Bigotry, discrimination, and racism cause real suffering. So we get angry, and we fight. They fight back, so we get angrier and fight harder, all in a righteous effort to make people suffer less and enjoy life more.
That effort is Humanism in action. We see injustice done to other people, we care, and we fight for them. Good stuff! At heart, the social justice activist is a Humanist: angry at injustice and determined to change the world.
(A quick note on language: “Social Justice Warrior” started out as a compliment for people who stood up for others, and was later turned into an insult. That shift is a small example of the dehumanizing labels this essay warns against.)
But anger has limits, or at least it should. Some activists, angry at the people who do bad things, dehumanize and demonize the other side. They write off the bigots of the world (a label often applied quickly, on thin evidence) as simply evil, and sometimes even people working within the system to make a living or do good, like police officers and politicians. Hating an outgroup is natural. It also leads to echo chambers, intolerance, and a life of negativity.
Understanding Our Adversaries
Transformative Justice asks us to understand the people we disagree with. Humanizing our adversaries helps us understand them and ourselves, which means a less hostile society and, frankly, better lives for all. So we ask hard questions about even our fiercest opponents. What makes them think that way? Are they evil, or badly misinformed? Could they truly believe their god wants them to be a bigot? Could someone fear people of color because of how they were raised? Does that make their behavior OK?
No. But it does mean they are not evil, even when we watch them do evil things with glee.
That’s hard to stomach. We instinctively outgroup, and we crave the tribal satisfaction of despising the other side. Those instincts hurt us and our society.
People, Not Labels
Dehumanization usually starts here: we define people by an identity instead of by who they are. A badge, a church, a bumper sticker, and we think we know everything that matters. We don’t. Nobody is “just another cop,” “just another Christian,” or “just another” anything. Every one of them was born into a situation, raised in a situation, and has made decisions based on all of those situations. Their identity is one part of that story, never the whole person. For the most part, people don’t do bad things to be bad; they do bad things in a misguided effort to be good.
That makes life more complicated for the Humanist. We look beneath the simple surface and try to understand with compassion. We feel for the people who do bad, and we want to help them change. We allow difference while fighting behavior that goes against what we see as good (grounded, again, in Practically-objective Good). And we fight our own inner warrior, the one who wants to rage against the enemy forever.
Because raging forever increases suffering too: ours. Rage, grudges, and echo chambers all lower our quality of life. So we allow for growth in our adversaries, as we hope to grow ourselves, and we keep them part of our society, learning from their perspective as they learn from ours. Ostracize them, and they build their own echo chambers, where their minds will never change.
Some will say life is too short to spend time around “one of them.” We say it’s too short not to. Keeping someone in your life who needs a positive influence is itself activism. Cut them off and you protect their problems, killing any chance of changing their minds, while shielding your own views from any challenge.
Where Forgiveness Comes From
A beautiful thing sometimes happens when we bring Humanist ideals to conflict: minds change, people become better people, and forgiveness flows.
Forgiveness is hard because we dehumanize our opponents and file them away as unworthy of it. Forgiving them then feels like admitting we were wrong to think so poorly of them. But when we see people as complex and capable of change, forgiveness comes easily, because we don’t have to admit we were wrong to hate them. We never did.
Say your uncle supports a politician you can’t stand, and you’re sitting across from him at Thanksgiving dinner. He voted for someone whose conduct you find detestable, a dead-stop deal breaker. There’s no way you could have a relationship with someone who supports that. Right?
A Humanist sees Uncle as more than his vote. Does he really support that politician’s worst behavior? Is he really what you’re tempted to label him? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he just has different priorities, and that politician promised to deliver on the issue he cares about most. Is that evil? Is that someone to dismiss forever?
See Uncle as a complex person and you can understand him and keep him in your life, with far less anger. Uncle sees your compassion, which opens a path for him to understand your position. And by listening to his challenges instead of dismissing them, you learn what the other side is actually saying.
Fight the Good Fight
Make no mistake: the principles of social justice are good and important, and most social justice issues are Humanist issues. Racism is real in all societies (and is not limited to majority groups). Members of the LGBTQ community regularly face oppression, bigotry, and threats of violence. Women face unique challenges that limit their ability to achieve outcomes equal to men’s. These are facts, and we must fight to resolve them for the greater Good.
So fight the good fight! But resist the instinct to hate haters, and take the harder, far more productive path of understanding and resolving conflict. Humanism doesn’t stop at the intent to do good.
Humanists Are Activists
Every movement starts with people. Whether or not you believe a god is watching, people run the show, and it’s our job to use our wonderful brains and resources to further the cause of good.
Humanists seek to be and do good for its own sake, and if good is actually good, we must do what we can to make the world better. For us, activism is a virtue and apathy is a vice. We aren’t just “good for goodness’ sake”; we are good for the sake of the well-being of all conscious creatures, especially humans, now and in the future. Sitting idly by is itself harmful, because permitting evil helps it.
That doesn’t mean we all have to become full-time activists or evangelists for Humanism. It means we want to help, and we’ll improve the world whenever we can. What matters is the intent and the action, not its scope. In her 1905 poem “Success,” Bessie Anderson Stanley wrote, “To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded.” (The line is often misattributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson.) That’s our ethic exactly: being good matters because it reduces suffering and helps the world, even to the smallest degree.
And because we humanize each other, no Humanist should judge another for taking a different, stronger, or weaker path to helping the world. We practice what we preach inside our community, too. We share the drive to improve the world, but how we do it, and how far we take it, is individual.
The Ethical Mandate for Civil Discourse
Yes, civil discourse is the better strategy, even on the most hotly contested subjects. Yes, it’s more effective, disarming your opponent with logic instead of the vitriol they’re spewing and expecting back. Yes, civil discussion can be ruthless, and it makes flawed arguments easier to dismantle.
And because civility works so much better, choosing it isn’t just a tactic. It’s an ethical question.
Hard-won rights come under pressure in every era. The separation of church and state gets challenged, abortion rights get restricted, and racism and bigotry find new ways to pass as normal. At times we feel besieged by clearly anti-humanistic forces, whose defenders too often rely on vitriol and misinformation (a sign of how weak their positions are).
When civil rights are under attack, suffering increases on a large scale, and because we are good people, some of us want to scream, panic, and attack. That makes things worse. Vitriol doesn’t beat vitriol. It creates stalemates, and in a stalemate the status quo wins. Venting feels good, but it wastes a chance to attack a real problem in other people’s lives. Algorithmic social feeds (Facebook and Instagram, X, TikTok, YouTube), now boosted by AI-generated content and bots, reward the angriest post in the room, which makes that wasted chance easy to mistake for activism.
When the stakes are this high, we can’t waste time on kindergarten tactics. We must fight for others’ rights with the best methods available, even if they rob us of the thrill of yelling, dehumanizing, and venting. Keeping calm, defeating the argument, and converting its supporters is a much better high. Most importantly, it makes the most of every chance to help the people who need it.
Extreme times don’t call for extreme measures. They call for thoughtful, intelligent, intentional methods that actually solve the problem.
As Humanists, we have a social responsibility to use those methods to defend ourselves, our rights, and our neighbors. We are responsible for passing up the short-term dopamine hit of a zinger and choosing the greater good instead. That means picking up the greater weapon against every attack we face: civil discussion.