Clarence Skinner and the Infinite Depth of the Individual:Insights on the Path from 1945 To a Values-Based 21st Century Personal Technology

By Herb Klitzner, Independent Researcher

Lee McCollester and Clarence Skinner

Clarence Skinner and the Infinite Depth of the Individual – Connecting Skinner’s Ideas to a Vision of the Depth of Individual Self-Knowledge in the 21st CenturyClarence Skinner (1881-1949), a leading Universalist thinker of the 20 th Century, energetically and imaginatively ploughed the earth of the social gospel for fifty years but, in 1945, near the end of his career, planted dramatic new ideas about the relationship of individualism to the social reforming community. This was following an era when Unitarians such as Francis Greenwood Peabody, a pioneer social gospel theorist, were gradually moving away from individualism as a central concept and toward the primacy of social community.

According to David Robinson’s book, The Unitarians and the Universalists (1985), in his chapter and section, “Liberal Religion and Social Reform – The Social Gospel and the Ethic of Individualism,” Skinner had transformed Universalist thought, leading

…the denomination’s move from a conception of Universalism as a theological doctrine to broadened notion of Universalism as a working philosophy aimed at securing the universal harmony of all individuals on earth.

Further, Robinson says, Skinner later went beyond the traditional social gospel thinking that stressed the primary importance of the social community to highlight the centrality of individualism in the context of a supportive and protecting social community. Robinson says:

In his 1945 late-career book, A Religion for Greatness, Skinner developed the concept of social universalism as a radically democratic effort to bring about an “organization of society with respect to the individual” (p. 103, [Skinner]).

Balancing this, Robinson also says that “Skinner recognized the necessity of having to sacrifice individual means of action to group solidarity in order to achieve an end that is ultimately individualistic.”

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A comment: In the national centralizing era (roughly 1880 to 1960) of countervailing power strategies (John Galbraith) of one big institution (e.g. big business) by another big institution (e.g. big labor), Skinner’s appeal to the “sacrificing” of individual decisions to membership in a representative organization was understandable. By contrast, today the Internet provides means for large numbers of individuals to collaborate on a specific project or cause, for example by electronic crowdfunding for an artistic project and by small-donation political strategies, such as were used in the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders.

Skinner’s evolution in conceptualizing social philosophy and theology, eventually putting the individual at the center of things, likely has multiple causes. These causes include his experience of witnessing the 20th Century development of mass communications and global technology, such as broadcasting; international air travel; and increasingly widespread higher education, all of which supported a more directly personal contact with global culture. (see picture).

Thirty years later, in 1975, decentralizing computer trends culminated in the beginning of personal computers and consumer electronic technology, which eventually expanded into the wide availability of the Internet/World Wide Web in 1994:

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With regard to Skinner’s global focus, research articles today in science and other disciplines are commonly written by a cross-section of international researchers distributed across the world’s universities.

New teams form partly as a result of Google searches on interests. Website searches by motivated individuals locate and dialog with people of like-minded interests, by discovering their unique papers. (This is how I found my own main collaborator, Terry Marks-Tarlow, on psychological applications of exotic mathematics such as fractals and quaternions.) Search tools support the rich quest paths millions of electronic journeys of individual researchers of all ages, from student to retired. Also, independent researchers are a key members of this community.

Member-focused Internet tools such as researchgate.com and linkedin.com offer further support to the connectedness of the individual researcher and seeker. These tools typically provide searchable individual profiles listing member research interests, history, papers, colleagues, and research questions.

Looking 5, 10, 20, and 30 years into the future, personal technology incorporating the human genome and other relevant scientific and technological tools will help each individual to create a model and summary profile of his/her attributes, and support self-research into interactions between attributes in that individual.

Moreover, each individual will be able to utilize his profile to obtain customized goods and services, through the Internet, augmented by online certified skilled agents cross-trained in industrial or craft production and human-development principles. This trend will accelerate rapidly because of 3D printers and other inexpensive customizing procedures, once a core market develops. These are characteristics of a society that truly puts the individual at the center of society, as Skinner foresaw.

Eventually, on a coordinated public/private planning scale to support the market described above, we sense that society will move to put the individual at the center of key economic, educational, and societal planning. Theologically, this resonates with the Universalist concept of universal salvation, interpreted by me for the 21st Century as recognizing, accepting, and supporting the unique nature of each individual by helping to structure the outfitting of its journey -- to develop into his/her full self in the course of life. Again, as reported on the UUA website section for readings, Skinner said (A Religion for Greatness, Chapter 6: Racial Universalism, p.70):

We must welcome differences because life in a varied world is richer than life in uniformity. We must recognize the rightful place of color, shape, and history in a syncretic culture. If we “see life steadily and see it whole,” we can appreciate all the parts. [Here, Skinner is, in effect, restating Goethe’s requirement for good science -- studying qualities of the abstract object under many conditions.] The part becomes misunderstood only when we see it without relationships, as an end in itself. One race is no more necessary than one kind of tree or one kind of horse. Each has its own genius and each may contribute to a life that is “rounded, divine, complete.” http://www.uua.org/worship/words/reading/183458.shtml

We might interpret “divine” here as meaning “connected to everything,” as in Buckminster Fuller’s model of the Universe, or “infinitely deeply connected,” as in mathematical fractals as representing “infinitely deep porous borders” between two different entities, such as two individuals, described by psychologist Terry Marks-Tarlow as a zone of mutual exploration, which is a new way to model and appreciate Martin Buber’s concept of “I and Thou.”

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The ability to search an infinitely deep border, and grow and develop further as an individual as a result of this search, makes the individual an infinitely deep individual within in his or her internal environment.

I think that Clarence Skinner would find this model of the individual and this way of thinking very appealing indeed. The reach and connectivity of each person to others and to group and social efforts is at the center of his interest.

In the following section, we will consider this interest of Skinner’s in the light of the ideas of several great designers of physical and psychological structures.

