Humanism and Its Perils

Modernism, as an advance towards humanism, has also revealed its weaknesses. As it evolved in the Western world, crass individualism emerged as its dominant tendency. At a basic level, the binary of the “I” and the “other” became central to human self-understanding. This binary, when reflected at the community and national levels, takes the form of aggressive nationalism and a drive to dominate others. It facilitates the otherisation of people and weakens sympathy for those of different races and nationalities. The culmination of this modernist trajectory was the two great wars that devastated the world.

Apart from this inherent weakness, which appears to be resurfacing with renewed force, other threats to humanism have emerged. One such threat is the rise of political and economic systems that are neither liberal nor democratic, but instead host forms of captive capitalism.

A separate challenge arises from the growing ethnic consciousness in different parts of the world, which undermines the universal moral claims of humanism.

The newest threat to humanism comes from technology. Human relevance has historically depended on mutual service and interdependence, but this role is increasingly being taken over by machines. Autonomous systems and their interconnectedness across geographies may severely undermine human agency and control. Clouds are gathering over both human consciousness and the experience of life itself.

Humanism needs to address both its internal contradictions and emerging external challenges.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Humanism and Its Manifestations

Humanism is the crux of modernism, or of the modern age. It is the centrality of the human person in human imagination. The grand ideas which the postmodernists contested may or may not be the essential aspect of modernism; they could have been facilitated by modern epistemology. It is another matter that postmodernists contested the very idea of essence itself.

The point I made earlier is what I am repeating here. Humanism manifests itself as liberalism in the domain of knowledge, as democracy in political affairs, and as capitalism in the economic sphere.

I anchor liberalism here in the idea of liberty, which I see as a mutual agreement on conditions that enable human beings to realise their humanity. In other words, it is a social contract wherein every order recognises the autonomy of individual human beings and constrains and disallows any person or group from violating it. In logical progression, democracy is the demand for the consent of such autonomous human beings in conducting collective affairs, which again are meant to ensure the autonomy of each of them. Capitalism, in that sequence, is not about capital being the centre of an order. Capital is only the lifeblood of such an order. The crux lies in the ownership of human beings over their persons and possessions, and their ability to conduct their businesses with utmost ease.

Humanism is the way humanity should follow.

Niraj Kumar Jha