HumanistLife

Archives for January 2010

Can humanists be “spiritual”? The yes camp.

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‘Spirituality’: Jeremy Rodell argues that it’s an important facet of our humanity.

As Marilyn says in her piece, there are fewer differences in our views than you might expect. My main concern is that we should not feel so insecure in our own position – that you can lead a good life without belief in the supernatural – nor feel so hostile to religion, that we should be afraid to recognise experiences and use language that are also used by religious people if the experiences are real and important, and the language is useful in communicating what we mean.

In the same discussion on Radio 4’s Today programme that Marilyn referred to, on the well-worn topic of whether atheists should be allowed to contribute to the “Thought for the Day” slot, Christina Rees, a member of the Church of England’s General Synod, argued that:

“Most people, more than 80 percent, understand life as having a spiritual dimension…”  whereas atheists are “…coming from a position that denies the spiritual dimension… a partial and diminished perspective…There is more to life than you can see, touch and measure”.

I was insulted. Here was a member of the General Synod telling me that, as an atheist, I’m a sort of Mr Spock – superficially like other people but missing a core part of what it means to be human. And, by implication, telling me that “spiritual” is not a word I’m allowed to use.

Unfortunately, as we’ve heard from Marilyn, many Humanists go along with this point of view, fearing they will somehow get contaminated by religion if they use the word, or admit to having a spiritual dimension in their lives. I think it’s time we moved beyond that.

What is “spirituality”?

It isn’t hard to define a Humanist spirituality that doesn’t imply any supernatural beliefs, yet accepts the reality of a spiritual dimension to being human.

The key is to recognise the reality of personal “spiritual” experience. Some people have this type of experience a lot in their lives, others only rarely. When a religious person has it they attribute it to an external supernatural cause – a deity, saint, or whatever fits with their beliefs. Of course, we think that’s a mistake. But the experience itself is a fact. Neuroscience can now show us what is going on in someone’s brain at the time, and it’s even possible to create the experience artificially in the laboratory. But that doesn’t diminish the power of the experience itself.

Of course, there’s actually a spectrum of experiences here, ranging in intensity from those stimulated by great art or, in particular, great music, to the more profound and unexpected, as described by the former Sorbonne Professor of Philosophy, Andre Compte-Sponville in this extract from his Book of Atheist Spirituality:

“The first time it happened I was in the forest in the north of France. I must have been twenty five or twenty six. I had just been hired to teach high-school philosophy in a school on the edge of a canal, up in the fields near the Belgian border. That particular evening, some friends and I had gone for a walk in the forest we liked so much. Night had fallen. We were walking. Gradually our laughter faded, and the conversation died down. Nothing remained but our friendship, our mutual trust and shared presence, the mildness of the night air and of everything around us…My mind empty of thought, I was simply registering the world around me – the darkness of the undergrowth, the incredible luminosity of the sky, the faint sounds of the forest…only making the silence more palpable. And then, all of a sudden…What? Nothing: everything! No words, no meanings, no questions, only – a surprise. Only – this. A seemingly infinite happiness. A seemingly eternal sense of peace. Above me, the starry sky was immense, luminous and unfathomable, and within me there was nothing but the sky, of which I was a part, and the silence, and the light, like a warm hum, and a sense of joy with neither subject nor object …Yes, in the darkness of that night, I contained only the dazzling presence of the All….

…’This is what Spinoza meant by eternity’, I said to myself – and naturally, that put an end to it.”

Personally, I’ve had a couple of similar experiences, neither of which were in any sense “religious”.

If none of this is meaning anything to you, these two quotes from Albert Einstein may help:

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe – a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to the affection for those nearest us.“

And:

“There are moments when one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny, only being.”

There are plenty of other examples where people from a wide range of backgrounds and beliefs report similar perspectives and experiences. Whether we’re talking about something as intense as Compte-Sponville describes, or a few seconds of “otherness” brought on by a Beethoven slow movement, spiritual experiences seem to have some common characteristics:

  • They are non-intellectual. As Compte-Sponville found, as soon as you start trying to analyse the experience, it disappears.
  • There’s a sense of connectedness with a greater whole, other people, wider humanity, the rest of the universe, or simply “something greater” (easy for a deity or two to slip into the religious imagination here!).
  • They involve a diminishment of the ego, sometimes to the point where there is no sense of separation between subject and object (not “you” looking at “it”, but simply “looking”).
  • They are very individual – others in Compte-Sponville’s party just had a nice walk.
  • They are associated with a sense of elation, joy and – often – compassion; they are powerful and positive for the person involved. (And anything that diminishes the ego and increases compassion for humanity is surely a good thing for society.)
  • Knowing that they purely subjective does nothing to diminish their power.