1939 World’s Fair site aerial view including Trylon and Perisphere

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The Westinghouse Time Capsule is meant to be opened in the year 6939, 5,000 years after it was buried. Whoever opens it will find copies of Life magazine, messages by Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, cigarettes, and glass tubes containing seeds of the country’s biggest crops, as well as millions of pages of text on microfilm. (1939 World’s Fair: a shaft of granite covers the Time Capsule)

Appreciating Skinner in the Light of the Ideas of Other Figures in Technology, Science, Psychology, and Social ServiceIn this section, we will consider Buckminster Fuller, Herbert Simon, Charles J. Liebman, Felix Adler, Carl Jung, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in relation to Skinner, his times, his challenges, and his hopes.

These particular personalities have greatly influenced my own thinking on the question of how science and technology blend with values and with the growth and support of the individual. I believe that exploring the ideas of these figures with specific reference to the vision of Skinner will lead to a better

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understanding and appreciation of both Skinner and these other personalities. These figures will be presented in thematic pairs, three pairs in all.

Buckminster Fuller and Herbert Simon: Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and Design for Humanity, seen as a Part of Humankind’s NatureBuckminster Fuller and Herbert Simon are not usually discussed together, but our focus on Skinner’s concerns brings them together. Fuller and Simon are bookends in the 20th Century search for design foundations for building physical and psychological habitats for humanity and support for the individual and his integrity, and are counterparts to each other in social-technical intelligence.

Buckminster Fuller did much of his major work in the first half of the century, synchronous with Skinner, seeing the rise of centralization and American power and leadership, but Fuller continued on in his work until 1983, creating the geodesic dome in the 1950s, talking about Spaceship Earth in the 1960s, writing Synergetics (including the concept of tensegrity – tension integrity) in the 1970s, and finally speaking at a series of nationwide daylong (personal) “Integrity Day” events in more than a dozen cities in 1983, shortly before he died at the age of 87. (Note: Skinner died in 1949 at the age of 68.)

I went to Fuller’s Integrity Day gathering in New York at Hunter College that year, and got to know his mathematical colleague, Amy Edmunson.

I later invited her to participate informally with me in the New York City School Chancellor’s conference on technical aides for the disabled for administrators of special education. I had brought six blind people in various careers and phases of life to talk about their need for graphic software, a surprising phenomenon. Amy pointed out to this group during a break that Bucky Fuller could not see more than a blurry world until he got special glasses at age 10. He had shared their disability is some form, and had later gone on to a world stage.

To Bucky Fuller, technology and nature were linked – technology, through the human, grew out of the structure and processes of nature. The following quote is by Lloyd Steven Sieden (1989, p.2-3).

From records of family history and accomplishments, it is clear that the external achievements of the Fuller family, as in most families prior to the turn of the [20th] century, were fulfilled by men…

Although she died decades before Bucky’s birth, Margaret Fuller’ influence endured within the Fuller family, and young Bucky was not exempt from it. He was told stories of his famous aunt, her distinguished cohorts, and their Nature-based philosophy which stressed the divine orderliness of the Universe.

Years later, when Bucky himself began to establish his comprehensivist philosophy, he could not help be influenced by the connection between human beings and all Nature which Margaret had championed. His philosophy would, however, also include the mechanical technology which was just beginning to seriously influence lifestyles when Transcendentalism was flourishing and which was overlooked or viewed as a negative influence by most Transcendentalists. Bucky felt that natural creations such as the human hand represented technology at its finest and believed

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that the best human-created technology was that which most closely mirrored Nature’s creations.

Seiden continues (p.9):

Natural technology simply referred to employing the extremely efficient techniques he perceived within Nature throughout his own designs. From that study of nature, Fuller learned to mirror Nature’s ingenious, yet uncomplicated principles and designs in increasingly more sophisticated designs and inventions, such as the geodesic dome and the Dymaxion Map.

Fuller has had to discover the world all by himself. It is not surprising, in fact rather reassuring, that the obvious should emerge alongside the novel, the obscure together with the useful. “Posterity will have to draw the line between the mystical and the scientific, a line that will certainly have to be redrawn from time to time.” (Wikipedia, Fuller)

God , to me, it seemsis a verb,not a noun,proper or improper.

No More Secondhand God (1963)

on first priorityin design considerationis the full realizationof individual potentialin order to reach the second derivative — full realization for all individuals

No More Secondhand God (1963)https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller

Here, above, Fuller has expressed, in his own words, Skinner’s philosophy that at the center of the social community and the social gospel lies the individual, and why this works.

Herbert Simon also sought out methods of imitating human nature, but psychologically, using artificial intelligence techniques. To improve teaching of math, he developed an artificial-intelligence-based math problem-solving software model so that it fit documented human error pattern propensities, and then find ways to reduce the errors by using informed instructional strategies in the human case.

Simon was a pioneering researcher and advocate in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). He is perhaps best known as initiating the project in the 1970s to create a team of developers of software that could one day defeat a grandmaster in a tournament. It took a little over 20 years to accomplish, in the 1990s. This electrified the world -- AI power was real. From there other dramatic applications came on stage – the Mars Rover in the early 2000s, then Siri, the voice-communicating information agent, and finally the prototype driverless cars ready to move into production in the late 2010s.

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While Fuller dealt mainly in the design of the physical world, Simon dealt mainly with the design of psychological problem-solving environments embodied in AI software.

Here is what Simon said to describe his focus on the generalized concept of design. This quote is from Chapter 5: “The Science of Design: Creating the Artificial” from his classic book, The Sciences of the Artificial (3rd Edition, 1996), first published in the 1969:

Historically and traditionally, it has been the task of scientific disciplines to teach about the natural world: how they are and how they work. It has been the task of engineering schools to teach about artificial things: how to make artifacts that have desired properties and how to design.

