Humanists, the Happy Heathens

Introduction

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Humanism Overview

1:45Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

1:56Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's chalk and cherries here, too. And this is Stuff You Should Know about humanism, which I find fairly relatable in a lot of ways, but in other ways, not necessarily. Yeah, can we say what Livia titled this one? She's been really killing it lately. She has. Go ahead. This is on humanism, the bright side of being a godless heathen.

2:29That's right. I was looking for that AHA definition because that put it about as good as anything in this whole article. The American Humanist Association, is it an association? Yes, they are associated. Yeah, they put it like this. It's a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism or other supernatural beliefs, bit of a dig, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good. And, of course, if you don't know what theism is,

3:01we're talking about, you know, religion and God. So it's like, hey, you can be a good person and have a moral and ethical center and strive to do those things without God at the center of it. Yeah, for sure. And most humanists, yeah, I think it's fair to say most, are atheists or at least agnostic. Yeah. At the very least, if they do believe in a God, he's not an interventionist God. He's not playing a role in our lives day to day.

3:34Maybe you could also interchange that definition of God with the universe or nature or something like that, but not God in any religious way whatsoever. Yeah. And, in fact, like, if you do believe that, a lot of, like, strict humanists will say, well, you can't really be a humanist because not believing in God in that sense is a core part of humanism. And a lot of other people say, hey, you're a humanist. Who are you to tell me what I believe? Yeah. And the humanist says, you got me.

4:05Yeah. Yeah, and as we'll see, you know, it had kind of been tangled up with religion here and there until it kind of landed eventually where it did. And we're going to talk a little bit about the history, though. That term humanism goes back to at least Cicero in 1st century BCE Rome when that very famous writer, and I think lawyer and statesman, used the word humanitus to describe, like, people developing or the development of these qualities,

4:35these virtuous qualities that Chuck will talk about, like a moral and ethical center, compassion. Good judgment, like being a good person and doing good things. Yeah. And then we leapfrog all the way over to the Renaissance, and you'll note that we leapt over what are called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, medieval era. The Renaissance humanists are the ones who gave us the term and the idea of the Dark Ages. That there was a part of history

5:06where essentially the church ruled everything with an iron fist, corruption was rampant, and people were removed from their relationship with God, and the church was inserted. And what these earliest Renaissance humanists did, they were all Christians to a person, most of them Catholics, too. They changed that whole idea and said, what happens if we get the church out from between the individual and God? And, you know, there's a connection between you,

5:37this person, who is important and matters just because you're a person, and God who made you. And this is where the very beginnings of humanism find themselves, even though no one in the Renaissance would have called themselves a humanist because that concept didn't really exist quite yet. This is the first step. Yeah. I mean, looking back, we apply the tag to a lot of different people. We're going to talk about some of them, but yeah, they wouldn't have called themselves that then. And Petrarch was probably looked at as maybe the first humanist or the first modern man, sometimes called.

6:10And in the Renaissance, it was a pretty hot ticket, depending on what crowd you ran with. If you were among the elites in the Renaissance, you might have hired humanist scholars to come and teach your kids all about like sort of the moral systems of the classical era to, you know, and very much in the effort, like you were saying, to bring us out of what they call the Dark Ages. And some aspects of this whole movement in the Renaissance included three things we're going to kind of touch on here, realism, dignity of the individual human,

6:43and application of learning, like putting it into practice. Yeah. So humanism contrasted with scholasticism, which had been going on for hundreds of years. It was essentially the church's form of teaching. And that was basically reconciling the concept of reality that came from the classical Greeks like Aristotle with scripture and basically using scripture to explain the world and reality as it is. That's right. And these humanists came along and they were like,

7:14what happens if we stop doing that? What happens if we just study the classical Greeks and just basically also still stay Christians, but stop using this scripture, this received wisdom that the church gives us? What if we study it ourselves instead? And that brings up that other, the second part you mentioned, which is the dignity of the individual human. Up to this point, individuality was not prized. You were not supposed to look inside yourself. You're supposed to look outside at the glory of God.

