Raymond Duncan GASTIL

Raymond GASTIL Obituary

GASTIL, Raymond Duncan Raymond Duncan Gastil, beloved husband and father, died December 14. A social scientist, he worked with Hudson Institute, Battelle Seattle Research Center, USAID, OECD, and launched the Freedom in the World survey. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard, after Fulbright and Ford Fellowships in the Middle East. A specialist in democracy and culture, he wrote Cultural Regions of the United States, Social Humanities, and Progress. He served on the Essex Planning Commission, the Essex Land Trust, Connecticut River Estuary Regional Planning Agency, and was active in planning issues in Deep River. He is survived by his wife, Jeannette; daughter, Leila; son, Raymond; and brother Gordon. At 2 p.m., Saturday, December 18, there will be a brief Graveside Service at the River View Cemetery, North Main Street, Essex, followed by a gathering in Deep River. Contributions in his memory may be made to the Essex Land Trust, P.O. Box 373, Essex CT, 06426. Arrangements by the Robinson, Wright & Weymer Funeral Home in Centerbrook.

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Published by Hartford Courant on Dec. 16, 2010.

Memories and Condolences
for Raymond GASTIL

Sponsored by michael sherman.

11 Entries

Michael Sherman

December 13, 2024

They still don´t come any better.

Roberta Cristina Gonçalves

July 19, 2013

A Beautiful Mind...

William Richter

December 28, 2012

I was saddened to learn, belatedly, of Ray Gastil's death. I knew him primarily through his work at Freedom House and his involvement with democracy strategies and assessments abroad in the early 1990s. I was fortunate to be included in one of his Freedom House conferences, on Muslim Central Asia, and in the subsequent Freedom in the World volume. I was also grateful when he phoned, some time later, to invite me to participate in a democracy strategy team in Pakistan. He led our small team there in 1990 and another such team in Bangladesh two years later. He was a wonderful person to work with, with character, depth, and mildness of manner that made living and working together both enjoyable and interesting. His contributions to democracy around the world were significant. We treasure his memory.

Steve Chivers

December 22, 2010

I first encountered “Big Ray” as a 7th grader when I became fast friends with his son Raymond. At that age, one of the first questions you ask a new friend is “what does your father do?” Raymond explained – repeatedly, because I never could quite understand what it meant -- that his father worked at a think tank. The answer only produced hazy images of my aquarium with the guppies and gouramis replaced with an exotic mix of thinkers and ponderers. At 12, it was simply beyond my comprehension that one could be paid to think. I had friends whose fathers were doctors and engineers, but this was something rare and intriguing. I realize now that Big Ray was the first real intellectual I ever met. This was back when the lights were on in American minds and “intellectual” wasn’t said with a dismissive sneer. Ray was a man who was genuinely interested in a multitude of things. He had kind eyes, a sly wit and a modest manner. Forty years after meeting him, as I read the comments here, it’s clear that he never lost his curiosity about the world nor his desire to improve it.

At niece's wedding behind brother (Gordon) and sister-in-law (Janet).

John Gastil

December 20, 2010

At Santa Barbara beach with Janet Gastil (spouse of brother, Gordon) and Cindy Simmons (spouse of nephew, John)

John Gastil

December 20, 2010

John Gastil

December 20, 2010

I knew my uncle, Raymond D. Gastil, as a scholar and public intellectual who showed me the relevance of rigorous social science to the largest questions of our time.

In his doctoral studies at Harvard, Uncle Ray created a special program for himself in “social humanities,” the title of his 1977 book that showed how values and science could inform one another, rather than stand in opposition.

His 1958 dissertation on modern Iranian culture launched his career as a cultural theorist. He made careful and modest contributions to the understanding of Iran and Pakistan, but his chief cultural work focused on the United States.

His most widely cited article appeared in 1971 in the American Sociological Review. “Homicide and a regional culture of violence” suggested that one’s place in the world mattered—that regions take on distinctive properties that do more than summarize the character of their inhabitants.

Decades before the Internet made such a project practical, he precisely recorded his nation’s regional divides in his 1975 book, Cultural regions of the United States.

Having cataloged the character of every state in the U.S., Uncle Ray turned his attention to the qualities of nation states. His enduring interest in democracy led him to study and rate the political rights and civil liberties in each country from 1972-1989. Working without a team of research assistants, he labeled nations as “free,” “partly free,” or “not free” (on a seven-point scale) for Freedom House, and from 1978-1989, he presented these ratings in book form as Freedom in the World, volumes that included influential essays on human rights, freedom, and democracy. The ratings became—and have remained—popular among comparativists, but Uncle Ray left Freedom House when they resisted his efforts to change the rating for the Soviet Union under Glasnost in the late 1980s.

