Humanism in a Posthumanist Age

Should we be surprised that Oxford University Press picked rage bait as the 2025 Word of the Year? Defining the compound noun as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive,” the chair of the selection committee explained that the point of the annual exercise is “to encourage people to reflect on where we are as a culture, who we are at the moment, through the lens of words we use.”

Quite clearly, we are not in a very nice place. When anger is the prime motivator, you can be sure that it feeds on other dark emotions, including fear, suspicion, and resentment. The ubiquity of anger also speaks to the widespread demoralization of late-modern society, evident in the grim statistics pertaining to depression, addiction, suicide, and other deaths of despair. Perhaps the darkest fear bubbling up through our culture is that humans themselves are replaceable—or at least in need of drastic biotechnological upgrading if they hope to keep up with the cool efficiency of their machines. The causes of our unhappy cultural condition are, as social scientists say, multifactorial and overdetermined, with some researchers placing the onus on our highly unsocial social media and others more sensibly arguing that the new media only amplify and reinforce trends and pathologies long in the making. We see the signs everywhere, from the decay of basic good manners and civility to gratuitously violent and crude entertainments to the mistreatment of working people as disposable units of production to actual acts of unspeakable cruelty inflicted on those we deem to be lesser or other, particularly those strangers whom we were long ago enjoined to treat as our neighbors. If we were still capable of the emotion, we would be ashamed of ourselves. But the loss of shame is another hallmark of our current condition, and as columnist George Will recently observed, “A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself.”

What we are witnessing today is less a degradation of politics—though it is also that—than a meta-political and profoundly cultural swerve away from the informing humanist idealism of the modern liberal democratic project. When Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, defined democracy as “the political form of the humane ideal,” he was emphasizing the inseparability of a set of political practices and institutions from a broader humanizing effort drawing on the richest ethical, intellectual, and religious traditions of the West. More important than the rivalrous claims of the partisan participants in a liberal democracy was a shared national commitment to the various goods that sustain a decent human life. Give that a thought. Masaryk was no proto-globalist, no “We Are the World” sentimentalist. He regarded the democratic nation as the indispensable crucible in which the humane ideal could be practically instantiated in the treatment of one’s fellow citizens. Though no utopian, he believed the betterment of the shared human condition was the raison d’être of the democratic nation-state.

Masaryk’s idealism, and the exuberant hopes of Czechoslovakia’s fledgling democracy, were for a time snuffed by another variety of nationalist whose goose-stepping troops marched into the Sudetenland in 1938, first annexing that rich northwestern region before moving on to absorb most of the remainder of the country within a year. Far from advancing the humane ideal, this conquering zero-sum nationalist would have no qualms about eliminating some three hundred thousand undesirable elements from his newly acquired territory. Here and elsewhere, he saw it as fundamental to his project of purifying the Reich, ridding it of human garbage, and making Germany great again.

Lessons learned, lessons forgotten. So today, when we utter words such as humanitarian, humane ideal, humanism, we may have trouble suppressing the ironic smirk or the dismissive yawn. Fine words, but what is their real purchase when so much is being done to diminish, transform, transcend, and even surpass the merely human? [...]

The cost of the obliteration of the humane ideal in our time is incalculable. The stakes are nothing less than civilizational—meaning the civilization of the West and other civilizations that value the sacredness and inviolability of the individual human person. The challenge is ultimately about resisting those authoritarians who, now empowered by the most advanced articulation of the Machine, aim to crush the merely human for the sake of absolute power and control. 

by Jay Tolson, The Argument |  Read more:

Image: Human Figure (detail), 1921, by Vilmos Huszár (1884–1962)