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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
We live in a mutilated world and our humanity seems irrevocably damaged. Many critics suggest we have reached the end of humanity. In this challenging book, Ken Plummer suggests that such claims may be premature; instead, what we need is a new transformative understanding of humanity. Critical Humanism critically reflects upon and reimagines humanism for the twenty-first century. What is now required is a fresh, wide-ranging imaginary of an open, worldly, plural and caring humanity. It needs to take a critical stance towards older, often divisive ideas of what it means to be human, while reconnecting to a wider understanding of the rich diversity of life in the pluriverse. In an age of post- and transhumanist turns, Plummer provides a personal, political and passionate call for thinkers, researchers and activists to not turn their backs on humanism. We need instead to create a vital new political imaginary of being human in a connected planet. We simply cannot afford to be anti-human or posthuman. Restoring our belief in humanity has never been more important for edging towards a better world for all.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Contents
Series page
Dedication page
Title page
Copyright page
Boxes, Tables and Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
I Rethinking the World: Connecting Humanity
1 Critical Humanism
II Dehumanizing the World: Disconnecting Humanity
2 Damaging Humanity
3 Dividing Humanity
4 Traumatizing Humanity
III Humanizing the World: Flourishing Humanity
5 Narrating Humanity
6 Valuing Humanity
7 Transforming Humanity
IV Transforming the World: A Politics and Literacy for Humanity
8 A Critical Humanist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century
Epilogue:
On Being Well in the World – The Joys of Everyday Living
Short Guide to Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
1 Critical Humanism
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‘This book is an extraordinarily brave and enormously comprehensive attempt to re-energize an interest in the battered concept of humanism. Ken Plummer’s agenda for a new politics of humanity explicitly recognizes the manner in which past “humanisms” have been undermined by ethnocentrism and cultural insensitivity. These, and other impediments to a “critical humanism”, are courageously confronted in a volume that fully realizes its author’s intention to provide “a vision of something better”.’
Laurie Taylor, Emeritus Professor, University of York, and presenter of Thinking Allowed, BBC Radio Four
‘In Critical Humanism, Ken Plummer engages with an extraordinary range of different literatures and a lifetime of reflection to consider what it will take to be truly human in the twenty-first century. We should grapple seriously with his impassioned and challenging arguments.’
Rob Stones, Professor of Sociology, Western Sydney University
‘Ken Plummer’s mission has been to expand the range and depth of decencies; here he seeks larger principles on which to ground mutual regard. This is a fundamental study – rooted in conscience, sociological learning and intimate generosity. Critical Humanism stirs the mind.’
Harvey Molotch, Professor Emeritus, New York University, and University of California, Santa Barbara
Dedication
In loving memory of my dear brother,
Geoff Plummer (1942–2020)
Critical Humanism
A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century
Ken Plummer
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Ken Plummer 2021
The right of Ken Plummer to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2794-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2795-3(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Plummer, Kenneth, author.
Title: Critical humanism : a manifesto for the 21st century / Ken Plummer.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A passionate defence of human value and human potential”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021006115 (print) | LCCN 2021006116 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509527946 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509527953 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509527960 (pdf) | ISBN 9781509527984 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Humanity. | Humanism--Social aspects. | Human beings.
Classification: LCC BJ1533.H9 P58 2021 (print) | LCC BJ1533.H9 (ebook) | DDC 179.7--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006115
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006116
Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Boxes, Tables and Figures
Boxes
0.1 Defining humanity
1.1 Connecting humanity: the critical humanist project
1.2 An expanding concern over human rights
2.1 Eight ways to destroy the planet over a few hundred years
5.1 Stories of an emergent human species: critical moments
5.2 Meta-narratives of worldly care: a few symbolic moments
7.1 A cascade of effervescent politics of humanity
7.2 Thinking beyond the West: an emerging consciousness
Tables
2.1 Monitoring the mutilated world
3.1 Hierarchies of humanity: the dehumanization of others
4.1 Making sense of atrocity and anti-humanity
5.1 Media landmarks of narrative humanity
7.1 The Sustainable Development Goals for a world in 2030
8.1Social imaginaries for a post Covid-19 world: from damaged humanity to a humanized world
8.2 Humanizing economies: from market values to human values
8.3 Humanizing the digital world
Figures
1.1 The connective spiral of humanity
2.1 Global inequality regimes, 2018
3.1 Circles of connective humanity
6.1 The Inglehart–Welzel World Cultural Map
Acknowledgements
My special thanks to Jonathan Skerrett, who has been my advising editor for the past three books. I have had some really good editors over quite some time, starting with Peter Hopkins at Routledge one very drunken lunch back in 1972; Jonathan has been wonderfully supportive, critically shrewd and very patient. I also thank Karina Jákupsdóttir for always being there to help bring this book into fruition. Sarah Dancy revised a very messy text into a much clearer one and I am very grateful. Thanks too to Evie Deavall (production) and Michael Solomons (index).
