Human identities

The five keynote speakers at the Utrecht Conference of the University of Humanist Studies were David Norris from Ireland, Grazia Marchiano from Italy, Alexandre Zinoviev, a Russian now resident in Munich, Daniel Callahan, from New York, and Stephen Toulmin whose lecture is published in an edited version on page 6. The themes covered European identity, humanist identity in East and West, communality and freedom.

Senator David Norris has been elected to the Irish Senate as the representative of Trinity College, University of Dublin. He is the first openly gay man to be so elected and he was the successful litigant in a case brought before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg which brought about the reform of the Irish laws on homosexuality.

He started by asking what it means to be European. ‘Does being European diminish or strengthen our sense of Irishness, Englishness, Frenchness etc? To what extent are we prepared to sacrifice the smaller identity of nationhood for pan-European aspirations?’ He then asked what elements constitute identity. ‘On a national level these must, I think, include such elements as language, culture, currency and foreign policy objectives.’

The EEC began as an economic rather than ethical union, and there remains doubts, as indicated by the Swedish Foreign Minister, Baroness Margaretha Af Ugglas: ‘after the triumph over an evil, but familiar, era that has passed into history, we see symptoms of a general identity crisis – on a transatlantic level, on a European level as well as on national levels. The feeling of uncertainty also contributes to ethnic and social tensions, xenophobia, nostalgic dreams of simple solutions. These are tendencies which, if not countered may also threaten the development of our own societies and our won democracies.

Following the disappearance of the Iron curtain, ‘national identities have been challenged externally by supranational structures on the one hand and internally by ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities on the other. Within the community itself we have witnessed the rise of neofascism and xenophobia, while just outside its borders but still very much within the wider Europe, and less than fifty years after the doors of gas chambers clanked shut on the last victims in the name of racial purity, we have listened in horror as a new obscenity was coined – ethnic cleansing.’

David Norris suggested that personal identities are threatened by the new uncertainty and fluidity. He was impressed by the introduction to the University of Humanist Studies: ‘The humanitarian potential of science, formulated as science with a human face is taken as a frame of reference. It does not refer to a kind of technical rationality but to a reasonability and spiritual values. The science of the human face includes the human heart.’

He said he would describe himself as a Christian, but nevertheless, ‘god has apparently whispered so many insidiously different views about the meaning of life into the ears of rabbis, popes, parsons and mullahs that either God is terminally confused and in need of treatment or the channels of communications are distorted to such an extent that divine revelation is so frequently unreliable and inconsistent as to be not only useless but actually positively dangerous in its political application.’ He said that he thought the humanist, human-centred approach was the only acceptable approach to general human values. He also suggested that we have become ‘far too squeamish about disturbing the sensibilities of religious groups.’

From an Irish perspective following 800 years of colonial rule, it was possible to understand the process of decolonisation on a global scale. ‘Indeed if I want to se the negative impact of an ethnic identity crisis on national politics all I need to do is to look a mere 90 miles up the road to Belfast.’

Speaking from the Irish perspective he considered both economic and moral issues. There was opposition to changes in the law related to divorce, homosexuality, abortion. An Irish judge addressing priests in Galway said that politicians and journalists were failing to protect traditional family values. This view could be echoed in other parts of Europe. The moral and social issues are as important as the economic ones.

The document of an Irish Commissioner stated that social progress is only possible through economic success, which depended on a competitive economy. David Norris questioned whether consumer capitalism is the ideal or even most workable system. On a global scale the system was not working at all.

Dave Norris concluded his lecture on European Identities by quoting the Irish President, Mary Robinson: ‘we need to listen to the narrative of each others’ diversities, so that we can each draw strength and not weakness from our differences.’

Professor Grazia Mrchiano, Chair of Aesthetics, University of Seina-Arezzo, talked about eighteenth-century influences from the East on European humanism. Up to the renaissance, Europe was a Mediterranean greenhouse, but after Montaigne, and in the three centuries following him, it has become almost commonplace to view Europe as an outpost of Asia.

Relations between East and West are complex and the Indonesian Prof. Tjan has written, ‘it was the West that had the fatal impact on the Eastern world. Probably it only followed an impulse which it could not but obey, and the consequences of which it had not foreseen …’ In the late nineteen-seventies, the Palestinian scholar Edward W Said, in his renowned work Orientalism radicalised Tjan’s thesis by denouncing the intellectual colonisation of the East perpetrated by the West, even going so far as to claim that the East was ‘invented’ by the West for its own use and abuse.

