231 | Sarah Bakewell on the History of Humanism

0:00:00.2 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Several years ago when I wrote my book, 'The Big Picture' its idea was to describe and defend Articulate Naturalism. The idea that the world is a fundamentally natural thing, no supernatural aspects or anything like that. And it's a weird task because you have to both say, "Well, here's what we have learned. Here's what we know." But also, when it comes to the things we don't yet know, our best future understandings are continue to... Going to continue to be naturalistic. And so that's the case that I tried to make. But as you might expect, within naturalism, people disagree with each other about very important things. So the particular line I took was that the universe, the physical world, it just is, it exists, it obeys its rules, it has its stuff that obeys the laws of physics and so forth.

0:00:56.7 SC: But it doesn't judge you. It doesn't care, it doesn't evaluate you. This is a moral anti-realist position. There is no set of rules out there given to us by the universe, that helps us differentiate between right and wrong, good and bad, things like that. The universe, in some sense doesn't care about us human beings, but that's not a reason to be nihilistic or depressed or anything like that, because we human beings care about we human beings. So it's not that there is no such thing as right and wrong or meaning to life or anything like that, it's just that those things are invented by human beings, not handed to us, either by the universe or by God or something outside the universe. So this particular point of view, which again, is not necessarily completely accepted, there are people who disagree, fits in very well with the tradition, not just of naturalism, but of humanism.

0:01:55.7 SC: Humanism in some sense it's the very old tradition of emphasizing human beings rather than the divine or something like that. It's not necessarily Atheistic. You can be religious and humanist, but there's a natural affinity if you don't believe in God for putting human beings at the center of what does matter. You could also think that human beings are insignificant in the universe, and that would make you non-humanist. But a humanist says, as far as evaluating what matters to human beings, where that evaluation comes from is also from human beings. So it's a fascinating history because it is not how human beings were thinking thousands of years ago. We were in large extent, very super naturalistic. Human beings 2000 years ago were pretty prone to thinking that human beings themselves were not the source of meaning and mattering in the universe. That idea had to develop over the years through, at least in the West, through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and so forth in the East around the world, there's of course, different paths that were taken.

0:03:08.9 SC: And the history is always fascinating because these ideas don't spring fully formed in their final form, they develop over time. So today's guest is Sarah Bakewell, who is a journalist, writer, scholar who thinks about the history of these things. In fact, if you liked our recent previous talk on existentialism with Skye Cleary, Sarah is the author of a book called 'The Existentialist Café' which you could check out. But her new book is called 'Humanly Possible：Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry and Hope.' So, we talk about precisely this history of humanism going back to the 1300s in Europe. We touched a little bit about the ancient Greeks in India, China, and so forth. But really her story starts in the 1300s with Literary Humanism, Petrarch, Boccaccio, people like that, going up through a whole bunch of different strains of thought from, Shakespeare to Voltaire, Thomas Paine and so forth, up to the current day, Zora Neale Hurston, Bertrand Russell, people like that, Science, Darwin, Huxley.

0:04:23.4 SC: How we should think about our place in the universe if the idea of a place in the universe is something that comes particularly from human beings. And where is the place for humanism right now? Is it important? Has it become the default? Is it being overly ignored? Is there a vital movement there? What do we do if we think that humanism is important or if we don't, how do we combat it? That might be something some of you are thinking right now, but anyway, the history one way or the other, no matter where you come down on these big issues is a fascinating one. So let's go.

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0:05:13.4 SC: Sarah Bakewell, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:05:15.8 Sarah Bakewell: Thanks very much. It's lovely to be here.

0:05:18.2 SC: So you've written a new book on The History of Humanism. Why don't you tell us the title of the book exactly?

0:05:25.1 SB: It's Humanly Possible. The title and the subtitle is Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry and Hope.

0:05:35.9 SC: I like those. I like the theme of optimism that runs through the book as a characteristic feature of humanism. But of course, like this is one of those interviews where the first question to ask is just perfectly obvious. Namely, what do you mean humanism? What is the definition of that? I can imagine people disputing different possible definition.

0:05:55.3 SB: It's very much disputed. And actually the first line of the book is, "What is humanism?"

0:06:01.8 SC: There you go. [chuckle]

0:06:02.7 SB: And I'm actually quoting I... And this is quite a good way into talking about that, I think I'm quoting, a comic novel by David Nobbs, who's a sort of English comic novelist, best known for The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. But this was a book which... Called Second from Last in the Sack Race, where he was kinda drawing up his own experiences of being at school. And he has this scene where in this imaginary school, some students decide to set up a humanist society and they have their inaugural meeting. And of course, in the inaugural meeting, the... This is the first question they ask, "What is humanism?" To which it immediately degenerates into total chaos because they all have different ideas of what humanism is. So one of them says, "It's the Renaissance's attempt to escape from medieval scholasticism and the church, and to... "

0:07:01.3 SB: You go back to sort of literary studies and free thinking. And then another one says, "Well, no, doesn't it mean being kind and nice to people and bandaging animals and things." And another one says, "Well, that's not humanism. Humanism is trying to live without belief in the supernatural and taking human life and human connections to each other as the basis about morality," and... As to which the other one responds, "But are you saying that it's not good to bandage animals and look after people and things?" And it just goes on but the thing is, they've actually nails all of the main definitions of humanism there and my starting point is rather than saying, "Well, no, humanism is not that, it's this." I prefer to say, "Well, actually it's all of those things." And they are all brought together by the word human that's at the center of the word humanism. So you have, for example, one of the meanings that is very familiar, especially in the English speaking world in general, is this idea of living without the dogmas of religion and probably without religious faith.

0:08:17.4 SC: Sure.

0:08:17.8 SB: But at least without putting that centrally and very much foregrounding human relationships, moral obligation to each other, a sense of community and things like that is the basis of our morality. But of course, there's this whole... At the other extreme of quite a range of meanings, it was used through much of history of this sort of Europe from really late medieval times through what the early modern era, or the Renaissance we might call it, to mean people who specialized in, well, the humanities and we still call specialists in the humanities humanists. They are the people who specialize in the human studies. So that means literature, the arts, culture, history, the historical understanding of things, a whole huge range of stuff to do with human culture. And again, that it just has the sense of human at the center of it. So I think there's a fantastic range, and I really believe in, at least for me in my book in trying to be inclusive in all these definitions to try and take the broadest, most connective sense of humanism that I can but there is still a core. There's definitely a core at the heart of it that's there in the word human.

0:09:36.7 SC: So you're not here to tell us what the once and for all right definition is so much is to be inclusive and ecumenical about the positive aspects of all these definitions?

0:09:45.5 SB: I'm definitely looking for a rich sense. I think all these meanings of humanism can enrich each other and really lead us to think about, well, what is the idea of the distinctively human, cultural or ethical realm, which I think all these kinds of humanism have in common that they foreground that. So there's the physical world, of course, there's the world that is studied by science. There's this sort of physical reality of which we're apart with undeniably and there may or may not be according to some people's belief a purely spiritual realm, a realm of gods and the transcendent abstractions perhaps. And then there's the realm of culture, language, songs, dances, stories, the many ways in which we respond to each other, educate each other, entertain each other, have moral obligations to each other. The entire realm of culture and humanists are definitely, I think, united by a real interest in that realm in all kinds of ways. And so, yes, it only connect is my motto is kind of I try to look for connections because I think that's... Well, for me at least I do. I find that so interesting.

