11 Humanisms
11
Humanisms: Secular and Religious
‘Who then will not look with wonder upon man?’1
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
As we reflect on the uncertain future of humanity, we need to ask what is distinctive and important about the human race. It is, at present, the most developed species in the natural world. Yet many are now reluctant to speak of humanity as representing the culmination of the evolutionary process. Why? Because, if Darwin is right, our presence at the top of the evolutionary tree is nothing but an accident, the consequence of a series of fortuitous and unintended twists in the unpredictable and uncontrollable narrative of evolution, doubtless helped along (as Thomas Huxley pointed out) by human cunning and violence. Charles Darwin may have found this an uncomfortable implication of his theory of natural selection, yet he did not hold back from sharing it with his readers: humanity’s elevated position within the order of nature was an undeserved fluke.2
We therefore need to think about humanism – an attempt to understand what is distinct and good about human beings, and how such virtues can be safeguarded. In the lazy and uncritical world of twenty-first-century journalism, the meaning of the word ‘humanism’ is self-evident and unproblematic. It designates ways of thinking and living which exclude God, focusing instead on the achievements and aspirations of human beings. The idea of a ‘Christian humanism’ is thus dismissed as an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, one of the impossible things that Lewis Carroll’s Alice valiantly tried to believe before breakfast.
Yet this influential way of thinking about humanism cannot be sustained without doing violence to contemporary experience or to history. It is not exactly difficult to point to a very large group of human beings who frame their aspirations and ground their achievements in religious terms! The real difficulty, however, is historical, in that this specific concept of secular humanism – to give it its proper name – was invented in the twentieth century. It bears little relation to the nobler and more generous visions of humanism that emerged in the European Renaissance, associated with genial and wise writers such as Erasmus of Rotterdam. We need to reclaim such an older and wiser vision of humanism, which is much better adapted for the challenges that humanity faces in the twenty-first century, and is more rigorously grounded in history and science than the impoverished ‘secular humanism’ that has temporarily gained the ascendancy. Let’s begin by doing some history.
The Renaissance: The Historical Origins of Humanism
Humanism was the intellectual glory of the Renaissance, that remarkable period in European history from about 1300 to 1600 which witnessed the transformation of culture through an immersion in the cultural vitality of the ancient world. It was a programme without parallel at the time, attracting individuals on account of the commanding power of its aesthetic vision, and its sense of new possibilities that would enrich the lives of individuals and nations. Humanism arose in Italy in the 1300s, and slowly made its way northwards and westwards, becoming a significant presence in England in the early sixteenth century.
My own interest in Renaissance humanism developed during the 1980s, when I specialised in a group of humanist writers based in Switzerland, including Joachim von Watt (1484–1551), Heinrich Glarean (1488–1563), and Johannes Xylotectus (1507–68). These writers did not fit into a rigid intellectual template, and exemplified the diversity that is now generally regarded as characteristic of Renaissance humanism. As I worked in university archives in the cities of Zurich, Vienna and St Gallen, I began to absorb something of the excitement which saturated the cultural and ecclesial atmosphere of the age.3 Renewal and regeneration were in the air! It was possible to step over the ‘Middle Ages’ (a phrase, by the way, invented by supporters of the Renaissance) which separated the present from the glories of antiquity, and allow their fruitful reconnection.
Modern readers tend to assume that ‘humanists’ were individuals who subscribed to a common body of beliefs, attitudes and values known as ‘humanism’, in much the same way as Marxists are individuals who subscribe to the ideas of Marxism. Yet there is little historical evidence for this assumption. Renaissance humanism was not an ideological programme of any kind, still less an anti-religious movement.4 It was fundamentally about the ‘pursuit of eloquence’ – the renewal of a moribund culture through the ‘revival of good letters’.5
Referring to someone as a ‘humanist’ in the fifteenth or early sixteenth century tells us little about their philosophical, political or religious views. In fact, the term ‘humanism’ is best seen as a nineteenth-century invention. During the time of the Renaissance itself, the word ‘humanist’ (Italian umanista) was widely used to refer to a university teacher of studia humanitatis – a Latin phrase designating ‘humane studies’, or the ‘liberal arts’, such as poetry, grammar and rhetoric. The English word ‘humanist’ ?rst appears in 1589, with the sense of ‘a literary scholar, especially someone versed in Latin studies’.
