The year has brought its usual variety of speakers with its usual range of topics. The attendance has been variable and sometimes disappointingly small. However, we humanists don’t really have any great expectations of crowd appeal in this unreasonable world. The subject of humanism remains too esoteric and far too sensible for most people to grasp - even when they doubt the very substance of the religion they feel compelled to support.

This has been my first year as Chairman and I am not at all sure that I have been able to make any significant contribution to our small group of free thinkers. It is a curious fact of life that human beings tend to measure their success by counting the changes, the innovations, the modernisations they achieve. Few of us are content with the idea that success may be commensurate with no progress at all, just a rock solid stability. Perhaps, by relating success to change, we are missing something. Perhaps we can count our success in the knowledge that humanism remains true to itself; it has an impressive stability in an ever-changing world. It never gives rise to divisiveness, it honestly turns its back on the myth of divine revelation, and it acknowledges that true understanding comes from the power of the human mind.

Our small, stable and perhaps dull association remains curiously attractive. It is a forum where we can safely say anything we wish. We in Ealing have no common way of thinking about humanism or anything else, as a result of which we sometimes have a tendency to be unnecessarily argumentative. We often do not know how to express our thoughts and this is quite different from the way religions rely on the divine word of some holy book and all cry, ‘halleluiah’ with one voice. We can be glad that we have no equivalent to this apparent internal harmony which belies the extreme disharmony that exists between the numerous religious theologies. Humanism, despite its sometimes argumentative style, has an overall harmony that even allows European and American adherents to share an underlying unity. Humanist manifestos have been dealt with in our open discussion evenings which clearly show an international unity that religions can never share.

There is not only a unity in deciding who and what we are but we also have a common attitude to those socio-political problems that cause never-ending squabbles among religious factions. Education is one such matter. I think all humanist bodies on both sides of the Atlantic would agree that religious instruction has no place in the educational system. We all regret how deeply entrenched it is in the British school system and are aghast at the way Christian fundamentalists try to overcome its absence in American schools. We are mostly agreed that Muslim children are being even more cruelly treated by unreasonable indoctrination than Christians ever were, even to the point of being instructed that apostasy is punishable by death. Can we sense a glimmer of enlightenment, a new pathway, in the new Framework for Religious Education which recommends the inclusion of atheistic humanism?

There remain great hurdles to working out new pathways in this tolerant country. The very low church attendance seems so incompatible with the institutional emphasis on anachronistic beliefs in miracles, ecclesiastical interference in the legislature and an unbelievably antiquated system of regal privilege that continues to connect the role of ‘head of state’ with that of ‘head of church’. Perhaps no new pathway will ever be found. Religion is remarkably resilient and will fight very hard against the rise of secularism. The excesses of one religion incite others to revitalise and retrench. I’m afraid that there are already signs of Christian retrenchment.

I want to thank all those who have worked hard on behalf of EHA in the past year and ask them to please continue in this vein. We need a good supply of speakers and I trust the new year will bring some new material on which we can continue to share a wide diversity of opinion while concurrently feeling a deep sense of unity with the global spirit of humanism.

Anthony Constable

These descriptions follow those of the summaries on pages 143 to 163 of the book.

Progressive humanism [R. Barthes] has to be partly endorsed by Combined Humanists in so far as progress in 'culture and politics' (mostly what we would call objectivity or collective human awareness) is acknowledged. However the notion of a 'Family of Man' cannot be, as here, dismissed as a myth. It is a biological fact.

Constructed [R. Coward] Instincts so called are not purely natural but she explains them - we would say only the non-genetic ones - by cultural circumstances, in other words they are 'constructed'. Incidentally this word is a useful antidote to 'deconstructionism' [J. Derrida] which in our view is anti-cultural, i.e. negative, philosophy.

European humanism [F. Fanon] Science, not here identified, comes closest to the writer's 'universal truth' than does anything else but it is by no means the 'partial world view' he ascribes to 'European Humanism' (since of course it includes science). Clearly Fanon entertains multiple confusions - born of his, we would say, justified political (but also cultural) antagonisms.

Human sciences [M. Foucault] According to this summary Foucault has suggested that this branch, anyway, of science does not represent any 'eternal, naturally-occurring phenomenon'. But on the contrary all and every branch of science does have this status.

Anti-humanism [L. Althusser] It is certainly not humanism, as is claimed in this Marxist account, that 'can never be scientific' but only, at times, its subjective component. Here subjectivity is described as 'a social construct', which it is in a secondary sense. But that of course does not prevent it too being a fact of nature also. Evidently the view is a mass of confusions!

Evil [J. Baudrillard] In his 'Transparency of Evil' this writer obviously fails to see through it as a mere opting out of the social contract.

Fiction [P. Rabinowitz] In the film 'Soft Fiction', the writer concludes, feminism is forced to evade truth and fiction enters - in the forms of performance and of identities which are constructed rather than being given. For us this seems a perfectly valid role for philosophy of any kind. It is not science. And what anyway is his 'truth', that is so pretentiously evaded?

Posthumanism in the realm of gender [J. Halberstam] "The exclusion of women . . . means that women have never been human". Really! How can a deficiency within humanism (mostly in the past, fortunately) be construed as a fact of nature itself?

