Critical Humanism. Ken Plummer
id="ulink_ddabfa7d-7f21-5395-839a-985ce53456b5">1 Critical Humanism
The status of human is something we claim and enact rather than something we uncover.
Anne Phillips, The Politics of the Human (2015), p. 131
Humanism and humanity have fallen on hard times. They need to be reimagined and reconnected. As Anne Phillips points out, our human status must be enacted, not simply discovered. Three or four generations ago, their death was being firmly announced by European philosophers.1 More recently, a posthuman era has been ushered in. This ‘ending’ of humanism happens periodically; the sociologist Marcus Morgan nicely calls it ‘the phoenix of humanism’.2 Humanism has its fates, fatalities and foes; yet it rises back up again and again. Humanity seems to keep calling us. At its best, as John Dewey once remarked, it is ‘an expansion, not a contraction, of human life, an expansion in which nature and the science of nature are made the willing servants of human good’.3 Each generation finds its new responses. This book is one such response.
Critical Humanism as a Project
Critical humanism suggests a fallible, worldwide, contested narrative about the collective, connecting and changing ways of being ‘human’. Just what this ‘human’ signifies is itself a long tale: of searching for the meanings of vulnerable life in a precarious plural world. The very idea of ‘humanity’ becomes a debated and contested one.
Critical humanism becomes a project shaped by many controversies. It highlights the plurality of our lives and humanisms, the connectivity and contingency of life and the narrativity of humanity. It argues for a humanism that is truly worldwide and not just an argument for some narrow, culture-bound version. It can learn from a wide range of different humanisms that have existed. And all this leads to the thorny problem of universalism and essentialism, a problem that haunts all discussions of humanism. As such, it is clear that a deep tension arises between the various claims for the generalities of a universal humanity in a world where lives are also and always lived in context-specific particularities, a ‘radical contextuality’.4
Critical humanism, then, is an open project not a closed theory. It is an ever-changing endeavour to rethink and remake a narrative of a world humanity. Different groups have struggled throughout history over just what it means to be a human being in a fragile universe. The task now is to connect: to imagine ‘like a world’ and build a rich planetary agenda of diverse and multiple critical projects that bring us together to re-create a better world for all. Box 1.1 sets out the basic agenda, which is then pursued in the rest of the book. By the final chapter, it will have somehow transformed itself into a political manifesto.
Humanist Sociology and Critical Humanism
To be clear at the outset, critical humanism is not new. It draws on a range of past humanisms, especially a flexible humanist sociology, but takes it further. A humanist sociology is one that builds on pragmatism. It recognizes and appreciates the value of every grounded, down-to-earth and uniquely different active human life. It listens to their stories and search for meaning. It appreciates the significance of their vulnerability, suffering and joy in life; aims at building a sympathetic human knowledge; connects to wider structural, historical issues; provides a conversation about human values; suggests transformations that aim to make better worlds; and confronts an emancipatory politics head on.5 It has many kindred spirits.6 Nowadays, this has to be a global argument not a local one: after all, although Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan and Russia rank as the largest and most populated countries in the world, they typically get little mention in the many works on humanism. It is part of the movement to de-Westernize, decolonize and repolarize the world. A new and important idea here is that of the pluriversal world: there are many ‘worlds of worlds’ living alongside one another. Ours is a plural world.7
Box 1.1: Connecting humanity: the critical humanist project
Critical humanism suggests an opening eight-point agenda to get us going. I explore all these in the chapters that follow.
1 Critical humanism What is this thing called ‘critical humanism’? Why do we need it? Where is it heading? What are its challenges?
2 Damaged humanity How have we come to construct such a mutilated, disconnected world? How might we repair it?
3 Divided humanity Why is humanity so divided? How can we learn to live well together with our amazing and vast array of differences?
4 Traumatized humanity How can we make sense of the atrocities of our past? Why have we treated each other so badly and with such cruelty? How can we build narratives and institutions of reconciliation, justice, truth and accountability with one another?
5 Narrative humanity How has humanity been assembled through narrative? We have become the distinctive, even distinguished, storytelling animal. So how can we cultivate stories that will encourage a better future, a flourishing world? Can there be a narrative of worldwide connection?
6 A valuing humanity How have we built a long and distinguished history of human values? We have become the distinctively ‘moral animal’ that dwells in a culture with ‘values for living’. Can there be worldwide values that will bring us together?
7 Transformative humanity What kind of futures do we want? We have become the creative creatures: we bring new things into the world. Can we create ways of making a better future that will connect all peoples, life and the earth?
8 A politics of humanity How can we act in the world to bring about change? How can we use creative political actions to bridge the local and the universal? And reconnect us all to earth, life, world and the cosmos. Can we create a globalization of better worlds for all?
Critical humanism establishes a politics of humanity. It asks (a) How can we reduce the human harm and hazards in the world, especially for the vulnerable, exploited and marginal? (b) How can we connect lives to the continuity and richness of the earth we live on? (c) How can we build creative and flourishing human worlds for all?
We look for harm reduction, connectivity, flourishing.
Critical humanism becomes both a worldly project of human connectivity and a global narrative that expands on this. It claims a critical stance by appreciating that humanity and humanism act as a narrative that shifts over time and space, bringing about historically grounded ‘projects’ as humans go in search of meaning. It can never be a pure universal constant. But it will most surely show slender threads of ‘fallible continuities’ – ways of making broad but tentative connections. There is no fixed meaning of humanism or humanity: they operate as a narrative that draws from a widely held pragmatic view of the workability, yet fallibility, of the everyday world.8
The idea of humanism is not always seen in quite this way. (More commonly it is seen as a fixed universal linked to some version of human nature.) But I think this more critical, long narrative view is helpful: it shows how the very idea of humanity and humanism, indeed the words themselves, signifies changing historical understandings developed in different contexts by different groups. What is claimed to be human at one moment in history may not be so claimed at another, even if slender threads hold them together. Our narratives are multiple in form, producing claims that are contested by (usually political) groupings. In all this, I draw from both classical humanism and a humanist sociology, but move beyond them.
Ultimately, I argue that the narrative of humanity is a changing, multilayered and plural idea. It introduces a value struggle over what it means to be a human being. Always diverse, it recognizes the need for a cooperative mutuality that will connect us all in the sharing of a universal planet. Some kind of ‘common ground’ has to be found to create visions of life and a future. We need some kind of global human imagination, practice, aesthetics,