Good deconstruction of the use/misuse/abuse of the term humanism:

“Humanism,” used as an anti-ism, is a lexical version of all those people who claim, as if they are unique in the sentiment: “I think all lives matter.”

If transcendence is your aim—if you happen to prefer the soaring over the searing in your rhetoric and in your life—then “humanism” is an ideal term. It is soft and smooth and inviting and historically inflected and, above all, conveniently unfalsifiable. Who doesn’t believe in the value and the potential of collective humanity? Who wouldn’t be excited by all that might be achieved by, as Sarah Jessica Parker put it, “a humanist movement”? Humanism is the stuff of the Taj Mahal and Leonardo da Vinci and “one giant leap for mankind.” It is also, today, the stuff of cultural utopianism. Who wouldn’t love a world in which the seams of our great human tapestry are rendered effectively invisible?

In that sense, “humanism” makes for a self-contained tautology. But it also makes, as a piece of rhetoric, for a sentiment that is extremely glib: It is concern trolling, essentially, in the guise of inclusivity. 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? To someone who ignores the ongoing nature of the civil-rights movement, and the battles women have fought for equality? Streep’s recent film, Suffragette, features a character willingly martyring herself so that her fellow women might one day win the vote. “Humanism” treats that sacrifice as, effectively, a little bit awkward.

Which is all to say: To confess that one sees oneself, all social strife aside, as a “humanist” is not to confess a partisanship with our better angels. It is to willfully ignore history. 

It is also to ignore, by the way, the history of the concept of “humanism” itself. “Humanism,” on the surface, suggests the Renaissance, and the flowering of human potential, and the ending of the Dark Ages, and education, and art. It whiffs of both Enlightenment and enlightenment. 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.” 

… Regardless, there are many ironies here. One of them is that humanism, in all its incarnations, has historically involved a rejection of regressive thinking in favor of something more “enlightened,” more forward-thinking, more optimistic about what humans can achieve when they strive for something together. The celebrities’ brand of humanism, on the surface, promises to the do the same. “Why classify people?” Charlotte Rampling asked in her now-infamous questioning of the validity of #OscarsSoWhite.

But in a time of legitimate division and strife—in a time that equates progress with the recognition of social divisions rather than the rejection of them—it’s Rampling’s question that’s regressive. It’s humanism that is, counter to all logic, on the wrong side of history. That’s the real tautology here: We classify people because, well, we classify people. It might not be the world we want, but it is the world we have. Loftiness is lovely, but humans—from our African origins to the present day—were made, in the end, to walk on the ground.