We in the Cognizant Society look up to a number of historical figures and movements and identify with their methodological subtlety, progressive humanism, and moral seriousness. Those we look to in the Western tradition include, but are not limited to, the following.
PHILOSOPHY • POLICY • SCIENCE
PHILOSOPHY
JOHN DEWEY (OXREF)
“Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”
Indefagitable meliorist reformer John Dewey (1859–1952) saw democracy and education as twin antidotes to societal ills. He believed that democracy demanded certain conditions for its great strengths, the greatest of which was progressive education, and was an unabashed proponent of scientific humanism and the necessity of education and democracy for its success.
His pragmatist worldview, faith in science, emphasis on education, and trust in democratic ideals has left him an enduring role model in the view of the Cognizant Society. Preferring humanism to religion, he signed the Humanist Manifesto as one of its original signatories in 1933. “What Humanism means to me,” he wrote, “is an expansion, not a contraction, of human life, an expansion in which nature and the science of nature are made the willing servants of human good.”
- A Humanist Manifesto (1933), the landmark humanist resolution signed by Dewey.
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL (OXREF)
“A believer is a songless bird in a cage, a freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wings.”
“The Great Agnostic” was the title borne by Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–1899), a humanist lawyer and orator who well deserved it. The son of a tolerant and relatively liberal congregationalist preacher, Ingersoll was exposed to the exchange of ideas at a young age and fast embraced freethinking. While practicing law, he married humanist activist Eva Parker and did considerable damage to the credit of blasphemy laws. During the American Civil War, he raised and commanded a cavalry regiment of the Union Army and was captured in a skirmish in Tennessee.
Postwar, he served as Illinois Attorney General, where he distinguished himself for his liberal outlook on women’s rights, egalitarianism, and tolerance. His publically professed agnosticism, however—from which he refused to stray—prevented him from seeking any higher posts. Ingersoll’s advanced views on religion were apparently in part due to Thomas Paine, and the anti-religious logic of The Age of Reason (1794–95) was thus introduced to a new generation. Until his death at 65, Ingersoll continued professing views ahead of his time; he opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act, criticized institutional religion and notions of Hell, and befriended Walt Whitman.
- The Age of Reason (1794–95), a skeptical work by Thomas Paine that inspired Ingersoll.
BERTRAND RUSSELL (OXREF)
“The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests of the desire to know.”
Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872–1970) pioneered analytic philosophy and logicism, unrelenting in a rigorous scientific approach to the universe and a love and empathy for its thinking inhabitants. Championing humanitarian pacifism as well as racial and sexual egalitarianism, he staked his faith in the value of democracy, women’s suffrage, internationalism, secularism, and humanism. Among his most well-remembered contributions to the public sphere was his participation in the Copleston–Russell debate of 1948, in which he outlined his agnostic sentiments in a discussion with Jesuit priest and philosopher Frederick Copleston.
In his later years, he remained a staunch and consistent advocate against imperialism and strongly opposed nuclear proliferation. He issued the Russell–Einstein Manifesto in 1955, despised Soviet totalitarianism, and critiqued American involvement in the Vietnam War. He opposed religion as creating fear, division and dependency and chaired the Cardiff Humanists; he was well ahead of his time in supporting an eventual world government and universal basic income. His vision was for a “scientific society” where rationalism and scientific inquiry uphold and defend human good.
- Russell/Copleston radio debate, a transcript of Russell’s aforementioned 1948 debate.
POLICY
BOB HAWKE (OXREF)
“The world will not wait for us.”
Australia has seldom witnessed the pace of humanist advancement achieved by that of Robert James Lee Hawke (1929–2019). Under his government, universal healthcare was established, the percentage of child school completion more than doubled, sex-based discrimination was outlawed, a workplace pensions system was built, loss-making industries were no longer subsidized, protectionism was dismantled, indigenous land rights were reformed, Antarctic drilling was forbidden, inflation sank, and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) was formed, all while avoiding any kind of lasting economic fallout.
An agnostic liberal, Hawke was particularly struck by humanism and endeavored to close the gap between men and women as well as Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. “The surest guarantee for continued conflict,” he wrote in 1979, “is to perpetuate the gulf between principle and practice which characterises our community today.” He was unable to end the monarchy of Elizabeth II over Australia due to the tide of public opinion, but he nonetheless ended his career as the longest-serving Australian Prime Minister and he who had experienced the highest approval rating.
LUDOVIC KENNEDY (OXLEARN)
“Any worthwhile progress in human affairs often involves risks.”
In the struggle for justice, few have been as tireless as Sir Ludovic Henry Coverley Kennedy (1919–2009). He served as a naval officer during the Second World War, witnessing the setting ablaze of the battleship Bismarck, and afterward set out to enact justice in civilian life as an investigative journalist. Though fascinated with naval warfare, his primary work as a journalist involved miscarriages of justice, researching police failure and corruption.
