Howard B. Radest - Speech at the IHEU World Congress, July 3, 2002, Noordwijkerhout

Setting the Scene

50 years is but a moment in history and less than a moment in the universe. From within, however, 50 years can seem endless and, while looking backward, time passes, it seems, all too quickly. In this passing of time, my 50 years of international humanism are punctuated by memories of events and issues, more significantly, of persons and places. That is what I want to share with you, hoping to capture the reality but knowing that I really cannot.

I began my professional work with Ethical Culture (AEU, American Ethical Union) and with the humanist movement in 1952. So, in a sense, IHEU and I have enjoyed a shared journey. I recall the reading the talks that Van Praag and Huxley and Muller gave at the early Congresses, recall too hearing the conversations about this or that issue - like what to name the new organization and how to govern it. In the mind's eye, I see the various settings - Amsterdam, London, Oslo, Paris, Hanover, Boston... I learned - we learned - that humanism lived in the many and varied voices of humanists from Holland, Norway, Denmark, Finland, France, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Yugoslavia, Italy, Luxembourg, Canada, United States, Mexico, Argentina, India, New Zealand, Ghana. Now, I look around in this 50th year and gladly add Africa and Latin America... long awaited new voices and new memories for some future reflection by some future humanist perhaps at some future 100th anniversary congress!

I write from within subjective space recalling memory to the present - usually with a certain fondness, occasionally with sadness, as often with laughter. Indeed, it is just this last note - laughter, joy, happiness - that I want to emphasize just because we humanists are all too often so soberly serious. Strange for a humanism so deeply influenced by the Dutch, that we ignore the humanism of Erasmus, forget to sing with him in 'praise of folly'. And does anyone remember the 'happy humanist' button that our British colleagues designed?

Over these 50 years the scenery has shifted radically and that too enters my subjective space. I think back to World War II, the hopes that greeted victory over fascism, that welcomed the UN and the Declaration of Human Rights, I remember the fears that matched these hopes - atomic bombs and radiation and all too soon the 'iron curtain' and Stalinism. So we journeyed - IHEU and I - through a kaleidoscope world, an unexpected and unprepared world with its rich and confusing shock of languages, habits, dreams, and fears. Long overdue, there was liberation everywhere - in Africa, Asia and Latin America. But liberation carried with it both promise and chaos. Long overdue too was recognition that women and children and people of color were party to the human condition. And long overdue yes again, there was the breakdown of colonialism and the equally chaotic rise of democratic expectations.

Our vocabulary mirrored this kaleidoscope world. We learned to speak the language of feminism and globalism, of ecology and space travel. The sciences entered consciousness with black hole, genome, and clone. Technology defeated space and time yet space and time could not really be defeated. New possibilities of course and yes, new fears too - terrorism and AIDS, nuclear winter and global warming, new imperialisms and new crusades in an impacted world.

The 50 years have seen only 'small wars'. Of course, there are no 'small wars' for their victims in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, Ireland, India, Pakistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. Ironically, the 'great' powers, often using small wars as their puppets, avoided the catastrophe of yet another world war - that 'last war' as Einstein warned. But, like Sisyphus, we climbed the endless mountain, over and over again.

Enter Humanism

Humanists are people of the word and the book, of many words and many books. But we forget that words have a price. They sharpen the differences among us, become swords and walls. Think of the adjectives we endlessly dispute - religious humanism, secular humanism, ethical humanism, naturalistic humanism, evolutionary humanism, existentialist humanism, Marxist humanism, libertarian humanism, scientific humanism and add to these free thought, atheism, liberal religion and on and on. Our adjectives invite into our midst the warfare of sectarianism and not the joys of variety.
So my first question: as I reflect on 50 years, can humanists join together; can the promise of IHEU be fulfilled?

Humanists are but a meager few in a world of billions. Whatever our brave talk in 1952 - and many times since - this is not the 'humanist century'. We dream the dream of reason, of liberty and equality, of a global community of literate and scientific peoples free of the ghosts of centuries. But the dream yields to struggle and not to victory. These days, sadly, even those who should be friends of the humanist dream retreat to fantasy, sentimentality, and mystification.
So, my second question as I reflect on 50 years, when will the peoples and powers of the world truly welcome humanism to the table; what must we do to secure that welcome?

Humanists are notoriously generous with arguments, notoriously ungenerous with money. Humanism struggles to survive not because of the untruthfulness of its cause but because of the anti-organization of its followers. We are independents, cosmopolitans, even nationalists.
So, my third question as I reflect on 50 years, when will humanists support with money and energy the humanism they claim as their own; what must we do to meet the necessities of building world-including institutions?

