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“Kilgore Trout wrote a science-fiction story called ’The Planet Gobblers’ one time. It was about us, and we were the terrors of the universe. We were sort of interplanetary termites. We would arrive on a planet, gobble it up, and die. But before we died, we always sent out spaceships to start tiny colonies elsewhere. We were a disease, since it was not necessary to inhabit planets with such horrifying destructiveness. It is easy to take good care of a planet.

“Our grandchildren will surely think of us as the Planet Gobblers. Poorer nations than America think of America as a Planet Gobbler right now. But that is going to change. There is welling up within us a willingness to say ’No, thank you’ to our factories. We were once maniacs for possessions, imagining that they would somehow moderate or somehow compensate us for our loneliness.

“The experiment has been tried in this most affluent nation in all of human history. Possessions help a little, but not as much as advertisers said they were supposed to, and we are now aware of how permanently the manufacture of some of those products hurts the planet.

“So there is a willingness to do without them.

“There is a willingness to do whatever we need to do in order to have life on the planet go on for a long, long time. I didn’t used to think that. And that willingness has to be a religious enthusiasm, since it celebrates life, since it calls for meaningful sacrifices.

“This is bad news for business, as we know it now. It should be thrilling news for persons who love to teach and lead. And thank God we have solid information in the place of superstition! Thank God we are beginning to dream of human communities which are designed to harmonize with what human beings really need and are.

“And now you have just heard an atheist thank God not once, but twice. And listen to this:

“God bless the class of 1974.”

• • •

Six years later I would still be, outwardly at least, an unwobbled Free Thinker, for I said this at the First Parish Unitarian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on January 27, 1980, approximately the 200th anniversary of the birth of William Ellery Channing:

“This will be very short. There will be almost no eye contact.

“This is only a dream. I know that this is only a dream. I have had it before. It is a dream of cosmic embarrassment. I stand before a large and nicely dressed audience. I have promised to speak on the most profound and poetic of all human concerns—the dignity of human nature.

“Only a maniac would make such a grandiose promise, but that is what I have done—in this dream.

“Now it is time for me to speak. I have nothing to say. Nothing.

“Dobedobedobedo.

“I will wake up at any moment now, and I will tell my wife about the dream. ’Where was it, honeybunch?’ she will ask me. ’In a Yankee church on Harvard Square,’ I will reply, and we will laugh and laugh.

“But every time I have had this dream before, I have been wearing nothing but olive drab, Army surplus under-shorts. That detail is missing today—so this just might not be a dream after all. Who can say for certain?

“In this dream, if it is a dream, it is the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of William Ellery Channing, a principal founder of Unitarianism in the United States. I wish that I had been born into a society like his—small and congenial and prosperous and self-sufficient. The people around here had ancestors in common then. They looked a lot like each other, dressed a lot like each other, enjoyed the same amusements and food. They were generally agreed as to what was good and what was evil—what God was like, who Jesus was.

“Channing grew up in what the late anthropologist Robert Redfield called a folk society, a relatively isolated community of like-thinking friends and relatives, a stable extended family of considerable size. Redfield said that we were all descended from persons who lived in such societies, and that we were likely to hanker to live in one ourselves from time to time. A folk society, in his imagination and in our imaginations, too, is an