Jim's Mailings

Sincerity

As an entering HS Freshman, I was astounded at the value of the Latin language. Here were unfamiliar words that had meaning, and they looked a lot alike words I was used to, but the spelling was new and mysterious. I caught on, they were our words, but the meaning or the spelling had changed, but they added a great deal to the spoken tongue. Then one day at Assembly, a guest speaker centered his talk on the word sincerity, which came from latin stems Sin and Ceres, meaning literally without wax. The term had been used to describe statuary, usually made or found in Greece, but imported, which had been repaired using wax, to deceive the buyer. He went on to tell the many ways students are given a wax job, instead of genuine learning, or so it seemed.
I do not intend to give you a wax job here!
In college, I had heard from many grad students about Dr. Gustav Bergman, a onetime refugee of Nazi Germany who had a great "Philosophy of Science" course. When I asked my advisor to get me in, he reported that grad students had already grabbed all the slots, and I could take it in a few years when I was in grad school. That never happened as I asked if there were any undergraduate courses by Bergman, and that is how I got into a deductive logic class.
In the logic taught in 1949 at the University of Iowa, study of symbolic logic as put forth by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead was in vogue. I suppose it compares with what was later taught in systems classes a Boolean Logic or similar versions. Anyway, the techniques used to sort out truth from falsity were demonstrated, and I later used them to excell in passing "personality inventory" tests and the like.
About the same time, I became acquainted with Dr. Harry Overstreet, through his Book of the Month Club selection "The Mature Mind" Chapt. 6, in this piece, which you will read later. But first I want to copy here a chapter (also 6)from an earlier book (1939)"Let Me Think" entitled "The Mind as a Weapon."
>>>>>>>CHAPTER VI THE MIND AS A WEAPON
THERE is always fighting to be done in the world. Even in the best society we are able to imagine —a society where swords have been beaten into plowshares—there would still be fighting to be done.
In the first place, we are faced by the forces of nature. These are still so little known and so uncertain that they can behave like deadly enemies. When they attack us, we have to know how to defend ourselves. We all remember how, not long ago, the waters of the Ohio River valley gathered in swollen volume and came surging down upon farms and villages and cities, carrying away the things that man
had made for his security and comfort, destroying animals and humans, and leaving in their wake a vast wreckage.
In those days of terror, I remember gangs of men carrying sandbags to the Cincinnati levee; men out in boats, rescuing families marooned in their houses; ambulances hurrying the sick and hurt to the hospitals. And I recall, too, hearing over the radio the voice of the city manager instructing the people what they were to do, whe re they were not to go, how they could help.
It was war. Man's mind against the forces of nature. At that time, as the waters swept through one city after another, man's intelligence seemed puny before the terrific power of the flood. Man's mind was fighting, but it was not equipped to come out victor. But even as the terrors continued, one could hear the people say:
"This thing must not happen again. We need a better flood control. We've got to have it."
These were human beings at man's old business of looking over his weapons, finding them not good enough, thinking of how they might be made more effective in defense and attack.
A child is hovering between life and death. The parents have called for the only weapon they know - medical science personified in the doctor. He comes prepared to fight. He takes the temperature, feels the pulse, looks into the throat, taps the chest—trying to locate the enemy. Then, keeping his face unrevealing, he takes things out of his satchel, calls for a glass of water, passes his hand over the child's forehead, meanwhile thinking hard how he (it) is to carry on the campaign. He knows he must strike swiftly and at the right point. Again, it is man's mind girding itself for battle, a battle for the life of a child.
We all have at times to do something of this sort. We are not always menaced by floods or deadly disease. But in one way or another we have to guard ourselves against forces in our environment that diminish our security or comfort. Recently a neighbor of ours went down into his basement to examine the woodwork at every point where it came into contact with the earth. He was looking for termites. He found no signs of any, but he decided it was better to be wise in time than to be sorry afterwards. So he had copper sills installed. These were the weapons that man had invented as effective means for turning back the insect enemy.
We fight against winter's cold with furnaces and defend ourselves from summer's heat with insulated walls.
When we count up all the things we do to guard ourselves, it looks as if life were little but - a defense against enemies seeking to destroy. We fight against the deadly thrust of lightning by making pur structures lightning-proof. We put up screens to keep out mosquitoes. We have refrigerators to prevent food from spoiling. We scatter disinfectants where there are odors of decay.
There are people who say that men have grown soft, that we have lost the rugged vitality of our primitive ancestors who had to fight or perish. But we are fighting all the time, only the fighting is now done vith our minds. Every time I decide that the tires of ny car are worn dangerously smooth and I put on new ones, I am making my particular kind of fight—a defensive fight against disaster. Every time I stop at a red light, I can recognize in that light the weapon that we have learned to use against the recklessnesses and the confusions that endanger life.
It is nonsense to believe that, as we move farther away from the cave man, we let our minds grow less alert, less vigorous in defense and attack. The more civilized we become, the more we find that there are things we care about that need to be defended, and things we fear that need to be attacked.
Sad to say, we also have to fight human beings. There are people who do things that diminish the lives, liberties, and happiness of other people. They may do it by breaking in upon our possessions and taking away what they themselves have no right to possess. Or they may do it by injuring or destroying our lives. We have to invent ways of protecting ourselves against such human foes. Police systems, courts of law, jails, and prisons are the weapons which we have shaped to defeat such enemies and discourage their practices.
