Challenges for Humanists - Defending a Secular Society

Fundamentalism on the Rise

Humanists are facing a number of challenges.  One is the growth in fundamentalisms: religious fundamentalisms e.g. Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and in parts of India, Hindu fundamentalism, being one of its most 'toxic' forms.  This growth is occurring despite a general decline in religion and more people registering as non-religious in the census.  Fundamentalism is on the rise in the West as a consequence of two factors.  First, for more than twenty years people had been encouraged to be self-interested individualists, a stance that is an important element in economic fundamentalism.  Second, along with the growth of western capitalism certain aspects of modernity have made many people feel anxious.  In combination these two factors have pushed many people to look for simple answers, such as one finds in religion, because religion basically says is, here is god, do what he says and you don't have to worry about anything else.  In a time of high anxiety a lot of people find that very reassuring.  They want something that gives them a sense of order, stability and meaning to their world, and if the world that we live in is far too confusing, then people get worried and look for the answers in some sort of supernatural being.  Hence there is growth in evangelical groups, the ratbags or rabids, but not the reasonable Christians who would respect the right of Humanists, atheists and agnostics to survive and dialogue with them.

In addition to religious fundamentalists there are economic fundamentalists and rabid nationalists, as so many people look for something that gives them a simple black and white answer to what is happening in the world.  For these reasons there is a need to promote secularism, perhaps even more than Humanism, because there are a lot of people trying to undermine secularism, both here in Australia and elsewhere.  However, we shouldn't start a school, as another speaker suggested, and encourage the move into private schools, but rather make sure we support and help build the public education system.

Rationality

The idea of rationality, in combination with modernity, is part of what academics call 'the enlightenment project'.  Rationality assumed that once we knew the answers to everything somehow there would be a great burst of knowledge and everything would fall into place.  Until probably 20-30 years ago there was the search for Theories of Everything, such as Marxist theories and capitalist theories of everything.  Part of the reason we have acute anxiety, is that in the last twenty years - not to be blamed on postmodernism, because it's one of the symptoms - the idea that we can know everything has been under challenge.  As a social scientist, I can say  that in two hundred plus years of social science we still haven't got a single statement where we can say 'if A therefore B.'  Even within the hard science, such as quantum mechanics, we are much less certain about where we can say, if A, therefore B.

We have to start thinking about ways to create worlds where people can live with uncertainty; where people have enough sense of security about their fellow human beings and about the kind of society they are part of, they can deal with the fact that they don't necessarily know the answer to everything.  At the moment we have a world that is pushing up far more uncertainty and changes, that undermines our comfortableness and our socio-political sense.  Such changes as the undermining the welfare state, the role of government, and international law, make people feel much more insecure.  Science which was once seen as a good thing is now seen as something that can be 'toxic'.  For example, people worry about genetic modification and IVF and many others scientific developments.  Science is now perceived by many as more Frankenstein orientated, rather than the saviour of humanity, as it had been previously.

Humanists can contribute to the discussions society needs to have, especially on how you can live ethical lives without being told by god what ethics are.  The really important message is that the sense of right and wrong is something that we can derive from our experiences, from our relationship with other human beings and from the nature of the world that we live in.  This is a very necessary message in the world now, because we seem to be losing out in terms of the idea of secularism, as many think secular people don't know what's right and what's wrong.

To be more controversial, I don't think rationality gives us the answers; it only tells us what the rational answer is, such as how to get from A to B to C to D to E.  Rationality has no inbuilt morals or ethics - ethics being the sense of right and wrong; morals being those things which they are part of the mores of society we're in.  For some people, depending on their starting premises, a reasonable outcome can be some of the neo-liberal assumptions about economics, others even see reason as part of what Hitler did!  We have no guarantee that reason, unless allied to certain values, is going to produce an answer which is ethical.

Source of values

We need to recognise that values come from emotions, as well as thinking, and that we all make decisions according to emotions and then reasons.  I recommend Martha Nussbaum, an American philosopher, as a good source of the idea that it is often our feelings that make us decide what reasons to look for in making a decision.

Humans are social beings, and we need to get away from the masculine idea of 'the social contract' - a ridiculous idea of little male individuals that were separately created and suddenly decided that they'd connect up with each other.  We are not beings that contract socially with each other, we are beings that are interconnected to each other, because we are interdependent and part of a set of social relationships.  To be valued by others is very important for us, and because we want to be valued by others and have good societies we are likely to act well.

It's important to recognise that humans are neither good nor evil.  As the philosopher Hannah Arendt observed after viewing his trial in Israel said, Eichmann was not an evil man. He was a boring nasty little bureaucrat who did evil things.  We need to recognise we all have the capacity for good and evil.  How we react will in part be determined by who we are, how we relate to other people and a sense of what we want to get.  If we have a sense of generosity and empathy, we are more likely to have a sense that strangers are like us.  However, if we have a sense of fear, anxiety, and distrust of others we will have the sense that other people are not like us, and we don't dare trust them and we're going have to take care of ourselves.

Trustworthy societies

We have to start thinking about how we create societies which are trustworthy, though trustworthy is different to trust.  We might trust a mechanic to fix our car but we wouldn't trust him to do anything else.  Trust is contingent on circumstances.  To find somebody trustworthy you don't just want to know that they'll do the right thing by you, you want to know that they'll do the right thing in the broader sense, because if they're prepared to dud other people to suit you, at some stage they might be prepared to dud you to assist others.  So you wouldn't call them trustworthy, even though you might trust them for one individual transaction.

