Global North Humanism With Andrew Copson

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/23

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. This is a series on global Humanism with the first session as “The State of Global Humanism: Overview.” 

Here we talk about Humanism in the Global North. 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so we are here again today for the “I’m a Lumberjack and I’m Okay” edition of interviews with Andrew Copson. How are you doing today?

Andrew Copson: I’m very well. How are you?

Jacobsen: I’m doing farmy, horsey. 

Copson: [Laughing] Yes, of course, not much longer.

Jacobsen: Not much longer; unfortunately, I’m leaving at the end of the month. We are going to be talking about the Northern Hemisphere of humanism. So, let’s start on the big stuff; we did a little historical talking in one of the previous sessions about off-the-top some of the earliest formulations of humanism. Insofar as we understand it today, a lot of organizational humanism came forward in Britain and the United Kingdom. Who were these major figures? People like Julian Huxley and so on.

Copson: Well, this is very unlike the global South that we talked about before. The global North has some extremely old humanist organizations and a very well documented history. We can look back and know where these things came from by people’s writing, thoughts, and institutional records. We start getting people in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries talking openly about abandoning belief in gods entirely. That’s usually where it starts. People who no longer think Christianity is right, that it doesn’t make sense, isn’t ethical, or isn’t meaningful, that no belief in divine forces is necessary. There are a lot of different causes of this. 

There is a rediscovery and an active promulgation of texts from pre-Christian Europe. Either because they are being discovered or being more widely translated. This challenges the assumptions that a lot of people had that Christianity was the great coming of wonderful things to Europe, that everyone had been secretly waiting for something like Christianity for hundreds of years and when it finally came, it made everyone happy, changed the world, introduced kindness, and was the right way. Well, when you take pre-Christian texts more seriously and are more exposed to them, that particular moment in history looks a bit more contingent than that. You get views of people before that period and that chips away at the edifice of Christianity in Europe. 

Then, of course, the increasing success of natural scientists in understanding the universe and putting forward accurate and reliable explanations of how nature behaves, which have nothing to do with religious explanations – and often challenge them too. Human beings are no longer at the top of a pyramid of creation because we understand more about how we organically came to be, the planet no longer being the center of the universe – coming to terms with what that means. So there is the discovery of pre-Christian cultures, there is science, history, geology. Then there is also the European encounter with other cultures. With ideas, suddenly, of Buddhism, Eastern religions, and the culture of civilizations as old, and older, than European civilization, civilizations where they have completely different ideas of morality, about where we come from, about how we should be. 

Combined with all of that, Europe had a growing material comfort. That gives people more scope and more comfort for thinking about worldly things rather than being on the breadline all the time and having to hope for a better life to come. Then, partly as a consequence of serious thought about ethics, there are the social justice movements of the 19th century, which feed very strongly into the humanism that we know and love now. 

Out of all these tributaries comes this new humanist tradition. The organizations set up to fortify people with these beliefs and spread these beliefs through education and agitation – we start to see them in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. We see them in Britain, as you say, in different forms. The Cooperators, the Owenites, the secularists, the ethicists and the rationalists, and eventually, the humanists. We see this, particularly in Germany and parts of Europe where higher education is well-funded and available. So, the German freethinkers were very numerous in the 19th century. Much more left-wing politically, somewhat more left-wing politically, than the Western parts of Europe, but humanist in our sense. In addition to this purely secular tendency, which we see in Western Europe, we also have a movement of post-Unitarians who are a bit more religious. It is not so secular but still leans towards humanism in our sense in the United States and the 19th and 20th centuries. They formed ethical societies and humanist societies. You get these different traditions communicating with each other and budding into institutions that not only start organization for their members but become platforms for advocacy for social change, services for funerals, weddings and naming ceremonies (the first humanist ceremonies started being conducted in Western Europe in the 19th century) and eventually, they grew into the organized humanism that we recognize today.

Jacobsen: How, in the 20th century, is humanism in Western Europe characterized and compared to North America?

Copson: Well it’s not just the west of Europe. In the early 20th century, especially in parts of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, humanism was well advanced. There is almost no difference between the levels of development of humanist organizations in places like Poland or Austria and in places like Britain or the Western parts of Germany, Belgium, or wherever. The biggest difference, internally, in Europe at that time is probably between North and South Europe rather than East and West. You have parts of Europe that were historically Protestant, where churches lost more of their political power over time – not necessarily social influence or control over public services like education or health – but they lost their coercive political power compared with previous centuries. In those parts of Europe, you get humanist organizations that are, perhaps, more ethically focused and more likely to promote a morality independent of religious belief, which is, nonetheless, liberal. (This is a gross simplification by the way!) in Southern Europe, where churches are still powerful in the traditionally Catholic parts of Southern Europe, you tend to get more militant secularists and anti-clerical organizations. Britain being as it were a country with a half-Protestant half-Catholic Church, it had both these traditions in the 19th and early 20th centuries. 

