Educating Humanists: The Challenge of Sustaining Communities in the Contemporary Era (Studies in Humanism and Atheism) 3030885267, 9783030885267

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Educating Humanists The Challenge of Sustaining Communities in the Contemporary Era

Edited by William David Hart

Studies in Humanism and Atheism Series Editors Anthony B. Pinn Rice University Houston, TX, USA Jürgen Manemann Universität Erfurt Katholisch-theologische Fakultät Erfurt, Thüringen, Germany

Although numerous scholars and activists have written academic and popular texts meant to unpack and advocate for humanism and atheism as life orientations, what is needed at this point is clear and consistent attention to the various dimensions of humanist and atheists thought and practice. This is the type of focused agenda that this book series makes possible. Committed to discussions that include but extend well beyond the United States, books in the series—meant for specialists and a general readership—offer new approaches to and innovative discussions of humanism and atheism that take into consideration the socio-cultural, political, economic, and religious dynamics informing life in the twenty-first century. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15125

William David Hart Editor

Educating Humanists The Challenge of Sustaining Communities in the Contemporary Era

Editor William David Hart Religious Studies Macalester College Saint Paul, MN, USA

ISSN 2634-6656     ISSN 2634-6664 (electronic) Studies in Humanism and Atheism ISBN 978-3-030-88526-7    ISBN 978-3-030-88527-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88527-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Pattern © Harvey Loake This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Humanism and Education  1 William David Hart 2 Humanist Education 17 Kristin Wintermute 3 Teaching Humanism 33 Joachim Duyndam 4 Edward Said as Humanist Educator (with a Note on John Dewey) 55 William David Hart 5 Going Back to College: The Survival of Unitarian Universalism Depends on It 83 April D. DeConick 6 Comparing Religions in Public: Rural America, Evangelicals, and the Prophetic Function of the Humanities 99 Jeffrey J. Kripal

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7 Confronting the Rising Danger of White Rage111 Sharon D. Welch Index133

CHAPTER 1

Humanism and Education William David Hart

Abstract  Humanism is a highly contested idea. Proponents and critics often use the term in different ways. Among humanists themselves, there are competing accounts of what humanism is. This chapter provides a brief introduction to the general topic of humanism and education. The purpose is to contextualize this issue and provide an account of why it is significant. From Cicero and the classical humanists to Erasmus and the Renaissance humanist to the modern humanisms of Vico, Auerbach, Dewey, and Said, humanists have been preoccupied with education. The contributors to this volume explore the triangulation of humanism, religion, and education. Keywords  Humanism • Antihumanism • Education

W. D. Hart (*) Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. D. Hart (ed.), Educating Humanists, Studies in Humanism and Atheism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88527-4_1

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Introduction The contributions to this volume were first presented at the Institute of Humanist Studies Symposium at Rice University, in November of 2017. The Institute for Humanist Studies is a thinktank dedicated to exploring the nature and role of humanist inquiry and life in contemporary American society and around the world. The Director of Research for the Institute of Humanist Studies and a majority of its fellows are American academics who teach in the academic field of religious studies. The Institute’s website carries the following description of its orientation and mission: “Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism and other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.” The organizing topic of the symposium was “Humanism and Public Education.” The contributors to this volume are both academics who teach humanism and leaders of humanist organizations. They came together to think expansively about humanism and public education. The focus of this broad inquiry includes the place of “legacy” religious organizations such as Universalist Unitarianism that ultimately root in a negative reaction to America’s Calvinist heritage as exemplified by Jonathan Edward’s eighteenth-century Reformed theology, where sinners are in the hands of an angry God, and the anti-Calvinist mediations of Emerson and his American transcendentalist circle. The focus also includes humanist societies whose members identify as nontheists and who may or may not regard themselves as religious. Finally, this volume includes inquiry regarding humanism and public education within the academy and society writ large. We can think about the “public” in public education in two ways. On the one hand, these contributors are concerned with the public significance of humanist education within humanist organizations and communities. On the other hand, they are concerned with the outward-facing place of humanism in public education. These contributions are not about humanism and public education in the abstract but about the specificity of reproducing a humanist orientation across a broad range of organizations and activities, some conventionally religious, some not. This volume is devoted to the various ways that humanists educate a new generation of humanists and the difficulties they encounter in the contemporary age where there are skeptics on both their “right” and “left” flanks. From the right, those with a conventional religious orientation rooted in the

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Christian church criticize humanists as an unwelcome post-Christian, post-religious, and secularizing orientation. For them, secular humanism is an index of what is wrong with America, especially the eclipse of traditional values, especially religion. From the left, a post-World War II, structuralist, and poststructuralist antihumanism hectors humanists for their liberal anthropocentrism which these critics construe as a reflex and echo of religious culture. As a legacy of Auguste Comte’s “religion of humanity” and its analogues, humanists are viewed as the new priests of a secular religion. Critics charge humanists with both exaggerating and minimizing human significance. One side of this Janus face difficulty is evident in those forms of humanism that grew directly out of conventional forms of Christian and church-based humanisms and that I refer to as legacy religious organizations. With the exception of the contribution by William David Hart and perhaps Joachim Duyndam’s, all of the contributions are particularly concerned with this liberal and secularizing problematic in a culture where liberal religious orientations have lost cultural power. How does one educate humanistic and/or liberal religious subjects in a culture that has difficulty recognizing this kind of (secularizing) formation as religious or alternately as a compelling ethic of living? How does one distinguish religious liberalism from economic liberalism and the morality of the marketplace? In short, how does one educate the public about the virtues of a humanism that is deeper than liberal individualism? The larger and, perhaps, unspoken backdrop of this inquiry is the shared space of religious liberalism and secular humanism, an interspace of dialogue where for practical purposes the two are often indistinguishable. This dialogical context and these definitional concerns with the nature and distinctiveness of humanism are especially evident in the contributions of Kristin Wintermute, April DeConick, Jeffery Kripal, and Sharon Welch. The other face of this two-sided difficulty manifests as skepticism and hostility to humanism in leftist intellectual and academic circles that are inflected by structuralism and poststructuralism. In this intellectual ecosystem, antihumanism is de rigueur, a necessary sign of one’s critical bona fides. This accounts for the difference of these left-facing critics from those on the right. Humanism is caught within the pincher-like move of these dueling orientations. In this conflicted theoretical space, at once traditionalist and post-Heideggerian and poststructuralists, humanism is neither fish nor fowl or, perhaps, it is both. Thus its anomaly.

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The Historical and Ideological Background Humanism is a highly contested idea. Under its broad canopy, this word gathers terms such as humanitas, humanities, humanitarian, and human. We tend to associate humanists with notions of human commonality beneath or across differences. Without denying differences, humanists accent human universals that might be conceived in the current age as based in the evolutionary development of the species Homo sapiens or in a variety of premodern notions of the human, including the Christian concept of the imago dei. Where Homo sapiens and human are taken as synonymous, the concept of the human is rooted in universal bio-evolutionary processes. Where the two are not synonymous, a gap can be opened between the species Homo sapiens, a biological category, and the human, an axiological category. As a practical matter, some might argue that a distinction between the biological and the axiological has always been a part of the very concept of Homo sapiens, that the concept is not value-­ neutral but laden with values associated with European practices of slavery and colonialism. Many of the untoward things associated with humanism live in the biological/axiological gap but not all of them. The synonymy of Homo sapiens and human is compatible with invidious distinctions between human types: male/female, cisgender/transgender, adult/child, noble/base, able/disabled, and slave/free among others. Much of the post-World War II critique of humanism is concerned with these forms of rank-ordering and with the construction of some classes of Homo sapiens as deficient in their humanity or even as nonhuman. In the hands of Martin Heidegger, the great German philosopher and one-time member of the Nazi party, humanism became a bad word, signifying a deficient and unworthy mode of being. Many intellectuals especially in post-World War II France more or less followed Heidegger’s lead. In his 1947 “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger opened a breach in phenomenology, existentialism, and the discourse on humanism. Eager to distinguish himself from Jean-Paul Sartre’s uptake of his analysis of being, Heidegger indicted humanism as a grave metaphysical error that paradoxically was both anthropocentric and underestimated the dignity of man and that left devastation in its wake. Coming from a man who was once an enthusiastic Nazi, this critique is rather rich. This irony notwithstanding, Louis Althusser became, perhaps, the pivotal figure in the antihumanist turn in France. According to Dominique Janicaud, “Althusser admitted having read the ‘Letter on Humanism’ only quite late, and he clarified that

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it ‘influenced’ his thesis concerning the ‘theoretical antihumanism in Marx.’ This clarification is not surprising, but refreshingly frank. The ‘Letter’ is indeed the text by Heidegger that had the greatest influence in France, above all in the 1960s” (Janicaud 2015, p. 81). Michel Foucault was among a generation of French intellectuals influenced by Althusser’s brand of antihumanism. I regard him as a synecdoche for antihumanism among French intellectuals from the 1960s through the 1980s. Heidegger’s philosophical antihumanism met Claude Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropological antihumanism, and two mated. Mark Greif describes this coupling as the orientation that came to dominate France and influence the American academy. Its name notwithstanding, he observes that antihumanism almost always has a humane motive, a normative or therapeutic orientation toward emancipation and liberation and against intellectual or political tyranny. (For example, Foucault’s various analyses drip with a cryptonormativity that he rarely if ever acknowledges. This is true despite his oddly positivistic, value-free narrative style. The style conceals his commitment to norms that he smuggles into his analyses of power.) This humane motive manifests as the scholarly desire to expand thought and improve the quality of explanation. The word “antihumanism” indexes the goal of shifting explanation from the subjectivity of individual rational actors to subhuman and impersonal superhuman aggregations. “It denotes an explanatory antipathy to humanism understood as the doctrine that ‘man is the measure of all things’ and that individual consciousness is the arbiter and best explainer of its own behavior, social practices, and beliefs” (Greif 2015, pp. 285–286). Like all contested but indispensable words such as beauty, freedom, love, reality, and truth, humanism is worth fighting for. The contributors to this volume do not fight (not explicitly, at least) for the word humanism so much as hold on to it in the absence of a compelling reason to abandon the term. While acknowledging its virtue insofar as it hits the mark, we are not compelled by Heidegger’s and the post-Heideggerian antihumanist critiques. To belabor this point just a bit, it is hard to find actual humanists who conform the antihumanist description of humanism. The humanism of Heidegger and the French poststructuralists is a highly curated object, a precious, fantasy object, an ideal-type at best that does not concern the contributors to this volume. In its broad and capacious sense, humanism may very well be unavoidable. James L. Battersby argues for the inescapability of humanism and observes that the object of Heidegger and French poststructuralist critique is very narrow and fairly rare in the contemporary

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context, if not a unicorn. There are, simply, few examples of humanists who subscribe to the views that antihumanists attribute to them. For the most part, the humanist under that description is an imaginary object. Battersby remarks that he does not know anyone in this modern pragmatist and pluralist humanist tradition “who believes, say, that we can look at our language or thought from a medium distance and compare it to things and the world as they really are to determine which are the real, intrinsic properties of things in themselves and which are the properties of our human projections” (Battersby 1996, p.  561). Again, the object of the antihumanist critique is a unicorn. The object of that critique is so broad as to be meaningless or, alternately, inescapable. Battersby notes that humanists of a pragmatist and pluralist bent neither traffic in essences, a metaphysics of presence, nor subscribe to the notion of an atomistic, sovereign, constitutive, and transcendental subject, the twin deficiencies as antihumanists see it of humanism. On this pragmatist and pluralist view, judgments of good and bad, true and false do not require a metaphysical guarantee. Our fallible claims, the only ones we can have, are not only good enough, they are precious, precious in their very fallibility (Battersby 1996, pp.  555, 557, 559–561). I conclude this brief “apology” with Battersby’s conclusion: In the end, then, it seems that because we are content-involved because content is inseparable from thought and thought from intentionality hence, agency, we cannot escape humanism; to have a thought or a world to talk about or be aware of, we must of necessity participate in systems of rationality, determining by our evolving standards which ones are good and right for us. Those who would deny the enduring value and significance of humanism, as we have construed it, must inevitably implicate themselves it seems in pragmatic inconsistency—in their denial they establish not only the falsity of their views but of also the truth of those which they reject or deny. (Battersby 1996, p. 566)

Gesturing to the long and rich history of the humanist, to the multiple ways that the term humanism has been used, to the many ideas for which it serves as a covering concept, Vito R. Giustiniani remarks: Humanism as an ideal of Greek paideia, humanism as a revival of ancient culture, humanism according to Ruge, Marx, Schiller, Babbitt, the Humanist Manifesto, and to Heidegger: humanism as discovery of man’s virtus, as a new vision of history and establishment of new ways of thinking: all these

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humanisms show how differently human beings can be and actually have been understood from one time to another, from one cultural area to another, from one language to another. (Giustiniani 1985, p. 194)

Having sorted the understanding of humanism that occupies the contributors to this volume from the invidious construction of humanism by Heidegger, structuralists, and poststructuralists, we can now attend to the relation between humanism and education. According to Benjamin G.  Kohl, Renaissance humanists are integrally connected to education defined as “the seven liberal arts, the verbal arts of the trivium and the quantitative arts of the quadrivium” (Kohl 1988, pp. 5, 12). The seven liberal arts were arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, grammar, logic, and rhetoric. They encompass the notion that education ought to be broad and humane. This medieval and Renaissance version of the liberal arts presages the more expansive modern idea that includes arts, social sciences, and humanities divisions. The Renaissance humanist privileged Latin and drew on the work of figures from the classical Mediterranean world, especially Cicero. This retrial of ancient learning also includes Greek sources, and Christianity mediated by Greek and Latin language and culture. In the first instance, a humanist was a “classically” educated person, usually men as women were typically excluded. There were female humanists, and some thrived despite severe patriarchal constraints, but they were systematically disadvantaged in a world where human, in the first instance, meant male. Over time, humanist education became associated with the notion of an ideal human, “the complete man, good citizen, and if need be a good soldier, who was at the same time a man of culture, taste, and discernment.” But this model of education neglected matters of practical concern and did not attract many adherents and thus became the province of professional scholars (Kohl 1988, pp. 18–19). Few early modern humanists achieved the influence of Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536). Erasmus and the Erasmian humanists were deeply committed to education as a liberating power. According to John M. Parrish, they were more self-consciously Christian and pious than earlier Renaissance humanists and following the lead of St. Jerome and St. Augustine sought to “Baptist the classics” for the purposes of the faith. This humanism was envisioned as a form of Christian practice that valued rhetorical arts more than deductive logic and advanced the notion of Christian scholarship. “These commitments of the Northern humanist movement [Erasmian humanism]—to antiquity and historical context, to

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a more Biblically-centred and practically-oriented form of piety—sharply influenced the movement’s approach to the issue of education” (Parrish 2010, pp.  590–591, 593). When possible, Erasmus thought that early-­ childhood education should resemble play. The more education included the seductive elements of a game rather than a punitive regard, the liker it was to succeed. Playfulness comports well with the natural mental flexibility of children as evident in their superior capacity for language learning. If Erasmus did not know better, childhood openness to experience might have convinced him that children inhabited an Eden-like, prelapsarian state. Their original sin notwithstanding, a coercion-free approach to educating children was better suited to knowledge acquisition and the cultivation of character, the latter of which was especially important for females. In his hierarchically gendered view, education is a weapon for resisting sin (Kohl 1988, pp. 594–598). Erasmus’s own persistent concern with the importance of early childhood education and his encouragement of playful and pleasing modes of pedagogy—both driven, as we have seen, by key tenets of the Renaissance humanists’ intellectual agenda—have of course become two of the central premises of contemporary educational practice throughout the world. What has perhaps been lost to some degree is the Erasmian humanists’ insistence on the importance of explicit cultivation of virtue in the educational process. Yet this emphasis was derived from premises equally central to Renaissance humanism and, as we have seen, inseparably linked in Erasmus’s mind to his arguments for early education and alluring pedagogy. (Kohl 1988, p. 603)

While heirs of Erasmian humanism among other expressions, in what ways are the contributions to this volume on humanism and education humanist? To properly answer this question, I wish to stage a dialogue with David E. Cooper, “Humanism and the Scientific Worldview” (Cooper 1999). Cooper criticizes the vague and slogan-like manner in which the term humanism is used in the contemporary era. As with freedom, love, and truth, people use these terms in different ways that are often overlapping but sometimes antagonistic if not mutually exclusive. Consider the following: humanism as the assertion of a human essence versus its denial, as the assertion of the epistemic pre-eminence if not exclusivity of science versus its denial, as the claim that the objectivity of the world depends on human observation and judgment versus its denial. As these antagonistic and contradictory assertions show, the discourse on humanism is nothing

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if not a messy set of disagreements. To manage this wild diversity and disagreement, Cooper identifies four descriptions of humanism: essentialist, naturalist, rational subjectivity, and existentialist. To determine in what sense they can reasonably be described as humanism at all, he subjects them to specific criteria or, as he calls them, constraints. First, the description must account for why philosophers as different as Heidegger, Foucault, and Thomas Nagel reject humanism. Second, the views criticized as humanist must have actually been held by people who regarded themselves as humanist. Third, the views criticized must fairly be shown to descend from a recognizably humanist tradition of thought. On Cooper’s view, essentialism, naturalism, and rational subjectivity fail to adequately describe humanism. None of them are constitutive of humanist ideas and practices. The argument from essentialism is trivial because there is nothing at stake in the claim, broadly speaking, that there is a human essence. It is true but trivial, not much different than saying that water is wet and that fire is hot. More important, there is no reason for essentialists to regard themselves as humanist. There is nothing in essentialist beliefs that associates them with the tradition of humanism much less that is definitive of it. No one defines themselves as a humanist merely on the grounds “that there is a human essence.” Even where a self-identified humanist does have a notion of human essence as did Sartre, it is not the pre-­existing and fixed essence that arouses the indignation of many philosophers. As Sartre famously argued, existence precedes essence. Essence is an artifact that can always and is always being remade. While naturalism meets the first criterion, as some humanists do describe themselves as naturalist, they often understand the term in radically different ways. The difference can be so wide as to become in epistemic terms a difference in kind. Here, we point to the difference between scientific naturalism and pragmatic naturalism, the claim that scientific description captures the world as it really is versus that claim that they are helpful for various human purposes, and that there is no reason to think that there is a way the world really is apart from human interests. If there is, how would we know? While both versions of naturalism have their critics, pragmatic naturalism is not vulnerable to the charge of epistemic arrogance. Pragmatic naturalism is not guilty of the metaphysical hubris that Heidegger and Nagel criticize. Pragmatic naturalists do not reduce the world to human size as Heidegger and Nagel claim; rather the world is “well lost.” We cannot appeal to “the world” to settle our disagreement. It is not that kind of thing. Like essentialism and naturalism, rational subjectivity fails to adequately describe

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humanism. In his critique of humanism, Foucault displaces actual humanism with Kantian autonomous and constitutive subjectivity, humanism in its full flower, with Enlightenment ideas. Foucault may provide a good critique of the transcendental subject, but it is a poor description of what humanists affirm. One does not find this Kantian and  Enlightenment notion among the Renaissance humanists or their contemporary legatees—Foucault’s “theory of the knowing subject” is not their theory, his critique of this theory does not apply to them. Unlike essentialism, naturalism, and rational subjectivity, existentialist humanism does conform to the constraints that Cooper establishes. Under the heading of existentialist humanism, Cooper includes the young Karl Marx, William James (and several other pragmatists), Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sartre, all of whom embrace some notion of agency-driven antirealism. Some of the figures under this description regard themselves as part of the humanist tradition; Sartre argues explicitly that existentialism is a humanism. Sartre and other existentialists humanist actually hold some of the views for which they are criticized, such as rejecting the notion of a “real world,” an objective measure against which we can correct our judgments and settle interest-driven disputes. Finally, this account of humanism explains why philosophers with wildly different orientations reject it. Existential humanism will, in particular, be the target of realists, especially (in our times) those who hold that science is on the way to providing an ‘absolute’ account of the world free from human ‘perspectives’ …. In particular explains why humanism should attract the charge of epistemic hubris. When Nagel so accuses humanism, he is repeating Russell’s charge against William James—of “cosmic impiety” and “lack of humility”—for refusing to accept “a concept of ‘truth’ as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control” …. It is less obvious, perhaps, why existential humanism should be the target of environmentalist hostility. But for writers as different as Heidegger and Stephen Clark, the Promethean view of a world whose contours and contents are the outcome of human agency and interests is deeply implicated with a technological stance to the world as so much “equipment” at human disposal. For Heidegger that stance, responsible for “the devastation of the earth,” is a bed-mate of the metaphysical doctrine that, in “carving” out a world, it is man who “decides whether and how beings appear”. (Cooper 1999, p. 12)

This is not to say, however, that the reasons for that rejection whether based on attributions of metaphysical hubris (Heidegger and Nagel) or

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disdain for antirealism (the critics are legion) are compelling (Cooper 1999, pp. 3–12). In his final assessment of the messy and contradictory discourse on humanism, Cooper remarks, “People today who hear in the word ‘humanism’ a call to attend to human culture and the civilized pursuits are those for whom it recalls the preoccupations of Renaissance humanism itself.” In an ironic twist, these civilized preoccupations have engendered “a naturalistic concern for the material well-being of humankind,” which is what other people hear, and what they value most, in the word humanism (Cooper 1999, p. 16). While indebted to both and without denigrating the dimension of spirit, the contributors to this volume owe more to this ironic development—a naturalistic concern for the material well-being of humankind—than to the original inspiration. The concept of humanism is an abstract noun that abstracts from the examples of Renaissance humanists and their retrieval of classical sources, of the long history of the artes liberales and studia humanitatis. One need not subscribe to the Pythagorean definition of humanism where “man is the measure of all things” nor the discredited idea that studying great literature necessarily produces persons with good character and moral judgment to understand the central place of education and cultivation for humanists (Groenland 2010, p.  221). The contributors to this volume stand in this long, diverse, and contradictory tradition. For the sake of simplicity, I reduce the complexity of humanism to three types: traditional humanism that is typically elitist and conservative, liberal humanism that is individualistic and elitist, and Marxist-and-existentialist humanism, which is revolutionary and popular but that is sometimes captured by conservative and liberalism forms of elitism. This volume’s contributors sit somewhat eccentrically in relation to these ideal-types in a space that I call pragmatic and pluralist. They are most closely associated with that strain of humanism that is concerned with the role of religion in human civilization, especially where religion has consecrated empire, slavery, and invidious constructions of gender, or constrained scientific and other forms of inquiry, or reinforced the worst forms of bigotry and discrimination. In short, they gravitate to humanism as the critique forms of religion that denigrate human character and capacities or otherwise subordinate human powers to the nonhuman and the superhuman in a worshipful, normative, or otherwise slavish manner.

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Itinerary In Chap. 2 “Humanist Education,” Kristin Wintermute explores the state of education within a broad range of humanist communities and organizations. Wintermute’s concern is the failure of grassroots humanist education that manifests in the inability to reproduce its membership. Formal memberships in humanist groups, especially Unitarian Universalism, are declining. She laments the haphazard and laissez-faire way that humanists approach educating their members in the practices and principles. The young are not being properly socialized into the humanist movement and too much is left to chance, which has led to humanists who do not know what they stand for, and are not sure why there should be a distinctive humanist identity and community at all. This is the boundary question of how one distinguishes humanism from any other secular liberal orientation. In one of the few ways that really matter, humanist communities, congregations, and organizations have failed to imitate churches and other theistically oriented religious groups in creating a sense of humanist identity. Wintermute attributes this humanist ennui to an educational failure within the humanist commonwealth. In-fighting among elites obscure that commonwealth, and as a result, institutional practices on the ground have atrophied. Wintermute calls for an end to the in-fighting and for collaboration across ideological differences on those common practices, ideas, and orientations that ostensibly unite humanists of all kinds. Whereas Wintermute explores teaching within self-identified humanist communities and organizations, Joachim Duyndam trains his sights on humanist culture writ large. In Chap. 3 “Teaching Humanism,” he explores a humanist way of teaching humanism. He argues that this way of teaching entails a relationship between exemplar and novice, teacher and student. The goal of such teaching is to transfer and cultivate humanist values, to equip the student with the skills necessary to apply these values in novel situations. In short, Duyndam argues that humanism is a tradition that demands its own methods of cultivation that connect directly with goods that are internal to its practices. He endeavors to root more abstract expressions of humanism in this exemplar and novice-based tradition. Duyndam associates humanism with a broad set of liberal and progressive values that he summarizes with the term humaneness. Under this orientation, humanism provides an antidote to the destructive mimetic rivalry that Rene Girard describes in his analysis of the scapegoating phenomenon. Humaneness is a kind of openness to the otherness of the other that,

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nonetheless, never fails to pursue its guiding values. In brief, Duyndam argues that humanism is a tradition-based set of values, ensconced within an exemplar and devotee relationship that requires a subtle hermeneutical practice of adapting these values to changing and sometimes novel contexts. Thus, he takes a broad approach to humanism within which the comparatively narrow notion of secular humanism can nest. Through the heteronomous influence of the ethical exemplar, the devotee develops the capacity to act autonomously, within the intersubjective space of humanist value. Unlike most of the contributors to this volume who accent intersubjective agency, Duyndam centers on a Kantian-derived notion of autonomy. Chapter 4 “Edward Said as Humanist Educator (with a Note on John Dewey)” explores Said’s late work titled Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Though he drew heavily on the work of the arch-antihumanist Michel Foucault, Said remained a humanist throughout. In this chapter, William David Hart compares and contrasts the humanism and broad educational philosophies of two eminent Columbia University professors. Though both Said and Dewey are secular humanists, Hart argues that they understand and inhabit their orientation differently. In this assessment, Said remains a high culture humanist. He is an elitist but a left-radical too who in his later life tries to reconcile his high cultural commitments with quotidian, popular, and even populous cultural ideas. Thus, he speaks of humanism and democratic criticism rather than secular criticism that for so long was among his leading and organizing ideas. Perhaps this is a democratic concession to a demos that is neither secular nor elite. In contrast, Dewey’s democratic and popular humanism is always already undermining the rigidity of high and low, elite and popular culture. We see this powerfully in Dewey’s aesthetic philosophy. Art as Experience beautifully describes the continuum between ordinary, mundane, and “creaturely” experiences of suffering and acting in the natural world and the most celebrated, “otherworldly,” and transcendent forms of art. Culture in general and art in particular are crucial to how both Said and Dewey think about humanism and education. Despite his highbrow instincts and maybe because of them, Said may have a better handle on the invidious aspects of humanism in culture, education, and politics than does Dewey. In Chap. 5 “Going Back to College: The Survival of Unitarian Universalism Depends on It,” April D. DeConick writes as both an insider and a participant-observer. She explores the challenges that Unitarian Universalism as a new religious movement faces in the current religious

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environment. If this movement struggles to find its niche, then this has much to do with self-presentation, which itself reflects a legitimation crisis. The crisis has both inner-facing and outer-facing dimensions that implicates both the socialization of “heritage members” and the recruitment of outsiders. This legitimation crisis encompasses the challenges that all new movements face when they transition from the founding generation to the successor generation. Can the charisma of the founding moment and movement be passed on and institutionalized by the seceding generations? Are they still motivated by the concerns that drove the founding generation and if not are they able to reinvent the ties that bind? To use a Christian metaphor, Unitarian Universalists buried their light and thereby failed to let it shine; they minimized their distinctiveness and undersold what they had to give. But this orientation of the founding generation is under challenge by its successors who accent distinctively religious and even theological language in a way that the founders did not. Like more explicitly humanist societies and congregations, the Unitarian Universalists face the challenge of reproducing their membership with up to 90 percent of children abandoning their affiliations by the time they leave high school. Absent change including more robust recruitment, this failure to retain members sounds a dead knell for the movement. As a critical insider, DeConick offers various proposals to address this hemorrhaging of membership. Much of this has to do with how Unitarian Universalists should educate young members and the need for “continuing education.” Thus her admonition for Unitarian Universalists: They must go back to college. Jeffery Kripal situates himself as both a critical insider and a sympathetic outsider in relation to his inherited religious tradition. In Chap. 6, “Comparing Religions in Public: Rural America, Evangelicals, and the Prophetic Function of the Humanities,” Kripal provides a highly personal account of American religious formation and the role of the scholar of religion. He argues that the traditional scholarly disposition toward religious traditions is problematic in part because of a well-earned but dangerous allergy to comparison. Comparing religions is unavoidable so our goal should be to do it well rather than pretend not to do it all. Indeed, this pretense almost guarantees that implicit and uncriticized comparisons will enter our account of religion. The task of the scholar is to educate herself and the academic and nonacademic publics in the proper art of comparing religions, to interrogate the ideological scripts that guide the invidiously comparative construction of religions. Kripal describes his life stance and approach to the study of religion as secret humanism, which

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breaks apart and pushes beyond conventional humanist/antihumanist binaries. He uses the metaphor of “the flip” to describe the one-sided accent on sameness (by humanists) and difference (by religious people) and urges a “flip back,” which is also a flip forward. On Kripal’s view, humanists must presuppose a shared human nature while being suspicious of it. If religious communities flip the humanist assumption about human universals in favor of particularity and exclusivity, then humanist must “flip black the flip” by accenting human universality while humbly refraining from the assumption that they can know or describe its ultimate contours with confidence. In Chap. 7 “Confronting the Rising Danger of White Rage,” Sharon D. Welch brings a humanist orientation and values to bear of the issue of a revanchist white supremacy and antiblackness. The context is the last three presidential cycles: the election and re-election of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th president and the first Black person elected to that office, and the backlash election of President Donald Trump. She poses the question of how we, as a society, and White people in particular, can educate ourselves out of this problem. Is the problem of white supremacy and antiblackness susceptible to an educational intervention? She thinks that it is but is skeptical about the prospects of reeducating White adults, while children with their greater flexibility of mind and openness to novelty can be educated to resist white supremacy and antiblackness. Welch identifies four challenges to those dedicated to fighting what she describes as the rising danger of white rage. They must be eternally vigilant, work collectively, do the work of learning just how bad the problem is, and create strategies and tools to restrain and meliorate white rage. The goal of this work of re-educating is humanist democratic renewal.

