Acceptance and Calling In

Dr. David Breeden received the American Humanist Association’s Humanist Distinguished Service Award at the 82nd Annual Conference in Denver, CO in May.

He is Senior Minister at First Uni​tarian Society of Minneapolis (FUS). As a congregational humanist community, FUS fosters a free search for knowledge and meaning, strives for justice, and serves each other, the Twin Cities, and beyond.

Dr. Breeden has an MFA from The Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, a Ph.D. from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, with additional study at Breadloaf and in writing and Buddhism at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He also has a Master of Divinity from Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago. He is Chair of the Education Committee of the American Humanist Association.

A published poet and author, he is committed to asserting the historic role of humanism within the Unitarian Universalist tradition and getting the good news of humanism out to the world. His many books are available online. His podcasts and videos are available on the FUS website.

This text is excerpted from Dr. Breeden’s acceptance speech.

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Acceptance

THANK YOU TO THE BOARD and members of the AHA and those gathered here tonight, in person and virtually. What to do with my fifteen minutes of fame?!

My social location: I’m David Breeden, he/him. I was born in the Ozarks, raised as a subsistence farmer, and I still own my family farm today. In other words, I chose to leave my heritage, not having to kill for a living, and I feel very fortunate that I have been able to get paid to do things that I, myself, have found of value.

I’m a first-generation college graduate. My mother was illiterate. My father dropped out of the sixth grade. I tell my story not because it is a story of victory but because it is a story no longer possible. America has changed. People born today in the poverty that I was born into are very, very unlikely to escape. And that’s unjust. I also tell you these things because I’m not the “typical humanist.” Except that I think I am! I think every last one of us in this room, and out there, is “typical” in our a-typicalness. Humanism is a vast story for all people.

I was raised in the Pentecostal tradition. I was raised by my parents to think that what you believe and what you do in the world with those beliefs are life’s most important questions. I still believe that today. I know from experience just how fortunate I am to live in a space where I have time and leisure and learning in order to contemplate and create art. And I believe that it is a fundamental human right that all human beings must have the ability to pursue truth and beauty as they see fit.

Jewish tradition includes the story of Jacob wrestling with an angel and claims for itself a long tradition of wrestling with monotheism. Humanist tradition includes the story of Frederick Douglass and claims for itself a long tradition of wrestling with the injustices of the human condition. This is what we humanists too often forget: We have stories, too. Good stories of lives well lived and of justice and freedom pursued. Humanism offers a history and stories of thought and struggle and overcoming. There are many humanisms. Where do people turn to learn more about our history, stories, thoughts, and struggles? Are you telling our stories and yours?

We owe it to ourselves right now—and we owe it to future generations—to ensure a strong American Humanist Association to be the repository of our stories and the catalyst for our future so that our ideals and struggles and victories will be known. And so that our values of liberation, truth, and beauty will not disappear.

Calling In

When I left Christianity, I did it through reasoned choice, yes, but also the deep feeling that the Christianity I was living in was deeply flawed and deeply unjust. Just like Thomas Paine before me, I read the bible. And the stories I saw there were not like the stories told in my church. Rather than subjugation and resignation until the next life—that “Pie in the Sky When You Die”—I saw stories of liberation and justice.

And, like Thomas Paine before me, I determined that the

world is my country,
all humankind my siblings,
and my religion to do good.

As I see it, the future of freethought movements in the United States is to follow the lead of philosopher Loretta Ross, calling out injustice, but as for people, never calling out, always calling in. Because—when it comes to “reality”—humanists choose to welcome everything and push nothing away. We want to know how things really are. As the writer Philip K. Dick phrased it, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” (I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon; St. Martin’s Press, reprint 1987).

Humanists will always quibble but at the foundation of humanist ethics are four assertions of aspirations. Humanists call you in to trust that:

1. 
Human beings matter more than ideas.
2. 
Each and every person is precious and unique, having unique human genetic and social composition and individual rights and collective responsibilities.
3. 
Freedom of speech and thought are essential to human flourishing.
4. 
Human beings can solve human problems; our goal is flourishing for all sentient beings.

The Two Horsemen

I’d like for us to remember, for a moment, part of our story. Roy Speckhardt in his book Creating Change Through Humanism (Humanist Press, 2015) relates this:

The American Humanist Association (AHA) was formed in 1941, when Curtis W. Reese and John H. Dietrich, two well-known Unitarian ministers and humanists, reorganized the Humanist Press Association in Chicago, into the American Humanist Association.

The goal was not to establish a religion…but instead to recognize the nontheistic and secular nature of humanism, organize its advocates, and align the organization for the mutual education of both its religious and nonreligious members. This makes the American Humanist Association the oldest organization addressing the breadth of humanism in the United States.

Reese became the first president of the AHA in 1941. Reese and Dietrich were both Unitarian ministers and had met at a ministers’ conference in Iowa back in 1916. They both grew up in pious, German-speaking homes, and I like to think of them kicking back with some beer and talking about this new idea called humanism.

Dietrich and Reese were not “Harvard men.” They did not have Ivy League educations or fancy theology degrees. They both had become ordained Christian ministers who reached the conclusion that Christianity no longer made sense for them. Dietrich left under threat of excommunication. As happened to freethinkers in those days, they were both forced out of their denominations and both became Unitarians.

