Welcome friends!
If you’re a regular reader of my blog you’ll know I think words and labels can be pretty tricky sometimes. Take “conservatism” for example. It’s the sort of thing people talk about all the time. Everyone clearly has something in mind when they do but I very much doubt it’s always the same thing. There are disparate strands of conservatism having precious little to do with one another in an intellectual sense beyond their shared antipathy to liberalism. Indeed I’ve long distinguished what I see as the two main strands of conservatism here in the USA: economic conservatism and social / religious conservatism. More recently I’ve added the “natural rights” political strain and of course now with the advent of Trumpism I suppose I should add the sort of nationalistic ethnocentric conservatism that was once pretty common in this country and many others but fell out of favor after the rise and fall of that angry murderous little guy with the funny mustache who stands as the eternal icon and champion of that particular form of conservative brain rot. Well, I was having a hard time finding my own blog the other day and it got me thinking about the terms I’ve been using these past seven years to describe the perspective of my little blog for those looking for something suitable to read or bash as the case may be: liberal humanism. Seems perfectly sensible to me but I’ve come to suspect this particular terminology may generate a certain amount of confusion. Perhaps some clarification would not go amiss. To make a long story short I’ve decided to tweak the name of my blog and my URL to something I hope may prove slightly easier to interpret. Sorry for the inconvenience but it’s something I thought I really had to do. Allow me to explain.
I originally chose to tag my blog with the “liberal humanism” label because I wanted to let people know I intended to take on what I described at the time as the two headed monster of American conservatism: economic conservatism and social / religious conservatism. In other words I wanted to let people know I intended to write from the perspective of both a political and economic liberal as well as a secular humanist. Going with “liberal humanist” seemed a logical and obvious choice. However, as everyone knows appearances can sometimes be misleading.
One problem is that I’ve finally realized the humanism side of the expression doesn’t necessarily always equate to secular humanism. Nope. Turns out there are or were anyway people who called themselves “humanists” but in a religious context. Seems a bit weird to me but what do I know? That’s why people here in the USA tend to use what I’ve always considered the rather redundant phrase “secular humanism.” Since I’m writing here in America primarily for my fellow Americans I suppose I should probably spell it all out in a way everyone understands so I’ve replaced the simple “humanism” with the more traditional “secular humanism.”
Another problem is it seems the phrase “liberal humanism” may not bring to mind the combination of what we in this country call liberalism and what we call secular humanism. Indeed if one looks up the phrase “liberal humanism” as I did just now one ends up with two interpretations that don’t involve liberalism in the political or economic sense at all. One interpretation equates to what we have just chosen to call “secular humanism” with the word “liberal” standing in for the word “secular.” The other interpretation involves some sort of literary theory. A bit awkward isn’t it? I only talk about religious matters once in a blue moon so if anyone were to stop by hoping to find an extended discussion of secular humanist issues I suppose he or she might be a little put off with my frequent posts on economic and political and more general cultural matters. The situation would be even worse for anyone hoping to find a discussion of literary theory because I’m afraid I don’t really know anything about that at all.
Even the term “liberalism” has some issues. I’ve previously mentioned some history minded or perhaps just purposely obscure economic conservatives choose to label themselves “classical liberals” in a nod to how the word was used in the eighteenth century when liberalism was contrasted to mercantilism and royalism and so on with the “classical” bit serving to differentiate that rather quaint and archaic interpretation of the word from the interpretation that became common here in the USA during the twentieth century relating to the belief democratic government can and should be used to improve not only market results but other social ills as well, basically what people in other countries tend to think of as “democratic socialism” or something along those lines. (And for my foreign readers let me just mention once again that the phrase “democratic socialism” equates to “anti-democratic communism” in the eyes of many Americans particularly of the older variety so if one mentions the S word at all one isn’t exactly clarifying matters in an American context. Bernie Sanders may be able to get away with it for one reason or another but it’s definitely not something to be taken lightly.) I suppose I could clarify I’m talking about twentieth century liberalism to avoid any possible confusion with classical liberalism but that seems a bit facetious to me. I think it’s probably fine to rely on the absence of the modifier to establish the now conventional type of liberalism I have in mind.
While researching these terms it occurred to me why finding a suitable expression for the particular perspective of this blog is so challenging. When it comes to blogs one can find plenty of people talking about religion both pro and con including atheists and secular humanists. One can also find plenty of people talking about economic and political matters from a liberal perspective. But one doesn’t necessarily find many people concerned with talking about both in the same venue. I suppose the two sets of issues strike many people as quite distinct but I suspect they have as much in common with one another as the economic and social / religious strands of conservatism have with one another and one often sees writers interested in talking about both of those themes at the same time so I can’t see why I shouldn’t be able to do the same.
The bottom line is I’ve decided everything would be a lot simpler and clearer if I just clarified I’m writing about both conventional political and economic liberalism as well as secular humanism by changing the title of my blog from The Modest Blog of A Liberal Humanist to The Modest Blog of a Liberal Secular Humanist and my URL from liberal-humanist.blogspot.com to liberalsecularhumanist.blogspot.com. (Looks like alphabet soup but really it’s just liberal secular humanist jammed together.) But have no concerns my brothers and sisters. I don’t intend to make any substantive changes to the format or content of my blog at all. It’s still me and I’m still doing battle with the two, three, or possibly four headed monster of American conservatism. I’m not going anywhere.
Addendum
I subsequently went back to my original URL and original title so forget everything I just said about that. Well, not everything. I still believe adding the word “secular” to the URL and title would have made things a lot clearer but I really had no idea of the sort of disruption and confusion changing a URL can cause particularly with respect to old posts. So let’s just keep it liberal humanism at least until I figure out a more elegant and transparent way to change it but in your mind of course you can think of the more descriptive liberal secular humanism. Why can’t things be simple? I don’t know. That’s life, I suppose.
