On his sitting room wall, I spotted two paintings that seemed somehow familiar. They turned out to be by Desmond Morris, the zoologist and surrealist painter; the larger one was The Expectant Valley, which served as the cover for the first edition of The Selfish Gene (1976). Dawkins later acquired them from the artist.

‘Please focus on the science in your write-up rather than the politics,’ he said as I was leaving, ‘it’s more interesting.’ But that is the risk of being a public intellectual with a Twitter account: humans are an odd species, and with all the scientific insight in the world, it is hard to predict which ideas will do best in the meme pool. We leave readers to judge for themselves.

Freethinker: The Selfish Gene was the work that first brought you fame outside academia. If you were to bring out a new edition in 2022, how much of it would need updating?

Dawkins: In terms of the science, surprisingly little. It is true that a lot more is known about genomes and how they work in embryology, but The Selfish Gene is about the role of genes in evolution, the role of genes in changing gene frequencies as generations go by. From that point of view, the fundamental thesis of the book is the same. There would probably be a lot more animal examples just to make it more colourful.

Freethinker: In a nutshell, how would you sum up the book’s thesis?

Dawkins: Natural selection is the differential survival of genes in gene pools. Individual organisms can be seen as survival machines for the genes that ride inside them. When an individual dies, its genes die with it. If it dies before it reproduces, they really do die. Individuals are descended from an unbroken line of successful ancestors, where ‘successful’ means that they reproduced and their descendants therefore inherit the genes that made them successful. That is what makes living creatures such good survival machines for the genes inside them.

So when you look at an animal and ask why it does what it does, the answer is, for the good of its genes. Genes are ‘selfish’ in the sense that they look after their own self-preservation. Individuals do not – they are not selfish, or not necessarily. They may be driven to be selfish by the selfish genes, but the selfish genes may equally well drive them to be altruistic. The ways in which individuals work for the survival of their genes is dependent upon their ecology, and they may do it up trees or underground, or in water or in deserts. They may be predators or prey, parasites or hosts. But it is all fundamentally about the same thing, which is preserving the genes into the distant future.

Freethinker: Do scientists have any idea when or how the very first genes emerged?

Dawkins: No. In a way, that is tantamount to asking when life itself arose. What I mean by that is that the origin of life must have been the origin of a self-replicating entity – a molecule, presumably, which probably was not DNA. So if you mean by ‘the first gene’, the first DNA, that would be much later than the origin of life itself. There would have been a forerunner of DNA, which was also a replicator, but a much less efficient one. DNA should be regarded as the usurper of the replicator role. And we do not know when that was.

Freethinker: How does your theory compare with any competing theories about genes and evolution?

Dawkins: I do not think there is a competing theory in the sense that all modern biologists subscribe to neo-Darwinism – the idea that evolution is the differential survival of genes in gene pools (it is ‘neo’ because Darwin did not know about genes). The ‘selfish gene’ theory is really just a way of expressing neo-Darwinism. Not everybody likes that way of expressing it, but I believe it is logically entailed by neo-Darwinism. Therefore the only competing theory would be one that rejects neo-Darwinism – some form of Lamarkism, perhaps, which to say the least is not fashionable and has no evidence in its favour.

Freethinker: At the end of The Selfish Gene, you posited the idea of the meme. Would it be fair to say that this idea has itself become a meme?

Dawkins: Yes.

Freethinker: How would you define a meme?

Dawkins: A meme is the cultural analogue of a gene. It is that which is replicated in the social milieu – words are memes, for example, but so also are clothes fashions, hairstyle fashions, that sort of thing, to the extent that they are imitated. The internet is a fertile ecology for the spread of memes. But memes are only interesting in an evolutionary sense if they are subject to a form of natural selection, giving rise to a form of evolution. Whether they are doing that is less clear. It is definitely clear that memes exist in a sort of trivial sense. But what is non-trivial is whether they get naturally selected – not naturally selected in the biological sense but in a cultural sense.

Do some ideas, fashions, tunes, words or ways of pronouncing words have a greater survival value in the meme pool? You could probably say that they do. A fashion for using a word like ‘awesome’ when you just mean ‘kind of OK’ is spreading through the meme pool. That is a trivial example. What would be less trivial would be the idea of a meme-plex, which is like a gene complex – a group, a coalition, a syndicate of mutually supportive genes. A religion might be an example of that.

Freethinker: The idea of the analogy as a form of argument goes right back to the Presocratic philosophers: they are always arguing by analogy, say, from visible things to invisible things – with greater success in some cases than others. How far is the analogy between the biological phenomenon of genes and the cultural phenomenon of memes really valid?

Dawkins: I think it is probably more valid than some other people do. One way in which it is under suspicion of not being valid is this: we know what genes are, they are DNA, and memes are a much more wishy-washy idea than that. It is not clear that there is any particular entity which you could identify as a physical counterpart of a meme. Furthermore, memes are not so watertight. They merge into each other. Words, for instance, are pronounced in different ways. If you have a Scottish accent, it is different from a Somerset accent. But nevertheless, because words do have a certain self-normalising quality, a word that is pronounced in a Scottish accent is still recognisable as the same word as one that is pronounced in a Cornish accent. So self-normalising does, in a way, concretise the meme in the way that the gene automatically is concretised.

Freethinker: Would the involvement of human agency in the production of memes be a difference from genes?

Dawkins: It is a big difference, but you can ignore it for this purpose. Genes too need a supportive environment of cellular chemistry in order to replicate – they do not replicate on their own. In the same way, memes need a supportive infrastructure of brains, radios, telephones and smartphones.

Freethinker: Would you say that religious beliefs might be considered in terms of memes, analogously to genes, or to viruses?

Dawkins: It is the same thing, really. I coined the phrase ‘virus of the mind’ as a way of describing certain types of memes. The word ‘virus’ has a negative connotation, because viruses tend to give us diseases – I half-intended that negative connotation. Religious beliefs are like viruses and they do have the same pernicious quality. They can spread horizontally like an epidemic of viruses. An epidemic can be as harmless as a craze at a school for a particular kind of toy – but it does spread like an epidemic. It even has the same time-course as an epidemic: rising and then dying away, and it may jump from place to place, say when somebody’s sister goes to another school and starts the epidemic there.