In terms of East and West, the great collapse of humanist organizations in Eastern Europe came under the onslaught of fascism and communism in the middle and later 20th centuries. That’s when you see humanist organizations that were thriving being choked off because both fascism on the one hand and Marxism-Leninism, on the other hand, were antithetical to the humanist way of being. The German freethinkers were the first organization banned in the Third Reich. Hitler gave a speech in the Reichstag, saying he stamped out atheism forever. Of course, he hadn’t, thankfully. Then, the situation wasn’t much better for those parts of Europe that were occupied and went Soviet after the Second World War because there, too, the liberal values associated with humanism were impossible to live out. Not atheism of course – that was strongly encouraged.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Copson: In Soviet countries, it is a bit like China today. Easy to be an atheist. Almost impossible to be a humanist. It was the same for Soviet countries. Humanist organizations in Western Europe suffered, too, in the 20th century because partly the fear of communism in Western countries led to an increase in soft social support for Christianity, but also some state support for Christianity because many Christians put Christianity forward as the way one could defend against godless communism. This is true in the United States as well as in Western Europe. Humanism suffered from two other factors at the same time. One was the New Age woo-woo, crystals and everything else. Speaking to humanists who were organizing in the 50s and 60s, it was a real threat. It was seen as an incredibly real threat. It has proved to be so: there is a lot of new age irrationality in the Northern part of our world even now. The other threat was materialism, market capitalism leading to gross, crass materialism, which, as the humanists at the time thought, would attenuate our inner lives and sympathies with each other to such an extent that it was a real threat, too. So, there is a potted history of the 20th century for humanism! 

Jacobsen: Some of the more enormous and robust humanist organizations are the American Humanist Association, Humanists UK, and the Norwegian Humanists. These are much bigger than many others, including Canada, by an order of magnitude or two. So, what do you think makes that distinguishing mark in terms of the organization’s size compared to so many other places?

Copson: The first big difference that affects size and impact in the global North is whether the organizations are voluntary or state-funded. Humanist organizations in Germany, Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands, for example, receive public money, although in different ways and to different extents. In the case of the Norwegian Humanist Association, there is substantial public money and the Belgian state funds the Belgian humanists so that they can maintain a building in every town in Belgium. This is simply a different league of size and impact. Then you have countries where the humanist organization is not part of the state or directly state-funded but is a voluntary association. That is much more common in the Anglo-American tradition of these things. The state does not raise church taxes nor administer religions, but a soft secularism exists, as we have said, in places like the UK, Canada, and the US. So, that is the biggest difference, leading to the scale differences between the humanist organizations. 

But you kindly included the UK and the US in your account of the bigger and more impactful humanist organizations and I think that is probably right. Even though they are by no means the biggest or the wealthiest. I think the impact that they’ve had there is probably because of the very widespread social influence of humanist ideas in their societies. We can think about two types of humanism: organized humanism in the sense of the organizations doing or carrying out humanist programs in the ways discussed and then the common sense humanism of the millions of humanists living their lives with these values who may or may not call themselves or those values humanist. Although organized humanism is smaller in places like the UK, the latest survey of the current population who call themselves humanists as a primary identity shows that it is around 7%. It is more than the non-Christian religions. The percentage of people with humanist beliefs and values; opinion polls put it at about 30% or more. So, I think that the reason why humanist organizations have done well in English-speaking countries is because there is just so much humanism implicit in the culture. If you go through people in certain professions, arts and culture, or politics, all those sorts of spheres, if Humanists UK wants to find patrons among famous scientists, writers, or actors, it can do so relatively easily. The American Humanist Association is the same. They had Kurt Vonnegut, Gore Vidal, as presidents and there are many very famous Americans. As humanists, they are famous in other areas of their lives apart from their humanism. Because humanism was widely spread as an idea of the population as a whole, which led to success. So, I wouldn’t say there is no correlation between state funding and its impact on the population but it’s not the only thing that counts. 

I think the second thing that has led to an outsized impact of English-speaking humanist organizations in the perception of other humanists elsewhere is the English language because the English language is everywhere and was the primary language of the internet. I don’t know if it still is. But it is many people’s second language and enormously affects the world’s culture. A lot of Europeans know who Stephen Fry is, for example. There is an example of a British humanist in thought and deed in how he talks about things and in that he is a member of the formal humanist movement. Inevitably, that has an impact. It ramifies through Humanists UK’s work and makes us more successful than we would otherwise be. I think that’s probably why. 

