First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Manifesting Humanism

The year was 1933. As Fred Edwords, director of communications for the American Humanist Association observes, "Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in January, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as president of the United States in March, Mohandas Gandhi carried out a hunger strike in May on behalf of the lower castes of India, physicist and humanist Leó Szilárd conceived of the nuclear chain reaction in September, and the Twenty-first Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, repealing Prohibition, went into effect in December." By any standard, it was an eventful year, that saw the rise of Nazism, the end of colonialism, and the dawn of the nuclear age all begin to operate as forces that would shape the world in ways no one at the time could have quite imagined. The authors and signers of a somewhat obscure document, published in May in the pages of the journal New Humanism were among those who could not have conceived of what even the coming decade was to bring. By the time the Humanist Manifesto – they were not aware, of course, that it was the first in a series – by the time their manifesto was ten years old, the world was engulfed in a paroxysm of global war that permanently redefined the political, cultural, economic and military challenges of preceding centuries, to inaugurate what most of us mean when we speak of the modern era. Certainly they had no crystal ball in 1933 to show them the issues that would confront their spiritual heirs 75 years later, in the new millennium where you and I now find ourselves. As humanists today, it is worth celebrating the audacious self-awareness which led that group to announce themselves as representatives of a new way to understand religion and the human condition. We could not be who we are, if it had not been for their effort to articulate the transformation they were experiencing; we owe them a debt of respectful gratitude for creating the identity that we have embraced, at least.

At the same time, it has been suggested in any number of contexts over the intervening ¾ of a century, that in some way the first manifesto failed, or proved inadequate to its ambitions, and that is the question I want to explore this morning. The Humanist Manifesto of 1933 is a product of its time, to be sure, and it is important that we understand some of the ways in which history has subsumed its premises or transcended its particularities. Nevertheless, I would argue that it has also a quality of timelessness, like all foundational documents, and that humanism as a movement can never outgrow, because it can never fully achieve, the ideals upon which that first statement bases its appeal to human intelligence, conscience, and hope.

The most immediately obvious limitation of Humanist Manifesto I is its gratingly gender exclusive language, which feels almost shocking to the modern ear. Of course, its authors composed their statement in a time when women had but recently been authorized even to vote, and the contemporary feminist critique of language with which we are familiar was decades away from its earliest expression, let alone from widespread acceptance. At the same time, early humanism should not be too readily absolved of sexism as more than a cultural artifact. In truth, early institutional humanism was a patriarchal proposition, a quality which was both an unconscious inheritance from academia and orthodox religion, and also a deliberate reaction to those worlds. The authors and signers of the manifesto were concerned to reject all forms of weak-mindedness, soft-heartedness, and sentimentality; qualities which they felt prevented people from recognizing the falsity of traditional religion, and in fact served to keep people loyal and in bondage to historical traditions even when they could no longer accept those ideas intellectually. Such feeling- and connection-oriented values appeared to the early humanists as weak and feminine, the very opposite of the kind of personal characteristics they hoped to cultivate. When they spoke of "reasonable and manly attitudes to be fostered by education," they were not merely using the language at hand; they were opting for a set of gender-identified virtues as the archetype for a properly developed human being. One of the motivations guiding the preparation of the second manifesto in 1973 was to shift to more inclusive language and value structures.

The first manifesto has also been regretted for what is often referred to as its naïve optimism. Fred Edwords, for example, says that "The declaration… shows a naiveté that prevents it from aging well." There are three ways in which this contention might be justified. The first, and most historically contingent, was the authors’ enthusiasm for "a socialized and cooperative economic order" as "the means to achieving a free and universal society…for the common good." The actual attempt to put Marxist social and economic philosophy into practice in the Soviet Union was then in its infancy, and it is not difficult to see why the theory sounded appealing to privileged American intellectuals, still reeling from the depression caused by unregulated speculation and the greed of America’s gilded age. Moreover, it seems to me that the redistribution of wealth is always a good idea in the minds of those who expect that they will be doing the distributing, which was certainly the assumption of the humanists, who took for granted that the cooperative economic order they envisioned would be constructed and operated under their own benign ethical and intellectual supervision. The economic world that we experience today is orders of magnitude more interwoven and complex than theirs was, and in the interval central command economies have repeatedly demonstrated the insurmountably flawed premises on which they are constructed. The manifesto’s confidence in socialism appears in retrospect to have been misplaced.

A second, more generalized optimism permeates the manifesto as an expectation that the development of the human species and its culture constitutes a straightforward linear process of evolution. This arose in part out an historical moment when it was still possible that the agonies of the first world war had indeed represented the war to end all wars, and the European colonial empire project of ‘civilizing’ the ‘primitive savages’ of the globe had not yet been repudiated. The early humanists did not have the consciousness, which the genocidal end of the twentieth century has driven home for us, of how quickly supposedly ‘modern’ and ‘highly civilized’ people can descend directly into irrational, barbarous violence. They assumed that education was a one-way process, that there was no retreat from information once provided, or from exposure to a cosmopolitan perspective. The ultimate triumph of the western Enlightenment was for them such a deeply founded article of faith that they could not even recognize it as such; their confidence in reason, tolerance and democracy as self-evidently superior social principles assumed that the only meaningful questions were about how to get there, not whether that was in fact where everyone wished to go. They assumed, too, that the exponentially cumulative increases in scientific knowledge which they observed in their own lifetimes, and correctly anticipated would continue, could only work to humanity’s general benefit; the more we could know, individually and collectively, the better of we would be. Thus culture, being a product of human interaction with the natural and social environment, would be inevitably improved by the spread of information, technology, prosperity, and western standards of justice. They did not foresee the extent to which the replacement of traditional custom and constraint by individual preference might work against the general good; they took it for granted that the direction of human evolution was toward ever greater personal autonomy, and that this was for others, as they found it for themselves, unambiguously a good thing.

