New Forbidden Fudge Brownie Chunk

for a Limited Time 

The Rev. Ron Sala

Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford

September 21, 2003 

 

 

This summer, I did some traveling: Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania. Alone and with ReBecca, I drove back and forth over a lot of territory, some of it listening to a tape of Jack Kerouac’s Beat epic On the Road.

One day, we stopped at a well-known restaurant chain for some lunch. As we waited for the waitress, a bright yellow sign on the table caught my eye. It had a picture of something gooey, with the exuberant words, “NEW FORBIDDEN FUDGE BROWNIE CHUNK FOR A LIMITED TIME.”

The first thing I thought was, “Forbidden by whom?” It was, after all, an advertisement for a particular desert the restaurant chain wanted to sell a lot of. It was, in fact, the opposite of forbidden, it was encouraged.

So, why, I wondered aloud to Becca, call it forbidden? It’s been a long time, indeed, since most churches have spoken of gluttony as a sin. Certainly, there’s no law against eating fudge brownies….

So, then, who forbids it? It must, I realized, be none other than ourselves.

We all know that making a regular habit of eating rich such desserts can have a negative impact on our health. Now, please understand, I’m not standing here saying I have perfect willpower when it comes to things ooey and gooey. In fact, you’re looking at someone who has the distinction of having lost a not-so-amazing eight pounds in the last nine months. I made a New Year’s resolution to lose 25 pounds, and I still have a few months!

But even I know that if I overdo it at every meal, I’m going to end up in trouble. We’ve all heard countless messages from doctors and surgeons general to avoid excess weight. And there’s the ever-present, unspoken message in the mass-produced (often retouched) images of beautiful people. The message is, “Look like me!” That message is especially targeted to women and girls.

Getting back to the sign, was it there as the silent bearer of yet another message? That message must surely be, “Indulge yourself!” But which self are you indulging? The self of the five minutes it takes to eat the ultra-caloric treat? But what of the self who may be embarrassed at the next doctor’s visit or trying on a bathing suit?

Was this sign, therefore, in front of me in the restaurant to, in effect, divide me from myself? Was I caught in the middle of a multi-interest struggle for my actions? Was all this going on, constantly, below our conscious awareness? Whom should we trust? Should we be thin, healthy, (and perhaps be mistaken for a model) or fat and happy? A lot of dollars can change hands depending on our actions.

I believe this internal struggle is an example of a more general phenomenon. We are constantly confronted with images and messages, many of which are in direct conflict with each other.

The average American child watches 28 hours of TV a week and sees 100,000 acts of violence by the end of elementary school.¹ (Studies have shown links between the watching of televised violence and aggressiveness in children).

We are bombarded with mass images and messages in our adult lives as well. There are companies dedicated to covering every conceivable space with advertising, even schools and police cars. I’ve seen print ads on the floor of a department store. There are even TV’s showing non-stop commercials in dentists offices, elevators, and taxis.

And advertising has even crossed the barrier into the so-called “real world.” There’s something now called “viral advertising” in which people and things you thought were just there, are actually there to sell you something. For instance, attractive young women are being paid to approach people standing at crowded bars and ask them to order a particular brand of drink for them. They’re then trained to engage the people in conversation and create, totally unknown to the mark, a favorable impression of that brand of alcohol. Another example is a marketing company paying the doorman of a building to keep shipping boxes from a particular corporation, thereby giving people living there that that companies products are very popular with their neighbors.

Or, even after you’ve bought whatever it is, and think you’re past the danger of being deceived, you call up customer service. You have a conversation with someone on the other end of the line who says they’re in, say, Texas and has an accent to match. The only problem is, they’re actually in India, where the corporation moved their service center, laying off an American worker and hiring an Indian for a fraction of the pay. The Indians sometimes take on British or American alter-egos.

Deception in marketing is certainly nothing new. Kitty Kelly, in her unauthorized biography of Frank Sinatra, reveals how one of Sinatra’s entourage paid a few teenage girls to go hysterical at one of his concerts. Soon afterwards, girl after girl, who hadn’t been paid began to scream or faint. A fake action had triggered a real response. Thereafter, girls everywhere knew exactly how to act at a Frank Sinatra concert, which undoubtedly increased his fame and record sales.

Add to these advertising age illusions all the ones people have been using to mislead others for millennia: flattery, perjury, evasion, false alibis, conspiracies of silence. What a tangled web we weave, lovers, reporters, ministers, rulers, and actors, when first we begin by half-truths and end up with whole lies—and diminished lives.

But, take all this into account, it can’t compare with the worst deception of all. The fourth century BCE philosopher Plato said that worst deception was self-deception?

Do we deceive ourselves? Listen to these statistics:

Ninety-four percent of university professors think they are better at their jobs than their colleagues.

Twenty-five percent of college students believe they are in the top 1% in terms of their ability to get along with others.

Seventy percent of college students think they are above average in leadership ability. Only two percent think they are below average.

