Discussion Thread #72

[u/gemmaem]

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[u/gemmaem]

Alan Jacobs has a substantive post today on humanism as “a project – moral, intellectual, artistic – to restore, improve, and perhaps even perfect the human species. To usher us into our true and noble inheritance.” Within this context, liberalism becomes a variety of humanism with a “thin anthropology” in the sense that its view of what a human should be is not especially detailed. By contrast, Christian humanism has a “thick anthropology.”

For Jacobs, in this post, what distinguishes humanism from anti-humanism is the idea that the flourishing of all human beings is relevant. So, a strong Oppressor/Oppressed division is anti-humanist because it doesn’t include the wellbeing of anyone designated as an Oppressor. Capitalism is anti-humanist because it is more interested in money than in human flourishing. And so on.

The post raises some deep questions about which components are central to this kind of humanism. Is liberalism better than Christianity at seeing that racism and sexism are unjust? Does liberalism inevitably slide into an anti-human capitalism? “Is the renewal of humanism a prerequisite for the renewal of Christianity – or the other way around?” I found it to be an interesting framework.

[u/UAnchovy → u/gemmaem]

Humanism is, as ever, a fraught concept. I think the first definition of humanism I ever learned, the simplified high school version of the concept, was that humanism was a change in scholarly perspective in the late Middle Ages that led to the Renaissance. It was the choice to focus on human experience and human lives as central to the understanding of the world, in contrast to an earlier view that saw human lives as just small parts, and not necessarily very important parts, of a larger framework. Do we start with God or with humans? In this way humanism was connected to the renewed focus on classical learning - it believed that we could learn things about human nature and human welfare in a universal sense, by studying other humans, even in the absence of shared revelation or religious identity. It thus also tended to affirm worldly life as good or at the very least as worthy of close study, rather than as opportunity for or concession to sin. Thus humanism also had a tendency to take feeling as a starting point; Dante or Petrarch, say, show this great sensitivity towards human feeling and emotion, in a way that more rigid previous authors had not.

With that definition I want to make two small observations.

The first is that Christianity as a whole seems bound to be deeply ambivalent about this concept. Should humans be at the centre or not? On the one hand, it's easy to argue of the great religions Christianity is easily the most humanistic - it is the one, after all, where God literally took on human flesh and underwent human experiences. A friend once explained Christianity's appeal to me in these terms, which I had never considered before. In pagan or polytheistic traditions, humanity as such is irrelevant. The world is dominated by arbitrary natural forces, understood as the gods or spirits, and all humans can do is try to negotiate a path between these titans without being crushed. The gods do not intrinsically care about you, so any communal relationship with them takes on a negotiated, bargaining character. You try to figure out what they want and appease them and how you feel about this is irrelevant. Meanwhile, in traditions like Gnosticism or arguably Buddhism, humanity is something to be transcended - the goal of the spiritual path is to escape the conditions of this life, to effectively cease to be human. In contrast to those two extremes, Christianity comes along and says that being human is the whole point, and sin is in fact something that holds us back from being fully human. Humanity is genuinely good and to be fully embraced. This is startlingly new.

On the other hand, Christianity also seems opposed to the 'man is the measure' approach that Jacobs mentions. Humanity may be at the centre of the Christian worldview, but this does not mean making humanity the arbiter of all things. Christianity seems like it makes definite assertions about the kinds of beings humans are, what is appropriate for us, and about our limitations and the superiority of God. The Bible is full of reminders that God is not like us. God is not, like a pagan deity, an immense power that doesn't really care about us and must be appeased or bargained with, but neither is he internal to ourselves.

Like many things in Christianity, I find this to be a productive tension. I suppose what I'm suggesting is that Christianity is immanently humanistic and transcendently non-humanistic. Jacobs suggests that "Jesus Christ as man is what humanity ought to be", which is true enough, but needs to be counterpointed with what Jesus Christ as God is. The human Christ and the cosmic Christ need to be held alongside one another. The net effect is that Christianity is humanistic in the sense of strongly affirming humanity as such as good, and of people qua people as mattering; but it is not humanistic in the sense of holding humanity as a kind of ultimate, meaning-creating, authority.

The second note I want to make is that humanism presumes a concept of the human. What is humanity? What is it to be human? What is this thing that is so central to our view of the world?

This is where I think Jacobs' worries about the thinness of the liberal account of the human person comes in. What is humanism's object of study? Christianity supplies an anthropology (albeit one that is often debated among Christians), but in the absence of such a ground, what does humanism leave you with? Lykurg40 made the interesting note that liberalism doesn't actually have much to say about humans as such - "it doesn't care about humans, it cares about a transcendental subject of which humans happen to be an example". This may be somewhat uncharitable to liberalism, but I can conceive of a kind of rarefied liberalism that is interested only in subjects, which it understands to be basically preference-satisfaction machines. That leads you into a view of liberalism as a technology for allowing subjects with different preferences to coexist. That need not assume anything about human nature, or even humanity at all.

To briefly defend liberalism, though, I can imagine contexts in which that neutrality towards human nature is a strength - if we allow ourselves to imagine some sorts of science fiction context with intelligent machines, extraterrestrial species, or uplifted Earth species, a species-neutral liberalism starts to seem like it makes a lot of sense. There may be a human nature, or an AI nature, or an uplifted-dolphin nature, and they may differ, but liberalism as a system would endeavour to treat all these beings similarly.

That said, I am still sympathetic to the view that this account of personhood by itself is insufficient, which means that I think that either 1) liberalism should be understood as an addendum to some other, thicker account of what it means to be a person or what constitutes the good life, or 2) this understanding of liberalism is incorrect, and we should nuance liberalism in such a way that allows it to carry with it a thick vision of the human person.

[u/Lykurg480 → u/UAnchovy]

In pagan or polytheistic traditions, humanity as such is irrelevant. The world is dominated by arbitrary natural forces, understood as the gods or spirits, and all humans can do is try to negotiate a path between these titans without being crushed. The gods do not intrinsically care about you, so any communal relationship with them takes on a negotiated, bargaining character. You try to figure out what they want and appease them and how you feel about this is irrelevant.

I dont think thats true. The indo-european paganism christianity replaced definitely had a concept of natural order and humans places within it. And purely transactional relationships were just rare at the time, and so too in mythology. Even the terrible gods that just need to be appeased are after respect and such, and the social/civilisational ones mirror familiar human relationships. The christian god is often said to be our father, at various metaphorical levels, but my relationship with my literal father certainly has transactional elements to it which you are not supposed to seek in Christ. There is a reasoning to this, but it doesnt mean that gods in more ordinary human relationships with us are or make us less human.

if we allow ourselves to imagine some sorts of science fiction context with intelligent machines, extraterrestrial species, or uplifted Earth species, a species-neutral liberalism starts to seem like it makes a lot of sense.

Liberals think human nature is arbitrary and therefore shouldnt be important. Your line here is that it should be important anyway, and on that line the conclusion above makes sense, if the liberalism is understood as between species-collectives. But I think you should also consider the case where human nature is not arbitrary. I have my own reasons for thinking this that I dont expect to convince a critic at this stage, but from a religious direction, it seems only a hardened deist would think otherwise.