Creating trustworthy societies is a real challenge.  First we've got to decide what are the criteria for a trustworthy society, and some of that is built into the assumptions about Humanism.  A government that is seen as attempting to be fair and ethical is part of a notion of a trustworthy society.  It is very difficult to create trust among citizens if people can't trust their politicians - a problem that we have at the moment.  You also have to look at how we see strangers, because if people who can be charming to people they know, but bastards to people they see as strange or threatening to them, we've got no basis for a trustworthy society.  It is no use screaming at people who don't like refugees that they are racist.  We have to work out ways and means of having ethical societies.

Looking at ethical organisations

I don't think we should have codes of ethics, rather we need to train people in ethical processes.  This means that the decisions we make should be based on the best information available, rationality and good decision making.  We have to make sure that we have the best information and make sure we collect it from anyone who might be alarmed by it, particularly the less powerful.  Then we should make decisions collectively, because you get more viewpoints.  You also need to do the least harm and preferably do the most good, as well as recognise that there are conflicting interests within society.  For example there are things I want passionately that others passionately oppose, so what we have to do is work out ways to resolve such differences civilly, not deny them. 

I really object to terms like 'harmony', because they assume we can create a solidarity about our viewpoints.  What we need socially instead is the capacity to deal with cacophony or discord, because we are different and we need to recognise difference and diversity, and that we don't know the answer to everything. While we can probably give a better answer and work out where we want to go next, there ain't no utopias.  As Karl Popper said (quoted in my Boyer Lectures) 'utopia is just somebody else's view of what they want.'   If we take away the idea that we can't get to utopia, and replace it with the idea of 'the light on the hill' we can try to make better societies.  In trying to make things better we realise that the solutions we come up with are fallible.  We need to go back to an almost Fabian process by which we move slowly forward, not uprooting things by their roots.  In this way we have a chance to stop and look at what we are doing and decide whether it was the best thing to do or whether we've got new information or different ideas that might improve it.  We need to look at a continuous improvement process which we constantly review and revise.

In order to make that work we have to give people confidence that we can make a better society, and that other people are like them and they can afford to take on the risks of difference, of conflict, and of having open societies.  We are becoming risk averse and that is very scary, because if we are risk averse we don't make change, we become small 'c' conservative.  We turn in on ourselves and decide change in itself is far too threatening.  We need to decide on a case by case what's good, bad and indifferent.  We should not be either pro-change or anti-change but we should look at what is proposed.  We need to be able to recognise that emotions, as I said earlier, are part of what makes us do things and if people are frightened, anxious and worried about what is happening, they don't make good decisions.  For example environmentalists tend to want to make us do things by scaring us witless.  However in order to make change we've got to do two things, one, point out the environmental problems and, second, create the sort of society where people are keen enough and optimistic enough about the future that they will make the necessary changes.  If you scare people too much, they are immobilized and they just opt out of politics.

The young now don't seem to join organisations, though some have joined the anti-globalisation movement.  We therefore know they are anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation, but we're not sure what they are for.  Maybe we've run out of alternatives, in part because we've run out of theories of everything, and the idea of utopias.  People are becoming caught up in small circles, in their own neighbour-hoods and they think that everything else is too hard.

We need to create a debate about, why we need to keep a secular society, and have the political will to make changes.  We also need to create a sufficient sense of optimism so that people don't believe that others are evil or bad.  We're getting a lot of talk about what is called the Manichean heresy at the moment - the assumption that some people are bad, some are good, and you've got some right to kill the bad ones.  This is a really destructive way of looking at society.  I think we've got some real debating in front of us about how we create, as I said in my Boyer lectures, a more civil society.  How do we create the possibility of moving forward without necessarily attacking religion and the churches, but trying to separate out those religions who will talk to us and be reasonable.  We need to give them the backing they need against their own fundamentalist groups.  It is not religion that is our enemy, it is the fundamentalisms of varying sorts that are our enemies, and they are much more our enemy than they were 20 years ago.

In conclusion

Humanists need to put secularism and Humanism back on the agenda.  This includes how to create ways in which we can make people feel better about strangers, and better ways to solve conflicts.  We need to work out ways of moving on which are civil and non-toxic, because we've currently got some very toxic tendencies.  It is not a case of continuing the arguments of the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s or even the 60s or 70s!  We need a set of new arguments about how we create a level of social certainty in an area where we have uncertainty, in terms of politics, religion and society in general.  We need to reassure people that not knowing all the answers is actually OK, as long as we have the curiosity to keep trying to find out where we go from here.

I'm putting this up as a way of saying, can we change some of the emphasis on the rational as the good?  Because it is time to recognise that it is not just rationality that we need, but we need ethics to frame the decisions we take.  We need to recognise that values, ethics and reasons are all tangled together with feelings and there are good and bad reasons and feelings.  So we shouldn't be anti-emotions because we've all got them. But we need to work out when they are productive or toxic.  We need to create new ways of running debates and of putting things together which allow us, hopefully, to counter some of the fear and anxiety which is undermining the possibility of civilisation.  "