New Humanism Note:
Three Cautionary Axioms
10 December 2014
Most people, when they get on a train for the first time, know where they’re going. The destination is not what makes the journey interesting. What’s interesting is what’s seen in passing. Hills, farms, towns, rivers — and let’s not forget the backs of factories. Trees up close whiz by; trees far away can almost be contemplated. But the train does not stop to permit further investigation of these phenomena, nor does it shift onto tracks that will take it to a different terminal. You can enjoy the ride, but you cannot direct it.
That’s perhaps why the phrase “train of thought” never meant much to me as a figure of speech. It seemed unintelligent, because I took it too literally. But reading Hannah Arendt, who was very fond of the phrase, taught me to loosen up a bit, to forget about destinations. Trains of thought make stops wherever you want them to, and they work their way to junctions of which you hadn’t an inkling at the outset.
For some time now, also as a result of reading Hannah Arendt, I’ve been deeply interested in the idea of humanism. I’ve used the word a lot, and, almost as often, its close cousin, humane. But what does it mean? Something new, I believe. I saw last night, from a train of thought that I happened to be riding, that humanism in the Twenty-First century embraces a respect for the multiplicity of human idiosyncrasies, and honors every individual idiosyncratic human being, in ways that were not characteristic of the humanist outlook of earlier times, such as classical antiquity or the Renaissance. In fact, this respect and this honor are now the heart of humanism.
The old humanism taught that every human being has a soul that is beloved by the Creator, and it insisted on the sanctity of every individual life. But it also taught that the things that distinguish any two people are accidents, the non-essential results of chance — and therefore not very important. The very thing that all human beings shared and that was held to make every life as important as every other, was also the thing that made the differences between people trivial. I might be tall, and you short; you might be rich, and I poor. But none of this sort of thing mattered in the long run, for the long run was a matter of souls.
So there was nothing in the old humanism to protect humanity from the many bright ideas that were spawned by what is usually called the Industrial Revolution but which would be more clearly grasped as a Mechanical Revolution.
There had always been machines, but they were as varied as the men who made them. Toward the end of the Seventeenth Century, craftsmen developed a knack for the production of precise instruments that repeated operations exactly. This meant that the parts of machines could be made the same, so that two machines could also be the same. One machine might be in Newcastle, the other in Bristol, but they would both spit out the same widget.
At the same time, the concept of civil engineering emerged. Hitherto, engineers had been military men, the designers and operators of weapons and fortifications. Engineering was one of the arts of war. Now it became an art of peace as well, an art of improvement. Civil engineers drained marshes, dug canals, and built bridges without any military or even political objectives. They put the steam engine to a thousand uses. They made life more productive and convenient, and, eventually, safer.
Unfortunately, there was nothing in the old humanism to refute the idea that human beings might also be improved by engineering, by a mechanical analysis of human behavior that would routinize human operations and iron out the quirks that make people different, unpredictable, and annoying. Everyone would be the same, and live together in perfect harmony. Failing that — and, even in the most intoxicated throes of this utopian daydreaming, it was fairly clear that everybody would never be the same — a ruling class of smart people would govern a mass of interchangeable human units.
It sounds ridiculous, but the history of the period 1750-1950 is stuffed with horrific attempts to realize variations on this theme. From slavery in the American South to the Final Solution and the gulags in Europe, and to the Cultural Revolution in China, we find nightmare after nightmare in the glaring light of day.
Today’s humanism begins with a cautionary axiom: Every human being alive is driven crazy by at least one other human being. This cannot be corrected without making things truly crazy for everybody. In most cases, you can teach yourself not to be driven crazy, and life can be grand.
***
I never quite saw this before, but my obstinate objection and resistance to self-help books and New-Age schemes for the realization of human potential are rooted in the belief that people cannot be engineered. (I also have a rather wonderful faith that, in the event that we ever do learn how to engineer ourselves, we’ll no longer want to.) The only way that you can make a human being conform for sure is to kill it, and this can take the violent form of inducing actual death, or it can take the nominally milder form of draining the human being’s life of meaning. Human beings cannot be engineered, but they can be degraded. (That sounds like a candidate for the second cautionary axiom of humanism.) Torture and ethnic cleansing are ancient examples of the application of military engineering to human beings. Standardized testing and television advertizing represent the newer, civil side.
Every happy human being (and here I should equate success with happiness) is the artisanal product, a complete one-off, of manifold acts of generosity. There are no shortcuts. There’s much that we can do to make life less awful for large numbers of people, but happiness is an individualized project: every human being aims for a peculiar kind of happiness that is not quite like anybody else’s. (Third caution: “less awful” ≠ “more better”.) The pursuit of happiness would be a maddeningly inefficient project, if it could not be assisted by a handful of loving and friendly helpers.