Humanism?

                    Holbein's Erasmus 

When I was in my teens and my parents had finally relented and stopped insisting I went to Sunday School and I was starting to question things, we had a school history lesson when the humanists were mentioned. The only name I remember from that lesson was Erasmus - probably because he sounded more like he should have lived in ancient Rome than 15th century Holland. I had very little understanding then of what humanism was about but I was getting sceptical about bible stories and God etc.  It was another year or two before a stand-in teacher gave us the best RE (religious education) lesson we had in five years at grammar school - on Buddhism or Islam or maybe Hindu, when all I had ever known was Christianity. The idea of humanism as it distilled in my mind seemed like an attractive alternative to mainstream religion.

My take on humanism was like taking the best bits of Moses and Jesus, like moral codes, kindness and caring, and ignoring the unscientific and frankly dubious bits about pillars of salt, miracles, heaven and hell and angels and the devil. I was born the same year as the NHS and I believe that even in my early teens I was attracted to equality and socialist ideals. Humanism, or putting people first as I understood it then and still think of it now, was an attractive philosophy.

Now though, some sixty-five years down the time line, I am starting to think humanism, or at least my version, may have had its day. Putting people first or humanism is starting to seem to me, a human, as a bit selfish. And selfishness seems to becoming a serious problem: the selfishness that drives us to acquire more and more, to drive massive SUVs, to jet halfway across the world for meetings, to oppose the social housing that might reduce our own property values, to make our country more prosperous at the expense of others, to clear forests, burn moorland, drain wetlands, breed fast-growing chickens we can slaughter sooner, all to put people first. All for humanity.

Now, I am not a vegan or a vegetarian and I could never be a Buddhist monk who depended on the charity of others and literally wouldn't hurt a fly, but I do see where they are 'coming from' and the aboriginal's respect for the land where they are guardians for just a few dozens of years chimes with me. I have planted hundreds of trees on 'my' bit of land and those trees will, I hope, be there, along with their offspring, hundreds of years after I have gone. Meantime the land will have been 'mine' to perhaps half a dozen more people yet still be the same land and the same trees. Ownership - especially of things like land, forests and rivers - is a very artificial concept and not really an essential to the Buddhist monk, the aboriginal, a nomad or a hunter-gatherer.

Look at what humans have done and continue doing: burning fossil fuels, causing global warming, melting glaciers, wildfires, drought, flooding and migration, polluting the air, the land, rivers and oceans, destroying nature to for intensive farming, mono-culture crops, driving species to extinction and increasing the risk of pandemics like avian flu. All for more money, for a better standard of living, for fancier cars, bigger homes and more exotic holidays. This is not really humanism - it is greed, it is capitalism. Real humanism should have a different definition of 'standard of living'.

We are globalists. World trade is global. We eat food grown halfway round the world, watch televisions made in China, fly thousands of miles to palm-fringed beaches, take part in Zoom meetings with colleagues in other continents. But globalism is not about the globe, about the planet, about Earth. Globalism is greed, it is capitalism.

There are those who believe humans are a curse, a  threat to the planet - that the world would be better off if we, the humans, went extinct. And they have a point. You don't have to believe in the Gaia theory to understand that the climate and nature would soon recover if mankind died out. There's a reason the protest group is called Extinction Rebellion. Humanism - putting people first - is not working. We need to rethink it - to redefine humanism and to redefine globalism. We need to rethink what is good for humans, good for nature, good for the climate and good for the planet. And we could learn something from our Buddhist monk and our aboriginal.