In arguing for freedom and democracy, he clashed with the left by refusing to believe naïve claims about the “true freedom” of repressive communist regimes and their satellite states. From the right, he once drew the ire of Milton Friedman, who invited him to speak at a conference only to discover that Uncle Ray believed a free society would be free to design democratically the nature of its economic system.

His more recent projects showed that even the Freedom House work was not a wide enough scope for his mind. In 1993, he tried to glimpse the net effect of civilization itself in his book, Progress: Critical Thinking About Historical Change. From cave paintings to modern art, from tribal council to modern representative government, Uncle Ray hoped to show just how far we have come and showed more optimism in his analysis that any postmodern account of humanity would allow.

One of his last projects followed this work by establishing the Enlightenment Network (http://www.enlit.net). There, he argued, “As a society, we need to return to the attitudes and values that infused the Enlightenment of the 18th Century. We must reaffirm the possibilities of human progress that stirred previous generations. It is our hope that this site will contribute to this reawakening.”

In his lifetime, Uncle Ray has awakened--and reawakened--many of us, and as one touched by him, I can only say, "Thank you."

John Gastil
University of Washington
Seattle, WA

Michael Sherman

December 20, 2010

Ray Gastil was a model of intellectual that becomes harder and harder to find. Super-smart but modest, wide-ranging but balanced and deep, free of ideology but full of principle. His colleagues respected him, his friends cherished him.

Raymond W Gastil

December 20, 2010

Read at River View Cemetery, Essex,CT,
December 18.

Thank you so much for being here on this cold, clear, Connecticut afternoon. My Dad loved days like these, and he even loved this special place, right on the Connecticut River. Thank you for honoring his memory and our family.

I have a simple message to share: my Dad made life interesting. He made life interesting because for him, everything was a topic for study and discussion, No subject was too humble or too vast.

He made life interesting because he was so interested in life: the birds at the feeder, the hawks overhead, the fox in the yard. He didn’t get to travel much in his last few years, but he was never bored with the world around him. You all knew him, so this
will be familiar to you, but it is good to recall just how many subjects fascinated him, whether it was a political campaign in his Connecticut home town, or global nuclear weapons policy, the variety of bird songs or Connecticut River ecology.

Spending time with him was like having your own interactive World Book Encyclopedia. A visit to a Connecticut mill town involved lessons in history and industry. A visit to Switzerland involved visiting every single canton, every single cultural institution. He was a romantic –he loved the beautiful Swiss mountain valley, yet he was always the social scientist, interested in whether the dairy industry was still viable, and who spoke what language where.

International issues were a major part of his life, often of places where the world’s challenges still smolder, Pakistan, Iran, Vietnam. He studied democracy everywhere, Panama, El Salvador, Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. In semi-retirement, because he was never retiring, he had a blog before we had blogs, and he called it the New York Times Letters to the Editor page, where his voice appeared like clockwork every quarter.

But he never, ever, thought that those issues were more important than his wife and children, or more important than the life he lived in his community. I was astonished to learn that at 75 he was becoming the high school tennis coach here. I still marvel at it. He said that it took a while to get used to how much the kids swore, but he enjoyed himself and, as usual, brought a new perspective. Today’s athletic directors want their student-athletes to do aerobics and strength-building. My dad had a different, idea, that to get better at tennis, they needed to play more tennis, not to go jogging. Debatable, but I’d say that common sense was one of my Dad’s great virtues.

He loved this corner of Connecticut and the friends he made here. While he didn’t always get everything he desired, he knew he was one of the lucky ones, and never questioned that life was abundant. He was a great 20th-century American, and for him, the world was rich – which meant he was always ready to hear someone else's point of view, enjoy someone else’s success, take time to learn about his wife’s passions for art and culture and his children’s lives. There were always options and opportunities for improvement, whether on Main Street, the back meadow or his many web sites, and yes, his health, which he fought for with all his brilliance. And while he could get discouraged towards the end, he never stopped rallying. With the heroic support of my mother and sister, he rose to so many tasks. I’m so proud to have seen him rally again this fall, the democracy expert, in a wheel chair but still clear of mind and purpose, voting at the Deep River library this November, and I’m so proud to be his son. Thank you so much for being here with our family to remember him today.

Joanne McCarty

December 16, 2010

Dear Jeanette and Family,
With sympathy and support,Ray sounded like a man dedicated to his wife and family who had a rich and full life.
Joanne and John McCarty ( Joanne ,Saybrook Racquet Club)

Joyce Micale

December 16, 2010

May your hearts soon be filled with wonderful memories of joyful times together as you celebrate a life well lived.

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