Let’s not make the concept vacuous
Nigel Warburton talks to Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association. I particularly liked this bit –
I think it is more coherent to call Christians, for example, ‘Christians’ rather than ‘Christian humanists’ and Humanists ‘Humanists’ rather than ‘secular humanists’. If we try to call any and every philosophy that in some way has something to do with people ‘humanist’ then we make the concept itself vacuous. There is a recent book in the Teach Yourself series by the agnostic Mark Vernon which runs into this sort of difficulty. Thankfully, this is not a very prominent debate within Humanism and I think the common usage of ‘Humanism’ is still that of a non-religious philosophy.
That’s why so much of what Mark Vernon writes seems wrong-headed, at least to me. He’s so intent on, on the one hand, portraying atheists as dogmatic and fanatical and impoverished, and on the other hand, portraying religion as reasonable and rational and humanist. He seems to be on a mission to defend religion and denigrate atheism, despite (he always insists) no longer being religious himself. There’s a whole crowd of atheists and agnostics now making a career of rebuking atheists while flattering theists; Vernon’s one of the standard bearers of that crowd. They’re very tedious (and in Matthew Nisbet’s case, worse than tedious).
There seem to be two separate issues involved here.
1. the use of the word “humanist”.
2. the claim that atheism impoverishes life by Mr. Vernon.
I confess that I’ve never much liked the word “humanist” myself. There is a Partido Humanista (Humanist Party) in Chile, based on a 1960’s hippie cult. The Christian Democrats claim to be represent Christian humanism, and then there is the long dialogue in Sartre’s Nausea, where the self-taught man confesses to the narrator that he is a humanist, that he believes in man. You may recall the narrator’s bleak view of humanism, of the belief in man, which is more or less mine.
The view that atheism impoverishes life is more or less what I might call the T.S. Eliot view of religion, now back in its pop form. As Marx says, things occur twice, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce. Religion adds an aesthetic dimension to an otherwise sterile existence, according to this view. Back in the good old Middle Ages, life, without the alienating materialism of contemporary consumism, was fuller.
That religion is a mass illusion (I would call it a delusion, but Freud insists that it is an illusion) is hardly important to this school of thought. I could use the same argument in favor of hallucinagenic drugs, which certainly do make colors more brillant, etc. Maybe Mr. Vernon should smoke more or better quality pot.
Shouldn’t “humanist” be placed on Orwell’s list (Politics and the English Language) of words which have lost all meaning?
Perhaps along with the ‘Respect’ that everyone deserves?