HumanistLife

What is TTIP, what’s going on, and should we care?

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An anti-TTIP flashmob in Hamburg, Germany.

An anti-TTIP flashmob in Hamburg, Germany.

TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, sounds pretty dull, doesn’t it? I had to force myself to take an interest and read up on TTIP (pronounced ‘T-tip’) when a friend in the local World Justice Movement group persuaded me to organise a small delegation to my MP late last year. Even though I was merely the channel to a local MP and others in the group would do most of the talking, I thought it would be embarrassing to introduce a topic about which I knew little or nothing. So I did some homework.

And like most people who read up about TTIP, apparently the world’s biggest ever trade deal, I became increasingly concerned. It’s not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with removing tariffs and freeing up trade between the USA and the EU, which is the main purpose of TTIP. On the whole, with the exception of a few developing industries in a few developing countries, protectionism does not seem like a good or necessary thing. But ‘harmonisation’ of regulations and standards, another aim of TTIP, could be a thoroughly bad thing, depending on whether this raised standards or reduced them – and, as the negotiations seem to be dominated by large corporations and their requirements, one can guess which way that will go.

I use words like ‘seem’ and ‘guess’ advisedly, as another concern about the TTIP negotiations is their secrecy, the lack of opportunity for proper democratic scrutiny, and the haste with which some supporters want to push through the deal – though, fortunately for democracy, the negotiations seem to be proceeding at glacial speed.

Our December meeting with my MP, Zac Goldsmith, went well. He, like many others, had found that the more he learnt about TTIP the more concerned he became – and he is keen to get other MPs (of all parties) interested and concerned.  Since then, I have emailed all my (London) MEPs and received a couple of replies – one from a UKIP MEP who opposes the TTIP and a thoughtful response from a Conservative MEP, Syed Kamall, who supports it and has written about it for The Huffington Post here and here.  It could be, as Syed Kamall suggests, that there is some exaggeration and scaremongering on the anti-TTIP side. It has been called by the World Justice Movement ‘the most dangerous free trade deal in a decade, [which] threatens democracy, public services and the environment.’  But if this ‘scaremongering’ is provoking debate and calls for openness and scrutiny it might not be a bad thing.

For TTIP does now seem to be emerging from the shadows, with increasing interest from MPs and the media. In January, backbench MPs initiated a debate on the motion: ‘That this House believes that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and any associated investor-state dispute settlement provisions should be subject to scrutiny in the European Parliament and the UK Parliament’ (Hansard report here). Business Secretary Vince Cable and the Liberal Democrats seem to be pulling back on TTIP, perhaps as part of a pre-election distancing from the Tories and the Coalition. There was some speculation that the sudden government rush to legislate for plain cigarette packaging was at least partly because it could become much more difficult post-TTIP. And there was also a useful half-hour discussion on Radio 4’s In Business programme in January.

So the discussion does seem to be hotting up, and that’s an achievement for the charities and pressure groups that have been campaigning on TTIP. However, it often seems as if the different sides are talking about different things, and what one thinks about TTIP does depend on one’s personal priorities and preferences: a boost for economic growth and businesses versus protections for consumers and national rights to regulate corporations.

Like many of the issues highlighted by Humanists for a Better World, TTIP is not a core BHA policy concern, and it’s certainly not an exclusively or particularly humanist issue – it’s one for all active citizens. At the very least, thoughtful voters should ask questions about TTIP and try to persuade our democratically elected representatives to take an interest in it and insist on transparency and opportunities to scrutinise and amend the treaty before it’s a done deal. If you’d like to know more about TTIP or take action on it, do please have a look at H4BW’s December 2014 briefing on TTIP.

 

10 tips for a happy humanist Christmas

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Marilyn Mason’s 10 top tips for humanists this festive season.

'Christmas' is a time for family and friends - and to overidentify it with Christian tradition specifically, or to fret about the name, is a waste of time. Photo: Josn McGinn.

25 December and thereabouts has been a special time for celebrating with friends for thousands of years. Some would say that to overidentify the holiday we call ‘Christmas’ with Christian tradition, or to fret about that name, is a royal waste of time. Photo: Christmas Eve dinner by John McGinn.

 

One

Accept that Christmas Day is what we call 25 December and you’re not going to change that, any more that we humanists can rename Easter weekend, Eid, Divali, Passover… Enjoy the fact that it’s the one day of the year when almost everything is shut, you can’t shop, almost no one goes to work, the roads are empty… Relax.

Two

Send a card if you want to keep in touch with friends at this time of year — as many people still prefer a hand-written card to an email. But if you think they wouldn’t appreciate a physical card, send an e-card instead and give the money you would have spent on cards and postage to a worthy (secular) charity like the BHA (or wherever you like). If you want to support a charity and send a card to your loved ones, then a great way to do that would be to buy the from the BHA’s range at 80p a card (in packs of 10).

Three

Keep present-giving simple: give to those who need stuff, come to an agreement with those who don’t (which is most people past their youth). There is nothing particularly virtuous in buying things that people don’t need which will probably end up in a charity shop – you could cut out the middle-man and give the cash to charity instead.

