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Key points
- These are hard times for humankind, so it's no wonder you might feel a little anxious.
- Some of us have romanticized humankind as if progress toward peace on earth was almost inevitable.
- Getting realistic about what we really are can help us avoid disappointment, guilt, and cynicism.
- The good news is that we didn't make us; the bad news is that there's no guarantee we won't fail.
"I married many men, a ton of them
because I was untrue to none of them,
because I bumped off every one of them
to keep my love alive."
In this song from the musical Connecticut Yankee, every verse is a woman’s proud confession to killing a husband to keep from having to lower her romantic standards. It comes to mind as I reflect on romantic humanism.
The words “humanity”, “humankind” or “humane” stir positive feelings for our species. Sometimes we extend this positive feeling to nature as if it’s kind, too. More often, we treat humans as a breed apart from nature.
I think of “romance” as the dream of a happily ever after that lives in all of us. Romantic humanism is the dream of continuous progress toward our ideal, a dream that has lived in each of us since childhood enchantment with fairy tales.
For a while, it seemed we were making progress toward our romantic ideal for humankind, that the arc of history bends toward justice and peace on earth for all humankind. These days, we seem to be in pretty rough waters. We can’t help but wonder whether we’re getting closer to utopia or discovering, much to our disappointment, that the last few centuries were a bait-and-switch. It looked like things were getting better for a minute, and then, no, they're getting worse.
Romantic humanism fuels our hopeful effort to make things better. Either that or our hopes get crushed and we get cynical about humanity sneering at it as if it’s a cancer.
I begin to suspect that as times get tougher, our romantic humanism adds insult to injury. Not only will we suffer the consequences of climate chaos and maybe extinction; we’ll feel like failures because we could have saved ourselves but didn’t.
It’s like the devil’s bargain people make when they decide that they can simply will their cancer away. Sure, it can be motivating, but if it doesn’t cure their cancer, they’re double losers. Not only is their cancer terminal, but they failed to save themselves when they had the chance. Insult to injury.
What are we really?
What’s absent from most speculations about whether humans are romantically good or cynically bad is any scientific examination of what we really are. For that, we’d have to drop the idealism and look squarely at ourselves.
I get why we avoid it. It could dash the hopes we rely upon to motivate us to make us better. Visualize romantic humanism and you will achieve it. For example, maybe we started ideal and lost our way. If so we should be able to find our way back. Fall-from-grace myths give us hope.
Truth told, we didn’t fall from grace; we evolved from slime and still have plenty of slime in us. We are primates who evolved language and technology that may be beyond us to handle.
Compassion is new, a function of us being able, through language, to put ourselves in each other’s shoes in some detail. The norm in nature is a kind of thoughtless ruthlessness looking out for us and ours. Thoughtless because without language there’s behavior and in animals emotion, but no abstract concepts. By nature’s standards, a tyrant is a highly evolved super-duper predator. Duper because, with language, tyrants can dupe, can rationalize any predatory behavior, and with technology, they’ve got huge leverage.
Nature is not a God selecting the best species and ensuring that it survives. There is no higher power rooting for us. It’s just us fumbling through, trying to fit reality while trying to feel good about ourselves, which is hard once you’ve got language—that voice in our heads that’s there in no other creatures whispering, am I OK?, I’m not OK, I’m great, I’m terrible, I’m a god, I’m vile, Am I OK?
The good news is that we didn’t make us. You didn’t choose who you are off some a la carte prenatal menu. You are the current product of a long line of organisms that each struggled for its own existence. Our kind made it this far. No guarantee we’ll make it farther.
Perhaps the problem isn’t a lack of ambition but too much. Language enables us to idealize in ways other critters can’t. With words, we can idealize anything—perfect partners, perfect utopias, heaven hereafter, our own species.
To idealize erroneously is human, as is being unforgiving of our failure to be divine. When things get rough, people tend to idealize harder. The anxious set their sights on enlightenment. The crushed fall prey to utopian cults. Humanity spirals out when people get so desperate they lurch into the laps of tyrants posing as ideal.
Romantic humanism is largely self-romance. If I can imagine the ideal, then I must be ideal, and everyone should start acting like me now. Follow my lead already dammit. If I just “educated” people, they’ll want to be like me, and if they don’t, they’re evil.
Humanity’s languaged-fueled and -fooled ability to idealize does us harm however way we slice it. It fills us with ungrounded hope or bitter cynicism.
I happen to be a human so here’s my idealization. What if we relegated romantic humanism and self-idealization to fiction, enjoying our flights of fancy but always returning to reality after? What if we embraced what we really are, these mid-sized mammals, juggling these newfangled power tools, language, and technology, trying to save ourselves before it’s too late, with no higher power out there ensuring peace on earth? What if we did the best we could and if we failed went down knowing that humankind didn’t create itself any more than did any other critter?
There might still be plenty of injury like that suffered by any of the 95% of all species that have ever existed, but not the heartbreaking insult or the cynical bitterness of the spurned romantic Maybe by eliminating the devil’s bargain insult-to-injury side effects of romantic humanism we’d calm down and face reality more productively.
You can say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one. ;-)
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