7:46You yourself, if you paid too much attention to yourself, that was a quick one-way trip to hell for you when you died. The humanists were like, no, let's look inside ourselves. Like we're important. You, the individual is important. Yeah. And also part of that first one with the realism was that we are flawed. So if we want to learn about each individual and human, the nature of what it means to be human, we have to look at the bad stuff too, like the devices and the disorders and things like that. Uh, and then that last one that I mentioned

8:16was application of learning. Like all this stuff is great, but it's not navel gazing, like, or we don't want it to be navel gazing. We want to actually like stimulate action. Yeah. And you're not learning just so you can give more money to the church or something like that too. And if this sounds a little bit like, um, like Protestant thought about the connection between the individual and God, um, that's exactly right. These thinkers eventually led to the Protestant Reformation, which basically pushed the face of the church

8:47off to the side and said, you and me, God, we're connected. Yeah, for sure. Um, and it'll also tie into the Unitarian church in a big way later on. Uh, a church that has interested me. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, uh, I like my Sundays free, so probably not going to go, but if any quote unquote church appeals to me at this age and where I am in life, uh, it's definitely those guys. Yeah. Those people that you see out and about at like 10 a.m. on a Sunday

9:18and give that little knowing head nod too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, um, something I think is worth pointing out real quick though too, Chuck, is everything we're talking about involves God. Even though the church has been pushed out of the way, God has not. God is still front and center. Christianity is still the most important thing around. And that is, this is the cradle of humanism. And one of the, um, frequent criticisms of modern humanism is that it's never really shaken off its birthright from Catholicism or Christianity,

9:51even though it opposes religion itself. We'll get more into that, but I just wanted to put that out there for the moment. And we're also talking about like coming out of a time where atheism like could get you killed. Yeah. You know, like saying that there is no God was, was, you know, was against the law and punishable by death. For sure. Yeah. But that started to change gradually around beginning in the 17th century. One of the people we have to thank for that

Renaissance Humanism

10:18is Francis Bacon. Yeah. Known as the father of empiricism. He also invented Bacon. And he also had a big hand into, um, coming up with the scientific method. Yeah, yeah. We talked about him and that. Yeah, for sure. Which has been largely abandoned by science in the last hundred years. Yeah. Well, uh, he argued for, um, really studying like the, like what we call social, social sciences now. He kind of kicked that off as well. Uh, the systemic study of like the human passions. Um, but all these people that we're going to talk about here

10:48in the next little bit were, uh, were, were Christians. So this is sort of, um, this is where it was still a time when it was still tangled up. Uh, even though they had these ideas, because all of these people, uh, Bacon and this next person, uh, Thomas Hobbes were Christian. Yeah. And the fact that there are Christians who identify themselves as humanists and vice versa, um, that, that goes to show you like the, that those two things are not incompatible. Yeah. That you can be religious and care about human beings.

11:20Um, and like, they don't have to oppose one another. Although humanists have eventually said, yes, they do. Yeah. I mean, that's the deal, right? Uh, I mean, did I read that correctly? Is that, is the modern humanist movement was really where they were like, we're really separate from and, and congruous with a belief in God. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So we mentioned Bacon. What about Thomas Hobbes? Because he came up with the social contract, which is basically like you and me, we basically allow a government to rule us in exchange for protecting us

11:51from nasty, brutish, short lives, which we would otherwise have without the state or without society, right? That doesn't sound very humanist, even though it's human centered, because he assumed that humans were essentially bad and would club you over the head and kill you first chance they got. That's why we need government, according to Hobbes. But he's considered, um, one of the early humanists for sure. Yeah. And he was Christian as well, but he did not write a lot, like in his writings, didn't write a lot about God. Uh, he kind of put that to the side

