210,000: A Failure of Conscience. We inheritors of the Protestant…
By: David Breeden
Tags: Covid 19, Responsibility, Humanism, Unitarian Universalist

Photo by visuals on Unsplash

That’s the number of dead.

We inheritors of the Protestant Reformation have a special relationship with conscience.

Our tradition has insisted upon it. And many have given their lives in its service. Both a summary of and central to that tradition is the work of Henry David Thoreau.

For example, in 1849 he wrote a poem titled “Conscience.” Here are a few lines from that poem:

. . .

I love a soul not all of wood, Predestinated to be good, But true to the backbone Unto itself alone, And false to none; Born to its own affairs, Its own joys and own cares; By whom the work which God begun Is finished, and not undone; Taken up where he left off, Whether to worship or to scoff; If not good, why then evil, If not good god, good devil.

Also in 1849 Thoreau wrote his greatest essay, “Civil Disobedience,” the inspiration for such people as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. Thoreau wrote:

A very few — as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and people (men) — serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it. . . . Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a person’s (man’s) real humanity (manhood) and immortality flow out, and the (he) bleed(s) to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.

Yes, the freethinking tradition takes conscience extremely seriously. Many in our tradition have “serve(d) the state with their consciences . . . and so necessarily resist(ed) it for the most part.”

One of my go-to definitions of Humanism is that:

Humanism is a way of thinking and living that focuses on human action in relation to the wellbeing of sentient beings and the planet.

We human beings are the sentient beings with a conscience on this planet, and that calls us to an ethics of responsibility and care for all the other sentient beings and the planet itself. That is our hope; and our meaning; and our purpose.

This bears repeating. Often.

You may have seen or heard about the editorial in the most recent New England Journal of Medicine that begins this way:

Covid-19 has created a crisis throughout the world. This crisis has produced a test of leadership. With no good options to combat a novel pathogen, countries were forced to make hard choices about how to respond. Here in the United States, our leaders have failed that test. They have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.

Our greatest national failure in this pandemic has been a moral one. A failure of conscience.

Failure to have established a functioning and widely available health care system.

Failure to assuage as best we can the economic disaster so many of our fellow citizens are suffering.

Failure to care for the traditionally oppressed.

Failure to care for each other by taking minimal safety precautions.

Failure to look reality in the face.

As a nation, we turned away.

There was no listening. And for those with a social conscience, this is an unforgivable tragedy.

FirstUnitarian.org

Huumanist.org

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