2023 has been an eventful year for free thought, humanism and secularism. Below, Emma Park and Daniel James Sharp look back on some of the major issues that have been debated in the Freethinker this year.

I. Free speech, religion and the culture wars

Free thought and intellectual progress are not possible without a shared culture of free speech, open debate and a willingness to engage with different points of view. One of the Freethinker’s concerns this year has been with attempts to repress free speech, especially in the UK and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, and in the context of the ‘culture wars’.

In Ireland, a new bill on hate offences threatens to undermine free speech, not just about religion but on a variety of the most sensitive topics – in other words, topics on which open debate is crucial. In Wakefield, England, in February, a non-Muslim woman, presumably under pressure, donned a veil and made a humiliating public apology in the local mosque, because her autistic son had brought a copy of the Quran into school and it was accidentally scuffed. And Puffin has made attempts to censor Roald Dahl in the name of ‘sensitivity’.

Free speech at universities also remains under pressure, as illustrated by the case of Professor Steven Greer, who was hounded by Bristol University Islamic Society in a smear campaign that was supported by academic colleagues who should have known better. Daniel reviewed Greer’s book about his experiences.

Across the pond, Professor Alex Byrne’s contract for a book critical of gender identity ideology was cancelled by Oxford University Press, but has since been published by Polity. From a different perspective, former vice chancellor Julius Weinberg argued that ‘freedom of speech is not as simple as my right to express my ideas’.

To supporters of democracy in Hong Kong, the culture wars are all but an irrelevance. The suffocating control of the Chinese Communist Party, said Kevin Yam, forced campaigners across the political spectrum to work together.

II. Science, philosophy, and humanism

As well as exploring the issues of the day, the Freethinker has also explored some of their deeper philosophical and historical contexts.

We interviewed the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett about the relationship between philosophy and science, meaning and consciousness in a godless, Darwinian universe, and New Atheism. With historian Charles Freeman, we discussed the richness and variety of the ancient Greek mind and how the coming of Christian orthodoxy put an end to that tradition. And we caught up with the humanist and author Sarah Bakewell to explore different traditions of humanism.

Meanwhile, Matt Johnson and Daniel Sharp both contributed articles about one of the most famous freethinkers of recent years, the late Christopher Hitchens.

III. Islam and free thought

With the rise of Islam in Britain and across the West, it has become urgent to consider how far the religion can be compatible with Western values and approaches. To explore this question, we interviewed Taj Hargey, possibly Britain’s only liberal imam. Other contributors have explored the need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought around the world, why the hijab is not a good symbol for women, and whether it is possible to distinguish between religious and political Islam.

IV. Secularism

Secularism is the principle that religion and state should be separated, and that religion should have no undue influence on public life. In the UK, thanks to a combination of political apathy and entrenched privilege, we still have an established church and unelected clergy in Parliament. Paul Scriven, a Liberal Democrat peer, spoke to the Freethinker about why he introduced a bill to disestablish the Church of England.

With a general election on the cards for 2024, Stephen Evans of the National Secular Society discussed where the political parties stand on faith schools. Two recent events in which the NSS participated revealed some of the challenges involved in secularisation. Daniel also argued in an article for Only Sky that the Church of England’s record on gay marriage is another reason to hasten disestablishment.

Other contributors to the Freethinker have looked at secularism, its history and future, in Québec, Turkey and Wales, and the strengths and weaknesses of French-style laïcité.

Did you know that, while the advancement of any religion, as well as of humanism, is considered a charitable aim under English law, the advancement of free thought, atheism or secularism is not? See Emma’s piece for New Humanist.

V. Israel and Palestine

One of the year’s biggest events—the Hamas attack against Israel on 7 October and the ensuing war—has produced a wide range of often emotional and heated responses. In contrast to all this sound and fury, the Freethinker has published a series of articles dealing with the conflict from different and often disagreeing, but rationally and charitably argued perspectives.

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid wrote about the ‘leftist postcolonial apologia’ for Hamas and argued that the Israel-Palestine conflict is, at root, a religious one, while in Emma’s interview with Taj Hargey, the imam was staunch in his support of the ‘occupied and oppressed’ Palestinians. Hina Husain wrote about her Pakistani upbringing and being inculcated with Islam-based anti-Semitism. Finally, Ralph Leonard responded to all these articles, arguing that the conflict is, in fact, inspired more by competing nationalisms than religious impulses.

VI. Republicanism

Free thought and secularism have been closely intertwined with republicanism in British history. The Freethinker has reinforced this link since its beginnings in 1881.

This year, we have continued in the same spirit of religious and political anti-authoritarianism, publishing a review by Daniel of the republican activist Graham Smith’s anti-monarchy book. Later in the year, Daniel interviewed Graham Smith in person at Conway Hall. Meanwhile, Emma delved into the archives to discover the connection between the Freethinker and Republic, of which Smith is the CEO.

See also Daniel’s article on the republican Thomas Paine’s influence on Christopher Hitchens and Tony Howe’s discussion of an even earlier famous British republican, John Milton.

VII. Free thought history

In June, we were saddened to hear of the death of Jim Herrick (1944-2023), former editor of the Freethinker. Bob Forder, NSS historian, wrote an obituary commemorating Jim’s lifelong dedication to free thought, humanism and secularism.

The composer Frances Lynch wrote a guest post about her rediscovery of Eliza Flower, a radical nineteenth-century composer associated with Conway Hall, who was neglected by the historical record because she was female.

We have also been reflecting on the history of the Freethinker and of the various non-religious movements in the UK. Former editor Nigel Sinnott kindly agreed to let us republish an article he wrote for the magazine in 1970 in which he discussed the complicated historical relationship between humanists and secularists. Historian Charlie Lynch introduced the recent book he co-wrote with two other academics charting the history of organised humanism in Britain, which Emma has also reviewed for New Humanist. And Bob Forder argued that free thought and secularism are inseparable.

VIII. The future of free thought

Artificial intelligence has made great strides in 2023. (We even used Dall-E, a generative AI model, to illustrate this post.) Given the exponential pace of development, it is clear that the implications need to be monitored very carefully. For instance, there are concerns that ChatGPT may be biased in favour of certain interpretations of Islam. And artificial general intelligence (AGI) may be just around the corner, making ethical oversight all the more urgent.

Emma and Daniel spoke about the nature of free thought and the challenges facing it today and in the future on the Humanism Now podcast, on Freethought Hour and to the Reading Humanists. Emma also spoke to the Central London Humanists about Pastafarianism, arguably the world’s fastest growing religion, and a topic about which there is much to say.

This year also saw the publication of two intriguing books about the impact of digital technology on free thought, one by Simon McCarthy-Jones, and another by Laura Dodsworth and Patrick Fagan. Emma interviewed Laura Dodsworth for the Freethinker and reviewed both books for the Literary Review. We will be looking further at the implications of digital technology for free thought in 2024.

Finally, a request for your support…

The Freethinker is an independent, non-profit journal and completely open-access. We are funded by donations and legacies given by generations of readers back to the 19th century – and not by big corporations or billionaires. To keep us going in the future, we depend on the generosity of readers today. If you believe in the importance of fostering a culture of free thought, open enquiry and irreverence, please consider making a donation via this link.

And don’t forget to sign up to our free fortnightly newsletter, to keep abreast of the latest developments in free thought in the UK and around the world.

Postscript: a merry Christmas of sorts from Christopher Hitchens…

The post Year in review: 2023 appeared first on The Freethinker.

The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, raised eyebrows recently by suggesting that Labour in power would be ‘even more supportive of faith schools’ than the current government.

Given the current administration’s enthusiasm for faith-based education, it is hard to see how this could be achieved in practice. It may have been an empty gesture, a case of playing to the gallery – Starmer was speaking during a visit to a state-funded faith school. But if he is serious, the implications are worrying.

Labour’s uncritical support for religiously segregated education is alarming – especially as religiously segregated often means, in practice, racially segregated too. In pluralistic societies, inclusive secular schools can be powerful agents of social integration, forging connections that transcend the boundaries of race and religion. In a world riven with religiously motivated conflicts and tensions, it is unwise for the state to fund a form of education that restricts exposure to diverse worldviews and to critical thinking.

Britain’s Muslim, Jewish, Sikh and Hindu faith schools are largely monocultural zones – silos of segregation that do nothing to foster greater social cohesion. Interfaith work between schools is often offered as a remedy to this, but it is a poor substitute for a school in which children of different backgrounds are educated together and mix with one another every day.

Earlier this year the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child urged the UK to end the use of religion as a selection criterion for school admissions. Starmer’s promise not to ‘tinker’ with faith schools signals his intent to do nothing about discriminatory admissions.

The evidence is clear, though, that religious selection also acts as a form of socio-economic segregation. Recent research additionally reveals that Church of England and Catholic primaries ‘serve as hubs of relative advantage’, less likely than community schools to admit children with special educational needs and disabilities.

It seems that Labour’s promise to ‘break down the barriers to opportunity’ only applies where it will not upset religious interests.

Probably the biggest clash between education authorities and faith schools in recent years has been over the introduction of relationships and sex education (RSE) – particularly the requirement for this to be LGBT-inclusive. Catholic, ultra-Orthodox and Muslim activists have objected to requirements imposed on schools to teach pupils about sex, the existence of same-sex relationships and the legal rights of LGBT people. Good quality RSE needs to be evidence-based, impartial and free from ideology of all kinds. It would be shameful if Labour’s keenness to appease religious groups were to allow faith-based prejudice to undermine the subject, leaving faith school pupils in the dark and young LGBT people feeling isolated.

The 50 per cent admissions cap is another area where religious groups are lobbying for privileges. This is the rule that where newly established academies with a religious character are oversubscribed, half of their places must be allocated without reference to faith. It is the only meaningful effort we have seen to promote inclusivity and address the problems caused by faith-based schooling. However, Catholic and Jewish groups have been lobbying to get it abolished. In 2018 they almost succeeded, but Theresa May’s government eventually backtracked in the face of vigorous opposition. It would be bizarre for any party to resurrect a regressive policy that risks increasing levels of discrimination and making integration less likely. Yet under the Conservatives, the cap remains under review.

When it comes to faith schools, all the major parties appear minded to maintain the status quo.

The Liberal Democrats have typically advocated a more inclusive approach to state education. In 2017 the party passed a policy to support an end to religious selection in publicly funded schools. But the policy failed to appear in the 2019 manifesto – and there was no mention of reform to faith schools in the party’s ‘core policy offer’ on schools that was set out at their conference in September.

The Greens, meanwhile, are much more upfront about their vision for an inclusive and secular education system. Their education policy is underpinned by sound secularist principles and includes ending the state funding of faith schools, removing religious opt-outs from equality legislation and abolishing the archaic requirement on schools to provide daily acts of collective worship.

The Greens would also prohibit schools from delivering a form of religious education that ‘encourages adherence to any particular religious belief’.

England’s outdated model of religious education is certainly ripe for reform. Faith schools still teach the subject ‘within the tenets of their faith’, which means the subject is often confessional in nature, rather than objective, critical and pluralistic. Even in secular schools, RE remains compulsory yet separate from the national curriculum – and heavily influenced by religious interest groups, through bodies called standing advisory councils on religious education (SACREs), which determine the syllabus for each local area.

Both Labour and the Lib Dems have promised to review the curriculum if they form the next government. This ought to include replacing religious education with a more relevant subject that promotes critical thinking while giving pupils a solid understanding of diversity of belief and non-belief among the UK population and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. But whether either party will be bold enough to wrest this area of the curriculum away from vested religious interests is another question.

Whichever party forms the next government, it is imperative that they tackle the scourge of unregistered schools. An estimated 6,000 children are being systemically undereducated in illegal and often unsafe ‘schools’ that teach a narrow, religion-based curriculum without oversight or adequate safeguarding.

This year, the government scrapped proposed legislation which included measures to address this issue, such as a register of children not in school and new powers for Ofsted to act against schools which operate covertly. Despite junking the Schools Bill, in which these proposed measures were contained, the government insists that it remains committed to the bill’s objectives concerning unregistered schools. Labour has also pledged to crack down on unregistered schools but suggested it would take a ‘different approach’. What that may be remains to be seen.

But it is not enough to focus solely on the illegal sector. The more diverse our society becomes, the more integrated it needs to be. Faith schools build division into the system by separating children along the lines of their parents’ culture and religious belief, encouraging them to identify with this from an early age, rather than allowing them to make up their own minds about who they are and what they believe. Schools that educate children together without imposing a religious framework on them or discriminating against some in favour of others are the only model that public money should support.