Religious ideas spread horizontally when a charismatic preacher goes around and propagandises for a particular religious idea, or they spread vertically – that is very important – from parent to child to grandchild. And they have a huge advantage in that, because children are a captive audience for their parents and grandparents and the schools that their parents send them to. Genetic natural selection probably builds into children a sensible propensity to believe what they are told by their parents. That would be a safety device in a dangerous world: do what your parents tell you without questioning them. But that safety device is open to parasitism by viruses because the child brain, by definition, has no way of distinguishing between sensible advice and viral advice.

Freethinker: Presumably other ideas could also spread in a similar way, such as political affiliations, cultural traditions?

Dawkins: That is right – they can all be viruses. But religious ones probably have a particular advantage in the longitudinal direction from parent to child. For example, our society, whether we are atheist or not, buys into the convention that we call a child by the religion of its parents. We talk about a Catholic child without actually asking the child what its opinions are. Because the child is born of Catholic parents, we say it is a Catholic child. If parents are conservative or socialist, we do not say it is a conservative or socialist child. So that gives a religion a head start.

Freethinker: Looking back on the New Atheist movement in the 2000s, what was the high point of that for you?

Dawkins: I don’t do movements. I suppose when four books came out within a couple of years of each other: The God Delusion, Sam Harris’ End of Faith, Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great. By coincidence – there was not a conspiracy or anything. That might have been a high point.

Freethinker: As a writer who has done a lot to popularise many areas of science, your style has been compelling and vivid, but often polemical. Why did you choose to write in this way?

Dawkins: I am not sure I see it as polemical. It is certainly read as polemical by religious readers. I think that is largely because they become so feather-bedded, so accustomed to religion being treated with exaggerated respect, that just ordinary criticism, which would not be seen as polemical if it was criticism of a play or a concert, is heard by them as polemical. If you read theatre criticism, it can be horrendously polemical in some respects, but it is not treated as such – that is the way theatre critics are, and we all accept it. But if you say something even mildly critical of religion, it is heard not only by religious people but by society in general as polemical, because for centuries we have not been used to it.

Freethinker: Many branches of science can be obscure, technical or simply difficult to understand. How far can popular science writing succeed in communicating such ideas?

Dawkins: As a biologist I have the easier task. It is not totally easy to get across biological ideas, but it is relatively easy compared to modern physics, where even physicists, in many cases, admit that they do not really understand it intuitively. Quantum theory is so foreign to human intuition that Richard Feynman was moved to say, ‘just shut up and calculate’ – get on with it, make your predictions and test them in the lab, and do not worry that you cannot understand intuitively what is going on at the quantum level. That is a difficulty with physics.

Biology is comparatively easy for people to understand. There are barriers in my own field of evolution, such as the immense time span involved, which the human brain is not accustomed to dealing with. You get people saying, ‘I will believe in evolution when I see a monkey give birth to a human’ – they do not understand the enormous lengths of time involved. But that is not a difficulty of the same order as quantum theory.

Freethinker: How would you define the scientific method, if there is one scientific method?

Dawkins: I hesitate to do so. I can give a list of things that it involves: logic, observation of the natural world, experimental manipulation of the natural world – which is very important because observation itself cannot prove causation, whereas experiment can. By ‘experiment’ I mean you manipulate a putative cause, preferably at random, and see whether the result is as predicted. It involves model building, that means imagining; the imagination is important. It involves imagining theoretical possibilities and logically deducing consequences from those theoretical possibilities and then testing those deductions.

It also involves taking elaborate precautions to avoid self-deception. That is what, especially in medical research, a double blind control trial is all about, where, for example, you are testing a new drug, and you give 100 patients the control and 100 patients the drug. The double blinding means that neither the patient nor the doctor, nor the nurses taking care of the patient, nor the statisticians eventually doing the analysis, are allowed to know which bottle contains the drug and which bottle contains the control, until finally the computer code is opened. Otherwise, with the best will in the world, a scientist may be deceived by a preconception, a desire for a particular result.

That is an incomplete list of things that the scientific method involves. I would refrain from giving a single-sentence definition.

Freethinker: To what extent do the sciences differ? Are some of them more rigorous or reliable than others – are some more dependent on interpretation, or more open to human error?

Dawkins: In biology, it is more messy, and we have to rely more upon teasing out patterns statistically. In physics, everything can be carefully controlled in an experiment – you almost do not need to do the experiment lots of times and then count the number of times in which it works. Whereas in biology, you do.

Science depends upon verification later, repeating experiments. In physics, because experiments are so accurate, if a repeat of an experiment fails to give the same result, it is a cause for alarm and maybe for saying there is something wrong with the original experiment. In biology one tends to say, ‘Oh, well, it’s probably just some random effect which we didn’t know about,’ so it is less satisfactory than physics. Within my own field of biology, I was trained in animal behaviour. In that field, failure to repeat an experiment may not mean that the experiment was wrong. It may just be some sort of random, unforeseen difference which you did not know about.

Freethinker: People can be inconsistent, and believe incompatible things at the same time. But logically speaking, is it possible to be scientific and religious?

Dawkins: Many people are, but I am not sure whether that falls under the heading of logic. I suppose I have to say it is possible, yes. You could say the universe is such a mysterious place that it would be foolish to be over-confident one way or the other about whether some monster intelligence lies behind it. That would be, for me, bending over backwards an awful long way. It is very hard to be a logical theist.

Freethinker: Would you describe yourself as a humanist?

Dawkins: My only hesitation in describing myself as a humanist would be that it implies giving too much of a privilege to the human species as opposed to other species. I would like to call myself a ‘sentientist’ or something like that – with a moral regard for sentient awareness. A large part of that would be human, but no doubt there are other animals that are capable of feeling pain and suffering something like the way we are. With that reservation, I would call myself a humanist.

Freethinker:  How does the scientific method relate to humanism, if it does?

Dawkins: Humanists take the view that we are on our own, we are not the children of some supernatural creator, and so we have to make the best of the world in which we find ourselves. The only way to discover what is true about the world is the scientific way. I think, as a matter of fact, most humanists are atheists, but there are some who would call themselves humanists from a religious point of view.

