Why I am no longer a humanist

I used to allow myself the comfort of calling myself a humanist. I don’t think I can hide there anymore.

Here’s a broad strokes outline of the tenets of humanism and some thoughts that have been fomenting of late.

Secular morality and humanism

First off, humanists separate morality from theology. As a thoroughgoing humanist I used to believe that the moral quandaries we face could be adequately addressed by rational means and without a theological or religious guide. These days I find myself wondering if this places a level of confidence in individual and collective human capacity for rational and objective evaluation that positively drips with hubris.

The 300 thousand years since these oversized brains of ours somehow stumbled into consciousness and we began using our minds to shape our world, and perhaps specifically the last three or four hundred years which saw us realise a whole lot of stuff, from the shape and dimensions of the planet to the mechanisms that keep our hearts beating, appear to have us convinced that we are able to use these capacities to answer every question that confronts us.

Can this really be true?

Even a cursory examination of the state of the world yields enough evidence to cast considerable doubt on our faith in human rationality. We can’t legitimately pin the global lunacy on display exclusively at humanism’s door – both secular and religious systems of government seem to be making a mess of things in equal proportion.

Perhaps it has something more to do with the kind of animal we are. It appears that the more we develop, engage and expand our rational understanding of the world, the more inclined we are to equip ourselves with technology that gives us powers, that until two or three seconds ago on a geological time scale, were reserved for the gods. The the ability to fly, to command massive explosions of the very forces that bind the universe together, to communicate instantaneously with anyone anywhere, and to order a feast of chicken or beef, whisky and wine at 10 000meters and Mach 1.4. are ours to command.

We do not seem shy to use these powers for almost anything we desire and we also appear able to make of reason and rationality willing allies in the pursuit of even more powers. Far from being the considered evaluator and intelligent informant of our actions that humanism asks reason to be, have we not collectively subjugated them into service as justifiers of our baser instincts for more, better, faster, stronger?
I am attracted to this famous quote.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Friedrich Nietzsche

Dwelling on this makes me sad. There’s an image of humanity here that I recognise from my observation of daily life. It is of a creature alone in a murderous world, guilty of terrible crimes and with no one to turn to for comfort or forgiveness.

(S)he is caught between reliance on a spark of rationality and consciousness and abdication of all responsibility to a fantasy of the forgiving father deity. For that is not the god that Nietzsche says is dead. He is speaking about the sense of ourselves as being a part of something larger than ourselves – something beyond our rationality.

And that is humanism’s murder of the baby in the theological bathwater – arguably the most influential intellectual movement of the last 100 years discounts the possibility of a mystery greater than our rationality can comprehend.

I cannot believe that this ridiculous little primate, who has existed for only a fraction of a fraction of the time that this planet has been around, is equipped with the wherewithal to comprehend himself, let alone the universe of which he is the tiniest part of a tiniest part.

Self as the new godhead – the actualising tendency

Humanists believe in something called the self-actualising tendency, that is, that every homo sapiens has within her a special essence called the self and that this self is tirelessly working towards realisation. We are drawn towards the light, inexorably growing towards the best expression of self.

It’s an attractive idea and I believe largely true.

Plants do this too – they burst through the soil, programmed by their nature to reach for the light and the water and to bloom as brightly as possible. Grass will break concrete and the tree at my window has lifted the pavement and warped the road surface outside. However, as any gardener will attest, lots of plants don’t make it no matter how much tending, shelter and nourishment they receive.

How is this relevant to homo sapiens? There are now so many humans, each driven to express their beings to the fullest extent possible, that it becomes hard not to extend the garden metaphor and draw a comparison with weeds. What answer does Humanism have for the undeniable reality that there are teeming billions of us all striving to maximally grow.

I find no answer.

Returning to Nietzsche’s lament for our murder of god Have we have left ourselves with nothing larger than self to which we can aspire? While a religious person is related to something larger than herself, the humanist has only herself – where one strives towards god realisation, the other strives for self-actualisation. Under humanism our striving must be reserved either for ourselves in increasingly spectacular displays of narcissism, or for others in the adoration of heroes and celebrities or slavish allegiance to brands.