Four

See friends and family when it suits you and them — don’t get too hung up on 25 December (remember Christmas is no big deal for humanists). Most people have several relatives they feel obliged to visit on Christmas Day – make life easier for them by opting out of the competition for their presence and see them another time.

Five

If you’re on your own over the holiday, just think — you can eat what you like, watch what you like on television, read a book, go to bed as early or late as you like… Relax.

Six

Eat, drink, and be merry, but pace yourself. You don’t have to drink alcohol at breakfast time or eat Christmas pudding, mince pies and Christmas cake all on the same day – or at all. You don’t have to cook or eat turkey or Brussel sprouts if you don’t like them. Admittedly this is harder when you are a guest, but tiny helpings may help!

Seven

Feed the birds, and enjoy watching them eat the inevitable leftovers

Eight

Go for a walk somewhere lovely on Christmas or Boxing or New Year’s Day — roads will be empty if you time it right, and few other people will be out. Be prepared to wish the few a Happy Christmas and New Year.

Nine

Take pleasure in in singing. Not all Christmas songs or carols are religious, and music of all kinds can be very uplifting.

Ten

Focus on enjoying yourself. Christmas can be a pleasantly sociable or self-indulgent time of year if you don’t get too caught up in the competitive consumerist rush. Relax.

Humanists for a Better World three years on

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worldmap h4bw

by Marilyn Mason

It’s now more than three years since the BHA decided to join the Stop Climate Chaos coalition (now The Climate Coalition or TCC) and asked me to be their volunteer representative. This inspired the creation of a new humanist interest group, Humanists for Better World (H4BW), with the broad aim of ‘putting humanist values into action – because the whole world is in our hands.’ Since then, the BHA has also joined the Jubilee Debt Campaign and Anti-Slavery International, and my fellow organiser and volunteer Richard Norman and I have attended the meetings and conferences of TCC, JDC and Anti-Slavery, as well as the occasional demonstration where we have been joined by the occasional humanist.

We set up the H4BW website, which passes on actions and news from these and other campaigns on global issues such as poverty, justice, human rights, the environment – and later moved it to become more accessible as a section of the BHA website alongside other humanist interest groups. And very recently we set up a Twitter account, @humanists4bw as a quick way for humanists who tweet to keep in touch with our news and campaigns. We have grown in numbers and hope to continue that growth, as we know that many, perhaps most, humanists are interested in the global issues that we cover, and that humanists probably think longer term than the average politician or businessman and see only too well the many connections between the various issues. It has been interesting to observe, alongside our expansion, the expansion of The Climate Coalition which now includes organisations as diverse as the RSPB, Population Matters, Greenpeace, CAFOD, Frack Off, the Woodland Trust, Oxfam, WWF, the WI, and many more groups large and small, national and local, that accept the scientific consensus on climate change and understand the potential negative impacts on their causes. (Humanists who support any of these organisations are thus already part of TCC.)

H4BW’s basic principles, interests and aims and have not changed much in the three years we have existed. The world is no more peaceful than it was then (rather the contrary); human rights are still under threat in many places; poverty, hunger, and exploitation of the poor still exist; and, despite our ‘greenest government ever,’ climate change and environmental sustainability remain low priorities for most UK politicians. The articles that Richard Norman and I wrote then explaining H4BW for HumanistLife, which disappeared when the website was hacked into and vanished, still represent our perspectives and have just been republished here. We know that all the causes that H4BW promotes don’t all appeal to all humanists, and there was hostility from a few members to the BHA getting involved with causes that are not central to its remit. But we firmly believe that humanists should not stand aside from  the big moral issues of the day, letting the religious take all the credit for being ethical, and that we shouldn’t talk a lot about being good without religion while ignoring opportunities to act for the common good. (One of the names we considered for our group was “Humanist Action” –  still my favourite – but we were told it was already taken.) And in any case, to borrow and adapt a Muslim tenet, “There is no compulsion in Humanism”. Right from the start we have seen it as our task to pass the requests for action on global causes that come our way, but to leave it to individual humanists to sign up via the website to receive these requests and then to choose which ones to support.

As Lord Deben (formerly Conservative MP John Gummer) reminded those of us at the recent Climate Coalition AGM, anyone can write a letter or email – and letters have a disproportionate effect. The BBC responds when they receive just 25 letters of complaint on the same theme (as they did recently to well over 25 complaints about the inclusion of climate change deniers like Nigel Lawson to ‘balance’ discussions on global warming). MPs assume that for every letter they receive, there are 40 or 50 voters who think the same but didn’t bother to write. Lord Deben’s extra insight and advice was that it is worth getting to know your MP and what makes him or her tick, and to use that knowledge in your correspondence, be it protecting the countryside, energy or food security, jobs, concerns about refugees and immigration…  He also reminded us that ‘Puritans never win!’ – it’s useless urging everyone to give up all the things they value and enjoy, even if that could lead to a better world. Somehow we have to move towards a better, fairer, more sustainable world without making the journey seem too painful – a challenge for humanists and everyone else.

 

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?