Ethical movement
The Ethical movement is an ethical and educational movement established in 1877 by the academic Felix Adler. The premise of Ethical Culture is that honoring and living in accordance with a code of ethics is required to live a meaningful life and for making the world a better place for all people.
The movement originated from an effort among ethical non-religious people to develop and promote humanist codes of behavior, drawing on the developed moral traditions and moral philosophy of 19th century secular societies in Europe and the United States. In practice, members of the Ethical movement organized themselves as two types of organization: the secular humanist movement, which is avowedly non-religious, and a predominantly moral movement that saw itself as religious but not theistic.
In the United States, Ethical movements became organizations for the advancement of education. However, in the UK, the Ethical organisations become secular humanist charities; the South Place Ethical Society and the British Ethical Union deliberately abandoned the congregational model of organization, becoming the Conway Hall Ethical Society and Humanists UK respectively.
Internationally, Ethical Culture and secular humanist organizations have always organized jointly; the American Ethical Union and the British Ethical Union were co-founders of Humanists International, whose original name, the "International Humanist and Ethical Union", reflected the philosophical unity of the Ethical Culture movement.
History
Background
The Ethical movement was an outgrowth of the general loss of faith among the intellectuals of the Victorian era. A precursor to the doctrines of the Ethical movement can be found in the South Place Ethical Society, founded in 1793 as the South Place Chapel on Finsbury Square, on the edge of the City of London.File:Fabian society 1886.jpg|thumb|left|The Fabian Society was an outgrowth from the Fellowship of the New Life.
In the early nineteenth century, the chapel became known as "a radical gathering-place." At that point, it was a Unitarian chapel; like Quakers, the Unitarian movement supported female equality. Under the leadership of Reverend William Johnson Fox, it lent its pulpit to activists such as Anna Wheeler, one of the first women to campaign for feminism at public meetings in England, who spoke in 1829 on the "Rights of Women." In later decades, the chapel moved away from Unitarianism and changed its name first to the South Place Religious Society. It again changed its name to the South Place Ethical Society ; its current name is Conway Hall Ethical Society.
The Fellowship of the New Life was established in 1883 by the Scottish intellectual Thomas Davidson. Fellowship members included poets Edward Carpenter and John Davidson, animal rights activist Henry Stephens Salt, sexologist Havelock Ellis, feminist Edith Lees, novelist Olive Schreiner and Edward R. Pease.
Its objective was "The cultivation of a perfect character in each and all." They wanted to transform society by setting an example of clean, simplified living for others to follow. Davidson was a major proponent of a structured philosophy about religion, ethics, and social reform.
At a meeting on 16 November 1883, a summary of the society's goals was drawn up by Maurice Adams:
Although the Fellowship was short-lived, it spawned the Fabian Society, which split in 1884 from the Fellowship of the New Life.
In the United States
In his youth, Felix Adler was being trained to be a rabbi like his father, Samuel Adler, the rabbi of the Reform Jewish Temple Emanu-El in New York. As part of his education, he enrolled at the University of Heidelberg, where he was influenced by neo-Kantian philosophy. He was especially drawn to the Kantian ideas that one could not prove the existence or non-existence of deities or immortality, and that morality could be established independently of theology.During this time, he was also exposed to the moral problems caused by the exploitation of women and labor. These experiences laid the intellectual groundwork for the Ethical movement. Upon his return from Germany in 1873, he shared his ethical vision with his father's congregation through a sermon. Due to the negative reaction he elicited, it became his first and last sermon as a rabbi-in-training. Instead, he took up a professorship at Cornell University and in 1876 gave a follow-up sermon that led to the 1877 founding of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, which was the first of its kind. By 1886, similar societies had sprouted up in Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis.
These societies all adopted the same statement of principles:
- The belief that morality is independent of theology;
- The affirmation that new moral problems have arisen in modern industrial society that have not been adequately dealt with by the world's religions;
- The duty to engage in philanthropy in the advancement of morality;
- The belief that self-reform should go in lock step with social reform;
- The establishment of republican rather than monarchical governance of Ethical societies
- The agreement that educating the young is the most important aim.
The Adlerian emphasis on "deed not creed" translated into several public service projects. The year after it was founded, the New York Society started a kindergarten, a district nursing service, and a tenement-house building company. Later, they opened the Ethical Culture School, then called the "Workingman's School," a Sunday school and a summer home for children. Other ethical societies soon followed suit with similar projects. Unlike the philanthropic efforts of the established religious institutions of the time, the Ethical societies did not attempt to proselytize those they helped. They rarely tried to convert anyone. New members had to be sponsored by existing members, and women were not allowed to join until 1893. They also resisted formalization, though they slowly adopted certain traditional practices, like Sunday meetings and life cycle ceremonies, yet did so in a modern humanistic context. In 1893, the four existing societies unified under the umbrella organization, the American Ethical Union.
