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

by Sarah Bakewell

But a society that respects the principle of diversity might also respond to your experience by seeking to enlarge its notion of what a full human life is. Dan Goodley has argued this in his 2021 book Disability and Other Human Questions: societies that are ableist also have a tendency to set up a “self-congratulatory kind of self-sufficient humanness” as their general ideal. (One thinks of muscly Vitruvian Man again, standing alone.) Such a society might make less provision for differing needs in other areas of life and perhaps incline toward a harsher economic model based on “self-reliance” for everyone. A society that questioned its ableism, on the other hand, might learn to put more emphasis on collaboration and community and be more aware in general of “the perilous, precarious, diverse and unstable nature of humanity.”

For Bentham, Nature does not find things repugnant; people do. And just because some people do not like the sound of something, or do not want to do it themselves, that does not mean that it is wrong.

Instead, Bentham proposes a test: If I do something, will it (so far as I can tell) make everyone involved happier, or will it make them more miserable? This is the “felicific calculus,” or calculation of happiness, and it is the central move in the ethical system known as utilitarianism. The process of applying it is invariably complicated, of course, by such questions as who makes the decision, how exactly the mathematics can be done, and what constitutes misery or happiness.

For Bentham, the only questions that need asking in such cases are: Does this harm anyone? Does it cause suffering? If it does not—if it makes those involved happy and hurts no one else (except through a self-inflicted “repugnance”)—then where is the problem? All that matters is that it is adding to the amount of happiness in the world instead of subtracting from it. Utilitarianism has sometimes been regarded as a cold thing, yet this strikes me as a generous and rather beautiful principle for living.

Along with the entwined braid of universality and diversity, our humanists also value a third quality: they do their best to reason critically, rather than accepting situations just because they have always been that way. They ask how those situations developed, and wonder whether, sometimes, what IS might NOT BE RIGHT, AFTER ALL.

But part of the humanist tradition is to try not to “indolently believe” anything at all without analyzing it.

Similar things could be said about Mill himself, in most respects. He made connections—for example, between the reasons given to justify slavery and the reasons given to justify women’s oppression. In both cases, many people apparently failed to see the underlying point about human beings in general: that people are affected by their experience and education. That failure of insight was, for Mill, the greatest impediment that existed to social progress.

“There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.” That single line destroys whole volumes of faulty argument—beginning with Aristotle.

On a moral and human level, the institution of slavery had destroyed them, too: “The slaveholder, as well as the slave, is the victim of the slave system.” As we saw earlier, Archbishop Desmond Tutu would later say something similar about South African apartheid, and James Baldwin said it, too, in 1960: “It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own.” In general, wrote Douglass, “a man’s character greatly takes its hue and shape from the form and color of things about him.” We are shaped by our surroundings. On the other hand, we do still have an essential freedom—which means that we can also work to change those formative forces. That was

He favored Ciceronian constructions, such as the long periodic sentence with its delayed finale, and the device known as “chiasmus,” in which two parts of a sentence reverse each other, as in: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.”

Eloquence—as the humanists of earlier centuries, and orators in every culture, had always known—is of essential importance to human beings. Language in general is our very element: the basis of our social and moral lives. It enables us to work out our intellectual critiques of the existing world in detail, to apply our best reasonings to it, and to imagine in words how things might be different—and then to persuade others of these imaginings and reasonings.

Language also plays a big part in binding us into what Archbishop Desmond Tutu called the “bundle of humanity.” We communicate and connect with each other. And that is the fourth of the ideas that has helped humanists to expand their field of concern.

For Carpenter, that exclusion impoverished life. It entailed a “thinning out of human nature.” It would be much better if sexuality were a subject taught in schools, not just to give information on physical basics, but especially to discuss the more important “human element in love.”

What Forster never forgot, amid all this connection and universality, was that class, race, and sexuality matter more than most of his peers admitted.

Forster remarked that the English sense of freedom was at once powerful and limited. “It is race-bound and it’s class-bound. It means freedom for the Englishman, but not for the subject-races of his Empire.” Within England, it means freedom for the well-off but not for the poor. And it is highly limited when it comes to sexuality.

Connections, communications, moral and intellectual links of all kinds, as well as the recognition of difference and the questioning of arbitrary rules: these all go to form the web of humanity. They enable each of us to live a fulfilling life on Earth, in whichever cultural context we are at home, and also to try to understand each other the best we can. They are more likely to encourage an ethics of worldly flourishing, in contrast with belief systems that picture each frustrated soul waiting hopefully for a correction of fortunes in the afterlife. The modern humanist will always prefer to say, with Robert G. Ingersoll, that the place to be happy is here, in this world, and the way to be happy is to try to make others so.