There is also a big question mark over the sustainability of the Church of England’s role in state education. Church attendance is at a record low. Data from the latest British Social Attitudes survey suggests that just three per cent of those aged 18-24 – tomorrow’s parents – would describe themselves as Anglican. Yet the Church of England runs a quarter of primary schools in England and is the biggest sponsor of academies. Despite all the talk about faith schools offering choice, it is already the case that in many areas of the country, families have little or no option other than a church school.

The Church of England is currently targeting schools as part of its plans to ‘double the number of children and young people who are active Christian disciples by 2030’. It is a sign of how privileged the established church is that so few politicians appear willing to question its exploitation of state schools as mission fields for Anglican evangelism. The more pluralistic and secular Britain becomes, the less appropriate will it be for churches to exert influence over state education.

It is unfortunate that, for the upcoming general election at least, faith schools are unlikely to be on the agenda. But the case for inclusive, secular education will only grow stronger. Politicians cannot file it away in the ‘too difficult’ department forever.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on freethought. Or make a donation to support our work into the future.

On religion in schools, see further:

Faith in education, by Emma Park (New Humanist)

Religion and belief in schools: lessons to be learnt, by Russell Sandberg (Freethinker)

Post-Christian Britain and religion in schools, National Secular Society podcast

Unregistered (illegal) schools with Eve Sacks, NSS podcast

A new Catholic school for Peterborough, NSS podcast

The Church of England’s influence over education, NSS podcast

The post Faith schools: where do the political parties stand? appeared first on The Freethinker.

I first encountered Eliza Flower (1803-46) in an online search for women composers from Essex during the 2020 lockdowns. My search was part of a ‘Women in Music and Science’ project with Chelmsford Theatre, called ‘Echoes from Essex’. I found only one piece of a capella choral music, ‘Now Pray We for our Country’, but it was exactly what I needed for the project. It was by a composer called Eliza Flower, whom I had never come across before. In the spirit of those strange times, we made a virtual recording of it: the choir consisted of just six members of our Electric Voice Theatre singers, who recorded several parts each in their homes and sent them to us for assembly. The result of this early foray into virtual singing transformed what had been an intriguing score into a moving hymn with qualities quite unlike any I had heard from this era. (Recording by Electric Voice Theatre here.)

Here was something quite remarkable: a piece of sacred English choral music written in the 1820’s which displayed many of the traits of secular European romanticism. The latter movement would not become widespread in the UK for some time – at least not among male composers. Flower called for sharply contrasting dynamics and tempi. The rich and dramatic harmony she deployed, coupled with her use of contrasting chorus and soloist ensembles, suggested that this work was written for no ordinary church choir.

This was just one hymn. However, as I would discover later from a letter written by Eliza herself to Novello, it was a hymn that Felix Mendelssohn was ‘most pleased’ with.

Where had all these ideas, packed into one short piece, come from? Was there more? There had to be more!

The words Flower had set to music, although adapted from those of an American preacher, were patriotic and almost jingoistic in their fervour towards England. They were almost patriotic enough to have deterred this fervent Scot from looking further – but the quality and innovation of the music kept nagging at me. I was impatient to discover more.

We were, however, still locked in: a feeling that was, I suspect, familiar to many women in England during Eliza’s lifetime, who were either hemmed in by societies’ expectations or forced to work, and legally dependent on their male relatives, with no prospect of freedom.

In time, I would discover that Eliza was not constrained in these ways, but was set on a different path. Unlike most women of her time, she was encouraged and educated by her radical parents to think for herself and to seek to fulfil her potential. My initial idea of her, constrained in a drawing room, encased in stays and stiff brocades, would turn out to be far from the truth.

Once normal life resumed in 2022, I investigated further at the British Library in London. There was more music!

The staff handed me a published pot-pourri of Flower’s vocal music, a large manuscript book bound with others from the same period. As I opened it, I was taken aback by the full-page drawing of Eliza. She certainly did not have the look of a starched Victorian lady, but instead of a gentle, bohemian soul, with her hair in soft curls on her shoulders and a face which shone with love. The artist, Eliza Bridell-Fox, had made the portrait in recollection of the composer after her death. Little did I know how important these names would be to Eliza Flower’s story in different ways.

On the opposite page was the index, which pointed to 182 pages of music. This page was full of clues to Flower’s character and outlook on life, but at this point I just wanted to read the music and listen to it in my head – since singing out loud in the British Library Reading Rooms is unfortunately not permitted. I could not take it all away with me, but I copied as much as I could and, when I returned home, began to sing and play the music, and to share it with my colleagues in Electric Voice Theatre. This was the beginning of an adventure that would lead us to Conway Hall in London, and to a performance based on that index page and the variety of work that it represented.

As I explored the music, I found unexpected harmony and structures; wonderful melodies, hymns, songs and ballads; and a strong and clear voice for the rights of men and women at all levels of society.

But who was this woman, creating music at one minute for Christian services, at another for the salon, and at the next for workers protesting in the street?

Thanks to the Conway Hall Ethical Society, at the invitation of Dr Jim Walsh, and to the efforts of researcher Carl Harrison and librarian Olwen Terris, my understanding of Flower’s music and ideas began to grow. When Holly Elson, Conway Hall’s Head of Programmes, introduced me to Oskar Jensen, a music historian, a new world opened up.

Oskar’s wide knowledge of Flower and of the musical and political history of the nineteenth century began to fill in some of the many gaps in her story. As we brought our own pieces of this fascinating jigsaw puzzle together, a fuller picture of Eliza Flower began to emerge as a highly regarded, prolific composer and radical feminist. Alongside her sister, the poet Sarah Flower Adams, she had exerted a profound influence on the move from Unitarianism at South Place Chapel in Finsbury towards humanism and the creation of the Conway Hall Ethical Society. The sisters’ contributions to the cultural and political life of the period were so important that when the chapel closed down, their portraits and archive were moved to Conway Hall, where they still hang in pride of place in the library, flanking a much bigger painting of the man usually credited with this move, William Johnson Fox. It seems this was, like so many other important historic events, a team effort. Yet gender bias eventually erased Eliza, and to some extent Sarah, from their shared history.

The beautiful drawing of Eliza discussed above holds the key to her story. When Eliza Fox, who became Mrs. Bridell-Fox and an artist, was only 11 years old, she was taken away from her mother by her father, William J. Fox, to live with him and Eliza Flower. They set up house together in the face of deep societal disapproval.

The courage this must have taken for Eliza to take up such a precarious position, totally reliant on Fox’s continued regard for her, can scarce be imagined.

Little Eliza Fox (the artist-to-be) went willingly to this new household. She loved and admired Eliza Flower, who, along with Flower’s sister, Sarah, had been part of the Fox household since their father’s death, with the then Reverend Fox as their guardian (after the break from his wife in 1834, he would eventually be removed from the Unitarian ministry). Reverend Fox, at the time minister of the congregation at the South Place Chapel, worked closely with Eliza Flower on his speeches, sermons and publications, and on the chapel’s political, spiritual, and musical direction. They grew closer, both spiritually and, apparently, in other ways, until in 1834 the break was made with Mrs Fox, who lost not only her husband, but her children too.

Not all of Fox’s congregation were happy about this arrangement, nor were some of the couple’s friends. For Eliza Flower, who by this time was a published and well-known composer, there was also the prospect that her music might be rejected by an outraged public. As a composer, her music fell into three distinct categories, each connected by her profound belief in equality and justice. I will now look at each of these categories in turn.

1. Sacred Choral Music

The hymn of Eliza’s that I first discovered turned out to be part of a book of ‘150 Hymns and Anthems’, published by Reverend Fox in 1841. Unusually, most are settings of poetry by the many freethinkers in Flower’s circle of friends – people like her sister Sarah (author of ‘Nearer, My God, To Thee’ with exquisite music by Eliza) and Harriet Martineau. These free thinkers expressed their ideas about morality with less emphasis on God than you might have imagined. 

Take Hymn 139, ‘Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter’. Its lyrics are a poem by the Corn Law Rhymer Ebenezer Elliott (1781 – 1849), containing a moral that is still relevant today (recording here):

But Babylon and Memphis

Are letters traced in dust:

Read them, earth’s tyrants! Ponder well

The might in which ye trust!

…

They fell, because on fraud and force

Their corner-stones were founded.

Eliza’s setting has more in common with the drama of a Bach Passion or Handelian cantata than a hymn fit for congregational singing. As reported by South Place Magazine in September 1897,

‘South Place was at this time (1833) like other Unitarian chapels, until Miss Flower… commenced a reformation in the musical part of the services, which rivalled the attraction to the chapel of its excellent Minister. Miss Flower’s musical genius, knowledge, and feeling enabled her to exercise a kindly influence over the choir… which would not even have come into existence without her.’

Eliza was one of the first people to champion the move away from the use of music as part of a religious service in the Unitarian denomination towards secular chamber music, as she began to include art songs in her repertoire (see below). This legacy continues to this day in the Sunday Concerts at Conway Hall.

2. Art Songs

These beautiful songs often brush on the themes of love and nature, but some present a quite different approach.

Over 17 days in 1845, the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden held their extraordinary Bazaar. A musical score entitled ‘Free Trade Songs of the Seasons’, with music by Flower, was published by Novello to support the Anti-Corn-Law League at this event. The texts, by Flower’s sister Sarah, combine the familiar art song trope with the struggles of poverty-stricken labourers.

These songs were also intended for the drawing room, a place where ladies could pass on their clear message to their menfolk, who had the political power to change things. The Free Trade Songs were a very particular form of protest song, full of trills and turns, recitative, melismatic passages, harmonic surprises and strong melodic lines. The final Winter song moves in a choral march towards the last category of Flower’s work: the protest songs.

3. Protest Songs

Flower wrote many of these with Harriet Martineau, a feminist author and influential campaigner against slavery. Together, Martineau and Flower formed what Oskar Jensen has described as probably the most powerful protest-song partnership of the nineteenth century in the UK. Many of their songs became popular anthems, sung by thousands of protesting workers in the streets – most of whom would have had no idea that their voices were carrying the words and music of two young ladies.

William Fox, too, provided some of the texts, my favourite being ‘The Barons Bold, On Runnymede’, which, written in 1832, has the feel of a jolly Gilbert and Sullivan patter song avant la lettre. The words encourage us to ‘join hand in hand’ and stand up against the power of kings and state, so that ‘our wrongs shall soon be righted’.

Fox continued their work after Flower’s early death in 1846, but distanced himself from her memory. It is not clear why he did this, but it may have been partly in order to avoid scandal: he was intermittently a Member of Parliament between 1847-62. He stopped promoting Flower’s music, compounding the deeply ingrained bias faced by all female composers. This is demonstrated by research recently published by Donne, an organisation promoting women in music, which shows that 88 per cent of music played worldwide in major orchestral seasons is by dead white men. In the Victorian era, composition was seen as an abstract intellectual activity, more suitable for men than women. Eliza Flower was considered an exception during her lifetime. Unlike her contemporaries, Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, she was not required to subvert her talent in favour of a musical husband or brother, but was free to express herself as a progressive composer, determined to leave her own musical mark. Yet this same memory was deliberately ignored after her death by the man to whom she had devoted her life. As John Stuart Mill wrote in a review of Flower’s music in 1831,

‘There are not only indications of genius as indisputable as could have been displayed in the highest works of art, but there is also a new ascent gained, a new prospect opened, in the art itself, which we welcome as a pledge of its keeping pace with the progress of society.’

As Robert Browning wrote to Eliza about her music, ‘I put it apart from all other English music I know, and fully believe in it as the music we all waited for.’

Yet like many women today, impostor syndrome loomed over Flower’s life. In a letter to Vincent Novello, she tells of her meeting with ‘Mendelssohn the grand, great as his music, as great an artist, (but not so good a man)’.  Mr. Novello had encouraged her ‘to send those sacred songs to him, but I shrunk… They were however shewn to him – (not with my consent). His praise was worse than censure. I did not want opinion, but help. He said I had genius…’ However, Mendelssohn also implied that her musical ideas were irregular and would not be popular. Despite Mendelssohn, Flower was popular in her lifetime. With our project to revive her music, we hope she will be again.

Frances Lynch and the Electric Voice Theatre, together with Oskar Jensen, will be performing in Conway Hall’s historic library, Red Lion Square, London, at 19.00 on 27 October 2023. For more information and to book tickets, click here.

Enjoying the Freethinker? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on freethought.