Nowadays, most of my intellectual debts go back a long way and most of my teachers, sadly, are dead. My earliest tutors (and colleagues), Stanley Cohen, Mary McIntosh and Jock Young, among others, taught me not only a passion for doing academic things that personally matter, but also showed me that intellectual life can be fun and enjoyable. John Gagnon and Bill Simon were dear friends as well as extraordinary thinkers. Michael Schofield was there with my very earliest worries. I remember them all with deep fondness.
A few people have been regular supports and I thank them dearly: Molly Andrews, Neli Demireva, Carlos Gigoux, Miriam Glucksmann, Mark Harvey, Phil Jakes, George Kolanckiewicz, Travis Kong, Harvey Molotch, Ewa Morawaska, Lydia Morris, Peter Nardi, David Paternotte, Colin Samson, Steve Smith, Arlene Stein, Jeremy Tambling, Pauline Tambling, Paul Thompson, Jeffrey Weeks and Glenn Wharton. I especially thank Rob Stones for years of engaged discussion and for a critical but sympathetic early reading of this work. And I thank Daniel Nehring for all his detailed, critical and generous comments on a final draft of the book. This has not been an easy book to write, but I hope it can make a small and timely contribution to a never-ending debate.
Sadly, although my Gay Liberation Front days were a critical turning point in my life, I have never been quite the activist I would have liked to have been. But I have always admired those who are. Any proceeds from this book will be donated to Amnesty International.
Finally, I dedicate this book to my dear brother Geoff, who died as I was completing it, after many years of cheerful illness. I am very thankful for my family of ‘Plummers’: Ethel, Len, Steph, Jon and Tony, Chris and Lorraine, Abigail and Emily. Most of all, I fear I could do very little without the perpetual kindness, support and love of my life-long partner and ‘bestest friend’, Everard Longland. We have had a long and wonderful journey together.
Wivenhoe, November 2020
Imaginations: Only Connect
Only Connect. Tell the Stories.
Connect the machine to the action
And the action to the person.
Connect the person to the other,
And the other to the self.
Connect the self to the body,
And the body to the mind.
Connect the mind to the senses,
And the senses to the community.
Connect the community to the country,
And the country to the world.
Connect the world to the earth,
And the earth to the sky.
Connect the sky to the cosmos,
And the cosmos back to humanity.
Connect the particular to the general,
And the unique to the universal.
Connect the public to the personal,
And the personal to the political.
Connect the present to the past,
And the past to the future.
Connect the media to the reality,
And the reality to the truth.
Connect the knowing to the doing,
And the doing to the values.
Connect the generations to our dreams:
Of love and kindness and care.
Connect creativity to dignity and hope,
To a politics of better worlds for all.
Connect to rights and justice and flourishing.
Hear the Stories. Only Connect.
Introduction
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871)
The year was 2007. I had been ‘born again’: a new human person, reconnected, full of life, energy and joy. I now had a new liver placed gently inside my body – donated by a seventeen-year-old girl, killed tragically in an accident. At any other time in history my life would have surely come to a fatal end. But in 2007, I was able to have a liver transplant. Over many years, I had developed chronic, fatal liver disease. The only way out now was full-blown transplant surgery. This saved my life. Recently invented, the transplant process brought together the altruism of the donor, the skills of the surgeon, the care of the nurses, the practical endeavours of hospital staff, the love of friends, partner and family, the intellectual brilliance of scientists – a full assemblage of humanity at work. Balancing on the edge of death for three and a half years and experiencing a successful transplant most surely wants to make you celebrate the wonders of being uniquely alive, connected to the world and being complexly human.1
And yet. Even as I was slowly being returned to my fragile wider planetary home, this very world looked like it could do with its own transplant! It was 2008: just seven years after the atrocity of the 9/11 New York twin tower slaughtering, we now had to face the enormous greed and corruption of the financial crash – casino capitalism – and its dishonest aftermath. Today as I write, in 2020, we confront a quite different order of crisis: a twenty-first-century plague, Covid-19, which has shaken everybody’s life and the very social structures in which we live.2 A new generational world experience is happening all around, like it or not.
Even as I recognize much of the extraordinary progress made in some parts of the world, I can also clearly see a world in woe, a much-mutilated humanity. We live in the chaotic flow of liquid modernity, a time of extraordinary volatility and change where life and the future have been rendered unsafe, insecure and at risk.3 The recent dominance of the West is now firmly in decline, and a new pluriversal world order is in the making.4 This is also an order with a tangible sense of the extreme harm we are doing to our environment. We build megacities of pollution in the middle of deserts. We cut down large swathes of forests all round the world, destroying both wildlife and the air we breathe. We elect leaders full of self-pride and little concern for global humanity. We fail to prepare ourselves adequately for a world in which a long line of anticipated catastrophes and disasters (the Anthropocene and the Precipice) is lining up for us. We tip endless muck into the oceans and rivers, so life cannot survive. We turn all of human sensitivity and life into a deluge of digital dehumanization. And wherever we look – if we do look – we can see a morass of inequality: the rich and their unqualified ‘greediness’ doing so much more damage than the poor, who are forced to suffer so much. The deep structural divides over men and women, different ethnicities and sexualities, and more, are embedded in deep levels of violence. An unbearable suffering stalks the world in many places. Myanmar’s generals preside over the brutal ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya population; Syria’s President al-Assad wages bloody war, bombing civilians and targeting hospitals; and in Yemen, the Saudi-led coalition has killed and wounded thousands of civilians, bringing an entire country to the brink of famine.
