The Great Asymmetry

While thumbing through a century-old issue of The Winnipeg Evening Tribune earlier this week – evidence of the exciting life I lead when the eyes of the world aren’t gazing in my direction – I stumbled upon a lengthy commentary by Mary Johnston, an American novelist and women’s rights advocate from a rather aristocratic Old Virginia family. The bestselling author of 23 novels, and a frequent contributor to both The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine, as well as a close friend of author Margaret Mitchell, her progressive social views and provocative writing drew the scorn of her conservative neighbors, including the widow of Confederate general Stonewall Jackson. She embraced socialism and abandoned mainstream Christianity for mystical spirituality.

Challenging the racism and snobbery of another contemporary author, Gertrude Atherton, Mary Johnston revealed herself to be an enthusiastic advocate of social equality, a more equitable distribution of wealth, and the superiority of love over money when it came to social relationships. Directing her attention specifically to marriage, she insisted that love – “love that is so strong at the centre that it can expand over the depth and height and width of things” – is the sole basis for a sound marriage and that neither ancestral pedigree nor religion should be allowed to get in the way of a loving relationship. Even differences in political opinions shouldn’t come between partners, in her view, and by extension, she envisioned a society in which neither wealth nor occupation, social status nor race, religion nor politics should be allowed to come between people.

“The happiest families are not those in which every member thinks, speaks, and feels alike; in which there is only one note that hollowly reverberates forever!” wrote Johnston, adding: “The Good Earth is our home. Humanity is our family. That today this is far from being appreciated with any thoroughness does not mean that it is not so, nor that the centuries to come will not see that it is so. … Life is a symphony, a vast record of rich and beauteous sounds. Harmony isn’t a matter of identical voices, one piling in on another, but of balanced unlikeness, of a multiplicity of exquisite strains, held in common love and admiration.” Balanced unlikeness striving for harmony!

If only it were that simple. A century after Mary Johnston articulated this vision of harmony, society seems as discordant as ever. Polarization and partisanship seem to be on the increase, even as growing numbers of people withdraw from public engagement, retreating to smaller than ever circles of friends and like-minded people. We’ve moved from front porches to back decks, from movie theatres to televisions in our living rooms, from stores to online shopping, and from churches to … well, nothing in particular for most people.

It's hard to listen for the harmony when the sopranos are in one room and the altos in another, when the tenors are next door and the basses down the street. It’s even more difficult to hear the harmony when the notes played by some – politically or religiously, behaviorally or intellectually – are notes we’d rather not hear at all, notes that puncture the quiet comfort of our own bubbles. Let’s face it, often when we talk about what’s appealing in this church, as people do in others, we talk about the like-mindedness rather than balanced unlikeness. Like-mindedness draws us together and, just because we don’t notice that we’re in a bubble, it doesn’t mean we’re not. Harmony isn’t the result of everyone playing the same notes and keeping the same time.

Modern media invites us to hear the discord that falls short of harmony. The news is filled with stories of human conflict, and the small kindnesses that dominate our days are rarely considered newsworthy, save for one feel-good story that typically ends most newscasts. For the most part, the news accentuates differences that seemingly cannot be resolved, pointing to troublesome events and developments from which we cannot turn away, even though we cannot think of a way to do anything about them, either.

And many organizations thrive on the discord, whether economic or political, social or religious. Disasters and depravity are good for holding our attention and opening our wallets. Businesses turn profits by filling the perceived holes in people’s lives with merchandise or services, politicians attract followers and raise copious amounts in donations, various organizations gather the spoils of ruptured community, and even churches trade upon people’s anxiety by promoting some doctrine or another as a balm to heal their wounds. Discord is an opportunity for some. And yet the dream of harmony endures.

Johnston’s words echo the meaning behind our own “Harp Window,” created by Fred Swanson based upon poem by Björn Gunnlaugsson called Njóla (Night), which posited that there is a fundamental harmony underlying all that exists. The vast universe of which we get but a glimpse coheres in ways that we can scarcely fathom. And here on Earth, where we stumble along beneath the heavens, there is likewise a harmony of which we are scarcely aware.

Two weeks after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 – a horrendous act of violence that occurred so long ago that there are now young people who have been born, raised, and graduated from university since it happened, although it remains vivid in my memory, as I’m sure it is in most of yours – the acclaimed Harvard paleontologist and science commentator Stephen Jay Gould penned an op-ed in The New York Times. It proved to be one of his last writings since he succumbed to cancer the following spring.

By then, Gould had a well-established reputation as one of the era’s leading “popular scientists,” for want of a better term – alongside the likes Carl Sagan and David Suzuki, among others – having produced several bestselling volumes of popular essays.

At a time when people’s faith in their fellow human beings had been seriously shaken, and mistrust in others swelled, Gould spoke out to caution people against assuming the worst, arguing that the apparent balance between good and evil, which, in terms of human behaviour, he called decency and depravity, still weighed heavily in favour of goodness and decency. This was something that was easy to forget in a time of crisis and confusion. Even at the best times, we can have an unfortunate tendency to magnify the negative, focusing on what is broken rather what is working, noticing who is acting out rather than who is cooperating, what disappoints us compared to what delights us.

