Kansas City Enlightenment Project

The Kansas City Enlightenment Project is an initiative inaugurated in July 2014, guided by veteran cultural activist Fred Whitehead, whose accomplishments include the edited volume Freethought on the American Frontier (1992) and the erstwhile newsletters Freethought History and People's Culture.

The group's name is a response to the challenge of Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno and the notion that Enlightenment was ineffective against fascism and the blockage of radical progressive agendas in the post-World-War-II capitalist democracies, especially the United States.

We noted the appearance of an international organization called The Re-Enlightenment Project, based mostly on participants from prestigious cultural institutions such as museums, universities, and so on. It began in New York, but quickly engaged people in Europe. In the United States, we further noted, its participants were entirely on the East and West Coasts. We believe our modest Kansas City effort, based in the geographical center of the country, can offer Midwestern perspectives and raise the flag of the Enlightenment in this territory.

The Re-Enlightenment Project is based at New York University. Its initiatives and personnel are listed on its web site. I recognize the name of its Director, Clifford Siskin, who is a noted scholar of Romanticism.

The American Midwest has its own heritage of freewheeling, independent radicalism, not kowtowing to the coastal power centers. We shall see what comes of their determination to fight back against the forces of ignorance, disinformation, and reaction dominant in the United States. You may find my writing on their web site at some point.

Freethought library (1)

Today I received a request for literature on the history of atheism. This reminds me that I wrote a series of reports on the scattered items in my collection as I unearthed them a year or so ago. Here is the first of those reports.

20 Jan 2008

The most valuable of [my] books are the historical surveys, which reveal not only the richness and complexity of the tradition, but the preponderance of efforts for social reform and progressive social causes, something you'd never learn from the libertarian vermin that infest our ranks. And a lot of this history is far more interesting and progressive than anything the "new atheists" have to offer.

I am especially impressed by:

Tribe, David H. 100 Years of Freethought. London: Elek, 1967.

[Note: On my web site: extract from Chapter 2 (Philosophical Outlook, section on humanism), pp. 46-61.]

This is an historical, global survey of ideas, movements, and organizations. It is far less provincial that much of what you'd read in the USA. The author is an Australian who apparently migrated to the UK, where this book was published. There is a heavy concentration of information on Britain and Europe but also on other countries, and it is not restricted to the provincial American perspective. It is remarkable how much information is packed into the chapter on philosophy alone, which is quite sophisticated though compact, and covers the history of the various labels--atheism, rationalism, humanism, agnosticism, materialism, etc.--and the ideas and controversies associated with them.

There is quite a bit of territory covered, including chapter on freethought's considerable contribution to social reforms.

I also learned from several of the books consulted, including this one, that "freethought", far from being a wishy-washy subterfuge (i.e. compared to "atheism"), has actually been quite militant. While so many people shy away from the term "atheism", it had not occurred to me that "freethought" (whose meaning is not transparent from the word itself) might be more of a fighting term. In contrast, "humanism" has always been fraught with ambiguities and not always accepted by freethinkers, and "agnosticism" was received with quite a bit of skepticism (no pun intended), as it was bound up with disputed philosophical ideas before it passed into more restricted general usage as applied to a position solely regarding the existence of God (what you will hear from people on the street ...).

The other most important historical book I dug out was:

Berman, David. A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell. London; New York: Croom Helm, 1988.

I should also mention:

Courtney, Janet E. Freethinkers of the Nineteenth Century ... With Seven Portraits. London: Chapman & Hall, ltd., 1920.

But there's no doubt the most important book of recent vintage is:

Jacoby, Susan. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004.

I attended Jacoby's book talk at Politics & Prose and asked her a research question about the civil rights movement.

In addition to consulting my own library, I've been doing some literature searches on the relevant history and sociology and have uncovered a few gems.

One interesting thing I've discovered: there are differences in researching the history of "atheism" and "(secular) humanism". While there is no real demarcation between them, there are some differences as recognizable traditions, perhaps because of the historical emergence of what we now term humanism from religious liberalism, even before the Cold War (and McCarthyism) had its effect on atheists/freethinkers/humanists in the USA and abroad. Curiously, most of what I'm reading of the relevant social history of the whole shebang comes from "freethought" books. (The journal literature is another matter.)

Postscript, 10 Feb 2009

Do not miss out on these magnificent anthologies:

Gaylor, Annie Laurie, ed. Women Without Superstition: "No Gods—No Masters": The Collected Writings of Women Freethinkers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Madison, WI: Freedom From Religion Foundation, 1997.

Whitehead, Fred; Muhrer, Verle, eds. Freethought on the American Frontier. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992.