Here is our cruel world of winners who get more and losers who get less. A world where women continue to be downgraded. A world where the humanity of some groups who are ethnically, sexually or bodily different is denied. And despite years of accelerating warnings, a world in which many people live in full-blown and much-celebrated, irresponsible, cruel and violent ignorance. We dwell in what might be called anti-humanity: a deep disconnection from being human as we engage in mass dehumanization, mass expulsions, mass digitalism and mass extinctions. Much of the pluriversal world lives in deep ignorance of the complexity (and often the suffering) of the rest of the world. And everywhere, Covid-19 has not made living any easier. So many people suffer; so many have been seriously let down by the human world in which they live.
From Humanism to Critical Humanism
So here we are. As agentic human beings we face the muddles, failures and tragedies of our world: some certainly more than others. How can our human world, one we have been building so artfully over the millennia, remain such a flawed place? Over the years we can see the uneven march of progress in the sphere of the technical. But in the ethical and human sphere, we linger behind. Advances in our ‘inner humanities’ do not match our scientific and technological awareness. Nearly 100 years ago – only three or four generations – there was the most atrocious Holocaust. Science and power were put to use with the vilest of thoughts. Today, despite our ritualistic posturing ‘lest we forget’, many in the world are no longer even aware of it. Indeed, what have we learnt since then? In writing this book, I found for a while that the Holocaust overwhelmed me as a serious preoccupation (as it probably should in every human life at some time). How can it be that after all these thousands of years of so-called humanity we had learnt nothing and were capable of such cruel atrocities, often in the divisive language of humanity and nonhumanity? Humanity is in a mess. Why still write about a moribund humanism?
My interest in a sociological humanist stance goes back to the modern foundational works of William James, George Herbert Mead, Jane Addams and Herbert Blumer.5 As a young gay man in the 1960s, then outlawed, stigmatized and apparently nonhuman, my earliest research on gay culture told me that the best way to understand the world was to be pragmatic: to get close to life as lived in its rich complexity and to listen to the diverse stories of unique human lives. Too much social science is done at a great distance from the lived human experience and its joys and pains. More: sociology should not just get done for its own sake. It needed to aim for social goals, social purpose, emancipation, connection and amelioration. Some forty years ago I wrote my first set of humanist claims, about using human stories to understand life, in the hope that we could move on. Today, many social scientists have long left humanism behind, if they ever even countenanced it. The worlds of big data, post-theory and academic capitalism have arrived.
There are very good reasons why some of my colleagues in the academic and political worlds have been critical of humanism. Political scientist Anne Phillips summarizes the objections well:
Humanism has come under attack from a number of directions in recent decades: for its essentialism of human nature; its tendency to read the course of human history as the steady progress towards realising the potential implicit in that nature; its misguided confidence in the powers of science and reason; its celebration of an autonomous self-determining subject; and so on and on.6
I have much sympathy with such critiques. There are many very good reasons to attack. But there are also many good reasons to defend and develop.
Critics argue that the very idea of humanism has become Westernized. It has led to the abuse and monstrosities of colonialism, slavery, femicide, class oppression, racism and exploitations of all kinds: ultimately, to genocides of the races. And they are indeed right. Yet, today we live in a world where anti-humanity is still rife. I will argue, somewhat ironically, that we now need the highly charged and contested term ‘humanity’ (or some equivalent) more than ever before: to help defend us and to give our lives, work and play some coherence, connection and common purpose. To act in the world for a more connected world. We need to find a fallible universality out of our precarious particularity. And I ask: what else is there? At its fragile core, the invented idea of humanity has to suggest a collective social nature of being human that is connected, relational, valued. Ours is an embodied narrative species and a connective humanity. Through language and stories, we can act to share common good things with each other: creativity, love, kindness, hope perhaps. We can find a shared solidarity in caring for one another. There may even be a possible common worth, respect, even ‘dignity’, to be valued across our species. And there is a putative mode of feeling for our human interconnectedness with other species, life forms and even planets. To live well with other people, animals and things in the deep multiverse is surely a laudable goal. Maybe, too, our world can now come to thrive on interdependent differences, be deeply pluralistic, learn from our connectivity. As times change and new debates appear, these all seem worthwhile aims for our different kinds of experience and activity in life. (Box 0.1 suggests a basic working set of terminologies, open to debate and change.) Ultimately, key questions become: How are we to live cooperatively with our diverse yet common humanity, not rendering it divisive or dehumanizing? How can we best live together with our differences?