The Italian Renaissance is so multi-faceted that just about every generalisation concerning its characteristic ideas tends to be a distortion. It is for this reason that the view of humanism developed by Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905–99) is of such importance, in that it was able to account for at least a substantial amount of the remarkable diversity of outlooks evident within the Renaissance.6
Kristeller offered a nuanced and sensitive account of humanism, which envisaged the movement as essentially cultural and educational, primarily concerned with written and spoken eloquence, and only secondarily concerned with matters of philosophy and politics. Although Renaissance humanism was characterised by no distinctive philosophical or ideological stance, the fact remains that, virtually without exception, Renaissance humanists were Christians operating within the context of the life and thought of the Church, and concerned for its reform and renewal. The Enlightenment tendency to portray the humanists as precursors of its critique of religion lacks plausibility, not least because leading humanists of the age – such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Lorenzo Valla and Desiderius Erasmus– tended to see humanism as continuous with the medieval Catholic spiritual tradition, rather than as a precursor of rationalism.
In debates about the ‘New Atheism’ between 2006 and 2011, I was astonished to find that some followers of this movement seriously believed that Erasmus and other leading Renaissance humanists were atheists. When I asked them for documentary evidence of this, they declared that it was below their dignity to respond to such ridiculous questions. If these writers were humanists, then by definition they were atheists. When I asked them to explain Erasmus’s strongly religious views in works such as his New Testament commentaries, or his highly influential Enchiridion Militis Christiani (‘Handbook of the Christian Soldier’, 1503), it became clear that they had not read any of them, and were dependent on popular atheist writers for their ridiculous views. I began to realise it was necessary to challenge this nonsense. Renaissance humanism has, to put it bluntly, been hijacked in the service of modern ideological agendas. Truth, as they say, is the first casualty of warfare.
So how did this myth of an intrinsically atheist humanism take root? In fact, this turns out to be a recent development, in which a specific and unrepresentative form of humanism – best designated as ‘secular humanism’ – asserted proprietorial rights over the more dignified and noble views of the Renaissance. Paul Kurtz, one of America’s most prominent sceptics and atheists,7 played a leading role in reshaping and redirecting American humanism in a specifically secular fashion during the late 1970s and early 1980s, largely by suppressing both its historic religious origins and continuing religious associations and commitments. While the original American ‘Humanist Manifesto’ (1933) made specific approving reference to religious humanism,8 Kurtz vigorously advocated more secular forms of humanism, and founded the ‘Council for Secular Humanism’ to lobby for a more aggressively anti-religious attitude within the American Humanist Association. He was one of the two primary authors of ‘Humanist Manifesto II’ (1973), setting out a vision for humanism framed exclusively in secularising terms.
Lazy and uncritical media reporting ensured that Kurtz’s vision of secular humanism quickly became elided with humanism as a whole, and was read back into older visions and implementations of the movement. This process gave rise to the utterly incredible and unevidenced belief that Renaissance humanism was an essentially atheistic movement. This makes a nonsense of history – at least, to those who know that history and realise the intellectual violence that is being done to historical scholarship by ideologically driven agendas. Although serious disagreements within the Council for Secular Humanism made headlines in 2010,9 media reporting of humanism continues to be trapped within a secularist framework. It’s time to move on from this outdated and indefensible perception.
Readers of this book who are unaware of the rich intellectual and cultural heritage of the Renaissance need to know that the term ‘humanism’, as used today, bears little relation to its historical predecessors. Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked that certain terms needed ‘to be withdrawn from language and sent for cleaning’ before they can be ‘put back into general circulation’.10 It is hard not to appreciate the wisdom of his remark for our topic. So can the term ‘humanism’ be cleaned up and put back into general circulation, shorn of distorted interpretations and sectarian agendas? It’s time to recover the word from the ideologues and put it back into circulation for everyone to own and use. There is, and never has been, any problem in speaking of ‘Christian humanism’ – save on the part of those concerned to impose their dogmatic and sectarian understanding of ‘humanism’ on everyone else.
