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Charles Fort & The Religion Of Self-Respect

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I have come upon an article by Tiffany Thayer, which doesn't seem to have featured previously and might be of particular interest:

Charles Fort and the Religion of Self-Respect
Tiffany Thayer

The Humanist
No. 2, April 1950
pages 58 - 61

This article, the first of several to appear on unorthodox personalities, deals with an original thinker who lived from 1874 to 1932. Fort’s theme was the importance of doubting; his method, fact-founded satire. Even science and its uncritical smugnesses were subjected to this method when in 1908 Fort evolved a series of bizarre theories on scientific phenomena, all grounded in established, documented and apparently reliable facts. The Fortean Society, founded by Tiffany Thayer to propagate his philosophy, bears some of the marks of a cult, with its only symbol a huge question mark.

Charles Fort would be the first to deny that he founded a religion. That is the religion he founded - a means of having your Atlantis and denying it too. Perhaps he hardly meant to do it. Indeed, a religion founded purposely is in danger of being no better and no more enduring than the purpose for which it was founded; but a religion created spontaneously, apparently by chance, is in tune with Charles Fort’s “infinite flux.” It can no more die than change can cease or an atom be found which is stable.

That is to say that what has become known as Forteanism is but the descriptive, non-defining and creedless statement of the happy, natural state of man. Our contention is that every child is born a Fortean, and that it is only by a determined effort on the part of parents, teachers, doctors, priests, politicians and bankers that the child is perverted to any other way of life.

I do not pretend that you will find these statements in The Books of Charles Fort. I found them there, between the lines, and you may find what you will and can: that is, in my view, highly conducive to self respect: thus the proposition is self-demonstrating, and Fort has ministered to your well-being in an almost mystical manner without ever telling you to hold up your chin and throw out your chest.

It is precisely in that absence of dogmatic instruction that Fort’s universality (and therefore his soundness) is vested. Sooth, you may like yourself better with your chin on your breast and your shoulders hunched. In Fort you may find the strength to walk that way - or on your hands - if it please you. He never tells you what to do or to think or to feel; he provokes you to the doing, incites the thinking process, imparts the feeling appropriate to the occasion and provides the means to continue all this serially to infinity, in an ever-growing spiral as his readers multiply and beget their noble kind, either biologically or by intellectual conversion among the dogmatic gentiles.

As the writer conceives it, Forteanism is hardly at all a religion of emotion, and it may or may not be a religion of action, as individual temperament lists, but it is primarily a religion of the intellect - which differs only subtly from a philosophy. In fact, some very good Forteans content themselves with Fort’s philosophy, and eschew the term “religion” out of well-founded prejudice against the abuses to which the word has been subjected for, lo! these many aeons.

One has no quarrel with that distinction. Fort’s celebrated “cordiality of acceptance” is wide enough to embrace us all. In the strictest sense this paper should not be considering “Forteanism” as a religion, but Self-Respect. If one had the space it would be a pleasure to demonstrate that the terms, in this application, are interchangeable, but within present limitations it may be easier to establish that Self-Respect is the essence of the most natural religion conceivable by man, and that Charles Fort’s greatest gift to his readers is his ego-building elixir.

(...)

The full article (as part of the entire magazine) can be read here (14Mb):

www.forteanmedia.com/1950_04_Humanist.pdf
 
"That is to say that what has become known as Forteanism is but the descriptive, non-defining and creedless statement of the happy, natural state of man. Our contention is that every child is born a Fortean, and that it is only by a determined effort on the part of parents, teachers, doctors, priests, politicians and bankers that the child is perverted to any other way of life".
I have personally become an ever increasing admirer of Tiffany Thayer's Fortean writing, this past year and the above paragraph alone exemplifies why.

Never thought about Forteanism like that before. :D
 
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