The natural and the unnatural [D.J. Haraway] Knowledge of nature is collective. 'Human' (knowledge) cannot be fully equated with it because of being both collective (objective) and distributive (subjective or individual). In the 'Cyborg Manifesto' these two are confused, a not uncommon event in philosophy, unfortunately.

Posthumanism [N. Badmington] The main author himself persists further in the confusion by quoting from a confessedly fictional entertainment (An essay 'The Body of Glass'). "No, future, use to man nor beast" might well, it seems, stand as a paraphrase of the word 'posthumanism'. ('Postmodernism' could readily paraphrase to "What next?" both as a question and as an ejaculation).

Science fiction [S. Bukatman] though is just more of the same confusion.

Universal justice [B. Readings] A valid criticism of the claim of an Australian court of law in conflict with the rights of Aboriginees. If not already disowned by humanists this judgement clearly should be. But justice is best described, in relation to a group, as a concept that is still partly subjective and can thus never be perfectly universal.

RC

These 'early obituaries' of EHA members are written by the persons themselves and are published while they are still alive. They are not identified by name but their identities can be easily guessed by those who know them. In addition to their life histories the persons may also tell us what they would like to be remembered by and any preferences for funeral arrangements.
Note: ARLOFF = potted Autobiography, Role of humanism, preferences for Later On, projected Fulfillment Finale.

Why do we seem to pay so little attention to our own motivation? I myself must get better informed on the subject generally but for now I can report finding that adversity - being suspended from the Medical Register in my case - can have an apparently paradoxical effect. At other times of course it is succeeding rather than failing that provokes motivation. I thought there had been a bit of that too recently. A past member of the EHA, an occupational scientist now retired, has taken the trouble to tell me by telephone that he now understands and accepts what Subjective Objectivity versus Objective Subjectivity was all about. I'm surprised that it should have been a mystery to him anyway: but others have since told me that he is possibly the only one to have understood. So where does that leave me?

In a lecture entitled 'Painting Without God' Richard Kendall sought to show that the hostility which greeted the Impressionists at their exhibition in Paris in 1874 was due not merely to outrage at their novel painterly qualities, defying many of the accepted academic rules, but also to their links to the atheistic and anti-biblical ideas of Darwin and the Positivists which many considered notorious at the time. He demonstrated that Degas and Morisot were familiar with the work of Darwin, particularly his third book, that Renoir wrote scathingly of religion and that Picasso was known for his anarchism. In their works the Impressionists emphasised ways in which science and industry were changing their world and drew upon the camera's revelations of movements that escaped the naked eye. Degas in particular seems to have been particularly impressed by Darwin's attention to "that most perfect organ, the eye". The impressionists rarely gave prominence to churches in their paintings, and when they did, portrayed them in disrepair and decline. In these ways they reflected the "godless movement" that was significant in French culture in the decade immediately preceding the Catholic revival of 1890.

H.H.Chambers

I am sorry that I'm unable to attend your meetings. Subscribing to the Bulletin however is a mark of my respect for much of what you publish there. But when it comes to the EHA concentration on religion I am bored and worry that it must deter many others like me who are scientists¹ without having militant views one way or the other over religious questions.

Keith Turner

¹ See my quote from the writer, a retired physicist, in this month's editorial. It was he who drew attention to - a book reviewed in the Bulletin, issue 41 - Baggott "The Meaning of Quantum Theory", that criticised the 'speculating about God' of Stephen Hawkins and (see following article below) of Roger Penrose. However, and in conformity with what is to be the title of the talk of January's Thursday meeting I would distance myself from the view of Keith's expressed in his letter.      R.C.

Michael Schermer, author of "The Science of Good and Evil", writes in the January 2005 issue of Scientific American of an attempt to link quantum mechanics with consciousness, spirituality and human potential.

As part of his regular 'skeptic' feature he describes the theory of University of Oxford physicist Roger Penrose and collaborator as having generated much heat and little light. Their conjecture - and, he states, that is all it is - is that something within the microtubules of neurones in our brain initiates a wave function collapse that results in quantum coherence of atoms. The recognised phenomena of quantum mechanics in turn cause neurotransmitters to be released into the synapses between neurones, thus triggering them to fire in a uniform pattern that creates thought and consciousness.

Because a wave-function collapse, he states, can come about only when an atom is "observed" (that is, affected in any way by something else), the late neuroscientist Sir John Eccles, another proponent of the idea, even suggested that "mind" may be the observer in a recursive loop from atoms to molecules to neurones to thought to consciousness to mind to atoms . . . .

But Schermer points to claims that the gap between subatomic quantum effects and large scale macro systems is too large to bridge. The mass of neural transmitter molecules and the distance of the synapse are about two orders of magnitude too large for quantum effects to be influential.

Physics Envy, he adds, the lure of reducing complex problems to basic physical principles, has dominated the philosophy of science since Descartes' failed attempt some 4 centuries ago to explain cognition by the actions of swirling vortices of atom dancing their way to consciousness. Such Cartesian dreams provide a sense of certainty but they quickly fade in the face of the complexities of biology. The writer advocates exploring consciousness at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organisation. Biology it seems, not physics, is the discipline to follow.

R.C.