The following was a short talk I gave at one of the weekly “Tuesdays in the Chapel” services hosted by Bob Randolph, MIT’s Chaplain to the Institute. The prompt for this year’s talks is “A book or event that changed my life.” The topic of my talk is what I call “centered sets” and I develop the ideas a little bit more in depth in this post.

“Well Jem, I don’t know- Atticus told me one time that most of this Old Family stuff’s foolishness because everybody’s family’s just as old as everybody else’s. I said did that include the colored folks and Englishmen and he said yes.”

“Background doesn’t mean Old Family,” said Jem. “I think it’s how long your family’s been readin’ and writin’. Scout, I’ve studied this real hard and that’s the only reason I can think of. Somewhere along when the Finches were in Egypt one of ’em must have learned a hieroglyphic or two and he taught his boy.” Jem laughed. “Imagine Aunty being proud her great-grandaddy could read an’ write- ladies pick funny things to be proud of.”

“Well I’m glad he could, or who’da taught Atticus and them, and if Atticus couldn’t read, you and me’d be in a fix. I don’t think that’s what background is, Jem.”

“Well then, how do you explain why the Cunninghams are different? Mr. Walter can hardly sign his name, I’ve seen him. We’ve just been readin’ and writin’ longer’n they have.”

“No, everybody’s gotta learn, nobody’s born knowin’. That Walter’s as smart as he can be, he just gets held back sometimes because he has to stay out and help his daddy. Nothin’s wrong with him. Naw, Jem, I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.”…

“That’s what I thought, too,” he said at last, “when I was your age. If there’s just one kind of folks, why can’t they get along with each other? If they’re all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other?

–To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee

Our topic continues to be “a book or event that changed my life.” I’m going to take a little bit of artistic license and talk about an idea that changed my life.

There’s different ways I can describe this idea and I’m going to share a couple. I’ll start by stating it this way: “Every single person on earth has something valuable to teach me about life’s most important questions.”

Now, for many people, this wouldn’t be all that surprising or profound. I’ve met many people who are naturally open-minded and seem to intuitively operate on this principle. But, for me, it was a little harder to come by and I had some baggage to overcome before this idea could really work for me.

For a long time I experienced an internal conundrum whenever I would have a spiritual discussion with somebody of a different faith background. It felt very important to carefully filter everything in the conversation through my understanding of God and the world. I needed to keep very careful track of what the other person was saying and what things matched up with my understanding of “the truth” and what things didn’t. I felt the need to be on guard against things that might somehow undermine or threaten my worldview.

If somebody described an experience that didn’t fit neatly into one of my categories, then I was doing some mental gymnastics to re-interpret their experience in ways that squared with my understanding of who God is and how he works.

You can probably guess that this didn’t make me a particularly good listener. And I certainly missed out on a lot of good opportunities to learn from other people and their experiences. In a word, I was being arrogant, thinking that when it came to God, my views were superior.

But the problem was that I was sort of painted into a corner and I couldn’t see a way out of this arrogance. If my way of understanding God and the universe was wrong, if I were somehow “in the wrong camp”… well that would have big and frankly earth-shattering ramifications for me. So the best option I could subconsciously arrive at was to doggedly assume that my opinions were the correct ones.

Well, I’m far from perfect in this or any respect, but these days, I find that I am much more able to listen and learn from others with differing perspectives without feeling so threatened by other ways of thinking. I still have my own opinions about God and spiritual things but I don’t find them getting in the way as much. So what happened? What changed for me?

Well it goes back to this new idea that came my way. Let me try to illustrate it a different way. And since we’re here at MIT, I hope you’ll indulge me as I try to explain this in a somewhat mathematical way–using set theory of all things. But don’t worry, this is isn’t the set theory you’d get in a Course 18 MIT class. This is kindergarten-level set theory.

Set theory gives us two different ways of looking at the world: bounded sets and centered sets. Let’s start with bounded sets because those are the easiest to understand. A bounded set is just a circle, a boundary. Whatever is inside the the circle is in the set and everything else is outside the set. So if we took the people who are in the room right now, that could be a bounded set. And then within that we could have a bounded set of the males, which I would be in. And a bounded set of the females, which I would not be in.

Bounded sets are very intuitive and very important for getting through life. I like to keep a mental bounded set of things that are ok to eat and things that are ok to say in polite company. They keep me on track.

If we’re talking about religion you can see how bounded sets would apply there. There would be a bounded set of people who are Christians, a bounded set of Jews, Muslims, agnostics, atheists, etc. We could draw lots of circles and circles within circles to represent all the religious categories and sub-categories. And I think it’s pretty automatic that we tend to put people into categories and these categories have a lot of influence on how we think about people and interact with them. More on this in a minute.

