From: metahuman (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Mon Oct 13 2003 - 17:21:47 MDT
After reading several essays and articles on humanism, I can conclude that people have varying definitions of the concept. Poll: Humanism in the MetaVirus? (http://bbs.metavirus.net/viewtopic.php?t=37)
There is Something Wrong With Humanism
By Jeremy Stangroom
It's not easy to write critically about humanism from a secular perspective. The problem has to do with the fluid nature of the concept "humanism". It has no single, precise meaning and there is little agreement about its constituent elements. As a result, to criticise humanism is to run the risk of being accused of a "straw-man" fallacy; that is, the fallacy of misrepresenting a position or argument in order to make it easier to criticise. It is easy to see how this might happen. Humanism isn't any one particular thing. If a good argument can be made against any one of the things, amongst others, that it might be, then likely you'll find that everyone disavows that particular thing. And then you've got a straw-man. It doesn't take too many repetitions of this pattern of criticism and disavowal before you end up with humanism weakly specified as a kind of rationally inclined, human centred, atheism (or agnosticism).
The problem here for the secular critic of humanism is that there doesn't seem to be much left in this conception to be construed as objectionable. It is possible to imagine a secularist being upset by such things as humanist funerals, but surely not by the thought that humanism is rationally inclined, atheistic and human centred? The humanist church, notwithstanding its godlessness, seems broad, inclusive and inoffensive.
However, things are not quite this straightforward. To understand why, it will help to consider briefly, for reasons that will become clear later, the rise of "Lysenkoism" in the Soviet Union in the middle part of the twentieth century. Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet agronomist, came to prominence as the proponent of a theory of heredity that stood in direct opposition to Mendelianism. The details of this theory need not concern us, except to note that it was "Larmarckist" in its contention that it is possible for organisms to inherit acquired characteristics. Lysenkoism dominated Soviet genetics in the 1940s. This was despite its being wrong and the fact that the principles of Mendelianism - the correct theory of heredity - were well understood by then. It came to dominate because it fitted so nicely with Soviet ideology. Particularly, the idea that acquired characteristics could be inherited held out the promise of the perfectibility of mankind. So science followed ideology, and in the Soviet Union, the conseque
nces, certainly for many of the scientists involved and arguably also for its agriculture, were disastrous.
What's this got to do with humanism? At first sight, nothing at all. After all, a tenet of humanism that probably everybody agrees on is that truth claims must be subject to rational scrutiny and investigation. However, then the thought occurs, what happens if science suggests hypotheses that are unpalatable from a humanist perspective? Part of the reason that Lysenkoism gained official support in the Soviet Union was because the Mendelian approach to genetics was not thought to be consistent with Engels's ideas about dialectical materialism. So are humanists immune to this kind of tendency to select between scientific theories on the basis of ideology rather than the balance of evidence?
A way into thinking about this question is to consider some of the objections that might be levelled against it. Two in particular spring to mind. First of all, it might be objected that it isn't possible to draw conclusions about humanism as a set of ideas solely on the basis of the actions or beliefs of individual humanists. So what if some humanists lack impartiality? Nobody is naïve enough to claim that all humanists are perfectly consistent. However, this objection is weak. If nothing else, the actions of individual humanists tell us something about the practice of humanism. But more than this, it just isn't obvious that one cannot learn anything about a set of ideas by looking at how well its adherents live up to them. If it does turn out that there is a tendency for humanists to judge the merits of scientific theories in terms of non-scientific criteria then this might well be indicative of some tension within humanism.
The second objection is related to this thought. If humanists do indeed bring non-scientific criteria to bear when judging scientific theories, it might be objected that they do not do so in the name of humanism. If humanism is nothing more than a rational secularism, then there isn't any extra humanist ingredient against which scientific theories can be judged. However, the difficulty with this objection is precisely that it only works by setting up an equivalence between humanism and rational secularism. It is true that some people see humanism this way, but many people do not.
What then is this possible extra ingredient, properly humanist, against which the merits of scientific theories might be judged? The answer is that it is the constellation of ideas which constitutes the human-centred aspect of humanism. These ideas include: that human beings are free, rational agents; that they are, in various ways, the source of morality; that human dignity and flourishing are important; and that there are significant common bonds between people, which unite them across biological, social and geographical boundaries. These ideas - and variations on them - are espoused in numerous humanist writings (just type 'humanism' into Google - and read at your leisure). However, the claim is not that all humanists accept all these ideas. It is rather that they are representative of a discernible and significant thread in humanist thought. Or, more strongly, it is at least arguable that if a person has no sympathy at all with these kinds of ideas, then they are not a humanist. As Kurtz and Wilson put i
t, in their Humanist Manifesto II: "Views that merely reject theism are not equivalent to humanism. They lack commitment to the positive belief in the possibilities of human progress and to the values central to it."
