KENAN MALIK In London, Muslim protestors demand
that the government pay greater heed to sharia law. In Oxford, animal rights
activists campaign to stop the building of a medical lab. What links these
two events? Nothing you might think. But each, in its own
way, challenges a philosophy central to the Western intellectual tradition,
and to much of secular politics - humanism.
ROY HATTERSLEY I call myself a humanist because
my standard of values, my aspirations, my view of life, is based on the human
character, human nature, and I think human moral perceptions.
RICHARD RYDER It seems to be a sort of selfish
in-group attitude rather like racism, putting my race above other races. That
sort of prejudice seems to me to be out of date, irrational and inexcusable.
ROY HATTERSLEY I don't believe there's anything
outside the human mind, which can guide us, which can advise us on how we
should conduct ourselves. I have enough faith in human nature to believe that
given the right environment, the right chance, it will be
humanity that makes the improvements I want to see in society.
TARIQ RAMADAN I am very suspicious with someone
who is coming with a pure rationalist approach. I am scared of these people.
Pure, autonomous rationality, it's a kind of dictatorship of intelligence,
of your own intellect. It's a dominant, arrogant posture.
ROY HATTERSLEY Humanism is the optimistic sort
of secularism. It's the view that human nature will triumph, that human nature
is a basically good thing.
KENAN MALIK Labour peer Lord Hattersley, a Distinguished
Supporter of the British Humanist Association, and two critics of humanism,
psychologist and animal rights activist Richard Ryder and Tariq Ramadan, an
eminent Islamic scholar. Dr Ryder and Professor Ramadan are far from alone.
Everyone from postmodernists to scientific naturalists seems to be taking
a pop at humanism these days. So, why is humanism in such bad odour, and should
it matter to us that it is? For Kate Soper, Professor of Philosophy at London
Metropolitan University, humanism has, over the past 500 years, helped shape
the ways in which we think about ourselves and our place in the world.
KATE SOPER In the Renaissance period, you get a sense
of this freeing up from some fixed place in the cosmic order. It goes together
with an emphasis on both the intellectual and potentially sort of what we
would now call scientific powers, but also in the Renaissance there's a lot
of emphasis on the emotional differences, our differences of sentiment from
other animals. And then that's carried forward in the Enlightenment, but I
think further reinforced by the Enlightenment's sense of confidence in science
to allow us to take control of nature, to harness natural resources in the
interests of human gratifications but what becomes more dominant, you could
argue, in the Enlightenment is the emphasis on reason as allowing us this
sort of control. So it goes together with a certain kind of confidence in
human amelioration in our powers to perfect ourselves and our world.
KENAN MALIK Are you saying then that underlying
different forms of humanism is a sense of human beings as being special, as
possessing agency or free will, and as having reason as an important component
of the way they deal with the world?
KATE SOPER Yes, I am indeed saying that. I find
it quite difficult to think of a politics that doesn't have some kind of humanist
basis in the sense that it's underwritten by some idea of a common universal
human nature.
KENAN MALIK Humanist ideas, in other words,
are important not just philosophically, but politically too. Concepts such
as democracy, equality and universal rights rely on the idea of a common humanity.
Institutions such as the International Criminal Court are rooted in the conviction
that all humans should receive equal protection against war crimes. The very
notion of politics rests on the belief that humans are, uniquely, self-conscious
agents capable of using reasoned dialogue and collective action to help transform
the world. Many people, however, don't just dispute this idea of humans as
special creatures but find it morally troubling. Richard Ryder is the author
of Putting morality back into politics and invented the term 'speciesism'.
RICHARD RYDER By speciesism, I mean a prejudice
like racism or sexism that encourages people to mistreat creatures of another
species merely because they're of another species. It is based upon attaching
moral importance to physical differences that are morally irrelevant such
as the numbers of legs, hairy coat and so on.
KENAN MALIK But the difference with racism is
this. Racists discriminate against people who are fundamentally equal; speciesists
assert something that's factually true, that humans and animals are fundamentally
different.
RICHARD RYDER We're not fundamentally different.
The whole message of Darwinism is that we're all related biologically and
there's more and more scientific evidence to show that in matters of real
importance morally, such as the capacity to suffer pain and
distress, we're very much alike. We have similar nervous systems. We react
to pain and distress in a very similar way.
