talk.philosophy.humanism

The group and its era

The address carries the interesting fact. A group about humanism might plausibly have been filed with the community groups in soc.*, or as an academic subject in sci.*; it was filed instead in talk.*, the quarter that the Great Renaming of 1987 set aside for the contentious, high-volume subjects — religion prominent among them — that not every site wished to carry. The placement was not neutral. It told a reader arriving from the newsgroup list what to expect: not a society, not a syllabus, but a standing debate.

Within that quarter the group belonged to the talk.philosophy.* branch of the talk hierarchy, where the newsgroup directories of the day gave it a one-line description — humanism in the modern world — and nothing more. Like the talk.* groups generally it ran unmoderated: no gatekeeper, and no enforcement of the charter beyond what readers chose to do themselves.

Its active life ran with the rest of Usenet’s: busiest in the 1990s, thinning through the 2000s as this kind of argument moved to mailing lists, weblogs and web forums whose hosts could set terms. The news2mail gateway carried the group between 2000 and 2004, near the end of that arc. What survives — the Deja News holdings Google acquired in February 2001, and the archives that followed — is patchy in the usual way.

What was discussed

The position the group’s regulars defended is well documented outside it. Secular humanism holds that ethics can be grounded in reason, evidence and shared human interest rather than in revelation or divine command, and that a life stance so grounded is sufficient for moral seriousness. Its organised history is short and traceable: the Humanist Manifesto of 1933, drafted by Roy Wood Sellars and Raymond Bragg and published with thirty-four signatories including John Dewey, which presented humanism as a religion without a god; the American Humanist Association, incorporated in 1941 out of the earlier Humanist Press Association; the International Humanist and Ethical Union, founded at Amsterdam in 1952 by five humanist and ethical societies and renamed Humanists International in 2019; Humanist Manifesto II in 1973, written by Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson for the AHA and markedly less optimistic than its predecessor; and the body founded by Kurtz in 1980, now the Council for Secular Humanism, which issued A Secular Humanist Declaration that same year.

Four kinds of thread recurred. The first was the grounding question: whether morality without God can be given a foundation at all, worked through utilitarian, Kantian, contractarian and evolutionary answers and through the standing objection that none of them binds. The second was church and state, where American constitutional litigation supplied recurring occasions. The third was meaning and mortality — what a naturalistic account of death leaves in the way of consolation — which tended to produce the group’s least combative writing.

The fourth was definitional, and it was never settled. Participants distinguished secular humanism from the religious humanism professed by the 1933 manifesto’s own signatories, and both from Renaissance humanism, the older scholarly programme with which the modern movement shares little but a name; the English word itself is a nineteenth-century arrival, long after the Renaissance scholarship it is commonly taken to name and before the twentieth-century movements that adopted it. Different users of the compound term brought different weight to it, and threads stalled on whose definition was in play.

Context

The group was a border town. alt.atheism, talk.origins, talk.religion.misc and the moderated soc.religion.* groups were a few keystrokes away in any newsreader, and crossposting — one article naming several groups on its Newsgroups line, delivered to all of them at once, with follow-ups flowing back to each — meant a thread begun elsewhere could arrive fully formed, carrying its own participants, grievances and history. A good deal of the traffic was therefore not native to the group.

The arguments were fierce and frequently unproductive. Exchanges about the origin of morality, the authority of scripture or the establishment clause ran long, cycled through familiar positions, and tended to end when the participants tired rather than when anything was resolved; the same claims and the same rebuttals came round again later. That is a description of the record rather than a verdict on it, and it was the ordinary weather of talk.*.

The absence of a moderator both suited the subject and defeated it. A stance that makes free inquiry a first principle could hardly ask for a gatekeeper, and having none meant that every position really was represented — including the ill-informed, the evangelising and the plainly bad-faith, sitting alongside patient exchanges between people who agreed on nothing. Anyone going to the archive should expect to find both, unsorted, in the order they were posted.