The post Celebrating Eliza Flower: an unconventional woman appeared first on The Freethinker.

In northwest Nigeria last year, Deborah Yakubu, a college sophomore, was stoned and beaten to death and her body was publicly burned, after she ‘blasphemed’ against Islam in a WhatsApp group. Usman Buda, a 30-year-old butcher, was stoned to death by a mob in June 2023, after he was accused of blasphemy in the same region. Mubarak Bala, President of the Humanist Association of Nigeria (HAN), was arrested over three years ago in the north-central city of Kaduna after he posted ‘sacrilegious’ statements on Facebook. He remains in jail today, in the Counter-Terrorism Unit of Abuja Prison; their main foe in inter-jail soccer matches, he tells me amusedly, is the Armed Robbery Unit.

Atheists in Nigeria are in constant danger of losing their jobs, families, freedom, human rights, and their very lives. Belief disagreements in this nation of around 220 million (and growing) frequently explode into violence: over 6,000 Christians were hacked to death in a recent 15-month span, and the bloody trend seems to be escalating. 

Security is needed. What’s the solution?

Humanist Mutual Aid Network (HuMAN), a not-for-profit organisation based in the US, has responded to this emergency by launching three ‘Safe Houses’ in Nigeria to provide sanctuary to non-believers. Abuja Safe House, Maiduguri Safe House, and Minna Safe House are secular oases for groups of 5-7 individuals, but the structure and goals of each heretic home vary widely.

Abuja Safe House (also known as ‘KaZoHa’) is now the irreligious residence of five women, one of whom is Amina Ahmed, Mubarak Bala’s wife. The couple are pictured in the photo at the beginning of this article, which was taken in late 2019 when the sanctuary was launched, just a few months before the arrest of Bala, who was its director. There is also a three-year-old boy at the Abuja Safe House: Sodangi, Mubarak and Amina’s son. Amina and the rest of the freethinking quintet survive financially with proceeds from their Fruit Juice Bar, funded by HuMAN. They also manage an online community centre for Mubarak Bala’s international support, and they guarantee shelter to atheists and LGBTQ people who are fleeing or hiding from persecution. 

Abuja Safe House residents are state-protected because Abuja, the nation’s capital, strives to be secular and tolerant. The godless group is also out of the closet, and comfortably active on social media. Any drawbacks? Yes. They do not own the property: it is leased annually, the fee paid by Humanists International (HI), which also provides legal aid to Mubarak Bala. 

Bala maintains near-daily contact with Abuja Safe House. He envisions its future goals as: ‘1) financial independence, 2) acquisition of a permanent non-rental residence, 3) expansion to accommodate more humanists at risk, 4) establishment of Abuja Humanist Primary & Secondary Schools for kids – like Tai Solarin’s Mayflower School.’

Maiduguri Safe House is a completely different establishment because it is situated in the Boko Haram-infested northeastern state of Borno, where publicly declaring oneself as an ex-Muslim would be suicidal. The six residents here are all young men, living together in happy liberation from suffocating Islamic rituals and the narrow eyes of suspicious neighbours. 

On their HuMAN webpage they have their faces blurred, they are all anonymous and the safe house itself is hidden behind a tall brick wall to guarantee safety from neighbours suspicious of their lack of conformity with Islamic ritual. On the plus side, the Maiduguri atheists own their property, purchased partly with funds generated from their World Peace Internet Café (funded by HuMAN), an ice cream factory (also HuMAN-funded), and a still-in-progress campaign to pay for the roof. 

Maiduguri Safe House is one hundred per cent male, high-security, closeted, and financially stable. This is in sharp contrast to the female, out-of-the-closet, state-protected, but economically tenuous abode of Abuja Safe House. According to ‘SMK’, a resident here, the top goals of this safe house are offering refuge to humanists who are physically threatened because they have abandoned religion; providing safety to ‘Almajiri’ (children abandoned by their parents at Islamic centres); creating strong unity between local humanists by living together; and teaching one another vocational skills which they can use to become economically self-reliant. 

Minna Safe House, in Niger State, is a third option that expresses HuMAN’s most idealistic vision. The seven housemates here include men, women and children with various stories: they may be LGBTQ people, ex-Muslims or ex-Christians, well-educated or illiterate, but they are all bound together by their renunciation of blind faith. As in Abuja, the Minna Safe House residents are out-and-proud atheists, with their smiling faces posted on HuMAN’s website, and their namesakes and occupations listed. As in Maiduguri, the Minna residents enjoy home ownership: the four-bedroom unit was inherited by HuMAN’s Africa Director, Saliu Olumide Saheed. Like Abuja and Maiduguri, the Minna Safe House gains income from its HuMAN-funded businesses: a grocery store (co-funded by Atheism United) and a barber shop. 

The ambitions of Minna Safe House exceed those of the other two sanctuaries, though, because it aims to also be a beloved community centre. Future plans include a community garden, with produce shared with needy locals in weekly community meals. Additionally, its Humanist Preparatory School is generating enthusiastic local support; the school will emphasise English learning, because that skill is highly desirable for Nigerian employees. Minna Safe House is also setting up a Humanist Clinic, organised by a housemate who is a trained healthcare worker, to provide first aid assistance and medicine to the local community. The clinic also plans to serve nearby refugee camps and rural villages; last year it delivered interventions for malaria, cholera, polio, hepatitis, HIV, scabies and dental care. 

Saliu Olumide, who serves as the Minna Safe House director, strives to operate the sanctuary on the basis of humanist and mutual aid values. ‘We are creating an egalitarian community,’ he says, ‘where everyone works to contribute to the common good of one another. What we have, we will use together and the excess will be stored for rainy days. No one will be left out, we will attempt to even out the system of greed that’s made life difficult for the oppressed and rural in Nigeria. It is our ultimate goal to succeed until we are role models for anyone who wants to create an active, successful community.’

Maiduguri Safe House also conducts multiple humanitarian projects, focused primarily on the Almajiri. Last winter, with HuMAN funding, the Maiduguri crew built a wood-and-aluminum-siding structure that protected 120 Almajiri from the seasonal wet and cold, and it supplied them with wool blankets, mosquito nets, and free computer classes. With the help of HuMAN funding, they have also been able to feed widows, provide medical assistance to refugees, help widows start sustainability projects, and operate an internet café and an ice cream factory.

The Humanist Mutual Aid Network (previously known as the Humanist Global Charity, and before that, as the Brighter Brains Institute) is not solely dedicated to providing safe houses in Nigeria. It also supports its mutual aid partners in Chad, Zambia, Uganda, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, the Philippines and the USA (Appalachia). Many of these efforts are collaborations with other groups like Atheist Republic, Burmese Atheists and the Humanist Alliance Philippines, International.

Is Nigeria doomed to always be dangerous to freethinkers? Safety varies geographically – the Muslim north is more dangerous than the Christian south – but ostracism exists everywhere. Atheists are often disowned and disinherited by their families, and barred from schools and employment. Safe Houses (on the HuMAN model) can simultaneously deliver freedom of belief, freedom of sexual preference, and freedom from poverty, prejudice and violence. Moreover, if they deliver humanitarian services to their neighbours, atheists will be regarded as, so to speak, ‘good without god.’

Perhaps Safe Houses can be set up throughout Nigeria, running from north to south, to serve as an ‘underground railroad’ for non-believers? Mubarak Bala would like to see many more established – perhaps one in every Nigerian state.

Bala hopes he will be released from prison soon. Whenever that happens, his initial plan ‘is to unite all the secular groups in Nigeria, such as Lagos Humanist Assembly, Atheist Society of Nigeria, Hausa Atheists, Northern Nigerian Humanist Association, Tarok Thinkers, Proud Atheists. I hope to bring them all under one banner, under HAN or ASN or Nigeria Secular Movement.’

After that, his long-term goal is ‘to lead Nigeria politically, but I have to adjust to the new reality, that I am too lone a voice, too vulnerable to dare the standards. I need to be diplomatic now for our community to be safe. I hope this new strategy works. Of course, my eventual aim is to be in a position to end religion permanently, without being killed in the process.’

Further Freethinker articles on Nigeria:

The price of criticising Islam in northern Nigeria: imprisonment or death 

Secularism in Nigeria: can it succeed?

Mubarak Bala: update on a ‘blasphemer’ in Nigeria

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on freethought. Or make a donation to support our work into the future.

The post Protecting atheists in Nigeria: the role of ‘safe houses’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

Life

Readers of this journal, particularly the older generation, will be saddened to learn of the death of Jim Herrick in Cambridge at the age of 78.

Herrick read history and English at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then worked for several years as a schoolteacher before emerging as a stalwart of the freethought, secularist and humanist movement and an important personality in all its organisations. He contributed as speaker, as manager, organiser and campaigner and, most of all, as writer and editor.

Over 30 years, Herrick wrote numerous pieces for the Freethinker and New Humanist, including book, theatre and cinema reviews. He also published five books: Aspiring to the Truth: Two Hundred Years of the South Place Ethical Society (2016); Humanism: An Introduction (2003); Humanist Anthology: From Confucius to David Attenborough (1995); Against the Faith: Some Deists, Skeptics and Atheists (1985); and Vision and Realism: A Hundred Years of The Freethinker (1982).

Against the Faith reveals the depth of Herrick’s understanding of the freethinking intellectual tradition and its roots. In his introduction, he noted the wide range of backgrounds of those who have contributed to freethought, ranging from fiery activists and politicians, like Paine and Bradlaugh, through poets, historians, scientists and philosophers (including Shelley, Gibbon, TH Huxley, and JS Mill), to polymaths like Bertrand Russell. In his review, Harold Blackham (Freethinker, June 1985) wrote:

‘Jim Herrick shows himself learned and acquainted with the ideas of his selected representatives, and is direct in expression… His temper throughout is cool and fair, and his material is controlled by judicious and perceptive comment.’

After leaving the teaching profession, Herrick’s first employment was as Assistant General Secretary of the BHA. In June 1977, he became General Secretary of the NSS, serving until August 1979. 

Herrick was assistant editor of the Freethinker from October 1975 until he took over as editor in January 1977, a post he held until to August 1981. In 1982, he published Vision and Realism, his centenary history of the magazine. In 1984, he became editor of New Humanist, and then, in 2002, literary editor, until his retirement in 2005; he also served as editor of International Humanist News.

Herrick’s association with the NSS, begun in the 1970s, continued until 2009, when he stepped down from the Council of Management.  He also served as one of the society’s vice-presidents. He was a long-term member of the Board of Secular Society and GW Foote & Co. (publishers of the Freethinker) and served as Chair of both; he was also a trustee of the Rationalist Association, which publishes New Humanist. In 1996 he received the Distinguished Humanist Service Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), and in 2022 he was the recipient of the International Rationalist Award. Herrick was a founder member of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association as well as acting as its Chair.

Herrick and the Freethinker 

According to the authors of The Humanist Movement in Modern Britain (2023, p. 239), a book recently published with the support of Humanists UK (HUK), Herrick told the research assistant Jessica Douthwaite in a 2018 interview that he left the Freethinker because he was ‘tired of all the anti-religious stuff…bashing the church’. In the concluding pages of Vision and Realism, published the year after he left the Freethinker, he recorded some of the ‘ill-feeling’ and verbal slights that had passed between some members of the National Secular Society (NSS) and the Freethinker on the one hand, and of the British Humanist Association (BHA, now HUK) on the other. The secularists spoke bitterly of ‘narcissistically Intellectual Humanists … disinclined to fraternise with working-class people.’ The humanists responded with pointed remarks about the ‘essential sterility of secularism’.

Yet in the same book Herrick also emphasised the ‘diversity’ within both the BHA and the NSS, and the fact that ‘there was overlap of membership and activists’. He characterised the purpose of secularism as ‘criticising religion and propounding social reform’. In the May 1981 issue of the Freethinker, he seemed more positive about the role of secularism, freethought and even the magazine itself than his later comments in The Humanist Movement might suggest. As he put it:

‘The major issues of our time such as disarmament, race relations, unemployment and equable sharing of the world’s resources of food and energy, do not allow us to look to the future with easy optimism. Freethought – the “best of causes” – will continue to clear the ground by exposing religions where they obscure issues and cloud thought. The secular humanist outlook… will continue to provide an essential ingredient of civilisation. Long may the Freethinker flourish.’

Herrick and humanism

Denis Cobell, NSS President from 1997 to 2006, knew Herrick for over 40 years, and regarded him as a friend. In his words:

‘Jim was not a self-publicist and was quietly spoken at meetings when matters of dispute arose. He displayed patience, kindness and objectivity. He was committed to what was once known as “the best of causes” and always went well beyond his duty.’

