indigenous peoples, ethnic groups and ‘queers’ amongst them. It is certainly time for a change. Critical humanism does not arise in opposition to these stances: it works to learn from them and tries to work with them. It recognizes that ideas about humanity are always wide open to disagreement. Through these conflicts, we move on.
We move beyond an exclusive focus on the rationality of Enlightenment thought, to incorporate affect, feelings and bodies: the world is not simply a rational, progressive order.
We move beyond a Western humanism to a global humanism. The monocultural ideas and structures of the dominant, colonizing and totalizing ‘male’ West need to be transcended by the multiplicities of world cultures, intersectional ties and the plural planet. It recognizes a pluriversal humanity, and the wide relational world of differences.
We move beyond the religious and secular divide. Ultimately, we are on a journey to perpetually expand all our horizons of thinking about and experiencing the world in many directions.
We move beyond the idea that science knows all the answers. Yes, science is making great strides in the advance of knowledge. But we need to be cautious of its overreach – it can become a dangerous divisive weapon. Debates about science must always be infused with debates about values.
We move beyond an uncritical claim for human rights. It is not all good news. It has achieved much, but it has failed too. The same holds for ideas of dignity. As potentially key values for humanity, they need to work in conjunction with a world of other values, especially those of inequality, justice and care.
We move beyond the idea that enhancing, modifying and developing the human endlessly and excessively (so that it no longer exists) is necessarily a good thing. We have to be cautious about human beings being ‘enhanced out of existence’!
We move beyond the ‘othering’ of some humans as nonhumans: from essentialized views of women, race, sexual difference and disability. We have to widen the circle of heterogenous humanity. And we must resist the use of ‘humanism’ as a tool for discrimination, exclusion and the extermination of groups we see as less than human.
We move beyond any narrow and exclusive definitions of what it means to be human; we can always be a little more than human, too. But we always need to keep some version of a fragile existential core of ‘being human’, so that we can still see, appreciate and talk about the problems of our own human existence.
Each debate is of value. I simply start to disagree with them when and if they turn into unitary dogmas against the human person or start restrictive thinking about what the idea of being human means. They then become the enemies of a more reflective and critical humanist thinking. Both Enlightenment thinking and secular thinking can bring about the possibility, for example, of excluding most of the contemporary world.
As I sit here writing this, I cannot help but see myself as a little human animal precariously doing what little human animals do: puzzling. In this, I join an infinite chorus of billions before me, with many more – I hope – to come. I am a rational, emotional, embodied world species, not a robot, a monster or a God. I share a history, a story, even an identity: that of a human being, a person. I am interconnected with the earth, animals, relationships, community, country, world and cosmos that I live within. As such, I am very unhappy to pronounce on my own death and that of my species. I am decidedly against the move around restricting our view of humanity or abolishing the very idea. Indeed, the danger might be that some ideas – of posthumanity, the critique of rights – may come to act as a self-fulfilling prophecy, hastening our own very demise. Humanity has to strive to keep connecting, to stay wide open.
That said, this attitude of multiplicity and openness is not what many people traditionally see as humanism. It is usually given a dogmatic Western, often secular, twist. The focus has tended to be on the autonomous rational human agent, the unencumbered self: man (or should I perhaps say, white heterosexual men). Although, over the millennia, what it means to be human has clearly taken very many forms – from Buddhist humanisms to Islamic humanisms to African humanisms – it is Western humanisms that have come to dominate thinking. Critical humanism has to go beyond such narrow views, taking seriously the idea that we are a planetary animal living in a world of many worlds.
Many humanisms of the past were only able to take seriously the world in which they belonged: the West, the Asian, the Christian, the Muslim, the male and more. Speaking for the world, they only considered a world. It is only fairly recently in our history that we have been able to see the planet as a world and to map through narratives the rich diversity of lands, cultures and hybrid ways of being in it. Now, with Google Maps, it is so easy to sense this. And so we start to tell the stories of an emergent, hybrid, worldly humanity. The time has now come to see the rich diversities across the world and their deep interconnections.
The Call of Humanity: Only Connect
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.62
‘Only connect!’ This was E. M. Forster’s famous pronouncement in his novel Howards End. What does it mean? In current times the very word, ‘connect’, has been taken over by digitalism. We speak of the culture of connectivity to indicate a world of platforms and the coding of human life.63 Much contemporary writing talks about ‘connectivity’ being through digitalism and machines. But this, most emphatically, is not what Forster meant. And nor do I. I want to reclaim the word to talk about human life, not digital life. Surely, if there is one idea that connects us all, it is that of ‘humanity’. It can help us ‘live [our lives] in fragments no longer’. It helps us bring together our fragile animality and the wider worlds of interconnected ‘other people’, ‘other species’ and ‘other things’, dwelling in time, space and the cosmos. Over and over again in the worldwide concern about Covid-19, the idea of humanity was been evoked to ‘bring us together’ and to make us conscious of our interdependence in the world and planet. Not to hear humanity’s call to ‘come together’ presents us with a clear and present danger.
Critical humanism sensitizes us to humanity as a narrative that can help bring things together. We can find many and various ways of achieving this connectedness64 linking the personal and political, time and space, mind and body. To give one illustration: the influential sociologist C. W. Mills argues for an important connection between the personal and the public: we need to bridge personal sufferings (and inner life) and public problems (and outer structural social problems). While personal suffering (a Rohingya refugee or a racial attack, for example) is endured as an intensely subjective experience, often in isolation, it ultimately needs to be connected to a wider (historical) environment. (There are more than 900,000 Rohingya living in camps in southeast Bangladesh; the Black Lives Matter movement arose to show that race attacks by the police are not isolated incidents; and there is, in the USA, a 400-year-old history of deep racism.)65
The connective spirals of humanity
A broad sense of connection can be depicted as a spiral of weaving and widening circles of a web of domain of life:
1 Bio-earth. We are intimately bound up with the bio-earth, the earthly commons, as a planetary ecological biological species. We are necessarily interconnected through our own bodies (and all their microbes) with all other things and forms of life on earth in time and space. As Homo sapiens, we bring our distinctively developed big brains, bipedal bodies, long postbirth dependency and upright postures to the grand march of animal life that has evolved over the earth’s millennia. We have become ‘the human species’, living around 200,000 years on Planet Earth, spanning
