women, different ethnicities and sexualities, and more, are embedded in deep levels of violence. An unbearable suffering stalks the world in many places. Myanmar’s generals preside over the brutal ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya population; Syria’s President al-Assad wages bloody war, bombing civilians and targeting hospitals; and in Yemen, the Saudi-led coalition has killed and wounded thousands of civilians, bringing an entire country to the brink of famine.
Here is our cruel world of winners who get more and losers who get less. A world where women continue to be downgraded. A world where the humanity of some groups who are ethnically, sexually or bodily different is denied. And despite years of accelerating warnings, a world in which many people live in full-blown and much-celebrated, irresponsible, cruel and violent ignorance. We dwell in what might be called anti-humanity: a deep disconnection from being human as we engage in mass dehumanization, mass expulsions, mass digitalism and mass extinctions. Much of the pluriversal world lives in deep ignorance of the complexity (and often the suffering) of the rest of the world. And everywhere, Covid-19 has not made living any easier. So many people suffer; so many have been seriously let down by the human world in which they live.
From Humanism to Critical Humanism
So here we are. As agentic human beings we face the muddles, failures and tragedies of our world: some certainly more than others. How can our human world, one we have been building so artfully over the millennia, remain such a flawed place? Over the years we can see the uneven march of progress in the sphere of the technical. But in the ethical and human sphere, we linger behind. Advances in our ‘inner humanities’ do not match our scientific and technological awareness. Nearly 100 years ago – only three or four generations – there was the most atrocious Holocaust. Science and power were put to use with the vilest of thoughts. Today, despite our ritualistic posturing ‘lest we forget’, many in the world are no longer even aware of it. Indeed, what have we learnt since then? In writing this book, I found for a while that the Holocaust overwhelmed me as a serious preoccupation (as it probably should in every human life at some time). How can it be that after all these thousands of years of so-called humanity we had learnt nothing and were capable of such cruel atrocities, often in the divisive language of humanity and nonhumanity? Humanity is in a mess. Why still write about a moribund humanism?
My interest in a sociological humanist stance goes back to the modern foundational works of William James, George Herbert Mead, Jane Addams and Herbert Blumer.5 As a young gay man in the 1960s, then outlawed, stigmatized and apparently nonhuman, my earliest research on gay culture told me that the best way to understand the world was to be pragmatic: to get close to life as lived in its rich complexity and to listen to the diverse stories of unique human lives. Too much social science is done at a great distance from the lived human experience and its joys and pains. More: sociology should not just get done for its own sake. It needed to aim for social goals, social purpose, emancipation, connection and amelioration. Some forty years ago I wrote my first set of humanist claims, about using human stories to understand life, in the hope that we could move on. Today, many social scientists have long left humanism behind, if they ever even countenanced it. The worlds of big data, post-theory and academic capitalism have arrived.
There are very good reasons why some of my colleagues in the academic and political worlds have been critical of humanism. Political scientist Anne Phillips summarizes the objections well:
Humanism has come under attack from a number of directions in recent decades: for its essentialism of human nature; its tendency to read the course of human history as the steady progress towards realising the potential implicit in that nature; its misguided confidence in the powers of science and reason; its celebration of an autonomous self-determining subject; and so on and on.6
I have much sympathy with such critiques. There are many very good reasons to attack. But there are also many good reasons to defend and develop.
Critics argue that the very idea of humanism has become Westernized. It has led to the abuse and monstrosities of colonialism, slavery, femicide, class oppression, racism and exploitations of all kinds: ultimately, to genocides of the races. And they are indeed right. Yet, today we live in a world where anti-humanity is still rife. I will argue, somewhat ironically, that we now need the highly charged and contested term ‘humanity’ (or some equivalent) more than ever before: to help defend us and to give our lives, work and play some coherence, connection and common purpose. To act in the world for a more connected world. We need to find a fallible universality out of our precarious particularity. And I ask: what else is there? At its fragile core, the invented idea of humanity has to suggest a collective social nature of being human that is connected, relational, valued. Ours is an embodied narrative species and a connective humanity. Through language and stories, we can act to share common good things with each other: creativity, love, kindness, hope perhaps. We can find a shared solidarity in caring for one another. There may even be a possible common worth, respect, even ‘dignity’, to be valued across our species. And there is a putative mode of feeling for our human interconnectedness with other species, life forms and even planets. To live well with other people, animals and things in the deep multiverse is surely a laudable goal. Maybe, too, our world can now come to thrive on interdependent differences, be deeply pluralistic, learn from our connectivity. As times change and new debates appear, these all seem worthwhile aims for our different kinds of experience and activity in life. (Box 0.1 suggests a basic working set of terminologies, open to debate and change.) Ultimately, key questions become: How are we to live cooperatively with our diverse yet common humanity, not rendering it divisive or dehumanizing? How can we best live together with our differences?
Most versions of humanism, of which this is one, are ultimately engaged with a human search for meaning. They usually tell a specific story of what it means to be human. In the Renaissance and Enlightenment of the West, a strong and unified storyline emerged. Here I take the stance of a critical humanist who appreciates this, but immediately sees how damaging this idea has been for much of the wider pluriversal world. We have to move beyond this to see the very ideas of humanity and humanism as themselves fragile: multiple and shifting over lives, time and place. Different humanisms bring contested claims about what it means to be human. These change over history as different (usually powerful) groups make different claims. Critical humanism engages with (and tells the stories of) the perpetual narrative reconstructions and conflicts over what it means to be human. Ultimately it does this with the goal of building on these contested understandings to find pathways into better futures and worlds. Critical humanism is an emerging project to remake sense of all this. Even as it will raise many problems, it enables us to ask questions about what kind of human world we want to live in, what kind of person we want to be in that world, and how it needs to be transformed.
Box 0.1: Defining humanity
The languages of both humanism and humanity are contested and muddled. That said, in this book I use certain key words to mean certain things while certainly acknowledging all these words need debating.7
The term human species (homo sapiens) is fairly straightforward. We are a biological species (hominin) and part of the evolutionary classification of domains of life. We make up about 0.01 per cent of life on earth,8 taking a small place in the grand encyclopaedia of living things. Humankind is a collective word to depict our bio-geo-historical existence.
The idea of human beings (or even persons)9 builds on the above but suggests the ways in which we differ from other animals. These terms bring a range of descriptive formal properties open for discussion. This includes (i) we are embodied with feelings and elaborate brains and cognitions; (ii) we are animals aware of our vulnerability; (iii) we develop language, consciousness, symbolic communications, we tell stories and create selves; (iv) we live in worlds of values, becoming moral animals; (v) we are agentic animals who act in the world; (vi) we have emergent potentials, capacities, capabilities; and (vii) we are creative animals. We could add more. These are only