12:21and said, you know, if we want to understand who we are and what, what it means to be human, um, we have to look, look at it through a, just a very sort of secular, uh, and like very reasoned approach. Right. Exactly. Um, so humanist, rationalism to understand ourselves in the world. Yeah. Thomas Paine was also one. He was probably, yeah, he was like the first person that you can point to and be like, that guy's a humanist. He even says so himself in not so many words

12:52or more than those words. Uh, he was a pamphleteer who helped get the American Revolution started despite moving to America just two years before the revolution started. Yeah. That's how effective his pamphlets were. Yeah. He was very, uh, forward thinking. He was arguing very early against slavery. Uh, he's, you know, had an idea for what we might call universal basic income now. Very much believe in the equality of all humans. And he has this quote that's, that's really pretty great. Like, I'm a big pain guy

13:22after reading up more on him. Uh, my country is the world and my religion is to do good. Pretty, pretty nice. Yeah. There's pretty much no better way to sum up the humanist view in, in a nutshell than that. Yeah. Um, the French Revolution also, there's a couple of people who get called out a lot. Jacques Hubert and Antoine Francois Mamoro, um, because they established the cult of reason where they would actually go in and seize churches in France during the revolution

13:52and, um, repurpose them, I saw, into temples of reason. Um, I read about them on The Collector, which is a great website that explains all sorts of different philosophies and stuff. Great website. Anyway, the French Revolution itself basically said, Catholic Church, you're out. And then they were like, okay, well, wait a minute. We're all about reason and enlightenment. What are we going to fill the vacuum left by getting rid of the Catholic Church? And all of these ideas like the cult of reason kind of came along, which was, um,

14:24essentially create humanist temples to logic in, in humans, in humanity. Yeah. Remove God from the equation altogether. Yeah, for sure. Uh, and Buddy, do you think I like Thomas Paine? Don't get me started on Jeremy Bentham because after reading up on Jeremy Bentham, I wish I had named my daughter Jeremy Bentham Bryant. That would have been a great name. I really missed an opportunity because Jeremy Bentham was a great dude. He was working for welfare, uh, fair programs for the poor, uh, early on.

14:54He didn't believe in slavery, obviously, uh, child labor. And this was like decades before anyone else was talking about this stuff. Um, he was into animals and we'll see that's some of the criticism from humanists is that they, they kind of stop at humans. And that's not to say that humanists can't be like pro-animal or pro-environment because most of them probably are. But Bentham very early on, uh, when it talked about like the, the suffering of animals, he said the question is not can they reason because that's what animals were just animals

15:24because they can't reason and they don't have brains like us. He combated that with the question is not can they reason nor can they talk but can they suffer? Yeah. What a thing to say in the 1700s. Yeah. I'm glad you explained what you meant by he was into animals because I was confused at first. Oh, come on. One of the other cool things about Jeremy Bentham is he willed his body to science. He donated it to science early on. Um, uh, and they used it. They said, thanks a lot, buddy. Here's your skeleton back because as part of his wishes,

15:56he wanted to remain at University College London which he helped found as a secular college open to everybody and, um, he's still under glass at the University College of London dressed up in his own clothes. He's got wax hands with gloves on. He has a wax head and apparently he originally wanted his head to be part of it. So they used some, uh, I guess some Maori technique of desiccation and it didn't go very well. Um, and his desiccated head

16:26is still around but they're like, Jeremy, we do not, you do not want us to leave this on your body because you look so great with the wax head. Um, we're just going to keep this separate under glass itself. Yeah. Up with Jeremy Bentham. Uh, you know, you mentioned the secular college. Like, he went well beyond like separation of church and state where he was like, colleges should have nothing to do, there should not be religious colleges. He, he really wanted to draw a strong divide, uh, between God and kind of all the institutions. Right.

