Almost by accident we found ourselves down in lower Heswall and walked thence along the beach then up onto the cliffs and through Heswall Fields towards Thurstaston on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the middle of May, a brief interlude, for me, from marking exam scripts and dissertations and so forth ........ in the intervals I have been thinking about Humanism again, partly because there was a Face to Faith article in Saturday's Guardian by Andrew Copson:
"Humanists believe that the reality we perceive around us - the world and
universe that we make sense of through experience -is the only reality we can
know and that there is no "second layer" to reality in which gods, demons or the
"supernatural" can exist. It is this conviction that also leads humanists to
believe that this life is the only life we have and that morality as we
understand it is a natural product of our social instincts and not handed to
humanity by some divine source."
Well, yes, but there is something jejune about the account, something is missing, and it's not a divine source or anything like that. I have some sympathy with humanism (and it is interesting to see who has nailed their colours to its mast on the website), but I feel queasy when people start talking about 'what we believe'. The idea that 'the reality we perceive around us' is 'the only reality we can know' is the sort of claim made by those who are anxious to distance themselves from anything that suggests 'the supernatural' but it looks too much like it wants to foreclose on the idea of reality as an open-ended concept, which allows for the possibility of an expansion and extension of the reality that we can know, as we free ourselves from the oppressive narrowness of egocentric self-enclosure, for instance, which precisely limits what we (are able to) perceive. I don't see why humanists shouldn't assent to such a claim as this, but their silence about it is not encouraging. I can also see why they might want to cut off the idea of a divine source for morality, but the danger is that too little is said about the way in which our ethical lives can develop into, for instance, a passion for justice that goes far beyond anything that might be found in 'conventional morality', far beyond what could be captured by a phrase like 'social instincts'. Again, I cannot see why humanists shouldn't go in this direction, and maybe they do. This is work for later, but perhaps, for the moment, the point is that to claim to be a secular humanist is a means of denying something ('the supernatural') as well as seeking to affirm something, and that to call oneself a Buddhist humanist, or a Christian humanist, say, is a matter of wanting to emphasise the particular perspectives on reality that those traditions have highlighted, just as the different religions can be thought of, though there is more to them than this, as asserting truths that depend upon particular histories of experience. There is a distinctively Jewish experience, for instance, a particular form of travail and endurance and there are analogies, say, with Shi'ism, so that there are these repositories of learned experience. And repositories of learned experience need to be preserved, so that our humanism should take account of them, should take account of the moral realities of greed, hatred and delusion, for instance, and the way they vitiate perception and conduct ...
As we walked along the meadows, which were strewn with wonderful buttercups, we could look out over the Dee estuary to the North Wales coast, the mudflats below us and the deep channel beyond.
We could also see Hilbre away in the distance:
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