“Do as you would be done by.” Or, in the more modest, reversed form that is more hospitable to diversity: Don’t do something to others if you wouldn’t like it yourself.

But some preferred to say that humans—while needing the guidance of good educators and influences—came out best if they developed their own natural “seeds” of humanity from within. The two aspects of development were not contradictory: the student still needed a good teacher to nurture that growth and ward off bad influences. Even if teachers were there mainly to nudge and guide, rather than to create a shape, they still had reason to feel pride in their work. One could even see them as guiding the whole future development of humanity. If each generation had a better education than the one before, and then produced new teachers in their turn, the result was that great Enlightenment goal: progress.

Similar visions of education as an unfolding of humanity would live on throughout the nineteenth century, initially in Prussia and other German-speaking lands, then elsewhere as other countries picked up on these (literally) progressive ideas. The approach can be summed up in two German words. One is Bildung, which means “education,” but with an added implication of making or forming an image, since it comes from the root Bild, meaning “picture.” Bildung suggests the making or forming of a person, usually a young man.

The other word was Humanismus. Surprisingly, it was not until nineteenth-century German usage that this emerges as a noun describing a whole field of activity or philosophy of life. There had been umanisti aplenty in Italy in earlier centuries, but what they did was not yet summed up as umanesimo. Initially, the German term meant mainly an educational approach based heavily on Greek and Roman classics: that was the context for its first recorded use, by the pedagogue Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer in 1808. It later expanded to denote the whole area of history, language, the arts, and moral thinking, as well as education.

Government authorities, he writes, seem to feel it their duty to impose some particular religion or dogma on their society, because they think that otherwise everything will turn into immorality and chaos. Humboldt disagreed, and for humanistic reasons. He had a humanist’s view of morality: he thought that its seeds lie in our own natural predisposition toward kindness and fellow feeling.

If the state imposes moral principles by diktat, it obstructs their natural development. Thus, in effect, a state that enforces a particular belief is denying people the right to be fully human. So Humboldt advises the state to limit itself, at least where matters of individual humanity and morality are concerned. People should be able to explore these things in their own way—with one proviso, however. If their actions lead them to encroach on the development or well-being of others (say, through violent or destructive behavior), then the state should intervene to stop them. Humboldt thus asserts the key principle of political liberalism. The government is not there to tell people whom to marry, or what to believe or say, or how to worship, but mainly to make sure their choices do not harm others. We do not need a grand moral vision from our state; we need it to provide the underlying conditions for a decent life, and for our freedom.

The two words featured in those lines, diversity and development, would always go together with the word freedom in Mill’s thinking. Each of those three nourished the others. For him, we become fully developed human beings if we have freedom, but also plenty of contact with the diversity of ways in which one can live a human life—including even the most eccentric possibilities. A liberal society lets us develop our own such possibilities through contacts with diversity, all taking place in a culturally rich environment and without state interference. Except, of course, if what we do hurts others. For Mill, as for Humboldt, the state’s task is to step in if my own pursuit of freedom and experience is damaging yours. The state has no business telling people what they should do: it is no part of its role to define a single perfect form of life or morality. Its role is to enable each of us to have the space we need to stretch ourselves, without robbing others of their space.

Moreover, the encounter with variety helps make us more tolerant: as Montaigne had said, speaking of the benefits of travel, “So many humours, sects, judgments, opinions, laws, and customs teach us to judge sanely of our own.”

Thus, Mill recommends that a liberal society support “absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological.” This includes supporting the freedom to express all this openly, since a freedom that must be kept secret is no freedom at all. He does note that such expressions may offend sensibilities; it may mean that people will do things that others consider “foolish, perverse, or wrong.” That is not a problem unless it causes real harm to those others. (Of course, defining “harm” is so complicated that we are still arguing about it today.)

Mill believed, like Humboldt, that individuals should be free to work out their relationships for themselves, with the usual no-harm clause.

“What pleasure comes from our faculties of appraisal, memory and understanding!”) Happiness is still the good to be sought, but from now on, Mill knew that some forms of happiness were more meaningful than others. One such form is that feeling of being free, “alive,” and “a human being,” which he would write about in The Subjection of Women. Strict utilitarianism cannot easily accommodate this: instead of countable happiness units, we are taken back to qualities that are incalculable and immeasurable. But what Mill’s new approach loses in rigor, it gains in subtlety. His version is more human than Bentham’s. As well as improving utilitarianism, Mill’s human element improves liberalism. It distinguishes it, for example, from the travesty now described as “neoliberalism,” which allows the rich to pursue profit without regulation while the rest of the population is left to deal with the consequences of such ravaging of society. For Mill, as for Humboldt, this is not what freedom means. A truly liberal society both values and enables deeper fulfillments: the pursuit of meaning and beauty, the diversity of cultural and personal experiences, the excitement of intellectual discovery, and the pleasures of love and companionship.

