DEAN'S LETTER

Since my last dean's letter, Institute affairs have been proceeding on many fronts. Carol Wintermute in another section of this newsletter describes the consolidation process of NACH and THI which has moved smoothly. Last December, class 11 began its three years of study. Although small, the class is representative of the varieties of humanism among us. This time will be be utilizing a series of co-mentors (with me as the primary mentor).

The Institute continues to explore new forms of learning and one of the most exciting has been the use of the Internet as an adjunct locus of readings. We are developing our own Web site (campus.humanistinstitute.org). (The "we" in this case really means Richard Siddall and Carol Stone, members of class 10). As this site expands, it will serve multiple purposes—describing the institute, recruiting students, providing information for board, faculty, students, and alums. Along with information, the web site will contain discussion groups where we can share insights on specialized matters as well as discuss general humanist topics. I hope that all of you will feel free to make suggestions for improving this new facility.

Our recruitment needs to be improved and broadened. To do this, our financial resources must be strengthened so that we can do more things on a better scale. There already have been some pilot projects in Minneapolis, and we hope for many more regional experiments. But the long run depends on the success of our capital fund drive.

No dean's letter would be complete without some sharing of the issues that demand my focus, and commending worthwhile books that have come to my attention. Some of you have followed the evolution of the Fellowship of Religious Humanists into the Friends of Religious Humanism and now the HUUmanists. Given the New Age eclecticism that has come to characterize many Unitarian Universalist churches, it is very important to keep the humanist option alive in that denomination. The fact that a great majority of the ministerial leadership for this denomination is either trained in non-UU seminaries or has actually transferred in from non-UU denominations underscores the need to articulate and expand the humanist strands within Unitarian Universalism.

As if to emphasize this, an Boston Globe interview with the new UUA president, William Sinkford, reads "Sinkford said he also wants to encourage Unitarian Universalist congregations, which are often accused of being overly cerebral, to increase their religiosity, which he said had been eroded when the movement was dominated by humanists. ‘There is no one dominant theological grounding —we're a religious faith in which everyone is in the minority theologically — and I think it's important for this movement to reclaim the ability to use religious language, which provides access to spiritual depth…. Our children need to know the stories out of the rich traditions that ground and support our tradition and our culture.'"

I would urge all those affiliated with the Institute to join the lists of both the HUUmanists and American Ethical Union. In the very near future we will have links to these as well as many other important websites posted on our own page to make it easier for you to tune in.

The discussions on the UU list have recently included partisans of dowsing and astrology, as well as a challenge to the Enlightenment traditions of reason and science. Whatever else postmodernism may mean, it always seems to include rejections of those parts of the past. We need many more serious evaluations of whether "postmodern humanism" is an oxymoron or simply a valid and useful label for buying into the trends of the times.

Similarly, the "liberal" designator comes in for current re-assessments. The editor of the conservative journal First Things has a very instructive article on Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as "the last liberal."It is one thing for Republicans and some Democrats to disavow this label, but quite another for humanists!

Two recent books seem "musts" for constructive humanists. "Neurotheology" has become a popular word with the publication of Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief" by Eugene D'Aquili, Andrew Newberg, and Vince Rause. But many speed readers have jumped to wrong conclusions from the title. If the same neurological experiences are now found to characterize meditating Franciscan nuns as well as Tibetan Buddhists, we have a biological concomitant of mysticism rather than any proof of anything conceptually "transcendent." Long ago Julian Huxley was urging his fellow humanists to root these experiences within a scientific naturalistic framework. Note also the parallels that the contemporary researchers find with sexual experiences. In the 1930s, Wilhelm Reich, a much-maligned psychiatrist, pondered the sex-repressive fanaticisms shared by German Catholics, Nazis, and Communists-concluding that all of these diverse groups realized the competitive threat posed by blissful individual experiences.

I also urge you to get Douglas Porpora's Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life. A sweeping survey of the kinds of nihilism that surround us, and a good use of thoughtful interview materials.

I am sure you are struck by the political ascendancy of Christian fundamentalism throughout the U.S., and not just in the Bush White House. How far we have come in the 50 years since Pit Van Dusen, president of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary, wrote of the "invisible religion." He was wrong then, because he, along with most elite academics, underestimated the forces of anti-intellectualism. The attenuation of liberal Protestantism, as well as a much less significant liberal Catholicism, has been precipitate.

What does, and should, this mean to humanists? Surely not that "humanism is America's real faith" or that humanism is an inevitable result of present educational structures and practices. Nor should we assume democracy will remain vital in an affluent economy. Nor that we have ever been justified in lumping together all forms of religious traditions. Liberal Protestants and liberal Catholics and liberal Jews are often necessary allies of humanists in extending Enlightenment democracy, but our rhetoric often obscures this. It is one thing to accept our weak minority status, quite another to cherish it!

The historic strength of humanism has been this merging of Enlightenment rationalism with an equalitarian democratizing. Both of these depend upon education. And focus on the ethical potentials of humans. When humanists spoke of human dignity, it was an "inherent" human quality. What mattered was ethical development, ethical culture. And what blocked this maturation, for humanists, was both theological insistences on human depravity and any kind of naïve ethical equalitarianism. Humanists saw ethics as first the recognizing of possible courses of action and then a choosing based upon rational consideration of alternate values and their consequences.

This ethical bedrock should be the center of our message, and the litmus of our relations to persons holding other religions and traditions. We need to remember that effective and lasting values are always rooted in emotions and beliefs and habits and rituals. Take the presently-contested issue of stem-cell research. Once we can agree that human flourishing is the central value, arguments about embryos-as-persons lose their thrust. So too the theological hairsplitting as to whether blastocysts are life or pre-life or whatever. Classical moral theory spoke of this as the double-effect (given a combination of both good and bad outcomes, which is the stronger?).

This issue is one that humanists should study carefully. What is it that makes some fundamentalists, Mormons, Catholics support stem-cell research? Surely not any rethinking of theological doctrines. And surely not any effects of doubt or ridicule of such doctrines. The issue is simply that expanding health for the living is more important than research-destruction of embryos that were already slated for destruction.

Does this count as an increase in humanism? It certainly indicates a humanizing of many religious traditions in relation to a value. And, of equal human significance, it further dramatizes the power of reason-as-science to augment life.

The varied dogmas of inferiorities that have plagued human history-based upon gender, "race" [itself a useless fiction], sexual orientation, ethnicity-all lose their power once the higher value of developing the creative potentials of all humans is seen and embraced.

The role of humanism is to celebrate these discoveries that enhance life, to honor and remember those who push these frontiers of knowledge, to make such discovery exciting and motivating to subsequent generations. This means a never-ending struggle against the effects of dogmatic limits on human knowledge and power, and a steady and powerful insistence upon the primacy of the ethical. As the Institute moves into its twentieth year, we have made a significant start toward serving this cause. Enemies without, we can handle! The challenge remains one of developing an ecumenical humanism that has moved beyond the too-frequent civil wars of our past