KENAN MALIK We are all related biologically,
but there is a fundamental difference between humans and other animals, which
is that you can bet your bottom dollar that no group of chimps will be having
a debate like this about the moral values of humanism or
speciesism.
RICHARD RYDER But why should that affect the
way in which I'm treated? I mean you can find human beings who are incapable
of having an abstract discussion. As a psychologist dealing with what was
called the mentality handicapped in the old days, I met many such people,
such human beings who were incapable of abstract thought, indeed incapable
of coherent conversation, and yet I wouldn't advocate using these people in
experiments or using them as quarries in sporting contests or any of the other
ways in which we customarily use animals of different species.
KENAN MALIK This debate about the differences between
humans and other animals is not just a philosophical tussle, but has practical
consequences. In Oxford 700, mainly young, people took to the streets earlier
this month in defence of animal experimentation, chanting Animal tests
cure disease / Humans before chimpanzees - a slogan probably unique in
the annals of political demos. According to one of the organisers, the protest
was about defending 'scientific progress' against the idea that 'there is
no moral difference between humans and animals'. Could this be the beginnings
of a humanist counterattack? The writer and neurologist Professor Ray Tallis
thinks it's about time.
RAY TALLIS I have to say I do believe in human exceptionism.
I do believe we're very special and I do believe that it's not inappropriate
that we should value ourselves more than we value other species. If humans
were just other animals, isn't it surprising we are the only animal that's
written The Origin of Species? We're the only animal that actually
questions and thinks about its own nature. We have a level of self-conscious
reflection, a level of self-criticism that is not matched in any other animals.
KENAN MALIK But do we really? Many scientists
challenge the idea that humans are distinct from other animals by virtue of
possessing self-consciousness and will. Dr Susan Blackmore is a psychologist
and author of Conversations on Consciousness.
SUSAN BLACKMORE Free will is a really interesting
and powerful delusion. Basically the world is a closed system, things happen
because of things that have happened before, and the brain is an amazingly
complex machine obeying physical principles and so on.
There's no room for free will.
KENAN MALIK What about the notion of a conscious
self?
SUSAN BLACKMORE I think that's another delusion
as well. That's a very tricky one because it's such a powerful feeling that
I am not equivalent to my body, I am not equivalent to the things that go
on in here. I am somehow the owner of this body. I'm sitting in my brain looking
out through my eyes. That's how it feels and that's how we talk. But, again,
if we look at what a brain is actually like, if you open up a brain you see
millions and millions of interconnected neurons with billions of connections.
There's no place for a self to be in there. Better to think in terms of 'Let's
work out the principles of what we stand for'.
KENAN MALIK Politics is all about making choices.
Should we go to war with Iraq. Should schools be able to select pupils according
to ability and so on? In your world view, how do we make political choices?
SUSAN BLACKMORE We are naturally political animals
who make these kinds of decisions and have to make those kinds of decisions.
It's not going to help us to think that we're a little conscious self inside.
Better to think in terms of… of let’s work out the principles
of what we stand for, let's try and fit our actions to those. Let's try and
make political decisions that will fit with what we're trying to achieve.
I'm saying if you let go the sense of there being a little me inside, the
world doesn't fall apart, you don't suddenly go out and you know start murdering
people or running them over. Actually rather the reverse happens because you're
not so obsessed with this kind of self in here that's important. And actually
without believing in free will or in inner self, still a person, a physical
thing here will talk about what is harmful and what is helpful to other people,
what is kind and what is not, what is the best decision if we want to have
a peaceful planet. You know maybe we shouldn't go to war. Those kinds of things
will be made anyway.
KENAN MALIK But will they? It's difficult to
know how decisions can be made and evaluated without some kind of conscious
thought. After all, we can only answer questions such as 'What do we stand
for?' and 'What are we trying to achieve?' by thinking purposefully about
the hopes, fears, and aspirations that human beings, individually and collectively,
experience. Few people will go as far as Susan Blackmore in denying human
agency. Many are, however, fatalistic about what humans can achieve, a fatalism
to which such arguments seem to lend scientific credibility. Kate Soper worries
about the consequences.
