Defending Humanism

 I read Jennifer Banks's What awaits us? (Aeon) as a defense of humanity against transhumanism. I favor humanism.

Humanism, however, fell further out of vogue in the two decades that followed. Humanities enrolments dropped dramatically at universities, and funding for departments like comparative literature, women’s studies, religion, and foreign languages got slashed. Increasingly, however, it wasn’t just the inadequacies of any -ism that were the problem. It was the subject at the heart of humanism that came under widespread attack: the human itself. Given that history could be read as a catalogue of human greed, blindness, exclusions and violence, the future seemed to belong to someone – or something – else. The humane in humanism seemed to be missing. Alternative ideologies like antihumanism, transhumanism, posthumanism and antinatalism seeped from the fringes into the mainstream, buoyed by their conviction that they might offer the planet or even the cosmos something more ethical, more humane even, than humans have ever been able to. Humanity’s time, perhaps, was simply up.

In his book The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us (2023), the American critic Adam Kirsch identifies the contested line between humanists and non-humanists as one of the defining faultlines of our political and cultural moment. The debates between them can feel merely semantic, the stuff of graduate seminars, but the revolt against humanity is likely to have major implications for our future, Kirsch argues, even if its prophecies about our imminent extinction don’t come true. ‘[D]isappointed prophecies,’ he writes, ‘have been responsible for some of the most important movements in history, from Christianity to Communism.’ Anyone committed to the prospect of a liveable future should pay close attention to what’s going on here.

Here she latches onto what makes me prefer humanism, an idea that includes both our species' failures as much as its successes.

 Against these foreclosures of the future, Morrison issued a daring wager: history was ‘about to take its first unfettered breath’. She challenged her listeners to allow the years 4000 or 5000 or even 20000 to hover in their consciousness. And she catalogued a variety of novelists – Umberto Eco, Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Cade Bambara and Salman Rushdie, among others – whose work was ‘race inflected, gendered, colonialised, displaced, hunted’ and who had courageously imagined a future for humanity. Their bright hopes paradoxically grew out of centuries of ancestral dehumanisation – a dehumanisation that had well attuned them to the reality of human limitations. The relationship between human possibility and human limits was, for her, the crux of literature. Through literature, these novelists had communicated their ‘unblinking witness to the light and shade of the world we live in’.

 See what you think, read the whole essay.

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