Herrick’s own view of humanism was poignantly encapsulated in a letter to the Guardian (24 August 2002), in response to claims by the indefatigable Giles Fraser that ‘the humanist agenda is almost entirely parasitic upon religious belief itself’. Not true, said Herrick:

‘The “unspeakable” may be experienced by humanists listening to a string quartet, or touching the depths of love, or acknowledging the puniness of self in the face of the vastness of the universe. There is nothing easy or empty about humanity and reason’.

Further obituaries of Jim Herrick: Humanists UK

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on freethought.

The post ‘There is nothing easy or empty about humanity and reason’: in memoriam Jim Herrick (1944–2023) appeared first on The Freethinker.

Sarah Bakewell is what you might call a non-organised humanist. That is not to say she is disorganised (far from it), but that she has developed her conception of humanism individually, over many years and to a large extent independently of the official humanist ‘movement’. Her previous books include a biography of Montaigne, a narrative study of Sartre and the existentialists, and two ‘true stories’ of eighteenth and nineteenth-century adventurers.

Bakewell’s latest book, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope, published by Chatto & Windus in March, represents her attempt to synthesise at least three distinct ‘humanist’ trends of thought that emerged, primarily in Europe, between the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries: the literary culture of Petrarch and the Renaissance umanisti; the philosophical humanism of Voltaire and the Enlightenment; and the expressly non-religious, scientifically inclined humanism of figures like TH Huxley and those involved in early organised humanism.

Humanly Possible has already attracted attention. Bakewell has been profiled by the New York Times; her book has been reviewed by the philosopher Julian Baggini and Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and featured on BBC Radio 4. She also gave this year’s Rosalind Franklin lecture, held annually by Humanists UK, on the topic of humanist women.

I interviewed Sarah Bakewell in the British Library. Over a cup of tea, we explored some of her ideas in depth – from the relationship between humanistic and scientific humanisms to how to find meaning without religion.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Freethinker: How does Humanly Possible relate to your previous books, as well as to your own intellectual development?

Sarah Bakewell: It definitely grew out of the previous two books. The spark was thinking about Montaigne as a humanist, and what role the humanist tradition played in his education and his attitude, but also how he rebelled against and reinvented it, and was much less reverent towards it compared to other people of his father’s generation. And humanism was connected with existentialism: Jean Paul Sartre famously gave a lecture after the end of the Second World War, saying that ‘existentialism is a humanism’ – then he kept changing his mind about it.

I also wanted to understand more about the connections between the different forms of humanism and their development in different eras and contexts. Thirdly, it was about what humanism meant to me. I have always been a humanist, although for years I did not use the label.

Are there any translations in the pipeline?

Yes. There are a dozen or so on their way, including German, Italian, French, and two Chinese editions – one for Taiwan and one for China.

Will the one for China be censored?

One publisher, who I did not go with in the end, said that any mention of religion would need to be cut, which is strange in a book about humanism. It was different compared to the last book, where none of this came up. I think there has been a shift in how much publishers feel they have to self-censor. But there were certain compromises that I would not and did not make.

Was religion a part of your life growing up?

No. My background was absolutely atheist. My parents were non-religious. My father was brought up as a Baptist and he rebelled against that when he was a teenager, and had the whole church praying for his soul as a result. My mother was never a believer. So I was lucky in that I did not have to go through that painful, challenging process of rejecting what you have been brought up with. My grandmother, the Baptist one, did hope that she might be able to get me interested in religion. She sent me a children’s pictorial Bible, which I loved because it had great stories, like fairy tales, with beautiful illustrations. But I never took it literally.

Would you now consider yourself agnostic, atheist or something else?

Theoretically, I am inclined to say agnostic, simply because you cannot prove a negative. But I am more of an atheist by personal conviction. There are parts of what institutional religion does that appal me. But there are parts that I respect, because religious activity is a form of human activity and artistic creation. I enjoy going into churches, and even reading religious books sometimes. I love the beauty that can be found in religious traditions.

But for me, the real beauty comes from contemplating the universe, what we know about it and what we might still discover, the scale of what we see in the night sky and how it might all work. The desire to find out more about the universe inspires me much more than religious traditions.

When did you first start using the label ‘humanist’ for yourself?

About 15 years ago. Definitely before I started writing this book. I have never been much of a joiner of organisations, but I did join Humanists UK when I started writing it. Labels are not something I usually feel very drawn to using. I think that might be true of many humanists, who by disposition want something subtler and more individual.

How much of your research was in the UK and how much elsewhere?

A lot of it was in the British Library, where we are now sitting, as well as the Warburg Institute, the London Library and the Bishopsgate Institute. I spend a lot of time in Italy anyway [Bakewell’s wife, Simonetta Ficai-Veltroni, is Italian]. I did not do much research in Italian libraries, but I did try to find out more about the places where the humanists of the early modern era lived. Padua stands out, because it was important for university life and education, particularly in the history of medicine. Chapter 4 of the book is about medicine and humanism. In the medical university at Padua you can stand in the Anatomical Theatre [built in 1595] and imagine what it would have been like to be a medical student, seeing the anatomising of a body – a process which is of course so important for good medical education, and thus for better medicine, and thus for better human welfare.

Petrarch, who is the main character of Chapter 1, lived close to Padua towards the end of his life, and was involved with the university and the local community. I also visited Avignon, where Petrarch grew up, and Paris. I spent a few days in Chartres. The cathedral there has got nothing to do with humanism in the non-religious sense, but it had everything to do with the flowering of education and a proto-scholarly humanism that started there and in other French centres before it started in Italy. It gives you such a different perspective when you are in a place. I visited Basel, which was the closest Erasmus came came to having a home – in fact, he spent most of his time travelling around and said that ‘My home is wherever I keep my library.’ Which sums him up, really.

Your focus is primarily from fourteenth to late twentieth-century Europe. Why did you choose this period, and those specific starting and finishing points?

Petrarch marks the beginning of the self-consciously modern revival of classical learning in Europe. He saw himself as bringing the light back from the classical world and starting a moral as well as an intellectual revival. In that sense, he is often called the first humanist, so it seemed a sensible place to start. The story tends to focus mainly on Europe, with some reaching in other directions, particularly to America. That was deliberate, because I needed to impose some kind of structure, limit and coherence. The people involved were influenced by each other, read each other, and responded to each other’s work.

I thought about ending with a more substantial survey of where humanism is now. But this has already been written about by others, and it is still very much a live story, changing and developing. I did not think I could do it justice unless I had a large section on it. And I am more of a historian by temperament.

You read philosophy at university. It seems to me that you are a little ruthless with Plato and Aristotle, writing that they ‘were (in most respects) not very humanistic’, and preferring Democritus, a fragmentary Presocratic, and the obscure sophist Protagoras. What made you take this approach?

From the fragments that we have of Protagoras, he and Democritus were in many respects proto-humanists, in the tradition of materialist philosophy. There is one fragment of Protagoras which says, ‘as to the gods, I know nothing about them’. This and other Presocratic sources suggest that, because we cannot know anything about the gods, it is not worth spending time worrying about them. There is a similar tradition of materialism in ancient India.

Your book talks about Cicero’s idea of humane studies, including in his speech in defence of Archias, where he identifies a ‘common bond’ between the ‘arts that concern humanity’. How far are these ideas a starting point for Renaissance humanism?

The Ciceronian idea of the ‘human and literary studies’ is really at the foundation of Renaissance humanism. This interest in Cicero was kick-started by Petrarch, who really admired Cicero, although he did criticise him as well. But others came along after him who thought Cicero was an almost godlike figure and could not be questioned, and that his style in Latin should be imitated absolutely. There was a tension between the kind of humanists who were obsessed with classical models and the ones that were more questioning and critical.

You point out that Renaissance humanists like Petrarch were concerned about literary style even when writing in an emotional state or about distressing topics. Is this an idea that would be worth considering for modern humanists?

We still recognise the importance of speaking and writing in an articulate way, though it does not go under the name of eloquence any more. But sometimes we are suspicious of the veneer of polished speaking. There is the idea, which started with the Romantics, that beautiful words mean nothing, and just cover up authentic feelings. This idea was alien to the Renaissance humanists, who would have said that deep feeling should be communicated as powerfully as possible. They also took from classical literature the idea that real eloquence must always be allied to virtue, or goodness.

We seem to have a double standard. On the one hand, we – at least I – do not trust the likes of Boris Johnson, who uses Latin quotations elegantly and is educated in the tradition of eloquence and classical reference, without that necessarily being a reflection of goodness or honesty. On the other hand, we can also be judgemental about people who do not express themselves very fluently.

Among the people you mention in your ‘Acknowledgements’ is Andrew Copson, the CEO of Humanists UK. To what extent did you consult with him or any humanist organisations during your research and writing?

I talked to Andrew, who was very helpful, and to one or two other humanists. Almost as a matter of principle, though, I mainly worked with my own idea of what I wanted to write. I did not not want to feel that I was presenting a view of humanism that was officially sanctioned by humanist organisations. Although I did include Humanist International’s Declaration of Modern Humanism (2022) as an appendix.

Is there anything in the 2022 Declaration (the latest version of the Amsterdam Declaration of 1952) that you would disagree with or want to modify?

No. One change I agree with is the emphasis on the need for humanism to involve respect and concern for the rest of the natural world and for other species, not only for human beings. There is a misconception out there that humanism is the same thing as anthropocentrism and that it implies not caring about other species.

Why should humanists care about other species?

On the simplest level, because we cannot survive without them. We are of this planet, and woven into the biodiversity around us. The general humanist approach also involves a sense of responsibility for the impact we can have on the planet. We have considerable powers technologically and by sheer force of numbers; I think we need to own up to that responsibility.

You identify ‘freethinking, enquiry and hope’ as consistent aspects of humanism throughout your period of study. Why these three?

These three points apply to all the widely divergent forms of humanism that I discuss in the book – not just modern humanism of the secular or non-religious sort, but also the scholarly and literary humanism of the Renaissance and the philosophical interest in human well-being and dignity of the Enlightenment.

To what extent can we really talk about a single humanism running through all these different threads?

I tackle that in the opening pages of the book. It is there in the word: they are all practices or ways of thinking which have the human realm as the centre of their concern – whether culture, literature and the studies of the humanities, or human nature and well-being. And modern humanism involves a sense of morality and meaning that comes from human relationships and human concerns.

I mean ‘freethinking’ in the broadest sense of not taking anything on authority alone – whether that be the authority of religious institutions or political ones. ‘Enquiry’ is linked to that, but it involves asking questions and undertaking intellectual investigations in a more active sense – something many of the humanists did with gusto.

‘Hope’ is a little different. We cannot just be naïvely optimistic, but a humanist does have some sense that we can use our faculties and talents and our abilities to improve the well-being of other people and of other living things, to achieve a better politics, to solve our problems to as large an extent as we can. It was well summed up by Bertrand Russell, who features towards the end of the book precisely for what he said about the need to have hope in ourselves. Today, many people are in despair over the state of the world. But I think that losing hope is an abdication of responsibility and also risks being a self-fulfilling prophecy. We have to have some sense that we are capable of using our best abilities constructively.

Your book focuses primarily on individuals who were humanist in different ways. Was your choice of characters a personal one, or were you influenced by other accounts of humanism?

I was influenced by who I was interested in and who had something new to contribute. I tried to ensure that everybody that features in the book advances the story in some way, or stands for a wider process. I did not want to write a reference book merely listing lots of names, but something that was fun to read.

You use photographs to illustrate some of your main characters. Where did you find them, and why did you decide to add this pictorial element?

I took many of them from picture libraries. I wanted to have images to make it easier on the eye, but I did not want it to be just portraits. I tried to choose images that were a bit different or unexpected. In a few cases, there are contemporary political cartoons of people, rather than portraits, and in other cases, pictures of title pages or manuscripts that illuminate the text in some way.

Did you make any surprising discoveries during the course of your research?

There were a lot of things that were surprising to me, because when I write books, I find out a lot as I go along. I think that is more fun for the reader too, because we are going along together. Some of the characters were more interesting than I expected them to be – for example, Matthew Arnold, who wrote Culture and Anarchy, which I had had on my shelves for years but never read because I thought it would be boring. He is conservative and Victorian sometimes, but his writing is interesting, and he is endearing and enjoyable from a humanist point of view – I warmed to him. Wilhelm von Humboldt is another character who was full of surprises, not least his kinky fantasy life.

