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As a boy, Zamenhof noticed that the lack of understanding between communities in his city seemed exacerbated by the fact that each group invested an intense emotional sense of identity into its own language, while seeing the language and identity of others as alien and threatening. Everywhere he went, he heard people talking about Russians, Poles, Germans, and Jews. He never heard them talk about “people.”
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.
Immanuel Kant had observed in 1795 that religion and language were the two main sources of human division, and therefore also of war,
First Book had opened with the admission: “The reader will doubtless take up this little work with an incredulous smile, supposing that he is about to peruse the impracticable schemes of some good citizen of Utopia.” (Or, as a charming early translation into English had it: “The reader will doubtless take with mistrust this opuscule in hand, deeming that he has it here to do with some irrealizable utopy.”)
Homaranismo
Next, he trained as a lawyer, apart from a gap during which he fought and was taken prisoner in the Civil War, an experience that left him with a lifelong hatred of all war.
To that cause, he brought all the rhetorical skills he had developed in his various careers. Cicero and Quintilian would have been impressed with Ingersoll’s range. He used logic, pointing out contradictions in stories of miracles or of answered prayers. He used humor, often sounding like a stand-up comedian. Once, when a woman saw him leaving a saloon bar and said in shocked tones, “Why, Mr. Ingersoll, I am surprised to see you come out of such a place,” he shot back: “Why, my dear madam, you wouldn’t want me to stay in there all the time.” At
“Good cooking is the basis of civilization. . . . The inventor of a good soup did more for his race than the maker of any creed. The doctrines of total depravity and endless punishment were born of bad cooking and dyspepsia.” So well did he eat that a journalist in the Oakland Evening Tribune commented on what a “spectacular auto da fé” his body would have made had he lived in a different era and ended up burned at the stake.
on this planet:
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?
a high capacity for spotting folly,
Like Zamenhof and Ingersoll, Russell was perplexed as to why things could not be managed more rationally; why could people not see the path to well-being and happiness, when it was all so logical?
I think this sometimes
sea, logic, theology, and heraldry. “The first two because they are inhuman, the last two because they are ridiculous.”
“They were going to shoot at me, or stab me, or I was going to shoot at a complete stranger with whom I had no quarrel, whom I didn’t even know.”
“though they were on the whole slightly below the usual level of intelligence, as was shown by their having been caught.”
how to redirect the forces that had driven humans into fear and bellicosity.
how to direct them
those who are most inclined to exclude or massacre others on the basis of race, language, or other grouping are probably not those most likely to bother to take classes for the sake of peace and enlightenment.
Chaos and Old Night, you could start with the two-part summary of Italian Fascist ideology published in 1932, cowritten by Benito Mussolini and his philosophical sidekick, Giovanni Gentile.
Gentile, who was the author of the main theoretical parts, explained that a Fascist state does not aim at increasing human happiness or well-being, and it is not interested in the idea of progress. If life were always gradually improving, why would anyone be motivated to fight or die for a transcendent, glorious purpose? Peace is not desirable, either: there is nothing good about making compromises and seeking equilibrium with other nations, as Erasmus, Kant, or Russell would have wished. The same goes for individual development or freedom, the goals sought by a Mill or a Humboldt. Far from
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The very name of Fascism evoked belonging: it came from the Roman symbol of the fasces, or bundle of sticks, which represented the tying together of individuals to create a powerful unity.
Benedetto Croce.
mentally traumatized but suddenly wealthy.
Why did humanism have this fatal “weakness”? Humanists seemed to suffer from a “beautiful error”: they allowed themselves to believe that better learning, better reading, and better reasoning would be enough to bring about a better world. The world kept proving them wrong.
Could it be because the devil is real? A battle of good and evil from the beginning to eternity?
She was in danger, too, being a theatrical performer and a flamboyantly cross-dressing lesbian, renowned among other things as a champion racing driver. Her brother Klaus was also gay and involved in the theatrical demimonde. Thomas himself was not as heterosexual as he pretended to be. It was clear that the whole family would be better off having nothing to do with Nazi Germany—although
Scuola Normale Superiore
independent library of the humanities, the Newberry Library.
In Chartres, the cathedral’s exquisite twelfth- and thirteenth-century stained-glass windows were taken apart piece by piece and buried in the crypt.
April 1941 broadcast,
Another regime of extreme nihilism was that of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge,
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.”
(In fact, some religious humanists, such as Jacques Maritain and Gabriel Marcel, had been saying this since the 1930s: nothing would go right for humanity, said Maritain, until they accepted that “the center for man is God.”)
we must, individually and at every moment of choice, “invent man.”
a banality of good;
Benedetto Croce had also stressed the “work in progress” principle. It is a mistake to despair over ourselves, he wrote in 1947; we make that mistake because we have come to expect the world to be reliably benign, with everyone living a civilized and enjoyable life. When that fantasy is shattered, we feel like giving up. The reality, however, is that history and the human world are neither stable and good on the one hand, nor hopelessly tragic on the other.
character-building, plenty of exercise, and the study of the humanities,
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
It is true that human beings have several times come close to knocking it down. But other human beings keep trying, even harder, to make it stay up.
Most of the smokers, being farther back, managed to swim out and were rescued—including Russell, eternal pipe-puffer that he was.
These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.
Humanist Manifesto, issued in 1933.
Another, F. C. S. Schiller, observed ironically, “I note that your manifesto has 15 articles, 50% more than the Ten Commandments.”
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.”
promoting humanist values was one way of warding off the possibility of such things happening again.
humanity has the potential to solve the problems that confront us,
?
finality of death.
?
“eupraxophy”—“wisdom and good conduct through living”—in
The implication, as John Mortimer wrote afterward, was that making Anglicans blush was a criminal offense.
illegal in Northern Ireland.
access to dignified assisted dying for terminally ill people, and so on.
Values
Jesus
humanism
how?
