We cannot revive old factions We cannot restore old policies Or follow an antique drum Mike Jenkins lives in Doncaster and is a member of the Yorkshire Sea of Faith Group. He worked for sixteeen years in the coal industry and then as a lecturer in Management Studies before illness forced early retirment five years ago. “Agenda for Faith” is available at £4.50 from Sea of Faith, 15 Burton Street, Loughborough LE1 12DT David Boulton reviews Nicolas Walter’s Humanism: What’s in a Word (Rationalist Press Association, nd Don said “Let there be a hisAw of the word humanism”, nd Lo! there was such a history.
And it was good.
When Don Cupitt, reviewing The Faith of a Quaker Humanist, wrote in our Summer 1997 issue that “somebody needs to write a history of humanism”, he was not to know that Nicolas Walter was putting the finishing touches to a book attempting just that: an historical survey of the many different ways in which the words “humanism” and “humanist” have been used over the years.
No-one is better qualified for the job. Nicolas Walter may be best known to some as the writer of pithy letters to the Guardian and other papers puncturing the latest pomposity or dogmatic truth-claim by church leaders. But he has a long and honourable record of conscientious dissent, first in radical politics and the peace movement, and for many years now as the most articulate voice in the fractured and fractious Humanist movement made up of such bodies as the British Humanist Association, the Rationalist Press Association, the Secular Society and South Place Ethical Society. His work is distinguished by scholarship, a breadth of vision not always characteristic of those who call themselves Humanists, and a mercifully easy-toread style. The casual reader would be unaware that his labours of love have been accompanied by a long struggle against poor health.
That said, I came to Humanism:
What’s in the Word with the assumption that, stimulating as it was bound to be, it would have a polemical and political purpose: to appropriate the labels £6 — £5 for “readers of Humanist papers”) The ‘W’ Word “Maybe to Walter’s many and various meanings of humanism, SoF can add Post-humanism; a view which embraces the humanist revolution of the 19th and 20th centuries, only to transform it into a broad-based, tolerant and free-form humanism for the 2|Ist’’. “humanism” and “humanist” for Nicolas Walter’s particular brand of hard-headed, rationalist, anti-religious humanism. I was wrong. In his introduction he acknowledges that “words are wild things”, they lead a life of their own. “Too many members of the organised Humanist movement, who call themselves Humanists and call for Humanism, are too much inclined to make the mistake of trying to appropriate these words, to claim them as being ‘our own’, and to restrict their use to our sense (assuming, of course, that we agree about ‘our’ sense).” Further, he quarrels with the International Humanist and Ethical Union for adopting a fixed “official basic definition” of humanism, and criticises individual humanists who have “complained about any qualification of ‘humanism’, and especially about any which associates it with religion”, such as “Religious Humanism” and “Christian Humanism”. “This approach”, he writes, “is surely both impracticable and undesirable...The various forms of Religious Humanism may puzzle both religious and nonreligious people, but they make sense to religious Humanists themselves”.
He goes on: “The facts are that, while ‘Humanism’ happens to be the word we [the Humanist organisations] now use, it isn’t ‘our own’; that it has been, is being and will be used by many other people in many other ways; that most of its senses have actually involved religion;...that semantic dogmatism and verbal authoritarianism are quite alien to what most of us understand by being Humanist”.
Words can’t be stolen. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “the meaning of a word is the way in which it is used”.
Things are what they are known as.
