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Objections to Humanism:
- GenresPhilosophy
128 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1967
About the author
H.J. Blackham
17 books5 followersHarold John Blackham (31 March 1903 – 23 January 2009) was a leading British humanist philosopher, writer and educationalist. He has been described as the "progenitor of modern humanism in Britain".
Blackham has been Chairman, Social Morality Council, Great Britain, and a former director of the British Humanist Association.
In 1977, he was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. He is on the editorial board of The Humanist. In 1980, he signed the Secular Humanist Declaration.
He has written that “Unitarianism in England is negligible intellectually. Of course, the Hibbert survives and holds a place, but that is because it is open to all comers in its fairly broad field. The Unitarians here are hostile to humanism. They are diminishing and count for little.”
Blackham, Jaap van Praag, and Julian Huxley] were the key founders of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), an organization which in 1974 granted him a Humanist Award “for his long and creative service to humanism in England and in the world.” From 1944 to 1965, he had edited the Ethical Union’s Plain View. In 1978, Blackham received the group‘s special award “for 25 years of devoted service to IHEU.”
In the New Humanist (July 1993), he is interviewed by Jim Herrick and recalls his involvement with humanistic causes. At the age of ninety, his sharp mind recalled his early interest in religion, his meeting Stanton Coit, his teaching philosophy and current affairs, his becoming chairman of the Ethical Union, his being in the Auxiliary Fire Service during World War II, his involvement in the founding of the British Humanist Association, his involvement with the World Union of Freethinkers, his working with Julian Huxley, and the writing of his several books.
Stalin, he stated, “was not a Marxist-Leninist in his heart. He paid lip-service to the creed, but was a Russian Czar, an imperialist who used the dictatorship of the proletariat to extend the dominion of the Russian State. The KGB was a continuation of the surveillance of the Czarist police-state.
Asked if liberal humanism is dead, Blackham reacted by saying, “How can it be dead really? It may be outmoded, or not the vogue, but what is the implication of saying it’s dead. Sartre said that liberalism was a betrayal to the Nazis of civilisation. To the liberal everything is worth entertaining, all is a level ground, everyone can exchange views. You have to make choices, you can’t be liberal in the sense of entertaining all things. But liberal humanism can’s possibly be dead. It is not merely, nor mainly an attitude: it is a commitment to which one gives priority.”
In 1993, Blackham completed a history of Western Europe from a new, transforming perspective, part of which was published in New Humanist. The work is entitled The Upshot of History, and it focuses on three claims to universality, those of Hellas, Zion, and Romanitas. They have led, he states, to our awareness of One World with its evident disorders, which he names: “disproportion between the prosperity enjoyed by the few industrialised nations and the penury endured by thousands of millions in the so-called Third World; the aggravation of over-population; the ecological damage, entailing serious threats to the survival of many species, and even of life on the planet; the existence and availability without adequate controls of annihilating weapons that make international security a political priority.” By recognizing such problems, he asserts, man has the chance to go beyond Hellas, Zion, and Romanitas. . . to universality.
His book, Six Existentialist Thinkers, became a popular university textbook.
He died on 23 January 2009 at the age of 105.
More: http://blackhamfellowships.org.uk/who...
http://infidels.org/library/modern/h_...
http://philosopedia.org/index.php/H._...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._J._Bl...
Blackham has been Chairman, Social Morality Council, Great Britain, and a former director of the British Humanist Association.
In 1977, he was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. He is on the editorial board of The Humanist. In 1980, he signed the Secular Humanist Declaration.
He has written that “Unitarianism in England is negligible intellectually. Of course, the Hibbert survives and holds a place, but that is because it is open to all comers in its fairly broad field. The Unitarians here are hostile to humanism. They are diminishing and count for little.”
Blackham, Jaap van Praag, and Julian Huxley] were the key founders of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), an organization which in 1974 granted him a Humanist Award “for his long and creative service to humanism in England and in the world.” From 1944 to 1965, he had edited the Ethical Union’s Plain View. In 1978, Blackham received the group‘s special award “for 25 years of devoted service to IHEU.”
