Critical Humanism. Ken Plummer
And we can reflect on it.36
Finally, there is the rise of AI (artificial intelligence) and ‘Humanity 2.0’.37 Already, we start to see the emergence of a robotic life, one that is radically transforming health, transport, work, governance and war. We are only at the beginning of this latest stage of human life, which may well lead to a super intelligence and ‘singularity’: the machine that will take over our lives, helping create a serious risk to our humanity and our existence. Extraordinarily big claims are being made for this. Mildly, it forecasts the ‘enhancement of humanity’ as never before; more extravagantly, we face the ‘the end of the human species’. At the very least, we may enter a world where the human being is significantly devalued.
The dark side of science
Science has clearly brought great advances to humanity, enabling us to live in ways that have hitherto been inconceivable. But it has not been without its troubled side. The algorithmic world is colonizing human life. Most blatantly, it has brought into being the most destructive forms of technology that humankind has ever known: the science needed for the Holocaust, the bombs on Hiroshima, cyberwar and now drone bombing. More: it has also brought into being a string of anti-human ideologies advancing beliefs that some human beings are subhuman. We find this in the early eugenics and race genetics of the nineteenth century, some of which are still at work in current times.38 And as we look forward to a new age of surveillance capitalism and robotic superintelligence, we may find a new super elite emerging, killing off the uniqueness of the clever, fleshy, passionate, big brains of human beings as we currently know them to be.
With all this, we see the need for a new kind of ethics and politics of life itself. A critical science, a critical digitalism. The very nature of what it is to exist as a human being is being radically transformed by these genetic, biological, neurological and technological interventions. Whatever human nature might have been, it is certainly now open to radical transformation. We are witnessing a new ‘emergent form of life’.39 Science on its own, then, can be a very dangerous thing. It needs a constant ethical, political and, above all, human counterstory to move it in humane directions.
Humanism as humanitarianism
In their important work, A Passion for Society, Iain Wilkinson and Arthur Kleinman argue that ‘humanitarian culture has made a vital contribution to the cultivation of modern social consciousness’.40 They call for social science to make key commitments to understand the centrality of repairing human suffering in social life. Since time immemorial, human suffering and vulnerability have been cast as central features of being human. Most religions put suffering at their very core, claiming the significance of dealing with this through caring, benevolence, beneficence, hospitality and ‘love’. The very human act of looking after others shows this most clearly. Throughout history, we have been concerned with doing good, cultivating human compassion and being kind – seen in the early historical example of the Hippocratic Oath. It recurs frequently in any discussion of the Golden Rule (see p. 141). Its modern history arrives with antislavery movements. Very much alive today, it has become a kind of duty for many – helping the sick, doing no harm, caring for others.
As society rolls on, benevolence, care and human amelioration have spread beyond the religious and medical concerns of churches to more and more human institutions. We now see this humanitarian movement at work in education, social work and the caring profession; in the rise of welfare states; in legislation around factory acts; in the rise of philanthropy and charity; in the gift relationships of blood and transplant donations; in the peace movement; in international aid; and as the bedrock of ethical anthropology and sociology. Through this, we sense a picture of humanity gradually emerging as a history of empathy and generosity, care and kindness, and even altruism.41
And yet, all of this brings problems. As literary critic Lionel Trilling once strikingly remarked: ‘Some paradox in our nature leads us, once we have made our fellowmen the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.’42 There are paradoxes and problems with benevolence. To take one example: Tony Vaux had had more than twenty years’ experience as one of Oxfam’s leading emergency programme coordinators. It took him through Kosovo, Ethiopia, Sudan, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda – all key emergency sites at the end of the twentieth century. The title of his book, The Selfish Altruist, suggests the irony of his work:
Looking at situations such as the famine in Ethiopia we may conclude that humanitarianism … has not always been as altruistic as it should. Ideological prejudices clouded judgement of aid workers in Ethiopia and they did not see the imminence of famine. Aid workers in Sudan battled against the war mentality but overlooked the marginalisation of women. In Mozambique an obsession with white South African power deafened us to the roar of our own power. In Afghanistan personal and organisational interests masqueraded as principle. In Somalia we were too self-righteous about good intentions and did not listen enough. In the post-communist world, we could not rationally limit our response. In Rwanda we hid from the fallibility of our own humanity. And in Kosovo, we let our human concern be swept away on a political tide.43
Worse still, contemporary humanitarianism, in its rush to help those in distressed conflict situations, often find themselves perpetuating or amplifying wars – creating a kind of cosmopolitan dystopia.44 Didier Fassin’s important study, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present, clarifies all this; he takes us to the intellectual hub of this issue. Writing as a physician social scientist, a critical thinker who works in the field (sometimes for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)), Fassin notes:
A remarkable paradox deserves our attention here. On the one hand, moral sentiments are focused mainly on the poorest, most unfortunate, most vulnerable individuals: the politics of compassion is a politics of inequality. On the other hand, the condition of possibility of moral sentiments is generally the recognition of others as fellows: the politics of compassion is a politics of solidarity. This tension between inequality and solidarity, between a relation of dominance and a relation of assistance is constitutive of all humanitarian governance.45
Here we see that paradoxes run deep: between self-interest and altruism, dominance and assistance, care and regulation, kindness and violence. There is a political hierarchy within the workings behind humanitarianism. All is not quite as wonderful with humanitarianism as might initially seem to be the case.
Humanism as rights
Much humanism has developed ideas around the rights of human beings. In modern times, these are embodied in purest form in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR; originating in Paris at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in December 1948).46 The document asserts:
recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world … [D]isregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people.
Here, core notions of equality, justice, freedom, peace, dignity and rights are all brought centre stage in a document that haunts all major contemporary humanist thought and writing. In one clear sense, this movement for ‘rights’ can be seen as a tremendous success; it has established a universal language that has gradually moved across the world over the past half century. And there is much evidence of a sort of success: a ‘justice cascade’.47 The world has become infused with a human rights culture, some even claiming that it has radically changed the nature of our human world. With the idea of rights, humanity has been given a major common language, an equality of dignity for all. And it has provided a strategy for political change that has already had far-reaching consequences for the lives of many peoples all around the world.48 Given that the document was only introduced seventy years ago, it has