References Battersby, James L. 1996. The Inescapability of Humanism. College English 58: 555–567. Cooper, David E. 1999. Humanism and the Scientific Worldview. Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 93: 1–17. Giustiniani, Vito R. 1985. Homo, Humanus, and the Meanings of ‘Humanism’. Journal of the History of Ideas 46: 167–195. Greif, Mark. 2015. Universal Philosophy and Antihumanist Theory. In The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973, 281–315. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Groenland, Juliette A. 2010. Humanism in the Classroom, a Reassessment. In The Making of the Humanities: Volume 1—Early Modern Europe, ed. Rens Bod, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn, 200–229. Amsterdam University Press. Janicaud, Dominique. 2015. Humanism in Turmoil. In Heidegger in France, 68–81. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kohl, Benjamin G. 1988. Humanism and Education. In Renaissance Humanism, Volume 3: Foundations, Forms, 5–22. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Parrish, John M. 2010. Education, Erasmian Humanism and More’s ‘Utopia’. Oxford Review of Education 36: 589–605. William David Hart (PhD Princeton, 1994) is the Margaret W.  Harmon Professor of Religious Studies at Macalester College. He is the author of The Blackness of Black: Key Concepts in Critical Discourse (2020); Afro-­Eccentricity: Beyond the Standard Narrative of Black Religion (Palgrave 2011); Black Religion: Malcolm X, Julius Lester, and Jan Willis (Palgrave 2008); and Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture (2000). His research interests include black studies, social theory, philosophy of race, American philosophy, and the intersections of religion, ethics, and politics.

CHAPTER 2

Humanist Education Kristin Wintermute

Abstract  I didn’t set out to be a humanist educator. My passion early in my career was practicing as a family therapist. I was intrigued by the varied difficulties families faced and the challenge to help them sort through their problems. Education was the last occupation I ever thought I would pursue. And I definitely never imagined I would devote the majority of my working life to humanism. But here I am 18  years later, the Executive Director of The Humanist Institute, the only organization in North America providing educational programs representing the full spectrum of humanist philosophy. Keywords  Ethical • Humanist education • Humanist community In my years working for the Humanist Institute, I have come to realize how unappreciated formal humanist education is for humanists. How so many dismiss the value of being a thoroughly educated, articulate person in the life-stance they propose to passionately believe in. This phenomenon has continued to amaze me as devout humanists profess their

K. Wintermute (*) American Humanist Association, Washington, DC, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. D. Hart (ed.), Educating Humanists, Studies in Humanism and Atheism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88527-4_2

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commitment to humanist values and principles without truly comprehending the life-stance in depth. On more than one occasion, I have had people proclaim that they fully understand what humanism is based on reading a handful of books. They truly believe that they need no further education. I almost always discover these individuals are well versed in what particularly intrigues them about humanism—as they selected books of personal interest from an Internet bloggers list of the “5 Essential Books on Humanism.” However, they lack a comprehensive knowledge of all aspects of humanism and often remain inarticulate about those areas that did not catch their attention. Why would one need to extensively study human nature, moral development, or ethics to be a humanist? After all, isn’t reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion or Greg Epstein’s Good Without God sufficient? It now comes as no surprise when I hear a Secular Humanist struggle to define what Religious Humanism is or to discover a Religious Humanist who believes that Secular Humanism is redundant in nature. The fact that the majority of Humanists rely solely on self-education is astonishing, but what is truly shocking is the number of humanist leaders who adamantly reject structured humanist education for themselves, those employed by them, or others associated with their organizations. Leaders of various humanist organizations have told me outright they did not see any logic behind engaging other individuals or encouraging them to enroll in Humanist Institute courses. The reason? Because they think that the “rigorously academic courses” that the Institute offers will not lead to tangible outcomes, such as employment. Personally, I don’t know any educational institution that guarantees employment, but I am aware of many that will prepare individuals for the workforce by providing the necessary knowledge and skills. I also know that continuing education opens doors to new opportunities within existing employment. And I am certainly aware of the vast array of religious organizations in our country that actively promote the importance of community members receiving a thorough education in their faith-based ideals. So why wouldn’t humanist leaders want to gain proficiency in their chosen career, encourage their workforce to be coherent advocates, or desire others to be informed humanists? I really do not know the answer to the above. But what is clear to me is that embracing and pursuing a formal system of learning is essential in

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making humanism a viable alternative to traditional religious life where extensive formal education in their belief systems is the norm. It is necessary not only to continue cultivating knowledgeable leaders but also to provide a substantial collaborative community. A community that is informed and fully capable of meeting the needs of nonbelievers as they face life’s joys, sorrows, and challenges. A community standing up and representing our like-minded beliefs to ensure what we value is upheld in our neighborhoods, cities, states, country, and world. A community supporting an ethical worldview that respects every individual’s worth promotes a more humane society and strives for global responsibility.

Where We Are Today At present, there are but a few humanist leaders who are required to have formal education in order to fulfill professional obligations. Most of these leaders exist within congregational life where their role is to provide guidance to the community through various programs and services. The very nature of their position makes it imperative that  they fully comprehend humanism—as congregants rely on their leadership to examine and support aspects of life from a humanist perspective. As noted by the Unitarian Universalist Association, “Ministers are spiritual leaders of our faith communities. They help us explore life’s questions, challenge us to live out our values, and comfort us in times of suffering. Ministers teach, preach, listen and learn by leading congregations, serving as chaplains, and working for justice in the community” (2017 Ministers). Like Unitarian Universalist ministers, Ethical Culture leaders carry responsibilities as clergy of the Ethical Culture Movement. The American Ethical Union indicates that their national leaders “… serve Ethical Societies and the broader community, providing pastoral support, inspiration, and a grounding in our deepest values. Leaders bring the ideals of Ethical Culture to the wider community through their work on social justice initiatives and in collaboration with organizations that share our priorities” (2017 National Leaders Council). In addition, Secular Humanist rabbis “…are spiritual leaders and philosophic and cultural mentors for Secular Humanistic Jews. They serve as teachers, counselors, pastors, ceremonialists (celebration and ceremonial guides), and experts in Judaism” (International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism). The obligations of Unitarian Universalist ministers, Ethical Culture leaders, or Secular Humanist rabbis demand that they are

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knowledgeable enough to meet these duties and responsibilities. Just as you would expect a teacher to be well informed on the subject they are teaching, a congregational community depends on its leader’s experience and insight to represent and distinguish a humanist worldview. Thus, for congregational leaders, education is not only a necessary qualification for performing the job, but a key component in engaging and directing community. While congregations are receiving the benefits of well-educated leaders, the reality is, only a minority of humanists are involved in a congregation. Most humanists do not have access to a congregational community that would fully support their life-stance. There are only 23 Ethical Culture Societies across the United States, and 8 of them exist in the state of New York. There are no Ethical Culture Societies in the western region of the country and a limited number available in the Midwest (2017 Member Societies). If you celebrate a culturally Jewish identity but maintain a humanist life-stance, there are 27 Secular Humanistic Jewish communities throughout the United States (2017 Find a Community). Similar to Ethical Culture Societies, Secular Humanistic Jewish communities are concentrated in specific, primarily urban, areas. Some humanists do find a home within Unitarian Universalists congregations (1098 in the United States), but there are a limited number specifically dedicated to humanism. In an effort to be inclusive, Unitarian Universalist congregations predominantly promote an openness that embraces a diversity of beliefs. As the Unitarian Universalist Association notes, “We are brave, curious, and compassionate thinkers and doers. We are diverse in faith, ethnicity, history and spirituality, but aligned in our desire to make a difference for the good … We are Unitarian Universalists and Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Humanist, Jewish, Muslim, Pagan, atheist and agnostic, believers in God, and more” (2017 Our UU Faith). The “being all things to all people” Unitarian Universalist approach is often unsatisfying for a humanist who desires a like-minded community devoid of any religious trappings. So while there may be more options in attending a Unitarian Universalist congregation, those congregations are less likely to satisfactorily meet the needs of humanists. Thus, a limited number of humanists have the opportunity to be guided by a leader who can authentically inspire, teach, and support humanist values and principles from a thoroughly grounded standpoint. The vast majority of humanists building and supporting community are simply dedicated, self-educated, volunteers. While within the last 35 years

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the number of paid positions outside of congregational life have grown from a mere handful to well over 60, there are still a large number of individuals unpaid for their work within the humanist movement. Whether or not these individuals are paid or volunteer is of little importance for the matter at issue. What is critical to this discussion is self-education and the absence of established qualifications. That individuals who are forming and directing groups, managing or working within organizations, officiating life celebrations, and/or providing pastoral care are relying predominately on self-education as sufficient to represent humanism. There is truly no demand, no requirement, or no expectation from the larger community that these leaders acquire anything more. While self-education does have its advantages under specific circumstances, it still does not measure up to a formal education. In his Internet blog on Why Self-Educated Learners Often Come Up Short, Scott H. Young writes: In my experience, self-education tends to be very good at high-level ideas. If you want to spend a few months understanding evolutionary biology, you could probably read about a dozen books on the topic. These books would give you the broad strokes of what’s going on in the field, the challenges being faced and what science currently understands. But I’ve noticed that the typical approach to self-education tends to be lousy at the deep, detailed knowledge of a field. Reading those evolutionary biology books won’t give you the statistical methods for analyzing gene selection, or the functions for how a population evolves over time. (Young 2010)

It takes an immense amount of determination and motivation to acquire the same level of learning through self-education as one would gain within a structured class setting. And even if an individual managed to muster up the necessary dedication, tackling a field of study on your own may still fall short without a solid curriculum to follow, instructor to encourage, or fellow students to look toward as critical resources during the learning process. How do you know what to sequentially study in order to build upon previous knowledge? Who provides feedback when you do not completely understand a concept? Where is your study group that will help add to your learning? These shortfalls of self-education become very apparent when one closely examines the current humanist community. There is a whole host of leaders who, as Young puts it, have a “broad stroke” understanding of humanism but lack the necessary “deep, detailed knowledge”

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about Humanism which is essential to cultivating a vibrant, compelling, and harmonious community. Ultimately, what we face today is a fragmented, uninformed community mainly defined and driven by those individuals who interpret humanism from their own bias or angle. They piece together self-acquired knowledge and arrive at unchallenged and unquestioned conclusions about humanism. Then they convey these points of view to the larger community. The outcome is a muddled conglomeration of what is and is not humanism across the movement. As Joseph Hoffman indicates in his article “The Problem with Humanism,” “Contemporary humanism is a mess because it doesn’t know what it believes, so much so that it doesn’t know what ‘it’ stands for. Humanism has become a garbled message of freedom, science, democratic values and church-state separation spread out over a playing field with no ball and no rules” (Hoffman 2010). While Hoffman’s goal is to claim a truly progressive humanism that is not found in definitions, statements, or manifestos, he does highlight the importance of being informed by learning. Taking it a step further than Hoffman, I would argue that it is not only imperative to be informed by learning, but the movement must establish standards and expectations for our workforce. We must require that individuals representing the movement have some formal education. For this is the best chance humanism has for becoming a cohesive, effective movement and an actual choice for the religiously unaffiliated as well as others who may share common values and beliefs.

We Have No Doctrine The Humanist life-stance or worldview is a philosophy with no clear dogma or doctrines to follow. There is common ground with lots of room for interpretation. All one has to do is Google “humanism,” and you will find a myriad of definitions within which, if crossed referenced, one discovers similarities, differences, and slight twists. For instance, the American Humanist Association (AHA) defines humanism as “… a progressive life stance that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead meaningful, ethical lives capable of adding to the greater good of humanity” (2017 Definition of Humanism). The Bristol Humanist Group notes, “Humanism is an approach to life based on reason and our common humanity, recognizing that moral values are properly founded on human nature and experience alone” (2017 Definition of Humanism). Which is the correct definition? Or do they both have it right?

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While humanists cannot exactly agree on a single definition, we do have some prevailing beliefs that get expressed across definitions. Humanism affirms science, reason, ethics, morality, democracy, naturalism, global responsibility, and the dignity of human life. These terms are scattered among the various characterizations of humanism. And they are gathered together in a presumably cohesive whole within Manifesto III, under the ownership of the American Humanist Association. As indicated in Manifesto III, “This document is part of an ongoing effort to manifest in clear and positive terms the conceptual boundaries of humanism, not what we must believe but a consensus of what we do believe” (2017 Humanism and Its Aspirations). It is our public declaration of our aspirations and what we hold as truth. The common ground that weaves us together like a tapestry of ideals. However, not all humanists confirm the Manifesto III as the predominant expression of humanist philosophy, life-stance, or worldview—as the Council for Secular Humanism adheres to the Secular Humanist Declaration. The Secular Humanist Declaration, like Manifesto III, attempts to incorporate key words and ideals into explanatory paragraphs, taking a firm stance on “this” is what Humanists believe. While Manifesto III is a list of proclamations, the Secular Humanist Declaration takes a stance on defending democracy against the “varieties of belief that seek supernatural sanction for their values or espouse rule by dictatorship” (2017 A Secular Declaration). Where Manifesto III refers to “life’s fulfillment” and humans as social beings, the Secular Humanist Declaration speaks against “cults of unreason” and humans having the ability to “solve their own problems with intelligence and perseverance.” Each document interweaves the buzzwords of humanism, maintaining their unique emphasis on what they hold as the basics of humanism. Unlike the American Humanist Association, the Council for Secular Humanism goes one step beyond their declaration in having drafted a statement of principles or “Affirmations of Humanism” that outline 21 bullet points of beliefs, commitments, understandings, desires, intents, and motivation. Curiously, these were written by the founder of the Council for Secular Humanism and the Center for Inquiry, Paul Kurtz, who upon resigning from the Center of Inquiry drafted “The Neo-­ Humanist Statement of Secular Principles and Values” under his newly established entity, the Institute for Science and Human Values. Once again both statements tried to be definitive expressions of what Humanism is, represents, and needs to be.

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There is one more document that claims to be “the official defining statement of World Humanism” (2017 The Amsterdam Declaration), the Amsterdam Declaration of 2002. Similar to the other documents mentioned, this statement also seeks to establish what are the fundamental principles of humanism. Originally written in 1952, the Amsterdam Declaration was signed by humanist organizations across the world, including the American Humanist Association and the Council for Secular Humanism. And for most of the signing organizations, this declaration is sufficient in outlining humanism. Only the American Humanist Association and the Council for Secular Humanism have created additional statements as mentioned above. All these competing attempts to define and establish the basis of humanism are reminiscent of the perils and plights of Unitarian Universalism following the merger of 1961. Two distinct, but not entirely incompatible, denominations struggling to find common ground that would enable them to be a strong united voice within the community. Both groups, similar to humanists, had no creed or dogma. And each came to the table representing similar ideals, but emphasizing quite different sentiments. Marilyn Sewell states in her article “Why Unitarians and Universalists Belong Together: A Fifty-Year Recollection” that: … the two groups had much in common. Most significantly, each was a free faith, with no creed, and both had a strong policy of congregational autonomy. They were compatible theologically, though each brought a different emphasis. The Unitarians brought the concept of “one God” rather than the Trinitarian God of conventional Christian churches. Too liberal for both Calvin and Luther, they had come out of the left wing of the Protestant Reformation, and were adamant that each person must be free to follow the dictates of conscience. The Universalists, who believed in the doctrine of universal salvation, were widely known for their tolerance and generosity of spirit. Both groups allowed the umbrella of their religion to encompass an increasingly diverse range of beliefs, including atheists, agnostics, humanists, Jews, as well as Christians. (Sewell 2011)

Despite commonalities and a willingness to join together, Unitarian Universalism suffered an identity crisis, not unlike what is occurring within humanism. Without a clear doctrine as guide or a specific creed to follow, the Unitarian Universalists found themselves lost in what they stood for as opposed to understanding what they believed in. Reviewing the history of

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Unitarian Universalism in his article “Why ‘Unitarian Universalism’ Is Dying,” David Loehr indicates that during the 1960s and 1970s political liberalism was driving American culture and having a great impact upon many religious entities. The spirit and language of religion became more political than theological. He notes, “So it’s not a coincidence that in the late 1970s, Unitarians were heard to complain that ‘Our kids don’t know what to tell their classmates they believe.’” Unitarian Universalist beliefs have become less about “what is worth believing?” and more about “for whom and what do we advocate”—gay rights, civil rights, feminism (Loehr 2005). This identity crisis did not lead to a more thoughtful and educated exploration of their religious beliefs grounded in history, but resulted in a political approach of polling congregations to find out exactly why people were attending Unitarian Universalist congregations in the first place. The process did eventually bring about the establishment of the Seven Principles as a guide to what Unitarian Universalist communities aspire to. And these principles continue today as the bonds that unify a diverse and inclusive religious tradition. But this obviously is not the answer for Humanism—as none of the drafted documents became the glue that would hold us all together. We remain, as Joseph Hoffman indicated, a mess of garbled messages. Entangled in a sort of ping-pong match volleying across the net to essentially capture and define the conclusive statement and/or put together the final words on what humanism is and stands for. As Anthony Pinn states in his chapter “Humanism as a Guide to Life Meaning,” “The situation is messy, but efforts to define evolving realities always are. There are just too many ‘moving parts,’ too many nuances and ideological shifts for the situation to be otherwise” (Pinn 2016, p.  32). While I think the dynamic nature of a progressing humanism makes it difficult to pin things down in an exact manner, it does not negate the importance of working toward organizing around our commonalities versus continuing to battle over our differing opinions. So how then do we become a collaborative, cohesive, and collective community led by informed individuals promoting and nurturing our point of view when we cannot even agree upon what that particularly is? Why is creating a larger community even important? Can we not continue to exist in our own defined entities?

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Importance of Working Together in Community There is immense power when a group of people with similar interests gets together to work toward the same goals. (Idowu Koyenikan)

We may be a jumbled disarray of definitions, terms, statements, proclamations, and documents; however, it is not necessary that we continue chasing our tails. For far too long, contemporary humanism has been a cult of personalities, driven by leaders who strive to be the “all-powerful, all-knowing” fathers of humanism (2017 Stalin’s Cult of Personality). Do not get me wrong; I am thankful to all those forefathers of humanism who attempted to proclaim loudly who we are to all our adversaries, such as the Religious Right. However, ultimately this has led us to this, sometimes unpleasant, tug of war among ourselves versus standing up against those who oppose us. We have become embroiled in a struggle over not only basic meaning, but also locked in debate on even the simplistic items such as whether or not to use a capital or lower case “H” to distinguish Humanism. We find ourselves gridlocked over semantics battling across like-minded organizations, which has only kept us from being effective within and outside our communities. As Atheist blogger Neil Carter wrote in his online article “It’s Past Time for Atheism to Grow Up,” “within my own chosen virtual community I’ve witnessed a great deal of division and ideological warring marked by power struggles, more group infighting, and whole host of people with tiny kingdoms to protect” (Dixie 2016). We are running around in circles of explanations without spending any time finding out where we intersect. We are concentrating too much on our own reflections, remaining fixated on the goal to be THE Humanist organization with that unifying manifesto or declaration, or, at minimum, the final word. It’s time we stop contemplating our image in a mirror and join together on common ground. As it is in community that we will grow, expand, and develop into an effective movement. Being in community is essential to the human spirit. Community is where we find comfort, a sense of belonging, nurturing, and advancement. Community can be powerful in bringing people together to create lasting change. Community can also be a safe haven shielding us from the challenges of new experiences and making us blind to other viewpoints. As Sarah Michelson, Teen Intern with The Food Project and Community Builder, said, “there is something potentially dangerous about communities. A community that is safe, comfortable, and trusting can be so

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enticing that individuals can forget about the world outside of their community, or regard other communities with subtle prejudices” (Michelson 2017). It is important that we resist the temptation to coexist, agree to disagree, or simply disagree. This keeps us immersed in our particular preconceptions of Humanism and its aspirations as opposed to assembling together as a collective, more powerful voice. Just imagine what we could accomplish if we risked putting away our exhaustive agendas for a more inclusive humanism. Frances Moore Lappe, author of You Have the Power: Choosing Courage in a Culture of Fear and Democracy’s Edge, said, “Appreciating that community is essential to human well being calls us to a particular kind of courage: walking with our fear of exclusion in order to stand up for inclusion” (Moore Lappe 2017). So, we may have to let go of our beloved manifestos, declarations, and desire to have “the last word” in order to achieve a higher purpose—making humanism a widely accepted and respected life-stance. To remain separate entities only dilutes our potential strength and ability to act in community. We can only get so far if we continue to draw lines around our moats, denoting that our kingdom rules the roost. It tends to provoke attack or, worse, cultivates a new competitive realm that doesn’t add the richness of diversity, but only serves to further alienate us from one another. It is far easier for our conservative religious foes to dismiss us when we tend to attack each other or are in relentless pursuit of our own successes. This is most evident at the atheist end of our life-stance spectrum. The Atheist Revolution blogger Jack Vance, in “How to Stop the Atheist Infighting,” remarks: What if all the online infighting we see taking place among atheists was not merely a harmless oddity or the sort of minor distraction that did not have any real consequences? What if it was seriously undermining our ability to pursue many of our shared goals and making it more likely that religious privilege would persist? If this possibility seems far-fetched, consider that “divide and conquer” is a common and effective strategy for weakening one’s opponents. If you were a Christian extremist who wanted to make sure those pesky atheists would never accomplish anything, you’d almost certainly be delighted by our infighting and all-around pettiness. When we are at each other’s throats, we’re making little progress at ending your Christian privilege. If there aren’t plenty of other reasons that might persuade you to stop attacking other atheists online, consider a pragmatic one: it prevents us from effectively challenging the religious majority and advancing our common

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goals. Instead of continuing to emphasize our disagreements, we could embrace our many agreements and work together to bring about some real change. (Vance 2017)

I could not agree more that it is time we assemble around our commonalities while respecting our differences. Building a community firm in its shared convictions and enduring in its capacity to advance agreed-upon ideals. To do this, we must start with education. For it is in formally educating ourselves we can move beyond our foregone conclusions and various interpretations to form a comprehensive harmonious Humanism that is focused on our common heritage and desires for the future.

Education as Foundation Education is the foundation upon which we build our future. (Christine Gregoire)

When the Humanist Institute was conceptualized, its primary goal was to educate leaders. It was Sherwin Wine, founder of the Society for Humanistic Judaism, who in 1982 proposed establishing a Humanist school in North American to train leaders. As he indicated, “The greatest need for Humanism today is the presence of well-trained leaders who will be able to mobilize people to embrace our philosophy of life” (Wintermute 2017), for in the early 1980s, there was neither a professional designation nor a way to train Humanist leaders. As the late Carol Wintermute indicated in her history of The Humanist Institute: While many Unitarian ministers had become humanist leaders, and the Ethical movement had created a program to train their own community guides, there was no strong sense of a professionally designated “humanist leader.” There was professional collegiality that crossed boundaries of historic groups. Unitarian humanist ministers in particular spent a significant amount of time connecting to non-humanists in their denomination and very little time connecting with leaders outside their movement who shared their conviction. The same was true for humanistic Jews. (Wintermute 2017)

The Institute became the way professional Humanist leaders were trained. For over 35 years, its adjunct faculty trained over 100 Humanist leaders serving in various capacities within the movement. Leaders who were and are informed advocates for Humanism motivating individuals to embrace our life-stance.

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But the Institute has done much more than just train leaders. What the founders could not have foreseen was the impact of affiliating with other current and emerging leaders. For the first time, religious humanists, secular humanists, freethinkers, atheists, and agnostics came together in a learning environment to discuss humanism. Individuals who had been completely unaware of the existence of other groups were sitting across the table discussing and discovering each other’s history and approaches to Humanism. And in this discourse, Humanism became much more than just that particular person’s familiar orientation. As the late founding Dean of the Institute, Howard Radest, said in his book Devil and Secular Humanism: Above all, I have benefited from the work of my students and fellow instructors in The Humanist Institute. Together, we have begun the fascinating task of uniting for the sake of the education of Humanist leadership. In our seminars and in our faculty colloquia over the past seven years we have set out to rethink Humanism. (Radest 1990, p. x)

For the Institute participants, Humanism becomes a dynamic, robust, and evolving philosophy with many different angles and places of intersection. I have witnessed the students’ delight in the diversity of thought, for it pushed them to reconsider what they believed to be truths. And I have seen them relish the common ground where they can take a rest from argument and further contemplation. The experience is life changing. It transforms people as they come together for the purpose of learning and leave having grown to be more fully human. As a graduate of the Institute so eloquently expressed upon completing the Institute’s certificate program: I came to The Humanist Institute to learn about Humanism, but I got so much more. Words cannot express the gratitude I have for HI. It has been the most powerful, rewarding experience that I have ever had. Each class added layers of understanding and knowledge that has helped make me the person I am today. A person more committed to helping others, more compassionate about life and living life now the very best that I can, more dedicated to sharing with others what living life as a humanist is all about what it means to me, and how these changes have influenced me in regards to how I look at my life, life in general, and this planet I share with other people of this world. (Cardwell 2015)

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It is this type of structured and encouraging educational environment that can fundamentally alter the humanist movement from a fragmented and disorganized assortment of definitions and statements toward a corporative, unified group working together to rethink a more inclusive humanism. Partaking in Humanist education needs to be a broadly accepted and expected factor for our community. Not just for those congregational humanists who are required to receive a thorough education as an overall job requirement, but also for individuals forming and directing groups, managing or working within organizations, officiating life celebrations, and/or providing pastoral care. Relying on self-education is not sufficient to understand humanism in depth, nor does it create a vital, cohesive community of nurturing members, representing our beliefs, and standing up for what we value. Acquiring the necessary education is critical for humanism’s future.

References 2017. A Secular Declaration. Council for Secular Humanism. https://www.secularhumanism.org/idex.php/11. Accessed 14 October 2017. 2017. Definition of Humanism. American Humanist Association. https://americanhumanist.org/what-­is-­humanism/defintion-­of-­humanism/. Accessed 14 October 2017. 2017. Find a Community. SHJ. http://www.shj.org/comunities/find-­a-­ community/. Access 14 October 2017. 2017. Humanism and Its Aspirations: Humanist Manifesto III, as Successor to the Humanist Manifesto of 1933. American Humanist Association. https://americanhumanist.org/what-­is-­humanism/manifesto3/. Accessed 14 October 2017. 2017. Member Societies. American Ethical Union. https://aeu.org/who-­we-­ are/member-­societies/. Accessed 13 October 2017. 2017. Ministers. UUA.org. https://www.uua.org/careers/minters. Accessed 13 October 2017. 2017. National Leaders Council. American Ethical Union. https://aeu.org/our-­ community/national-­leaders-­council/. Accessed 13 October 2017. 2017. “Our UU Faith.” UUA.org. https://www.uua.org/beliefs. Accessed 14 October 2017. 2017. Stalin’s Cult of Personality. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Stalin%27s_cult_of_personality. Accessed October. 2017. The Amsterdam Declaration. IHEU. http://iheu.org/humanism/the-­ amsterdam-­declaration/. Accessed 14 October 2017. Cardwell, JC. 2015. Graduate The Humanist Institute Class 19. Graduated August 2015.

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Dixie, Godless In. 2016. It’s Past Time for Atheism to Grow Up. Godless in Dixie. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2016/06/12/its-­past-­time-­ for-­atheism-­to-­grow-­up/. Accessed 14 October 2017. Hoffman, R.  Joseph. 2010. The Problem with Humanism. The New Oxonian. https://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/of-­p rogressive-­ humanism-­beyond-­the-­creeds/. Accessed 14 October 2017. International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism. https://www.guidestar. org/profile/38-2640824. Loehr, David. 2005. Why “Unitarian Universalism” Is Dying. Journal of Liberal Religion 5: 1–11. http://ww.meadville.edu/uploads/files/99.pdf. Accessed 14 October 2017. Michelson, Sarah. 2017. What Is Community, and Why Is It Important? The Ikeda Center for Peace, Learning & Dialogue, Cambridge, MA.  Accessed October 2017. Moore Lappe, Frances. 2017. What Is Community, and Why Is It Important? The Ikeda Center for Peace, Learning & Dialogue, Cambridge, MA.  Accessed October 2017. Pinn, Anthony. 2016. What Is Humanism and Why It Matters? London: Routledge. Radest, Howard B. 1990. The Develop and Secular Humanism: The Children of the Enlightenment. New York: Praeger. Sewell, Marilyn. 2011. Why Unitarians and Universalists Belong Together: A Fifty-Year Recollection. The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost. com/marilyn-­sewell/unitarians-­and-­universalists_b_873972.html. Accessed 14 October 2017. Vance, Jack. 2017. How to Stop the Atheist Infighting. Atheist Revolution. https://www.atheistrev.com/2017/09/how-­to-­stop-­atheist-­infighting-­html. Accessed 15 October 2017. Wintermute, Carol. 2017. History. The Humanist Institute. Accessed 15 October 2017. Young, Scott H. 2010. Why Self-Educated Learners Often Come Up Short. https://www.sottyoung.com/blog/2010/02/24/self-­education-­failing/. Accessed 14 October 2017. Kristin Wintermute  is the Director of Education at the American Humanist Association’s Center for Education. She holds BA degrees in Psychology and Art Studio from the University of Montana and a Master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Maine, Orono. Wintermute has done postgraduate course work in Business Administration at the University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management; Web Design at Minneapolis College of Art and Design; and Accounting Certification at North Hennepin Community College. She has worked as a family therapist in private practice, in a nonprofit clinic for women, and in a for-profit health maintenance organization.

