Blackham was the architect, and Forster was the heart of the humanist movement, says Andrew Copson

H J Blackham

My two humanist heroes are Harold Blackham and E M Forster.

Harold Blackham was one of my predecessors as head of the BHA – in fact, he was our first Executive Director – and he died just last year at the age of 105. An energetic activist, prolific writer and speaker, he was the architect of the national and international humanist movements, and I greatly admire his vision and his hard work. The idea of his which has influenced me the most is his conviction that there is an age old tradition of humanist thinking that is accessible to us today as a coherent and substantial inheritance, and which we can partake of and use in our lives:

To share the natural piety of Epicurus or Santayana, the enthusiastic intelligence of Diderot, the indignations of Voltaire, the vision of Condorcet, the strenuous intellectual conscientiousness of Mill, even the endearing pedantries and eccentricities of Bentham or the urbane astringency of Hume, reflects and confirms and expands wonderfully one way of being human, if one has chosen that way.

E M Forster

Mainly known these days for the sumptuous Merchant Ivory adaptations of his novels, E M Forster was President of the Cambridge Humanists from 1959 to his death, a Vice-President of the Ethical Union (the BHA’s predecessor body) in the 1950s, and a member of the Advisory Council of the BHA from 1963.

I admire his inquiring and anti-dogmatic approach, which led him to take a strong line against faith, which he described as ‘mental starch’, and observed,  ‘There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.’

Instead of faith Forster admired the critical individual:

Humanism covers my main belief and my main disbelief. My belief in the individual, and in his duty to create and to understand and to contact other individuals. A duty that may be and ought to be a delight… I disbelieve in spiritual authority, however sincerely exercised and however nobly garbed… Absolute power which believes itself the instrument of absolute truth corrupts absolutely.

I appreciate his sensitivity, and his belief in the high importance of human relationships. ‘Tolerance, good temper and sympathy,’ he wrote in 1939, ‘ – they are what matter really.’ At a time when so much of the world was gripped with super-human, anti-human, and massively destructive political religions, they are simple values, simply expressed, and admirable. This sort of writing led mid-twentieth century humanists to say that if Betrand Russell (another hero) was the ‘head’ of the humanist movement, then E M Forster was its heart.

This post is part of  a series written by members, friends and Distinguished Supporters of the British Humanist Association about their own “humanist heroes”.

You can find out more at www.humanism.org.uk/humanism/humanist-tradition/heroes

Andrew Copson became Chief-Executive of the British Humanist Association in January 2010 after five years coordinating the BHA’s education and public affairs work.