Having a Lousy Day
Your February issue discussed a book about American life by
Justin Webb, a British journalist who actually lives here
(“Finally, A Brit Who Gets It,” by Joseph A. Harriss,”
TAS, February 2009).
The title of the book is Have a Nice Day, and
your columnist asserted that the author “gets it,” and not only
gets it, is actually willing to admit, even to other Europeans,
that under certain circumstances, Americans might not be absolutely
awful. I’ve spent years in Europe, on the economy, and I especially
know my Brits, and I had to physically thrust down my incredulity.
I simply couldn’t wait for the book to come out in the States, but
scrambled to order it from my favorite London bookseller.
I might have known: disappointment! And it didn’t help that I
could predict Webb’s politics within the first couple of pages. His
take on the war in Iraq: a “catastrophe,” of course, for the
Americans and the Iraqis; on President Bush: he is variously called
a toxic Texan and, slightly obscenely, a pillock; on Vice President
Cheney: we’ll pass over him in pained silence; on the “Religious
Right” (whoever that may be): the embodiment of all that’s
dreadful; on something called Intelligent Design: “disguised”
creationism and unspeakably stupid; on Barack Obama: a marvel, a
miraculous chance for the Americans to redeem themselves; and on
and on—standard leftist tripe, delivered with European
superiority.
But! Where another might snarl about American coarseness and
stupidity and simply radiate loathing, Webb grants that yes, they
are coarse and certainly stupid; however (one can imagine his
embarrassed smile), they can’t help it! With his broader, yet
indulgent, European outlook, he takes the role of a good father
toward someone else’s unruly children. Is there a criminal in
Arkansas who, grasping the import of Christianity, has taken steps
to change his life? Why, how nice. Naturally, the great Richard
Dawkins could instantly annihilate his position in an Oxford Union
debate, but still, how nice. One could point out that the great
Richard Dawkins, under questioning by our own Ben Stein, was forced
to grant that, okay, living systems might have been designed by an
intelligent agent—just not by God, that’s all!—but Webb would not
believe it. With his own eardrums he could hear Dawkins saying it
on Ben Stein’s DVD; he still wouldn’t believe it.
The notion that a doltish lout like, say, an Iowa wheat farmer
might actually have been to, say, Paris, more than once, understood
what he saw perfectly well, and been ironically amused and saddened
by it would not enter his darkest dream. No one, certainly not the
Americans, and a thousand times not the Texans, understands how the
Texas primary system works. If it is practical, and even ingenious,
we are left to conclude it must be by accident. His description of
the people of Minneapolis (of all places!) makes you almost hope
for a nuclear mishap there to remove a world plague spot.
The American version is apparently set to come out in April. You
can check it out of the library (for Heaven’s sake, don’t buy the
thing) to see if it’s been toned down a bit. Just don’t be
fooled.
— Mark T. Skarstedt, Ph.D.
Newfield, New Jersey
The new Is Old Again
Flattered as I am that Roger Scruton mentioned New
Humanist, the magazine I edit, in his piece on the New
Humanism (TAS, March 2009)—any publicity—I feel I should
correct his misapprehension regarding the new humanist movement he
claims to describe. He describes New Humanist as being
part of a novel, self-conscious movement—analogous to Blair’s New
Labour—with our own “sages” and campaigns and a perspective on
humanism that diverges from the worthy “old” humanism of his own
parents. Perhaps it would be good if this were the case, if we were
a movement as new, unified, and well- organized as Scruton implies,
but it is not. The fact is New Humanist is a journal that
has been published continually, in one form or another, for 120
years. It started life as Watt’s Literary Guide—a
catalogue of the secular books published by one freethinking Fleet
Street publisher, then morphed into Watt’s Literary
Guide and Rational Review, then in mid-20th century was
renamed The Humanist, and in the sixties the “new” was
added.
