In August of 2015, Fox News Corp. and Facebook teamed up to host the first Republican Presidential Candidate Debate for the 2016 election. With unfiltered, offensive (then) candidate Donald Trump participating with nine other men, the event was more like a special episode of Trumpâs show, The Apprentice, than a debate befitting the importance of the U.S. presidency. Bracketing the political consequences of much of the discussion, the conversation was downright comical at times. And like (good) bad TV goes, they saved the best (and worst) debate question for last:
I want to know if any of [the candidates] have received a word from god on what they should do and take care of first [upon winning the election].1
Senator Ted Cruz said he was âblessed to receive a word from god everydayâ through the scriptures. He went on to politically nuance his position by telling the crowd that god speaks through the Bible, before he shifted gears to remind everyone that he was a âconsistent conservative.â Next up was Ohio Governor John Kasich, who led with âI do believe in miracles.â He then offered a few mixed platitudes about [god] wanting America to be a strong leader. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was next, saying something about having been redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ, appealing to the evangelical crowd, before specifying that âgod doesnât call [him] to do a specific thingâŚbut to follow his will.â Senator Marco Rubio followed next with a homily on all the ways god has blessed the United States. Last up was Dr. Ben Carson, who was thrown a question about race on top of the god question. His response:
Our strength as a nation comes in our unity. We are the United States of America, not the divided states. And those who want to divide us are trying to divide us, and we shouldnât let them.
Few would argue with the physicianâs suggestion. A united nation is most assuredly a strong(er) nation, as true for the U.S. as it is for any other country. Yet, the politicians did not pick up on the irony of using the idea of god for an appeal to unity. The humanist Jean-Paul Sartre might refer to such a scenario as one marked by bad faith, and self-deception.
Some might wonder how a life philosophy like humanism can thrive in a world where those contending for the highest seat in the office, the crème de la crème of those assumed to operate from sound mind and action, could somehow be guided by such a skewed rationality. What is the âhumanistâ citizen to do about such continued rhetorical appeals to, and presumable weight of god, or traditional religions, prevalent in America, and many places across the globe for whom we must develop relations and reason with? One easy response is to turn things like the GOP debate into comedy spectacle. After all, many humanists will find it hard not to laugh at ending any political debate with the god question. Lurking behind the humor, however, is what many consider a tragic dimension to contemporary U.S. (and global) social life, especially in a âpost-factualâ and âalternative factâ political climate and reality: That it often seems most of the world would rather believe mythological conjecture than face the concrete issues dividing people across the globe today. Especially when a good bit, if not most, of such post-factish mythologies foster such divisiveness and perpetuate social inequalities across human differences.
Humanism in a Non-Humanist World asks how humanism might relate to a world filled with myth, halve-truths, and countless social problems and injustices that arise from, and whose solutions are often complicated by, bad faith of many kinds. For many, the humanist task of relating to a ânon-humanistâ world is akin to trying to relate to a foreign culture without knowing its language or customs. Doing so produces frustration, resentment, heartache, and at worst, apathy. Further, the culture deemed non-humanist is often thought to be âguiltyâ of indifference towards humanist and atheist voices (though these are not, as many humanists know well, precisely the same categories of identification). Nevertheless, the seeming durability of religious dogma (and their attendant methods and myths of legitimation) and stagnant beliefs in the irreducibility and immutable nature of difference across social categories in the U.S. and across the globe, is such that humanists face a wide variety of challenges on social, legislative, and personal levels in the twenty-first century.
Yet, the need for a forceful consideration of humanismsâ relationality to a non-humanist world is likely as great as it has ever been. Though it comes in many varieties, humanism(s) promote the value of human life, the possibility for its flourishing, and believes it not robbery that humans might see the world as it isâbeyond fabricationsâso that we might all work to make it what it could be. One of these humanistic âtruthsâ long relied on is that much of the world is simply non-humanist. Throughout the pages that follow, this non-humanist world is respectively animated and depicted in wide-ranging ways with each of the volumeâs contributors focusing on different dimensions of the world as it presents itself through the lens of humanism. But to begin, by the ânon-humanist worldâ we mean a couple different things: First, it is quantitatively non-humanist, in that roughly more than 70% of the world holds some version of a higher power in higher regard than humans. Therefore, to exist as a humanist today is to find oneself a minority. Second, when considering global crises of starvation, water and food shortages, environmental crises, the proliferation of identity-based wars, racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and rampant greed, the world is also non-humanist to the extent that it is largely anti-human: It doesnât seem to have the best interest of humanity in mind. While these characterizations can be viewed as perhaps more traditional understandings of non-humanism (reliance on traditional religious logics and reasoning, and lack of human rights and social equitability), readers will also encounter unexpected, and uncanny depictions of a non-humanist world that track in a different direction towards the limits and possibilities of expanding and complicating assumptions pertaining to the humanism/non-humanist divide. From critical examinations pertaining to the inefficacy of rhetorical binaries to the call for new voices in and sources of humanist reflection, the challenges posed in the pages that follow range in scope, content and form. These varied understandings of the humanist/non-humanist world situate the impulse behind this present volume. From academia to government, today, the world is in desperate need of involvement with and leadership from humanism and humanists like never before. And yet, because of either the marginal status and lack of clarity of humanism and its worldview, this involvement remains incredibly difficult to accomplish, facilitate, or sustain. Working to respond to this seeming paradox, The Institute for Humanist Studies (IHS) held a conference in the Fall of 2013 geared toward asking the question: How should humanism relate to a world where not only are humanists few in number and marginalized for their non-theistic worldviews, but also, find themselves in a world that increasingly seems less and less interested in the social well-being of those for whom we share a planet with? The proceedings of that conference, along with contributions from a number of thinkers outside of the conference, are published here as Humanism in a Non-Humanist World.
Humanist HeritageâBeginnings
Despite strand of humanism today, most accounts begin, if not explicitly, at least conceptually and ideologically, with Enlightenment conceptions of the world, the human, and ethical ideals such as equality, freedom, and justice. Whatâs more, across the vast subjects, approaches to, and practices of humanism, a consistent feature has been a developed embrace of science (or, the scientific method) over religion, evidence over faith, skepticism over unfounded certainty, undergirded by a somewhat collective suspicion of the supernatural and theism. With (now) wide-ranging definitional variability, it seems that one of the few, if not the only, unchanging principles of the subject(s) of Humanism is the centrality, individuality, and attitude of thought which centers the uniqueness of the human, the significance of being a human.
Beginning with the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which launched a forceful confrontation with theological dogmatism and the rigid religious authority of its time, the âAge of Enlightenmentâ sought to sweep away the medieval remnants of old, and break new ground in the making of a new Modern Western world. Intellectual revolutions in areas of the sciences, politics, and philosophy, facilitated and ushered in a new age of human reason. Such a narrative, as representative as it is brief, serves as the more conventional and popular point of departure for the historical emergence of humanism today. While such a sketch, no doubt, provides a historical basis from which to locate the emergence of humanist thought, what else, beyond a starting point, do we traffic into our contemporary de...