We spoke to historian of humanism Dr Charlie Lynch about his contributions to the new history book, The Humanist Movement in Modern Britain: A History of Ethicists, Rationalists and Humanists, published by Bloomsbury earlier this year.
In a fascinating interview, Charlie shares what he learned from his time researching in Humanists UK’s archives and conducting oral history interviews; about some of his own personal convictions as a humanist; and explores the difficult task of correcting the record for some of history’s unsung heroes.
You were one of the three writers on The Humanist Movement in Britain, alongside Professors Callum Brown and David Nash. Briefly, can you tell us what the book is about and how you came on board?
The Humanist Movement in Modern Britain is the first book which provides a comprehensive overview of the development and activities of Humanists UK from its foundation in 1896 as the Union of Ethical Societies, its later transformation into the British Humanist Association (BHA) in 1963, and through its emergence as Humanists UK in 2017. The book further tells of the varied cast of humanist intellectuals whose labours informed and accompanied the organisations, including author H.G Wells (sometimes considered the father of modern human rights), nutritionist John Boyd Orr, and the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who was widely admired by the public for his unshakable moral convictions and who was imprisoned at 93 for his militant opposition to nuclear weapons.
Having previously been Professor Brown’s PhD student, I was recruited to the project after my predecessor unfortunately had to retire due to ill health. We were then rapidly plunged into the coronavirus pandemic and all its attendant privations and uncertainties, not least that for a time, all archives closed their doors and travel was tightly restricted! So, Humanist Movement was a real ‘pandemic project’ and I think it is testimony to the assistance we received from numerous sources, and the skill and ability of Professor Brown as an editor, that we were able to deliver a completed book of this quality.
Could you share some of the most striking stories you’ve discovered in your research for The Humanist Movement… Do you have any favourite finds?
I found myself intrigued by the history of the humanist movement’s involvement in housing, something which seems to have slipped into obscurity. The Humanist Housing Association (HHA) was founded in 1954 by members of the Ethical Union’s Social Services Group in response to shortages of housing for vulnerable and or disadvantaged tenants and the prevalence of religious discrimination. The HHA was extremely successful in its time but seems to have floated away from the movement and was eventually absorbed by another group in the early 2000s. We could certainly do with the HHA today.
Some of the source material for the project was a gift to a historian, not least, Barbara Smoker’s autobiography. An account of a very English radical life lived to the fullest, it deserves to read more widely than it perhaps is. Readers will have to make up their own minds about her claims to have played a key part in ending World War II in the Pacific and to have invented the CND logo. There were also many stories which told of the sense of absurdity that so often emerges when dealing with the history of political activism. Many of the most striking were located in the ‘wilderness years’ of the 1980s and 1990s!
Do you think the humanist movement gets due recognition for its role in driving some of the social reforms in the past century? Are there any examples that come to mind for you?
One of the weirder developments of the early 1970s was that the role of humanists in bringing about the liberal reforms of the 1960s was so quickly forgotten. What seems to have happened is that the cultural and social changes which the movement helped bring about very rapidly outpaced it!
We should not forget that when discussing the sixties, we are dealing with what one historian famously theorised as an international cultural revolution. These were unprecedented times. The emergence of radical mass movements in the form of women’s liberation and gay liberation was to change the Western world, and they eclipsed 1960s-style humanist activism, suddenly making it appear old-fashioned.
Our book will, hopefully, play its part in the rediscovery of the role played by humanists in bringing about the ‘liberal hour’ of the late sixties. They contributed immeasurably to the struggle to reform laws and attitudes surrounding sexualities, making the case for greater enlightenment and liberalism in sexual culture. Humanist intellectuals provided some of the least equivocal evidence to the Wolfenden Committee in 1954, which was to recommend partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality. Humanists including philosopher A.J. Ayer, sociologist Barbara Wooton, and author E.M. Forster were vocal in their support of the Homosexual Law Reform Society when it was founded in 1958. Few clergy joined.
One of the most intriguing of the bunch was H. Montgomery Hyde, barrister and Ulster Unionist MP, whose support of law reform led to his deselection by disgruntled locals in Belfast. Hyde, who explained in his memoir that he had been a humanist and a rationalist since the 1920s, later published one of the first histories of homosexuality written from a sympathetic perspective!
You’ve also written for our own Humanist Heritage website about key figures and chapters in humanist history. Have you come across any other humanists in your research whose life, work, and legacy have you found particularly inspiring?