But there are subtler enemies of our lives with whom it is more difficult to deal because they pretend to keep inside the law. There are those who trap the unwary investor into buying gold bricks, or who gang up in the stock market and manipulate securities so that they sell for more than they are worth.
We have to forge weapons of the law to protect our-seves against these crooks. There are those—perhaps the most dastardly of all—who put poison into medicines and cosmetics, or who sell food that is unsafe for human consumption. In the Spanish-American War we had the scandal of rotten meat sold to the army. The people who sold the rotten meat knew what they were selling. They were willing to injure human beings because it brought them more money. There are people—individuals and firms—that make and sell what is unsafe for use. I recall a serious automobile accident that occurred on a mountain road because a part that should have been renewed was flimsily patched together. The man who was injured had bought the car in good faith from a used-car concern. He had no suspicion of the defective part. On a steep mountain road the part broke, the car rolled down a canyon-side, and the driver was terrribly injured.
I recall also, in my boyhood days, witnessing the death of a boy who had gone to the roof of a public building, leaned against the parapet, and had fallen to the street when the parapet gave way. An investigation showed the contractor had skimped on the cement in the mortar to such an extent that the bricks scarcely held together. He made money—and killed a boy.
It is a curious comment upon our civilization that such things are done as part of business practice. We know that they are done. Here, again, we are in a fight, a fight against dishonest practices. When we form a consumers' cooperative, we make for ourselves a weapon of defense against unsafe products and loaded prices. When we organize a consumers' research organization to analyze the products that are sold to us, we make a weapon of defense. When we pass pure food and drug laws, and laws for the inspection of buildings, steamships, motor cars, highways, we make weapons of attack and defense.
In these things we dare not be soft and sentimental. We have to care enough about decent ways of living to make the indecent ways increasingly impossible.
But there is a much more difficult form of fighting that we have to carry on. It is the fight between different opinions that are equally sincere.
We do not all see eye to eye. As a human race, we are still pathetically limited in our outlooks and con¬fused as to our purposes. So we do not all agree. We misunderstand one another. The things we want to happen are not what others want; others want things that seem to us wrong and sometimes terrible.
Even war—terrible as it is—cannot be regarded as merely a fight of good people against those who are evil. The case is not so simple as that. To the one side, its cause is holy; to the opposite side, it is damnable. So each side takes up arms in the sincere belief that it is fighting for justice and truth against injustice and lies. The American Civil War was a perfect example of two groups of people fighting, each group believing profoundly in the righteousness of its own cause and the unrighteousness of its enemy's cause.
In political warfare, we frequently make the mistake—particularly if we belong to one of the two larger parties—of believing that the opposing party is merely evil. But political warfare, for the most part, is a fight between sincerities. The people who oppose us think the way they do because they have come to be the way they are. We think the way we do because we are the way we are.
Where there is a fight of sincerities, we have to learn civilized ways of fighting. This is why we are coming to believe that mere brute force is a bad argument. To blow up neighboring people because they cannot see as we do settles nothing. To throw people whose political views differ from ours into concentration camps, or to club them into obedience, settles nothing.
The major problem of a civilized society is to devise civilized ways of carrying on the fights of sincerities. One way we have invented is that of free and open discussion.
If we start with the idea that anyone who opposes us is bad, utterly bad—whether he belongs to another party or to another race or nation—we shall act like people who suppose themselves to be righteous, and who take up weapons against the unrighteous. Most of our religious persecutions have been carried on in this spirit. Today, the persecutions of racial minorities proceed in the same spirit. One side is completely convinced that it is right, that it has truth. It sets itself up, therefore, as judge and executioner.
Calvin did this, back in the sixteenth century, when he condemned the noble-spirited Servetus to the stake because Servetus held religious views that differed from his own. Hitler and his hoodlum gang do this when they let loose their barbaric wrath upon the Jews and Catholics and upon all those whose political views differ from their own.
The uncivilized thing in all these cases is the idea that one man or one group has the complete and unquestionable truth, and the right to impose this truth upon others. Nothing more barbaric has occurred for centuries than the assumptions, publicly expressed, that Hitler, the Fuehrer of the Germans, can make no mistake. When we become civilized people, we realize, with a good deal of humility, that we can all make mistakes and that the opinions of others which seem wrong to us may not be wrong at all. It may simply be that we ourselves are ignorant, or misinformed, or not logical in our thinking.
When we are really civilized, we see that our fights of sincerities have to be carried on with the freest and most generous give-and-take of opinion. We have to be willing to listen to what the other person has to say, and we expect him to be willing to listen to us.
Because we have to fight many different battles, we have to have the qualities needed in each. To fight against the violence of nature, we have to have not only courage but intelligence. We have to learn about the forces that can destroy us and about the counter forces that can save us. This means a willingness to look at our world and find out about it. Scientists, physicians, engineers are all working at this task. The individual who is neither scientist, physician, nor engineer needs to draw upon their knowledge and skill, and he is also under obligation to encourage the growth of such knowledge and skill in the world.
To fight against the human foes in your midst who deliberately set out to injure life, we have to possess certain citizen-qualities. It is not enough to know that there are thieves and murderers. We have to ask why there are thieves and murderers, and what can be done in our social arrangements to diminish their number.
It is not enough to know that we punish these antisocial individuals. Wre have to ask whether our forms of punishment are just, whether they make criminals into worse criminals, or make them into persons capable of reentering human society. Also, it is not enough to know that there are confidence men, and stock market sharps, and falsifying advertisers, and sellers of poisonous foods and drugs. We have to pos¬sess the kind of citizen-interest that promotes laws to discourage these criminals.
To fight for the views we care about and against views we disapprove or dislike, we have to possess the rarest of all qualities—a generous willingness to listen to views other than our own. If we are employers, we have to be willing to listen to what labor demands. If we are workers, we have to be willing to consider the problems of employers. If we are members of a political party, we have to be willing not only to listen to our opponents, but to welcome the presentation of their views. If we are members of a nation in conflict with another nation, we have to spend every possible energy to keep open the channels of communication so that we may give mutual understanding the best possible chance to develop.
We have above all to learn to beware of being quickly and passionately "against." This is our easiest vice and the most dangerous. We are civilized to the extent that we are willing to see some justice on the other side and try to get that justice realized.
So, as fighting creatures, we have obligations thrust upon us. We have to develop the kind of mind that can fight not only effectively but wisely.<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
-------------------------
Here we see the word sincerity used to describe the two sides of political debate, which to my Latin soaked mind tells me both sides use a lot of wax.
The easiest way to overcome my own neglect of purging absurdities (wax) if my thinking is to look at the other side. Two Republicans are having it out in the recent David Brooks, New York Times article published in the Plain Dealer last week:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>DAVID BROOKS on Kevin Phillips
There's always been a strain of paranoia running through American politics. Back in the mid-1960s, when the right felt powerless, the John Birch Society thrived. Today, when, the left feels disinherited, liberals seize upon the conspiracy fantasies of Kevin Phillips, whose book "American Theocracy" is in its fifth week on the New York Times' best-seller list.
Phillips method is pretty conventional for conspiracists: He takes a single issue or set of data points and constructs an all-explaining story line to show how hidden cabals are controlling America.
In the first part of "American Theocracy," he describes the rise of the "fossil-fuels political alliance." Dwight Eisenhower was "born in oil country" and in 1952 became the first Republican to sweep the Southern oil centers. Richard Nixon, too, "had an oil-state childhood" and deepened oil's influence.
Pretty soon, Republicans could count not only on energy and automobile producers but also on "secondary cadres" including "racing fans, hobbyists, collectors and dedicated readers of automotive magazines, as well as the tens of millions of automobile commuters from suburbs and distant exurbs."
By 1997, reasons were mounting to take over Iraq's oil, Phillips asserts. "A” near-final decision to invade seems to have been made in early 2001," he adds, months before 9/11. The Iraq war was born.
The oil alliance melded with another hidden army, the "end-times electorate," Phillips continues. Relying on the fact.that millions of people read the "Left Behind" apocalyptic fantasy novels, Phillips asserts that 50 percent to 60 percent of Republicans believe in Armageddon and are influenced by the argument that the "destruction of the new
Babylon" in Iraq will hasten the coming of the Messiah.
Phillips says that the Bush White 1 House sends messages to these Americans through "double-coding" in his speeches — phrases that mean one thing to secular America but contain hidden meanings to people with the "biblical" worldview. Phillips cites research showing President Bush used the phrase "I believe" 12 times in his 2004 GOP convention speech — code for religious zealots.
Needless to say, Phillips' book is rife with bizarre assertions. He writes that "many Orthodox Jewish females cannot even study the Torah," that the Rev. Sun Myung Moon "has been close to the "Bush family," that the American Revolution was "in many ways a religious war."
But his method is pretty standard. First, he takes advantage of the record of his liberal readers' ignorance of evangelical communities to make ludicrous assertions. Second, as Jacob Weisberg noted in Slate, Phillips will begin a chapter making some grand accusation. Then he will depart on what Weisberg accurately calls "a pompous, pedantic history tour" of medieval mineralogy or 16th-century politics. Then, without presenting any evidence or answering any objections, he will repeat his accusa¬tion in stronger language.
Third, Phillips is a master of slicing reality so that it conforms to predetermined conclusions. To take one example ~ among many, in 2002 the evangelist Franklin Graham organized a meeting to address the AIDS crisis. Graham said evangelicals should be ashamed of how slowly they've responded to the crisis: "I have to point the finger at myself and" say, 'I'm late.'" AIDS is not about homosexuality, he continued, "the danger is to all of us." He praised Colin Powell's efforts, even though Powell is a strong advocate of condoms. He accelerated what has become a strong evangelical mobilization against AIDS.
Philips writes about that meeting, but ignores all of this. Instead Phillips lumps the conference in with gay-bashing and writes, "Only Jesus Christ can bring about the societal change needed to stop AIDS, preacher Franklin Graham told a 2002 Washington conference."
This is intellectual dishonesty on stilts. Nonetheless, Phillips' books fly off bookstore shelves, and he's given respectable platforms in the major media and at universities.
We're at a moment when crude conspiracy-mongering — whether it is aca¬demic papers on the Israel lobby or George Clooney’s "Syriana" — is emerging from the belly of the American es¬tablishment.
And while many informed critics have picked apart Phillips' fantasies, other Americans, at once cynical and naive are willing to believe any whacked-out theory, so long as it focuses hatred on-Bush.
