Critical Humanism. Ken Plummer
sexual difference and disability. We have to widen the circle of heterogenous humanity. And we must resist the use of ‘humanism’ as a tool for discrimination, exclusion and the extermination of groups we see as less than human.
We move beyond any narrow and exclusive definitions of what it means to be human; we can always be a little more than human, too. But we always need to keep some version of a fragile existential core of ‘being human’, so that we can still see, appreciate and talk about the problems of our own human existence.
Each debate is of value. I simply start to disagree with them when and if they turn into unitary dogmas against the human person or start restrictive thinking about what the idea of being human means. They then become the enemies of a more reflective and critical humanist thinking. Both Enlightenment thinking and secular thinking can bring about the possibility, for example, of excluding most of the contemporary world.
As I sit here writing this, I cannot help but see myself as a little human animal precariously doing what little human animals do: puzzling. In this, I join an infinite chorus of billions before me, with many more – I hope – to come. I am a rational, emotional, embodied world species, not a robot, a monster or a God. I share a history, a story, even an identity: that of a human being, a person. I am interconnected with the earth, animals, relationships, community, country, world and cosmos that I live within. As such, I am very unhappy to pronounce on my own death and that of my species. I am decidedly against the move around restricting our view of humanity or abolishing the very idea. Indeed, the danger might be that some ideas – of posthumanity, the critique of rights – may come to act as a self-fulfilling prophecy, hastening our own very demise. Humanity has to strive to keep connecting, to stay wide open.
That said, this attitude of multiplicity and openness is not what many people traditionally see as humanism. It is usually given a dogmatic Western, often secular, twist. The focus has tended to be on the autonomous rational human agent, the unencumbered self: man (or should I perhaps say, white heterosexual men). Although, over the millennia, what it means to be human has clearly taken very many forms – from Buddhist humanisms to Islamic humanisms to African humanisms – it is Western humanisms that have come to dominate thinking. Critical humanism has to go beyond such narrow views, taking seriously the idea that we are a planetary animal living in a world of many worlds.
Many humanisms of the past were only able to take seriously the world in which they belonged: the West, the Asian, the Christian, the Muslim, the male and more. Speaking for the world, they only considered a world. It is only fairly recently in our history that we have been able to see the planet as a world and to map through narratives the rich diversity of lands, cultures and hybrid ways of being in it. Now, with Google Maps, it is so easy to sense this. And so we start to tell the stories of an emergent, hybrid, worldly humanity. The time has now come to see the rich diversities across the world and their deep interconnections.
The Call of Humanity: Only Connect
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.62
‘Only connect!’ This was E. M. Forster’s famous pronouncement in his novel Howards End. What does it mean? In current times the very word, ‘connect’, has been taken over by digitalism. We speak of the culture of connectivity to indicate a world of platforms and the coding of human life.63 Much contemporary writing talks about ‘connectivity’ being through digitalism and machines. But this, most emphatically, is not what Forster meant. And nor do I. I want to reclaim the word to talk about human life, not digital life. Surely, if there is one idea that connects us all, it is that of ‘humanity’. It can help us ‘live [our lives] in fragments no longer’. It helps us bring together our fragile animality and the wider worlds of interconnected ‘other people’, ‘other species’ and ‘other things’, dwelling in time, space and the cosmos. Over and over again in the worldwide concern about Covid-19, the idea of humanity was been evoked to ‘bring us together’ and to make us conscious of our interdependence in the world and planet. Not to hear humanity’s call to ‘come together’ presents us with a clear and present danger.
Critical humanism sensitizes us to humanity as a narrative that can help bring things together. We can find many and various ways of achieving this connectedness64 linking the personal and political, time and space, mind and body. To give one illustration: the influential sociologist C. W. Mills argues for an important connection between the personal and the public: we need to bridge personal sufferings (and inner life) and public problems (and outer structural social problems). While personal suffering (a Rohingya refugee or a racial attack, for example) is endured as an intensely subjective experience, often in isolation, it ultimately needs to be connected to a wider (historical) environment. (There are more than 900,000 Rohingya living in camps in southeast Bangladesh; the Black Lives Matter movement arose to show that race attacks by the police are not isolated incidents; and there is, in the USA, a 400-year-old history of deep racism.)65
The connective spirals of humanity
A broad sense of connection can be depicted as a spiral of weaving and widening circles of a web of domain of life:
1 Bio-earth. We are intimately bound up with the bio-earth, the earthly commons, as a planetary ecological biological species. We are necessarily interconnected through our own bodies (and all their microbes) with all other things and forms of life on earth in time and space. As Homo sapiens, we bring our distinctively developed big brains, bipedal bodies, long postbirth dependency and upright postures to the grand march of animal life that has evolved over the earth’s millennia. We have become ‘the human species’, living around 200,000 years on Planet Earth, spanning something like 600 generations (see Chapter 5). Right now, we can count nearly 8 billion individual human animals on earth (estimated to reach 11,200 billion by 2100).66 Each of us may be uniquely individual; but we make up only about 0.01 per cent of life on the planet. And we have only been here for a very short time. We can never stand alone as a species, but live within a deep ecology encompassing the earth, other people, other life, things and the cosmos. There is a deep interdependence of all. It is dangerous to break this connection. As we will see, many of the problems we now face may well flow from the fact that we have in recent centuries been slowly breaking this bond with a wider universe of which we are an irrevocable part.
2 Existential human beings (persons). We are emergent, embodied creatures bridging inner agency with outer lives. Collectively, we are creatively engaged in symbolic human activities, self-reflexive and permanently unfinished. We are the vulnerable, biographical creatures of body, feeling and reflective consciousness. We are born, we suffer, we face ambivalence and contingency, and we die. We may even have an afterlife. And each life brings its own distinctively different and unique life story. Humanism then becomes its grounded project: to tell its story. Narratives are collectively developed with others, refined and distorted, persistently contested, and reshaped generation by generation. All the time, they pump meaning into life. We seem to be the only vulnerable life form on a fragile earth that is consciously aware of this. Suffering, and our responses to it, are key. A connecting humanity brings a major reflexivity and awareness to all these issues.
3 Interpersonal. We interact and relate to each other in families, friendships, networks. More: human life is intersubjective. People can never really be alone. We ‘do things together’, ‘living in the minds of others’, in ‘circles of others’ (see Chapter 3). Human ‘persons’ develop actions that are grounded in complex language and symbols, capable of engaging with a startling creativity: writing literature, composing music, engaging in Olympics, doing science, sending people to the moon. No other planetary life that we know of at present can quite do this. Humans are creative beings who connect to others in relationships.
4 Communal. We bond, sharing life together in a wide range of communities. We are the bonding group animal who lives with others