Remembering Freethinkers and Secular Humanist Lives

by Gary Berg-Cross
One of the 5 founders of WASH died in August, 2015. It got me thinking about how to celebrate a freethinker’s life and what we learn from the lives of people deep into the values of Secular Humanism and a reason-based life. So I looked up a few of the reflections people have made on a few of them and some their own thoughtful expressions

A starting point for me was a childhood influence, Bertrand Russell, describe in and OBIT as:

“Philosopher, mathematician, academic, and campaigner for intellectual, social and sexual freedom, and peace and disarmament, Russell was a prominent atheist. He wrote about his worldview in Why I am Not a Christian, and was a member of the British Humanist Association’s Standing Advisory Council, as well as President of Cardiff Humanists, until his death.”

When the NY Times wrote at length on his passing they included this:

Unlike some generative thinkers, Russell epitomized the philosopher as a public figure. He was the Voltaire of his time, but lacking in the Sage of Fernay's malice. From the beginning to the end of his active life, Russell engaged himself with faunlike zest in the great issues of the day-- pacifism, rights for women, civil liberty, trial marriage, new methods of education, Communism, the nuclear peril and war and peace-- for he was at bottom a moralist and a humanist. He set forth his views on moral and ethical matters in such limpidly written books as "Marriage and Morals," "Education and the Social Order" and "Human Society in Ethics and Politics."

Russell like others mentioned here helped build useful organizations and they often contributed in multiple areas as Renaissance people - philosophers, natural philosophers (scientists), intellectuals and writers.  They are thus remembered also in their own words on topics they held forth on important topics such as in  the quote from BR below:

A 2^nd such poymathic person, also from my childhood, was Isaac Asimov.

On his passing STEVE ALLEN wrote this still relevant observation noting the avoidance of his humanistic and atheistic stance in some OBITs. Mainstream culture often values things differently than the innovator does.

 A Tribute to Isaac Asimov

It is interesting that even so prominent a newspaper as the Los Angeles Times, in running a long and complimentary obituary story, one that started on the first page, referred to Isaac Asimov as a “science fiction virtuoso” and made no mention of his achievements as humanist thinker and writer.

I have the impression that the Times intended no slight whatsoever to the humanist movement in this matter but that its lack of reference to something so important to Asimov himself is an indicator of the general lack of attention paid to humanist philosophy by the American mainstream mindset. Indeed it has occurred to me that if it were not for daily attacks by right-wing fundamentalists, who are given to using the term secular humanist as they might use the phrase Satan or Communist, the non-theistic humanist movement would get almost no publicity at all

More friendly was this letter on his personality:

Isaac Asimov was not merely a great and prolific writer, but also a very funny and warm and friendly man ("Isaac Asimov, Science Fiction Virtuoso, Dies, April 7). He was always bubbling over with the most amazing wit and had more energy than any three normal men his age together. No matter how deeply involved he might be in some project or how pressed by some publishing deadline, he always enjoyed giving generously of his time and experience to help and encourage young writers of promise.

The media attention following his death was on his amazing output of publications and their influence. But for those of us who knew him, his written work is dwarfed by the challenge of his personality. Just to know him was to become a deeper and wiser person. BEN A. TUPPER Ramona

More recent is the memory of Carl Sagan. Joel Achenbach provided a tribute to him in THE SAGAN FILE which included this characterization of something familiar but something remarkably balanced by cosmological perspective. Freethinkers require many adjectives:

 He was your basic progressive liberal, a college professor, a peace advocate. But he saw our human obsessions as trivial in the grand scheme of things. The universe isn’t about us, he would say. He railed against human arrogance, against “our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe.”

And yet the voice in the file is that of a person who liked human beings, who rooted for them. Perhaps because Sagan had seen so many desert worlds out there in our solar system, so many cold, airless, sterile planets and moons, he appreciated the one place where we know life has proliferated, and where intelligence has somehow appeared.

   

   And much more recently, but just as complex we have the life and remembrance    of Christopher Hitchens.  The AHA remembrance started with:

Humanists and atheists are saddened by the death of the prolific writer and outspoken atheist Christopher Hitchens, who died Thursday, December 15 at the age of 62...

“Humanity has lost a powerful stalwart for atheism,”

We feel a deep lose when the person has made us think and feel deeply and made us proud to be of the human species.

 On Saturday November 21, 2015 from 10:45 AM to 12:45 PM at the Wheaton Public Library, 11701 Georgia Ave., Wheaton, MD WASH will  remember another Secular Humanist Life  -George Porter on of the five founders of WASH.