Engineers are not the only professional designers. Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state. Design, so construed, is the core of all professional training; it is the principal mark that distinguishes the professions from the sciences. Schools of engineering, as well as schools of architecture, business, education, law, and medicine, are all centrally concerned with the process of design.

So Fuller treats nature and human design as a continuum, while Simon treats them as a complementarity. Skinner is closer to the Fuller model in his linking the human to a divine nature of the world, but is resonant with Simon in seeing the human as an individual problem-solver and a center of focus of the social community.

Of course, Fuller saw the human as a local problem-solver – and a global thinker, too, but it’s not so clear that Skinner saw the average person as a global thinker. He saw individuals more as supporting local and global organizations who would do the strategic thinking. But he did see diversity among individuals as being a social asset.

Simon touched on Skinner’s theme of the bending of individual human will through organizations. Simon, in his earlier years through his book, Administrative Behavior (1947), studied organizational behavior – decision-making and the taking on of the values of the organization through loyalty and identification.

Furthermore, says Simon, organizations help give individuals greater access to personal knowledge from their peers in the organization, such as where to get the best buy on a car. This is important because all individuals have natural limitations of knowledge scope which he calls bounded rationality that lowers their rational decision-making effectiveness.

Skinner’s framework for balancing the individual and social is described in Robinson (1985, p. 141):

Skinner’s call in this book for global integration as the ultimate expression of Universalism had its roots in an earlier book that defined both the nature and future of liberalism, Liberalism Faces the Future (1937). There he described the “starting point” for liberalism as a “belief in man,” a sense that “at the core of human nature is a something sound and good” (p. 57). The liberal affirmation of human nature rests on a confidence in human intelligence, an “inherent

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moral capacity to choose the right,” and a social ability to meet the difficulties of shifting and confusing forces” (p. 59). For Skinner, this human social ability was a paramount consideration in any social or religious theory, and the challenge of modern thought was to find a way to make effective “the innate urge to socialization which resides in social groups (p. 61). For Skinner, the unity that social cohesion promises is central to any hope for individual freedom: “there is a natural, in fact, inescapable, connection between freedom and social unity” (p. 74). As Skinner put it, in discussing individualism, it was necessary to see “the necessary and enough.” Individualism was indeed “necessary,” but it was not “enough” (p. 97). A larger view was required that demonstrated that individual fulfillment arose within a social context.

Carl Jung and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Psychological Archetypes, Archetypal Ideals, and MysticismSimon’s psychological digital modeling of human behavior processes, in my opinion, was foreshadowed by and resonant in certain ways with Carl Jung, who was a contemporary of Skinner, Fuller, and to an extent Simon himself. Jung developed a complex model of the self, including selected inherited archetypes, balances, and developmental forces. This is an oversimplified description, but conveys something of its essence.

Jung laid down the architecture and polarities of the self, conceptualizing the “shadow” opposites of the conscious self, and the increasing need through life for integration of the shadow with the life of the ego, together making up the self.

Jung valued the individual over the expert in the activity of dream interpretation, saying that only the patient could authentically give the “proper” interpretation of a given dream (a very different view than Freud’s).

Goethe wrote about archetypes, with a different meaning and a different process in mind than Jung’s internal-self archetypal elements – Goethe developed a research process for how to study a type of object. His method was to observe the object under all possible circumstances and environments, and then, having assimilated this data, to look for the essence of the object, and to extract the “archetype” from the object’s varying expressions within different environments.

What if we are looking at the Goethean object as a particular person and not the human race as a species in biology. What would a Goethean study of interactions of attributes in various environments look like in searching for the essence, the archetypal ideal, of the person? This could be an aspect of Personal Science. The future will find the appropriate use of this question.

Jung dealt heavily with modern physics concepts such as quantum mechanics and the structure of time (he suggested considering three parallel dimensions of time – past, present, and future – in addition to the conventional time representation of one time dimension and three space dimensions in his famous 26-year correspondence with quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli, available in one volume.

Jung also dealt in this correspondence with synchronicity – unusual coincidences without a known causal basis.

Skinner held an important place for mysticism in his world view in A Religion for Greatness.

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As we have discussed, Buckminster Fuller believed that every world view had two components, a rational component and a mystical component, and that each subsequent age reduced the mystical component to a more rational explanation, through science and insight, while creating the potential for new mystical elements.

Charles J. Liebman, Jr., Felix Adler, and Ethical Culture: 20th Century Refugees and the Confident Quest for Social JusticeIn Skinner’s world of thought, encapsulated by the earlier Robinson quote on the relationship between freedom and social unity -- and in the world of many other 20th Century global social community advocates – one of the most challenging and overwhelming tasks from 1933 to 1950 was dealing with the international refugee crisis, involving large numbers of Jews seeking emigration or who were later displaced, but also many others who were not Jews.

Three seasoned leaders from various parts of the social service and philanthropic communities working together in the period 1938-1941 arranged for a unique if limited resettlement of refugees, mostly Jewish, in the Dominican Republic, beginning in 1940. This was known as the Sosúa community. They had hoped for an eventual community of 100,000, but the conditions of war interfered with transit, and about 500 people were initially able to come there. However, 7,000 visas were issued which helped many refugees find other reachable havens.

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The three were Charles J. Liebman, Arthur Lamport, and James Rosenberg. All three were American Jews who had also received an Ethical Culture schooling, and were taught confidence in going out into the world and creating social change.

Above: Liebman, Lamport, and Rosenberg

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Liebman’s family, in addition, were members, officers, and supporters of the Ethical Culture movement itself. I have described this comprehensively in the online publication http://www.klitzner.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/The-Liebmann-Family-and-the-New-York-Society-for-Ethical-Culture.pdf .This publication is also available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258840261_The_Liebmann_Family_and_the_New_York_Society_for_Ethical_Culture_1880s_to_1950s_A_Mutual_Partnership_in_Brilliance_and_Values .