Freethinker: In April last year, the American Humanist Association stripped you of your 1996 Humanist of the Year Award on the basis of a tweet. Speaking as a scientist, what are your views about the transgender debate?

Dawkins: I have sympathy for people who suffer from gender dysphoria. Jan Morris’ Conundrum moved me very much when I read it soon after it came out in 1974. In one of the tweets to which people objected, I said that whether you call a trans woman a woman is a matter of semantics – it depends upon your definition of words. That’s what we mean by ‘semantics’. You are at liberty to define a woman either as a scientist would in terms of genetics, in terms of chromosomes, or as an individual person might do, or alternatively as a sociologist who believes in social constructs might do. So it is a semantic question whether a trans woman is a woman or not. That does not mean it is trivial. Words are our servants, not our masters. I am sympathetic to people who identify as a different gender from their biological sex, and I am perfectly happy to call them by the pronouns that they request.

Freethinker: But in terms of biological sex, that is a matter of chromosomes?

Dawkins: Yes, absolutely. It is one of the few really distinct dichotomies that we have.

Freethinker: You wrote an article for Areo magazine entitled ‘Race is a spectrum. Sex is pretty damn binary.’ But what does ‘race’ mean?

Dawkins: I do not even need to answer that in order to justify the point that it is a spectrum, because whatever race is, people hybridise. And so you have a complete spectrum. Sex is not a spectrum in that sense. There are extremely rare intersexes – people who have chromosomes that suggest that they are male but have a very shrunk penis that is hard to notice, and vice versa. There are various kinds of rare intersexes of that sort, but they are so rare that we can forget about them when talking about the vast majority of people, who are either male or female. That is binary, which is not true of race.

Freethinker:  You talked about semantics in terms of sex and gender. Is there a similar issue with race, that it means one thing genetically speaking, and another culturally speaking?

Dawkins: Yes, there is. There are many geneticists who actually say that race is a fiction, because they point out correctly that if you look at the actual genetics at a molecular level, you will find that there is more variation within geographical races than between them. Another way of putting that is to say that you could wipe out everybody on earth except people living in sub-Saharan Africa, and the great majority of human variation would be retained. There is a case, therefore, for denying the concept of race. On the other hand, in terms of observation, the few differences that there are between geographical populations are conspicuous, because they involve things like skin colour.

There is less variation in the whole of the human species, from Africa to Japan to Greenland, than there is between two chimpanzees in the same forest. From that point of view, we are a remarkably uniform species. Yet because of a few superficial features like skin colour, we look very different. That demands a biological explanation.

Freethinker:  Which has not yet been satisfactorily made?

Dawkins: You can speculate about it. We know why it is that certain geographical areas are different from others. We know that skin colour is about melanin protecting the skin from the harmful rays of the sun. On the other hand, in places where there is not so much sun, people with too much melanin can suffer from a shortage of vitamin D: they get rickets. From a Darwinian point of view, it is not difficult to see why, as you go further away from the equator, you tend to see people becoming lighter in colour. There are other things, local, regional adaptations, like in mountainous areas, there are adaptations to high altitude oxygen shortage. I have speculated, and Darwin did before me, that sexual selection might be important. It is an interesting question, bedevilled by the fact that it is politically so sensitive.

Freethinker: Let’s talk about a few more controversial issues. First of all, blasphemy and free speech. You recently tweeted about the rescreening of Monty Python on British TV and the fact that it was accompanied by a warning saying, ‘some viewers may find this content offensive’.

Dawkins: I don’t like having my tweets quoted. I would much rather you quoted my books, if I may say so.

Freethinker: OK. But how far do you think anything should be banned, censored or accompanied by a warning because it is offensive to some people?

Dawkins: Censorship is justified when it is a direct incitement to violence. Unfortunately, some people might want to censor a film, play, lecture or book, not because is itself an incitement to violence, but because they are afraid that other people may incite violence in attempting to suppress it. People refrained from publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, which were deemed offensive, and they did it because there were threats of violence if they did publish them. It is not that the cartoons themselves were threatening violence, but that there was a threat of violence in response to their publication. I stand for free speech, except only in those cases which are a direct incitement to violence.

Freethinker: In 1959, the scientist and novelist C.P. Snow published The Two Cultures, in which he bemoaned the scientific illiteracy of those educated in traditional humanities subjects. Since then, things have moved on dramatically, not just in terms of what science has done but perhaps even more in people’s perception of it. Today, in a world where science has achieved so much, both for good and ill, what place is left for the humanities and arts, for philosophy, history, literature and culture?

Dawkins: A huge place, obviously. One of the things that makes life worth living, for me, is poetry and music especially.

Freethinker: Do you play an instrument?

Dawkins: Sort of. Behind you over there is an EWI – if it was not for Covid, I would offer you a go on it. It is an electronic instrument which has an amplifier inside it. The noise that comes out depends upon software and it is programmable. You finger it like a clarinet or oboe, and it can sound like a clarinet or tuba, cello or trumpet. I shall try and make it sound like a clarinet. [He plays the cat theme from Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’.] You get the idea that you can sound like pretty much what you like, but not all that accurately – it is an all-purpose instrument. Quite apart from that, yes, I love music. That does not mean I can play it, but I love listening to it.

I am deeply moved by poetry. I have got a bit of a blind spot about visual art. I am ready to learn, but I do not have the same depth of feeling about it as many people do. I have not read all that much history, but I am interested in it. I enjoy talking to my humanities colleagues in Oxford and learn a lot from them. I don’t know what more to say, really.

Freethinker: What projects are you working on at the moment?

Dawkins: I am working on a new book called The Genetic Book of the Dead, which is aimed at the same kind of audience as The Selfish Gene. Its thesis is that an animal is a description of ancient worlds, of an ancestral world in which its genes are naturally selected. A sufficiently knowledgeable zoologist of the future should be able to pick up an unknown animal and read it as a description of a palimpsest of ancestral worlds in which its ancestors were naturally selected.

Freethinker: Over the course of your long career, what is the achievement of which you are proudest?

Dawkins: My second book, The Extended Phenotype (1982), about the visible manifestations of genes, because it has the most of me in it, and the most original thought. It is aimed at professionals rather than lay people, although lay people can enjoy it.

