Mr Chairman, I thank the Society for the honour of inviting me to address this meeting. It is some forty years since my one and only previous visit to a meeting of the society. The occasion was notable for an address by Archibald Roberston in which he made a critical comparison of Huxley's 'Brave New World' and, the then recently published, '1984' by George Orwell. Huxley got the best of it and I, as a then member of that ultimate middle-class protestant sect known as the British Communist Party, applauded that assessment. I would now, about forty years after my leaving that party, rate those two cautionary tales as 'equal but different'.
A very great deal has been brewing these forty years and it has come to a head in somewhat less than forty months of the immediate past. Many well-meaning people took years to absorb the significance of the Kruschev Report to the 1956 congress of the Soviet Communist Party. We have not, I think, got year upon leisurely year to absorb what has now happened as historic sequel to that report - the withering away of homo sovieticus.
It is no part of our business to discuss general politics while wearing our secular humanist hats except in so far as 1) there are political threats to humanist values and 2) there are effective humanist contributions to be made to the easement of political problems.. I suggest that we have to draw those lines very firmly but also to recognise that we do not all draw them in precisely the same way, limiting precisely the same areas. The unsureness of our touch in these matters has been illustrated amply by the discussions of the Gulf War that have diverted us in recent months. The fact remains that the political world has changed enormously; 1988 is a long time ago and we have to make some political analysis as a preliminary to the discussion of our future humanist strategies.
The model upon which I base my political assessment for humanist consideration is that of the mythical monster which, freshly beheaded, instantly sprouted three equally horrible heads. The monster of terminal 'communism' has been beheaded and has sprouted the three monstrous heads of capitalism unrestrained, nationalism unthinking and religion unreformed. Those are the monstrous things at large in the former Soviet Empire and they all threaten humanist values directly. The complacent propaganda, to the effect that democratic enlightenment has now the chance of a clear run in the former communist sphere, is to be taken with a large grain of salt. We are not at 'the end 0f history'. We must not be misled by the cosy norms of our own little world. Our capitalism has been tempered by a long process of ameliorative reform - underwritten by a once flourishing imperialism whose slackening momentum we often mistake for a divine right of ours to be wealthier than most of the wider world. Capitalism in the former Soviet empire is likely to be the ruthless purveying of anything that the locals can be persuaded to welcome as 'western'. The lawless pushers of hard drugs and the lawful pushers of nicotine will see the Second World as, perhaps, even more attractive than the Third.
Nationalism, in our society, is mostly a matter of patronising the person who has the misfortune not to be native British, English or Scottish or whatever. Nationalism 'over there' is much more likely to take the form of burning down the next village. Religion here is mostly a domesticated pet thing that Monday-to-Saturday Humanists keep up for old times' sake. The Orthodox/Catholic divide is not like that at all; it is a killer and militant Islam, too, is on the loose again all over much of Asia and South-east Europe..
Humanists, however defined, embody only one trend within society and before attempting any assessment of our humanist perspectives it is necessary to locate our 'class' in contemporary history. By 'our class' I mean that fragment of total humanity which is the semi-educated, semi-philistine middle class in countries such as Britain. This fragment is by no means wholly secular - certainly not consciously so; it includes religious traditionalists, militant revivalists and a number of beleaguered would-be sanitisers of piety. This diverse fragment of humanity consists of people who see themselves as responsible caring citizens; they are a minority embedded in a silent majority of 'default humanists' who half believe in a half-guilty way in a vestigial half-god.
It has fallen to that fragment, of which we humanist are a part, to be the beneficiaries, and part authors, of a mini-enlightenment. We have grown up in a post-war world of serene expectations that have almost, at times, seemed to be coming true. It has been possible for us to credit a high and rising standard of living accompanied by high and rising standards of civil liberty, social peace and shared conscience. The downfall of Hitler, the immediate post-mortem exposure of Stalin, the withering of Spanish fascism, the emergence of secular states in the third world - notably India and some of the Muslim countries of our near east - seemed, a decade or two ago, to be the signs of a new and better order of things. The liberal decencies were perceived to be on the move. Many of us took it for granted that tyrannies were wilting and that, in particular, religious fanaticism was in terminal decline. The people were in decreasing need of their traditional opium because their lives were brightening by the decade.
The falsity of this latter wishful thought began to be exposed and so the consciously secular movements - of which our several organisations are examples - have grown somewhat in prominence in recent years.