KATE SOPER One of the problems of politically
abandoning a humanist conception would be that perhaps you know we see ourselves
as simply fatally caught up in some pre-ordained, natural - you know that
we are just carried along as flotsam and jetsam on some natural wave and,
therefore, you know a sense of fatalism can set in politically and it can
justify the idea that there is nothing that we are going to do that is really
ultimately going to make any difference. I mean you can already hear voices,
I think, saying that it's actually too late to do very much about the environmental
crisis. I think these are quite worrying developments and I think that they
are to some extent encouraged by an anti-humanist perspective, yes.
KENAN MALIK If many scientists are sceptical
of some of the basic claims of humanism, so too are many religious believers,
though for very different reasons. Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Religious Studies
at Oxford University.
TARIQ RAMADAN As a Muslim of course my references
are two sets of text. The Koran as a revealed text, which is for the Muslims
the very word of God. And the other set of texts is what we call the Sunna,
the Prophetic tradition - what he did, what he said and which
decision he took. And there is something else which is really important, is
that we also have values coming from rationality. The text is an outward revelation
and your intellect is an inward revelation, so what is coming from your rationality,
your intellect is also promoting and building universal values for the believers.
My belief and my faith in God is a protection in the way I am using my reason.
In fact it's the protection for me not to be arrogant because the first sin
with my reason is to think that with my reason I will get it all. Be humble
in the way you use your own faculties.
KENAN MALIK So you think that the importance
of religion and of God is that it places limits on what humans can and should
do?
TARIQ RAMADAN I am very suspicious with someone
who is coming with a pure rationalist approach without limits. The people
who don't have limits are really scary people. I am scared of these people.
NICHOLAS BOYLE Christianity and humanism are
from a religious point of view virtually synonymous because Christianity's
central assertion is that God is human.
KENAN MALIK Nicholas Boyle, Professor of German
Literary and Intellectual History at Cambridge University and a leading Christian
humanist.
NICHOLAS BOYLE Humanism in a political context
is above all the assertion that our human affairs have to be organised in
accordance with principles that make sense on the basis of the ultimate value
of human flourishing, human love, human self-sacrifice. They are not to be
understood as dependent on or to be organised in accordance with some non-human
principle, whether that non-human principle is understood as some kind of
supernatural power or whether it's understood simply as a book.
KENAN MALIK That seems a perfectly secular view.
But doesn't the fact that you look to God for your values and require that
humans are redeemed, they require God to redeem humanity, doesn't that undermine
a basic tenet of humanism?
NICHOLAS BOYLE The notion that human beings
are self-creating is one which has a certain place in a Christian view of
the world. There is a sense in which the human realm is autonomous and we
are responsible for what we do or what we make out of ourselves. But in a
deeper sense, it is quite unrealistic to describe human beings as self-creating
and no one can actually think of themselves as entirely self-made. We know
that we depend on forces, things, people outside ourselves and the term God
is used in many religions to refer to that outside ourselves on which we are
ultimately dependent - dependent even for the values that we observe.
KENAN MALIK There is a long and important tradition
of Christian humanism. But can the tension between the religious belief that
values come from God and the humanist belief in self-created Man be easily
reconciled? For many religious believers - and not just for
those so-called fundamentalists - the Word of God constrains their actions
on Earth. And this can have troubling political consequences. Tariq Ramadan
recently called for a moratorium on traditional Islamic punishments such as
the stoning of women for adultery. Why, I asked him, does he not simply condemn
such punishments outright?
TARIQ RAMADAN My point here is to say, look,
I need this to come from within. I can please you by saying I am against it.
It's not going to change the Islamic society, it's not, because the Muslims
are referring to the text.
KENAN MALIK I'm not asking you to please me.
I'm asking you to state your views on it. So why can't you simply state that
such punishments are barbaric and wrong and should not take place?
TARIQ RAMADAN Because I am referring to a text
and this text is revealed and I think it's coming from God. You cannot expect
from me to condemn a Koranic verse. You can expect from me, in the name of
my understanding, in the name of my rationality, my active and dynamic rationality,
to put this verse into a specific context and to understand it.