Though I might flatter myself that in recent years we have
achieved a degree of prominence which might lead some to think that
we really are new on the scene, we were actually around before
Roger’s folks discovered their humanism. What is new is the
reemergence of particularly virulent forms of religious
fundamentalism and intolerance in recent years—from creationism
retooled as Intelligent Design, to Jihadi violence, to
state-enforced religious intolerance from Iran to Nigeria and
Russia—which has convinced secularists that we need to have a
stronger voice in the public sphere, and diversify our tactics
somewhat so as to meet the challenge laid down by so many shrill
dogmatists. That Scruton has mistaken this vigorous response for a
new movement is, I suppose, a measure of our success. But lumping
together the various organizations and many different people
speaking up for secularism and the humanist world view has some
clear disadvantages too.
Scruton uses the example of one particular ad campaign on a bus
to paint us all as trivial hedonists who are uninterested in “man
as an ideal,” faith, hope, charity, belief, or how to improve the
world. He is absolutely right that we can be light-hearted (the bus
campaign was successful precisely because the message was so simple
and uplifting) and scathing— our God Trumps parody card game mines
religious beliefs for laughs—but we also devote a lot of space in
New Humanist to serious critical analysis of ideas (those
of our “sages” like Richard Dawkins as well as of believers),
exploration of scientific and artistic endeavor, and discussions of
what makes a sound secular basis for moral judgments and the good
life. (Our wide range of contributors includes many of the world’s
leading thinkers on these subjects like Stephen Lukes, Amartya Sen,
Paul Heelas, A.C. Grayling, and Conor Gearty.) During my tenure as
editor I have published articles on all these issues as well as
appreciations of, for example, Goethe, Mozart, and Francis Bacon as
well as photographers, film makers, and musicians who cast light on
the human condition and provide stirring examples of human
achievement. In addition to supporting this wideranging
human-centered content, readers of New Humanist have
recently raised over £25,000 to support a secular school in rural
Uganda—proving, I would argue, that we are not the hedonist
nihilists Scruton paints us.
It is true that we are all wary of dogma, that it is harder for
us to articulate what we collectively believe in than what we are
not prepared to believe (we are after all advocates of free
thinking), but trying to define that difficult bit—the shared
values that underpin our common inheritance and destiny—is part of
the fun, and what New Humanist seeks in its small way to
do.
— Caspar Melville
Editor, New Humanist
London, UK
Mr. Scruton’s indictment of the New Humanism is spot on, but
he’ll find no correction in the old humanism—merely the first
crucial steps toward the New Humanism. Mr. Scruton strikes the
right note when he calls the old humanism of his parents “a
rearguard action on behalf of religious values.” Indeed, at least
his parents’ generation of humanists knew what they had put at
stake.
The struggle that remains with the Christian faithful today,
however, is not just against the hedonism of the New Humanism but
also against the moralism of the old humanism. This struggle is
central to Christ’s parable of the prodigal son. The hedonist
prodigal seeks a life on his own terms without the father, but
eventually moves toward an understanding of ultimate happiness in
the father’s (God’s) kiss. But the one who is most at risk in this
story is the elder brother, who lives as an old humanist in
complete obedience to the father, unaware that what motivates his
commitment to proper living are the same rewards and drive for
independence from the father that nearly destroyed the younger
brother. No doubt England would enjoy better living if everyone
could maintain an elder brother’s commitment to decorum, but the
old humanism and the New Humanism are little more than way stations
along the same road of where England is today.
— J. Douglas
Johnson
Chicago,
Illinois
Roger Scruton is of course right about the humanism he knew from
his parents, which sought to raise man rather than denigrate God,
but that was in a different England. Now it faces the leveling of
socialist education, the stridency of Islamists and Christian
evangelists and the ghetto-making dogma of multiculturalism, all
directly attacking Englishness: if it remained quiet and decent,
humanism might simply evaporate (like queuing and politeness have).
Its fight might be badly phrased at times, like the bus slogan
about enjoying life (instead of perhaps “be good for the sake of
goodness”), but the fight was brought to us.
— Mark Baillie
London, UK
