on humanism: the big picture

The word “humanist” has several meanings, but they tend to fall within two broad camps. (There are other, more specialized, meanings, but we won’t deal with them here.)

The first holds that “man is the measure of all things,” and that there is no God, or at least no God to whom we owe worship and obedience. This is the sort of thing preachers denounce when they speak of “secular humanism.”

The second sees humanism as a project – moral, intellectual, artistic – to restore, improve, and perhaps even perfect the human species. To usher us into our true and noble inheritance.

The first camp is not compatible with Christianity, but I would argue that the second camp pursues a project of which Christianity is the proper fulfillment. Christianity is the true humanism because Jesus Christ as man is what humanity ought to be, and by his death and resurrection he makes it possible for that “ought” to become “is.” Augustine: “As God, he is the goal; as man, he is the way“ (City of God XI.2).

The decline of Christianity in the West and its replacement as a key motive agent of society by liberalism entailed the exchange of a thick description of the human for an exceptionally thin one. Under liberalism, the human becomes the one who chooses its own way, and the role of society, including the political realm, becomes the facilitation of each human’s choice. This account is thin because it’s so simple, but the simplicity has certain virtues: in the light of liberalism’s one principle it becomes obvious, to many anyway, that the racist and sexist structures of the traditional social order are unjust and must be abandoned or at least seriously reformed. And this has been done, albeit inconsistently and imperfectly.

But as the thinness of liberalism’s anthropology – what Charles Taylor called the “Is That All There Is?” problem (A Secular Age, Chapter 8) – became more evident, alternatives with a thicker (if often also a coarser) account of human life began to emerge. And most of these are antiliberal and therefore antihumanist – because, remember, liberalism is a humanism, if an inadequate one. The various illiberalisms, on the Right and on the Left alike, have no room for the concept of the human.

Pause for what I hope will be a useful analogy: Back when I was devoting a good bit of my energy to cultivating ecumenical endeavors among small-o orthodox Christians, I discovered that there are some Roman Catholics for whom “non-catholic Christian” is a functional concept and some for whom it definitely is not, for whom the distinction between Catholic and non-Catholic is the only one that matters. The former might be willing to pursue ecumenical endeavors; the latter would not see the point. If I had pressed any people in that second group, they probably would have acknowledged that there are non-catholic Christians, but the fact was not relevant to them. It did not function as a concept in their ordering of the world. It cut no ice.

Something similar may be said of the illiberalisms of the Left and Right: they would probably acknowledge the existence of the category of the human, but not its relevance. They order the world by three categories: Us, Allies, and Enemies – that last being populated largely by the Repugnant Cultural Other. Thus in the assaults on liberalism humanism is also eviscerated.

In addition to those of the Right and the Left, there is one other antihumanism at work in the modern era, and that is the antihumanism of Capital: the reduction of men and women to machine, parts, instruments of commerce, either as Tools or as Targets. The great critic of Capital is usually thought to be Marx, but Marx’s response to the rise of a thoroughly dehumanizing industrial capitalism with an equally antihumanist account of the world has divided — so he and Engels say in The Communist Manifesto — between the Oppressors and the Oppressed. There’s no room in this analysis for the human. No, the great humanist critic of Capital is John Ruskin, who in The Stones of Venice and elsewhere denounced Taylorism before Frederick Winslow Taylor was even a gleam in his father’s eye.

Whether the antihumanism of modern Capital is a covert repudiation of liberalism or its natural and inevitable culmination is a question I don’t feel obliged to answer here.

But in any case, as the various illiberalisms and antihumanisms have risen and risen in power, we’ve seen various attempts to restrain and subdue those forces. Three such attempts are:

The reassertion of the liberal version of humanism as a secular alternative to the various illiberalisms and Christianity alike, all of which are seen as “extremist” and “intolerant.” (See Karl Popper, and, quite recently, Alexandre Lefebvre.)

The assertion of the vague colorless construct of “Judeo-Christian values” as the protector and guarantor of liberalism – liberalism’s Daddy, as it were.

The assertion of a robustly Christian anthropology as the only viable alternative to all antihumanisms. (This movement, in the intellectual realm as opposed to the populist realm in which Billy Graham and the larger evangelical movement largely operated, is the subject of my book The Year of Our Lord 1943.)

As the “humanism” tag on this blog suggests, I have thought quite a lot about these matters, and the one Great Conundrum for me continues to be this: Is the renewal of humanism a prerequisite for the renewal of Christianity – or the other way around? That is, does an embrace of humanism make Christianity more plausible, or must one become a Christian – one who believes that all humans are (a) made in the image of God and (b) ”fallen into sin, and become subject to evil and death” (BCP) – before the concept of the human becomes a living and vibrant one?

Beats me.

What I do feel sure of, though, is this: While there are great predecessors to the rearticulation of the human, like Ruskin, vast cultural energies were devoted to resisting antihumanism only in the middle third of the 20th century – basically the period from Lang’s Metropolis to Kubrick’s 2001. (I use cinema to establish those boundaries because cinema is the essential art form of this period, and the one most consistently occupied, if often in a subterranean sort of way, with “the question of humanism.” Even Cat People concerns the human and the nonhuman Other. But you could tell a similar story via any of the other arts. I could describe this as the period between Brave New World and Philip K. Dick, or between early-career George Orwell and early-career Joan Didion, or between Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony and Revolver.)

In the latter third of the 20th century, several forces combined to suppress the influence of humanism, and since then the antihumanists have been largely triumphant. But that is why I devote my attention to the artists and intellectuals of the mid–20th century: They were the last generations to really fight back. I’m speaking generally, of course: we have humanist artists today, though not so many that you’d notice. Today, most people in the West and in other parts of the world as well have won the victory over themselves: They love their antihuman Big Brothers. So on this blog and elsewhere I will keep turning to those figures of the middle of the previous century for lessons in resistance, lessons in courage, lessons in hope.