What does a humanist feel when they gaze up at the stars? In this episode, George Miller speaks to philosopher Richard Norman, author of What Is Humanism For?, about wonder, meaning and morality in a world without God.
Their conversation traces Norman’s intellectual journey, from religious upbringing to secular commitment, and explores how humanism answers some of life’s deepest questions — not through divine revelation, but through shared human experience.
Along the way, they consider humanist funerals, climate change, artificial intelligence and how a humanist might still feel awe in a godless universe:
‘The awe comes from our sense of both our insignificance when confronted with the vastness of the universe — and our connection with it. A sense that we are part of this magnificent universe.’
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Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
Richard Norman, BA (Cantab), PhD (London), is a British academic, philosopher and humanist. He is Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Kent, where he spent most of his career, and a patron of Humanists UK.
What Is Humanism For? by Richard Norman is available on Bristol University Press for £8.99 here.
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SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
00:58 – What feelings and thoughts does it provoke in a humanist when they look up on a starry night?
08:22 – Did you have a religious upbringing?
17:13 – When does it become possible to begin to put forward ideas which seriously question Christianity?
22:55 – What provides the ethical foundations for humanism?
26:48 – How does that basic foundation then begin to help us with the purpose?
32:15 – How does a humanist funeral work?
34:59 – Does putting the human at the centre lead to things like climate change?
41:05 – What do humanists think about this possible brave new world where we’re no longer the most rational creature on the planet?
44:14 – What should you do next if you’re still curious?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
George Miller: Hello and welcome to the Transforming Society podcast from Bristol University Press.
My name is George Miller and I’m the editor of a series from BUP that launched recently: over the next few years What is it for? will explore the purpose of a range of institutions, beliefs, ideologies and other key elements of the contemporary world: from war to philanthropy; nuclear weapons to free speech; conspiracy theories to veganism.
The latest addition to the series is What is humanism for? by Richard Norman. Richard is emeritus professor of moral philosophy at the University of Kent, a patron of Humanists UK, and a member of Humanist Climate Action. He has published widely in the fields of ethics and political philosophy.
When I spoke to Richard recently I took my lead from something he mentions in the book: staring up at the night sky. He cites Freud’s phrase ‘the oceanic feeling’, which most of us will probably recognise: a sense of looking up at the immensity of the sky and experiencing awe and wonder.
A religious person would look up and take the firmament as a manifestation of a god, perhaps of a creator and would be inspired to think religious thoughts of mystery and wonder.
What feelings and thoughts, I wanted to know, does it provoke in a humanist when they look up on a starry night?
Richard Norman: Yes, that’s a very good question, I think. I think it’s interesting that you use the word manifestation there, because a humanist would certainly feel the importance of that experience, but the focus would be on the experience, not the idea that it’s somehow leading you to something else, drawing you towards some belief which you need in order to explain it. In a sense, I think the humanist is, in a sense, in a better position to relish the experience itself for its own sake.
Now, because there are things one can say about it from a humanist point of view, from a human point of view, that it involves a great sense of peace, a sense of being connected to something larger than oneself, a sense of being able to put into perspective what can seem rather petty preoccupations which tend to divert us from what’s important to us.
But the emphasis for the humanist would be on the nature of the experience and the difference that it makes by itself to our lives, rather than trying to go beyond it to something else. In that way, I think it’s very emblematic of the difference between humanism and conventional religious perspective.
Critically, the humanist wouldn’t be rejecting that experiential, personal sense of wonder. They wouldn’t be standing there contemplating it in a scientific sense and thinking about these gases and distances and astral bodies, which I think is quite an important distinction to make.
It is. And, of course, the science is important. In a way, the science adds to the sense of wonder. I mean, when we look up at the night sky, we no longer think, well, it’s quite a few thousand miles away. What we’re seeing is something immense, something that defies all our common sense expectations. We’re looking at billions of stars and billions of galaxies which have existed for billions of years. That in itself is awe-inspiring. The science, in a way, adds to the awe. But it adds to it. It doesn’t create the awe.
