WHAT IS HUMANISM?

HUMANISM AND ACTION By Alex Carey

NEW SOUTH WALES HUMANIST SOCIETY.

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Alex Carey is a lecturer in the School of Applied Psychology, University of N.S.W., a foundation and leading member of the N.S.W. Humanist Society. THIS PAMPHLET has been printed by kind permission of Outlook, an independent journal published bi-monthly in Sydney.

FURTHER INFORMATION about the N.S.W. Humanist Society may be obtained from the Secretary, 72 Tooronga Terrace, Beverly Hills — phone 50 7675. Reprinted from Outlook, Vol. 9, No. I February, 1965 — No. 2 April, 1965 for the N.S.W. Humanist Society and printed by Admiral Press, Sydney.

What is Humanism? Recent years have seen the formation of three humanist societies in Australia. And there have been signs of new life in comparable societies overseas. These bodies clearly belong in the tradition of the anti-clerical thought and movements of the last century which are associated with the names of such men as Thomas Paine, J.S. Mill, Darwin, Huxley, Bradlaugh and Holyoake. But wherever such bodies are flourishing (e.g. at Oxford University) they are showing certain new characteristics, or new emphases at least. Unbelievers in the last century typically called themselves rationalists. I think the very definite preference among their present-day descendants for the label humanist signifies a good deal. But first of all what these two groups have in common : Both find the evidence for belief in a benevolent deity totally inadequate; Both conclude that man must therefore rely on his own resources of intelligence and compassion to chart his own future ; Both consider there are grounds for believing these resources would be adequate to this task once released from the restrictions of superstition and dogma ; Both look to a wider application of the spirit of empirical science to achieve this release. But differences are important too. Rationalists tended to pay a rather unqualified homage to the human intellect per se (and its supposed a priori powers for knowing the good, the beautiful and the true) which often lent their statements a note of arrogance that had something of the same temper as religious dogmatism. This came, I think, in part from the rationalist tradition in philosophy, in part from 19th century science, in which the Newtonian, mechanistic universe and its detached human observer —to whom it represented final and objective truth — had not changed significantly in 200 years. Such rationalist intimation of infallibility still occasionally shows itself among contemporary humanists. (Professor Anthony Flew, for all his lucidity and brilliance, is very liable to it.) But it has little popular following. And polemical attacks on religion which indulge its temper get little support. Indeed in the British monthly, The Humanist, such attacks have, in recent years, produced a spate of irritated letters which plainly shook the editor — who has been there for some time. Present-day humanism seems, by contrast, to have moved towards a matter-of-fact empiricism that it often almost Baconian in temper ; and an increased mistrust of ambitious schemes of abstract concepts and intuitive logic which, from Communism to Andersonianism are found so easily to become doctrinaire and dogmatic. There is little talk among humanists about pursuit of

ALEX CAREY abstract ' truth ' or other rationalist holy grails. Apart from a continuing concern for a clearer theoretical foundation for ethics and morality, there has been a marked shift of interest from theory to action ; from problems of understanding to problems of bringing about humanist-inclined social change. Humanists believe that it requires neither elaborate theory nor great intelligence to distinguish most of the major ' errors ' or defects in the way we run our lives and societies which require attention : the dogmatic belief and inculcation of belief which sustains opposition to birth control, to divorce, and abortion law reform, and to an empirically honest and thorough-going re-evaluation of age-old official sexual attitudes and institutions generally ; the dogmatic tendencies in Communism and Capitalism which so easily express themselves in inflexible confrontation ; the futile preference for easy explanations of the behaviour of one and another party to conflicts, from trade unions to nations, in terms of ` responsibility ' and ' irresponsibility ', of virtue and wickedness, to the neglect of any serious attempt to comprehend what is happening in more impersonal, sociological terms ; the contribution to maintaining all this of an educational system which, outside the laboratory sciences, doesn't even try to teach children an empirical, undogmatic approach to life and society. Humanist outlook as I have described it is marked by a fairly simply conceived empiricism so far as social advance is concerned ; by a somewhat modest view of human rationality, which sees our securest way forward not in quasi-inspirational or revolutionary solutions which aspire to take us by sudden jumps in the direction of the ' right ' and the ' true ', but in cultivating an undogmatism which could greatly speed up the process of progressively eliminating patently wrong ' solutions ' and giving a run to any others among the remaining alternatives for which an empirical case can be made. Putting it briefly, humanists emphasise that it is not primarily by cultivating humility before God (clerical view) or even before human intellect (rationalist view), but before the evidence of our own experience, that we are most likely to find our salvation. Because of its fairly unpretentious, empirical emphasis, humanism as I have described it seems (if experience in New South Wales is any guide) to have an attraction which is not limited, as rationalism tended to be, to an intellectual coterie ; and because of the explicit emphasis on impartial opposition to all dogma, rather than primarily to religious or any other particular dogma, it both discourages sterile anti-clericalism in its own ranks and finds support which cuts across political affiliations ; and which could yet cut across religious affiliations. For much religious belief nowadays is so