Speakers include:

Fred Edwords (former AHA Director & former national director of the United Coalition of Reason) will moderate and our speakers include:

Ron Lindsay (president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry)

Rob Boston (Director of Communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State and Editor of Church & State magazine)

Stuart Jordan (past WASH President, emeritus senior staff scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, past President of ISHV, served as Science Advisor to the Center for Inquiry Office of Public Policy.)

Ken Marsalek (WASH Cofounder, 6 years as early WASH president, coauthor of WASH bylaws, early WASH Board member)

Pete Lines WASH Cofounder, coauthor of WASH bylaws, early WASH Board member, secretary and treasurer) 

Bill Creasy (WASH Board member and Baltimore Chapter coordinator for 16 years, 6 years as WASH president, current WASH secretary)

Mike Reid Reid (WASH Board member for 10 years, editor of WASHline for 6 years, WASH president for 5 years.) 

Aaron Porter (son of George & Lois Porter, musician, and administrator for the Navy Band in Washington, DC)

There will be a small reception afterwards.

Please come and honor George Porter's  Secular Humanist Life as people who knew and loved him reflect on his life and contributions.

http://www.meetup.com/humanism-218/events/226418573/

Burundi, Overpopulation and Pope Francis

By Edd Doerr

Burundi and Rwanda are two very small countries in central Africa, each about the size of Maryland. Both became German colonies in the late 19^th century, then Belgian colonies in 1916, and won independence in the early 1960s. The Germans and Belgians favored the Tutsi minorities over the Hutu majorities. Both countries suffered Tutsi/Hutu civil wars and massacres after independence, due largely to their being the most crowded, overpopulated, and rapidly growing populations in the world. Both are about 2/3 Roman Catholic, thanks to nearly a century of German and Belgian missionary activity.

Burundi’s  overpopulation crisis is spelled out in Jillian Keenan’s excellent feature article in the October 2015 issue of Population Connection, from which I quote relevant portions:

“The Catholic Church was among the institutions that benefitted from the colonial approach to land. Missionaries, known as the ‘White Fathers’, began arriving in the late 19^th century, and over several decades, the king gave them large tracts of land, which they used to establish churches, schools, hospitals, and farms. After colonialism ended, the self-sufficiency that land provided the church helped it retain influence, even as its influence with the newly independent government grew fraught.” Despite opposition from military leader Jean-Baptiste Bagaza in the 1970s, “The church retained millions of Burundian followers, along with plenty of land, though no one, it seems knew exactly how much.”

“The Catholic Church was also complicit in nurturing Burundi’s ethnic divisions; Catholic schools, for instance, were largely reserved for ‘elite’ children, meaning Tutsis. Intensifying schisms led to various outbreaks of ethnic violence, and in 1972, the Tutsi-dominated military launched a series of pogroms targeting Hutus.”

Beginning in 2011 the Dutch and German governments began supporting “programs promoting sexual and reproductive health, among other human rights.” But, Keenan continues, “It’s an uphill battle. According to the United Nations, modern contraceptive use among females between the ages of 15 and 49 was just 18.9% in 2010. . . . Then there is the Catholic Church: In addition to claiming an estimated 60% of Burundians as followers, the church has affiliations with roughly 30% of national health clinics, which are forbidden from distributing or discussing condoms, the pill, and other contraceptives. ‘Catholic teachings against birth control are very resonant with Burundian culture, which says that children are wealth,’ explains Longman of Boston University. ‘Because the Catholic Church is so powerful and controls so much of the health sector, it creates a huge stumbling block for family-planning practice’.”

“In 2012, the Ministry of Public Health launched a series of ‘secondary health posts,’ which offer medical contraceptives; sometimes these clinics … are built right next  door to existing Catholic ones. . . . There is also tension over a variable with unknown dimensions: how much of the land the Catholic Church held onto after colonialism it still owns today. ‘The Catholic Church can’t keep owning all the land while Christians are starving,’ says a regional government employee in Kayanza, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for his safety. … ‘National politics don’t allow us to focus on the Catholic Church,’ he says, referring to the fact that the church’s followers are also voters’.”

Many Burundians “fear that support for family planning is too little too late.”

A great many Catholics worldwide are concerned about overpopulation and climate change, and most ignore the Vatican’s regressive policies on contraception, abortion and other matters, but far too many politicians, especially in the US, are afraid to stand up to what they fear might be church pressure. Gutsy politicians would call out, “The king – er, bishops – have no clothes!” Relevant is what I wrote in the National Catholic Reporter in February 2015:

“Pope Francis [is} to be commended for [his] forward push on climate change. Many of us are hoping that Francis will do the one thing that he and he alone can do about climate change: rescind Paul VI’s 1968 Humanae Vitae encyclical, promulgated in defiance of the vast majority of his own advisers. Since 1968 there have been 1.5 billion abortions worldwide, 50 million in the US alone. Vacating Humanae Vitae would seriously lower the abortion rate, save women’s lives, and contribute to reducing overpopulation  and such concomitants of climate change as resource depletion, environmental degradation, deforestation, soil erosion and nutrient loss, biodiversity shrinkage, rising sea levels (40% of world population lives in coastal areas), and increasing sociopolitical instability and violence.”

