Humanism and the territory of novelists.

In honor of its thirtieth anniversary, the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard University hosted The New Humanism conference April 20-22, 2007. The event kicked off Friday night in the Memorial Church at Harvard Yard with a literary reading by renowned novelist and humanist Salman Rushdie. Rushdie was presented the first Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism jointly by the chaplaincy and the American Humanist Association. What follows is an edited version of Rushdie's remarks in acceptance and excerpts of the Q&A that followed his reading.

MOST OF MY LIFE I was brought up happily free from religion. I grew up in a community in Bombay, India, where there were, in our immediate neighborhood, people of every conceivable religion and no religion. There were children of Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, Parsi, and a few, like my family, unbelieving households. And they somehow all cancelled each other out--except that we all decided we would celebrate each other's holidays as well as our own. And this led me later in life to wonder, where was the holiday for people who didn't believe in God?

Speaking specifically of humanism, I remember that when I was a university student, the most popular lecturer at Cambridge had nothing to do with my subject, which was history. He was an elderly, heavily Mittel-European accented professor of architecture, Nikolas Pevsner, who had written the classical study of the churches of England and Europe. His lectures, because he was a mesmeric speaker, would be packed every week, with people literally hanging from the rafters. You had to get there an hour early to get a place, which was not always the case in college lectures.

I have always remembered his explanation, given with much flamboyant arm waving, of the difference between the Gothic and the Renaissance principles of architecture. He said that in the Gothic cathedral, the eye is led forward towards the altar and upwards towards God. But the Renaissance church was made in an X shape; it looks like a cross but, in fact, the only way one can experience the church is if a human being stands at the center. Instead of making a movement towards God, Pevsner said, it makes a movement towards the human. This works as a description not just of architecture but of a movement from the period of the Gothic into the period of the Renaissance, which is also a movement away from worshipping God to placing human beings at the center of the story. I thought it was an unforgettable explanation. And here I am forty years later repeating it, because it seems to have informed a lot of what I have subsequently thought. In the words of Alexander Pope:

   Know then thyself, presume not God to scan.
   The proper study of mankind is man.

For a novelist, of course, if you don't study mankind than you aren't doing anything.

The great thing about the novel as a form is that even the most abstract fiction can never entirely lose the human scale. If you do not have a thing the size of a human being at the center of a work of literature, around which everything else is woven, then you don't have literature; you have something else.

So it almost follows in trying to be a novelist that you would find yourself involved with the ideas of humanism. For me it just comes with the territory.

And thank you for this honor, by which, really, I do feel slightly overwhelmed. People like being praised--but sort of in their absence. I just like to hope that people would say this kind of thing when I wasn't there. But I guess I'll never know.

Question from the audience: What is your favorite book?

Salman Rushdie: That's difficult. I mean, it's easy to say what your favorite one hundred books are, but it's quite difficult to choose just one. And it also depends what day of the week it is and what you had for lunch. The question of the 'desert island book'--when I've been asked that before I tend to cheat and ask for the Arabian Nights, which is like having twelve books in one.

But I think the reason I say that is because a lot of the way I think about writing was shaped by growing up in the culture of the wonderful tale--in the culture in which you know that stories are not true, that stories are make believe. And that's why it's possible for carpets to fly. The truth of stories, the truth of literature, is another kind of truth; it's a felt emotional truth, not a sort of documentary, journalistic, reportage truth.

Q: Is God a good character, an interesting character?

Rushdie: No, I don't like him very much, actually. Speaking in purely fictional terms, I much prefer the polytheistic gods to the solo gods. Because the great thing about the pantheons, whether the Greek gods or the Roman gods or the Norse gods or the Hindu gods is that they don't behave well. They're kind of mean spirited and vengeful. And what's even better about them is that they don't ask you to do as they do. They don't set themselves up as moral exemplars. They're simply ourselves writ large.

Q: What advice would you give to an aspiring writer?

Rushdie: My real answer is, if you need the advice, don't do it. Because everybody I've ever known who really was a writer had some real fire burning inside them that forced them to do it. They didn't have an option; they had to be a writer because they couldn't not be a writer.

Q: Thinking about the idea of defining ourselves by what we don't believe in versus defining ourselves by what we do believe in--I'm wondering if you could comment on the idea of calling ourselves atheists versus humanists or naturalists. I would also love it if you could comment on the values of the Enlightenment and whether you're optimistic about an enlightenment period within the Islamic world.

Rushdie: Well, in a way I think you're right that all these labels are in some way partial, but I do think that the question of origins and the question of ethics--which are the two big things which lead people to religion--are things which for me are not answered by religion. I don't believe in any of the religious stories of the origin of the universe and I don't look to priests for my moral answers. And so, in that sense, I suppose it is a bit of a definition against. Because it's also not belief, so it's difficult to define it as another kind of belief.

As for enlightenment in Islam, I think there is much enlightened thought in Islam, and there always has been, and there is now, which we don't hear about because we hear the loud angry voices. At the same time it's very important to recognize that those loud angry voices have all the momentum just now and that other, gentler ways of thinking have been in retreat in the Muslim world for the last twenty or thirty years. Can that change again? I hope so. But don't hold your breath.

Salman Rushdie is a novelist, essayist, and critic whose award-winning fiction includes Midnight's Children (1981), The Satanic Verses (1988), and Shalimar the Clown (2005).