Short Fuse
Interview: Susan Jacoby, Robert Ingersoll, and Keeping the Secular Tradition of
American History Alive
Susan Jacoby, "The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and
American Freethought"
Early on in her profile of Robert Ingersoll, Susan Jacoby writes
that: "Intellectual history is a relay race, not a hundred-yard dash.
Ingersoll was one of those indispensible people who keep an alternative version
of history alive."
The alternative Ingersoll helped to keep alive is the secularist
view of American history. It refers back to the Founders having omitted all
mention of god from the Constitution: Search that document and you will find no
"god" or "God", no "Supreme Being", not even so
much as a polite tip of the hat to "Providence". It's instructive to
think that when, in January, 2011, the Tea Party read the Constitution out to
the House of Representatives, as if it were scripture, they were not called to
account for the fact that the Constitution was, if anything, anti-scripture, a
document meant to be construed as the work of human beings. For that reason, among
others, it was not only revolutionary in its day but remains so in ours.
Ingersoll, the son of an Abolitionist preacher, was a famed late
nineteenth-century exponent of secularism, or, as it was then known,
freethought. His sources were disparate, ranging from Shakespeare, whose works
he cherished and would often quote, to poetry by his friend Walt Whitman, to the
discoveries of Charles Darwin. At the center of his effort was Tom Paine.
Jacoby writes that for Ingersoll, "the relative
obscurity of Thomas Paine. . . was nothing less than a crime against the true
history of the United States." Paine, she writes, had been vilified by
"religious reactionaries [who] attempted to equate the separation of
church and stage with the violent Jacobin period of the French
Revolution." The Tom Paine that she, after Ingersoll, wants to rescue from
obscurity is not so much the Paine of "Common Sense," whose
pamphleteering against English rule and on behalf of the American Revolution
are acknowledged, but the Paine of "The Age of Reason", who took what
was considered an "heretical" stance, namely that sacred books,
despite claims to divine authority, were authored by men.
Ingersoll was inspired by "the radical humanism of Tom
Paine." He, like Paine, saw, "the separation of church and state not
only as the guarantor of personal freedom of conscience but also as the
foundation of a world in which inherited status and wealth would be replaced by
merit and intellect."
By trade, Ingersoll was a attorney. In 1887, in New Jersey,
he defended C. B. Reynolds, who had been brought up on charges of blasphemy —
punishable by up to a year in prison — for having "distributed a
pamphlet denying the infallibility and divine authorship of the Bible."
Though Ingersoll's defense of Reynolds on grounds of free speech garnered
praise even from devout visitors to the courtroom, the jury found Reynolds
guilty. The judge however, "unwilling to be recorded in history as the man
who imprisoned an American citizen for blasphemy for the first time in fifty
years imposed a fine of only twenty-five dollars". Jacoby points out that
the Reynolds Trial was a precursor of the Scopes (Monkey) Trial four decades
later.
By the time of the Reynolds Trial, Ingersoll's views and
oratorical gifts were nationally known. A speech he gave at the Republican
Convention of 1876 put him on national stage. After that, the lecture circuit
was his preferred medium and he, like Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, was one
of its stars. "Between 1874 and his death in 1899," Jacoby writes,
"Ingersoll spoke in every state except Mississippi, North Carolina and
Oklahoma." His appearances brought him into contact with Eugene V. Debs
and with Bob LaFollette, the Progressive Party Governor of Wisconsin, who said:
"Ingersoll had a tremendous influence on me. He liberated my mind. . . He
was a rare, bold, heroic figure."
The fact remains that Ingersoll is all but unknown in our
time. Why that is so is a question Jacoby sets out to answer. One answer she
proposes is that it was generally assumed that the reactionary expressions of
religion Ingersoll contended against would simply fade away over time, to be replaced
by education, broader culture and scientific reason. It is also the case, as
she notes, that the sort of humanist optimism Ingersoll ascribed to was, in
effect, vitiated by World War I.
"The Great Agnostic" aims to do for Ingersoll what
Ingersoll did for Tom Paine. But Jacoby herself is part of the intellectual
relay race she describes. In this and previous books such as
"Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism", and in the columns
she wrote for the Washington Post (under the rubric "The Spirited Atheist:
In Search of a New Age of Reason") she proves herself a wide-ranging,
endlessly engaging and original advocate of the view that morality and compassion
do not derive from religion and are often, if anything, compromised by it.
I was pleased to have the following email exchange with
Susan Jacoby.
FUSE: What led you, personally, to advocate secularism and
free thought?
SJ: First, it’s freethought (not two words). Free thought as
a concept is two words, but freethinkers and freethought refer to a specific
movement dating from the beginning of the eighteenth century.
As for me, that this is the only life we have, that we are
connected by virtue of our common humanity, not by the “fatherhood” of a deity,
that moral sensibilities arise not from fears or hopes connected with an
afterlife but from a natural empathy that must be honored: these things have
all seemed true to me since I began to think seriously about them in childhood.