If Pope Francis is serious about social justice and climate change, the mess his church has helped create in Burundi and Rwanda would be good places to put action where his mouth is.

Bertrand Russell wrote about overpopulation in his Marriage and Morals., the year before I was born (1930), when world population was ¼ what it is today. Harrison Brown and other scientists were writing about it when I was in college. Before my  kids  were out of college the Ford administration finished the National Security Study Memorandum 200 report on overpopulation, which was immediately “classified” and deep-sixed until shortly before the 1994 UN Cairo population conference and it still virtually unknown. I am apparently one of the very few writers who published reviews of it. And  today, with world population well over 7 billion, even a great many of the scientists, writers and politicians who are on the front lines on climate change are reluctant to say we need universal access to contraception, abortion and sexuality education, not to mention equal rights for all women.

http://www.arlinc.org/

NY Times Sept 21 editorial “The Pope and the Birth Control Ban”

Edd Doerr

The NY Times Sept 21 editorial “The Pope and the Birth Control Ban” is one of the best ever.

 It made all the right points and could not be condensed. Actually, it made exactly the same points that I have long been making in various venues. It needs to be read and circulated far and wide.

The only thing that could be added to it is that Pope Francis’s good words about action on climate change and social justice will fall well short if the Vatican does not reverse its perverse, damaging, misogynist bans on birth control and abortion. I made this point in a short piece published in the National Catholic Reporter in February. Overpopulation will thwart nearly all efforts to deal with climate change and its concomitants – atmospheric CO2 build-up, fossil fuel overuse, environmental degradation, toxic waste accumulation, deforestation, desertification, soil erosion and nutrient loss, rising sea levels, increasing sociopolitical instability and violence.

BTW, I recently  noticed that Bertrand Russell brought up the overpopulation problem in his 1929 book Marriage and Morals, when world population was about ¼ of what it is today.

Neutral Monism

By Gary Berg-Cross

My education was a bit deficient so I don’t remember running into the idea of neutral monism as part of my training in Psychology and the questions of world materialism and mind idealism.  A new book by Thomas Nagel is provocatively entitle:is provociisi “Mindand Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.” It features a skeptical take on materialism, but a naturalistic and not theistic alternative. Nagel is well known for an interesting and influential 1974 paper called "What is it like to be a bat?" He used the bat view of the world to argue that phenomenological facts about consciousness are not so obviously reducible to physical facts. In his new book he argues that lack of progress in materialistically explaining  suggests he is right in rejecting naïve materialist explanations.  Early on Nagel defines materialism succinctly as follows:
 

Materialism is the view that only the physical world is irreducibly real, and that a place must be found in it for mind, if there is such a thing.  This would continue the onward march of physical science, through molecular biology, to full closure by swallowing up the mind in the objective physical reality from which it was initially excluded. (p 37)

I’m not convinced by Nagel’s anti-materialist arguments about the irreducibility of mind rather than matter, although I doubt reductionist approaches that try to explain everything in reductionist concepts. I like evolutionary explanations for the emergence of cognition and the related concept of consciousness.  But I did find the discussion of neutral monism stimulating, if only because I had missed its presence in thinkers I had studied. I also appreciated Nagel's conversational style and in Mind and Cosmos and his frank admission that his aim "is not so much to argue against reductionism as to investigate the consequences of rejecting it". This blog is not so much about that as a some intro to neutral monism.

Thoma

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Are you an author? Learn about Author CentralAs covered in the Wikipedia entry neutral monism is the philosophical/metaphysical view that:

 the mental and the physical are two ways of organizing or describing the same elements, which are themselves "neutral," that is, neither physical nor mental. This view denies that the mental and the physical are two fundamentally different things. Rather, neutral monism claims the universe consists of only one kind of stuff, in the form of neutral elements that are in themselves neither mental nor physical. These neutral elements might have the properties of color and shape, just as we experience those properties. But these shaped and colored elements do not exist in a mind (considered as a substantial entity, whether dualistically or physicalistically); they exist on their own.

It’s an exciting idea of continuity of reality rather than dichotomy and some faint versions of it were quietly posed in works by some of my favorite philosopher – James, Russell and Dewey as cited. 

