Critical Humanism. Ken Plummer. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Ken Plummer
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Социология
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509527984
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And we can reflect on it.36

      Finally, there is the rise of AI (artificial intelligence) and ‘Humanity 2.0’.37 Already, we start to see the emergence of a robotic life, one that is radically transforming health, transport, work, governance and war. We are only at the beginning of this latest stage of human life, which may well lead to a super intelligence and ‘singularity’: the machine that will take over our lives, helping create a serious risk to our humanity and our existence. Extraordinarily big claims are being made for this. Mildly, it forecasts the ‘enhancement of humanity’ as never before; more extravagantly, we face the ‘the end of the human species’. At the very least, we may enter a world where the human being is significantly devalued.

      The dark side of science

      Science has clearly brought great advances to humanity, enabling us to live in ways that have hitherto been inconceivable. But it has not been without its troubled side. The algorithmic world is colonizing human life. Most blatantly, it has brought into being the most destructive forms of technology that humankind has ever known: the science needed for the Holocaust, the bombs on Hiroshima, cyberwar and now drone bombing. More: it has also brought into being a string of anti-human ideologies advancing beliefs that some human beings are subhuman. We find this in the early eugenics and race genetics of the nineteenth century, some of which are still at work in current times.38 And as we look forward to a new age of surveillance capitalism and robotic superintelligence, we may find a new super elite emerging, killing off the uniqueness of the clever, fleshy, passionate, big brains of human beings as we currently know them to be.

      Humanism as humanitarianism

      In their important work, A Passion for Society, Iain Wilkinson and Arthur Kleinman argue that ‘humanitarian culture has made a vital contribution to the cultivation of modern social consciousness’.40 They call for social science to make key commitments to understand the centrality of repairing human suffering in social life. Since time immemorial, human suffering and vulnerability have been cast as central features of being human. Most religions put suffering at their very core, claiming the significance of dealing with this through caring, benevolence, beneficence, hospitality and ‘love’. The very human act of looking after others shows this most clearly. Throughout history, we have been concerned with doing good, cultivating human compassion and being kind – seen in the early historical example of the Hippocratic Oath. It recurs frequently in any discussion of the Golden Rule (see p. 141). Its modern history arrives with antislavery movements. Very much alive today, it has become a kind of duty for many – helping the sick, doing no harm, caring for others.

      And yet, all of this brings problems. As literary critic Lionel Trilling once strikingly remarked: ‘Some paradox in our nature leads us, once we have made our fellowmen the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.’42 There are paradoxes and problems with benevolence. To take one example: Tony Vaux had had more than twenty years’ experience as one of Oxfam’s leading emergency programme coordinators. It took him through Kosovo, Ethiopia, Sudan, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda – all key emergency sites at the end of the twentieth century. The title of his book, The Selfish Altruist, suggests the irony of his work:

      Looking at situations such as the famine in Ethiopia we may conclude that humanitarianism … has not always been as altruistic as it should. Ideological prejudices clouded judgement of aid workers in Ethiopia and they did not see the imminence of famine. Aid workers in Sudan battled against the war mentality but overlooked the marginalisation of women. In Mozambique an obsession with white South African power deafened us to the roar of our own power. In Afghanistan personal and organisational interests masqueraded as principle. In Somalia we were too self-righteous about good intentions and did not listen enough. In the post-communist world, we could not rationally limit our response. In Rwanda we hid from the fallibility of our own humanity. And in Kosovo, we let our human concern be swept away on a political tide.43

      Worse still, contemporary humanitarianism, in its rush to help those in distressed conflict situations, often find themselves perpetuating or amplifying wars – creating a kind of cosmopolitan dystopia.44 Didier Fassin’s important study, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present, clarifies all this; he takes us to the intellectual hub of this issue. Writing as a physician social scientist, a critical thinker who works in the field (sometimes for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)), Fassin notes:

      Here we see that paradoxes run deep: between self-interest and altruism, dominance and assistance, care and regulation, kindness and violence. There is a political hierarchy within the workings behind humanitarianism. All is not quite as wonderful with humanitarianism as might initially seem to be the case.

      Humanism as rights

      Much humanism has developed ideas around the rights of human beings. In modern times, these are embodied in purest form in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR; originating in Paris at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in December 1948).46 The document asserts:

      recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world … [D]isregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people.