The awe comes from our sense of both, in a way, our insignificance when confronted with the vastness of the universe, but also our sense of connection with it, a sense that we are part of this magnificent universe.
GM: Now, when I was planning this series, I made lots of lists of potential titles. And, the lists were very much longer than the series will ever be because there’s so many possible titles you could put in it. On an early list, I think I probably wrote down the word atheism. I think I probably wrote that down because I remember, 20-odd years ago, there was this vogue for new atheism, the Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins approach, where atheism did really seem to be instrumentalised. It did seem to have a purpose. Its purpose seemed to be to take down religion. It wasn’t simply setting out a set of beliefs or assumptions or conclusions about the world and our place in the world. It seemed to have a project.
I felt for a variety of reasons, one of which that wave seems to have passed, and also that it seemed to be overwhelmingly negative and really not to give a good account of itself. And it seemed to me that humanism was much richer and more interesting and positive, if I can put it as straightforwardly as that, way to approach perhaps a similar set or an interlocking or overlapping set of questions. Do you mean, do you think that I made the right decision? Can you see where I’m coming from?
RN: I think you’ve made exactly the right decision. I think you’ve put your finger on it. I think you’ve left me with nothing to say. I think that’s, that’s absolutely the difference. Atheism is not something you can live by. Humanism is.
If you ask what is atheism for? Well, I suppose you could say it’s, it’s for getting at the truth, getting to an understanding of how things are. That’s, that’s a crucially important exercise, of course. I wouldn’t want to knock that vogue for what people called the new atheism, though it wasn’t new at all. It was a really a restatement of ideas that have been around since the European enlightenment. So, it was, it had an interesting impact. It reawakened the debate, which I think was very valuable, but the debate needs to go beyond the negative.
The debate needs to engage with the perfectly legitimate question. Well, if there is no God, what do we live for? What are our lives about? What gives value to our lives? How do we make sense of the world around us? And that’s what humanism is for, to address those questions.
GM: I guess the new atheist perspective saw the world in very binary terms. I get the impression that humanism is perhaps more open to agnosticism and to nuance and perhaps doubt than the card-carrying atheists.
RN: I think so, yes. I mean, humanists come in all shapes and sizes and some will be, see the world in more binary terms than others. I’m very much on the non-binary extreme.
So, I think that people’s beliefs and values are incredibly complex, and that includes religious people. I’m very interested in dialogue with religious people, very actively engaged in .
I have another book that I’m about, that I’m co-editing and which is going to be published the day before, What is Humanism for? which is rather nice, is an edited collection called Religion and Atheism in Dialogue, which is exactly what it says.
It’s engaging in dialogue with thoughtful religious people to look at what we have in common, what beliefs we share, what common ground there is, what the nature of our differences is, how we can try to make sense of those differences and perhaps go some way to understanding them better.
So I’m very much, yes, I’m very much on the complexity end of the relationship between religion and non-religion. It’s important to do justice to that and not set up a simple binary, as you say.
GM: Now, one thing we didn’t talk about when we were working on this book, and which I’m curious about, is your own intellectual path, your own spiritual path to humanism. I wondered, could you take us back to your childhood and tell us, what, did you have a religious upbringing? How did you end up where you are today, as it were?
RN: Well, yes, I did indeed. That’s an interesting story., this is a story that I tell when I go to talk about humanism. I get a lot of invitations these days to go into schools to talk about humanism. I’m a humanist school speaker.
Latterly, those invitations have been very much focused on primary schools. That’s a wonderful opportunity to tell my own story, of course, at that age, the kids are keen to know about you as a person. For the first 20 years of my life, really, I was a Christian.
One of my grandparents was a Baptist. So I went along to the Baptist Church and Baptist Sunday School for 10 years. When we moved house, I went along to the Methodist Church where my great aunts were mainstays of the local Methodist Church. I continued going there regularly every Sunday for another, pretty much 10 years or so.
It was a hugely important part of my life. In many ways, a very positive part of my life. It got me thinking about beliefs and values. It got me thinking about the nature of the world and so forth. It was intellectually stimulating. It wasn’t a narrow version of Christianity. It was one that very much encouraged me to think. I did.
