Humanism, aspiration, and the labels one identifies with

BU theology student Mario Melendez tagged me in a post on Facebook, the content of which I copy here:

To my Humanist brothers and sisters: I found the following definition of Humanism in a Doctor Who related article...yes, I know, I am a geek. Anyway, the author (a humanist himself) said: "The basic idea behind humanism is that humanity can, against all the odds and in the face of overwhelming evidence, be good. In the absence of God or gods, we can achieve greatness. It’s faith for people without faith.

[Aside: on the idea of "faith for people without faith", see this weird article in the Washington Post.] I think the gesture of the quoted definition is laudable. However, I'd offer the term "aspiration" as an alternative to "faith", for the reason that aspiration in its common usage entails ongoing action -- we do aspire, whereas faith is a thing one has and not an action one does. Further, the common usage of "faith" implies several epistemic concessions which I am not convinced a responsible person should be casual about making. Finally, I'd recalibrate the superlatives. E.g.: Are we up against all the odds, or are only some factors stacked against us?

My version would then look like this:

The premise of humanism is that humanity can, against the odds, and in the absence of supernatural powers, achieve greatness. Humanism is the aspiration that takes the place of faith in the lives of nontheists.

There's a lot of cultural work to be done before the word "humanism" (note the lack of capitalization) is widely adopted as the general term describing the various species of aspirational ethical lifestances of nontheists. But it's work worth doing. We aren't losing on the matter of the facts; where we have a lot of catching-up to do is in the generational domain of labels, implied and imputed values, and cultural cachet.

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I came across a quote recently, from a sermon the UCC preacher and pastor William Sloan Coffin, Jr. gave in 1984: "You can act in such a way that people identify you with something greater than yourself." Which led me to wonder under what banner or emblem or label should I be working to associate my actions with. Because I have made a commitment, as an activist and community member and community organizer, to atheism, I have already made it a habit to wear my Friendly Neighborhood Atheist shirt when doing charity, or to make donations (most recently, to a boy in need of tuition to continue attending his grade school in South Africa, and to a no-kill pet shelters) "in support of" the Boston Atheists or the Secular Coalition for Massachusetts. But the entity of "atheism" or even "a [congregational] community of atheists" might be the wrong level of scale to really serve as a rival for "faith". What, really, is the salient distinction between persons of faith and persons without faith -- faith vs. skepticism? Faith vs. aspiration? Naturalism vs. supernaturalism? Here I almost wish to list religion vs. irreligion, but I'm actually inclined to include nontheist forms of community under the heading of "religion"; I justify this by pointing to an anthropological and sociological conception of "religion", in which the defining features are the shared experience and explicit values of a congregation or more widely dispersed identity community.

In light of which, I'd like to reconsider Rev. Coffin's words: "Act in such a way that people identify you with something greater than yourself." What kind of thing is that greater thing? For the Christians I have known, the answer would not be "faith", but Christianity. This suggest that capital-H Humanism would be the appropriately-scaled counterpart, and not the ethical type of humanism, or the epistemic disposition skepticism, or the broad lifestance category atheism. I fear, that the consequences of an identity label *on this scale* will breed sectarianism. Are you a Secular Humanist, or a Humanistic Jew? No, I'm a Boston Humanist. (Or a Positive Humanist, or a Humanist Plus, or a Cantabrigian Humanist, or a Reformed Secular Humanist, or...)

If this kind of label proliferation (or though of in other terms: this kind of community sub-division) is inevitable, it would be prudent to pull back and reconsider the rationality of Coffin's exhortation to affiliate one's actions with something greater than oneself. Jack Miles, in his book God: A Biography, writes:

Philosophers of religion have sometimes claimed that all gods are projections of the human personality, and it may be so. But if so, we must at least recognize the empirical fact that many human beings, rather than project their own personalities upon gods wholly of their own creation, have chosen to introject—take into themselves—the religious projections of other human personalities.

