HUMANISM FOR A MORE JUST PLANET

Dr. Tom Arcaro, Professor of Sociology, Elon University, Elon, NC 27244

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco,CA, November29-31 1996.

I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;

Yet know I how the heather looks,

And what a wave must be.

Emily Dickenson Time and Eternity, XVII

Reflexive Statement

What is "humanistic social science?" How can a more just planet be created? I have been working on these questions for 20 years, specifically since the fall of 1976 when I heard Miles Richardson read his essay "Culture and Struggle to be Human" at the American Anthropological Association meetings that Fall in Washington DC. I was a second year graduate student at the time; I am now a Professor of Sociology. My career has progressed, but my ponderings about humanism have only generated more questions and I know that I am nowhere close to closure on the issues surrounding humanism. This uncertainty is an appropriate place to be for, to invoke Georg Simmel, "...nothing more can be attempted than to establish the beginning and direction of an infinitely long road. The pretension of any systematic and definitive completeness would be, at least, self-delusion." There is a big part of me that feels inadequate in that I have no sage conclusions or findings to offer my esteemed fellow humans; I am no expert in any sense.

Why? Why after 20 years of searching have I no more to offer than what appears below? Part of the answer to that question is that the journey I have chosen has taken me into many fields that my social science training did not equip me for: theoretical physics, chaos theory, evolutionary psychology, environmental studies, medicine, ethnobotony, philology, various subfields of philosophy, and on and on. I have looked for insights both in non-fiction "scientific" works but also in all manner of fictional offerings related to these fields. To be short, the search for what it means to be human has lead to numerous fields of science and philosophy, and I have, like many of my humanistic sisters and brothers, refused to be seduced by the reductionism's inherent in any of the narrower paths to the truth. I have remained an intellectual omnivore despite the frequent indigestion brought on by the efforts to bring together insights from many disparate fields.

Introduction: How Does a Humanist Function?

By first understanding and discussing how a humanist functions we can begin to shed light on what humanistic social science is. Below I offer my insight that the human in humanist is a real person with many levels of being. This framework of mind, self, and society will be important throughout the remainder of this essay.

The Inner (Mind) Humanist One must be a humanist inside oneself, integrating mind, body, imagination, soul and spirit in such a way as to maximize the nascent potential and, as importantly, to allow the most authentic and pure self to be accessed by others during the life span. In other words, humanism starts with the human, the individual, and is an ongoing struggle, an ideal to be striven for constantly. The inner mind of the humanist is always crowded with data concerning not only personal life but of the entire human and planetary condition as well. Human being is different from other life being in many ways, not the least of which is the fact that it involves living in the past as well as the future. Few of us are "here now," and hence in a very real sense the humanist's mind has a distinct and deep temporal fluidity. The humanist cannot function qua humanist unless and until he/she is inwardly humanistic, a good keeper of one's own garden, an intrepid warrior prepared to deeply know oneself.

The Outer (Self) Humanist The next level one must be a humanist on is the interpersonal: a humanist interacts at every moment as a humanist, i.e., every interaction (be it with loved ones or the pizza delivery person) is engaged in with an underlying agenda, always and consistently acting in such a way as to maximize productive contact, social justice and wholeness. We play a huge number of roles at any one time and through the life course, and each of these should be played authentically. The inner mind can "talk the talk," but it is the Self  that must continually "walk the walk" of humanism.

The Professional (Society) Humanist The next level involves what is most typically perceived as operative humanism: the professional level. Little explication needed here. The humanist publishes not for the Dean or status but to make a contribution to the goal of global justice. Here we can find two paths for the humanist, one that assumes that short term social goals are worthwhile and thus fights for causes with vigor. This humanist is passionate, active in social causes, believes in social change, accepts the challenges posed by C. Wright Mills, and knows the answer to Al Lee's question Sociology For Whom? Most of my colleagues in the Association for Humanist Sociology would fall into this category.

The other path, the one I learned first from Miles Richardson and which reflects Peter Berger's definition of humanism, looks long into history, reads Leslie White ("Man's Control Over Civilization: An Anthropocentric Illusion"), Lovelock's Gaia, Quinn's Ishmael, and tries to read a little Joyce to get Vico clearer in the mind. This type of humanist looks into chaos theory and sees hope, but also the reality that the engineering of social change involves an understanding of both inter and intra system cybernetics that comes only with much deep thought and not just a few beers. This type of humanist looks at the 21st century at times as only a small blip in Gaia's existence, and frequently recalls that "There are more things in heaven and earth...than can be dreamt of in your philosophy." A major difference between these two paths for the professional humanist is that the former is more explicitly and unashamedly anthropocentric than the latter. Both types take C.Wright Mills seriously, internalizing the idea of the sociological imagination.

