The ideas which make up modern humanism have developed slowly
throughout history and will not fade into oblivion just because
people may some day cease to use the term "humanist." Although there
were individual humanists throughout the world in each of the past
fifty or more centuries, it has been only in recent ones that these
ideas have been recognized as forming a point of view, an approach to
life.
There are, however, certain specific ideas which have gone into
the making of modern humanism. Seven of these, although at some
points shading into one another, seem to us to stand out.
As a starting point let us take the idea that this life should be
experienced deeply, lived fully, with environmentally sensitive
awareness and appreciation of that which is around us. Those of
artistic or venturesome inclination, in particular, have had this
keen awareness. This earthy state of mind has existed throughout the
ages, particularly in many tribal societies.
Another idea is that nature is thoroughly worthy of attention and
study. Early philosopher-scientists, among them Aristotle, shaped
this notion.
Still another idea is that of confidence in humankind. For
expression of this we are indebted in large measure to the to the
eighteenth-century democrats who had faith that humans can control
their own destinies.
A fourth idea is that of the equality of rights among humans. This
is part of the democratic ideal and for it we are again particularly
under obligation to the eighteenth century democrats. More recently
anti-slavery and womenís movements have come to the
surface.
Cooperation and mutual aid can be thought of as a fifth central
idea. This important theme lies deep in most religions. Early
humanists were exhilarated to see it given a new justification
through the work of sociologists and biologists.
A further idea is that of evolution as worked out by
nineteenth-century scientists. Early humanists were quick to realize
the implications of development through gradual change.
For a seventh and last idea we have chosen rational logical
thinking, the need of proving theory by testing and experience. On
this principle has been built the whole modern rational scientific
method of verification by experiment. Perhaps no other idea has been
of more practical importance to the humanist movement than this
one.
Enthusiasm for Life
Back through the centuries whenever people have enjoyed the sights
and sounds and other sensations of the world, and enjoyed these for
what they wereónot because they stood for something
elseóthey were experiencing life humanistically. Whenever they
felt keen interest in the drama of human life about them and ardently
desired to take part in it, they felt as humanists.
The Greek and Roman philosophers Epicurus and Lucretius urged
their followers to find happiness in the present world, in nature,
and in the affection of friends. During the Renaissance there was a
general rebirth of interest in the present, of zest for living.
In each age the work of some writers and artists has revealed the
beauty and harmony of the world as it is, beauty that might otherwise
go unnoticed. Such work has given new insights into the grandeur and
meaning of human life as we experience it. Beethoven's fifth and
ninth symphonies, Rembrandt's portraits, Shakespeare's plays and Lou
Harrison's multicultural compositions do this for us.
Nature Matters
Throughout history many have used their intelligence and energies
to force nature to give up its secrets. They have done this in order
to make life more livable, or because of an inspired, disciplined
curiosity. Indians in North and South America and many Asian and
African societies focused on understanding and interacting with the
soil, sky, and whatever grows and lives.
In the humanist tradition are Copernicus, Galileo, and other
investigators who, in the face of indifference or hostility,
courageously observed, experimented, recorded, and formulated.
Scientifically focused, they took the whole universe as their domain
daring to explore the heavens, the earth, and even humankind.
Protagoras, speaking in Greece, 450 B.C., encouraged people to
turn their minds to the investigation of what lay about them. "As to
the gods," he said, "I have no means of knowing either that they
exist or do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede
knowledge, both the obscurity of the questions and the shortness of
human life."
Many centuries later Francis Bacon, leading the revolt against
medieval scholasticism, urged people to be rational, to look at the
world more scientifically.
Only in recent centuries have mountains been considered more than
residences for gods. Now their climbing by some is almost spiritual
recreation.
In philosophy, the materialist and naturalist tradition had sturdy
roots in ancient times. Early philosophers based their systems
entirely on the natural world in founding schools of thought. The
naturalists emphasized the sufficiency of nature as a framework for
thinking. The materialists developed theories of matter little
different from those held in this atomic age. Today these have been
developed and blended together. However, they had barely survived the
rise of the Church and the advent of the Dark Ages. In the Western
world the modern tradition can be traced through Francis Bacon,
Benedict Spinoza, and Charles Sanders Peirce to George H. Mead, John
Dewey, Arthur Bentley, and Julian Huxley. Modern refinements have
been important, but for this school of thought nature as the sum
total of physical realities still remains the framework.
