Humanism? What kind of crazy ‘new age’ religion is this?

Humanism’s actually been around for centuries, and has in many ways become the opposite of religion. It’s a philosophical and ethical stance emphasizing human beings thinking for themselves using logic and evidence rather than blind acceptance of doctrine or religious faith. Its meaning has shifted over the years, at times more focused on the notion of “human nature” but, today, the humanist movement is pretty much aligned with secularism, looking to science not religious dogma to understand the world.

All sounds very sensible and 21st Century. How did the ‘humanist’ movement come about?

Its modern form can be traced back to the European Renaissance that bridged what we now call the Middle Ages to the modern period – so roughly the 14th to 17th Centuries – and a desire to increase education and independent thinking in the general populace, to focus on classical learning as well as (or instead of) religious learning and create a well-read, eloquent citizenry able to engage with the civic life of their communities and use reason and critical thinking to pursue virtuous lives.

So before that, it was all just ‘God’, was it?

Pretty much, at least for most uneducated Europeans. The term itself was taken up during the French Enlightenment in the mid-18th Century, gaining traction after the French Revolution in the late-18th Century when philosophers strongly argued the idea that human virtue was possible as a result of human reason alone without the crutch of religious institutions. The Church, as one would expect, fought back and accused the humanists of idolising humanity.

18th Century France wasn’t the first time humans had faith in creating their own destiny, though. The European Renaissance shone a light on the Ancient Greek philosophy of the 6th Century BCE where philosophers such as Thales and Xenophanes attempted to explain the world around them using human reason as opposed to unquestioned myths, legends and blind tradition. They were really the first humanists. Aristotle continued this emerging tradition of empiricism in the 4th Century BCE. The Medieval Islamic world was also far more open to humanist ideas of individualism, secularism, skepticism and liberalism than one might immediately imagine.

But it’s humanism or religion, right? One or the other?

Not at all. The key figure of Renaissance Humanism was Petrarch, a 14th Century scholar and priest who re-discovered the Roman writer Cicero’s letters, identified the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and his own time as the ‘Dark Ages’ and set about re-introducing classical learning alongside the religious traditions of the day – his primary goal being educational. Many other early humanists were also priests and it was felt more open access to older writings from early Christian (and Jewish) writers would usher in a harmonious new era of universal agreement. Greek Orthodox priests brought Plato and Aristotle to Rome in the 15th Century and those rational, scientific old texts began to be studied at universities. In the 16th Century, the Dutch humanist Erasmus began re-translating The Bible from different sources, essentially paving the way for the Protestant Reformation.

So how did Humanism come to be seen as secular?

The Renaissance enlightenment that re-introduced classical learning sparked a new wave of curiosity and discovery. With that came the Scientific Revolution, and with that came scientists such as Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo Galilei, the latter of whom was tried for heresy in the 17th Century for his belief that the Earth was not in fact the centre of the universe but instead orbited the sun – a theory originally put forward centuries before by the Greek philosophers, by the way. The Christian Church, however, had become oppressively powerful in the intervening centuries and was not for hearing this. The worlds of religion and reason had become increasingly divided.

Grass-roots groups explicitly espousing Humanism slowly began to appear. In mid-19th Century London, the British Humanistic Religious Association promoted knowledge of science, philosophy and the arts and made a specific point of having both male and female members. In 1929, the First Humanist Society of New York was established by Charles Francis Potter, whose advisory board included Albert Einstein. Potter promoted Humanism as an alternative to religion throughout the 1930s, advocating liberal causes such as women’s rights, access to birth control, civil divorce laws and an end to capital punishment. The American Humanist Association had become a national concern by 1941 and, following World War 2, the fledgling United Nations appointed three prominent humanists as directors.

So is Humanism still going strong today?

Difficult to say. Although the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) comprises 114 organisations across 40 countries and has consultative status at the United Nations, total membership or affiliation is unclear. Lots of people who would self-identify as secularists, atheists or agnostics are likely to be Humanists, but may not actively self-identify as Humanists themselves.

Why is the concept and definition of Humanism so hard to pin down?

Because it means different things to different people and because it’s meant different things over the years. Nonetheless, all member-organisations of the IHEU have to sign up to the following statement. I’ll leave it up to you to give it a read and decide whether or not you might be a Humanist yourself.

“Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance, which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethic based on human and other natural values in the spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.”

Can’t say fairer than that. Go to the last chapter of the book – Chapter 360 – content to follow – or back to Chapter 1: World Peace to start a new peace adventure through these articles.