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liberal/nebulous as to present little significant bar to a non-dogmatic consideration of most important social issues ; and many clerics, even including evangelists like Alan Walker, who promote dogmatism in one direction (e.g. sex or theology) will be found promoting a thoroughly undogmatic, sociological, broadly humanist position on some other issue of possibly much greater importance (e.g. international relations). This does not mean there will be no more battles between religion and humanism. There undoubtedly will be on particular issues. But these issues will, I think, be largely restricted to sex and education. For outside these areas theology, nowadays, is virtually non-consequential. Hence outside these areas genial, and even co-operative, relations between humanists and many religionists are, I believe, both possible and desirable. HUMANISM AND PHILOSOPHY

Most humanists evidence little concern with a logical justification for their general position in anything like systematic, philosophical terms. I think this is fair enough and consistent enough — I am uncertain what warrant there can be for asking an empiricist to do more by way of justifying his views on society and values than to state his belief that, insofar as these views have been applied, they have contributed uniquely to advancing the cultural and material conditions of human life, and to point out the historical developments he takes to be evidence for this belief. However, most human beings desire not only a method of advancing their general welfare which works, but also a coherent world-view within which the method might be set. And there is a wider context of thought within which humanism is, I think, coming to be set. The concept of evolution has had considerable attention from modern humanists. Julian Huxley has made much of it as a focus for humanist genuflections. And in doing so has endowed it with almost supernatural, certainly purposive, properties. Which is a pity since, shorn of all hocus-pocus, this concept is, I believe, capable of playing a crucial role in an integrated humanist world-view. First of all, to dispose of the hocus-pocus, it is necessary to be clear that the term evolution ' is only a grandiose label for the trial and error method of progress when this occurs on a grand scale. For evolution to occur two conditions are requisite : the continual occurrence of variations about some theme, and the repeated rejection of variants which are unsatisfactory in terms of some more or less stable criterion. The appropriateness of this description to Darwinian evolution is clear. The most important recent work on the philosophy of science (` Conjectures and Refutations', K.R. Popper) sees advance in scientific understanding not as a process of discovering new truths but of eliminating errors. This view conforms the method of science precisely to the evolutionary model : scientific hypotheses are seen as the continually occurring variants on a theme of explanation '; the principle of rejection employed is that hypotheses are discarded whenever

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caught out in the prediction of observations which do snot, in fact, occur. What we call scientific knowledge at any .time is constituted from the fund of so-far-notcaught-out-hypotheses. It will be seen that this view of Popper's (and Toulmin) about the way scientific knowledge progresses gives explicit support to the empirical emphases in the humanist approach to social problems. This view of progress, which puts the emphasis not on detecting truth and proclaiming it but on detecting error and acknowledging it, is of the very first importance in that it explicitly defines undogmatism as the very foundation and condition of advance in any field. HUMANISM AND ETHICS

