AC Grayling - Humanism

well it's a very great pleasure to be here again these walls have soaked up many ways and encouraging words and it's great that the AHS is having a sign your conference here's the right place for it to be I'm going to talk if I may about humanism and the importance of doing so is very great because in the debate between people who have a religious outlook and those who don't the question most often asked by people who are religious is well what are you going to put in this place water's going to be the foundation of our morality how are people going to deal with the difficulties and tragedies of life as if religion was the only resource for answers and indeed the assumption is sometimes made that it's the best resource for answers but the fact is of course that there is a much which much deeper indeed even more ancient than certainly the young religions of the world like Christianity in Islam a much more long-standing way of thinking about these things which is vastly more encouraging vastly more of a support to anybody who will accept the invitation to think along humanist lines the first thing to say about humanism is that it isn't a doctrine it isn't a teaching it isn't a list of do's and don'ts instead it's an attitude and the basic attitude of the humanist outlook is that in thinking about how we're to live lives that are flourishing which are good to live which are have at their heart break good relationships with our fellows in the human story when we do this when we begin that process of reflection I have to do two things we have to acquire a measure of self understanding you remember what's written over the entrance to the Delphic Oracle know yourself that's an important an injunction seems rather a cliche to us now we live in the post Freudian age of knowing ourselves as well as we possibly can but the idea that lies behind is that when one has a sense of one's own talents and capacities for living a life that really does feel good to live then one can make good and informed choices about the kinds of values that we could live by and the sorts of goals that it would be worth us pursuing and the all-important assumption that lies behind that in its turn is that there are as many kinds of good and worthwhile lives as there are people to live them a view about the matter utterly different from a view that says there is one a one-size-fits-all answer to how everybody should live what the right answer is and that of course is where all the great ideologies and chief among them the religious ideologies have always claimed it's one right answer one right way and if you don't sign up for it you can be in trouble doesn't matter whether you're Stalin or taqwa murder doesn't matter with your ideology as political or religious they have the same tenor and the tenor is we know the answer this is the truth you must sign up for it to whisper of me as being a point of historical importance that people should notice the transition that occurred in the first thousand years of Christian history from the age of the Church Fathers the patristic writers in the 4th 3rd 4th 5th 6th centuries of the Common Era who wrote what was called apologetics that is accounts of justification for the faith trying to persuade people usually a skeptical educated audience of people why they should accept the doctrines and promises of the faith apologetics is an attempt to persuade people to give them arguments evidence reasons why they should accept the teachings by the time that the church was at the height of its power in the High Middle Ages there was no longer any need for apologetics because it was by then a crime not to believe and if you didn't it wasn't a question of persuasion you just got burned at the stake and this is how things work in this world of ours that when institutions get into positions of power and the church did very early on as you know you're all reading about Constantine in the bath last night so you remember that he said well let Christianity be one among the accepted religions of the Empire and in less than a century it was the only one so when we look at the teachings of the great young religions of the world particularly as I say Christian Islam we see that the premise on which they operate is that they have the answer their story is the right story and all we have to do is to sign up for it and in both those religions and it's again another striking contrast with the humanist tradition is that they ask us not to think remember the great sin in Christianity is pride stand on your own two feet and think for yourself that's a big bad mistake we pray that we not my will be done but thy will be done to die to yourself to submit yourself to God these are things that are regarded as virtues not to think but to submit to accept to believe and to obey these are regarded as virtues the very word Islam means submission submission to the will of submission of the intellect you must just have faith you must just believe the humanist tradition starts with the Socratic injunction to think for oneself to take responsibility for the the choices that one makes in life and how one's to live it and Socrates went around talking to his fellow Athenians his whole the whole thrust of his challenge to them was to think that themselves to explore and investigate what they thought they meant by the sorts of concepts that shaped their ethical lives courage countenance the good justice what did they mean by did they really understand it and it's a very familiar theme in the Socratic dialogues that Socrates interlocutors would offer definitions of these ideas and Socrates would show them that they were mistaken very often the turning point in the dialogue would be when he had succeeded in showing his debaters that they really didn't have the right idea or a correct year and then the process started of trying to explore what the right idea might be and familiar of course until we get to the middle and later period electronic dialogues where pleasure himself is telling us what to think and as you know if the right or the most beautiful Greek but he was a really terrible old fascist and so we didn't really want to to go too far along the road with Plato himself but what we've learned from the at least from the earlier dialogues is that the kind of life that is worth living is the life considered reflected upon and chosen that was Socrates message Socrates is often quoted as saying the unconsidered life the life not thought about and chosen is not