About what do deans worry when they are not concerned with funding, recruiting, curriculum, and the like? In my case, at least, they worry about the state of humanism--our smallness in size, the enormity of our opportunities, and our own intellectual shortcomings. Our critics abound on all sides, from the "religious right" to the "academic left." They concur in deeming humanism outdated, but for vastly different reasons. Conservatives accuse us of relativism, and various postmodernisms charge us with essentialism.

In some significant sense, they both are right! Our kinds of secular and religious humanism have always stressed the contexts of human action, and have viewed ethics as responsive to the gritty stuff of history rather than carved in stone. The freeing of enterprise (which was one side of the Enlightenment) can produce a kind of self-serving individualism which destroys community while denying its very existence. The American Enlightenment in particular was concerned to create the kind of community in which persons could flourish. One of our tasks in these hyperindividualistic times must be to remind our neighbors of the lasting relevance of Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Felix Adler, Jane Addams, John Dewey, and their many successors.

Does this make us conservatives, traditionalists, essentialists? In some sense, Yes. One difference is that these are adopted ancestors for almost all of us. Our choices and evaluations are thus more rational than were our "choices" of parents, ethnicity, gender, epoch, or country.

But we need always remind our conventionally-conservative neighbors that

New occasions teach new duties,
Time makes ancient good uncouth.

In trying to discern those things that liberate or enslave persons in our time, we cannot simply recall the past. Thus we are indeed relativists. Human reproduction, for instance, becomes a different matter when formerly rural societies become urban, and when medicine lengthens lifespans.

In recent years it has been easy for Americans to condemn ethnic chauvinism in places like the former Yugoslavia. But how deal with it in our urban police forces and in the subtexts of much current politics? In a real sense most of us are "bosnians" of very mixed heritages, and it simply won’t do to unleash the old ethnic hatreds. Enormous damage would result. How to assess objectively those parts of our ethnic pasts to honor and those other parts which need to be relegated to museums of our no-longer-celebrated past? Lutherans have recently disavowed the virulent anti-Semitism of Martin Luther, and the Pope has decried past (at least) support by his church for totalitarianisms. For starters, get David Hollinger’s Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, where this kind of rational-critical selectivity is pushed.

Perhaps the hardest task for humanism in our time is to keep some terms from being co-opted, being bought and brought into the service of the enemy. We should all remember how quickly denim jeans ceased to be the equalitarian badge of Everyperson and came to have "designer labels". A few years ago I was brought up short by a nightclub sign reading "Designer Jeans Only."

I’m thinking of the ways in which critiques from within our midst have been appropriated by the neanderthal right: political correctness, culture of complaint, hate America, benign neglect, permissive education, the death of god, mindless relativism, blame America, self-hatred, Western chauvinism, giving empowering the victims and the oppressed. Constructive critiques of culture, that central humanistic enterprise, requires us to focus us both on the cultural changes we desire and on those who would nullify changes by co-opting and corrupting discourse.

Think, for instance, how restrictive is the current trinitarian mantram that anchors many debates in our intellectual and cultural life-- "race, gender, class". Our "academic left" was too crude in its neo-Stalinism to realize and include the divisive power of religion. Part of this stemmed from the prejudice many intellectuals have acquired against religion. If they had really studied their Marx they should have known that the critique of religion is the beginning of any cultural criticism. In addition to ignoring the powerful role religions play in human life, many of these same "intellectuals" have been guilty of a kind of cultural relativism that comes from learning history by slogans. To speak of Western civilization as simply being "imperialistic," for instance, overlooks the many quite unique features in the culture that surrounds us, and of course overlooks the propensity of power to spill beyond its own borders throughout our human experience. Thus there are "civilizational" components to any assessment of human history that render simplistic relativisms wrongheaded.

A key example is the role of voluntary organizations in modern Western history. These are surely an outgrowth of left-wing Protestantism (with its own reappropriation of many this-worldly elements in Judaism). A recent study of this unique phenomenon can be found in Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics by Sidney Verba, K. L. Schlozman & H. E. Brady. Read this and then go back to Verba’s classic work with his own mentor (Gabriel Almond), The Civic Culture. Stable democracies require much more than voting.

Speaking of "classics," I recently reread Sidney Hook’s "What is Materialism?" (1934). He argued there that neither idealism nor materialism were necessarily connected with any particular social or political doctrines. Hobbes and Santayana were both very conservative! In other words, take nothing for granted. The successes of neither science nor technology will automatically produce more desirable social attitudes. The contest remains in the humanistic, all-too-human realm that we share with our neighbors on the planet. And it is there that plausibilities must be adduced. Not only logic but rhetoric and polemic are needed.

If we work at it, our Institute may contribute to this struggle by challenging us to do our intellectual best, and by providing us with effective tools to be part of the debates leading toward, and not away from, a more humane home for humans.

Robert Tapp