Edited by Andrew Copson and Alice Roberts

London: Piatkus, 2020

The Little Book of Humanism is a small volume of easy summaries and accessible quotations designed as a genial introduction to humanism.

It’s been published under the names of Andrew Copson, the Caesar of English humanism, and Alice Roberts, Professor of Public Engagement in Science at Birmingham University and patron of Humanists UK. Dr Roberts, until recently president of Humanists UK, is a reputable academic who has fronted a large number of television programmes with a view to putting science across to the public in an accessible way.

The least fair criticism of a book of this sort is to complain about who’s been selected for inclusion. Everyone has some axe to grind about who has been left out. For me, I’m surprised to see not one quotation from Charles Bradlaugh, Joseph McCabe or H G Wells. Wells, in particular, had a great store of aphorisms and highly quotable passages which look good a century and more after they first appeared. Having said that, many of the passages chosen are wise, reflective and noble and offer a serene and unthreatening picture of humanism. The illustrations are winsome, rather like a children’s book. But the design, its illustrations, and its striving towards pious uplift give the impression of a children’s book. It’s like Bambi does humanism.

More serious is the First World bias to the book. It’s not that non-Western humanists aren’t included. They are, and their quotations are as helpful and interesting as any. What I mean by First World bias is that the fears and concerns the book is designed to address are
those of the prosperous West. On one view, there is nothing unreasonable about this. It will, after all, only be prosperous Westerners who buy the book. Finding purpose when all one’s material needs have been met is a First World problem. So is being good without God. And so — especially — is finding calm and solace amid the noisy disappointments of prosperity. The Little Book of Humanism helps people negotiate those sorts of troubles. But the elephant in the room is that the ecological crisis threatens all these safe and distracting neuroses.

The real disappointment with The Little Book of Humanism is that it represents an opportunity lost. As we approach a decade that could well be critical for the future of human species on earth, it is more than a little disconcerting to be assured that everything is just fine. ‘Sometimes when we look around at the world, we can get depressed. But in fact, this is one of the best — if not the best — times to have ever been born.” (p 124, emphases in the original) This will come as a surprise to a lot of people around the world. Wars, climate extremes, social unrest, authoritarianism, corruption and failing infrastructures around the world mean that for many millions of people, possibly billions, life is as hard and precarious as it’s ever been. I imagine the authors have Steven Pinker in mind, whose The Better Angels of Our Nature made the case summarised in the passage just quoted.

And for millions of people in the West, I’m sure it’s true, so long as we don’t look too hard at the price being paid for our comforts. The question is, are we content that humanism be understood in this way at a time of global ecological crisis?

I don’t for a minute think the editors are not concerned about the ecological problems we all face. But this is the impression given by the book. Humanism in the twenty-first century is going to need to change if it is to be credible.

Associating humanism with First World problems sitting astride a comfortable anthropocentrism is no longer a credible option. We are past the time when panglossian confidence that everything’s hunky-dory is acceptable. The need for humanists now, as for everyone else, is how to change one’s life in a way that increases our chances of surviving as a species. Here, The Little Book of Humanism is no use at all.