Most versions of humanism, of which this is one, are ultimately engaged with a human search for meaning. They usually tell a specific story of what it means to be human. In the Renaissance and Enlightenment of the West, a strong and unified storyline emerged. Here I take the stance of a critical humanist who appreciates this, but immediately sees how damaging this idea has been for much of the wider pluriversal world. We have to move beyond this to see the very ideas of humanity and humanism as themselves fragile: multiple and shifting over lives, time and place. Different humanisms bring contested claims about what it means to be human. These change over history as different (usually powerful) groups make different claims. Critical humanism engages with (and tells the stories of) the perpetual narrative reconstructions and conflicts over what it means to be human. Ultimately it does this with the goal of building on these contested understandings to find pathways into better futures and worlds. Critical humanism is an emerging project to remake sense of all this. Even as it will raise many problems, it enables us to ask questions about what kind of human world we want to live in, what kind of person we want to be in that world, and how it needs to be transformed.
Box 0.1: Defining humanity
The languages of both humanism and humanity are contested and muddled. That said, in this book I use certain key words to mean certain things while certainly acknowledging all these words need debating.7
The term human species (homo sapiens) is fairly straightforward. We are a biological species (hominin) and part of the evolutionary classification of domains of life. We make up about 0.01 per cent of life on earth,8 taking a small place in the grand encyclopaedia of living things. Humankind is a collective word to depict our bio-geo-historical existence.
The idea of human beings (or even persons)9 builds on the above but suggests the ways in which we differ from other animals. These terms bring a range of descriptive formal properties open for discussion. This includes (i) we are embodied with feelings and elaborate brains and cognitions; (ii) we are animals aware of our vulnerability; (iii) we develop language, consciousness, symbolic communications, we tell stories and create selves; (iv) we live in worlds of values, becoming moral animals; (v) we are agentic animals who act in the world; (vi) we have emergent potentials, capacities, capabilities; and (vii) we are creative animals. We could add more. These are only formal features of being human. The controversies start when we talk about their substantive content. What kinds of bodies, selves, vulnerabilities, values, capabilities? Some ideas – rights, dignity, equalities – are perpetually controversial because they straddle the descriptive formal and the evaluative substantive.
Humanities refers to the study of all things human – especially its arts, literature, languages, music, poetics.
Humanity is a more recent and more muddled idea. It can be taken (i) as a collective descriptive word for the entirety of human life. But it can also suggest (ii) a collective evaluative word for human life, often implying those who show human sympathy with others. Often these two get muddled. (An emerging idea, (iii), is that we are actually all ‘little gods’, albeit little gods who shit! But we can leave that controversy to one side for the moment. See pp. 84–5.)
Finally, humanism itself has many meanings. Here I use it to signify all ideas that try to understand what it means to be human and to find ways of enhancing our being in the world.
The Book and Manifesto Ahead: A Politics of Humanity
I have written this book to help re-energize an interest in humanism. I examine how we are dehumanizing the world (through damage, division and atrocity) and how we might reconnect and humanize it (through narrative, values and creativity). I identify many humanist practices at work across the world, from dialogue and cosmopolitanism to creativity and ‘generational hope’, and aim to give them a rudimentary coherence. An opening section explains why I use the term ‘critical humanism’; I outline its key claims and challenges (as a project, an agenda, a narrative). The middle core of the book looks first at the failings of humanity and then goes in pursuit of its successes. The closing (and final) part makes a direct link to a politics and education of humanity, suggesting things that could be done to make a connective world for all. I illustrate the importance of cultivating a generational hope and building on a multiplicity of existing world projects that work to make the planet a better place for all.
This had to be a short book so there is much ground I have not covered. That said, there is a website (kenplummer.com/criticalhumanism) with substantial guides to readings, websites and other material concerning critical humanism.
As I write, Covid-19 has arrived; wildlife is in serious decline; the world is literally and metaphorically ablaze. The global hazards so long predicted are becoming the stuff of everyday life. So much suffering in the world and the widespread failure of many key institutions. So much unnecessary suffering for so many, wrought often by so few. We could do so much better as a species. (And I could do so much better as a person.) Very many have had such thoughts before me. Why have we not put our enormous learning into better practice? I make the claim here that we need ‘humanity’ as a narrative to guide us, a literacy to learn with and a tool to act with. Human beings can be creative. They can create a common empathic and dialogic world of human connections. They can build a world that will flourish over the generations by creating strong, caring, just and loving institutions so we can live well, if fragilely, with each other and our differences. But still, I sometimes ask myself: am I just a foolish dreamer?
Notes
1
I have provided a short account of my illness in ‘My Multiple Sick Bodies: Symbolic Interactionism, Autoethnography and Embodiment’, in Bryan S. Turner, ed.,
Routledge Handbook of Body Studies
(Routledge, 2012), pp. 75–93.
2
In a short space of time there has already been a mad rush of publications about Covid-19. Everything is in flux, but one early useful book is Fareed Zakaria,
Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
(Allen Lane, 2020).
3
See Zygmunt Bauman,
Liquid Modernity
(Polity, 2000). Bauman has written many works on this theme, including
Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds
(Polity, 2003),
Liquid Fear
(Polity, 2006) and, with David Lyon,
Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation
(Polity, 2013).
4
I use the word ‘pluriverse’ a lot in this book and it may not be familiar. It has three genealogies. First, William James wrote of the plural experience and ‘the pluralistic universe’ (see
A Pluralistic Universe
, CreateSpace Publishing, 2015 [1909]). He suggested a world of human multiplicities. Second, the term ‘multiverse’ is used by physicists to claim that the universe is not one but multiple. And third, it has been used recently to capture diversity in world politics, developed in the works of Arturo Escobar in
Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible
(Duke University Press, 2020). These are not incompatible. The challenge is to think in the local and specific diversity, to see worlds in the plural.
