About us

Penza is a limited company that provides services in research and communication, and in education and educational consultancy, including institutional and curriculum development especially at the tertiary level. From the surplus income generated it funds a project to extend humanist attitudes and practices in education with a principal focus on Australia, based on the tradition of humanism in England.

Humanism

Most words that end in ‘-ism’ in order to denote a philosophical outlook are all too likely to be labels for a variety of views rather than a single clearly demarcated view. This is true of the word ‘humanism,’ which even in its contemporary use to imply a non-religious ethical outlook which is broadly premised on an interest in human affairs at the human scale of interest, allows a good deal of interpretative latitude to those who use the word to describe their own outlook.

In many cases such imprecision creates problems: ‘empiricism’ and ‘rationalism,’ ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism,’ ‘dogmatism’ and ‘scepticism’ are all words that denote baggy concepts whose internal varieties need to be distinguished and more circumstantially described. But the bagginess of ‘humanism’ is one of its strengths. It implies a starting point, a premise, rather than a finished body of doctrine; it leaves to those who share this starting point the task of working out what it demands of them in their ethical life and choices. For some, the result might be close to a fairly conventional set of moral principles, for others something less conventional. But the starting-point they share will impose a certain overall character on whatever they arrive at, in at least this sense: that it will not be derived from a faith-based conception of the world, and it will therefore be the outcome of their own thinking about their responsibilities and relationships.

In this respect every humanist’s ethics is an attempt to respond to the Socratic invitation to live the considered and chosen life, rather than a life prescribed by religious doctrines inherited from the traditions of whatever community he or she happens to be born into, as is the case with the great majority of people throughout history and even today. Socrates famously goaded his fellow Athenians to think for themselves about what they meant by the moral concepts they took themselves to live by, arguing that ‘the unconsidered life is not worth living.’ He is accordingly regarded as the initiator of a debate which, in its permutations through the schools of Epicurean and Stoic thought in antiquity and beyond, has continued to our own time in the minds of those whose view of the world is naturalistic and free-thinking.

The base line for a humanist ethics is that is has to start from our best understanding of human nature and the human condition. The ‘human condition’ is somewhat easier to specify than the concept of ‘human nature,’ that Protean thing which literature, psychology, philosophy and individual experience all struggle to understand. Whereas a study of history and a thoughtful reading of literature together offer abundant insights into the human condition, the sheer diversity of human character, interests and desires make the task of understanding human nature a work that demands whole lifetimes to undertake – these being our own individual lifetimes as we seek to make sense of ourselves and those we are close to: a task which, it seems, we never quite complete. But that endeavor is itself a major part of what is constitutive of good and worth-while lives, as we see if we consider the opposite, namely, any life lived in carelessness and indifference towards the questions of who we are and how we can best relate to others.

In saying that humanism is the ethical endeavor that starts from our best understanding of human nature and the human condition, I am making an assumption and at the same time hinting at a disguised stipulation. The stipulation is that by ‘best understanding’ I propose to mean not only ‘most accurate’ but also ‘most generous and sympathetic,’ for this is surely a desideratum for achieving that understanding: only if we have an open-minded approach to human experience can we hope to fathom its diversity and imperatives.

Of course, we can confidently expect to find that a significant part of what impels human activity is not only not admirable but downright appalling and hateful. But this is not the majority story. In every village, town and city of the world, every minute of every day, there are millions of acts of ordinary co-operation, courtesy and kindness, and they constitute the greatest part of human interaction. One has only to look around any of those places to see, in plenitude, the fruits of social life, the products of agreement, the outcomes of the fact of community which governs most peoples lives. This is a hopeful observation.

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