Arnold’s overall point is that anarchy, which he deplores, can be warded off by means of culture, which he admires.

Above all, he shows an almost willful tendency to confuse people by using words to mean things they normally don’t mean. Thus, he borrows the term “Hebraism” from the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, but mostly uses it to denote Christian Puritanism. When he speaks of the “Barbarian” social class, a careless reader may think he is talking dismissively of the lower orders, but no; he uses it for the aristocracy. (The working class is “the Populace,” and the middle classes are “Philistines.”) Also misleading are two key phrases that he repeats often in the book. One is the statement that “culture” can be defined as “the best which has been thought and said in the world.” The other is also a definition of culture, this time as whatever brings “sweetness and light.” The first of these, “the best,” sounds elitist, implying high things accessible only through rarefied tastes and an exclusive education. But Arnold is emphatic in rejecting the tendency of the middle and upper classes to feel that all culture somehow belongs to them by birthright, whether or not they ever touch a book or look at a work of art. For him, real culture is accessible to all, and it comes from an “eagerness about the things of the mind.” It means curiosity and the questioning of received ideas; it means “turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically.” This is the exhilarating sense of expanding into the human world that Humb...

Developing such a mind is difficult, however, if you have not had sufficient exposure to high-quality material, which is why education is important.

Culture and Anarchy is a book from which you can read different messages, depending on your inclinations. Conservatives often took it to heart because they shared Arnold’s horror of “anarchy,” specifically the public disorder and street demonstrations that were a feature of British life at the time of publication. Privileged himself, Arnold could see no call for people to behave in such an uncouth and unharmonious way when they could be reading Horace instead. Yet some of what he says is remarkably forward-looking: he is against exclusivity, and open-minded in his support of critical and curious thinking. He also describes himself as a liberal. At the heart of Culture and Anarchy are humanist ideas of an enduring vintage: that our shared humanity connects us all, and that no one has a right to condescend to others or dismiss them as unimportant.

Some feared that—as the radical author and former cotton-mill worker Ethel Carnie put it in a letter to the Cotton Factory Times in 1914—too much culture would “chloroform” working people, distracting them from the task of agitating to bring about real changes to their lives. For such readers, working-class people would do better to read Karl Marx, not Kongzi or shrimp biographies, and to turn to revolutionary political action to change their living conditions.

But others did not see any contradiction: they argued that reading and studying were the best way of opening one’s eyes to the exploitation going on in society and equipping oneself to fight against it—thus, not being chloroformed into sleep, but emerging into wakefulness.

Humanists had always emphasized the hedonistic aspect of cultural life. Manetti had written of the enjoyment that came from thinking and reasoning. Cicero had argued for giving Roman citizenship to the poet Archias because of the pleasure as well as moral improvement he gave Romans. All three of our humanists in this chapter were in agreement that pursuing culture and developing one’s humanity to the utmost were deeply satisfying things to do.

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.

Such ways of talking lose sight of everything that makes cultural life worthwhile for a genuine humanist: the ability to connect to others’ experiences, the free pursuit of curiosity, the deepening of appreciation. In particular, it loses joy, replacing it with compulsion—or a kind of accidia, if you will.

His theory of the variety of life was elegant: as members of a species reproduce themselves over an immense period of time, random variations occur, generating a bigger beak, a longer toe, or some new, fluffy ear hair. These can be passed on to offspring. If the variation works well in their environment, those individuals thrive and go on to produce more such offspring. If it does not work, they often die without issue. This is how, as he concluded the book, “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” It is a vision of majesty, but also of horror, since Darwin admits that it all depends on cycles of failure and suffering. “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.” Not only does this tell us that life comes from death but also that we might be those “higher animals,” and thus results of such a process, too. At this stage, he says nothing more overt about us than that.

He agreed with Arnold and Humboldt that the purpose of education was to produce well-rounded human beings with a rich mental life and an insightful understanding of the world. He did not agree with them about the humanities being the only place to start. Instead he suggested that a better foundation might lie in studying the sciences. These taught children the basics of the physical world and also gave them humanistic skills, in the form of an inquiring attitude. It taught them to observe phenomena closely and to learn actively through experiments, as opposed to taking everything from the authority of ancient texts—or even of teachers. It would therefore also equip them better for understanding those texts and teachers.

