Why I’m a humanist.
And what’s it got to do with the human condition?
Before I begin prognosticating I’d better offer some background notes:
- This entirely non-fictive piece was originally called ‘On the Human Condition’, which is an awfully pretentious title.
- I’m an atheist.
- And that’s despite being raised in a Seventh Day Adventist home. This statement needs a little clarification/explication: my father was a churchgoer, but not my mother, and he’d been a wild youth. He found god somewhere in the Highlands of New Guinea in 1952. He was a regular attender of the SDA church on Ela Beach in New Guinea and all his children were trooped along with him until age 13, when dear old father gave us his word that we could choose what we wanted to do with our Saturdays. I chose to play football. [My recollection is that both my brother and sister did not choose to stop walking the narrow path until they were older. But that does not make of me a rebel, merely someone who wanted to play football. I do not recall wrestling with my conscience.]And maybe I’m a mis-rememberer too – who knows when my older brother and younger sister chose not to attend church? I was a teenager and not paying much attention to anyone other than me and various friends. But both my brother and my sister, like me, did stop going to church. My brother sees himself as an atheist, my sister is more an agnostic.
- I flirted for quite a while with agnosticism but now consider myself a humanist who does not believe – that should be think; let’s leave beliefs out of it – there is a god. An atheist. It’s up to us. No supernatural interventions are going to happen – nor have happened. So what are we to do about the state of the world. I’ve read my Bregman, Hitchens and Dawkins, and any number of others on the human condition – and here I go…
Part of what prompted this stream of consciousness[1] – though a little post stream editing is bound to occur, I can’t help myself; thus I should call it a modified stream of consciousness – is that I began reading Humanly Possible [ a much better title than my original, but it was taken]. In the introduction [not even the first chapter, pre-corporeal] Bakewell writes: ‘ “What is humanism?” That is the question posed, in David Nobbs’s 1983 comic novel Second from Last in the Sack Race, at the inaugural meeting of the Thurmarsh Grammar School Bisexual Humanist Society – ‘bisexual’ because it includes both girls and boys. Chaos ensues.’ (Bakewell, Sarah. Humanly Possible, p. 1, Random House. Kindle Edition.)
And chaos should indeed ensue… dispute over first things- it’s the nature of humanism, and, for that matter, religion. Indeed, it’s natural to any ideology, philosophy, body of thought.
And what should we call humanism? Of what are we speaking? I like that Bakewell’s first foray into the weighty bag of humanism is a comic novel. Chaotic indeed.
So.
In the novel, the Thurmarsh students offer a wildly see sawing range of definitions, all delivered with varying degrees of emotional fervour. What stopped me – and prompted this slathering of words – was this little bit:
‘ “It’s a philosophy that rejects supernaturalism, regards man as a natural object and asserts the essential dignity and worth of man and his capacity to achieve self-realisation through the use of reason and the scientific method.” This is well received, until someone else raises a problem: some people do believe in God, yet they call themselves humanists. The meeting ends with everyone more confused than they were at the start.’ (Ibid, pp. 2-3)
Like that student, I had thought that god [supernaturalism] had been banished from humanism. Apparently not.
It takes a little while to get there, but eventually Bakewell determines that the god believing humanist is perfectly acceptable to humanism – and a humanist – because ‘their focus remains mostly on the lives and experiences of people here on Earth, rather than on institutions or doctrines, or the theology of the Beyond.’ (Loc cit.)
Now, what did she mean by their focus remains on the lives and experiences of people here on earth, rather than institutions and doctrines [dogma?]?
I gave this question more than a little thought. Did Bakewell mean that these people were ‘religious’ but NOT members of a Religion with its institutions and doctrines, its dogma? Was theirs a humanist ideology/philosophy that accepted god as a first principle but not membership of any institutionalised religion?
Hmnn? It wasn’t just the Thurmarsh students who were confused.
I read on.
She writes: ‘Religious, non-religious, philosophical, practical and humanities-teaching humanists – what do all these meanings have in common, if anything? The answer is right there in the name: they all look to the human dimension of life.’ (Ibid, p. 3)
After a little of what passes for thought in my mind, I found this idea of looking to the human dimension – after all they’re all humanist – acceptable. Perhaps some humanists acceptance of the idea that there is a god must be considered illogical[2]. The illogical is of course part of the human condition because humans – and several other species, perhaps – exist at both a cognitive and an emotional level: never purely reasonable, nor entirely emotive. That’s our condition. Thus we must accept that some humanists, and humans, will – illogically – both believe in god BUT not religion as an institution. The humanist who believes in god will still make their focus human connections. Such an oxymoron is not for me, but permissible – am I not generous? – if our focus remains human connections. I should add that to the humanist those connections are not just with other humans but the entire panoply of life on this planet.
Religion is banned but god might just be allowed a nod. The nature of our human connections is all.
And via my brain’s love of digression, I thought then of another book I’d recently read; Rutger Bregman’s Humankind. The key idea of this text’s rich and complex exploration of the human condition (and our connections with others, or non-connections) is that we are essentially a trusting and positive species; Rousseau’s noble savage somehow tricked by time, and civilisation, into something that is not really human – a distrust of our fellow creatures. Bregman would agree with Camus’s character in The Plague – one Dr. Rieux – ‘that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.’
Might the humanist have more faith in his or her fellows than those less inclined to humanism? [And is faith the word I want, or is trust the better word?] Is the secret to a betterment of the human condition a humanist approach, simply because in some ways the humanist is more the noble savage – pre God, if you like – than those of a more civilised and/or god fearing bent?
And why not end with this question?
[1] Another part of what prompted this is a realisation that we are continually engaged in a discussion of this human condition. It’s ongoing but particularly pertinent – I think – now. We seem very much engaged – in our political institutions, in the social realms, including social media, in the current debates re wokeness and whether democracy is dead or at least terminally ill, et cetera. – in this debate re how humans connect to each other and the world at all levels. Interestingly, Bakewell’s Introduction is entitled ONLY CONNECT.
[2] Illogical but NOT inhuman.
Inkstained fingers 