0:11:11.2 SC: I think there's definitely been maybe a slight shift in the immediate connotation of the word when we think about renaissance humanists. It was more about thinking about human beings, writing fiction and stories about them, centering the human experience. And maybe today there's more of a secularism, atheism, agnosticism implication that comes along?

0:11:37.7 SB: Well, really what I'm trying to do is to draw the connections between some of those things. And in fact, it's even more the sort of the earliest meaning of the word in Italian, umanisti, was literally just based on those who teach and study the human studies. And what that meant, actually, it was quite specific. It was things like grammar, eloquence rhetoric. It was drawing on the classical Greek and Roman sense of what you needed for public life and to be a good person. And passing that down the generations of the... So of course, it's come a very long way since that meaning, but each step of that, those transformations I think is connected.

0:12:25.8 SB: So for example, those people, although they were fascinated by the humanities, and by rhetoric, eloquence, and all the rest of it. They were also fascinated by the idea of moral revival on the basis of these ancient sources of finding a better way to manage society, finding a better way for each of us to govern ourselves in our relationships with our communities, with our world. So the moral meaning, the literary if you like, meaning, and by extension, I think the secular meaning is there, of course they were certainly not unbelievers most of those people for most of European history, because that was very rare. To be an absolutely overt, outspoken, direct atheist was extremely rare and there's a lot of debate about how rare it really was. But the emphasis was on the human world, the way in which we manage society, as I say, all of those political, social and communicative skills, so literature, eloquence and things like that, not on theology, which tended to be very much set apart. In fact, it was actually... People would say, "Well, I just speak of human things and I leave divine things to the theologians?" So there was that separation of realms even then.

0:13:54.1 SC: I can relate one tiny relevant story here, which is that my wife Jennifer Willette, is a winner of the Humanists of the Year award from the American Humanist Association.

0:14:04.6 SB: Wonderful.

0:14:06.2 SC: And when she got the notice, she said, "Maybe they mean you," [chuckle] to me because I'm the more outspoken atheist secularist. But I thought it was brilliant because her life's work has been devoted to writing about science, but in a way that centers human beings and tells stories and relates it to us. And I thought that was an ideal example of humanism in actions. I thought that was a brilliant choice.

0:14:30.5 SB: It is, absolutely. I think... And, that's great that she got that award and that sounds like a very, very good reason for giving it. Although I imagine the same thing could be said of you as well. I know you could... Great science communicator, science philosophy. I think, I like to see that connection too, because as I say, on the one hand, you've got the realm of theology and the realm of the human, but the other great division in those three parts is this idea of the realm of the physical world, the realm of science. And I think sometimes we're encouraged to think that scientific thought is entirely set apart from human feelings, human thought, human responses to the world, ethics, values, all of that. And I don't think it is, I'm not a relativist when it comes to science in a sense. I don't feel like scientific method is somehow purely subjective. I think that's... I really don't agree with that. But I think that, our desire to use scientific method to explore the world, to explore the nature of the universe is itself very much a part of our humanity. What we are as human beings, is deeply bound up with our interest in science and our scientific instincts, if you like. So, I love to see those potential gulfs being bridged and that's brilliant.

0:15:55.4 SC: I do wanna get to the actual history here, but maybe one more clarifying question would be, given all these wonderfully good aspects of humanism, as you've laid them out, who would ever not be a humanist? What does it mean to... Who's the other side, who are the anti-humanists, both early and maybe today?

0:16:14.0 SB: There certainly are anti-humanists and always have been. And it's equally hard to define what that means too, because it does, it sounds like self evidently a bad thing and [chuckle] it's not. It may not be, because actually quite often those might be people who are reminding us not to be too vain about ourselves, not to be too carried away on saying humans are wonderful, which is something I don't think humanists do usually say, but there have been some who have, expressed themselves in those terms. Humanists who... What a piece of work is man, how excellent we are. [chuckle] Well, anti-humanists are there to say, "Hang on a minute. Are you sure about that?" And I think also, they do remind us of the less rational perverts that we can't pride ourselves on being too rational, too good at getting on with each other in society, let's remember that there are all these bad things that happen, and that we do and...

0:17:14.0 SB: So, I think there's a really useful constant response and interrelationship between humanism and anti-humanism. I think they naturally tend to call each other up because as soon as somebody says anything strongly humanistic or anti-humanistic, it naturally calls up a response. But this is all part of what we always do as human beings, which is thinking about ourselves, trying to figure out what kind of creatures we are and how we should be living in this world. So definitely, I think you can never have one without the other. And some humanists are more optimistic than others, some are maybe naively so, and this is something that, again, the anti-humanists are there to remind us not to be naive. But not all, a lot of humanists have had a much more nuanced sense. And to me, my great case of that, and we might be jumping ahead of any kind of chronological sequence here, the term...

0:18:19.4 SC: Please go ahead.

0:18:19.9 SB: But is Michel de Montaigne who has... I've written a book about him before. He's a great... Somebody I find endlessly fascinating as a writer, 16th century essayist. He was certainly a humanist in all kinds of ways as a literary, somebody who read deeply in the literature of classical and contemporary authors who considered what he read, reinvented it for his world. And he was a humanist in that he was fascinated by human life, by his own human character. He wrote about us all the time, but he is also... He wrote pages and pages and pages on how we shouldn't get up ourselves, basically, because we [chuckle] do terrible stupid things all the time. And the other animals are much better at all kinds of things than we are. And he draws on Plutarch, who assembled a great massive stories of animals who build better... Birds build nests. They do a much better job of it than we ever do within our buildings and things like that. So Montaigne is somebody who, to my mind, sums up that, those two, exactly that tension between humanism and anti-humanism. The tension between, he is a humanist, but he's not always an optimistic one. And his book, he gives a much more nuanced view.

0:19:45.1 SC: And as you said, especially back in those days, to be a humanist was not to be an atheist in the way that we would recognize it right now. But you also mentioned that there is a strain in religious thought, maybe not all religions or whatever, but there's a kind of religious thought that is deeply anti-humanist where they say the fundamental nature of humans is to be fallen, is to be sinners, is to be falling short and we need to look outside humanity for salvation. Am I correct in saying that is more or less unambiguously not what a humanist would want to say?

0:20:21.7 SB: Yeah, I think that's pretty safe to say that's not a humanist view. And William James, who wrote a great varieties of religious experience analyzing religion, a lot of it from a psychological point of view said that for him, this is the basic structure of religion. First, it tells us that there's something wrong with us, deeply wrong with us. Then it tells us that this is the way to fix it, and it holds up the religious well, dogma or consolation or whatever you want to call it, or appeal to a higher authority. It may or may not... I'm kind of unsure myself, whether would it really be right to say that all religion has that? I'm not sure that I would say that, but you can certainly find it in Christianity. Of course, if you go back to St. Augustine, he invented the concept of original sin and it's certainly there in original sin, that's what original sin is. Even newborn babies are born wrong and needs redemption from the Jesus Christ and from God.

