In a previous post I referenced Edge.org publisher, John Brockman, and his 2003 book The New Humanists: Science at the Edge.



In Brockman's own essay, which opens the book, he describes what he calls the "third culture"; the first culture being the intellectuals of the humanities, and the second culture being the scientists of the "hard" sciences. The third culture, as Brockman describes it, "consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, have taken the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are."

He claims that the "arts and the sciences are again joining together as one culture, the third culture."

The type of humanism to which Brockman refers is actually the specific academic disciplines of literature, history, philosophy/religion, visual and performing arts - commonly referred to as "academia." The type of humanism I address here in this blog is more a broad group of metaphysical, epistemological and ethical philosophies that appeal to the unique and universal human qualities. But I want to talk a little bit about Brockman's thesis before discussing the type of humanism I countenance, and how it may or may not relate to Brockman's articulation of humanism.

Brockman's speculation is an interesting intellectual indulgence in and of itself. He claims that in the Renaissance era (approximately the 15th Century) of human history, the word "humanism" was part of one intellectual whole which encompassed both the humanities and the sciences (think Leonardo, Michelangelo, etc.). But he feels that the 20th Century regressed somewhat:

In the twentieth century, a period of great scientific advancement, instead of having science and technology at the center of the intellectual world - of having a unity in which scholarship included science and technology along with literature and art - the official culture kicked them out. Traditional humanities scholars looked at science and technology as some sort of technical special product. Elite universities nudged science out of the liberal arts undergraduate curriculum - and out of the minds of many young people, who, as the new academic establishment, so marginalized themselves that they are no longer within shouting distance of the action.

I was an undergraduate from 1990 to 1994 at a small liberal arts college. My major was accounting and my minor was philosophy. My declared major in the beginning was computer science (or whatever it was called at my school), but I quickly dropped that when it became too abstract for my own tastes. But I do remember taking calculus and an introductory biology course; I don't remember much science beyond that - unless you include some of the 'softer' math like economics, statistics, and financial equations that were part of an education in accounting. Most of my curriculum was occupied with courses in literature, history, art history, psychology and philosophy. So I guess his claim appears somewhat reasonable, at least from my academic experience.

Brockman goes on to claim:

There are encouraging signs that the third culture now includes scholars in the humanities who think the way scientists do. Like their colleagues in the sciences, they believe there is a real world and their job is to understand it and explain it. They test their ideas in terms of logical coherence, explanatory power, conformity with empirical facts. They do not defer to intellectual authorities: Anyone's ideas can be challenged, and understanding and knowledge accumulate through such challenges. They are not reducing the humanities to biological and physical principles, but they do believe that art, literature, history, politics - a whole panoply of humanist concerns - need to take the sciences into account.

I personally think this is a good development. Brockman's unspoken assumption is that these people have a naturalistic view of the world, because they are using the methodology of science to explore their respective disciplines. In keeping with Brockman's vision of his Edge Foundation's project where the participants are "key thinkers in various fields...who are arguing with each other, learning from each other," he is not without his detractors, even within his own volume here:

John Horgan: If you essay was meant to provoke, it obviously succeeded. But it really works more as a kind of Nike ad for science than a serious analysis of science's relation to the humanities or culture as a whole...If people would rather read about Virginia Woolf's sex life - or watch Friends, for that matter - than wrestle with A Brief History of Time or The Origins of Order, I don't think they should have to feel like second class citizens.

Timothy Taylor: One has to confront the tricky problem that popular science often either preaches to the converted or, when it strays into more "humanistic" domains, makes an unwitting ass of itself....A real victory for science would consist not in sweeping away other aspects of existence, such as religion (not that it has any hope of doing so) but in respectfully deepening understanding of what it is to live and die as a human being and observing the universe from that perspective.

Marc D. Hauser: I read "The New Humanists" with interest, but actually think you have painted a caricature of both scientists and humanists...I am often shocked and appalled by scientists who have never read some of the classics of literature, who know little about history, who continue to ignore insights from philosophy. The finger can be pointed both ways.