After some initial success, the movement stagnated until after World War II. In 1946, efforts were made to revitalize, and societies were created in New Jersey and Washington D.C., along with the inauguration of the Encampment for Citizenship. By 1968, there were thirty societies with a total national membership of over 5,500. However, the renewed movement differed from its predecessor in a few ways. The newer groups were being created in suburban locales and often to provide alternative Sunday schools for children, with adult activities as an afterthought.
There was also a greater focus on organization and bureaucracy, along with an inward turn emphasizing the needs of the group members over the more general social issues that had initially concerned Adler. The result was a transformation of American ethical societies into something much more akin to small Christian congregations in which the minister's most pressing concern is to tend to their flock.
In the 21st century, the movement attempted to revitalize itself through social media and involvement with other Humanist organizations, with mixed success. As of 2014, there were fewer than 10,000 official members of the Ethical movement.
In Britain
In 1885, the ten-year-old American Ethical Culture movement helped to stimulate similar social activity in Great Britain when American sociologist John Graham Brooks distributed pamphlets by Chicago ethical society leader William Salter to a group of British philosophers, including Bernard Bosanquet, John Henry Muirhead, and John Stuart MacKenzie.One of Felix Adler's colleagues, Stanton Coit, visited them in London to discuss the "aims and principles" of their American counterparts. In 1886, the first British ethical society was founded. Coit took over the leadership of South Place for a few years. Ethical societies flourished in Britain. By 1896, the four London societies formed the Union of Ethical Societies, and between 1905 and 1910, there were over fifty societies in Great Britain, seventeen of which were affiliated with the Union. This rapid growth was partly due to Coit, who left his role as leader of South Place in 1892 after being denied the power and authority he was vying for.
Because he was firmly entrenched in British ethicism, Coit remained in London and formed the West London Ethical Society, which was almost entirely under his control. Coit worked quickly to shape the West London society not only around Ethical Culture but also the trappings of religious practice, renaming the society in 1914 to the Ethical Church; he did this because he subscribed to a personal theory of using "theological terms in a humanistic sense" to make the Ethical movement appealing to irreligious people with otherwise strong cultural attachments to religion, such as cultural Christians. Coit transformed his meetings into "services," and their space into something akin to a church. In a series of books, Coit also began to argue for transforming the Anglican Church into an Ethical Church while holding up the virtue of ethical ritual. He felt that the Anglican Church was in the unique position to harness the natural moral impulse that stemmed from society itself, as long as the Church replaced theology with science, abandoned supernatural beliefs, expanded its Bible to include a cross-cultural selection of ethical literature and reinterpreted its creeds and liturgy in light of modern ethics and psychology. His attempt to reform the Anglican church failed, and ten years after he died in 1944, the Ethical Church building was sold to the Roman Catholic Church.
During Stanton Coit's lifetime, the Ethical Church was never officially affiliated with the Union of Ethical Societies, nor did South Place. In 1920, the Union of Ethical Societies changed its name to the Ethical Union. Harold Blackham, who had taken over leadership of the London Ethical Church, consciously sought to remove the church-like trappings of the Ethical movement and advocated a simple creed of humanism that was not akin to a religion. He promoted the merger of the Ethical Union with the Rationalist Press Association and the South Place Ethical Society, and, in 1957, a Humanist Council was set up to explore amalgamation. Although issues over charitable status prevented a full amalgamation, the Ethical Union under Blackham changed its name in 1967 to become the British Humanist Association, establishing humanism as the principal organizing force for non-religious morals and secularist advocacy in Britain. The BHA was the legal successor body to the Union of Ethical Societies.
Between 1886 and 1927, seventy-four ethical societies were started in Great Britain, although this rapid growth did not last long. The numbers declined steadily throughout the 1920s and early 30s until only ten societies were left in 1934. By 1954, there were only four. The situation became such that, in 1971, sociologist Colin Campbell even suggested that one could say "that when the South Place Ethical Society discussed changing its name to the South Place Humanist Society in 1969, the English Ethical movement ceased to exist."
The organizations spawned by the 19th-century Ethical movement would later live on as the British humanist movement. The South Place Ethical Society eventually changed its name to Conway Hall Ethical Society, after Moncure D. Conway, and is typically known as simply "Conway Hall." In 2017, the British Humanist Association changed its name to Humanists UK. Both organizations are part of Humanists International, founded by Harold Blackham in 1952 as the International Humanist and Ethical Union.