Liebman lived in the same period as Skinner and saw the rise of the same industrial growth and rise of social/urban problems in America and globally in the first half of the 20 th Century. As said above, Liebman was part of the distinguished Liebmann family – American German-Jewish family that was a pillar of the Ethical Culture movement at one time. They made Rheingold Beer, a very successful product, and they made or contributed to social justice institutions for generations.

Felix Adler founded the Ethical Culture movement in 1876. A founding principle was the dignity and worth of every person, recognizing the importance of the individual, separately and collectively. This preceded the birth of Skinner by five years. The Unitarian Universalist movement also adopted this principle.

Adler inspired many talented individuals to put their principles into practice locally in New York and worldwide, including Liebman, Lamport, and Rosenberg.

For Liebman and his two colleagues, the global social community vision of Skinner was a reality, a thing they spent decades nurturing on a personal scale with caring counterparts in different areas of the world, in times of threat, war, and reconstruction.

Charles J. Liebman occupied leading positions in Ethical Culture service projects in educational oversight of the Fieldston school and presidential responsibilities at the Hudson Guild settlement house in the period 1900-1920. At that point he became involved in managing post-WWI medical reconstructionist programs in cities and towns in Eastern Europe, primarily in the Jewish communities, for the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC).

After the rise of Hitler, Liebman and his colleagues founded the Refugee Economic Corporation (REC), mostly giving small loans to individual business entrepreneurs who would repay the loans, making capital continually available. They also provided grants for settlement research and for settlement administrations directly.

In particular, Liebman’s organization contracted for high-quality research on the suitability of various habitats for refugee resettlement on a global scale. He summarized these studies in a brief book, Quest for Settlement, accessible at http://www.klitzner.org/history-culture/liebmann-family-integrity/453-2/ , see Table Rows E3-E8 for chapter links. Liebman writes: “Financed by our grants to the Johns Hopkins University, the Studies were conducted under the auspices of the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees.” This refers to Roosevelt’s committee.

We can see Skinner’s understanding (of the larger importance of linking the individual with the global social community) in a tangible way by individual actor examples, such as Liebman, especially in their response to various phases and locations of the 1933-1950 refugee crisis.

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Today, in 2017, there are estimated to be 65 million refugees in the world. We are in another age of the refugee. In my own Unitarian Universalist congregation, a family and several individuals have gone to a Greek island for a week or two to help refugees from coming from Syria.

The echo comes back from the Armenian genocide of 1915. In 1930, another Liebmann family member, Henry L. Liebmann, married Dolores Zohrab, daughter of assassinated Armenian leader and poet, Krikor Zohrab, who was living in exile in Romania.

Sixty years later, Henry L. Liebmann’s share of the Liebmann family fortune helped build an Armenian cultural center in New York. It was there in that cultural center that I first learned about the Liebmann family, their values, and their talented and dedicated family members.

This complex process of connecting relationships embodied Skinner’s highest values for the individual with respect to the global society. And the role of personal search technology and publishing technology through the Internet was integral to the process. So Skinner would well admire us today for having and using that technology to express our individuality and our deepest values.

Better self-knowledge and personal development tools in the future will take us even further on the path of constructive counterpoint between individual initiatives and social actions that Skinner clearly saw as possible to emerge in the postwar period after 1945, when he wrote A Religion for Greatness.

Skinner, Universalism, Democracy, and ChangeIn this concluding section, we’ll go deeper into Skinner’s ideas about democracy and universalism. We’ll briefly describe the Universalist movement, its origins, and Skinner’s career in helping to transform it as a relevant 20th Century religion. We will indicate its resonance with the thinking of John Dewey, a Skinner contemporary, and Dewey’s Unitarian-oriented advocacy of democracy, social evolution, and the process of training children to live effectively in a democratic environment. We will also discuss the prophetic predictions of Donald W. Stotler, former science supervisor for the Portland, OR public schools and community leader, as reflected in his 1970 book, The Self-Learning Society.

Let us first present an enlarged picture of what Clarence Skinner wrote about radical democracy and the organization of society around the individual in A Religion for Greatness (p. 103):

This leads us to the heart of the problem of democracy: a word which is greatly misunderstood., and a philosophy which needs clarifying. Democracy is not simply a vote for every man and woman, although that is important. Democracy is not merely what Lincoln called it: government of the people, by the people, and for the people, although that is fundamental. The best definition that the writer has ever seen is the following: Democracy is the organization of society with respect to the individual. Such a definition is broad and inclusive. It includes every phase of man’s life. It recognizes the fact that there can be nothing approaching complete democracy until all groups recognize and develop all individuals, and are open to all and encourage the participation of all.

This is Skinner’s characterization of greatness – the opposite of the situation in which the Romanian government intensively trained a relatively small number of youngsters to become champion athletes in international Olympics, and ignored exploring the potential of the rest. It can be called greatness

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because it opens up all of society to contribute to the social good, to shape one’s own life for a special purpose, and to be able to enter into collaboration with both individuals and teams.

Buckminster Fuller advocated integrity in individuals, so they could self-selectively put forth effort as local problem-solvers, and also appreciate the whole of society and environment. Tensegrity structures could be formed out of individual components in tension in a space-shape could form a dynamic unity – a tensegrity (a tension-based integrity). This is an engineering view version for Skinner’s for the road to greatness in the organization of society around the individual.

The best path to create this may be the road of scientific self-knowledge exploration systems and Internet marketplaces for expanding customizations. This is another set of strata for greatness, within reach of our successor technological society if it builds in the concepts of the individual and supporting processes and enterprises. There is a logic to the earlier phenomenal growth of the personal computer market and Internet that suggests this process can repeat, in spite of the often-limited values of current maturing players in the personal technology markets.

Universalism as a Historical Religious DenominationUniversalism in America began in America in 1770 with ideas about universal salvation brought from England by John Murray. Within a Christian Protestant context, Murray believed and preached that all men and women would be welcomed into heaven after their life was over, regardless of the content of their life. He believed that their creator could not commit any creature he created to eternal suffering.