Thus theologians like Karl Barth and Paul Tillich may claim “Christian Humanism”, Martin Buber “Jewish Humanism”, and “the Quakerism of the Society of Friends is often close to Humanism”. Later, in a section on “Religious or Secular Humanism?”, he writes: “Similarly, the later progressive elements in the Christian Churches in Britain who have been abandoning theism and joining the Sea of Faith movement call their position ‘Christian Humanism’, and the progressive Jews in both America and Britain and also in Israel who have been abandoning theism call their position ‘Humanistic Judaism’. It is wrong to call these positions ‘contradictions in terms’ or to call their adherents hypocrites. There is an infinitely wide spectrum extending from total belief to total unbelief and the intermediate points have often employed combinations of terms.” Here, of course, Nicolas Walter is battling with some of his own more blinkered colleagues to whom any link or association whatever with religion is the sin against humanism’s holy ghost. There are humanist fundamentalists who make it their life’s crusade to eliminate such words as “faith” and “spiritual values” from a fully-enlightened humanist’s vocabulary. One major value of Walter’s book is that it may open the eyes of the Humanist movement’s exclusive brethren to the broad-spanned history of the label they clutch so protectively to their breasts.
The word “humanist”, says Walter, first appears in 15th-century Renaissance Italy, where it was applied to those who studied the Latin and Greek classics rather than the religious scriptures. It appears in French in 1552, in Spanish in 1615, and in German in the 18th century. It makes two appearances in 16th-century English, the first to describe a 1589 translation of classical Latin poetry and the second, in 1596, in a decidedly secular setting: the first published proposal for a water-closet! By 1605 Francis Bacon was lumping “humanists” among those like “antiquaries” and “poets” who were not physicians or scientists, but only twelve years later Fynes Morrison was defining “the Humanist” as “him that affects the knowledge of State affaires, Histories, Cosmography, and the like”. Johnson’s dictionary (1755) returned to the more limited definition of “philologer, grammarian”, but Webster (1841) widened it again to “one versed in the knowledge of human nature”.
Meanwhile an Irish clergyman named Patrick Delaney, living in England, had started a short-lived magazine as early as 1757 called “The Humanist”, The title, said the editor, meant “amusement... [and] entertaining knowledge of various kinds, historical, classical, natural, moral, and now-and-then a little religion”.
Interestingly, the word was not used by those who now tend to be seen as the founders of the Humanist tradition: the French Libertins, English Freethinkers, German philosophers and European and American advocates of a “Religion of Humanity” like “Seated Youth”, bronze by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, 1918 Thomas Paine, Auguste Comte or George Eliot and her circle. And when the term “humanism” began to be used first in Germany near the end of the 18th century, it was appropriated, ironically, by the defenders of traditional education in Christian religion and classical studies, as against the educational innovators of the Enlightenment. In English its first use was by Coleridge in 1812, where he defines as a Socinian (ie a Unitarian) “a man who has passed from orthodoxy to the loosest Arminianism, and thence to Arianism, and thence to direct Humanism”. Coleridge added, incidentally, that the Humanist was likely “to fall off into the hopeless abyss of atheism”.
Coleridge’s throw-away line proved prophetic (as did so much of the writing of this extraordinary philosopher/theologian/poet/critic/nonrealist). The Unitarians of South Place Chapel in London broke from Unitarianism in 1830 and embarked on their journey towards humanism, becoming a religion-free Ethical Society in 1888. The same kind of thing happened on a much larger scale within American Unitarianism where several churches, having long abandoned the first and second persons of the Trinity, began to take leave of the third person too. As Walter puts it, “Between the two world wars, about one-tenth of the Unitarian denomination became Humanists, and there was danger of schism between ‘God Men’ and ‘No God Men’; but first the Humanists began to leave, and then the latter began to adopt Humanism as well”.
It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that it was only those who came to humanism through the progressive religious traditions like left Unitarianism, left Quakerism and “modernist” or “demythologised” theology who saw Humanism as itself a religion. Even Arnold Ruge (who briefly co-edited a magazine with Karl Marx), ‘described by Walter as the 19th-centu- ry “pioneer of non-religious philosophical Humanism”, described Humanism in 1841 as “the new religion, realised Christianity”. In the 1850s he was preaching that “real Humanism has to abolish neither philosophy nor religion, but to establish a new system of both” — a “religion of Humanism” for “Freethinking men”, (Freethinking woman was an idea whose time had not yet come).
