DEAN'S LETTER

How do we best describe modern humanism? What alternative wordings can we use? I am proposing Liberation into Humanization. Immanuel Kant described enlightenment as the outgrowing of youthful dominations—families, churches, subcultures, nationalisms. Few of us were completely fortunate in our pre-birth choices of these regards, and we need to choose for ourselves. “Humanization” suggests more than simply physical development. It is a commitment to an ongoing psychosocial maturing, a growing realization both of our own potentials and of the social nature of selfing that makes our moral growth dependent upon our commitment to the growth of all humans.

US culture has been degraded by a number of antihumanistic forces to the point where more of our neighbors believe in a devil than in Darwin (or equate the two!). A celebrity culture has trivialized the  pursuit of human excellence, and violence has replaced intelligence in much of our dealing with our world—at home and abroad.

Much of American religion has played into this. Voices of the various gods seem better at articulating hatred than love, better able to divide  us’s and them’s than to unite peoples. The alternative religions (book stores label them New Age, metaphysical, spiritual, and the like) mostly help people narrow their concerns to their own selves. Taking care of Number One is a kind of ethic, but not one that leads to humanization.

Surprisingly enough, I want to call upon Thomas Aquinas for help! Early in his major Summa he argues that one cannot simultaneously “know” and “believe” the same proposition. The child “believe that there is a god” on the authority of parents and priests. But if and when that child studies philosophy, Thomas asserts, he will come to “know” that god exists. And knowing is better than believing! (Thomas, to be sure, admitted that some essential aspects of his god--trinity, atonement—could not be proved and therefore had to be believed).

Those of us fortunate enough to live in the modern world (and that is more than a geographical term) surely still believe that knowledge is better than belief. But modern knowledge makes Thomas’ traditional proofs no longer possible. First causes, prime movers, cosmic design, supernatural revelations and interventions are either unnecessary or clearly rejected in modern science and in contemporary philosophy.

Why, then, are these obvious aspects of modernity so little known or observed—especially in the belief-ridden United States?  We are the anomaly of the developed world in this regard, and becoming worse, not better! One of my hunches is that the separation of religions and state has created a competitive market situation that has reshaped religions into unregulated hustling. Another hunch is that, absent information and critical examination, a kind of Gresham’s law operates where bad religions drive out good ones.

Those fundamentalisms that are operating within almost all of the world’s religions fear modernization since it would give more freedom to individuals to inquire and to choose. Those are precisely the styles that characterize what I am calling humanization. Informed choosing is central.

The authors of the excellent multi-volume study of fundamentalisms are now using the term “strong religion” to describe the phenomenon. One of its characteristics is eschatology—the conviction that some climactic end-time is at hand. This means conventional moralities are suspended. The innocent can be killed, the balanced patternings of democracy can be overturned, the linkage between knowledge and lasting happiness can be denied, the long-range preferability of freedom can be rejected.

Let me take sexuality as an example of the impact of knowledge upon culture and morality. Modern knowledge, from both the harder and the social sciences, made the modern world aware of our enormous human variability. It also undercut conventional wisdoms regarding female sexuality as well as the linkages of sexual activities and reproduction. As a result, reproduction rates have dropped among those persons possessing both knowledge and social freedom. Put positively, the percentages of “intended” children have risen. This happened despite the fulminations of those inhibited by traditional moralities. Humanization means that even “misused” freedom is better than oppression. Rational morality is based on consequences, and moral responsibilities are most likely to emerge when consequences are clearly explored.

A second example of this salutary function of knowledge is in what our adjunct faculty termed “ecohumanism.” Throughout most of human history, we have exploited our environments to the extent of our technologies—and in complete ignorance of consequences. In reaction to this, some recent “deep” ecologisms have viewed humans as destructive parasites. We are in fact the most complex product of an evolutionary process that could “care less” about our welfare or survival. But our intelligences are part of that evolving process, and must be put to use balancing what will enhance human living and what will destroy the platforms and plants and animals by which we live.

Humanization, then, involves a very particular set of values. Many of them appear threatening to persons who have not yet liberated themselves from memes that restrain and constrain. These values, upon reflection, will each be found to have personal and social linkages. They need to be articulated, philosophically and aesthetically, in ways that can be widely understood, moving more persons into liberation.

Robert B. Tapp