This perspective involves an expansion of the vision to include a wide scope both temporally and geographically. The second type of humanist, the one using the perspectives discussed below, takes to an extreme this vision and wrestles with the realization that answering questions about what it means to be human must involve looking backward --and forward-- in time not just centuries or millennia, but millions and even billions of years.

What does being human mean? The view from Gaia.

This question will be addressed first from the perspective of James Lovelock's Gaia. To be human is to be a part of the 'great oneness of being;' to be one species among countless others which are all in toto the component parts of a meta-life form which has survived for perhaps 3.5 billion years. All life is part of the biota that operates unconsciously to help maintain the equilibrium of Gaia, and all past life is part of the living present, as in, for example, the fact that the ocean floor is made up of the remains of countless generations of marine species. All life evolves and adapts to its environment, and in turn it's environment is made up of other species adapting to their environments. Understanding life -and Gaia- involves an appreciation for how the complex inter and intra life form cybernetic systems function. All topographies, i.e., profiles of evolutionary ebb and flow over time, are interrelated, and to be human is to be, simply, a part of Gaia.

But is human being any different than, say squirrel being? From Gaia's perspective perhaps not, at least up until perhaps 5,000 years ago when our species developed cultures which for the first time began to work under the assumption that humans were apart from nature and destined to control all life forms for human needs. These new cultural forms ("civilizations?") represent an anomaly in all of Gaia's existence: a life form that does not obey all the laws of nature, which acts more against than in harmony with other species. From Quinn's (1995) perspective "Takers" (i.e., post hunting and gathering "civilized" cultures) are enacting a story which has only one possible conclusion: the self destruction of the human species.

A second difference between humans and other species is the breadth of our temporal reality. Humans live in the past, present and future much more so than, presumably, any other species. At any one moment most of us have trouble "being here now;" our minds wander back to where we were last night or last year, and forward to what we will be doing in a few minutes, days or years. We can both reflect on the near and distant past and imagine the future. Not unimportantly, this temporal wandering is only in small part a conscious activity, and we make connections to the past constantly in our subconscious minds. This temporal multidimensionality makes us different from other species in several ways, the explanation of which involves a deeper understanding of Gaia, cultural dynamics and evolutionary psychology.

Cultural vestiges are those aspects of a culture which persist despite their original purpose or function being lost. Examples abound all around us: we say "Bless you!" when someone sneezes because back in our Western culture past it was thought that when you sneezed you were susceptible to the intrusion of evil spirits. We carve pumpkins with scary faces and put them on our porches on Halloween for much the same reason, to ward off the spirits from the netherworld who are traveling on that night. These simple examples belie the deeper power of this concept, however. Nothing is ever lost or disappears as life and culture evolves, but rather previous forms become embedded in the present, not unlike the mathematics which underlie the topographical transformations generated by Samle's horseshoe and which produce the inspirationally beautiful Mandelbrot Set. The past can be known from the present and the present can only be completely known by studying the past. In this sense all anthropology is archaeology. Understanding our temporal multidimensionality becomes even more complex when we realize that human being involves the internalization of the entire history of consciousness which in turn has enfolded into it the entire Gaian history of life.

Human being is different from squirrel being in that the human can at times reflect upon that fact that s/he is a carrier of all Gaian history, and that reflection can be seen in the stories that are told, the art which is produced and even the shape that our cities take. Our material culture is very much an externalization of our individual and collective psyches and hence histories. Our species acts upon nature in a way that is unlike any other, and thus perhaps from Gaia's perspective we represent a cybernetic anomaly whereby the topographies of human and non-human species are becoming more grossly out of synchronization as we become more "civilized." This picture becomes even more complicated when the mind-body and individual-culture conundrums are confronted. How do entities which exist on different ontological levels cybernetically interact? How do mind and culture, which surely exist but on another plane than brains and people (and all other empirically accessible entities), interact with Gaia? Is it non-anthropocentric to assert that human being is profoundly different from all other life? Perhaps this has always been so with human being, and it is only now in this mode of "civilization" that this fact has become problematic.

What does being human mean? The view from Vico.