The more I thought about it, the more I thought, I’m not sure that I can make sense of this. One of the things that I say to kids when I go into schools is I used to every night kneel down by my bed and say my prayers and increasingly, I thought, what am I doing here? As I became more conscious and began to raise questions more. That didn’t lead to an immediate change of perspective. It led me to try to think it through in a more thorough, more satisfactory way.
The attempt to think it through coincided with some quite important changes that were going on within the Christian churches. It was the time of the publication of the book Honest to God, which some people may remember by Bishop John Robinson, which caused a great furore because it set out to question very naive views about the nature of religion, the idea of God as a super person who was looking after you and tried to put Christian belief into more intellectually sustainable form. So I was very excited by that.
But the upshot of my engagement with all that thinking was to think the very idea of a deity in the end can’t be articulated in a coherent way. But I think also it took with me very much the important values that I’d learned from my Christian upbringing, because as I say, it was a very open, liberal version of Christianity. So the virtues of compassion, the importance of justice, of social justice, which my Methodist family was very strongly committed to. So in some ways, it was a positive experience.
It’s always, of course, a struggle to leave behind not only a set of beliefs, but also a community in which those beliefs are embedded, which was very, very much a part of my life. So it wasn’t an easy transition debate, but much easier.
Of course, it has to be said, then that transition for a great many people who are sometimes under huge pressure to stay with a religious community, which they have come to find extremely constricting, and very difficult to live with, but also very difficult to leave. But that was my history.
GM: That’s really fascinating. It’s left me wondering, as you began to lose this framework for your beliefs and your values, were you simultaneously beginning to seek another framework in philosophy and in science? I mean, were you questing for something else which would undergird and frame those beliefs?
RN: In philosophy, yes. I mean, to be personal about this, this also coincided with, the culmination of this was when I went to university. I had to decide what I was going to study at university. I went up to university to study classics, ancient Latin and Greek literature and history. In my first year at university, I increasingly felt uncomfortable with that, mainly because I didn’t have a flair for the language, which is crucial for studying that theory. Because I was so very much preoccupied with thinking about religious issues, initially, I thought, I’ll change to theology.
I talked to the Dean who said, well, take your time, think it through properly. By the end of the year, I knew what I wanted to change to was philosophy. That’s what I did. Of course, as you intimate, that fitted in perfectly with the intellectual activity that I was going through.
At first, I was rather disappointed in philosophy, because this was the heyday of linguistic philosophy, when so much of it seemed to be about rather trivial questions about the meanings of words. I got a bit impatient with philosophy as well. I said to my philosophy tutor, what about the big questions this instance of God? And he said, well, we can talk about those as well. But yes, it was very much part of that whole process of change.
What I also learned, of course, from studying philosophy, is that there are no easy answers. What’s as important as the answers is the process of trying to look for it, the process of rational inquiry, of coherent, logical thought, trying to get clear about things. So yes, that’s really shaped my life since.
GM: You mentioned classics. From the book, it’s clear that the questions that humanists are asking today have much in common with what some ancient Greeks were asking over 2000 years ago. The same impulses there. Is it fair to see that ancient Greek tradition as part one of the wellsprings for contemporary humanism? Or is that stretching too far?
Absolutely. One of the temptations when I write about humanism is to go on and on about the Greeks. That’s something that I had to cut down for this book as well. I would love to write a book about the ancient Greek origins of humanism. It’s in around the seventh century BCE.
You get these questions as this wonderful thinker, Xenophanes, about whom we know very little. But he said, if horses had gods, they’d think they were horses. If cows had gods, they’d think that their gods were cows. The Ethiopians think that their gods are snub nose. The Thracians say that their gods have red hair. What he was saying is we create these gods in our own image, rather than being made in the image of God.
What’s amazing is that is not the actual points that he made, but that he represents that willingness to thoroughly question beliefs which were, simply accepted as normal within his society. That impulse for questioning, I think, is absolutely crucial.
