Humanism and the Great Conversation

From David Brooks's farewell column:

...Trump is that rare creature, a philistine who understands the power of culture. He put professional wrestlers onstage at the last Republican convention for a reason: to lift up a certain masculine ideal. He's taken over the Kennedy Center for a reason: to tell a certain national narrative. Unfortunately, the culture he champions, because it is built upon domination, is a dehumanizing culture.

True humanism, by contrast, is the antidote to nihilism. Humanism is anything that upholds the dignity of each person. Antigone trying to bury her brother to preserve the family honor, Lincoln rebinding the nation in his second Inaugural Address, Martin Luther King Jr. writing that letter from the Birmingham jail — those are examples of humanism. Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs singing "Fast Car" at the Grammys — that's humanism. These are examples of people trying to inspire moral motivations, pursue justice and move people to become better versions of themselves.

Humanism comes in many flavors: secular humanism, Christian humanism, Jewish humanism and so on. It is any endeavor that deepens our understanding of the human heart, any effort to realize eternal spiritual values in our own time and circumstances, any gesture that makes other people feel seen, heard and respected. Sometimes it feels as if all of society is a vast battleground between the forces of dehumanization on the one side — rabid partisanship, social media, porn, bigotry — and the beleaguered forces of humanization on the other.

If you want to jump in on the side of humanization, join the Great Conversation. This is the tradition of debate that stretches back millenniums, encompassing theology, philosophy, psychology, history, literature, music, the study of global civilizations and the arts. This conversation is a collective attempt to find a workable balance amid the eternal dialectics of the human condition — the tension between autonomy and belonging, equality and achievement, freedom and order, diversity and cohesion, security and exploration, tenderness and strength, intellect and passion. The Great Conversation never ends, because there is no permanent solution to these tensions, just a temporary resting place that works in this or that circumstance. Within the conversation, each participant learns something about how to think, how to feel, what to love, how to live up to his or her social role.

 

One of the most exciting things in American life today is that a humanistic renaissance is already happening on university campuses. Trump has been terrible for the universities, but also perversely wonderful. Amid all the destruction, he's provoked university leaders into doing some rethinking. Maybe things have gotten too preprofessional; maybe colleges have become too monoculturally progressive; maybe universities have spent so much effort serving the private interests of students that they have unwittingly neglected the public good. I'm now seeing changes on campuses across America, from community colleges to state schools to the Ivies. The changes are coming in four buckets: First, a profusion of courses and programs that try to nurture character development and moral formation. Second, courses and programs on citizenship training and civic thought. Third, programs to help people learn to reason across difference. Fourth, courses that give students practical advice on how to lead a flourishing life...

 

nyt

Shaw’s splendid torch

 

Don't be a clod. Great reminder.

Big things

Boldly going w/humanism

"Star Trek was explicitly crafted by its creator, Roddenberry, into a humanist manifesto; the stories Trek told were humanist parables, putting forth the core philosophies to which he was devoted: equality, reason, integrity, fairness, opportunity, community. I was soaking them up before I even really understood what they were. I didn't know it way back in 1972, but Star Trek had already made a humanist of me. It just took me a while to discover that there was a word for it."

— Star Trek and Humanism: Living by the Star Trek Ethos in a Troubled World by Scott Robinson
https://a.co/jkRipSG

An adjustment

Jon Stewart on the disconnect between Trump excusing J6 protesters and MAGA condemning Renee Good

https://www.threads.com/@thedailyshow/post/DTb9uOFjOqi?xmt=AQF0dAOP0i-RK7kR_pXKkuF92PH33yIoBnz5NRfvYrrwRk38SjrCaFo8oE-LhH0Dg2TziGVC&slof=1

never less alone

"One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to do it myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone."
~ William Hazlitt, 'On Going A Journey'

19 pieces of teaching advice

From Paul Bloom... Some good suggestions here, but #17 doesn't work in the chatgpt era.

https://open.substack.com/pub/paulbloom/p/19-pieces-of-teaching-advice-0e9?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer

A meliorist at the bar

Can American Children Point to America on a Map?

"…One of the peculiarities of the American educational system, compared with those in other democracies, is that most public school districts prefer hiring graduates with degrees in education rather than in specific academic subjects like history and physics. This leads to a greater focus on the methods of teaching, expressed in jargon phrases like "inquiry-based learning," than on acquiring particular knowledge. Traub found a real allergy among public school educators to memorization of vocabulary, chronology and narrative — the elemental material out of which reality-based opinions and arguments can be formed.

In some places, fear of running afoul of politicized parents seems to have made some teachers gun shy about raising certain subjects. In Ron DeSantis's Florida, Traub reports, parents at one Miami school received a notice that their first graders would need a signed permission slip to "participate and listen to a book written by an African American."

In other states, too many teachers just seem to have abdicated their responsibilities out of despair, convinced that their students are no longer capable of reading whole books or remembering what they read. "History has been pushed to the side within social studies because there's too much reading and writing," as one frustrated teacher in Illinois puts it, on the verge of tears. "That creates too much stress, and it makes the kids feel bad about themselves…"

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/books/review/the-cradle-of-citizenship-james-traub.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Dogs Build Their Vocabularies Like Toddlers

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/science/dogs-research-vocabulary-toys.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

On the road to peace

Save the book

…Literacy rates are the highest in the history of the world. Still, the world that Huxley imagined, and Postman prophesied, is upon us. That's because people consume Facebook updates, Instagram captions, and X posts throughout the day. Rarely do they pick up a book. A recent Atlantic story, citing the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, said that just 48 percent of Americans had read a single book in 2022, a 6 percent decline from a decade earlier. According to a study released in August, over the past two decades the number of Americans who read for pleasure daily has fallen from 28 percent to 16 percent. The slide among young people is even more pronounced. 

Turns out, reading a book is a lost art—and the demise of book reading might have dire consequences. "Perhaps this plague of illiteracy has played a role in the disappearance of truth and, with it, liberal democracy," George Packer wrote in The Atlantic this fall.

By that account, I suppose I shouldn't feel too bad about my early morning in Rome. The least insidious manifestation of a postliterate age is wasting time scrolling through Instagram; the worst is the most powerful country in the world being led by a cadre of egomaniacal, antidemocratic morons...'

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a69920140/lost-art-of-reading-a-book/?link_source=ta_thread_link&taid=696029224bc2970001396128&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=threads

Orenda

Orenda is when we look at how things are and decide how we want them to be.

https://substack.com/@philosophyminis/note/c-192409784?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

Don’t fall into the gap

And what's the word for hanging onto your dreams, no matter how daunting the present actuality?

Not that there's anything wrong with short people, but

Hope in a Time of Cynicism... At a moment when Americans are distrusting and fearful...

While optimism is the belief that the future will be better, hope is the belief “that we have the power to make it so,” said Chan Hellman, the director of The Hope Research Center at the University of Oklahoma. It is “one of the strongest predictors of well-being,” he said. It helps improve the immune system and aids recovery from illness. More hopeful people may actually grow taller than less hopeful people...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/briefing/hope-in-a-time-of-cynicism.html?smid=em-share