Eighty-five percent of medical students think it is improper for politicians to accept gifts from lobbyists. Only 46 percent think it's improper for physicians to accept gifts from drug companies.²

Even if we decide to be scrupulously honest with ourselves, we still encounter the problems of our very nervous systems. The human brain can only process a tiny fraction of the inputs that come through our five senses every moment. Our brains are choosing every second what to process into that 3D, hot/cold, wet/dry, good-and-bad-smelling, noisy/quiet mélange we each call reality. You’ll notice I said, “each of us call reality” not “all of us call reality.” Each of our brains chooses and processes the data of the world around us differently. It depends on our genetics, our place in society, our formal and informal education, our experience.

It’s been said that a fashion designer and an architect don’t walk down the same street. The fashion designer is likely to notice the quality and cut of fabrics and where the hem of skirts is this year. The architect with tend to see the height and date of buildings, the relative positions of windows, etc. Which is right? They both are. That’s not even to mention that these two people will never walk down the same street with exactly the same filter. For instance, the architect might have had enough of buildings for once and is just watching the skirts….

To take a more somber example, there’s the case of the man who “saw” a shadowy figure coming towards him in his darkened home. Seeing a burglar, he reached for his gun and fired. In the light, to his horror, he saw that the person he had killed was his own wife. The poor man’s brain had simply done what all our brains are doing all the time: making a gamble, based on limited information, on what’s real.

Lest you think this example rare, I had a great uncle who was fortunate to have only lost the sight in one eye after a shotgun-toting hunter “saw” a muskrat, which turned out to be Uncle Steve….

I understand that I may have sent some people to the dictionary in my description of this sermon in the newsletter. I said I would meditate on the “epistemology and ontology of deception in everyday life.” Epistemology is simply that branch of philosophy that asks, “How do we know what we know?” Ontology asks, “What do we know about life?” The latter depends much on the former.

Through the history of western philosophy, there have been a few basic approaches to the question, “How do we know what we know?”

One of these is rationalism, the view that we know through reason. Socrates taught his disciple Plato a method of questioning dialogue to determine truth. Plato was of the opinion that there are certain basic forms, laws, or ideas, eternally existing, of which the material objects around us are only instances. Rene Descartes was the first modern rationalist, with his famous dictum, “I think, therefore I am.”

Another approach is empiricism, which says we know through experience and experiment. Empiricism relies more on direct observation than reasoning from principles. Some examples are the Sophists Socrates struggled with, John Locke, who so influenced the early United States, and the 20^th century philosopher Bertrand Russell, who said that we know two ways, through other people’s descriptions and through our own acquaintance with the world.

Then, there has been a skeptical tradition holding that absolute knowledge is impossible and has challenged the great epistemological systems on how they can justify claims to knowledge. At its most extreme, skepticism is known as zeteticism, whose adherents refuse to believe in anything, including nihilism, the belief in nothing….

There have been other ways to know that have sometimes been recognized in the western philosophical tradition, sometimes not. These include revelation and intuition, which to some minds are the same thing. These might be approached in conjunction with everything from transcendental meditation, tribal dancing, prayer, art, spontaneous or induced mystical states, yoga, ritual, etc. It seems to me that Lao Tzu, the author of our ancient reading this morning, would fall into this category.

An underlying assumption of these direct ways of knowing is that to understand reality, you must understand the creator (or shall we say re-creator?) of reality. You’ll recall a moment ago we were considering how the brain filters what it pays attention to and interprets what it perceives in a unique way? The great German existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, “We are all greater artists than we realize.”

Liberation theologians speak about “the epistemological privilege of the oppressed.” That is to say that those who are on the losing end of social transactions understand much that the dominant can’t. Blacks and Hispanics understand racism in ways that whites can’t. Women understand gender discrimination in ways that men cannot. Gays, Lesbians, Bisexual, and Transgender people understand homophobia in ways that straight people can’t. Elderly people understand ageism in ways that younger people cant—but probably will….

To me, all these approaches to knowing have value. They serve as checks and tests for each other. We all need each other, no matter how we approach knowing life, sorting fables, fantasies and fibs from a ground of truth we can rely on. None of us has all the truth, but all of us have a lot more truth than any of us. That is to say, as we learn from each other, as well as our own minds and experience, we come ever closer to understanding who we are and why we’re here.

Max Ehrmann, in his beloved poem, “Desiderata,” “With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams; it is still a beautiful world.”

Robert Frost wrote, “Earth’s the place for love. I don’t know where it’s like to go better.”

Perhaps, in the end, that’s all we need to know. They say, “People don’t care how much you know till they know how much you care.” It calls to my mind the example of Henri Nouwen, a brilliant academic who became professor of pastoral theology at Yale Divinity School and then moved to Harvard. As one of his biographers puts it, “The period was successful, but he felt that he missed something. Teaching theology doesn't guarantee a religious life.”³

Nouwen eventually decided to leave academia behind in order to spend the rest of his life working in communities of mentally handicapped people. He still wrote in his spare moments, but the people he served came first. He found that love was more important than knowing.

The world does not reduce itself to a statement about the world. Life is meant to be lived, not analyzed. My advice? Every once in a while, eat a brownie….

¹ Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting (http://www.cipbonline.org/quiz-answers2.htm)

² The Skeptic’s Dictionary (http://skepdic.com/selfdeception.html)

³ Golden Compass (www.ping.be/~ping1696/parken1.htm)