And, for most people, intense spiritual experiences are pretty rare.

Whose language it is anyway?

Even if we accept that Humanists have a “spiritual dimension”, it can still be argued that we shouldn’t use the word “spiritual” because of its religious connotations and lack of clear definition.

The snag is that no other word will do as well if we want to communicate what we mean. Terms such as emotion, aesthetic awareness, love of nature, or simply love, goodness or hope simply don’t do the job. Just because it’s used for everything from the experiences of Catholic nuns to New Age gurus, doesn’t mean it’s off-limits to us. In fact atheists are uniquely positioned to understand that all of these people are really talking about the same thing, but they interpret it through the filter of their (to us irrational) beliefs. We shouldn’t allow the religious to ban a useful word from our vocabulary.

Here’s an illustration: that well-known organ of Humanist thought, Photography Monthly magazine, recently carried an article by Joe Cornish – one of the most respected landscape photographers working in the UK today. In it he said:

“For some landscape photographers, Nature’s beauty is all the evidence they need of a Divine Creator. For others, scientific curiosity reveals an alternative explanation, where over unimaginable aeons our plant has evolved into the unique wonder that is our home today. This is a form of “terrestrial theology”, a belief in the fundamental, non-negotiable laws of physics. It’s not by any means depressing, reductionist scientific thinking based on the inevitability of nature’s immutable laws, but a broad church which encourages compassion and wonder in the beauty that we find in landscape, and humility in the face of what the world has to teach us. There is little doubt that for many of us, landscape photography is a spiritual journey.”

What should we say to him? “Sorry Joe, you’re obviously an atheist, so you’re not allowed to use that word”? I’d rather thank him for explaining that you don’t have to be religious to have a spiritual perspective.

The Humanist response

Because many Humanists put so much energy into being against religion, the important and enriching potential of the spiritual part of our lives has been under-developed. Yet, for many people, spiritual experience is a profound part of being human, even if they rarely experience it in their daily lives.

Christina Rees’s opponent in the Today programme discussion was the humanist philosopher A.C.Grayling. Unfortunately, he didn’t pick up the point about spirituality – perhaps because it’s the type of concept philosophers feel uncomfortable with, or more likely, because there was limited time and he had his own points to make about non-religious philosophers. But what he could have said is something like:

“It’s simply untrue to say that humanists are not spiritual, and rather insulting. Spiritual experiences are pretty much universal across cultures and beliefs, and can be shown to be a feature of the way the human brain works. Many Humanists have as profound a spiritual awareness and understanding as you have. The difference is that they know the cause is not any sort of supernatural agent. But the experience is profound and important in helping us understand our place in the world. If humanists have a fault, it’s that we’ve failed to do enough to acknowledge and develop this aspect of our humanity.”

Can humanists be “spiritual”? The no camp.

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‘Spirituality’: Marilyn Mason finds it a word to send Humanists heading for the hills.

Marilyn Mason and Jeremy Rodell recently led a debate asking “Can humanists be spiritual?” at a South West London Humanists meeting. Here they present their arguments again. You can see the outcome of the original debate at the end of Jeremy’s contribution. But what do you think think?

In Alice Munro’s story, Silence, Juliet, looking for her lost daughter Penelope in a Canadian island retreat, is told:

“Wherever she has gone, whatever she has decided, it will be the right thing for her. It will be the right thing for her spirituality and growth.”

Juliet decides to let this pass. She gags on the word spirituality, which seems to take in – as she often says – everything from prayer wheels to high Mass. She never expected that Penelope, with her intelligence, would be mixed up in anything like this.

Later, the leader of this retreat says:

“The spiritual dimension – I have to say this – was it not altogether lacking in Penelope’s life? I take it she did not grow up in a faith-based home?”