worth living because one is living somebody else's idea of a good life one is the football in somebody else's football match the direction that one travels in is chosen by other people or by conventions or by society so instead of really thinking things through and really making decisions for oneself about one how one is to live one is just a pawn in another in a much larger game and of course the great religions of the world want that to be the case they want acceptance and obedience they want faith and Submission so there's a very very sharp contrast between the humanistic outlook and the religious one religious doctrines very often are quite explicit about about how one should behave and what one should believe indeed as churches and religious movements become more complex and sophisticated and well organized they begin to tell us what to wear what we can eat on certain days of the week who to marry I mean if there is a deity he has a very bureaucratic outlook on things or she for that matter and this is this again is the mark contrast with humanism because as I say humanism isn't attitude and the attitude in question is this not just to think for oneself to take responsibility for the choices that one makes but also in viewing other people and one's relationship with other people to do so on the basis of one's most sympathetic and generous attitude towards them now sometimes but the point by saying our most generous and sympathy sympathetic attitude to human nature and the human condition but both those phrases the phrase human nature and phrase human condition are of course labels for something immense history philosophy literature psychology law economics and the study of political theories and institutions or ordered them in their different way contributions to the study of the human condition what are the circumstances in which individual human lives are lived how do communities work by what institutions can and those communities best operate themselves if there is to be a chance for individual members of them to flourish these questions are exhaustively and sometimes exhaustingly examined and re-examined in all these great debates and because of the sheer complexity of human society in human life there are various approaches and theories about these matters and a considered choice of view that man takes about the human condition will very much depend upon the route that one navigates through these discussions questions about human nature even more complex again there are two prosity in literature and a number of other pursuits offer us contributions of insight into what it is to be a human being what the underlying nature of humanity is one of the earliest lessons that we learn when we think about these things is that human nature is tremendously diverse a great plurality of kinds of experience in human nature it takes a whole lifetime to start to understand ourselves that learn other people and perhaps one aspect of the really well live life is that it is a reflective life where we do try to make sense of ourselves and of others but this is as the French say over wadjda long Helene a work of long breath a work could take up most of one's reflective moments during the course of a of a thoughtful life but the endeavor is worthwhile because if one is to relate to others well if one is going to be a good neighbor to our fellows in the human story then one has to be reflective about these matters I love to quote George Burnett sure on this if you've heard this before no doubt but you remember what he said about the golden rule nobody knows the golden rule do unto others as you would have them do unto you and sure said under no circumstances should you do to others what you would like them to do to you because they may not like it and this is a very very deep insight because if you think that how you behave to others should be what you like and what your tastes are then you're making yourself the standard or the benchmark for the entire human species but really to be a good friend to your fellows is to see them in their individuality to recognize that they might be different from you to adjust your behavior towards them which is considerate and respectful of differences of course all this is lies under the government of what John Stuart Mill called the harm principle you may remember and you will remember of course because you were reading this in the bath last night his great essay on Liberty where his real anxiety was not political tyranny but the tyranny of social convention the attitudes that your fellows in society might have about your individual way of living and the choices that you make he was of course living at the high point of the Victorian era where there was a massive and oppressive and social tendency to get everybody to live in a very narrow and constrained kind of way and he said the problem with that is that we need as many experiments in ways that a human life can be lived and can flourish as possible we need to allow people to do things differently from one another if they choose but the one constraint Rondon is what he called the harm principle not to do harm to others or generate not to go out of your way deliberately to interfere with other people's chances of happy and fulfilling lives or getting in the way of their choices unnecessarily certainly not a course of stealing and lying and cheating and doing harm to others in that more emphatic way so the harm principle provides us without constraint and after that none of us has a right to tell anybody else how to live or what to do providing there within those reasonable and responsible balance now I think that's a good point that Mel was making there and it's a very humanistic point it's a point about being generous and accepting of human diversity you will remember what Ludwig Wittgenstein said to his sister Hermione you do remember this thing Jim good Vicki was a bit of an eccentric and his sister Hermione said to him one day ooh Ludwig we can't make any sense of how you behave you are so odd and difficult and he said you're like a person who looks out of a window and sees a man walking in the street in a very odd way you don't know why he's walking like that but it's because there's a tremendously strong Gale blowing and he's struggling to make headway against it this is a vey it's it's a very speaking example because each one of us in the psychological landscapes of our lives have gales blowing from time to time we sometimes do things say things feel things behave