Quixotic Humanism

Humanism has Faced Considerable critical challenges throughout its history. In the recent abundance of international conferences and publications exploring ‘the inhuman’ in all its forms — whether through conceptions of a machine-dominated ‘viroid life’ or contemplation of a ‘transhuman’ and ‘posthuman’ future — we can see the latest in a long series of critiques (Brewster et al., 2000; Fuss, 1996; Halberstam & Livingston, 1995; Pearson, 1997; Tester, 1995). Cyber-criticism flourishes as only one strand in the postmodern interrogation of perceived humanist certainties. There are other more overtly moralising attacks. A particularly strident example is John Carroll's Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture (1993), which implicates the entire tradition in an arrogance and paralysis that is said to define the legacy of the last century:

We live amidst the ruins of the great, five-hundred-year epoch of Humanism. Around us is that ‘colossal wreck’. Our culture is a flat expanse of rubble … We are desperate, yet we don't care much any more. We are timid, yet we cannot be

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shocked. We are inert underneath our busyness. We are destitute in our plenty. We are homeless in our homes.

What should be there to hold our hands, is not. Our culture is gone. It has left us terribly alone. In its devastation it cannot even mock us any more, sneer at the lost child whimpering for its mother. That stage too is over. Our culture is past cruelty. It is wrecked. It is dead (p. 1).

We dwell on this critique as a point of departure. Such damnation as this relies on the misapprehension that humanism can be defined almost wholly through its hubris, its earnest attempt ‘to replace God by man, to put man at the centre of the universe, to deify him’ (p. 2). For Carroll, it has been a ‘colossal undertaking’ borne out of colossal arrogance, leading to a ‘colossal wreek’. Carroll names a range of culpable humanists, from the 15th-century sculptor, Donatello, to the 20th-century director, John Ford; but