[laughter]

0:21:31.6 SB: I think that, religion is... That's such a blanket term. There is so much going on in religion, there is a humanist strand in religion. A lot of people argue quite strongly for that others argue that, no, that's kind of... You can't really see that much humanism and religion and it's a bit of an abuse at time. I don't agree with either extreme. I think that religion tends towards a kind of more humanist strand when it really focuses on human wellbeing and life here on earth amongst each other and what we can do for each other rather than this idea that there's something terribly wrong and that the main thing we have to do is pray to be redeemed from it.

0:22:15.3 SC: Okay, good with all of that background out of the way, thank you very much. I don't know whether you want to elaborate, but I'm sure there were precursors to what we think of as humanism in ancient Greece, in ancient China or India or elsewhere in the world. But arguably, your story starts in the 1300s in Italy. And so how did it start? Why did it start? What were they reacting against?

0:22:40.9 SB: I kind of started it there because it has to start somewhere, and it is quite a traditional place to start telling the story of humanism. And with good reason because there was all sorts of what we could certainly regard as humanist activity going on before that, well, through the previous centuries. But what really changes in the 1300s among a small group of people is they start explicitly thinking of themselves as recovering from some kind of dark age, a term which they basically coin in order to renew the modern worlds by reaching back to the lost or half lost or not quite lost writings of the ancients, meaning mostly Latin authors and also Greek authors, which they had great difficulty in reading still because very few people could read Greek, but they explicitly began.

0:24:11.0 SB: So I'm really talking about the sort of, the people that stand out in this story are Petrarch. We always call him an English Francesco Petracco, who was born in Italy and his family were sort of refugees from Florence due to political upheavals there, he actually grew up in Avignon or just near Avignon in France where they had to flee to. And he devoted his life to literature, which he had to battle for a little bit because his father, who was basically a notary, expected his son to follow into the legal world, he didn't want to do that he wanted to read and write and collect books, and that's exactly what he managed to do all his life. So he became...

0:24:27.5 SC: Some things never change, the. [laughter]

0:24:29.2 SB: I know, and I never said...

0:24:30.6 SC: Children not living up to the expectations of their parents is never gonna go away.

0:24:34.0 SB: Well, that's it, you can rebel by sort of going out and taking drugs or getting drunk or something, or you can rebel by going out and buying manuscripts of Cicero.

[laughter]

0:24:46.1 SB: Which is what Petrarch did and he managed to make quite a good life for himself by really working for patrons, which were sometimes involved with the church, sometimes just sort of private nobility who really funded his activities. So he got to spend his time collecting what he could find. And this meant often going around monasteries, which did have fantastic collections of books, often including secular works from the ancient world, or at least copied and handed down by generations of copiers from the ancient world. And so Petrarch, sort of collected these, studied them, edited them, began all... Again, it's back to the humanities, all the things that we now associate with the humanities, this close work on text and then generally literary and moral study and political. And the other one of that time that I do find a very sort of fascinating character is Giovanni Boccaccio, who became a friend of Petrarch, slightly younger generation, and he too did the same thing going around monasteries digging at these manuscripts or sort of bragging his way into getting hold of them, doing copies of them, sharing them with friends and with Petrarch. It was kind of a bit of an industry, it was a tremendous energy that they put into it. But as I say, they really saw themselves as starting a new beginning and...

0:26:17.7 SB: And that makes them quite a good point to start in looking at that story of humanism.

0:26:22.9 SC: But they were also writers themselves, they weren't just collecting old manuscripts, so they were...

0:26:28.1 SB: Oh, very much so...

0:26:28.6 SC: They were starting something new.

0:26:29.9 SB: Very much so. They wrote in almost every genre imaginable. I mean, Petrarch is remembered particularly for his sonnets in poetry. But he wrote other kinds of poetry and lots of prayers [0:26:43.9] ____ and really my favorite writings of his, were his letters to his friends, which he then at a certain point in his life, decided to collect and assemble into a volume and copy out and improve on a little bit, quite a lot of polishing up went on. And then he made that into a sort of a collection which he then distributed among his friends for their enjoyment and interest, full of details of his life, his world, his concerns. Some of the letters were addressed to the ancient authors that he loved. So he'd write to them quite familiarly as if they were friends as well, and sort of tell them off a bit for doing things that they shouldn't have or. And Boccaccio also wrote a very wide range of stuff. We remember him mainly for The Decameron, which is this hundred Tales of a tremendous range. Again a lot of them are quite boredy and just good fun romps really, and others are really quite serious. And they're meant to be taken as moral lessons. So he's showing off the range of what he can do.

0:27:53.7 SC: And so what made those two figures and their contemporaries specifically humanist in your view?

0:27:58.8 SB: Well I think it's the way that they saw themselves as recovering the past and through these manuscripts, this manuscript hunting, this reading of the ancient authors, recovering the past and then reinventing it, reinvigorating it for a new generation. So there was certainly that sense of hope in the future. Not much hope in their present. It was very difficult too, because they lived in a very difficult time. The 14th century was really a terrible time in much of Europe, not least because the plague spread through all those areas in the middle of their lives and it was devastating, absolutely devastating to people's sense of security in life as well as just literally devastating to many cities and populations. So tough times... And they saw themselves as using the power of literature, the power of these ancient arts of good government and good speaking, good writing, beautiful eloquence in writing and speech, using those as a way of renewing human life.

0:29:08.8 SC: It's interesting that you mentioned the plague. 'Cause obviously was on everyone's mind at the time. And whenever we talk about grand historical shifts in how people think and talk and what have you, I'm fascinated by do the ideas themselves lead to these shifts, or are there external factors that nudge them along? I mean, in the case of the 1300s on the one hand, it's the end of the Dark Ages, the beginning of the Renaissance. At the other hand, it's the end of the Islamic Golden Age in a world where...

0:29:42.8 SB: Exactly.

0:29:43.3 SC: The Islamic world was tightly interacting with the European world at the time. So do you give credit mostly to the thinkers and their ideas here, or were there external conditions that help explain why it was then and there that this happened?

0:29:58.5 SB: I think it's tremendously complex, and I also think that the point that you're making is also absolutely essential as a reminder that this whole idea of there being a Dark Age is all some sort of terrible time before the Renaissance brought light to anything, is a very Euro-centric idea, because it only makes sense from the point of view of mainly of Western Europe. And in fact it's not an idea that really stands up to a lot of scrutiny as is always the case with these pretty sweeping characterizations of particular eras as being one thing or another, because they're always vastly more complex in the chain of cause and effect the relationships of different cultures to each other across fertilization of cultures. All of this was going on and it was definitely no one simple story. I mean, in a way I sort of take Petrarch and Boccaccio in their own sense of themselves, but not uncritically, I think that we can look at them under all sorts of different lights and see a whole load of factors that went into what made up their world.

