- Humanism
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a doctrine, attitude, or way of life centered on human interests or values especially: a philosophy that usually rejects supernaturalism and stresses an individual’s dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason: secular humanism1
Recently in my intellectual and philosophical life, the main thing I’ve existed in opposition to is Humanism. Humanism as a philosophy centers humans, their specific struggles, their faculties for rationality, and their very way of being. My problem with Humanism isn’t tied to the notion that humans are worthy of moral consideration, but moreso about the lines it drawns between humans and other organisms and natural processes. It also seems way to sure of the specifically human capacity for rationality.
I think that evolutionary change is a very important framework how things operate and interoperate. It’s not just a matter of biological evolution, but of countless other interlocking evolutionary processes. As far back as we currently speculate, that begins with an event like The Big Bang which leads to a rapidly expanding universe with areas of different energy/mass densities. It’s the more dense areas that result in the formations of stars which have temperatures and pressures high enough to fuse the nuclei of hydrogen molecules and launch the resultant helium atoms outward. Only to happen again and again, each time building heavier and heavier elements. The process of nucleosynthesis continues still today, but it was through that process that aggregates of elements could come together to form the Earth. It was the specific conditions on Earth and millions of occurrences of small probability, gradual changes that led to the arrival of the simplest life-forms. After that, still many steps; eukaryotic cells, then multicellular organisms, then mammals, then apes, then… us.
This is all our history. It’s a lineage that we exist within and have diverged from, and that a lot of Humanists deny. Maybe not by way of their reason, but in terms of the priorities and an unexamined anthropocentricism. It feels like a lot of perspectives, religiously inspired and secular, see humans as a clean break from all the natural processes that both came before and are coexistensive with us. There’s this common notion that humans are “conscious” while other living systems aren’t. It results in an acceptance or downplaying of violence against them. It allows people to look past the horrors of factory farming or animal testing or the like because of the perceived difference/betterness of humans (not to mention the monetary incentives involved).
In my opinion, humans serverely overestimate their own agency and capacity for reason. The most immediate example of that to me would be the human nervous system. It’s in large part out of our control, but is a primary actor in responding to stimuli. It’s the body’s pharmacist; shooting you full of adrenaline/cortisol and maintaining your neurochemical levels. It’s so easy to let those systems control you and to just operate according to their rhythms. More distant from your nervous system, but still incredibly impactful on your agency is the social systems you operate within (g.e. your family, your education system, your workplace). They all have different mechanisms for getting them to regulate themselves which involves regulating the humans that are components within them. I don’t think that these systems necessarily cultivate reason within people, but use their regulatory apparatuses to get people to conform to an already existant environment that maintains a sort of dynamic equillibrium through a web of interconnection between people involved, procedures, legitimating institutions, etc.
In conclusion, I think that humans exist in a lineage that includes the non-human, and also non-biotic and that there’s something wonderful about that that is lost in anthropocentric ideologies like Humanism. And also, that humans have less agency than they believe they do because of the systems that co-determine their behavior that they often don’t consider. I think it’s hard to argue against Humanism because of the vibes that the word carries with it, but I ultimately think that an Anti-Humanism is both a lot more ethical in its ability to consider non-human animals and environments as important in themselves and also a lot more accurate when it comes to understanding how the world actually works.