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Sidney Hook at Eighty

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Sidney Hook at Eighty FREE INQUIRY devotes this special section to Sidney Hook, who is both a distinguished philosopher and a dedicated secular and democratic humanist. Hook is professor emeritus at N.Y.U. and a . fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. An Interview with Sidney Hook at Eighty "The most important issue facing humanism on a world scale is whether a free society can survive the multiple assaults of totalitarianism." Paul Kurtz: What in your opinion is the most important issue Commission of Inquiry into the Truth of the Moscow Trials. facing humanism in the world today? Long before Solzhenitsyn published his remarkable Gulag Sidney Hook: The most important issue facing human- Archipelago, which should be required reading for everyone ism on a world scale is whether a free society can survive the who discusses the internal regime of the Soviet Union, there multiple assaults of totalitarianism. By a free society I do not was sufficient evidence of the multiple ways in which the Soviet mean "a free-enterprise society," but one in which citizens have Union was violating not only human rights but its own norms the power to determine through the democratic political of legality. After the war, Great Britain and the United States process the economic as well as the other institutions under actively abetted the commission of the gruesome crime of the which they wish to live. On this view it is seriously misleading to forcible deportation of millions of refugees—men, women, and phrase the issue as the choice between capitalism and socialism children from Soviet territory into the merciless hands of the in any of their varieties rather than between democracy and GPU. No one in the Allied High Command—military or totalitarianism. It is obvious that political democracy, in which political noted the significance of the fact that even some of a legally recognized opposition party functions under the the survivors of Dachau sought to end their lives in the most protection or guarantee of basic civil rights, is a necessary horrible ways in order to avoid deportation. condition of a free and open society. It makes possible the The news recently released about the Chinese Gulag and extension of the values of democracy as a way of life to other the Vietnamese Gulag shows that essentially there is little areas. Despite the semantic corruption in the usage of the term difference in the degradation and cruelty of the treatment democracy by the enemies of the free society, it is manifestly visited upon their peoples by Communist totalitarian regimes. true that without political democracy no other kind of It should sorely trouble the conscience of those who hailed the democracy is possible. Chinese cultural revolution and the victory of the Hanoi The acuteness of the totalitarian threat to free institutions regime. There are also non-Communist countries with has increased since the end of World War II and is a result terroristic regimes that warrant our severest dispproval. I cite largely of the failure of the American and British governments the existence of the Communist Gulags not because it is our to realize that, although the Soviet Union was a co-belligerent responsibility to interfere with their internal regimes, much as in the war against Hitler, it was not a democratic ally. In the we may deplore them—that is the task of their own peoples— early days of the war John Dewey warned that the conditions of but to indicate what is in store for the relatively free cultures of peace should be agreed upon while Stalin was in need of aid the world if the totalitarian regimes expand; and expand they from the democracies, after Hitler double-crossed him, in order have, as the map of the world unmistakably shows. to limit the danger of postwar totalitarian advance. Kurtz: Does this mean that you endorse the position of Dewey had become familiar with the nature of Commun- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose book you have referred to? ist totalitarianism as a consequence of his service on the Hook: Not at all. Much as 1 admire his courage, 4 eloquence, and profound psychological insights, I disagree with his supernaturalism, his assumptions derived from Dostoyevsky that ethics is based on religion (Smerdyakov, in The Brothers Karamazov: "If God doesn't exist everything is permissible"), and above all that the defense of freedom and the free society must ultimately rest upon some religious affirmation. I have elsewhere written a critical evaluation of Solzenitsyn's famous Harvard commencement address, and so I will content myself here with the last point. If the defense of the free society rests upon the revival and assertion of religious faith, we are lost. First, what is the religious faith in question? Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, or one of their varieties? Historically the free society of the West has developed in opposition to the authoritarian tendencies of institutional religion. Toleration and freedom of worship—especially freedom not to worship—have not been strongly favored by most religions. Religious freedom, even in the United States, historically owes more to the fact that no sect was powerful enough to impose its dogmas on others than to the enlightened defense of the human right to worship or not to worship according to one's conscience. Would contemporary believers in the God of the Ayatollah Khomeini risk their lives in defense of a free society? Second, by what authority, logical or historical, do we assume that God, if he exists, is on the side of democracy or the open society? Heaven and Hell are strict hierarchically ordered communities. It seems to me theologically presumptuous for Bruce Barton to contend that God is in favor of capitalism and equally absurd to deny this and assert that he is in favor of socialism, not to mention the unspeakable Red Dean of "Humanism to me is the view that morals are Canterbury, who held that the Holy Grail was housed in the autonomous of religious belief." Kremlin. Both Kierkegaard and the author of the Book of Job were convinced that God was beyond good and evil, for these Soviet Union and asserts that its practices in this area are not attributes are essentially related to human weal and woe and much different from what exists elsewhere in the West. And, their norms develop out of human experience. after listening to some Catholic bishops in the United States on Third, in the light of the words and actions of many devout the sinfulness of participating in the nuclear defense strategies churchmen today, I am bewildered by the assertions of some of our free society, one wonders whether they are candidates embattled defenders of the free society that our resistance to the for the Lenin Peace Prize. evils of totalitarianism must be founded on religious faith. One Kurtz: What do you think of the Fundamentalist Right? of the most shocking experiences of my life occurred at the Hook: The Fundamentalist Right is not so much a threat Humanist-Catholic Dialogue in New York at the height of the to the free society today as it is the price we pay for having a free Chinese cultural revolution. 1 spoke in defense of religious society in which the press and the air are open even to those freedom and inveighed against the Chinese execution of who wish to destroy it. You yourself have been the chief target religious missionaries, some of whom had devoted their lives to of the so-called Moral Majority, and I have been next to you on ministering to people who were outcasts in their own their list of "Satanists." I do not believe that they constitute a communities. Whereupon a Jesuit priest spoke up in support of majority, or that their position on many (not all) matters can be Mao's regime with a tirade against Western imperialism, justified on rational moral grounds. Nonetheless, I do not ignoring the vast millions of victims of Mao's despotism. Since believe that they constitute "a clear and present danger." As then the actions as well as the liberation theology of many secular humanists we should seek them out to discuss the issues Catholic priests have in effect made them staunch allies of before their constituencies, which are more numerous than totalitarian guerrillas whose conception of a free society is ours. The trouble is they are more interested in denunciation illustrated in present-day Cuba and Nicaragua. Nor is the than in discussion, as you know better than most. Protestant clergy free from this kind of confusion in thought What the Moral Majority signifies is a periodic and action. The National Council of Churches gave financial phenomenon in American history. When life becomes hard or aid and propagandistic comfort to terrorist groups in Africa. crime becomes rampant or public life-styles give offense to What conception of a free society can the Reverend Billy many ordinary citizens, there is a retreat to religion and a Graham have when under the influence of a bowl of Caspian mobilization of religious fervor to press for reforms, not in Sea caviar he finds no suppression of religious freedom in the their own terms—a good case can be made for the prohibition Fall 1982 5 of hard-core pornography as a clear and present danger of the basis of some shared interests derived from common needs, incitement to violence against women—but in the light of the humanist seeks to expand the area of shared interests, Revelation and the Sacred Book. hopefully to induce those with conflicting interests to mediate I welcomed the conference on Science, the Bible, and them, if not to live and help live at least to live and let live.
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