0:31:14.1 SC: It does seem that one little bit of technology was absolutely crucial was simply books, right? I mean, we had books for a long time, but the idea of sharing texts back and forth was... It wasn't their version of social media, but it was absolutely necessary to make these shifts happen.

0:31:32.6 SB: Well, even more specifically, a crucial thing was the arrival of paper technology in Europe. They'd had it, of course in China for much longer. Before that they had to use parchment made from calf skin and the skin of other animals, tremendously expensive and labor intensive to manufacture. I mean, you could hardly call it [0:32:01.7] ____ terribly painstaking process. And of course, that material was so valuable that quite often in order to have a fresh bit of parchment for writing or copying some new text in the monasteries, and their Scriptoria, they would scrub off an old piece of writing in order to get themselves a piece of parchment that they could reuse and that process certainly contributed to our loss of quite a few texts, especially if they felt that they wanted to write something sacred and that it was better to scrub off an old bit of something from the classical world pre-Christian, which didn't mention in it...

0:32:42.1 SC: Pagan.

0:32:42.1 SB: Wasn't in line with it. I think that that can be exaggerated in the sense of, yeah, these monasteries did also actually preserve those pre-Christian texts and often did a very good job of it. But definitely, yeah, there was an element of we desperately need parchment. Which of these precious things are we going to erase in order to have it? So paper was, of course, paper was brilliant. It was much, much cheaper and more readily available.

0:33:10.4 SC: And when these first stirrings of humanism arose, we're in a very deeply religious culture at the time. Was there backlash or did people even realize that, oh, this was gonna go bad places in terms of the established religious hierarchy?

0:33:29.9 SB: Almost never because... Or usually, it wasn't really any kind of direct challenge to Christianity at all. It was taking place, a lot of these people worked for the church. They were part of the...

0:33:40.6 SC: Mm-hmm.

0:33:41.2 SB: Especially in Rome, but also elsewhere, they often were associated in some way. They often had taken orders in one way though, because the church was such a center of intellectual activity. There wasn't really much choice but they probably... You don't get the sense that they did it particularly reluctantly that... It just wasn't there. But there are some exceptions where people did write things which antagonized the church greatly, or challenged the church's claim to authority. And one of my favorite of the humanists, this is into the 15th century now, it's later than Petro Boccacio.

0:34:17.5 SC: Sure.

0:34:18.2 SB: Was Lorenzo Valla, who wrote a fantastic total takedown of this bogus document that was called the Donation of Constantine.

0:34:29.6 SC: Oh, yeah.

0:34:30.2 SB: Which supposedly recorded this moment when the Emperor Constantine signed a document bequeathing to the Pope, and all their successors control over the all of the Western Empire really, Italy and all sorts of other lands, all over Western Europe. And in fact, it was a total fabrication. It had been put together years after it was supposed to be and Valla used these humanistic skills to expose the fraud. He particularly used... He was a phonologist, he was an expert in the Latin and also Greek. His Greek was very good, but he used his knowledge of Latin, not just as a timeless thing. But Latin is... There's a language that had evolved and been used differently in later medieval times from the way that it had been used in early medieval times. In the fourth century when it was supposedly written to point out that it couldn't possibly have been written then. Because the words that we used they weren't used at that time. And there were all sorts of clues in the text, which he pointed out saying, Well, this document is not what it's claim to be. And that therefore, of course, was a big challenge to the church's claim over all the territory that it said it had been bequeathed forever.

0:36:00.9 SC: In some sense, can we look at that as almost a precursor to science and as sort of a new way of thinking in the sense that it's not pure logic or irrationalism in the old sense, nor is it revelation or anything like that. It's looking at the evidence...

0:36:18.3 SB: Yeah.

0:36:18.7 SC: Comparing different hypotheses and seeing where it takes you.

0:36:20.8 SB: Yeah, it's definitely using those tools and it's kind of using... But it's using literary tools, so it's using knowledge of language, cultural tools, more than study of the natural worlds. But certainly it's using them in a way that points out contradictions, it points out... I think that, of course medieval, scholastic intellectuals did, they did point out contradictions. They did have a very good knowledge of language. What's new is this sense of a historical way of looking at what has come down to us, so thinking, historically, thinking this text has come from somewhere and what has gone into it. How was it made, who made it and why. And we're seeing really the beginning, almost less of science, I'd say we're seeing the real beginning of history of historians in the modern sense.

0:37:19.3 SC: Okay.

0:37:19.6 SB: And certainly of that kind of critical history, that history that investigates the evidence and fore grounds the evidence and then asks, well, what is the hypothesis here? What's likely, what's not likely?

0:37:33.0 SC: I'm very happy to count history as a subset of science, that's...

0:37:35.7 SB: Oh, [0:37:35.7] ____.

0:37:36.6 SC: Completely you can battle with me. But it also points to another kind of big deal at that time, you've already mentioned books and paper, but also education reform. Different ways of organizing the curriculum and different ways of teaching things, the birth of the university may be part of this whole story.

0:37:57.9 SB: Yeah, again, that sort of goes back to an earlier era, that's for sure, the university. But... And also of course, very much drew on the Arabic world that... That was really where that began, but it's what's new again in the education is this idea of being educated for a good life, being educated for, to be a good human being, to be a fully realized human being and somebody who's able to take up their place in society. Because of course, it was mostly the elite and almost entirely men who were being educated in this way. And they were being educated to become wise princes and heads of whatever it was that they were gonna be called on to do. Perhaps working in the city administration. It's actually very similar to the training of the civil service people that went on in much earlier time in China, which is a lot of Confucian writing...

0:39:10.1 SB: Is very much focused on how do you learn? It's not just about learning the various rules and how to use the bureaucratic documents. And although that was a large part of their training, went on for years and years and years, it's about how do you become a good person? Because if you're a good ruler, the people below you sort of in the community will want to emulate you and they'll become better and everybody will be better off. And... Cultivating humanity, they have this word ren, which means humanity, conscience, being a good person. There's a huge range of meanings in that word. And there's really the same thing could be found in a lot of the writings of the humanists of the Renaissance. And they in turn are drawing on the writings of the Roman world, which also stressed... And the Greeks as well, who also stressed virtue being a good person. So this becomes at the center of education, public life, and humanity, human virtue.

0:40:17.7 SC: At the risk of maybe being parochial and too much caught up in my own time, is there a worry that we are losing that conception of education? That modern universities and high schools for that matter, are focused on giving technical skills to students and less focused on turning them into good human beings?

0:40:38.2 SB: Well, definitely where we start to see that concern, absolutely sort of being expressed all over the places in the 19th century, and even actually the late 18th century, you start getting philosophers of education and public commentations of all sorts saying, we're just teaching skills. We're just teaching. We're teaching people, training them for jobs and careers maybe, but it's in a very fragmented way. There's no, what we're not doing is training people to be whole human beings, and they're fascinated by wholeness in that time, like complete fulfillment development, wholeness as a human being. That's what education should be doing primarily. And also doing it, a matter fair bit of freedom that students should... It should come from within them. They shouldn't just be drummed in with skills and skill sets and bits of knowledge. They should be encouraged.