in ways that are puzzling to others we sometimes see other people doing things and making choices that we don't approve of instinctively or like or understand but if we remember Vidkun Stein's great wind then Korea will perhaps be more sympathetic and a bit more tolerant about how it is with others so humanism is not a doctrine it's not a set of do's and don'ts it is as I say an attitude is an invitation to approach the matter of living in a way that is genuinely constructive when is humanism fit in the great debate that we're having at the moment because I think it's a debate which is not going to be shut down anytime soon and I do think it's a debate that we on the non-religious side of the argument are going to win because we have history on our side you may think that's an optimistic view but one can reduce all sorts of considerations and I will in a minute if you like I'll talk about the great and startling tendencies revealed by the Pew Center polling data in the United States of America about the shift from what is after all religion besotted country to increasing proportions of the population who are nuns that's in Oh any put in the plural people who tick the numbat when they're asked by the by the posters whether they have a religious commitment something like thirty years or so ago it was eight percent of the u.s. population ticked the non box it's now nearly twenty percent if not indeed on 20 percent but among under 35s it's considerably higher this means that one out of every five people that you meet as you walk down Fifth Avenue or through Central Park is going to be one of us and the movement is increasing in that direction it's increasing in that direction in a very interesting way last year at about this time I went to the annual conference of the American atheist Association the AAA they do have a drink by the way perception and that this was held in Austin Texas anybody that was everybody you were there it was great fun wasn't it one thing I was struck by was that the AAA have chosen a technique that has been so successful in the gay movement and gays at a certain point back in the 60s and 70s decided that they were going to be out and they were going to be proud about it out and proud acknowledged the fact that you're gay make it possible for other people who were gay but who were bei nervous about coming out to come out because they recognized they had friends there had fellows in the movement and society had to sit up and take notice and the gay movement has changed the world as a result at least in the developed world still a huge amount to do in places like Iran where gays are hanged from cranes in the public square in the most awful way well at the AAA the the movement now is to say I'm atheist and I'm proud I'm out about being an atheist and I'm proud and you may think we have been functionally secular Europe this may seem a sort of obvious thing but it's not so obvious in fact as I was doing a book tour with the god argument around the States and I was hosted by by by people who were atheists or humanists or secularists and they all order them without exception said well I can't really let on publicly that I'm an atheist because it would affect my business or you know I'm an insurance salesman so you know people who knew of my proclivities in this intellectual direction wouldn't be too pleased about it and I've had the experience of people coming up and saying oh you know I've gone in America this is I've gone to church all my life my family and friends and community it's just a reflex thing but I've discovered that I don't really believe any of it and if I were able to you know find friends and be part of a movement where I felt comfortable it would be a tremendous relief by the way when I was in Austin I said to my and the person who was responsible for my book tour part of being there I should point out you by the way that Austin is said to be to Texas what California is to the rest of the US so it wasn't such a bad place to be from the borders of being an atheist but I did say to him it would be tremendously good publicity for my book if somebody shot me I mean missed of course that we've been quite important part of the story but if somebody took a shot which is you know not not completely off the cards in the southern states that would be great publicity and he wasn't a very humorous individualist and he said in a how the door tone of voice he said in Texas assassination attempts are usually successful so I thought better leave that suggestion to one side Mackey's by the way on my travels around the states at last year I visited the Creation Museum in Oklahoma I kid you not my ghast was flat the minute that I set foot across the threshold of that place they have these sort of electronic taranis vegetarian Tyrannosaurus Rex playing with the children of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden I mean the really dismaying thing about it was the troops and troops and troops of small school children being taken through and presented with all this as fact that seems to me to be a human rights crime and that is part of the reason for saying that it's important that we should have the the humanist message at our fingertips when you debate as one sometimes does I might be on the telly or the radio or in some public setting with people who are invested in a religious commitment so with bishops or rulers or rabbis or whoever you're not going to change their minds Jonathan Swift said there is no reasoning a person out of a position they weren't reasoned into and this is the case with religion because it was the vast majority of religious people are ready just because of their early experience they were indoctrinated as children and we all know that the usual trajectory you know when you're very small for good evolutionary reasons you're very credulous you believe everything that the adults in your circle tell you so you believe in father Christmas the tooth fairy and God round about the age of 10 or 11 mm file the Christmas fade-out of the scene but social reinforcement of religion is immense so many church spires so many synagogues and mosques and temples religious services on the radio and television men in dresses crowning the new monarch or marrying a prince to a new princess so there's massive social reinforcement of religion in society so children having in there very early has been evolutionarily primed to be credulous of course when they become teenagers no longer believe anything that they adults