The notion of evolution can be reckoned, then; to have a crucial place in our understanding of scientific knowledge and scientific progress. It remains to consider whether a comparable role can be defined for it in respect of ethics and value notions. Here, as elsewhere, the majority of humanists are not very philosophically inclined. They believe we can and do modify our notions of right and wrong, of morality and justice, in the light of advancing empirical knowledge, and they are not much impressed about the relevance of philosophical talk about the logical invalidity of deriving value judgements from facts. Humanists tend to accept, whether or not explicitly, a naturalistic ethic, i.e. to believe that there are certain activities and conditions of life which are especially satisfactory (and especially unsatisfactory) to man in virtue of his being a particular kind of creature ; that it is possible to discover empirically what these are ; and that morality and ethics are properly a function of such discoverable facts about human beings. All of this implies an evolutionary view of ethics also ; it implies, as T.H. Huxley held nearly 100 years ago, that the great need is to discover pragmatically what would happen if people behaved in a certain way and leave the question of what ought to be done for decision in the light of the evidence '. On this view systems of ethics and morality are theories about how life should be lived (and, more basically, imply varying theories about human nature) which, like any other theories, must be judged by the results they produce. And since it is only human beings who can experience these results, only human beings can judge whether one or another moral theory enables them to have life and have it more abundantly '. Given this approach, moral questions reduce to empirical questions about the extent to which, and the conditions under which, agreement can be reached that one kind of actual observed human result is preferable to another. The .principal objection made to this view is that it wouldn't work in practice because, even if people judged in the light of the evidence (e.g. about legalised abortion or unnatural methods of contraception), they would judge differently — they would disagree. There are several points to be made here. Firstly : the conditions

under which people can come to agreement about what we call moral issues on the basis of observation of relevant evidence is an empirical question and cannot be decided a priori. Secondly, it must be agreed that, while different people bring to their consideration of the relevant evidence more or less dogmatic preconceptions that the question at issue is already decided by a variety of other than evidential considerations, they would not agree on the import of the evidence. But that is not very significant. Until they abandoned dogmatic preconceptions people disagreed violently about the import of the evidence regarding the movement of the earth, the age of the earth, the origin of species, and so on. Plainly whether or not broad agreement is naturalistically ' possible on some moral or value questions will not be discoverable until people accept that it is appropriate to decide moral questions by reference to empirical evidence. Thirdly, wherever it were still found, due (presumably) to constitutionally determined differences in taste, preference etc., to be genuinely not possible to reach some general agreement on some moral or value issue all this would mean, I suspect, is that it was unnecessary for society to adopt any particular official attitude on that question. However, the properest answer to be made by a properly empirical humanist to objections against the possibility of settling moral questions in the way proposed is simply to point out that we have quite patently been doing this for the last 100 years at least. Ever since the belief in Hell declined there has been an increasing readiness to abandon or modify particular moral rules or values simply on the ground that this is found to decrease purely terrestrial unhappiness or suffering. With the notable (and, one might suppose, temporary) exception of the Roman Catholic attitude to birth control, we have in general come a long way from the clerics who opposed the use of chloroform in childbirth on the grounds that it ' unnaturally ', and therefore immorally, reduced suffering which was God-intended. In fact we are engaged in more or less continuous reconsideration of older moral notions — of values, conceptions of justice, and of ' right ' and ' wrong ' in human conduct — on the basis of new knowledge about the empirical human consequences of such moral notions ; and it is quite evident that as the idea of basing our judgement of moral rules etc. on a consideration of their human consequences has spread it has been possible to reach a wider and wider consensus on changes that were necessary in the old values, etc. Greater attention to their

