THE DIALECTICS OF DECENCY

In our fractious times, divided by tribalism and animosity, I find a model for a more pluralistic and decent society in the vision of Felix Adler, the founder of Ethical Culture.

In these fraught and brutish times, I am always searching for a response that will bring more decency and kindness to our turbulent and nasty social condition. There aren't, needless to say, any pills, elixirs, or magic bullets (poor choice of words) that will mollify the anger, self-righteousness, and hate that so ominously divide us and threaten democratic values and practices. No revolution will bring sudden change.

I am of a philosophical bent, and I have devoted my essays to illuminating the values that underlie the events and trends currently informing the interests of journalists. I like to peer beneath the surface at foundational ideas that inspire political and social movements.

At the moment, I find myself turning to the thought of the founder of the movement that has comprised my career and personal dedication for more than half a century. I have served as a professional leader in the Society for Ethical Culture. For those unfamiliar with Ethical Culture, a brief primer:

Ethical Culture is a religio-philosophical movement, congregationally organized and dedicated to the primacy of ethical ideals in personal and public life. Unlike monotheistic religions, it has no theology, just an intuitive understanding that living an ethical life comprises our highest purposes. Ethical Culture is the only “religion of humanity” founded in the nineteenth century that has survived into the twenty-first.

I'm often asked which ideals should be seen as foremost? many in our movement would reply that acting with respect for the dignity of others and oneself is paramount.

Those who have studied philosophy might recognize echoes of the thought of the German luminary, Immanuel Kant, in this brief summary.They would be right. The founder of Ethical Culture, Felix Adler, was a German-born Jew who received his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg and fashioned himself a neo-Kantian thinker. In Germany, Adler studied for the Reform rabbinate alongside a secular curriculum taught by the stellar academics of the age. On returning to America it became clear that he had abandoned belief in traditional notions of God, even as they were liberalized by the Reform rabbis of the age, his father among them.

A fully modern figure, Adler nevertheless took religion seriously. In his view, the most significant endowment that both Judaism and Christianity offered was a recognition of the indwelling holiness of the person. Ethical Culture's radical mission was to preserve this essential value while jettisoning the beliefs, practices, and hierarchical authority associated with the historical religions.

Ethical Culture began as a lecture series in New York City in 1876. In the ensuing decades, it became a congregational movement and spread to several major cities in the United States and Europe. With emphasis on ethical ideals, Adler preached the development of “ethical personality.” But Ethical Culture impressed itself on society at large through the ongoing creation of noteworthy social justice projects and creating progressive institutions that are still doing their work more than a century later.

On the social, economic, and political side, Ethical Culture was a response to the inequities and oppressions wrought by the Industrial Revolution, and as such it was in step with the reformist initiatives of the Progressive Era. Overwhelming urban poverty, overcrowded tenements, substandard education, and workers – including children - laboring in unsafe factories, were conditions that crushed the dignity of men and women at every turn. A man of sensitive conscience and a probing intellect, Adler felt a need to create a philosophy that would preserve human dignity in an intellectual environment that he felt was inadequate to the task.

Adler was confronted with a philosophical problem he dedicated his best thought to solving. Here is the problem and his response in a nutshell:

Science reached the pinnacle of its prestige in the nineteenth century. The science of the day remained deterministic, Newtonian, a science wedded to a strict framework of cause and effect. Science, moreover, was grounded in and bolstered by, philosophies of mechanism and materialism. Marxism reduced human behavior writ large to historical materialism, and history unfolded in accordance with deterministic laws.

The most powerful scientific contribution of the century was arguably Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. Darwin's findings were revolutionary. He was able to demonstrate through meticulous observation that species were not static but evolved one into the other through the pressures of natural selection. The theological implications were momentous. Religion of the day confirmed that God created each species as fixed, and except for micro-evolution allowing for alterations within species, the transition from one species to another defied divine perfection. The most controversial conclusion of Darwin's work was that humanity, which found its place in the animal kingdom, itself evolved from previous forms of life. Hence, the forces of nature, and nature alone, absent any divine intervention, constituted a closed system that could account for the origins of the human species. God and divine creation were unnecessary.

The nineteenth century comprised a battlefield between science and religion as science relentlessly provided natural and rational explanations of phenomena throughout the millennia understood to be caused by divine agency. It was in the 1860s, that Thomas Huxley, known as Darwin's bulldog, coined the term “agnostic,” and non-belief became current among British and American intellectual elites.

The science of the day, especially Darwinism, was extremely troubling to religious minds and generated numerous theological responses. Acknowledging science's prestige, some theologians hitched their beliefs to scientific models. Some posited a “God of the gaps,” consigning the Almighty to the role of providing explanations for phenomena that science could not yet explicate. A radical religious response was the total rejection of science and modernism. And in that reaction, fundamentalism was born. Such Christian conservatives, who committed themselves to a literal reading of scripture and to doctrines that rejected Enlightenment values, may have suffered the derision of intellectuals and the educated, but their attitude was one of defiance regardless of the blowback. That reality continues and has even grown more intense in our day.

Felix Adler was among those religious thinkers who were troubled by the implications of Darwinism and the determinism inherent in contemporary science. Science was powerfully eating away at religious belief and with it the doctrine of the divine creation of the human species. But it was God who gave humanity a special status within the natural world. And that status was vested in the possession of a soul. It was the soul that made women and men holy, sacred, and in principle, inviolate from harm and degradation.