Grazia Marchiano examined in detail the way in which the West developed relations with the East during the renaissance, the age of discovery and the enlightenment.

‘In the last quarter of the eighteenth century a new figure took his place beside the missionary, the merchant, the soldier and the overseas functionary: the orientalist … He instilled in the European consciousness the sense of the relativity of knowledge. He pushed back, beyond the line of Baghdad and the time of Muhammad, the boundaries of a knowledge hitherto limited to the study of Hebrew by the theologians, and of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish by interpreters stationed in the Near East.’

But the indisputable centre of the Eastern renaissance in European philosophy was Germany during the age of idealism and romanticism. Schopenhauer declared that ‘Sanskrit literature has had no less an influence on our time than that of the Greek renaissance in the fifteenth century.’

Grazia Marchiano concluded by suggesting that ‘one might conceive a humanism expressing not only the values of human dignity, evoked by Fons Elders in his recent writings (Humanism toward the Third Millennium), but those of nature as conceived in the old Taoist way: a nature that fuses man with animals, plants, rocks, metals, stars – a world of worlds, boundless and without boundaries.’

Professor Alexandre Zinoviev described tow aspects of society: the business and the communal ones. In the first people produce goods and render services, in the second people perform actions with respect to each other in their communality. The latter can be called ‘human’ and the former ‘superhuman’. We are both conscious of our individuality (as ‘I’) and of our membership of a union of many individuals (‘We’).

Human relations are emotional, sincere, confidential. In Western society we find the domination of the business aspect over the communal one. This type of man may be called the ‘westernoid’. The traits of westernoids are practicalness, efficiency, economy, readiness for competition and risk, inventiveness, resourcefulness, coldness, heightened self-respect, honesty, sense of superiority, heightened ability for self-organisation. The westernoid is artificially developed, it is a superman – but the superman is to a certain extent a degradation of man.

The meaning of life for westernoids is reduced to a) obtaining the highest standard of living and b) obtaining the maximum of personal freedom. Conditions of life are encouraging for him – telephone, television, car, isolated dwelling, innumerable devices for personal services. The West has resolved the problem of whether ‘to be or to possess’ with ‘to possess.’

Superman relations are superficial. They are established easily and fast, come to an end painlessly and are not burdensome. They give possibilities not to waste time, emotions and strength, to hide your thoughts and feelings, to be sociable and tolerant in communication. The negative consequences are hard-heartedness, reserve, indifference to the fact of other people, solitude. These are the final results of individualism.

Professor Daniel Callahan suggested that a common enemy create cohesive societies. Now the West must find a common identity on the basis of shred ideals. He asked: ‘can humanistic values offer something more than a way to fight common enemies, something positive and enduring, workable in peace as well as war?’

Two ideas of community now struggle with each other – the market-technocratic view and the organic-ethnic view.

Sharing of ideals of democracy, technological advance and the market does create a kind of community. There is the opportunity to make money, create new technologies, but it creates a common life which favours the strong over the weak, the young over the old, the rich over the poor, the bold over the timid, the forces of an individualistic market over those of a communitarian welfare state. Fast-changing technological societies work against the old, the disabled, the slow of mind and pace.

The organic-ethnic community achieves coherence through racial or ethnic or nationalistic identity, or by religious agreement and uniformity. It inclines towards authoritarianism and exclusivism, but there is a security and willingness to care for the old and the sick.

Many people live in both communities at the same time, and most countries see an overlapping of both characteristics.

Our problem, both in Europe ad North America, is to learn afresh how to create c community of caring. We must do it by finding a fresh synthesis from the strengths of each type of community.

Human rights and human community. We live our lives embedded in specific communities, where intimate ties bind each to others. Only a life together of mutual responsibility and caring will make that intimate life meaningful and even possible.

Caring, pluralism and life in common. How can there be caring in a pluralistic society? It is easy to be caring in the intimacy of the family, or with our own kind than with a stranger in a pluralistic society, who is of a different colour or religion or ethnic background than ourselves. The test of caring is whether it will go beyond our own ties to the wider level of a pluralistic society.

‘I have offered no clean and simple solution to the problem how we create workable, peaceful communities of nations and cultures. But I believe the key lies in finding a way to take the best of the traditions of science, reason and freedom – those goods most praised by humanism – and graft them together with some of the important and sustaining values of older, more traditional cultures, and those that stress the value of intimacy, coherence and tradition.’