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, ethics and politics to go with it. ‘We’ (and by this I mean, rather immodestly, you, me and the whole damned human world) have to move through our differences. We have to find some of the things we can agree on. And this is a key theme of this book. Critical humanism seeks a narrative for the betterment of a global humanity, in all its rich connected diversity, by enhancing the world for all in each generation. This just might be a commonality worth trying for. We need here to think and talk, a little, like a planet.
The critical humanist imagination moves from a unique, but limited, little human being towards a vision of a collective way of ‘living with difference’ – of all being valued and connected to a wider planetary world. It moves back and forth between the biological and the cosmic, the local and the global, from personal sufferings to political transformation. It is grounded in a paradox: while it recognizes just how fragile, contested and divided our humanity is, it also challenges us to ask how we human beings can build a world of shared common humanity that enables us all to flourish and live well with each other and our differences.
The Plurality and Hybridity of Humanisms, Humanity and the World
And so, let’s see humanity at its most expansive and generous. Humanism suggests a theory and practice of what it means to be human and to live a vibrant human life in an infinite pluriverse of time and space. But there is never just the one way: humanism appreciates the rich diversities of humanity in an ever-changing world, and the way in which human beings struggle to make sense of their lives, ultimately building worlds that intermingle with one another, with animals and with other things. A little while back, the sociologist Alfred McClung Lee, a much-ignored champion of a humanistic sociology, saw humanism emerging everywhere throughout history:
Humanism has figured in a wide range of religious, political and academic movements. As such it has been identified with atheism, capitalism, classicism, communism, democracy, egalitarianism, populism, nationalism, positivism, pragmatism, relativism, science, scientism, socialism, statism, symbolic interactionism, and supernaturalism, including versions of ancient paganisms, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and Mohammedanism. It has also been rationalized as being opposed to each of these. It has served as an ingredient in movement against each. And these terms do not at all suggest all of humanism’s ideological and social associations.9
This listing is not exhaustive: how could it be? There are many practitioners who make very particular claims: for example, Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent, pacifist humanism, Franz Fanon’s new humanism, Edward Said’s democratic worldly humanism, Marcus Morgan’s pragmatic humanism, Martha C. Nussbaum’s ‘cosmopolitan-cultivation-capabilities’ humanism, Paul Gilroy’s antiracist planetary humanism, Jeffrey Weeks’s radical humanism, Judith Butler’s mortalist humanism, Cornel West’s prophetic humanism of love, William E. Connolly’s entangled planetary humanism, Roberto Unger’s new religious pragmatic humanism – and many more.
To take just one major example. Edward W. Said was one of the world’s leading cultural critics of the late twentieth century. His work Orientalism spearheaded the postcolonial movement and decolonization. He argued for a position that many claim is anti-humanist. But this is not so. From his earliest works to his very last, he remained a staunch, if critical, humanist. As he famously said: ‘Humanism is the only … I would go as far as to say the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.’10 Working with this is a wide array of humanisms in the making that highlight the struggles of a range of human peoples: indigenous, disabled, colonized, racialized, gendered, queered. This curious listing seems endless. Diverse humanisms provide a deep flow of rich thinking.11
Debating Humanism: Learning from Controversies
With all this, why might another humanism be needed? Here I discuss some controversies of recent developments in humanist thinking. I claim that a great deal can be learnt from these arguments, but we need to make connections and move further.
Humanism as Western Enlightenment
I start straightforwardly: with the widely accepted claim that humanism is a Western phenomenon and derives from the Enlightenment. This view has been promoted over the last 250 years; it is pervasive in the academy and the West, and its most prominent, popular proponent these days is the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker.12 For Pinker, humanism begins with the ancient Greeks, is rediscovered in Renaissance Florence, and accelerates with the science and rationality of the Enlightenment. It claims to be the harbinger of unmistakeable essential human progress. And such ideas have been widely influential. But they flag just one form of humanism bound up with one narrow ‘Western’ context. It is better to call it just that: ‘Western Enlightenment Humanism’. It should not be allowed to completely overwrite the rich diversity of earlier and wider claims for thought about humanity across world history. If followed, it can indeed become part of the much wider dominance and hegemony that male Western thinking has been busy claiming for itself over the past 500 years or so (a view recently claimed as narcissistic in the extreme13). It seems, rather perilously, to have claimed to be the only serious thought in the world! Creating a monologic world, it has denied the rich reality of a ‘world of many worlds’, a ‘plural world’.
For some time, a number of major intellectual and political movements have been trying to bring this ‘rest of the world’ back into our thinking. We need a world humanism, not a Western humanism. As ideas of globalization have accelerated, we have been made to think about the processes and interconnectedness of the world’s nations. More strongly, key ideas around colonization and postcolonization have brought us to see the divide between the global North and the global South, the East and the West, the poor and the rich. Starting perhaps with Gandhi and Franz Fanon, these ideas developed especially in the works of Edward Said. They are now advanced in the writings of Gurminder K. Bhambra, Raewyn Connell, Arturo Escobar, Marisol de la Cadena, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Bernd Reiter and many others, in a major critique of colonized, metropolitan, Western-centric thought.14 These works suggest there exists a vitality of intellectual and creative humanity across history and cultures that has been ignored or stunted. Providing a much greater awareness of a diverse human world and its ‘ecologies of knowledge’, they raise the ways different ideas are bound up with diverse local cultures and social conditions. Where, for example, do Africa, Asia and Latin America fit into this Enlightenment account? Where are China, Russia and India in this story?
From this, we start to see the role of power, ideology and hegemony in understandings of the Enlightenment. ‘Knowledges’ of many of the world’s countries – like the countries themselves – have been colonized. Spanish sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos notably talks about the ‘waste of experience’ and a world knowledge (epistemology) where so much has been excluded through ‘blindness’ and ‘absences’.15 A wide rich mosaic of diverse cultures all over the world, a pluriverse, gets excluded by Western thought. The lush richness of world humankind gets denied, lost or betrayed.
Humanism