From now on, both “humanities-humanism” and the meliorist humanism of the Enlightenment would find themselves in the company of the new arrival, scientific humanism. The principles of the latter—an interest in modern scientific methods and reasoning, along with a naturalistic interpretation of how humans fit into the picture—would remain a part of the larger humanist worldview into our own time.

Humanities-based, ethical forms of humanism remind us that we are spiritual, cultured, and moral beings: we are formed by our human environment as well as by our physical nature. Scientific humanism reminds us that we are animals, too, and that we live in a constant process of transition on a changing Earth, in a very large universe. If everything is in a good balance, these visions of ourselves do not work at cross-purposes; they inform and enhance one another.

His theory owed a lot to humanists of the Enlightenment era, such as David Hume, because he thought—as they did—that morality probably emerged from our tendencies to fellow feeling and “sympathy.” These in turn emerged from our nature as group animals. Like all social species, early humans had to negotiate the interpersonal challenges of the group; this has made us sensitive to others’ responses. When they treat us positively, we feel good. Other animals share such sensitivity, but in our case, we also have language, so we can go further in expressing feelings in terms of praise or blame. Our moral world deepens, because we can also look back on past situations to make comparisons between the things we have done before and the responses they evoked. Out of this, general ethical opinions begin to form, and these are shared with others. Thus, emerging from a combination of “habit, example, instruction, and reflection,” a moral system comes into being.

Actually, agnosticism is more of a definite and positive position than Huxley makes it sound. His contemporary Richard Bithell stressed in a book titled The Creed of a Modern Agnostic that it did not mean floating off into a mystical cloud of unknowing. For him, agnostics do think that humans can have definite moral principles. They also believe that they can learn things about the world, by trusting the scientific method of advancing hypotheses and testing them against evidence. It is just that they retain more modesty than usual about the results. More recently, another agnostic, the philosopher and broadcaster Bryan Magee, wrote in his short final testament, Ultimate Questions, that the word meant to him “an openness to the fact that we do not know, followed by intellectually honest enquiry in full receptivity of mind.”

The Victorians had a great feeling for “duty” as something almost transcendental. George Eliot held it in high regard, too: one day, out strolling with a companion, she remarked that out of the three words “God, Immortality, Duty,” she considered the first inconceivable and the second unbelievable, but the third was “peremptory and absolute.” Darwin also wrote of the “deep feeling of right or duty” as the “most noble of all the attributes of man” (and, as with moral attributes in general, he speculated about its origins in the social group). Leslie Stephen himself seems to have been thinking of something similar when he noted, some years earlier and à propos his loss of faith: “I now believe in nothing, but I do not the less believe in morality.” He added, “I mean to live and die like a gentleman if possible.”

Today, many of us feel strongly about duty, but it is more likely to be in the context of a specific situation, perhaps in relation to the needs of family or work. To the Victorians, it was almost an entity in itself. Yet it was essentially humanistic: it needed no God to guarantee it but emerged from our own moral nature. It was a human-centered wish to do the right thing, not just by each other, but by our own lives—our own humanity.

Other nineteenth-century metaphors for describing loss of faith evoked feelings of vertigo or disorientation. The novelist and biographer J. A. Froude described his generation as finding “the lights all drifting, the compasses all awry, and nothing left to steer by except the stars.”

Most interesting, from a humanist point of view, is that Robert does much more than fall into doubt’s sea, or lose himself on the darkling plain. He loses one version of himself, but that is not what the story is finally about. It is about finding a positive, humanistic set of values to take its place. For him, those values are worthy of being called a new religion.

One approach, if you wanted to redesign Christianity to fit the new ideas of humanity, was to take the existing Jesus story and strip it of everything supernatural, leaving only an inspiring story about a great moral teacher who lived long ago.

The problem, perhaps, was that something of the divine did still cling to Jesus, whether you believed in that divinity or not. One could try to make him “human, all too human,” but he remained the sort of human who was entirely dedicated to redemption in the beyond and to submission to and love of God the Father.

Despite such appealing personalities and the pleasures of exuberant hymn-singing, the Religion of Humanity in general left an unfortunate legacy. Even today, a common view of humanists is that they just want to replace one religion with another and to make an idol out of humanity, looking down on all other species as inferior. These things were mostly true of Comte’s religious confection. But they do not feature in modern humanism, which rejects dogmatic systems of all kinds, and stresses its respect for non-human as well as human life.

It seems to me a pity that Comte’s perfectly good humanist ideas about reason and morality should have gone along with another, rather insulting one: the notion that human beings must have saints and virgins, or they will not be able to cope.