Your book discusses the debate Matthew Arnold had with TH Huxley about the relative importance of the humanities and literary studies versus the sciences. In 1959, CP Snow revived this debate with his Rede lecture on the ‘two cultures’. These days, it seems, if anything, too easy for scientists to take pot shots at the humanities for their irrelevance, lack of rigour or stagnation in the morass of literary theory. How far can the literary and scientific approaches to life, or more specifically literary and scientific humanism, be reconciled?

The clue to it is, again, in that idea of human studies. The universe is physical; we are physical beings. Some people would see that as invalidating all of the ‘human studies’ or humanities, as if they are somehow irrelevant because they do not correspond to how the universe is. But human studies are not irrelevant to us, because we are human beings. We are social and cultural by our nature, and so the human realm is enormously interesting to us. It is the sea in which we swim all the time – it is language, culture, communication, society, politics. The two cultures are connected, I think, not contradictory.

You say you like contemplating the universe. This reminds me of Kant’s idea of sublimity: ‘the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’. Is there an argument that the scientific perspective is fundamentally inhuman because its focus is on the very big and the very small, on the objective and not the subjective human experience? Isn’t the human, from the scientific point of view, just a collection of processes or cells or atoms?

Yes, but the paradox is that the science that we do, the ability to visualise and study the very large or the very small, is a human activity. There is no getting away from the human, for us. One of the things that is fascinating about science as a human activity is that it does try to set aside human preconceptions, perspectives, prejudices, and to work from the evidence – and that is a truly impressive thing to do. But even that – working out scientific methods, testing hypotheses, looking for falsifications and evidence – is still a human activity.

At the end of the book, you briefly mention posthumanism and transhumanism. How might the development of technologies like artificial intelligence affect humanism, and what it means to be a human, in the future?

This is a difficult question, because we do not know where we are going and things are moving very fast. We are already closely integrated with our technology, and are likely to be ever more so. Is there a line that we would one day cross, when we would no longer be the same? Have we crossed it already? I do not know the answer to that because it is all developing under our noses. I am wary of simplistic answers as to whether there will always be some human ‘essence’. I really do not know.

Your book was published in March this year, and you have said elsewhere that you spent about six years writing it. Those years were also a very eventful period in Britain. Did the turbulent political atmosphere have an effect on your book?

It was quite dramatic because I started working on it in early 2016, and then Brexit happened, and Trump. Since then, there have been all sorts of further blows to our sense of confidence in human common sense, if you like. I tried to keep reminding myself of what Bertrand Russell and others have said, that the greater the challenge to our sense of hope in ourselves, the more we actually need that hope – and the more we need a sense of faith in ourselves and in our processes, in our better political institutions, legal protections, free press, and the ability to talk openly about issues and to establish effective media of communication between countries. Altogether, we need more of our good qualities rather than just giving up on them.

Bertrand Russell [1872-1970] also experienced growing up in a hopeful time and then having to realise that things would not always simply get better and better. That is not how human history has ever gone. There will always be complications, steps backwards, obstacles and wrong moves, but it is wiser to expect that and not to be naïvely optimistic. And, as always, it is up to us. If things are going to be even a bit better in this world, we are going to have to do it.

Does the humanist have a natural political stance? Or should humanists today subscribe to any particular political views about anything?

No. I do not think there is any inevitable connection with any particular political viewpoint. In the nineteenth century, Humboldt and Mill were classical liberals, but Matthew Arnold, whose views about culture and education had much in common with theirs, was a small ‘c’ conservative. I am more interested in how the humanist dimension works with various political positions.

Where would you put yourself on the political spectrum?

I would say I am a humanist liberal.

Does the humanist today have a moral obligation to be involved in any sort of political campaigning or activism, or can they live a quiet life?

Personally, I live a fairly quiet life – I am not a political activist. That is just me. So I have to say that it is not necessary to be politically active in order to be a humanist! But looking through history, a lot of humanists were politically active, or became so. Bertrand Russell, for example, started as a scholarly logician, mathematician and philosopher, but was politicised by the First World War and decided from then on to write political material as well, and campaign for political causes. Renaissance humanists were often engaged with the politics of their city and their environment. Humanists are often drawn to political activity because it goes with the idea that it is up to us to make the world that we want to have.

You emphasise the importance of freethinking and enquiry to humanism – which leads naturally to the question of how important you think free speech is today, and where you would draw the line. How far should free enquiry go?

I am drawn to the free speech end of that continuum: I think things should be talked about. If we are ever going to say that something should not be talked about, we had better give a very good reason why not. There are certain things that disturb me when I hear them said, but I am not sure that the best method of stopping people from saying them is just to silence them. I would want to ask why people might be saying those things, what that implies about us as a society, and where we should go from there.

Your book is full of references to happiness, human fulfilment, and the need for connections between people. Is writing a way in which you make connections?

There is a relationship with the reader. But part of the nature of writing is that you do not know what everybody who reads it thinks or wants to say back to you. I think that is as it should be. It is nice to hear back from readers, but that is not the primary reason why I write. It is a way of discovering things for myself as I go along, and taking other readers with me. It is like walking along a path together, but without knowing who the readers are – that is part of the appeal. I like the idea that people could make something out of the book that I would never dream of.

A recurring motif in the book is the idea that humanists can, in a sense, live on in their writings after they are dead. Is this also a motivation for you?

No. Most of the things that any individual does gradually fade away out of view after they are dead. Even those we think of as timeless classics – Plato and Aristotle and Protagoras – it is too early to say whether they are all going to endure. They became fragments. There would be an egocentric arrogance in thinking that somehow your words are going to live on. But I do spend a lot of time pottering around in second-hand bookshops and libraries and picking up obscure and forgotten books from a hundred years ago or more. I love the idea of reading something that has not survived in more than a few copies, and yet finding the voice of the author still talking to you.

You talk about hope as an ingredient of humanism. In the very long term, of course, the earth will probably be swallowed by the sun, and the human race may well have died out long before then. Where can humanists find hope, given that, on a cosmic scale, we are, by all appearances, so fundamentally meaningless?

On that scale, I do think we are completely meaningless and forgettable, as is everything to do with this planet and the very fact that we have existed at all. But we have got much more immediate things to worry about, and we could find ourselves disappearing a lot sooner than that. We are still a very young species – dinosaurs were around for an enormously longer time than we have been. Also I do not believe in God, so even if I wanted to find meaning there, that is not an option. Would I be happier if I had this great sense of meaning? No, because to me it would not be a genuine source of meaning. Actually, I find it exhilarating to think about the size of the universe. The fact that we are tiny does not bother me.

Final question: what is your next project?

I have not got one yet. I am having a little interlude to see what might arise next. And even if I did have one, like most writers, I probably would not want to talk about it.

Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope, by Sarah Bakewell, was published on 30 March 2023 by Chatto & Windus.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on freethought.

The post ‘The real beauty comes from contemplating the universe’: humanism with Sarah Bakewell appeared first on The Freethinker.

Born in 1971, Woodhouse studied business at Aston University, Birmingham. Although growing up in a broadly Anglican tradition, he became an atheist in his teens, and turned to humanism, attracted by its emphasis on positive moral values; this has led him, more recently, to veganism and sentientism.

Woodhouse’s podcast on sentientism has run for over 150 episodes. Guests have included the philosopher AC Grayling, the journalist Henry Mance, and Ingrid Newkirk, president of the controversial animal rights group PETA. In episode 76, the activist Peter Tatchell claimed that ‘humanism will evolve into sentientism’.

I met Jamie Woodhouse at a café in Edgware, north London. He ordered a coffee with plant-based milk, while I had a peppermint tea. In this interview, we discuss Woodhouse’s path to sentientism, what the concept actually means, and its relationship with humanism and veganism.

Is sentientism internally consistent? Is a sentientist necessarily vegan? What circumstances would justify the use of violence against people in order to protect animals? Would it matter if a species, including our own, became extinct? Can sentientism save the world?

Comments are open below.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Freethinker: How did you get into sentientism?

Jamie Woodhouse: I had a corporate career, mostly as a consultant. I still do some ad hoc consulting, but I mainly work on a portfolio of different projects that relate to charitable causes, NGO work, and open data initiatives. The sentientism project has become more and more central – it has become a personal mission.

Over the years, I came to view humanism as a combination of a naturalistic understanding of the world and a universal compassion. But it always concerned me that humanism was too centred on our own species. When I was about 25, I became vegetarian. Many years later, I began to realise that the ethical reasoning that led me to vegetarianism should, by implication, lead me to veganism. I went vegan about five or six years ago, but this also made me have another look at humanism.

The reason I care about other humans is not that we happen to share the same species, but because they have a capacity to suffer and flourish and they want to live. If sentience is the reason I care about other humans, why should I not extend that care to all sentient animals?

Is anyone else involved in the sentientist movement – if there is one?

There is a movement, but it is anarchic, informal, unorganised – no governance, no money, no membership. There are many people who are working on different aspects of it who would not necessarily label themselves sentientists. At the same time, the commitment to a naturalistic understanding of the world goes back through history, predates religion, and, I would argue, predates humanity as well. Non-human animals have, in a sense, a naturalistic way of understanding the world. They are using their senses, they are trying to explore and to develop beliefs and understandings about the world to help them survive. That is a putative sort of basic naturalism.

Another ancient source of sentientism is the idea of ahimsa, which simply means ‘do no harm’, and which is central to Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism. Sentientism is also based on the idea that we should care about one another – this idea runs through religious worldviews as well as humanism, but arguably also predates humanity. Non-human animals often care about each other. They did so long before humanity arrived on the scene.

How far is it possible for sentientism, as a single worldview, to be consistent with ethical pluralism? Surely some moral attitudes are inconsistent with others?

Sentientism is pluralistic in the sense that there are lots of different ethical systems you might apply once you adopt a ‘sentiocentric’ moral scope that cares about all sentient beings. But if you have an ethical system that carves out or disregards or ignores some group of those sentient beings, then it is clearly not sentientist. Or if you have a nihilist ethical system, or maybe a morally relativist ethical system that says that some group of sentient beings do not matter, that does not qualify. You have to have universal compassion for all sentient beings. But once you do, you can apply it in many different ways.

Does ‘universal compassion’ entail that we must not kill animals?

I have tried to suggest that we set some form of baseline – a minimum degree of compassion for one another. We would expect this compassion to be universal, not just for friends or family. Similarly, a humanist might ask what the minimum was that he or she could expect from another human. Compassion or moral consideration means that no sentient being should be needlessly harmed or killed. That is the suggested baseline.

What does ‘needlessly’ mean? What about animals that can harm humans, such as mosquitoes, poisonous snakes, or lions?

Many people would agree with the naturalistic commitment of sentientism in theory and many people will agree with the sentiocentric commitment in theory. But when it gets to the implications, it gets tough. Just like humanism, sentientism does not have all the answers – it is not a complete ethical system. It just says that we should have serious moral consideration for every sentient being that is involved. There might well be situations where we would need to harm or even kill other sentient beings – but as with harming or killing humans, we would need a strong justification.

Some sentientists will argue that all sentient beings are equal and will push for an egalitarian approach. Others will argue that even if we have a universal compassion for all sentient beings, there is still an ethical basis by which we might differentiate between them.

What would an ethical basis of differentiating between animals be? Something like a hierarchy of levels of consciousness?

That is probably the most common way of doing it. People might look at factors like longevity, richness of experience, the different types of interests that different beings can have, and they might use that to apply some form of differentiation that could guide their approach in difficult situations.

Some animals can, of course, flourish more than others. In particular, humans can flourish and have experiences to a much higher degree than any other species that we know of – can’t they?

A naturalistic and scientific approach will help us understand whether that is true or not. Different sentientists will disagree, but in my view, there are types of experience, interests, needs, that humans can have that non-humans probably do not have – just as there are types of experience that a dolphin or a bat might have that we cannot. We can experience existential angst. I can worry about things that other animals might not. This is important and valid; we should use a scientific approach to determine how far these differences hold.

However, it can work the other way around too. Suppose you were to rewrite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a Universal Declaration of Sentient Rights. The right to education might seem not to make sense for non-human animals. But if you think broadly enough about education, maybe it does – the right of a mother to teach her children how to live as an animal, in a way, is a right to education. As to the rights that are the most fundamental to humans – the right to family life or to food and shelter, the right not to be tortured or killed – these foundational needs and interests are relevant to all sentient beings because they are so central to our common evolutionary history. At the same time, humans have ways of mitigating suffering that are not available to non-human animals. So it is possible that their experiences of pain might be worse than ours.

Peter Singer has views about degrees of self-consciousness and ‘personhood’ that are similar to sentientism. On this basis, he has argued that infanticide could be morally acceptable in some circumstances. Would you agree?

This is another area where ethical pluralism comes in: people answer in different ways. My view is that the best way of approaching these situations is to genuinely and deeply consider the best interests of the being we are talking about in every respect. I can imagine situations in which it would be in the being’s best interests for their life to be ended. Or there are situations where individuals choose that for themselves. The best we can do is to imagine ourselves in their position and ask ourselves what we would want – and have some humility about it. But that does not mean that sentientism is going to answer every question clearly and easily.

Isn’t there a need to work out some generally applicable principles?

The danger is that the desperation for clear principles can lead us to a position where we are more confident than we really should be. Having clear principles does not necessarily mean that they are right, or that they lead to the right conclusions. We are apes who have evolved to survive on the Savannah: sometimes we are just not going to know what the best thing is to do.

Is there a difficulty that other animals do not have compassion for one other, or for us, in the way that you are saying we should for them? How can we make sense of the fact that our relationship with them is so asymmetrical?

Universal compassion is the right starting point, but it might lead us to other principles that we then apply in our lives, depending on the ethical system we choose. If we put anything else before universal compassion, we will risk causing needless harm to some sentient beings because we have excluded them. This is a clean dividing line. If you do not warrant moral consideration, you do not warrant compassion and are outside of our moral scope. Anything can be done to you with impunity. You can be tortured, killed, treated like an inanimate rock. That is a serious exclusion. There is no logical or philosophical reason for excluding any sentient being, any suffering from moral consideration.

Does sentientism, therefore, advocate a sort of unilateral disarmament by humans – that we should give up our rights and allow animals to live without any interference from us?

In some parts of the animal advocacy and the vegan movement, activists have, understandably, come to be so cynical about the human race and our track record that they have lost compassion for humans and humanity. One of the things I want to do with sentientism is to reset that balance and remind everybody that humans are sentient beings too, and warrant serious moral consideration.

If you look at all of the habitable land on the earth, humans themselves take up less than one per cent of it. All of us, human and non-human beings, have plenty of space. What occupies most of the land is agriculture. That is one area where there is a conflict, because agricultural land takes away space from free-ranging animals. If you took all of the agricultural land we use today and switched everybody to using plant-based agriculture, it would free up three quarters of the land.

Isn’t the reason why so much space is taken up by fields, agriculture, and animal products, that there are so many people in the world? Wouldn’t a better solution in the long term be to gradually lower the human population to a more sustainable level, rather than for everyone to become vegans?

That is one approach. The latest projection is that the human population will peak at around ten billion – our growth rate seems to be flattening off already. My worry with those who suggest a more radical population reduction is that, in the past, the only way that people have achieved those sorts of population reductions was through abject horror.

There can be an interesting tone that comes through some of those conversations, where there is an implication that the people who will survive will be of a certain type and that those who will not will be of a different type.

Doubtless population control could be used as a pretext for genocide. But respectable people have also supported it: see, for example, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Could not the human race agree that in the long term it would be better if we could find voluntary ways of controlling the population?

Autonomy is important, as is people’s ability to take intelligent decisions about whether to have families. But I am nervous about those downsides because I see them coming through in many debates. People start out from a good place and end up in ecofascism or somewhere extremely dark. I am not sure how we would navigate that path and I am not sure that many humans want to go down that route.

On the other hand, we cannot have indefinite population expansion.

No, but I think we will flatten off at ten billion and we will be fine. There are much easier strategies than population control which avoid its ethical downsides. There may be eight billion humans on the planet, but there are about 100 billion farmed animals just on land, and another 1-2 trillion farmed aquatic animals. If we have a population problem, we can either choose to look at eight billion humans or we can choose to look at 100 billion farmed land animals. The latter is an easier problem to solve ethically.

That is partly what leads me to think that the Earth’s carrying capacity is already much higher than what is needed to support even ten billion humans. If we freed up three quarters of the agricultural land we could rewild and put up solar and wind energy facilities, or public parks, and the carbon capture through the reforestation would be enormous. Or we could grow more plant-based food – so instead of freeing up three quarters of agricultural land, if we freed up half of it, we could double our current food production with the other quarter.

Is it not the case that population control could reduce all types of environmental damage caused by humans, whereas veganism and sentientism focus only on one particular type of damage, namely the use of land for farming animals?

It could, but we would need to think very carefully about how our economy would work in that context. Often the economy and the poorest humans are harmed when the population falls. We would need to find an intelligent way of managing that. Ethical population management and veganism could complement each other.

However, my main reason for wanting to transition away from farming animals is that this practice is needlessly harming and killing sentient beings that do not want to be harmed and killed. This is independent of environmental concerns.

How far would the sentientist distinguish between the rights of humans and other animals in particular situations? For example, what about the damage to animal habitats that is being caused by the construction of new housing developments?

It depends on which ethical system you apply. If new housing needed to be built in an area where there were wild animals living, instead of killing those wild animals, they could be rehoused or encouraged to move to another place. As far as the effect on insects is concerned, the science about them is developing rapidly at the moment. It is thought that the more social ones are sentient, but the simplest ones may not be sentient. You could also take estimates of their degree of sentience into account. We need to act with compassion for all the sentient beings involved.

Should wild animals – sentient ones, at least – be given a legal right to the land they inhabit?

Some go beyond sentientism to extend moral concern to the environment, or plants, rocks, rivers and trees. Personally, I believe that all value strictly comes back to sentience: the view that the experience of things, the feelings you and I are having every second, is the root of all value and all moral worth. I view plants, rocks, rivers, trees and the environment instrumentally. I appreciate them and care about them deeply, but only because of their impact on the sentient beings, not because a tree, a rock or a house has its own intrinsic worth. I am not sure that wild animals have the same sense of ownership that we do, although many have an appreciation for territory and the homes they build.

What would happen to all the farm animals if they were no longer farmed?

At the moment, farmed animals are force-bred. When you stop this practice, the population of farm animals will naturally come down over time. I am comfortable with the idea that the population of farmed animal species would ultimately reduce towards zero – with any remaining animals being cared for in sanctuaries.

So there would be no intrinsic harm if any particular species disappeared altogether?

There is no intrinsic value in any particular species. What matters is the existence, experience and will to live of the individual sentient beings. Often we humans value a species for aesthetic reasons, but ultimately it is the individual sentient beings that matter.

On that line of reasoning, would you be equally happy with the idea that humans might become extinct one day?

It would be a shame, because we have enormous positive potential, and I see value in our experiences, our lives and our flourishing. But again, what matters to me is individual human beings, not humanity as a species or as a construct.

Surely people have often been motivated by the desire to perpetuate the human race and improve life for future generations beyond their own death?

I think this is important to the degree that it is important to the individuals – including those potential future individuals.

Aren’t you adopting a relativistic morality?

Sentientism rejects the sort of relativism that accepts a group’s agreed ethics regardless of the harms they cause. Instead, it is trying to value the perspective of other sentient beings in the same way that they do. That standard should apply to every group.

If you take the view that what matters is each person’s experience to them, then, once that person had died – or once all people had died – there would be no more experiences to matter. Can the long-term survival of the human race be of any concern to the sentientist?

Extinction would be a shame, because there is positive value in experiences and good lives as well. I am not advocating human extinction. I would love to see humanity persist, continue and improve. Part of the reason for this is that there is catastrophic suffering in the non-human world, for example among free-ranging animals. One of the possibilities of humanity continuing is that we might actually be able to mitigate that suffering or help those free-ranging animals in some way. Many humans already do this on a small scale.

Without humanity, there is just biological evolution. And gene propagation evolution is amoral, harsh and brutal. Despite the terrible track record of humanity so far, the prospect of benefit to all sentient beings might be greater if we persist in the future than if we do not.

Would you see humans as the moral arbiters of the other species?

It is less about being moral arbiters than just being ethical and caring about morality. It is not about us as arbiters deciding one way or the other, it is just about having a motivation to help others.

I am also not suggesting that humans are the only beings that have the capacity to be moral or to care. However, we are able to use our rationality and power to extend our compassion in a much richer, more impactful way than other species. We have already demonstrated we have the power to cause greater suffering than other species – it would be good to set that right.

Must the sentientist be vegan?

I would suggest so. There are some who call themselves sentientists who disagree. They have found some way of rationalising their consumption of sentient animal products, but I think they have made mistakes. There is so much noise and hyperbole with veganism that it can feel like a club, a cult, an identity, but it is not any of those things. It is simply a philosophical stance and a set of actions that aims, as far as is possible and practicable, to avoid needlessly causing suffering, death or exploitation. When you put it like that, it is hard to understand why the idea gets so much resistance.

On the question of diet, would it not be possible to have a compromise in which everyone in the world cut down on animal products but did not abandon them completely?

Cutting down is better than not cutting down. Is it good for people to be a bit less racist or sexist, or to cut down on exploitative labour? Yes – the less of these things you do, the better. The system of farming animals is an ethical horror. Reducing can be a step along the way. If there is an argument to reduce, there is an argument to reduce a bit more and a bit more – and to bring these bad things to a complete end.

You draw an emotive analogy between eating animal products and being racist or sexist. Racism and sexism, it could be argued, are morally wrong in human terms because they involve one human harming another. But there are things about eating animal products that all humans can share in: not only in dietary terms, but also because so much of world food culture, as well as clothing and other artefacts, depends on them.

Someone who is defending racism might say the same thing – that racism benefits the racist – that supremacy benefits the supremacist. In doing so, they exclude the perspective of and harms done to those they oppress. But benefits to oppressors do not justify the harm done by oppressing others.

Intra-human and intra-species forms of oppression are very different, but there are some common themes. One is that ending bad things is better than just reducing them. Another is that we should work to end them while having compassion for those implicated and those trapped by immoral social norms – however difficult that might be.

Which comes back to the question of whether the animal’s perspective should be treated on an equal footing with the human’s.

It does not have to be equal. It should be in accordance with their interests. Being farmed for food does not accord with even a minimal level of moral consideration outside of a sustenance or a survival situation.

What about the argument that many farm animals only exist because people have bred them in order to be farmed?

This is called the ‘logic of the ladder’. If you have two choices between a being not existing at all or being brought into existence, having a short, happy life, having one bad day and then being killed for food, you might argue that the latter was preferable. But this does not work for humans, because otherwise, farming toddlers and babies would be ethical. For the same reason, it does not work for animals. The fact that we may have created them does not mean we are justified in then hurting or killing them because we enjoy the taste of their flesh – whatever deal we might have done with ourselves in advance.

Is killing a cow as bad as killing a baby?

I would not say it is, but they are both bad and needless. That is why I reject the ‘logic of the ladder’: even at the point where you walk towards a non-human sentient being with a knife, because you have bred it to be killed, that being will look you in the eyes and will not want to be hurt and killed.

What we are getting to there is the point is that sentientism does not distinguish between humans and non-human animals in the way that a human might. You do not see the human as having any particular moral claim on other humans that other animals do not have.

I would not put it quite that way. Being a member of a species does not carry any moral significance, even the human species. There might be other reasons why you would want to care in particular ways about humans, and that could be about the potential for them to do good in the future. It might be their longevity, it might be the richness of their experience. But their membership of a particular species is not in itself relevant.

You have identified two core aspects of sentientism: evidence-based reasoning and universal compassion. Where does the principle of universal compassion come from?

It can just be a choice. Sentientism is neutral about moral realism and moral anti-realism. A sentientist would reject a ‘divine command’ theory that derives moral imperatives from God or a relativism that accepts whatever a particular group agrees as moral. Instead there are sentientists who think there is no such thing as an objective moral truth, but that we construct it various ways. There are others like me who ground their morality in a naturalistic understanding of what it is to be a sentient being – for example not liking suffering and not wanting to die.

So there are different ways of answering your question. Factors could include enlightened self-interest, the benefits of reciprocity, the ‘warm fuzzy feeling’ moral behaviour can give. For people who are committed to a rational way of understanding the world, there is an attraction to having an ethics that is coherent and consistent. We do not like cognitive dissonance. If we acknowledge that we already have compassion for at least some other sentient beings, for humans and for companion animals and for some charismatic wild animals, for example, we already feel that compassion, and we choose to care about them. If we want to be consistent and coherent, we should extend that compassion to every sentient being.