Much of it is down to humanist organizations attracting people who already have public prominence for other reasons. The Norwegian Humanist Association has mainly had its impact from coming-of-age ceremonies that they have provided for several decades, allowing them to build their brand. They attracted famous Norwegians to their cause. Åse Kleveland, who everyone in Norway has heard of… She was the Norwegian Minister of Culture and was the Norwegian entry in the Eurovision Song Contest a number of times. Everyone in Norway just knows her. She was the president of the Norwegian Humanists. That brought great lustre to their name, correspondingly. That is also one of the ways Northern European organizations had an outsized impact. 

Jacobsen: There are challenges in spite of the ease of cultural spread of humanism, with English as the dominant language across that hemisphere, as well as many lots of the strong humanist movements’ roots in countries. There are backlash movements, particularly as we see in some of the United States. There also are more life and death challenges as with the Ukrainian-Russian war in terms of “How do we make the theory of the values of humanism practical when applying to these difficult circumstances, whether sociopolitical backlash or military aggression?” 

Copson: Yes, that’s right. We have talked before when we have had other conversations about the intimidating range of different threats humanists face.

Jacobsen: [Laughing]. 

Copson: It is a whole range of problems, especially the social and political backlashes or response movements – they are very considerable and dangerous. There is, as there has always been, a religious backlash to humanist ideas and organizations in the global North. That comes in different ways. There are anti-choice, anti-freedom groups that seek to roll back the successes that humanists and their allies have had in our societies in the global North over the last few decades. In parts of the North where humanism is state-funded, those religious movements also try to remove their state funding. They try not only to reverse those values in society but they attack humanist organizations and the foundations of humanist organizations. Then, of course, there is ethnic nationalism, white conservatism, whatever you want to call it, which is increasingly setting its face against the liberal cosmopolitan aspects of humanism. The universalist aspects of humanist values, which underpin not just humanism as a worldview but because of the success of humanism over the 20th century, also underpin our rules-based international order and the constitution of democratic societies. That is under threat. 

I think humanism is also under threat by economic forces, like the growing inequality between rich and poor, which reverses the tendency of people to feel more secure and socially safe. People feel less socially safe and less socially secure and are in a situation where there is growing inequality. There is a corresponding harm done to people’s humanist common sense. Their values change as a result. And you’re right – imperialist wars, such as Russia is now engaging in, are incredibly threatening to civilizational humanism, as you might find embodied in aspects of the European Union or the European way of life, where human rights are protected by law, where a certain measure of peace and social security is provided by stable governments that can, therefore, create the space for human happiness and productivity. All of that is threatened by war. At the moment, war does seem to be increasing in popularity in the global North. You haven’t asked for any solutions to these problems…

Jacobsen: Andrew, I have a question. What do you think are some of the solutions to these problems?

Copson: [Laughing] Oh, dear, I don’t know. I think that, obviously, what has to happen is resources for peace need to be redeveloped and peace needs to be reprioritized. Human rights need to be respected and grow in popularity and acceptance. Liberal democratic citizenship needs to be more of a concern of the state in encouraging young people to be ready for it, for adults to develop it further and continuously. The liberal principle of individuals being free to pursue their own sense of the good up to the limits of the freedom of others needs to be re-established as the cornerstone of our social order. 

That’s what needs to happen. I am less certain how it is to be achieved. We all have responsibilities as citizens and as potential activists. What responsibilities and contributions could humanists make or humanist organizations? I think the parts of the global North where humanist organizations are established or funded by the state have an important function in social life and in promulgating and embedding those social values in the lives of humanists and others. They can be very significant. In some countries in Europe, humanist organizations have contact with almost every individual in the country at one point or another during their lives. That is huge. In those countries where those organizations are not state-operated or don’t operate at that scale, we need alliances with liberal political and religious belief groups – liberal Jews, liberal Christians, liberal Muslims, and others. We need to spend more time building solidarity with them and should do so. I think humanists need to be more politically active than they have been, not just humanist organizations but individual humanists, and cultivate a new priority of participation – civic and political participation. 

