Jeffrey Nall, Ph.D. delivered this talk to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of St. Augustine, December 14, 2025.Our society encourages us to concentrate on the mechanics of achieving our objectives, on the how-to more than the what-for. There is an overemphasis on tactics at the expense of vision and, most importantly, values. From this perspective, all that we really need is political science to help us identify the right strategies and techniques to achieve whatever our strategic goals happen to be.Comparatively little time is spent thinking about how to stimulate and to sustain creativity, empathy, perseverance, and the sense of purpose that is needed to face the inherently bad odds of life and be part of social movements for progress and human dignity, which inevitably go against the tide.I believe that the humanities, though often diminished as impractical, as disposable, as defundable, offer invaluable guidance and spiritual support to sustain our efforts to foster both personal and social transformation. Through our engagement with philosophy, religion, history, literature, poetry, music, and the wider arts, the humanities help us preserve our integrity.Humanities help us live lives that are centered on something deeper and richer than good strategy and victory, namely virtue and principle. Humanities can help us realize living solely to win is a doomed endeavor for mortal beings, particularly those living in a consumerist society in which success inevitably requires the subversion of truth, justice, love, and integrity.In 2024, the independent journalist and the co-creator of Don’t Look Up. David Sirota shared that he sometimes struggled to believe in his efforts at social change. He wrote,“On my good days, I think the work matters. On my bad days, I think we’re all just spamming the internet while billionaires and politicians laugh and the ecosystem collapses. The trick is to have an internal monologue saying the former, not the latter. A trick I haven’t mastered.”I hear similar sentiments when I do talks such as the one I gave in 2024 on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Other Dream, namely his dream of remedying economic injustice.I remember a sympathetic listener coming up afterwards and sharing his frustration and sense of defeat after spending decades of his life contributing to progress he felt was being rapidly undone.We could respond by pointing to all the good that has been achieved over the years. We might call for a spirit of optimism, emphasizing the silver linings. But I think the humanities and our spiritual traditions are uniquely positioned to help us acknowledge these feelings of frustration and despair. These are features of the human condition. Just trying to paper them over doesn’t really do anybody any good.To be human, after all, means having problems. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, in an interview in 1972, that a person can be judged by the quality of their problems. Anyone without real problems is “an idiot,” Heschel said. He said the greatness of man is that he faces problems. “I would judge a person by how many deep problems he’s concerned with,” said Heschel.Contemporary Problems of Humane PeopleHow can we not have problems? Who in their right mind could not have problems when the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists puts the Doomsday Clock 89 seconds before midnight—a metaphorical representation of the increased risk we face of nuclear conflict and civilization-ending catastrophe?How could we not have problems when Oxfam International shows us that economic injustice is rapidly increasing such that the richest one percent of the population are taking nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world? When homelessness is criminalized, and ordinary working people increasingly are struggling just to pay rent, let alone the now almost magical thinking that you can actually get a mortgage and a house?How can we not have problems when climate scientists are telling us that our leaders across all of the political spectrums are not taking the necessary steps to avert climate catastrophe? How can we not have problems when antisemitic hate crimes target people during Hanukkah?How can we not have problems when the U.S. government continues to support Israel’s onslaught against Palestinians in Gaza; a campaign deemed a genocide by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Forensic Architecture, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights, the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars.How can we not have problems when the Trump administration continues to push us closer to another war—war with Venezuela—launching 22 attacks against boats allegedly carrying drugs, killing 87 people? And while some have shown concern about a double tap—where we not only struck a boat, but then fired on it again as people struggled to survive the initial ...
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