human consequences has altered our attitude to capital punishment, to war, patriotism (which is now deprecated as nationalism —except when it is our own), and to the treatment of human immorality', from criminals to children. It is even altering our attitude to homosexuality — compare the liberal recommendations of the Wolfenden Report with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah ; and note that the Wolfenden recommendations were shelved not because they challenged some absolute moral value, but only because it was judged that they did not yet have majority support in the community. We have, then, been modifying our notions of morality, of ' right ' and wrong ' in human conduct, roughly according to the procedures proposed — a consensus based on evidence — for a _considerable time. All that is being suggested is that we should henceforward employ a procedure consciously, systematically and consistently, that we are already employing half-consciously, unsystematically and inconsistently. Reality is necessarily more complex than any brief and orderly description of it. And, of course, modern humanism is neither as homogeneous nor as orderly as I have described it. Even so, I think my account conveys whatever is distinctive in temper and belief in this movement. The real difficulty about describing it is that it is so ordinary and commonsensical. Shaw said that one knows a person's beliefs not by what he says but by the assumptions on which he habitually acts. The growth of the empirical temper as a part of our popular culture is such that; judged by the assumptions on which we habitually act, most of us nowadays, clerics and all, are humanists most of the time. We only cease being so when we become conscious of the relevance to some point at issue of some particular dogma to which we are wholly committed. Humanism, as a self-conscious movement, is really more concerned with making explicit, and as coherent as possible, the direction in which the assumptions on which most of us act most of the time have been shifting for several hundred years than with any novelty of view. What little novelty it possesses comes from working out what it would mean for our attitudes and institutions if we behaved as consciously empirical humanists all of the time rather than unconsciously empirical humanists most of the time. It would, I think, mean changes of great importance. I shall discuss these in a later article.

Humanism and action There are humanist societies in some twenty countries from Iceland to Japan, and these are affiliated through the International Humanist and Ethical Union in Utrecht. In Britain, for example, there are several such societies

now in process of federation. The largest of these, the Rationalist Press Association, has over 5,000 members and includes a dazzling array of people of outstanding achievements in all fields of life. A sample of these

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might include Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley, Bronowski, Ayer, Hoyle, Medawar and McFarlane Burnett to Ritchie Calder, Baroness Wootton, Kingsley Martin, John Freeman, E.M. Forster, Ivor Brown, Somerset Maugham, Peter Ustinov and Yehudi Menuhin.

or, to put the matter more strongly, humanists are (or ought to be) attentive, as Flew notes, to the warning that it is one of the marks of a" closed society " that it mistakes its values to be in principle beyond criticism ; as if they were inexpugnable facts'.

In Australia there arc, so far, humanist societies in New South Wales, South Australia, Victoria and Canberra. The NSW Humanist Society was formed four years ago and has flourished by local standards for such bodies. It has a current membership of almost 500. Over the past four years it has published a number of reports on important social and moral issues and has played a part in influencing government action on one such issue (religion in schools).

However, humanists would for the most part consider that the evidence in terms of human consequences already available for certain values (such as compassion and respect for individuality), and against others, is great enough to warrant acceptance of these as orienting notions. Yet they must remain liable to critical re-examination. Humanists avoid the mindclosing habit of making high abstractions into absolutes — if only because such absolutes (e.g., Freedom, Good and Evil) are found to carry, in practice, most uncertain implications for action in many particular circumstances.

In an earlier article I described modern humanism as (i) sceptical about the supernatural ; (ii) empirical to the point of regarding dogmatism as the root of all abiding evil ; (iii) optimistic about man's capacity to learn from his own experience ; (iv) secular in the sense of believing that all moral rules must be tested by examining whether they tend in fact to realise ends that we desire ; and finally, (v) concerned to translate these beliefs into practical action on concrete social issues. I want in this paper to move from assumptions and philosophical outlook to practical politics. What, if anything, do humanists do? But first a few general comments about humanism and ' commitment '. HUMANISM AND COMMITMENT

