Humanly possible, p.2
Humanly Possible, page 2
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We can start with the first possibility mentioned by the Thurmarshians: understanding human life non-supernaturally. Of all the views that came up in that meeting, this is the one with the oldest recorded pedigree. The first discussion of materialist views (that we know of) arose in India, as part of the Cārvāka school of thought founded by the thinker Bṛhaspati sometime before the sixth century BCE. This school’s followers believed that, when our bodies die, that is the end of us as well. The philosopher Ajita Kesakambalī was quoted as saying:
This human being is composed of the four great elements, and when one dies the earth part reverts to earth, the water part to water, the fire part to fire, the air part to air, and the faculties pass away into space. . . . Fools and wise, at the breaking-up for the body, are destroyed and perish, they do not exist after death.
A century or so later, a similar thought turns up in the coastal town of Abdera, in northeastern Greece, home of the philosopher Democritus. He taught that all entities in nature are made up of atoms—indivisible particles that combine in various ways to make all the objects we have ever touched or seen. And we are made of these particles, too, both mentally and physically. While we live, they combine together to form our thoughts and sensory experiences. When we die, they drift apart and go to form other things. That is the end of the thoughts and experiences—and therefore we end, too.
Is this humanist? Isn’t it just depressing? No; in fact, it offers cheering and comforting consequences for our lives. If nothing of me will survive into any afterlife, there is no point in my living in fear, worrying about what the gods may do to me or what torments or adventures may await me in future. The atomic theory made Democritus so lighthearted that he was known as “the laughing philosopher”: freed from cosmic dread, he was able to chuckle at human foibles rather than weep over them as others did.
Democritus passed on his ideas to others. Among those to take them up was Epicurus, who founded a community of students and like-minded friends at his school in Athens, known as the “Garden.” Epicureans sought happiness mainly through enjoying their friendships, eating a modest diet of porridge-like gruel, and cultivating mental serenity. A key component of the latter, as Epicurus wrote in a letter, was avoiding “those false ideas about the gods and death which are the chief source of mental disturbances.”
Then there was Protagoras, he of the “human measure,” who also came from Abdera and knew Democritus personally. His talk of measuring everything by humanity was already considered disturbing in his own time, but he was even more infamous for writing a book about the gods, which reportedly started in this surprising way:
As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life.
Given such a beginning, it would be nice to know what he filled the rest of the book with. But the punch is already there in this opening. There may or may not be gods in existence, but for us they are dubious and undetectable beings. The argument that followed was probably that we need not waste our brief lives worrying about them. Our business is with our earthly lives while they last. It is, again, another way of saying that the right measure for us is the human one.
The reason we do not know what came next in the book is that nothing beyond those few lines survives—and we have a good idea as to why. The biographer Diogenes Laertius tells us that, as soon as Protagoras’s work on the gods appeared, “the Athenians expelled him; and they burnt his works in the market-place, after sending round a herald to collect them from all who had copies in their possession.” Nothing directly written by Democritus survives, either, or by members of the Cārvāka school, and perhaps it is for similar reasons. From Epicurus we do have a few letters, but his teachings were also turned into verse form by a later Roman, Lucretius, in the long poem On the Nature of Things. That was almost lost, too, but a later copy survived in a monastery, where it was found in the fifteenth century by humanistic book collectors and circulated afresh. And so, after all these fragile moments and near losses, Democritan ideas did survive into our own era—and could thus be put into beautiful words by the American author Zora Neale Hurston, in her 1942 memoir Dust Tracks on a Road:
Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance.
The tradition lives on, too, in the words of a poster campaign of 2009 in the UK, supported by the British Humanist Association (now Humanists UK). The message, displayed on the sides of buses and in other places, was a Democritan statement of mental tranquility: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” The idea had come from Ariane Sherine, a young writer and comedian who wanted to provide an alternative, reassuring message after she saw buses carrying an advertisement from an evangelical religious organization whose website threatened sinners with eternal hellfire.
This switching of focus to the here and now remains one of the key principles of modern humanist organizations. It was even formulated as that most unhumanist-sounding thing, a “creed,” or statement of core beliefs. The author of this was Robert G. Ingersoll, a nineteenth-century American freethinker (or non-religious humanist). The creed goes like this:
Happiness is the only good.
The time to be happy is now.
The place to be happy is here.
And Ingersoll ends with the all-important final line:
The way to be happy is to make others so.
That last part takes us to a second big humanist idea: the meaning of our lives is to be found in our connections and bonds with each other.
This principle of human interconnectivity was put into a neat phrase in a play by Publius Terentius Afer, known as Terence in English. The “Afer” refers to his origin, since he was born, probably as a slave, around 190 BCE in or near Carthage in North Africa; he then found fame in Rome as a writer of comedies. One of his characters says—and I include the Latin because it is still often quoted in the original:
Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.
Or:
I am human, and consider nothing human alien to me.
Actually, the line is a comic gag. The character who says it is known for being a nosy neighbor: this is how he replies when someone asks him why he cannot mind his own business. I am sure it got a good laugh, catching the audience off guard and mocking philosophical profundities. It tickles me, too, to think that a quotation cited seriously for so many centuries started life as a piece of knockabout comedy. Yet it does in fact do a good job of summing up an essential humanist belief: that we are all tied up in each other’s lives. We are sociable beings by nature, and we can all recognize something of ourselves in each other’s experiences, even those of people who seem very different from us.
A similar thought comes from the other, southern end of the African continent, captured in the Nguni Bantu word ubuntu, along with equivalent terms in other southern African languages. These refer to the network of mutual human relations connecting individuals in a community large or small. The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairing South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission during the country’s transition away from apartheid in the 1990s, cited ubuntu along with his Christian principles as inspiration for his approach. He believed that the oppressive relationships of apartheid had damaged oppressor and oppressed alike, destroying the natural bonds of humanity that should exist within and between people. His hope was to create a process that would reestablish those connections, rather than focus on avenging wrongs. He defined ubuntu with these words: “We belong in a bundle of life. We say, ‘a person is a person through other people.’ ”
In yet another part of the world, shared humanity is also considered crucial: this is in the ancient Chinese tradition of Confucian philosophy. Kongzi, or Master Kong, or Confucius, as he became known to Europeans, lived slightly before Democritus and Protagoras, and passed on a wealth of improving advice to his followers. Over the years after his death in 479 BCE, those followers collected and expanded his sayings to form the Analects, covering matters of morality, social etiquette, political advice, and philosophical insight of all kinds. A key term running through the collection is ren. This can be translated into English variously as benevolence, goodness, virtue, ethical wisdom—or simply “humanity,” because it is what you cultivate if you want to become more fully and deeply human. The meaning is very close to that of humanitas.
When disciples asked Kongzi to give a fuller explanation of ren, and also to come up with a single word that would be a good guide for living, he mentioned shu: a network of reciprocity between people. Shu, he said, means that you should not do to others what you would prefer they did not do to you. If this sounds familiar, it is because it is a principle found in many other religious and ethical traditions around the world, sometimes called “the Golden Rule.” The Jewish theologian Hillel the Elder said, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.” The Hindu Mahābhārata and Christian scriptures turn it around the other way: Do do unto others as you would be done by—although, as George Bernard Shaw perkily pointed out, this version is less reliable because “their tastes may not be the same.”
These are all ways of saying that our moral lives should be rooted in the mutual connection between people. It is fellow feeling, not being watched and judged according to divine standards, that grounds our ethics. The good news is that we seem—mostly—to feel that basic spark of fellowship spontaneously, because we are highly socialized beings who have already grown up in deep connection with the people around us.
One of Kongzi’s later followers, Mengzi (or Master Meng, or Mencius), made this spontaneous recognition a starting point for a whole theory of the goodness of humanity. He invites his readers to find the source of it in themselves. Imagine that you are out one day and spot a small child about to fall into a pond. What do you feel? Almost certainly you feel an impulse to jump in and save the child. No calculation or reasoning precedes it, and it requires no commandment. That is your “seed” of a moral life—although you still have to reflect on it, and develop it, for it to become a full ethics.
The need to germinate and cultivate our potential in this way is another idea that runs through the humanist tradition. Because of this, education is all-important. As children, we learn from parents and teachers; later we continue to develop through experience and further study. We can still be human without advanced education, of course, but to realize our ren or humanitas to the utmost, mentoring and the broadening of perspectives are invaluable.
Being well educated is especially important for those who will go on to run the political and administrative systems for everyone else. Kongzi and his followers were adamant that leaders and civil servants should learn their tasks through a long and studious apprenticeship. They must learn to speak well and to know the traditions of their career, and they should also immerse themselves in literature and other humanities. Having such refined people at the helm is good for all of society, said Kongzi, because virtuous leaders help to inspire everyone else to live up to similar standards.
In Greece, Protagoras was a believer in education too, as well he might be, because he made a good living (too good, some felt) as a traveling tutor, preparing young men for political or legal careers by teaching them how to speak and argue persuasively. He even claimed to be able to teach them how to be virtuous: he could help students “to acquire a good and noble character, worthy indeed of the fee which I charge and even more.”
To lure in new students, Protagoras would relate a story to show why education was vital. At the dawn of humanity, he said, people had no special qualities at all—until the two Titans Prometheus and Epimetheus steal fire from the gods for them, along with the arts of farming, sewing, building, language, and even religious observance. The myth of Prometheus’s theft, and his punishment for doing it, is much told, but Protagoras’s version includes some twists. When Zeus sees what has happened, he adds an extra gift for free: the capacity for forming friendships and other social bonds. Now humans can cooperate. But not so fast: they still have only the capacity for these things. They have a seed. To develop a truly thriving and well-managed society, humans must make that seed grow, by means of learning, and teaching each other. This is something that we must take charge of ourselves. We are showered with gifts, but they are nothing unless we work out how to collaborate in using them together.
Underlying humanists’ love of education is a great optimism about what it can produce for us. We may be quite good to begin with, but we can be better. Our existing achievements are there to be built on—and meanwhile we can also take pleasure in contemplating what we have done.
Accordingly, joyful recitations of human excellences became a favorite genre of humanist writing. The Roman statesman Cicero wrote a dialogue with a section praising human excellence; others followed suit. The genre reached its height in Italy with such works as On Human Worth and Excellence, written in the 1450s by the diplomat, historian, biographer, and translator Giannozzo Manetti. Just look, says Manetti, at the beautiful things we have created! Look at our buildings, from the pyramids to the cathedral dome recently built by Filippo Brunelleschi in Florence, and the gilded bronze baptistery doors by Lorenzo Ghiberti nearby. Or the paintings of Giotto—the poetry of Homer or Virgil—the histories by Herodotus and others; and let’s not even start on the nature-investigating philosophers, or the physicians, or Archimedes, who studied the movements of the planets.
Ours indeed are those inventions—they are human—because it is those that are seen as made by humans: all the houses, all the towns, all the cities, including all the structures on earth. . . . Ours are the paintings, ours the sculptures; ours are the crafts, ours the sciences and ours the knowledge . . . Ours are all the kinds of different languages and various alphabets.
Manetti celebrates the physical pleasures of life, and also the finer delights that come from using our mental and spiritual capacities to the full: “What pleasure comes from our faculties of appraisal, memory and understanding!” He makes the reader’s heart swell with pride—but it is our activities that he praises, so this implies that we should keep laboring to do better, rather than sitting back and preening ourselves. We are building a kind of second human Creation, to complement that made by God. Also, we ourselves are such a work in progress. Much remains for us to do.
Manetti, Terence, Protagoras, Kongzi—each of these helped to weave the threads of the humanist tradition, over the millennia, and in different cultures. They share an interest in what humans can do, and a hope that we can do more. They often put great value on study and knowledge. They lean toward an ethics based on relationships with others, and on worldly and mortal existence, rather than on an anticipated afterlife. And they all seek to “connect”: to live well within our cultural and moral networks, and in contact with that great “bundle of life” from which we all emerge, and which is our source of purpose and meaning.
There is much more to humanist thinking than this, and we shall meet many more strands and more types of humanists in this book. But first, a companion story must be told.
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All this time, along with the humanist tradition, there has run a shadow. It is equally wide and long, and we could call it the anti-humanist tradition.
While humanists count out the elements of human happiness and excellence, anti-humanists sit beside them just as eagerly counting our miseries and failings. They point out the many ways in which we fall short, and the inadequacy of our talents and abilities for either dealing with problems or finding meaning in life. Anti-humanists often dislike the thought of taking delight in earthly pleasures. Instead, they argue for altering our existence in some radical way, either by turning away from the material world or by dramatically restructuring our politics—or ourselves. In ethics, they consider good nature or personal bonds less important than obeying the rules of a greater authority, whether sacred or secular. And, far from praising our best achievements as a basis for future improvements, they tend to feel that what humans mainly need is to be humbled.
In Confucian thought, for example, the philosophy espoused by Mengzi found its counterweight in that of another thinker, Xunzi, who described human nature as “detestable” in its original state. For him, it could be made better only by remolding, as when a wheelwright steams wood to make it into a different shape. He and Mengzi agreed about education being useful, but Mengzi thought we needed it to make our natural seeds of virtue grow. Xunzi thought we needed it to bend us out of our spontaneous form entirely.
Christianity also offered both options. Some early Christians were extremely humanistic: for them, praising humans was also a way of praising God, since He made us this way, after all. The fourth-century theologian Nemesius of Emesa sounds a lot like Manetti when he writes, of the human being, “Who could express the advantages of this living thing? He crosses the seas, in contemplation he enters into the heavens, he recognises the motions of the stars . . . he thinks nothing of wild beasts and sea-monsters, he controls every science, craft and procedure, he converses by writing with those with whom he wishes to do so beyond the horizon.” But a few years later, Nemesius’s influential fellow theologian Augustine of Hippo formulated the concept of original sin, which states that we are all born fundamentally wrong (thanks to Adam and Eve), and that even newborn babies start out in a flawed condition from which they had better spend their lives seeking redemption.