in their circle tell them so that's good too and if they've been taken to church every week as children then when the courting years start in and the first you know interest in the other sex all the same sex that matter begins to flare up in an interesting way religion is a nuisance and so belief tends to fade until later on in life when your parents die you lose your job you get ill you can do it depressed you think to yourself where is comfort to be found now we all think that the past is a place where the grass was greener and the summers were longer because of course they were when you're little you don't pay taxes people drive you around and get you ice creams when you grow up you find you have to do it all yourself so the past was a much nicer place and when you reflect on one of the aspects of how it was nicer you remember going to church so you might go wrong to the local church and what happens you meet nice people they welcomed you in and you feel part of a community and you will transfer that sense of belonging to the whatever religion it happens to be that the nice people themselves espouse and that's what happens with Rican versions in adulthood the data suggests that they don't stick this might last for a little while then people drift into what I call the Feng Shui Chanin see this is crystals having your fortune told and so on because after a bit you know all the stories of whatever religion you happen to to have rejoined will will begin to seem implausible again and then finally you'll drift out into a kind of acceptance you've all seen that postcard you know the 19 year old boy know-it-all the middle-aged man say it all pontificating and the old man ting or bubble root or Ganesha you do you do get to there you do get to the point where none of these things matter any longer and you're prepared just to accept the vicissitudes for what they are and rather welcome the idea of death which is when you no longer have to pay taxes but the whole point about debating people with a real investment in a religious outlook is that you're not going to change their minds when one goes on to a program as Andrew cops and does as I do is and perhaps number of you do to debate with religious people you're not really talking to them because you're not going to you're not going to make a difference to them but you might make a difference to people who are uncertain people who are reflecting people who are Havering on the brink or people who are just interested and want to know whether there is a good case on each side those are the people that one might be addressing and it might one might be helpful to them and it would be especially helpful to them if they know that there is this extraordinarily rich view the humanist tradition starting from Socrates and Aristotle running through the post Aristotelian schools the outlook of almost all educated people probably secretly thought and in these ways even if they were also practic as they had to be had to go to church and sign up and say that they believed because otherwise the punishment was very severe and then we know and people like Erasmus in the Renaissance period and Hume in the Enlightenment who looked back across the landscape of thought and saw people like Cicero and Seneca and others and certainly the the earlier philosophers and as being the ones who gave them their most inspiration Hume himself said remember famously humors an atheist visited by Basel on his deathbed I mean humors on his deathbed both will visited him to see how an atheist dies the Boswell himself was so superstitious so anxious about death and what might follow it that you went along out of the worst kind of curiosity really to see that the humors frightened and came away amazed at how tranquil he was and how prepared he was for death but humid was who said if only I'd had Cicero put into my hands rather than the the prayer book when I was a child my whole experience of growing up would have been very different and so deed it would have done this by the way is why I did the the good book the humanist Bible a sort of humanists version of the Bible by the way it's completely I promised on the idea that if only the Bible makers who had taken lots of different texts and put them together edited them and change them and took out inconvenient occurrences of the word not and so on you know if only they had done that to the secular literature of the world the philosophers and historians the poets and put together a budget of the wonderful inspiration and insight and solace and understanding that the non-religious literature of the world has in it then a very different book a different byblos would have been the chief text of our history and maybe the world would be a very different place as a result and when I thought this long time ago more than 30 years ago when I was studying the big contrast between the basis of ethical systems was when I saw you know that religious morality is tend to be divine command morality whereas non-religious morality is tend to be premise on the idea that it is our responsibility to think through our values and to choose them and I thought to myself a phony if only they'd gone to the those guys to make a Bible instead of to the preachers and the prophets and the madmen and as soon as I thought that of course our next thought somebody should do it and then I thought oh damn it did take about 30 years to do and that there is the result one thing about it I that I must say is that there's not one mention of the word god or goddess or faithful religion in it not one as know I mean I have written plenty of attacks on religion I'm perfectly happy to have a go at at the bishops and the the mullahs but this this book can changed nothing in it that even a religious person would find intolerable it starts by the way my book of Genesis with the Apple falling in Newton's garden the beginning of science so I thought it was a much better place to start anybody that they owe an impulse behind it was to try to show that something which has been marginalized actually by the religions because the religions are not interests in people thinking for the Safavieh they're not interested in them thinking at all so that whole debate and that immense resource of insights and solace and inspiration which the non-religious literature's of the world offer us has been pushed aside in such a way that it's only philosophy undergraduates in universities who read some of that stuff because of the pressures of the curriculum they