KENAN MALIK But isn't that the problem? That
you know rationally certain things are morally and politically wrong, but
you are not willing to say that because of certain texts which you also believe
in?
TARIQ RAMADAN No, I wouldn't say it's wrong
the way you think it's wrong.
KENAN MALIK My rationality tells me that stoning
women is wrong full stop.
TARIQ RAMADAN I think it's a clash. I think
that in the name of your understanding, you are not ready to listen to people
saying look, we are starting with a text and we are moving out of our understanding
towards something which is dealing with our world. And we need you to understand
that because in the name of your pure, autonomous rationality, it's a kind
of dictatorship of intelligence, of your own intellect. It's a dominant, arrogant
posture. It's dangerous.
KENAN MALIK It's not just religious believers
who think that humanists are arrogant. For many postmodern thinkers the very
idea that Europeans should lecture peoples of other cultures smacks of bad
faith. Robert Eaglestone, senior lecturer in Literature at Royal Holloway
College, and author of The Holocaust and the Postmodern.
ROBERT EAGLESTONE There's also a critique of
humanism from a sort of post-colonial perspective, which is about the hypocrisy
of European humanism. When humanism was taken abroad to the European colonies,
the Europeans applied their humanistic ideals
intermittently on the populations they subjugated. The anti-colonial thinker
Franz Fanon writes a very savage attack on humanism. He says that the formerly
colonised nations must leave this Europe where they're never done talking
of Man, yet murder men
everywhere they find them - meaning that while Europe has this great rhetoric
of humanity and human values, their behaviour round the world has been bloody
and savage. And I think the most important critique of humanism is in a sense
a post-Holocaust critique. The American philosopher Hilary Putnam writes that
the danger in grounding ethics and the idea that we're all fundamentally the
same in sort of humanist ethics is the door is open for the Holocaust. So
he's saying that once you start saying we're equal it doesn't take very much
to say some are more equal than others or that some people are less human
than other people. And once you've done that, once you've set up a criteria
of what it is to be human, it's very easy to shift and change and alter that
criteria. So if you want to keep a notion of there being an essence to humanity,
it has to be an essence without content. It has to be an essence that can't
be used to exclude people.
KENAN MALIK But if you do away with a notion
of a common humanity, you might not be able to exclude people but you won't
be able to include people either.
ROBERT EAGLESTONE Well that's right, but both
of those paths lead to danger.
KENAN MALIK The trouble is, what could the idea
of a 'human essence without content' mean in practical terms? How, for instance,
could we enact equal rights laws if we can't define who is a human being and
hence covered by those laws? And does it really make sense to suggest that
the belief that all humans are fundamentally the same opened the door to a
genocidal regime that treated certain groups as fundamentally different and
fit only for the concentration camps? What is unquestionable, though, is that
the experience of the Holocaust has led many people to become far more pessimistic
about the human condition, a pessimism that makes them uneasy about the humanist
exaltation of reason and progress. Nicholas Boyle.
NICHOLAS BOYLE We haven't actually proved ourselves
very good at sorting out our own affairs, not only in recent years but for
many centuries. And the continued existence of injustice, of the misapplication
of violence, inequalities in our economic system, whatever improvements may
have been seen in it, are an indication that we don't really know where we
are or what we're doing.
RAY TALLIS It is however interesting to note
that in the 20th century, although appalling things have happened, in parallel
with that there have been some extraordinarily positive moral developments.
KENAN MALIK Professor Ray Tallis, author of
The Enemies of Hope.
RAY TALLIS If one thinks back over history,
it would be interesting to ask the question you know where was the International
Red Cross when the Crusades were taking place? You know what kind of international
law was regulating wars in the Middle Age and so on? And it seemed to me that
okay there has been appalling behaviour collectively of humanity in the 20th
century, as in all previous centuries. Perhaps what was unique in that century
was an awareness of how appalling it was and a recognition that something
must be done collectively to prevent a repetition of that kind of thing.
KENAN MALIK Ray Tallis is surely right: however
barbarous our recent history, we shouldn't forget our response to that barbarism.