It's a funny way to run a theocracy.
Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
You can see how David is irritated when Phillips starts probing the wax in his mantra of Conservatism. He used exaggerations, inflammatory adjectives, and downright distortions to trash some good points Phillips seems to bring out in absurdities most Republicans carry around after being dumped on by the likes of Rush Limbaugh.
For a clear path out of the deep woods of obfuscation, please read Harry Overstreet's Chapter 6 from "The Mature Mind" reprinted without permission below:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>CHAPTER SIX
(I stopped trying to absorb Brook's argument on the first "Needless to say." Harry Overstreet captured my star with his Mature Mind book in 1949. I happened to be reading J.B.N. Sullivan's book "Limitations of Science" at about the same time.
(Notes are at the end)
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>THE MAKING OF THE MATURE MIND AND ITS AFTERMATH
In his seventy-fourth year, Harry Overstreet produced the work with which his name is still best associated: The Mature Mind. In the description of what he labeled “the maturity concept,” Overstreet was able to synthesize a lifetime of effort into a stimulating book which became a great best seller beyond the dreams of the author or the publisher. Within three years more than 500,000 copies had been sold. It was on the top best seller lists for seventy-two weeks – nine of them as the number one non-fiction best seller in the country. In August, 1949, The Mature Mind was made a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. In 1950, the book had the honor of
receiving a special citation from the National Book Awards as it did not fall neatly into any of the specialized categories. The book was translated into many languages and proved to have an international appeal.

The Preparation and Writing of The Mature Mind

Work on The Mature Mind had been a major writing project for Harry for more than
seven years. When he was completing his book, Our Free Minds, in 1940 he began to see the need for a deeper psychological interpretation of the individual and of his relationship to our institutions. The central thesis of The Mature Mind came to Harry at this time and he put it into the form of an article, “Educating for Maturity,” published in the Journal of Adult Education in
April 1940. In the years that followed, this thesis gave organizing direction to his research and writing and ultimately became the essence of Chapter III, “Two Old Theories and a New One.”1
Pursuing the line of thought begun in the journal article, Harry began the research that became his major absorption during the next seven years. He followed the method he had pursued in the writing of all of his books. He began intensive research into the latest findings in the fields of psychology, philosophy, and mental health. Then as he gathered his materials he clarified and expanded his ideas through articles, lectures, and courses. Two eight-week courses for the University of Michigan in the Fall of 1945 and the Fall of 1946 were particularly helpful in developing his thesis. In those courses he worked out the “linkage theory” of personality and the “curve of growth” which he incorporated in Chapter II, “The Criteria of Maturity.”2
During 1945 and 1946 Harry tried two tentative drafts under the titles “Design for Growth After Growth” and “The Unfinished Business of Being Human.” Several drafts were discarded and the semi-final draft was submitted to the publisher in the summer of 1947 under the title, The Mature Mind. It too was rewritten and the final manuscript was completed in the Fall of 1948. It had been in the making for nearly eight years. The book was, as Harry put it, “long in the making because the idea itself, in the full range of its individual and social implications, had to pass through its stages of maturing.”
Overstreet’s “Maturity Concept”
Harry Overstreet for many years had been highly esteemed in intellectual and academic circles and most notably as a lecturer, but now he was reaping “the harvest of the years of intellectual labor.”4 Those intellectual labors included the fields of philosophy, psychology, and mental health as well as adult education. And Harry Overstreet integrated the findings in these fields into the maturity concept which was the basis for The Mature Mind.
In his preface Overstreet indicated that his purpose was to heed the words of the educator and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, that it was the business of philosophers to “re-create and re-enact a vision of the world. . .penetrated through and through with unflinching rationality.”5 According to Overstreet The Mature Mind was concerned with the re-creating and re-enactment of such a vision through providing a new insight out of the psychological and psychiatric sciences to help in understanding the new problems of the post-war world. This insight was centered in man’s mental, emotional, and social maturing. Most importantly, Overstreet wrote that it “affords the clue to our possible advance out of chaos.”6 This insight must have had a special appeal to many other people because the public response to the book, as previously noted, was astounding.
In putting together “the maturity concept” Overstreet freely borrowed and integrated some of the major ideas of Freud, Binet, Pavlov, and Thorndike. They form the psychological foundation for the book. As described by Overstreet, the “maturity concept” is based upon five psychological insights, the last of which specifically involves adult education.
The first concept was the idea of psychological age, which stems from the studies of Alfred Binet: Chronological age does not necessarily betoken a corresponding emotional or social age. “Not all adults are adult. Many who look grown-up on the outside may be childish on the inside.”7 The second was the idea of arrested development or fixation as the root cause for the halting of the maturing process. This idea had its inception with Freud. It is important to
“look at the whole process of human growth, from birth to death – through infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood”. . . to “make us aware of ‘fateful years’ and ‘fateful’ experiences.”8 The idea of conditioned response was the third concept. Pavlov’s experiments gave us the clue that “maturity is achieved where conditions favorable to maturity exist.”9 The fourth concept dealt with the idea of individual aptitude uniqueness. Overstreet stated that this was not new because all of the major social and philosophical thinkers had been keenly aware of the fact of individual differences. However, he observed that for the individual “to mature is to bring one’s powers to realization” and the years of schooling, including adult education, can help to build one’s power. It was vital to the maturity concept that these powers be used “to affirm life” and this required involvement in the “process of living.”10 The fifth concept dealt with the adult capacity to learn. Edward Thorndike’s psychological research in adult learning established the fact that adults can and do learn and where there is failure it is rarely attributable to age. The actual reasons for failure are more likely to involve other factors within the individual or within the culture.
