The Humanistic Teachings Of Earl S. Johnson

Earl S. Johnson, John D Haas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000302295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Earl S. Johnson has dedicated his life to enriching the lives of his students, to enhancing global humanism, to perfecting democracy as both government and way of life, and to improving civic education. As a person and an educator he has promoted the moral life in the moral community. This collection of Professor Johnson's work–reflections on humanism, democracy, and general and social science education–offers insights that will be valuable not only to educators but also to anyone concerned with the qualities of citizenship in a free society.

PART ONE
Reflections on Humanism

CHAPTER ONE
The Faith of a Humanist

ABOUT twenty-five centuries ago, when discussing with Cratylus the nature of things, Socrates observed that it is not to be derived from names but that these must be studied and investigated in themselves. So, if only to make it clearer to myself, I propose to investigate the thing called humanism.

I think of it as scientific humanism by reason of the fact that the convictions to which it is bound, which it owes to the Hebrews, must continually be subjected to criticism of the kind it owes to the Greeks. Thus humanism undertakes to reconcile the sacred and the secular in order to mend the harmful dualistic view in which these two aspects of the human adventure are so generally held.

My discourse is in debt to both poetry and prose, To poetry, because I hold, with George Santayana, that one's religion is the poetry in which he believes, but the poetry that intervenes in life rather than merely supervening upon it. My prose is, for the most part, my own, but I am in debt, as is the case with the language and thought of us all, to the prose of others that I have assimilated to fill my own needs. My use of the pronouns "my" and "I" can hardly be avoided in a statement of personal faith. I trust you will not charge me with egotism.

As a philosophy, scientific humanism is the name for an ultimate concern; as a religion it is the name for an ultimate commitment. The difficulties that it poses relate to it much less as a philosophy than as a religion. But, in order to insure that its identity as a religion does not confuse it with traditional denominations or sects, I choose to think of it as a religious sentiment. I owe this view to William James, who tells me that there is not one "elementary religious emotion but many" and by that token there is "no one specific and essential kind of religious act." In this sense of the meaning of a religious emotion, scientific humanism is not given to any fixed dogmas—dogmas, yes, but not fixed ones.

My understanding of scientific humanism is that it does not equate the religious with the supernatural but, instead, with the superactual. By superactual I mean simply the interacting union of the actual with the ideal through which the actual will be changed, even glorified. In effecting that union, the method of inquiry called science, which helps to bring it about, may attain the stature of a sacrament. In that union the actual is, of course, transcended; but its transcendence does not go by the name of supernatural. In substance, I mean that man may put on a supernature, but in so doing he need not repudiate his natural world. From such a union will come, I believe, a greater capacity for freedom through the exercise of more enlightened choices.

In his poem, "Earth is Enough," Edwin Markham confirms the thought I have in mind.

We men of Earth have here the stuff
Of Paradise—we have enough!
We need no other stones to build
The Temple of the Unfulfilled—
No other ivory for the doors—
No other marble for the floors—
No other cedar for the beam
And dome of man's immortal dream.

Markham's imagery meets, for me, Santayana's standard for the poetry that can be one's religion; it is poetry that intervenes in life—a form of expression literally false but poetically true. Thus viewed, the poetic myth is something "to be enjoyed and understood" rather than a "dark superstition to be fought and eradicated."

For good measure and as a further test of Santayana's standard I share with you some lines from Shelley's "Prometheus" that are thought to contain some of the most moving passages of militant humanism in the whole poetic realm.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

Because I seek in these poetic forms to illustrate and confirm my views about the nature of the superactual, in contrast to the supernatural, I share with you now part of George Eliot's "The Choir Invisible":

Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their wild persistence urge men's search
To vaster issues....

None of these poems take from life its mystery, but none equates mystery with the supernatural. Each views man as spiritual but does not conceive the spiritual to be magical. Each pictures man as conscious, capable of choosing freely among alternatives, a being who cherishes hopes and aspirations, acknowledges moral duties and responsibilities, appreciates beauty, and pursues truth.

What now, I ask, has happened to the ancient view that the secular in literature is base, but the sacred is exalted? If the poetic thoughts I have cited are not scriptural are they, by that token, any less sacred than, say, the Psalms of David? Socrates' farewell to his friends as told by Plato in the Crito joins the actual with the ideal, as in this sentence: "We ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to any one, whatever evil we may have suffered from him." But this is in literature that is called secular. The poetry that is the Book of Job is about matters no more or less precious; but it is called sacred. I must now ask: What is the basis for classifying Socrates' words as secular and the author of Job's as sacred? It was an accident of history, I believe, not the thrust of either of these writings. Certainly we ought to heed the wisdom of Emerson in his wish that "religion cease to be occasional."

Permit me now some reflections on the scientific aspect of the humanism in which I invest my faith. It looks to facts as the stuff needed to realize what the imagination entertains as possible. This search is disciplined by the method of science. If, by his espousal of that method, the humanist makes judgments that prove to be in error, he seeks in his imagination a new revelation, or to call it by its other name, a new hypothesis. He does not confuse fact with myth for to do so would be to mistake the material for the spiritual. If perchance his ethics and his economics are at loggerheads he seeks their redefinition and reconciliation—not their abandonment.

The humanism of my persuasion respects the wisdom of Confucius in that the religious spirit follows what the heart desires without transgressing against what is right. In the perspective of such a humanism, religion must render clear to the understanding of ordinary men "some eternal greatness incarnate in the passage of temporal fact," as Alfred North Whitehead has expressed it. Such a simple but profound sense of the nature of the religious stands in sharp and condemning contradiction to the unintelligible dogmas of traditional ecclesiastical orthodoxies.

The scientific humanist understands evil to be the work of man and hence something to be overcome by man—now, not in some afterworld. He takes the same view of happiness, namely, that it is something to be enjoyed now rather than a prize that only death can award him. For him the Kingdom of Heaven is within him, even as the Teacher of Nazareth said it was. He writes not "God and man" but "God in man." If according to the dogma of an archaic fundmentalism it is held that "infinite goodness, wisdom, and power rule the world," the scientific humanist refuses to believe that any action on his part to improve the world is irreligious.

Nothing I have said descriptive of the scientific humanist denies that he is beset by doubts; but he does not, on that account, submit to fears or guilt. His doubt is not the doubt of nihilism but rather, as Justice Benjamin Cardozo holds, the doubt through which the judicial function enters. The humanist of my image risks uncertainty but seeks with all patience to reduce it to the degree to which intelligence and hope will permit. He does not, however, dismiss present uncertainties on the ground provided only by hope that an unerring future time and condition insure certainty. With such grand minds as those of Blaise Pascal and William James, he holds that thinking is a moral act, that it lies within the power of human thought to make rather than discover truth, and that the power to think is the spiritual foundation of man's mental life.

It is the view of the scientific humanist that nature is not finished and that man, since he is part of nature, is not finished. He thus believes in growth, but, by the same token, he admits the possibility of decay. He stands for growth rather than decay on purely arbitrary grounds—simply as one of the basic premises on which his philosophy and religion rest. He can't help but believe in growth.

He believes also in infinity; hence he settles for no finite revelations. He subscribes to no doctrine of last things. He believes infinity to be an attribute of both nature and knowledge. He believes mankind to be infinitely perfectible. Thus he rejects, out of hand, the theological dogma that "in Adam's fall we sinned all," which every Puritan schoolgirl wove into the sampler of her handiwork and which was the rhyme used to teach the letter "A" in the Puritan elementary school. Consonant with his rejection of the doctrine of original sin, he feels no guilt in having descended from the "first pair" who are said to have been ejected from the Garden of Eden by the God of Genesis. On the contrary, he finds in the folklore of their defiance of divine authority the beginning of man's spiritual and intellectual freedom.

The scientific humanist believes in the possibility of universal good, which makes no distinctions between men on account of their geography, race, ethnic identity, class, color, or religious persuasion. He believes that such a universal good may be practiced in many ways; hence he believes in religious and political pluralism, granted that each is a genuine pluralism that requires of men a decent difference rather than a difference merely for its own sake. Furthermore, he believes that man is capable of practicing the truths of a body of moral standards that were not spelled out ahead of him by nature. But if the possibility of such moral constants is denied, he believes that a universal human god is not capable of achievement.

