DEAN'S LETTER

Let me start with some report of ways the Institute is flourishing. Class 12 will be starting December 6, 2002. We have a large group of promising applicants and 2 stellar mentors. Curt Collier and Rebecca Armstrong, both graduates of the Institute who will bring multiple experiences and talents to the task. If you know of persons who should be in this class, please get them in touch with Kristin for more information and applications.

Adjunct faculty met in Minneapolis in May for their annual Colloquium. At their previous May meeting they had chosen Power as this year's topics. Papers ranged from power on personal levels to power internationally. We are now exploring possible ways to publish the papers as revised by our discussions. The ensuing events of September 11 made the topic  more poignant as well as more timely.

Ecohumanism, volume 15 of Humanism Today, is now in your hands, We need lots of help in distributing this unusual collection of nontheistic and nonsentimental essays. You should have received a flyer offering special rates when purchased with the earlier volume on Multiculturalism. They make great gifts--and don't forget local libraries and universities!

Our web site continues to grow in usefulness (www.humanistinstitute.org), thanks to our dedicated webmasters Richard Siddall and Carol Stone (who will be graduating with class 10 this August). Ideas for improvements are always welcomed.

Progress in past months toward the ecumenical humanism that has continued to inspire the Institute is slow. The humanist organizations from which we draw may be small but they are strong on separatism and parochialism. Money won't solve all of our problems, but the annual and capital fund drives need your support. We are still struggling along with one part-time paid staff member, and there is so much more that we should be doing!

Many of us moved through universities at a time when the "common wisdom" was that religions would soon succumb, unable to resist modernity. Of course the reverse has happened. Modern communications may have shrunk planet earth, but more rigid and anti-modern forms of religions have struck back. Note my plural. This is not just a case of Islam fundamentalism or "Islamicists" (whatever such terms are taken to mean). Anti-modern agendas have appeared in almost every religion. If you have any doubts about this happening in our own society, try explaining the success of the "Left Behind" series of dispensationalist fundamentalist novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. I have said many times that there is a Gresham's Law operating with religions where bad money always drives out good. Their churches are filling while our meetings dwindle. A perfectly sensible ruling by the 9^th Circuit Court on the 1954 insertion of "under God" into the flag salute generates hysteria.

Our schools have so debased the teaching of religious history that many do not understand that there is no "generic god" and that different nuancing of that alleged being have spilled more blood throughout history than any other cause! The recent flap among Missouri Synod Lutherans (a very conservative group representing 1/3 of US Lutherans) brings this home. For participating in a public interfaith memorial for those who died on 9/11, a minister has been suspended! The causes are instructive. Sharing a platform with other Christians was impermissible "unioning;" moreover sharing also with nonChristians was [yet more??] impermissible "syncretism." The bloody centuries of European history that the US Founding Fathers worked so hard to prevent on US soil were not battles between theists and atheists. They were over ways to split the god-hair.

For many years people would ask me how I could teach comparative religions when I was not religious (i.e. conventionally, and to them). I found myself saying that religions were like viruses--mostly dangerous, and even more dangerous when only imperfectly understood. We need to help people realize that virus-religions are not simply those of other groups but that undesirable viruses may well be lurking in their own versions. The potentials for promoting violence are in every culture and therefore in every religion. In many historical cases, religions and political ideologies (which function as pseudo-religions/new religions/revived religions) inflame cultural propensities. May I recommend several films, not on every rental shelf, that bring this home. No Man's Land is set in former Yugoslavia; Destiny is set in 12^th-century Spain; The Occult History of the Third Reich treats Nazism as a revived religion. The Devils sets Catholic Inquisitors in the midst of a civil war against Huguenots.

What should humanist strategies be in this time? Several come to mind.

