The State of Global Humanism: Overview

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/08/23

Andrew Copson has been Chief Executive of Humanists UK since 2009 and is currently serving his final term as President of Humanists International, which office he has held since 2015. He is the author of Secularism: a very short introduction (Oxford University Press) and, with Alice Roberts, of the Sunday Times Bestseller The Little Book of Humanism.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Hi! And welcome to the ‘Debauched Comedy Hour with Andrew Copson and Scott Jacobsen’.

Andrew Copson: [Laughing].

Jacobsen: So, today, we are going to be starting off a series on global Humanism. It will cover some topics and some regions. To start off, we will go with an overview. Let’s start on a happy note, I like happy starts. What are some positive areas of progress for human rights and humanist values coming to fruition?

Copson: It is a challenge these days to think of anything as a shining positive light but there are some hopeful things. I think one of the encouraging things from an organized humanist point of view is that we simply have organizations now springing up or people forming organizations where we would never have thought that would have been the case. I am thinking particularly of the Arab world and Southeast Asia. The increasing global connectivity and especially through the medium of the English language are leading to humanist ideas being transferred and discussed, and passed on much more rapidly than in previous times, even in places of the world where the political and social context is very hostile. That is a great positive point. It gives reason for optimism. I think that in broader human rights terms… It is true that the world is facing a lot of challenges from extreme religion and existential threats to human life. But if you want to find grounds for optimism, you want to find responses to those challenges being sketched out in the policymaking fora of the world to a global extent that would be imaginable in previous centuries. Genuine concern for human rights is informing at least part of that policy response: seeing the human race as one, seeing the planet as one, seeing this as something that we’re all in together, and using those guiding principles to challenge the forces of chaos unleashed on the world. Take Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a disgrace. It is a terrible violation of international law and a degrading act. So much of the response has not been in kind, but to reassert the values of democracy and human rights that stand against that sort of aggression. I think that is encouraging. 

Jacobsen: Speaking not only of violations, but sort of standing risks to humanists internationally, we have very prominent cases like Mubarak Bala or Gulalai Ismail. Both of whom are very well-known, but there are dozens of lesser-known cases of humanists at risk as well as, potentially, with the death penalty and on death’s door. 

Copson: I think that’s right. What I am constantly surprised by working in Humanists International is the extent to which there is such widespread, low-level harassment of humanists. I think of a country like India. It is silly things, petty things. Problems to get your passport, being deplaned at regional airports, just because someone knows who you are, knows you are a rationalist or a humanist activist, and just wants to give you a bit of bother. That bit of petty, neighbourhood, bureaucratic harassment. That’s not all of course. People are also being assassinated for being humanists and rationalists, activists, in villages and elsewhere. That constant, low-level harassment, which is becoming more of a feature of States and bureaucracies that are influenced by political religion. It is so widespread. 

Then, of course, like you say, you draw attention to two particular cases with Gulalai arrested, subjected to harassment, family arrested and tortured. She had to flee her country. Mubarak Bala imprisoned, now, sentenced for 24 years – subject to intimidation in the runup to his trial, and during and since, but those standout cases. Those ones that you hear about. There are so many going on that you never hear about. That’s bad. And then, there are those humanists in contexts where they cannot even raise their head above the parapet. Gulalai and Mubarak felt, at least, the liberty to speak out, but the liberty was shot down. But there are many who don’t feel the liberty to speak out. That is a unique challenge for organizations like Humanists International for the non-religious. It is a sense you have after working in the field for a long time. Christian converts in Islamic States, at least, can find structure and community in a church. Non-religious people don’t even have that readymade potential network, even when under siege. That is a structural disadvantage that humanists and other non-religious in religious contexts and jurisdictions have to deal with. 

Jacobsen: Do you think the internet has been a big driver of getting humanist values, non-religious ideas, out to places, where they wouldn’t otherwise have that access?

Copson: Absolutely, obviously, the internet and social media, per se, have been incredible vectors, especially with the prevalence of the English language medium, for humanist values in particular. That has been a great success and something to be celebrated. It has also been ironically the tool of oppression of those people. Because, once they have begun to be organized and begun to be visible, they can be detected and suppressed. That’s the downside, of course. But just like the printing press, the printing press allowed ideas to be rapidly transmitted, but it also allowed publishers to be tracked down, presses to be tracked down and burned, and people who would’ve otherwise have kept their ideas to themselves to be found. It is a mixed blessing, but a blessing overall, I think. 