A member of the Humanist Society Scotland and British Humanist Association, he grew vocal about humanist values in his later life. Continuing to campaign against miscarriages of justice, he also supported the right to euthanasia and wrote extensively in discussion of his atheistic views, contributing also to New Humanist magazine. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher vetoed his knighthood, but he was granted it by her more moderate successor John Major in honor of his contributions to journalism.
OLOF PALME (OXREF)
“Human beings will find a balanced situation when they do good things not because God says it, but because they feel like doing them.”
The Nordic model has, at present, proven itself the most demonstrably successful form of government in happiness and safety metrics. Fewer contributed to it more ardently than Swedish social democrat Sven Olof Joachim Palme (1927–1986), a two-time Prime Minister whose government wove the now-famous social safety net of Swedish welfare. During his tenure, public health was supercharged, education was comprehensively overhauled, women’s rights were fully enshrined, labor unions were strengthened, disability pensions were introduced, progressive taxation was reinforced, nuclear power was advocated, and many more facets of public life were reformed on a revolutionary scale.
Though he faced mild domestic unpopularity on account of the taxes his reforms necessitated, the deeply progressive changes he introduced in spite of his upper-class upbringing defined the unquestionable success of Swedish social democracy in the coming decades. He also stood firm on foreign issues, remaining inveterately anti-imperialist in spite of American chastisement. Further, he was a professed atheist.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT (OXREF)
“The most serious threat to our institutions comes from those who refuse to face the need for change.”
Assuming the presidency of the United States in one of its most shadowed ages, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945) fought friend and foe to drag it skyward into the light of progressivism. Establishing a federal pension program, work programs for millions, agricultural relief, and widespread market reform, it was unprecedented—and hated by the traditionalists of its time. Roosevelt’s efforts began to bring the United States out of the Great Depression but were nonetheless asphyxiated by pro-austerity conservatives in 1937, leading to a recession.
Roosevelt perished in 1945 amid his war against fascism in Eurasia. His wife, Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962), championed humanism and civil rights in the years following his death, becoming universally esteemed and stalwartly promoting the early United Nations.
SCIENCE
KARL POPPER (OXREF)
“True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.”
Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902–1994) certainly earned his reputation as a logician. His pioneering of falsificationism spread the notion that science is advanced by the testing of theories, a pursuit to which he was committed. Though a socialist in his youth, Popper was eventually intellectually alienated by Marxism and he later became an avid defender of liberal democracy and humanism. He believed in free will, opining that higher consciousness supervenes upon on the materiality of the brain, and was an agnostic on the issue of God.
Falsificationism is not logically infallible and remains rightly questioned, though Popper’s commitment to scientific fact and observation, human rights, skepticism, democracy, and an open society are universally esteemed. Particularly noteworthy are his thoughts on tolerance. His paradox of tolerance states that, if a society is tolerant of intolerant ideas, intolerance will come to dominate; thus, to defend an open society, one must be intolerant of intolerance.
CARL SAGAN (OXREF)
“Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves, but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.”
Naturalism and skeptical scientific inquiry were the twin banners carried by astronomer Carl Edward Sagan (1934–1996). Sagan spent his career eliciting considerable public excitement about space travel and was responsible for the assembly of the first human objects to leave the Solar System. To him, the human mission was an entirely united one without regard to nationality. He was prescient on the issue of global warming, founded the space-interest Planetary Society in 1980, and unceasingly promoted critical thinking.
While some of his colleagues disliked the attention Sagan received, Sagan saw public science advocacy as a route not only to stimulating science funding, but also to gain more popular support for science from the wider population. Sagan had much to say of the world beyond his own professional astronomical achievements; he believed in the responsibility of the government to maintain welfare, strict stewardship of the environment, and relaxed cannabis laws. On the matter of religion, Sagan appreciated Jeffersonian Christianity in reducing the Bible to philosophy only, but otherwise shunned religion and considered himself agnostic.
- Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980–81), a television series presented and partially written by Sagan.
JONAS SALK (OXREF)
“Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.”
After developing a landmark polio vaccine, Jonas Edward Salk (1914–1995) declined to patent it, comparing such a thing to be like patenting the sun. Salk pushed the boundaries of vaccine technology and advocated always for its expansion; he was a noteworthy proponent of mandatory vaccination. By the 1970s, polio had been eradicated from the United States, ending centuries of human suffering. Salk’s resolve to better humankind was informed by his “biophilosophy”, a worldview which, drawing upon “scriptures of nature”, recognizes the beauty of the human potential as a culmination of a long chain of evolution.
In 1963, Salk founded the Salk Institute, envisioning a “Socratic academy where the supposedly alienated two cultures of science and humanism will have a favorable atmosphere for cross-fertilization”. Salk believed strongly in the intersection of science and humanism; he was named the 1976 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association and believed that his biophilosophy was founded on artists, scientists, and humanists alike.