Whatever else humanism may be – and there are multiple understandings of its significance, some secular and some religious – all forms of humanism affirm the importance of humanity, and its distinctiveness within the natural order. As the great Renaissance writer Pico della Mirandola remarked, ‘Who then will not look with wonder upon man?’11 The rise of the ‘Age of Ideology’ in the twentieth century saw the rise of dehumanising ideologies, such as Nazism and Stalinism. The forceful reassertion of a theologically grounded view of human rights and dignity in the Soviet bloc – then teetering on the brink of collapse – was one of the most significant achievements of Pope John Paul II, who spent much of his life working in Poland during the Soviet era.12 This vision of Christian humanism, grounded in a robust theological understanding of the human person, may only be one version of humanism – but it serves both to demonstrate the plurality of humanisms and to undermine the claims of any one variant of humanism to speak for the entire movement.
Yet there is another issue that emerges from this brief discussion of John Paul II’s religious humanism. Does the existence of religion itself undermine or subvert the entire intellectual and moral plausibility of secular humanism? In what follows, we shall pick up on a concern expressed in the writings of the great Oxford philosopher Bernard Williams (1929–2003) – himself a secular humanist – that the movement has never really faced up to the intellectual and moral consequences of its belief that religion is a human invention. It’s an important point, and we shall consider it in some detail.
The Problem of Religion for Secular Humanism
As a secular humanist, Williams had a marked distaste for religion, but he was acutely aware of the intellectual implications of any suggestion that religion was evil or degenerate. If there is no God, or any transcendent being, then religion is a mirror, reflecting the heart and soul of its creators – human beings. And that, he pointed out, exposed some glaring internal contradictions within ‘humanist’ thinking.
For granted that [religion’s] transcendental claim is false, human beings must have dreamed it, and we need an understanding of why this was the content of their dream. (Humanism – in the contemporary sense of a secularist and anti-religious movement – seems seldom to have faced fully a very immediate consequence of its own views; that this terrible thing, religion, is a human creation.)13
So if religion is indeed intrinsically degenerate and perverting (a belief that Williams regarded as normative), this ought to give humanists grave cause for concern about the goodness and integrity of human nature itself.
This is an important point, and needs to be explored thoroughly. The New Atheists hold that God is to be blamed for the evil of the world. God is nasty, vindictive and oppressive. This fundamental criticism is summed up by Richard Dawkins in an oft-quoted, if slightly hysterical, passage from his God Delusion: ‘The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.’14 Yet this New Atheism scapegoating of God for the rational and moral failings of human beings merely exposes what many, including Williams, see as a fatal contradiction within its own worldview. Everything that is wrong with the world, the New Atheism assures us, can be blamed on God. But if God is an invention, a ‘fictional’ character with no existence outside deluded human minds, that idea of God can only emerge from human minds. Christopher Hitchens argues that human beings create God in their own likeness, attributing their own moral and rational qualities to these supposed supernatural beings. ‘God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about.’15 Both God and religions must be recognised to be ‘man-made’.16
But there is clearly a problem here. The logic of both Dawkins’ and Hitchens’ analysis of God and religion as human fabrications leads to the conclusion not that religion corrupts an innocent humanity, but that corrupt human beings create a religion that is just as evil and degenerate as they are. Let me playfully rewrite Dawkins’ piece in the light of this point.
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction, created by equally unpleasant human beings who were jealous and proud of it; who were petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freaks; who were vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleansers; who were misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bullies; and who created their gods in their own image.
