Atheists and humanists and skeptics...
...and all the rest of those non-believing folk. A book review by me.
So glad to have just published in the Washington Post a review of Sarah Bakewell’s new book, Humanly Possible, about the history of “humanism.” She is better known for How to Live, her book on essayist Michel de Montaigne, which was a very innovative biography that won all sorts of awards. Here’s a bit of my review of the new book:
Sarah Bakewell, our premier popularizer of the history of philosophy, just keeps going bigger. Her breakthrough 2010 smash, “How to Live,” was an innovative exercise in writing the life of a sole subject — in that case, essayist Michel de Montaigne. Her 2016 follow-up, “At the Existentialist Café” (2016), looked at the enduring influence of a handful of 20th-century thinkers. Now, with “Humanly Possible,” she attempts a group biography with a cast of dozens, from antiquity to now. Her topic is humanism, and she’s given us a chatty, discursive survey of way more than the “seven hundred years” of “freethinking, inquiry and hope” that her subtitle promises.
Bakewell is interested in describing the nontheistic tradition that urges us to be happy in the here and now, rather than waiting for an afterlife, and to seek that happiness through good works and kindness to others. She begins in the fifth century B.C.E., when Democritus formulated his atomism, locating the ultimate nature of things in matter rather than divinity. Before it’s all over, she has roped in literary humanists like Petrarch and Montaigne (naturally); Enlightenment skeptic David Hume; the utilitarian John Stuart Mill; Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass, Ludwik Zamenhof (inventor of the international language Esperanto), Thomas Mann, Bertrand Russell and Zora Neale Hurston, among many others.
Her goal is to offer them up as models, reminders us that there have always been alternatives to religion, fascism and other forms of idol worship; her method is to introduce us to a favorite thinker, put him or her in context (that context usually being Europe, mostly from 1300 to 1950 or so), and then sprinkle some anecdotes, like fairy dust (too religious a metaphor?), to make them come alive. Some humanists are explicitly interested in alternatives to religion; others, like Leonardo da Vinci, are important to the humanist project because of their avid attention to the glories of man.
Bakewell is not blind to the failings of humanists, who can be racist, sexist or just more generally stupid. They can be quixotic and daft, like the post-Revolutionary Frenchman Auguste Comte, who tried to create a godless religion, replacing the Virgin Mary as an object of veneration with Clotilde de Vaux, a freethinking French intellectual who died in 1846, at age 31, and on whom Comte had a big crush. Comte also briefly considered making himself the pope of this new religion. (Somehow, it never caught on.) Bakewell has fun at her subjects’ expense, as when she describes how 16th-century physician Vesalius wrote an anatomy textbook in which he mislabeled the clitoris.
Read the rest of it here.
Here is Bakewell:
And here is her book jacket:
Bonus for those of you who read the review: a mention of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, inventor/impresario of modern Hebrew, the only person to make an antiquated literary language into a live one spoken by millions. He should be wicked (see here at 1:40) famous.
I am getting very into this band, The Heavy Heavy, which presses all my 1970s, Laurel Canyon, Eagles, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Dawes (neo–Jackson Browne), Big Star, etc., etc., buttons. They may be the best English band ever to do American rock. Check them out:
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