Their problem is that they have grown from the contrived decay of the mini-enlightenment but most of their members still take that (I think) transient phenomenon for granted. These organisations of ours are manifestations of 'senior common room atheism' and they mirror, in a distorted way, some of the non-humanist organisations of the twentieth century urban middle class. Some humanist trends are 'all things to all men' rather reminiscent of the Anglican Church and the Scottish Kirk. Other strands of secularism are inclined to be 'unholier than thou' - weird analogues of some of the grimmer Protestant sects so familiar a blot on the Scottish scene. Others remind me of the Fabian Society and the Left Book Club of my youth. These rather cruel caricatures conceal a certain frustrated admiration that I feel for our secular organisations (I am a member of many of them). As for the senior common room ambience, I mean no offence; I value it and I would be the first to proclaim my admiration for the many academics in our secularist ranks. I am wishing merely to draw attention to one of the most significant contradictions of our contemporary secular humanism; it is a tender growth sprouting spontaneously from a world that is getting tougher - too tough for us if we do not think hard who we are, where we are and where we must go if we are not to be marginalised and perhaps extinguished.
The future cannot, I think, be described convincingly as a continuation, or revival, of the somewhat cosy mini-enlightenment of the middle decades of this century. It cannot be described convincingly as the belated emergence of New Right Triumph. It can be described best, in my opinion, in terms of 'green scepticism'. (This is a very different beast from its litter siblings, green romanticism and green mysticism).
There are, both globally and in such countries as ours in particular, too many people plundering and polluting the planet too much. We, humanity, are going to be poorer or fewer or both and we are not going to like it and our dislike of it will take forms that challenge, directly and brutally, the central humanist precepts.
Before going any further it is necessary to set out, not a ponderous 'belief system' (the world is over-stocked with pretentious belief-driven tyrannies) but, a brief, indeed minimal, formulation of what humanism seems to me to be about. We can then see something of the challenge that the erosion of the ephemeral mini-enlightenment and the three menacing monsters that I have suggested are at large in the Second World, might present to us.
As I see it, humanism is the notion that we humans can, to a useful extent and subject to the moral imperatives implicit in our being social animals intent upon social and individual survival at a tolerable level of well-being, identify and solve the problems we face SOLELY by recourse to experience and observation and WITHOUT recourse to Authority. This holds whether Authority is perceived to be divine (the supposedly revealed will of 'god') or surreptitiously deified slogans - progress, the state, the party, market forces, the destiny of the nation or any other items in the burdensome catalogue of received pretensions.
On this premise I see humanism primarily as an open, co-operative and constructive challenge to gratuitous Authority in all its many blatant and insidious forms; that remit is not narrow, not unworthy of the finest and most generous-spirited among us. That remit largely defines us and on it we should plan our strategy and set our agenda. It follows that humanists should be concerned most with those matters in which Authority intrudes most, in which Authority is at its most stifling of human well-being. The crumbling mini-enlightenment is providing a field-day for Authority and, by the same token, a huge and varied challenge to humanists. What are we actually thinking and doing?
One disturbing feature of humanist discourse is the tendency to avoid the sharp points of humanism - the challenging of authority and the promotion of intelligent co-operation - and to lapse into general conversation and pontification on any matter that is of interest to any intelligent person. There seems to be an implied precept that 'if human beings do it, or think about it, then humanist organisations, too, should talk about it and produce a line on it'. If we were living in a world in which pontificating were all that is required of us then we would not need our own organisations - everybody would be doing it to their hearts' content. Some humanists seem to think they dwell already in a benign world shaped by discursive discourse and attentive listeners.
The practical outcome of this attitude is that we do not set our own agenda; our agenda is set by what the rest of middle class society is currently talking about; therefore we are often reactive rather than proactive.
A good example of this easy reactive life-stance is afforded by the BHA Conference 1990. The programme was a series of hand-me-down sessions on green issues with no perceptible attempt to identify, in discussion, a humanist approach to them. The proceedings could have been those of any number of amorphous discussion groups. The proceedings were, in humanist terms, a non-event.
After the conference I spoke to a very distinguished and rightly respected member on this question of 'keeping to the humanist point'. With what was intended to be the gentlest irony I said "Next year, let us discuss the efficacy of high interest rates as a means of countering inflation." The reply I expected was along the lines of "don't be silly; there is nothing that we can say on the subject that could not as well be said by any reader of the quality press." To my dismay the actual reply, after a pause for thought, was "What a good idea - so long as we discuss it fairly and impartially." So humanist discourse equals the fair and impartial discussion of anything that serious persons happen to think is important. ('Happen to think' is not meant pejoratively. I think that green issues are vitally important and I think that inflation is a serious matter but I do not think that organised humanists have much of value to say on these subjects that cannot be said by us, and many non-humanists, as individuals. Another luxury we cannot afford is the practice of sneering at everything that religious people do and think - just because they are religious. This secular sectarianism overlooks the facts that liberal religion exists, is declining relative to its illiberal relatives and has more in common with us than it does with the fanaticism against which all liberal minded persons - secular or not - rebel instinctively. Some of today's liberal believers are tomorrow's humanists and they should not be discouraged, by us of all people, from making that very natural leap. (Some of today's humanists are really liberal believers on the point of 'coming out'; good luck to them so long as they stay liberal). The mainstream churches have among their adherents not a few closet humanists - ask any evangelical enthusiast!
