An Interview with Andrew Copson (1)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Humanists International (Unsubmitted)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/10/08
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We are now recording another interview with Andrew Copson. Today, we’re going to be talking about an update to the 2002 Amsterdam Declaration, which itself was an update to the 1952 Amsterdam Declaration. So this would be something like but may not necessarily be titled an Amsterdam Declaration 2022. As well, there is an annual general meeting for Humanists International, formerly The International Humanist and Ethical Union in Glasgow from June 2nd to June 5th. So, let’s focus first on the update to the foundational life stance or ethical documents within international Humanism, what prompted the necessity or the desire to update two decades after the 2002 Amsterdam Declaration?
Andrew Copson: I think the world has changed an enormous amount in the last 20 years. I mean certainly a lot of change in the 50 years between the 1952 Declaration and the 2002 Declaration, but even more has changed in the world and in the humanist movement as well in the last 20 years. If we started with the humanist movement, I mean what’s happened in Humanists International in the last two decades is that we’ve had a much greater presence within our organization and within our wider movement of humanists from the global south. We just became more and more aware that from the very West European perspective of the ‘52 declaration, which to some extent still carried over quite strongly into the 2002 revision, we need it to become much more global and universal and true to our own founding value. Humanism is the universalist worldview; and, certainly, we believe that men and women whenever they sat down to think about difficult questions or stood up to take action to improve the world and for as long as we’ve got records of these things having happened for thousands of years all around the world, humanist ideas have been there in the mix. There have been people who thought this way and acted that way. So, we didn’t think that that global diversity was properly represented in the 2002 Declaration. We also wanted to take a more specific stand on some of the bigger global ethical challenges that face us today.
We’re thinking particularly of prejudice and discrimination and of environmental catastrophe and the climate crisis that we’re living through. I’m not saying we want to make necessary specific reference to those things, but we wanted to make it clear in our declaration of the fundamentals of modern humanism what the Amsterdam Declaration is about. We wanted to make clear the ways in which the humanist view contributes to thinking about the solutions to those problems. So it’s an update, it’s a modernization; it’s not a revolution. It’s an evolution of what remains in fundamentals pretty much the same thing – a timeless approach.
Jacobsen: And what has been the conversation or feedback from the various organizations?
Copson: We’ve had a very wide process so far. So, we first of all… a long time ago now… I mean Covid has ruined all of our senses of time, but I think it was maybe 100 years ago that we put out a call to all of our member organizations because that’s the national humanist organizations around the world and also our individual supporters, and asked them, “What do you think the declaration lacks? What is it that when you’re going around your work or thinking about what the humanist approach entails, what you think it is that you’re not seeing in the existing declaration? What’s missing? What isn’t there? What needs further elaboration?” That was very helpful. We got a lot of really good observations from people about that. Again it was interesting to have observations from literally all over the world. I mean that speaks to the point about the global diversity of humanists that I was mentioning in the beginning.
We saw a lot of what was there from new perspectives and that was very illuminating for us. So we had that very broad initial conversation about what was in and should be, and what was not in and should be in. Then we appointed a commission of people from all over the world, humanists from all over the world, say more famous humanist thinkers, maybe, like Anthony Pinn, Steven Pinker, and Anthony Grayling, and then more grassroots people as well who run their organizations in Latin America or in Africa or in Southeast Asia. We had them work on three different drafts over the period as it worked out, but to produce the final version that we’ve now put out for final comments; final minimal comments, to all at once. And then that will be the final version will then be agreed by the board at its meeting ahead of the general assembly due to Glasgow. Then the general assembly will hopefully adopt that declaration, and then we’ll formally make it in Amsterdam later in the year because we wanted to have that continuity. We were in Amsterdam in ’52, we were in Amsterdam in 2002; and although there’s nothing, there’s no offense to Glasgow to say that we thought that the Glasgow Declaration would be second best to having it keep the name of Amsterdam, which is where we started all those seven decades ago. So, we’ll be back in Amsterdam at the end of this year to launch informally.
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