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principle of universally shared humanity.
It was thanks to humanistic beliefs in reason and meliorism that Voltaire argued for tolerance of different religions, Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges argued for including women and non-European races in the French Revolutionary idea of human liberation, and their fellow Enlightenment thinker Jeremy Bentham argued for what would now be called LGBTQ+ rights.
Universality, diversity, critical thinking, moral connection: these have all become widely held values in our day, although still less so than a humanist might wish.
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.
Nature does not find things repugnant; people do.
This is the “felicific calculus,” or calculation of happiness, and it is the central move in the ethical system known as utilitarianism.
John Stuart Mill, in The Subjection of Women, wrote that we simply cannot know what either sex is “really” like, because there has never been a society in which women were not influenced by male domination.
“There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.”
James Baldwin said it, too, in 1960: “It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own.”
Eloquence—as the humanists of earlier centuries, and orators in every culture, had always known—is of essential importance to human beings. Language in general is our very element: the basis of our social and moral lives.
He wrote to a friend in 1915, “My defence at any Last Judgement would be ‘I was trying to connect up and use all the fragments I was born with.’ ” But it was not easy, and particularly when it came to the difficulty of being honest about being gay—the context for his remark. Homosexual acts were still illegal in Britain; Forster, having written a novel called Maurice, about a gay man very much like himself,
It entailed a “thinning out of human nature.” It would be much better if sexuality were a subject taught in schools, not just to give information on physical basics, but especially to
discuss the more important “human element in love.”
The modern humanist will always prefer to say, with Robert G. Ingersoll, that the place to be happy is here, in this world, and the way to be happy is to try to make others so.
He had a humanist’s view of morality: he thought that its seeds lie in our own natural predisposition toward kindness and fellow feeling. Such impulses need guidance and development, but they do not need replacing by state-imposed commandments. For Humboldt, principles such as love or justice harmonize “sweetly and naturally” with our very humanity, but for this harmony to have any effect, there must be a free field of operation.
Humboldt’s principle was not “anything goes”; he sought to allow and foster the development of truly harmonious, many-sided humans. His vision of humanity and freedom remained at the heart of the Prussian educational system and went on to influence educational thinking elsewhere. Questions were raised that we are still wrestling with in our own time: What is a humanistic education for?
“It is only through the study of language that there comes into the soul, out of the source of all thoughts and feelings, the entire expanse of ideas, everything that concerns man, above all and beyond everything else, even beauty and art.”
The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument hitherto unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.
Except, of course, if what we do hurts others. For Mill, as for Humboldt, the state’s task is to step in if my own pursuit of freedom and experience is damaging yours. The state has no business telling people what they should do: it is no part of its role to define a single perfect form of life or morality.
Mill recommends that a liberal society support “absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological.”
(Of course, defining “harm” is so complicated that we are still arguing about it today.)
Crux
He fell into a depression. It produced the sort of accidia that Petrarch had suffered five centuries earlier:
Reading Wordsworth made Mill reflect that humans need such deeper satisfactions, in a way that other animals do not seem to. We long for meaning; we crave beauty and love. We seek the fulfillment to be found in “the objects of nature, the achievements of art, the imaginations of poetry, the incidents of history, the ways of mankind, past and present, and their prospects in the future”—all the aspects of culture.
For him, real culture is accessible to all, and it comes from an “eagerness about the things of the mind.” It means curiosity and the questioning of received ideas; it means “turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically.”
the right kind of education.
Even the poorest members of society should have access to good, original works of art and literature, not the dumbed-down
pabulum that is often given to them in the belief that pre-chewed and undemanding thing...
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Privileged himself, Arnold could see no call for people to behave in such an uncouth and unharmonious way when they could be reading Horace instead.
George W. Norris, a post office worker and union official who spent twenty-two years taking Workers’ Educational Association courses, looked back on the effect they had had on him, and wrote: “Training in the art of thinking has equipped me to see through the shams and humbug that lurk behind the sensational headlines of the
modern newspapers, the oratorical outpourings of insincere party politicians and dictators, and the doctrinaire ideologies that stalk the world sowing hatred.”
In Mill’s case, personal experience of “the imaginations of poetry” and the study of “the ways of mankind” had given him back his ability to feel anything at all.
Where their profit is, let their frolic be also.
For some of those who now seek a diverse and more generous approach to culture, the very word humanism suggests a narrow elitism.
Robert FitzRoy, former captain on Darwin’s Beagle voyage, was there; he had written to Darwin saying, “My dear old friend, I, at least, cannot find anything ‘ennobling’ in the thought of being a descendant of even the most ancient Ape.”
Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature of 1863, with a frontispiece showing a series of skeletons of apes marching along in formation and culminating in a human figure.
humanistic skills, in the form of an inquiring attitude.
For example, if we hear science telling us that our ancestors resembled monkeys, we will leap (sorry) to conclusions about ourselves and our human nature. If we are not guided in more constructive directions, those conclusions might be dangerous and negative. For example, we might think: Well, we are only animals anyway—we cannot expect high moral standards of ourselves.
Scientific humanism reminds us that we are animals, too, and that we live in a constant process of transition on a changing Earth, in a very large universe.
his deepest satisfactions when he had helped others, and
reformer Frederick James Gould recalled once chatting about the afterlife with an amiable Salvation Army officer over tea and sandwiches: “I asked him what became of sincere Agnostics. He pointed dramatically to the floor, and calmly munched bread-and-butter and water-cress.”
took umbrage at the idea of God as a deliberate deceiver.
He wonders what a Christ who was only human would be like, and imagines “a purely human,
explicable, yet always wonderful Christianity. It broke his heart, but the spell of it was like some dream-country wherein we see all the familiar objects of life in new relations and perspectives.”
a “human Christ”
the book became a test case for campaigners trying to introduce international copyright protections for authors and publishers. They succeeded, and the protections were won in 1891: a small humanistic victory in itself.
Jefferson Bible. His intention, as he had said in a letter, was to isolate “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man,” by removing what he called “amphibologisms,” or ambiguous elements, including stories that he suspected had been added by various hands or were generally bogus.
Jesus is no longer quite of this planet. Renan makes us feel why people
“such an absence of humour and fun that my blood’s chilled.”
Mill expressed this objection to Comte’s thinking when he asked, “Why this universal systematizing, systematizing, systematizing?”
Related dramas continue in our own time, too. We still ask similar questions, even if we formulate them in different ways: How do humans fit into the rest of the variety of life, or into the physical universe in general? How can we reconcile what emerges from scientific reasoning with what is offered by our heritage of religious thought? Do we need heroes, or saints, or moral leaders? What kind of entity is this humanity, anyway, which so dominates the planet that some have begun to call this the Anthropocene epoch? We certainly do not have answers yet, and perhaps never will.
