Sarah Bakewell - Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

What is humanism? That is the question posed, in David Nobbss 1983 comic novel Second from Last in the Sack Race, at the inaugural meeting of the Thurmarsh Grammar School Bisexual Humanist Societybisexual because it includes both girls and boys. Chaos ensues.

One girl begins by saying that it means the Renaissances attempt to escape from the Middle Ages. She is thinking of the literary and cultural revival conducted by energetic, free-spirited intellectuals in Italian cities such as Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But thats not right, says another of the societys members. Humanism means being kind, and nice to animals and things, and having charities, and visiting old people and things.

A third member replies scathingly that this is to confuse humanism with humanitarianism. A fourth complains that they are all wasting time. The humanitarian bristles: Do you call bandaging sick animals and looking after old people and things a waste of time?

The scathing one now puts forward a different definition altogether. Its a philosophy that rejects supernaturalism, regards man as a natural object and asserts the essential dignity and worth of man and his capacity to achieve self-realisation through the use of reason and the scientific method. This is well received, until someone else raises a problem: some people do believe in God, yet they call themselves humanists. The meeting ends with everyone more confused than they were at the start.

But the Thurmarsh students need not have worried: they were all on the right track. Each of their descriptionsand morecontributes to the fullest, richest picture of what humanism means, and of what humanists have done, studied, and believed through the centuries.

Thus, as the student who spoke about the non-supernatural vision of life knew, many modern humanists are people who prefer to live without religious beliefs and to make their moral choices based on empathy, reason, and a sense of responsibility to other living creatures. Their worldview has been summed up by the writer Kurt Vonnegut: I am a humanist, he said, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after Im dead.

Yet the other Thurmarshian was also right to say that some of those considered humanists do have religious beliefs. They can still be described as humanists, insofar as their focus remains mostly on the lives and experiences of people here on Earth, rather than on institutions or doctrines, or the theology of the Beyond.

Other meanings have nothing to do with religious questions at all. A humanist philosopher, for example, is one who puts the whole living person at the center of things, rather than deconstructing that person into systems of words, signs, or abstract principles. A humanist architect designs buildings on a human scale, in ways that do not overwhelm or frustrate those who have to live in them. Similarly there can be a humanist medicine, politics, or education; we have humanism in literature, photography, and film. In each case, the individual is kept at the top of the list of concerns, not subordinated to some grander concept or ideal. This is closer to what the humanitarian student was getting at.

But what about those scholars of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy and beyondthe ones the first Thurmarsh speaker was talking about? These were humanists of another type: they translated and edited books, taught students, corresponded with their clever friends, debated interpretations, advanced intellectual life, and generally wrote and talked a lot. In short, they were specialists in the humanities, or the studia humanitatis, meaning human studies. From this Latin term, they became known in Italian as umanisti, and so they are humanists, too; American English usage still calls them humanists today. Many have shared the ethical interests of the other kinds of humanists, believing that learning and teaching the human studies enables a more virtuous and civilized life. Humanities teachers still often think this, in a modernized form. By introducing students to literary and cultural experiences, and to the tools of critical analysis, they hope to help them to acquire extra sensitivity to the perspectives of others, a subtler grasp of how political and historical events unfold, and a more judicious and thoughtful approach to life generally. They hope to cultivate humanitas, which in Latin means being human, but with added overtones of being refined, knowledgeable, articulate, generous, and well mannered.

Religious, non-religious, philosophical, practical, and humanities-teaching humanistswhat do all these meanings have in common, if anything? The answer is right there in the name: they all look to the human dimension of life.

What is that dimension? It can be hard to pin down, but it lies somewhere in between the physical realm of matter and whatever purely spiritual or divine realm may be thought to exist. We humans are made of matter, of course, like everything else around us. At the other end of the spectrum, we may (some believe) connect in some way with the numinous realm. At the same time, however, we also occupy a field of reality that is neither entirely physical nor entirely spiritual. This is where we practice culture, thought, morality, ritual, artactivities that are (mostly, though not entirely) distinctive to our species. Here is where we invest much of our time and energy: we spend it talking, telling stories, making pictures or models, working out ethical judgments and struggling to do the right thing, negotiating social agreements, worshipping in temples or churches or sacred groves, passing on memories, teaching, playing music, telling jokes and clowning around for others amusement, trying to reason things out, and just generally being the kinds of beings that we are. This is the realm that humanists of all kinds put at the center of their concern.