Are You A Humanist?

There are certain words that are put to such a bewildering variety of use that they accumulate over time a surplus of meaning, and one such word which encompasses a wide range of conflicting meanings is 'humanism'. To begin with, there is the historical sense of 'humanism' which was the emphasis on 'Man' as the focus of study during certain periods such as the Italian Renaissance. Next, you can espouse 'humanism' in the ethical sense and claim that all human beings deserve respect and compassion, and enjoy certain rights across all cultural boundaries. You may also affirm that all human beings should be given the opportunities for self-development, even if this process leads them on certain occasions to adopt a governing stance towards the natural world.

Then you can defend a metaphysical form of 'humanism' which can take either an atheist or a religious turn. In its atheistic forms, 'humanism' is tied to a naturalistic world-view according to which all phenomena can be explained in terms of physical causes and scientific laws, and you would claim that human beings should rely entirely on their own powers without taking recourse to any (non-existent) supernatural help. If you accept one of its religious forms, however, you would argue that it is precisely this transcendent assistance that empowers you to move towards self-fulfillment.

Likewise, there are a number of 'anti-humanisms'. To begin with the crudest formulation, you are an anti-humanist if you believe that it is morally right to torture babies over a slow fire and eat them alive. Or you could be 'anti-humanist' in denying that human beings share a common nature in terms of some properties by virtue of their humanity (which, to be sure, is never easy to define), and in claiming that bacteria, trees, mosquitoes, dogs, cats, and termites are as valuable as human beings in every respect. A more subtle version is that which denies that human beings are, to some extent at least, self-determining agents, and are instead enslaved to some regime of inexorable determinism, whether it is astral, cosmological, genetic, economic, sociological, or cultural.