What Does 'Humanism' Mean? An Interview with Andrew Copson

What does 'humanism' mean? Some writers are intent on seeing similarities between all the things that have ever been labelled 'humanist'...but just because the same word is used, it doesn't follow that they have anything else in common, or are on a continuum. Does so-called religious humanism have anything significant in common with the kind of humanism that non-religious humanists endorse?

To clear these muddy waters, I turned to Andrew Copson, Director of Education and Public Affairs at the British Humanist Association (BHA).

Nigel: There is some confusion about what 'Humanism' means. What do you understand by the term?

Andrew: I think the Oxford Companion to the Mind has it right when it calls Humanism 'a morally concerned style of intellectual atheism openly avowed by only a small minority of individuals (for example, those who are members of the British Humanist Association) but tacitly accepted by a wide spectrum of educated people in all parts of the Western world.' This contemporary and widely-shared meaning, which the word has had now for over half a century, takes it to denote a non-religious worldview entailing a belief in reason and evidence as the ways of understanding reality, in human welfare and fulfillment as the aim of morality, and  in the capacity of humanity to make meaning and purpose for itself in the absence of any 'ultimate' meaning or purpose to the universe. This is the meaning of the word understood by the British Humanist Association and all the other national Humanist organisations in the world, and the meaning that is commonly understood in education in UK schools today. It is the Humanism described in books like Richard Norman's On Humanism (Routledge) or Jim Herrick's Humanism: An Introduction (RPA) and great books from the 1960s such as Hector Hawton's Humanist Revolution. Any confusion that there still is over the term, I think, is down to the word having had different uses at different points in the past, before it came to mean what it mainly means today, and this sometimes gives rise to misleading uses of the word.

Nigel: Could you give an example of what you take to be a misleading use of 'Humanism'?

Andrew: Sometimes the confusion is comparatively innocuous, arising because we are translating out of another language, for example, French or Italian where the word may be used to mean just a general spirit of humanitarianism. Sometimes there is confusion, however, because people attempt to project old meanings of the word into the contemporary context; so, for example, people may try to relate the 'humanism' of the Renaissance to the contemporary non-religious worldview and this does muddy the water as the two usages are not identical. More confusion has been created recently, with some religious people and groups trying to use the term to refer to themselves as well as to the non-religious. While in the United States evangelical Christians (and creationist organisations in particular) still routinely use 'Humanism' as a secular bogeyman in their sermons and public statements, in the UK we have seen some religious people trying to co-opt the term for their own use and construct what they call 'Christian humanism', for example. I don't know why this is, but it can have the negative effect of seeming to deny non-religious worldviews their own integrity and seems to be related quite often to religious apologism. In a sense it is a sort of victory for the positive Humanism of the last half century that more and more people wish to apply the word to themselves, but I think it is more coherent to call Christians, for example, 'Christians' rather than 'Christian humanists' and Humanists 'Humanists' rather than 'secular humanists'. If we try to call any and every philosophy that in some way has something to do with people 'humanist' then we make the concept itself vacuous. There is a recent book in the Teach Yourself series by the agnostic Mark Vernon which runs into this sort of difficulty. Thankfully, this is not a very prominent debate within Humanism and I think the common usage of 'Humanism' is still that of a non-religious philosophy.

Nigel: How does Humanism feature in Religious Education syllabuses? Does that mean it is a quasi-religion?

Andrew: Humanism in the sense I am using the term is on the school curriculum alongside religions in a number of European countries such as the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Belgium and in the UK it has been a feature of Religious Education (RE) syllabuses in one way or another for decades. This certainly does not mean that Humanism is some sort of quasi-religion - the reason more and more RE syllabuses include teaching about Humanism is specifically because it is a good example, in the words of the UK government's National Framework for RE, of a 'secular worldview' and the Religious Education Council of England and Wales has said that it is essential for RE to include Humanism so that all children learn that there are many people for whom the answers to life's big questions are Humanist not religious ones. If this were not the case, the subject of RE would give a false impression of the reality of beliefs in the modern world. Teaching about Humanism in RE is a good way of introducing pupils to the beliefs and values of the non-religious in a way that makes them coherent and also allows comparison of religious views with Humanist ones.

Nigel: Thank you very much.

Comments

[Terry Thomas]

Nigel
I have read with considerable interest Andrew Copson's take on Humanism. It matches my own thoughts on the term in attempting to express where I stand in trying to avoid the negative implications of the term Atheism. Incidentally I am co-operating with Andrew in translating his educational material into Welsh.
However, while Andrew lists all the uses of Humanism he will try in vain to persuade others, including the religious, that his take on Humanism is the recognized and sole legitimate one. When I was grappling with belief in the years before I became an atheist I referred to myself as a Christian humanist. I still think it was a legtimate use of the term. After all, all humans are properly entitled to think in a humanistic way.
Having grappled with the term humanist in something I am writing I have come round to using the term 'naturalism'. I realise that there are problems with the diverse uses of philosophical naturalism, nevertheless there is a clue to the efficacy of the term when it is used as a term that embraces atheism. This is the attack on the concept by literlist Christian 'philosophers' such as Alvin Plantinga and William Craig Lane. They are not to be seen attacking humanism in a similar way.
Naturalism, for me, stands for a view that covers my atheism, my embracing of cultural forms, art, literature, music etc. and even the existence of religion, while rejecting any notions of 'religious' art or 'revelatory' religion. Much of what I now see as embraced by naturalism matches my position in the history of religions, which I taught in the OU, in which religion in the world is an example of a humanly devised cultural construct. This position I arrived at after years of studying and observing the various religions.
Primarily my 'world view' is explained by the term naturalism, as excluding any 'thing' that is imagined to exist beyond the world as experienced.
Perhaps you might address this posting with thoughts of your own. I have a long way to go before I can claim a wide range of argument to support my current 'world view' but nothing I have come across so far discourages me from following this line.
With kind regards
Terry

[D. R. Khashaba]

For me Humanism means the determination to find all meaning and all value within humanity. But Humanism was side-tracked when it adopted a narrow naturalistic conception of humanity. If humanity is to be the matrix and the fount of meaning and value, we must find our reality, and all reality, in the meaning and value within us. We must see that our inner reality is not reducible to nature as objectively observed.