“Obstacles within the culture arise from the unusualness of adult study: from the fact that the enterprise of organized learning lies outside the accustomed pattern of adult life.”11 According to Overstreet significance of these five concepts leads to one interpretation – that “the proper psychological undertaking of man is to move from immaturity toward maturity.”12 To achieve that end, the role of adult education was a vital one.
Harry pointed out that today’s world, described by Eugene Staley as one of rapid evolution in politics, economics and technology, requires adults to unlearn and relearn facts in order to be responsible members of a democratic community.13 He agreed with Staley that the rapidly changing world meant there was a more important job for adult education than ever before, and that “adult education in these days should rank in importance with elementary, secondary, and college education."14 Harry urged adult educators to speak out for the rights of adults to a kind of education “that recognizes their entrance upon a new and uniquely significant stage of life experience. . . and help us to move beyond the routines of a half-baked adulthood into the creative surprises of an adulthood that is truly maturing.”15

In The Mature Mind, Overstreet defines the maturing person as one “whose linkages with life are constantly becoming stronger and richer because his attitudes are such as to encourage their growth rather than their stoppage.” These attitudes are directed toward knowledge, social responsibility, adjustment to vocation, political responsibility, personal relationships, and communication skills. The maturing of any one of them has an influence on the development or growth of all of the others. Overstreet developed the concept into what he calls the linkage theory of maturity which sees man as a creature who lives by and through his relationships. (As has been noted earlier, the concept of linkages with life was not new with the publication of The Mature Mind, for Bonaro had discussed it in her earlier book, How To Think About Ourselves.)
Most of the reviews of the book were highly favorable. The eminent literary critic of the New Yorker magazine, Clifton Fadiman, wrote:
"The Mature Mind is not to be confused with the usual shallow “self-help”
and “inspirational” books. It is the considered and, to date, the most
important work of a responsible educator and philosopher. . . . many books entertain. some instruct. This one, we think, really helps."16

According to Stubblefield “The Mature Mind represented an achievement of
considerable importance in adult education.” The concept could be used “in measuring how well social institutions had promoted human growth,” and adult educators could use it as “a meta-goal which they should strive to attain in all their programs regardless of the subject matter under study.”17.

That the book is still vital is attested to by the numerous citations from it made by the Australian adult educator Philip C. Candy in his book Self-Direction for Lifelong Learning published in 1991. Candy refers to The Mature Mind as a “classic book..”18
Another well-known historian of adult education, Malcolm Knowles wrote that “attempts to bring the isolated concepts, insights, and research findings regarding adult learning together into an integrated framework began as early as 1949, with the publication of Harry Overstreet’s The Mature Mind.”19
Paul Bergevin in his outstanding book, A Philosophy For Adult Education, summarizes
twenty-two beliefs that are the basis for adult education. Overstreet would undoubtedly agree with all of them, but two are especially instructive and closely relate to Overstreet’s concept:
“Adult education should be designed to help people to grow up, mature” and “adults need to live together in community in order to grow and mature, and they need to learn how to do this.”20
Bergevin provides a relatively short reading list at the end of the book with only a few books on adult education. The list includes Aristotle, Jefferson, Thomas Hobbes, and Alfred North Whitehead. The adult education books include only Eduard Lindeman, J. R. Kidd, C. Hartley Grattan, and Overstreet’s The Mature Mind.

In 1952 the New American Library published Good Reading, a guide to the world’s best
books prepared by the Committee on College Reading. The book list is by literary categories and The Mature Mind is doubly honored by being listed under both Contemporary Philosophy and Psychology. The statement in the Psychology section reads “an inspection and a challenge to apply an adult social outlook to our home, our social, our economic problems.”21 Of the approximately 1250 volumes from every age and every field, The Mature Mind is the only book that could be classified as being involved with adult education.