And the list of sacred games and rituals we have invented in the pursuit of self-actualisation is an elaborate one. The iconography of the humanist is to be found on the billboards, seldom smaller than a few storeys high, which adorn our cities and buildings featuring god-like images glorifying attributes to which we too are entitled. Our culture bellows our entitlement to beauty, joy, connection, status, travel and magical experience at every turn. We have become gods and we expect of our world to provide commensurate experiences.

We live in a culture of celebrity and the market for news of the divorces, open secrets, problems and triumphs of movie and music stars is never saturated. Could this be because we hanker for news of the comings and goings of the gods, beings outside of ourselves and larger than we are? In place of the relics of saints we collect autographs.

Arguably humanist ideas have lost much of their nuance as they have filtered into the public consciousness and perhaps it is true of all religions that the profound apprehension of our participation in a mystery greater than us and beyond our comprehension becomes lost as it is disseminated and used to justify the worst of our behaviours? Any number of religious wars spring to mind, the selling of indulgences, the religious inquisitions – all are evidence of this.

And is one of the casualties of the wholesale popular embrace of the religion of self, our own experience of being inferior? Arguably, having a “poor self-esteem” is frowned upon or at least deemed a state of being requiring pity or perhaps even some form of medical intervention.
Does the pressure to be “awesome” pervade our culture to such an extent that it becomes difficult to be with those aspects of ourselves that are spectacularly dismal or even just mundane and ordinary? And to Nietzsche’s point, how are we to atone for these “sins” which, as many of the world’s other religions have it, is a part of our nature?

As an example, one such ritual might be service – the process of acting selflessly in service of the good of another without little or no direct benefit to oneself. Service was an act of subjugating one’s will to something outside of oneself.

In our world service is most often associated with a requirement to be served by a waiter or a company. Our culture makes demanding good service from people a laudable quality and evidence of a healthy self esteem. We walk around in our service economies armed with a plethora of rights that entitle us to a particular response from the world around us. This entitlement was once reserved for kings and queens by the divine right – now it is extended to us all by virtue of our human right.

But aren’t we like poorly socialised children let loose on the world mistakenly believing that the little spark of consciousness our frontal lobe lends us, makes us divine and mature enough to be masters of our worlds?

It certainly seems so sometimes. A proliferation of popular psychology literature informs us of the untrammelled power we have over, not only our own destinies but the world and sometimes even the fabric of reality. Our belief in positive thinking is remarkably akin to the magical thinking that governs the wishes of a child for a new trinket or for peace in the home or that an angry teacher or parent would look more favourably on us.
I wonder if we are ready to hold the responsibility for ourselves and our world. The state of the planet, largely due to our runaway infatuation with intellect and reason and the god-like capacities for destruction and creation they bestow on us, suggests not.

Here’s that quote again

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Friedrich Nietzsche

If god is dead and humanism too hubristic – what alternative?

Make no mistake – this is not an appeal to return to the tenets of the old religions be they Catholicism, Islam, Judaism. But I am making an argument that as a belief system, humanism is not immune to humanity.

The brutal, greedy, self-aggrandizing, war-mongering essence of humankind has expressed itself just as much as our capacities for selflessness, love, altruism and humility have regardless what theological and moral systems we have invented for ourselves over the three hundred thousand years or so since the first human drew breath.

What then is the basis for a moral framework?

Before addressing this I would like to recap the argument so far. I have said that humanism fails as a useful moral framework on 2 counts. First that inherent in the central role it accords our capacity to reason is an overestimation of that capacity and second that in placing the self-actualising tendency at the core if it’s view of humanity Second, it has inadvertently contributed to a cultural context that regards the maximal growth of the individual as a moral and natural right due every single human being.

I have come to believe that these two factors in tandem comprise a hubristic attitude towards the world endemic to our civilisation. Further they leave us in a kind of spiritual vaccum which we then as a society and a culture, attempt to fill with compulsive and often self-aggrandising behaviour.

These criticisms aside for a moment, I’d like to be clear that humanism, and the existential philosophy at it’s root, remains a tremendous achievement of western post enlightenment civilisation and certainly preferable as a governing idea for cultures than brutally enforced and loyalty to an elite powerfully entitled by their supposed access to the word and wishes of an imagined deity.

