Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

From Philosopedia.org

Schlesinger Jr., Arthur M(eier) (15 October 1917– 28 February 2007)

Schlesinger, whose The Age of Jackson (1946) and A Thousand Days (1965) won Pulitzer Prizes, responded in 1956 to Warren Allen Smith about his views concerning humanism and philosophy:

I am not sure that I can contribute anything very useful. My own views on the problem are rudimentary. It seems to me that most important for the preservation of civilization is a belief in moral standards. That belief is really most solid when it is founded upon a fervent belief in a supernatural order. For those of us who lack a belief in supernatural religion, we must base the standards as securely as possible on our own conception of man. For my own part, I find the Christian interpretation (as in Reinhold Niebuhr) of the incompleteness of merely human experience and the inadequacy of merely human resources entirely convincing; but I cannot go along with the belief that this incompleteness and this inadequacy are to be perfected by an infusion of the supernatural. I do not know where this puts me in your categories, but I do think that any great literature must be based on an understanding of the weakness and fallibility, the misery as well as the grandeur, of man.

Schlesinger's father, Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. (27 February 1888 - 30 October 1965), also was a historian who pioneered the new social history and women's history. He taught at Harvard, where Harvard's Schlesinger Library in women's history is named after him and his wife Elizabeth, a noted feminist.

Schlesinger (which he pronounced SCHLAY-sing-er) elsewhere has written:

• My general belief is that Augustinian Christianity is fine up to the point where belief in God comes in. In other words, I find the Christian interpretation of experience more illuminating than any humanist interpretation, though I agree with the humanists in being unable to take the supernatural seriously.

Elsewhere, Schlesinger has identified one of the problems in our country to be that we have “too much pluribus, and not enough unum.”

In a Wall Street Journal article (22 November 1995), Schlesinger lamented the murder of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, saying it was “only the latest outrage committed by people who think they are executing the will of God.”

Noting that pollsters find that “more than a third of American adults claim that God speaks to them directly,” Schlesinger asked,

Am I alone in finding this a scary statistic? What in the world do they mean? How does God talk to them? Do they hear voices, like Joan of Arc? And what does God say to them? . . . Fundamentalism in one form or another has been the scourge of the 20th century. Fundamentalists are absolutists - people who believe they are appointed carriers of a sacred gospel and feel so sure they are right that they have no compunction about killing heretics or doing anything else to advance their cause. . . . Unrebuked and unchecked, fundamentalists of all faiths will continue to believe that they are serving God by mayhem and murder.

Schlesinger in the Who’s Who volumes listed himself as a Unitarian. In 1996 he was elected a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. He was President of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1981–1984) and had been its Chancellor.

(In a 22 June 1992 Op-Ed column of The New York Times, Schlesinger relates how he first heard Niebuhr preach in the winter of 1940-1941. The preacher “cast an intellectual spell on my generation,” he wrote. “He persuaded me and many of my contemporaries that original sin provides a far stronger foundation for freedom and self-government than illusions about human perfectibility.”)

Journals

In 2007, Journals: 1952-2000 was published. Its 894 pages had been pared to one-sixth of it original length by his sons Andrew and Stephen Schlesinger. Janet Maslin, reviewing the work in The New York Times the week the work was published, commented:

The author, who could be described as either a treasured historian or "the power-loving stablemate of statesmen" (his own sardonic phrase), did not intend this as a profound, analytical work or a deeply personal one. Instead, candor and spontaneity are its highest priorities, even at the expense of consistency.

Maslin lists Schlesinger's personal evaluations of many of the VIPs of his day: John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Henry Schlesinger, Ronald Reagan, Adlai Stevenson, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Hubert Humphrey, Reinhold Niebuhr, Mick Jagger, Gina Lollobrigida, Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky. In a 1998 tidbit, Schlesinger wrote of telling a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee that "gentlemen always lie about their sex lives." For his he was pilloried and accused of flippancy, but he noted happily, "I have not enjoyed such a fusillade for a third of a century. It makes me feel young again."

Correspondence

Following his graduate work in 1949 at Columbia University, where he researched the several connotations of "humanism," Warren Allen Smith continued to ask intellectuals as to their views on philosophy and religion. Their responses served as the basis for his Who's Who in Hell (NY: Barricade Books, 2000), which became the basis for Philosopedia's first entries. Smith met Schlesinger several times, shared with him his article about the American Academy of Arts and Letter mentioning his being a Unitarian and a humanistic naturalist, and received the following letters: