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

by Sarah Bakewell

The nineteenth century was such a transformative period, in the sciences and humanities alike, that it need not surprise us to see wayward responses emerging.

Related dramas continue in our own time, too. We still ask similar questions, even if we

formulate them in different ways: How do humans fit into the rest of the variety of life, or into the physical universe in general? How can we reconcile what emerges from scientific reasoning with what is offered by our heritage of religious thought? Do we need heroes, or saints, or moral leaders? What kind of entity is this humanity, anyway, which so dominates the planet that some have begun to call this the Anthropocene epoch? We certainly do not have answers yet, and perhaps never will. But as any agnostic would say, it is sometimes better not to be too sure about answers.

Yet it had a major advantage: people were driven more by hope than by fear. In his view, if humanity were to flourish, or even continue to survive at all, it would have to deal wisely with the fear and recover some trace of the hope.

The Old Testament story of Babel told of how the denizens of that great city, speaking the same language, designed and built a tower that reached almost to heaven itself. God looked down and said, “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” Not liking this prospect, he smashed the tower, sent the builders off in all directions, and multiplied their languages so that in future they would always have difficulty working together for the common good. Ever since then, linguistic and cultural incomprehension continued to keep humanity weak, unable to achieve what Forster would call a way to “connect,” or what Erasmus called “friendship among many.”

Immanuel Kant had observed in 1795 that religion and language were the two main sources of human division, and therefore also of war, because they threw the differences between people into such obvious contrast. Just as with the language problem, Zamenhof hoped that people would find it easier to cross over such differences if there were a shared, secondary religion that they could add to their own cultures and practices. The idea behind it was that everyone shared a basic spiritual humanity, and to some extent also basic values. For example, one could find a key to universal ethics in the Golden Rule espoused by the Jewish theologian Hillel as well as others: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.” Variations on this rule were found in so many cultures, and it was so simple to remember, that it made a good starting point in creating a sort of Esperanto for the spirit.

Yet the thinking was the same: Homaranismo should merely add a level of communication and shared humanity, not take anyone’s religion away from them.

Yet Zamenhof and the Esperantists always found the ideal of the language, and to some extent the religion, worthwhile, primarily because it was a sign of continuing hope. Esperanto and Homaranismo may never be projects that large numbers of people are going to adopt, but they do raise the idea of such a possibility. They are attempts, like Montaigne’s “essays.” Even if they don’t change the world much, it is cheering that such attempts exist. Esperantism also provides an international network of mutual engagement and connection for those who do get involved.

Why should we not be happier than we are? Why accept the miseries of religious dread, or patriarchal cruelty, or unreason, rather than just take it on ourselves to find a better way to live? That was Zamenhof’s hope in inventing his language. And as Bertrand Russell wrote, “It is not the whole duty of man to slip through the world so as to escape the wrath of God. The world is our world, and it rests with us to make a heaven or a hell.”

Even before the war ended, the most urgent question for him was how to redirect the forces that had driven humans into fear and bellicosity. He did not quite share Zamenhof’s hope that people could be brought together by something as simple as a shared language or belief system—or even by a spirit of friendship, as Erasmus had thought. Nor would reason be enough, at least not on its own.

In his ensuing writings on this subject, Russell sometimes channeled Wilhelm von Humboldt: education should encourage the young to unfold their humanity freely and to pursue curiosity instead of sitting passively, being crammed full of facts.

Russell shared this vision of education as free development. He also shared with T. H. Huxley the view that science study was crucial for developing a spirit of inquiry about the world.

You can generally be sure, whenever ideologues speak of true or serious freedom, that it will be at the expense of actual, ordinary freedom. And when the rhetoric is transcendental, the reality will probably be miserable.

At first, there was little philosophy or classical imagery to be found among the Fascists: their main occupation was violent street fighting against rival groups of socialists and communists, who were similarly radicalized by their war experiences.

Education was important because, in the Fascist vision, ordinary human beings as we know them need to be transformed to fit the state’s needs.

As Erasmus and others had observed long before, if you want to mold humans into particular shapes as a mother bear does with her cubs, you must begin with early education, at home and at school.

But what does a humanist do? This was the question over which so many were now puzzling. Do you involve yourself in government and hope to minimize the damage from within?

Given such events, as well as the two world wars and the Holocaust, it is not surprising that some writers looked back on the mid-twentieth century and saw in it an unanswerable refutation of the entire humanist worldview. The novelist William Golding said of the Second World War that “anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.” His nihilistic and grotesque fable Lord of the Flies, depicting the moral degeneration of a group of boys stranded on a remote island, was an expression of that thought. He explained that he had not previously had such negative views, but such was the spirit of those times.