In the New Humanist (July 1993), he is interviewed by Jim Herrick and recalls his involvement with humanistic causes. At the age of ninety, his sharp mind recalled his early interest in religion, his meeting Stanton Coit, his teaching philosophy and current affairs, his becoming chairman of the Ethical Union, his being in the Auxiliary Fire Service during World War II, his involvement in the founding of the British Humanist Association, his involvement with the World Union of Freethinkers, his working with Julian Huxley, and the writing of his several books.
Stalin, he stated, “was not a Marxist-Leninist in his heart. He paid lip-service to the creed, but was a Russian Czar, an imperialist who used the dictatorship of the proletariat to extend the dominion of the Russian State. The KGB was a continuation of the surveillance of the Czarist police-state.
Asked if liberal humanism is dead, Blackham reacted by saying, “How can it be dead really? It may be outmoded, or not the vogue, but what is the implication of saying it’s dead. Sartre said that liberalism was a betrayal to the Nazis of civilisation. To the liberal everything is worth entertaining, all is a level ground, everyone can exchange views. You have to make choices, you can’t be liberal in the sense of entertaining all things. But liberal humanism can’s possibly be dead. It is not merely, nor mainly an attitude: it is a commitment to which one gives priority.”
In 1993, Blackham completed a history of Western Europe from a new, transforming perspective, part of which was published in New Humanist. The work is entitled The Upshot of History, and it focuses on three claims to universality, those of Hellas, Zion, and Romanitas. They have led, he states, to our awareness of One World with its evident disorders, which he names: “disproportion between the prosperity enjoyed by the few industrialised nations and the penury endured by thousands of millions in the so-called Third World; the aggravation of over-population; the ecological damage, entailing serious threats to the survival of many species, and even of life on the planet; the existence and availability without adequate controls of annihilating weapons that make international security a political priority.” By recognizing such problems, he asserts, man has the chance to go beyond Hellas, Zion, and Romanitas. . . to universality.
His book, Six Existentialist Thinkers, became a popular university textbook.
He died on 23 January 2009 at the age of 105.
More: http://blackhamfellowships.org.uk/who...
http://infidels.org/library/modern/h_...
http://philosopedia.org/index.php/H._...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._J._Bl...
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 25, 2020
This wonderful little book is a collection of four essays of varying approaches and varying levels of competency, maturity, and intelligence, all related to the title issue. The introduction and the fourth essay are bookended by the same author. I'll go through the four essays and the introduction individually:
Intro) The intro was a good (albeit lengthy) appetizer meant to bring up some controversies and lay the groundwork for the essays to come. It was lively and elucidates what humanism is and isn't, and how it's seen as being born out of a negation of Christianity "when in reality" it's actually a secularization of the useful parts of religion, or as the first essay ponders, a "making-religious" of the secular (i.e. "salvaging" what is expedient).
Essay 1) The first essay was very fair in its approach, almost never delving into its own humanist dogmatism, which was refreshing. The author explained and then took on the issue of making humanism religious in a straightforward way, pointing out dead ends and absurdities, allthewhile giving Christianity and traditional religion its due when that was appropriate. I appreciated the nuance and the fraternal ethos that the writer used.
Essay 2) The second essay shot off in a somewhat funny direction by taking "sterility" in relation to virility, i.e. physiologically. This however didn't address humanism per se, but rather philosophy and philosophers, and bemoaned their oft-cerebral nature and how that ruins their philosophy. Only near the end does she get to the bread and butter of actually defining what it is that she means by Humanism, and this is the first of the sidesteps which occurs, and she paints a very extreme version of rationalism which she doesn't agree with, and then posits that humanism is an ongoing and dynamic alternative. This author obviously had the strongest command of language of any of the writers in the book and could have been imposing if not for the unpretentiousness of her prose, using such large and precise terms only when necessary, as Orwell would have been pleased to see.
Essay 3) The third essay was easily the most forgettable and least worthy to be included in this anthology. The author first sets up a strawman of his own design of what he thinks critics of humanism think of humanism. He points out how WWI killed and WWII buried the blindly hopeful progressivism of yore, but then he sidesteps the issue and says that's not true humanism. Then, in a short one or two page pivot when he actually deals with the issue, he then switches to a boring and neo-cliche critique of dogmatic, orthodox religion, specifically Christianity, pulling out all the steriotypical and tired stops, claiming Christians simply believe because "it's comfy" or "don't really believe but just hang onto old scaps of tradition" etc. I was helpfully reminded that the number of times a writer uses the word "obviously" is directly in inverse relation to their intelligence and maturity.