The accelerating reaction to the withering mini-enlightenment is taking many forms, most of them authoritarian and anti-humanist. One obvious form is the personal escapism offered by the religious revivalists (erroneously flattered by the use of the term 'fundamentalists'). They are the main reactionary force in the ideological field. Revivalism not only diverts people from their real and urgent concerns, not only divides society and families into warring factions but also, by reason of the explicit authoritarianism in (say) bible-worship or koran-thumping, makes for acceptance of authoritarian politics and the mass hysteria that both bad politics and bad religion feed on. A major concern of humanists must be to challenge religious revivalism intellectually. In a post-Christian country this means relentless exposure of the supposed special authority of the bible and, in the international field especially, the organising of united opposition to the fascism of the nineties - militant Islam. Countering religious fanaticism is our first humanist concern.
Another authoritarian reaction to the vulnerable mini-enlightenment is even more explicitly political. Because of planet-wide plunder and pollution more and more people are going to get poorer and poorer; there will be a natural tendency for people to quarrel over sharing the cake that will be shrinking relative to the number of slice-hunters. The divine right to a high and rising standard of living, proclaimed by the rich and the organised, is pernicious enough in prosperous times; when it becomes the divine right to fight for what we can get and the devil take the hindmost in a floundering world economy - then there will be trouble the like of which we have not ourselves experienced.
'Discipline' and 'law and order' will be alike both increasingly necessary features of human life and increasingly plausible excuses for gratuitous tyranny exercised by the powerful, the rich and the uncritically enthusiastic. In this last connection, the possibility of tyranny, ostensibly 'green', is a real one. Unfortunately it is not certain that the Green Party (of which I am a somewhat passive member) and its associated pressure groups appreciate fully the excuses for tyranny that the necessary green rethinking of our rights, expectations and lifestyles could generate. Some of us remember, when making a reasonable request, the grim delight exuded by those who would ask us "don't you know there's a war on?" Are we to hear "Don't you know there's a biosphere at risk?" Will there be posters - "Gaia is watching YOU!" Some of us remember, dimly or vividly, black-shirted fascists with their clubs and castor oil bottles promoting a 'New Order'. The shirts being green, the clubs and castor oil being organically produced and the bottles being made of recycled glass, would be of little comfort to the victims.
The second specifically humanist concern is therefore the defence and protection of civil and individual liberties in a world in which these liberties will be under ever increasing threat.
A third area of humanist concern will be increasingly the need for us actually to help people practically as their problems worsen and multiply. In India - a country that seems to be slipping from the primitive sustainable way of life to the unsustainable environmentally destructive mock-western way without passing through a mini-enlightenment in between - the Positive Atheists of Vijayawada are getting on with the job of helping people to help themselves. The Indian Atheists are not merely academically anti-god; they do not compromise with godly superstition as it affects people's lives. They cut straight through the pious cackle, take off their coats and get on with addressing people's needs. In our cosy world - being devalued and brutalised by the year - we will have to be Positive Atheists. We have a lot to learn from our friends in Vijayawada. They are showing people that there is something better than 'putting up with it' in the real here and now on a promissory note about the imaginary hereafter. Of course, we should not despise those religious groups who actually do good where there is a crying need for good to be done but we should never forget that the insidious poison of 'blame the victim' stems from doctrines such as 'original sin' and the 'abuse of free will'. Humanists, we who believe in human worth in this the only life we know, should theoretically be especially willing and uninhibited in helping people in trouble. Our practice does not always match up to this theoretical expectation.
To summarise, our strategy should be to contribute as humanists, not just as serious informed persons in general, to the defence and betterment of human life. We must stick to the humanist point; nobody else can be trusted to do so. In particular we have to combat belief-driven tyranny and help practically those who suffer at its hands.
If we humanists cannot define our goals and conduct our work in ways that are both specifically humanist and that relate to the real world then we shall become a marginal discussion group whose agenda is set by other middle class, middle aged, middle everything else people. The human race can do without us if that is all we are.
These three thrusts - against religious fanaticism, for civil liberties and for practical leadership to real people in real trouble - could perhaps be appropriate themes for a three-session Conference. How about that then?