Harry Overstreet as “Popularizer”
Newton’s third law of motion states that reaction is always equal and opposite to action. This may have a corollary in other fields as well. It came as no great surprise that the remarkable success of The Mature Mind brought some reaction that all of this was an oversimplification and thus the word "popularization" began to be used about Overstreet's writings. For some people "popularization" is a perfectly healthy term that describes a capacity to take useful information and present it in an attractive form so as to reach a wide audience. Dante, Martin Luther, Voltaire, Bertrand Russell and Herodotus, the father of history, were all popularists in much of their work according to Gustav Francis Beck.22 For others the term is pejorative and meant to be used disparagingly. This definition was used against the Overstreets for the most part by anonymous critics right up to Harry’s death in 1970. The New York Times unsigned obituary referred to him as a “popularizer” and quoted unnamed critics of The Mature Mind as complaining that it was an “over-simplification of a problem that was infinitely complex in its nature.”23 When a critic was named it was Morris Ernst whose comments in the Saturday Review had been favorable. Ernst, who was a famous attorney and one of the leaders of the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote that the book provided useful information in the fields of psychology and psychiatry and that Overstreet filled "the interstices with wise, temperate and calm observations."24
The Overstreets’ books and lectures were not as the critic Ernest van den Haag put it, the same as those of Dale Carnegie or Norman Vincent Peale: messages that that everyone could be happy and free from anxiety if they followed certain prescriptions or bought certain products. van den Haag went on to say that it was his contention “that by distracting from the human predicament and blocking individuation and experience popular culture impoverishes life.”25 The Overstreets do not fit this description. They offered no simple solutions or prescriptions. They faced the “human predicament” head on and discussed difficult problems. They emphasized the importance of working toward solutions through research, education, and sound thought processes. As Stubblefield pointed out, they “did not shrink from controversy,”26 as they fought for civil rights and for integrated communities, schools and the armed services. Nor was there anything the least bit pollyanish in their writing. After all, it was Bonaro who had written that one must have the courage to be willingly called a “nigger-lover” when the situation called for it.27
They worked with prominent mental health groups such as The Menninger Foundation and the Hogg Foundation in mental health research and treatment. They investigated, with long and thorough research, the tenets of communism and the methods of political extremism. And, above all, they decried any attempts to sway people from logical thinking. One astute media critic, Gilbert Seldes, noted that it was Harry Overstreet who was a major critic of the misuse of the mass media.28 In The Mature Mind, Chapter Nine is entitled, “What We Read, See, and Hear,” and in it Harry took on the debilitating effects of newspapers, radio, movies and advertising. For example, he wrote of advertising, “To put the matter succinctly, advertising halts our psychological growth to the extent that it makes us do too much wanting and makes us want things for the wrong reasons.”29
There are other aspects of van den Haag’s diatribe against popular culture which cause the writer to question his judgment. He makes numerous unsupported statements such as, “Why do classics clutter rather than enrich the minds of so many readers?”30 He states that people can “live happily and well without high culture,” and he seems to think we have mutilated the works of such composers as Mozart through cutting, condensing, rewriting and presenting him by radio or television, although any reasonable person can see that Mozart’s symphonies, piano concertos and operas are now enjoyed by tens of millions of people throughout the world today compared
139 to a few thousand in his own lifetime. It might be suggested that the “popularizing” of the classics this way may enable the public to hear artists perform who are superior in quality to any locally available. And, as one last criticism of the critic, this writer suggests that he was also seriously mistaken when he misapplied Thoreau’s famous observation in Walden that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”31 Thoreau’s statement was not a puerile acceptance of
“despair” as our natural lot. Thoreau was admonishing us to wake up and break out of the mold. One paragraph later in Walden Thoreau wrote, “It is never too late to give up our prejudices.”32
The writer accepts the term “popularizers” in its positive sense to describe the Overstreets, but thinks it is important to discuss what she believes the term means in relation to them. Stubblefield defined it as interpreting the research of the social sciences and translating “these findings into applications for adult life in a language that the lay people could understand.”33 Certainly the Overstreets did that. But as Stubblefield went on to say about Harry, “He was more than a disseminator of knowledge for popular consumption; he worked with social science materials to understand and improve human relations.”34
And how is “popularization” treated in the literature? To one of the most notable reform leaders in adult education, James Harvey Robinson, it meant how knowledge is “to be popularized and spread abroad among adults who have become dissatisfied with what they know and are eager to learn more.”35 Robinson of course was a contemporary of Harry Overstreet and in this area of adult education they are both part of the same tradition. In books such as The Human Comedy, Robinson commended Professor Overstreet for his observation that one of the aims of a college education is to “critically examine basic assumptions.”36 The title of one of Robinson’s most famous books, The Humanizing of Knowledge, seems to say it all. In the book
Robinson went so far as to say the problem of humanizing knowledge “ is the supreme problem of our age and no one can hope to do more than to make modest contributions to its solution..” (Italics are Robinson’s) One of the phases of the problem is “how is knowledge to be popularized and spread abroad among adults who have become dissatisfied with what they know and are eager to learn more?”37

In an article in the Adult Education Quarterly, Professor Rae Wahl Rohfeld of Syracuse University wrote Robinson’s espousal of the popularization of knowledge paralleled not only the views of many social scientists, but also of other adult educators.
For example, Newton D. Baker, a civic leader who served as the second president of the American Association for Adult Education, later told a prospective political science instructor, “The world’s trouble at the moment is not lack of knowledge of the kind which research provides but rather a lack of the dissemination and popularization of that knowledge. Motives varied, but the idea that knowledge had to be popularized in order to be applied to human betterment was common among intellectuals of the time.38
Soon after Robinson’s book was published there was a reaction to the subject of popularization. The 1936 anthology, Adult Education in Action, published by the American Association for Adult Education, carried an article by Gustav Francis Beck of New York University titled, “Is Adult Education Overpopularizing?” The article was actually written in 1929 when Beck was Director of the Labor Temple School. It is somewhat ironic since the Labor Temple School was founded by Will Durant who was often targeted by critics as a major popularizer of the period.. (The Labor Temple School, at which Harry Overstreet sometimes taught philosophy, unfortunately could not make it through the depression years and closed in March, 1935.) It was Beck’s view “that the terrific industrial and commercial drive of our age is probably the chief cause of the pathetic universal demand for popularization.”39
Beck was not completely opposed to popularization. He made a clear distinction by citing Dante who had the rare gift of amalgamating art, instruction, propaganda and popularization without a visible flaw. He indicated that “the old dry-as-dust style of teaching in book, lecture, and pulpit seems to have vanished for good, and for this by-product of popularization we may be truly grateful.”40
What Beck apparently disapproved of were the “short-cuts” to history, psychology and the various sciences. One of the authors of whom he disapproved was H. G. Wells, the “self- appointed universal historian.” In a sense, how a reader feels about H. G. Wells and his huge best seller, The Outline of History, written in 1919 seems a good litmus test of the subject of popularization. Many historians were critical of the book, but James Harvey Robinson praised it wholeheartedly. Robinson wrote, “when one of Mr. Wells’ hundreds of thousands of readers has finished his Outline of History he does not say, ‘I have had history’. . . and why? Because Mr.