CHAPTER 3

Teaching Humanism Joachim Duyndam

Abstract  This chapter proposes a humanist way of teaching humanism. Rather than as a doctrine or a fixed set of values, humanism is understood as a tradition, that is, a movement of passing on (finding, reinterpreting, and applying to new contexts of) meanings, values, ideas, and practices in a critical relationship to existing (cultural, religious, political) views, opinions, and practices—in which movement the critical is for the sake of humaneness. Subsequently, it is argued that humanist traditions can be articulated through exemplary people—sometimes called ‘role models’— who represent or embody this by (briefly speaking) ‘applying of humanist values’. These may be thinkers, scientists, artists, activists, or politicians (e.g. Nelson Mandela). From there it is shown that teaching humanism starts with being inspired by an exemplar representing a humanist tradition, and that by hermeneutically (re)interpreting the views and practices demonstrated and ‘lived’ by the exemplar, one becomes oneself part and representative of that humanist tradition. Thus, teaching humanism does not deal with ‘something out there’, but it consists of relating oneself to a

J. Duyndam (*) University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, Netherlands © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. D. Hart (ed.), Educating Humanists, Studies in Humanism and Atheism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88527-4_3

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humanist tradition, guided by a humanist exemplar, interpreting what is conveyed from sources, and passing it on in new directions—again, for the sake of humaneness. Keywords  Autonomy • Heteronomy • Humaneness • Hermeneutics

Humanist Traditions To claim that humanism is a tradition does not exclude other, more general, or abstract conceptions of humanism, such as humanism as a particular life stance, a philosophy of life, a worldview, an existential orientation, an educational practice (Bildung), a meaning frame, or a paradigm. On the contrary, humanism encompasses all these matters. I call these definitions abstract, though, because they tend to waive the temporal, historical, developmental, dynamic, and interactive character of humanist tradition in favor of some steady essence or identity. That tendency is quite understandable from an apologetic perspective, in contexts or situations where humanism should be defended, for instance, from assaults from the orthodox religious fringes. In the context of this volume, however, such defensiveness may not be necessary. From a Historical Point of View Let us first look at humanism from a historical point of view. It is generally accepted that humanism originates from the Renaissance, although it can justifiably be claimed that its roots go back to Antiquity. The socalled Renaissance humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536), Thomas More (1478–1535), and Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) took a critical position toward the cultural conditions of their time, particularly toward religion. According to the historian Jacob Burckhardt, one might roughly say that their contributions included a correction of the dominant theocentric worldview toward a more anthropocentric worldview (Burckhardt 2009). Instead of total dependence on God’s grace, humans came to be seen as having a free will (Erasmus); instead of being the only savior, Jesus came to be seen as a valuable teacher; instead of directed at life after death, human life in its earthly and bodily conditions came to be seen as worthwhile and beautiful in itself. Still, their critical stance toward church and religion did not allow these Renaissance humanists to be atheists in the modern sense. They continued to be

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Christian believers during their entire lives. Their humanism coexisted, so to speak, with their Christian faith. The main resource of their criticism was classical Antiquity. By digging up and dusting off classical literary and philosophical texts, and reviving attention to Roman and Greek sculpture, painting, and architecture, they brought about enormous innovations in literature, the fine arts, and religion. The revitalizing of classical sources not only explains the name of the historical period—re-naissance, or re-birth—but it is typical for humanism as a tradition. Tradition (from the Latin trans-dare) means the passing on, giving back, or giving further. A humanist tradition in a culture passes on something from sources of that culture, which may have become lost, forgotten, or unserviceable. Humanism revitalizes cultural sources (such as texts and pieces of art), gains inspiration from them, reinterprets them, and passes them on to the audiences of that humanism’s time period. Humanism does so if and when such is thought necessary for the sake of humanity, in the sense of humaneness. The Renaissance humanists propagated the meaning and beauty of human life—using long-forgotten sources from Antiquity—to counter the dominant thinking of abstract, rigid, and theocentric medieval scholasticism, because this kind of thinking and its ideas were thought to fall short to what human life is all about according to the humanists: humaneness. Humaneness is aimed at both in an intellectual and in an artistic humanist tradition. Both derive from Cicero’s concept of humanitas (Derkx 2016, pp. 18–49). I will return to this important notion of humaneness in the course of this chapter. The lost, forgotten, or unserviceable sources that humanism revitalizes include not only ideas from texts and works of art that really historically existed at one time, but also ideas that express meanings and values belonging to humanity as such, according to humanism, whether they have actually been realized or not. These also need to be passed on. In the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, another important period in the history of humanity and in the history of humanism, humanists championed the individual’s ability and right to think for oneself—autonomy in the context of various heteronomies. The nineteenth-century (particularly German) Bildung-humanism, to give another example, advocated freedom and education (paideia) in an age of industrialization where many people were exploited or enslaved. Freedom, autonomy, and dignity are values that, from a humanist point of view, have to be passed on whether or not they have ever been fully accomplished or to what extent.

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The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) renewed and passed on autonomy from its Socratic “maieutic” source and applied it to morality (Kant 2008 [1785]). It does not mean that Socrates already had a Kantian notion of autonomy; it means that Kant took some elements of Socratic thinking—such as ‘think for yourself’ (Platon 1973, pp. Apology 22c, 23c, 28e, 29d), ‘real knowledge is to be found through the thinking of the ideas’ (Platon 1973, pp. Meno 81c–86c, 1988, pp. Phaedo 723–77a; Plato 1980, pp. The Republic 504d–509c), “a life without thinking is not worthwhile” (Platon 1973, pp. Apology 38a)—interpreted these, and passed them on to his time and context. According to Kant, for answering the question, “What should I do to act morally well?” we do not have to rely on the external authorities of church or state or custom. We can find the answer ourselves by just thinking, by using reason, he argued. Reason gives us the unconditional moral imperative, “Act only according to that rule whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law”, or in its second formulation, “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end”. Consequently, morality is not given and legitimized by an external authority but by the reason we all share, according to Kant. Therefore, we can (and should) be moral because we are reasonable beings. Reason-based autonomy is not something that was once there, historically, and then disappeared. Since the time of Socrates’ Apology (in the year 399 BC), it has always been necessary to pass on and to defend reason and autonomy against stupidity and docility. From a moral perspective, it has always existed—as a value, a goal, a virtue to be acquainted—whereas historically it has only existed to some precarious extent and always under pressure. Humanist Tradition: Resuming and Reinterpreting Resuming Kant’s goal today, moral autonomy should be passed on in quite another context of heteronomy. Whereas church and state show an ever-declining moral authority, at least in Western countries, the heteronomous influence from the media and the markets is still increasing. The media showcase appealing models of successful life, how we should act best, and even how we should be; the markets prescribe our options of desiring. I will come back to the theme of autonomy in the last section. The examples discussed so far show how humanism can essentially be viewed as tradition, critically passing on meanings and values that should

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be passed on and brought forward in different times and contexts for the sake of humaneness. Thus, humanist traditions are always connected to other traditions, ideas, and movements in the culture that humanism is also part of. At some times and places, humanism is even present within religious traditions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and other religions and worldviews—usually in a liberal appearance and as a critical counterforce to orthodoxy. The humanist traditions considered so far are examples of so-called ‘great’ historical manifestations of humanism in Renaissance and Enlightenment. There is also, however, a variety of “smaller” humanist traditions that are not at all less important. One example is the essay tradition in—and, in a way, between—literature and philosophy in Western culture. Since the Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne, the essay has become a genre exercised and practiced by many authors from different countries (Montaigne 2004). In the Netherlands, for example, Multatuli (1820–1887) and Rudy Kousbroek (1929–2010) sustained a humanistic essay tradition since Montaigne. While the humanist tradition has no holy books of its own, the essay can be considered a typical humanistic genre. Although there is not one essential quality to define the essay, the genre can be circumscribed by a “family resemblance” of qualities: critical, open argumentative, truth-seeking, examining, creative, morally interested, challenging boundaries, more narrative than systematic reasoning, concrete and detail-oriented, and, most of all, exemplifying a specific style such as ironic, humorous, self-mocking, polemic, or persuasive (Schreijnders 2017). Another significant and quite different example of a humanist tradition is to be found in today’s black humanism movement. The Black Humanist Alliance fights against the devaluation of black lives, white privilege, and racism—widespread in today’s Europe and America. In their commitment to realizing social justice for all, they resume the humanist tradition of emancipation, empowerment, and intersectionality—a tradition that aims at dignity and respect, comprising humaneness in this context. The struggle is being conducted by means of critical reason, ethics, free inquiry, and self-determination. Black humanism is also rooted in the history of the African American community in the United States. African American humanists including W.E.B.  Du Bois, Hubert H.  Harrison, A.  Philip Randolph, Carter G. Woodson, and Anthony B. Pinn, among others, have made significant contributions to history, literature, human rights, science, and activism. Today’s black humanism movement can profit from

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the heritage of this black humanist tradition to better understand current problems and devise solutions. Vice versa, the entire humanist movement can learn from the black humanist tradition, for example, the fallacy of “all lives matter” versus “black lives matter” (Pinn 2017).

The Critical Substance of Humanism Now that we have seen, from our Teaching Humanism perspective, how humanism can be understood as a tradition—including “greater” and “smaller” traditions—and before turning over to the exemplary persons embodying humanist traditions, we first have to pay attention to what humanism consists of, its substance, so to speak. Taking humanism to be a critical cultural tradition that uncovers and interprets sources from that culture does not yet specify the meanings and values to which humanism is committed. The concept of tradition does not in itself imply the content or the substance that is passed on in a tradition. However, in the previous section on humanist traditions, it was indicated that it is for the sake of humaneness that the humanist tradition strives, based on its critical character. To discuss the substance of humanism, let me start with the latter. Looking synchronically from a bird’s eye view—unlike the diachronic view from a tradition point of view—the meaning of humanism seems quite extensive. Both its connotations and its denotations vary over time and across different cultural contexts. At least in Europe, humanism displays a broad range of appearances. It diverges from (1) radical atheism at one edge of the spectrum (‘religion is a dangerous delusion, and it should be conquered’); through (2) a more tolerant freethinking, a little further on the spectrum (“we can do without religion; we are better off without it”); to (3) agnosticism, somewhat more to the middle of the spectrum (“we don’t know and, what is more, we cannot know if there exists anything beyond, independent of our imagination”); to (4), still further on the spectrum, the so-called inclusive humanism (“although I may be not a believer myself, the majority of the world population is religious in one way or another, so let’s keep the dialogue open to learn from one another”); to (5) forms of religious humanism at the other edge of the spectrum (Grayling and Copson 2015). All these variations of humanism, however, find themselves in a critical relationship with religion, and the most prominent among them do this in a negative way (a-theism, a-gnosticism, the negative freedom in freethinking). Humanism’s criticism is basically directed at dogmatism in religion.

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Dogmatism is understood here as taking a principle, idea, conception, or belief for granted as incontrovertibly true and unquestionable, without consideration for evidence, arguments, or the opinions of others, and legitimized by the “authority” of power, prejudice, custom, peer pressure, and so on. Basically, in my own words, dogmatism takes an answer for granted without pondering the question that could have led to that answer, or possibly to other answers. Humanism does persistently ask the questions behind the given answers of culture. Of course, this applies also to the answers of humanism itself. They should also be questioned. Inherent to the critical character of humanism is that it is also self-critical, for criticism can only be credible and plausible if it includes self-criticism. Criticizing from an immune position makes no sense. This applies even more strongly to humanism, which is always part of and rooted in the culture that it criticizes. Its self-critical character should prevent humanism from the undying risk of dogmatism. Humanism and Philosophy: Anti-dogmatism Anticipating the discussion of the significance of exemplars for understanding traditions, in the next section, it is important to stress that humanism resembles philosophy regarding their critical and self-critical character. In this respect, teaching humanism can learn from teaching philosophy. Philosophy is generally understood to mean the systematic study of concepts, premises, and principles underlying people’s primary relationships—that is to say people’s relationships to themselves, to others, and to the world around them. More specifically, philosophy includes the systematic study of the practices of science and has an integrative duty toward them. Like humanism, philosophy operates as a critical tradition that reassesses, reinterprets, and rejuvenates the thinking of earlier philosophers in response to cultural, social, and scientific developments. For example, today’s philosophy is reviving Descartes’ early-seventeenth-century dualism, which despite many twentieth-century refutations is very much alive thanks to current neuroscience. The Cartesian dualism between res cogitans and res extensa returns today as the dualism between the world of meaning in which we live on the one hand and what happens simultaneously to brain processes in our minds on the other.1 Brain research poses a 1  Neuroscientists like the brain researcher Dick Swaab try to overcome this dualism by reducing the world of meaning to brain processes (2014).

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fundamental challenge for both humanism and philosophy of the twenty-­ first century. Although humanism (as an intellectual and artistic tradition) and philosophy (as a systematic academic discipline) cannot be equated, there is a key parallel between humanism and philosophy in their performance as critical, self-renewing traditions. Both are interpretative. Both are forward-looking precisely because they are traditional, in the sense that they pass on something valuable to the culture in which they operate. Humanism transfers valuable knowledge by critically reviving earlier humanisms with an eye to safeguarding humaneness in the twenty-first century. Depending on time and context, humanists consistently articulate, explore, and call attention to the values that constitute humaneness. But humanists can also personify and demonstrate those values. The way that the humanist tradition can be articulated through exemplars who personify and demonstrate these values is discussed in the next section. Humanism and philosophy, though being different categories, resemble each other not only by operating as traditions but also by offering their anti-dogmatic incentives. Dogmatism is the natural enemy of both philosophy and humanism. Therefore, both are per se self-critical. Philosophy not only questions social and natural reality but itself as well. Indeed, a feature distinctive to philosophical questions is the way that the question is itself part of the question. A philosophical question, directed at any domain of reality, always also asks about whether this is the best possible question to acquire what we want to know, what kind of answers come into view by this question, and which possible answers are thereby excluded. For instance, the seemingly obvious question, “what is …?” usually taken as the primary and most fundamental question to be asked, is actually directed at fixed essences. The world opened up by a “what is?” question consists of “things with properties”, including humans as special things with special capacities, such as reason. This limited ontology can be circumvented by asking the meta-question: Is a “what is” question the best possible question to be asked about human life, values, history, tradition, and so forth? Not asking this meta-question would be dogmatic because, precisely as a consequence of not asking, it takes one (customary) answer to this meta-question for granted, namely the answer that “what is?” is the best question. Philosophy and humanism share their anti-­ dogmatic spirit and conduct. Related to their anti-dogmatism, they also share their hermeneutic character. Among all kinds of philosophy, hermeneutical philosophy is particularly alert to dogmatism. I will come back to this in the next section.

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Humanist Values and Humaneness Having discussed its critical character, we now come to the substance of humanism. Our conception of humanism as a critical tradition gives a clue as to why it substantively matters. It is for the sake of humaneness that humanism criticizes what falls short of this standard. Although the concept of humaneness does not lend itself to an unambiguously positive description and its meaning presumably varies through time and across cultures, we still can operationalize it into a concrete understanding. At the University of Humanistic Studies, humaneness is defined in terms of meaning in life and humanization: A humane life is a meaningful life under fair conditions in just circumstances. A meaningful life can be conceptualized as a life in which basic needs for meaning are jointly fulfilled, such as purpose, moral worth, self-worth, competence, comprehensibility, connectedness, and excitement (Derkx in Pinn 2013, pp.  42–57; Derkx in Grayling and Copson 2015, pp.  426–439). Humanization is strived for through tools like human rights. Another way of articulating how humanist traditions are focused on humaneness is by understanding this focus as developed and motivated by certain values that make up the building blocks of humanist tradition. Humanism stands for values such as freedom (understood as autonomy), responsibility (understood as the duty to care, for which you are answerable), justice (understood as upholding institutions and arrangements that protect people from exploitation and humiliation), solidarity (understood as spiritual and material care for one another), pluralism (understood as the right to individual and group identity), art of living (understood as refined moral conduct toward oneself and others), and sustainability (understood as long-term care for the inhabitability of the planet). Taken together, these values lay down the road map, so to speak, to humaneness. At this point, it is good to reflect briefly on what is actually meant by ‘value’. Often, values are fenced, flaunted, or preached with, as if they were shiny balls on a Christmas tree. Rather than treating values as a special kind of ‘things’, however, I would prefer to emphasize their relational character, particularly their resilient relationality. Freedom, for example, relates resiliently to slavishness. Not in an absolute sense, in the sense of either freedom or slavishness, but gradual: on a scale of more and less. Freedom must always be obtained from, conquered from, and defended against unfreedom and slavishness. That battle is never over. The value of freedom is a permanently resilient relationship to its “opposite”. Similarly,

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responsibility relates resiliently to indifference and to shifting the blame to others; justice is taken as resilience against exploitation and humiliation; solidarity as resilience against social gaps (in terms of wealth, health, age, etc.); diversity as resilience against the dominance of a monoculture; sustainability as resilience against spoiling water, soil, atmosphere, and climate. The metaphor of resilience fits well with this relational understanding of values. A spring only gives its strength when pressed on. The “opposites” of the values mentioned permanently weigh on them. As we will see in the next section, exemplary people, for example, from humanist traditions, may strongly support to find the resilient balance in the values at stake. Based on these (resiliently relational) values, humanism holds an open worldview, a stance of critical thinking, and the virtues of self-reflection and dialogue—acknowledging and promoting the autonomous and responsible role of humans in shaping their lives. While humanism has its own views on humaneness, it claims no monopoly on it. Humanism’s critical stance implies that humaneness is continually rediscovered, reassessed, and defended in a dialogue with other domains of culture: literature, arts, philosophy, worldviews, and religions. Today, for instance, the notion of humaneness is challenged from at least two different sides: from the research into the moral capacities of other animals, like apes and elephants, among others conducted by Frans de Waal (2013, 2016, 2019); and from the development of robotization as it is brought forward by Yuval Noah Harari, who predicts that humans, at least most humans, will become superfluous when robots will have taken over the world (Harari 2015).

Teaching Humanism: Hermeneutically Relating to Exemplary Humanists In this section, it is argued that teaching humanism is achieved through hermeneutically relating to exemplary people representing and “living” a humanist tradition. Both the way ideas, meanings, and values are passed on in humanist traditions from cultural sources to present-day contexts and the way we relate to humanist traditions through exemplary humanists are hermeneutical. So, let me first explain the concept of hermeneutics and then move on to exemplary persons in humanist traditions.

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Hermeneutics The term “hermeneutics” refers to both the art and the theory of interpretation. Hermeneutics originated in Antiquity; in its classical sense, it is particularly concerned with religious and legal texts (the name “hermeneutics” derives from Hermes, the messenger between the gods and humans). Interpretation in relation to tradition means that what is taken from the source should be translated from the source’s context to the present-day context of the interpreter—as I did with Kant’s autonomy, in the first section, translating it from its eighteenth-century heteronomous context to our twenty-first-century heteronomies of the media and the markets. The source can be anything—a work of art, a book, a story, or a life narrative— but the paradigm of hermeneutical interpretation is the interpretation of a text. Hermeneutical interpretation is directed at “the meaning(s) of the text”, which is usually not obvious but partly clear and partly hidden. The interpretation proceeds by negotiating meanings between interpreter and text. Negotiating meanings can be imagined as being moving backward and forward between debating readers and texts in the process of reconstructing meaning, in what the hermeneutic philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) labels the ‘hermeneutic circle’, involving a flux of hypothesis-forming, testing, adjusting, and testing once again (Gadamer 2006 [1960], p. 267 and ff). The meanings that then materialize are not purely objective, as if all we had to do was simply dig them out of the text, but they are not merely subjective either, as if the reader/interpreter could extrapolate the meaning from the text to suit oneself (as if it were a process of simply seeing in a text only what is already in the reader’s mind). The meaning is the result of a wrestling interaction and debate between readers and text. Not only is the interpretation itself a matter of moving between contexts, as we stated already, but obviously the interpretative process as such also always happens in given contexts: in historical-cultural, economic, and political contexts and in the context of ongoing debates. Moreover, a hermeneutic reader has a vested interest in the meaning he or she wants to negotiate. Equally, in the classical hermeneutics of authoritative religious scriptures and legal texts, great importance is attached to knowing what the gods meant or what the law prescribes. This important aim demands honesty and respect for the text. A hermeneutic interpreter cannot just change or ignore parts of the text without good reason. Unlike orthodox readers, however, who tend to stick to one unchanging sense, the hermeneutical reading of humanism wrestles with the text, knowing that meanings change over time while their contexts change over time.

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This brief introduction to hermeneutics helps us to understand the way humanist tradition works, including our own relation to it, as we humanists are involved with it. Hermeneutical interpretation is not just the way that the humanist tradition works; it is also the way we can relate to it. To explain our relation to humanist tradition, I now focus on the role of exemplary people in humanist traditions. One significant way in which ideas, values, and meanings are passed on in humanist traditions is through exemplary people who embody, demonstrate, and “live” these values, meanings, and ideas. Humanist education must take this into account. Unlike most worldviews (such as Christianity, Judaism, or Buddhism), humanism seems to underestimate the importance of its exemplars, among whom I would list Socrates, Erasmus (and other Renaissance humanists), Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft, Immanuel Kant, George Eliot (pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans), Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Nelson Mandela. Speaking generally of exemplary people, we might perhaps first think of moral heroes such as Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, who inspire us to be brave, courageous, generous, and the like. However, humanist models do not have to be such well-known people. We have all experienced coping with a bewildering situation by following the example of a wise friend or have been moved by someone’s authentic behavior. These are not at all unusual experiences. Everyone who has at some time in his or her life had to make a fundamental decision, and has had to bear a loss or has had to overcome opposition, knows the power of an inspiring model. In these everyday-life situations, we can get ahead, find strength, or even surpass ourselves by being inspired by exemplary friendship, exemplary conduct after a loss, or exemplary authenticity. Mimesis To grasp the hermeneutical character of being inspired by exemplars, both the “great” and “smaller” exemplary people, it is best to distinguish this kind of inspiration from mere imitation. Imitation is part of human nature. As such, imitation is not good or bad per se. In our present-day culture that highly values authenticity, imitation is held in disrepute. On the other hand, without our capacity to imitate, we could not learn anything at all, from walking and speaking to playing the piano and conducting scientific research. However, according to the so-called mimetic theory of René Girard (1923–2015), imitation is principally dangerous. By imitation or

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“mimesis”2 Girard does not refer to the copying or mirroring of someone’s gestures or behavior but to the imitation of someone’s interested relation to the world, particularly someone’s desire. Mimetic desire means desiring something because someone else desires it, if only by being the proud owner of the same thing. Perhaps it is my neighbor’s larger car or my colleague’s facelift, a new smartphone app, a fashionable holiday destination, a current opinion, or a refined taste. To me, as a man, a woman becomes attractive because someone else desires her. Our longings, wishes, and aims do not arise in us as individuals but are created, stimulated, and maintained by others aiming to satisfy the very same longings and wishes. The other person functions as a model for our own covetousness, in Girard’s view (Girard 2008). This holds for more than desires only. Thinking and forming opinions and emotions are equally mimetic. Some views and opinions are desirable, and if you think the same way too, you belong to us. Because the model also has a model and so on, the mimetic mechanism is contagious, and because it is contagious, it catches on fast and takes on a popular character of its own accord. Thus, mimetic theory can explain such phenomena as consumerism, media hypes, and peer pressure. Mimetic contagiousness is demonstrable in every stakeholder relationship. Thinking, desiring, acting, attributing meaning, feeling, or observing—in short everything that in phenomenology is called intentionality—is mimetically transferred by way of models, according to mimetic theory. I interpret this mimetic contagiousness as a determining influence on one’s will. The dangerous aspect of mimetic desire, according to Girard, is that imitating models, who themselves of course imitate models in their turn, invariably leads to a crisis—and often to violence. For if everyone is after the same things, by definition these desirable things become scarce, and a struggle to own or to have control of them follows. Moreover, according to Girard, a mimetic crisis leads just as invariably to the singling out and banishment of scapegoats who, rightly or wrongly, are blamed for the 2  Imitation is one of the meanings of the original Greek word mimesis. Aristotle has elaborated on mimesis in his theory on art (in his book Rhetorics). The meaning of mimesis is, also In Aristotle, far more extensive than ‘imitation’ only. Dependent on the domain of phenomena to which it is supposed to apply, possible English translations of the Greek mimesthai (from which mimesis derives) are to imitate, to follow, to mimic, to ape, to counterfeit, to reproduce, to copy, to mirror, to double, to depict, to represent, to render, to repeat, to translate, to recite, and so forth. See the systematic overview in IJsseling (1997).

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crisis. The tragic conclusion of mimetic theory is that peace can only be restored through the expelling of a scapegoat (Girard 1986). Humanism, however, can offer an answer to this seeming inevitability of mimetic desire. Inspiration Versus Imitation The humanist answer is based on the distinction between being hermeneutically inspired by an exemplar on the one hand and getting infected by imitation on the other. Although it is a subtle distinction between imitation and inspiration, it is of the greatest importance. The distinction is not between good and bad. Not every inspiring exemplar is as ‘good’ as the moral heroes already mentioned, supposing that we can be sure at all about their goodness. Also “bad” figures—ranging from those who appeal to the imagination like top criminals right down to the notorious dictators of world history—are deeply inspiring to their followers and admirers. Inspiration is ambivalent; it can spur us on to do either good or evil. Conversely, although it may be dangerous, imitation is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, nor necessarily wrong. As we said, without the ability to imitate, we would not be able to learn anything at all, and we would as humans not have evolved as far as we have. In order to understand the difference between the imitation of a model (in the sense meant by Girard) and being inspired by an exemplary person, we must first approach the model as well as the exemplary person from the way we relate to them. It makes no sense to distinguish a class comprised of exceptional people simply according to the fact that they are inspiring. Inspiration is a relational concept and must therefore be understood through the relations between the person displaying the inspiration and the person who is inspired. Mimetic infection is also relational in this way. The relationship with an exemplary person should be hermeneutic, while the imitative relationship with a model remains hermeneutically deficient. If I become inspired by an exemplary person, I am attracted by a specific meaning or value that this exemplary person demonstrates in his or her life or actions. My attention may be drawn to courage, respect, patience, a forgiving disposition, or more specifically the “humanistic values” mentioned earlier, such as autonomy, responsibility, justice, solidarity, pluralism, art of living, and sustainability. The exemplary people appeal to me because of the way they behave: ‘to be so courageous, honest, patient, responsible (and so on) is how you should be’. However, an exemplary person always demonstrates such qualities in a specific context.

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In the case of Nelson Mandela, who emerged as a black African leader during and after the rule of apartheid, his context was quite different from that of a prosperous European or American free (white) citizen today. Nevertheless, Mandela can still be a very inspiring person for Europeans and Americans. Due to the difference in context, however, it is impossible for me as a European to imitate Mandela, so I must make a leap from his context to mine. Practical Wisdom In hermeneutics, translating from one context to another is called “application”. Originally, Aristotle formulated a virtue of practical knowledge, phronèsis, for the application of what he called ethical virtues (values, in our terminology). This is the practical wisdom that knows whether, and how, to apply a value. Aristotle also emphasized the importance of an exemplary phronimos: a wise person who demonstrates virtue and lives virtuously (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book VI). For Gadamer, application is the core of hermeneutics. In his major work Truth and Method (1960), he uses the Latin term applicatio (Gadamer p. 2006, p. 305v). I sometimes prefer terms like “concretization” and “performance”, in addition to ‘application’, as a better translation in order to avoid any misinterpretation. The misinterpretation to guard against is thinking that a preconceived objective value is applied, whereas in my view, a value is never “separately obtainable” but only emerges as a value when actually applied or performed as a value, preferably by an exemplary person. In other words, a value only really exists in its application. Consequently, the “humanistic values” mentioned above are as such—in their general (abstract) wording—not exclusively humanistic; they could be Christian, Islamic, and so on as well. They are humanistic in their application—in the way they are operationalized and autonomously applied. As such, humanism is the practical wisdom of application, phronèsis. Interpreting an inspiring relationship with an exemplary person as hermeneutic, as I am proposing here, entails in the first place realizing that the inspiring actions or behavior of the exemplary person is in itself an application or performance of the value that so appeals to me, even if the exemplary person does not do this consciously or deliberately. In his actions, Mandela applied courage, and in his behavior, he performed the general value of a forgiving disposition. And this is equally true of the less famous inspirational people from our own circle of acquaintances. The

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way they act is also, hermeneutically speaking, an application of a value. What it is now important to remember about the hermeneutic relation to an exemplary person is that I, as the person being inspired, do not imitate the way the exemplary person applies a value. Instead, I apply the value in question myself or perform it autonomously in my own context. By autonomously performing my own application of the value that I have learned, I show how I am inspired by its application demonstrated by the exemplary person. I will come back to autonomy in the last section. Therein is to be found the difference between imitating a model and interpreting and being inspired by an exemplary person. As far as the latter is concerned, I perform an application of my own, whereas in the former (the application of another person) I am imitating the model. For it can also be said of a model that he or she applies or concretizes a value. It is precisely the interest a model takes in an object (an interest that he or she very probably is imitating from another model) that shows or demonstrates the importance the object holds for the model. Thus, it is the model’s application that is contagious. But contagion becomes infection if I forget my own creative capabilities, which allow me to perform my own authentic application of the value held up before me. Merely imitating a model is a hermeneutic deficiency.

Teaching the Core of Humanism: Autonomy The distinction just made shows the important difference between having a heteronomous contagious relation with a model and his/her applications on the one hand and an autonomous relation to the exemplar through one’s own authentic application on the other. However, it should be noted that the distinction between a heteronomous and an autonomous relationship to an exemplar or model is not an absolute distinction but actually a gradual one. Heteronomy comes first. In any stage of our life, we are all initially exposed to what others say, think, express, and determine. What matters is that, in due course, we find our own responses to what others say, think, express, and determine, that we gradually grow from heteronomy to autonomy. Our responding means that, more and more, we make our own applications from the applications displayed by others. In doing so, we are supported by humanist traditions providing us with exemplars of autonomous responses to heteronomous circumstances. However, we will never be completely free from heteronomy, because autonomy is never definitively secured. The passage from heteronomy to

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autonomy is a balance for which we should always struggle. Because we all start as newborns, totally dependent on others, we all start as heteronomous imitators—that is how we begin to learn anything. With the help of good exemplars, however, we can gain a relative (balanced) and relational (responding) autonomy. Increasing autonomy is a development from heteronomous pressure to resilience against these pressures (Duyndam 2012). That is why teaching humanism is directed at humanist exemplars, especially when it comes to teaching autonomy. Most importantly, it is autonomy itself that is acquired through exemplars as it is resiliently displayed by them. Autonomy and authenticity can be truly achieved in actions inspired by model persons. The example of authenticity is paradigmatic because someone’s authenticity can be very inspiring, although authenticity cannot, by definition, be imitated (because it would not then be authentic). Authenticity must therefore be interpreted in the light of one’s own life. The hermeneutical approach to inspiration precludes a futile opposition between a “pure” ideal of morally high-principled inspiration (Mandela as a modern saint) and something like a bad, depraved mimetic desire. A hermeneutic approach begins with the recognition that we all are also exposed to mimetic contagiousness, popular trends, and group pressure. Relating resiliently to these, we may achieve relative hermeneutic freedom: Given the opportunity to make our own interpretation, we create our own application. Doing this is achieving autonomy. If anyone is qualified to endorse this kind of achievement despite the context in which he or she was oppressed and humiliated, it must be Nelson Mandela. Similar is true for people like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, who showed autonomy in their situations—and by that may inspire many. Hermeneutical Freedom Autonomy in the sense of making one’s own application implies a certain amount of freedom. I term this ‘hermeneutic freedom’. Its positive and negative aspects show how we are dealing here with true freedom. If looked at positively, the exemplary person demonstrates possibilities, new perspectives. By showing courage under the difficult and extremely degrading circumstances in which he was forced to live, Mandela reminds us of these possibilities and invites us to be brave in our own situations. The effect of an exemplary person is liberating, in the positive sense of making something possible. The possibilities that an exemplary person

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opens up are appealing, by showing me “that is how it should be done”, “that really is true friendship”, and ‘that you too should be so brave, or patient, faithful, honest’. This means that applying this inspiration effectuates a transformation. Due to the influence of an exemplary person, something in my life changes. The inspired subject remains negatively free, to a certain extent, by resisting and distancing him or herself from the mimetic pressure released by a model’s application. One is negatively free through occupying one’s own space to think and choose and from the will to obtain and to keep one’s values in the process of application. It is up to me as an acting subject to determine how I apply the courage inspired by an exemplary person like Mandela. The value “courage” does not in itself prescribe how it should be applied. The link with mimetic theory shows that this room to decide how to act must be permanently negotiated against constant mimetic pressure. The freedom of the applicatio is therefore of a limited and relative kind; this is a freedom, in the literal sense of the word, inspired by a hermeneutic relation with an exemplary person. Autonomy gained through creatively and hermeneutically relating to the applications performed by models and exemplars is crucial for humanism. The balance between autonomy and heteronomy refers to a different volition. For Kant, the will is the ability to connect individual actions to general principles, be they heteronomous or autonomous. The hermeneutic concept of the will presented here connects general values with concrete actions or performance. This connection we understand as applicatio. There is the option of either heteronomously imitating the applications of others, or autonomously applying it by recognizing the application as such in an exemplar and subsequently searching for our own application. We thereby give it meaning by applying it ourselves, thinking for ourselves, autonomously from our own volition. Humanism is practical wisdom, as explained, a hermeneutics-by-doing (Duyndam 2012, pp. 5, 9–10). Crucial to humanism is the notion of humaneness, as we have seen. It is not easy to describe humaneness positively and unanimously; its meaning varies across different periods of history and in different cultures. In a negative sense, however, it is usually obvious when humaneness comes into play. In my view, humiliation is the most devastating opposite of humaneness. Humiliation is a relational concept, and because humans are relational beings, we cannot withdraw from humiliation but have to

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respond to it—as Mandela did, and many other exemplars have done. Humanism is this positive response to humiliation, for the sake of humaneness. Humiliation is far more everyday business than the extreme examples such as Mandela’s suggest. The humiliation of slavishness is evident due to the mimetic contagion of human will. By terms like ‘slavishness’ and ‘slavery’, we first think of forced labor or serfdom, but even respectable and prosperous citizens can be ‘slaves’ in the broader sense of slavishness, without even knowing it. Seen from the perspective of the will, the will of the slave equals the will of the master: The slave wants what the master wants. In mimetic theory, this master is the Girardian model: The slavish imitates the will of his model. And because the model itself also imitates a model, and that model imitates another and so on, they form a herd; and so we form a herd. A slavish person wants what ‘they’ want, what we all want. In hermeneutical terms, slavishness is the situation of imitating each other’s applications. If there is one ultimate characteristic of humanism, it is the fight against slavishness—the physical slavery dealt with by human rights and any mental slavery of the will as well. To combat this, humanism has for a long time defended the individual autonomy of the self. This is understandable, but it is not enough. Not only has this autonomy been partly responsible for leading us toward a culture of self-directedness and self-overestimation, but also it has failed in particular to comprehend the susceptibility of the autonomous self to heteronomous mimesis. Today, humanism must defend relational autonomy. Autonomy must be relational, because heteronomy, slavishness, and humiliation are also relational. We can achieve and defend relational autonomy by growing a hermeneutics-driven relational resilience to heteronomous pressure and violence.

Conclusion I hope that, in this chapter, I have convincingly demonstrated a humanist way of teaching humanism. By understanding humanism as tradition—in fact, as multiple traditions—we can relate to humanist traditions, and appropriate its values, ideas, and practices, by hermeneutically interpreting applications by exemplary humanists, creatively apply those values to new contexts, and by that passing them on to future generations—for the sake of humaneness.

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References Burckhardt, Jacob. 2009. Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Stuttgart: Kröner Verlag. Derkx, Peter. 2016. Contemporary Humanism in the Netherlands. In Humanism and the XXIth Century: Lessons, Problems, and Perspectives, ed. M.B. Konashev. Saint Petersburg: The Russian National Library, Plekhanov House. Duyndam, Joachim. 2012. Humanism, Resilience, and the Hermeneutics of Exemplary Figures. Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism 20: 3–17. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2006. Truth and Method. London and New  York: Continuum. Girard, René. 1986. The Scapegoat. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2008. Mimesis and Theory. Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953–2005. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Grayling, A.C., and A.  Copson, eds. 2015. The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Humanism. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell. Harari, Yuval Noah. 2015. Homo Deus. A Brief History of Tomorrow. London: Vintage. IJsseling, Samuel. 1997. Mimesis: On Appearing and Being. Kampen: Kok Pharos. Kant, Immanuel. 2008. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. New Haven: Yale University Press. Montaigne, Michel de. 2004. The Complete Essays, 1572–1592. London: Penguin Books. Pinn, Anthony, ed. 2013. What Is Humanism and Why Does It Matter? Studies in Humanist Thought and Praxis. Durham, UK: Acumen. Pinn, Anthony B. 2017. Humanism and the Challenge of Privilege. TheHumanist. com. https://thehumanist.com/magazine/may-­june-­2017/features/humanism-­ challenge-­privilege. Accessed 16 July 2019. Plato. 1980. Republic II. The Loeb Classical Library, Plato VI. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Platon. 1973. Platon, Des Sokrates Verteidigung. Werke in acht Bänden II. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. ———. 1988. Platon, Phaidon. Werke in acht Bänden III.  Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Schreijnders, Rudy. 2017. Rudy Kousbroek in de essayistisch-humanistische traditie [Rudy Kousbroek in the Essayistic-Humanist Tradition] With a summary in English. Dissertation UvH. Utrecht: Papieren Tijger. Swaab, Dick F. 2014. We Are Our Brains: A Neurobiography of the Brain, from the Womb to Alzheimer’s. New York: Spiegel & Grau. Waal, Frans de. 2013. The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates. New York: Norton.

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———. 2016. Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? New York: Norton. ———. 2019. Mama’s Last Hug, Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves. New York: Norton. Joachim Duyndam  (PhD in Philosophy) is Full Professor of Humanism and Philosophy at the University of Humanistic Studies in the Netherlands. His dissertation Thinking, Passion, Compassion (1997, in Dutch) is a multidisciplinary philosophical-psychological study on empathy. His research is focused on the significance of exemplars to moral agency. His published articles (in English) include titles such as ‘Hermeneutical Mimesis’, ‘Humanism, Resilience, and the Hermeneutics of Exemplary Figures’, ‘Ideals Today Between Wishful Thinking and Realism’, and ‘Empathy and the Potential Body of Imagination’.

CHAPTER 4

Edward Said as Humanist Educator (with a Note on John Dewey) William David Hart

Abstract  Drawing on Edward Said and John Dewey, this contribution explores the relationship between humanism and education and a range of practices such as democracy, slavery, Orientalism, and colonialism. Said is a humanist educator who educates humanism about its often troubling past and present, and what he hopes can be a different future—the world as a democratic commonwealth. Such a democratic commonwealth, however, would be more capacious than Said’s narrow secularism and Enlightenment view of religion allows. Secular humanism needs to be educated and re-educated too. Keywords  Colonialism • Orientalism • Democratic criticism • Secular criticism Let us waste now time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet

W. D. Hart (*) Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. D. Hart (ed.), Educating Humanists, Studies in Humanism and Atheism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88527-4_4

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murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. —Frantz Fanon (1961, p. 311) When we say that reason concerns what is human and religion what is divine; when we distinguish history from theology, or a study that must remain outside from a study that is ineradicably inside—when we say, in short, that, in talking about religion we are talking about human beings and not gods, we have said something true. But we are not done. For what is a human being? And what is God or the gods to her? —Nancy Levene (2017, p. 53)

Introduction What is the relationship between humanism and education? This simple question resists any easy answer. Both humanism and education have competing definitions. Without suggesting that these modes are mutually exclusive, humanism might be understood as an ontological category or as an ethical-political orientation. When modified by the adjective secular, humanism might be taken as an ontological claim about the nature of ultimate reality, namely, that there is no nature-transcendent reality whether understood as gods, utopian geographies such as paradise and Summerland, or states of being/nonbeing such as nirvana. Secular humanism might be understood more narrowly as the claim that gods, singular or plural, are not real independent of the human imagination. If we draw the concept in an even more restricted way, then secular humanism might be taken to mean, minimally, that the person in question does not know whether there are gods or other nature-transcendent realities. Such realities or their nonreality is not something that we can know. In this case, secular humanism is not so much an ontological claim as an epistemic one. It is about what we can and cannot know. This last view comports most closely with the ideal-theoretical self-understanding of science, though not with the actual practices of scientists and the scientifically informed. In assessing Edward Said as humanist and educator, I shall move among these and other notions of humanism. Said was not your standard humanist. He published his last word on the topic, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, in 2003, the year that he died after a long bout with Leukemia. Though he never tired of describing himself as a humanist, and though it is hard to understand how anyone who has actually read him could think otherwise, many people do. Perhaps

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they experience cognitive dissonance when reading Said, especially his most influential text, Orientalism. Almost singlehandedly this text enunciated a new domain of academic inquiry call postcolonial studies. Both because of the ideological orientation of this field of study and the fact that Said had a long and sustained encounter with the work of Michel Foucault, readers simply do not take his solicitude for humanism seriously or read past an affirmation that does not fit their cognitive frame. But Said is a radical humanist and that radicality is mediated by both Marxist forms of existentialist humanism (Sartre, Fanon, and others) and the antihumanism of Foucault and the structuralist/poststructuralist French left. Those who read Orientalism carelessly may think that they are reading an antihumanist analysis. After all, Said adopts much of the conceptual apparatus and vocabulary that Foucault developed in his archeological phase and that extend into his genealogies. Said is especially fond of the concepts of discourse and the archive in relation to which he gives shape to Orientalism. But looks can deceive. Said is a radical humanist who uses elements of an antihumanist critique to refine and sharp his humanism. In effect, he deploys antihumanism as homeopathy, as a poisoned/cure for the deficiencies of Eurocentric humanisms in their reactionary, liberal, and Marxist versions. Foucault’s conceptual apparatus and vocabulary enable him to wrestle Orientalism from the orientalists of area studies—also known as colonial and postcolonial management studies—and to redefine it. Said provides three definitions of Orientalism. First definition: “Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient—and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian or philologist— either in its specific or general aspects, is an Orientalist and what he does is Orientalism” (Said 1979, p.  2). Second definition: “Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the ‘Orient’ and (most of the time) the ‘Occident’” (Said 1979, p. 2). Third definition: Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point, Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching about it, settling it, ruling over it, in short, Orientalism is Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the orient. I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse, as described by him in The Archeology of the Knowledge and Discipline and Punish, to identify Orientalism. My

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contention that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-­ Enlightenment period. (Emphasis added, Said 1979, p. 3)

One might think of Orientalism as a massive outworking, transformation, and expansion of studia humanitatis, of humane and classical education in the modern period, which expresses itself, perhaps paradoxically, as imperial/colonial modernity. In Said’s analysis of Orientalism, the whole range of the ancient and the modern liberal arts is deployed in knowing the non-European other, specifically Asians and “Asians Minor,” in the service of a globalizing imperial project. In a sense, Said engages simultaneously in an emic and etic critique of Orientalism as both a marginal insider and outsider of this vast culture of imperialism. As a Palestinian-­ born American, he is both an object and an expert analyst of that knowledge. From this complicated subject position, he endeavors to reveal the entanglement of Western “power/knowledge” with the construction of the “Oriental” while disentangling from that formation a radical humanistic possibility, that is, a minor and fugitive practice of humanism as democratic criticism at the very site of an antidemocratic crime. Said brings to bear on the current configuration of knowledge a studia humanitatis of the future, which is in the making, and that is being created by the insurrection of subjugated humanities and the objects of their knowledge.

John Dewey Like humanism, education also challenges our conceptual imagination. The work of John Dewey represents the most serious effort to think about education as a humanist practice. I’ll work my way back to Said with a detour through Dewey. Regarding how we think about education broadly, Dewey notes that “any theory and set of practices is dogmatic which is not based upon critical examination of its own underlying principles” (Dewey 1938, p. 22). Dewey’s humanism is indissolubly bound up with his metaphysics of experience that accents continuity and integration, his ethical-­ political commitment to democracy, and his philosophy of education. Dewey is a radical empiricist. He is among those philosophers, from preSocratic materialists to Aristotle and beyond, who embrace the world of everyday experience. He is an empiricist in the sense that he takes the

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evidences of our senses as the basis of what we know. In this regard, empiricism is an epistemology, a theory of knowledge. However, Dewey is critical of standard notions of empiricism as expressed by the British school of John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume and is dissatisfied with Immanuel Kant’s attempt to remedy the problems associated with this kind of empiricism through transcendental critique. Transcendentalism is the notion that the human mind is structured by inherent forms of sensibility and categories of understanding that logically precede any encounter we have with the world. In short, experiences of all kinds presuppose and are made possible by the fact that we receive them in the sensible forms of space and time and understand them according to various logical categories that structure the mind. According to Kant, these forms of sensibility and categories of understanding must be real in order for us to have experiences at all. Kant undercuts traditional empiricism by arguing that there are logical realities that transcend experience. Though he accepts the critique of traditional empiricist notions of passivity and of the mind as a blank slate, Dewey is skeptical of Kant’s transcendental move. The mind is neither a blank slate nor a transcendental entity: It has a bio-evolutionary and a sociocultural history. To reiterate, Dewey is a radical empiricist, which is another way of saying “experimentalist,” a philosopher of experience, relationality, and continuity. Dewey’s philosophy of experience centers on the notion of continuity. This is the claim that experience does not comprise isolated and discrete events, which was the very assumption that led Kant to criticize the classical empiricists and to go transcendental in the first place. In a sense, Dewey is saying a pox on both of your houses as he seeks a third way. Of course, Dewey the humanist was much too humane to say this or at the very least to mean what this traditional aphorism, which is really a horrible curse, literally says. Radical empiricism is a via media, a third path between classical empiricism and transcendental philosophy. Dewey notes that every experience is connected to other experiences both antecedent and consequent. Experience is a relational and causal phenomenon in the world and not merely or, in the first instance, an inner subjective state. Experience is not in your mind and your mind is not in your head but is an artifact of sociality. So what exactly does it mean to say that experience is a connected, relational, and causal phenomenon in the world? Any kind of habit will do. Indeed, habit formation is Dewey’s privileged way of illustrating experience as continuity. For good or ill, when behaviors become repetitive, they take on the character of habits. Habits are dispositions to do

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more of the same under the appropriate circumstances. Telling the truth exercises our truth-telling muscle, so to speak, and disposes us to tell the truth in the future. Addictive drug or alcohol use disposes us to further addictive behavior. For good or ill, habits shape the kind of experiences we have, the experiences we desire, and inhibit our capacity to engage in behaviors such as lying and addictive drug and alcohol use that cut against the habit. Habits canalize the nature (healthy or pathological) of the growth we experience. Dewey puts it this way: “The basic characteristic of habit is that every experience enacted and undergone modifies the one who acts and undergoes, while this modification affects, whether we wish it or not, the quality of subsequent experiences” (Dewey 1938, p. 35). He argues that the task of the educator is to recognize where experience is going, to distinguish between experiences that lead to the growth of good habits and those that produce bad ones, while creating the circumstances in which students can have the right experiences. Though rooted in the present and the developed capacities of the student, the educator’s work is future oriented. This work seeks to project new habits of learning into the future of the student (Dewey 1938, pp. 38, 76). As the proverb says, experience is the best teacher. But experience is the worse teacher also. Some people learn the wrong lessons from experience, repeatedly. Thus: A Primary responsibility of educators is that they not only be aware of the general principle of the shaping of actual experience by environing conditions, but that they also recognize in the concrete what surroundings are conducive to having experiences that lead to growth. Above all, they should know how to utilize the surroundings, physical and social, that exist so as to extract from them all that they have to contribute to building up experiences that are worth while. (Dewey 1938, p. 40)

This is a very difficult task. It taxes the resources and places far greater demands on the educator than does the traditional education model where students are perceived as passive recipients of previously digested knowledge. The Deweyan educator seeks to avoid experiences that miseducate students by “arresting or distorting the growth of further experience.” This task challenges the creativity of the educator to the utmost. The educator must arrange educational experiences that balance the student’s immediate enjoyment with the cultivation of new habits that are conducive to further learning. “Hence the central problem of an education based

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upon experience is to select the kind of present experiences that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences” (Dewey 1938, pp. 40, 25, 27–28). Dewey’s philosophy of experience overcomes any bifurcation of inner and outer, subjective and objective experience. Experience integrates the two. Experience is a transaction between an individual and the environment, which includes other people, and the social world. Education is similarly an integration of inner and outer, of subjective and objective conditions. Educators use the “funded experiences of the past” to lure and goad their students toward good educational experiences and habit formation. In educational terms, the ultimate good habit is learning to learn and the desire to learn. The active union and interaction of continuity and integration provide “the measure of educative significance and value of an experience” (Dewey 1938, pp. 43–44). Dewey is no Pollyanna. He knows that education cannot be separated from social control. The only question is the nature of that control, whether it is more autocratic or democratic, statist or anarchist in orientation. To put it bluntly, do we educate for the benefit of the state or as a critical hedge against the power of the state? How we answer this question is crucial to how we conceive the purpose and ends of education. In this regard, education is irreducibly political. In addition to rejecting the notion that we have obligations to nonhuman qua superhuman powers, humanists, one could argue, ought to oppose any construction of the state as a god substitute or, in the language of Thomas Hobbes, as Leviathan. Democracy is a value-laden term that is widely and trans-ideologically affirmed as good. At the same time, its nature is highly contested. Virtually everyone, anarchists and authoritarians alike, is for democracy, but they disagree about its meaning. Dewey was an advocate of democracy in nearly all circumstances. He argues that a democratic, open, and noncoercive form of education is superior, both ethically and practically, to authoritarian education. It is here, around this ensemble of humanism, education, and democracy that John Dewey and Edward Said converge. As a critic of Orientalism, colonialism, and Eurocentric constructions of the human, Said has a sharper edge.

Edward W. Said When Dewey died in 1950, Edward W. Said was a 15-year-old college-­ prep boarding school student in Massachusetts. Dewey was Said’s predecessor at Columbia University where Said began teaching in 1963. I would

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imagine that Dewey casted a large shadow across the campus. Both of these great humanist intellectuals ranged broadly beyond their narrow professional expertise, Dewey’s disciplinary location was philosophy, Said’s, English and Comparative Literature. Dewey may very well be better known as an educational theorist than as a professional philosopher. Likewise, Said’s intellectual scope is much broader than the casual reader might know, from literary critic and theorist to classical music critic to critic of Orientalism, colonialism, and the dispossession of Palestinians by the State of Israel. Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Said’s final word on this subject, was originally presented as a set of lectures at Columbia University in 2000. So, with Dewey’s account of experience and education in mind, we turn back to Said. In Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Said describes his task as providing an account of humanism as a critical practice that informs how the humanist intellectual as scholar and teacher comports herself in a turbulent world torn by the belligerency of discursive and virtual wars and the destruction, death, and suffering caused by actual wars and various kinds of terrorism. Distinguishing his effort from Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” Said remarks that the usability of humanism as an intellectual and academic praxis is his chief concern; humanism for those who want to understand what they do, what commitment they assume as scholars, and who want to integrate these principles into their lived experiences as citizens (Said 2003, pp. 2, 6–7). Said’s effort demands that we think about the relations among humanism, humane, inhumane, and humanitarianism. Is there more than an etymological relation? Said certainly thinks there is and wishes to argue for a certain ethical-political relation among these terms. For his purposes, “the core of humanism is the secular notion that the historical world is made by men and women, and not by God” (emphasis added, Said 2003, p. 11). The corollary of this view is the claim that we can rationally understand the historical world because we created it; that we know things that were made according to the manner in which they were made. He derives this principle from the early modern humanist Giambattista Vico as formulated in New Science. According to Said, Vico takes secular history rather than sacred history as the subject of the humanities. Said bases this distinction on Vico’s sacred/gentile division; the difference between the biblical account of the Hebrew people under the providential guidance of YHWH, which ostensibly is outside historical time and inquiry, and the histories of non-divinely favored peoples. The humanities concern the artifacts of human effort, of their capacity for

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coherent expression. As an “ism” that abstracts from the concrete practices of humanists, humanism indexes the human will to create or discover form. Given his understanding of the humanities as personal, subjective, and intersubjectively centered phenomena, Said opposes them to impersonal and systematic forces such as the market of classical economics or the psychoanalytic unconscious (Said 2003, pp. 11, 15). Humanism is, well, human, all too human. Part of the humanist task is to combat destructive forms of humanism (there is no singular, uniform, or essential version), forms that betray the very idea, among which are narrow, exclusionary, and mean-spirited versions. Said rejects the notion that humanism as cultural and educational ideal requires the exclusion of broad segments of society and that only a small class of properly vetted readers and authors qualify for consideration. On this view, humanism is not an elitist idea, though there are undoubted humanist elites and elitist humanists. He regards humanism properly understood as “unending disclosure, discovery, self-criticism, and liberation” that is democratic and open to people of every background, class, ethnicity, and racial construction (Said 2003, pp. 21–22). In its focus on liberation, this notion comports well with the Christian humanism of Desiderius Erasmus. Moreover, Said affirms Walter Benjamin’s famous claim that “every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism” (Benjamin 2019, p. 200). Thus, he advocates a humanism of self-criticism, a tragic humanism that acknowledges that cultures are imperfect regardless of their achievements, tragically flawed at the very heart and height of their achievements. Civilization and barbarism are conjoint twins. It does get any better than that. The genocide of Indigenous Peoples, trans-Atlantic enslavement of African peoples, imperial/colonial modernity, the Belgian Congo genocide and nameless genocides throughout the colonial period, the Nazi holocaust in Christian Europe, and two world wars that were primarily driven by tensions internal to Europe are part of the “dialectic of Enlightenment.” Only the blind fail to see that knowledge and understanding of human history, and not merely the experiences of elites, is the essence of humanism. (Here, essence is a kind of unity without uniformity.) Consequently, they also fail to comprehend humanism as the ongoing and inclusive work of self-understanding through which all people, elites and commoners, seek self-realization. Properly understood, humanism is not the privileged much less exclusive possession of whites, males, Europeans, and Americans. Genius of various kinds is neither the birthmark nor the exclusive property of the West.

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In his account of humanism, Said privileges language. “Humanism is the exertion of one’s faculties with language in order to understand, reinterpret, and grapple with the products of language in history” (Said 2003, pp. 23, 26, 28). The Arnoldian concept of humanism, which defines culture as “the best that has been thought and said” (Arnold 1993, p. 79), has been displaced or decentered, as the jargon goes, by a quotidian understanding. As an example of this displacement of the Arnoldian cultural idea, Said points to the effects of the insurgent discipline of African American Studies. Said claims that this insurgent form of knowledge has made two contributions to a culture of democratic criticism. First, it questioned the universalism of Eurocentric humanism. Second and simultaneously, African American Studies or Black Studies as some prefer reveals with irresistible urgency the constitutive role of Black experience, the doings and sufferings of Black people, in American humanism. The historical experience of African Americans is Exhibit A in the multiple exclusions that define the purported universalism of Western humanism. It exposes the practice of writing differences of all kind out of the standard account of humanism. In demanding that the history and culture of Black people be acknowledged, African American Studies opened the door for similar demands by women, transgender persons, Indigenous peoples, and other marginalized, minoritized, and racialized groups. By shedding light on these exclusions, this insurrection of suppressed histories, cultures, and knowledges revealed an implicit idea of national identity that purported to be representative but in fact was highly restricted to a racialized elite class. This dishonest exclusivity and the sanitized version of national identity it empowers work to conceal the cultural turbulence and unpleasant violence of an immigrant and multicultural America. I wish to put the point more emphatically than Said. The highly redacted version of American identity that Said identifies and the notion of humanism it presupposes conceal its violent origins in genocide, settler colonialism, and chattel slavery driven by an insatiable desire for land and cheap labor (mercantile, planter, and industrial capitalisms) enmeshed in a violent culture of honor. We have to question the humanism of American humanists who, when they were not complicit with these practices, were milquetoast in their observations if not silent (Said 2003, pp. 44–46). Of course, more radical critics of humanism might say that there is no reason for surprise, and genocide, settler colonialism, and chattel slavery are what humanism is and does.1 1

 Frank Wilderson displays a version of this idea in 2010 and 2020.

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Said rejects the totalizing character of this critique. Humanism is not perfect. We should neither search for perfection nor expect to find it. However, it is important that we acknowledge and more importantly learn from our historical failures. So how should a mature, historically conscious, and self-critical humanism look? What would it mean to enact that kind of humanistic practice? It means recognizing that critique ought to be the core practice, “critique as a form of democratic freedom and as a continuous practice of questioning” (Said 2003, p.  47). Inquiry is the heart of humanism. This kind of humanism would acknowledge rather than deny the constitutive role of early colonial formations, the post-Cold War world order, and America’s status as the sole superpower in the invidious construction of knowledge. Said claims that religious enthusiasm poses the gravest danger to humanism as a culture of democratic criticism given its antidemocratic nature. Monotheistic forms of religion, in particular, encode a sacred politics that is dogmatic, intolerant, and inhumane. But here too we need to be careful. It is as difficult to separate religion and politics as to isolate and insulate various cultures. Like the biblical wheat and weeds, the roots and branches of various cultures intertwine, and to pull up one, or disentangle their organic and historical entanglements would only mutilate them. It is tempting to essentialize. Essentialism underwrites the assumption that cultures are hermetic. Even though essentialism has been subjected to devastating critique in virtually every domain of knowledge, it continues to beat as humanism heart and to underwrite cultural arrogance. In his binary understanding of religion and the secular, Said appears to affirm the very dogmatism and uniformity that he otherwise rejects. His double-mindedness is best understood, I believe, in relation to a constitutive ambiguity in the concept of humanism that he is constantly negotiating and that produces an ambivalent presentation. At times he sounds exactly like the Heideggerian and structuralist/poststructuralist antihumanists from whom, ultimately, he distinguishes himself. We can anticipate the whiplash, therefore, when he argues that it is past time that we abandon this way of thinking and embrace humanism as what it truly is, namely, “an unsettling adventure in difference” where we encounter alternative traditions and texts that challenge what we know and demand a new hermeneutics and modes of contextualization (Said 2003, pp. 51–52, 54–55). The humanism the Said envisions, which he struggles to rescue from invidious Eurocentric humanisms on the one side and from Heidegger-inspired (and also Eurocentric) antihumanist critiques on the other side, shows the circumstances of its birth, which includes an

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unreconstructed Enlightenment critique of religion. Thus the unsettling experience of Said reproducing dogmatism as he dislodges it. Said argues that Eurocentrism has deformed twentieth-century American humanism and that fact merits interrogation. Across the board, the restrictions of basic core university courses to a small number of translated and dutifully venerated Western masterpieces, the narrowed perspectives on what constitutes ‘our’ world, the obliviousness to traditions and languages that seem to be outside respectable or approved attention—all of these must be jettisoned or at the very least submitted to a radical humanistic critique. For one thing, too much is known about other traditions to believe that even humanism itself is exclusively a Western practice. (Said 2003, pp. 53–54)

In response to the failures of humanism, Said calls for a renewal of the philological method, that is, a patient, detail-oriented, highly focused, and lifelong scrutiny of words and rhetoric. This work, he argues, demonstrates the secular and worldly character of the humanistic enterprise. Said is self-conscious in his use of secular and worldliness, which in earlier work he distinguishes from the otherworldliness and dogmatism of the religious disposition. Both concepts, he argues, enable us to account for the contingencies of distinctively human life, practices, and values as opposed to the purported eternity and stability of values with a supernatural provenance (Said 2003, p. 61). Otherwise put, the subject of humanism is anthropology rather than theology. (Sophisticated theologians, I might add, have been saying the same thing about theology for more than 100 years.) With a secular and worldly disposition, philological method may be among the best hedges we have against humanism’s sorry record of elitism, essentialism, and the denial of difference that underwrite acts of domination. Said’s instinct is to herd those aspects of humanism he does not like under the categories of theology and religion. If humanism was born as a flight from divinity, or at least from scholastic and dogmatic conceptions of God and religion, then its deficiencies represent a failure to complete the break. But I do not think that this effort works. The invidious construction of theology and religion cannot do all the critical work that must be done. Said argues that the humanist disposition entails a double movement of reception and resistance. Receptivity is a kind of passivity where the reader submits to the text, taking texts, as it were, on their own terms, “treating them provisionally at first as discrete objects” free of context, which is

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how, phenomenologically, they initially appear. Resistance is the activity of contextual interpretation. Said’s categories remind one of Kant’s epistemic categories of receptivity (forms of sensibility) and spontaneity (categories of understanding), which describe the passive and active dimensions of knowing. Said further specifies his notion of reception by noting that it derives from ijtihad, the Muslim legal practice of independent reasoning. In Said’s elaboration of this practice, receptivity modeled on ijtihad requires “close reading, hermeneutic induction, and it entails troping the general language further in one’s own critical language with a full recognition that the work of art in question remains at a necessary final remove, unreconciled and in a state of integral wholeness that one has tried to comprehend or impose” (Said 2003, pp. 70–71). In other words, artistic and aesthetic objects transcend our efforts to understand them, to comprehensively capture them in a set of descriptions or analyses. In his most non-Deweyan mood, Said says that he agrees for the most part with Adorno’s claim regarding the fundamental irreconcilability of aesthetic and nonaesthetic judgments and that the humanist must affirm this failed meeting as a necessary condition of their work. “Art is not simply there: it exists intensely in a state of unreconciled opposition to the depredations of daily life, the uncontrolled mystery on the bestial floor” (Said 2003, p. 63). In Art as Experience, Dewey argues, to the contrary, that art and aesthetics inform the most quotidian human activities, that there is a continuum between the highest artistic achievements and the ordinary and the everyday, and that human experience is aesthetic and artistic all the way down to its groundless ground (Dewey 1980 [1934]). On Dewey’s view, Said’s notion of the aesthetic object is a bit too precious. In constructing art as transcendent object, Said remains a captive of an antidemocratic high cultural humanism in a way that Dewey is not. Further, I would argue that Dewey’s notion of art and aesthetics is more hospitable to the open culture of democratic criticism—as “an unsettling adventure in difference”—that Said advocates than are the views he derives from Adorno. Said’s categories of receptivity and resistance are integral to his call for a return to philology, a love of and careful attention to words. To get a better handle on Said’s notion of philological method, we might compare this practice to the deconstructive style of reading. Said criticizes Derridean readings for their failure to go beyond undecidability and uncertainty. Ending where it begins, the circular logic of deconstruction is vicious rather than virtuous. Said regards this style of reading, interpretation, and

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analysis as ethically and politically irresponsible. Advocates of this style of writing wrap their refusal to decide, to choose between competing options, in a higher sophistication and virtue. Said remarks that revealing “wavering and vacillation in writing,” as he describes uncertainty and undecidability, is useful to a certain degree, just as Foucault’s stricture regarding knowledge as ultimately serving power has its uses. But these newer and far more suspicious masters of suspicion defer for too long the necessity of choosing and thus fail to acknowledge the forms of “human emancipation and enlightenment” that the act of reading entails, however limited and imperfect. These modest, incremental successes get lost in cynicism, reductive accounts, and the failure to commit (Said 2003, p.  66). This critique is more apropos of Foucault than of Derrida who retains a subtlety that Foucault does not. Said is not arguing against difficult and highly technical writing. But if the humanist, here he speaks in particular of the humanistic intellectual, wishes to reach a broad audience, then she must avoid alienating jargon. Jargon is time-efficient and sometimes unavoidable. When its use is necessary, then the writer, on first usage, should carefully explain what it means in plain language. Some things are difficult to say with simple clarity. Here, the difficulty of the saying mimics in an unavoidable way the difficulty of what is said. Beyond this technical necessity, there is another reason for using jargon and employing a challenging writing style. This is what Said has in mind in the following remark: True, as Judith Butler has argued, the prepacked style of what is considered acceptable prose risks concealing the ideological presuppositions it is based on; she has cited Adorno’s difficult syntax and thorny mode of expression as a precedent for eluding, even defeating the smooth papering-over of injustice and suffering by which discourse covers its complicity with political malfeasance. Unfortunately, Adorno’s poetic insights and dialectical genius are in very short supply even among those who try to emulate his style; as Sartre said in another context, Valéry was a petit bourgeois, but not every petit bourgeois is a Valéry. Not every coiner of rebarbative language is an Adorno. (Said 2003, p. 72)

Like many serious thinkers, our ability to communicate complex knowledge in contemporary society worries him. Said died in 2003 on the cusp of the digitized world we now inhabit. Were he alive today, I can imagine that his concern would have only intensified given the challenges that

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everyone faces in our rapidly changing and destabilizing digital environment. Digital technologies increase exponentially both the volume and the pace at which information circulates. It makes the educator’s and the intellectual’s task of distinguishing knowledge from mere information and truth from lies increasingly difficult. Said encourages humanists to break free from the tyranny of the sound-bite, headline format and strive to enable “a longer, more deliberate process of reflection, research, and inquiring argument that” actually engages the situation in question. This too is an increasingly difficult task. Even humanistic intellectuals, in the relatively cloistered space of the college and university, feel pressure to conform to the market imperatives of neoliberal globalization. For example, one might think of the push for “massive open online courses” (MOOCs) as the premier academic manifestation of the kind of neoliberal, labor-displacing automation occurring in other sectors of the global economy. These realities notwithstanding, Said argues that humanists “must excavate the silences, the world of memory, of itinerant, barely surviving groups, the places of exclusion and invisibility.” This type of knowledge—devalued, subjugated, fugitive—is typically excluded from official reports but concerns the very processes and consequences of neoliberal globalization that grinds down, flattens out, and displaces; that destroys the environment; that undermines the sustainability of small nations and local economies; and that further disadvantages the most marginalized peoples (Said 2003, pp. 74, 80–81). Said does not explicitly address the rise of digital technologies and the proliferation of information and knowledge in part because so much of it has occurred in the nearly two decades since his death. However, I wish to situate his comments about the expanded writing environment in which the humanistic intellectual works within the context of those digital developments. Even if one is a journalist, he argues, and I would say especially if one writes for a digital publication, the discourse and the archive as Foucault meticulously describes them in The Archaeology of Knowledge and elsewhere require radical modification. The virtual realities of digitized information, and their unmanageable proliferation, have transformed both archive and audience (Said 2003, p. 130). Among the risks of writing in this environment is the temptation to either accent complete opacity or complete transparency. Given this binary choice, Said recommends transparency over opacity. But recalling, perhaps, his critique of Butler, he observes that “transparent, simple, clear prose presents its own challenges, since the ever-present danger is that one can fall into the misleadingly

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simple neutrality of a journalistic World-English idiom that is indistinguishable from CNN or USA Today prose” (Said 2003, p. 131). Given the choice of either repelling readers and meddling editors or winning readers with a simple prose style that mimics, and threatens to reinforce, the very simple mindedness one seeks to challenge, Said is forced to acknowledge the quandary that drives Judith Butler’s often arcane writing style. Despite this complexity and challenge, Said argues that the intellectual must contest power in the language that power uses. There is no language outside the shared language of power and its critics. For example, the State Department and its opponents use the same language such as human rights and wars of liberation. Using this common language, the humanistic intellectual must recapture and reclaim the subject by reconnecting it to “tremendously complicated realities” that their antagonists simplify, diminish, betray, or dissolve (Said 2003, p. 132). Said speaks of his own approach but thinks that it is valid as a general claim. In response to the urgent circumstances he has described, Said advocates that humanists adopt “a para-doxal mode of thought,” an idea that he gets from Pierre Bourdieu. Para-doxal thought regards common sense and elite opinion with equal skepticism. To right-thinking people of either orientation, para-doxal thought risks appearing as either “an effort “to ‘shock the bourgeois’” or as a shameful “indifference to the suffering of the most disadvantaged people in our society.” Said quotes Bourdieu who basically argues that the only way to avoid the substantialist error of establishing an unmediated and thus false homology between people and the spaces they inhabit (such as Oriental and Orient) is “‘through a rigorous analysis of the relations between the structures of social space and those of physical space.’” The point here is to avoid misplaced concreteness or reification. But the purpose of such analysis is not more efficient rulership. The humanist should not be in the business of auditioning for the role of consigliere to the state or other principalities and powers, that is, humanistic intellectuals as a matter of principle should not get into the policy game. Their job is not to provide policy solutions but to keep critical eyes on those who do. They should resist the assumption that knowledge ought to serve the ruling power and avoid incorporation and cooptation by the state. Whenever possible, intellectuals should expose the mystifying efforts of the powerful, which often take a discursive form (Said 2003, pp. 83, 124–135). Said hankers for a more robust notion of truth than those typically available in many versions of postmodernist and poststructuralist thought or, for that matter, conventional philosophy. In light of

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this desire, he rejects, for example, the ultrapostmodernism of Richard Rorty that he elaborates vaguely in relation to a contemptuous critique of those he describes as the academic left. On Said’s view, this perspective has little to recommend it and many reasons for resisting its bromides. He finds this perspective lacking in the face of ethnic cleansing and genocide that occurred under the sanctions-regime in Iraq or other evils that track such events including torture, famine, censorship, and ignorance. He appears to associate this Rortyian insouciance with a disposition that he elsewhere describes as religious criticism. I think that his critique misfires on this point. This point does not really touch his basic claim that Rorty-­ style postmodernism, a term that now sounds stale, undermines the status of human rights. Said worries that Rorty’s construction of human rights, as merely “cultural or grammatical things,” necessarily diminishes the force of any critique of their violation. I read Rorty’s antirealism as saying that the world or God cannot underwrite of knowledge claims and ethical judgments. In assuming that reality requires more than this, Said is compelled to describe himself as a “crude foundationalists,” which appears to him as the only way to safeguard what he values from what he takes to be the corrosive views of Rortyian postmodernism. As I read Said, a forceful advocate of secular criticism loses his nerve in the face of a secular critique whose epistemic radicality outpaces his own. The task of the humanistic intellectual is to contest the official narrative and memory that sanitize history and underwrite “national identity and mission.” Said ends his account on an ambiguous note. The role of the intellectual is to engage in an oppositional and dialectical form of critique in which differences are reconciled. On the other hand, some conflictual experiences resist dialectical mediation. They are overlapping but irreconcilable. Like a work of nondiscursive art that we can never adequately know or comprehensively describe, some experiences are “exigent, resistant, intransigent” toward our efforts to reconcile them. The intellectual must be willing to acknowledge this truth even as she strives to reconcile the irreconcilable (Said 2003, pp. 136, 141, 143–144).

Giambattista Vico and Erich Auerbach If Said “apprenticed” himself to any humanist scholars and teachers, then Auerbach and Vico would be those “masters.” Standing between Erasmus in the sixteenth century and Auerbach in the twentieth, Vico (along with Auerbach) represents Said’s ideal humanist. Said’s corpus is studded with

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numerous references long and short to Vico and to the influence of his work, especially The New Science, on his own work as a humanistic intellectual. Vico is paradigmatic for Said because his manner of conceptualizing the development of human thought enables Said to get better leverage on what he invidiously labels as theologizing, dogma, and “religious criticism.” Said never tires of reaffirming Vico’s central idea that he summarizes in a sentence. “What humans do is what makes them human beings; what they know is what they have done” (Said 1983, p. 112). Vico provides both a descriptive ontology and an epistemology that redirects human attention and energy from the sacred to the profane, from the acts of the gods to the earthly endeavors of those beings who act, suffer, and bury their dead; from sacred history exemplified by God’s agency within ancient Hebrew history to the worldly history of the Gentiles. The human mind and its modification displace the mind of God as object of inquiry and source of knowledge. By attending to the course and recourse of history, Vico enables us to break free from the endless cycles of repeating what the gods have done, of being imitators of their originality. “There is a great difference.” Said remarks, “between what in The New Science Vico describes as the complex, heterogenous, and ‘gentile’ world of nations and what in contrast he designated as the domain of sacred history.” Unlike the latter, gentile or secular history develops heterogeneously, through recurrent cycles of culminations, collapses, and new beginnings. These develops are subject to historical investigation by “new scientists,” that is, historicizing inquirers. They can do so because humans can know “what they have made, that is, the historical, social, and secular” (Said 1983, pp. 290–291). Vico uses ideal history to refocus our attention on human making, on what humans do, and how they make themselves in the process. This is neither Hegel’s spiritual labor of self-making and understanding nor the Marxist subject produced and reproduced through material labor. While encompassing elements of both forms of making, before they were imagined by Hegel and Marx, Vico’s perspective runs closer to the latter while maintaining its distinctiveness, color, and power of provocation. Said was provoked. The following passage from the Conclusion of The New Science, which Said is fond of quoting, is among the most famous and gives the reader a sense of its flavor. I quote at length: It is true that men have themselves made this world of nations (and we took this as the first incontestable principle of our Science, since we despaired of

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finding it from the philosophers and philologists but this world without doubt has issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always superior to the particular ends that men had proposed to themselves; which narrow ends, made means to serve wider ends, it has always employed to preserve the human race upon this earth. Men mean to gratify their bestial lust and abandon their offspring, and they inaugurate the chastity of marriage from which the families arise. The fathers mean to exercise without restraint their paternal power over their clients, and they subject them to the civil powers from which the cities arise. The reigning orders of nobles mean to abuse their lordly freedom over the plebeians, and they are obliged to submit to the laws which establish popular liberty. The free peoples mean to shake off the yoke of their laws, and they become subject to monarchs. The monarchs mean to strengthen their own positions by debasing their subjects with all the vices of dissoluteness, and they dispose them to endure slavery at the hands of stronger nations. The nations mean to dissolve themselves, and their remnants flee for safety to the wilderness, whence, like the phoenix, they rise again. That which did all this was mind, for men did it with intelligence; it was not fate, for they did it by choice; not chance, for the results of their always so acting are perpetually the same. (Vico 1984, p. 425)

Said’s most extensive engagement with Vico occurs in Beginnings: Intention and Method where he puts him to work in sorting through the difference between origins and beginnings. Beginnings is a human way of craving human agency out of the prior acts of the gods. Or, as Said puts it, “Only by imagining (divining = inventing) a force anterior to our origins, a force for Vico capable of preventing further regress into irremediable savagery, can we begin to intend to be human” (Said 1975, p. 349). Here, he speaks of humanity as a human rather than a divine creation where being human is about beginning against the backdrop of, and even if opposition to, what God and the gods have already done. Beginning brings the regress of divine origins to an end. But beginnings unlike origins are never final, once and for all. To begin is always to begin again and again. Beginning is repetition rather than originality, a human rather than a divine act. (Or as Marx might put it, humans make history but do not make the circumstances under which they do so. Unlike divine making, human making is not ex nihilo. Humans can only begin, again.) This is what Said discerns in Vico’s quasi-Platonic notion of an ideal eternal history that moves through recurring ages of gods, heroes, and humans. Said takes these three stages (corsi and recorsi) of psychocultural development as epoch-making modifications of the human mind. In their bestial

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savagery, on the bestial floor (the uncontrollable mystery of human existence, and perhaps of all existence)2 where in ignorance they were barely distinguishable from (other) animals, humans first understood the world, matters of cause and effect, as acts of God and the gods, and later of heroes. Gods, heroes, and men are three modalities of human self-understanding and being. To put it crudely, one might say that humans evolved from gods and heroes, from the divine to the superhuman to men, and that only when they became “men” did they truly become human. Again, gods, heroes, and men correspond to modifications of the mind, modalities of becoming human, and forms of human understanding (Said 1975, pp. 349–353). Human intelligence means for Vico the willed perpetuation, the constantly experienced order of being. The collective human fate is far from a simple choice over extinction. It entails the historical creation) also constantly experienced) of an order of meaning different from (hence gentile—i.e., the world of the gentes and families) the order of God’s sacred history. Man’s beginning is a transgression; and so long as man exists, the fact of his existence asserts the beginning-as-transgression. (Said 1975, p. 353)

The human act of beginning is a transgression against divine origins. From his reading of Vico, Said derives “seven Vichian signpost” that inform his own work as a humanist scholar and educator. First, Vico’s distinction between the gentile (the history of the nations) and the Hebrews (sacred history) corresponds to Said’s distinction between human beginnings and divine origins. Second, Vico’s intellectual practice combines a particular focus on an idiosyncratic problem and a universal solicitude for collective human experience. Without denying genealogical succession and biological foundations, the third signpost is Vico’s acute awareness of multiple forms of relation that are nonlinear and nonsequential, especially, parallelism, adjacency, and complementarity, relations that are lateral and dispersed. Fourth, Vico’s work reveals the interplay of “beginning and beginning-again,” of beginning as repetition rather than origin. Said describes the fifth Vichian signpost as follows: “Language as rewriting, as history conditioned by repetition, as encipherment and dissemination—the instability, and the richness, of a text as practice and as 2  I am reinterpreting William Butler Yeats’ reference to Jesus as applicable to all human life, indeed, to all life.

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idea.” Sixth, Vico provides a crucial model for the humanistic intellectual by exploring topics that defy conventional categories of commentary, chronology, and thematic analysis. Seventh and finally, Vico demonstrates that writing exemplifies the act of beginning: It inaugurates and sustains a new regime of meaning and writing that challenges a preexisting one; gentile (historical) writing and meaning displaces a sacred version. I will note here if only in passing that Nancy Levene provides an incisive critique of Said’s interpretation of Vico’s sacred/gentile distinction. She rejects the notion that so-called sacred history and the divine are outside history and critical inquiry, that the sacred is about something that we cannot know and about which we cannot pose questions of truth and value (Levene 2017, pp. 47–48). On her reading of Vico, divine providence and history, that is, human nature and powers, are mutually constitutive. The Hebrew/Gentile distinction is a conceit, a myth, an elaborate metaphor that enables Vico to separate what God has made (nature and the sacred history of the Hebrews) from what the gentiles have made, that is, history. The metaphor separates natural cycles and historicity. According to Vico’s verum-factum principle, what humans make, they can know. On these points, Levene agrees with Said’s interpretation of Vico. However, she diverges from Said when she observes, “In Vico, the religious and the secular are each the subject of history.” (Among other things, this means that inquiry regarding truth is not outside the jurisdiction of religious studies in as much as truth is not merely given but is made. Religious studies is necessarily among other things a normative enterprise.) The very notions of the sacred and the divine depend on historical consciousness, the human capacity to distinguish, and the power of distinction. The construction of the sacred/gentile distinction is a creative act of mind, imagination, and of self-understanding. Nature is what is “given,” history is what is “made.” History is what we make of and in flight from the given. Only the perspective of history can equip us to make this distinction. Historical consciousness enables us to distinguish history from nature (Levene 2017, pp. 57, 75–79, 90, 100). The cycles of human history that Vico describes in the New Science—the ages, respectively, of gods, heroes, and humans represent the phenomenology of the human imagination and understanding as Homo sapiens (the given) become human (the made). Beginning and beginning again is sacred and historical because they are human.

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With Levene’s insights in mind, we return to Said’s account of Vico and his humanist legacy. Said regards Vico as Erich Auerbach’s humanist predecessor, describing him as “Vico’s principle and most profound literary student” (Said 1975, pp. 357, 363). As a scholar, Auerbach produced a German translation of Vico’s La Scienza Nuova, the historicism of which inflected his hermeneutical method that drew heavily on the interpretive tradition of Friedrich Schleiermacher,3 Wilhelm Dilthey, and others. Not only is Said captivated by Auerbach’s signature work, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature—“the greatest and most influential literary humanistic work of the past half century”—he is especially impressed by Auerbach’s ability to write it under the circumstances he faced. A Jewish refugee from the Nazi onslaught in Europe, Auerbach holed up in Istanbul where he wrote Mimesis without access to a Western research library. He relied primarily on an enviable humanist education and a working memory and literary imagination that were equally prodigious. For Said, Mimesis exemplifies humanistic practice at its highest, as Auerbach endeavors to do nothing less than to represent Western representations of reality across several forms of writing, from Homer to Dante to Virginia Wolf. Mimesis, Said observes, is grand even in its Eurocentrism, an inter-European ethnocentrism that privileges German over the French while giving short shrift to English language contributions to what Goethe calls world literature (Said 2003, pp. 85–90, 94–95). According to Said, Mimesis is not a fount of easily appropriated concepts because Auerbach operates on the level of detail exposition and explication rather than the grand concept. In considering this detail, Said identifies what he describes as three seminal moments in Western literary history. The first moment pertains to Auerbach’s reading of a particular story in the Christian Scripture or, as some call it, the “Old Testament,” the second moment is Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the third, the emergence of the realistic novel. These seminal moments, and I guess that is the right word since all but a few of the writers are male, structure Auerbach’s grand narrative of the Western literary canon. What is important for our purposes is what Said thinks Auerbach’s account of these moments reveals about humanistic practice. According to Said, Auerbach’s reading of Peter’s denial of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, and its focus on the quotidian lives of common people in the emerging world of early Christianity, signal a shift from the antique classical tradition to a new 3

 Said mistakenly gives “Herman” as Schleiermacher’s first name (2003, p. 89).

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mode of representation. “Christianity shatters the classical balance between high and low styles, just as Jesus’s life destroys the separation between the sublime and the everyday” (Said 2003, p. 106). Ordinary people become the subject of pathos and not merely bathos, where the doing and suffering of the humble reveal tragedy and sustain a grand narrative. This is a humanist achievement that encodes a proto-democratic sensibility. In turn, Dante’s great poetic work, The Divine Comedy, a work rooted in Thomas Aquinas’ Christian cosmology where Jesus baptizes Aristotle into the Christian fold, and that is full of otherworldly places and acts, ultimately reveals a reality that is basically human. Sacred history notwithstanding, Dante reveals that human life is all too human. A growing historicism that characterizes the three seminal moments culminates with the modern and realistic novel that Auerbach associates with multiple perspectives, dynamism, and holistic representations of history (Said 2003, pp.  107–114). In these three seminal moments in Auerbach’s Mimesis, Said discerns humanism as a turn to the common and every day, as emergent in sacred forms, and as concerned with a fuller representation of history as something that humans make and, therefore, can know. To paraphrase and elaborate an observation by Levene, Said regards history as inexorably Orientalist. He desires a secular history but is skeptical about its possibility. “When he speaks of liberation, he therefore searches for a set of generics: all cultures, all peoples.” This distinguishes him invidiously from Vico who understands that we will never “know every mind and culture alike” and who thus historicizes the mind. If the specter of Orientalism, along with the convergent and divergent logics of imperial/colonial/capitalist modernity, haunts Said’s democratic humanist dreams, then the common world that Levene describes and the democratic commonwealth that Said desires will not have the character of a natural fact, of an antecedent reality that we discover but the attributes of a historical artifact, and of a common world that we jointly and inclusively make (Levene 2017, p. 94).

Conclusion History is what humans make and American humanists have made a mess of things. We might take Humanism and Democratic Criticism as a wholesale critique of the American educational establishment, both academic and nonacademic. Their common failure is to see humanity in its capaciousness and manifold expressions. They conflate the human with the

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Western, the male, the Christian. Likewise, they construe the experiences of the wealthy and powerful as exemplifying the truly human. Encoding an aristocratic sensibility, they cannot resist rank-ordering human types. In the language of Matthew Arnold, this rank-ordering corresponds to what they regard as “the best that has been thought and said.” The American educational establishment, “K” through college, conspires to reproduce these associations between culture and people. Once established, these associations are hard to dislodge. Critics must work overtime to contest the notion that some people are merely junior partners in the humanistic adventure and that some humans have a probationary, prove it to us, status (e.g., Wilderson 2010, 2020; Warren 2018). The sensibility Said criticizes is captured well in the crude and bellicose language of Saul Bellow who, in an interview with Alfred Kazin for the New Yorker magazine, remarked: “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him” (Bellow 1994). While there is overlap between them, Said and his antihumanist interlocutors and critics—those who subscribe to poststructuralist antihumanism—construct humanism differently and worry about different things. Viewed through Deweyan lenses, we might construe Said’s argument as the claim that American and other Western humanists have a defective view of the human, which reflects their inadequate understanding of experience and education. They deny the contiguity and integrated character of experience and education, the manifestation of experience as good or bad habit formation, and its fundamental role in the quality of the education students receive. Thus, they view humanism and the humanities as the product of a kind of cultural-racial essence that defines Western civilization rather than a matter of historical contingency and the kind of experiences available to the people in question. In short, they think of humanism in culturally proprietary terms. In the first instance, humanism is a property of the West. This view affects and infects related ideas such as human, humane, inhumane, and humanitarian. In our war-torn and conflict-­ridden world, these terms are applied in a differential, hierarchical, and exclusionary manner that reflects the historical self-understand of Western humanism itself. This Western self-understanding drove Fanon’s comments that are quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Those words bear repeating. “Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe.” Though deeply critical, these are the words of a humanist. Like Sylvia Wynter, Fanon calls

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for a humanism after humanism, a new humanism that resists the desire to “manipulate the physical processes of nature in order to enhance the military and economic power of some human groups over others.” This new studia humanitatis, a humanism after the humanism of European Man, “must be reinvented as a higher order of human knowledge, able to provide an ‘outer view’ which takes the human rather than any one of its variations as Subject” (Wynter 1984, p.  56). Humanism must come to terms with the multiple genres of the human. The Said of Humanism and Democratic Criticism, indeed, the activist, scholar, and educator that we encounter throughout his life, resonates with this anti-antihumanist view. This anti-antihumanism, it should be noted, is mediated by a dialectical, “yes” and “no,” encounter with antihumanism in its Heideggerian, structuralist, and poststructuralist forms. Like John Dewey, Edward Said is a secular humanist. He believes that he knows and knows that he believes (Derrida 1998, p. 40)—that God is imaginary. In this regard, like everyone else, he remains with a hermeneutical circle of faith. His hard turn from divinitas to humanitas is more polemical than Dewey’s soft turn. Unlike Dewey who found a use for God as a metaphor for inclusive ideal ends, when properly de-­transcendentalized and reconstructed, Said has no use for God at all. To paraphrase Marx, Said’s critique of religion, his disavowal of God, is the premise of his critique. But his rejection of God and religion is merely the beginning of his critique of imperialism and its culture, of racism, authoritarianism, domination, and cruelty—of humanism as it (often) is and not of the humanism that can and must be. Understood in this way, and with an acknowledgment of Nancy Levene’s inspiration (2017, p. 5), humanism is the project of making values collective, a commonwealth. But we should not imagine as Said apparently did or, at least, hoped that this democratic commonwealth will be post-religious or that religious people will stop engaging in practices and making claims that challenge the limits of secular reason.4 Such claims are part of a democratic exchange of reasons (Stout 2004). Contra the view of some, truth claims no less 4  Said persists in thinking of religion as merely an abstraction. Thus his Enlightenmentstyle critique of religion as simply dogmatism and obscurantism. He never adopted the Frankfurt School-derived notion of religion as a “real abstraction,” that is, as reflecting the realities and constraints of our social practices, of relations of production that are driven by the inevitability of commodity fetishism in societies organized by a capitalist mode of production. On this view, religion exists because it says something true about the world (Toscano 2010). It is not simply otherworldly in relation to which Said’s trope of worldliness is a cri-

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than practices are the subject of religious studies as an academic field. Religious truth claims are part of the object to be understood. They need not be embraced or affirmed, but they cannot be bracketed (e.g., Lincoln 1996). As Levene remarks in the opening epigraph, the questions— “[W]hat is a human? And what is God or the gods to her?”—will not go away.

References Arnold, Matthew. 1993. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings. Ed., Stefan Collini. Cambridge University Press. Bellow, Saul. 1994. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1994-­06-­19/ features/9406190395_1_saul-­bellow-­janis-­freedman-­keith-­botsford/2. Benjamin, Walter. 2019. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed., Hannah Arendt. New York: Mariner Book. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone. In Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, 1–78. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dewey, John. 1938. Experience and Education. New  York: Macmillan Publishing Co. ———. 1980. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Books. Fanon, Frantz. 1961. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Levene, Nancy. 2017. Powers of Distinction: On Religion and Modernity. Princeton University Press. Lincoln, Bruce. 1996. Theses on Method. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 8: 225–227. Said, Edward. 1975. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New  York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1983. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2003. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New  York: Columbia University Press. Stout, Jeffrey. 2004. Democracy and Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Toscano, Alberto. 2010. Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea. London: Verso.

tique and provocation. I should note that some critics regard Toscano’s account of religion as, in fact, an ideal abstraction from the real abstraction of commodity exchange.

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Vico, Giambattista. 1984. The New Science of Giambattista Vico Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of “Practic of the New Science”. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Warren, Calvin L. 2018. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Durham: Duke University Press. Wilderson, Frank. 2010. Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2020. Afropessimism. New York: Liveright. Wynter, Sylvia. 1984. The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism. boundary 2 (12): 19–70. William David Hart (PhD Princeton, 1994) is the Margaret W.  Harmon Professor of Religious Studies at Macalester College. He is the author of The Blackness of Black: Key Concepts in Critical Discourse (2020); Afro-­Eccentricity: Beyond the Standard Narrative of Black Religion (Palgrave 2011); Black Religion: Malcolm X, Julius Lester, and Jan Willis (Palgrave 2008); and Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture (2000). His research interests include black studies, social theory, philosophy of race, American philosophy, and the intersections of religion, ethics, and politics.

