market, like a commodity. The idea that humanism has no immediately
ascertainable use at all, and is invaluable for precisely that reason, is a
hard sell in an age when the word “invaluable”, simply by the way it looks,
is begging to be construed as “valueless” even by the sophisticated. In
fact, especially by them. If the humanism that makes civilisation civilised
is to be preserved into this new century, it will need advocates. Those
advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an
age in which they were not yet alive.
It was terrible, that age. Bright, sympathetic young people who now face a
time when innocent human beings are killed by the thousand can be excused
for thinking that their elders do not care enough, and indeed it is true
that complacency tends to creep in as the hair falls out. But their elders
grew to maturity in a time when innocent human beings were killed by the
million. The full facts about Nazi Germany came out quite quickly, and were
more than enough to induce despair. The full facts about the Soviet Union
were slower to become generally appreciated, but when they at last were, the
despair was compounded. The full facts about Mao’s China left that
compounded despair looking like an inadequate response. After Mao, not even
Pol Pot came as a surprise. Sadly, he was a cliché.
Ours was an age of extermination, an epoch of the abattoir. But the
accumulated destruction yielded one constructive effect, salutary even if
solitary. It made us think hard about the way we thought.
For my own part, it made me think hard about all the fields of creativity that
I seemed to love equally, whatever their place in a supposed hierarchy. I
loved poetry, but such towering figures as Brecht and Neruda were only two
of the gifted poets who had given aid and comfort to totalitarian power. I
loved classical music, but so did Reinhard Heydrich and the ineffable Dr
Mengele.
I loved modern fiction in all its fearless inclusiveness, but Louis-Ferdinand
Céline, the author of Voyage au bout de la nuit, had also written Bagatelles
pour un massacre, a breviary for racialist fanatics. On examination, none of
these exalted activities was a sure antidote in itself to the poison of
irrationality, which is inseparable from human affairs but fatal to them if
granted a life of its own. And for the less exalted activities, examination
was scarcely necessary.
Humanism wasn’t in the separate activities: humanism was the connection
between them. Humanism was a particularised but unconfined concern with all
the high-quality products of the creative impulse, which could be
distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increase the
variety of the created world rather than reduce it. Builders of
concentration camps might be creators of a kind — it is possible to imagine
an architect happily working to perfect the design of the concrete
stanchions supporting an electrified barbed-wire fence — but they were in
business to subtract variety from the created world, not to add to it. In
the connection between all the outlets of the creative impulse in mankind,
humanism made itself manifest, and to be concerned with understanding and
maintaining that intricate linkage necessarily entailed an opposition to any
political order that worked to weaken it.
As the late Edward W. Said wrote after the attack on the World Trade Centre,
Western humanism is not enough: we need a universal humanism. I agree with
that. The question is how to get it, and my view is that it can’t be had
unless we raise our demands on ourselves a long way beyond decorating our
lives with enough cultivation to make the pursuit of ambition look civilised.
The ideologists thought they understood history. They thought history had a
shape, a predictable outcome, a direction that could be joined. They were
wrong. Some were intellectuals who shamed themselves and their calling by
bringing superior mental powers to the defence of misbegotten political
systems that were already known to be dispensing agony to the helpless. The
way to avoid the same error now is not through understanding less. It can
only be through understanding more.
The getting of wisdom is a hard road. Most of us are not equipped by nature to
travel it at high speed, and some of us must crawl like babies. Our chafed
hands and knees can easily make us wonder if the journey is worth it. If I
could go back in time and design my own birth, I would introduce the genetic
material that might have made me a bit less of a dunderhead. Even today, in
my seventh decade, I meet people 40 years younger who are patently more sensible
than I was when I set off on my great adventure. I was their age then, but
they are my age now: old heads on young shoulders. What I had to learn by
trial and error, they seem to have been born knowing. But perhaps they have
had the luck to be born into a better time. If so, and if they are to stay
lucky, the worse time had better not come back. For those it didn’t kill or
maim, it injured the air. Uncertainty was something we all breathed in, back
then. The horrors of the past and present made us nervous about the future,
and the habit is hard to shake. The young might do well to tie a
handkerchief over the rear-view mirror and just get on with it.
The world is turning into one big liberal democracy anyway. Terrorism will
punch angry holes in it, but in the long run nothing will stop the planetary
transformation. Even if armed with a second-hand atomic bomb, an
obscurantist can do nothing for the poor. Most of the poverty on Earth is
caused by the number of people being born who would ordinarily never have
been conceived. Prosperity gave them life. All too frequently the life seems
not worth living, but when we cry out at the injustice we are asking for
more democracy, not less.
Subsidiary populations that migrate into the liberal democracies are seeking a
legitimate economic advantage in comparison with the homelands they left.
They are understandably reluctant to accept that their economic disadvantage
in the homelands they left might have been at least partly due to the
culture in which they grew up.
In their adopted countries they are often encouraged in this reluctance by
local humanitarians who think it illiberal for an imported culture to be
criticised for its backwardness. But when the zealous young men of the
imported culture begin to practise terrorism under the encouragement of
their religious leaders, even the local absolutists for human rights come to
see the point of restricting the freedom of religious leaders to preach
violence against the adopted state. So eventually the rule of law under an
elected, replaceable government will have even the humanitarians behind it.
It can’t lose. Why, then, bother to ponder how we got out of the maelstrom?
Why be an Ancient Mariner, who stoppeth one in three and boreth them to
tears? The only answer comes from faith: faith that the rule of decency —
which at last, and against all the odds, looks as if it might prevail—began
in humanism, and can’t long continue without it.
How will we know if our earthly paradise is coming to pieces, if we don’t know
how it was put together? It was the human mind that got us this far, by
considering what had happened in history; by considering the good that had
been done and resolving to do likewise; and by considering the evil and
resolving to avoid its repetition. Much of the evil, alas, was in the mind
itself. The mind took account of that, too. The mind is the one collectivity
in which the free individual can thrive: which is lucky, because live in it
he must. Even within ourselves there are many voices. Hegel, when he said
that we can learn little from history, forgot about Hegel, author of the
best thing about history that has ever yet been said. He said that history
is the story of liberty becoming conscious of itself.