These reference books are also to be kept in mind:

Dictionary of Atheism, Skepticism, & Humanism by Bill Cooke

The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief edited by Tom Flynn

The Encyclopedia of Unbelief edited by Gordon Stein (old edition, 1985)

See also:

Secular Humanism—Ideology, Philosophy, Politics, History: Bibliography in Progress

What’s in a name? What’s in a movement?

(The following was originally posted on my blog on the Freethought Forum on 8 February 2008. Note comments there. I will reproduce my own follow-up comment on this blog.)

Many of the the various names for what we do are packed into the title of my web guide:

Atheism / Freethought / Humanism / Ethical Culture / Rationalism / Agnosticism / Skepticism / Unbelief / Secularism / Church-State Separation Web Links

Still, I omitted other terms in use or historically related, such as ‘irreligion’, ‘naturalism’, ‘deism’, and ‘godless’. Some of these terms have meanings outside of our central area of concern, some have distinct agendas (e.g. skepticism), and some overlap or appear to be synonymous. I was never particularly preoccupied with terminology, but the history and distinction of these terms are relevant to my current research.

I note, for example, that in my current environment, people in our groups customarily refer to themselves as atheists or humanists. I do not meet people who have adopted the label “freethinker” or refer to “freethought”. While this term persists in other English-speaking countries, none of the extant national organizations in the USA have “freethought” in their name. (I think some of the local and regional organizations do.) The organ of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) is Freethought Today, which is the most prominent usage of the term I can think of in the USA today. I assume that the title “Freethought Forum” was chosen because of the obvious affinity to FFRF. I note that its mission statement includes a dedication to ‘social activism’, though what that means beyond activism for irreligion and secularism is not specified. As FFRF embodies a concern with feminism, it appears that this forum is similarly inspired as well.

I hardly gave the distinctions among these terms a second thought, except for some impressions about their acceptability in mainstream society. Since the word ‘atheism’ is anathema in American society, I assumed that this was the boldest term, and since American Atheists had the history of greatest stridency, I assumed that ‘atheism’ is socially more confrontational than the more restrained if also hated (secular) ‘humanism’. Only recently, when I made a survey of my personal library in pursuit of some research, did I realize I had simply not paid attention to something very obvious. All of my books on the history of atheism as a movement and atheists as social reformers carry the word ‘freethought’ in their titles. All of my books on the history of atheism with ‘atheism’ in their titles are not about movements or organizations but ideas. (Wikipedia follows this pattern as well.) For all practical purposes, ‘freethought’ is historically the fighting name of a fighting movement, while ‘atheism’ seems to have come into organizational use with American Atheists. Also, freethought has a history of linkage with other social reform movements not strictly connected to irreligion or secularism. I read a number of books on the subject without thinking of ‘freethought’ as anything other than an antiquated term. Now, though the word ‘freethinker’ still sounds quaint to me, I think I’d much rather be known as a ‘freethinker’ than as an ‘atheist’ or ‘humanist’. It’s a history to be proud of, especially since it embodies a social consciousness that seems much scarcer among America’s atheists today.

These musings are actually by-products of a different focus. My original intent was to research the histories of secular humanism and the skeptical movement as distinct topics, because I have found that these categories embody certain ambiguities and ideological undertones in both their world-views and institutional histories that invite scrutiny in a way not required by the other main terms in use, whatever their organizational histories might be. I have only begun this project, but I want to call your attention to two new web pages:

Secular Humanism—Ideology, Philosophy, Politics, History: Bibliography in Progress

and

Humanism—100 Years of Freethought by David Tribe

The latter is a section of David Tribe’s 1967 100 Years of Freethought. This chapter, on ‘Philosophical Outlook’, covers the histories of freethought, secularism, ethicism, rationalism, humanism, atheism, agnosticism, materialism, and determinism. The survey is global, and the emphasis is decidedly British rather than American, which means that the political purview is much more progressive than one often finds here in the USA.

‘Humanism’ apparently grows out of the liberalization of religion, and the secular or atheistic variety only becomes sharply defined with time. There is also a political and organizational as well as intellectual history, but the strongest social histories can still be found under the rubric ‘freethought’.

My esteemed colleague Fred Whitehead, cultural activist, co-editor of Freethought on the American Frontier and editor of a marvelous bulletin Freethought History, took steps to revive the old-time activist tradition of freethought, but could find no takers.

As for the social perspective of contemporary atheism, a comparison of the so-called ‘new atheists’ and the freethinking agitators of yesteryear might well be in order, perhaps yielding a different perspective on ‘change we can believe in’.