All of this leads to an understanding of why we are Humanists. On one level, we are Humanists because we say we are. As the references in the Appendix show, we have been calling ourselves a Humanist movement for roughly a century. Presently there are dozens of groups calling themselves Humanist (most are secular Humanists and some are anti-religious), and Humanism is hard to define because it is more so a perspective than a specific philosophic position. The Encyclopedia Britannica does us a favor by saying, “In recent years the term humanism has often been used to refer to value systems that emphasize the personal worth of each individual but that do not include a belief in God. Modern Humanism, also called Naturalistic Humanism, Scientific Humanism, Ethical Humanism and Democratic Humanism is defined by one of its leading proponents, Corliss Lamont, as “a naturalistic philosophy that rejects all supernaturalism and relies primarily upon reason and science, democracy and human compassion”.
Since Adler’s thought predates and prepares the way for Religious Humanism, Ethical Culture can rightfully claim ownership of an understanding of Humanism. It is part of our history, and we have been evolving Ethical Culture within Humanism’s conceptual boundaries. While the humanist perspective is thousands of years old, it is in the Enlightenment that the ideas of reason and freedom became the foundation of today’s Humanism. Twentieth century Humanism, the sort to which we ascribe, began as a religious movement. The Enlightenment prioritization of reason was challenged by 19th century Romanticism’s appeals to emotion as a meaningful facet of experience, and Adler’s thought (integral to the formation of Religious Humanism) is a product of Enlightenment values filtered through the Romantic perspective.
My favorite explanation of Humanism comes from Alan Bullock in The Humanist Tradition in the West. He explains “As a rough generalization, Western thought has treated humankind and the cosmos in three distinct modes. The first, the supernatural or the transcendental, has focused on God, treating human beings as a part of the Divine creation. A second, the natural or scientific, has focused on Nature and treats humankind as part of the natural order like other organisms. The third, the humanistic, has focused on humankind, and on human experience as the starting point for human beings’ knowledge of themselves, of God and of nature.” Although Bullock is talking about the very broad humanist thread that runs through Western literary, artistic, philosophic, political, and cultural history, I think his explanation opens the door to a wide range of approaches specific to the religious center of Ethical Culture. Bullock makes a valuable distinction; rather than an explanation of reality, a philosophy, a life stance, a commitment to science and reason, or a commitment to human fulfillment (although Humanism including Ethical Humanism usually includes all of those), fundamentally Humanism is an acceptance of the human condition. This acceptance that becomes a way of looking at reality. It is the acceptance that human beings have built a human cultural reality full of thoughts and feelings that filters and reconstructs our experiences through its evolving perspective.
I do not claim that is the definition of Humanism that organized humanism would accept, but it is my Ethical Humanist understanding of the essence of humanism. Although many Ethical Culturalists would assume we fit more closely Bullock’s second mode, the naturalistic or scientific approach, our particular approach begins from reflection on human experience. Our religious foundation is the ethical significance of human relationships, which means Bullock’s scientific mode is a tool for understanding life that we have incorporated into our larger religious vision.
One negative of this understanding of Humanism is the realization that we do not experience pure, uninterpreted reality. We have no choice but to look through human eyes. Human consciousness filters pure natural reality through our powers of sensation and reason and in the process creates the human world that we experience on a daily basis. Cultural evolution has shaped human nature, and there is a danger of carrying flawed ways of understanding that can become accepted gospel even when they promote injustice and error.
However, this view of humanism entails an acceptance that humankind through its collective cultural effort has taken nature to greater heights. Humanity has made conscious the striving that is part of all life. It has created gods and science. Part of the grid we place on life is judgment about what is good and what is bad: what helps life and what hurts it. We have humanized the universe as we reconstruct it in our minds to become part of our cultural human world.
As with Naturalism, we see no other possibility than to accept that we live in a human reality. And that is wonderful. As the latest product of evolution we have created a conscious, relational reality that is at its core ethical. Our religious Humanism incorporates the beliefs in human power, science, and reason along with the driving force of the dreams and desires of individual human beings. Our world begins in our deepest thoughts and feelings.