The idea that humans somehow oozed evil took up residence in the cultural atmosphere. Any seemingly civilized or cultured behavior—all the things in which humanists have taken pleasure or pride over the centuries—now looked like a mendacious veneer.

It was a bizarre twist, considering that both German and Italian Fascists defined themselves explicitly by rejecting the principles of reason, internationalism, individualism, humanitarianism, and meliorism, in order to embrace instinct, violence, nationalism, and war. Anti-humanist though those ideologies were, somehow they were supposed to be humanism’s fault—which to humanist ears sounds like saying that car crashes still occur despite traffic lights, therefore the traffic lights are to blame.

Such distortions, however, reflect the difficulty intellectuals were having in finding an adequate response to extreme events. Seeing civilized values dismantled and having nowhere else to turn, they seemed to consider nothing adequate as an answer but some kind of even more extreme dismantling of values.

is true that the major totalitarian states of the twentieth century tended to be atheistic, thus proving again that there is no automatic connection between questioning religion and being open-minded or humanist. (Their main problem with religion was that they could not stand there being a bigger God out there than themselves and their ideologies.) Now, in the wake of the horrors, some argued that humans should no longer trust themselves to work toward a better world on their own, and instead should return humbly to the old theologies.

For now, in the immediate wake of the war, he promoted an “existentialist” humanism based on the idea that each of us is radically free and responsible for our actions. Sartre’s humanism was a tough-guy version made for the 1940s; it was also genuinely non-religious. It rested on the idea that humans have no preexisting blueprint for our nature, divine or otherwise. It is up to us what we make of ourselves; we must, individually and at every moment of choice, “invent man.”

While philosophers tried to adjust their ideas of humanity after the Second World War, more pragmatic types worked for the physical reconstruction of cities, or for cultural and political recovery, and everywhere simply for the restoration of human flourishing, so far as was achievable.

As well as admiring the beauty of the building itself, I found myself deeply moved by the way it embodies human time. All buildings do this, but Chartres makes its temporal process more visible than most. It rises from the ancient crypt and foundations. Then it reaches its main twelfth- and thirteenth-century space of carvings, buttresses, and windows—all made using the most up-to-date technologies of their time, from the structural engineering of the buttresses to the stained-glass work, much of it featuring a distinctive “Chartres blue.”

“Remember your humanity, and forget the rest”—the “rest” being national interests, vanity, pride, prejudice, despair, and anything else that gets in the way of choosing to live—became a much-quoted line, not least by Russell himself.

They thus endorsed a statement that showed concern with civil liberties and social justice, and a preference for reason as the best means of governing public affairs. Although the manifesto called humanism a religion, it also said that humanists see the universe as “self-existing and not created,” and that they expect no “supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values.” A humanist may have “religious emotions,” but these mainly take the form of “a heightened sense of personal life and [a belief] in a cooperative effort to promote social well-being.”

As humanist organizations work to become more positive and more approachable, they have also sought to build better connections with wider communities—including some that may have a high level of distrust or dislike of humanism. Religious institutions and beliefs can be central features of life in these communities, and often bring people a sense of social identity and shared meaning. If humanists are perceived mainly as anti-religious, they may be thought of as opposing the validity not just of specific beliefs but of the whole principle of meaning and identity.

One of the things that modern humanist organizations—such as African Americans for Humanism, of which Goddard is now director—have tried to do is to emphasize how deeply Black and other perspectives enhance, inform, and enrich the humanist world, rather than being treated as something separate, supplementary, or distracting.

Fighting against blasphemy laws has continued to be a crucial part of what humanist organizations do.

All this lies at the most dramatic end of the activist spectrum, but organized humanists also keep busy working toward more modest achievements in their various countries: more inclusive and humanist-friendly treatment of religious subjects in schools, equal recognition of humanist wedding and funeral ceremonies, access to dignified assisted dying for terminally ill people, and so on.

Even during those pious postwar years, the United States’ secular principles meant that, in theory, children should never be obliged to attend religious lessons. In practice, this was often ignored.

Even if one lives in a society where non-religious views are widespread, generally, it can be hard to admit to doubts about a religion one has grown up personally embedded in. Humanist organizations hope to promote a general spirit of acceptance and even comfort, reminding people that if they do question their religion, they have company, and that living with a purely humanistic morality is a valid choice.