don't even read that Cicero and Seneca are not on philosophy curricula and so that has been sort of lost to sight it's the browser or the classicist or somebody who comes across very very intelligent discussion of how we deal with life and make choices how we're to think for ourselves which is lost to sight to most of our culture as I say and I think there is something deliberate about it but if one could remind people that it's there one could remind people that there is a different way of thinking which is very very powerful and it provides us with a framework a way of approaching life and other people and our own experience of life in a way that is so much so much more fulfilling than the religious stories I pointed out to people and it's a great irritant to religious folk but I'm afraid it's just a simple truth that the doctrines and promises of any great religion of the world can be explained in less than half an hour it takes years to understand physics mathematics and chemistry it takes years to be a reflective attentive responsive reader of our fellows in the human story who have given the best of their intelligence to this great Socratic question how should we live what people what kind of people should we be how should we think of our of others in society that is a work for a lifetime the work of being thoughtful and responsible for our choices and it is so often happened so often happened in history the people who do think with themselves about these matters and make their own ethical choices find themselves at odds with the conventional morality of the day so Bakey point this that ethics and morals not quite the same thing you can see that from the etymologies of the two terms in question the word ethics comes from ethos ancient Greek meaning character what sort of person you are whereas the word morals has a Latin root cognate to the word morays or customs or practices and so morality is about thinking in a community or a social group about how to behave towards one another morality is change over time the pendulum swings backwards and forwards more liberal times more puritanical times we've seen it again and again look back across the last three four hundred years of just of English history not level in British history and see the Puritanism of the early 17th century the libertinism of the restoration period the the relative liberality of views in the 18th century and the Regency period followed by Victorianism think about the 60s and and the great revolution there I've still got the hairstyle now we are moving back we're moving back into a more puritanical age turn the pages of The Times newspaper and what do you see page after page of the page of the page about aging DJs and what they go up to back in the 60s and you notice that we're coming back into this more puritanical and time I suppose because things like gay marriage for example frighten people who are conservative with either a small or a big see about these moral matters and there's a reaction and so the pendulum goes backwards and forwards but ethical reflection thinking about the question of value of what really matters of the nature of the good of how we should treat one another and on what basis we do so so often stands at a very sharp angle to conventional morality it's very been very often the case that the most ethically reflective individuals have been persecuted by their contemporary society if you want an example think of Socrates who put to death by his own society because he asked him to think think what would happen to anybody in one of our political parties who asked anybody to do some thinking rather than just going into the right voting Lobby well these these are examples not just of they great difference between an ethical outlook that says you were responsible for making your life good and meaningful there's not a one-size-fits-all answer where each of us under the under the caution a way of having to make some sense of ourselves so we can make some sense of our lives and our relationships you all remember that thing that has to be a refrain at the back of all our minds what Bertrand Russell said on this most people would rather die than think and most people do that's the great tragedy of the world in a way that people want other people to do their thinking for them they want to take a frozen you know package out of the freezer of ideas tells them how it all began what it all means what they should do what's going to happen to them later on or when they die most people want the answers served up in a simple digestible form they don't want to have to think for themselves they find it difficult or even frightening if they look at their assumptions they may find that they there are some really important things that they disagree with in conventional morality that are to say and they don't want to disagree with it because they feel really unsettled by it people are horrified when they look into the realities of the sorts of choices that people make in the lives they live and they're frightened off by them you know the great the great premise of the moralizer is this I don't like it so you mustn't do it I don't like it so you're not allowed to see it I don't like it so you can't read it that is the great premise of the moralizer wanting to close things down for other people because he or she is very timid some of you in this room will remember Mary Whitehouse the only human being in the history of the universe who had a television set without North button so she watched absolutely everything all the nudity and sex after nine o'clock and then wrote complaining letters about it why because she didn't like it what was the consequence of how not liking it nobody else must be allowed to see it well I'm that is a kind of horror if you think about it the attempt to interfere with other people's lives and choices and so dramatic away and when we look at the pace of the law in matters of private morality when you look at the attempt to organize society and its institutions in its legal framework and so as to corral and to lead people in certain directions preventing them from making certain sorts of choices protecting certain people from the consequences of other people's choices then you see what it was that Isaiah Berlin was so worried about because I know the other thing you were reading in the bath last night was his two concepts of Liberty and so you'll remember he was he was very anxious about the idea of what he called positive Liberty which is our governments