These questions stirred us as IHEU began its work and they still remain as we come to the end of five decades of that work. Frustrated, yes, but I am not defeated. I understand - I trust we all understand - that world movements are built over generations. And so as the first generations pass into history, the next need take up these questions and their own.

Enter the Humanists

Movements, ideas, and ideals live in and through persons. What then of the generations that depart the scene. Their task - our task - was to find the global agenda, to begin the foundation, to search out successors. But before this, humanists had to know each other, trust each other. 1952, 1957, 1962... were meetings of strangers, of names and faces that had only been known in a note, a letter, a book, or an essay. Breaking through the curtain of words toward a common language and a common purpose - that was and that is the work before us.

Obviously, I select from the hundreds, even the thousands, who at congresses and boards and task-forces encountered each other for the first time. I select from memory and, by omission, I do injustice to those my mind forgets. So trusting in forgiveness - even humanists can forgive - let me wander over these 50 years.

First and above all, I think of Jaap Van Praag. I recall my first meeting with 'Dr. Van Praag' in 1956 (he was not Jaap to me until much much later). It was in the US at our home. He was on a visit to humanist organizations in the US and I was just beginning my work with the Ethical Culture Society in northern New Jersey. Slowly, carefully, he lectured us on how to organize. As you may gather, Americans didn't take kindly to his message. In fear and trembling, I worried about how and if I should tell this to 'the chairman'. Of course, I did not - at least not until many years later over a chess game and good Dutch cigars in his and Mart's garden. He smiled, reminded me that Americans seldom took advice anyhow, and recalled that he understood the courteous attention of the audience as mere courtesy.

Even as we genuinely became friends, Jaap remained 'the chairman' - always the chairman - determined, never blocked by disagreement, listening patiently, undramatic in style and speech. Beneath the quiet surface, passion held him to his task. He never failed to see things through to the end, humanism's end and therefore his. And the remarkable fact - remarkable because we humanists are an undisciplined lot - is that most of the time most of us accepted his authority without resenting it.

I remember the flowers in the garden behind the Van Praag home in Voorburg near the Hague. After I joined the IHEU board and served as IHEU Secretary, we would return to his home after a meeting. On his desk there would be files delivered from his office as Queen's Counselor to South Holland which he would review before anything else. Then, we would replay the Board meeting - more papers - over a glass of wine. Around us were the flowers, always the flowers. Mart would interrupt our 'important' talk to call us to dinner, to take a walk, to forget this humanist business for a while. One year, when my wife, Rita, joined us in Holland, Jaap and I had to face two critics who reminded us that meetings were only meetings and papers only papers!

Another picture enters my mind - the Vatican/Humanist dialogue in Brussels. At one point there was an interchange between Jaap and Gà³mez Caffarena, a radical Jesuit priest from Latin America. Jaap had just finished a talk describing a generous but rigorous humanism. Father Gà³mez replied, 'A God [as I] conceive [it] cannot be a competitor to man...' He added that the issue was 'not either/or but both/and'. Then looking directly at Van Praag, he asked, 'If this concrete point of divergence can be overcome, I ask myself why I should not become a humanist. Or perhaps it is better to address the question to you: would you receive me in your Union if I applied for admission?... I guess that I should feel pretty comfortable with you because, after all, you believe in man. My own faith in God originates in a more elemental faith in man, a faith that we could peacefully share although we receive it from different sources...' There was silence on both sides of the table. For once, Jaap was at a loss for a reply. Gà³mez's question was never answered.

I recall Jaap's embarrassed pleasure at the perquisites of his government office. A former school teacher and a social democrat, he had a chauffeur-driven Mercedes (a small one to be sure) and access to the Queen's yacht to which, one day, he invited a few of us board members and our wives for a sail and a picnic. Mart, ever the realist, enjoyed but never took the perquisites seriously. Like 'papers', there were more important things than 'perks' too.

Sadly, I recall Jaap in his last years. I remember his frustration because he knew that he would never see the fruit of building a world humanist movement. And I remember his pain as his arthritis grew worse and when he had to admit that he couldn't do the things he always had done.

Of course, IHEU was never only Van Praag so I turn elsewhere. I remember two 'battles' over capitalism and socialism. One was a debate at the Oslo Congress (1962). Corliss Lamont, an ardent American humanist and inheritor of one of America's great fortunes, defended socialism Opposite him was Sidney Scheuer, also American and a self-made very successful businessman who insisted on the productive energy of capital and condemned the anti-democratic statism of socialism. Of course, Lamont was a democratic socialist and Scheuer a left-of-center democrat but these distinctions didn't seem to influence their argument.