Freethinker: Finally, in your view, what are the biggest achievements of biology since the beginning of the millennium?

Dawkins: In biology, there has been steady progress in the molecular genetic world. The revolution initiated a half a century before by Watson and Crick is being built upon with astonishing speed, including the development of instrumentation to enable us to read the genes of any living creature. So from the year 2000, when the Human Genome Project was approximately completed, having taken ten years and huge numbers of dollars and man hours, what was done then can now be done in a couple of days very cheaply. We are well on the way to a time when doctors can simply take anybody’s genome and tailor their prescription to the individual, rather than giving a generic prescription that applies to everybody. In the future, it will be possible to say, your genome is so and so – what you need is so and so.

As a zoologist, taxonomy – the study of classification, what animals are related to – is revolutionised by the ability to read the genome. You can take any two animals or plants and read every single letter of their genome, and literally compare it as a scholar might compare two manuscripts of the Book of Isaiah and say, there is a letter here, a word there that is different. You can imagine how powerful that is in comparing, say, a hedgehog to a frog, and seeing how closely related they are. That is uncovering surprises which will go on uncovering surprises.

The post ‘An animal is a description of ancient worlds’: interview with Richard Dawkins appeared first on The Freethinker.

I met Copson in his office in the Humanists UK headquarters, in the basement of 39 Moreland Street, Islington. His dog, Juno, lay quietly on his desk in her tartan blanket until she was picked up by his husband. The feet of occasional passers-by could be glimpsed through the windows. A poster hung above the desk with the motto ‘WORK HARD & BE NICE TO PEOPLE’.

Copson read Ancient and Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford. He graduated in 2004 and started working for the British Humanist Association in 2005, becoming its Chief Executive in 2010 at the age of 29. The organisation changed its name to Humanists UK in 2017.

Over the last decade, Copson has become one of the leading advocates for modern humanism. His published books include Secularism: A Very Short Introduction; The Little Book of Humanism (with Alice Roberts); and The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Humanism (co-edited with A.C. Grayling), to which he contributed a chapter on ‘What is humanism?’

In this interview, we discuss the origins and various meanings of humanism, its relationship to policy-making in Humanists UK, and whether it is legitimate to label all sorts of thinkers ‘humanist’ in a modern sense even though they lived before the nineteenth century.

The conversation also touches on the culture wars, Brexit, the pandemic, and the scientific method, as well as why, from a humanist perspective, free thought and free speech are inextricably linked – and what limits there should be to the latter. Finally, Copson reminisces about the ‘atheist bus’ movement, and reveals the books he turns to for humanist inspiration.

Freethinker: There are different things which different people mean by humanism. We may think of Renaissance humanism, or humanism in the classical world. But what is the idea of humanism represented by Humanists UK?

Andrew Copson: You’re right that, just like secularism, there are multiple and contested definitions of humanism that have operated at different periods in the past, and also different definitions that operate in different parts of the world. Ever since Humanists UK has been an organisation, including its predecessor organisations, the ‘humanism’ that they have meant is that attitude that combines a naturalistic approach to the universe with a human centred approach to morality and questions of meaning and purpose.

So people like Harold Blackham at the start of the BHA, Margaret Knight, Hector Hawton, who kickstarted the organisation in the mid 20th century, were happy to talk about the humanism of the ancient Mediterranean world, the humanism of classical China, or the humanism of ancient India and the humanism of the modern West as the same type of thing. And that non-culturally specific range of attitudes and values that has appeared perennially in different human cultures at different times is the sort of humanism that Humanists UK are talking about.

Freethinker: So a human-centred morality and non-religious attitudes?

Copson: Yes. It’s very difficult to put into a potted definition, because there are long books of many volumes that are written about what humanism is, but, in brief, that’s the humanism that Humanists UK– and in fact, international humanists or humanist organisations around the world – use. The other uses of the word are not so common, especially in languages other than English. The word ‘humanism’ is sometimes glossed as being like humanitarianism. And then there’s the use of humanism to refer to a particular historical scholarly movement, like Renaissance humanism, that rediscovery of pre-Christian literature and ideas in Europe. And then, in US English, humanism sometimes refers to the modern discipline of the study of the humanities. But humanism for us is that non-religious worldview.

Freethinker: How would you distinguish humanism from atheism, scepticism, freethought, and so on?

Copson: I would say they’re all different things, doing a different job. Atheism is a lack of belief in god, it’s a specific word to describe a specific attitude on one particular question. Scepticism is a wider intellectual attitude. It’s a certain approach to knowledge, how you find things out and how you react to other people’s truth claims. That sceptical approach is part and parcel of the humanist view. ‘Freethought’ feels to me a historically specific thing. I think of freethinking as being a nineteenth-century phenomenon – a very nineteenth-century word.

Freethinker: To what extent does your idea of humanism involve positive values? I mean definable values more than just the attitude that you have been talking about.

Copson: I think that humanism is an approach, an attitude, a framework for making sense of things and understanding your own place and the place of people generally in the universe and in our own societies. I would never say that it had prescribed content. So if by positive values you mean some sort of manifesto or platform – certainly humanist organisations have manifestos, platforms and agendas where they try to apply humanist values and approaches in their own specific contexts and in the domains we operate, whether it’s the political sphere, the provision of community services, social movements and so on. But I wouldn’t say that humanism itself had, as it were, eleven pillars of humanism, or ten rules in that sense.

But it is a positive attitude. If you want to say that it’s not a negation of something in the way that atheism is a negation of the idea that there should be gods – atheism is quite a Christian concept – to the extent that it’s not about negating things, the humanist approach to life is positive. It’s saying we accept the evidence that we can see around human origins, the nature of the universe and everything else. The humanist approach is affirmative in terms of human choice and freedom, and in our responsibilities to each other and in the attaching of value to human lives and to our own experiences. And it’s positive in the sense that a humanist approach to life and to other people is affirmative of them, not just of humanity generally and of one’s own freedom of choice, but of others. For a given value of positive, I would say that a humanist approach is positive, proactive and affirmative. And that’s not just a way of saying I like it and it’s a good approach to life – I think there is something inherently positive about it.