telling us what's good for us and how we should live and of course that in the end ends up with trampling on human possibility because the variety the responsibility the diversity tends to get narrowed and when it gets narrowed it doesn't disappear it goes underground and when things go underground they're much worse of a problem than they were when they were out in the open air and that is what happens in puritanical periods of history when the government does our ethical reflection for us and gives us our morality now humanism says we've each of us got to do our ethical reflection with each of us got to make our moral choices where each of us responsible for this life of ours which lies so briefly between birth and death and so constrained by adventitious factors like the time we were born in the period of history the place the geography the society and so navigating our way through this labyrinth of constraints is a very important duty humanism offers a fantastic way of doing this it offers us resources the people you read when you're a humanist the philosophers the best of them they don't say what you should think to help you in learning how to think about things they help you with insights and perspectives they don't expect you to agree with everything but they do expect you to make up your own mind at some point and to live accordingly with a certain kind integrity or authenticity it's not so fashionable these days to invoke the spirits of jean-paul sartre and how they are Camus who by the way didn't really like one another and didn't quite agree about matters existential but that's par for the course with philosophers the collective term for which for whom might be a dispute ation of philosophers or a disagreement of philosophers or a quarrel of philosophers or an argument or philosophers so you can't expect any to them to be so much in agreement with one another but what they did agree about these great figures of the existentialist movement was that we cannot expect to find meaning provided for us antecedently they talked in all the dramatic times about being thrown into the world finding ourselves there in an absurd situation absurd in the sense that it is neutral as to matters of value and meaning and that we have the responsibility and such in particular times in his writing characterized it as a very awful responsibility because we have this deep metaphysical freedom where we can choose what we're to do but the responsibility to infuse our life with meaning and they talked about love but freedom about creativity and about respect for human dignity as the four values that if we explored them and thought about what they really might mean and how we might try to realize them in our own lives would make our lives meaningful this is a very important point there to the assumption they're making is that we can make each of us our own individual lives full of meaning full of significance and therefore really worth living and that assumption shares with the Socratic outlook the view that there isn't a one-size-fits-all answer to how wish how we should live cab drivers sometimes ask me what I do and they always miss hear my answer because I say I teach philosophy to say that you are a philosopher is quite a big claim isn't it really when you think that Aristotle andaman you Kant was references put yourself in the same team as them like they're playing for Manchester United or something um so I say I teach philosophy so they think that I am one so then there's a silence because they're obviously thinking themselves what the hell does philosopher do and he gets up in the morning you know what a plumber or a doctor does but does a philosopher do this answer is yes by the way and then so then they almost always say all right governor what's the meaning of life and I say I know the answer to that question how wait a minute or two I'd like to see the eyes in the mirror you know cab robbers oh well go on then they say what is it and I say it's what you make it the meaning of your life is what you make it it's a very very simple answer and it's a very deep one it's an answer the Socrates gave right the way through the educated reflection on this matter of how we're to live that is the answer that has come up again and again and it's a heavy responsibility what it demands of us is that we equip ourselves with the resources to think for the answer that is tailored to our in case well do you know that time the conversation that begins the dinner of the seven wise men by Plutarch of course you do you were reading it in there last night so you remember in that essays what if I say that the two of the sages are on their way to this dinner party and what might say dinner the dinner of the seven wise man is always men in those ancient times isn't it I think is because the ladies are doing something much more important and interesting anyway so the true them are on their way to dinner party the one says to the other we know what a host must do at a dinner parties God provide the food why in the entertainment but what is the duty of a guest another one said a guests duty is to be a good conversationalist that is somebody who's informed knowledgeable thoughtful has got point of view to put to articulate it explain and defend it if necessary but also who is a good listener who hears what other people say you know don't you that most of the world's problems come from not here what other people say but only thinking you have what they said mmm domestic in Felicity turns on this Bay essential point well you're really hearing what people say as we say in our common idiom now knowing where people are coming from you know really hearing them and then being able to engage with them draw them out discuss debate challenge them if necessary so to be informed and to be attentive those are the two great things that make one a good conversationalist and therefore a good guest at the dinner party but they are also precisely what makes one a good guest at the dinner of life and that's what humanism asks us to be be a good guest at the dinner of life be informed read be a good conversationalist discuss debate listen to what other people have to say have a kind of intellectual integrity even if people think you are the most frightfully immoral person they've ever heard of because your ethical choices are not conformable to contemporary conventional ideas nevertheless have the integrity in the honesty to think through your values and to stick by them and to live them honesty