Critical Humanism. Ken Plummer
content. What kinds of bodies, selves, vulnerabilities, values, capabilities? Some ideas – rights, dignity, equalities – are perpetually controversial because they straddle the descriptive formal and the evaluative substantive.
Humanities refers to the study of all things human – especially its arts, literature, languages, music, poetics.
Humanity is a more recent and more muddled idea. It can be taken (i) as a collective descriptive word for the entirety of human life. But it can also suggest (ii) a collective evaluative word for human life, often implying those who show human sympathy with others. Often these two get muddled. (An emerging idea, (iii), is that we are actually all ‘little gods’, albeit little gods who shit! But we can leave that controversy to one side for the moment. See pp. 84–5.)
Finally, humanism itself has many meanings. Here I use it to signify all ideas that try to understand what it means to be human and to find ways of enhancing our being in the world.
The Book and Manifesto Ahead: A Politics of Humanity
I have written this book to help re-energize an interest in humanism. I examine how we are dehumanizing the world (through damage, division and atrocity) and how we might reconnect and humanize it (through narrative, values and creativity). I identify many humanist practices at work across the world, from dialogue and cosmopolitanism to creativity and ‘generational hope’, and aim to give them a rudimentary coherence. An opening section explains why I use the term ‘critical humanism’; I outline its key claims and challenges (as a project, an agenda, a narrative). The middle core of the book looks first at the failings of humanity and then goes in pursuit of its successes. The closing (and final) part makes a direct link to a politics and education of humanity, suggesting things that could be done to make a connective world for all. I illustrate the importance of cultivating a generational hope and building on a multiplicity of existing world projects that work to make the planet a better place for all.
This had to be a short book so there is much ground I have not covered. That said, there is a website (kenplummer.com/criticalhumanism) with substantial guides to readings, websites and other material concerning critical humanism.
As I write, Covid-19 has arrived; wildlife is in serious decline; the world is literally and metaphorically ablaze. The global hazards so long predicted are becoming the stuff of everyday life. So much suffering in the world and the widespread failure of many key institutions. So much unnecessary suffering for so many, wrought often by so few. We could do so much better as a species. (And I could do so much better as a person.) Very many have had such thoughts before me. Why have we not put our enormous learning into better practice? I make the claim here that we need ‘humanity’ as a narrative to guide us, a literacy to learn with and a tool to act with. Human beings can be creative. They can create a common empathic and dialogic world of human connections. They can build a world that will flourish over the generations by creating strong, caring, just and loving institutions so we can live well, if fragilely, with each other and our differences. But still, I sometimes ask myself: am I just a foolish dreamer?
Notes
1 1 I have provided a short account of my illness in ‘My Multiple Sick Bodies: Symbolic Interactionism, Autoethnography and Embodiment’, in Bryan S. Turner, ed., Routledge Handbook of Body Studies (Routledge, 2012), pp. 75–93.
2 2 In a short space of time there has already been a mad rush of publications about Covid-19. Everything is in flux, but one early useful book is Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World (Allen Lane, 2020).
3 3 See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity, 2000). Bauman has written many works on this theme, including Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Polity, 2003), Liquid Fear (Polity, 2006) and, with David Lyon, Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation (Polity, 2013).
4 4 I use the word ‘pluriverse’ a lot in this book and it may not be familiar. It has three genealogies. First, William James wrote of the plural experience and ‘the pluralistic universe’ (see A Pluralistic Universe, CreateSpace Publishing, 2015 [1909]). He suggested a world of human multiplicities. Second, the term ‘multiverse’ is used by physicists to claim that the universe is not one but multiple. And third, it has been used recently to capture diversity in world politics, developed in the works of Arturo Escobar in Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (Duke University Press, 2020). These are not incompatible. The challenge is to think in the local and specific diversity, to see worlds in the plural.
5 5 It is present in my Documents of Life: Introduction to the Problems and Literature of a Humanist Method (Allen & Unwin, 1983); but I make it much more apparent in the major revised second edition: Documents of Life-2: An Invitation to a Critical Humanism (Sage, 2001). I expand on it in several other works: for example, Cosmopolitan Sexualities: Hope and the Humanist Imagination (Polity, 2015), Narrative Power: The Struggle for Human Value (Polity, 2019) and ‘A Manifesto for a Critical Humanism in Sociology’, in Daniel Nehring, Sociology: An Introductory Textbook and Reader (Pearson Education, 2013), pp. 489–516.
6 6 Anne Phillips, The Politics of the Human (Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 14–15.
7 7 As well as the discussion in Phillips’s Politics of the Human, see discussions in Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Vintage, 2011) and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Vintage Books, 2015); Siep Stuurman, The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History (Harvard University Press, 2017); Alexander Harcourt, Humankind: How Biology and Geography Shape Human Diversity (Pegasus, 2015); John Hands, Cosmo Sapiens: Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe (Duckworth, 2015); and Bruce Mazlish, The Idea of Humanity in a Global Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
8 8 Trees account for some 82 per cent of biomass; tiny bacteria some 13 per cent; we humans account for a mere 0.01 per cent. For a summary of these ideas, see https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study. The original study can be found at: Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips and Ron Milo, ‘The Biomass Distribution on Earth’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115/25 (19 June 2018): 6506–11: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506/tab-article-info.
9 9 Discussions of the ‘person’ raise many issues – especially concerning dignity and agency. It corresponds roughly to what I will refer to as existential being, but I do not discuss it here. An important clarification is to be found in Christian Smith, What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (University of Chicago Press, 2011). See also Margaret Archer, Being Human: The Problem of Agency (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Part I Rethinking the World: Connecting Humanity
Critical humanism:
a narrative that provides changing, connective, critical and contested stories of how we become human in the universe;
a dialogue between contrasting and contested meanings about what it is to be human in the universe;
a project that aims to repair the damaged world and cultivate its flourishing;
a connection between life and earth, people and communities, societies and the world: and the cosmos beyond;
an imagination that thinks like a planet, ‘only connects’ and creates a generational hope;
an imaginary that builds grounded projects for a better world for all;
a politics of humanity that works for positive transformations of the world in a multitude of ways;
a theory to make sense of all the above.