And that's just a sample. The thing I like most about Brockman's project is precisely this kind of argument and debate. That's how progress gets made, ultimately. This is in stark contrast to the discourse that takes place within religious circles - at least within fundamentalist religious circles. I'm not comfortable speaking about more liberal religious thinkers, about whose discourse I know very little.

But I want to say a final word about what I would call the new "humanism." To me, the term "humanism" could first of all be characterized by a naturalistic world-view, which itself is built on the methodology of science: i.e., evidence-based empiricism. Additionally, it would eschew supernatural theories about nature and human nature in its attempts to address human as well as planetary concerns. By human concerns, I mean both pressing concerns such as poverty, war, and public policy; and more secondary concerns like meaning and purpose. It would encompass the humanities as a way of enriching and exploring the human experience, and it would utilize the scientific mindset to provide a springboard for further exploration in the humanities.

As Brockman indicates, many of the thinkers in his book come from a diversity of backgrounds, from both the 'humanities' and the 'sciences'; but the common thread in all of them is the naturalistic world-view. They look for natural explanations of phenomena, believing (rightly, in my opinion) that supernatural explanations are really explanatory dead ends: non sequitur deus ex machinas, if you will.

So while on this blog I promote and the world-view known as Naturalism, I sometimes wonder if there is a better term to describe it. The problem with the term 'naturalist' is that it, like so much in the English language, admits of several connotations: it could designate someone who is a student of the natural history of life; or someone who practices naturalism in art or literature; or someone who adopts philosophical naturalism - which would be the case with me. As I've noted in previous posts, and as Brockman's book shows, even the term 'humanist' can signify different domains. Even one of Brockman's essay detractors (Chris Anderson) highlights this problem when he says:

Are you sure you want to use the term "humanist" as a banner to unite under? [Richard] Dawkins's preferred banner of "atheist" has its own problems. If the goal is to reference Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, how about "Renaissance thinker"? Actually this would be a great forum for you to canvas alternatives. "Rationalist"? "Universalist"? There's a lot of historical baggage whichever way you turn.

Of course, there is also the term "Bright." Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett describes it as:

The time has come for us brights to come out of the closet. What is a bright? A bright is a person with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view. We brights don't believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny — or God. We disagree about many things, and hold a variety of views about morality, politics and the meaning of life, but we share a disbelief in black magic — and life after death.

The term "bright" is a recent coinage by two brights in Sacramento, Calif., who thought our social group — which has a history stretching back to the Enlightenment, if not before — could stand an image-buffing and that a fresh name might help. Don't confuse the noun with the adjective: "I'm a bright" is not a boast but a proud avowal of an inquisitive world view.

So it's not just a term, it's a movement. As an ethical atheist in today's America, I am sympathetic to the idea of a movement to gain a seat at the table of political and social discourse; but the term, as Dennett hints, is not without its controversy. I like the idea of coming up with a single umbrella term to unite the diversity of which Dennett speaks for political reasons, but I'm not convinced that the term 'bright' will accomplish this.

Tom Clark of The Center for Naturalism had a good discussion of this concern at his blog Memeing Naturalism:

...those who are naturalists in all but name might consider coming out as such (although the countersuggestible among them likely won’t). Atheists, secular humanists, skeptics and freethinkers are basically naturalistic in their worldview; a science-based, rational, empirical naturalism is their philosophical lodestone, even if it isn’t always explicit. Naturalism simply names the worldview that holds the world is of a piece, not divided into the natural vs. the supernatural, and naturalists are simply those that subscribe to naturalism.

But again, do we really need another ism, in this case naturalism? Well, if it’s an accurate, convenient label for what you believe on careful consideration to be the case, make use of it. Not to name your worldview, after all, leaves it at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace of belief, what Susan Blackmore would call the “meme-o-sphere.”








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There seem to be two divergent trends in the world these days, at least in the realm of human nature; namely, the ever accumulating body of evidence from the sciences that humans are not so unique as we like to think, and a resurgence of the traditional religious assertion that human beings are categorically different from the rest of the animal kingdom.

