I feel ill disagreeing over philosophy with people like my Galician friend Ivan, a poet whose creed is inspired by a good heart. There are some people whose philosophies apparently come from a base of blackness or utter egoism. Notwithstanding, I think Karl Marx had a good heart, and probably so did Jesus, and so many others whose philosophies became the basis for civilizations gone awry, typified by the fall of the Soviet Union and the Spanish Inquisition.
Philosophies must be updated. Like urban infrastructure that is most efficient to adopt new technology, ideas must be revamped and continuously put in perspective with new discoveries and understanding.
The most important aspect of a philosophy is something that every one throughout history seems to lack: it must begin with awareness that it is contrived. Philosophy should be a tool to help humans, most of whom are living in a human-created environment, organize societies to be happy, efficient and harmonious. Philosophy should never become the static constitution of a dynamic and incessantly learning human society.
But this is precisely what has happened with Christianity, and Islam, and Buddhism, and now Humanism. Ivan is a typical zealot in his humanism. He could say reasonably that his philosophy is based on the belief that a system which regards individual health and freedom should be the aggregate goal of any collective or individual decisionmaking. However, the basis of Ivan’s philosophy is the dogmatic assumption that to harm humanity is the ultimate evil.
Ivan did not even seem to be aware of the basis of his own philosophy, a predicament I have found to be quite common. When I asked for his argument for exalting humans as supernatural, he conjectured on the existential differences between humans and nonhumans. This conjecture was based on his and other’s extrapolations about nonhumans - derived out of defiance of what they could have read in any textbook from biology 101, anthropology 101, and genetics 101. But so many humanists have taken all these classes!
To support the dogma that humans are the ultimate good, humanism purports to explicate humanity as better than nonhumanity. That is, Ivan began a circular logic of explaining that humans are the ultimate good because they are superior to nonhumans in certain attributes, which are superior attributes because they are human. And superior attributes are, to Ivan, those that are more complex in the manner that they are complex for humans.
Circular logic is pervasive in this form of humanism, but if it were not enough to undermine, the extrapolations upon which it is based are most likely false - based on information we have had since before
Sure, it appears to us that human art is more refined than that of hummingbirds, but is being more refined a reason to say that humans are existentially superior to hummingbirds? This would circular logic indeed, especially since hummingbirds fly better, see better, and hear better than humans.
To be fair though, most humanists with whom I have conversed base their reason for valuing human life over all else in light of the fact that human culture is more refined, complex, and, most importantly, that human culture is more an integral part of our existence. (Actually everyone with whom I have spoken simply said that “because humans have culture and ‘animals’ don’t”, an untruth I will ignore here for the purpose of a more refined argument).
There are so many problems with this argument. First, they usually fail to define ´culture.’ Second, given many definitions of culture I have seen, this assumption may not be true. Third, to say that a human characteristic is the reason why humans are superior in value is, again, a circular argument. Finally, from the perspective of the grand history of the earth it seems ludicrous to choose a basis of ranking today’s terrestrial inhabitants that is ephemeral and so often in direct opposition to nature. It seems to me more appropriate to rank species (if we must) based on aspects that are more universal throughout the history of the biosphere, like longevity or even the capacity for physical enjoyment. We avoid discussing the reasons why we value species based on how human they are.
Religious humanism makes us so unaware that we do not see the dichotomy in sending a 14-year old drug addicted mother to prison for infanticide, while a person who performs surgical experiments on unanaesthetized Rhesus monkeys is considered an altruist. Another example is that the plight of non-captive Rhesus monkeys in
If humanism is going to be the world religion (which the UN charter may portend), it desperately needs more popular scrutiny, and to become reasonable it needs to shirk this last bastion of civilized prejudice: speciesism. If there must be dogma, let it be compassion, and let the compassion be universal. Otherwise, humanism will simply be another sophistic religion that is buckling more and more under the weight of its unquestioning adherents.