In short, science, devoid of divine agency, reduced human beings to nothing but matter and molecules in motion, to a product of deterministic, mechanical forces. As such, humanity was robbed of its special nature. Humanity was thereby worthy of no more protection than the worm, the rat, or the microbe. If we are prone to do away with such creatures, then there was no metaphysical characteristic inherent in the person that gave her or him protection from degradation, abuse and elimination.

So Adler walked an intellectual tightrope. His pressing need was to be able to prove the worth of the person in a world that denied that worth at every point. He could look neither here nor there for the saving foundation he needed. As a modern progressive committed to the deliverances of science, he could not look to religion because science had successfully done away with a personal God who endowed man with a soul that -in principle - vouchsafed protection from violation. But science could not yield what he needed either, for science had reduced man to nothing to a soulless entity comprised of molecules in motion and natural forces.

Unable to look here nor there to ground the absolute worth of the person, Adler took what I refer to as an “introspective turn” and found what he was searching for in Kantian epistemology. Adler was a philosophical idealist, as was Kant. As such, ideas, and not material substances, are most real, what Plato referred to as the “really real.” Material objects fade away, but ideas (think mathematical truths) are eternal.

Following Kant, Adler affirmed that the mind creates reality. We assess nothing as real before it is winnowed by, or passes through, the mind. Kant elaborated a dozen bedrock mental processes that work to create reality. Adler reduced them to two.

While a more detailed analysis of his thought at this point requires a more elaborate analysis, it suffices to state that Adler's theory of mind creates an incorporeal (ie. Spiritual) reality he referred to as the Organic Ideal, or inelegantly “the Ethical Manifold.”

It is the structure of his elaborate philosophy that I believe is of value to us. Adler posited that this Spiritual Universe was comprised of an infinite number of members, each of which he identified with us, with individual persons. Critical to his scheme is that these individuals are joined to all others as the nodes in a vast net are joined together. In short, we are all connected in a vast human family, so the actions of one individual have an effect on all others and on the family taken as a whole. It is this interrelation that defines the concept of “organic,” just as a change in the functioning of any organ in the body has an effect on all other organs and the body as a whole.

Adler founded the philosophy club at Columbia University, where he taught social and political ethics for 30 years. It was there that he communed with such luminaries as William James and John Dewey. Though Adler's brilliance was respected, he could convince none of his peers of the truth of his ethical scheme, nor did he create any philosophical disciples. Philosophical idealism, which was the regnant philosophy in Europe in the nineteenth century, reached a dead end in America in the twentieth, replaced as it was by variants of pragmatism and naturalism.

I am personally also not an idealist and remain more inclined toward philosophical naturalism. In short, naturalism purports that nature is all that there is and there is nothing outside of nature. Yet, I believe that Felix Adler's ethical vision is worthy of renewed consideration in these fractured and decidedly unethical times. It remains of great value and relevance if it is understood metaphorically.

If asked, are we primarily individuals, independent of society (as libertarians would proclaim), or is society primary so that the individual is subordinate to it (as Marxists might have it)? Adler most likely would have responded that we are both individuals and social simultaneously.

We are unique individuals, he asserted, and it is our uniqueness that gives our lives value, noting that if there were replicas of ourselves, the duplicates would be superfluous. But we are also organically tied to others in the community. Our actions have an effect on others and, as they do, our actions set off reciprocal actions that redound to influence us as they do.

Adler's vision of society and our place in it is dynamic, democratic, and radically pluralist. Our lives are lived in a dialectic relation between the universal and the particular. We recognize and honor the universal humanity and dignity in each and all fellow women and men, but we also recognize the uniqueness of each and all. We strive to realize our own individual potentials but we come to realize ourselves, and our best selves, through active engagement with others and the community as a whole.

His ethical vision is one of individual flourishing and mutual support. It recognizes the importance of our differences and the need to nurture those differences for the sake of enriching the lives of all. It avers that we are social beings with needs that can only be met by others, and by asserting our obligations to our fellow beings. For Adler, ethics deals not so much with obedience to rules and regulations but with life lived in vital relations to others. He once wrote:

“The ethical movement stands for the idea that personal relations, between individuals and between group and group, are of supreme concern. Sometimes I wish we might abandon such words as moral and ethical altogether, if it were possible because they convey notions of repression and old-time sanctions that are really quite foreign to our thought. We mean life, but that life that which you can find only in and through the life of your fellowmen, through the radiation that goes out from you into him, and that comes back to you from him.”

It is recognition of our organic interdependence with each other and all others that affirms cooperation and leads to relations of greater decency, compassion, empathy, and caring.

Society is suffering division along many axes – political, ethnic, racial, and gender-based, and ideology. With regard to the latter, a major divide is between radical individualists and libertarians on one side, and those who hold forth a pluralistic vision of society, on the other. Its watchwords are mutual respect and acceptance of difference.

The philosophy of Felix Adler, as I have outlined it and updated to our times, affirms this pluralism and the varieties of human experience. If it were to become the framework for American society as we move ahead, it will foster greater respect for others and begin to replace animosity with feelings of decency, as well as acts of kindness and mutual support.

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