The Limits of Humanism: Making Darkness Visable

Today’s Agenda:

1)      Journal Entry:

a.       Last time, I had you write on your moral compass, or where it is you get your sense of good and evil from. For today, I’d like to ask you another, related questions, which is this: are you are good person? If so, how do you know? Where does that information come from? Many of us may be quick to think that we are good people, but what is this presumption based on?

2)      Group Discussion:

a.       Who are your heroes? Why are they your heroes? What makes a hero?

3)      Class Discussion

4)      Class reflection on the reading:

a.       What has stuck in our minds from the reading?

5)      Mini-Lecture:

• Consider Columbus’ attitude towards the natives. He disregards everything about them, because they are, to him, heathens, and therefore beneath notice – essentially sub-human, as we would define the term.Their personalities, their government systems, and their religion

He does this because he presumes that there society and life is so inferior to his own that it makes them essentially inhuman – beneath notice.

The desire to dehumanize people has been with us for a very long time, and it is an issue we still struggle with today: for example – today we simply call it prejudice, but it is essentially the same thing.

• Prior to The Inferno, the notion that the dead had personalities was essentially a Classical notion, and not a Christian notion. We see this in The Iliad and the Odyssey, but if you look in the Old or New Testament for it, you really won’t find it. Sheol in the Old Testament, the Kingdom of God in the New Testament. There is the promise that one goes to “be with God,” but virtually nothing about what one’s time in heaven will be like.

• One of the things Dante does is HUMANIZE the dead. That is to say, as Virgil takes him on a tour of hell, he doesn’t just see moaning, groaning ghosts – he sees people that look like himself, who want some of the same things he wants, and who experience pain as he himself experiences pain. This was a fairly radical notion at the time.

• Prior to Milton, the desire to humanize people and experiences was all the rage in England. Last time I mentioned the work of Spencer and Shakespeare, which, too be all to superficial, can be cited as not simply humanizing people – but humanizing them so well that their characters, for all intents and purposes, have come to represent for many people what it MEANS to be human. For example, Hamlet’s emotions, one could argue, are so deep and powerful that than are essentially MORE REAL and MORE HUMAN than your own.

• But as soon as I say that, we might notice the first big problem we might have with humanism: Hamlet wasn’t real, and so he cannot be more human than me, right? My pain is real pain – his is imaginary. For Chaucer, the Wife of Bath isn’t real — so no one lives that exact life, right? This would seem to be a slight problem, to say the least.But let’s put that problem aside for a moment, so we can consider John Milton, but we will come back to it.

d.      Well, John Milton was as eager to spread humanism as anyone else writing during this period, but he had a problem, as we  all have a problem now. Shakespeare had essentially done the job already, and completely. So where does one go from there, if one wants to be a great writer?

Well, as I told you last time, this was also an era when people were very nervous about religious, as the older ways of understating and communicating Biblical truths were no longer sufficient. Milton, then, decided to tackle this issue. He begins by telling us that he is going to tackle this fundamental issue – and how does it do it?

He does it by humanizing the Devil, by making a creature that was so scary precisely because it was inhuman human. In doing this, he makes the Devil understandable to us. And this is wonderful, right? Well — maybe yes, and maybe no.

This brings us to our first major problem with Humanism. On the one hand, we recognize that, by humanizing subjects like the dead, or the poor, or even spiritual creations, we can come to know them in a much more specific and meaningful way.

On the other hand, the question we must deal with is: Where does it stop? How much humanizing is too much humanizing? After all, there are certainly a lot of things that are not human, right? In our culture today, we humanize about everything, from cellular human beings to dogs, to hurricanes, to even cell phones (why would we shout ‘Where’s my damn cell phone, if we did not believe it had a spiritual dimension, which it almost certainly does not)

While most rational people would recognize that these subjects are NOT either emotionally or psychologically complex entities, we humanize them anyway – because we believe that, by doing so, we will understand them better, even when it is all too obvious that such understanding does not really help us understand these subjects one bit, though it does help us understand ourselves.

Let me give you an example of why  unrestricted humanism may be a problem for us in our society. After hurricane Katrina (which you will notice is named after a woman, as if it were a person) thousands upon thousands of people were stranded in very dangerous situations, and over 1000 people died. As the scale of the disaster was becoming apparent, the media shifted focus from people on their tops of their homes screaming for help, to stories about “rescued dogs and cats.” Now, because we humanize dogs and cats, we might not see why this shift in news is a problem, but we will if we consider the fact that the dogs and cats rescued after the flood were not human beings – and that actual human stories were being overlooked so that people could watch dog and cats being rescued.

Homework: Read the first fifty pages of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

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