Whether humanists can be “spiritual” or not, depends entirely on what you mean by “spiritual”. In the example above, it patently means “religious”, so we’d have to say No to that usage. On the other hand, I’m sure humanists can be many of the other things that this vague, baggy, pretentious and overused word encompasses – but why would they want to describe themselves as “spiritual” when countless other adjectives would be so much clearer and have fewer unacceptable connotations? I’d never describe myself or anyone else as “spiritual”: “She’s so spiritual” – what would that mean exactly? (I tend to imagine a sweet but unworldly and superstitious old hippy.)

So I’m going to argue that humanist can’t be “spiritual” per se, and don’t need to be. And that’s for three overlapping reasons:

1. It’s an ambiguous word. The only proper response to anyone using it is to ask what they mean by it, at which point one has to wonder why they hadn’t used one of the many more precise alternatives in the first place. And the alternatives are many and varied, including many secular ones – it can be used to mean: good, moral, kind, nice, psychological, emotional, inspiring, beautiful, life-enhancing, joyful, thoughtful, reflective, abstract, artistic, sensitive, mysterious, weird, exciting, at one with nature …  Or it’s often associated with art, music, ritual, love, motherhood and apple pie…. And some of these concepts and emotions humanists share, of course – but if in order to explain which of these concepts or emotions you mean, you have to use another word, why not use that word in the first place?  One good reason why no one, let alone humanists, should use it!

2. It often, as in the example I began with, means religious, as in “spiritual leader” or “Buddhist spirituality”, or as in a recent discussion about “Thought for the Day” on the Today programme in which the C of E spokesperson arguing for the status quo spoke of the need for a “spiritual” moment in the programme, using the word as a touchy-feely, more acceptable, synonym for religious. Similarly, in a hospital recently I was asked if I had “any spiritual needs” – I refrained from a discussion about what exactly that meant and assumed (safely as it turned out) that it was a question about my religious needs. The Barbican is currently advertising “A three-part spiritual journey from Teatr ZAR: a three-part ritualistic lamentation on birth, death, pleasure and pain”, with strongly religious overtones. Newspapers write about Madonna’s “spiritual journey” (Independent, 6 August 2009) when they mean her dabblings in Jewish Kabbalah; people talk about having powerful “spiritual experiences” on Alpha courses or at evangelical Christian festivals. So this common enough usage would preclude humanists from being spiritual.

3. “Spiritual” and “spirituality” have associations with all kinds of other things I wouldn’t, as a sceptical rational humanist, want to be associated with. And I have good support:

David Mitchell in The Observer (5 June 2009), while mocking the atheist summer camp for children also took a pop at “Spirituality Camp”:

For children of parents who believe in being open to everything, including what is self-evidently bullshit. Join us for a week of exploration in the New Forest! As well as seeking out crystal skulls and listening for flower spirits, we’ll be discussing and enthusing about hundreds of sincerely held sets of belief. From reflexology to astrology, from ghosts to homeopathy, from wheat intolerance to ‘having a bad feeling about this’, we’ll be celebrating all the wild and wonderful sets of conclusions to which people the world over are jumping to fill the gap left by the retreat of organised religion.

Jonathan Miller on his production of King Lear, when asked “Would you say it has a spiritual dimension?” replied “No. That’s modern, New Age drivel.”

Let me give you some specific examples of the various meanings that cluster under “spirituality” and “spiritual”, which are often used to give a spurious respectability to all kinds of mumbo-jumbo, and/or status and mystery to quite ordinary ideas or emotions – they are pretentious words and that’s why I dislike them so much.