That assumption, that evolution was on their side, so to speak, led to the third aspect of what now seems like unwarranted optimism on the part of the early humanists; which was that they had only to state their ideas with clarity and integrity in order to see them spread easily across the intellectual and cultural landscape. This of course is a danger confronting any group which talks primarily among itself; that its members will come to see their shared ideas as self-evident, and needing only to be properly explained in order to make just as much sense to everyone else. The authors of the first Humanist Manifesto were persuaded that humanism was going to sweep the nation and the world – indeed, they thought the process had already begun – and when that happened, they wanted people to get it right. It was for this reason that they spent many months in animated, not to say agitated, correspondence about the document they proposed to publish. They wanted to set a standard that could be referred to whenever someone started to ask, well what IS real humanism, anyway? They recognized that they were a small minority at the time, but they didn’t expect it to remain that way. Just like Thomas Jefferson predicting in his day that every young man then alive in America would become a Unitarian before they died, the humanists of 1933 foresaw the decline of the institutional church into an anachronism, and the dissemination of humanist ideas across all segments of society. There are many suppositions about precisely why this did not happen, but the bottom line is that it turned out to be not nearly as easy as they thought.

Now as the 21^st century dawns, the humanist community is sadder and wiser, perhaps, than in those heady days, but we are still here. Women’s voices and feminist values have been incorporated into the ‘manly attitude’ once advocated by humanist pundits, and we know that it’s no picnic, and there are no guarantees – which is as it should be. However, to my mind, none of this suggests that the Manifesto failed. No single document, even with 34 of the most brilliant and prestigious of signers, is going to inaugurate the beloved community of justice and kinship on earth, and that was not the purpose in 1933 anyway. Neither was it in 1973, when the second manifesto was published, nor most recently, in 2003, when a third was added to the sequence. This process of subsequent reconsiderations and new publications makes it clear that humanism itself is an evolving universe of thought, which can only be approximated in the periodic effort to describe it to ourselves and others. We expect and intend to learn as we go, to incorporate the lessons of experience by observing how far off the mark we sometimes are, by trying again to sort out the essentials of our message from the accidents of history. We have by now given up, I hope, on two losing propositions. One is that if only we humanists were clear about what we believe, and could state it to everyone’s satisfaction, all human suffering and all the world’s problems would be over. And the second is like it, that if only we could get everyone to agree with us, and become humanists, all human suffering and all the world’s problems would be over. Personally, I don’t believe that it’s ever going to happen that all human suffering and all the world’s problems will be resolved; I just don’t think the universe operates that way. In fact, that is why humanism is important to me, because I think that we finite, fallible human beings need some guidance for living with the suffering that is part of life, and the problems that are part of the world. And for this purpose, it seems to me, those humanists of 1933 still have a lot to say to us.

To begin with – and this is why I always have and continue to consider myself a religious humanist – they affirm the importance of humanity’s quest for the highest, abiding values of life. They called, not for a petulant renunciation of all religious emotions, institutions, or satisfactions, but rather for a vital, fearless and frank religion that would be capable of addressing authentic human experience and genuine needs. It was because they believed such a religion to be possible, and humanism to be the basis for it, that they went to the effort of creating and publishing their manifesto.

Based on their description, it seems to me that such a religious perspective has its own unique disciplines; it was never about believing whatever you want. Rather, it means accepting the authority of evidence, logic, and reason, even when wishful thinking appears so much more comfortable. It means acknowledging that we are, individually and collectively, a product of natural processes in a material world, not the darlings of a universe designed especially for us. It means resigning ourselves to the understanding that we are all in this together; nobody gets special preference, or exemption from the human condition. It means taking responsibility for the consequences of our actions, and choosing to behave ethically because it is the right thing to do, not because it will pay off, either here or hereafter; to live, in other words, without cosmic guarantees, or the expectation of rescue or reward. It means finding our joy in the satisfactions of human creativity and relationships, discovery and problem solving, and the full realization of personality in a shared world, rather than imagining some divine affection or approval for our lives.

Seventy five years ago, some three dozen thinkers and leaders asserted that it is possible to live from this point of view. They said it in the language of their day, making the assumptions of their time, as clearly and boldly as they could express. Not surprisingly, they were mistaken about some aspects of the details; it would not be possible for us today to return to the implicit faith in human progress that colored their confidence for the future. But like all pioneers, they opened a road that did not end with their own journeys; they invited us all to leave the confinement of tradition and convention, to suppose that however startling or uncomfortable the truth might be, we could deal with it, and still find meaning and joy along the way. That summoning courage, and that trust in the enduring power of the human spirit, never grows old. If, as I expect, I live for another thirty some years, perhaps I will have the opportunity to see what changes emerge in Manifesto IV, as humanism responds to the unfolding of this new century. No doubt we will learn some things between now and then; no doubt some of what we think we know at that point will turn out later to be wrong. But we will stay on the journey, still guided in part by what Ray Bragg and Roy Sellars and John Dietrich and their buddies once set forth -- about affirming life, rather than denying it; about eliciting the possibilities of life, not fleeing from them; and establishing the conditions of a life well lived, not just for the smart or the lucky, but for everyone. That’s the living heart of humanism, and it stands the test of time.