CHAPTER 5

Going Back to College: The Survival of Unitarian Universalism Depends on It April D. DeConick

Abstract  Despite historical ties to Unitarianism and Universalism, Unitarian Universalism today is a new religious movement in its second generation. Although we might be led to believe that Unitarian Universalism is a Christian denomination with a lengthy history among Unitarians and Universalists, this grand narrative of their origins requires some reflection. The construction of this particular narrative is more a function of the decision in 1961 when the Unitarians and Universalists consolidated and chose the name Unitarian Universalist to highlight their historic heritage, rather than a new name like United Liberal Church of America or the Free Church of America, which were favored by those who wished to be descriptive of their distinctive mission and attract more constituencies into their new church from among the Quakers and ethical culture societies. Keywords  Unitarian • Universalism • Liberal religion • New religious movements

A. D. DeConick (*) Rice University, Houston, TX, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. D. Hart (ed.), Educating Humanists, Studies in Humanism and Atheism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88527-4_5

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The consolidation of the Unitarians and the Universalists did not result in the sum of their parts as their chosen name likes to suggest. The consolidation did nothing less than form a new religious movement with strong historical ties to Christian Unitarianism, Christian Universalism, and religious humanism. Religious humanism had penetrated Unitarianism through the ministry of a number of Unitarian leaders who wrote and signed the first Humanist Manifesto in 1933. Universalism received religious humanism especially through the work of Clinton Lee Scott, who also signed the Manifesto and then turned to mentor an entire generation of Universalist leaders to embrace a global religious naturalism (Buehrens 2011, p. 167). We should not forget that several high-profile Unitarian humanists—Max Otto, Harold Buschman, James Hart, and Stanton Hodgin—refused to sign the Humanist Manifesto out of fear that the document represented a creed, even though those who framed the Manifesto were careful to disclaim any creedal intention for their document. The voices of the Unitarians and Universalists resonate deeply in the language of the first Humanist Manifesto which begins: “Today man’s larger understanding of the universe, his scientific achievements, and deeper appreciation of brotherhood, have created a situation which requires a new statement of the means and purposes of religion. Such a vital, fearless, and frank religion capable of furnishing adequate social goals and personal satisfactions may appear to many people as a complete break with the past. While this age does owe a vast debt to the traditional religions, it is none-the-less obvious that any religion that can hope to be a synthesizing and dynamic force for today must be shaped for the needs of this age. To establish such a religion is a major necessity of the present.” Laid out in this document were 15 theses of religious humanism meant to replace religious forms and ideas of the past that were considered no longer adequate for modern human beings who felt it necessary to rely on their own internal powers and intelligence to achieve the good life (https://americanhumanist.org/what-­i s-­h umanism/manifesto1/). Effectively, by the 1950s religious humanism, not Christianity, was the common ground between Unitarians and Universalists that made the consolidation finally possible in 1961 (Buehrens 2011, p. 166). So the merger of three constituencies (not two) resulted not in a new Christian denomination that was both Unitarian and Universalist as their many publications and religious education programs emphasize, but a new religion that offered safe haven to free and liberal thinkers in a world they

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felt was increasingly becoming dominated by religious fundamentalism that threatened democracy. As early as 1937, the President of the American Unitarian Association, Frederick May Eliot pushed to unite the two denominations into “The United Liberal Church of America” urging that “if liberal religion is to play a real part in working out the destiny of democracy in America, it is imperative that our efforts be concentrated and not scattered” (Ross 2001, p.  14). Alfred S.  Cole, Unitarian Universalist minister and Professor at Tufts, agreed. Advocating consolidation, he said, “If ever we needed to rally our scattered forces, our precious democratic traditions which seem to be going down in a savage reaction and fear, then that time is now” (Ross 2001, p. 9). The choice of a name is a declaration of identity. But it is also a strategy that new religious movements use in order to market themselves and ultimately survive. While those most directly responsible for the consolidation (Frederick May Eliot, Dana McLean Greeley, Philip Giles, William Rice, and Raymond Hopkins) understood themselves to be members of a free church of common memories and common practices whose main objective was to promote liberal religion, in the end they intentionally opted to keep the historic names Unitarianism and Universalism to emphasize the historical continuity of the new movement with its parent Christian traditions (Ross 2001, p. 17). New religious movements always struggle with their newness, since in the realm of religion, antiquity reigns. To some extent, all emerging religions have to figure out a way to connect with a past, to legitimate and authorize their very existence in the present. So this choice in name, however misleading and difficult to pronounce, allowed the new religion to capitalize on a ready-made past. Even today, some 50 years after its formation in 1961, there are numerous books and religious education modules on the historic past of Unitarianism and Universalism, but only one book published in 2001 on the consolidation and its outcome. I have been attending Unitarian Universalist congregations since 1999, and never once have I heard a sermon or a talk on the consolidation and creation of a new religion. But I have heard plenty about Unitarians and Universalists as our forbearers. Those who voted for the name Unitarian Universalist knew that the name was too complicated and thought that over time one or the other would carry the day. It is noteworthy that before the consolidation, the Unitarian Laymen’s League on the advice of Munroe Husbands ran ads in newspapers and magazines with the headline: “Are you a Unitarian

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without knowing it?” These ads turned out to be very successful in attracting new members and helping to found new local congregations. But after the consolidation, when they changed the headline to “Are you a Unitarian Universalist without knowing it?” the advertisement had to be abandoned because it just stopped working (Ross 2001, p. 86). The simplification of the name that the originators expected did happen, but not through the adoption of either name. Rather it happened through settling for the abbreviation UU (Ross 2001, p. 87). While simplifying the name, this unfortunate abbreviation, which is meaningless to anyone outside the church and a joke to those inside, has not benefited the identity of the new religion or the promotion of Unitarian Universalism. Think about the episode of The Simpsons (“I’m Going to Praise Land” Season 12, Episode 19) when Lisa asks for the new Unitarian flavor-of-­ the-month ice cream. When she looks at the carton, she exclaims, “But there’s nothing in there.” Reverend Lovejoy says, “Exactly.” This is not the kind of reputation that does a new religion any good. Emptiness is not the distinctive flavor you want to market, nor is “anything goes,” another common perception of the faith. Unitarian Universalism as a new religious movement is only 50 years old, which means that it is transitioning from the founding generation to a second generation of members. Studies of new religious movements suggest that this transition is a pivotal moment in the survival of new religious movements because they must adjust to a new generation of people who may value different things from their founders. Most new religious movements do not survive a second generation because they cannot make this transition to the values of a new constituency nor do they negotiate successfully the problems that have been inherited from the founding generation. The problems that Unitarian Universalism faces go far beyond a name that has historic value but not much more. Its clumsy name is only a single indicator of a much larger identity problem that Unitarian Universalist congregations face. When a new religious movement that is 50 years old has the same number of congregations and members that it had the year it was founded, alarms should be going off. When 85–90% of children raised in Unitarian Universalist churches do not remain in them when they reach young adulthood, the fire trucks should be on their way (cf. https:// www.uua.org/sites/livenew.uua.org/files/retention_of_uus_raised_in_ the_church.pdf).

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Given what we know about new religious movements—who survives and who fails—we can get a pretty good idea about what obstacles Unitarian Universalism is facing as it makes this transition. Even more importantly, we can get a pretty good idea about what solutions would be most effective in helping this new religious movement make a second-­ generation transition into a more successful future.

What Makes a Successful New Religious Movement? In sociological literature, the discussion of the success and failure of new religious movements has been occurring for decades. An early attempt was made by Gerlach and Hine (1970) who compared the rise of the Black Power Movement with Pentecostalism. They argued that the most successful religious movements are organized in independent segmented units that are linked together by a bigger network or organization, because this allows for a greater number of constituencies to be included in the movement. Face-to-face recruitment that built on preexisting social relationships had an extremely positive effect on the group’s success. The personal commitment of the members to the new identity must be built, and this is most successfully done through some kind of identity-altering experience or action. There must be an ideology promoted that can provide unity as well as support the segmented diversity of the group. This ideology needs a conceptual framework that will help the group interpret events and define their opposition. Finally, if the group perceives itself to be experiencing opposition from the established order, this perception can provide optimal conditions for the growth of the movement (Gerlach and Hine 1970, p. 199). In 1987, Rodney Stark published a rational choice model for the success of new religious movements based on his study of Mormonism. The model had eight propositions for success. He later revised this model in 1996 to include ten propositions. He brought into the conversation the importance of cultural continuity, that new religious movements do well when they retain a certain level of continuity with the conventional faiths of the societies they are converting. At the same time, he recognized that they need to maintain a medium level of tension with their surrounding society so that they are strict in their expectations, but not too much so. The environment matters too, so that new religious movements are most successful when they have to compete for members within a religious marketplace where the conventional religions are weak and the religious

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economy is not regulated by the state. Successful movements depend on leadership that is considered legitimate and is given adequate authority to be effective. They depend on members who have formed strong bonds to the group while maintaining external ties to outsiders. To minimize defection, the most successful movements have been able to build a highly motivated, volunteer labor force that proselytizes and socializes their youth. Additionally, the movement must maintain a level of fertility that is sufficient enough to offset the mortality of the membership (Stark 1987, 1996). Sociologist Bryan Wilson flipped the question when he published an article on what causes new religious movements to fail. Wilson brought into the discussion the importance of ideology. Movements that are unable to confirm their ideological pronouncements fail. If the movement cannot routinize and accommodate sufficiently to traditional religious forms and social organizations with business models, they do not survive. This connects to leadership. If management fails to control and to communicate effectively, the movement dies. Those groups that recruit from only one constituency do so at their own expense. Particularly dire are situations where the new religious movement fails to transmit itself from one generation to the next. Most uncontrollable are exogenous factors, such as hostile reactions from the media, general public, and state authorities, which can be the demise of the group (Wilson 1987).

What Is Distinct About Unitarian Universalism as a Religion? My own read of this literature and study of new religious movements, combined with my knowledge of the emergence of early Christianity as a successful new religious movement within the Roman Empire, has led me to conclude that there are two fundamental observations we can make about religions that have transitioned beyond the second generation successfully and have an impact on society: their distinctive continuity with conventional traditions of faith; and strong commitment of youth to the movement. For the purposes of this investigation of the transition of Unitarian Universalism into its second generation, I focus on how these two observations can help us evaluate possible futures for Unitarian Universalism.

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First, successful new religious movements strike a balance between continuity and discontinuity with conventional religious knowledge and structures, a balance that is perceived to be distinctive but familiar. We have already seen how the founders of the movement tried to maintain continuity with the historic past of Unitarianism and Universalism by naming the new movement Unitarian Universalism despite its complexity and unattractiveness. The problem with this choice of name is that the movement linked its most visible identity into a familiar Christian past, while abandoning in the choice of name its distinctiveness, which has everything to do with religious humanism, free thought, and liberal religion. This left the movement in the precarious position of looking to outsiders like it had nothing new to offer as a religion, or at least nothing truly distinctive. This was compounded in the 1970s by the adoption of a religious education program for the youth that was a completely secular anthropological approach to religion centered on human beings as meaning makers and culture builders. The goal of the program was to develop in the youth religious tolerance and the appreciation of cultural diversity by teaching that all religions are essentially the same. Because the creators of the program made a conscious decision to develop a religious education program that could be sold to public schools, they did not even mention Unitarian Universalism in the modules. Judith Frediani, Director of Curriculum Development in the Department of Religious Education at the time, said, “Parents came back to us to say that their kids now knew more about Buddhism than about UU” (Ross 2001, p. 139). Yet this is not the worst of it. I met an adult man a few years ago who was raised a Unitarian Universalist in the 1970s. When I asked him what church he affiliated with as an adult, he said “Baptist.” He told me that the woman he married was Baptist so he decided to join her church because all religions are the same anyway. This man got the message that the Unitarian Universalists were teaching their youth in the 1970s, and it justified his defection as an adult. In the early 1980s, the identity crisis came to a head within women’s groups in UUA congregations. Women had become very dissatisfied with and felt disenfranchised by the original statement of purpose that the founders had drafted and agreed upon since its language and orientation were thoroughly patriarchal and demeaning to women (https://www. uuworld.org/articles/the-­uuas-­original-­principles-­1961). The original statement read that the UUA united to (1) strengthen one another in a

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free and disciplined search for truth as the foundation of our religious fellowship; (2) cherish and spread the universal truths taught by the great prophets and teachers of humanity in every age and tradition, immemorially summarized in the Judeo-Christian heritage as love to God and love to man; (3) affirm, defend, and promote the supreme worth of every human personality, the dignity of man, and the use of the democratic method in human relationships; (4) implement our vision of one world by striving for a world community founded on ideals of brotherhood, justice, and peace; (5) serve the needs of member churches and fellowships, to organize new churches and fellowships, and to extend and strengthen liberal religion; and (6) encourage cooperation with men of good will in every land. Through a massive grassroots effort, the women’s groups organized and drafted a new set of Principles and Purposes, which was adopted by the UUA in 1985 (https://www.uuworld.org/articles/the-­uuas-­ principles-­purposes-­1985). These are prominently displayed in the front of every hymnal and represent the values that bind the congregations together, followed by references to the historic traditions that the religion honors. Harry Hoehler is remembered as the person who came up with the solution to divide the Principles and Purposes into two parts in order to highlight what unifies Unitarian Universalists in all their diversity. Seven commonly held values were printed first, followed by references to five “living traditions we share.” Since the summaries of the traditions were historical statements that accurately reflected the diversity of Unitarian Universalist views and beliefs, they were accepted without objection. Noteworthy is the prominent reference in the sources to humanist teachings “which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.” These new Principles were meant to showcase a liberal religion that embraces pluralism yet values the universality of the human family (Ross 2001, p. 92). Following their adoption, they became central to a newly developed religious education curriculum for the youth that finally expresses and nurtures a Unitarian Universalist sense of identity. While some Unitarian Universalists worry that the Principles represent “creeping creedalism,” it is becoming understood that they represent the responsibilities of membership in a Unitarian Universalist church because the congregation “covenants” to affirm and promote the Principles. It also is believed that a sincere commitment to them can change the lives of Unitarian Universalists and all those they meet.

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In some ways, the adoption of this shared set of values hearkens back to the Unitarians in the 1950s, who tried to spur on growth of Unitarianism by using an advertising campaign “What Is Your Idea of True Religion?” (Buehrens 2011, p.  165). Their advertisement answered the question: “Unitarianism is a way of life, a life of vigorous thought, constructive activity, of generous service—not a religion of inherited creeds, revered saints, or holy books. Unitarianism is not an easy religion. It demands that people think out their beliefs for themselves, and then live those beliefs. The stress is placed upon living this life nobly and effectively rather than on the preparation for an after-existence. If you have given up ‘old time’ religion, Unitarianism has the answer for you.” In terms of shifting values of a new generation, it needs to be noted that there has been something of a divide between the new more spiritually oriented generation and the founding generation who identified Unitarian Universalism with humanism and the use of reason in their search for truth. While the new Principles still emphasize “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” they also acknowledge the “acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.” While theism is practically absent (except for a historic reference to the Judeo-Christian God in the sources), what comes out front-and-center is a reference to the “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.” None of this religious language can be found in the original Principles adopted in 1961, because they represent a shifting constituency from a strong humanist generation to a generation of people who still want a free and responsible search for truth and meaning guided by reason, but one that is also spiritual but not religious, at least in the sense of dogmatic traditional religion. In the adoption of these new Principles and the shift to the second generation, the distinctiveness of Unitarian Universalism has been redefined as the promotion of personalized spiritual journeys that are guided by personal conscience, free and responsible thinking, and individual human experience. Rosemary Bray McNatt puts it this way in the pocket guide for the faith: Unitarian Universalism is a non-creedal faith. Rather than a common theology, we are bound by our common history, our affirmation of each person’s spiritual quest, and the promises we make to one another about the spiritual

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values we uphold. Whether you revere God, Goddess, nature, the human spirit, or something holy that you have no name for, you are welcome to join any Unitarian Universalist community and to worship, study, work, and be in relationship with people who are all on their owns spiritual paths…There has always been people of faith like us: We are the people who sought a religion marked by freedom and reason and acceptance, in addition to faith and hope and love. (Morales 2012, p. 3)

This is a distinctiveness that must be passed on to the youth, so that they understand Unitarian Universalism in relationship to other religions, and that Unitarian Universalism has something to offer that other religions do not. While religious tolerance and diversity must be taught to the youth, it should not be done by teaching that all religions are the same. This simply is not true on any level, whether we are talking historical, philosophical, sociological, or phenomenological. The recognition that Unitarian Universalism has something distinct and impactful to offer people and society is making a comeback in Unitarian Universalism as it advertises itself as it did before the merger “as especially important right now” to fight back against “a harsh and hateful fundamentalism in both religion and politics” (McNatt in Morales 2012, pp. 5–6). The pocket guide summarizes this distinctiveness: “We believe in building and sustaining communities of memory and hope, in providing way stations of resistance for a people and a world battered by the relentless assault of intolerance” (McNatt in Morales 2012, p.  6). This appeal to social resistance opens the door even wider to social action, which remains vital to the future of the faith. Now that the distinctiveness of Unitarian Universalism has been defined, the question remains, how can this distinctiveness be marketed successfully beyond pocket guides and webpages? We can brainstorm about a new advertisement campaign, but I think one thing that should be considered is adjusting the name. It may be too late to just eliminate the old historic name, but it is certainly not too late to associate the name with a tag line that highlights the religion’s distinctiveness. We might imagine resurrecting one of the other suggestions made at the merger, like “Unitarian Universalism: The Universal Liberal Church” or “Unitarian Universalism: The Universal Free Church.”

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What About the Children? Second, successful new religious movements develop a strong commitment to the movement among their youth and adult converts through socialization, education, voluntary religious labor force, kinship and social ties, and other intentional programming. This is particularly telling for the future of Unitarian Universalism, which loses 85–90% of its youth after they leave high school, and has had to rely on adult converts who are dissatisfied with conventional religions to keep their numbers at the same level as they were in 1961. Comparably, the 2014 Pew Study (http:// assets.pewresearch.org/wp-­c ontent/uploads/sites/11/2015/05/ RLS-­08-­26-­full-­report.pdf, page 39) reveals that the highest retention rate in the United States is among Mormons, who retain 64% of their youth. Not far behind are the Catholics who keep 59% of their young people. The major Protestant denominations retain 45%. The literature discussing these numbers sees this decline as a religious collapse, because the future of these churches will be unsustainable if these numbers hold down the line. In terms of Unitarian Universalists who rely on dissatisfied converts to keep their membership up, this has inadvertent consequences. As conventional religions continue to decline, this base of dissatisfied consumers of traditional religions is going to decline at the same rate. In the future, there simply will be fewer numbers of the religiously disaffected to convert to Unitarian Universalism. Unless Unitarian Universalism can effectively reach out to a different constituency, conversions to Unitarian Universalism will decline too. More troubling is the fact that there is no new religious movement that can survive multiple generations of 85–90% of its children abandoning the faith, let alone become a real force for social change. The power of family commitment and multi-generational youth remaining within a new religious movement is evidenced by the exponential growth of Mormonism, and I might add, early Christianity (Stark 1997). Why do so many youths raised as Unitarian Universalists abandon the faith as young adults? We have already discussed the historic problem of the self-identity of Unitarian Universalism, which in the public’s mind is considered “empty.” To complicate matters, internally the youth were taught for years that all religions are the same. This teaching left the youth with nothing distinctively religious for them as Unitarian Universalists. Some of this is being rectified now at the primary and secondary school

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levels in terms of strong religious education programs focused on the new Principles and dedication to social action. So this is a good first step to address defection. But another critical juncture has to be addressed as well. What happens to the youth once they leave high school, never to return? While we might look at ways to increase commitment to the faith while in the younger years, I want to focus attention on the years immediately after high school when the majority of young Unitarian Universalists go to college. The history of Unitarian Universalists tending college-age students is dismal. In 1961, the UUA had a College Centers Office that supported the college youth group called Student Religious Liberals. In 1963, there were a hundred campus groups and a dedicated office run by Orloff Miller. In 1968, the office was closed, and for the following 18 years, there was no UUA staff person assigned to running young adult programs (Ross 2001, p.  149). The decline in young adult membership was dramatic. While in 1966, one-fifth of the membership of the UUA included young adults, by 1983 this had declined to one-tenth of the membership. In 1985, President of the UUA, Eugene Pickett, recommended the establishment of a Young Adult Ministries Task Force, but little came of it. By 1987, the UUA had only appointed a quarter-time staff person to work on organizing campus ministry groups. By 1994, a full-time director of young adult campus ministry programs was appointed and set up in an office in Princeton. In 2001, there were 125 campus ministry groups. These campus groups consisted of equal numbers of young adults who were raised as Unitarian Universalists and other students who are interested in Unitarian Universalist programs and beliefs. All groups were lay-led by the students themselves. There were few campus ministers to support them. According to Donna DiScuillo, the director of the campus ministry office at that time, recruiting campus ministers was a prime objective because without them the rapid student turnover makes the long-term survival of these groups highly problematic (Ross 2001, p. 150). Information on UUA young adults remains sorely lacking today. The UUA does not track young adults after they have bridged. According to the current director of campus ministry, Reverend Annie Gonzalez Milliken, the reason for this disinterest is linked to the way in which the UUA defines membership, which is based on the number of pledging members in the congregations. So the attention of the UUA leaders focuses on the congregations, not on young adults who are not present or

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pledging in the churches. She also identified two assumptions that are in play. The first assumption is that if children are raised as Unitarian Universalists, they will be good people and the course of their life will be set. Following is the second assumption that as adults these good people will return to Unitarian Universalist congregations to raise their children, so there is nothing really to worry about (Gonzalez Milliken 2017). This, of course, is a narrative that serves to justify the UUA’s apathy toward building a strong young adult ministry, to stay the course, hoping for the best. But this narrative, however satisfying it might be, is not supported by data because the UUA has not collected information about returning children. They simply do not know and rely on this narrative to maintain business as usual. Since the 1990s, the UUA has done nothing extraordinary to alter the way they handle campus ministry. According to, Reverend Gonzalez Milliken, today there are a few campus groups that have professional leadership (36 groups), but this is rather ad-hoc and dependent on individual congregations who might have a student intern or a religious education coordinator that meets up with students on a nearby campus for a few hours a week (Gonzalez Milliken 2017). By in large, college students continue to be entirely or mainly responsible for organizing campus groups (25 groups) using UUA publications on small group meetings, publications that they must personally purchase. The cost for an “Instant Start-up Kit” is $25 purchased through the UUA bookstore. It consists of a pocket guide to Unitarian Universalism, four tiny anthologies of prayers and readings to be used in small group settings, social action stickers (“Standing on the Side of Love”), a glass votive chalice, and a letter from Reverend, the Young Adult and Campus Ministry Associate from the Office of Youth and Young Adult Ministries in Boston. The letter thanks the buyer for their purchase and leadership. The letter directs the new leader to the UUA website for campus ministry (www.uua. org/campusministry) for more start-up ideas and curriculum suggestions for small group meetings. To stay in the loop, the new leader is asked to check out their Facebook page (www.facebook.com/CampusUUs) and join an email Listserv. Milliken offers to consult and troubleshoot with the new leader and the new campus group over the phone or video chat. The letter ends on an upbeat note, “Thanks to your dedication, our faith is enriching the lives of students at colleges and universities all over the country. I am glad to be on this journey of growing Unitarian Universalist

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campus ministry with you, and look forward to staying in touch as your campus ministry grows.” How successful has this program been? In 2001, there were 125 campus groups (Ross 2001, p. 150). In 2017, there are 61 college campus groups left, most of them on the east coast (www.uua.org/college). According to Gonzalez Milliken, 19 groups are very active and have some longevity. Five groups are recent start-ups. The remaining 37 are unresponsive to her queries or in transition. Gonzalez Milliken says that this is a very sad picture. Out of 133 total campuses where they have had a Unitarian Universalist group or outreach effort in recent years, only 24 are ongoing or new start-ups that are keeping in touch with her office. The rest either have died off or are unresponsive. She concludes tongue-in-­ cheek, “This tells you a lot about the success rate of our campus ministries” (Gonzalez Milliken 2017). While Reverend Gonzalez Milliken says that UUA members and leaders know that they need to do campus ministry differently, there is little resolve to act at a time when classic models of the church are dying and there is no clear replacement for them (Gonzalez Milliken 2017). While it is true that Unitarian Universalists are trying to figure out how to invigorate their worship services, local ministries, and justice work, these cannot be invigorated without appealing to and including young adults in their efforts. It will be costly putting into place an authentic campus ministry program led by trained ministers, but the Unitarian Universalists cannot afford to do otherwise. Young adult Unitarian Universalists who are away from home often find themselves far away from Unitarian Universalist churches with no transportation to get there. Those who are able to find rides discover that there are few (if any) other young adults present in the congregation. This is when the lapse happens, when they become isolated without the community they are used to and begin affiliating with others instead. The proselytization value of campus ministry groups cannot be overemphasized either. If 50% of the UUA campus ministry groups are made up of interested students who were not raised within the church, these campus ministry groups provide a natural place for the UUA to seek new young members and to push forward its agenda for social action against fundamentalism, the promotion of liberal religion, humanist thinking, and the values of the universal human family. This would be a unique location for students with liberal religious and humanist leanings, who otherwise have no place to go and become committed to other affiliations.

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At the end of the day, the Unitarian Universalists cannot afford to continue to lose their young adults. They have to go back to college—whatever this takes—because the future of their religion depends on it.

References Buehrens, John A. 2011. Universalists and Unitarians in America: A People’s History. Boston: Skinner House Books. Gerlach, Luther P., and Virginia H. Hine. 1970. People, Power, Change: Movements of Social Transformation. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. Gonzalez Milliken, Annie. 2017. Phone Interview with April DeConick, November 2. Morales, Peter, ed. 2012. The Unitarian Universalist Pocket Guide. 5th ed. Boston: Skinner House Books. Ross, Warren R. 2001. The Premise and the Promise: The Story of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Boston: Skinner House Books. Stark, Rodney. 1987. How New Religions Succeed: A Theoretical Model. In The Future of New Religious Movements, ed. David G.  Bromley and Phillip E. Hammond, 11–29. Macon: Mercer University Press. ———. 1996. Why Religious Movements Succeed or Fail. Journal of Contemporary Religion 11: 133–146. ———. 1997. The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Wilson, Bryan. 1987. Factors in the Failure of the New Religious Movements. In The Future of New Religious Movements, ed. David G.  Bromley and Phillip E. Hammond, 30–45. Macon: Mercer University Press. April D. DeConick  (PhD University of Michigan 1994) is the Isla Carroll and Percy E.  Turner Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Rice University. She is the author of several books including The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today (2016) and Holy Misogyny: Why the Sex and Gender Conflicts in the Early Church Still Matter (2011). She works at the intersection of history, sociology, and cognitive studies; founded and serves as executive editor of Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies (Leiden: Brill); and directs the Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism Certificate Program at Rice.

CHAPTER 6

Comparing Religions in Public: Rural America, Evangelicals, and the Prophetic Function of the Humanities Jeffrey J. Kripal

Abstract  I go home to my hometown in Nebraska every year. I am always struck by the immense cultural abyss and different moral values that separate my university and cosmopolitan urban world from the rural world of my extended family and the general culture of the American Midwest. Those intellectual practices and moral values that we simply take for granted in the university culture or at least strive to achieve as ideals (self-­ reflexivity and cultural criticism, religious pluralism, gender equity, cultural, racial and sexual diversity, environmental sustainability, and a secular public space) are held in deep suspicion in vast swaths of the American Midwest. I go home to the country grateful for my family and birth

Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.” He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their lack of faith. Mark 6.4-6 J. J. Kripal (*) Rice University, Houston, TX, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. D. Hart (ed.), Educating Humanists, Studies in Humanism and Atheism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88527-4_6

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culture and return to the city depressed about the seeming futility of explaining to my family members why I think so many of their beliefs are built on dangerous half-truths and ultimately unsustainable values. Keywords  Comparison • Flip • Cultural • Religious • Ideological scripts This is a very old frustration. Even Jesus felt a version of it, as the famous verses from the Gospel of Mark above give witness. I think something similar applies—in very different terms, of course—to scholars of religion and their hometowns. I often joke that the discipline should someday host a major event at the American Academy of Religion around a single question: “So, what does your family think of what you think?” The answer would often come down to this: “Not much” or “Very little” or “We try not to talk about it.” I predict a vast therapy session would follow. In my own experience, the cognitive dissonance has been extreme. At the time of this writing, the general beliefs of my home culture include the following: a fundamental denial of climate change and environmental crisis (all “liberal fictions”); bigoted views about sexual orientation and gender camouflaged as positive “family values”; openly racist attitudes toward African Americans and utterly bizarre statements about President Obama that made no sense unless one simply translates them as “there was a black man in the White House”; seriously distorted views of Muslims, Mexicans, immigrants, and religious plurality in general, again all rationalized as measures to “protect” “our Christian country,” two phrases that are in turn linked to another: the “military,” which must be supported, apparently without a shred of cultural criticism, as if every war is a good one. Taxes for schools, universal health care, and social service projects are “wasteful.” Taxes for the military are never questioned. Émile Durkheim and the sociologists are right: Religion is society worshipping itself, here under the banner of an unimpeachable “God, faith, country.” Put differently, “God” is a word in the American Midwest that rationalizes for all too many why they (whom God loves) live and flourish and so much of the rest of the world (whom, apparently, God does not love) suffer in abject poverty and often die in misery. I despise and utterly reject this “God” and the religious nationalism that it undergirds and makes possible every minute of every day. This is my gnostic rage against the violent and stupid demiurge of my own birth culture.