Wells manages to humanize the past of mankind.”41 This humanization, according to Robinson and others, stimulates the reader to learn more.
Other critics of popularization include Bernard Rosenberg in his article, “Mass Culture in America,” which was the first entry in an anthology which he co-edited. He quoted Ernest van den Haag as suggesting that there are two false assumptions “underlying all mass culture: (1) everything is understandable, and (2) everything is remedial.”42
In the 561 pages of Mass Culture there is not a word about a book that was exceptionally popular in the early 1950’s and which takes that first assumption head on. The book was The Universe and Dr. Einstein by Lincoln Barnett who was neither a scientist nor a professional educator. The book was intended for the general public and attempted the formidable task of presenting a clear explanation of Einstein’s theories, -- theories that had seemed to be beyond the understanding of all but highly educated scientists. On publication, some critics said it was
an oversimplification. But fortunately for Mr. Barnett, Dr. Einstein was still alive and provided a foreward for the paperback edition. Einstein said that it was extremely difficult “to present a rather abstract scientific subject in a popular manner.”43 He went on to say that “Lincoln Barnett’s book represents a valuable contribution to popular scientific writing. The main ideas of the theory of relativity are extremely well presented.”44 Critics of mass culture such as Rosenberg, van den Haag, and Joan S. Rubin are capable of being dismissive of many writers as popularizers, but nobody seems to want to take issue with Albert Einstein on his defense of popularization.
Rosenberg chose to prepare the reader for the book of criticisms by beginning it with high praise for Morris Cohen. The very first words of Rosenberg’s article are more interesting and ironic than he knew. He wrote:
The late Morris Raphael Cohen, an extraordinarily gifted teacher, was perhaps best known in and out of his classroom as a superb critic of other philosophers. From time to time students would grumble about his negativism; Cohen tore down whole systems of philosophy without offering an alternative view of his own.”45
This was Rosenberg’s way of warning the reader to accept the criticisms but not to expect any positive proposals on the subject of mass culture.
However, Rosenberg’s view of Cohen which emphasizes his “negativism” is somewhat at odds with that of Albert Einstein who wrote a message to the Morris Cohen Student Memorial Fund stating, “I knew him well as an extraordinarily helpful, conscientious man of unusually independent character and I rather frequently had the pleasure of discussing with him problems of common interest.”46 Einstein then wrote about Cohen’s book, Logic and Scientific Method, which “fascinated” him.
“The results were not presented as ready-made, but scientific curiosity was first aroused by presenting contrasting possibilities of conceiving the matter. Only then the attempt was made to clarify the issue by thorough assignment. The intellectual honesty of the author made us share the inner struggle in his mind. It is this which is the mark of the born teacher.”47
And what did the “born teacher” himself have to say about his methods? Cohen wrote in his unfinished autobiography, A Dreamer’s Journey - The fact is that my teaching bore many resemblances to the instructional methods of a drill sergeant. Not only had my childhood experiences with education been filled with whippings and the fear of whippings, but my student days at City College itself had been dominated by the harsh standards approved by the first presidents of the College, both West Point graduates. . .It took me a long time before I could rid myself of my drill-sergeant attitude. I have always been grateful to Harry Overstreet, who came to the College without a trace of that attitude. Under his influence I found my teaching methods gradually becoming less harsh.48

We now come full circle. On the one hand Rosenberg considers Cohen to be a “gifted teacher” and “superb critic” but would relegate Overstreet, who regularly taught classes for universities and regularly published articles in scholarly journals, to those he places in the category of mere popularizers. (For although Overstreet was not mentioned by name by Rosenberg, the book is dedicated in part to van den Haag who had made his position quite clear.) On the other hand, it is Overstreet who Cohen credits with helping him become a better teacher and who, over strenuous opposition, brought Cohen in 1911 to teach philosophy at C. C.N.Y., “the first Russian Jew to do so in the United States.”49 And Cohen, his family, and his son’s family all have paid tribute to Harry Overstreet and the important influence he was in all of their lives.
Overstreet and Cohen worked together for more than twenty-five years. When Cohen retired in 1937, Overstreet contributed this profile to The Faculty Bulletin which also seems to contradict Rosenberg’s description of Cohen’s negativism:
. . . I have been in almost daily contact with him for the entire time of his service in the Department, and yet when I try to reduce him to a formula, to say what I have discovered in him, I find I am at a loss for words that will exactly turn the trick.