I think of another evening nearly a decade later in Boston (1970). It was the evening after the formal meetings had ended and we were talking - still talking - over coffee. Lou Sapir, a successful Wall-Street broker and Sveti Stojanovic, a Yugoslav academic and a leader of the Praxis group, argued late into the night over the virtues and vices of capitalism and socialism. More than enough beer (coffee had long since left the table) lubricated the conversation. Neither convinced the other but both obviously enjoyed themselves immensely as did their audience. The next day each protagonist laughingly pointed out the exaggerations of his own argument and the foolishness of ideology. As Sveti said, 'what is this baloney [he really used an earthier and more odorous word not ordinarily spoken in polite society] about capitalism and socialism. We have work to do so let's do it!'

If Jaap Van Praag was 'the chairman', Harold Blackham was the ever present 'voice of reason'. spoken of course with a mastery of the English language that only the British can mobilize. Yet, for Harold, reason was not a sword but a gentle reminder that passion needs its governor. As a graduate student, I had known of Harold because of his insightful book, Six Existentialist Thinkers. Later, I followed his career in developing a secular moral education program for British schools to replace the one prepared by the churches. Now, working together in IHEU, he became a colleague and a friend. A picture still remains with me of Harold's visit to our home along with several others after the Boston Congress. It was a very hot summer's day. In our backyard, we had a small swimming pool which offered some relief from the heat. The only one who didn't swim was Harold. Ever the proper Englishman, for all his radical ideas, he wore his suit-coat and his tie all through the hot afternoon. The rest of us never could understand why he did not sweat and suffer.

One time, the Board met in Antwerp. Naturally, after a long-day and evening of talk we needed refreshment and, above all, something to drink. But the dining room was closed and nearby stores and bars were closed too. As I recall, Henry Morgentaler and Paul Kurtz discovered where the kitchen staff kept its supply of vin-ordinaire. Needless to say, led by these two petty felons, we began to sample the harsh red wine. Much much later, after talk about important matters - we humanists always speak of important matters, which we forget by morning - we staggered off to bed to await another day of meetings.

Tall and dignified, Justice Tarkunde often represented India. A member of the high court, I always thought of him and still do as if 'Mr. Justice' were part of his name. Another Indian: a quiet dedicated man, slight in stature, big in dreams. Abe Solomon and his wife Ruby became good friends. Early in our friendship, we sat together at dinner. My wife, Rita, leaned over to ask him how he came by his rather interesting Indian name. Before she could finish her question, he answered with a smile: the 'lost tribes of Israel'. Then there was Gora in all his simplicity and radicalism. I can still see him in my mind's eye, dressed in his white dhoti, wearing worn sandals, and dancing the Israeli 'hora' with evident joy at the banquet after the Boston congress.

Of course, no humanism would be complete without the French. Always formally dressed, always an image of politesse, Pierre Lamarque (Ligue Franà§aise de l'Enseignement) reminded us at least once at every meeting of 'liberté, égalité, fraternité'. The Belgians come to mind, Lucien De Coninck and Karel Cuypers, not to be outdone by the French, so earnest in their anti-clericalism. From them we heard never a good word for religion, let alone for church and priest. We Americans (and the Germans from the Frei Religiöse Gemeinde) tried to convince Belgium that it was possible to say 'religious' humanism and 'free religion' without surrendering to the Pope and deserting the humanist cause. Joining them from Norway in the north, Kristian Horn spoke proudly of winning the battle for the separation of church and state and the right to welcome children into the world in a humanist way and without the rituals of official Christianity. Carrying on the tradition of a free-thinking humanism, I recall Levi Fragell's first visits to the Board, his impatience with all that talk, his commitment to making IHEU grow as Norway's humanism had grown.

Walking warily around their European brothers and sisters, were the Germans. The war was fresh in everyone's mind so there was a certain comradely suspicion in the conversation. A younger generation, Armin and Ilse Reiser and Renate Bauer, struggled to bring the free religion of 1848 into the present with a secular democratic 'religion' for the 1960s and '70s and '80s. Passing through the scene from Italy was Ruggero di Palma Castiglione of the Centro-Coscienza. Always correct and correctly dressed. If he was not a reincarnation of the Castiglione who wrote the 'Courtier' in the 16th century, he should have been.