If this is the only life and world we have and the only chance we have to improve it is in our own lives, politics and civic participation is the only way to do that. You can do some things in charities, social service, and civil society, but he only way to achieve lasting change at scale is in the political theatre. So, that is what humanists need to do more. Hopefully, they can hold these values at the centre of that. I think one of the problems is that it has been a long time assumed that anyone not religious was probably a humanist. With the growing secularization of the North, of the global North, a large proportion of the newly non-religious people are humanist and have humanist values. But for others it is more complicated. They have other values or conflicting values. There is a growing nihilism in the global North. There is non-religiousness that doesn’t entail universalism as humanism does. There can be selfishness, the growing appeal of borders and walls, and closing off. That makes sense. People are afraid of many things at the moment: of the climate crisis, of political instability, of war, of the effects of economic scarcity. But this putting up of walls and borders opposes the humanist idea of connecting, of universalism, and of seeing humankind as one family. So these are all tendencies that we have to be quite energetic against, unlike previous social trends that we’ve benefitted from. We need to work harder to bring humanism to non-religious people and ensure that these values are the best for achieving wider human fulfillment. 

Jacobsen: Maybe this can be the last question. It raises the issue of the long arc. I do not appeal to any divine arc leading to justice. There is a statistical tendency in recent history to lean towards a humanist application more often than not. 

Copson: It depends on your timescale. One day, Scott, the few remaining human beings may be left fighting for resources. They won’t be having a nice life. And we’ll all be dead one day. So narrow it down for me; what kind of timescale are we discussing? [Laughing]

Jacobsen: Next couple of centuries if we survive or the next 20 years.

Copson: Okay, yes.

Jacobsen: For many of the global North, the churches have declined. 

Copson: I think they’re finished for all practical purposes in this discussion.

Jacobsen: In my country, the 2001 census stated self-identified Christians were slightly over three-quarters. By 2021, the most recent Statistics Canada census coming out. The number was 53%. If you run a line of best fit, this year will be, for the first time, less than half of the population. So, the next 20 years from now. It raises the question you were alluding to: “How do we fight for church and state separation?” The question for me is, “Despite some of the immediate or medium-term battles, what next?” So, if we are not taking ourselves as an oppositional force to a dominant, now, it is a constructive dialogue, a more assertive dialogue, at least in the United Kingdom. 

Copson: I think this will be the case all over the global North, particularly in the West. Our challenge becomes not how we emphasize the human instead of the divine. But how do we emphasize the human as opposed to the me-me-me? In that, our aim isn’t different. The question still remains as before, “How do we maintain and develop human happiness and make a better world?” That has always been the point of humanist organizations. It is to do those things. We are looking at a different range of challenges now. Some obvious global challenges need to be met, like the climate crisis and the growing political instability of the world, which have multiple causes, as we know. The growing economic inequality and consequent unfairness of Western societies, which as we see in the history of any society, is not a good sign for social stability over the medium to long term. Those are the challenges that we have to face. There is still the challenge of irrationality and religiosity that is damaging. But I think the principal challenges are the other ones we’ve outlined. I suppose we’re saying that it is a humanist response to try to answer these questions and address these challenges in dialogue with others and bring them to the table. I think there is also a responsibility to clarify the basis of what we think of as Western values. Humanism is like the wallpaper of the Western world at the moment. It is there. It is encoded into so much of what we think, what we think about people, and what we think about ourselves and the world. Our habits and our ways of thought. So humanist in so many ways. But because that is not made explicit, I think there is a vulnerability in those values, too. 

It is common when people first hear about humanism and non-religious people in the global North to say, “That’s common sense. Why do you need a name for that?”

Jacobsen: [Laughing]. 

Copson: “It is what everybody believes. Isn’t it?” [Laughing] You have to say, “No! It’s not what everyone believes.” [Laughing] I know it seems to you now, as a man or woman in the modern West, that this is the end of a historical situation. Surely, this is just what everybody believes or has believed. That’s not the case unless we are more aware of how exceptional and precarious the humanist approach is. Even though it has given rise to such enormous gains in human welfare and progress, how fragile it is if we forget about its roots and fail to be conscious of that. I think that is also a very important task for the years ahead. Because if you don’t, you are defenseless when Putin says, “Family. Flag. God. This is where it comes from. This is what underpins our civilization.” Or the ethnic nationalists who say, “Judeo-Christian values, that’s where it all comes from. That’s how it is.” Or those tribalists who say, “Our own culture, our traditional values, this has got us to where we are. This is what needs defending. This is what it is all about.” Unless you say, “No, that has not made the modern world. What has made the modern world is humanist values, science’s way of understanding the world, living by reality and consequent gains as a species over time, questing for peace and fulfillment in this life because it is the only one we have. Trying to secure social safety and the possibility of choice for individuals in our lives. These things have come from growing humanism in our societies and the global North. It is a lot of what our prosperity and happiness rests upon.” I think that is a job for humanists to do with greater articulacy than we have in the past.

Jacobsen: Andrew, thank you for participating in “I’m a Lumberjack, and I’m Okay” once again. 

Copson: [Laughing] Good, thank you.

Jacobsen: You’re welcome.

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