More aggressive forms of secular humanism – such as the New Atheism – are thus caught in a dilemma which is both framed and created by two of its core beliefs: God is evil and nasty; and God is a delusion created by human beings. The more the New Atheism excoriates religion as irrational and immoral, the more it inadvertently highlights the irrationality and immorality of its human creators. This is obviously a problem for secular humanism. As Williams points out, the root of the problem is not religion, but humanity. If Dawkins is right, and God and religion are just nasty human delusions, what does this tell us about the moral and intellectual status of the human beings who invented these nasty ideas?
The easiest way of getting out of this mess is to develop a New Atheist variant of Manichean dualism, which declares that some human beings are moral and rational (and hence secular), and others are evil and intellectually degenerate (and hence religious). This strategy lies behind the use of the word ‘Bright’ as a positive designation of someone with secular or atheist views. It was enthusiastically commended by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins back in 2003.17 Brights weren’t responsible for the outrageous invention of God; both God and religion were dreamed up by less intelligent, less enlightened human beings. Yet the notion of the ‘Bright’ was widely ridiculed – even within secularist circles – as elitist and self-congratulatory. Christopher Hitchens openly mocked Dawkins and Dennett for their ‘cringe-making proposal that atheists should conceitedly nominate themselves to be called “Brights” ’.18
For most of us, religion is a striking example of something with great potential for good but that can go badly wrong. William Temple (1881–1944), sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, delivered a series of lectures at the University of Glasgow on the theme of religion in 1932, in which he declared that there were good reasons for suggesting that religion had done more harm than good to humanity. The problem lay in the corruption of religion. ‘Religion itself, when developed to real maturity, knows quite well that the first object of its condemnation is bad Religion, which is a totally different thing from irreligion, and can be a very much worse thing.’19
Nobody denies that religion can go badly wrong. Yet religion here turns out to be a particularly luminous example of a general problem with human nature. Just about everything that we blame for enslaving or perverting us turns out to be a human creation. Terry Eagleton thus takes no small pleasure in lampooning the self-indulgent and self-congratulatory optimism of much Western liberalism by pointing out that the social evils against which it pits itself are themselves the outcome of human decisions and actions. We blame society for our ills, but just who created that society in the first place?20 Human beings thus act as both their own oppressors and liberators.
As Aristotle pointed out, human beings are social animals, who create societies – and those societies are shaped by human values. Reinhold Niebuhr argued that, while individuals often showed a willingness and ability to transcend self-interest in their personal dealings, this tendency was at best imperfectly realised at a corporate level. Relations between nations, ethnic groups or social classes often show little if any capacity for self-transcendence. Yet paradoxically, a dehumanising society is ultimately a human creation, a depressing witness to both the fragility of human moral concerns and the lingering power of human self-interest.21
So what can be done to change this situation? To make both individual human beings and human societies more just and humane? For many, the answer lies in education.
Humanism and Education
Renaissance humanism regarded education as essential to the future of humanity. It was a channel for the transmission of inter-generational wisdom, capable of creating a moral and cultural vision for the future of humanity. My own study of Swiss humanism in the early 1500s brought home to me how much education mattered to the Renaissance. Many humanists of the age saw the study of the humanities – such as history and rhetoric – as keys that unlocked the potential of human beings to achieve their true potential.
It is a bold and brilliant vision, characteristic of Renaissance humanism at its best. Yet some will wonder whether it quite matches the remarkable capacity of human beings to do utterly stupid and destructive things. Can we be educated to be good? Or do we need some kind of moral transformation in order to help us to love good in the first place, and pursue it in the second? Some within the humanist movement of the Renaissance took the view that only God is capable of bringing about the radical transformation of human nature that is needed if we are indeed to love good, rather than our own self-interests. Others hoped for a rationalisation of self-interest, limiting its toxic scope.