Even G.J. Holyoake began by describing his humanism (though he did not use the word) as Rational Religion before he turned to “Secularism” and later “Rationalism”.
Well into the 20th century such giants of Humanism as Albert Einstein and Julian Huxley defined humanism in religious terms, Einstein calling himself both an atheist and a “deeply religious man”, and Huxley arguing to the end of his long life that “Scientific Humanism” was a “religion without revelation”, a “religion of life”, a “religion based on science and nature”.
The essence of this new religion was “a protest against supernaturalism: the human spirit, now in its human, now in its corporate aspects, is the source of all values and the highest reality we know”.
So, Walter concludes, there is no one true meaning of the word “humanism”. There are or have been classical, philosophical, political, religious, pragmatic, secular, ethical, rationalist, scientific, socialist, ecological, existentialist and many more humanisms and humanists. The Humanist movement itself still argues whether its own humanism is “a religion or a philosophy, a ‘life-stance’ analogous with religion or a worldview opposed to religion, a way of life or an evasion of responsibility, a movement or an attitude”. But if the word is only a few hundred years old, and still evolving in meaning, the tradition — like that of Christianity — goes back a couple of millenia. “In the mythological terms of the age in which it first appeared, Humanism is both Protean and Promethean — like Proteus it constantly changes its form, and like Prometheus it offers assistance to humanity and defiance to the gods. And in the philosophical terms of the age in which it first appeared, Humanism involves both philanthropia and paideia — our identification with all other actual members of the human species, and our cultiva- tion of the ideal humanity within ourselves and other men and women.
Two final morsels of food for thought:
Firstly, given the attrition rate of earlier “religious humanist” organisations, what chance does SoF have of survival? We are far from the first proponents from within the religious tradition to declare that all religious faith is a human creation, that all gods reside in the human breast, made in human imagination, language and culture. A Humanistic Religious Association saying much the same things existed in London in the 1850s, there were humanistic Free Religious Congregations in Germany, and Humanist Unitarian churches in Britain and America. There were Ethical Societies in the 19th century holding religious if non-theistic Sunday services and annual conferences on human values.
What happened to them? It seems that, having started with the intention of modernising and rationalising religion, they found themselves moving steadily towards secular humanism until they split apart at the seams, some members resisting the trend and eventually being reabsorbed into the liberal churches, others abandoning the language and rituals of religion altogether and setting up shop as wholly secular associations. Thus America’s left Unitarians became the American Humanist Association, and London’s South Place Unitarian Church became the uncompromisingly rationalist South Place Ethical Society. Often those who stayed within, and those who moved beyond a religious sensibility, attacked each other bitterly and the chance to transform and humanise religion from within was lost. The only victors were the colour-blind who could only see and think in stark blacks and whites.
Can Sea of Faith avoid the same fate?
Secondly, does Sea of Faith have its own brand of humanism, its own special meaning for the word? In the article I referred to at the beginning, Don Cupitt urges the need for a history of “humanism” to help us “get really clear about just what version of religious humanism we are commending, and why”. A Network exploring and promoting religious faith as a human creation, and emphasising the wholly human nature of our values and experiences, is clearly humanist. But does it have its own “version” of humanism? In what sense, if any, is it part of what Nicolas Walter calls “the Humanist movement”?
A full answer will require several more articles (from several hands).
Suffice it to say that SoF humanism would be not only better-disposed towards the poetry of religious tradition and its inspirational potential, but also critical of the philosophical realism of the older humanism -— its apparent assumption of the objectivity of Reason or Rationality or Science, its implicit belief in some real, foundational essence of human nature. Many mainstream humanists have long abandoned God but have not yet taken leave of a secular version of metaphysical foundationalism —- which is a way of saying that some humanists still live in the modern world and have not yet come to terms with post-modernism. Maybe to Walter’s many and various meanings of humanism SoF can add Posthumanism; a view which embraces the humanist revolution of the 19th and 20th centuries, only to transform it into a broad-based, tolerant and free-form humanism for the 21st.