Late in the last century Robert Green Ingersoll told thousands of
Chautauqua attendees what few had been taught to believe:
When I became convinced that the Universe is
naturalóthat all the ghosts and gods are myths, there
entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood
the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. For the first time I
was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all
worlds. And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with
thankfulnessóand went out in love to all the heroes, the
thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain.
And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held and hold it
high that light might conquer darkness still.
Confidence in Humankind
In the Western world during the Renaissance there was manifested a
new confidence in human powers, but the social implications of this
new awareness were first fully faced in the eighteenth century by
those who fought for human rights. These leaders felt confidence in
what all people could do if given freedom. They had a profound belief
in reason, a deep distrust of all tyrannies which control our
minds.
These individuals lived in a world where political, economic, and
religious power was in the hands of a few. They lived in a time when
the dead hand of tradition was strong and that tradition backed by
deeply entrenched interests. Classical scholars and priesthoods
encouraged respect for divine revelation and discouraged
self-reliance. People were told to accept rather than to investigate
and to question.
Through the centuries religious leaders had taught that there were
laws beyond the reach of reason and that one should follow obediently
those who knew and interpreted such laws. They taught that we should
concentrate on reaching the next world rather than center thoughts
and actions on this one.
We see here two opposing moods: the one for self-determination;
the other against it. As John Herman Randall, Jr., has said, history
is
. . . an alternation of two moods. . . there is the mood
of supernaturalism. . . a mood of dependence and self-abnegation,
a bitter realization of frustration and failure, in which man's
confidence oozes to nothingness and he feels himself the plaything
of forces which he cannot pretend to comprehend.
And there is the humanistic hope "involving the triumphant
apotheosis of man, the creator and builder."
The eighteenth century democrats, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
Voltaire, believed in liberty. They felt that only where people are
free are they able to become all they might be. Thomas Paine and
Thomas Jefferson were opposed to all governments, institutions, laws,
and customs which restrained the free use of our minds, which imposed
arbitrary, unnecessary authority on how we shall think and act.
Thomas Jefferson wrote:
I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and
constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand and hand
with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more
developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new
truths discovered and manners and opinions change. . .
institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We
might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted
him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the
regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
Equality
We are indebted in large measure to the eighteenth century
democrats not only for their concept of political freedom but for the
idea of political equality. Not only is there intrinsic value in each
of us, but there is a basic human equality among us.
Political and religious leaders traditionally supported the theory
of divine right and the notion that some groups were inherently
superior to others. Some people with an independent turn of
mindó nonconformists who were perpetually getting into
troubleólooked at all the kings, dukes, bishops, and priests
and whispered the simple questions: What, if anything, makes them
superior? What indispensible purpose do they serve?
Mutual Aid
For centuries many religions have advanced the idea that all men
are brothers and therefore should help one another. This notion,
however, has fared but poorly and still is bravely struggling for
survival in a largely callous world. The difficulty lies, perhaps, in
that humans have been told merely that it is our duty to feel as
brothers and sisters. We have been given no satisfactory reasons.
There are, however, many reasons why the modern humanist is
convinced of the value of cooperation. In the first place,
concentration of interest in the present, in this life on earth, acts
as a dynamo generating the idea that existence should be tolerable
for everyone. If this is the only life we can be sure of, let us make
it a worthy one, both for ourselves and others.
During the last hundred years, furthermore, the humanist knows
that scientists have made clear how cooperation is, in a very real
sense, important to survival on many levels of life. Pyotr A.
Kropotkin pointed out how crucial to human and animal survival is the
exercise of mutual aid. At least one paleontologist found in
cooperation the grand strategy of evolution. According to H.M.
Bernard's zoological researches, the development of higher forms of
life was made possible by the progressive cooperation of cells.
Things Evolve
Many early Greeks, Asians and Africans did not believe that the
world had been created as of a particular date by a deity. They felt
that somehow this universe with its wealth of living things had
changed or evolved from some simpler forces and material. Certain
nineteenth century scientists had come to this view but not until the
publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species were
average men and women faced with the idea of evolution.
In early consideration of this revelation most felt that a common
ancestry with animals lowered the human race to a level with them.