Essay 4) The fourth essay had a pervasive tone of finality (tempered with an agnostic modesty which superseded all the other essays, perhaps even the first essay). The author wasn't willing to make some grand claim about the efficacy of Humanism against Nihilism, and frankly it added to his credibility. I am not a Humanist, but I suppose this last objection was also the strongest one, so it made sense to save it to the end. The author, in an effort to competently and honestly face the question soon abandoned the palisades of philosophy and retreated to the fortress of the arts and literature, quoting Shakespeare and many others (explicitly and implicitly, both the "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech as well as the "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, [and our little life is rounded with a sleep]") in an effort to stem the tide. Ultimately the tone of the content of the last essay, as well as its agnostic humility were nice in contrast with the relative worthlessness of the previous essay (#3).
Intro) The intro was a good (albeit lengthy) appetizer meant to bring up some controversies and lay the groundwork for the essays to come. It was lively and elucidates what humanism is and isn't, and how it's seen as being born out of a negation of Christianity "when in reality" it's actually a secularization of the useful parts of religion, or as the first essay ponders, a "making-religious" of the secular (i.e. "salvaging" what is expedient).
Essay 1) The first essay was very fair in its approach, almost never delving into its own humanist dogmatism, which was refreshing. The author explained and then took on the issue of making humanism religious in a straightforward way, pointing out dead ends and absurdities, allthewhile giving Christianity and traditional religion its due when that was appropriate. I appreciated the nuance and the fraternal ethos that the writer used.
Essay 2) The second essay shot off in a somewhat funny direction by taking "sterility" in relation to virility, i.e. physiologically. This however didn't address humanism per se, but rather philosophy and philosophers, and bemoaned their oft-cerebral nature and how that ruins their philosophy. Only near the end does she get to the bread and butter of actually defining what it is that she means by Humanism, and this is the first of the sidesteps which occurs, and she paints a very extreme version of rationalism which she doesn't agree with, and then posits that humanism is an ongoing and dynamic alternative. This author obviously had the strongest command of language of any of the writers in the book and could have been imposing if not for the unpretentiousness of her prose, using such large and precise terms only when necessary, as Orwell would have been pleased to see.
Essay 3) The third essay was easily the most forgettable and least worthy to be included in this anthology. The author first sets up a strawman of his own design of what he thinks critics of humanism think of humanism. He points out how WWI killed and WWII buried the blindly hopeful progressivism of yore, but then he sidesteps the issue and says that's not true humanism. Then, in a short one or two page pivot when he actually deals with the issue, he then switches to a boring and neo-cliche critique of dogmatic, orthodox religion, specifically Christianity, pulling out all the steriotypical and tired stops, claiming Christians simply believe because "it's comfy" or "don't really believe but just hang onto old scaps of tradition" etc. I was helpfully reminded that the number of times a writer uses the word "obviously" is directly in inverse relation to their intelligence and maturity.
Essay 4) The fourth essay had a pervasive tone of finality (tempered with an agnostic modesty which superseded all the other essays, perhaps even the first essay). The author wasn't willing to make some grand claim about the efficacy of Humanism against Nihilism, and frankly it added to his credibility. I am not a Humanist, but I suppose this last objection was also the strongest one, so it made sense to save it to the end. The author, in an effort to competently and honestly face the question soon abandoned the palisades of philosophy and retreated to the fortress of the arts and literature, quoting Shakespeare and many others (explicitly and implicitly, both the "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech as well as the "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, [and our little life is rounded with a sleep]") in an effort to stem the tide. Ultimately the tone of the content of the last essay, as well as its agnostic humility were nice in contrast with the relative worthlessness of the previous essay (#3).
November 30, 2021
Overall an interesting read for those interested in the topic with interesting points made. The book consists of five essays related to the theme, although the third one is somewhat unclear about what it's talking about and debatably isn't even about Humanism. Despite that though the book still holds up.
September 6, 2018
3 3/4 stars
September 13, 2023
Worthwhile
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews