Some things stick in the mind

Shirley Dent*

Let me tell you about a couple of things that stuck in the adolescent mind of this writer when she was LBH (Living Before Humanism). A doubting, rapidly-lapsing London Anglo-Irish Catholic girl (labels, as Levi Fragell notes, are things twenty-first century Humanism is concerned with and I will return to this point later), I used to hang-out, knock-about, okay downright flirt, with the lads from the local Catholic College. And I remember a few of these lads getting, shall we say, over-excited and chanting pro-ira slogans: 'Oh-Ah-Up-the-ra' etc. Most-all of them-had about as much chance of a skirmish with the Provos as I have of an encounter with the Virgin Mary Incarnate. What stuck with me about this incident was the mashed up, but strongly spiced, commitment to a political position based on religious heritage. That's one point. The other point? There is/was no argument in these slogans. None. Whatever the political reasoning behind the struggle for an Irish (rather than Catholic) republic, or for power-sharing in Northern Ireland, it just completely gave way to religious romanticism. We hear a lot about the threat to humanist values from the religious right. I think humanist values are equally endangered by a reactionary religious romanticism.

So where do we go from here? The eminent historian and Humanist, Romila Thapar, said 'You cannot right the wrongs of history. They're already done'. But you can make a better future for humanity. This is Humanism's great potential. We are freethinkers, rationalists, unbounded by roots (particularly religious roots), but inspired by routes. Routes both as ways out for human suffering-be those routes scientific, political, social, cultural or aesthetic-and ways into what Babu Gogineni describes as 'our common humanity' and 'humankind's common destiny'. This is our great potential. But we have problems. We are stuck.

First, an observation. Go out in the street and ask a stranger-any stranger will do-:'Have you heard of any of these organizations: the IRA, Al-Qaeda, and last but not least, the IHEU?' I guarantee you that the vast majority will have heard of the first two, but will be nowhere near the foggiest with the last. To my mind this is a tragedy. But wait, I hear you protest, these are terrorist organizations. People have heard of them because of the terror they have unleashed on the world. So your argument is that in the battle for ideas-and that is what these terrorist organizations are ultimately about (think, for example, what focus has been thrown on political Islam's ideas by the World Trade Center attacks)-terror wins? Couragio, I say. Similarly, ask your stranger what they understand by Republicanism, Nationalism, Fundamentalism, Christianity, Islam and Humanism, and I suspect the one they will fumble for and fudge is Humanism. We can call ourselves whatever we like, label ourselves up to the eyeballs. Personally, I don't care what we call ourselves at a national or international level-there are bigger arguments to be won or lost-but if the idea, the vision, isn't clear and concise, then forget it. A name will not inspire commitment or instigate change. Ideas about how the world could be a better place will. At the end of the day, it is not for us to scratch our heads about a name. If those nine hundred million secularists out there commit themselves to the International Humanist body, they will let us know what they want to be called. The problem at the moment is that Humanism has lost its way as a leader. We need to reclaim the ideas at the heart of Humanism.

Before putting forward one conception of those ideas, let me, from my introductory comments, extrapolate on another problem facing us. Religion, in my lifetime, is still doing a good propaganda job. We are doing a bad one. Religion goes forward with emotion. It is not afraid to put its bloody martyrs on posters and billboards, to propagate the double binds of injustice turned into cause and brutalism romanticized.

Well let's talk about those other 'religious martyrs', the martyrs not for but to religion. The women stoned, beheaded and lashed under Shar'ia law last year. The 'rat children', whose plight Zaffarullah Khan exposed in his prize-winning essay for the IHEU International Essay Competition for Youth in 2000, deposited at a tomb in Gujarat when born to 'ensure' continued fertility for their parents-they have an iron-cap locked on their skulls, preventing mental development, they are mutilated and stunted before they are hardly aware of the world so that they may serve as human-collection plates in a tomb. The young girl in the 'civilized' USA, whipped to death by her Jehovah Witness parents as they administered the biblical punishment of forty lashes minus one three times. I could go on. I won't. In comparison with the above, I think ceremonies and care services should be the least concerns of the international body. They are undoubtedly needed and wanted, but individual countries have responded well to this need while paying due respect to those individual countries' cultural traditions and laws. We are not going to build a ground swell of support on the basis that someone wants a nice wedding or a good send-off. I will not apologize for feeling emotional about the above cases. We are so proud of our rationality. But we should not underestimate the power of emotion to spark a response, to make people aware, to make people committed to change. If Babu Gogineni is right that the 'Humanism of this century has to be an angry Humanism ... willing to assert itself', then let it be angry out there. Give the world these images of human victims nailed to the stake of religious servitude, deprived and dying in the name of the UN-provable, the intolerant, the inhumane. But give the world something else as well. Give the world reason. Reason which is an engagement of free and open debate.

We need instead to build an international momentum, a coherent network. IHEU needs to be the hub, the spyglass that focuses diverse beams. The trust-keeper of reason. Take the appalling story of the rat children-what is the international strategy for gaining media coverage for this story? How do we get it as a feature in the Guardian, the New York Times, Marie Claire? Where is our network of international media contacts? Who are our friends? Imagine we had an international group connected with the media, to whom we could feed stories. Imagine we had a group of eminent scientists, worldwide, whom we could support and who would support us. Imagine we had such a grouping in politics. Work needs to be done to nurture and gather those who are with us who have influence. Grass roots are great, but an influential network of supporters equals impact. We have more friends than we realise. And this is my far-from-immaculate conception of why we should bother to cohere, co-operate and co-exist in such a way. Because after the emotional shockwave, we don't ride out on a crest of emotion. We have an answer. What is the answer, you ask?

My answer is: I do not have the answer. This is the most rational and the only position I can take. The answers are out there and we need to stick to our guns to ensure that they are not lost, silenced, or discarded. Our strength is that we do not have one idea, but that Humanism is a forum for human ideas. It is this forum of free-expression and freethinking-the root-core and route-forward of progress and the scientific method-that is under attack at an international level. You do not have to be Lady Macbeth to say, in these circumstances, 'screw your courage to the sticking place.'

* Dr. Shirley Dent (1971, Great Britain) is Assistant Editor of the New Humanist and has completed a doctorate on Blake.