0:41:36.5 SB: The job of an educator is to... Literally the meaning of educate is to draw out, to lead out what's in the student, what's in the person as they develop. It's a Ducarre which is like sort of Duche actually, funnily enough, in Italian, it's that same meaning, which means, to lead and you're sort of leading out. So you're help, you're leading out what's in the student. So that I knew sort of concerned about, fragmentary education or education that is simply skills-based, simply education for a purpose of churning out people who can do whatever's required of them in society rather than encouraging people as they grow up to develop into fully realized human beings, fully integrated human beings, rich... With a rich interior life as well and able to play a really valuable role in society.

0:42:35.9 SB: That became the new ideal. And I think we... But that was drawing on the ideas of the earlier humanists. So there's a real chain of, inspiration going between those different centuries. We're definitely still talking about the same issues today, [laughter] absolutely. And as always, there's no real right answer because I mean... There are criticisms that could be made of this renaissance ideal of the humanistic education, because for starters, it was definitely for an elite who are expected to govern. Well, I mean, we actually see quite, that is still going on in the modern world. I mean, there's this sort of... There's a kind of Oxford university path that is a bit infamous here in the UK because it's... This is where so many, in the government and often perhaps people who are sort of maintaining, they have those skills. They have a certain polish, they can sling around Latin quotations. But do they, how much do they really know about the struggles of ordinary people? So there's still that tension, there's still that debate that's going through to do with elitism, is to do with the question of elitism. And related to that is, again, going back to that renaissance education, very few women got it. There were a few, Queen Elizabeth the first was a prime example of that. So that was towards the end of her period.

0:44:04.4 SC: She's pretty good at it. Yeah.

[laughter]

0:44:06.3 SB: Yeah. She got a great education. She also, was, kind of insisted on it herself, I think. But she did get a good education. Now that was actually largely because she was destined to govern. She was expected to govern, so she needed that training in how to do it. So yeah.

0:44:22.9 SC: Yeah. I think this is...

0:44:24.5 SB: But most women didn't have that at all because they were not expected to have any kind of public life. They were expected to live a purely private life in the family.

0:44:32.0 SC: This is in danger of being a whole nother podcast topic, but it's so fascinating to me. I don't wanna let it go quite yet. I mean, as you're pointing out the ideal of a humanistic education, a full one, a broad one. It's very interesting 'cause I never really... It never really dwelled on the fact that it was meant for prospective leaders, right? It was obviously for an elite, it was for a tiny number of people, and in particular the ones who were going to be leaders. And so that was the justification for why you would have this broad education. And today we have more of an ideal of universal education, and we put less emphasis on the broadly humanistic aspects of it. But so maybe there's a gap there that remains to be filled where people make the strong argument for why every person deserves a broad humanistic education.

0:45:23.3 SB: Yeah. And also another thing I'd add to that is that, it didn't really include anything that we would call science. It didn't include... It arguably, and I think this has been argued, they got a more kind of scientific education in under medieval scholasticism than they did under the humanistic ideal, because that was very focused on good government, good literary skills, and all the rest of it. There really wasn't much science at all. Of course, science as we know it now, didn't exist yet. But yeah, there wasn't what we would now call science really just was pretty absent. And it was in the 19th century again, where educators started to say, well, maybe it's more useful. The most important thing is to give everybody a good grounding and scientific thought. And that means not just the actual, knowledge of science, but how to think scientifically, how to ask questions scientifically, how to test hypotheses, how to...

0:46:25.5 SB: That's... Those are great thinking skills, and some of them reacted against that humanistic education by saying, "Well, it's just to... " What's the point of learning Latin and ancient Greek when you could be learning about the physical world that's all around us. And of course, I think as always, I'm inclined to say, "Well, why can't we have it all?"

0:46:47.7 SC: Yeah, there's room for both here. [laughter] Okay, sorry for that digression, but I do think it's important. But let's... Since we're trying to squeeze many centuries of human development into a tiny amount of time, take us from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Which when I was a kid, I always used to think that they were the same thing, but they're clearly very, very different things, but the humanist strand continues through there.

0:47:16.3 SB: It does and there's a whole kind of meandering, there's a... There are periods between those two which are very interesting as well. But I do think it's... I do quite sort of think jumping to the enlightenment is not a bad idea, because that's when you start to see... Certainly you start to see the rise of scientific thinking. So we're talking 18th century, there's a kind of long enlightenment that sometimes is traced back to the 17th century, and various philosophers and scientists, of course very much that were beginning to revolutionize science in that era. But the height of it was the 18th century and one strand is using reason, using scientific method, being... Having a great belief in the power of that, but the thing that I think is specifically humanistic about that is that it's having a belief in the power of that to improve human lives, to improve human wellbeing, and the fact that they wanted to foreground that question of human wellbeing.

0:48:20.5 SB: So, one of the figures that leaps out in that is Voltaire, great figure of the enlightenment. Who really believed that it's... We should do everything that we can to... Instead of sort of trying to find ways of justifying by reference to some divine principle the fact of human suffering, we should actually do what we can to... Of course, you can never banish human suffering at all, but to reduce it and to minimize, to make it a little bit less widespread than it is or to provide ways of sort of, well, yeah, just making the be less suffering. He was very... Famously very shocked by the earthquake, this is sort of the earthquake in Lisbon of 1755, which shocked a lot of people around Europe and that happened physically.

0:49:23.0 SC: Yeah.

0:49:23.4 SB: Of course. But, it actually was felt as far afield as like Sweden and Scotland, they could feel this earthquake from Portugal. Of course the destruction in Lisbon and around it was absolutely horrific, and so many people died either instantly or because of the fires and just civic breakdown that that followed. Voltaire was wrote several things, most famously con-deed his little, it's a sort of fable. But he also wrote a poem about it and he wrote entries in his philosophical dictionary about this question of, when terrible things happen. And he took aim at this justification that was put forward by the philosopher Live nets. But, it was sort of cited by... In other contexts as well, this idea that well, it's often quoted as all is for the best and in the best of all possible worlds. The idea behind it was that, well, clearly God he could have made there not be an earthquake, he didn't, but since God is benevolent and since I'm sure he would've stopped it if he could.

0:50:39.1 SB: Clearly he can't, clearly there's some very good reason that only God knows about, which means that a world in which that earthquake didn't happen would be somehow worse. And far be it from us as mere human beings to dispute that, and clearly it's something's going on that's far above us and we couldn't bust in and said it. It's this justifying the ways of God to man, it's this referring of we should... We just have to accept, we just have to refer it upwards. Well, Voltaire was very annoyed by that attitude, because he said, "Well, whether that's true or not, first of all we've got a perfect right to bewail our faith and complain and gnash our teeth that the sufferings that we undergo in life. And secondly, why not actually do something practical to make it... Just a... Yeah, less likely to happen, less destructive when these things happen."

