Stephen Eric Bronner, defending the Enlightenment for progressives

I still find Bronner's treatment of the Danish cartoon controversy and his work on the Enlightenment immeasurably superior to everything the secular humanist movement has produced in these areas.

STEPHEN ERIC BRONNER ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT-- LOGOS SUMMER 2004

STEPHEN ERIC BRONNER -- INCENDIARY IMAGES -- LOGOS 5.1 WINTER 2006

Martin Gardner Dead at 95

Martin Gardner is no more. Say it ain't so. I discovered Martin Gardner in the Mathematical Games column of Scientific American, having innocently bought it off the newsstand because of my boyhood interest in science. I think the issue I bought was June or July 1967: his column that month was about John Horton Conway's game "Sprouts". And then I was hooked. My name was published in one issue of Scientific American for my solution of some problem involving "Baker's Solitaire". Names were omitted though, when said article was reprinted in one of Gardner's anthologies. Gardner's columns radiated from the base of recreational mathematics to encompass quite a range of topics. Gardner stimulated my interest in the related hobby of abstract strategy board games, but that was only the beginning. Through Gardner I learned about the artist M.C. Escher, the 19th-century fad of 4-dimensional space, anamorphic art, the godfather of the ars combinatoria Raymond Llull, and numerous other fascinating topics reaching into obscure corners of intellectual history. I also read several of Gardner's books in addition to his collections of Mathematical Games columns, most memorably Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.

Gardner is also known for The Annotated Alice and other volumes, but his two biggest claims to fame are probably his contributions to recreational mathematics and to the "skeptical" movement. I returned to Fads and Fallacies several times over the decades. I was never fully convinced of Gardner's criteria for the demarcation of science and pseudoscience. In addition to dealing with obvious crackpots, he delved into fringe areas where rationality bleeds into irrationality, such as Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics, William Reich's radical psychoanalysis and orgonomy, and Marshall McLuhan's theory of the media. Still, the range of Gardner's examples supplied a background I could draw upon throughout my adult life. This book can be said to have stuck with me, but I will forever be indebted to Gardner for all the wonders to which I was introduced via his work on recreational mathematics.

Martin Gardner, 95, a journalist, provided in-depth analysis of Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat

Julian Huxley revisited (2)

I recall a certain fuzziness and eclecticism in Huxley's thought. This might be an English thing, but it's Huxley in any case. At least Huxley had a breadth of knowledge and cultural reference that made him far less provincial than many prominent secular humanists today. The fuzziness is evident even from the title of one of Huxley's books, Religion Without Revelation. The religious language used by figures such as Dewey and Huxley, who entered the fray on behalf of "humanism" rather than "atheism", has not always been acceptable to others in this camp.

Doing a Google search on Huxley in connection with certain keywords, I note that opposition to his ideas comes from Christian anti-humanists and anti-Darwinists, replete with misrepresentations of Huxley and evolutionary theory, sometimes with imputations of Nazi-like association with eugenics. Well, Huxley was interested in eugenics, but he unequivocally opposed Nazi racial theories and racialism generally. Huxley's writings show a breadth of sympathy for the plight of all of humanity, in the best liberal spirit, a far cry from the farrago of character assassination one finds in the aforementioned screeds.

Huxley's liberalism made him the perfect candidate for assuming leadership of the fledgling UNESCO. His political position was broad and vague enough for him to assume a position abstractly dedicated to cultural and social inclusiveness. It is also revealing how the position of liberals of his day were influenced by the social democratic or socialist tenor of the time, incorporating such social consciousness into their view of liberal democracy.

Huxley's presence in the postwar era is marked by an affirmation of individual liberty and freedom of thought (combined with social responsibility) in opposition to the twin horrors of Nazism and Stalinism. The only Marxism Huxley knew was the Soviet variant, and so any coincidental similarities between some of his statements and the views of dissident Marxists were unknown to him. In a future post I will delve into his comments on Marxism and materialism. Interestingly, Huxley was no reductionist. He distinguished cultural from biological evolution, for example. His broad evolutionary perspective, and his social analyses, however, do not coalesce into a sufficiently elaborated, structured, and concrete socio-historical framework. There is no discussion of imperialism, for example, something which should have been on the mind of an Englishman at that time. And there is no class analysis beyond the general recognition of social stratification.

This critique is, not surprisingly, absent from criticisms of Huxley from within the humanist camp. Here is one assessment:

"Evolutionary Humanism Revisited: The Continuing Relevance of Julian Huxley" by Timothy J. Madigan

On Huxley's role in UNESCO, see:

Introduction: Visions and Revisions. Defining UNESCO’s scientific culture, 1945–1965 by Patrick Petitjean

(To be continued . . .)