The humanism of my imagery holds that man's uniqueness lies in his ability to think and to love and that any philosophy of education calling itself liberal must effect a working union between these two human attributes. It takes into account that man is the only creature who can think about thinking and thus improve it. This ability marks his unique place in the "great chain of being."

This same scientific humanism holds that man builds his own future as he has built his own past, by the projection of his imagination. Through imagination he launches his attack on his environment—human, material, and nonhuman—in order to bring his imagined future to realization. If his times are moral or if they are immoral it is he who is accountable, for he understands that man introduced morality and immorality into the world; it was not here before he was.

I wish now to say something about the most sensitive element in the religion of scientific humanism: the role and the nature of God. Humanism holds that the word "God" is irrelevant to man's religious problem unless it refers to whatever, in truth, operates to save men from evil thought and conduct and to advance individual men and the community of men to an ever greater good. Here again the humanism of my image admits of no last and final things but, on the contrary, insists on the continuous quest for a certainty that grows as the mind and spirit of man grow.

The evils from which the God of humanism saves men I believe to include pettiness, greed, injustice, prejudice, jealousy, and any form of neglect or hatred of one's fellow man. The greater good for which man is saved has already been told in the poetic fragments given earlier from Markham, Shelley, and Eliot: "here the stuff of Paradise," "to love and bear," "the hope that creates," "generosity," "thoughts sublime," and "deeds of daring rectitude."

The concept of God that grows out of such a natural/human history is a positive concept. In that virtue it is totally contrary to the idea of God that is but another name for idolatry. Erich Fromm has taught me much about such a God. That deity is one into whom man projects his own power of love and reason, with the result that he no longer feels these forces any more to be his own powers. He then prays to that God to give him back some of what he had earlier projected. Man thus creates an idol with the result that he, through submissive worship, estranges and alienates himself from the very God of his making. The result is, Fromm argues, that humans seldom experience themselves as powerful actors who impinge on the world, but as puppets manipulated by external sources. The God of the scientific humanist is, on the contrary, "not a symbol of power over man but of man's own power." Thus the place of the Kingdom of Heaven is within us. The God of humanist man thus transforms character through man's service to the virtues I have noted, but only when, as Whitehead insists, "they are sincerely held and vividly apprehended."

As for giving you a formal definition of God, I forebear. All I feel able or disposed to say is that, for me, "God" symbolizes the universal good that, while being universal, is also local and intensely personal. I find it quite impossible to reduce his nature to an item in a catechism.

I bring my testament to a close by recourse to more poetry. The poem that I now share with you affirms, as no other in my knowledge does, the truth of the philosopher William E. Hocking's image of "the million masks of God," another affirmation of the true pluralism of God's nature. Some say that the God of William Henry Carruth's poem, "Each in His Own Tongue," is pantheistic, but if it is so I am not disturbed; his God is, for me, the God of the full range of human experience, as is the God of scientific humanism. These are the words of Carruth, who was at once a teacher of chemistry and a minister of the gospel:

A fire-mist, and a planet,
A crystal and a cell,
A jelly-fish and a Saurian
And caves where the cave men dwell.

Then a sense of law and beauty
And a face turned from the clod,
Some call it Evolution, but
Others call it God.

A haze on the far horizon,
The infinite tender sky,
The ripe, rich tint of the corn-field
And wild geese sailing high.

And all, over upland and lowland
The charm of the golden rod.
Some of us call it Autumn, and
Others call it God.

Like waves on a crescent sea-beach,
When the moon is new and thin,
Into our hearts, high yearnings
Come welling and surging in.

Come from the mystic ocean
Whose rim no feet had trod.
Some of us call it Longing,
And others call it God.

A picket frozen on duty,
A mother starved for her brood,
Socrates drinking the hemlock
And Jesus on the rood.

And millions, who, humble and blameless,
The straight hard pathway trod,
Some call it Consecration, and
Others call it God.

Pulpit address, First Unitarian Church, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, October 27, 1968.

CHAPTER TWO
Humanism: Its Claim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Recollections
• Introduction
• Part 1: Reflections on Humanism
• Part 2: The Essence of Democracy
• Part 3: General Education and the Curriculum
• Part 4: The Social Sciences and Social Studies Education
• Acknowledgments
• About the Series
• About the Book and Author