This suggests a great definition for (lower-case, generic) humanism. Rather than projecting the best qualities of humanity onto an unknowable (and, in my view, fictitious) being outside of ourselves, humanists take these qualities into ourselves. Humans give the credit for human goodness to humans. We claim as our own, the highest values common to human experience and culture across all ages and nations; and we accept as our responsibility the need to come to terms with a universe in which all phenomena are natural, and all life is a rare and precious occurrence.

The greater something a humanist identifies her actions with is... humanity. Or more precisely, human potential. This is probably too tautological to serve an an effective rallying cry, but is nonetheless where this casual analysis brings me. This circularity does suggest that humanists (and nontheists of all persuasions) are at a distinct rhetorical disadvantage. It isn't "their" divine mascot against "our" other-than-divine mascot; it's their mascot, God, against our nothing. And this will be the rhetorical terms of interfaith engagement and all forms of intersectional contact, until open-minded persons of good will are successful in challenging the rhetorical status quo.

Let this be another place where I vote for the general adoption of the term "interpath" (a term that I credit to theology student Derek Lewis Knox). Here is Coffin's slogan, now filtered through the interpath lens and thereby greatly altered:

Let your actions be testimony to the value of humanism as an aspirational path.

Good advice. And, potentially, a banner for secular-minded people to wave in response and kindred spirit to theists waving the faith flag.

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NB: It isn't just the secular community that has to find a way through these knotty questions of terminology. The modern obsessive personality known variously as "nerd" and "geek" suffers a similar identity crisis. Not to worry; science will sort it all out.

"Secular" and "religious" are not antonymous

Over at Metabelief, Josiah is test-driving a bit of argumentative flair:

There is something that most atheist critiques of religion have failed to internalize. If there is no god, and there never has been, then religious practice is also a secular practice.

In the post comments and at Facebook, he's taking some flak for this bit of rhetoric; "You can't just redefine words to suit your activist aims", the criticism goes. Well, I'd like to don a philological hat here for a moment and point out that the semantic domains of "secular" and "religious." are not mutually exclusive. (As against a pair of words which do exclude one another, e.g. "faith" & "atheism".)

The first definition listed in the OED for "secular" indicates that the meaning of "secular" as "of the world" was used to differentiate monastics who lived "in the world" rather than in seclusion. And the first definition for "religion" gives its meaning as "a state of life bound by religious vows".... it is not until the third definition that any mention of supernaturalism or faith comes appears. (Keeping in mind here that the first definition is not necessarily the primary definition.)

The use of the terms "secular" and "religious" in the ways I describe above is not at all rare in historical sources (You can confirm this for yourself by a quick browse through Google Books). That we tend to use them as opposing terms at the present time, is a contingent happenstance of semantic drift or narrowing.

One textbook case of semantic change via pejoration ("the process by which the meaning of a word becomes negative or less elevated over a period of time") is the drift in meaning of the word "silly" (from Old English sēlig). "Silly" originally meant "holy" or "blessed." What kinds of things are holy or blessed? Innocent things. What does innocence usually indicate? That a thing is deserving of sympathy, helpless, or simple. If a thing is simple or helpless, what does this show? That the thing shows a lack of good sense. Linguists who have studied historical texts can find attestations forming a smooth, continuous shift in the meaning of the word "silly", from "holy" through all these variations in meaning, down to the present sense of "showing a lack of good sense, frivolous." Now when you go around declaring theistic churches, clergy, and creeds to be "utterly silly", you can do so with a straight face and the best of intentions.

I don't know if it's been done, but I suspect that a historical study of the words "religious" and "secular" would show a similarly smooth shift in their meaning from broad to more narrow usage. Well, there's no ethical or logical reason we language-users would be barred from pushing things in the other direction. Semantic narrowing can be reversed through semantic broadening. That's not semantic violence, or a reckless disregard for the dictionary -- it's just the way language works. Some of the factors that influence linguistic change are deliberate, and some are unplanned.

Short put: there is no contradiction in saying that "(some) religions are secular" or "(some forms of secularism) are religious." These statements are unconventional, not oxymoronic. Whether such statements or ideas are rhetorically useful, is a separate question. I for one would like to see what Josiah works out.