Tourism and Humanism

In the last post, I discussed how the sense of agency, an integral element of humanism, seems crucial for leading a meaningful life. The secular world many of us inhabit is a continuation of Renaissance humanism, but what do the roots of this tradition tell us about its chances for survival in this unnamable present of modernity with its endless amusement, vanity, boredom, and voids of desire?

I will begin this two-part discussion of the roots of humanism with an overview of its manifestation in one particular node of the Western story, in Renaissance Italy. While there were many important cities in the early modern period between the 14th and 17th centuries, I will focus on Florence as the harbinger of global finance and modernity.

Hundreds of years past its heyday, the city remains a living testament to the ingenuity of mankind in his mastery of artifice; from the magisterial bureaucratic center of the Palazzo Vecchio, to the early scientific wax genitalia of La Specola, visiting the city allows us to indulge in a celebration of ourselves as heirs of the antique. In the quattrocento, Greco-Roman ideals were consciously laid as foundation stones for this modern city-state. In a trim rendering of history up to now, Florence can be construed as a turning point in Western Civilization that led through the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution to the contemporary West.

In the estimation of its citizens, Florence was the daughter of Rome, and by dint of matching its cultural accomplishments, it extended Classical aesthetic forms and the ethical philosophy of Humanism. Florence is closer to us than the great cities of antiquity; surly modern-day Athens was looted indiscriminately for hundreds of years and doggedly hides its charm, while the hodge-podge of Roman ruins is, while grand, far less intact. In comparison, Renaissance Florence seems a living city qua museum.

The visual relics of the quattrocento commissioned by the new mercantilists and financiers, as well as semi-public institutions like the church, inserted famous personalities of their own society into foundational scenes of Classical and Christian iconography. Their characteristic Tuscan bravura bristles throughout: we find representations of famous Florentines gathered for the Adoration in Botticelli, or kneeling like saints at the side of the cross in Masaccio, and solemnly marching in frescoes depicting good governance in the complex of Santa Maria de Novella. Florentines seemed to revel in a consciousness of their position in history; by studying, modifying, and mimicking notions of antiquity, they self-consciously historicized their civilization. They were also of course great consumers of antique remains, filling their palazzos with ancient sculpture and imitations thereof.

One of the roots of our modern predicament is that our unnamable present stands in a stark contrast to our overconfident proclivity to name and thus understand the past through shorthand. Whether it is in epochs (i.e. Renaissance, the Raj, the hunter-gatherer period) or even decades (i.e. the ‘seventies’, the postwar years, soixante-huit), we simplify the past with the sleight-of-hand of naming. One of the reasons that the present is so overwhelming is because the past seems easier to capitulate. Whereas we live in the midst of a struggle wherein multiple story lines seek to usurp our lived motivations into their narrative cloak.

In addition to the proclivity for historicizing that the contemporary West is inextricably engaged in, other forms of modernity that date to the Renaissance include the valorization of personal expression in art and the reification of the artist-genius. During this period artists like Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Fra Angelico, and so many others were able to flourish, but this required immense amounts of patronage including spaces for learning, dissemination, and appreciation. Changes in the institutions that constituted the arts enabled a shift in the estimation of the project an individual artist is engaged in. Then as now, substantial artistic achievement can be interpreted as a manifestation of spiritual refinement, a reflection of the aesthetic sophistication of a civilization in the individual and her patrons. But we can of course imagine another way, the anonymous craftspeople and artisans or members of guilds who are considered more skilled laborer than artist.

During the renaissance we can also observe the development of the scientific revolution surging forth from Great Britain. The most well-known Florentine example is the plight of Galileo Galilei who remains a touchstone for the recalcitrance of empirical evidence, which remains the sine qua non of contemporary rational discourse. A due consideration of how Christianity flourished in this period where rationalism gained ground is evident in the confrontation between Galileo and the Church, but a further analysis of changes in the relation of man to Nature such as in Deism would take us further afield.

The central ideology behind shifts in our notions of historicism, art, and the capability of man to discover the natural world through reason is humanism. Humanism enshrines notions of the power of man, the range of his artifices, and the uniqueness of his view of the universe. It is an idea that harkens back to the exalted vision of mankind of which we observe glimmers in antiquity. For example, the pre-socratic Greek philosopher Protagoras said “man is the measure of all things, of those that are, that they are, and of those that are not, that they are not.” In many ways, this legacy remains with us as the cornerstone of contemporary notions of ‘progress’ and meaning which I discussed in earlier posts.

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Tourism

How is our historical consciousness and estimation for this humanist tradition manifested in the present day? I argue that in contemporary tourism, humanism is enacted in the way our curiosity leads us to spend money and leisure time visiting cities like Florence. Humanism provides a psychological pull to such a destination as a way of celebrating humanity, most especially through the symbolic world of the arts.

According to John Urry in The Tourist Gaze (1990), experiences in foreign lands bestow a higher social status within the home community, as did the pilgrimages of yore. The value we embody in our pilgrimage to Florence is the very same one that begat Renaissance art: tourism is patronage for a new class of mercantilists founded upon the value system of humanism as a learned form of conspicuous consumption. Compare contemporary tourism to how patronizing Michelangelo’s sculptures was a way for the newly-moneyed Medicis to conspicuously display their investment in humanist ideas. Similarly, the Renaissance itself is a self-conscious consumption and interaction with the ancient world. A series of knots that bind us to the Renaissance (and elements of antiquity) are the humanist discourse of some form of personal and social refinement made evident through aesthetic thought, the importance of cultural products, the enlightened use of wealth, the adaptation of Christianity to modernity, and the glory of good governance.

And yet, in visiting we are also paying homage to the economic and religious character of Florence. Indeed, the roots of early modern global finance stemmed from Florentine trade networks from the Levant to Northern Germany, instituting global financial outposts which established the Florin as a global currency. As dramatized in Henry James’s novella The Madonna of the Future (1883), the heritage of Renaissance humanism felt everywhere in Florence binds one in a slavish, commercial awe towards the antique beauty materialized by the city, and a monkish, highbrow, spiritual devotion to the creative potential of human beings.

In a way this conjunction is humanism writ large: we can experience refreshment through aesthetic bliss in the marvels of exemplary craftsmanship and organization, but the pearl of this process is enmeshed in consumer society. Post-renaissance, post-aristocracy, it is finance economy that enables 1.4 billion international tourists (in 2018) to travel to see the fruits of another culture. Tourism in this vein is motivated to a great extent by humanism; the industry is a sum of the following equation: surplus income from the finance economy (beyond the subsistence economy) plus the affective pull of expectation that one may experience the breadth of achievements of which mankind is capable.

As I wrote in an earlier post, tourism is a form of modern rootlessness, a form of coping through decadence; it embodies the magnetism of the unnamable through facile forms of the historicizing transmogrification of cities into living ethnographic museums. In the next post, I will consider the durability of this form of humanism, how it has been modified in our age of technological feats in communication and media, and what a post-humanism may look like.