Mumbo-jumbo: pseudo-religious “new age spirituality”

  • An article on “spirituality at work” in The Independent (17 October 1999) suggested that the third eye, feng shui, healing herbs, God and crystals all have a role in the work place
  • My local FE / sixth form college, under the guise of Agenda 21 courses in sustainable lifestyles and work practices, offered one on “Spirituality … ancient and modern spiritual traditions, spiritual traditions of indigenous people of the world, healing, soul & spirit, reincarnation, Shamanism, healing [sic], experimental phenomena [?], ancestral beings, comparative religions, discussions with visiting speakers etc.”
  • A sixth former once asked me whether I, as humanist, “believed in spirituality”.  When I responded by asking her what she meant, she replied, “Ghosts – that kind of thing.”
  • The “New Spirit” book club has resources for “mind, spirit and body”: topics include nature, meditation, creativity, Christianity, Sufism, relationships, psychology, spiritual journeys, yoga, native wisdom, the afterlife, new philosophy, mindfulness…

In the arts and the media it’s usually pure pretension, a way of making something quite ordinary seem more than it is:

  • An advert on the side of a bus urging us to have “a spiritual adventure” – it was for a couple of books about snowboarding and surfing.
  • A travel feature in The Guardian praises Montana for its “alpine meadows, ancient forests and spiritual space”.
  • The American writer Rebecca Wells claims, “My work is the result of my imagination dancing a psycho-spiritual tango.”
  • The group of artists who call themselves the Stuckists are “in favour of a more emotional and spiritual integrity in art via figurative painting.”
  • In the Tate Modern, the text beside a Joseph Beuys tell us that “he often used unusual materials for his sculptures, investing them with personal or spiritual significance”.

In education

As an educator I was prepared to use the word “spiritual” pragmatically, because “spiritual development” is a requirement of the National Curriculum – in a list that also includes social, moral, and cultural development, so it’s obviously not identical with those. But what spiritual development is remains elusive – and teachers often wonder what exactly they are supposed to be developing and inspectors scratch around, sometimes quite imaginatively, for evidence of it. Parents and other non-specialists don’t understand it at all – when working at the BHA I received an email from a parent protesting vigorously at Ofsted’s comment that her children’s school was not fulfilling its obligation to promote spiritual development in all subjects, and wondering if this meant that Maths lessons were now supposed to begin with a prayer.

There is a vast range of views and advice about what spiritual development in schools might be, much of it (including Ofsted guidance) quite secular and acceptable to humanists. But it remains an ambiguous word as some of these examples from the world of education show:

  • “Any teaching is ‘spiritual’ which opens a child’s eyes to the position he as a human being occupies in the universe,” writes the philosopher Mary Warnock, “…a lesson in palaeontology or geology, in biology, ecology or chemistry may be spiritual…”
  • A description of “the spiritually aware child” in a TES Primary supplement (26 November 1999) included: self knowledge, reflective awareness, sensitivity, striving, and, “central to all this”, love.
  • The International Journal of Children’s Spirituality has a very inclusive policy, publishing articles on subjects as diverse as religion and RE, emotional literacy, bereavement and death education, Father Christmas, and relationships, in recent issues.
  • “Awe and wonder” are often seen as being at the heart of spiritual development: But inspectors looking for awe and wonder in Kingston schools sometimes find it in strange places: “a pupil was in awe of a classmate’s ability in a PE lesson”; as well as in more predictable ones: “a nursery pupil was in wonder [sic] at the hatching and growing of chicks”, and in school assemblies and displays and science lessons.

So how should Humanists regard “spirituality”?

Humanists of course are divided on its meaning and use, not just here but in Europe and the USA too.  Some want to “claim” it and demystify it, others to abandon it to the religious sphere, and often humanists, like everyone else, are talking at cross-purposes.  We are not always clear, for example, what we are complaining about when we say that religious people have hijacked “spirituality”.  Are we saying that religious people deny that we can have rich, fulfilled aesthetic and emotional lives, or that they deny that we are religious – or is it something else we resent: the implication that we are all materialistic, in the worst sense of the word?

Many humanists feel uneasy about using words carrying so much religious and pseudo-religious baggage: “I do not think that the word ‘spirituality’ can be used at all without the implication of a supernatural spirit”, wrote one humanist, and some American humanists in their  magazine Free Mind thought it “meaningless” or “laughable nonsense”, best shunned to “avoid repetitive, cumbersome explanations.” A Dutch humanist expressed scepticism about our tendency to label the “unknowable as spiritual”.

To sum up, “spiritual” and “spirituality” almost always require explanation if they are to communicate clearly, and so I think that it would be better to abandon them altogether, and leave them to the religious. If we are really talking about emotions or emotional development or emotional literacy, or aesthetic awareness or experiences, or love of nature or humanity, or love and goodness, or hope, why just not say so?