Humanist parents Mark and Sophia and son Benedict
Sophia “Gizmo” and Mark, discuss aspects of parenting as freethinking humanists (with some secular Buddhist leanings) with their son Benedict.
This video interview was conducted for HumanistLife toward the end of last year. Below follow transcribed extracts on particular themes.
On Benedict’s interests and questioning dinnertimes
Sophia: What are your interests? That horrible question – what do you want to be when you grow up.
Benedict: Science, maths, music… history.
Sophia. Yeah. Those seem to be your favourite subjects. Science mostly. I think, we have a questioning life, don’t we? … And our dinnertime conversations while they may be hilarious–
Benedict: And quite inappropriate on most occasions–
Sophia: [Laughs] –are mostly about keeping the questioning alive. It’s a kind of fun scepticism, I think, that informs our household and it’s not just the scepticism, it’s not the negative part of it. It’s about wanting to know what things are about.
Benedict: The answer to most questions now is Wikipedia.
Mark: [Laughs] It’s a new religion isn’t it. The great god Wiki!
Humanist parents Sophia, Mark and son Benedict
On fantasy and playfulness
Sophia: And play is the way children and animals learn. So in a way it might be light-hearted, but it’s absolutely loaded in terms of becoming a well-rounded human being; that the more we’re allowed to experiment with things, the more we’re allowed to be, as Mark says fluid, with the way we think about things, the bigger our minds are allowed to get.
Benedict: Probably about 90% of the books I read are fantasy or sci-fi. But I still like to ask questions. I can be quite skeptical. I think that fantasy – as long as you don’t believe it so to speak, as long as you don’t completely let it get under your skin, so to speak, it doesn’t make a difference, it doesn’t change your reasons.
Sophia: Well plus it’s all magical! I think Roald Dahl is one of the most magical people in the world. He’s also one of the biggest skeptics.
Mark: I think it’s important to distinguish between the capacity to think and the need to believe. My understanding of what heads us in a humanist direction is freethinking, you know that one is free to use one’s mind in all sort of ways, and imagination is one of the ways in which the mind expresses itself. Beliefs always close down that freedom. If you believe in something then somehow you’ve decided that you can’t play with it anymore. It has to become a sort of fixture, as opposed to a flowing position which one can mess around with.
On disagreements
Benedict: They tend to be quite trivial–
Mark: We just disagreed over coffee! You like this industrial sludge.
Benedict: Yeah.
Mark: We like proper coffee.
Benedict: I mean, there was another one where, you didn’t think fish had tongues, or something. I disagreed and we looked it up on the internet, and some fish have tongues and some fish don’t–
Sophia: Some fish don’t have tongues!
Mark: … Do we disagree about positions, then, on things, like believing?
Sophia: Yeah Benedict disagrees with us!
Mark: –politically, spiritually, religiously.
Sophia: I asked you if you wanted to learn to meditate or take the three refuges and you said no. Why don’t you talk about that? Because we respect that difference.
Mark: He just thinks you’re a Buddhist old hippie, that’s all.
Sophia: He’s not far off that!
Benedict: … Until I can really make my mind up, I’m quite happy to be…
Mark: “Non-aligned”.
Sophia: We’ve chosen to align ourselves, very mildly, with a certain way of thinking. But that doesn’t mean Benedict has to.
On rules in family life
Sophia: I don’t police Benedict’s internet usage. Now, there’s going to be a lot of parents that might be watching this that says that’s absolutely criminal. But what we do around the dinner table is to encourage Benedict to have some judgement.
Mark: And the only way you can do that is by having a conversation.
Sophia: Remember that thing about the animals? You said come and look at this website.
Benedict: Oh, yeah.
Sophia: And at first it was funny, and then it got cruel, and then it got really gross and grotesque, and I said, look, no, we’d stay away from this website. It’s inviting you in with this stuff that just seems silly and funny, and then once you get in there there’s this really unspeakable cruelty going on. We talked about what made it cruel, didn’t we?
Benedict: Mm.
Sophia: And we, together, I turn my back on Benedict and he’ll have his own judgement. He doesn’t like cruelty.
Benedict: Now I’ve learned to completely ignore every single pop-up! [Laughs] I mean, if it’s a pop-up then it’s obviously there because no one is going to go looking for something like that.
…
Benedict: There are some things that I will probably never tell you.
Mark: Quite right! I don’t want to know!
Sophia: There are some thing you just don’t want to know about your kid.
Mark: You’re allowed your own secret life, you know.
Benedict: But, I’m not worried that they’re going ot pry into my life, and know every single secret that I have.
Mark: [Mock seriously] You have secrets?!
Benedict: … I am, their kid, but – they still have better things to do than spend a hundred percent of their time listening to absolutely everything that I have to say, or not have to say.
Sophia: And vice versa. You’ve got better things to do than listen to us all the time.
On the future
Mark: I think there’s a paradigm war going on. And I think the rise of fundamentalism is the biggest problem that will have to be resolved, if it can be resolved, in the next fifty years. Because the inequalities in the world have become extreme. … And that’s a huge psycho-educational project, which I don’t think has even really begun. … Carl Jung said it would take a thousand years for the world to get anywhere near, you know, for human beings around the world to be free and self aware and I think he’s probably right. I just think there’s an enormous century of conflict around what it is to be a human being.
Sophia: … Sometimes I’m all doom and gloom. And I think that in terms of evolutionary biology that we’ve encroached on too many habitats and like Jonathan Swift says, we’re a race of odious, pernicious vermin, that are going to by our very numbers end up through an epidemic or a catastrophic war or some other form of – global warming – going to exterminate ourselves. … But then there’s people like Richard Dawkins, or Harris, or Lewis thomas, or anyone of a number of people you could point to who are thinking outside the box, who have playful, hopeful visions of humanity. So for me the future’s a mixed bag and I’m just sorry I’m not going to be around to see it all. You know I’m very very very curious about what’s going to happen now.
Benedict: I think quite a lot of people are into the forecast that there’ll be death and misery and everybody will be sad – but then there’s also the opposite where there’ll be robots that do everything for you and stuff like that. But I think, you know, life may be much the same as it is now. A little bit different in some ways, the same in others. Society has change a lot from medieval times to post-modern, but there’s only so far you can go before things start to either break down or you find a state where you just stay there, almost.
Great to see the way the boy is free to express his thoughts – I have a 10y/old girl and she is studying in a CoE school, and trying to be brave in saying what she/we at home think about religion… Our kids need celebrations: so we started a Solstice Party tradition, we have parties when Nature has a special occasion:) But it is not easy… Most parents we know are bemused and some – not happy about our atheism, and it is unfair that they should have their cathedrals, churches, community halls… and we don’t! We should have a Book shop and a Charity in support of Free Thinking in every major town, so people can join us, especially young people:)