The main point of contention is human morality. Is it something that has evolved and has its beginnings in non-human primates, and possibly even certain non-primate animals? Or is it something implanted in us by God or some other intelligence at work in the universe?

One might ask what the significance of the debate is. Isn't this type of discussion merely the realm of pocket-protector-wearing scientists and bespectacled philosophers? Well, no. Opinions and beliefs about human morality invariably find their way into public policy. The increasing sophistication and precision of medical technology brings to the forefront heretofore unimagined ethical dilemmas; an increasingly visible and vocal homosexual populace challenges traditional human relationships; and the full-blown threat of terrorism and clash of ideologies makes us address cultural relativism.

By far the dominant view in America is that human morality is not only categorically different from anything that could be called morality in animals, but that God is the embodiment of, or the gold standard for, Morality with a capital 'M'. In other words, there is an objective Morality to which all human beings are bound; there is an independent standard by which we are able to judge right and wrong, good and evil. And this God is the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible.

A consequence of this view is that we can therefore legitimately judge the actions of others, whether privately or publicly, and rebuke them with the sanction of Divine authority. Of course this has implications for public policy, as anyone who has access to a TV or a newspaper can plainly see.

But here we run into a problem: not everyone, even within the Judeo-Christian milieu, has the exact same ideas of what is right and what is wrong. It seems we can all agree that things like murder, rape, and theft are immoral and ought not to be done regardless of religious belief, or even no religious belief, if only for the reason that prescriptions against those things make civil society possible.

Alonzo Fyfe over at the Atheist Ethicist blog draws the distinction between morality and what he calls religious culture:

The view that I will present will divide religious prescriptions into two classes. One class is properly and correctly linked to ‘morality’. This is a class that transcends different religions and even non-religious belief. This is the class of prescriptions that can legitimately be forced upon others. The second class consists of those prescriptions that belong only to a particular religion. I am going to call this class ‘religious culture’. These are prescriptions that cannot be legitimately forced upon others.

Prescriptions against things like murder, rape, and theft fall within the realm of morality, whereas things like what types of food or what types of consensual relationships are permissible fall within the realm of religious culture. I think many if not most Americans would be up in arms if they were forbidden to eat beef, pork or shellfish. On the other hand, our civil society would undoubtedly collapse into chaos if murder were legalized.

Of course, I'm stating the obvious here.

Many Christian laypeople as well as clergy turn to Christian apologist C.S. Lewis because he argued that human beings are intuitively aware of a standard of behavior to which they feel justified in holding their fellow human beings. He calls this the Law of Human Nature, or the Law of Right and Wrong. He claims that all humans possess this innate knowledge, even if they don't regularly follow it.

As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.

Lewis anticipates the objection that what he's really talking about is the "herd instinct":

Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law. We all know what if feels like to be prompted by instinct...it means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way...But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not.

He goes on to say that there may be two instincts, or impulses: a desire to help, and a desire to not help; but that there is a third thing involved, and this third thing is characterized by a feeling of 'ought': one ought to help even if one doesn't want to. Lewis wrote this in the mid-1940's; our concept of a herd instinct - or even instincts in general - has since been refined to a degree unimagined by Lewis.

Philosopher Tamler Sommers recently interviewed primatologist Frans de Waal for The Believer magazine. From Sommers' introduction to the interview:

Until recently, biologists thought such complex behavior—behavior with an undeniable moral dimension—was exclusive to human beings. As much as anyone in the world, the primatologist Frans de Waal is responsible for changing this perception....de Waal has illustrated the uncanny similarities between human beings and our primate relatives. De Waal has not restricted himself to descriptions of behavior, however. He is famous for his willingness to enter into the largely taboo world of animal emotions, where research is routinely dismissed as “anthropomorphizing.” The result is an impressive array of evidence suggesting that we are not the only species to have moral feelings.

It is significant to note that serious studies of chimpanzee behavior did not take place until the 1970's, well after Lewis' informal treatise on Christianity; indeed, well after his death in 1963. But Lewis' engaging exposition is widely considered by many Christians to be a watertight case for the truth of Christianity, as well as for the truth of an objective standard of morality.

