Today I read Humanism as the future of religion by Elle Griffin.
I didn’t know what humanism but learned from this essay that it is a philosophy:
Voltaire may have been the first progress writer—focused on how we can make the world better one plot at a time—and we have built a lot of bridges since his time! We created an inoculation for smallpox. We figured out germ theory, increased sanitation, and developed antibiotics that saved our children’s lives. We created safer working conditions and regulations that make it easier to evacuate a building in a fire or survive an earthquake or cross the train tracks.
And we did all of these things whether we were religious or not.
Elle motivates the idea behind humanism by discussing the titular character of Candide. The simplicity of “We can fix things. We can make them better” is quite endearing.
We can build bridges, and this became Voltaire’s beat. In his novel Candide, the titular character rages against the “mania for insisting that all is well when things are going badly.” We can fix things, he insists, we can make them better. We needn’t sit idle as we await the next plague or earthquake, assured that this is all part of God’s grand design. Instead, we can study earthquakes, build safer buildings. We can develop vaccines and halt pandemics.
“We must cultivate our own garden,” Candide concludes.
I love the way of framing humanism via this African proverb:
Or as the African proverb puts it: “When you pray, move your feet.”
Praying without moving our feet is akin to “waiting for God to save us,” and here we must recall the classic Christian joke: As a man sits on the roof of his house, his entire town flooded, he turns down the aid of a passing boat and helicopter—he’s “waiting for God to save him.” When he dies and arrives at the pearly gates, God is flummoxed. “What do you mean you were waiting for me to save you?” He asks incredulously, “I sent you a boat and a helicopter!”
The following made me think about a talk that Macalester English professor Jim Dawes talked about in regards to his book The Novel of Human Rights. In his talk he questioned empathy as a “good thing” in its prioritization of the self. I know I’m not remembering the context of his talk fully accurately, but it was an interesting idea. How can we think about moral issues in a way that doesn’t in some way center on the self?
If we are ever in doubt whether something is the Humanist thing to do, we have only to look to the Golden Rule which has become the banner of Humanist thought. Do unto others what you would have done to yourself, it asks. Or more importantly: Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself. As the social reformer Frederick Douglass once put it, “There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.”