rel="nofollow" href="#u8a1c1433-e320-565d-8254-0ef5bb1daca5">Chapter 5). Right now, we can count nearly 8 billion individual human animals on earth (estimated to reach 11,200 billion by 2100).66 Each of us may be uniquely individual; but we make up only about 0.01 per cent of life on the planet. And we have only been here for a very short time. We can never stand alone as a species, but live within a deep ecology encompassing the earth, other people, other life, things and the cosmos. There is a deep interdependence of all. It is dangerous to break this connection. As we will see, many of the problems we now face may well flow from the fact that we have in recent centuries been slowly breaking this bond with a wider universe of which we are an irrevocable part.2 Existential human beings (persons). We are emergent, embodied creatures bridging inner agency with outer lives. Collectively, we are creatively engaged in symbolic human activities, self-reflexive and permanently unfinished. We are the vulnerable, biographical creatures of body, feeling and reflective consciousness. We are born, we suffer, we face ambivalence and contingency, and we die. We may even have an afterlife. And each life brings its own distinctively different and unique life story. Humanism then becomes its grounded project: to tell its story. Narratives are collectively developed with others, refined and distorted, persistently contested, and reshaped generation by generation. All the time, they pump meaning into life. We seem to be the only vulnerable life form on a fragile earth that is consciously aware of this. Suffering, and our responses to it, are key. A connecting humanity brings a major reflexivity and awareness to all these issues.
3 Interpersonal. We interact and relate to each other in families, friendships, networks. More: human life is intersubjective. People can never really be alone. We ‘do things together’, ‘living in the minds of others’, in ‘circles of others’ (see Chapter 3). Human ‘persons’ develop actions that are grounded in complex language and symbols, capable of engaging with a startling creativity: writing literature, composing music, engaging in Olympics, doing science, sending people to the moon. No other planetary life that we know of at present can quite do this. Humans are creative beings who connect to others in relationships.
4 Communal. We bond, sharing life together in a wide range of communities. We are the bonding group animal who lives with others in close social proximity (like many of our ancestors, especially apes); and we do this through bounded and bonded families, groups, communities and local social worlds. We clash and we cooperate; these bonds provide the direct canopies of meaning, sentiment and solidarity in our lives. We are the belonging animal. But the ability to connect with others in communities also brings the potential to not connect.67
5 Societal. We are the human life that flows through societies and their tribes, civilizations and nations. Our challenge is to create social institutions and practices that enable the flourishing of production and work (economy), reproduction and socialization (education, family, religion), communication (language and media) and security and welfare (governance). And through these we achieve practical things like food distribution, transportation, housing and good health, all interconnected with one another. We connect to each other through societies.
6 Cultural. We are the animal who weaves complex ‘ways of living’ – bringing values and stories – across the world. We are the linguistic, symbolic, manipulating, communicative, cultural animal. Ultimately, we are also the animal that creates symbolic cultures, ways of living, that are necessarily messy and murky. These bring issues of values and power relations. Establishing relations of symmetry and asymmetry, power expands or concentrates the degree of freedom and control exerted over lives. All life might be guided and shaped by certain rules; and many animals have a sort of sensitivity to other life. But only humans invent elaborate cultural frames of values; only they can develop ethical and normative orders organized through legal and power relations. Our cultures become sites of struggle over value and emancipation – of what it means to lead the good (or bad) life. We are elaborate linguistic animals capable of manipulating symbols in complex ways to produce historically based value systems. But cultures usually also have material foundations. We connect to others through these cultures.
7 Worldly. We are the animal that finds other tribes and creatures living on the earth. We look to become a worldly animal as humanity becomes globalized. We get to know these other strangers living in other parts of the world. A cosmopolitan attitude is in the making. We have to live with each other. There is life beyond the little world we live in.
8 Cosmic. And finally, we are a planetary animal connected to the cosmic universe or multiverse. We are a lunar, cosmic animal. A hallmark of our being human in the world is that we look up to the heavens and down to the oceans and can see our insignificance in the vastness of the cosmic order. Excitingly, in many ways hard to fathom, we are connected with this vastness of planetary things. These days, with the help of satellites, we can just click on Google Maps to see and sense our close interconnectedness.
Figure 1.1: The connective spiral of humanity
There is more than all this. Very significantly, we become, each one of us, a uniquely different human being. Remarkable to behold, like all life, the billions of us are each distinctly different from one another and connect to one another in uniquely different ways. A distinctively different and unique life story can be told by each and every life. Humans alone develop a personal and heightened self-aware consciousness of these unique differences. This can become the basis for tensions as well as conflicts. But also surprise and amazement. Consider your own life: even as it remains enmeshed in connections, nobody can ever live a life quite like you. Ever.
Living in Connection and Complexity
Taking our spiralling human connections seriously is no easy task, especially in a digital age. Critical humanism sees ‘connection’ as a pragmatic tool for living life. ‘Humanity’ here becomes the narrative that binds us together through our habitats and pursuits, from the bio-organic to the cosmic. It is through our stories of collective living that we come to sense our togetherness with others, our creativities, our limits. It is through these stories that we can come to sense possible human coherence. We start to see things that might just hold us all together: maybe a common humanity, a solidarity of common projects. Once we start making these narrative connections, we recognize something about who we are, where we came from and, indeed, why we are. All this is at the core of learning about becoming human. Religion is often at the heart of this storytelling. But in the twenty-first century we need more: a wider literacy and pedagogy of hope. New ideas appear across the generations. And older ideas that have recently been heavily critiqued and become unfashionable – like progress, dignity, rights, universal values – can be brought back, reconsidered and reconnected. The world is not a closed place, but a perpetual series of challenges to ‘only connect’. It will be wise to return to humanity and humanism. But this time round, we must do all this with a cautious, careful and critical eye.
Notes
1 1 Anne Phillips, The Politics of the Human (Cambridge University Press, 2015). For a recent analysis, see Daniel Chernilo, Debating Humanity: Towards a Philosophical Sociology (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
2 2 Marcus Morgan, Pragmatic Humanism: On the Nature and Value of Sociological Knowledge (Routledge, 2016), ch. 2. Morgan also enumerates some seven responses to this recurrent death of man/humanity/humanism.
3 3 See John Dewey, ‘What Humanism Means to Me’, in Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, Volume 5: 1929–1939 (Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), p. xxxi.
4 4 See Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (Duke University Press, 2010), p. 20ff.
