“Attitudes: Socio-Historical Change in Unitarian Universalism,” Dr. Neville Buch”
Today, I am looking at attitudes in Unitarian-Universalism, and they are not always good, but in critical thinking each person can renew, for themselves, better unitarian universalism thinking.
Each of us has a free mind but we are not free in our thinking if we do not understand the past in the better ways histories are constructed.
The past is the past but histories are the stories we construct to understand the past. The better histories are those that explain the changes of the past, to explain historical patterns.
When we concluded, we will look Channing ‘s 1830 Election Sermon, and land on the conclusion of the philosophically correct idea of Spiritual Freedom.
I first came to understand attitudes when I worked on my history honours thesis in 1987. The thesis was called, “Protestant Churches and their Attitude to Public Issues in Queensland 1919-1939”, done in the Department of History, University of Queensland, and completed in November 1987.
What I found in that thesis about attitudes is that elements in thinking are a starting point of pre-judgement (prejudice and bias), with existing attitudes, and the adopted values framework, which all settle into some exclusion and inclusion, creating the limits of understanding. For western democracy, Protestant attitudes had shaped everyone’s thinking including all those who do not identity as Protestant.
In April this year, 2025, I wrote up these findings in an essay, called, “Healthy Cognition: Attitudes, Values, and Jungian Framing”. And I will explain this later in the service.
“Now it came to pass that while the elder in Israel tarried in Babylon, a message came to him from a distant city saying, come thou and counsel with us. Help us to search out a priest for the one that has served us has gone mad. And the elder in Israel arose and journeyed to that distant city. And when the men of affairs were assembled, the elder spake unto them saying, what manner of man seeketh thee to be your new priest? And they answered and said unto him, we seek a young man yet with the wisdom of gray hairs. One that speaketh his mind freely yet giveth offense to no one. That draweth the multitude to the temple on the Sabbath but will not be displeased when we ourselves are absent. We desire one who has a gay mood yet is of sober mind. That seeketh out dark sayings and prophecies yet speaketh not over our heads. That filleth the temple, buildeth it up, yet defileth not the sanctuary with a Motley assortment of strangers. We seeketh one that puts the instruction of the young first but requireth not that we become teachers. That causeth the treasury to prosper yet asketh not that we give more of our substance. Verily we seek a prophet that will be unto us a leader but will not seek to change us, for we like not to be disturbed.”
Another reading is, “What is Enlightenment”, Kant’s famous essay. He said:
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!”–that is the motto of enlightenment.”
Today’s problem is that we have too many in population who dismiss such knowledge out of hand. With our current political climate of western democracy, if a great thinker, like Kant, walked around today, he would have been treated as a fool. Each of us has to challenge that dismissive thought in our own thoughts.
We are all free in our intention, and free to re-think our intention for unity and universality.
Channing stated,
“I call that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstances, and is not the creature of accidental impulse:
Which discovers everywhere the radiant signatures of the infinite spirit, and in them finds help to its own spiritual enlargement.”
Channing is only half correct, and the socio-historical change since his time, is that we have allowed ourselves to be, in fact actively framed by outward circumstances. To some extent, it is an escapable fact, but not so inescapable as dogma. Each has the capacity to make their own thinking their own thinking in self-awareness. That is spiritual enlargement or enlightenment.
We are in different moments of time confront with, for each of us, a new question. But it is not really a new question. In time we are being casting into the world of the past. In doing history, the cyclical beginning is prejudice. It is the state of what is pre-judged, “pre-judgment”. “The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know“, said President Harry Truman.
With the cycles of thinking, there is the movement from prejudice to knowledge and arising from our pre-existing attitudes and typologies of value.
The model works as a system, and where, until there is a connection between working concepts, it is simply a space of non-engagement. I shall explain the concepts.
Attitudes are the states of what is forcefully conveyed in and of the ideas. They are forcefully conveyed because they are grounded in natural dispositions, and dispositions which have been shaped in the past. A disposition only means taking a position in what we say, as opposed to when we are speculating in the thinking. Our attitudes can be forceful directed to what is outside of our thinking or of our thinking itself, which is internal, of the mind. In thinking we are condition to thinking our values in different ways. We are attempting to connect one thought to another; that is, we search out the meaning of words until they become concrete to each of us, and that happens by connecting with one of thick concepts; the terms on the diagram. Thought here is framed in the system that Carl Jung developed, using the terms and references, sensation, intuition, thinking (meaning reason), and feeling (or passion).
We do choose the direction of our thinking by what we exclude in ignorance, and what we include in empathy.
George Santayana said,
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
Malcolm X stated,
“History is a people’s memory, and without a memory, a man is demoted to the lower animals”.
And John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, the nineteenth century English Catholic historian, Liberal politician, and writer, said:
“History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul”.
This is our feeling of spiralling and is what we each understand as the social-historical change.
The general change, of course, is never all good or all bad. That is merely our judgement, we each just explain. If thoughts diminish in our judgment then matters spiral downward, but when something good happens, as we judge it, a momentum of an upward turn to better clarifty: we find things improve.
If you are not caring in the comprehension, you are not learning, and what you think you might know, you do not. This is not a criticism of a broad doctrine of neutrality nor a broad doctrine of objectivity, where care is integrated into the understanding of a neutral and objective stance. But then there is also our subject self in the judgement.
In Channing’s 1830 election sermon, he recognised that his critics are very correct in what they say, but he argued, they were still very outdated in their thinking and language. Channing stated:
“From what I have now said, the general tone of this discourse may be easily anticipated. I shall maintain that the highest interest of communities, as well as individuals, is a spiritual interest; that outward and earthly goods are of little worth but as bearing on the mind, and tending to its liberation, strength, and glory. And I am fully aware that in taking that course I lay myself open to objection. I shall be told that I show my ignorance of human nature, in attempting to interest men by such refined views of society ; that I am too speculative; that spiritual liberty is too unsubstantial and visionary to be proposed to statesmen as an end in legislation; that the dreams of the closet should not be obtruded on practical men; that gross and tangible realities can alone move the multitude; and that to talk to politicians of the spiritual interests of society as of supreme importance, is as idle as to try to stay with a breath the force of the whirlwind.”
In more concrete conclusion, and as histories, we have the Anglo-American Major Belief-Doubt Systems, it is your sense of place, and mine, in the prejudices, biases, attitudes and values, we share.
The Anglo-American major belief-doubt systems have occurred since the seventeenth century, which at the end of that century expanded, and transformed our thinking in the present.
As such, the six basic socio-political worldviews listed in the graph, are religious ideological systems, known as, Unitarianism, Universalism, and Unitarian-Universalism, which adapted in choices to these six basic, Anglo-American, socio-political worldviews.
Originally the Presentation at The UU Multiracial Unity Action Council on May 21, 2025.
Neville Buch
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