Humanism should never mean taking anything away from the riches of human life; it should open up more riches.

My own sense of rapture and glory comes mostly from trying to imagine the grandeur and complexity of the universe, about which we are learning more all the time. Science tells us things that I can only describe as sublime: that we live in a universe estimated to contain some 125 billion galaxies, of which our galaxy alone contains some 100 billion stars, of which our particular star shines upon our planet and fills it with some 8.7 million diverse species of life, of which 1 species is able to study and marvel at such observations. That makes us a marvel, too: somehow, our three pounds or so of fleshy brain-substance are able to encompass and develop such knowledge, and to generate a whole mini-universe of consciousness, emotion, and self-reflection.

But very little of the human mental landscape is ever remotely like a reflection in a clear, undistorting mirror. Julian Huxley wrote of a human being as a transforming mill, “into which the world of brute reality is poured in all its rawness, to emerge . . . as a world of values.” We can try to make ourselves think as rationally and with as broad a scientific reach as possible; it is a good thing if we do. But we will also always live in a world of symbols, emotions, morals, words, and relationships. And that will often mean a porous border between non-religious and religious ways of relating to that world.

well. A more serious problem occurs not when supernatural beliefs are asserted but when deeper humanistic values come under threat, including in ways touched on throughout this book: cruelties to humans and other living things, the denial of respect to certain kinds of people, the preaching of intolerance, the burning or other destruction of “vanities,” and the suppression of freedom in thinking, writing, and publishing.

We could add more for our own time: a whole breed of authoritarian, fundamentalist, illiberal, repressive, war-mongering, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, nationalist, and populist manipulators, some of whom claim devotion to traditional religious pieties, whether or not this is sincere. They show contempt for actual human lives yet promise—always!—something higher and better. As enemies of humanism, and of human well-being, they must be taken seriously.

For example: What is humanist architecture, or humanist city planning? It is the sort that does not constantly crush the ability to live a decent, satisfying human life. A humanistic civic designer pays attention to how people use a space and to what makes them comfortable, rather than trying to make a big impression with buildings of gasp-inducing size or a field of stylish obstacles that is frustrating to walk around.

What applies in urban design applies in many other fields as well—politics, certainly, but also aspects of medical practice and the arts. Anton Chekhov, whose thoughts on “pluses” we met a few pages ago, took this human-first approach in his work both as a physician and as a writer. His short stories, especially, are humanistic in the close attention they pay to the events (or quiet non-events) from people’s everyday lives: moments of love or heartbreak, journeys, deaths, boring days. His views on religion and morality were also those of a humanist: he disliked dogma and was skeptical about supernatural beliefs.

In a Communist regime, it was fine to criticize the ideologies of traditional religion, but not those of the state.

Every time a person dies, writes Grossman in Life and Fate, the entire world that has been built in that individual’s consciousness dies as well: “The stars have disappeared from the night sky; the Milky Way has vanished; the sun has gone out . . . flowers have lost their colour and fragrance; bread has vanished; water has vanished.” Elsewhere in the book, he writes that one day we may engineer a machine that can have humanlike experiences; but if we do, it will have to be enormous—so vast is this space of consciousness, even within the most “average, inconspicuous human being.”

And, he adds, “Fascism annihilated tens of millions of people.”

These days some think that, if humanity ends in disaster, caused by rogue artificial intelligence or environmental collapse or some other blunder, the world would be better off without us anyway. We are hardly a good influence: we are wrecking the planet’s climate and ecosystems, obliterating species with our crops and livestock, and redirecting every resource to the production of more and more humanity.

“Posthumanists,” as they are sometimes known, look forward to a time when human life is either drastically reduced in scope or no longer around at all.

“Transhumanists,” unlike posthumanists, look forward eagerly to technologies that will, first, extend the human lifespan considerably, and, later, allow our minds to be uploaded into other data-based forms, so that we can ditch the need for human embodiment.

Posthumanism and transhumanism are opposites: one eliminates human consciousness, while the other suffuses it into everything. But they are the sort of opposites that meet at the extremes. Both agree that our current humanity is something transitional or wrong—something to be left behind. Instead of dealing with ourselves as we are, both imagine us altered in some dramatic way: either made more humble and virtuous in a new Eden, or retired from existence, or inflated to a level that sounds like that of gods.

A sense of sin is of no help on that journey; neither is a dream of transcendence. Dante was right: we really cannot transumanar, and if we have fun trying—well, that can produce beautiful literature. But it is still human literature.

Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. —

Humanists strive to be ethical