Freethinker: Looking at your Little Book of Humanism and other humanist materials, it seems that you do want to develop quite a specific approach to morality, which is this human-centred approach. Would it be fair to say that concerns with human-based morality have been part of humanism since 1896 at least?

Copson: I use the word ‘humanism’ as the people who started humanist organisations did, to describe a certain approach to life that does exist, and existed before the word ‘humanism’ was coined. The people I talked about a moment ago as being amongst the founders of the modern humanist movement in the mid-twentieth century, they didn’t think they were making this stuff up. They thought that they were discerning a real tradition of thought that has existed in different societies and different places in disconnected ways, but that was increasingly widely held in their own time. They tried to give form and to describe the content of this attitude, but they didn’t think they were inventing it.

They weren’t like American humanists who would write a humanist manifesto and claim to have invented humanism. The founders of British humanist organisations were more likely and are still more likely to claim that humanism is a pre-existing thing, and the word ‘humanism’ a post-hoc coinage to describe something that already exists – a perennial philosophy that pops up now and again. So we’re not trying to develop a certain content for humanism, or that it was a belief-based organisation which needed to flesh out its policies. But I would agree with the characterisation of a humanist approach as being human-centred in this way. Once you start thinking in that way, some things follow from it. The things we talk about in The Little Book of Humanism are just the outworkings of that attitude.

Freethinker: Hence why you can justify calling all sorts of people who lived in so many centuries before the nineteenth century ‘humanists’.

Copson: Yes. It’s an almost sociological, descriptive use of the word, just as you might argue that Spartacus was a socialist. Today, everyone is obsessed with identity, and there’s an allergic reaction to the idea that you might apply an adjective to someone if they didn’t apply it to themselves. But I think that is a basic misunderstanding of language.

Freethinker: Is there a risk that calling all these people humanists in the ‘attitude’ sense might be confused with calling them humanists in the sense of sharing the values, campaign aims and policies of an organisation like Humanists UK?

Copson: I don’t think so. Not every humanist would agree, for example, with all the policies of Humanists UK.

Freethinker: You could argue that anyone who thinks that morality starts with human beings and has a non-religious world view would count as humanist. How is it that Humanists UK can justify labelling any particular policy as ‘humanist’, if this is such a general term?

Copson:Today we organise ourselves under the broad platform of freedom of thought, expression, choice. The idea being that it is a distinctively humanist idea that the individual human being has one life, and that if human development, flourishing and happiness is going to occur, it can only occur then. This idea of human flourishing, which is based on distinctively humanist foundations, dictates the sort of policies that Humanists UK promotes – for example, legal protections for freedom from discrimination; reform of school curriculums and school structures so that they better promote freedom of thought; and removing obstacles to individual freedom of choice, whether it’s outmoded law, religious strictures, social conformity, the government’s poking of its nose into things, prejudice or discrimination, or the way that your circumstances might limit your freedom of choices in life.

So that’s the way policy is developed by Humanists UK. And then we apply those principles to the political, social and legal environment, and see where the barriers are to the realisation of those human development aims.

Freethinker: To what extent would you characterise Humanists UK as a political organisation?

Copson: Humanists UK is many types of things. It’s a community service provider, a movement for social change, and an organisation that seeks to elucidate particular values to people. But it is also a platform for political change, as well as legal and social change.

Freethinker: Where would you describe Humanists UK on the political spectrum, in terms of the political philosophies or the political change you’re advocating?

Copson: I think it’s ‘humanist’. I think there’s an obvious sympathy between humanist political positions and liberal ones. When Bertrand Russell was talking about discerning humanism, as it were, through the ages, he almost made it inherent in the humanist position. So he was talking about the reliance on science, a certain attitude towards moral judgement and towards questions of meaning and purpose in life, and a certain liberal political attitude.

I think that’s probably right. If you think that human development has an importance in the mortal context that we’ve just been talking about, then you’d probably best pin a humanist approach today, at least in Britain, to a liberal approach. In the twentieth century in particular, some humanists have been very strong advocates of socialism – meaning different things by that.

Freethinker: And some who weren’t.

Copson: Exactly. So I think liberals and socialists probably have a good claim to be humanistically inspired. But then if I think of political Conservatives that I know who are members of Humanists UK or members of the Parliamentary Humanist Group, they also mount a human development, human freedom-based argument for their political principles. So I think they would typically say something like, it’s more likely that more people will be happier and have more freedom if we give greater protections to personal property, greater incentives for self-improvement. A socialist humanist might say, well, it’s far more likely that more people are going to have greater freedom of choice and dignity in their lives if we make more standardised provision for everybody.

Freethinker: But Humanists UK wouldn’t come down on the side of a particular political party?

Copson: No. It would be unlawful.

Freethinker: Because you’re a charity.

Copson: Yes. But even if we weren’t a charity, I don’t think that would happen, because there are humanist groups in all the political parties: there’s the Conservative Humanists, the Labour Humanists, the Humanist and Secularist Liberal Democrats, the Green Party Humanists.

Freethinker: Is there a UKIP Humanist group?

Copson: No. Is there a UKIP? When the Brexit referendum happened, we commissioned six blogs on our website, three by humanist Remainers and three by humanist Brexiters.

Freethinker: So it can cut across those sorts of divides.

Copson: Definitely. I think what a humanist attitude is incompatible with is a small ‘c’ conservatism. To be hidebound, to put a value on tradition that is weighed in itself against other values and priorities, is probably incompatible with the idea that we should think from first principles about things, be free, be self determined, try to maximise human development.

Thinkers who have opposed humanism, like Roger Scruton or Edmund Burke, these are the sort of people who have said, we don’t want individuals to be rational actors, we don’t want the state to be a social contract – we want something more ethnic, more organic, more rooted in timeless things that you can’t question.

Freethinker: You’re not saying that tradition is automatically bad?

Copson: No. But the attitude that put it above everything else dogmatically as a point of principle would be bad.         

Freethinker: But the aim you have in mind is human flourishing – individually and –

Copson: And en masse.

Freethinker: Presumably there will be times when individual human flourishing and the flourishing of society more generally are in conflict. How does humanism deal with that?

