Action and history have a curious relationship and a fraught one for WES. WES is about action here and now to achieve progress and rectify wrongs. That is the priority our founder Felix Adler wanted. Our current leadership and membership are committed to action. However, what guides action? I feel, action should be guided by reason and history. You might add also principles, but arguably principles are just a summary of the history of our people. Yes, prioritize action but know your history. This year marks the 75th year for WES and our organization has racked up significant history. 

You may be asking what this message is about. The point is that we are losing history at WES and I’d like to appeal for help to preserve our digital records. 

I’ve initiated an effort to restore digital records to our web site from recovered parts of the old. You can see this material at ethicalsociety.org by following the menu path Connection=>The Past. Would anyone want to expand my effort? Would anyone volunteer to keep copies of digital records on a corner of their hard drive as backup? Does anyone even know how to add some indexing and search functions to the records? If so give me a shout by e-mail. (I’m plbaker on me.com)

I feel this appeal is timely in the 75th anniversary year of WES’s founding. It is also roughly 20 years into WES’s digital age. That is enough time to demonstrate the stark difference between paper and digital. Digital is fragile.  While WES generated and discarded tons of paper in 75 years, it has kept several piles of selected, useful paper documents. By contrast, in the last 20 years we’ve had three web site services. After each move, the public record starts from year zero. The previous years go in some desk. Meanwhile, our platform recordings are currently stored with a service that relies for its existence on micro-payments from music listeners – a highly unproven business model. Will SoundCloud last? For how long? It pays to worry about these things. Jone Johnson Lewis, the Leader at the Riverdale-Yonkers Ethical Society, compiled an incredible on-line, indexed collection of quotations from Felix Adler, Emerson and other leaders that I always found useful. It was at ethicalmanifold.org. Now good luck using it. Gone. 

Without getting too analytic here, I think we should think of history as a several step process: recording, preservation, curation, interpretation, publication. There is room for work on all aspects but I’ve been concerned with preservation and curation. That seems essential because without preservation, nothing will be available to curate, interpret and publish. Let me know what you think. 

Thanks,

Paul Baker — plbaker@me.com