Here is a summary of the American career of John Murray:

In 1774 he settled at Gloucester, Massachusetts, and established a congregation there out of a Rellyite study group. There he met his second wife, the author and catechist Judith Sargent Murray. He was suspected of being a British spy, but in 1775 was appointed chaplain of the Rhode Island Brigade before Boston by General George Washington despite petitions for his dismissal by other chaplains over his rejection of belief in hell.[1] He participated in the first general Universalist Convention at Oxford, Massachusetts, September, 1785. On October 23, 1793, he became pastor of the Universalist society of Boston, and faithfully served it until October 19, 1809, when paralysis stopped his work. He was a man of great courage and eloquence, and in the defense of his views endured much detestation and abuse. (Wikipedia, John Murray (minister), 4/27/2017, 2:34 pm)

Later in the Universalism of more modern times, this concept of universal salvation translated into treating all people universally as worthy of being brought to wholeness in this life, which then gave further meaning to the Protestant social gospel movement during the Progressive era.

During the 19th Century, Universalism became the sixth largest Protestant denomination in America, and colored the thinking of many writers, including Carl Sandburg. This was a strongly proselytizing religion. Enthusiastic revival meetings were held in large tents, but unlike many other such meetings in different denominations, fire and brimstone was not preached – instead, universal salvation was put forth in this liberal, passionate religion.

Clarence Skinner’s Career in UniversalismClarence Skinner was born in Brooklyn. His higher educational work, both as a student and teacher, were at Universalist institutions in the Northeast.

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Skinner graduated St. Lawrence College in 1904, at age 15, served as a parish minister in New England and New York, served as the secretary of the newly formed Universalist Service Commission in 1910, until 1919, engaging in progressive social-service and social justice work.

In 1920 he began an independent church experiment with John Haynes Holmes, who had developed the Community Church of New York, to build the Community Church of Boston. I used a number of innovative forms including an open forum following each worship service. He was practicing the methods of democratic encounter and relationship in the church. In this respect, he was taking a similar approach to that which Dewey was taking in the schools – putting democratic attitudes and methods into practice.

He spent most of his career on the faculty of Tufts University in its Crane Theological School, starting in 1914, later becoming its Dean in 1933, and serving through 1945. Thus, his Deanship coincided with the reign of Hitler as ruler in Germany.

In 1945, in this world framework, he wrote (in A Religion for Greatness, Chapter 6: Racial Universalism, p.70):

The religion of the unities and universals is (a) radical cure. It gets down to the roots out of which prejudice grows. It digs into the soil of man’s selfishness, superstitions, and distortions. It destroys the vicious partialisms which would lock men into divisive cells of race, denying them the common rights of humanity. This enemy must be routed on every front—economic, social, biological, and cultural. The only way to rout it is to supplant the fears and errors of partialism by a vigorous, realistic religion of universalism. For every denial we must make an assertion. Man must enlarge the borders of his consciousness to include the human race. We must think, feel, and act in universe terms, and thus see how petty and sinful are the partialisms of our lesser selves.

Buckminster Fuller also urged people to “think, feel, and act in universe terms,” as Skinner puts it.

Clarence Skinner, Democracy, Rooted Utopian Thinking, and Societal ChangeWe have already described Skinner’s concept of radical democracy.

More broadly, David Robinson, with reference to democratic ideals, said this about Skinner and democratic/religious utopian thinking (1985, p. 321):

…his A Religion for Greatness (1945) called for a Universalism that was not only religious but economic, racial, political, social, and scientific. It called for an enlightened, peaceful, and progressive world order based on democratic principles. Such a utopian sense of the possibilities of the liberal faith has helped to focus Universalist energies on the process of achieving a universal social salvation on earth.

In the 1600s in Europe, there were numerous secret scientific societies that were also spiritual brotherhoods devoted to utopian goals Often the goals were modeled in the actions of the organizations themselves. The most brilliant and famous utopian collaboration was the Antilia group (active roughly from 1628 to 1660 in Germany, Sweden, and finally London).

They were inspired by the ideas and writings, at various stages, of Johann Valentin Andreae, Samuel Hartlib, Amos Comenius, John Dury, and Bengt Skytte, each a giant thinker and activist in his own right,

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redefining paradigms in education methods, cooperation between Protestant denominations, regional and scholarly knowledge dissemination, attempted universal language creation and research, metaphors for use in scientific investigation and literature, and blueprints for utopian spiritual cities of knowledge.

This ultra-talented were not dreamers – they were planners and lobbyists, and got backing of various kinds at one point and another for a community in places selected from a list that included America (New England and Bermuda), the Baltic sea near Estonia, and Lithuania, but each time some obstacle derailed it.

Skytte’s plan was for a Sophopolis, a university research city and refuge, in which persecuted scholars from all over the world, even Jews and Muslims, could take residence and collaborate. Skytte was a top planner and governmental official for the Swedish Empire for most of his career.

In actuality, America grew into this role of the utopian research center refuge envisioned by Skytte and the Antilia group, culminating during the 1930s in being a refuge for an amazing array of researchers, including Albert Einstein, from Nazi Germany and other European centers. The Princeton University Institute for Advanced Research and The New School for Social Research in New York were among the most prominent hosts for this researcher-refugee community.

Skinner saw this happen. It must have given him further hope that his utopian ideas were facing in the right direction. The Civil Rights revolution and the LGBT acceptance into the mainstream of society would have had a similar effect on him.

Skinner’s concept of a global/universal identity also partially came into being, first from Earth Day, with its blue image of Spaceship Earth (Buckminster Fuller’s frequent phrase), then weather satellites, automated language translation, the EU, the CNN 24-hour international news network, the Internet and its World Wide Web, global integrated markets, and climate change research awareness, local and international activism and treaties, and so on.