Julian Huxley revisited

Many years ago (decades, most likely) I read two of Julian Huxley's books: Religion without Revelation and Knowledge, Morality, and Destiny (formerly titled New Bottles for New Wine*). I remember mostly some remarks from the latter, in the essay "A Re-definition of Progress", that contradicted the reactionary mysticism of Julian's brother Aldous (p. 20, 34-5).

Aldous reviled "the religion of Inevitable Progress" and replaced that ideal with "unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground of being". Aldous stressed self-development rather than social transformation, characterizing self-development as a transcendental dissolution of self in the eternal Divine Ground (per Aldous' notion of The Perennial Philosophy). Julian did not go for this. Years earlier, as a teenager, I admired Aldous Huxley but later found his mysticism too repellent to accommodate. Hence I noted his brother's dissent. (Years later I wrote a rather crude critique of reactionary utopianism: Screed on the Politics of Utopianism.)

Otherwise, though my philosophy in my teenage years was pretty much congruent with Julian's liberal humanism, by the time I read his work I found it philosophically and politically behind the curve, however appreciative I was of the repudiation (albeit diplomatic) of his brother. Skipping ahead: I perused one or both of these books again four years ago, and Knowledge, Morality, and Destiny within the past two weeks, whereupon I noted Julian's philosophical laxity in defining his humanism as a religion, coupled with his repudiation of materialism. I will have more to say about this in a future post.

Some essays by Julian Huxley online:

“Transhumanism” (1957)

"The New Divinity"

"The Coming New Religion of Humanism"

And see:

Julian Huxley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

* This latter work was published in 1957. My copy was published under the new title: New York: Mentor Books, 1960.

Jacques Vallee's "Passport to Magonia": addendum

The preface and table of contents of the 1969 edition are now on my web site:

Jacques Vallee: Passport to Magonia (Contents & Preface, 1969)

Jacques Vallee's "Passport to Magonia" revisited

In a previous post (Gods, UFOs, Zen, epistemology, autonomy) I mentioned scientist and UFO investigator Jacques Vallee. Of the two books mentioned, I now think that Passport to Magonia is the principal book of relevance to that discussion. The entire book is available online:

Passport to Magonia

The preface and table of contents of the original 1969 edition are missing, but I hope to scan them and make them available. Otherwise, I call your attention to chapter 5: 'Nurslings of Immortality', particularly the final sections 'The Functioning Lie' and 'Conjectures' (pp. 148-163 in the text, pp. 80-87 in the PDF file), which summarize the epistemological questions engaged by Vallee.

Note the other works by Vallee available on the same web site:

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_autor_vallee.htm

You can also download this book at Downtr:

http://www.downtr.net/find/Jacques+Vallee+Passport+To+Magonia.html

See also Vallee's own web site:

Jacques F. Vallee

Lloyd L. Brown on black cultural religiosity

MARY HELEN WASHINGTON: I'm wondering if you've ever thought about how religious this book [Brown’s novel Iron City] is despite the fact that you wrote it as a communist?

LLOYD L. BROWN: I tell you, that comes not from my own religiosity. I am not religious except culturally. Culturally I am in a sense and. . . if I am an Afro­-American therefore I have to be moved by, let’s say gospel; when there's a gospel program on I tape it. I’m inspired by gospel. It moves me. And so it’s religious, but it is a humanistic religion. . .

I once discussed with Paul Robeson the song ‘Little Jesus Boy’ that Mahalia sings. ‘They didn’t know who you are, they treated you like they treat me’ is in the song—she humanizes Jesus. Makes him like one of us. One of our own people, she makes him. So it is, in that respect, the Afro‑American religion is very earthy, it’s down‑to‑earth. It’s very real. And therefore if I’m trying to write how they are I have to have them come into it. The role of the preacher in this thing, who became the head of the committee, the church, well that was his role, you see. Rev. Bruford. So, to me, you cannot write about our people and leave out their spirituality. To me, I see it as cultural rather than ideological.

I think of it as, well, like in the ‘spiritual.’ See now some of the Reds used to say that they weren’t spiritual; that they meant ‘follow the drinking gourd’ means escape—they made everything into ‘practical’; ‘steal away to Jesus’ that meant escape from slavery. I said, No, no, they’re talking about both. They’re talking about stealing away. Yes. But they’re also, they’re also looking to heaven because they don’t have anything here. It’s not just the North. They’re going to have to . . . get away! To get on board. ‘Come on children, there’s room for many or more.’ The escape was a big part of it, but it was both spiritual and, and that’s what made it so good. Because it was not, you know, some abstract hymn. This was their own lives they were talking about, they were singing about their own lives, that’s what gave them.

SOURCE: “Lloyd L. Brown Talks to Mary Helen Washington: Writing the Collective Narrative (Route One Interview),” Route One [University of Maryland, College Park], vol. 1, no. 1, Spring 1996, pp. 64-78. Extract, pp. 73-74.