The New Humanism

Observing the new humanism from my old perspective I am struck not only by its lack of positive belief, but also by its need to compensate for this lack by antagonism toward an imagined enemy. I say "imagined," since it is obvious that religion is a declining force in Britain. There is no need to consult the pronouncements of the Archbishop of Canterbury: the response to the bus campaign abundantly proves the point. But a weak enemy is precisely what these negative philosophies require. Like so many modern ideologies, the new humanism seeks to define itself through what it is against rather than what it is for. It is for nothing, or at any rate for nothing in particular.

--"The New Humanism" by Roger Scruton, The American Spectator (3.09)

First, for transparency's sake, I am a Christian of a type: a seeker after God as a follower after Christ, at least to the extent I understand His essential spiritual teachings and example. And I also count myself something of a traditional humanist, at least so far as I understand that term. I do not consider the highest understandings and expressions of each to be incompatible with the other, and certainly not mutually exclusive.

But I am now more than a little troubled by a shameless, unapologetic appropriation of the proud and worthy name of humanism. It is a tradition that has long and consistently stood for the highest regard, respect, and caring for all humanity, and a kindly tolerance for cultural and religious differences. For now comes an angry, edgy group of self-important anti-theists, counting among their proselytizing leaders the fundamentalist Darwinist, Richard Dawkins. The article's author, Mr. Scruton:

This humanism is self-consciously "new," like New Labour; it has its own journal, the New Humanist, and its own sages, the most prominent of whom is Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and vice-president of the British Humanist Association. It runs advertising campaigns and letter-writing campaigns and is militant in asserting the truth of its vision and its right to make converts. But the vision is not that of my parents. The new humanism spends little time exalting man as an ideal. It says nothing, or next to nothing, about faith, hope, and charity; is scathing about patriotism; and is dismissive of those rearguard actions in defense of the family, public spirit, and sexual restraint that animated my parents. Instead of idealizing man, the new humanism denigrates God and attacks the belief in God as a human weakness. My parents too thought belief in God to be a weakness. But they were reluctant to deprive other human beings of a moral prop that they seemed to need.

I understand that some might rightly say that the rise of this publicly aggressive, anti-theistic initiative by those who have made a religion of Darwinist theory is a predictable response to the long-standing public aggressiveness of anti-evolution, anti-science fundamentalist Christians, those who express their faith to the world primarily as conservative cultural and political advocates. For unlike the U.K., these kinds of Christians in the U.S. are forces to be reckoned with. And I also understand there has long been a troubling strategy by marginal political or cultural groups of appropriating honored philosophic or patriotic descriptors or names to provide cover for and misdirect understanding of their marginal views. For this anti-theist group, humanism will do nicely.

So, yes, publicly aggressive, intolerantly judgmental, and poorly informed elements of the Christian or other faiths have likely invited this response. What else might we reasonably expect in response to the threatening, ignorant denial of evolutionary and environmental science by influential fundamentalist Christians? And a result, perhaps the least of the harm done, is that a proud name and tradition could be smeared and changed irreparably--much as the name "Christian" has been. "Humanism" may no longer be viewed the way Mr. Scruton or his parents understood it; and the expectation that faith and humanism can share the same common ground with respect and good will may no longer be realistic. Hear Mr. Scruton on the humanism of his parents:

They regarded humanism as a residual option, once faith had dissolved. It was not something to make a song and dance about, still less something to impose on others, but simply the best they could manage in the absence of God.

All around me I encountered humanists of my parents' kind. I befriended them at school, and was taught by them at Cambridge. And whenever I lost the Christian faith which had first dawned on me in school assemblies I would be a humanist for a spell, and feel comforted that there existed this other and more tangled path to the goal of moral discipline. Looking back on it, I see the humanism of my parents as a kind of rearguard action on behalf of religious values. They, and their contemporaries, believed that man is the source of his own ideals and also the object of them.... All the values that had been appropriated by the Christian churches are available to the humanist too. Faith, hope, and charity can exist as human causes, and without the need for a heavenly focus; humanists can build their lives on the love of neighbor, can exercise the virtues and discipline their appetites so as to be just, prudent, temperate, and courageous, just as the Greeks had taught, long before the edict of the Church had fallen like a shadow across the human spirit. A humanist can be a patriot; he can believe with Jesus that "greater love hath no man than this, that he should lay down his life for his friend." He is the enemy of false sentiment and lax morals, and all the more vigilant on behalf of morality in that he believes it to be the thing by which humanity is exalted, and the proof that we can be the source of our own ideals.

That noble form of humanism has its roots in the Enlightenment, in Kant's defense of the moral law, and in the progressivism of well-meaning Victorian sages. And the memory of it leads me to take an interest in something that calls itself "humanism" ...

But these traditional humanists may now be relegated to their quiet, anonymous back seats as the "new humanism" assumes a more strident public voice, much as people of more traditional religious spirituality were shouted down by the strident voices of the cultural, political soldiers of the religious right. So this is what it has come to: culture wars, too often fueled by misunderstandings or misrepresentations of matters of faith and spirituality.

Regrettably, history clearly informs us that it is all too sadly human and too troublingly predictable. It makes me careful in relating the nature of my Christian identity, for I want in no way to be confused with the intolerantly judgmental, anti-science, politically-oriented Christian cultural warriors. How can you miss the point of Christ so badly? And now I must also be careful in relating my sympathies and solidarity with the honorable notions of humanism, for it is being defined anew as a strident and uncompromising anti-theistic voice in the public forum. And it is addressing all people of faith, whether or not they are among the aggressively intolerant, judgmental forces of the cultural and religious right. May God help us. And, too, may the more moderate voices of wisdom step forward to lead us.

http://spectator.org/archives/2009/03/10/the-new-humanism