The non-dogmatic, empirical, almost pragmatic character of modern humanism makes some difficulty for ' commitment' in so far as this implies a psychological condition of certainty that one's present views are right beyond any need for major amendment ; or at least a readiness to to close one's mind for a protracted period to the possibility that they are seriously wrong. It cannot be doubted that the world has, from the tribe to the corporation and the commissar, suffered from far too much of such commitment. Yet it may be argued that commitment helps good causes as well as bad, and that no cause is likely to succeed without it. To this the humanist can only reply that he looks for a middle way, admittedly difficult, between the undue momentum of certainty and the inertia of doubt. There are, however, two sorts of commitment which I think might be usefully distinguished : commitment to a particular theory or doctrine as defining the only or best way by which certain values may be realised in society ; and commitment to the values themselves. As I have indicated, humanists, as humanists, avoid the first sort of commitment. On the second sort the answer is more complicated. As a matter of existential fact, most humanists (like most other educated people) are a product of liberal values learnt in childhood and discovered more fully in our scientific and literary traditions. None the less the humanist position requires that one remain aware that in principle any values. may require revision in the light of increased knowledge of the human consequences, in changing circumstances, of a society's adopting them ;

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HUMANISM AND SOCIAL ACTION

Many people think of political parties as the only effective instruments through which to pursue social change. Such people are inclined (at best) to look on groupings of humanists as well-intending but strictly ineffective bodies because politically naive and lacking any organised access to the political and power structure of society. With this goes the view that humanist societies are insufficiently ' committed ' ; by which seems to be meant that they ought to, and do not, choose among the political groupings in our society and say whose ' side ' they are on. Humanists, on the contrary, are almost unanimous that they should avoid any such commitment like the plague. I think this reflects in part a weariness with the clash of closed minds, the dogma and posturings that make up most political debate. But it also, and principally, reflects, I think, a recognition that political parties are so much structured along the lines of conflicting economic interests and ideologies that they are not very useful instruments through which directly to pursue purposes that are not predominantly economic. And humanists are, as humanists, occupied primarily with a critical scrutiny of the quality of life in other than its strictly economic/material dimensions. About matters of this sort, from the content of TV programmes and educational syllabuses to divorce and homosexuality, our political parties as such neither show interest nor offer alternatives. (If only because views on them cut right across party affiliations. Parliaments will not lead in these matters, as became clear, for example, from the fate of the Birkett Report on abortion [19391 and the Wolfenden Report. If progress is to be hastened this will depend, I think, on efforts from non-political bodies.) Such efforts need to be directed both to making manifest whatever support for liberal change now exists in the community and to enlarging that support. The NSW Humanist Society has found the publication -of brief readable outlines of the humanist arguments on one and another issue, and the evidence for them, to be useful here. The popular press usually gives such pamphlets good coverage. And this has led (following, for example, humanist reports on Religion in Schools

and on Termination of Pregnancy) to numerous invitations to put the humanist case on radio. TV, and in the press. (The successful agitation in NSW for a revision of the 1959 social studies syllabus, with its highly dogmatic and doctrinaire content, began in the Humanist Society, though it soon gathered sponsors and momentum independent of the Society.) Indeed during the short life of the society there has been a considerable movement in NSW towards a practice of giving representation to humanist views wherever relevant social issues are under discussion. The NSW Humanist Society also holds monthly meetings on a wide variety of social issues ; thereby providing a public platform for informed liberal opinion of humanist temper. (These meetings frequently attract press coverage.) It also supplies speakers for debates in universities, clubs, etc. All of this is intended to contribute to a double purpose : to provide opportunity for humanists to discuss, and better inform themselves about, important social and practical issues ; but also, and more generally, to bridge the great gap between popular understanding and the knowledge and outlook of qualified scholars on any field from theology and ethics to the White Australia Policy and fall-out. The great weight of informed scholarly opinion is liberal/humanist opinion, i.e., is inclined towards a reduction in the prevalence and the force of many of the forms of coercion and restraint which our society maintains — from religious and sexual dogma to censorship, the vice squad and bombs-for-freedom. Such opinion prevails widely among intellectuals, and is in general simply taken for granted in small-circulation periodicals such as Nation or OUTLOOK. But these periodicals probably reach few beyond an audience already persuaded to their views. They preach largely to the converted. Between this audience and much of the rest of society a great gulf of incomprehension is set, due to an almost total lack of communication. It is a feature of humanist social action to be concerned to bring liberal thought and ideas to the attention of people now quite unacquainted with these. For this purpose, letters in the daily press may have more value than articles published in liberal periodicals. Much is made of the separation between C.P Snow's two cultures. But I believe this separation is neither as great as the separation between intellectuals (and perhaps especially academics) on the one hand, and the great bulk of society, even including many professional people on the other ; nor perhaps so important, since in so far as we can be reckoned democratic our values and our way of life are sustained by public opinion. HUMANIST ATTITUDE TO SEXUAL STANDARDS