Dietrich discovered the term “humanist” while reading British publications and began calling himself a humanist. Reese had reached similar conclusions to Dietrich’s, though he had been calling his new ideas “The Religion of Democracy,” a term I sometimes wish had won the day, rather than “humanism.” (But Dietrich, it appears, was either more persuasive or better at holding his alcohol.)

The people of First Unitarian Society called Dietrich as their minister in 1916. Dietrich was a congregational humanist to his very core, as am I. Curtis Reese, on the other hand, was much more of a secularist. For example, he worked with the Abraham Lincoln Center in South Chicago, a twenty-four-hour gym, library, and cafeteria free for the asking. Reese served on the board of Meadville Lombard Theological School, as do board members of the AHA to this day.

We humanists have a rich history and a story of resilience, defiance, and liberation. Our beginnings are not the green quads of Harvard but the corn fields of Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. The first AHA office was not in Washington, DC, but Yellow Springs, Ohio.

The base and core of humanism is—and I think always will be—not the airy heights of a Paul Tillich but the down-and-dirty pragmatism of John Dewey. Ours is not the careful and quietist theology of a Harvard or a Yale but the radical rethinking of the personal as political of the Chicago School of Theology. Our intellectual forebears were not of the “sit-and-git” variety but were rather constructivists—get your hands dirty; get in there and explore. The average American religious institution is still exactly like the average American school—a place to sit down, shut up, and accept what you are taught. We, rather, are the Montessori school—come in. Engage. Learn. Enjoy life!

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“As I see it, the future of freethought movements in the United States is to follow the lead of philosopher Loretta Ross, calling out injustice, but as for people, never calling out, always calling in.”

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Where Ya Gonna Get Points of View?

As First Unitarian Society board member Drew Bekius mentioned this morning in the conference’s opening session, there are aspired values and lived values. Our work is to align our values and actions. Part of that is listening to and searching for marginalized voices.

Take for example Mary Midgley. An odd choice, perhaps, but I hope you’ll see my point.

Midgley died in 2018, known mostly as an animal rights ethicist. She did not publish her first book until she was in her fifties, having—like so many women in her generation—first fulfilled the socially expected marriage and children.

There have been two books recently—finally—about this generation of female philosophers who attended Oxford University during the 1940s, when most of the British men—professors and students—were away at war. One book is titled Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life and the other is titled The Women are Up to Something. I recommend them both.

In the last book she wrote before her death (What is Philosophy For?; Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Mary Midgley wrote this:

It is that all our solutions are incomplete, for reasons that can often be understood. The area of our ignorance is enormous and, by its very nature, has no outward frontiers. The methods we have been using are proving inadequate because of difficulties which tend to arise about all problems if we pursue them beyond the more obvious first steps. The later stages of an enquiry often call for a change of method, and finding appropriate methods is itself a troublesome new problem.

…but it always needs a new kind of thinking….These are not problems about alternative facts in the world. They are problems about alternative possible descriptions, both of which can be used in appropriate contexts. In fact, they are problems about how to make the best use of our own imperfect faculties.

Good question, isn’t it: How are we to make the “best use of our own imperfect faculties?” When are we going to see that misunderstanding and untruth flow from the failure to consider “alternative possible descriptions?” When will we learn that we can’t get “alternative possible descriptions” into the room until all sorts of human beings are in the room.

That’s why “the women” weren’t listened to in 1950—they were saying that the vast palaces of reason created so pridefully by the glitzy science that had won the war were only so much dust. Smoke. Partial solutions and unintended consequences. They were saying, they still are saying, quote:

It is that all our solutions are incomplete, for reasons that can often be understood. The area of our ignorance is enormous and, by its very nature, has no outward frontiers.

Midgley gives a scientific example: the International Prototype Kilogram. It was the Enlightenment. All human knowledge, they believed, could be codified and fixed for all time. So, they created the ideal kilogram in 1799 made of platinum and preserved under glass. The perfect kilogram. A true measure. Problem was, a century later, in 1899, the perfect kilogram no longer weighed a kilogram. So, they made another model, this one of platinum–iridium. Perfection at last, right? A few years later, the prototype was fifty micrograms lighter than when it was made. Molecules fall off.

“All our solutions are incomplete.”

Now, we use the Planck constant to define the kilogram. I have to wonder: Will the Planck constant become…un-constant?

The brilliant female philosophers of the Second World War period have some news some of us still don’t wanna hear: “All our solutions are incomplete.”

I’m not a scientist. I’m not a philosopher. I’m a child of the soil and the son of sharecroppers. But what I can say is that I see a deep truth here that serves as a call to us as humanists: All our solutions are incomplete! We’re all gonna die! Therefore, we must love each other!

Four Assertions

Allow me to repeat those four assertions that have helped me live a life of meaning and purpose as a humanist for something over forty years now:

1. Human beings matter more than ideas.
2. 
Each and every person is precious and unique, having unique human genetic and social composition and individual rights and collective responsibilities.
3. 
Freedom of speech and thought are essential to human flourishing.
4. 
Human beings can solve human problems; our goal is flourishing for all sentient beings.

Thank you for honoring me with this award. The future of humanism is bright because you, and you, and you, and you all hold it lovingly, but with a fiery thirst for liberation.

Join with us, lovers of freedom, lovers of liberation, lovers of mystery and multiplicity. Join with us lovers of life!