5
It is present in my
Documents of Life: Introduction to the Problems and Literature of a Humanist Method
(Allen & Unwin, 1983); but I make it much more apparent in the major revised second edition:
Documents of Life-2: An Invitation to a Critical Humanism
(Sage, 2001). I expand on it in several other works: for example,
Cosmopolitan Sexualities: Hope and the Humanist Imagination
(Polity, 2015),
Narrative Power: The Struggle for Human Value
(Polity, 2019) and ‘A Manifesto for a Critical Humanism in Sociology’, in Daniel Nehring,
Sociology: An Introductory Textbook and Reader
(Pearson Education, 2013), pp. 489–516.
6
Anne Phillips,
The Politics of the Human
(Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 14–15.
7
As well as the discussion in Phillips’s
Politics of the Human
, see discussions in Yuval Noah Harari,
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
(Vintage, 2011) and
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
(Vintage Books, 2015); Siep Stuurman,
The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History
(Harvard University Press, 2017); Alexander Harcourt,
Humankind: How Biology and Geography Shape Human Diversity
(Pegasus, 2015); John Hands,
Cosmo Sapiens: Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe
(Duckworth, 2015); and Bruce Mazlish,
The Idea of Humanity in a Global Era
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
8
Trees account for some 82 per cent of biomass; tiny bacteria some 13 per cent; we humans account for a mere 0.01 per cent. For a summary of these ideas, see
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study
. The original study can be found at: Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips and Ron Milo, ‘The Biomass Distribution on Earth’,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
, 115/25 (19 June 2018): 6506–11:
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506/tab-article-info
.
9
Discussions of the ‘person’ raise many issues – especially concerning dignity and agency. It corresponds roughly to what I will refer to as existential being, but I do not discuss it here. An important clarification is to be found in Christian Smith,
What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up
(University of Chicago Press, 2011). See also Margaret Archer,
Being Human: The Problem of Agency
(Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Part IRethinking the World: Connecting Humanity
Critical humanism:
a
narrative
that provides changing, connective, critical and contested stories of how we become human in the universe;
a
dialogue
between contrasting and contested meanings about what it is to be human in the universe;
a
project
that aims to repair the damaged world and cultivate its flourishing;
a
connection
between life and earth, people and communities, societies and the world: and the cosmos beyond;
an
imagination
that thinks like a planet, ‘only connects’ and creates a generational hope;
an
imaginary
that builds grounded projects for a better world for all;
a
politics
of humanity that works for positive transformations of the world in a multitude of ways;
a
theory
to make sense of all the above.
1Critical Humanism
The status of human is something we claim and enact rather than something we uncover.
Anne Phillips, The Politics of the Human (2015), p. 131
Humanism and humanity have fallen on hard times. They need to be reimagined and reconnected. As Anne Phillips points out, our human status must be enacted, not simply discovered. Three or four generations ago, their death was being firmly announced by European philosophers.1 More recently, a posthuman era has been ushered in. This ‘ending’ of humanism happens periodically; the sociologist Marcus Morgan nicely calls it ‘the phoenix of humanism’.2 Humanism has its fates, fatalities and foes; yet it rises back up again and again. Humanity seems to keep calling us. At its best, as John Dewey once remarked, it is ‘an expansion, not a contraction, of human life, an expansion in which nature and the science of nature are made the willing servants of human good’.3 Each generation finds its new responses. This book is one such response.
Critical Humanism as a Project
Critical humanism suggests a fallible, worldwide, contested narrative about the collective, connecting and changing ways of being ‘human’. Just what this ‘human’ signifies is itself a long tale: of searching for the meanings of vulnerable life in a precarious plural world. The very idea of ‘humanity’ becomes a debated and contested one.
Critical humanism becomes a project shaped by many controversies. It highlights the plurality of our lives and humanisms, the connectivity and contingency of life and the narrativity of humanity. It argues for a humanism that is truly worldwide and not just an argument for some narrow, culture-bound version. It can learn from a wide range of different humanisms that have existed. And all this leads to the thorny problem of universalism and essentialism, a problem that haunts all discussions of humanism. As such, it is clear that a deep tension arises between the various claims for the generalities of a universal humanity in a world where lives are also and always lived in context-specific particularities, a ‘radical contextuality’.4
Critical humanism, then, is an open project not a closed theory. It is an ever-changing endeavour to rethink and remake a narrative of a world humanity. Different groups have struggled throughout history over just what it means to be a human being in a fragile universe. The task now is to connect: to imagine ‘like a world’ and build a rich planetary agenda of diverse and multiple critical projects that bring us together to re-create a better world for all. Box 1.1 sets out the basic agenda, which is then pursued in the rest of the book. By the final chapter, it will have somehow transformed itself into a political manifesto.