I am saying that Skinner was an American spiritual/intellectual heir to the ideas and actions of the 1600s Antilia group, rooted partly in an American outward-looking religious community tradition, and partly in an American potential for social change and for technological ambition and discovery.

Clarence Skinner and Our Future – Considering Technological Community-Building and TrustScience Educator Donald Stotler’s Accurate VisionClarence Skinner knew how to build communities – in his case, religious and spiritual communities, such as the independent, innovative Community Church of Boston.

Donald Stotler, a leading science educator in the nation, based in Portland, OR, knew how to build local and regional science school and community programs, such as OMSI, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. I met him in 1969 and we worked together on ideas for a teachers’ community lesson plan database grant proposal for New York City when I was based at the Center for Urban Education (CUE).

The unexpected and marvelous thing about meeting him was that Don already had an operational site to do this. I ran across Don by word of mouth in a meeting in San Francisco while I was carrying out a feasibility study for CUE on whether such as system was practical to build. My study conclusion was

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“yes, such a system could actually be built – in fact, I saw one running in front of my own eyes in Portland!”

In Don’s system, a sample query might be to find a fifth-grade level biology activity that was experiment based, specifying subject, level, and method. The system could even accept feedback, such as “The activity didn’t suit my particular needs, but here’s the improvisation I came up with that worked for me.”

In the end the New York project did not get built -- it did not receive a grant simply because the targeted grantee was a well-known information technology company and said, to our surprise, that their conviction was that information delivery was a business focus, not a school focus. They saw information-sharing projects as their business, not ours.

But I learned much from Don – he was quietly but confidently inspiring – and we stayed in touch. Don’s model was to apply the community-building process to educational technology and other goals.

Stotler also made published predictions about educational technology in a 1970 book, The Self Learning Society, and correlated these with community values. Here is what he assumed the future would bring that could be drawn on to re-orient and re-develop education in the decades after 1970 (p. 1):

In this book a social model designed to involve all individuals in the endless frontiers of research, education, and recreation is set forth. Research is the process of increasing man’s known alternatives; education is the process of utilizing man’s known alternatives.; and recreation is the process of involvement in diversionary experience. Science and technology are deployed for the purposes of liberating man for the art of full living. What is proposed, however, is not a 19th Century style Utopia with all basic problems solved, but rather a problem-seeking, self-renewing, open society with systematic ways for everyone to be involved in the production of alternatives and in decision making.

Note that Stotler rejects the Utopianism of the 19th Century but advocates for many of the qualities we have described above in science-and spiritual-based 1600s Utopian circles. This meets Skinner’s formulation of the need for a collaborative relationship between science and religion in our future society of the 20th and 21st Centuries.

This indeed, did occur in miniature following publication of Darwin’s theories, which were communicated and defended by the Unitarian religious movement, and which went hand in hand with Dewey’s development of his ideas regarding application of Darwin’s ideas to education and social reform by recognizing that the higher intelligence of man could let him make aware choices, especially through collaboration and democratic processes. (Let me add that Dewey himself was a Unitarian.)

Following Dewey, Herbert Simon understood and used this evolution-produced human intelligence insight in economic and psychological terms, and extended it to approaches to artificial intelligence in a method of human model-building that created collective self-knowledge models for various human processes. His theory of bounded rationality anticipated the Internet-Age practice of crowd-sourcing of knowledge described by David Weinberg in his book, Too Big To Know (“The smartest person in the room is the room.”)

Stotler continues in his book, examining freedom, responsibility, and communication (p. 1-2):

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The basis of The Self-Learning Society is total communication. This requires (1) realignment of our basic institutions as to function, and (2) their interconnection by electronic devices such as the computer, TV, and radio. Four assumptions provide a basis for total communication:

A. FreedomSociety would exist to increase each individual’s alternatives – to increase his freedom [this was also Skinner’s premise] [.] As a result value systems would be tested and evolve, and knowledge systems would grow.

B. ResponsibilityAt each decision point the individual would act in such a way that both he and his environment would increase his productivity – this modern “Golden Rule” would increase the individual’s responsibility in proportion to his freedom. [This, too, is very compatible with Skinner’s view of the person as a social being contributing to the community.]

C. DialogueNo matter where he was on earth, the individual would have an opportunity to carry on a dialogue with anyone else – and by a variety of media. [The Internet essentially provides this now through search engines combined with email, Skype, Twitter, message boards, file attachments such as presentations, etc.]

D. ParticipationNo matter where he traveled on earth the individual would be able to readily engage in any type of activity – politics, religion, or art, for example – which did not disrupt the alternatives of others. [This is a compact expression in active terms of Skinner’s discussions of political, economic, racial, social, and scientific universalism.]

A few pages later in his book, Stotler examines the basic flow of methods in education in light of the increasing availability of technological tools in a mobile society (p. 12-13):

The question is whether our maze-style of education can be replaced by a society organized so that nobody “teaches in the prepared sense of the word” where…learning is relevant because it is in the hands of the learner [i.e. available at the time and place it is needed, like a dictionary or translation application or map or restaurant listing on a mobile phone]. It seems improbable that such relevance can be achieved in the extremely complex framework of our20th Century society unless automation meets certain criteria in its rapid expansion; an expansion which has only just begun. [Seven years later, in 1977, the pre-assembled personal microcomputer arrived on the market, and in the seven years that followed, radically changed both business and personal ways of communicating with others and accessing and analyzing information.] “The network of electronic communication is inevitably producing a world superculture,” according to Kenneth E. Boulding, “and the relations between this superculture and the more traditional and regional cultures of the past remain the great question mark of the next fifty years.” “What would an appropriate computer-based communications system do?” [These concerns are present in Skinner’s discussion of political, social, and racial universalism, largely because movement toward a hybrid global/local outlook is taken as a goal.]