I'm a vegetarian I'm going to end on this Nate by the way but I'm not a prostitute Iser I don't want you all to become vegetarians but I wear leather shoes people say to me that's inconsistent I say yes it is and then when their eyebrows have reappeared from their hair lines again I say look the thing is that I'm doing my best now that claim that one is doing one's best is a terrible fig leaf you can really get away quite literally sometimes with murder you know you murder somebody and said would you did a terrible things that well I was doing my moral best it just kind of happened and that would be a no kind of explanation or defense at all but the idea of doing one's best the idea of an authentic endeavor to live a life which is consistent with one's principles if it is sincerely meant if it is genuinely meant then of course it's an important and powerful thing so when I'm really challenged over my leather shoes I say this poor cow is dead I don't have to keep on killing a cow couple of times a week to wear these shoes so I've got some sort of slightly sophistical justification for it and I'm aware of that fact and I have the grace to blush but if you've tried wearing cardboard shoes in our climates you can see the point so humanism if one knows about it if one sees it as an attitude if one sees it is a very generous and thoughtful attitude that requires intelligence remember what TS Eliot said there's only one method and that is to be intelligent and one intelligent reader reflective debater discuss a an attentive listener if one informs one's choices about how to live in this sincere way if it's a sincere authentic outlook then one has an opportunity to make something of one's own life that might be an inspiration and a help to others who want to make their lives for themselves it moves away from this idea that there is an overarching agency that makes a demand of us and we have to conform to obey to submit tremendously different premise for the moral life the ethical life between the religious and the humanistic outlooks so we're not in the metaphysical debate over theism and atheism get to change the minds of the committed faith in the secularism debate about the place of the religious voice in the public square I think we're making great progress the British Humanist Association and the National Secular society and all of us here are little by little I hope pushing the cart in the right direction even though it does slip down the hill sometimes and but the the real issue is the undecideds the people who haven't don't know which way they're going to vote yet who who are hungry for an understanding of some framework of thought some set of concepts or ideas some approach to life that would help them to live it flourishing ly and well what we need to do is to say here it is it's humanism humanism is an attitude and outlook but it is a wonderfully resourced one there's an enormous amount you can read and think about and will making a great difference to your life if you were to adopt this approach to the question of the good thank you thank you thank you very much questions comments or complaints now not everybody might have heard that question it just repeats the central point which is that in effect talking about the individual responsibility to make choices about how we live doesn't that in that sometimes the case that we need a communal agreement or a democratic agreement where for example in connection with climate change we have to act together and that does mean subordinating the individual to the collective and great philosophical answer coming up yes and no I mean I do I think you're right that signing up I mean volunteering for the the democratic process on matters like this where we have to we have to temporize our own individual desires for example to consume a great deal and to keep our houses at 30 degrees centigrade and so on now we have to temporize with those in the larger interest of the community yes absolutely it's it's integral to what I was saying about the idea that good lives have good relationships at the heart of them that to given to receive love to have friends to be part of a community to take one's part in the wider society to use one's vote to think carefully about political process all these things are part of the story and that part of the story means that we're going to have to accept that sometimes our personal choices have to be constrained in the interests of the community so I agree with you there anything which takes major collective endeavor is going to ask of us as individuals that we agree and go along and sign up the other point that mill made in on Liberty was that there have to be protections for minorities I mean if I'm you know there was a 51% vote that we don't like you know people with long hair then we want to be able to protect the people long hair from the sheep-shearing scissors that the majority might want to wield and that that kind of consideration is important too so a social structure a political structure has to be a complex one with lots of checks and balances in it we're major important collective decisions such as the one that you mentioned can be enacted so I agree with you that but doesn't seem to me to be inconsistent it seems to me to be possible to make the case for saying that actually whereas individual liberty and choice is crucial to the possibility of good individual lives there is a kind of enlightened view that individuals can and should take which is relative to the to the joint interest of the community yeah yes at the back on the left or on the right depending which thank you earlier you said that you you founded a violation of the human rights of children to bring them to a creationist Museum later on you said that the moralizer always knows what others can't see so uh well if you're talking about contradictions does one of the contributors I've been come across and that when religious people have discussed with me that how can we under one the hand you know advocate what is right and what is probably right from unis point of view without falling prey to the hypocrisy of many religious people who would make the same claims about us you'll say that going to an evolutionist Museum is basically child abuse yeah sure and well you put your finger on a really important point here or to quote a former pupil of mine Oxford you put your foot on something very important here it's just probably one of the great issues that we've got a debate and come up with a decision on