Secular moral philosophers throughout the ages have likewise attempted to discover an objective morality. They relied mainly on the power of human reason (or Reason with a capital 'R') to discover such a standard. However, the 18th Century Enlightenment philosopher David Hume argued convincingly that the proper domain of human reason covers things like mathematics and logic, while knowledge of the way things are in the world is derived from the senses. But neither of these methods can provide us with any set of principles for proper conduct. Morality thus falls under the domain of preference, and reason is then employed to justify our preferences. As Hume famously said: Reason is the servant of the passions.

But more on that in a minute.

Frans de Waal's work seems to indicate that the seeds of morality lie within our animal lineage:

BLVR: Much of your work recently has been aimed at correcting another misconception—that morality is exclusively a human invention, something that evolved long after we split from other apes. Do you think apes and bonobos are moral species? Do they exhibit moral behavior?

FDW: Well, I usually don’t call it moral behavior. I tend to call it building blocks or prerequisites for morality. I don’t think that chimpanzees are moral beings in the human sense. But they do have empathy, sympathy, reciprocity. They share food, resolve conflicts. All of these elements are present in human morality. So what I argue is that the basic psychology of the great apes is an essential element of human morality. Humans add things to that, making our morality far more complex. And that’s why I don’t want to call chimpanzees moral beings exactly.

BLVR: Meanwhile, your most recent book, Primates and Philosophers, attacks the view that human beings aren’t really moral, never mind nonhumans. You argue against the view that human morality is a thin veneer, a kind of cultural overlay or hypocritical mask covering our deeply selfish animal nature. You see this as fundamentally misguided because of the connection between our morality and animal emotions.

FDW: The interesting thing about my position is that it’s really the old Darwinian position: human morality is an outflow of primate sociality. That’s how Darwin saw it—it’s an outgrowth of the social instincts. It’s a moral sentimentalism—the view that emotions drive morality. In the last thirty years, people have abandoned that view. They all take this position that evolution could never have produced morality, because evolution produces only selfish, nasty, aggressive individuals. And obviously human morality is a way of going beyond that. But if you read Darwin’s book The Descent of Man, it’s very obvious that Darwin himself did not agree with this view at all.

Now this of course doesn't prove or even imply that there is an objective standard of morality independent of human nature. And neither does this understanding of human and animal behavior resemble the 'herd instinct' Lewis speaks of. Under de Waal's view, it's perfectly reasonable that something as complex as moral behavior could be thought of as an instinct (or a confluence of instincts); thus there's no need to posit a 'third thing' independent of natural human instincts.

Now getting back to the 'Reason is the servant of the passions' bit. Tamler Sommers also interviewed social and moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who argues for what he calls the 'social intuitionist model' of morality, where we intuitively judge human thought and behavior first, and then attempt to justify our judgment with reasons. He further argues that we engage in providing reasons not to appeal to an objective standard of morality, but to convince others of the rightness of our judgment.

BLVR: I want to talk about the philosophical implications of your model for a moment. In particular, I thought the social intuitionist model makes plausible the claim that there is no such thing as objective moral truth, even though human beings believe that some of their moral judgments are objectively true.

JH: If anybody thinks that moral truths are going to be facts about the universe, that any rational creature on any planet would be bound by, then no such facts exist. I think that moral truths are like truths about beauty, truths about comedy. Some comedians really are funnier than others. Some people really are more beautiful than others. But these are true only because of the kinds of creatures we happen to be; the perceptual apparatus—apparati—that we happen to have. So moral facts emerge out of who we are in interaction with the people in our culture.

One of my favorite quotes is from Max Weber: “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun.” So I think that with morality, we build a castle in the air and then we live in it, but it is a real castle. It has no objective foundation, a foundation outside of our fantasy, but that’s true about money; that’s true about music; that’s true about most of the things that we care about.

So what de Waal and Haidt are saying has been misinterpreted as an objective Moral Law is really a predisposition of our nature as social animals, fueled by powerful intuitions which themselves are a result of emotions born of that same social interaction.

In other words, there is a Moral Law - but it is not objective and it is not independent of animal human nature.









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