1. Support universal human rights. Universal in the sense that reasonable people under reasonable circumstances can develop versions of them. Freedom to develop fully as a human--without coercions of body, mind, or conscience. Freedom to create societies where these freedoms extend to all. Freedom to think, speak, assemble, work for change.
2. Focus on democracy. Not simply the rule by majorities, but the structures to restrain majorities and protect minorities (a "rule of law"). As we continue to develop its meanings here at home, our foreign policies need to encourage it more fully abroad
3. Take education seriously. Foolish tax rebates have made almost every state cut back on support for adequate public education for all. The green light for vouchers will further erode already inadequate schools.
4. Insist that public education should teach a common public morality. I urge you all to find copies of Moral and Spiritual Values in Public Education (NEA, 1951) and quote this startling volume copiously on all occasions whenever someone asserts that schools can't teach an acceptable public and private morality (or even more fatuously, that religions either can or do).
5. Support the sciences. Against critics from the camps of postmodernists as well as fundamentalists. That evolution should still be controversial in our society indicates a devastating failure here. A hard but essential read is Philip Kitcher's latest book, Science, Truth, and Democracy.
6. Support the arts as major sources of human creativity (and thus societal change). I use the term broadly here to cover all those areas where we add new things to  life. Take one example. Albert Camus' The Plague may have done more in our time to destroy naïve claims of divine providence than any other single work. Partly because it is a very readable parable, partly because it alludes to totalitarianisms, and partly because its hero exemplifies a caring, reasoning human. Is it still widely read? If not, why not? Nor should we neglect the brilliant creations of such humanists as Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur C. Clarke, Steve Allen, Gene Roddenberry, Carl Sagan. By the way, have you discovered the digital cable channel Ovation yet? A superb arts channel, created by the late J. Carter Brown, that does a little of everything but very well--from reggae to classical chamber, ballet and drama. Programmed well-enough to hook even teenagers!
7. Revitalize media as sources of information and not just entertainment. Alternatives to commercialized newspapers and TV networks still exist, but they require motivation and search. The source of such motivation is critical intelligence, a quality that humanists have always emphasized. Russell Baker's "American Journalism in Peril" in the July 18 New York Review of Books in depressingly instructive.
8. Develop economic sophistication. Globalization and market economies have not been floods that lifted all ships (see vol. 12 of Humanism Today). We are surrounded by a new awareness that "free markets" need moral oversights if they are not to become channels of greed for the few. Institute students recently have been reading Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom with considerable enthusiasm. We may have the best Congress that money can buy, but its record of dealing with the growing polarization of rich and poor is dismal, and its record of reducing corporate fraud is even more dismal. The Savings & Loan scandal was put behind without significant legal or moral improvement, and has now been surpassed by tech and energy exposures. There are plenty of real victims here but none to press their case. Media attention flits from Martha Stewart to the next celebrity. Reread Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.
9. Sharpen our relativism. Fundamentalists regularly accuse us of "moral relativism." Plead guilty--then ask about their moral "absolutism" in regard to slavery, subjugation of women, child labor, compulsory pregnancy, environmental degradation, burning of heretics, theocracy, divine kings! Of course morals are relative; and the issue it to improve them by critical intelligence. But no humanist would ever say that local customs justify any or all moral practices. Humanists need to guide the current uncritical rejections of the "Arab/Muslim" world into a more rational examination of historical practices in the light of emerging modern moralities. Multiculturalism (vol. 14 of Humanism Today) can be of help here.

My list above is only a start toward how much needs our attention. And of how few there are with time or temper to attend. Why should anyone turn from making money or having fun to task on such a set of challenges? Humanists before us had a series of answers to their critics. They knew that it was our human duty, since there were neither gods to help us or devils to blame for our failures. They also knew the satisfactions of making life better, for themselves and for their neighbors. They had discovered that the meaning of life was found in making this life more meaningful. And that the excitement of problem-solving suffused all activities with a sense of joy.

The next time you have to endure a meeting where humanist bickering and infighting become stifling, try to revive this history!

Robert B. Tapp