So we see that Skinner’s outward-looking utopian approach aligns well with that of some of the best minds present at the dawn of a new global culture of ecology and communications satellites on April 22,

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1970, the first Earth Day, as represented by advocates such as Don Stotler, Ken Boulding, and Bucky Fuller. Like Herbert Simon in the artificial intelligence sphere, they pick up at the point where Clarence Skinner worked out his last great vision -- of the individual, the society and wholeness, or using Skinner’s terminology, universalism as an attitude.

Stotler and Self-DevelopmentStotler puts the learner/researcher in charge of his own learner to the extent possible. The learner has alternate paths to learning and objective. Stotler lists four “inquiry skills” that together are an essential part of his learning equipment, along with emotions such as curiosity. I would observe that these same skills could also be used in the course of self-inquiry and self-research. Here is his formulation of the skills required for general inquiry (p. 13):

General Inquiry Skills. The individual should be encouraged to learn by inquiring, with guidance as needed. In achieving his goal, he will necessarily grow in his ability to interact and react with:

Nature (Exploring both his immediate environment and understanding that at a distance.)

People…(Working in a variety of groups as searchers see the need.) Records (Studying, storing, and retrieving information.) Self…(Developing values for decision-making.)

Science and Technology, Community-Building, Personal Development, and TrustSkinner, Stotler, Fuller, and others, each from a unique lifetime of experience, have focused their energies on questions of the community and the individual, and how to approach science and technology (whether as tools or treasures), in building real communities in which people can live and grow and collaborate. This is the same spirit as seen in the best of the 1600s societies I described earlier, especially the Antilia group. Each member trusted and supported the other.

TrustTrust is a key issue throughout. In science one assumes honest reporting in data and procedure. In religion (meaning connected units or congregants), trust has a variety of meanings, personal and covenantal. It is the basis of community and of business exchange.

Applying technology to community building is no different. Even in the business environment, I have learned from my technical writing work, from senior executives responsible for standards compliance, that users need to see themselves as a community, not just employees, that is each defending the other by maintaining security policies such as not lending or borrowing passwords (which destroys data on who was actually responsible for using a particular system at a particular time). This is parallel to our discussion about integrity in data reporting in science.

The Meetup SiteIn terms of community development and personal development, and building trust, one of the most useful technological tools to emerge from the Internet is the Meetup website, which arranges face-to-face gatherings of registered members around common interests, at no cost or low cost. The site is www.meetup.com . Scott Heiferman and Matt Meeker began the site in 2002 and has a presence now in many cities, including internationally.

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The Meetup service growth is driven entirely by the formation of a new Meetup Group by an Organizer and a moderator or moderators (Event Hosts). The Meetup website announces and takes reservations for events.

The key dynamic is the creation of new moderators and groups. Being a participant in a group helps some personalities to eventually want to, and feel ready to, form their own group. So personal development takes place at two levels: (1) as a participant in an interesting group with meaningful relationships forming between many of the participants, and (2) as a person learning to lead as a moderator.

Being an Independent Researcher and Finding Supporting CommunitiesI went through this meaningful and exciting development cycle myself in New York for the past five years or so as a charter member of the Meetup-based group called Conversations New York (www.conversationsnewyork.com ), founded by Ron Gross, a “formal public conversation” organizer and advocate for the past 20 years. His larger career has including writing pioneering works in the fields of Lifelong Learning and Independent Researching.

The latter, Independent Research, happens to be my own mode of research – not using an institutional base such as a university or research institute, yet participating in high-quality research communities. For me, these have included the New York Academy of Sciences (www.nyas.com ), the Columbia University endowed “University Seminars” that bridge Columbia to outside researchers around topics of interest – the current three seminars that I attend are: Innovations in Education; Ethics, Moral Education, and Society; and Cultural Memory – and the global ResearchGate community with millions of researchers in every field (www.researchgate.net ). ResearchGate facilitates permanent posting of papers on the website, for dissemination, and online discussion groups formed around provocative broad research questions, sometimes dealing with fundamental issues in a field. I have met some wonderful colleagues and learned fascinating things through this process.

Skinner and Scientific UniversalismSkinner advocated that science and religion collaborate. Indeed, he said this was necessary. Here are several excerpts from the final chapter, “Scientific Universalism,” of his book (p. 114-115 and p. 117-118):

Faith is the power man has of going beyond the demonstrable into the uncharted realm which surrounds us on all sides. Faith is a kind of courage which makes it possible to put our beliefs into actions. It is an act of the creative imagination which gives us an insight into the nature of the unseen. It is compounded of experience, reason, conviction, intuition, and surmise. It is what we all employ every day of our lives when we trust that somehow our acts which are not based on incontrovertible knowledge will issue in satisfactory results.

It is pathetic that so often we confound faith with superstition, credulity, or with an exclusive theological dogma. Like everything human, faith can be debased by men of low intelligence and narrow prejudice. But that cannot, must not, confound our understanding or our use of it. Art and science can be debased and be made to serve ignoble ends. That statement hardly needs proving in this day and generation! That is because faith is so universal, and it is so universal because it is so human. It is like courage, it belongs to all nations, races, and creeds. It is a common heritage of mankind…

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The value of this creative act of confidence is realized by all thoughtful men who are concerned with the large problems of human destiny. Prof. Harold Laski can hardly be accused of a theological bias, but he writes:

“I do not think anyone can examine with care our contemporary situation without being constantly reminded that we again require some faith that will revitalize the human mind. Almost as clearly as in the declining days of the Roman Empire, our scheme of values seems to have broken down. Scientific advance, material progress, an immense widening of the horizons of knowledge, not all of these together have been able to maintain a sense of confidence about the future. On the contrary, this second world war is the climax of an era of frustration in which the conflict over the values to be maintained was as ugly and as cynical as at any period since the Reformation.”

That from a student of political science!

The religion of greatness is big enough to believe in science and religion; in quantitative measurements and qualitative values; in exactitude and faith. It believes that any attempt to build a satisfactory and lasting civilization on earth will fail unless these two great resources are brought together and made to serve a common purpose.