Again, the English: Hector Hawton of the Rationalist Press Association and Peter Draper of the British Humanist Association. It was Hector that introduced me to the joys of the British pub lunch and Peter who joined Kurtz and Morgentaler and I in punting on the River Cam after a session at Cambridge. To the laughter of our British audience on both banks of the river, we struggled to master the punt, going from side to side more often than forward. Both Hector and Peter spoke so beautifully that even where their ideas were doubtful, they often carried the day in the Board. Their language was so harmonic, so impressive in its rounded phrases, that it almost seemed insulting to the art of rhetoric to disagree.

Dubrovnik is never far from my mind these days after the horrors of Bosnia. I remember walking on the old city wall with Nettie Klein and Piet Thoenes. I remember the international university center and our dialogue on Marxist humanism with the Praxis group. I return to thoughts of Markovic and Stojanovic and Tadic and the rest. I cannot avoid a note of sadness and disbelief when I think of Serbia and Croatia, comparing today's events with yesterday's nearly successful struggle for academic freedom and social democracy against Tito's rule.

Of course the Americans were present, trying so hard not to be the 'ugly Americans'. Here I think particularly of the women. May Weis of AEU, so earnest in her dedication to the United Nations where she served IHEU as NGO representative for years. She would get terribly frustrated with us for not giving internationalism its due, for dismissing her carefully crafted reports with a polite nod or two. She never missed a meeting, never missed an opportunity to put the matter before us. It was through her - seconded by my colleagues, Jeff Hornback and later by Jean Kotkin - that we began to speak the language of environmentalism, of exploding populations, of global human rights. From another part of the forest, Mary Morain (AHA, American Humanist Association) tried over and over again to move us from words to acts despite our habit of drowning acts in words.

Finally there were the Dutch with their documents - always dutifully numbered and filed by Ernst Van Brakel, IHEU's secretary - the 'careful punctual Dutch' as KLM put it in their advertisement. But that was a misleading surface. I recall Piet Thoenes, also a Chair of IHEU, and also a good friend. There was the time, while driving back in their Volkswagon Camper to Amsterdam from a meeting in Hannover. I can still hear Remke and Piet singing folk songs at the top of their lungs. Or I think of Max and Madzy Rood, so curious about American politics. It was in their home in 1973 that we watched President Nixon resign after Watergate.

Another Congress in Amsterdam: we began with a reception at the newly opened Van Gogh Museum. The wine and genever and whisky flowed freely - no doubt too freely - as we wandered through the magnificence of the exhibits. And, I must report, there were more than one or two 'important' people who did not enjoy the liquor without paying the price of foolishness. We closed that same congress, I think, with a final banquet at the zoological gardens. The chatter of monkeys and the grunts of lions provided background music to our speeches. I remember Wim Koppenberg and the sadness of his sudden death. I think fondly of IHEU chairmen like Bert Schwarz and Rob Tielman. Of course, there was always Nettie Klein who never missed the chance for a whispered comment that punctured pretense. Yes it was the 'careful, punctual' Dutch without whom there would not have been these 50 years! The Dutch could be serious, or at least they worked very hard at appearing serious.

More Than Memory

Yes, over the years we have dealt with weighty things, argued this truth or that, approved resolutions, organized projects, published pamphlets. Nothing I say is intended to demean these things. We have made a difference at UNESCO, at the UN, at the Council of Europe, in Tito's Yugoslavia and Morgentaler's Canada. Thanks to HIVOS, we have done good work in developing countries. And, above all, we have added humanist voices to the chorus of humankind.

But, as it were, boards and committees, and projects, and organizations are, if I may say so, bricks without mortar. What then held us together through frustration and deficit all of which were and are inevitable in any organization, let alone a small poorly funded one? We set out 50 years ago before internationalism and globalism were part of our consciousness, part of our language. So each step, modest though it may have been, was a step into that which was not yet known, not yet experienced. So, what held us together?

People were and are the mortar, hence my memories. Their gestures and laughter, yes their anger and annoyance, held things together when, objectively as it were, there was no reason to hold together. In those 50 years there was no grand success and no grand parade. We simply did what had to be done, hoping that the foundation so painfully set down would give to others the chances we could not have had. We knew, intuitively, that our generation was not destined for humanist glory.

But the work got done and in the doing our experience was enriched. So, the point of these brief notations which are but invitations for others, for the future, to tell the fuller story. A tangible humanism exists alongside the humanism of the word, a humanism of effort and friendship across the boundaries of time and place and language, a humanism of persons.

I close then with a simple thought: enlarge the circles of humanist memory, enjoy our follies, be patient with time and generation. Above all, tell stories so that little by little, the humanist voice may be heard in this lovely world of ours.