Copson: The moral principle that a human has recourse to then, which has become quite deeply encoded in human rights law, is the John Stuart Mill idea that your rights or entitlement to the maximum possible flourishing you can have, should be limited only by the rights of others. That’s a pretty good tool. I’ve never, in my 15 years here, seen a political discussion, a conflict of rights, a clash of individual or social aims or group versus group that couldn’t be resolved by that sort of mechanism. Doesn’t mean the answer is obvious.

Freethinker: And you want to argue that you need to look not just at ‘freedom of religion’, but ‘freedom of religion or belief’.

Copson: Absolutely. I think we’d far rather talk about ‘freedom of thought and conscience’.

Freethinker: You said before that humanism was more of an attitude. Perhaps it doesn’t easily fit into the idea of ‘belief’?

Copson: No. With the definition of ‘belief’ as it is now in human rights case law, it does fit. But that’s not because of anything obvious about the word itself, or the normal usage of the word.

In French, the translation is convictions, and in German, Weltanschauung, ‘worldview’, – both of which are much clearer. In English, they inexplicably put ‘religion or belief’, where ‘belief’ has a common usage which has all sorts of meanings. But ‘belief’ as a term in equality law and human rights law, as legislators have intended it to be defined, and as case law has continued to define it, is a humanist attitude. And the ideas of humanists fit into that very clearly. But you wouldn’t use that word if you were having a commonsense conversation.

A lot of humanists react poorly to the idea that a lot of the things they think could be described as beliefs. If you think that human beings are the product of natural processes like evolution, you would not want to say it was a belief, but accepting the evidence. If I was writing it down, I would say that I accept that human beings are the product of natural processes. I do not believe it in some sort of convictional way. I just accept it because I can see the evidence for it.

Freethinker: Would that also entail a certain amount of reservation, just in case you might be wrong?

Copson: Exactly. I accept that evidence for now, with the implication that that is the current view, that is where the evidence currently is. I don’t know if I really have any ‘beliefs’.

Freethinker: But you’ve done a whole podcast series on ‘What I Believe’.           

Copson: Yes, but that’s a historical reference back to essays by Bertrand Russell and E.M. Forster.

Freethinker: How did the rise of the humanist movement in Britain relate to humanism in other countries?

Copson: When we think about our movement, like all history, it is difficult to mark the clear points. Do you want to tie our history into the history of the man who goes up in front of the magistrate in the seventeenth century, because when he was drunk in the tavern he said he did not believe all this nonsense anyway and why did the priests have so much power?

Freethinker: Let’s take 1896 as a starting point.

Copson: 1896 is probably the least important. Organisationally that’s when we began. We were founded as the Union of Ethical Societies, which had a slightly different ethos from humanist organisations today. But the word ‘ethical’ in ‘Ethical Union’ does not refer solely to morals – it was almost like the way we use ‘humanist’ today. It describes both the intellectual approach to things and a set of values.

Freethinker: If freedom of thought and freedom of speech are two sides of the same coin –

Copson:They are inextricably linked.

Freethinker: And absolutely essential to a humanist or non-religious worldview –

Copson: Yes.

Freethinker: Does Humanists UK find itself taking a position in the culture wars, or do you try to stay above them? Let’s say all the topics that are controversial at the moment: transgender theory, definitions of race, Brexit, the pandemic, religious freedom, how far one should criticise Islam, pulling down statues…

Copson: I don’t think we do. There are about 47 policy areas within our policy remit, but we have six campaigns at any one time. At the moment, they are assisted dying, humanist marriages, the RE curriculum across the UK, the blasphemy law in Northern Ireland, collective worship across the UK, and working to get the UK government to be more active on behalf of humanists persecuted abroad. We select these campaigns because they are the areas we judge to be of high social importance, or where other people are actively arguing against the position that we would promote, or where we think success might be more achievable in the shorter term – but they are all focused on achieving specific legislative changes.

So, for example, when we are asked questions like, do we have a view on what a woman is  – we don’t. We have a long-standing view on the need for people who are undergoing gender reassignment to have equal treatment and for the human rights of trans people to be respected and upheld. That’s a specific legal, political, human rights question. But then on the wider question of what’s a woman, what’s a man, it is not the sort of thing on which an organisation would take a view. The important thing for us is that people should always discuss these things and be open-minded, and there should be a space for freedom of thought and freedom of expression on these issues.

Freethinker: So you would say that Richard Dawkins, for example, is entirely entitled to discuss gender issues in whatever way he wishes.

Copson: I would hope he would do so in a way that respected other people’s dignity and everything else. We have got certain values as an organisation, which we we could expect our own people, our own staff, to abide by. You would not expect everyone to abide by this, but I would hope everyone wanted to treat other people with respect, listen to different opinions, express themselves in a way that did not undermine other people’s dignity or rights or threaten them in any way.        

Freethinker: What about satire? Is there still a space for that in the humanist worldview?

Copson:Yes. A lot of our patrons are satirical comedians.

Freethinker: Where do you draw the line between legitimate satire and not respecting people’s dignity?

Copson: This is one of those questions that cannot be answered in the abstract. I do not think that the causing of offence is a harm. I feel quite strongly about that. Some of the problems that people get into today are because they say, ‘if I’m offended, I’m harmed,’ and that because it is right to limit other people’s freedom in order to avoid harming others, this is an example of where their freedom should be limited.

That is wrong, because offence is not a harm – it can be a great benefit. I have been offended in the past and as a result, changed my mind about things on reflection. Martin Rowson, the Guardian cartoonist, is highly offensive in a lot of his material. He gave a talk at the 2014 World Humanist Congress called ‘Giving the Gift of Offence’, where he made an argument based on anthropology, sociology and history, to say that one of the most important things you can do is to offend people.

If you’re offended, agitated in your opinions, vexed about something in your mind, that can stir thought, change, and all sorts of positive developments. I think, for example, about the cases involving the cartoons of Mohammed, for example in the Batley case, I would have probably said that offence actually has educational value. It stimulates thought.

Freethinker: So cartoons like that or blasphemous cartoons should be capable of being taught in school?        

Copson: Absolutely. I went on the Sunday programme and said that. I had an interesting discussion with a Muslim teacher at the time – we sort of agreed.

