Against ‘Humanism’
Used as an alternative to feminism or any other civil-rights movement—used, broadly, as a justification for convening an all-white film-festival jury in the year 2016—it suggests that those movements are somehow petty or point-missing. That they ignore the beautiful human forest for its trees. That they insist on strife and manufacture drama and, all in all, have no chill. I am for nice, easy balance.
.. In all that, the deployment of “humanism” effectively forestalls conversation about gender or race or power or privilege or any of the other things that, especially right now, desperately need talking about. What do you say to someone who refuses to acknowledge divisions? To someone who seems to see social movements that fight systemic injustices as awkwardly thirsty?
.. Humanism, certainly, embodied all that as a historical movement. But that was centuries ago. Today,most commonly, the term functions as an abbreviation of “secular humanism,” or the espousal of cultural values that have been disentangled from belief in the supernatural. It suggests the primacy of social norms over religious ones. “Humanism” suggests, essentially, “atheism that isn’t jerky about it.”