That is very much part of the intellectual tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks. Socrates, of course, a classic example, Socrates always asking questions. In the end, the Athenians got so fed up with him, they put him to death, which was a bit extreme.
But that whole tradition of questioning received beliefs, thinking through the evidence, thinking through what you can coherently say, that’s very much a tradition that goes back. One of the reasons why it’s important not to pin it on the Greeks, I think, is that increasingly humanists become aware of how, within other cultures in other parts of the world, you find that same exercise going on.
If you look at ancient Indian thought, you find very much the same sorts of questions being raised there at about the same time. We don’t know to what extent there was interchange and influence between the two. But yes, this same thinking has gone on other cultures as well. It’s important to draw on that more global history as well. So there are certain impulses in common that we see in different parts of the world at different times.
Yes, and they’re huge, very difficult questions to raise about, why it is at certain times in history that people start raising those questions and thinking outside the box, thinking outside their own culture.
GM: I realise I’m skipping through millennia here. But when does it become possible to begin to put forward ideas which seriously question Christianity? If ancient Greece is one important reference point, it seemed to me that when it became however dangerous, if it became possible to erect some argument that rejected Christianity, that’s significant.
RN: Yes, I mean, I suppose it’s really, of course, it’s a slow process, it becomes really possible in the 19th century, I think, you’ve got the new period of very radical thinking going on across Europe in the 18th century, what we call the Enlightenment, but it was still very dangerous to say, well, I’m an atheist.
Hume, a great philosopher, David Hume, publishes wonderful dialogues on natural religion. He made sure that it wasn’t published in his lifetime. He wrote it in dialogue form, so that none of the characters came out as an atheist.
But Hume was a master of irony and of subtle writing. It’s very clear, when you read dialogues of natural religion, it’s very clear what the message is that no version of orthodox Christian belief can be rationally and philosophically defended. But he couldn’t come out and say that.
Another very influential thinker, contemporary with you, Baron d’Holbach, who was German, but was part of salon in Paris. There’s a story of Hume visiting him and saying, well, I’ve never met a fully-fledged atheist.
D’Holbach said, well, I think there are eleven in this room. But d’Holbach couldn’t, again, publish his own writing explicitly saying, this is a defence of atheism. He published pseudonymously. He was very careful about using the word atheism.
Another landmark example is that the poet Shelley, when he was at Oxford University as a student, he and a friend of his produced a book, again anonymously, called The Necessity of Atheism. A few copies were sold. As a result, Shelley was chucked out of Oxford University with his friend Hogg.
So even then, that was the first decade, I can’t remember the exact year, that the first decade of the 19th century, it was still very dangerous to call yourself an atheist.
But what’s fascinating is over the period of the 19th century in European cultures, and in the United States, of course, gradually people became more and more explicit about religious doubts. It became more and more of a wider cultural phenomenon, the so-called crisis of faith that’s epitomised in Matthew Arnold’s famous poem ‘Dover Beach’, when he talks about the sea of faith now, once was at its full, but now it’s receding.
I think that was very much a sense that a lot of people had in the 19th century, this crisis of faith that really, we had to think this through. Again, of course, it’s something that people really struggled with.
What’s impressive is the way in which in the 19th century, you began to get these new institutions and organisations coming into existence, the so-called ethical societies, for example, the forerunners of the modern humanist movement, in which people really try to think through what it is in a positive way they believe, if they can no longer rely on the old traditional religious dogmas.
GM: So it’s in the latter part of the 19th century that we see humanism in a sense that we would recognise it today, beginning to come together, beginning to think not about the loss of religious belief, but about what might replace it in wild view and ethical terms, because humanism, of course, has been used at various periods of history to mean quite different things, isn’t it?
RN: Yes, that’s right. I mean, the original use of the word humanism in the European languages and Latin languages was to refer to the Renaissance humanists, the scholars who discovered after the fall of Constantinople, in particular, all these classics of Latin and Greek became more available in Western Europe, and scholars who studied these, and the humanists because they were reviving this interest in the literature and the culture that focused on the humanities, on what it is to be human.
Of course, initially within a religious context, but that was the original use of the word humanism. Then the use of the word gradually changed. It’s only quite recently, only in well into the last century, well into the 20th century, that people we now call humanists started using that word.
There are all sorts of other words that people use, secularists, rationalists, free thinkers, sceptics, and so on. It took a long time. Of course, as I said, the ethical societies, that was the preferred phrase for a long time.
What is now Humanists UK was originally the ethical union for a long time, it had that name. Then only in the 1950s, I think it adopted the name the British Humanist Association. Then more recently, that was changed to the rather more trendy Humanists UK. So the movement has a longer history than the word.
GM: So you dispense with the religious framework, you reject the appeal to some supernatural creator God. What then provides the ethical foundations? And how is that arrived at? Because I guess that’s central question, isn’t it? So if you lose that structure that religion provides, which makes everything, well, let’s say, reasonably clear, and explains why you should be doing certain things. If you reject that, then do you build from the ground up? And if so, on what floor plan?
RN: Well, you do build from the ground up, you build from what we are. I mean, my simple answer would be, you look at our shared humanity, and the nature of our shared humanity, and why that gives rise to values which we share, that there are shared human needs, which we all have, not only biological needs, but also needs, the needs that we have in order to flourish, the need for community, the need for a sense of achievement in our lives, the need to think for ourselves to feel that we’re making a difference in the world, to make sense of our lives as something specific to us as individuals.
The need for communities is crucially important there, because living in human beings, as social beings, social animals, as Aristotle famously said, and to live in a community is to live by its very nature in a network of values, a network of shared values. Any community is impossible without shared values.
So at a very basic, very general level, although of course, at some level, cultures and communities vary hugely in the way that they live and in the values that they have, at a more fundamental value, any human community needs to recognise some version of the value of justice, for example.
To cooperate, we need some agreed notion of how we share our tasks, how we share out the benefits of cooperation. Of course, there are all sorts of ways in which that can be articulated, but some notion of justice, of fairness is built into human affairs and human cooperation. Some notion of honesty, fundamental to any human community is the use of a shared language.
That whole realm of activity would be impossible without some norm of honesty, the presumption that when people talk to one another, the default position is to assume that they’re attempting to tell one another the truth.
Now, of course, that’s no guarantee that people always will do, but some concept of honesty, of using language in order to convey what you really think is built into the whole exercise of the use of language.
Some value of loyalty, we exist within communities, large and small, where we have responsibilities to one another, where we share our lives, and therefore where we have obligations of loyalty to one another, that built into the very idea of a family, a friendship and so forth.
All these values underpinning them all is the value of kindness and compassion, the recognition of our shared humanity, the recognition of our shared experiences, our shared experiences of happiness and sadness, and our fundamental, deeply human capacity for empathy, for sharing other people’s feelings, entering into other people’s lives.
Now, all of these things, of course, are no guarantee that people live by these values, but that’s where we need to look to understand why those values are fundamental to what it is to be human, and why some version of those values is found in any human community.
That’s where we would start. That’s when your phrase ‘from the ground up’ is ‘that’s the ground one would start from’.
GM: So can you talk a little bit about, equipped with those set of values, how that enables you to begin to address the title question of your book, ‘What Humanism is for?’ So you’ve got this ethical framework, you’ve rejected religion. So from that point, is it about navigating daily life? Is it about finding meaning? Is it about purpose? How does that basic foundation then begin to help us with the purpose?
RN: Well, it’s partly about navigating daily life. Of course, that’s what, a lot of the time we navigate daily life with those sorts of values without having to think about them. They come naturally to us. Sometimes they don’t. That’s the problem of human life.
But a lot of the time in our day to day interactions with other people, we, implicitly respond to other people on the basis of values of that kind. But also then they provide the starting point for thinking about more controversial ethical issues.
I’m going to take an example, if I may, that’s very pertinent today, because in the House of Commons today, members of Parliament are debating the assisted dying bill, about whether the law should change in such a way as to make it possible to help terminally ill people who want help with ending their lives because they’re at the end of their lives and they’re in terrible pain.
They simply don’t want to go on longer and they want help in ending their suffering. That’s become a hugely controversial issue. In many ways, a very divisive one.
People have very strong views. Some people think, yeah, it’s absolutely vital the law should be changed. Other people think, no, that will be a terrible move. Although it’s so divisive, I think as a humanist, I would want to say it’s important to look at the capacities for rational dialogue about it.
That’s where what I was saying about these fundamental values comes into play. Whatever we think about the issue of assisted dying, most people would say we share the importance of the value of compassion. Then we have to think through the difficult question, well, what does compassion mean in this situation?
Some people, the opponents of legalising assisted dying will say, well, how can you try to bring about, promote the death of someone, human being, surely compassion should always lead you to want to preserve human life.
Then other people would say, well, yes, of course, fundamental compassion normally in most circumstances would be to want to help people, to keep them out of danger, to help them to go on living. But there are extreme circumstances in which the value of compassion might point the other way. We have to recognise the complexity.
We have to recognise that people who are dying in terrible agony, in huge indignity, who desperately ask for help, that the compassionate response to them might be to help them to put an end to their suffering.
But the important point there is there is scope for rational debate and dialogue on matters that, precisely because we do have a shared language of values within which we can try to articulate what our differences are and how we can think them through.
So that’s an important feature then of the humanist approach to values. We don’t get our answers from a sacred text or a religious institution, which tells us, well, if you’re a real Christian, if you’re a real Muslim, if you’re a real Jew or Hindu or whatever, this is your answer. That is what you have to go by, which is, you can be a very divisive way of looking about these, look at these controversial moral and ethical issues.
What the humanist would say is we need to look at these fundamental human values, which we share because we are human, and look at what they mean in this particular context, in the light of all the facts. I mean, the recognition of the facts is crucially important, including the science. Look at what the circumstances are.
So if I may stick with the assisted dying example, one of the issues here, of course, is whether the legalising assisted dying could be misused to put undue pressure on people to ask for help in ending their lives when they didn’t really want it.
So an important part of that debate, again, is looking at the evidence, looking at what has happened in other jurisdictions where assisted dying has been legalised, look at what safeguards can be put in place, look at institutionally how they might work, how they might be problematic.
So an important part of the debate is also getting at the facts. Again, humanists would say that’s absolutely essential. We need to do our research, we need to find out what the social and scientific and biological and medical facts really are. So that’s why it’s a hugely complex question.
But it’s one about which there can be informed moral debate, and which there can be intelligent moral dialogue, because we can share the task of trying to get clear about the facts. We can share the values that we start out from in trying to arrive at thoughtful solutions to the issue.
GM: Richard, you spoke earlier about the importance of community to all of us as human beings. Religions have been very good at finding ways to express that desire for community and ceremony and ritual and togetherness and sharing.
To stay on a sombre subject, I wanted to ask about a humanist funeral, because that’s probably where religion, if I can put it in these terms, doesn’t most work in terms of consolation and, offering this promise of the beyond and something more than our human life and our human limitations.
It struck me that’s probably, that’s probably quite a, maybe one of the hardest tests for humanism to pass, not in intellectual terms, but in terms of feeding our human needs. So how does a humanist funeral respond to that?
RN: That’s a good question. As it happens, I went to the humanist funeral of a friend last week, and it was conducted by the humanist celebrant of whom there is a picture in the book, my friend Sue Baumbach.
As always, with the humanist funeral, what it does is to focus on the person to whom we’re saying goodbye, the person whom we will miss, focusing on the nature of that person’s life, telling stories about that person’s life, sometimes funny stories, but stories, of course, tinged with sadness, with great grief often about them, the person that we’ve lost at this particular funeral, the daughter of the person who died, spoke, and her contribution was a mixture of laughter and tears in a way which really sums up a humanist funeral. She was telling funny stories about her mum and broke down in tears at one point, literally.
That epitomises, really, the nature of a humanist funeral as an occasion in which we share our grief, the sometimes terrible loss that we’ve experienced, but at the same time, we recognise that the person for whom we’re grieving has lived a life well lived, a rich life, a full life, hopefully, and the memories of that life will stay with us, that person will stay with us through those memories.
These are not uniquely humanist, they are classically human responses that we all share. Again, it’s typical of humanism that it focuses on those, it focuses on our common human responses and human experiences, rather than what humanists would see as understandable, but in the end, illusory expectations of another future life.
GM: Richard, as we draw to a close, I don’t want to talk about all the objections to humanism, because you’re very honest in the book, and you deal with several of them. I think people will be interested to see what you have to say about some of those objections.
But I wanted to maybe pick out one or two things. One of them is, you could say that, well, you might say this is a distortion of what humanism is, but we’re doing an incredible amount of damage to the planet. We’re, perhaps careering towards some existential crisis.
You could say that by putting the human at the centre, in fact, not by not living by, true religious tenets, but being very much about the material, the human, our needs, our wants, and expressing those and fulfilling our desires, we’ve brought ourselves to this, terrible situation.
What we have, what we should be doing in the Anthropocene is trying to, in some way, decentre the human, rather than focus on our material human reality.
What body humanists, and as I say, I recognise that’s probably something of a distortion of humanism, but is probably not an objection you haven’t heard before.
RN: It’s a very good case. It’s something I feel very strongly about. I’m a member of a group, which is a section of Humanists UK, which is called Humanists Climate Action. I’m very involved in that I produce a newsletter for it and so forth. Part of the purpose of that is to emphasise to our fellow humanists, the importance of taking action on the environmental crisis. That’s not something new that has a long history.
One of the early presidents of the is the first president of the British Humanist Association, the great biologist Julian Huxley was one of the pioneers of back in the 1950s of taking action on the environmental crisis, and force foresee the need for saw the need for this much more than most people at the time. So that’s something crucially important.
Now, the questions that you raise there, again, are crucial ones, but I think it’s important to pin down what we mean by the phrase human centred. Human beings have been human centred in their attitude to the environment in the sense that they’ve been short-sighted in their preoccupation with the ways in which technically and scientifically we can simply use the natural world as a resource. Part of the problem is that human beings have thought in a very short term way about that.
Most human beings, not all, but most human beings have failed to think ahead to what we’re doing to the natural world which we’re making use of through the whole process of industrialisation, of course, ravaged the natural world in all sorts of obvious ways.
There were always people speaking out against it, people William Morris at the end of the 19th century saying, what are we doing to our world? What is capitalism doing in creating terrible smoke-filled cities in which are a degradation of human life as well as a degradation of the natural world?
But the answer to that is not to stop thinking about the impact on human beings, but to think in a more adequate way about what we’re doing to ourselves, how we’re destroying the world from which we gain so much sustenance, not materially but also emotionally in giving meaning to our lives.
It takes us back to the night sky example, that if you can’t see the night sky for the smog, then you’re diminishing your own life. Of course, there’s much more to it than that.
An important part of what gives meaning and purpose to human life for humanists is recognising that we’re a part of the natural world which we share with other living things, the wonder of the life of other living things with which we share life on this planet, but which are so different from us in myriad ways which enrich our lives.
So thinking in human terms, if you, but in a much, much deeper way about what the natural world means to us as human beings, and thinking also of course on what we’re doing to other living things in the ways in which we affect their lives as well.
So of course, the environmental crisis also extends to thinking in a responsible way about modern agriculture, modern farming techniques, the way in which animals are kept in terrible conditions sometimes. That matters not because of its effect on human beings, but because of its effect on other sentient beings as well.
Keeping pigs reared in cages where they simply can’t move and can’t live their normal piggy life is a terrible wrong done to the animals as well as to ourselves in terms of the quality of the food that we eat and so forth.
So yes, crucially important humanist issues which raise the question of what we mean by being human centred and prompt us to think about how that notion should not be understood in purely narrow terms. In a sense, we have to be human centred because we are humans.
We have to think about what difference all these things make to our lives, but we have to think about the differences they make to our lives by seeing ourselves as something larger than simply our own narrow individual lives.
That we are part of a larger society, we’re part of an ongoing human history and we have to think about what world we are creating for those who will come afterwards, our children and our grandchildren and future generations, and thinking about the impact that we’re having on the natural world itself.
So it’s a good example that raises some good issues about the nature of humanism and in what way it’s human centred.
GM: Yeah and I guess another challenge to us as humans, I was thinking this morning having invented God and then having rejected God, we’re now at a stage in our development where we’re trying to create artificial superintelligence and it may never happen and if it does happen it may be a long way off, but serious people are spending a lot of money and talking about it as a potential to create something which is more rational, more all-seeing, more all-knowing than any human being has ever been by orders of magnitude and that must be, well it’s a profound challenge, even as a thought experiment for us all.
So what do humanists think about this possible brave new world where we’re no longer the most rational creature on the planet?
RN: Yes, I’m no expert on AI and I have to be very cautious about treading into this. At the same time I think my impression is that there’s a lot of wild thinking and fantasy in some of the things that people write and say about this, though I’m no expert at all.
I mean I think the crucially important thing to keep in mind is what we’re talking about is new techniques that human beings have created and the crucial question is what as human beings are we going to do with those things?
AI has huge potential for increasing our knowledge base, for example, for enabling human beings to process data and acquire information of a kind that has traditionally been extremely difficult to arrive at and extremely time consuming.
So it creates a lot of potential for improving human thinking, promoting human progress in the sense of giving us better control over how we do things and what we do, but we have to stop thinking about this as something that will take us over.
The proper way to think about it is to think about responsible use of it, how it can enable us to do new things, how it can also give huge power to some human beings over others and the dangers of that, looking at the political dangers, the social dangers of it.
Again, I’m no expert on this, but the influence of social media for good and for ill is a classic issue here.
People sometimes talk about transhumanism as the emergence of a world which will go beyond the human altogether and in which current scientific developments will lead to the existence of completely new beings with maybe cyborgs or whatever with a completely different biological basis and so forth.
The important serious questions are the questions about what difference these things make to human lives, to the human responsibilities, to the ways in which we use this new technology as human beings.
It’s that focus, I think, that again is part of what you were referring to earlier as bringing things down to earth, starting from where we really are, starting from the values that we have now and thinking about how we use this technology in responsible ways.
GM: So to finish, Richard, if people are curious about humanism, having listened to this, a very good place to go next is of course your book.
Then beyond that, out in the world, are people likely to then be able to find ways to connect with other humanists? Is that easy to do? I imagine some people might be curious but maybe a little bit trepidatious about, going to a new church. So once they’ve read your book, what should they do next if they’re still curious?
RN: Well, you mentioned humanist ceremonies and these are ways in which a lot of people first come across humanism for the first time. Humanist weddings are becoming increasingly popular. They’re now legally recognised in Scotland, though not in England. So the number of humanist weddings in Scotland has shot up and one of the things that we’re pushing for is for them to be legally recognised in England and Wales as well.
But that’s a very specific way in which people come across humanism. But I’ve talked about Humanist UK as an organisation and Humanist UK has lots of resources about the nature of humanism and how you can find out more about it. Very good section of its website called Understanding Humanism, which is partly for use by school teachers and for use in schools and colleges for finding out more about it. But it’s accessible to anyone. So you can Google Understanding Humanism and there’s a lot of resources there.
There are humanist groups, there are humanist organisations. Annual convention of the Humanist UK will be happening in Sheffield next month. So though as humanists, we don’t try to replicate the structure of other religious institutions and churches and so forth. There are humanist groups that people couldn’t get in touch with. This is where we come back to the new technology by going onto the web and looking at what’s around there. People can find out ways of getting in touch with humanism and humanist groups and other people who call themselves humanists. But there are a lot of ways of doing it and reading the book will be a good start as well. There are some suggestions at the end of that as to how you can find out more.
GM: I was talking to Ricard Norman, whose book, What is humanism for?, is available now. There are more details about it, and all the other titles in the series, on the Bristol University Press website, bristoluniversitypress.co.uk.
That’s it from me for now, so thanks for listening and goodbye.