0:51:33.5 SB: We can't stop earthquakes, but as we've improved on vastly since then, there's a lot that can be done to build to a higher quality so that buildings don't fall down so much. To provide better civic management actually, which is vital of course, in the aftermath of disaster. And since long after Voltaire we've sort of developed a certain ability to see earthquakes coming, as we know none of this works always and still horror, absolute horrors happen. But the... It was later called me lyricism, [0:52:09.5] ____ this actually wasn't a term of Voltaire's or anything. It was apparently the novelist George Elliott who was the first, or possibly the second actually to use... To be quoted as using this term. It just means we can make things a bit better.

0:52:23.0 SC: Yeah.

0:52:23.4 SB: We can't solve... We can't make a perfect world, we can't solve everything, we can use our ingenuity, our technology, our political skills, our management of situations, our ability to predict things, we can use those to make things a little bit better. And I think that idea is to me is one of the... It's the humanist idea at the heart of a lot of what happened in the enlightenment. So the enlightenment's often been seen largely in terms of people adulating the idea of reason and being besotted by the idea that we can be reasonable. But I think a lot of enlightenment thinkers actually were just saying, "Let's just try to be more reasonable."

[laughter]

0:53:05.3 SB: Than we currently are because it improves human life if we do.

0:53:09.0 SC: I like the idea that plagues and earthquakes play such a large role in the flourishing of humanism throughout history. But.

0:53:15.9 SB: Yeah, So it's supposed to be such a cheerful philosophy, and.

0:53:18.9 SC: It's supposed to be.

0:53:19.3 SB: It's just a chapter of disasters.

0:53:20.5 SC: But it actually it makes sense upon reflection because I would take part of humanism to sort of, like you just said, accept the responsibility of trying to make things better. An anti-humanist or non-humanist philosophy can kind of offload that to, if not explicitly God, to destiny, to providence, to fate, or whatever it is. Whereas a humanist has gotta say, well, look, there's randomness, but we still have to do the best we can in the face of that.

0:53:52.1 SB: That's absolutely right. That idea of responsibility, taking responsibility for ourselves collectively and individually. I mean that there are disasters. There'll always be disasters, but it's really up to us to try and respond to these in a way that's as helpful as possible. You can sort of start to see the connections with the... The worldview that doesn't put divine order at the center of things, the worldview that starts to put human, not only wellbeing, but also actually human decision making, human action and responsible choices at the heart of things instead, from our point of view. The realm in which some sort of divine battle between God or Satan, for example, might be going on, is like, well, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. This really doesn't have much to do with us on a day to day basis. We have to think about ways to build better buildings so they don't pull down so on, so.

0:54:56.0 SC: Right.

0:54:56.5 SB: Yeah.

0:54:57.2 SC: And this was the period when you said earlier about the Renaissance humanists. None of them were loudly, explicitly atheists, but now in the 18th century, we begin to get some loud, explicit atheists. Voltaire was not one as far as I can tell.

0:55:15.3 SB: That's right.

0:55:16.4 SC: And you give a lot of prominence to David Hume, one of my favorite philosophers, and you refer...

0:55:21.8 SB: And he was, yeah.

0:55:23.0 SC: Yeah. You refer to him as Merciless, but there's an anecdote, I'm not... I'm not sure if it's true or not, of Hume visiting the salons of Paris and saying something like, none of us here is, is explicitly atheist. And all of his hosts are like, no, we all are, except for you [chuckle] Well, how did that transition happen? Yeah.

0:55:47.7 SB: There was a philosophy that came to be called Deism which provided a very good cover for any atheist who wanted to cover, because it basically said exactly that, that there probably is a God, we're not saying there's not a God there's, yeah. The deity but he just, he or it or whatever doesn't enter into everyday human life. There's no direct... Everything in the natural world and in our lives goes on separately from that. And so, of course, if you're an atheist, but you don't want to say so because being explicitly atheist was quite dangerous. Still. It really was very dangerous. Still, it could get you into all sorts of trouble if you directly challenge the idea of the being a God at all. But you could just set that aside and then go on, talk about human life as if God had everything connected with that sort of transcendent realm was completely irrelevant. Of course, I don't think that all of the people that we think I was deists were simply using it as a cover. The problem is that we just can't really know, it's terribly difficult to know.

0:56:55.0 SB: 'Cause obviously, if they didn't record that in their writings, then they're not gonna write down on a piece of paper, "Well, I'm pretending to be a deist, but really I'm an atheist," or very rarely. But there is some where we do have a pretty good inkling. I mean, another great enlightenment philosopher and thinker, Denis Diderot was probably... Gives quite a lot of sign of probably being an atheist. He had to bury or leave unpublished a lot of his writings where that was suggested. And as I say, David Hume who did make it about as explicit as he could. But even then, not entirely. But he was known in... He lived in Edinburgh and he was known as the great infidel and the great atheist. So, he had a reputation.

0:57:45.5 SC: But there was nevertheless a looming blind spot, which of course you're gonna talk about, which is that even the people who would've identified as humanists would narrowly define humanity, the part of humanity that deserves the rights and respect that everyone should get; White male, certain age, certain proclivities, etcetera. And it took people who were not in those categories to raise their hand and say, "Wait a minute, we're human beings too." That's an important story in the history of humanism.

0:58:19.3 SB: Absolutely. Yeah. And that is... The enlightenment is particularly ambiguous in that regard because some of the apparently most critically minded and rational and... You would expect better of them, frankly, enlightenment thinkers were perfectly capable of saying that, of course, this didn't apply to. And then there's a whole list of sort of colonized peoples or people of African origin or anybody basically who wasn't of European origin. And of course, women are the great... Just half the human race is absolutely left out of it, for much of it. But what you begin to see is people who are... Say Black women, for example, starting to say, "Well, there's us. Okay? We are human too."

0:59:13.6 SC: Yeah.

0:59:15.5 SB: But often, they use... And where I find it particularly interesting is where they use some of the tools of humanistic thought or enlightenment thought precisely to think critically about the received idea that women don't really count, and to start to investigate that and to query it. And they do it on the basis of a lot of humanistic philosophy. So somebody like Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women in the late 18th century used the same critical thinking about, how did things come to be this way? That, for example, I was talking about Lorenzo Valla who used the sort of historical thought. And she does the same. It's like, well, what if... You might think that women seem a bit vapid and they are uneducated and they lack confidence. Well, think about why are they uneducated. It's because you haven't given them an education. Why do they lack confidence? It's because they're constantly told that they should be modest and retiring and that they shouldn't express their opinions. And so it's starting to think at a kind of genealogical way or a historical way about, why is this?

1:00:26.4 SB: So, there's that. And another humanistic strand, I think, is starting to appeal to an idea of there being something, a kind of... I mean, the phrase of dignity is often used in the context of the dignity of human rights or the dignity of human essence, somehow, that we all, all of us have an essential dignity, an essential humanity which for all... However diverse, many aspects of our lives are, there's also something that we all share, which is our humanity. And nobody should be seen as having any less of that than anybody else. And so then you sort of start to see this argument coming, which will end with things like the declaration of human rights, where that's a central idea in the mid 20th century. But it's feminists and all kinds of other voices are starting to come in and say, "There is an essential humanity, so you can't... " Mary Wollstonecraft says, "You can't talk about there being particularly female virtues, for example, and male, and then not even male virtues, but kind of human virtues...