It’s a long way from the upbeat optimism of the Renaissance to the year 1942, when Stanford University in California opened its new School of the Humanities. The celebration of that event was somewhat muted. How could the cultural achievements of humanity be applauded and promoted as a force for good in the light of the devastation of the Great War (1914–18), and the rise of totalitarianism in many parts of Europe previously regarded as bastions of civilisation? As if that were not enough, the United States itself was now caught up in a new global conflict, having declared war on Japan and its allies a few months earlier, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. John W. Dodds (1902–89), the first Dean of the School of Humanities, conceded it was not a particularly propitious moment to celebrate human cultural achievements. Why establish ‘an outpost of the humanities’ and talk about the ‘place of culture in our civilization’ when that civilisation itself was teetering on the brink of disaster?22
Dodds acknowledged the force of this point. The disasters into which the world had lurched in recent decades seemed to speak more of inhumanity and insanity than of the great human cultural virtues. Tempering his idealism with a heady dose of realism, Dodds offered a sober account of the enigmas and inconsistencies of human nature, above all the need to confront our capacity for destruction.
[Human technological] development has been accompanied by a progressive dehumanization of society, until at last the Frankenstein monster seems in a good way to wipe out its master. Man’s mechanical contrivances are the marvel of the world, but morally and ethically and socially we are still (relatively speaking) trying to crawl out of the primeval slime. Man has gained mastery of his environment but he seems to be less and less master of himself. Today we see him turning the weapons of his brain against himself—groping, amid the noise of a tottering civilization, for some faith in man to which he can cling.
Yet for Dodds, the humanities articulated a vision which might both sustain a nation during a time of war, and guide its post-war construction. ‘We need to be reminded of the dignity of man, to remember that we are potentially noble, to learn the infinite worth of the individual.’ Once the war was over, it might be possible to recover such lost ideals and dreams.
For me, some sections of Dodds’ 1942 speech stand out as being among the finest defences I have read of the place of the humanities in safeguarding certain core values of Western culture, and of the role of education in creating better and wiser people. Yet there are points at which his speech seems so unrealistic about the moral qualities of humanity that it verges on the utopian. There has always been a stream of thought within Western culture which holds that education transforms people, converting them from a selfish ignorance to a generous toleration. Yet this often reflects the importance of peer pressure in maintaining positive and generous social values, and the social role of universities in influencing students’ political and social views through judicious selection processes, which filter out those with undesirable attitudes and outlooks. It is unclear whether education itself – as opposed to other social processes – modifies the human tendency towards self-interest and self-promotion.
The outbreak of the Second World War precipitated a fresh outburst of reflection on the enigma of human nature. Although the full horror of the Nazi extermination camps did not become apparent until 1945, as the war in Europe moved into its final phases, many suspected that both sides of the conflict had committed atrocities that could only be described as ‘inhuman’. So how could human beings behave in such an inhuman manner? Surely a good education would prevent such things from happening?
Maybe it should have. But it didn’t. One example will suffice to indicate the scale of the problem. In January of 1942, thirteen Nazi technocrats gathered for a conference at 56–58 am Grossen Wannsee, a villa in a leafy suburb of Berlin.23 Most of those present were highly educated, with doctorates or medical qualifications from leading German universities. Their task was to agree protocols and procedures for the elimination of Jews from Germany and the occupied territories. One copy of the protocols agreed by the meeting has survived, detailing – although in somewhat euphemistic language – the arrangements for the deportation, economic exploitation and final extermination of the Jews.24 While I like to think that learning makes us into better people, I have to admit that I find it very hard to see how their education ‘humanised’ these people.
One of the more thoughtful reflections on such themes came from the pen of C.S. Lewis, whose fame in Britain stemmed initially from a series of wartime talks, broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation.25 While realising that humanity’s capacity for self-deception was so great that such sombre lessons would simply be suppressed and forgotten once the war was over, Lewis nevertheless took the view that optimistic ideas of human nature had been dealt a deathblow by the horrors of the war. Lewis’s Abolition of Man (1943) is one of his most difficult books, lacking the clarity of many of his works of this period. Yet alongside Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), it remains one of the most eerily prescient books of the twentieth century, opening up awkward questions about human nature that just will not go away – including our failure to learn from our past.