Humanist Sociology and Critical Humanism
To be clear at the outset, critical humanism is not new. It draws on a range of past humanisms, especially a flexible humanist sociology, but takes it further. A humanist sociology is one that builds on pragmatism. It recognizes and appreciates the value of every grounded, down-to-earth and uniquely different active human life. It listens to their stories and search for meaning. It appreciates the significance of their vulnerability, suffering and joy in life; aims at building a sympathetic human knowledge; connects to wider structural, historical issues; provides a conversation about human values; suggests transformations that aim to make better worlds; and confronts an emancipatory politics head on.5 It has many kindred spirits.6 Nowadays, this has to be a global argument not a local one: after all, although Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan and Russia rank as the largest and most populated countries in the world, they typically get little mention in the many works on humanism. It is part of the movement to de-Westernize, decolonize and repolarize the world. A new and important idea here is that of the pluriversal world: there are many ‘worlds of worlds’ living alongside one another. Ours is a plural world.7
Box 1.1: Connecting humanity: the critical humanist project
Critical humanism suggests an opening eight-point agenda to get us going. I explore all these in the chapters that follow.
Critical humanism
What is this thing called ‘critical humanism’? Why do we need it? Where is it heading? What are its challenges?
Damaged humanity
How have we come to construct such a mutilated, disconnected world? How might we repair it?
Divided humanity
Why is humanity so divided? How can we learn to live well together with our amazing and vast array of differences?
Traumatized humanity
How can we make sense of the atrocities of our past? Why have we treated each other so badly and with such cruelty? How can we build narratives and institutions of reconciliation, justice, truth and accountability with one another?
Narrative humanity
How has humanity been assembled through narrative? We have become the distinctive, even distinguished, storytelling animal. So how can we cultivate stories that will encourage a better future, a flourishing world? Can there be a narrative of worldwide connection?
A valuing humanity
How have we built a long and distinguished history of human values? We have become the distinctively ‘moral animal’ that dwells in a culture with ‘values for living’. Can there be worldwide values that will bring us together?
Transformative humanity
What kind of futures do we want? We have become the creative creatures: we bring new things into the world. Can we create ways of making a better future that will connect all peoples, life and the earth?
A politics of humanity
How can we act in the world to bring about change? How can we use creative political actions to bridge the local and the universal? And reconnect us all to earth, life, world and the cosmos. Can we create a globalization of better worlds for all?
Critical humanism establishes a politics of humanity. It asks (a) How can we reduce the human harm and hazards in the world, especially for the vulnerable, exploited and marginal? (b) How can we connect lives to the continuity and richness of the earth we live on? (c) How can we build creative and flourishing human worlds for all?
We look for harm reduction, connectivity, flourishing.
Critical humanism becomes both a worldly project of human connectivity and a global narrative that expands on this. It claims a critical stance by appreciating that humanity and humanism act as a narrative that shifts over time and space, bringing about historically grounded ‘projects’ as humans go in search of meaning. It can never be a pure universal constant. But it will most surely show slender threads of ‘fallible continuities’ – ways of making broad but tentative connections. There is no fixed meaning of humanism or humanity: they operate as a narrative that draws from a widely held pragmatic view of the workability, yet fallibility, of the everyday world.8
The idea of humanism is not always seen in quite this way. (More commonly it is seen as a fixed universal linked to some version of human nature.) But I think this more critical, long narrative view is helpful: it shows how the very idea of humanity and humanism, indeed the words themselves, signifies changing historical understandings developed in different contexts by different groups. What is claimed to be human at one moment in history may not be so claimed at another, even if slender threads hold them together. Our narratives are multiple in form, producing claims that are contested by (usually political) groupings. In all this, I draw from both classical humanism and a humanist sociology, but move beyond them.
Ultimately, I argue that the narrative of humanity is a changing, multilayered and plural idea. It introduces a value struggle over what it means to be a human being. Always diverse, it recognizes the need for a cooperative mutuality that will connect us all in the sharing of a universal planet. Some kind of ‘common ground’ has to be found to create visions of life and a future. We need some kind of global human imagination, practice, aesthetics, ethics and politics to go with it. ‘We’ (and by this I mean, rather immodestly, you, me and the whole damned human world) have to move through our differences. We have to find some of the things we can agree on. And this is a key theme of this book. Critical humanism seeks a narrative for the betterment of a global humanity, in all its rich connected diversity, by enhancing the world for all in each generation. This just might be a commonality worth trying for. We need here to think and talk, a little, like a planet.
The critical humanist imagination moves from a unique, but limited, little human being towards a vision of a collective way of ‘living with difference’ – of all being valued and connected to a wider planetary world. It moves back and forth between the biological and the cosmic, the local and the global, from personal sufferings to political transformation. It is grounded in a paradox: while it recognizes just how fragile, contested and divided our humanity is, it also challenges us to ask how we human beings can build a world of shared common humanity that enables us all to flourish and live well with each other and our differences.
The Plurality and Hybridity of Humanisms, Humanity and the World
And so, let’s see humanity at its most expansive and generous. Humanism suggests a theory and practice of what it means to be human and to live a vibrant human life in an infinite pluriverse of time and space. But there is never just the one way: humanism appreciates the rich diversities of humanity in an ever-changing world, and the way in which human beings struggle to make sense of their lives, ultimately building worlds that intermingle with one another, with animals and with other things. A little while back, the sociologist Alfred McClung Lee, a much-ignored champion of a humanistic sociology, saw humanism emerging everywhere throughout history:
Humanism has figured in a wide range of religious, political and academic movements. As such it has been identified with atheism, capitalism, classicism, communism, democracy, egalitarianism, populism, nationalism, positivism, pragmatism, relativism, science, scientism, socialism, statism, symbolic interactionism, and supernaturalism, including versions of ancient paganisms, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and Mohammedanism. It has also been rationalized as being opposed to each of these. It has served as an ingredient in movement against each. And these terms do not at all suggest all of humanism’s ideological and social associations.9
This listing is not exhaustive: how could it be? There are many practitioners who make very particular claims: for example, Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent, pacifist humanism, Franz Fanon’s new humanism, Edward Said’s democratic worldly humanism, Marcus Morgan’s pragmatic humanism, Martha C. Nussbaum’s ‘cosmopolitan-cultivation-capabilities’ humanism, Paul Gilroy’s antiracist planetary humanism, Jeffrey Weeks’s radical humanism, Judith Butler’s mortalist humanism, Cornel West’s prophetic humanism of love, William E. Connolly’s entangled planetary humanism, Roberto Unger’s new religious pragmatic humanism – and many more.
To take just one major example. Edward W. Said was one of the world’s leading cultural critics of the late twentieth century. His work Orientalism spearheaded the postcolonial movement and decolonization. He argued for a position that many claim is anti-humanist. But this is not so. From his earliest works to his very last, he remained a staunch, if critical, humanist. As he famously said: ‘Humanism is the only … I would go as far as to say the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.’10 Working with this is a wide array of humanisms in the making that highlight the struggles of a range of human peoples: indigenous, disabled, colonized, racialized, gendered, queered. This curious listing seems endless. Diverse humanisms provide a deep flow of rich thinking.11
Debating Humanism: Learning from Controversies
With all this, why might another humanism be needed? Here I discuss some controversies of recent developments in humanist thinking. I claim that a great deal can be learnt from these arguments, but we need to make connections and move further.
Humanism as Western Enlightenment
I start straightforwardly: with the widely accepted claim that humanism is a Western phenomenon and derives from the Enlightenment. This view has been promoted over the last 250 years; it is pervasive in the academy and the West, and its most prominent, popular proponent these days is the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker.12 For Pinker, humanism begins with the ancient Greeks, is rediscovered in Renaissance Florence, and accelerates with the science and rationality of the Enlightenment. It claims to be the harbinger of unmistakeable essential human progress. And such ideas have been widely influential. But they flag just one form of humanism bound up with one narrow ‘Western’ context. It is better to call it just that: ‘Western Enlightenment Humanism’. It should not be allowed to completely overwrite the rich diversity of earlier and wider claims for thought about humanity across world history. If followed, it can indeed become part of the much wider dominance and hegemony that male Western thinking has been busy claiming for itself over the past 500 years or so (a view recently claimed as narcissistic in the extreme13). It seems, rather perilously, to have claimed to be the only serious thought in the world! Creating a monologic world, it has denied the rich reality of a ‘world of many worlds’, a ‘plural world’.
For some time, a number of major intellectual and political movements have been trying to bring this ‘rest of the world’ back into our thinking. We need a world humanism, not a Western humanism. As ideas of globalization have accelerated, we have been made to think about the processes and interconnectedness of the world’s nations. More strongly, key ideas around colonization and postcolonization have brought us to see the divide between the global North and the global South, the East and the West, the poor and the rich. Starting perhaps with Gandhi and Franz Fanon, these ideas developed especially in the works of Edward Said. They are now advanced in the writings of Gurminder K. Bhambra, Raewyn Connell, Arturo Escobar, Marisol de la Cadena, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Bernd Reiter and many others, in a major critique of colonized, metropolitan, Western-centric thought.14 These works suggest there exists a vitality of intellectual and creative humanity across history and cultures that has been ignored or stunted. Providing a much greater awareness of a diverse human world and its ‘ecologies of knowledge’, they raise the ways different ideas are bound up with diverse local cultures and social conditions. Where, for example, do Africa, Asia and Latin America fit into this Enlightenment account? Where are China, Russia and India in this story?
From this, we start to see the role of power, ideology and hegemony in understandings of the Enlightenment. ‘Knowledges’ of many of the world’s countries – like the countries themselves – have been colonized. Spanish sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos notably talks about the ‘waste of experience’ and a world knowledge (epistemology) where so much has been excluded through ‘blindness’ and ‘absences’.15 A wide rich mosaic of diverse cultures all over the world, a pluriverse, gets excluded by Western thought. The lush richness of world humankind gets denied, lost or betrayed.
Humanism as secularism
A second debate is closely linked and also Western. In this, humanism is a secular, rational critique of religion. This is a little odd given that such luminaries as the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and several Chief Rabbis also proclaim humanism. Nevertheless, since the Enlightenment, many humanists have argued for the Death of God. An age of secularization is arriving whereby rationality, objectivity and truth will come to reign, old mythologies and fables of religions past will ebb and flow away, and science will come to ‘lighten the burden of human existence’.16 ‘Humanism’ becomes the term for rational progress in the world. For much of the twentieth century, Western intellectuals generally envisioned religion’s demise in this new world.17 And the idea of humanism became almost synonymous with atheism or nonbelief.
Such arguments have been widely promoted by public atheists: notably, in works like Richard Dawkins’s bestselling The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape, Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great18 and the works of many others, such as Daniel C. Dennett and A. C. Grayling. Most contemporary organizations for humanism, for example Humanists UK and Humanist International, take this view. It is a stance also taken in the important Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Humanism (2015).19 And in some accounts, these claims go much further. If there is a God, then it is indeed the human being, humanity itself, that is this God: Homo Deus. In his bestselling work, the Israeli Yuval Noah Harari sees modern humanism as ‘the worship of man’: ‘On the verge of becoming a God, poised to acquire not only eternal youth but also the divine oblivion on creation and destruction.’20 Likewise, as the physicist Brian Cox has said: ‘We are the Cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.’21
Widespread as this view may be in scientific communities and some Western countries (though certainly not in the United States), the secular claim remains a minority view.22 There may well be major countries where religious storytelling has become much less significant23 (atheism attracts around 14 per cent of the world, mainly in Western Europe and the Nordic countries). Yet the power of religion is still growing in many countries across the world. Christianity remains the largest world religion, with around 2.4 billion adherents (and growing). The Islamic world expects a 70 per cent growth between 2015 and 2060. Far from the secular world that was once predicted, a post-secular age has arrived.24
In examining this, sociologist Ulrich Beck has suggested that religion in the twenty-first century now has two faces.25 One face takes a decided turn towards fundamentalism: there is only one story, one God, one truth. It has led to a proliferation of devastating major armed conflicts and global violence. In the Middle East between Shi’ite and Sunni, and a global Jihad; in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; in the Syrian civil war between ISIS, Kurdish forces, the Assad government and others; in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, all raising issues of religious extremism. There are also Buddhist revolts in Asia: for example, Sri Lanka, Mongolia and Myanmar, where the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked the Muslim Rohingya community, creating a large refugee group. And lesbian and gays are under attack in many countries from fundamentalist Muslims, Christians and Jews.26 Fundamentalism is absolute and seeks to destroy any whiff of plurality, including humanity, through devastating violence.
More hopefully, a second ‘religious’ route is outlined by Beck. It is a more open, plural and tolerant vision. This response takes a more humane and cosmopolitan narrative, encouraging people to live together with their differences. It draws on past religious works and more recent arguments of people like Mohandas Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh, Martin Luther King and the Dalai Lama to work towards creating interfaith communities, listening to others and searching for basic common values. In 1993, the celebrated theologian Hans Küng drew on the key principles of the world’s major religions to build ‘a global ethic’.27 This was based on a declaration made at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in 1993 by more than 200 leaders from forty or more different faith traditions; it claimed four essential affirmations/commitments as shared principles essential to a global ethic:
commitment to a culture of nonviolence and respect for life;
commitment to a culture of solidarity and a just economic order;
commitment to a culture of tolerance and a life of truthfulness;
commitment to a culture of equal rights and partnership between men and women.
Here is an indicator of visions to grow. Today we can find a major mission for a common discourse across civilizations and religions alongside the development of this interfaith dialogue.28 We find it evidenced in works like the Dalai Lama’s Beyond Religion, Daisaku Ikeda’s A New Humanism and Felix Unger and Daisaku Ikeda’s The Humanist Principle.29
Beck argues that religions need to become civilized if the world is to survive. The absolutist and totalitarian narrative of religion will feed into populism and encourage both hatred and violence. It makes humanity very unsettled. It threatens its extinction. The other open response suggests the need to practise values like the capacity for peace and global justice rather than totalitarianism and violence.30 These contrasting capacities can be found throughout the history of religion. Religions of love and religions of hate provide two contrasting unresolved tensions over being human. It is in the hands of the latter to destroy the world.
Humanism as rationality and science
Science has long searched for a rational and objectively ‘true’ account of what it is to be a human being in a wider universe. From Chinese and Arabic Islamic science, through Leonardo, Galileo and Newton to Hubble and Hawkins, the gradual growth of scientific ideas about the human species has told us much. And advances have rapidly accelerated in recent years. Quantum revolutions, biomolecular revolutions and digital revolutions bring key issues for humanity. A biomolecular revolution, for example, raises issues of designer babies, cloning, gene editing, the extension of life and the problems of eugenics. A digital revolution brings widespread surveillance, data selves, fake imaging and an algorithmic social order. Space science develops plans for sustainable living in outer space. Overall, science is now assembling a very detailed mapping of just what it might mean to be a member of the human species in a future universe of infinite time-space. It is at work everywhere enhancing and challenging what we know about humanity. But wondrous as it is, problems surely come with it.
Charles Darwin’s influential work (even if still rejected by significant numbers of the world’s population31) sets the major evolutionary frame of thinking for science around the