Sexual standards and attitudes figure prominently in the interests and attention of associations of humanists. This is not only for the negative reason that they are the greatest remaining stronghold of dogma, irrationality and superstition ; but also for the positive reason, in line with all psychology since Freud, that the attitudes inculcated towards sexual matters profoundly influence the entire personality and are likely to be connected with the

prevalence of harsh, dogmatic and irrational characteristics in matters seemingly remote from sex, e.g., pathological need for power, and for its exercise in prohibition and domination ; readiness to support physical aggression against others — from flogging, capital punishment and war to belief in a vindictive, manichean God. Humanists believe that there is no more reason to suppose that we — cleric or sceptic — now know the best way to accommodate the sexual aspects of human personality than there was reason to suppose, at the time of their currency, that Aristotle's or Newton's theories represented finality in physics. I must therefore, in this matter of sexual standards especially, make it clear that I speak for myself only though I believe my views indicate modal humanist opinion. In any case I shall attempt here no more than brief comments intended to illustrate the temper of humanist views in so far as these differ from the orthodox. I think we will eventually come to see that the present notion that ' sex ' and ' morality ' have some special connection is a hangover from primitive superstition and primitive asceticism. I think we will recognise that one can be sensitive or insensitive, kindly or selfish, dishonest or truthful, exploitative or considerate of the welfare of others, and so on, with respect to sexual behaviour as with respect to any other behaviour ; and that sexual behaviour has no more special connection (but also no less connection) with morality than this. It follows from the humanist outlook as I have described this that ' no form of sexual behaviour can be regarded as unacceptable, sinful or deserving of censure unless it has demonstrable ill effects on the individual who practises it or on others ' (Comfort, Sex and Society, Pelican). Only this outlook provides any guarantee against stultifying and quite unnecessary prohibitions and coercions. Since this outlook has not prevailed in the past, ' the pre-requisite (now) of satisfactory relationships of any kind is probably a far greater freedom of personal judgement and initiative than we now possess, but coupled with a supportive social background of community which we still lack or have progressively lost '. As noted by Professor Carstairs in his 1962 Reith lectures, this humanist outlook is widespread among intelligent young people nowadays. But they apply it in a context of irrational guilt, confusion, avoidable ignorance and lack of social support — a condition which orthodoxy in general and the churches in particular seek strenuously to maintain. However, the rest of us are in not much better state. We are handicapped by an astonishing lack of evidence either about the pattern of actual sexual practice in our community or about its effects. Thus Russell (Marriage and Morals) can advocate varied sexual experience on the ground (among others) that it increases the likelihood of a wise choice of marriage partner ; Comfort may claim that 'it is highly probable that adultery today

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maintains far more marriages than it destroys ' ; and the traditional moralists, after hundreds of years of harangues which ranged from hell to ill-health and bags under the eves, can produce no substantial evidence in refutation of either. For centuries, fear of pregnancy and fear of venereal disease have been exploited to bedevil attempts at a rational sexual ethic. Developments in contraception and venereology are very near the point where they will dispose of the rational, as opposed to the rationalized, objections so far advanced to free sexual intercourse from an early age. Time has run out for the

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traditionalists, and a consideration of sexuality as an aspect of human personality, guilt-free and in its own right, cannot be long delayed. In brief — religious sanctions as a basis for sexual ethics have quite failed. There is nothing for it but to develop a secular code of sexual morality, preferably as a conscious act of sustained research. The churches and all others who oppose this course are culpably and irresponsibly extending the period during which popular sexual morality in our community, and especially among the young, will remain, in Carstairs' phrase, ' a wasteland littered with the debris of broken convictions '.