The Threat of Dehumanisation
One of the core tasks of any viable form of humanism – whether Christian or secular – is to resist the perennial threat of dehumanisation. This almost invariably takes the form of one social ‘in-group’ declaring that a social ‘out-group’ is less than human – for example, in referring to its members as ‘animals’ or ‘vermin’. The most familiar example of this is the dehumanising racial ideology of National Socialism, which treated Jews, gypsies, Poles and Serbs as Untermenschen (German: ‘sub-humans’). Yet recent history is littered with genocides which reflect the influence of dehumanising ideologies – such as the Armenian genocide of 1915–17, or the Rwandan genocide of 1994.26 Part of the solution must be to challenge and neutralise such value-laden ideologies, which cause one set of human beings to regard others as representing a lower form of life.
Yet the threat of dehumanisation is broader than this. It lurks within the tendency to commodify humanity, treating persons as if they were objects of potential commercial value or economic exploitation. This corrosive process of depersonalisation leads to certain individual humans being treated as an ‘It’ rather than as a ‘You’. This trend can be seen in the Nazi genocides. Individuals were first robbed of their valuables, then stripped of one of the most fundamental marks of human dignity and identity: their names. Now anonymous, these extermination camp inmates were known only by the numbers tattooed on their arms. Finally, they were treated as economic assets, being stripped of their hair and other valuable body parts, before being liquidated in an industrial-scale killing process. There is simply no parallel to this within the animal realm. Human beings alone seem morally and physically capable of genocide.
Ideologies both generate and sustain this dehumanising outlook. Sometimes these ideologies are religious, with some groups regarding themselves as ‘God’s chosen people’. Yet we must not overlook ethnic ideologies which speak of the ‘Master Race’, or those which dehumanise older people on account of their failing mental or physical capacities. The Nazi ‘Action T4’ programme of 1939–41 – which led to the involuntary euthanasia of some 70,000 psychiatric patients – was based on the assumption that such people were simply devoid of any value or utility. It provoked a powerful reaction from Pope Pius XII in 1943:
We believe that it is necessary to reiterate this solemn statement today, when to our profound grief we see at times the deformed, the insane, and those suffering from hereditary disease deprived of their lives, as though they were a useless burden to society; and this procedure is applauded by some as a mark of human progress, and as something that is entirely in agreement with the common good. Yet who that is possessed of sound judgment does not recognize that this not only violates the natural and the divine law written in the heart of every person, but that it violates the noblest instincts of humanity?27
While there are many issues that need to be addressed, one of the most pressing is the need to develop a way of seeing humanity which is capable of resisting the denigration or devaluation of any groups of people, or isolated individuals. The preaching of Jesus of Nazareth was not about the creation of a new ‘in-group’, but about the subversion of ‘in-groups’ in general. So what theological foundation might be offered for this principled repression of such a fundamental human social instinct leading to the creation of ‘in-groups’, which is as biologically natural as it is socially damaging? One answer lies in the notion of humanity being created in – and still bearing – the ‘image of God’.28
The Christian belief in humanity bearing the ‘image of God’ affirms that humanity has an identity and value which transcends our economic utility and social location. One of the earlier discussions of this within the Christian tradition is due to Lactantius (c.240–c.320), who argued that the belief that human beings are created in the ‘image of God’ demands equality among peoples, and gives rise to affection and respect across social and political barriers.
Now it was from the one human being that God created us all, so that we are all of the same blood, with the result that the greatest crime is to hate humanity or do them harm. That is why we are forbidden to develop or to encourage hatred. So if we are the work of the same God, what else are we but brothers and sisters?29
For Lactantius, this theology implied that slavery was unacceptable, since all human beings were created equal, bearing God’s image.30 Few were bold enough to follow him, yet the theological logic of his position is irresistible.
Others would not agree. If humanity is prone to weakness and the degeneration of old age, why not take charge of the evolutionary process, and bring about a radical change in human nature, so that these problems might be consigned to the past? In the next chapter, we shall consider some approaches to this question, including the movement known as ‘transhumanism’, which argues for the transformation of humanity through technological progress.