I am in agreement with Donald Verene that the most useful of the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico's ideas are not his thoughts on historical progression and cyclical change. Vico's phrasing of these arguments is, in my opinion, overtly grounded in Western theology and for the most part reflect the sexisms, classisms and anthropomorphisms current when he was writing. The part of Scienza nuova most relevant to the present question about what being human means has to do with the epistemology that Vico proposes. How do humans know the world? His non-Western epistemology is an aggressive attack on positivism and the tendencies toward the compartmentalization of knowledge which are a logical extension of a Cartesian world view. Above all else Vico stresses the importance of the imagination (fantasia) and the fact that the individual is the creator of the truth. A frequently cited Vichian aphorism is verum et factum convertunur, "the true and the made are controvertible," which not only is a statement rejecting positivism, but is the premise of his epistemology. The social sciences are on the path toward truth, because since humans create society they can know it, and, conversely, since the "natural" world is not made by humans it can only be imperfectly known. Vico would point out that the social world can only be imperfectly known also, but that is because the nature and origins of all human phenomenon stems from God, and thus, since humans are subordinate to the deity, comprehension of the whole will always elude scientists. Wisdom is the ability to understand one's limitations and to have proper respect for the divine, i.e., Vico's epistemology, unlike that of modern positivism, assumes some inherent limitations.

According to Vico the primary components of the mind include memory, imagination and invention, and these three work in concert allowing the individual to know the world. Through memory of past experience the individual is connected to the sensus cummunis, "common sense," and largely through the medium of metaphor uses the imagination to create original knowledge about the human world. The "new" scientist looks inward and outward alternately in building knowledge of the world, and all aspects of culture are important sources of data for understanding, especially myth, poetry and other forms of artistic expression that employ symbolism and essentially deal in the rhetoric of metaphor. Though these sources will remain the most difficult to read, they are the most dense and productive in terms of cultural and historical data. The collective mind is revealed more through the material representations of its dreams and visions than its more "rational" productions. In Vico's words, "For when we wish to give utterance of our understanding of spiritual things, we must seek aid from our imagination to explain them, and like painters, form human images of them." Here we see that Vico's epistemology is the antithesis of pure reason and logic, and appears at least somewhat related to Eastern mystic religions.

Does George Herbert Mead in part merely restate the insights of Vico? In Mind, Self and Society Mead tells us that the mind is only the sum total of all that has been experienced in the individual, i.e., an internalization of society. Freud offered the challenge that if you allowed him to thoroughly psychoanalyze eight individuals he could tell you the whole history of their culture. That is, their collective minds, in Mead's sense, house all history. Perhaps we can expand this thought to include the insights of biogenetic structuralism and evolutionary psychology which go beyond both materialism (reality is reflected in the mind and is the same for all) and idealism (we all construct reality in our minds using the same sensory "raw materials") and suggest that there are biogenetic structures in the brain which prestuctures and/or orders and/or prioritizes sensory data as it comes into the mind. The point is that we at least have to nod at the possibility that not only would psychoanalysis be an interesting tool for a cultural historian, but in order to go back even further, biogenetic structures --messages from even our pre-hominid past-- are passed on from one generation to the next. Vico infers that the creativity comes from inside the individual, i.e., he argues creativity is a function of the mind using the imagination on memories. I submit that what he would take for imagination could, in another light, be called the subconscious (which of course includes all of the culture's -species? life?- history) and that imagination is not idiosyncratic to the individual but is rather a bond between the individual and all others.

Vico meets Gaia

Vico extends Mead in that he sees the mind as a dynamic synergy of memory, imagination and creativity. I would extend Vico, using the insights of Lovelock, to say that the human mind with all of its interwoven substructures, includes more than an internalization of the individual's society (Mead). The mind includes as well not only the entirety of all that is humanly made (Vico), but all that has ever been alive (Lovelock). To look deeply into the human mind is not only to know the entirety of human consciousness but the entirety of Gaia's past. Specifically, my difference from Vico is that he does not voice as vigorously as I the connection between the individual and the cultural, and between the cultural and other life. I agree only partially with his observation that the true and the made are interchangeable. As stated above, he argues that the human sciences are necessarily more valid in that you can only know that which you make and since humans make society and not the natural world we can know history and society but can only have an indirect knowledge of that which is not made by humans, i.e., the natural world. Vico was anthropocentric in that he, as typical of most thinkers of his time and thereafter in all sciences, set humans apart from the natural world, even to the point of saying that we couldn't understand them as clearly as we could understand ourselves. Lovelock (et al ) would convince him that in order for humans to thoroughly know themselves they first must understand how they are connected to all other life, and that history extends back long before humans existed.