Is it possible to be consistent unless you have principles against which to judge your consistency, judging, say, the hierarchy of different animals with different creative senses?

I am not saying that becoming a sentientist fixes all those problems. There is so much more complexity to work through. Sentientism does not answer everything. It just answers the question of moral scope: who should and should not be included in our moral consideration.

If the scientific consensus were that humans need to eat animal products in order to have a healthy, balanced diet, would you stop being a vegan?

I think that is unlikely.

But suppose it were the case.

I genuinely do not know. Cultivated meat will fix that problem for us. But the scenario is almost inconceivable, because meat is just a collection of nutrients – and we can get those nutrients from elsewhere. Your question is similar to asking a humanist whether, if science discovered that we could only be healthy by eating each other, they would become a cannibal.

To many people around the world, having a diet that includes some animal products, such as cheese, butter, eggs, meat and fish, is strongly preferable to a purely plant-based diet. Does this matter?

I think that, as we cultivate plant-based meat and dairy replacements, those differences will erode to nothing. In any case, marginal taste preferences and social norm compliance are not a sufficient justification to mutilate, harm or artificially impregnate non-human animals, or to separate them from their families.

Can animal testing be justified, for example, in the interests of scientific progress?

There might be situations where it is justifiable, but they are extremely rare and getting rarer all the time. Similarly, testing on humans can be justifiable in some circumstances – for example, the vaccination trials during the Covid pandemic, where people volunteered to participate in trials.

Do you think that science needs to be directed by sentientist principles?

I think everything does. A humanist would say that we should motivate even our intellectual pursuits by some sort of ethical framework. No sphere of human interest should be exempt from ethics.

Animal rights organisations such as Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty have sometimes been involved in violent protest. Can violence against humans to protect animals ever be justified?

I can imagine situations where it could. If I saw my neighbour torturing his dog in his front yard and the only way I could stop him doing it was to put him in a chokehold, I would do it. In the UK, if someone is hurting their pet, the police can be called out and that person will be prevented, by force if necessary, from continuing to do so. If people thought of farmed animals as they think of their companion animals, we would all be on the same page.

Your family has a rescue dog as a pet (or ‘companion animal’). How compatible is the practice of keeping pets with sentientism?

There are different points of view about this from within sentientism and animal advocate communities. Some people argue that all forms of pet ownership are exploitation. I do not agree – I think it is possible for us to have positive interspecies relationships. I would end the deliberate breeding of companion animals. But in terms of rescue animals, providing a happy home and a positive life for one that already exists can be a positive thing for the animal concerned.

Do any environmental considerations need to come into play when deciding whether to have a pet?

Yes, they do. It is like having children. Our children are going to have an environmental impact. Companion animals have an environmental impact. All life causes some impact. That is unavoidable.

Can dogs be vegans?

Not in the sense that it is a philosophical stance, but modern science shows they can thrive on a completely plant-based diet. It is becoming clearer that there is can be positive health benefits for dogs and cats from plant-based diets. There are nutritionally complete, vet approved products out there on the market today. The process of making animal-based foods is often so brutal that it destroys many of the nutrients that dogs and cats need. The animal-based food makers add synthetic supplements to put these nutrients back into their products. Plant-based producers use exactly the same supplements.

What are your personal aims in talking about sentientism to people – on your website, your podcast, or in interviews like this one?

I want to persuade eight billion humans to agree with me, thereby helping to solve all of the world’s problems. In a way, that is not even a joke. These problems seem to be caused either by a failure of compassion – we have excluded certain humans or other sentient beings from our moral scope – or a failure of evidence, reasoning and understanding. Sentientism has implications for our personal choices, our institutions and politics, from local to international. If people applied sentientist principles at every level of human endeavour and governance, that would be a good thing for us human sentients, for non-human sentients and for the world we all share.

The post Can sentientism save the world? Interview with Jamie Woodhouse appeared first on The Freethinker.

The purpose of this article is to briefly discuss the absence of the concept of a deity in the Shona traditional religion or spiritual system. It will consider the Shona grammar, and argue that, to combat misinformation and religious dishonesty, religious scholars ought to focus less on the concept of a deity, and to stop assuming that belief in the existence of a deity is the essential characteristic of a religion or spiritual system.

This article adopts a humanist and secularist approach. It relies on evidence and critical discussion. It also supports the co-existence of people of different religious points of view and defends the rights of religious adherents to express themselves in relation to their supernatural beliefs, as long they do not cross certain lines, such as subjecting everyone to their beliefs in public spaces.

In the developing world, much remains for humanists to do to correct misconceptions by using facts and evidence to criticise longstanding error and myth. One such myth is the claim that there is a concept of a deity among Zimbabwe’s traditional religion or spiritual system, known as Shona.

According to the research I have been doing for the past three years, there is no deity in traditional Shona. I therefore prefer to call Shona a ‘spirituality system’, not a ‘religion’, because it is not organised like other religions. Instead, it is somehow based on heredity – people of the same totem practise spirituality together – and organised around an extended family as a binding force. The family is symbolised by totems at times, but the spiritual practice is not about worship like other religions. (A totem is any animal that is considered sacred by a particular family, and which serves as an emblem of that family.)

Some linguistic scholars have argued that Shona is a broad term that was used to connect a number of dialects during the Zimbabwean colonial era (1897-1980). The Shona people are a Bantu ethnic group native to Southern Africa, and primarily live in what is now Zimbabwe, as well as in Mozambique. They can be divided into five major clans. In this article I shall focus specifically on the spiritual systems of the Karanga group within the wider Shona people, among whom I am privileged to have been born and bred.

Someone might ask how it can be established that there was historically no concept of a deity among the Shona people who use the Karanga dialect. Fortunately or unfortunately, a term now has been invented which is a case of syncretism, or, put simply, a mixture of two religious/spirituality systems. The Karanga people had their own form of writing, which probably was not advanced and so died a natural death. It is therefore unknown to the general public and little-known even among linguists of present generation. 

It is, however, an established phenomenon that in many languages, when a means of writing is not available or disappears, the collective knowledge, wisdom, doctrines and teachings are often preserved in proverbs, idioms, riddles, and names of rivers, people, trees, mountains, chiefs and chiefdoms. So if a concept is important, it is likely to be easy to spot in a people’s language.

In Shona proverbs, idioms and so forth, however, the concept of a deity is clearly absent. In Shona today, a deity is referred to as Mwari, a concept and word which is absent in traditional Shona culture, and which was probably imported by missionaries in an effort to convert local people to Christianity.

A critical analysis of the Shona cosmology reveals that the highest being is mudzimu, which can be loosely translated into English as an ‘ancestral spirit’. There are a number of proverbs, idioms, riddles and grammatical components in the Karanga dialect which involve the concept of an ancestral spirit or spirits. Why the concept of ancestral spirit is so clear while the concept of a deity (Mwari) is absent is a million-dollar question. Religious advocates would, however, be wrong to claim that the concept of a deity existed in Karanga before the advent of foreign religions.

I discussed the absence of the word and concept of a deity in Shona grammar at a World Philosophy Day conference in November 2021 at Arrupe Jesuit University. Some people in response to my presentation argued that the concept of a deity is so essential that it would not have been used in constructing proverbs and idioms. Therefore, it could not be expected to be mentioned there. In response to this, I would argue that this might be true for the Jewish attitude to God in the Old Testament, whose name was too sacred to be written down, and was instead referred to by the declaration “I am who I am”, but was not necessarily true for Shona.

Moreover, the fact that language is evolutionary and flexible means that it is easy for it to absorb new concepts such as that of the (Christian) deity. Finally, since my research is relatively new, I challenge religious and linguistic scholars from different religions in Zimbabwe, who have done research on Shona traditional religion/spirituality, to have a discussion and engage with my findings.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on freethought.

The post Traditional religion in Zimbabwe: was God a Christian import? appeared first on The Freethinker.

Humanists contributed immeasurably to ethical debates in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. Relatively small in number, yet often vocal and articulate, the humanists made their voices heard in a land where moral politics remained dominated by Christianity. There is much to be said about the rise and fall and rise again of one of the movement’s major organisations, Humanists UK, which emerged from the soup of 19^th century counterculture to be constituted as the Union of Ethical Societies in 1898.

But the focus here is upon some of the thinkers and activists whose humanist views informed and contributed to progressive political campaigning in Britain from the 1940s to the 1960s. Most of these people were familiar figures in British humanist and secularist organisations, but some spent most of their time in campaigning for their particular ethical causes. A brief introduction to the activities and concerns of a selection of these people can serve to illustrate the reach of humanist ideas, as well as how these ideas were able with varying degrees of success to influence social policy, moral sensibilities, and even international law.

Sexualities  

A concern with the politics of sexual morality has been a staple of the humanist movement since the 19^th century, with humanists and rationalists frequently locked in combat with religious conservatives. Humanists contributed immeasurably to the struggle to reform laws and attitudes surrounding sex in the 1950s and 1960s, making the medical and legal case for liberalism in sexual culture and in the process providing a younger generation with ammunition to craft social change.

Humanist intellectuals were vocal in support of gay law reform from its earliest beginnings. They provided some of the least equivocal evidence to the Wolfenden Committee in 1954, generally favouring decriminalisation over the age of eighteen and the social acceptance of gay men. Humanists including the philosopher A.J Ayer, the author E.M Forster, the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes (wife of playwright J.B. Priestley) and the sociologist Barbara Wootton, were vocal in their support of the Homosexual Law Reform Society upon its foundation in 1958. By contrast, only a handful of liberal clergy joined and they often expressed reservations.

One of the most intriguing personalities in the liberal intellectual vanguard of the fifties was the Ulster Unionist MP, Harford Montgomery Hyde, who repeatedly spoke in favour of reform in the House of Commons, and for his efforts was deselected by his local party. Hyde, whose political career in an establishment political party with a socially conservative electorate required him to remain discreet about his religious views, described himself in his autobiography as having been both a humanist and a rationalist since the 1920s. Although himself heterosexual, Hyde was a staunch ally to the gay movement and in 1968 published one of the first histories of homosexuality written from a sympathetic perspective.

Humanists were active, too, in early sorties against the oppressive moral codes which surrounded heterosexuality prior to the liberalisations of the later 1960s. Eustace Chesser was a humanist and progressive as well as a psychiatrist and researcher who penned a stream of popular advice manuals on aspects of sexualities from the 1940s onwards, along with works on medical sociology. In 1959, Getting Married, a booklet which Chesser published witn the British Medical Association, resulted in a wave of reactionary opposition. The pamphlet, which suggested that pre- and non-marital sex should be the result of individual choices, was withdrawn and a television appearance by Chesser blocked. Undeterred, Chesser then penned a polemical defence of his arguments which aimed to demolish the ‘outmoded’ theological prohibition of sex before marriage.

Nuclear disarmament

One of the most strenuous contributions of humanist intellectuals to the politics of morality in post-war Britain was, unfortunately, the least successful. The case for unilateral nuclear disarmament was, in my view, morally unanswerable, yet advancing it relied on attempts to influence transnational politics which would in turn prove futile in the face of the Cold War. A network of elite scientists, including the humanist Jacob Bronowski (who had been one of those dispatched by the British government to assess the impact of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and the nuclear scientist Joseph Rotblat, mobilised in the mid-1950s to oppose nuclear weapons. The majority of signatories of the 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto – which opposed nuclear weapons – were humanists. Humanists were well-represented too amongst the membership of the founding executive committee of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in 1957. The CND is perhaps most closely associated with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, a luminary who was widely admired by the public for his unshakable moral convictions and whose bestselling 1927 exposition, Why I am not a Christian, remains in print today.

Barbara Smoker, the campaigner, author and former president of the National Secular Society, formed a link between CND and the leadership of humanist and secularist organisations. She had joined Russell’s short-lived ‘Committee of 100’, a non-violent group campaigning against nuclear weapons, which deployed direct action tactics such as mass demonstrations at locations including American air bases. The idea of the ‘Committee’ was that there would be safety in numbers, as the government would be unwilling to convict so many people at once. Russell’s scheme failed, observed Smoker, when the authorities simply arrested random people, demonstrating that the government was less concerned with justice than he had imagined. When Russell was convicted for his protest activities and obliged to spend two weeks behind bars at the age of ninety, Smoker was amongst his supporters in court. She was also closely involved in the clandestine ‘Spies for Peace’ movement, which worked to reveal and publicise egregious plans by the British state to shelter their elites in secret bunkers while the rest of the population were to be abandoned to perish in the nuclear holocaust.