Rather my aim is to offer some additional thoughts that might usefully modify and add to the possibilities for human thought and action that humanism makes available to us.

With that qualifier in place, what then might be some corrective ideas that might be offered into this age of self?

A sceptical attitude towards oneself or “You’re not all that”

Humanism has I believe inherited the Judeo-Christian myth of a personal deity that cares and is interested in our well-being as individuals and in homo sapiens as a collective. Where religion affords us a relationship with an external force who wishes us well and attends to our needs, humanism suggests to us that our humanity bestows on us a special quality and that this quality is manifest as our ability to reason and to bring ourselves into the fullness of our beings.

However, as evolutionary biologists point out, humans anatomically identical to us were alive and eating, drinking, playing, fucking, bickering and warring almost 300 thousand years ago. The genetic code that informs our natures and that, driven by the relentless drive towards actualisation, comprises each of us as people, has been part of countless generations of humans who have perpetrated all manner of deeds in order to survive and thrive. As the direct inheritors of those genes we too have the ability to perform these acts. And this isn’t a latent ability – it’s present all the time in the way we drive our cars, treat the beggar on the side of the road right through to the relationships between countries.

Stated differently, our natures are perhaps even more brutal than the events of the 20th century (Two World wars, half a dozen genocides, unspeakable atrocities) or the crusades (800 years ago) or Ghengis Khan (more or less the same era as the crusades) suggest they might be. The genes we have whithin us are directly transmitted to us by people who have raped, murdered, committed infanticide, suicide, cannibalism, betrayal of love and cause as well as sacrificed their lives selflessly for the collective good and devoted themselves to noble ideals.

It behoves us then to be at minimum sceptical of whatever rational explications we offer ourselves and perhaps even flatly disbelieving of what our minds offer us as rationale for our actions. It is always possible that the beast within us is in charge of what we are doing, and intellect is simply coming along for the ride and telling itself a pretty story that gives it some kind of palatable meaning.

What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instinct of beasts.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Responsibilities before rights

Humanism with its allied discourse of human rights, suggests to us that there are certain inalienable entitlements that are due each one of simply because we are human. While the tenets of mutual respect, empathy for the experience of another, a willingness to treat other people with dignity embodied in a commitment to the humanist ideal, it appears to me that these ideas encourage in us an alertness to infringement on our rights and a corresponding right to advance our own causes and interests in our quest to “be all that we can be”.

Put in another way I wonder if our culture’s having apparently swallowed whole the idea that we are entitled to an optimum space within which to self-actualise makes the self the most important cause in an individual’s sphere and allows him to abrogate any responsibility he might have towards the context in which he is living.

Rights that do not flow from duty well performed are not worth having.

Mahatma Gandhi

On a macro level, the environmental crisis that is gaining momentum year by year is the largest indicator of this all too human tendency. In day-to-day living it is manifest in the smallest of acts, from throwing a burning cigarette to the pavement to zealous devotion to political movements furthering a particular power agenda.

All men equal in rights and duties, all men equally responsible for the destiny of mankind – what a dream!

Léon Bourgeois – french statesman of the 19th century

Although the notion of personal responsibility is a cornerstone of existentialism, this aspect appears almost completely eclipsed by humanism’s placement of the human being at the centre of it’s cosmology. I wonder how different our landscape would be if our culture made the question “What is the nature of my responsibility?” take priority over the question “What is the nature of my rights?

Prayer – Find something larger than the self and dwell on it

A third notion I would like to add concerns what we might term a spiritual dimension. I realise that the word spiritual has largely lost it’s meaning in the general cacophony of self-help style pseudo religions that proliferate on the psychology/spirituality shelves of our virtual book shops but I use it to refer to seeking and developing the act of relating to something larger than oneself.

Humanism has I think, left us without the capacity for prayer – we are reluctant to seek out of a relationship with something that is outside of our awareness and not amenable to dissection using our clumsy meat computers.

If you are not sure where to begin I suggest lying on your back under a tree and watching the branches and allow yourself to talk to the tree.
Do this until you feel awe …. no not awesome, you’re not awesome remember.

The trees are.