From universal suffrage to the Geneva Convention, from international laws
to civil rights legislation, the past century has also revealed the human
capacity for moral and political progress. Nicholas Boyle and Ray Tallis both
describe themselves as humanists. Yet they have very different views of the
human condition. Their debate suggests that the crisis of humanism has emerged
as much from anxieties within its own ranks as from attacks by critics outside.
Let's return to the vexed question of experimenting on animals in order to
benefit people. Here, too, humanists are divided. For Ray Tallis there can
be no equivocation.
RAY TALLIS If you had seen as much human suffering
as I have from diseases that are incurable, you would be very strongly supportive
of animal research. The rather absurd notion that research on animals is a
unique expression of our speciesism does not provide a good argument for bringing
animal research to a halt.
KATE SOPER I'm opposed to animal experimentation
really. That's not to say I couldn't imagine one or two exceptional cases
where it could be justified, but part of being a humanist is actually in recognising
your difference from other creatures; also in a sense respecting the gap between
us and them and not trying to assimilate them too closely to us. But I don't
actually think there are many needs of human beings that will continue to
licence that kind of intense experimentation with animals.
KENAN MALIK The philosopher Kate Soper, who
describes herself as a 'green humanist'. Once again we see that, for all the
accusations of arrogance, perhaps the real problem is that humanists have
become uncertain about what they stand for. Where once they affirmed the specialness
of human beings, now many are not so sure. Where once they lauded scientific
progress, now they often feel anxious about it. Where once there was an optimism
about human capacities, today there is often a stress on the darker side of
human nature. Does all this hesitancy and backtracking matter? Here's how
Susan Blackmore, a critic of humanism, sees it.
SUSAN BLACKMORE I have a lot of sympathy with
humanism because of its emphasis on humans treating themselves and each other
with respect and the planet and so on and absolutely not having a God and
a religion and so on, but I part company with those humanists who put the
responsibility on a conscious entity inside. I think humanism is under threat,
but it's always been somewhat under threat. It sets itself up in a way that
simple atheism doesn't to be offering an alternative and actually there are
huge
problems with that alternative. Anyone who wants to attack a non-religious
viewpoint will find an easy target, I think, in humanism. It would matter
to me terribly if humanism and everything like it disappeared. It wouldn't
matter to me if it disappeared because
scientific naturalism and other kinds of equivalent ideas were doing better
and I don't suppose it would to a lot of humanists, would it?
KENAN MALIK Actually it would. For Roy Hattersley,
humanism is not simply a way of challenging religious belief, but also a means
of inoculating us against the pessimism that suggests that conscious, collective
progress is an illusion.
ROY HATTERSLEY In the history of the 20th century
man can do more and more - and by man I mean men and women. The human mind
is capable, the human body is capable, of doing things which were unthought
of a hundred years ago. Indeed every ten years man's capability is demonstrated
as being incredibly more than it was a decade before. If there is pessimism
about, it's a pessimism of total ignorance. We ought to be bursting with optimism
because it's all within our power. It is within our power to feed Africa,
I mean. It is within our power to stop the evaporation of the ice cap. It
is within our power to do all the things that need to be done and it's evidently
so and self-evidently so. It's whether people want to do it or not that counts,
not whether they think they can.
KENAN MALIK The fact that such optimism might
appear wild-eyed and naïve is itself telling. Roy Hattersley is surely
right that, notwithstanding terrorism and war, poverty and famine, inequality
and injustice, the world has improved immeasurably over the past century.
He's also right that, compared to a century ago, we are much better equipped
to tackle the problems that we do face. Yet many people today feel paralysed
both by a sense of impotence about human capabilities and by a fear that human
activities often make things worse. Such pessimism, Ray Tallis suggests, may
be the biggest problem of all.
RAY TALLIS Disillusionment about human beings
will become self-fulfilling. If we really don't believe that progress both
in terms of material prosperity and ethically is possible, if we have no sense
of a better future, I think we lose our collective sense of purpose and all
that is left is for individuals to pursue their own rather selfish aims.
KENAN MALIK Humanism remains central to any
kind of progressive view of the world. Not just because it underpins such
notions as democracy and equality. But also because it makes possible the
very process of political change. Without humanism we become transfixed by
our own impotence. That's why today we need, not less arrogance about human
capabilities, but more.