“Good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one,” Gould maintained, seeking to restore a sense of calm and comfort when people were anxious and afraid, reassuring everyone that goodness still prevailed, notwithstanding the shocking events that dominated most people’s consciousness. This is easier to see in the aftermath of a fire or a hurrincane, which sweeps through a community and calls upon its people to bind together, for while we call these events “acts of God” – an interesting turn of phrase – they are acts of nature to which we do not attribute moral agency. It’s so much harder when confronted with a willful act that might be characterized as evil, rather than natural.

“The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people,” he explained. Yes, disorder can overwhelm order, and destruction can wash away hours and years, even centuries, of creation, but the trajectory of human history still remains with the forces of order and creation, goodness and decency. He called this the Great Asymmetry, noting that, “every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible as the ‘ordinary’ efforts of a vast majority.”

The numbers Gould cites are poetic rather than numeric, of course, for it would be impossible to calculate precisely how many actual acts of goodness there may be compared to a single act of evil. And, judging by crime statistics and other measures, it seems pretty obvious that the magnitude of human goodness compared to human failure, ranging all the way from simple shortcomings to outright acts of evil, doesn’t seem to be in the order of 10,000 to one. Or is it? Even horrible people unwittingly do good things along the way, which, if nothing else, is how they can go undetected for long periods of time.

Standing at Ground Zero, Gould described it as “the focal point for a vast web of bustling goodness, channeling unaccountable deeds of kindness from an entire planet” as he recorded in his own mind “the overwhelming weight of human decency.” It was a small number of men who had committed the evil deed, but it was thousands – indeed, tens of thousands – who responded to make things right, bolstered by the goodwill and support of countless millions. Perhaps 10,000 to one underestimates the magnitude of acts of kindness compared to acts of evil. “The rubble of ground zero stands mute,” he noted, “while a beehive of human activity churns within, and radiates outward, as everyone makes a selfless contribution, big or tiny according to means and skills, but each of equal worth.”

Gould went on to offer a few illustrations of the ways that individuals and groups sought to be present in the moment, offering open hearts and helping hands to others, in small efforts to redeem the situation.

One really caught his attention, though, because he scoffed at it at first. A woman in a café where Gould and his wife and stepdaughter were picking up a bite to eat handed them a bag with a dozen freshly made cobblers. They were still warm, she noted, and she asked them to take them back to Ground Zero where Gould and his family were volunteering. They did so, but Gould thought to himself, what could a dozen cobblers mean in the face of an enormous problem? What difference would it even make? But they took them back and passed them out. The last person to get one was an aging firefighter, sitting down for the first time in a while, who ate the cobbler, saying it was the best thing to happen to him in four days. And then he said: “And it’s still warm.” In that moment, Stephen Jay Gould recognized the importance of an apparently small and insignificant act of kindness to buoy the spirit of others and to help make right a difficult situation.

Still, it’s rarely a simple matter of good people vs. bad people, but more often a matter of how everyone – each and every one of us – falls short of the mark from time to time. Through intent or neglect, sometimes through mere indifference, we each contribute to the world’s problems, no matter how good we strive to be, nor how successful we are in the effort. But on balance, there is more goodness in the world than not, evidenced by the fact that, at any given time, most of us – the overwhelming majority – would prefer to be alive than not, even though the battle for goodness becomes fatiguing after a while, and often less certain.

As Dorothy Parker mused in her poem, “The Veteran” –

“When I was young and bold and strong,

Oh, right was right, and wrong was wrong!

My plume on high, my flag unfurled,

I rode away to right the world 

‘Come out, you dogs, and fight!’ said I,

And wept there was but once to die.

“But I am old; and good and bad

Are woven in a crazy plaid.

I sit and say, ‘The world is so;

And he is wise who lets it go.

A battle lost, a battle won –

The difference is small, my son.’

“Inertia rides and riddles me;

The which is called Philosophy.”

Our lives, individually and collectively, are asymmetrical, “woven in a crazy plaid,” or “vast web of bustling goodness” – our acts of kindness may be random, but that doesn’t mean they’re insignificant – and just as the “arc of the moral universe bends towards justice,” the Great Asymmetry tends towards goodness.

“We have a duty, almost a holy responsibility,” declared Stephen Jay Gould, “to record and honor the victorious weight of these innumerable little kindnesses, when an unprecedented act of evil so threatens to distort our perception of ordinary human behavior.” And we must do so, as well, when we are dealing with mundane and routine differences, polarization and everyday indifference. We are called to redeem the world with our goodness our everyday acts of kindness.

It matters where we focus our attention, especially when so much seems to conspire to distract us and distort our perception, so that we can keep our eyes on the greater good that surrounds us, acknowledging that, on balance, people are overwhelmingly kind, it is a good world, and we are blessed to be alive to enjoy it.

A sermon delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Winnipeg.

Works Cited

Stephen Jay Gould, "A Time of Gifts," The New York Times (September 26, 2001).

Mary Johnston, "Better to Marry an Upstart than a Downstart," The Winnipeg Evening Tribune (December 15, 1923).