Since I was raised a Catholic, I grappled early (as all
people raised in a faith must) with the contradiction between evil and belief
in an all-powerful, all-loving God. The classic Christian (and Jewish) answer —
free will — was not satisfactory to me. Why would a good God endow man with
“free will” to torture his fellow man? Who would want to rely on a god like that?
Not me. This is hardly an original thought, but the theodicy problem is at the
root of why most atheists become atheists. Also, of course, I can’t believe
anything that contradicts the observable and provable laws of nature.
FUSE: Is there a cyclical process in the United States, so
that sometimes secularism is in the forefront and sometimes, as now,
fundamentalist zeal appears to prevail?
SJ: I don’t agree that ‘fundamentalist zeal” is prevailing
right now. It’s more accurate to say that that there has been growth in both
the fundamentalist and the secularist portion of the American population.
Fundamentalist religious believers, however, are better organized than
secularists. Churches themselves are powerful mechanisms for propagating their
own values.
FUSE: You write that the "new atheists", unlike
Ingersoll, "consider 'moderate' religion as bad or worse than
fundamentalism." How so?
SJ: Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, both of whom I greatly
respect, have expressed the view that the real problem with moderate religion
is it’s a kind of stalking horse that lends respectable cover to all religion.
I don’t agree with this. It’s fundamentalism — the religious right — not the
religious left or center, that wants to write its own values into law.
Many liberal religious believers are as fierce in defense of
the separation of church and state as atheists are. We need to work with them
when we agree on certain political issues.
FUSE: Was Ingersoll more open to "moderate"
religion than "new atheists" because religion in his day was more
moderate, less fundamentalist, than it has become in our ours?
SJ: Religion was not more “moderate” in Ingersoll’s day than
in hours. Orthodox religion was much more powerful then than it is now,
although the late nineteenth century was also an era in which the freethought
movement expanded. Again, there’s an analogy with the current cultural climate.
FUSE: Darwin himself believed that the advance of science
would lead to the withering away of religion. For him, there was no need to
challenge religion directly, as Huxley did. But aren't all sorts of Darwinians,
from Daniel Dennett through E.O. Wilson, scurrying to explain the fact that
Darwin was, at least as the United States is concerned, wrong about the
withering away of religion? Today's Darwinians try to understand what, in
culture and/or neuro-wiring, keeps religion going.
SJ: I very much dislike your use of the word “Darwinian,”
This is a political term, not a descriptive one, and is meant to imply that
those who essentially accept Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural
selection are somehow impervious to new research that has modified and
continues to modify the particulars. The difference betweens science and
religion is that science is always open to and modifiable by new evidence.
Faith is impervious to evidence. Why would Darwinians have to ”scurry” to
explain why Darwin was “wrong” about the withering away of religion?
In fact, the United States is the only developed country in
which a significant segment of the population (about 25 percent) believes in a
literal interpretation of the Bible. Even so, fundamentalist religion is
certainly less powerful than it was 150 years ago.
There will always be religion in the world, I believe,
because there will always be people who cannot live without an overarching
ideology that explains everything. This is, of course, true of certain kinds of
political ideologies as well. Atheism, by the way, is not a religion because
atheism does not attempt to explain everything.
FUSE: Ingersoll meant to revive Thomas Paine. Did he
succeed? Has Paine been revived?
SJ: Paine’s vital role in the American Revolution is widely
known and taught, and Ingersoll had a lot to do with the revival of his
historical memory in that regard. His role in the history of secularism and
freethought is much, much less well known (in America) and is not taught in
schools at all.
FUSE: In his effort to resolve the conflict between religion
and science, Stephen jay Gould proposed the idea of Non-overlapping Magisteria,
in which religion and science each have their sphere of influence.
Why do you reject this idea?
SJ: Gould, and the Vatican, are completely wrong about the
possibility of “nonoverlapping magisteria.” (On this I agree 100 percent with
all of the other “new atheists.”) The idea of putting religion in the “morality
magisteria” cubbyhole and science in the “material world” cubbyhole is utterly
ridiculous.
Let us take a simple example. Science has made it possible
for couples to conceive children through in vitro fertilization — in a test
tube without the physical act of intercourse. Whether we are going to fund this
research — that is, whether it is right to use public money for this purpose,
and for insurance payments — is a moral issue as far as some religions are
concerned.
But religious pressure on politicians to make laws that
follow certain religious views, but not others, constitute interference with
science. There is no way, in modern society, that moral judgment can be
disentangled from scientific advances. There never has been, in fact.
Not all religion is the enemy of science, but religion
always wants its say. In the United States, right-wing religion is opposed to
the evidence-based world of science.
FUSE: What is the best single thing to read by Ingersoll?
SJ: Ingersoll’s collected works were published in twelve
volumes. Many of his most famous lectures are available on the Web. These
include, “The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child,” “Individuality,” “The Ghosts,”
“The Gods, “Thomas Paine,” and “What Must We Do to be Saved?” — all of which
provide a good overview of his thinking.
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