16:57He was also the father of utilitarianism, which is essentially if, um, at its, at its worst, killing one person saves two people, then you kill that person. Mm-hmm. Which gave us things like the trolley problem as a utilitarian, um, thought experiment, essentially. Um, Bentham, I think, didn't really think that way, but he was basically like, we want to maximize the most good for the most people. Yeah. That's the way he developed it. Yeah, pretty cool stuff. You want to take a break?

17:27Yeah, I think we're off to a hot start. Uh, so I'm going to go take a cold shower and we'll be right back.

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Modern Humanism

20:07we're back and we're going to talk about the development of humanism in the way that we know it today. Because up to this point, we've been talking about little bits here, little bits there, that all together changed the world and essentially took all the power in the West, especially Europe and eventually the United States, away from the church and organized religions in general and said, no, there's a way for you to live a upstanding,

20:37meaningful, ethical life without even believing that there's a God or an afterlife. And here's how we're going to do it. Yeah, I mean, the idea at the time, and there's still people that believe this in 2026, which is pretty scary, is that if you were not religious and devout, then you were a heathen and you were like morally bereft. And those like people very early on stood up and were like, that doesn't make any sense. Like, why is it? I don't believe in God. Like, like people have feelings in their heart or whatever.

21:08And someone realized like, why is it that in my heart, like, I don't believe in a God, but like, I believe in doing like really good things. Like, why are those, why are those two things have to be tied together? And that was humanism. Or if you look at philosopher and theologian from Germany, Friedrich Niedhammer, the term was humanismus in 1808. And that is, he was kind of talking about that Renaissance humanism, those studies that they were doing with the,

21:38the people that are trying to sort of reform education during the Renaissance. Yeah, but very quickly, people latched onto that. He just kind of came along at the right, he was in the right place at the right time. Yeah. Which was Germany because Germany eventually became kind of the cradle of modern humanism. And eventually humanismus, what we would call humanism now, we just dropped the US or the US. And if you kind of subscribe to that, it was way beyond the way

22:08that you interpreted scripture. It was, you supported women's equality. Yeah. You were all about separation of church and state. You had compassion for all people, not just people that looked like you and had the same amount of money as you. Right. You cared about actually doing stuff to get the government to take care of poverty and things like that. Like Quakers, the conception of Quakers at this time is a really good like view of what

22:39it meant to be a humanist at the time because you still believed in God, but you really cared about other people. And this was fairly new for Europe at the time. Yeah, for sure. You mentioned the French Revolution, but in the 19th century, during the time of all those European revolutions, it also started to kind of touch on socialism, of course, and like this idea of a utopian society that we could strive for. It was starting to become a little more acceptable

23:09in the United States at the time where, well, partially because of German immigration to the United States and you were talking about them being the cradle, but also Charles Darwin and just this idea that you don't need these theist beliefs to be a good person and there's something called free thought that can happen. Like free thinking is very much at this time aligned with deism.

23:39Yeah, for sure. And free thought essentially as a concept is, it's just questioning everything. Yeah. Especially received wisdom. You stop and ask like, well, wait a minute, why do I think that? How do I know that? You just challenge all of your own assumptions and by doing that, you can kind of free yourself from being indoctrinated by the man, essentially. So this is when, it seems to me, the progressive movement in the United States really started to come about. Yeah. Right? This is the- Mid-1800s.

24:10Mid to late, yeah, 19th century. One of the next big things that happened was the establishment of the New York Society for Ethical Culture by a guy named Felix Adler. And this became essentially the ethical movement, E and capital E, capital M. And they were basically like the very first humanists. They tried to essentially provide the same thing, that same moral upstanding structure that the church provides for so many people

24:40to people who don't believe in God. Yeah. And not more than that, but alongside that, I think they realized that the church had something that people clearly liked in tradition and in ceremony. And they were like, hey, if we're going to be a thing, like maybe we should have some of that stuff too. So they organized Sunday services and they said, how about a deist marriage ceremony? Like kind of substituting