Jacobsen: Your team at Humanists International. What are the items that continually come up in meetings or as points of concern for humanists, outside of sort of general harassment in the street or State repression in the cases like Mubarak Bala or Gulalai? 

Copson: I don’t want to give the impression that we’re always talking about oppression and persecution. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing]. 

Copson: There is that side to it, of course. Every aspect of that is something that the personnel of Humanists International is dealing with, whether supporting people in a country, supporting applicants for asylum or refugees on the account of their beliefs. One of the more positive things that we talk about, which is still a challenge but a more positive challenge to have, is how to sustain and build humanist organizations in countries where we don’t have them. We spend more and more time talking about that. How do we support the transfer of knowledge and experience from one humanist organization to another? (Which is not always North to South. There are plenty of young humanist organizations that have things to teach organizations in the Global North and within the region.) It is something that we talk about. It comes up quite a lot. It is now plausible. We’ve had a strategic aim, for a long time, to have something… you know, the language of strategies is always extremely ambitious like, “A thriving humanist organization in every country of the world or every part of the planet – everywhere.” Humanists everywhere, all at once, is the idea. I’ve always thought that is very ambitious and declaratory sort of aim to have, but, in the past few years, I’ve thought that could be achieved in 2 or 3 decades. We’ve begun to see these ideas catch light in so many different places, and also to understand that there is more than one way to organize. When they set up Humanists International in 1952, they imagined a very traditional Anglo- or German, certainly Western Europe or Western, organization with a board, a membership, and a congress, and everything else. Then, eventually, there would be an organization like that in every country. I think that idea is gone. More and more, we are realizing there are more ways of organizing, different types of organizations, different types of humanist movement that they can form in their own specific contexts. Quite a lot, recently, we have talked about how cheerful the prospects for that look. 

Jacobsen: What are the pieces of information, feedback, coming from some of these global South organizations and global North organizations about how they organize and how they are succeeding in how they are doing so, how ever they may be organizing?

Copson: Incredibly diverse, Scott, it is an incredibly diverse set of challenges. I suppose the common themes are great economic difficulties at the moment. That is a very common theme right now. The global North is also not in tip-top condition, economically, so the chance for humanist organizations from the North to the South for the stimulation of local activities; which is quite strongly relied on until now, it is a challenge to sustain in the moment. It is costs and struggles from fledgling organizations, in particular, which are reliant upon grant funding. Also, everyone is aware that global religious, especially North American Christian – White Christian Nationalist – money is flowing into the global South to fight their proxy wars, whether against LGBT rights or women’s rights to reproductive rights and sexual health, non-Christian religions’ freedom. That’s a recurrent story that we hear from the global South. Then there are the problems of being a fledgling organization. Young people of the global South, which is comparatively young to the global North. Young people are trying to live, develop their lives, be happy, develop their families and careers. They don’t have time to always put time into developing a movement and an organization. There are always activists in the world, naturally, but building an organization requires time, capacity, spare time, leisure, as well as everything else. So, there are challenges of capacity that recur across the regions in the global South. At the same time, of course, there are incredible stories of people overcoming all of those things. You just have to work harder in the global South to sustain humanist organizations. It provides great challenges and inspirational stories, of course.

Jacobsen: Regionally, as arose in the World Congress, there was sort of the demographics of the humanist organizations. There was a dip in the Middle East and North Africa region. 

Copson: You’re speaking about the distribution table.

Jacobsen: Not necessarily why, but more how are things going for organizations there, because a general assumption would be, not unjustified, of a humanist organization having a more difficult time to self-sustain. 

Copson: In the Arab world, we find some of the harshest legal restrictions for people trying to organize. We produce the Freedom of Thought Report that looks at every situation in every country of the world in policy terms. The countries in the Arab region are the countries where formal humanist organizations are against the law, declaring your identity as a humanist in identity papers is against the law, blasphemy laws and punishment are severe. It is inhospitable to put it mildly to humanist organizations and to humanist individuals. Not necessarily if you are someone from an upper class family and wealthy. Maybe, your non-belief might come as an acceptable quirk or something like that. But broadly, in most of society, to be public with personal views – let alone to establish any organized movement to support those with your views and to promote them, it is legally almost impossible. But at the same time what we have in teh Arab world are not populations like the population of China, which is sequestered away from the rest of the world. These are populations that have access to information, literature, the internet (which we were talking about a moment ago). In the Arab world, we know there are tens of millions of downloads of atheist literature. What we’re dealing with there is suppression, active suppression – social and political, of these opinions. And there is every reason to believe, I think, that if freedom were to break out in the region, those opinions would come naturally to the surface and those people would begin to communicate about them in the way that those people in freer countries have been doing. 

So, I think that’s the current situation there. Under the surface, I think that humanist beliefs are an enormous phenomenon in the region, but are held in check and actively repressed by tradition, family as much as forces of law, order, and the repressive State.

Jacobsen: What about the Western world, Western Europe and North America? Those social and political groups, growing in some cases, and using their heft to push back against what we would consider humanist progressive moves in different areas of social and political, and policy, life in Western societies. What are the risks with those organizations and movements? What can be done to combat them well?

Copson: Religious nationalism of various types is the most obvious threat to humanist values in the West today. That religious nationalism might be Islamic and not currently in possession of a government or a State. It might be Christian and currently in possession of the levers of power and of a State, as it is, obviously, in Poland, Hungary, Russia, and until recently the United States (where it is now in possession of a Court). Perhaps, in the future, some Western European countries will fall into their grasp. Obviously, to have that doctrine in power or as the principal opposition in some countries is a terrible threat to Humanism and humanist values in that region. All the more possession for not being immediately obvious to everyone, I think, because humanists are very used to the idea that it’s very obviously religions, or extreme Communism and Fascism of the old types, which are the threats to open societies, humanist values, human rights, rule of law, and so on. Whereas this idea of ethnic conservatism, if anything, seems a little bit benign to some people, quite old fashioned, quite innoffensive, clothed up in all of the trappings of tradition, and one’s own national culture, and with a folkish air. That, of course, is much more dangerous than some of those doctrines that present themselves as very much in your face and totalitarian. So, I think that Christian Nationalism, of all types, is a threat to humanist values of all types in Europe and the West right now. It is comprehensively at odds with humanist values. It opposes universalism and the principle of universalism upon which any consideration for human rights must rest. Christian Nationalism opposes diverse ways of living, experiments in living, as the best way to maximize human happiness, which we, as humanists, hold to in a free society to be the laboratory of living. Which we want to see for human beings, it opposes that. It opposes personal sexual freedom. It opposes education for citizenship and critical thinking necessary for a humanist conception of a healthy political community. It imposes, instead, a static backward-looking ethnically delineated political community, which is at odds with a sort of social contract thinking that lies at the heart of the humanist conception of the State. From the ground up, this tendency is anti-humanist. I think that more people who give it house room in their own heads need to realize that. It is incompatible with humanist ideas to think that there can be limiting of human rights for individuals. To think that the rule of law should be suspended when it comes to refugees, let’s say, or another group within society, that’s antithetical thinking to humanist ideas. But I don’t think it is always feared and, hence, opposed with the strength that it should be. 

Jacobsen: What are your hopes coming out of this particular interview series on the state of global Humanism?

Copson: Well, I hope that the young people who are such a populous segment of emerging humanist organizations are supported by everyone else to turn their enthusiasm into resilient organizations and a sustainable movement. That is really my key strategic hope. That somehow, together, we will manage to match ambition and resources, and personnel, and opportunities, together in a way that will work for us. So many times, the humanist community has collapsed, nationally or globally. Collapsed in the 19th century in the face of resurgent Christianity, collapsed in the 20th century in the face of Fascism and Communism, collapsed in the late 20th century because of the entirely false belief that we’d won [Laughing]. This was the end of history, democracy, and humanist values. 

Jacobsen: Oh! Francis Fukuyama.

Copson: Exactly! You know, exactly, there are all these sorts of booms and busts in organized humanist movements. I hope that this time around that we can match, like I say, resources to need and people to the moment, and sustain ourselves, because we are very much needed. I mean, the problems the world faces now, globally and nationally, are the ones best solved – can only be solved – by a humanist approach, whether the use of critical inquiry and science to address our technological needs or a universalist moral ethic to take seriously the rights of every human being in the calculations that we make about the future of various policies that affect real people today and future generations. I think that that’s highly likely. I think that, at least, the common sense Humanism that is required to address those challenges will be successful, whether the organized humanist movement that, I think, is a vital bulwark for that way of thinking will be as successful. I’m not so sure. But I am hopeful. It was hope you wanted, right? 

Jacobsen: Yes.

Copson: It seems a frail sort of hope. 

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Copson: What I just rehearsed, it is hope, nonetheless.

Jacobsen: Andrew, thank you very much for the first session today. 

Copson: Thank you.

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