Ring in Something New — Unitarian Church of Montreal

Rev.Diane Rollert

January 3, 2021

Ring out wild bells, to the wild, wild sky,

the flying cloud, the frosty light:

the year is dying in the night;

ring out, wild bells, and let it die…

Ring out false pride in place and blood,

the civic slander and the spite;

ring in the love of truth and right;

ring in the common love of good.

— Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1850

Those words were written 170 years ago and it’s as if they were written for today.

Four years ago, I told you a story about a book I had read by science fiction novelist Robert Sawyer. The book was Quantum Night. You may remember that I had read it as a (mostly unsuccessful) way to distract myself from all the anxiety I was feeling right after the US election in 2016.

Well, four years have passed, including these past ten months mostly in lockdown during a pandemic. I’ve read a lot of other things, but I kept thinking about again about that book, although the details had gotten quite vague, which tends to happen to me once I put a book down.

Robert Sawyer is a popular Canadian science fiction writer who tends to promote a hopeful, positive view of the future of humanity. He does a lot of scientific research and likes to grapple with big, existential questions. As I’ve told you before, he’s not the most poetic writer, but what he lacks in style he makes up in imagination. In Quantum Night, he explores a creative relationship between psychology and quantum physics as he considers the existence of evil and the nature of consciousness.

Sawyer introduces the fictional but Trump-like character of Quentin Carroway as the sociopathic president of the United States. Ironically, the book was published in 2016, before the US election. Justin Trudeau and Vladimir Putin also appear in the story as themselves, along with Naheed Nenshi, the current and first Muslim mayor of Calgary. In the book, the year is 2020, and Sawyer has cast Nenshi as the leader of the NDP and the new prime minister of Canada. (Well, that didn’t happen!)

In 2016, Sawyer says that he wrote the book to prove that he was not naively caught up in hopeful fantasy, that he too recognized the dire situation the world was facing. He thought it would be interesting to contrast a Muslim-hating US president with a Muslim Canadian prime minister. But his real goal was to show that human nature can change.

The book’s protagonist is a psychologist who has developed a simple test to identify sociopaths, or psychopaths. Sawyer says these two words mean the same thing. That is: “an individual devoid of empathy and conscience who doesn’t feel for other people — someone who only cares about their own self-interest.”

As the book goes on we learn that there are three types of people in the world: philosophical zombies, psychopaths and people with a conscience. The philosophical zombies are, by far, the largest group. These are people who live their lives without ever paying attention — you know, the way you can move from point A to point B without realizing how you got there. “The lights are on, but nobody’s home.”

These are individuals who can be kind and harmless, but they have no inner voice, no ongoing inner monologue or conscience talking to them. So they need others to follow, others to show them what to do in the world.

In the third group are the people whose minds are “firing on all cylinders.” They are “normal, fully conscious human beings.” They have inner voices that give them the ability to reflect on themselves. They can actually think about whether what they’re doing is right or wrong. In other words, these are people who are conscious with a conscience. They are the minority in the world.

Here’s the book’s big question: Who will the zombies follow? Well, they can either follow the psychopaths, or the people in the third group, the people with a conscience.

Remember, this is science fiction that is stretching beyond scientific truth to entertain and to make a point. Are the majority of people in the world really unconscious without any conscience? That’s an unproven theory, but it is a theory — one that I dearly hope is wrong, but one that I sometimes fear is true.

A bit of a spoiler alert here. At the end of the book, Canada is nearly annexed by the US and the US and Russia are about to fire nuclear weapons at each other. It is bleak. But then quantum physics saves the day by shifting everyone’s consciousness. Hurray for science!

You’ll have to read the book to find out how that happens. I’m not going to tell you. But let’s just say, hallelujah, everyone’s innate human nature is changed — even the psychopathic nature of the US president and Vladimir Putin.

If scientists working together across the world have been able to develop vaccines for the coronavirus in record time, maybe, just maybe, there are quantum physicists out there who could shift all of humanity’s innate nature toward more goodness. What a thought.

As I told you four years ago, I didn’t find much relief reading Quantum Night, but it did get me thinking about the concept of human nature — is it fixed or is it changeable? That is a major theological question. Like Robert Sawyer, I want the world to know that we are capable of change.

In 2016 I asked if we were going to walk around like zombies this next year. Were we going to let social discourse be shortened to the length of a tweet? Or were we going to rise up, listen to our inner voices, find our consciousness and our consciences?

I’d say that we’ve witnessed both responses during this pandemic and during these past four years. We’ve seen incredible care and consciousness, ongoing acts of admirable kindness and self-sacrifice. We’ve seen people stand up for racial justice and for human rights. But we’ve also seen the worst. We’ve seen selfishness, cruelty, the widening inequality between those who have abundance and those who are hungry — here and around the world, between individuals and between countries.

There’s a lot to congratulate and a lot to lament.

Some of us may have stronger inner voices, and maybe those voices can be too loud or too painful sometimes. Maybe many of us need role models who can lead the way and carry us forward into change.

We have faced this pandemic together. We have worn our masks, kept our distance, limited our contacts. We have supported each other and we have supported others outside of our community. We have held each other together through these online gatherings, through phone calls, email, care packages, and letters.

There is hope on the horizon. It may be slow in being fully realized. It may take more time than we’d like for a full vaccination program to be rolled out, and for enough people to be vaccinated before we can gather together again in person, but the light at the end of the tunnel is starting to shine.

We’ve seen the worst of humanity, but we’ve also seen the best. And so, four years later, I still believe that if people’s view can shift toward hatred, then it can also shift toward love.

That’s why we have to ring out those wild bells, once again, loud and clear.