Human rights

Another committed humanist was H.G Wells, who in 1931 inspired the foundation of the Progressive League, an organisation which aimed to bring together campaigners and thinkers dedicated to social and ethical reform. Motivated by the catastrophic failure of the League of Nations, by the early 1940s, Wells was very concerned with the development of the concept of universal human rights, with their implicit shift from the rights of nations to those of individuals. His efforts stimulated the formation of the Sankey Commission, chaired by the lawyer John Sankey. This resulted in the Sankey Declaration of the Rights of Man (1940), which was issued for a wide readership in paperback and serialised in the Daily Herald by the journalist and humanist campaigner, Peter Richie Calder, under the succinct title: ‘What are We Fighting For?’

Wells’s and Sankey’s endeavours in turn influenced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) – particularly in terms of vocabulary. Wells appears to have been the originator of the phrase ‘freedom of thought, conscience and religion’ which was inherited by the 1950 European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), which carried the underlying idea of the plurality of secular and religious ideologies, the freedom of worship, and the freedom to change and not to have a religion. Noteworthy, too, was the absence in these documents of the notion of enforcing a state religion and the absence of mention of god or gods. The latter was a source of controversy, and religious interests at the 1948 Congress of Europe insisted on the addition of a reference to ‘common heritage of Christian and other spiritual and cultural values.’

The Sankey Commission’s eleven clauses created paradigms for the thirty articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the eighteen articles of the European Convention, and thence to the development of further international agreements. The contribution of humanists to the creation of the human rights movement requires further research, but it seems clear that the chain of innovation can be traced back to the visionary thinking of H.G Wells, who, as bombs rained down on Britain in the early 1940s, foresaw that the concept of the equality of rights for every human being might be the foundation upon which international co-operation between nations could rest.

These individuals were but a few of the leading figures in Britain who campaigned for real-life change to the ethical basis of national and international laws in the mid-twentieth century, leading the charge for progressive reform. Our book explores their efforts and shared humanist outlook.

The Humanist Movement in Modern Britain: A History of Ethicists, Rationalists and Humanists, by Callum Brown, David Nash and Charlie Lynch (2023), is published by Bloomsbury.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on freethought.

The post Humanists and ethical reform in mid-twentieth-century Britain appeared first on The Freethinker.

Zimbabwe is a deeply religious country. According to the 2017 Inter Censal Survey by the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency, 10.2% of the population have no faith. The rest are comprised largely of Christian denominations (84.1%), as well as African traditional religion (4.5%), while a small fraction are Muslim (0.7%) or follow other faiths (0.5%). Compared to other African countries, the proportion of the non-religious in Zimbabwe is significant. There may be many reasons for this, including because the country’s poor economic performance of late has has led a number of religious officials to turn entrepreneurs, treating their congregants as clients and trying to extract money from them.

However, many people in Zimbabwe do not know about humanism as a non-religious life stance. One reason for this is that in the Zimbabwean education curriculum, one rarely finds any allusion to humanism, or anything to do with being non-religious. Instead, the formal school system is dominated by Christianity, because Christian missionaries originally introduced it. When humanism is mentioned, it is usually associated with ubuntu or unhu – an ethical theory on how to govern human conduct in traditional African societies – probably because there is no other English term for this concept.

When Zimbabwe became independent on 18 April 1980, the government committed itself to providing education for all irrespective of race, gender or religion. In the Education Act of 1982, education was declared a basic human right, making primary and secondary public education free and compulsory. But in the 1990s, as a result of economic hardship, the situation changed with the coming of Economic Structural Adjustment Program (ESAP) policies. In addition, at independence and even today, Christianity, particularly the Catholic Church, is the biggest stakeholder in the Zimbabwean education system. Catholic schools are among the best in the country. As a matter of tradition, Catholic schools demand their students practise Catholicism; in many cases, a Catholic baptism is a requirement for a child to be accepted into the school. 

Religious education in Zimbabwe has developed in response to pluralism; it has been inspired by the teaching experience throughout the country. There has been a growing need to expand the horizon as the nation becomes more sensitive to religious diversity among learners. Despite the government’s efforts, little has been done in the classroom; this can be blamed on government’s failure to engage teachers in the implementation of proposed changes. There is a strong bond between teachers and religious education in schools. Teachers are the main determinants of the quality of education received by learners, as they make the choices, both conscious and unconscious, about how to structure academic and social relations in classrooms. Very few teacher can be deemed to be non-religious, and it is very common to recite the Lord’s Prayer at assembly points and classrooms. Unfortunately, the relationship between teachers and religious education was not given much attention in the development of the subject.

In 2015 the Zimbabwean Government adopted a new education curriculum, which tried to limit the dominance of Christianity in the education system. There was serious opposition, predominantly from Christian parents, despite the curriculum being a progressive one. The minister of education at the time, Dr Lazarus Dokora, was accused of attempting to introduce unacceptable alien ideas into primary and secondary education. The curriculum replaced the Lord’s Prayer with the Zimbabwe National Pledge, which was non-religious in nature. It also recommended the objective teaching of religious studies. However, Dokora was accused of being Muslim in a country which is largely Christian and objectively knows little about Islam. Moreover, most Zimbabweans consider Christianity the only true religion, and are biased against Islam, considering it a violent and suicidal religion.

The National Pledge which replaced the Lord’s Prayer in 2015 was extracted from the preamble to the Zimbabwean Constitution. Christian parents feared that the purity of their children’s faith was at stake due to an alleged syncretic act: the mixture of Christianity and traditional religion. The Pledge reads as follows:

‘Almighty God, in whose hands our future lies, I salute the national flag;

United in our diversity by our common desire for freedom, justice and equality;

Respecting the brave mothers and fathers who lost their lives in the chimurenga/umvukela and national liberation struggle;

We are proud inheritors of our national resources;

We are proud creators and participants in our vibrant traditions and cultures;

We commit to honesty and dignity of hard work.’

Even if you look at the Zimbabwean Constitution, as argued in an article I co-authored with a colleague:

‘Even though most constitutions in the 21st century ought to be secular, the Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (No. 20) Act of 2013 in the preamble has a clause that states that “Acknowledging the supremacy of Almighty God, in whose hands our future lies, resolve by the tenets of this constitution to commit ourselves to build a united, just and prosperous nation, founded on values of transparency, equality, freedom, fairness, honesty and the dignity of hard work. And imploring the guidance and support of almighty God …” The above-mentioned clause gives an impression that Zimbabwe is a quasi-theocratic state of the Christian persuasion, hence discriminating against nontheistic religions like Buddhism and the nonreligious (nones). Also, at public gatherings in Zimbabwe it is easier to say a Christian prayer disregarding religious plurality; for instance, in the 2018 harmonized elections both throne favourites referred to themselves as chosen ones by a Christian God, President Emerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa who emerged as the winner used to say, “The voice of people is the voice God” while Nelson Chamisa the runner up and main opposition leader used also to say “God is in it”. Furthermore, Christian gospel artists such as Charles Charamba doom indigenous traditional religion in their songs. All this is predicated on the religious intolerance of some sort.’ (Chinama, T. and Muzondo, E., 2022)

As noted above, the constitution of Zimbabwe is a ‘religious victim’ document due to its religious overtones and the fact that it was drafted in an environment which is heavily religious; it now needs to be liberated from religious connotations. While the constitution references god, it stipulates that everyone has a freedom of conscience, thought and religion (constitution of Zimbabwe amendment [no 20] Act of 2013, section 60). The constitution guarantees the rights of citizens to profess a change of religion or belief, or profess no faith at all.

However in Zimbabwe, to profess non-religiosity is often interpreted as a rejection of Christianity, because a large part of the population is Christian. To some fundamentalists, it is even a declaration of Satanism. In the Zimbabwean context, being a Satanist is associated with evil deeds such as blood spilling, blood sucking, road accidents, inexplicable natural calamities and many more. Therefore, many humanists choose not to be open about their views, just in order to be safe and to avoid being persecuted. As mentioned above, the non-religious constitute around 10% of the population. Although they might not identify as humanist specifically, there is no doubt that they are naturalist, hence why they choose not to associate with any religion.

Thus one of the consequences of openly and publicly professing a lack of religious belief is being labelled as a Satanist. A second is that, if one is not financially independent, religious family members and other benefactors may withdraw their financial support. If an openly irreligious person goes into business, he or she is likely to lose clients and customers. Such a person is treated with suspicion and mistrust. Hence businesspeople are not at liberty to open up about their religious (or non-religious) views. To some Zimbabweans, it is unthinkable for a person to live without supernatural beliefs. When I go on radio or television to give a humanist perspective, listeners who call in accuse me of lying and of not truly being a non-believer. Others troll me, saying I am still young and inexperienced.

For the rights of humanists, the non-religious, and those who defend secular spaces, there are few formal organisations. In 2017, humanists in Zimbabwe organised themselves through a WhatsApp group to set up some organisational structures under the name of the Humanist Society of Zimbabwe. They managed to draft a constitution, but the society died slowly due to lack of funds and commitment. As of today, there is a WhatsApp group called ‘Talk to humanists’. There are also some notable humanists who normally defend secular spaces such as Shingai Rukwata Ndoro, who before 2019 had a section in the local newspaper, Sunday Mail, where he promoted secular ideals.

Another humanist organisation, and an affiliate of Humanists International, is ‘Project-ICH’ or PICH. This is a secular freethought content platform fronted by Mxolisi B. Masuku. It exists to provide non-theistic content creators with a space to share progressive ideas, to stimulate growth, and to connect and share useful ideas with other individuals and organisations. The group started in 2018. In 2019, it launched an offline initiative, working in schools and training debaters, public speakers and content creators. Since then, PICH has evolved through collaborations with many organisations and individuals, web developers, debaters, designers and bloggers whose valuable insights as stakeholders and contributors continue to guide their vision today. The organisation’s goal is to provide ideas with a dependable collaborative content environment built on the values of empathy, logic and progress by people committed to these ideals. And they are guided by the non-theistic, humanist values of freedom of expression, mutual respect and the pursuit of personal fulfilment.          

In 2022, in collaboration with Leo Igwe, I started an organisation called the ‘Ex-cellence Project’, based in Zimbabwe. I am the contact person designate while Leo Igwe is the co-director. The main objective of this group is to provide psycho-social support to former religious officials in Africa who are now non-religious. Former members of the clergy suffer from stigmatisation and ostracism; they are discriminated against and treated as cursed outcasts.

The Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW), another organisation that is affiliated to Humanists International, and which operates from the premise that witchcraft is a myth and an imaginary accusation, was also founded by Igwe, who is a champion of humanism in Africa. AfAW’s vision is to end witch hunts and persecutions by 2030. In Zimbabwe, I am AfAW’s acting country representative and co-director. The objects of AfAW are as follows:

(a) Defending and empowering alleged witches

(b) Educating and enlightening witchcraft accusers and believers

(c) Pressuring state authorities to protect citizens who are alleged witches

(d) Fostering critical thinking in schools.

Currently at AfAW, we are conducting a fact-finding mission into the matter of Solomon Tendai Chitaukire, aged 73, who was allegedly murdered by his two sons (Bruce and Changchu Chitaukire) in January 2023 at the family’s home near Harare, after they accused him of witchcraft. Our ultimate goal is to give psycho-social support to the widow of Solomon Chitaukire and his immediate relatives, as well as to educate the sons, who are now in police custody, regardless of the outcome of their trial.

Recently, I have also featured as a humanist guest on both television (DSTV Channel 294, Sunday 18:00 CAT) and the radio (StarFM, 89.7MHz, Monday, 22:00 CAT), participating in the programme Faith on Trial. In addition, as one of the promoters of academic philosophy in Zimbabwe, I regularly invite humanist guests to attend and participate in world philosophy conference programmes. In 2021 and 2022 I invited Monica Zodwa Cheru, a local journalist and humanist, to participate in a panel that I moderated for World Philosophy Day.

Ultimately, there is a need for humanists to promote their worldviews through the reform of Zimbabwe’s education system, and to tackle religious indoctrination in schools and the misrepresentation of topics such as evolutionary theory. Humanists have a hard time convincing people in Zimbabwe that we share the same ancestors as other primates. There is need for humanist-sponsored engagements, debates and public lectures through the use of print media, radio, television, public halls and social media. All these are possible if humanists band together: there is strength in organisation. Above all, humanists ought to be active politically, economically and socially for maximum influence and impact, especially on the young, who are still open to new and progressive ideas.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on freethought.

The post Humanism in Zimbabwe appeared first on The Freethinker.