1:01:40.3 SC: Of course, yes.

1:01:41.3 SB: So there's [chuckle] human virtues. And then there's the particular ones that women are supposed to have, which just happen to be all very negative. So it's all like modesty, sort of silence, not talking too much, yeah, all the rest of it. But there are... She says it's not... We all have or should have human virtues. We should all be educated to have human... If you're human beings, your virtues are human virtues. And the total sum of the virtues of humanity include the traditional female ones and the traditional male ones. So, these are all very humanistic concerns, because the humanists had always been very interested in the question of what makes a good human being? What is it to be virtuous? What's needed in the public realm in terms of training people to be good, training people to be completely... To be knowledgeable, to be eloquent, to be able to take part in decision making in society? All of these things are starting to be brought up in the context of not being exclusive. So there's less and less of the idea of the human as something exclusive and more inclusive. It's certainly not a straightforward story, because there's a tremendous amount of backwards and forwards, there's confusions, there's inconsistencies. You get somebody might be very good at arguing for women, but actually hopeless on questions of race and...

1:03:10.8 SC: Oh yeah.

1:03:10.9 SB: So it's a tremendously complicated process. And it's not just like one smooth progress, that's for sure. But what is being seen is a great sort of diversifying of the whole humanist picture, which is still going on today because we're still...

1:03:25.6 SC: Very much, for sure.

1:03:28.0 SB: Of course, this is a never-ending dole. There's no point where you can say, "Well, we've arrived. We've sorted out the whole problem of exclusion." [chuckle] I mean, of course not.

1:03:40.0 SC: One of the stories in your book that I really liked, which... Not quite contemporary, but I think anything that happens after I'm born is the modern world. So Mary Whitehouse was a conservative British activist, and she argued against what she called the humanist gay lobby. And as you point out, there wasn't any humanist gay lobby, but once she started complaining about it, a bunch of people got together and started one, because that sounded like a really good idea. [chuckle]

1:04:08.5 SB: Exactly, yes. And it's now affiliated with the... That organization is now affiliated with Humanists UK. And I was told they took the slogan, "Born of Mary," because they were born out of this case that was brought against the magazine, Gay News, by Mary Whitehouse. [1:04:31.4] ____.

1:04:32.0 SC: And that was in the '60s? '70s?

1:04:35.9 SB: No, no. It was... Yes. Hang on. It was... I'm trying to remember. Actually, I've forgotten it. No, it was the '70s...

1:04:39.2 SC: '70s, okay, yeah.

1:04:39.3 SB: But I think it was '73 or something. Yeah, it's long ago. It's early '70s, yeah...

1:04:43.1 SC: Living memory anyway.

1:04:45.4 SB: Early to mid '70s. I had a...

1:04:47.9 SC: Okay. So, again, we're still trying to compress a lot of human history here, so we've become enlightened, we've liberated different parts of the world, different segments of humanity. In some sense, if you would just tell the story of the 20th century, the political story, there's these wars, both the World Wars and the Cold War. Can we think of fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, in some sense as fundamentally anti-humanist movements, but in a different way, because they're sort of valorizing the state or the system rather than the individual human being?

1:05:23.1 SB: Yeah. Well, I think that's absolutely right. That's exactly what makes them anti-humanist, because it has the same structure, in a way. There's something wrong with... Like deeply wrong, not just details that are wrong. There's something profoundly out of kilter about human life as we find it. What's needed is a strong, authoritative other thing. And that thing might be... In communism, of course, it's the Marxist dialectic, the dictatorship of the proletarian. It's an abstraction. It's a theory that's going to revolutionize human life and make us into this shining light of the post-revolutionary world where everybody is fulfilled, nobody is alienated anymore, everybody will... Then, of course, the reality turns out to be quite the opposite of that, inevitably, because it's imposing an abstract idea. It's imposing the state. Again, the state is what guarantees them with that. So the state is being set up as having an absolute authority over individual choices.

1:06:35.5 SB: I mean, if you're part of a revolutionary state, you can't just live your little individual choices, that can't be tolerated because everything must be subordinated to this goal. And of course, in Nazism, what you've got, and fascism of all kinds, you've got the nation playing that role and you've got national destiny, plus you've got the figure of the dictator. So, you've got Mussolini, we've got Hitler playing that absolute role. Individual freedom, individual choices, individual responsibility, the kind of humanist basis for morality that relies on our fellow feeling, our empathy or our sense of responsibility to other people, all of that goes because it's all to be subordinated to the needs of the state. Profoundly anti-humanistic, I think, those movements.

1:07:27.5 SC: So how... I guess we didn't say this explicitly. How crucial is the idea of individualism to humanism? I mean, I could imagine claiming that I'm a humanist but being a humanist who puts front and center some group of human beings rather than individual human beings.

1:07:46.2 SB: Yeah. Individualism is a problematic concept because it can also be associated with this idea of individual self-assertion, the justification of [1:07:57.7] ____ idea that an individual who... Or a kind of Nietzschean superman, Übermensch that can just assert themselves and have everything they want. It's a kind of neoliberalism in-the-market idea that, basically, might is right. Well, definitely that kind of individualism would not be particularly humanistic, I think. And individualism in itself is a very... When you sort of go back through the centuries and history, it becomes very hard to talk about individualism. It's a very modern concept that doesn't always make a lot of sense when you're talking about different historical times. When does it really arise? I think it's a concept of the individual, is, well, it becomes a very 19th century concept and liberal philosophy. There are several liberal thinkers who were deeply humanistic because they did think about the individual, but they also thought about it in the context of having the wellbeing of all at heart. So, if individual people are... Basically, the state steps out of their lives as much as is possible, except to prevent them harming each other. So, to prevent abuses.

1:09:21.3 SB: That's the role of the state, is to prevent anybody's freedom being brutally curtailed by somebody else's. But within that, basically, people should be able to develop as they want to by having... Running their personal lives the way that they want to, as long as they don't harm anybody else. This is the central idea, I think, of liberalism, which is very humanistic. So, to say that all humanism is individualistic, I think is just not quite right because it's kind of... It blurs some of the historical developments and it also gets dangerously mixed up with this rather arrogant idea of the individual as being able to do whatever they like, which is totally inconsistent with the humanist idea that we are basically morally responsible to each other, that we have a responsibility to the people that we live among, and not only people, but also to other animals, to the rest of the natural world, to the very foundations of life. So yeah, it's complicated. As with so many things, it ends up being, "It's complicated," is the answer.

1:10:29.4 SC: It is complicated. But I think you put your finger on something that does make sense to me, the idea that what we think of as classical liberalism emphasizes the individual and their rights and their flourishing, whereas the humanist tradition has individuals as very important, but cares a lot about helping other individuals. I mean, you mentioned the EM Forster quote of Only Connect. Individuals matter, but not in the sense that they matter individually, [chuckle] but as the object of our care.