One of the most inspiring figures I came across was the secularist and humanist, Bill McIlroy, who like me, was a native of the North of Ireland. McIllroy was an unusual person in that he emerged from a working class, provincial, fundamentalist evangelical background in County Down in the 1940s. He was gay, although like many of that generation, was less than entirely comfortable with his sexuality. To say that being a gay atheist was dangerous in Ireland in the 1950s would risk understatement, and Bill spent his life in exile in England, eventually ending his days as an esteemed local historian in Brighton. With little formal education, he became a campaigning journalist whose editorials comprised a running commentary on the moral battles of the 1960s. In 1979, his admonishment at the foundation of the Gay Humanist Group (now LGBT Humanists) that ‘the gains of the gay population could be quickly reversed if religious reactionaries had their way’ was prescient and remains pertinent today.
Can you tell us a little bit about your other research interests?
First and foremost, I would say I am a Scottish historian. I was long domiciled in Scotland and my university education took place there. I am working to complete my next book, which is based on my doctoral thesis. This investigated heterosexuality and secularisation in Scotland between 1950 and 1980, a period which can be seen as laying the foundations for the type of culture and society which we now have. I am interested in the relationship between large-scale historical changes and individual experiences, and as such, make extensive use of oral history.
I am at present back in Ireland working on an LGBT history project, ‘Queer NI before Liberation.’ Queer NI investigates a mysterious and complex landscape prior to the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in Northern Ireland in 1982. The lives being rediscovered by the project include an ‘artistic’ country squire with an ‘open secret’, a cat loving lesbian activist who ran a magazine from the suburbs of Belfast in the 1970s, a profoundly problematic social climber and travel writer who was obsessed with conspiracies and, it must be said, plenty about the miseries of lives led in the shadow of criminalisation and repression.
Returning to NI after fifteen years in Scotland has been an experience, and I can certainly see a society now that has become both somewhat more socially liberal and more secular. The recent Census returns showed that the number of those declaring that they had ‘no religion’ had increased markedly. Much of the statistical shift seems to be due to an acceleration in the long-term decline of protestant religiosity, which is now manifesting in identity change. There are other factors at play, too, including the reactionary nature of the unionist parties, and the DUP in particular, alienating numbers of young people from a ‘British’ identity. Interesting times!
When did you discover that you were humanist?
I think I have been a humanist since childhood, but realised this much later in life. Although my own upbringing was fairly liberal, I grew up in a part of NI which was very religious and very protestant, and where summer days are frequently disturbed by the egregious sight and sound of orange marching. I recall seeing a banner in my home village exhorting me to ‘Fear God and Honour the King’ and quite early in life I resolved to do the exact opposite. I also recall being a child and seeing the Rev Dr Ian Paisley shouting away on the television and feeling an instinctive loathing of him!
In response, I developed a rather frosty atheism, and I wish that I had learned of the humanist outlook much earlier in life. The words I have used to describe myself have evolved over the years – we talk of the history of overlapping terms for non-religious self-identity in the book. I started out (and will always be) an atheist, and then a secularist, and finally a humanist. I would now call myself a socialist humanist because I also personally believe that neoliberalism is inimical to the moral and ethical goals of humanism.
What about the humanist approach to life appeals to you most?
Our moral and social responsibilities in a godless universe. Richard Paterson, who was Chair of Humanists UK in the 1990s, and who I interviewed for the research project, deserves credit for opening my eyes to this concept. Other than that I would cite the effort to be rational and to seek insights and solutions to human issues without recourse to unprovable and improbable claims made by religion.
I have plenty of time, too, for the gentler and fuzzier parts of humanism, notably the appreciation of art, of creativity, and the natural world (I appreciate music, particularly hardcore, folk and drone, and am a keen if ineffectual hillwalker). It is however, all too clear to me that the kind of economy we presently live under inhibits a great many people’s ability to enjoy their lives.
Are any other humanist campaigns particularly close to your heart?
One of the campaigns closest to my heart is not one that is presently waged by Humanists UK. I am very interested in the movement for justice in housing and in tenants’ rights. To me, the housing crisis is a humanist issue in that access to adequate housing is recognised as being a human right. The present system, which exalts property ownership but places it beyond many people, and which extracts money from the labours of the less well-off and funnels it into the pockets of the wealthy, surely cannot be seen as either ethical or sustainable. The perpetual uprooting of people as rents are raised or properties sold is profoundly damaging to community life. The issue of housing is one where our fundamental needs and even our dignity as human beings has been placed at the mercy of the market. As President Michael D. Higgins said last year, housing is no longer a crisis, but a disaster.
As far as Humanists UK campaigns go, it would have to be assisted dying. I think that it is obscene that people experiencing pain and suffering and who wish to end their own lives are denied the right to humanely achieve this. I also think it is disgraceful that we have a situation in the UK where access to assisted dying discriminates against those who cannot afford private healthcare and travel.