To come back to your question, where does the dignity of a person begin, that is a genuinely difficult question, because it is contextual. We can all understand that if you are shouting abuse into someone’s face, you are violating their rights, their dignity. That is why we have a concept of harassment in the law – you are harming them, threatening them, intimidating them, they feel that way and you have crossed the line. If you imagine pulling that person back from that other person’s face further and further, how far do they need to go before it is not violating the dignity of the person they are targeting? There is a good case for saying that any targeted criticism of that sort could begin to meet a definition of being a violation of person’s dignity. It would depend what they were saying, how they were saying it, and who was saying it.

Freethinker: What about individuals versus groups? You might accept that targeted hatred or harassment against particular named individuals would cross the line. But what about specific groups? What about if you were criticising Christians or Muslims in general?

Copson: It depends on the context. Are you asking what sort of things should we morally disapprove of, or what sort of things should be legally sanctioned? I think there’s a high bar for legal sanctions because you want to maintain the maximum space for the exchange of views and individual agency.

The Rabat Plan of Action [on the prohibition of advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence] is good in relation to hate speech because it lays out a series of principles which you might apply to find out whether or not you have reached a threshold to be treated as the incitement of hatred.

I do think that there is scope for laws that criminalise the incitement of hatred, not just the incitement to violence, because I think it is better than allowing hatred to be incited that makes large groups of people’s lives difficult, precarious, vulnerable or limited in some way. It is prudent to cut off hatred before it turns into violence and persecution, but with a very high bar. Intention has got to be an important part of it, the vulnerability of the group or class that you are stirring up hatred against.

I would not say that landlords should be treated in the same way as gay people in concepts about incitement of hatred. If you are having a demonstration to say that there should not be any landlords because they are ruining the economy, obviously that is different from saying there should not be any gay people.

Freethinker: But look at what happened to landlords in communist Russia and China. 

Copson: Again, that’s why context is important. That’s a long way from happening here. Were it to be a possibility, then I might easily be persuaded that you would have to protect that class of people in some way.     

Freethinker: Moving onto a topic which is related to free speech in different ways: science. Scienceor the scientific attitude seems to be an important part of modern humanism. Do you agree?

Copson: Yes. A lot of scientists came into the humanist movement in the mid-twentieth century. There were some early on, but not quite as many. In the twentieth century, the sort of people who came in who in the nineteenth century might have more naturally fitted into the Rationalist Association. For example, the scientist T.H. Huxley was a rationalist in the nineteenth century, and his grandson, Julian Huxley, was the first President of the British Humanist Association. Francis Crick was another; Jacob Bronowski was the most famous one because he was so involved – he was not just a scientist, he was a patron and activist for humanist organisations.

Freethinker:  If we think around the turn of the millennium, we have the New Atheism movement, in which Richard Dawkins, A.C. Grayling and Christopher Hitchens were the ‘big three’. Richard Dawkins has arguably made a big impact on the status of science in humanism – would you agree?

Copson: Arguably, the humanism that we have had since the twentieth century has been the ethical people plus the rationalists. Although the Rationalist Association exists as a separate organisation, there was a huge influx of everyone into the British Humanist Association. Humanism was seen as a coming together of the ethics on the one hand and the ‘rational’, scientific people on the other. Throughout the twentieth century that has been the keynote.

What might have been new by the end of the 20th century was that more biologists were involved. And that was because of the totemic importance that human origins had assumed in the wider humanist movement – both because it is an important part of being self-aware to know where our species has come from, what we are not and what we are, but also because there was an increasing contrast with the biblical literalism of some of the bigger religious groups at the time, not just Biblical literalism, but Quranic literalism, any sort of scriptural creationism.

The great stimulus to growth in the beginning of the twenty-first century for humanist organisations, both here and elsewhere in the world, was the threat of creationism in schools, creationism as a phenomenon being exported from Turkey or America. So probably scientists and biological scientists in particular assumed a greater importance within the things we would talk about.

Freethinker: How important is the scientific method to humanism?

Copson: It has always been very important. For example, Harold Blackham, when he talked about reason and experience, was really talking about the scientific method that applies to everything.

Freethinker: When we talk about the scientific method, are we talking about something like verification or falsification or trying to get the best possible understanding through empirical evidence?

Copson: Yes. The important concepts are observation, experience, open-mindedness, and thinking critically. The scientific temper, the attitudes that go with the application of the scientific method are probably just as important.          

Freethinker: Presumably people in the humanities too can (sometimes) reason critically?

Copson: Exactly. When I was studying history, I used to have long conversations with a friend about whether or not history was a science, whether or not I was engaged in scientific work when I was evaluating sources or looking back in the past. We have consciously divided the world into disciplines, but they are not really separate from each other. They are all the application of our minds to certain problems and questions. So I suppose there is great crossover in the skills that you would use – if you think the history is about finding out the truth about the past. Some might say history is about telling a nice story –

Freethinker: Or just one damn thing after another.

Copson:Exactly.

Freethinker: Is there a risk that science can be valued too highly, or that, in non-religious movements, science can be put on a pedestal and seen as almost infallible, like a quasi-religion or a religion substitute?

Copson: There is a great line in the Amsterdam Declaration about this, which is that science provides the means, but human values must provide the ends. That is very important to remember. There is a risk that we lose sight of the purpose of any human enterprise, and science is a human enterprise – a very important one, but nonetheless, it is there for us to decide what to do with it. It should not set the agenda. We need to understand, especially when it comes to technology and the results of science, that it is not necessarily scientists who should be saying why things should be done, or what should be done.

Freethinker: So while Plato said philosophers should be kings, you would not necessarily say that scientists should be kings?

Copson: Definitely not. Well, I don’t believe in kings. I think there should certainly be more scientists in Parliament. But I do not think they should rule the roost.

I declare an interest, which is that I am not particularly interested in science personally. This is an area where there will be rampant disagreement between humanists of different persuasions. But we need to set the ends, and science only provides the means – although science can be part of a happy existence for the individual scientist who is pursuing it.

Do we risk losing sight of the fact that the answers of science are provisional, that scientists disagree, that there is an ongoing conversation by which, hopefully, we will move closer to the truth, but we are not there yet? Yes, that should be borne in mind. It would be better if that were taught about science a lot more. When I look at the children of friends, the way they learn about science at school is as if it provided the answers.