I gain support from sources like F. Capra's The Tao of Physics for my diversion from Vico's "the true and the made are controvertible" observation and this perspective's assumptions concerning what can be known by humans. We are part of the natural world, and hence to look deeply into our minds and the cultural productions of the minds of others (and at the complexity of the natural world) is to know both the cultural world and the natural world: they are isometric in a very real sense. "We were the dinosaurs, just as we were the prokaryotic cells." Here I (and Thompson and Lovelock) am only extending the old saw "ontogeny recapitulates plylogeny" to say that in each human is the history not only of that species, but of all life itself. Gaia's complete history is seen in all of us. Capra argues that the insights made at the highest levels of theoretical physics were previously made, albeit in different form, by the religions of the East. Again, to repeat a point made earlier in this essay, nothing is ever lost as life evolves, the past is merely enfolded in the present.

To be human is to be not separate from the natural world, but rather part of it, and a non-anthropocentric imagination employed by a careful thinker is capable of yielding insights about not only the history and current state of human consciousness but of all life. As the Sikh greeting says sahts riakal or "truth is eternal," i.e., verum is human being if seen through the eyes of Gaia.

And what of "humanism for the 21st century?"

To be sure, the problem of understanding and learning from oneself let alone all Humanity is awesome in its challenge. To be human in 1996 is to be part of a population --some 5.9 billion souls-- which, taken together with all those who have lived this century, is more than were alive cumulatively in the entire history of our species. We still certainly are ruled more by the dead than by the living, but the inertia of the entirety of past human consciousness (an unstoppable force?) is now running into the (immovable object) present mass of minds and cultures on the planet. This psychic mass is being made even more formidable as a result of the speed and pervasiveness of communication via television, radio, air travel and of course the internet. Mind is getting bigger and much more complicated because Society is no longer a simple coherent and somewhat homogeneous entity that it was in earlier periods of human history, but rather a monstrously large and polymorphous web of minds, memories and experiences from all over the globe. The Self for its part must deal with ever more roles to play, most of which are characterized by a thinness and superficiality which has become all too habitual (yet necessary?) for most.

Can it be that the human mind has begun to reach some limits? Erich Fromm was certainly not the first to ask the question 'are we sane?,' and he was definitely not the last. The Unibomber in his manifesto captures this question well, and puts into lay terms the observation from evolutionary psychologists that the human brain evolved to deal with a much simpler and smaller set of stimuli than is the current situation. We are being overwhelmed on many different levels, and hence the externalizations of our psyches, i.e. the material culture we produce will become less and less readable for a humanist. How this increase in size and complexity of the Society and the Mind will impact the connection with our evolutionary Gaian past is unclear, but I see no increase in clarity. As stated above, the past is enfolded into the present, but with the size of the "present" being so large, the past may be overwhelmed and become ever more difficult to read and interpret.

Vico's epistemology infers that the knower and the known are one, and as our cultural world gets more complicated and globally interconnected the task of the humanist scholar becomes ever more difficult. 

And now it is time to discuss what "humanism for a more just planet" can and should entail. The phrase "freedom is indivisible" can be extrapolated to also infer that justice is indivisible. For example, working toward human justice involves understanding that women's issues are men's issues, "the problem of the poor is not the problem, the problem is the rich," and so on. But merely limiting oneself to that level of empathy and activism is anthropocentric and ignores the Gaian truth that justice for one species involves justice for all. Can a humanism for the 21st century involve modification of the planetary ecosystem for human purposes including the exploitation of non-human species? I think not. In Ishmael Quinn offers the suggestion that injustice does not exist among other species, and by extension among other life forms. He would argue that injustice is indeed only an artifact of the Taker ("civilized") cultures. If justice is indeed indivisible then we must act according to the Gaian reality that all life is interconnected. The "Takers" simultaneously created intra and inter species injustice with the development of civilization, and the insights of human scientists thus far have only contributed to the injustice. Humanism for the 21st century involves a renewal of effort and commitment by humanists to eliminate not only injustice among humans, but injustice on a larger scale as well. We would do well to adopt a Gaian-Vichian epistemology which would allow humans to achieve a knowledge of the world and a self-consciousness beyond anthropocentrism which would allow for a development of a more just relationship among all life forms on the planet.