25:11religious ritual for non-religious ritual because people like that kind of stuff. Yeah. They're like, how about atheist holy communion? And the humanists are like, how does that work? Right. They're like, we don't know, this is new. We're just throwing everything we can at the wall, see what sticks. Yeah. Maybe instead of the blood and body of Jesus, it's just crackers and grape juice. There you go. And they were like, grape juice or flavor aid? And they were like, grape juice. We used grape juice. We used grape juice at our church because even the Baptists

25:41did not take wine as communion. It's kind of funny to think about. I remember moving to the South and being like, you don't drink any wine? Like even in church? Yeah. Because I was raised Catholic, right? Welch's, baby. So everybody drinks wine. Yeah. That's funny. So this whole kind of evolution is still going on in the United States in particular. It started to take off. Humanism really is huge today or through the 20th century in the U.S. and the U.K. They're kind of like hotbeds for humanist activity.

26:12And the people who were attracted to this were very frequently liberal intellectuals, philosophers, literati, intelligentsia, like academic elites and people who ran in their circles, which included communists at the time in the 20s and 30s, like basically super radical liberal thinkers were very much attracted to the early establishment of modern humanist organizations. Yeah, 100%.

26:43That in the United States in particular, the University of Chicago in 1927 was one place where it really got cooking. There were efforts there by students and some professors who belonged, and this is where the Unitarian Church comes into play. They were Unitarian Church members, which is technically a Protestant denomination. It's very political, has always been very politically progressive.

27:09And in this group in Chicago, there were a lot of ministers even and theologians who had non-Christian ideas that they were putting forth, like transcendentalism and they had a magazine. They organized what was called the Humanist Fellowship and put out the New Humanist magazine. It was like all ads, though. Yeah, probably so. All ads and perfume samples. Well, and at the very end, they had the little fold thing like the Mad Magazine did. Right. It's very popular.

27:39But they were trying to move Unitarianism, even in 1927, completely away from theism. Unitarianism. Yeah. And Unitarianism as a church was like, yeah, let's go and then stop. Just short. And that's where it stays today, essentially. Right. They're like, you don't believe in God? Great. You can be a member of our church. Do you believe in God? Yeah. Great. You can be a member of our church. It's Universalist, Unitarian. Yeah. Right? Should we talk about the manifestos?

28:11Yeah. Because you can't have liberal thinkers and communists together and not come up with a manifesto, right? It's just going to naturally bubble up from those people being together.

Humanist Manifestos

28:21And in 1933, I think, they drafted the first Humanist Manifesto.

28:28And it basically said, so, and this is where, this is one reason why religious people don't like humanists. It took direct aim at religion, right? Yeah. And then this is why people who aren't religious don't like humanists. It also called humanism its own type of religion.

28:49Take that, Chuck, and run with it.

Humanism and Technology

28:51Mixed messages. Can I read this bit from the 73 manifesto? Yeah. Or wait, this was, okay, the 73 was the manifesto part two. Yeah, sorry, 1938, I believe. 33 was the first one, I think. Thank you, we got there. Okay, the 33 was the first one. 73 was manifesto two, and this, this was from 73. Using technology wisely, we can control our environment, conquer poverty, markedly reduce disease, extend our lifespan,

29:22significantly modify our behavior, alter the course of human evolution and cultural development, unlock vast new powers, starting to sound a little bit like Scientology there, and provide humankind with unparalleled opportunity for achieving an abundant and meaningful life. Yeah, it also smacks of transhumanism too. Oh, yeah, yeah. Which is denoted by H plus. Stellark. It's a branch, yeah, it's a branch of humanism where you graft a human ear onto your forearm. Right, oh boy. Man, I can't believe you remembered his name. It just came right up.

29:53If you're a long time listener, you remember when we first talked about Stellark, the transhumanist who did in fact graft a human ear to his arm, complete with a little speaker, like it,