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April 28 - May 3, 2024
whereas scientists study the physical world, and theologians the divine one, humanities-humanists study the human world of art, history, and culture. Non-religious humanists make their moral choices based on human well-being, not divine instruction. Religious humanists focus on human well-being, too, but within the context of a faith. Philosophical and other kinds of humanists constantly measure their ideas against the experience of real living people.
“There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” The idea had come from Ariane Sherine,
Good job, Ariane!!
Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. Or: I am human, and consider nothing human alien to me.
ubuntu,
‘a person is a person through other people.’
education is all-important.
Being well educated is especially important for those who will go on to run the political and administrative systems for everyone else.
We are showered with gifts, but they are nothing unless we work out how to collaborate in using them together.
William James analyzed how this two-step move in religion works: first we are made uneasy, feeling “that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand.” Then religion provides the solution: “a sense that we are saved from the
wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.”
Whenever we see leaders or ideologies overruling the conscience, liberty, and reasoning of actual human beings with the promise of something higher, anti-humanism is probably in the ascendant.
Anti-humanism usefully reminds us not to be vain or complacent; it supplies a bracing realism about what is weak or nefarious in us. It reminds us not to be naive, and prepares us for the fact that, at any moment, we and our fellows are likely to do something stupid or wicked. It forces humanism to keep working to justify itself.
humanism warns us against neglecting the tasks of our current world in favor of dreams of paradise, whether on this earth or elsewhere. It helps to counter the intoxicating promises of extremists, and it wards off the despair
Freethinking:
Inquiry:
Hope:
“Alone of all mankind, the scholar is no stranger in foreign lands; after losing kinsmen and intimates he still finds friends; he is a citizen in every state, and fearlessly despises the awkward chances of fortune.”
Petrarch and Boccaccio had set the task for their successors: digging out the traces of wisdom and excellence, studying them, disseminating them, using them to illuminate moral and political questions, and creating new works of similar wisdom and excellence on old models.
No single religion, and no single century, has a monopoly on destroying beautiful things.
They would have had no problem communicating in Latin, which enabled educated men in Europe to transcend place and time.
On Avarice, which argued for an ancient idea: that great wealth was not sinful but virtuous, because life-enhancing things could be done with it.
“Let me tell you,” she says, “that those who speak ill of women do more harm to themselves than they do to the women they actually slander.”
Christine de Pazan, Late 14th Century
“Even though the study of letters promises and offers no reward for women and no dignity, every woman ought to seek and embrace these studies for that pleasure and delight alone that [comes] from them.”
Cassandra Fedele, mid 16th Century
to govern well, one should be able to speak well, reason well, practice moderation and balance, and be suffused with “humanity” in all its senses—including knowing something of how real human stories had played out in the past.
He freed the authors from confinement, and freed readers from the problems they had previously had in getting hold of good books.
To prefer good government to bad is to prefer order to chaos, peace to war, prosperity to starvation, and wisdom to stupidity.
“Out of such crooked wood as the human being is made, nothing entirely straight can be fabricated.”
One thinks of the way some twentieth-century Western intellectuals fell in love with totalitarian communism, never considering what such a regime would be likely to do to them.
Addressing the humanist reaction to Savanarola
“My home is wherever I keep my library.”
learning is acquired from each other, and we in turn should always pass it on. This is a key reason why education, especially in the arts of civics and civility, is so central to the humanist view of the world.
We are then free to write as human beings, about human things.
a good description of Montaigne’s Essays, too: a book all about human stuff.
They drew on a tradition of “theodicy”: the attempt to explain and justify God’s actions, especially when those actions were so obviously unpleasant for humans.
This, in a word, was the philosophy of Voltaire and his intellectual circle—and that word could be “progress,” “improvement,” “reason,” or “enlightenment,” depending on where you prefer the emphasis.
Voltaire “asserted that the human condition can become better, and invited mankind to do something about it.”
This attitude and an inclination to value the human measure more highly than mystical submission to fate are two features that unite the Enlightenment spirit to the humanist one.
Enlightenment and humanist thinkers share a tendency to look to this world more than to the next, and to humanity more than to divinity.
To quote the nineteenth-century humanist Robert Ingersoll, “In all ages man has prayed for help, and then helped himself.”)
If we want to live in a well-regulated, peaceful society, then we must create one and maintain it.
John Stuart Mill said, “I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.”
Human-based morality implied that we needed no external authority to guide our ethical choices. This worried the political establishment, as well as the religious one, because it suggested a state of moral anarchy in which people could follow their own ideas.
“human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”
I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy.
“no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish.” (The later science communicator Carl Sagan put it more neatly: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”)
David Hume
Hume locates the basis of morality in “sympathy,” or fellow feeling.
Universality, diversity, critical thinking, moral connection:
The proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest which they are able to attain to. What this is, cannot be ascertained, without complete liberty of choice.
After the claim to humanity, another claim follows: that we should all have the full range of human virtues to aspire to, not a set of virtues particular to our group.
Mary Wollstonecraft. Her Vindication of the Rights of Women of 1792 began by stating: “I shall first consider women in the grand light of human creatures, who, in common with men, are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties.”
Universality without diversity would be an empty abstraction; there would even be something inhuman about it. Diversity without an idea of universal humanity would leave us all isolated, with few avenues of contact.