1:11:03.1 SB: Well, really... If I had to say what is my favorite quote from the... Well, I'll tell you what, actually, favorite two quotes I think from the whole of humanist thought. One is from Terence the Afro-Roman playwright of the ancient world who said a very famous line of, "I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me. We're all connected." The other one that I was originally gonna say was from the 19th century free thinker, Robert G Ingersoll. Apparently, it was pronounced "Ingersoll," not "Ingersoll." Because his enemies used to call him "injure soul," 'cause he was injuring people's souls, apparently, by going around preaching a secularist free-thinking message. "Preaching," perhaps not the right word there, but you know. [chuckle] And he came up with what he called the happiness creed [1:11:52.1] ____. It was his belief about how to be happy. And he said, "The time to be happy is now, the place to be happy is here." He started it, "Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here, and the way to be happy is to make others so."

1:12:11.2 SC: Can't leave out that last line.

1:12:12.0 SB: I think if you're... Yeah, exactly. It all goes together. Happiness is for this world, not for some imagined paradise beyond. It's the here and now, but it's... The path to happiness lies through being connected to each other and nothing human being alien to us.

1:12:32.3 SC: So let's just leap up to the present day now. We're in a situation where, okay, we've in some sense won the battles against fascism and Stalinism and so forth.

1:12:44.1 SB: I hope so...

1:12:44.8 SC: Maybe.

1:12:45.1 SB: But I'm not sure. I sometimes wonder...

1:12:46.3 SC: Yeah, I know, I know. I should... Even as I spoke those words, I was... Kept bringing them back. But there's a different frontier. People now talk about transhumanism and post humanism. There's a technological frontier. Uploading ourselves into the matrix, frolicking in virtual reality. Do you see these technological advances as tools to further the humanist cause or potential challenges to them?

1:13:15.6 SB: I think that at the moment, it's... Of course, it's all very theoretical at the moment. I mean, we're dealing with the arrival... The imminence and arrival, in many ways, of artificial intelligence, things that are not human but they have some kind of intelligence. This is something we're gonna have to wrestle with, for sure, in relation to what it is to be a human being and what humans need as opposed to what machines might need. But the sort of wilder shores of transhumanism, the idea that we will merge with machine intelligence or with a kind of abstract spiritual or intellectual mentalism in the universe, not need bodies anymore, it's always a... I find it kind of fun and fascinating as an idea, but I think that it misses so much about what it is to be human.

1:14:08.8 SB: And this is where humanism is there to remind us that being human, of course, it's a bodily thing, but it's also... We're connected to our societies that we grow up in, the people that we know, the people that we live among, and to all the details of our cultural lives as the whole planet. We have this tremendous cultural inheritance from each other, from all the things that have happened in the past, books that people have written, the arts, music, everything else, that is this tremendous humanistic realm of human culture and just the details of our everyday lives. All of that, I mean, it's as if this transhumanist idea treats all of that as being something that could just be cast aside, and then there would be a pure human essence of some sort that could just float about in a purely mental realm as an abstraction.

1:15:05.1 SC: Yeah.

1:15:05.3 SB: And I think that there's something that is really sad about that, I now feel. I mean, I used to feel that that was quite exciting when I used to read science fiction. I still do read science fiction. I love it. But that particular idea used to seem like, wow, cosmic, transcendent. Who wouldn't want to be... Have a mind that's basically almost identical with the whole universe? And now I think, well, yeah, but what about all the things I love? What about reading Petrarch's Letters? What about looking at artworks? What about just having a cup of tea with my wife or patting the dog? And all of that, the texture of life, the intertwined nature of our reality with each other and with the particulars of the planet that we live on is treated as just dispensable. And I think that there's something... You're kind of talking again about something rather similar to this idea that all of the detail of this life is something in the old idea of the religious... The totally dedicated religious life would be that you set aside all of that as, don't enjoy it, don't enjoy eating, drinking, listening to music or whatever it may be, because you should always just be thinking about the paradise that lies beyond. And you see a very similar structure, really, in some of this transhumanist dream, that it's... All of that detail doesn't matter. There's gonna be something better.

1:16:42.3 SC: Yeah, I think I'm...

1:16:42.8 SB: And that's not humanist.

1:16:44.6 SC: I'm extremely sympathetic here, and to wind things up, maybe I don't even have a question, but let me just say some things that what you just said sparks in my brain, and you can respond to it. Because to be more specific, you mentioned the science fictional ways of thinking, you mentioned in the book, particularly Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End where the human beings are visited by aliens and ultimately they all sort of transcend into this higher realm. And it's not that different than a lot of ideas about joining the Matrix and being free of our bodily wants. And it's not that different from classical views of heaven, right? Where we get a reward and there's words about eternity and infinity and things like that. And what I feel about these is that they really neglect the crucial central point about being human, which is our finitude and the struggles, the embodiment that we have in the world and just the need to be fed and to walk and to touch and to be sad sometimes. And I struggle myself because I want to be open to new things and better things and I don't know what they would be like. But I do feel, like you just said, that some of this narrative is just glossing over what makes us us. And it wouldn't be as good as people are imagining.

1:18:12.8 SB: I mean, it would be good in a different way, perhaps even, but it would be good in a way that is no longer recognizably human, I think. But with the loss of all that to which, as I said, I would also add our social nature. We're extremely social animals. We are nothing without... It's very hard to imagine a life completely separated from any kind of social contact.

1:18:41.3 SC: Sure.

1:18:41.6 SB: You wouldn't even know where to start with that idea of what that would be like. Especially if you're talking about from childhood, from the beginning. I mean, we're formed by social contact. How could... If you sort of imagine something better that somehow leaves all that behind, it's... There was this strand in medieval thinking, some of the more extreme theological writings of the various times in medieval writing that wrestled with the problem of, okay, you live a good life and you go to heaven. What about your relatives and beloved ones and children or whatever who have not had a good life, and they're going to hell? How are you supposed to feel about that? And some people even said, "Well, actually, it's fine because you'll be so transformed when you go to heaven that you'll be able to lean over, as it were, and look down on them in hell and just watch them with total detachment or even pleasure." As if you're just sort of... You watch them writhe around in the fires of hell and you can even take pleasure in it because you will be so changed. And I think that really touches on this issue with the transhumanist idea, is that we will be so changed that we won't miss all of our...

1:20:05.4 SC: Interesting.

1:20:06.8 SB: The people we love, because we're going to be this transcendent thing. I'm always suspicious of anything that promises any kind of transcendent reality.

1:20:17.8 SC: Well, maybe then the lesson is that whether it's education or liberation or technology, there's more need for top flight humanism than ever before.

1:20:30.8 SB: [chuckle] Oh, that would be... Yep, I hope so. I hope there's going to be a tremendous call for humanists all over every level of society and it's... Maybe that is a bit optimistic. It'd be nice though.

1:20:39.6 SC: We can be optimistic, that's okay. It's the end of the podcast, this is the time to be optimistic. So Sarah Bakewell, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

1:20:46.6 SB: Thank you very much indeed. I really enjoyed it.