Can we do that? If so, how?...

Each group must realize that both the methods of science and the methods of religion are complementary and each must be employed if we are to achieve a universal view. Very slowly the best minds in the various fields of science are coming to see that faith is as necessary in their work as in any other human endeavor. Thinking of the daring hypotheses which have been developed in astronomy, chemistry, and medicine. It required creative imaginations of the noblest order to conceive the great changes which have taken place in these subjects. The men who dream dreams of emergent and revolutionary forces suddenly creating new heavens and new earths must be at least half poets, for no mere laboratory drudge could think such startling thoughts, or imagine such strange forms of reality.

A scientist whom we have already quoted [Burnett Streeter (ed.), p. 18] writes:

“At the present day the student of natural science does not allow himself to be deterred from a theory merely because it appears incredible or incompatible with all that has gone before. To such theories indeed he is attracted. The spirit of adventure is strong in him.”

That is not Alice writing from Wonderland, but a chemist writing from Oxford University. And that represents a great triumph for those who have always believed that the greatest minds in science were akin to the greatest minds in religion.

So, too, the men of faith must learn to use the methods and techniques of science as far as they can go. They must be forever testing their beliefs in what is unknown by the light of what is known, and they must have the courage to discard that which becomes untenable. This is no easy matter for those who have staked their very lives on some ancient dogma…

The above quotations give us roots into the American mind of conscience near the close of WWII, often entwining anxiety, faith, science, and adventure – for the present and for the changed and daring future

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to emerge. Clarence Skinner’s A Religion for Greatness is a remarkable window into that world, and at the same time a haunting and timeless mirror for coping with our own time.

BibliographyBoulding, Kenneth E. (1966). In Morphett, Edgar L. (chief editor), Prospective Changes in Society by 1980, p. 209. Report of an Eight-State Project, 1362 Lincoln St., Denver, CO.

Kaplan, Marion A. (2008), Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosua, 1941-1945, Museum of Jewish Heritage: New York. In print, available on Amazon. A copy is located at the JDC Archives.

Laski, Harold J. (1944). Faith, Reason, and Civilization, p28. The Viking Press.

Klitzner, Herb (2017). 1600s European Circles of Open-Minded Thinking and Tolerant Living. Presentation to the New York Academy of Sciences, Lyceum Society, January 3, 2017. Published on ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313994102_1600s_European_Circles_of_Open-Minded_Thinking_and_Tolerant_Living

Klitzner, Herb (2013). The Liebmann Family and the New York Society for Ethical Culture (1880s to 1950s): A Mutual Partnership in Brilliance and Values. Written with the cooperation of the board president and staff of the NY Society for Ethical Culture and self-published on ResearchGate and also on the Klitzner.org website.http://www.klitzner.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/The-Liebmann-Family-and-the-New-York-Society-for-Ethical-Culture.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Herb_Klitzner/contributions

Peckham, Nick and Berkabile, Bob (2003). Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science: The Vision of R. Buckminster Fuller. http://www.usgbc.org/Docs/Archive/MediaArchive/407_Peckham_PA178.pdf

Robinson, David (1985). The Unitarians and the Universalists. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Sieden, Lloyd Steven (1989). Buckminster Fuller’s Universe: An Appreciation. New York: Plenum Press.

Simon, Herbert A. (1997). Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization, 4th Edition, 1997 (1st Edition 1947). The Free Press.

Simon, Herbert A. (1996). Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd Edition (1st Edition 1969). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Skinner, Clarence R. (1937). Liberalism Faces the Future. New York: Macmillan.

Skinner, Clarence R. (1945). A Religion for Greatness. Boston: Murray Press.

Streeter, Burnett Hillman (ed. and co-author) (1930). Adventure: The Faith of Science and the Science of Faith. The MacMillan Company. Other authors are Catherine Mary Chilcott, John Macmurray, and Alexander S. Russell

Weinberger, David (2011). Too Big To Know. New York: Basic Books

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Wells, Allen (2009), Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa. , Duke University Press: Durham, NC, Note: Wells is the son of a Sosúa settler. In print, available on Amazon. A copy is located at the JDC Archives.

CreditsMarine Air Terminal – “Flight” mural in main lobby, composed by James Brooks in 1940 (constructed 1942):

Inside the terminal hangs "Flight," a mural measuring 12 feet (3.7 m) in height and 237 feet (72 m) in length, the largest mural created as part of the Great Depression-era Work Projects Administration (WPA).[2] Completed by James Brooks in 1940, "Flight" depicts the history of man's involvement with flight. (Wikipedia entry for “Marine Air Terminal”)

Marine Air Terminal – photos of Flight mural segment – copyright 2011, Snapstarre (Brian Snapp), All Rights Reservedhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/snappstare/6008368149/

1939 World’s Fair (site and construction photos) – New York City Parks Department document: Tomorrow’s World publication (2013):

1939 World’s Fair site aerial view including Trylon and Perispherehttps://www.nycgovparks.org/pagefiles/73/tomorrows-world-publication.pdf

Burial of Westinghouse Time Capsule on the groundshttps://www.nycgovparks.org/highlights/fmcp-worlds-fairs/1939-photos

1964 World’s Fair – the Unispherehttps://www.nycgovparks.org/pagefiles/73/tomorrows-world-publication.pdf

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The Unisphere at the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New YorkTo me this is a symbol of Clarence Skinner’s belief and aspiration

for global universalism as an individual attitude

While working for the Port Authority of New York as a scientific computer programmer in 1964-1967, I and my supervisor collaborated with engineers at U.S. Steel, designer of the Unisphere, to calculate the proper size and weight of offset material to balance the metal continents on the sphere so that the structure would not tip to one side. The Port Authority was asked to use its computer and staff to do this because it was the designated designer of the whole Transportation Pavilion at the fair.

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