Most likely, intentional, practical individual and group humanism predates history. It certainly predates monotheism. It may well have predated theism. After all, animism, which seems to have promoted a higher standard for respect of all life, predated theism. It seems sensible and logical to speculate that early tribes survived through some form of humanism. Throughout recorded history, practical and philosophical humanism are recorded. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, referred to Greek and Roman humanism in his Renaissance Humanism of the 14th Century, as one example.
I considered my own intellectual motivation to do good in the world as my humanism for the past four decades. My understanding and application of that word, humanism, is simple: Humanism is my practice of being a truthful, responsible, giving and respectful human being with an awareness that every person, while ultimately living and dying alone in an unique human experience, has the same basic human rights, to life and peace, and the same responsibilities to himself and to all humankind.
Recently, a new popular movement has arisen under the name of Humanism, in part, I believe, as a predictable reaction to the rising religious fundamentalism of the last two decades. Opposite and equal reactive forces are part of the physics of life in this Universe.
I have been privileged to meet Greg Epstein, the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University, who has written a book called "Good Without God: What A Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe". He is a dynamo of energy on behalf of his ideals. He represents, in my opinion, the energy and good will which are needed qualities in this world.
My concern about this new Humanism, as it spirals into a popular movement, is that it may fall prey to some of the cancers of religion and other human bureaucracies, which are born initially as popular movements. One of the calcifying diseases of movements for good is the establishment of authority by the perceived leadership of a movement.
Pastors and popes, imams and rabbis, lamas and shamans, all these authorities have contributed more misery to humankind than enlightenment. My own sense of humanism is based in its foundation in peer, human relationships, which are equal and mutually educational. The sum of intelligence in these relationships exceeds any amount of intelligence in the one human brain of any authority figure.
The fellowship, equality and mutual learning of movements in their early development is what powers them. The establishment of hierarchy and authority usually saps them of their creativity and goodness, as greed and ego corrupt. Once the process of a movement yields to this force, it is no longer an open, free movement of people of like minds. It becomes a bureaucracy, which exists for itself and for the support of its management.
While this seems increasingly unavoidable in the materialist, media-driven world of this time, I am optimistic enough to believe that this process is not inevitable in this Humanism movement that is currently developing with the help of Greg Epstein and many others. I hope that this new Humanism can develop as a cooperative fellowship of equals, which can draw comfortably on the expertise of individuals for the common good, without ceding to anyone, or group, the 'last word' of authoritarian orthodoxy.