Freethinker: Humanists UK did not take a position on Brexit because you had humanists on both sides. Did you take a position during the pandemic on policy-related matters – things like lockdown, health restrictions, masks?

Copson: No, we did not. I personally was a member of the Department of Health’s Moral and Ethical Advisory Group during that period, together with people from different religions and beliefs, but also medical ethicists and other practitioners. We were providing often different ethical frameworks as to how the government might see these things, the balance between freedom and safety. But Humanists UK did not take a position. It would almost have been impossible to know how to have done so, because things changed so quickly, and the evidence was often so contested or unavailable.

The approach that I took on the Advisory Group was to remember that there was an ethical balance to be struck, and that public health, in terms of avoidance of the spread of that particular disease, had to be weighed against all sorts of other public health outcomes, and other human developmental and human satisfaction outcomes. For instance, is it acceptable to limit some spread to prevent a partner of fifty years from holding the hand of their dying partner? It is not automatically clear what the right answer is.

Freethinker: Is it acceptable to close schools?

Copson: All those sorts of questions. As an organisation, we were just too busy with other things to take a position on it, but if we had done, I think we would have confined ourselves to process. The process argument would have been to urge policymakers to explicitly weigh up these different things that they were balancing against each other. Because it is not just public health at any cost: there are other costs. We have seen the costs on people’s mental well-being, on relationships, child development, social solidarity – we saw the cost everywhere. That would have been our contribution, I think, but we did not make it, apart from in my personal capacity.

Freethinker: On your website, you have encouraged people to get vaccinated against Covid.

Copson: Yes. That is a no-brainer. We did not support making it mandatory.

Freethinker: Would you ever support making Covid vaccinations mandatory?

Copson: I think that is possible. We have taken positions on various other public health measures, for example, the addition of folic acid to flour, along the lines of, where there are interventions, weigh the costs. I do not know whether we would have supported mandatory vaccines. We have not discussed it and I do not just make up policy on my own – we have got policy and research staff that develop policy, and we have a process involving our Board. But what we did very strongly believe is that it was right for us to seek to persuade people to take up the vaccine, on all sorts of moral grounds. The most obvious one is one’s responsibility to others, but also that so much misinformation was being spread that was unfounded. The polling we did showed clearly that vaccine uptake amongst humanists was something like 97%.

Freethinker: How did you decide that the vaccines had been sufficiently tested to be reliable?

Copson: We took advice from people who are our patrons, scientists, and we spoke with the people who developed them – we had a lecture from Professor Sarah Gilbert, the Oxford Project Leader of the AstraZeneca vaccine. And the policy team formed a view on it.

Freethinker: Did any humanists disagree with you?

Copson: Yes, you always have one or two, but it was not a significant number.

Freethinker: How big is your membership at the moment?

Copson: 103,000 members and supporters in the UK, including members of the Humanist Society Scotland, of whom about 30% are members and 70% are supporters.

Freethinker: I am looking at the poster behind you on the wall with the notorious atheist bus quote: ‘There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ Were you involved in that?

Copson: Yes, I was one of the team of four.

Freethinker: What was the idea behind it?

Copson: It started off as a joke. There was a bus campaign running in London by a Christian church, which everyone has now forgotten about, which basically said, ‘you’re going to hell, God is coming back, so watch it.’ Ariane Sherine, the journalist and comedian who had the idea, wrote an article in 2008 in the Guardian saying, wouldn’t it be lovely if instead of this ‘God is coming’ message, we could have a cheery one saying, there isn’t a god, so don’t worry about that and enjoy life? She asked us if we would set up a crowd-funder for it, and we did. And then it became the biggest crowd-funding campaign in history at that point, in the early days of the internet. It was JustGiving. They set a £3,000 target, and it eventually reached £180,000. Quite an embarrassing amount of money. So we put posters on buses, on the tube, and by the end of it, we were just desperate to find places to put them all.

It got a lovely reaction – people found it positive. It was probably in the last days of the New Atheist wave, before people had, as they perhaps have now, got beyond that. It was almost like the punchline after ten years: people were on a high, they enjoyed it. Of course then others started criticising it, because most people who saw it had never even heard of the campaign that it was a reaction to. So they started saying things like, what has there being no god got to do with enjoying your life and not worrying? But actually it was also a message that stood on its own, because there are people who, when they were raised in religious backgrounds themselves, were very frightened, and have been taught to worry and be afraid of what was coming afterwards.

It was a feel-good campaign, really. And it was emulated all over the world. An academic book has been written about the atheist bus campaigns around the world. I was the press officer – it was the easiest press ever. Everyone wanted to cover it; it just hit the right moment. It was the most press coverage we’ve got for anything apart from our ‘Protest the Pope’ rally in March 2010. It boosted our membership enormously – it was a big step up at the time.

Freethinker: You say we’re over the New Atheism wave now…

Copson: Well, I don’t like to say that too much. It’s a different society from 20 years ago, it’s a long time ago.

Freethinker: Where is Humanists UK going now?

Copson: The lesson of Humanists UK so far has been continuity over change. I do not think that we have changed very much in terms of where we are going. Last year was our 125th anniversary, and we looked back quite a bit. What was quite striking was the consistency through time of the sort of things we do. We have always been a community service provider, and while today, it is ceremonies and pastoral care and support for apostates, whereas once it was counselling and housing associations and adoption, that function is still the same. We have always been a campaigning organisation, and by and large the motivating principles are the same as well. We have always been an organisation that promotes humanist ideas into the Zeitgeist. That is what we continue to do. There is no great change of direction, just hopefully a never-ending expansion.

Freethinker: Do you have any specific aims?

Copson: Reach more people, do more ceremonies, provide more pastoral care, speak to more children in schools, achieve more policy changes, increase the number of people we are in contact with, and scale up what we are doing all the time.

Freethinker: Final question: do you have any favourite humanist or philosophical books that give you inspiration?

Copson: I like the novels of George Eliot for humanism – it’s the best place to go. And the novels and essays of E.M. Forster – and the novels of Zadie Smith, and of James Baldwin. Go to your novels for humanism, that is my motto. 

The post What I believe: Interview with Andrew Copson appeared first on The Freethinker.