I'm a humanist. I mean I aspire to be.
A friend once responded that she is a “being-ist.” I understand the idea, but it's kind of like responding to Black Lives Matter with “all lives matter.” Humanism doesn't mean “valuing humans over other beings;” it's the effort to retain our “humanity,” and fierce humanism often (maybe always) emerges in times when we're seeing cracks in our humanity, or the horror of its opposite.
The word “humanity” is by its very nature hard to define – it's a work in progress, and it's taken a whole human history of trial and error to build a definition. The halls of humanism are populated by minds who love the gray area: Montaigne, Primo Levy... and millions of others who will not reach fame because of their lack of sensationalism or absolute adherence to an idea.
Some possible aspects of Humanity: compassion, reason, self-examination, self-critique, willingness to change, moral courage in the face of one's peers (never mind one's enemies – that's easier,) willingness to consider another's point of view (especially an unpopular point of view.) Maybe its main characteristic is a love of those aspects that make us human, such as our curiosity, creativity, sense of wonder, and consideration of the world beyond the tip of our nose.
Looking up formal definitions of “Humanism” will give you a good sense of how humanism is moving forward – old definitions of the word, blindered by Western masculinist academic myopia, imply that classical booklearning is necessary. While education is valuable to the expression of humanism, and humanism teaches us to value well-rounded education, booklearning itself is not a prerequisite of a humanist mind, and plenty of learned people don't pass the test of being humanists.
Humanism is not necessarily secular, either, though there are those who identify as “secular humanists.” Humanism asks a person to reflect on and question one's beliefs, and is antithetical to fundamentalism or evangelism, but there are many humanists who also follow a religious faith. Many of the most illuminating humanist thinkers of the 20th Century West were Jewish, for example, and for obvious reasons.
When I say “for obvious reasons,” I'm coming to the heart of the definition of humanism. We are currently honoring the 75th anniversary of the end of an event that exemplified the exact opposite of Humanity – the Holocaust. While the Nazi's main targets were Jews, and “Others” of various kinds, the Nazis also feared and murdered liberal intellectuals in general. And many of the Jews and others who escaped death went on to become dedicated, devoted scholars of the questions, “What makes us human?”, “What causes us to lose our humanity?” and “How can we create a more humane world?” See Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, or any of the founding scholars of the New School for Social Research.
Arguably, 1945 was the year that a trend of particularly modern inhumanity reached a climax, from colonialism and slavery, through the commodification of labor and its abuses, to systematic genocides, peaking in the blinding light of the bombs dropped on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our species has always had brutality, and in some fundamental ways we are always improving, but the above events had to give 20th Century humans pause in assuming we were becoming more “civilized.”
Perhaps humanism is, most simply put, the response to inhumanity. Hence humanism has more questions than answers, because it is trying to make sense of the senseless. Humanism's home is in the uncomfortable middle ground.
Following WWI, the Far Right took political control of Germany through democratic voting, and subsequently attempted to take military control of the rest of the world. It failed. The fascists attempted to crush humanist thought out of existence, and instead an explosion of humanist thought prevailed in the decades after. Now, the Far Right is succeeding in taking political control, through democratic voting, of many of the most powerful nations in the world, and military victory doesn't even look necessary any more. The gains that we made toward a more just world in the late 20th Century are being eroded. Will humanism survive this wave?
When times are dark, there are always those who will passionately rail against the wrongs of the world and promise fast and sweeping solutions. Humanism longs for a humane world, and yet understands that “the arc of the moral universe is long.” Humanist politicians don't last long in populist political climates, unless they have enormous charm and are masters of compartmentalization... and then they could still be brought down in an instant.
Humanism, to me, has a feeling to it. It's hopeful and sad, proud and appalled, full of wonder and alarm, and completely alive and engaged in life. It rises above the fray to reflect, but it can't exist in a vacuum or a bubble – one must feel the pain and discomfort of involvement to feel how we could do better; one needs the moral compulsion that comes from being part of the fray.
Humanists are the first to be torn apart by mob mentality. Humanists are hated and feared by extremists on either end of any scale. And the life of a humanist is the most marvelously alive of all lives.
Today, humanists are writing beautiful essays about the sadness of Brexit.
Humanism is the canary in the coal mine.
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