale of his parishioners by implying that they are better servants of God
than strangers are? That is a very old type of sermon—very old indeed. As old as the hills. Read the Old Testament. You can probably borrow a copy from the church next door.
“When Channing began preaching a new sort of sermon in this town, a sort of sermon we now perceive as Unitarian, he was urging his parishioners to credit with human dignity as great as their own persons not at all like their friends and relatives. The time to acknowledge the dignity of strangers, even black ones, had come.
“Couldn’t strangers, even black ones, have human dignity without the acquiescence of Channing’s congregation? No. Human dignity must be given by people to people. If you stand before me, and I do not credit you with dignity, then you have none. If I stand before you, and you do not credit me with dignity, then I have none. If Channing’s parishioners felt that illiterate black slaves in the American South had negligible amounts of dignity, then those slaves would in fact be negligibly dignified—like chimpanzees, perhaps.
“It is easy to see dignity in relatives and friends. It is inevitable that we see it in relatives and friends. What is human dignity, then? It is the favorable opinion, respectful and uncritical, which we hold of those most familiar to us. It has been found that we can hold that same good opinion of strangers, if those who teach us and otherwise lead us tell us to.
“What could be more essential in a pluralistic society like ours than that every citizen see dignity in every other human being everywhere?
“And let us consider for a moment a society which was the exact opposite of what ours is supposed to be—which was Hider’s Germany. He trained a generation of warriors and police to be blind to human dignity, to never see it anywhere. So wherever he sent his warriors and police, there was no dignity. If he had conquered the world, there would
have been no dignity anywhere. The penalty for crediting anyone with dignity in such a society? Death. And that, too, since there would be nobody to see dignity in it, would be undignified.
“Potter’s field.
“Doesn’t God give dignity to everybody? No—not in my opinion. Giving dignity, the sort of dignity that is of some earthly use, anyway, is something that only people do.
“Or fail to do.
“What happens if you credit a bum with human dignity—a drunken bum with his pants full of shit and snot dangling from his nose? At least you haven’t made yourself poorer in a financial sense. And he can’t take whatever it is that you have given him and spend it on Thunderbird wine.
“There is this drawback, though: If you give to that sort of a stranger the uncritical respect that you give to friends and relatives, you will also want to understand and help him. There is no way to avoid this.
“Be warned: If you allow yourself to see dignity in someone, you have doomed yourself to wanting to understand and help whoever it is.
“If you see dignity in anything, in fact—it doesn’t have to be human—you will still want to understand it and help it. Many people are now seeing dignity in the lower animals and the plant world and waterfalls and deserts—and even in the entire planet and its atmosphere. And now they are helpless not to want to understand and to help those things.
“Poor souls!
“I am descended from fairly recent immigrants. My first American ancestor, an atheistic merchant from Münster, arrived here about five years after William Ellery Channing died. Channing died in 1842, a reluctant Abolitionist who did not live to see all the murdering in the Civil War. I am a drop of spray from one of the waves which swamped the American Atlantis.
“The faith of my ancestors, going back at least four generations, has been the most corrosive sort of agnosticism—or worse. When I was a child, all my relatives, male and female, agreed with H. L. Mencken when he said that he thought religious people were comical. Mencken said that he had been widely misunderstood as hating religious people. He did not hate them, he said. He merely found them comical.
“What is so comical about religious people in modern times? They believe so many things which science has proved to be unknowable or absolutely wrong.
“How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash? For one thing, I guess, the balderdash is usually beautiful—and therefore echoes excitingly in the more primitive lobes of our brains, where knowledge counts for nothing.
“More important, though: the acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.