Humanism
My Positions
- Humanism is the nearest existing name for the positive content of my world view: that this life is the only one we have, that morality comes from human needs rather than from above, that reason and evidence are how we find things out, and that people are owed dignity because they are people. I accept the label as a description.
- I do not lead with it. "Atheist" answers the question people actually ask; "humanist" answers one they rarely do; and a label is an invitation to a package deal I did not sign. My positions are held one at a time, each for its own reasons, and the humanism is the sum, not the premise.
- Humanism is not a religion and should not want to be one. Humanist weddings, funerals and namings are a good thing, and so are the communities that have grown up around them. The moment it acquires a creed to recite or a hierarchy to defer to, it has caught the disease it was meant to cure.
- Organised humanism in Britain campaigns for almost exactly the things in my social positions: assisted dying, no faith schools, no bishops in the legislature, no compulsory worship, no blasphemy laws, legal recognition of humanist marriage. My disagreements with it are about tone, not substance.
Notes
- What the word means. It has meant several things. The Renaissance humanists were scholars of Greek and Latin, mostly devout. "Humanism" as a secular ethical stance dates from the nineteenth century, through the positivist and ethical societies, and took institutional form in Britain in the Ethical Union of 1896, which became the British Humanist Association in 1967 and Humanists UK in 2017. The international movement defined itself in the Amsterdam Declaration of 1952, revised in 2002 and 2022, and American humanists in a series of manifestos from 1933 onward, the first of which still called itself "religious humanism" and was signed by John Dewey. The modern definition is stable: a naturalistic view of the world, an ethics grounded in human welfare and reason, a commitment to free enquiry and to democracy, and the explicit rejection of dogma. The 2022 declaration says humanism "imposes no creed", which is the clause that lets me sign it.
- Checked against the positions. Naturalism: yes (Philosophical naturalism, Consciousness, Life After Death). Morality from human needs: yes (Morality, Objective morality). Reason and evidence as the method: yes (Knowledge, Fallibilism). Human dignity: yes, with the qualification I always make, that we are factually unequal and morally equal and the two must not be confused (Equality). Flourishing as the aim: yes, in the harm-reduction form. Two places where I keep my hand on my wallet. First, humanism has a tendency to speak of progress as if it were a law of nature rather than a run of good results; the decline of violence is evidence, not a guarantee, and a humanism that forgets how recently and how often it has lost is a complacent one. Second, "human" in the name is doing work I am not sure it should: the suffering of a pig is not made weightless by its species, Peter Singer's argument on that point is the one I cannot answer (Veganism), and an ethics of welfare ought to follow the welfare wherever it is.
- Why not lead with it. Because of how labels work. Tell someone you are an atheist and they know one thing about you, which is correct. Tell them you are a humanist and they will assume a dozen things, several of which I hold and some of which I do not, and from then on you are defending the brand rather than the claim. Atheism note 4 says atheism carries no further commitments; that is a feature, and I would rather add the commitments by argument than by subscription. There is also the practical point that the word has been claimed by Christian humanists, Marxist humanists, Renaissance humanists and the Humanist Party of Argentina, so it needs a prefix anyway, and "secular humanist" is a phrase that only its enemies use with any energy.
- Not a church. The temptation is real and I understand it. Religion supplies ritual, community, a calendar and someone to call when your father dies, and Religion note 4 and The human need for religion both concede that these are real goods badly served by the alternatives. Humanist celebrants now conduct more weddings in Scotland than the Church of Scotland does, and a humanist funeral has the advantage of being about the person rather than the doctrine. Fine. The test of whether an institution has become a religion is whether there is anything you must believe to belong, and whether disagreement is heresy. So long as the answer to both is no, humanism is a club for people who have noticed the same things, and that is what it should stay. A "Sunday Assembly" with hymns about reason is harmless, and I would not attend one.
- The company. The label has been worn by Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, Kurt Vonnegut, who was honorary president of the American Humanist Association and said at Isaac Asimov's memorial that "Isaac is up in heaven now", which brought the house down because everyone there knew it was a joke, and in Britain by A. C. Grayling, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Fry among Humanists UK's officers and patrons. In the 2021 census 37 per cent of people in England and Wales declared no religion, and most of them hold something like the view above without having a word for it. Giving them the word is the useful thing organised humanism does, and it is why, asked directly, I will own it.
Sources
- Humanists International, The Amsterdam Declaration (2022) — https://humanists.international/what-is-humanism/the-amsterdam-declaration/
- Humanists UK, "What is humanism?" — https://humanists.uk/humanism/
- American Humanist Association, Humanist Manifesto I (1933), II (1973) and III (2003)
- Law, S., Humanism: A Very Short Introduction (2011)
- Grayling, A. C., The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism (2013)
- Vonnegut, K., A Man Without a Country (2005), for the Asimov story
- Office for National Statistics, Religion, England and Wales: Census 2021