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Looking back on my life, I can see that the ethnocentric logic behind such “traditional values” and this nationalist civil “God” were major reasons I left the culture in the first place, even if then I framed these unbearable dissonances in moral and theological terms. I fought “God” with God. I could see even then as a teenager how little my home culture understood the radical roots of Christianity, much less the executed social firebrand who was Jesus of Nazareth. I was especially upset by my culture’s quiet disdain for the poor and the marginalized, who were (and still are) considered “lazy” and so underserving of public aid. But I was equally upset with my culture’s militarism and, above all, with the nuclear arms race. When I registered for the draft in 1980, I registered as a conscientious objector in protest. The poor local Postmaster didn’t have a clue what to do with me. Nor did I. I should add that the situation is much worse today than it was in the 1970s and early 1980s. At least then the American Catholic bishops spoke up against the insanity of the nuclear arms race and the grotesque injustices of neoliberal capitalism. At least then the public did not equate Christianity with its exact moral opposite: the right-wing political extreme. I suspect, or at least hope, that many of these disconnects will be addressed with the generations and the gradual urbanization of the culture. I can see such changes even in my hometown, where young people who come out are commonly shunned but are also commonly embraced. Indeed, I have seen the same people twist up their faces at the mere mention of gay marriage but warmly and affectionately engage individuals whom they know are gay. Such contradictions go uncommented on. The truth is that these are good, decent, complicated people and that Midwestern culture is ambivalent, shifting, thinking, moving. The truth is that what I perceive as the bigotries and blindnesses of my home culture is no individual’s fault. My family, like everyone’s family, is caught and conditioned by a set of cultural and religious scripts that they did not write. They are not the problem. Those scripts are. I also sense a poignant sadness in the racism and the fear of difference. People are mourning the gradual disappearance of a cultural world—their own. “Make America Great Again.” That is, turn back the clock. “Make America White Again.” They are correct to sense such a loss. The broader culture is changing; globalization will continue to roll on; America will continue to become more, not less, diverse; and the world they grew up in will soon be no more, for better and for worse. What they are wrong about, of course, is the assumption that their cultural world, or any

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cultural world for that matter, should remain unchanged. The world is always ending. What such an insight requires, of course, is a fairly developed sense of history, which such communities simply do not possess. My Catholic family, for example, does not understand that the same xenophobic logic that now wants to wall off the Mexican and deport the Muslim as dangerous and as somehow contaminating the purity of America is the same political logic that once targeted our own ancestors. They do not know that Protestant haters once burned down Catholic churches and crudely painted immigrant Catholics as lazy, dangerous religious others who idolatrously worshipped a foreign despot (the pope), who were out to steal their jobs and who would certainly compromise the biblical purity of Protestant America. I mention all of this not to dwell on my own Midwestern culture, nor to demonize the people whom I love and from whom I came. They are in no way unique in their moral prejudices or religious nationalisms. I dwell on these things because I think these values are representative of a very large segment of the American population with which the professional study of religion has failed to engage in any sufficiently direct and effective way. It is our job to engage those unconscious scripts or ideological myths and expose them as such, not because we vote this way or because those individuals vote that way, but because that is what these ideological scripts and myths really are—constructed fictions that hurt people, that result in violence on both local and global levels. Let me put the situation this way. The kinds of truth that the humanities are about are not arrived at by a popular vote. More so, the kinds of truth the humanities are about—interpreting texts, decoding cultural scripts, and deconstructing ideologies—are inevitably poised against the public consensus. There is something profoundly countercultural about what we do. That is why right-wing politicians hate us. That is why my own state, Texas, passed a law in 2015 to allow students to bring concealed weapons to class: to intimidate and silence us. We should not look for agreement or popularity, then. We should seek and speak the truth as we see it, unflinchingly, without ever imagining that we have that truth in any full or complete fashion. We are not prophets, but the humanities are.

Restoring the Humanities to Consciousness Of course, the main social space in which an academic engages the public in a consistent and profound way is the classroom. I have thought and written about the classroom for some time, particularly around the

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pedagogy of comparison. It began in the mid-1990s, when I was teaching at Westminster College. Bryan Rennie and I both taught the introductory course to the study of religion there, more or less every semester. After teaching the course for a few years, I was growing increasingly disturbed by a particular pattern I was seeing. I was teaching the course in the fall. I was giving these young people very powerful new methods to think about religion, particularly their own religions, which was usually some form of Protestant Christianity or Roman Catholicism. The end result was often massive confusion, if not full-blown existential crises. And then the course just ended. And then we sent them home for Christmas. That seemed irresponsible, if not actually a bit perverse. Not that I wanted, or want now, to have students leave the introductory course comfortably confirmed in their religious or secular heritages. But I came to think that we needed some way to help them come to some personal closure for the course. That did not need to be a final closure, of course. I wanted them to see the educational process as ongoing, but also as not simply deconstructive, much less as destructive. Bryan suggested that we use the anthropologist Victor Turner and his model of initiation to structure a course. Turner, as is well known, had picked up on earlier anthropological work to write eloquently about a three-stage process that can be seen in countless initiation rituals around the world: (1) the recognition or acknowledgment of a pre-initiation identity; (2) a deconstructive “liminal” stage in which this earlier social identity is taken apart and “killed” or dissolved through some symbolic or ritual means; and (3) the social recognition of the new post-initiation identity. College, of course, is American culture’s one widely shared initiation cycle. If a college classroom could not be turned into an initiatory space, I concluded, then nothing could be. I thought that Bryan’s suggestion was a wonderful idea. It worked. I used this method at Westminster College throughout the late 1990s and into the new millennium. When I wrote Comparing Religions (2014) with three of my PhD students (Ata Anzali, Andrea Jain, and Erin Prophet), I adopted the same tripartite structure, now in conversation with what I considered to be the various consensus positions of the field. The fundamental move that I made in the text was foregrounding the intellectual act of comparison as a universal cognitive function and backgrounding the religions themselves. I also took it as one of my goals to explain how and why absolute “difference” has been over-emphasized and fetishized over the last four decades, while “sameness” has been denied and tabooed as some kind of horrible intellectual sin.

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I did not reverse the fetishization, fetishizing sameness over difference now. Rather, I offered a comparative model that could balance the two poles of comparison instead of using one to beat up on the other. I wanted to show that comparative thinking is involved in pretty much everything human beings do, from the histories of polytheism and monotheism to the birth of evolutionary biology, from how the media thinks about ethnicity and religious identity to our deepest yearnings for social justice, which makes no sense at all without some intuited or assumed sense of sameness, and which can be defined very simply as “a demand for sameness in difference.” Comparison done well is justice. It is worth reminding ourselves: Simply because scholars decide not to compare religions (for whatever perfectly defensible historical and philosophical reasons) does not mean the rest of the world will suddenly stop doing it. Quite the contrary, they will just keep comparing religions. Human beings must compare to make sense of anything. And without any input from professionals with sophisticated historical and reflexive methods, they will usually do it very, very badly, which is to say, without a sufficient historical consciousness or any adequate degree of critical reflexivity and self-questioning. They will assume the eternal, unchanging truth of their religion and use its measuring sticks to “compare” every other religion. When professional intellectuals refuse to compare religions, what they are also doing is handing the public shop over to these same unsophisticated, and often extremely dangerous, voices.

Flipping the Human (Back) Here in this conflation of a cultural script with personhood and community is the most basic problem of all. Happily, it is precisely this same problem that humanist intellectuals can most forcefully and effectively address, if only they will. Intellectuals in the humanities make a number of fundamental philosophical assumptions that often go unspoken but are nevertheless active and important. Such assumptions have been increasingly questioned and nuanced in recent decades, particularly in postmodern and postcolonial thought, but they are nevertheless worth acknowledging and describing, since (a) they continue to exert tremendous influence and are, at the end of the day, both defensible and plausible even after the criticisms; and (b) they will have to be acknowledged, re-emphasized, and re-visioned, if we are going to have any effective public voice and political influence moving

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forward. The new political realities have forced the issue and have demanded new, or renewed, responses from us. There is the silver lining I see in all of this for the humanities and, in particular, for the study of religion. Consider this. Humanists commonly assume in principle that all human beings share a common human nature and that, therefore, their cultural productions can be studied with similar methods and tools within a common field, be it history, anthropology, art history, literary study, or the comparative study of religion. They also assume that any and all religious identities are secondary, are “constructed” upon the deeper and more fundamental facts of human nature—our most fundamental forms of awareness, our sensory system and kinesthetic orientation in the world as upright bipeds, our ability to manipulate vocal and visual symbols to communicate with each other in language and (much more recently) writing, our social capacities to organize, our biological need to reproduce and raise children, and so on. We may not ever be able to get to that shared human nature, and it is a morally fraught enterprise to try to describe whatever that shared nature might be (since we will always be tempted to confuse our own local experiences and cultural assumptions for some universal “human being”), but the disciplines, by their very existence, assume that there is such a shared human nature. Otherwise, the disciplines make little or no sense. Nor, by the way, would any quest for social justice or “equality.” What would be the point of, say, a department of anthropology or religion if such assumptions were not made, or were flatly denied? What would be the purpose of working for social justice if we were all octopi and bacteria to one another and shared no common sense of right and wrong? In other words, we can say that there is no shared human nature, no “psychic unity,” to use the old anthropological phrase, but the very existence of departments and their knowledge practices and the human desire for justice strongly suggest otherwise. But here is the catch. Religious people often assume the exact opposite. They flip the humanist assumption or moral principle. They value their religious identities over the human species. They assume that their religious identities are primary and that their humanity is secondary. That is why such communities or individuals will express hatred or act unjustly toward other human beings who are outside their religious fold. That is why they will sometimes even kill other human beings who do not share their belief systems or religious affiliations. Such acts of intolerance,

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injustice, and violence follow very logically from a simple assumption, which we might put in our own terms like this: Religious identity is more fundamental, and more important, than anything else, including the other person’s humanity. They do not put it like this, of course. That is a very modern, and very Western, way of putting it. Such a blunt logic also sounds (because it is) morally appalling to our own modern civil sensibilities. Many of the religious traditions do not speak or think like this. They use their own local religious languages about being “saved,” or being “chosen,” or being a “believer,” or possessing some proper “essence” or belonging to some special community or ethnic group. This sounds different, for sure, as it seems to draw on modernity’s unspoken contract to respect any and all religious expression, but the underlying logic remains the same. The moral problems of such speaking are simply hidden behind a thin screen of relative religious egos and historically constructed cultures. Basically, a form of gross intolerance is papered over with a form of political correctness: the political correctness of respecting religious belief, even when it is functioning as a dehumanizing form of exclusion that would be condemned and rejected were it expressed in any other nonreligious way. If we as intellectuals can flip back the flip, if we can revision a shared humanity, we will have an important voice moving forward. We will become a collective prophet. If we cannot, or will not, do this, we are in for some very difficult times, both inside and outside the academy. The choice is ours. The pivot is there to make, but we will have to make it. We will have to turn around and look at the looker, watch the watcher, and become human once again.

Introducing an Act of Public Comparison The brief piece anthologized below is the text I delivered at Rice University during my debate with Dr. Richard Mouw of Fuller Theological Seminary for the Boniuk Institute event on “Shutting Heaven’s Door” on Christian theology and religious exclusivism. I have tried very hard to engage Evangelicals in particular, as they have carried so much political force in recent decades. I have debated two Evangelical intellectuals in public at Rice: Prof. Marianne Meye Thompson in 2012, on the nature and person of Jesus,1 and Mouw in 2015, on religious tolerance and religious pluralism. 1

 I summarize my position and tell this story in DeConick (2016).

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The Chess Game I am most interested this evening in having a conversation with Mouw, not hearing myself blab about this or that. Having said that, I do think it is important to get some ideas on the table right away so that we can have a rich conversation. I will speak autobiographically and bluntly, as I think that this will best serve our conversation this evening. I grew up in a small rural community in Nebraska among German immigrants. When my maternal grandmother left her Lutheran church for my grandfather’s Catholic church in the 1930s, it was a terrible scandal. By the time I graduated from high school, Catholics and Lutherans married all the time. I did my undergraduate work at a Benedictine monastic seminary in the early 1980s. I wanted to be a monk. There I was trained in the rich intellectual traditions of Roman Catholicism, the same intellectual tradition that eventually birthed the university itself in the thirteenth century: hence the monastic gowns that we wear every graduation day. I learned that the Church had long held a strong exclusivism on matters of faith. This was captured in the Latin sound-bite: nulla salus extra ecclesiam, “Outside the Church there is no salvation.” This all changed in the 1960s with Vatican II, when the Church abandoned this exclusivism for a clear inclusivism. Now we were told that there is salvation in the other religions. Judaism was recognized as the mother-faith of the three Abrahamic monotheisms, and Islam was a treasured member of the family. Moreover, profound truths were recognized in the devotional, philosophical, and contemplative traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism. Still, the full truth resided in the gospels and the ancient deposit of faith that is Roman Catholicism. All the other religious truths, including the other Christian denomination truths, were “rays” of this same universal light. That seemed like a giant step forward, but it also seemed like a halfway house. I could see no good moral or rational reason to raise the accident of anyone’s birth culture, including and especially my own, to the full truth of final divine revelation, into which all other people’s faiths must be somehow “included.” It all seemed suspiciously convenient. I graduated from the seminary and took up the comparative study of religion at the University of Chicago to pursue these questions. By the time I had my Ph.D., I had adopted a new set of metaphors and a new pluralism, that is, I now believed that each of the religions was a kind of filter or prism of the sacred and that each filter was blocking out as much of the divine light as it was letting in. None were absolute. None were perfect.

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In the new millennium, I found myself working with various modern mystical movements in California. Again and again, I encountered profound people who had found their own birth traditions painfully lacking and had decided to step out on their own, as it were, into a new world, a future faith in which religious experiences of all kinds could be embraced but none would be taken absolutely. This orientation would eventually morph into our present “spiritual but not religious” demographic, a deeply American tradition that does not go back to the New Age movement of the 1980s, or the counterculture of the 1960s but to the Bostonian Transcendentalists of the middle of the nineteenth century and, beyond that, back centuries and millennia to countless mystics and visionaries around the world. So that has been my spiritual journey. What would I say now? I would probably not describe myself as a pluralist anymore. I have grown frustrated with the clunkiness of this way of thinking. Pluralism too easily suggests that there is a single objective goal, a mountaintop “out there” that we are all walking up from different directions. After 30 years of studying religion, I am no longer convinced that this is the case. I think we are walking up different mountains, and that there are a lot of mountains, none of which can say with any convincing argument, “I am the highest!” Each of these different mountains, moreover, gives us different things. There is something else I came to. I came to think that all of these mountains emerge out of the earth of our own humanity, that is, out of us. I have never encountered a religious experience, vision, out-of-body experience, scriptural text, or revelation that was not experienced and expressed by a human being. Clearly, if the gods exist, they need us to speak. In truth, I think the gods are us, but that we are not ready to see this yet. I think they are the unconscious, unintegrated part of us speaking to the conscious integrated part of us. If I had to name my present position, I would describe it as a secret humanism. I think that it is our own secret humanity that lies behind and within all of the planet’s religions. If the revelations of these traditions mean anything at all—and I think they do—I think that they mean that we are not who we think we are. We are not just our religious egos, our conscious selves, our families, our languages, our genders and races, and our customs. We are More. There is something transcendent, some secret divine spark, something More out of which all revelations emerge. What that secret More is I do not know and so cannot say. Nor do I think any

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ego here can know or say. The filter cannot speak for that which is filtered. The prism cannot speak for the light. It can only refract and reflect it. A secret humanist, then, does not ask, “Which religion is true?” That is the wrong question. She does not pit this religion against that one in a never-ending story of conflict. She sees the history of religions as a centuries-­long chess game, with different communities moving different pieces around on a shared, and quickly shrinking, global table. At some point, she simply stops identifying with any of the pieces on this chessboard, stands up from the table, and asks a simple question: “Just who is playing this game?” And, perhaps more radically still, “Is there not another game to play?” “Do we really have to keep playing this one?” Religious believers, and particularly exclusivist religious believers, of course, often operate with the exact opposite assumptions. They don’t see the game. They see life-and-death issues of absolute meaning and import. They see the eternal fate of their souls at stake. Accordingly, they assume that one is primarily a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, or a Jew and only secondarily a human being, a global citizen, or a member of a species. They do not generally put it this way, of course. Rather, they use their own religious language to claim that one cannot be “saved,” be “twice born,” become a “believer,” or the “chosen” unless one is a member of a particular religious community—their own, of course. From my own perspective, this is the exact reverse of things. It is also suspiciously convenient. There is a profound truth hidden (and distorted) in the religious claims, though. It is indeed the case that human beings need culture, language, and community to become fully human, and probably to become fully conscious. An infant boy abandoned to wolves does not grow up speaking elegant British English and always looking bathed, like Mowgli of the Disney film. He grows up dirty, mangy, and acting, howling, and eating like a wolf, if he grows up at all and is not eaten. We might say, then, that human beings do not need a particular culture or community to become fully human (which is what the religions commonly assert), but they do need a culture or community. Moreover, it clearly does matter through which culture one chooses to become human. There are many mountains, not one, and where you end up in your life will depend largely on which path you start the climb on, whether or not you understand that you are really already there, that the individual mountain you are climbing for a time has been pushed up out of us all.

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References DeConick, April, ed. 2016. Secret Religion. New York: Macmillan. Kripal, Jeffrey J., Ata Anzali, Andrea Jain, and Erin Prophet. 2014. Comparing Religions. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. Jeffrey J. Kripal  holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. Trained as a comparatist, Kripal specializes in the religions of the Indian subcontinent. He is interested in mysticism, Gnosticism, esotericism, and what might be describe as the uncanny and boundary-defying aspects of religion. Kripal is the author of several books including Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal (2011) and The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge (2019).

CHAPTER 7

Confronting the Rising Danger of White Rage Sharon D. Welch

Abstract  How do we maintain connection as a nation? What types of social relationships are necessary for justice, equality, and democracy? There is a debate in the United States over what it takes to maintain a democratic society. Does it require common ground, shared values, shared language, culture, and ideals? If so, what then is the place of difference within community—different histories, values, cultures, languages, experiences of access, and/or discrimination? Furthermore, how do we affirm membership in a community and still be critical of key aspects of that community’s values, practices, and history? Keywords  Violence • White rage • White supremacy At the core of multicultural education is a wager: A vital national identity can be constituted through multiplicity, ambiguity, and contradiction. Multicultural education shows us the reasons for a nondualistic

S. D. Welch (*) Meadville Lombard Theological School (Unitarian Universalist), Chicago, IL, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. D. Hart (ed.), Educating Humanists, Studies in Humanism and Atheism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88527-4_7

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understanding of community; it educates us about the history and culture that demonstrate the checkered past of the United States, the mixture of opportunity and exclusion, of freedom and institutionalized racism and sexism. Multicultural education also provides the analytical and emotional tools for living within a nondualistic understanding of self, group, and national identity. Healthy identity can include seeing failures and successes, acts of cruelty and compassion. As a practitioner and scholar of multicultural education, I am exploring with others strategies that address a related but new challenge. The words of Michael Dyson in Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America are telling: “We have, in the span of a few years, elected the nation’s first black president and placed in the Oval Office the scariest racial demagogue in a generation… The remarkable progress we seemed to make with the former has brought out the peril of the latter” (Dyson 2017, p.  3). As educators, how do we help students and fellow citizens see the connection between the two? Furthermore, how do we help students acknowledge the brutal costs of racism and the historical drivers of racial injustice? And, once aware of these dynamics, how can people of all races take up our roles in containing such violence in the present and preventing its resurgence in the future? We can work for a genuinely inclusive democracy only when we confront both the scope of white violence and the depth of our dependence upon Americans of all races for the very ideals of a democracy that fully expresses our values of liberty and justice for all. First, let us address in more detail the scope and depth of the threat that we are facing at this juncture in history. Like, many people throughout the world, I was profoundly heartened by the election and then re-election of President Barack Obama. I was not, however, one of those who thought that his election reflected the inauguration of a post-racial society. The signs of ongoing racism were all too clear—the explicitly racist and demeaning personal attacks on President Obama and on First Lady Michelle Obama, and the relentless Republican obstruction to his leadership. In addition, I, along with many others, was well aware of the ongoing serious problems of structural racism as manifest in mass incarceration, educational and income inequality, and of the debilitating social and political effects of implicit bias. Our focus was on rectifying the ongoing impact of slavery and racial injustice and removing the ways in which racism is perpetuated through both implicit bias and structural racism. I shared the conviction of Iris Marion Young that we were in a time in history in which

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injustice was perpetuated primarily through systems rather than systems and individual hatred and fear (Young 2011, pp. 207–227, 241). I would not have been surprised if a moderate Republican had beaten Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, but I thought that the explicit racism, sexism, and hatred of the Trump campaign represented the death throes of white supremacy, not its possible birth pangs. I did not expect to see the return of explicit racial hatred at this scale— the resurgence of the KKK, of neo-Nazis, of explicit calls to white nationalism, and of the public marches and campaigns on college campuses nationwide for a white identity politics that explicitly advocates white supremacy. Nor did I expect to see blatant denials of the scope and depth of the racist violence of the past. In the fall of 2017, such denials were evident in the defense of Confederate monuments. A particular telling example of such denial was highlighted by the editors of The New York Times in November 2017. They recounted the dangerous distortion of history in the statements of John Kelly, former military officer and then White House chief of staff. Kelly stated that calls to remove a plaque of Robert E. Lee showed “a lack of appreciation of history” and then demonstrated his own dangerous lack of such appreciation. Kelly stated that Lee “was an honorable man” and that in the Civil War “men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.” As the editors stated, this is a mythology created by “white racists to hide the truth and course of the Civil War. The truth is, white Southerners went to war to destroy the United States in order to continue enslaving nearly 40 percent of the people in the region.” They go on to point out the depth of Lee’s support for racism: “while some historians argue that he held a distaste for human bondage, he nevertheless fought ferociously to preserve slavery, which he viewed as the best arrangement that could possibly exist between whites and African-­ Americans. During the war, his army kidnapped free blacks, returning them to chains. After the war ended, he advised acquaintances to avoid hiring free blacks—arguing that it was against white interests to do so— and suggested that free black people be forced out of his native state, Virginia.” The conclusion drawn by the editors of the New York Times is compelling: Mr. Kelly really gave the game away when he went on to argue that it was wrong for us to look back at the past through the lens of ‘what is today

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accepted as right and wrong.’ As the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has noted, you can only contend that most people believed that slavery was right at the time of the Civil War if you exclude black people from your analysis, not to mention from your moral imagination. (Editorial Board 2017)

Perversely, what eases my shock at the rise of authoritarianism and explicit racism is the realization that it did not rise in spite of the best efforts of all progressives to contain it. It rose for just the opposite reason. Many of us, as whites, did not work with our fellow African American, LatinX, Native American, and Asian American citizens to do what was needed to stop the resurgence of explicit racism and to prevent its rise in the future. In face of these rising threats, my stance is not despair but awakening. It can be that bad again. There can be lynchings, hate crimes, and other forms of white violence against people of color. We whites who are committed to racial justice were not doing enough to stop the rise of explicit racism and hatred, and we can and must do more. In light of these threats, I remain committed to the core goals of humanism as stated so clearly by Anthony Pinn, a “commitment to the well-being of life in general and human flourishing in particular. To omit attention to modes of social injustice—like racism—is to reduce the connotations of the human in humanism. Further, it is to truncate the challenges confronting human well-being in the contemporary world” (Pinn 2017, p. 14). In living out these goals, however, I see a need to confront four political challenges for multicultural education. The core commitments of multicultural education remain, but how do we live out these goals at this juncture in history? I have been part of teams where we have made major changes before in our teaching strategies while upholding the same goals. When I went to the University of Missouri-Columbia, we quickly discovered that an approach to seeing and challenging white privilege that worked with upper middle class and upper class white and Asian American students at elite universities did not work in Missouri with a student body that was increasingly racially diverse, but was primarily white and working class or middle class. Many of our white students were first-generation college students and came to us from racially segregated suburbs and rural areas (Eferakorho 2003). We changed tactics while upholding the same goals: recognizing systemic power imbalances; acknowledging the power held by one’s own group; gaining the courage to use that power for

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justice; and discovering how to learn from conflict. They, too, were the victims of class exploitation, and not merely the beneficiaries of white cultural and political privilege. We found ways of helping students see for themselves the complex interactions of race, class, and gender and helped them see the power of working simultaneously for racial, economic, and social justice (Welch 2004, pp. 249–280). What are the challenges of multicultural education now? While I have never shared the belief that “the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice,” nor do I believe in linear and assured progress, I did think that there was a threshold below which we would not go. That we have gone below it is for many of us a challenge to our basic understanding of human nature, of the relationship between good and evil, and the multiple dimensions of social change. What does it take to stop the resurgence of racism now and prevent its rise in the future? I concur with convictions expressed by Anthony Pinn and Ida B. Wells Barnett. Pinn makes a point that is crucial for all of us committed to expanding racial justice and containing white supremacy to address: White supremacy mutates: Ending one form does not mean that it will not re-emerge in other forms. “That is the genius of white supremacy: it mutates and transforms, and it gives up a little in order to present the illusion of fundamental change. It finds ways to blame victims for the violence perpetuated against them” (Pinn 2017, p. 2). We find in Paula Giddings’ comprehensive account of the life and legacy of the anti-lynching activist and journalist Ida B. Wells Barnett another key insight. Not only does white supremacy mutate, but even if defeated in one context, white supremacy may re-emerge in its old forms of violence and systemic social control. Given this dual threat of mutation and re-emergence, the words of Ida B.  Wells are as compelling as those of Anthony Pinn. Writing at the end of her life, and reflecting on her lifelong struggle against racism and for racial justice, Wells wrote that “the price of democracy is eternal vigilance” (Giddings 2008, p. 659). Here, then, is the first political challenge: Rather than a hope for assured progress, we must grapple with the need for eternal vigilance, and that vigilance is twofold—vigilance in expressing our best and vigilance in containing our worst. This is, of course, at the heart of the democratic ideal— liberty and justice for all, the inclusion of all people in the shaping of our common life, and a social contract that holds us accountable for the ramifications of our actions and that checks the temptations of tyranny and systemic injustice.

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The second fundamental challenge of multicultural education at this moment in history is the realization that both forms of vigilance are primarily collective, not individual. That is, we need collective structures to live out our individual aspirations and contain our individual and collective irrationality, folly, and cruelty. One of the breakthroughs in the field of social science in the past 20 years is the emergence of the field of behavioral public policy. One of the leading exponents of that field is Daniel Kahneman. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, he primarily addresses constitutive errors in financial decision making. What makes his work so important, however, is not just the disclosure of constitutive forms of irrationality, but his finding that we can best check irrationality collectively. He states that it is far easier to see when others are making a mistake, than when we are doing the same. He urges, therefore, the creation of collective procedures to check that constitutive irrationality (Kahneman 2011, pp. 1–15). How do we check the constitutive folly and cruelty of white supremacy? To do this, we must see how bad it is, how bad it was, and how bad it can be again. This, then, is our third challenge—how do white people learn how bad it was and is? It is my wager that most white Americans are woefully unaware of the extent of the cruelty and violence that was part not just of slavery, but of the wave of terror that was “Redemption,” the eradication of economic and political rights for African Americans after Reconstruction, and the accompanying wave of white rage against prosperous black communities. (Lemann 2006)

My wager is based on my own experiences. While long committed to ending racism, and building racially just institutions, I was unaware until recently of the extent of white mob violence following the Civil War. I was aware of the magnitude of white mob violence in Tulsa against the prosperous middle- and upper-class community known as Black Wall Street. I did not know, however, until a few months ago about the Wilmington Massacre of 1898. In her biography of Ida B. Wells, Giddings recounts the scope and impact of this violent resurgence of white supremacy. The fact that white collective violence erupted here with such fury and scope was, to many, a surprise. Wilmington was integrated, and the white and black populations coexisted both economically and politically.