Ok, now let’s talk centered sets. With centered sets, there’s no boundary, but there is a center point. And then everything else is floating around the center somewhere. Some things are closer to the center, other things are farther away. And it’s quite natural for the centered set universe to be dynamic rather than static. So all of our objects are moving and have some trajectory that they’re on. This motion is also in relation to the center, taking some more towards the center, others further away from it.

Centered sets are a little less intuitive and less a part of our everyday experience. I have to think a bit to come up with some good examples. Here’s one: let’s say I have a room full of people and I ask myself the question who here is “nice”? Bounded sets are probably somewhat lacking in this area because there tends to many levels of gray (I’m trying to train myself not to say “shades of gray” anymore) with niceness. So if the center is something like ‘maximum niceness,’ we all know that one guy over there is not very nice and is probably far from the center point. But most of the people here are pretty nice. And then there’s that one girl who is exceedingly nice and seems to be much closer to the center.

Ok, so we’ve got these two kinds of sets, so what? Well, it’s interesting because in recent years, a lot of smart atheists have been telling us about all the ways that religion screws things up. It’s causes wars, it breeds intolerance and bigotry, it’s anti-intellectual, it’s imperialistic and ethnocentric and it’s often corrupt and hypocritical.

What’s interesting to me is, that I think all of these things are connected, at least in part, to the baggage of bounded sets. Bounded sets cause us to focus on who’s in and who’s out, who’s right and who’s wrong. In this mode, it’s very difficult to not judge the people outside our own bounded set. And if we let our bounded sets solidify it’s probably just a matter of time before we see people on the outside as wrong, inferior or even evil.

Bounded sets also tend to discourage progress and growth because, once we’re in our bounded set, we don’t tend to want to move. We settle in and get comfy there because the whole emphasis is being in the “right” group. And since, I’m in the right group, why should I move? It’s good for me to stay right here. In fact, I’m helping the world by staying put, I’m one of the good guys. It’s always the other person who needs to move, get their act together, shape up. It’s always other people in those other bounded sets who are the source of the world’s problems. And you can probably connect the dots from here to all those bad things that are associated with religion.

As a case study, we can look at the track record of Christianity. To be sure, I would want to emphasize there’s been many very positive moments in the past 2000 years. But, it’s still quite amazing to me how much intolerance and persecution has taken place (and still takes place) in a faith that has such a tremendous, and I’d even want to say indisputable, emphasis on loving people. I think this happens because bounded-set thinking gets out of control and takes over.

Now, let’s take a look back at centered sets. One simple way to apply centered-set thinking is to label the center something like “The Good Life,” meaning the best, most fulfilling life you can imagine. Then people are all floating around that center somewhere. The most important aspect of centered-set thinking is also the simplest. It’s the fact that everyone is on the same playing field. There’s no in group or out group, no good guys or bad guys, just people, one kind of folks. I like this because it feels a lot like real life to me. We’re all human and we’re all here trying to live the best life that we know how to live.

So let’s take me for instance. I’m one of these dots floating around in space. Let’s say that I choose to label the center as God or Jesus, which is probably not too surprising given that I’m a Christian chaplain. Centered-set thinking very helpfully keeps my arrogance in check. Because I always have to remember that however close to or far from the center I am, I’m not at the center. So I can’t say with certainty what the center is or even where it is. Whatever I have to say about what is at the center is my best educated guess based on my experiences.

This is why I included a quotation on Abraham Lincoln’s approach to religion.

“When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.”

I think he’s saying that there will be intrinsic feedback to our actions, the way we approach God and people. This idea of feedback plays a big part in centered-set thinking. Doing the hard work of self-reflection is one of the ways we determine if we’re off track and need to recalibrate to head towards the center.

And since I only have limited information on what’s at the center and how to get there, I begin to realize that every single person on earth has something really important to teach me. Because every single person knows something about the center that I might not know. Again, if we’re paying attention, all of our life experience is giving us feedback about what the center is and how to get there. But the information anyone of us has is pretty miniscule and may not get us very far. So being able to learn from other people, traditions, cultures and worldviews is immensely valuable.

That means I’m no longer asking “which religion is right?” That’s almost a meaningless question in centered-set thinking. Instead, I’m eager for the chance to interact with any person whose experience and way of thinking might be different than mine. They will have insights about the way to the center that I lack.

This picture of the centered set is something I’ve been chewing on for a number of years. It’s been a slow and sometimes bumpy paradigm shift. I’ve discovered that it has it’s own pitfalls to watch out for. But on the whole I was really excited to share it with you today because it has been so very helpful in how I relate to others, not to mention how I relate to God.