OK, it wasn’t just my education. The ideas were probably too subtle for me to grasp when I dashed over their discussion of mind-body dualism. William James, for example, followed Peirce in developing Pragmatism as a way of getting beyond dualist debates on realistic materialism and idealism. 

According to an easy summary and readable source by David Pears (answers.com):

 the philosophy of mind adopted by Russell in his middle period was neutral monism, which denies that there is any irreducible difference between the mental and the physical and tries to construct both the mental world and the physical world out of components which are in themselves neither mental nor physical but neutral. He adopted this theory because he believed that there was no other way of solving the problems that beset his earlier dualism (see Russell's philosophy of mind: dualism). The book in which he developed the theory, The Analysis of Mind (1921), is an unusual one. The version of neutral monism defended in it is qualified in several ways and it is enriched with ideas drawn from his reading of contemporary works on behaviourism and depth psychology. The result is not entirely consistent, but it is interesting and vital especially where it is least consistent.

John Dewey followed James in seeing more continuity between mind and brain than a gulf. Like many my brief exposure to philosophy courses left me somewhere in the pragmatic camp with a healthy respect for reality-based materialism as the hull hypothesis. Dewey account of phenomena like intelligence does have a naturalistic basis that integrates biology & psychology as does Nagels’ new work.  But one is surprised to see have non-reductionist subjects of intentions and communication ala social psychology as front and center in Dewey’s new view. It is interesting to bump into some of these thinker’s metaphysical struggles to reconceptualize our view of nature to resolve the issues, even if one does not follow into a form of panpsychism with mind and consciousness everywhere and everytime in the universe. 

Images

 

Nagel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nagel

Mind-Body Dualism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dualism-vs-Monism.png

Something Monism: http://telicthoughts.com/category/philosophy/

Hearing the Voice of Bertrand Russell

by Gary Berg-Cross

The recent mention of Bertrand Russell in the Washington Post was nice reminder of a philosophical thought leader who was influential during my childhood. The article’ discussion takes place in a drum beat atmosphere for war with Iran and focused on some of Russell’s thinking about how we could survive in an age of nuclear weapons. Generally pacific, although he supported WWII, his approach during the Cold War was to confront, but not attack the Soviet Union over its nuclear materials and weaponry. Russell thought that a defensive deterrence stance was the right approach for ending war and “the only hope for humanity’s long-term survival in a nuclear age. Still sound advice and “ahead of his time” as the article notes.
Russell, born into the liberal aristocracy (his godfather was John Stuart Mill), was justifiably famous as a mathematician & logician with a three-volume work Principia Mathematica, on the foundations of mathematics, written with Alfred North Whitehead on 1910. Logic has moved on from the atomism of that work but Russell’s generally writing earned him a nobel prize for literature in 1950 "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought". It is a bit wonderful to hear humanitarian ideals being praised so freely. Bertie is remembered broadly as a campaigner for intellectual, social and sexual freedom, as well as peace and disarmament. It's a voice that heard in my mind as I read his wrtitings in paperback as a youth. For me and for many Russell’s image combined a rational, skeptical, humanist, and philosophical voice with an atheist one. Russell was probably the most prominent atheist voice of the era and well known for this from the 1920s on. His broad knowledge and clear philosophical argument provide a standard that only people like Dan Dennett attain:

"Dan Dennett is our best current philosopher. He is the next Bertrand Russell. Unlike traditional philosophers, Dan is a student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He's redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher." Marvin Minsky

In logical and analytic debates with clerics like the Jesuit Copleston he prefigures and illuminates the current debates by people like Richard Dawkins. Dawkins has been called by one critical of both he and Russell, “the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell.”
He wrote about his view on Religion in Why I am Not a Christian (published in 57, but given in a lecture in 1927). In outline it covers:

• 1.1 What is a Christian?
• 1.2 The existence of God
• 1.3 The moral arguments for deity
• 1.3.1 The argument for the remedying of injustice
• 1.4 The character of Christ
• 1.4.1 Defects in Christ's teaching
• 1.4.2 The moral problem
• 1.5 The emotional factor
• 1.6 How the churches have retarded progress
• 1.7 Fear, the foundation of religion
• 1.8 What w e must do

Russell’s logical approach is great to read and you can see a 3 minute video Bertrand talking in 1959 about this, truth, intellectual belief and his discarding of Christian dogma in his pursuit of knowledge onYouTube. One might find it amusing to see the interviewer trying to find some scrap of religious belief in Russell who focused responses as a “passionate skeptic” of such things are an intellectual joy to behold.
“A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.”

— Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic