2008-12-30T23:40:00.001-08:00

An Historical Survey of Humanism

Humanism is defined as a non-theistic belief system based on a faith in democracy, rationality, and human autonomy. Secular humanism finds its roots in anti-Christian movements and is closely akin to a number of radical religious positions espoused during and after the Enlightenment. Its institutional embodiment varies from country to country, but Unitarianism and Ethical Culture have been particularly important in its history. Secular humanism has an ambiguous relationship to religion. on the one hand, it asserts that religion, per se, is an outmoded anti-modern way of relating human beings to the cosmos, but on the other hand, its totalistic world view makes it a functional equivalent of traditional religious views. This conflict over its religious status lies at the heart of recent controversies over secular humanism and makes it hard to categorize the position as either a religion or a philosophy.

During the course of this lesson you will view four 10 minute videos on the Religion of Secular Humanism. Click the link below to begin with the first video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sc3w-4vZPWw

Broadly, humanism can be categorized as a phenomenon of the modern era that has attracted the attention and interest primarily of intellectuals in the West. When considered solely as an intellectual world view, it encompasses the general scientific, philosophical, and religious perspectives of modern Western thinkers. In many respects, it is the ideology of modernity. As a religious point of view, some scholars have equated it with a generalized "religion of democracy," the American civil religion. However, this article treats humanism more narrowly, as a social movement tied to nineteenth-century free-thought groups and to twentieth-century liberal religions. Depending on the specific emphases of individual humanists, they may call themselves religious, secular, naturalistic, ethical, or scientific.

In general, humanists reject theism and supernaturalism and emphasize humankind's responsibility for its own well-being. This humanism must not be confused with Renaissance humanism, literary "new humanism," or Christian humanism, all of which have some points in common with it but, by and large, stem from entirely different roots and hold quite different assumptions about the nature of human beings and the world.

The myriad of iconoclastic free-thought movements can be classified according to the extent to which they emulate religion: on the one side, there is irreligious free-thought (utilitarianism or materialism, for example) and on the other side, there is religious free-thought (Comtean positivism or radical Unitarianism). The categories are not entirely distinct, however, and often great ambiguity exists between them; this is especially true when traditional religious markers, such as God, immortality, and cosmic purpose, disappear, and religion comes to connote a particular relationship to the world (often ritualistic or emotional). In some cases, religious freethinkers have explicitly sought to create an alternative religion, in other cases, the movement may attempt to replace religion but avoid the label. Because of humanism's comprehensive response to traditional religion, it has more in common with religious free-thought. Probably the most distinctive characteristic of humanism is the holistic quality of its thought that seeks to encompass human knowledge and experience in a broad synthetic manner. In this way, it functions as a substitute for religion and not merely a negation of it. Humanism advances both a destructive critique of religion as well as a positive program to supplement it.

This article will discuss first the pre-twentieth-century history of humanistic movements in the West, then the birth of humanism proper in the twentieth century. Finally, it will examine the emergence of a "secular humanist" movement and an allied formation of rationalistic skeptics.

Humanistic Currents in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Humanists have traced their history as far back as ancient Greece is the measure of all things," proclaimed Protagoras but the current movement finds its immediate intellectual origins in Enlightenment rationalism. In the eighteenth century, several political, ethical and religious currents coalesced into a bellicose anticlericalism. The resulting ideology emphasized the unity of man and advanced the cause of liberty. The ideology of liberty, especially liberty of thought, was probably the Enlightenments main contribution to humanism and free-thought. Many of the Enlightenment intellectuals espoused some form of deism and attacked the hypocrisy and irrationality of Christianity. Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was perhaps the most widely read of these deists as a result of his enormously popular book The Age of Reason. Christianity, the desists contended, merely placed shackles on the mind and was not consonant with what they termed "natural religion," a universal religion that could be deduced from the "book of nature" and did not contain the provincialism of Christianity. The deists emphatically affirmed the existence of a Creator-God even as they found contemporary religion muddled with ancient superstitions. They sought to discover a religion which conformed to the universal truths of science. It was this spirit of revolution (The abandonment of Christianity and the rationalistic reformulation of religion) that most explicitly links it to the humanist tradition. Religion purified of its hypocrisies, they contended, could serve the needs of humankind.

August Comte's (1798-1857) "religion of humanity" exemplifies one extreme of religious non-theism. The French philosopher August Comte advanced, as part of his progressive view of history, a suggestion for a new religion, one which eliminated all supernaturalism and which emphasized science and human achievement. His religion, modeled quite closely on Roman Catholic ritual and observances, replaced, for example, the traditional Catholic saints with important scientists. Comteanism found enthusiasts among French and British intellectuals who sought to reconstitute the state-church (Catholicism in France and Anglicanism in England) along non-theistic lines. The movement was not popular, however, in the predominantly Protestant United States with its anti-Catholic bias.

In America, religious radicalism came to be expressed as a non-creedal free religion that attracted a variety of contradictory non-Christian viewpoints, ranging from Emersonian transcendentalism to scientific theism to ethical agnosticism. At the core of the free religious movement was radical Unitarianism, and perhaps because of this, American free religionists usually retained some form of supernaturalism or idealism, finding materialistic atheism too vulgar. One of the leaders of the Free Religious Association was Francis Ellingwood Abbot (1836-1903), a radical Unitarian minister who promoted what he called scientific theism, a late nineteenth-century theological view which saw God as immanent and postulated that science would provide knowledge of God. The most successful free religious group, Ethical Culture, arose out of Reform Judaism. Founded by Felix Adler (1851-1933) in New York City, it spread thought the United States andEurope. Ethical Culture was agnostic regarding questions about the existence of God, focusing its attention on social activism, Adler's motto was "deed, not creed." Adler himself was a Kantian idealist and rejected scientific materialism. The early Ethical Culture movement followed Adler in this belief, though in later years it would abandon realism. Ethical Culture was a strongly community-centered religion and flourished in the larger cities. Ethical Culturists, like radical Unitarians, found most of their support among the politically liberal middle and upper classes.

Nearly all of the nineteenth-century free-thought movements aligned themselves with important political and social issues. Many of them agitated for the separation of church and state. Freethinkers were often sympathetic to the plight of the working class, but not always; in fact, in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, the labor issue was unpopular with freethinkers. Freethinkers generally supported the equality of women, and prominent leaders of the woman's movement were agnostics themselves and sympathetic to the agenda of radical religious reconstruction, this is most especially true of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, principle editor of The Woman's Bible. Contraception, however, which was inextricably linked to obscenity and free love in the nineteenth century, presented a continual source of controversy among radical religionists. The moralism that pervaded respectable middle-class free-thought kept these issues at the fringes of the movement. Overall, the freethinkers social and political positions varied widely, but they tended to embrace nontraditional social views: the attack on the church was as much an attack on hypocrisy and church sanctioned immorality as it was on specific theological dogmas.

Please take the next 10 minutes to view the video link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qodu3uPEHtE

free-thought's dependence upon science caused it to change with new scientific developments. Enlightenment thought concerning science largely stemmed from the fundamental discoveries and proofs of Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Based in the logically rigorous disciplines of mathematics, astronomy, and physics, the model of science that Newton left to posterity was precise, empirical, and highly objective. The deistic ideal of natural religion, which arose out of the Enlightenment, reflected the optimism of a culture that believed all knowledge could be derived through Newtonian-like scientific investigation. Newtonianism brought with it a faith in a universal and rational order underlying the world, an order that could only be the result of a completely rational Creator. Thus, the religion of the deists was a reaction against the provincialism and arbitrariness of Christianity. The Enlightenment promoted a faith in rational thought and in nature's underlying perfection.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the scientific world had been transformed by the almost universal adoption of some form of evolutionism. The Newtonian world view no longer dominated, and in its place stood a dynamic universe that no longer looked to a separate Creator for its existence. Instead, if a Creator was postulated, it was an immanent being, part of the evolving universe itself. Human beings in this system might continue to remain a pinnacle of the universe, but this was not longer necessary, and more pessimistic views of the relationship between man and nature came into existence. The assertion of absolute human autonomy and an explicit attack on other-worldly belief systems marked a transition to twentieth-century free-thought. Freethinkers had come to embrace a variety of views, including outright atheism, ethical agnosticism, and belief in an immanent God. Some parts of the Enlightenment heritage remained unaltered, however; the view of the common humanity of mankind did not disappear, nor did the belief in the ultimate efficacy of science to uncover universal truths.

Twentieth-Century Humanism

Bring with it new conditions and new scientific and philosophic premises, the twentieth century saw the rise of humanism proper; developments in the United States proved to be of singular importance in the rise of this new religious point of view. Shortly after 1910, several American Unitarian ministers, all of whom had left more conservative denominations of their youth, began to preach what they called humanism, in effect, a liberal non-theistic ethical stance. In 1933, a small group of young minister with ties to the Meadville Unitarian seminary in Chicagopublished "A Humanist Manifesto," a document which outlined in fifteen tersely worded affirmation the basic thrust of humanism. The thirty-four signatories included many liberal ministers (Unitarian, Ethical Culture, and Reform Jewish) and a number of well-known intellectuals, including John Dewey (1859-1952). The statement was drafted by the philosopher Roy Wood Sellars (1880-1973), himself an active Unitarian.

The foundations of religious humanism came out of a newly reconstructed philosophical naturalism. Non-theistic naturalism had flourished in the previous century, promoted by such individuals as Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and, later, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), but it was a deterministic philosophy and tended to reduce human experience to biological, chemical, or physical phenomena. The new naturalism, promoted most avidly by philosophers at Columbia University, was still a materialistic philosophy, but it avoided the determinism and reductionism of its precursor. This made it possibly for these philosophers, most of whom had strong liberal religious connections, to integrate religion into their world-view without compromising the rigor of scientific empiricism. They reconciled religion and science by separating personal religious experience from public scientific knowledge. Where religion depended on factual knowledge claims, it had to yield to science in all instances. And where science provided no information, such as for the existence of God or immortality, religion must remain mute. Humankind in the scientific age had to learn to live without certainty. Humanists insisted on this last point, reiterating over and over again the need for people to internalize the methods of modern science, especially its tentativeness and its open-mindedness.

Between 1918 and about 1937, Unitarianism was critically split between those members who sought to expel the humanists and others who insisted on tolerance and inclusion. The reconcilers eventually won out, and humanism has remained a viable option for American Unitarians since then. During this same period, humanism was attacked by Protestant modernists, from various denominations, liberal whose theological positions were closest to humanism, because they believed humanism had gone too far. It was, they contended, an untenable religious position, overly rationalistic and therefore unsatisfying. Rather than a religion, humanism was merely unadorned moralism. Furthermore, humanism’s optimistic assessment of mankind’s abilities precluded a clear understanding of the tragic elements of human existence. Finally, many modernists found it to be distastefully arrogant.

But humanism was not just confined to a religious dialogue. During the late 1920s, a number of like-minded intellectuals wrote books espousing this humanist point of view. The young British biologist Julian Huxley (1887-1975), grandson of T.H. Huxley, published his personal expression of a humanistic faith, Religion Without Revelation. In America, social commentator Walter Lipmann (1889-1974) wrote Preface to Morals, a long portrait of an age transformed by "the acids of modernity." Similar views were presented in E.A. Burtt's (1892-1989) Religion in an Age of Science, H.J. Randall, Sr. and Jr.’s (1871-1946 and 1899-1980) Religion and the Modern World, and John Dewey's A Common Faith. The motive driving much of this literature was the belief that the demise of traditional religion left a spiritual vacuum. Men and women were left aimless in the modern world and needed some way to integrate personal and cosmic elements of life, an honest way that harmonized with modern knowledge and social conditions. The striving for integration characterizes this humanist view.

Early British humanism differed from its American counterpart in its less ostensibly religious character. The main free-thought groups in England after the turn of the century were the Rationalist Press Association (RPA), the National Secular Society (NSS), and the Ethical Culture Societies. The Ethical Culture groups, of course, expressed a distinctly religious form of free-thought, retaining congregational and ritual aspects of traditional churches, holding weekly meetings, and performing social work. The religiosity of the Ethical Societies, however, was counterbalanced by the generally irreligious character of the RPA and NSS. The Rationalist Press focused their efforts on publishing ventures to make inexpensive rationalist literature widely available. A number of well-known British intellectuals have been members of the RPA, including Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Gilbert Murray (1866-1957), Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974), Julian Huxley, and Alfred J. Ayer (1910-1989). The rationalists held a more explicitly intellectual point of view from that of the Ethical groups and were not communal in nature.

The political views of perhaps the great majority of humanists in both Britain and the United State at this time were distinctly socialistic. Humanism’s global vision and emphasis on human betterment made it quite congenial to Marxism and to the interests of labor. Humanism also exhibited a strong pacifist strain; World War I, many of the humanists thought, merely showed the folly of militarism.

Humanism became a truly international movement at mid-century. The American Humanist Association (AHA) was formed in 1940, and groups in other countries soon followed suit. Ethical Culturists slowly came to see themselves as essentially humanistic, and began to cooperate more and more with humanists on common causes. The British Humanist Association was founded in 1963 through the union of the Ethical Culture groups and the RPA. Earlier, in 1952, American and British humanists had met with like-minded groups in Western Europe,America, and India and formed the International Humanist and Ethical Union. In a number of European countries, the combination of a high percentage of unchurched citizens with a state-church tradition created conditions quite favorable to the spread of humanism. In the Netherland and Norway in particular, humanism flourished in an atmosphere of state-supported religious pluralism. There, humanism represented a alternative "life-stance" to traditional religions, and thus became eligible for government subsidies like other church groups. In nearly all of these countries, some people adopted humanism as a substitute religion which would provide counselors to perform rituals like weddings and funerals. Indian humanism is unusual in that it finds its origins in a grass-roots political movement based in a strong social reform tradition. The Indians de-emphasize the intellectualism that pervades most of the Western forms of humanism. In all of these countries, humanism reflects a very similar worldview. Democracy and science play key roles in defining the positive outlook of humanists, providing it with the fundamental assumptions upon which specific religious, social, and political issues are considered.

Go to Module 8 - Lesson 3

Module 8 - Lesson 2: Historical Survey of Humanism