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Wilmington, with its population of 11,324 African Americans and 8731 whites, was the most integrated city in the South—and nowhere was the black middle class, many of whom had attended one of the state’s fifteen educational institutions available to them, more successful…Wilmington especially excelled in the number of blacks that had a central place in its business and political sector…many with majority white patronage. (Giddings 2008, p. 397)

Giddings highlights the political strength of the African American community in Wilmington, “a black voting majority of about fourteen hundred,” an African American member of the House of Representatives, Congressman George White, “fifteen to twenty-five black postmasters,” and concludes that “in no other American city were blacks more integral to its political and economic life.” The history that Giddings recounts has telling resonances with our current political climate. The fury at economic setbacks experienced by whites was taken out on the black population: “All of this, however, would change in the bat of an eye. In the fall campaign of 1898, Democrats launched a campaign to recapture the Populists’ constituency—including farmers suffering from the low price of cotton and whites whose wives were forced to find jobs.” The white supremacist campaign was multifaceted. First whites surrounded polling places to prevent blacks from voting. Secondly, between 800 and 1000 whites issued the Wilmington Declaration of Independence that “demanded that black officeholders immediately abandon their positions, and that white employers fire their black workers.” Third, on November 10, 1898, 2000 whites burned the prosperous black community, confiscated abandoned black properties, and forced the mayor, the board of aldermen, and the entire police department out of office. A total of 1400 people left Wilmington immediately, and 400 women and children hid in the woods (Giddings 2008, pp. 397–401). The losses were severe, the implications profound: In North Carolina, the “Wilmington Massacre” had resulted in dozens, perhaps as many as a hundred lives lost. Much of the black community, called Brooklyn, had been burned to the ground, and thousands of residents were fleeing or preparing to do so from the city. Everything that Ida had been warning about came to pass in Wilmington: the dangerous rhetoric about white women’s need for protection, the fact that black achievement was no antidote to race hatred, and that lynching inevitably led to mobocracy. (Giddings 2008, p. 397)

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The white attacks on the prosperous black community in Wilmington were far from an anomaly. The historian Carol Anderson provides another essential account of the many forms that white supremacy has taken, and explores what triggers attacks by white Americans on black freedom, dignity, and equality. Her conclusion mirrors that of Giddings: The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship. It is blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to give up. (Anderson 2016, p. 4)

Anderson goes on to state that the election of Obama was the “ultimate advancement, and thus the ultimate affront.” The truth is, white rage has undermined democracy, warped the Constitution, weakened the nation’s ability to compete economically, squandered billions of dollars on baseless incarceration, rendered an entire region sick, poor, and woefully undereducation, and left cities nothing less than decimated. All this havoc has been wreaked simply because African Americans wanted to work, get an education, live in decent communities, raise their families, and vote. (Anderson 2016, pp. 5–6)

In his book 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back, David F. Krugler also explores the manifestations of white rage examined by Anderson. Here is his description of the extreme white violence that followed Reconstruction: After the Civil War, white opposition to abolition and to citizenship for African Americans ushered in a new era of racialized mob violence. Reconstruction, directed by congressional Republicans and policed by federal troops, enabled black men’s participation in the democratic process as voters and officeholders… . Despite the presence of federal troops, white southerners deployed violence in a sustained campaign to topple the new Republican majorities, oust black officeholders, and disenfranchise black voters. At times, the violence resembled warfare: between 1865 and 1875, whites in Louisiana killed 2,141 blacks and wounded another 2,115. By 1877, the formal end of Reconstruction, the “redemption” of the South was complete: mob terrorism had suppressed black voting rights. (Krugler 2015, pp. 8–9)

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Krugler rightly states that the use of the language of “race riot,” for attacks like these, is fundamentally misleading, both implying spontaneity and hiding that the violence was planned and initiated by white Americans. He argues that a more accurate term is antiblack collective violence: “Race riot implies that rioters of all races were equally responsible for the violence, but almost all of the year’s conflict resulted from white-on-black violence. …African Americans were not so much rioting as fighting back, counter-attacking, repelling violence; above all, resisting” (Krugler 2015, p. 11). In his recent book, We Were Eight Years in Power, Ta-Nehisi Coates also draws parallels between the eight years of modest racial justice during the Reconstruction period and the white violence that ensued to restore white domination of economic and political life. He states that during “the Red Summer of 1919 [there were ] a succession of racist pogroms against dozens of cities ranging from Longview, Texas, to Chicago to Washington, D. C. Organized white violence against blacks continued into the 1920s— in 1921 a white mob leveled Tulsa’s ‘Black Wall Street,’ and in 1923 another one razed the black town of Rosewood, Florida—and virtually no one was punished” (Coates 2017, p. 186). In addition to collective white mob violence, during the same period there were lynchings of unspeakable cruelty, routinely attended by thousands of white Americans. Carol Anderson describes the scope of the violence: In the wake of the Civil War, government and judicial officials had decimated the right to vote, the economic provisions of forty acres and a mule, the chance for good public schools, and equality before the law. Despite the Thirteenth Amendment, African Americans had virtually no protection from a system that came painfully close to re-creating the exploitation and brutality of chattel slavery. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, white Southerners had saturated the old Confederacy in black blood. By 1920…there had been more than a thousand lynchings per decade; and in the rebel South, almost 90 percent of those killed were African American… .One of the most macabre formats for the murders was a spectacle lynching, which advertised the killing of a black person and provided special promotional trains to bring the audience, including women and children, to the slaughter. These gruesome events were standard family entertainment; severed body parts became souvenirs and decorations hung proudly in homes. (Anderson 2016, pp. 42–43)

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How do we contain this rage in the present and prevent its rise in the future? First, white Americans have to learn what African Americans, Native Americans, and people who are LatinX know so well, the horrendous past and present of racist violence. It is not hard to teach children and young people about this history, but I genuinely do not know how it can be effectively taught to adults. In terms of teaching children and young people, we have proven educational strategies that can be expanded. When students first learn about U.S. history in the fourth through sixth grades, they can be, and in many places are being, taught the real history of compelling ideas, brutal conflict, and extreme violence. All the way through high school, they are also taught the ways in which many of those excluded from the ideal of democracy were in fact pivotal actors in making that democracy a reality. As they are first taught about our national ideals, they learn that it has always been difficult to bring our vision of an inclusive, expansive democracy to life. Sometimes the challenge lies in communicating the vision; at others, it lies in extending it to all people, and not just to a privileged few. The work of the organization Facing History and Ourselves is notable in this regard. Their mission is clear: “We help students learn about hatred and bigotry so they can stop them from happening in the future.” They have a 40-year record of working with high school teachers to achieve the following goals: “By integrating the study of history, literature, and human behavior with ethical decision making and innovative teaching strategies, our program enables secondary school teachers to promote students’ historical understanding, critical thinking, and social-emotional learning. As students explore the complexities of history, and make connections to current events, they reflect on the choices they confront today and consider how they can make a difference” (https://www.facinghistory.org/about­us; accessed July 20, 2018). The legal scholar Patricia Williams describes this challenge well in her book The Alchemy of Race and Rights: To say that blacks never fully believed in rights is true. Yet it is also true that blacks believed in them so much and so hard that we gave them life where there was none before…This was the resurrection of life from ashes four hundred years old. The making of something out of nothing took immense alchemical fire—the fusion of a whole nation and the kindling of several generations…But if it took this long to breathe life into a form whose shape had already been forged by society, and which is therefore idealistically if not

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ideologically accessible, imagine how long the struggle would be without even that senses of definition, without the power of that familiar vision. (Williams 1991, p. 163)

For example, I have a colleague who teaches fourth grade in Kansas City, Missouri. Her class is racially diverse—12 students are African American, 1 is LatinX, 12 are white, and 2 are other races. This is the first time that students are taught in school about Missouri history, and this teacher does so beginning with the indigenous peoples, explaining the sophistication of the pre-conquest mound builder nations, and then the horror of conquest and displacement. While students are taught about the Civil War in fifth grade, she teaches them about the 1857 Dred Scott decision and does so as a drama in which they are involved. The students readily identify with Scott as he sues for freedom for himself and his wife and two daughters after having moved from the slave state of Missouri and living in the free territories of Illinois and Wisconsin for five years. The students are genuinely horrified by the results of the case, the declaration by the judge that neither Scott nor any other African American could claim citizenship, and that it was illegal to deprive the Missouri owner of his property. She also teaches them biographies of men and women from many different races and backgrounds who have had a positive impact. She states that students become invested in the characters, and learn more than they would from other forms of writing. She and others are also working on the idea of finding role models in history, in fictional characters, and in people that they know personally. When multicultural educators first began teaching such honest history, there was concern that this might be inappropriate at such a young age. On the contrary, we have found that children at the age of 10 and 11 are well aware of the human capacity for error and for cruelty. The poet Billy Collins expresses this realization well in his poem, “The History Teacher”: Trying to protect his students’ innocence he told them the Ice Age was really just the Chilly Age, a period of a million years when everyone had to wear sweaters. And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age, named after the long driveways of the time. The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more than an outbreak of questions such as

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“How far is it from here to Madrid?” “What do you call the matador’s hat?” The War of the Roses took place in a garden, and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan. The children would leave his classroom for the playground to torment the weak and the smart, mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses, while he gathered up his notes and walked home past flower beds and white picket fences, wondering if they would believe that soldiers in the Boer War told long, rambling stories designed to make the enemy nod off. (Collins 1994)

It was that bad, and it can be that bad again. At this point, I have another open question. Are there any other ethnic groups as capable of such sadistic violence and systematic oppression as white Europeans and whites in the United States? From the torture and violence of the Crusades, through the terror of the Inquisition, to the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the horrors of the Holocaust, extreme, direct violence has accompanied the creation of systems of economic and political exploitation. And, if there has been such violence committed by other peoples in history, how has it been named, denounced, and contained? Here we have much to learn from cultures that do recognize ongoing tendency toward violence and cruelty. In his pivotal book, The Truth About Stories, the First Nation’s author Thomas King asks a key question: “So just how would we manage a universe in which the attempt to destroy evil is seen as a form of insanity?” (King 2003, p. 110). Drawing on the wisdom of other indigenous peoples, he describes such a world of ongoing self-critique and vigilance, containing not just the evil of others, but the fundamental tendencies toward evil in ourselves. We see the same wisdom shared in the writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmerer, a botanist and a member of the Potawatomie nation, describes the importance of recognizing the ongoing threat of domination and violence, not just by others, but by one’s own people. In the Potawatomie nation, stories are told of the Windigo, a person who, in times of scarcity and fear, focuses only on their own satisfaction and even experiences pleasure in violently taking from others. Kimmerer sees this Windigo at the core of extractive capitalism, and, as an ongoing temptation for indigenous peoples as well. She claims we can only check the Windigo when we reckon with its devastating

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power, know that it will return, and check its recurrence earlier, rather than later (Kimmerer 2013, p. 377). Gratitude for all the earth has given us lends us courage to turn and face the Windigo that stalks us, to refuse to participate in an economy that destroys the beloved earth… to demand an economy that is aligned with life, not stacked against it. It’s easy to write that, harder to do. (Kimmerer 2013, p. 377)

While we in the United States have yet to make such a collective reckoning part of who we are as a nation, I wager that we may find insights in both the necessity of such reckoning with cruelty and with insights on how to contain it in the extensive work worldwide to identify and contain bullying among children and youth. Note, I did not say eradicate bullying. Many schools have rigorous and comprehensive anti-bullying programs. These programs work when they are continuous, comprehensive, and multifaceted. Continuous—so far, social scientists have found that there are always bullies. Schools do not wait to prevent bullying until an incident occurs, but know that they will occur and are ready. Secondly, the responses to contain bullying are comprehensive, including teachers, staff, administrators, parents, and fellow students—all of whom receive regular and ongoing training. Thirdly, the specific activities are multifaceted. When I first explored the meta-analyses of bullying, I was shocked by what I learned. The first set of findings was expected and reassuring. Students who are bystanders can be taught to build on their empathy for victims and can be taught how to intervene in creative and effective ways. The second finding was, however, a shock—bullies cannot be taught empathy. In fact, training that seeks to evoke empathy actually led to more bullying behavior. While they cannot learn empathy, their behaviors can be constrained if there is consistent and widespread curtailment of social privileges and clear negative consequences for bullying behavior (Ttofi and Farrington 2011, pp. 27–56; Olweus and Limber 2010, pp. 124–134; Polanin et al. 2012, pp. 47–65). Let us now consider a fourth challenge—how do we take these lessons to adults, and how do we apply them in the political sphere? Here the social science is clear and profoundly challenging. It is profoundly difficult for adults to accept information that counters previously held ideas. In fact, typical debate strategies, presenting adults with rational counter-­ information, only reinforce prior held beliefs. Unfortunately, dangerously, this is true of the myths of American innocence and exceptionalism. In fact, reasoned debate with the systematic presentation of other facts has

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been shown to reify previously held convictions (Redlawsk et  al. 2010; Kuklinski 2007). How do we teach this complex and violent history to adults? Movies like 12 Years a Slave are crucial, but was it seen by those who argue that the civil war wasn’t really all about slavery? Did it open their minds to new information? This leads to a related question. Children and young people who are bystanders to bullying can be taught to build on their empathy with victims and to stand up for justice. This is not only true of children, but at key times in our history has also been true of adults. The social psychologist Steven Pinker describes the role of literature in leading to the expansion of human rights for women, workers, and enslaved Africans in England and in the United States. The autobiographies of slaves were pivotal in the abolitionist movement, showing the full humanity of those formerly seen by whites as inferior. The same was true of novels by Dickens about white workers and novels about the lives of women. This literature fostered both the expansion of the circle of sympathy and the escalator of reason—more fully valuing the humanity of others and finding ways to honor that humanity in laws and economic practices. Pinker is clear—sympathy alone was and is ineffective. It is not enough to acknowledge the dignity of others and decry the pain they experience because of injustice. This emotional connection must be, and can be, lived in redressing the actions and structures that create the injustice (Pinker 2011, pp.  171, 689–696 and Chap. 4). While the popular media and political activism of the Enlightenment period led to greater humanization, our social media is doing the opposite. That literature was part of the expanding awareness of other worlds and increased empathy and respect. Social media now (Facebook, reality TV, the proliferation of multiple news sources) reinforces both isolation and fosters cruelty. Timothy Snyder, a historian of the Holocaust, analyzes this phenomenon and explores how to counter it (Snyder 2017). At the core of much reality TV, for example, is taking pleasure in the physical and emotional humiliation of others; at the core of much media is delight in spectacle, in sensational and simplistic analyses, and not the satisfaction of rigorous, critical thought. This problem was described well by Obama in an interview with David Remnick after the presidential election. In that interview, President Obama described a new challenge for communicating our vision of American greatness—the limiting power of new media. Now, in a way not true in 2008, it is increasingly easy to stay confined in self-reinforcing bubbles in

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which only messages are heard that reflect preconceived idea, and it is increasingly difficult to challenge both distortions and outright lies (Remnick 2016). This is not the first time we have encountered this challenge. In fact, while Pinker recounts the powerful humanizing role of literature, one of the first uses of the printing press was just the opposite—the widespread dissemination of the Malleus Maleficarum, the handbook for identifying and torturing witches, published in 1487 and a bestseller for 200 years, second only to the Bible (Guiley 2008, p. 223; Mackay 2009). There is another question for ongoing research: Are there ways in which social media is being used to connect, rather than to divide, and to enhance critical thinking, rather than reinforce preconceived ideas? In order to do the latter, we could create a kind of preventive education that builds on what can be done to use the collective to enable individuals to live out our best and to contain our worst. One example of how this can be done is teaching students the ways in which public discourse can block our awareness of collective forms of injustice. The social psychologist Albert Bandura has demonstrated how people routinely use moral justifications for acts of collective atrocity. I discovered the power of teaching students about his work, and the role of morality in the perpetuation of inhumanities quite by accident. During the Spring of 2004, weeks before the release of the photographs of Abu Ghraib, and the disclosure of the horrific torture of hundreds of Iraqis by U.S. and British forces, I was teaching a class on religious perspectives on peace and war at the University of Missouri. This was, in many ways, a stealth class. It was listed only as Contemporary Issues in Religious Studies and attracted a student body looking for a general humanities credit. As a result, the students reflected the general population of Missouri, 80% considered themselves to be conservative, 10% considered themselves to be very conservative, and only 10% thought of themselves as moderate or liberal. Most of the students also had family members who had a long history of military service, including service in the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. When the news was released in late April of the outrageous acts of torture and sexual humiliation, these conservative students were appalled and horrified. They immediately and readily saw these actions as violating all codes of military honor and human decency, and shared wholeheartedly the sentiments expressed by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair: “Let me make it quite clear that if these things have actually been done, they are

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completely and totally unacceptable. We went to Iraq to get rid of that sort of thing, not to do it ourselves!” (“Photos allege abuse of Iraqis by British troops,” Saturday, May 1, 2004. Posted: 2327 GMT(0727 HKT) http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/04/30/iraq.brit.prisoner.abuse/ accessed May 2, 2004). Given that these conservative students saw the injustice for what it was, I was quite shocked to discover that their reaction was unique and that far from being appalled, leaders in the Bush administration dismissed such actions as aberrations, and defended the use of torture. What made the difference between the responses of conservative students in mid-Missouri and conservative citizens and governmental leaders throughout the United States? In the week prior to the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib, we had read two essays, William Schulz’s “Security Is a Human Right, Too,” and Albert Bandura’s “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities.” In his essay, Schulz (then director of Amnesty International U.S.A.) made the claim that it is equally important to condemn human rights violations in the name of preventing terrorism and to denounce terrorism itself. He stated, “We have chastised one government after another for using terrorism as an excuse to muzzle peaceful dissent. We have criticized the United States for its arbitrary roundup of Arab and Muslim residents, for the incommunicado detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in defiance of the Geneva convention….” In addition to these legitimate criticisms of governmental actions, he also spoke of the ways in which the human rights community can also combat terrorism: “name the suppliers of arms to terrorist groups, suppliers who include established states, and not just ‘rogue’ ones; mobilize grass-roots opposition to terrorism by addressing root causes like economic deprivation or social discrimination.” He ended his essay with a quotation from Stephen Spender, an opponent of the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. When I saw photographs of children murdered by the Fascist, I felt furious pity. When the supporters of Franco talked of Red atrocities, I merely felt indignant that people should tell such lies. In the first case I saw corpses, in the second only words… I gradually acquired a certain horror of the way in which my own mind worked. It was clear to me that unless I cared about every murdered child impartially, I did not really care about children being murdered at all. (Schulz 2004, pp. 1–3)

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The power of Spender’s poetic self-disclosure was augmented by the careful arguments of Albert Bandura. Bandura described how easy it is for moral clarity and absolutism to lead to cruelty and violence. He delineated seven practices of moral disengagement—ways genuinely decent human beings commit and justify behaviors that they would otherwise recognize as morally abhorrent. The practices are clear, and examples readily came to mind (Bandura 1999). The first and fundamental practice is being convinced that one is the bearer of a just cause, “fighting ruthless oppressors, protecting …cherished values, preserving world peace, saving humanity from subjugation, or honoring their countries commitments.” The second practice is avoiding the negative consequences of one’s behavior through the use of euphemistic language—the term collateral damage for the death and injuries caused to civilians; or the terms professional interrogation techniques for physical and psychological torture. A third practice is advantageous comparison—our violence pales in comparison to theirs (Bandura 1999, pp. 2–5). For example, when challenged by Senator Lindsay Graham to decisively condemn the use of torture by U.S. personnel, then U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales stated: “While we are struggling to find out what happened at Abu Ghraib, they’re beheading people like Danny Pearl and Nick Berg. We are nothing like our enemy!” (Goodman 2005). The fourth and fifth practices are the diffusion and displacement of responsibility—for subordinates, one claims to have been only following orders. For those in charge, orders to commit atrocities are most often implicit, rather than direct, and officials dismiss harmful actions as the actions of a few irresponsible personnel who are either “misguided or overzealous” (Bandura 1999, pp. 5–6). In the case of Abu Ghraib, the early outrage of Tony Blair was quickly supplanted by a displacement of responsibility on what were seen as a few ill-trained and misguided soldiers, and the policy decisions by government officials that not only allowed but fostered such abuse have even yet to be thoroughly and independently investigated. A sixth practice is the disregard or distortion of consequences. If euphemistic language no longer works, the “evidence of harm can be discredited.” And finally, when the severity of the consequences can no longer be avoided, one dehumanizes and/or demonizes the victim: They are all terrorists; or, they all share an irrational hatred of us (Bandura 1999, pp. 6–8). These processes of moral disengagement are pervasive and extremely hard to dislodge once in place. It is, however, possible to inoculate people against these practices. As in the case of the conservative students in

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Missouri, early warning served to heighten moral intelligence. With this preparation, students could easily see the operation of moral justification in the rhetoric of governmental officials and were singularly unpersuaded by their legitimacy or morality. Again, I’m sure you see the challenge. We can check ourselves in regard to moral disengagement if educated about it in advance. However, how do we convey these same lessons to adults who are caught up in the morass of moral disengagement? Another related challenge regarding the extension of what works with children and youth to the realm of citizens is that of how to contain bullying in the public sphere? Even the liberal press is now reinforcing it through its critical yet exhaustive coverage, rather than finding ways of containing and discouraging it. I do not know what alternative forms of journalism could be better at denouncing and containing bullying. I do, however, have ideas about how it can be done by citizens in the public sphere and will share with you one positive example about what has been done to effectively stand up to the bullying of white nationalists on college campuses. As you may know, there is a concerted campaign by white nationalists to take a white supremacist form of white identity politics to college campuses throughout the United States. The first such event was held in early December 2016  in College Station, Texas. Texas A&M was chosen for obvious reasons—primarily conservative, and likely more Republican than Democratic voters. Richard Spencer was invited by a private citizen, who rented university space for the speech. There was considerable debate about what the response should be. A total of 10,000 people signed a petition stating that he should not be allowed to speak, others argued that he should be allowed to speak, with a response from the university only after the speech. Others proposed a very different response that reflects a plus of new media. It was not hard to reasonably surmise the likely content of Spencer’s remarks given the views reflected on his website. The response of the university was immediate and proactive. At the same time that Spencer spoke there was an Aggies United rally, sponsored by all the sports teams, and many student organizations, the Black Student organization, the LatinX organization, the LGBTQ organization. At this rally, multiple voices expressed in poetry and song their commitment to a unity based on respect for diversity, on an identity of expansive community, of being stronger together. This celebration of being stronger together through

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poetry and music was attended by 6500–7000 students (Texas A&M Today 2016). In sharp contrast, Spencer’s message to the audience of around 400 students was unabashed: “We conquered this continent…Whether it’s nice to say that or not, we won and we got to define what America means; we got to define what this continent means. America, at the end of the day, belongs to white men” (Thompson 2017). Thousands of students, citizens, and faculty, however, gave a vastly different definition of what Texas A&M means, and what being American means, celebrating the core values of excellence, integrity, leadership, loyalty, and respect for diversity and service. We are at a critical juncture in our collective life as a nation, and Carol Anderson describes it well, challenging all of us to refuse to follow and his attempt to “take our country back”: It’s time instead that we take our country forward into the future, a better future. It is time to defuse the power of white rage. It is time to move into that future. It is a future where the right to vote is unfettered by discriminatory restrictions that prevent millions of American citizens from having any say in their own government…. The future is one that invests in our children by making access to good schools the norm, not the exception, and certainly not dependent upon zip code…. Why use property taxes as the basis for funding schools when that method rewards discriminatory public policy and perpetuates the inequalities that undermine our society? The future is one that takes seriously a justice system whose enormous powers are actually used to serve and protect. (Anderson 2016, pp. 161–162)

To create this future requires the honest embrace of four challenges. The first challenge—the price of democracy is eternal vigilance in expressing our best and containing our worst. The second challenge—the forms of vigilance are primarily collective and not individual. To live out our aspirations and contain individual and systemic irrationality, folly, and cruelty requires ongoing systematic checks to systemic injustice and implicit bias. The third challenge—to check and contain explicit and violent white supremacy all people have to see how bad it is, how bad it was, and how bad it can be again. We must learn the history, the scope, and depth of the violence, as well as the means of perpetuating structural racism and implicit bias. The fourth challenge is realizing that we must find or create the means of containing white supremacy and rectify its cost, and do so in full awareness that there are no simple answers, no single solutions, and no silver bullets.

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Daunting challenges, serious questions, all of which require our best as humanists as we live out the mission of the Institute for Humanist Studies “to extend the circle of justice, caring and concern to all.” As we began with the words of Michael Eric Dyson, let us conclude with his challenge to white Americans “to wrestle with these truths and confront these realities” (Dyson 2017, p. 7): I know that when we get out of our own way and let the spirit of love and hope shine through that we are a better people. But such love and hope can only come about if we first confront the poisonous history that has almost unmade our nation and undone our social compact. We must face up to what we as a country have made of the black people who have been the linchpin of democracy, the folk who saved America from itself, who redeemed it from the hypocrisy of proclaiming liberty and justice for all while denying all that liberty and justice should be to us. (Dyson 2017, pp. 4–5)

As whites we can join with our fellow citizens who are African American, Asian American, Native American, and LatinX in the essential work of renewing our democracy and expanding what we are at our best. White people can reject the calls for white power, white nationalism, and white supremacy that lead white elites to fight for a world in which their belonging requires domination. We can reject the logic of racial domination in which economically marginalized and oppressed whites blame immigrants, African Americans, Native Americans, Muslims, and people who are LatinX for their economic precarity, and in which they, too, long for a form of belonging that entails white domination (Hosang and Lowndes 2019). As citizens of this beleaguered democracy, we all can take up the soul-­ expanding work described so well by Michael Eric Dyson: “But the time is at hand for reckoning with the past, recognizing the truth of the present, and moving together to redeem the nation for our future” (Dyson 2017, p.  8). This is the task, this is the gift, that faces us all. May we embrace it with courage, honesty, and creativity.

References Anderson, Carol. 2016. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. New York: Bloomsbury. Bandura, Albert. 1999. Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review 3: 193–209.

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Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2017. We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy. New York: One World Publishing. Collins, Billy. 1994. The History Teacher. Los Angeles Times, June 12. Dyson, Michael. 2017. Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Eferakorho, Jte. 2003. A Critical Analysis of Multicultural Education Reform Initiatives in a Collegiate Teacher Preparation Program. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Missouri-Columbia. Giddings, Paula J. 2008. Ida: A Sword Among Lions. New York: Amistad. Goodman, Amy. 2005. Amy Goodman Show. Democracy Now. Amy Goodman Show, July 1. www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid+05/01/07/1621235. Guiley, Rosemary. 2008. The Encyclopedia of Witches, Witchcraft and Wicca. Checkmark Books. Hosang, Daniel Martinez, and Joseph E.  Lowndes. 2019. Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-wing Politics of Precarity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. King, Thomas. 2003. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Krugler, David F. 2015. 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kuklinski, James H. 2007. The Limits of Facts in Citizen Decision-Making. Extensions 50: 5–8. Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center. University of Oklahoma. Lemann, Nicolos. 2006. Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Mackay, Christopher S. 2009. The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum. Cambridge University Press. Olweus, Dan, and Susan Limber. 2010. Bullying in School: Evaluation and Dissemination of the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 80: 124–134. Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking Press. Pinn, Anthony B. 2017. When Colorblindness Isn’t the Answer: Humanism and the Challenge of Race. Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing and Washington, D. C. Institute for Humanist Studies.

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Polanin, Joshua R., Dorothy L. Espelage, and Therese D. Pigott. 2012. A Meta-­ Analysis of School-Based Bullying Prevention Programs’ Effects on Bystander Intervention Behavior. Social Psychology Review 41: 47–65. Redlawsk, David P., Andrew J.W. Civettini, and Karen M. Emmerson. 2010. The Affective Tipping Point Do Motivated Reasoners ever Get It? Political Psychology 31: 4. Remnick, David. 2016. Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency. The New Yorker Magazine. Schulz, William F. 2004. The Way We Live Now: 4-18-04: Essay: Security is a Human Right Too. New York Times Sunday Magazine, April 18. Snyder, Timothy. 2017. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books. Texas A&M Today. 2016. https://today.tamu.edu/2016/12/07/aggies-­united-­ event-­brings-­campus-­and-­community-­together-­to-­denounce-­hate/. Aggies United Event Brings Campus and Community Together to Denounce Hate. Texas A&M Today, December 7. Thompson, Laura Marie. 2017. Aggies Wheel Out Unwelcome Wagon for White Nationalist Richard Spencer. Texas Observer, December 7. Ttofi, Maria M., and David P.  Farrington. 2011. Effectiveness of School-Based Programs to Reduce Bullying: A Systematic and Meta-analytic Review. Journal of Experimental Criminology 7: 27–56. Welch, Sharon D. 2004. Ceremonies of Gratitude and Accountability. In Disrupting White Supremacy from Within: White People on What We Need to Do, ed. Jennifer Harvey, Karen A.  Case, and Robin Hawley Gorsline, 249–280. Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press. Williams, Patricia. 1991. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Young, Iris Marion Young. 2011. Justice and the Politics of Difference. New Introduction by Danielle S. Allen. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sharon D. Welch  is a social ethicist and activist who has held faculty and administrative positions at Meadville Lombard Theological School (Unitarian Universalist), the University of Missouri-Columbia, and Harvard Divinity School. Welch’s scholarship reflects her ongoing exploration of the power of humanist thought for constructive civic engagement, and she is the author of six books, her most recent being After the Protests Are Heard: Enacting Civic Engagement and Social Transformation (2019).

Index

A Abu Ghraib, 125–127 American Humanist Association (AHA), 22–24, 31 Anderson, Carol, 118, 119, 129 Antihumanism, 3, 5, 57, 78 Aristotle, 47, 58, 77 Atheism, 26, 38 atheists, 24, 27, 29, 34 Auerbach, Eric, 71, 76 Autonomy, 48–51 B Belief, 19, 23, 39, 105, 157 creed(s), 24, 84, 91 creedal, 84, 91 creeping creedalism, 90 faith, 7, 18–20, 24, 35, 79, 86, 87, 91–95, 99, 100, 107, 188

C Calvin, John, 24 Calvinist, 2 Cicero, 7, 35 College, 13, 14, 61, 69, 78, 83–97, 103, 113, 128 Colonial, 57, 58, 63 colonialism, 4, 61, 63, 64 postcolonial, 57, 104 settler colonialism, 64 Comet, August, 3 Community, 12, 18–22, 24–28, 30, 37, 90, 92, 96, 102, 104, 107, 116, 117, 126, 128 Comparative, 14, 104, 105, 107 comparison, 14, 127 Critical thinking, 42, 120, 125

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 W. D. Hart (ed.), Educating Humanists, Studies in Humanism and Atheism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88527-4

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INDEX

D Dawkins, Richard, 18 Democracy, 27, 61 Democratic criticism, 13, 58, 62, 64, 65 Dewey, 13, 55, 58–61, 67, 78 Dogmatism, 39, 40, 65 E Epstein, Greg, 18 Erasmian humanists, 7, 8 Ethical, 19, 28 Experience, 8, 20–22, 29, 57–60, 62–64, 67, 74, 78, 87, 91, 100, 108 F Foucault, Michel, 5, 10, 13, 57, 68, 69 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 43 Giddings, Paula, 115, 116 Girard, René, 12, 44–46 God, 2, 18, 20, 24, 34, 62, 66, 71–75, 79, 80, 100 gods, 43, 56, 72, 108 H Heidegger, Martin, 4–7, 9, 10, 62, 65 Heteronomy, 36, 48, 50, 51 Hoffman, Joseph, 22, 25 Humane, 5, 7, 19, 41, 58, 59, 62, 78

humaneness, 12, 33–35, 37, 38, 40–42, 50, 51 Humanist, 1–15, 17–30, 33–38, 40–49, 51, 55–80, 84, 90, 91, 96, 104, 105, 109, 130, 133 Humanist Manifesto, 6, 84 Humanitarian, 4, 78 Humanitatis, 11, 58 I Ijtihad, 67 J James, William, 10 Justice, 19, 37, 41, 42, 46, 90, 96, 104, 105, 111, 112, 114, 115, 119, 124, 129, 130 K Kant, Immanuel, 36, 43, 44, 50, 59, 67 Kantian, 10, 13, 36 King, Martin Luther, 44, 49 Kurtz, Paul, 23 L Levene, Nancy, 75, 77, 79, 80 M Mandela, Nelson, 33, 44, 47, 49–51 Mimesis, 44–46, 53, 76

 INDEX 

N Nagel, Thomas, 9, 10 Nature, 2, 3, 15, 18, 19, 22, 25, 44, 56, 60, 61, 65, 79, 92, 105, 106 New religious movements, 83, 85–89, 93 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10 O Obama, Barack Hussein, 15, 100, 112, 118 Orientalism, 55, 57, 58, 61, 77 P Pinn, Anthony, 25, 114, 115 Pragmatist, 6 R Religion, 3, 11, 14, 24, 34, 38, 65, 66, 79, 81, 84–93, 96, 100, 104, 107 Religious humanism, 18, 38, 84, 89 religious humanists, 29 Renaissance humanists, 7, 8, 10, 11, 34, 35, 44 Russell, Bertrand, 10 S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 4, 9, 10, 57, 68 Scripts, 14, 101

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Said, Edward W., 1, 13, 55–80 Secular criticism, 13, 71 Secular Humanism, 3, 13, 18, 23, 24, 29, 56 Slavery, 4, 11, 51, 64, 73, 112, 114, 116, 119, 124 chattel slavery, 64 T Transcendent, 13, 56, 67, 108 Trump, Donald, 15, 113 U Unitarian Universalism, 12, 13, 24, 83, 86–93, 95 V Vico, Giambattisa, 62, 73–77 Violence, 45, 51, 64, 102, 105, 112, 114–116, 118–120, 122, 127, 129 W Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 115, 116 Williams, Patricia, 120 Worship, 92, 96 worshipped, 102 Wynter, Sylvia, 78 Y Young, Scott H., 21, 94–96