There were others, however, who sensed that in the idea of evolution
there lay cause for special encouragement. While other living things
must adapt themselves to nature, must change their own forms, humans
on account of their special gifts are able to adapt nature to
themselves. The idea that we can consciously turn the process of
evolution to our own advantage, to further our own highest good, to
recreate the world and ourselves, is at the very center of
present-day humanism.
During the nineteenth century a few thinkers suggested that moral
laws have not come to us through revelation. Herbert Spencer's strong
voice announced that these are the results of our experiences in
living with one another and are not the precepts of any supreme
being. Here we find emphasis on the evolutionary aspect of morality.
This too contributes to our philosophy.
Experience Is Our Guide
Gradually humans have learned to test the truth of our notions by
experience. Within recent centuries this practical good sense has
developed respect for rational thinking and scientific method, a
method which has served the interests of humanity more successfully,
more humanely, and therefore in a sense more spiritually, than any
other. Within the past century some of the implications of this
method have become widely known and appreciated. Most citizens of the
technically advanced countries have at least a vague faith in the
practical results of scientific methods. However, there have never
been large numbers who perceived how much value there was in using
this method in one's own daily life, or in the building of a living
philosophy. Those who were able to see it as a major tool in their
total adjustment to life have been, to that extent, in the humanist
tradition.
And So. . . Humanism
By the twentieth century, many individuals, impelled by their own
kind of interest in the world around them, had been carrying on a
quiet revolution. They had built up for us an entirely different
picture of the universeóand of our place in itófrom
that which had been accepted in the Middle Ages.
The established religionsóChristianity, Islam, Judaism, and
to some extent Buddhism and Hinduismóhad been built around a
predominantly static picture. The new picture is so different that
many have been repelled or have not been able to bring themselves to
accept it. It was the impact of this new knowledge, however, which
brought about the transformation of humanism into a relatively
clear-cut body of ideas and into organized movements. Humanism has
developed as scattered individuals and small groups realized that
they had a common bond in their thorough, ungrudging rational
acceptance of new knowledge and its implications.
Let us consider certain of the changes brought about in knowledge
during the past few centuries.
The earth, this globe of ours, once proud center of the divine
handiwork, has lost considerably in geographical importance. Even our
sun, itself thousands of times the size of the earth, is found to be
but an average-sized star on the edge of a nebula of perhaps 30
billion other stars. Beyond there are even other nebulae!
The earth, once thought in Europe to have been planned and created
about 4000 B.C., is now known to have a far longer history. While it
is uncertain how many millions of years ago the earth came into
being, it has reached its present condition through sporadic changes
and is still in process of change.
And humans, once center, master, and darling of the universe, for
whom all else was created, have had to take a more humble position.
We appear to have evolved from lower forms of life and to differ from
these less than had been supposed. Moreover, the findings of
advancing knowledge reveal that each of us is an inseparable unity of
body and personality, of mind and emotions. The "soul," long thought
to be a humanís unique possession, has evaporated into
literary existence.
When the impact of this new picture was felt, the implications
seemed staggering. How could people accept the new view of humans and
their universe? We had lost our security, our importance, we who had
been the favorite sons and daughters of the creators! We who were
made for a special destiny! Some even feared that our most precious
human goals, values, ideals, would lose importance in this new
world.
But these implications did not stagger the humanists of a century
ago. They had a solid faith in humankind. To them humankind needed no
privileged position in the scheme of things. Having a genuine respect
for, and interest in, human purposes and human ideals for their own
sakes, they were not upset to find that these are not linked up with
any great purposes of the universe as a whole.
Far from shrinking from the implications of biology, anthropology,
astronomy, psychology, paleontology, and physiology, they made them
the basis of their thinking. They built up from them the philosophy
and faith of humanism.
The sociologist Frank H. Hankins pointed to humanism as becoming a
logical step in the human venture:
Sociological and historical researchers have shown that
the essential core of religion is devotion to those social values
which bind men together in cooperative effort for group
preservation and mutual welfare; and that these values are
discovered through human experiences. Among those discovered in
recent times are devotion to truth as exemplified in the
scientific mentality, the dignity of individual man, and the
ideals of democracy. Humanism thus becomes the next logical step
in religious evolution; it is the heir and creative fulfillment of
the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the democratic revolutions.