And yet it is not that Cohen is an enigma. The difficulty is that he is a phenomenon. If you listen to him expounding an idea -- and he
is generally doing that -- you will be astonished at the ease with which he moves on intimate terms with the worthies and unworthies of all the ages. He brings forth their wisdom or their folly as familiarly as if he had just met them at breakfast. . .
We love him for his courage, his passion for the philosophic life, his deep and never faltering interest in his students, his wise counsel, his profound insight into the difficult problems of our time …50
The story does not end there. Overstreet played a key role in bringing important scholarly legal papers to the public. Morris Cohen’s son, Felix, who became an outstanding lawyer and who was a champion of civil rights for the underprivileged and a fighter in the cause of American Indians, studied under Harry Overstreet and considered him a mentor and close friend in his professional life. Unfortunately, he died at age 46, but under the urging of Overstreet, his widow compiled a book from his papers titled The Legal Conscience. In her introduction she singles out
“Harry Allen Overstreet, Felix Cohen’s teacher of philosophy at City College, who first expressed his own need for a collection of papers in one accessible volume.”51
Harry Overstreet in his writing and lecturing, and in his joint efforts with his wife, dealt with difficult and complex areas of the human condition. Both continued throughout their lives to communicate with other scholars in the fields of philosophy, psychology and adult education and to publish scholarly articles in the professional journals of these fields.
The Overstreets considered their profession to be adult educators. Always foremost in their minds was the importance of adult education in helping adults to face the world with intelligent, mature behavior. We may dub them as “popularizers” since they were indeed popular with multitudes throughout this country and abroad; however the writer prefers to think of them first and foremost as “adult educators.”
NOTES
1 Harry Overstreet letter to Howard Wilson, March 26, 1949, Overstreet mss.II, Manuscripts
Dept., Lilly Library, Indiana University.
2 Harry Overstreet, Memorandum on the Preparation of The Mature Mind, Overstreet mss.II,
Manuscripts Dept., Lilly Library, Indiana University.
3 Ibid.
4 Harold Stubblefield, Toward a History of Adult Education in America, (London, New York,
Sidney, 1968), 168.
5 Ibid, 9
6 Ibid,.
7 Harry A. Overstreet, The Mature Mind (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1949) 19.
8 Ibid., 27.
9 Ibid., 32.
10 Ibid., 35.
11 Ibid., 37.
12 Ibid. 17.
13 Ibid. 38.
14 Ibid., quoting Eugene Stanley in “Knowledge for Survival,” California Journal of Elementary
Education, November l947.
15 Ibid, pp. 284-285
16 Clifton Fadiman, Review in “Book-of-the-Month Club News,” August 1949.
17 Ibid.
18 Philip C. Candy, Self-Direction For Life Long Learning, ( San Francisco, Oxford: Jossey-
Bass, 1991), 421.
19 Malcolm Knowles, The Adult Learner: A Neglected Species, (Houston: Gulf Publishing
Co., 1973),51.
20 Paul Bergevin, A Philosophy for Adult Education, (New York: The Seabury Press, 1967), 5.
21 Committee on College Reading, Good Reading (New York: The New American Library,
1954), 168.
22 Gustav Francis Beck, “Is Adult Education Overpopularizing?” in Mary Ely, ed.,Adult
Education in Action (New York: American Association for Adult Education, 1936), 437.
23 Harry A. Overstreet obituary, New York Times, August 18, 1970.
24 Ibid.
25 Ernest Van Den Haag, “Of Happiness and Despair We Have No Measure,” in Bernard
Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (New
York: The Free Press, 1957), 535.
26 Stubblefield, 156.
27 Bonaro W. Overstreet, Freedom’s People (New York: Harper & Bros., 1945), 115.
28 Gilbert Seldes, “The People and the Arts,” in Bernard Rosenberg & David Manning White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (New York: The Free Press, 1957), 86.
29 Overstreet, The Mature Mind, 223.
30 Van Der Haag, 528.
31 Ibid, 536.
32 Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York: Illustrated Modern Library, 1937), 9.
33 Stubblefield, 156.
34 Ibid.
35 James Harvey Robinson, The Humanizing of Knowledge, (New York: George H. Doran Co.,
1924), 83.
36 James Harvey Robinson, The Human Comedy (New York:;Harper and Rothers, 1937),
37 Ibid, 73.
38 Rae Wahl Rohfeld, “James Harvey Robinson: Historian As Adult Educator,” Adult
Education Quarterly, Summer, 1990, 225-226.
39 Gustav Francis Beck, 438.
40 Ibid., 439
41 Robinson, 85.
42 Bernard Rosenberg, “Mass Culture in America,” in Bernard Rosenberg & David Manning
White, eds., Mass Culture, 5.
43 Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein, (New York: New America Library, 1948),
Foreword.
44 Ibid.
45 Rosenberg, 3.
46 Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1954), 79-80.
47 Ibid.
48 Morris Raphael Cohen, A Dreamer’s Journey, (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1949),
49 P. M. Rutkoff and W. B. Scott, New School: A History of the New School for Social
Research, ((New York: The Free Press, 1986), 78.
50 Lenora Cohen Rosenfeld, Portrait of a Philosopher: Morris R. Cohen in Life and Letters,
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1962), 106-107.
51 Lucy Kramer Cohen, The Legal Conscience, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), viii.

posted by James E. Opfell @ 9:13 PM