H. J. Blackham
H. J. Blackham
H. J. Blackham ©
H. J. Blackham, born on 31 March 1903, has been a leading and widely respected British humanist for most of his life.
As a young man he worked in farming and as a teacher. He found his niche as a leader in the Ethical Union, which he steadfastly moved away from the trappings of religion. The Ethical Union maintained that ethics was independent of theology, and this ethical dimension was central to Blackham's life.
In the 1960s he played a leading role in the transition from the Ethical Union to the British Humanist Association and became its first Executive Director. He worked with leading figures such as Barbara Wootton, A. J. Ayer and J. Bronowski. Particular interests were education and counselling. Blackham cared deeply about the importance of moral education, writing on 'Education for Personal Autonomy' and 'Education and Drug Dependence'. He was involved in founding the Moral Education League while with the Ethical Union. He worked with politicians, not entirely successfully, to bring moral education into schools, and was a founder of the Journal of Moral Education.
H. J. Blackham was a key organiser of the World Union of Freethinkers' conference in London in 1938. When he tried to refound it after the war he decided a new organisation was needed and together with the Dutch philosopher Jaap van Prag started the International Humanist and Ethical Union, of which Julian Huxley was the first President. Blackham worked closely with Julian Huxley in many ways including helping him to revise Religion without Revelation.
Blackham wrote of 'a resourceful, self-dependent, realistic, constructive attitude to life', an attitude he has held for 100 years ©
Throughout his career he lectured , taught and wrote. His first book was a collection of essays called Living as a Humanist (1950), published by the Rationalist Press Association. His long term belief was that humanism was a way of living as well as a way of thinking. He wrote an epilogue to a revised version of J. B. Bury's A History of Freedom of Thought.
His philosophical interests were seen in Six Existentialists (1951), which became a standard university text, and The Human Tradition (1953). His humanist beliefs were founded on the whole humanist tradition from the Greeks and the Epicureans, from Democritus and Protagoras, to Bentham and Mill, including the philosophers.
One of his most widely read and definitive works was a Pelican Special, Humanism (1968) which succeeded his analytical Religion in a Modern Society (1966). He continued writing, lecturing and officiating at humanist funerals into his nineties.
The Fable as Literature and the mammoth and original historical survey The Future of our Past: from Ancient Greece to Global Village were fruits of his old age.
Blackham has enjoyed many years' retirement in the Wye valley, reading, writing and growing vegetables. He lives the exemplary humanist life: that of thought and action welded together.