Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

by Sarah Bakewell

Babbitt argued for moral training based entirely on a monocultural canon: mainly the literature of the ancient Greeks, with perhaps a few Romans. Any other cultural sources were of no interest, and there was to be no talk of freedom in education. He began his polemical career with a published attack on Eliot’s educational philosophy; it appeared the year before the arrival of the Five-Foot Shelf. Such outreach projects, for Babbitt, were an abomination. In some ways he agreed with Arnold’s vision, but emphatically not in others: he had no wish to sweep the whole of humanity thitherward. For him, it did not matter whitherward the general public went. The humanist’s job was only to train an elite, who should be encouraged to have a “selective” and disciplined sympathy for others, tempered by judgment—not an empathetic free-for-all. We are not all connected by our humanity. Of Terence’s line “I consider nothing human alien to me,” Babbitt wrote that it was a mistake: it fails to be sufficiently selective. That line, for him, was responsible for the excess of weak-minded, wishy-washy do-goodery he saw everywhere around him in society. For him, and for the New Humanists who followed, the “best” was something to be shored up with ramparts and defended against outsiders.