What evidence is there then that these kinds of ideas might be involved in the judgements that humanists make about scientific theories? Let's take, as an example, the article by Kenan Malik, "Materialism, Mechanism and the Human Mind", which appeared in the Autumn 2001 edition of New Humanist magazine. In this article, Malik argues that human beings are "exceptional" in that they "cannot be understood solely as natural beings". In pursuing his argument, Malik attacks "mechanistic" explanations, which reduce human beings, and the human mind, to the equivalent of sophisticated machines. He argues that this view is flawed in that it fails to recognise that humans are conscious, capable of purpose and agency. According to Malik, human beings are, in a sense, outside nature, able to work out how to overcome the constraints of biological and physical laws. In his words: "Our evolutionary heritage certainly shapes the way that humans approach the world. But it does not limit it, as it does for all other animals."
It is quite hard to make sense of this argument. For starters, the idea that the evolutionary heritage of human beings does not limit the way we approach the world is highly questionable. For example, it's hard to see how we can rule out the possibility that had our brains evolved differently, then puzzles that presently seem intractable (for example, the fact that there seems to be something that it is like to be a human being) would have long ago been solved.
But, more significantly, the whole idea that human beings are somehow outside nature is slightly odd. It seems here to amount to the claim that things like consciousness, agency and free will are real - though non-physical - and that they are, in principle, beyond scientific, or at least mechanistic, explanation. But the trouble is that Malik, in this article at least, does not argue for this position. He merely repeats what everybody already knows - that it certainly seems that we all have inner lives (and everything that entails), and it's a bit of a puzzle.
So what's at stake here? Why not draw less hard and fast conclusions about the proper domain of scientific explanation? Perhaps part of the story has to do with the spectre of anti-humanism, which seems to be in the background of all scientific attempts to get to grips with the stuff of human existence. How this might be so can be illustrated by briefly considering Benjamin Libet's experiments, from the 1960s, on readiness potential. An RP is an electrical change in the brain that precedes a conscious human act - such as waggling a finger. Libet's discovery was that if volunteers are asked to waggle their finger within a 30 second time-frame, the RP that accompanies the waggling begins some 300 to 400 milliseconds before the human subject reports that they have become aware of their intention to waggle the finger. This is disturbing, because, as Libet puts it, the "initiation of the freely voluntary act appears to begin in the brain unconsciously, well before the person consciously knows he wants to act!"
The anti-humanist threat is obvious. If our conscious acts are unconsciously initiated, then what of free-will and agency? Perhaps we are just sophisticated machines after all. And if we are, what does this mean, for example, for the idea that human beings are the source of morality? It must be said that Libet's work is not uncontroversial, and he himself does not draw particularly radical conclusions. However, in an important sense, this is not the point. Rather, the point is that science is in the business of providing reductive, causal explanations of the phenomena that it investigates. Consequently, when it turns its gaze to the stuff of the inner life of human beings - consciousness, agency, will, sensation, etc. - there is the possibility that these things will turn out just to be physical, or indeed that, in one way or another, they will disappear completely.
Malik seems to recognise this threat when he argues that the attempt to understand human beings in mechanistic terms is motivated by an anti-humanism. But his solution, to deny that reductive, scientific explanations are admissible in the case of the inner life of human beings, is not yet at least rationally justified. It is too early to rule out on a priori or empirical grounds the possibility that science will be as successful in this domain as it is in others. The brain is rapidly giving up its secrets to neuroscientists and there are philosophical theories available - for example, eliminative materialism and epiphenomenalism - which offer a way of dealing with issues of consciousness without denying the explanatory power of a reductive, physicalist approach. To preclude the possibility that science might be successful in this area, on the grounds that it results in theories that are counter-intuitive, is bad science and bad philosophy.
The important point is that Malik is grappling with a tension that lies right at the heart of humanism. If a person is serious about science then they cannot, without fear of contradiction, embrace a doctrine which requires, as humanism might, that human beings have free will or that the stuff of consciousness is non-physical and causally efficacious. To escape the possibility of contradiction by asserting the truth of the kind of science or philosophy which is, in principle, anti-reductionist in its approach to humans is to allow ideology to govern scientific and philosophical commitments.
In an endnote in his book, The Selfish Gene (2nd Edition), Richard Dawkins writes: "If…you are not religious, then face up to the following question. What on earth do you think you are, if not a robot, albeit a very complicated one?" It may be that complicated robots have consciousness, free will and agency; that is, that they have the things which are important to many humanists. Unfortunately, it may also be that they do not, and to deny this possibility requires a leap of faith. What this means is that it is not rationally justified to assert the truth of the constellation of beliefs which constitutes the human-centred aspect of humanism. Rather, one is forced to concur with Kurtz and Wilson's more general verdict on humanist affirmations, that they are "but an expression of a living and growing faith."
Jeremy Stangroom is New Media editor of The Philosophers' Magazine (http://www.philosophers.co.uk/).
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