because let me just say that I do think it's a human rights issue that small children are indoctrinated into religious beliefs in such a way that it makes it can be very difficult for them to leave that religion or not be shaped and framed by that early experience even if they do cease to be religious you know how it is people who brought up as Roman Catholics and become atheists are still Catholic atheists and was very very hard not to be and Roman Catholicism and Islam are two examples of extremely totalizing religious experiences for young people and it's very hard for them to escape it so it does seem to me to be a human rights issue but then on the other hand as you say who are we humanists and atheists and so on to impose our view on everybody and tell them they're not allowed to believe in God well of course the answer is people must be free to believe anything they like however silly and the constraint on them is that they shouldn't use that as an excuse for doing harm to others which I'm afraid you know happens all too often we're all very familiar with the saying it takes religion to make good people do bad things and I'm afraid that's too too often true so what I would say about the Creation Museum is that anybody who goes to it should either just before just afterwards and you know have a have a session with the Richard Dawkins or some evolutionary biologist here the other side of the story the point about these kids is they're not being given the other side of the story what they're being told is that there are bad people out there who don't think that the day is you digital and that then they mustn't have anything to do with those people they must shut their ears to them and you know the perpetual struggle that the United States has with itself over school curricula especially in the Bible Belt States there's an example of how the the war over this matter is waged and it hasn't been won by the by the by either side well though I think the biologists so probably got the upper hand in most appeal court cases anyway but I agree with you that um shutting people up is no great idea people say to me they look at my college for example they see that Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett and Steven Pinker I Tom people lecture there they're visiting professors at the college so they say all yours is an atheistic or college isn't it I say a higher education institution exists to teach people how to think not what so we don't spend any time proselytizing there so they say Oh in that case you're going to have a department of theology I say yeah yeah after we've got our department of astrology yeah and in the front could you wait for the microphone everybody can hear awesome people can hear my voice everywhere yeah continuing on the question that he asked would you say that it this outright an immoral act to take children to this museum or do you would you say that it is some something that cannot be judged via moral because from their point of view they around the doing the right thing I believe was Penn Jillette who at one point said when he came to proselytize in from people who were Christian that he made the similitude of Savior a person standing in the middle of the road and someone else standing by the sidewalk thinks that there's a car approaching you even if this man is perfectly delusional and there is no car approaching you it is still the morally appropriate thing for him to jump out and try to get you out a way away from this delusional car fantasy of his so wouldn't you say that in a certain sense these people who try to indoctrinate the children are only doing the moral thing trying to prevent their children from coming to hell but let me go back to the very first part of the questions you asked there about is it immoral for these children to be taken to the Creation Museum and I think it is because it wouldn't be if they were told about all the creation myths and they knew about evolutionary biology and they were in a position to evaluate the evidence and look at the reasons and were left to make up the decision for themselves some of them might you know end up going with the the Mayan creation myth or the Zoroastrianism or you know if there were museums of creation from all the great religious faiths and also a thorough explanation of what the evidence is for descent with modification in the biological sphere and if we were helping our students at school in university to be very good at evaluating information I mean look you know this is a always been a crucial matter the matter of having a good sharp critical awareness of arguments of evidence of how things stack up of just what a claim is that's being made and how you can test it but it's all the more so now that people can at the touch of a button at the speed of light get all sorts of information and misinformation on the Internet the Internet is the biggest lavatory wall in history on which everybody scribbles their graffiti in about 90% of what silence is a load of rubbish people are very surprised when they learn that the Israel page on Wikipedia is modified several times the second as so many people are trying to in a massage what the information is on there both pro and con and people even more RF ID when they realize that the automatic system used by Google to watch your searches so they know how to target advertising at you doesn't only target advertising but because it knows your interests when you ask it a question it targets the kind of information to you that it thinks you might be might find agreeable so you don't get a you know a neutral random set of information you get information which is conformable to your view that's frightfully worrying isn't it so to be to be very good evaluator of information and sources of information to be able to go into the Creation Museum and ask yourself the question whether you know they're good biological reasons for thinking that Methuselah might have got to 900 years or that Tyrannosaurus Rex was ever a vegetarian with dentition like that and so on is important so it's immoral if that is the only version that they're given then the alternative is demonized yeah thank you very much everybody

Channel: Humanists UK

Views: 105,560

Rating: 4.8572927 out of 5

Keywords: humanism, secularism, atheism, agnosticism, education, talks, lectures, britishhumanistassociation, philosophy, A. C. Grayling (Author)

Id: -LyTc7Vh8zo

Length: 56min 44sec (3404 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 01 2014