America’s humanist: Studs Terkel

Just finished watching a wonderful tribute to Studs Terkel on C-SPAN2’s BookTV which is introduced here at their website. Studs Terkel died on October 31, 2008, at age ninety-six, having lived long enough to see much of his humanistic hopes for the U.S. re-energized by the campaign and election of Barack Obama as our 44th President. Here’s a resourceful website dedicated to Terkel’s life and work which is an integral part of the Chicago History Museum’s online media. Studs Terkel’s person and productive dedication to the humanity of neighbors and citizens continue to remind me and others to listen for the voices of people who live and love and dream in common ways most often drowned out by the pronouncements of presidents, generals, and other proponents of the ways of the mighty among us. In today’s many troubled world, his message of social solidarity is at a premium.

conversion as a psychological process, not a religious destination

I’m reading Robert D. Richardson’s terrific intellectual biography William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. (Here’s a book review which appeared in the New York Times soon after the book was published two years ago.)

Richardson wrote this about James in the book’s Preface: “Nothing in our experience, for James, is really passive–not sleep, not hypnotic trance, not habit, not instinct, and least of all temperament. Active…does not mean orderly. Much of James’s best work is a protest not only against dualism but against what Ian Hacking calls ‘dynamic nominalism’; that is, our habit of creating and naming categories into which we then sort ourselves. Once ADHD had been described, suddenly we saw it in every other child. James’s strength of mind, his resistance to easy labeling, and his focus on experience itself rather than words for experience give his work its continuing explanatory power….James is famous for pragmatism (which he sometimes felt he should have called humanism), though he should be remembered for his radical empiricism (which could have been called phenomenology); that is, his belief that reality is confined to what we experience, with the crucial proviso that nothing we experience can be excluded.”

Jacques Barzun, who’s written about James’s influence on him in A Stroll With William James, sums up what I myself feel about James: “He is for me the most inclusive mind I can listen to, the most concrete and the least hampered by trifles.”

Here’s a YouTube video of Robert D. Richardson speaking briefly about “conversion,” an idea which most of us do not understand as William James did.

William James’s perspective about our always active and pragmatic minds which are inextricably embodied in our brains still wears well with today’s neuroscientific theorists and experimentalists.