A Canticle For Humanism

“Beware! The time of the most contemptible human is coming, the one who can no longer have contempt for himself. Behold! I show you the last human being.” Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1885

When I was 18, a psychologist told me that there was nothing wrong with me that a good education couldn’t fix. He had been born in Latvia to a wealthy and highly educated family, but when the Nazis rose to power, first his family’s substantial art collection was seized, and then he was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany. In Buchenwald, he met his wife, and after the US Army liberated Buchenwald in April of 1945, together, they emigrated to Israel, and then to America.

When I had arrived at the door of my beloved psychotherapist and teacher - this former Buchenwald prisoner - he unceremoniously told me that I was an intellectual Neanderthal, and then he proceeded to introduce me to the European intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. I knew at that moment that I was the luckiest teenager in the world.

We spoke about Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, luminaries of the British Enlightenment, and he explained his own personal worldview, or as he described it - his philosophy of life - which had been shaped by a deep understanding of the humanistic psychology of The Enlightenment. It was the same worldview that shaped the thinking of our own Founding Fathers and the ideas that became enshrined in America’s Constitution.

We spoke about his understanding of point of view and Plato’s, “Allegory of the Cave” - where Plato depicts people chained in a cave facing a blank wall for their entire lives. A fire at the mouth of the cave creates shadows on the blank wall that the people, lacking experience outside of the cave, interpret as reality. And we spoke of how humans, lacking any sense of self-actualization – any concept of introspection, any curiosity, any intellectual independence – create their own simulacrum of reality, an incomplete rendering of existence that becomes frozen in time.

These are the same simulacra that we see unfolding before our eyes, as right-wing terrorists assault our democracy – our civilization. We watch in horror as right-wing politicians refuse to recognize a global pandemic that is ravaging the world. And it is their ossified worldview that now steers America toward a renunciation of Enlightenment values.

At Buchenwald, my psychologist must have been familiar with the famous oak tree that stood in the commons at Buchenwald, the tree that was believed to be the oak tree under which Goethe wrote Faust in 1808.

In Buchenwald, only 131 years later, this same oak tree still stood, but instead of providing shade for a philosopher contemplating ethics, knowledge, and the meaning of a fulfilled life, it now was used by the Nazis to torture, maim, and hang prisoners at Buchenwald, as the other prisoners looked on in terror. The Nazis had made their own Faustian Bargain with Hitler - and the prisoners at Buchenwald chose to ironically name the old oak tree under which Goethe wrote Faust: “Goethe’s Oak”. During the Allied bombing in 1944, Goethe’s Oak was reduced to a stump, a stump that remains today as part of the Buchenwald memorial.

As I matured, I began to understand how the humanism that began in the Renaissance led to The European Enlightenment and how it could illuminate the dark places where human frailty flourished. By applying reason and logic to events both contemporary and throughout history, I began to feel like I could see the history of the future.

Stephen Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, and the author of 12 books, remarked in an interview when asked if he is too optimistic about the fate of human society:

“Certainly, if anyone were to propose that things will get better no matter what we do, there would undoubtedly be a moral hazard in that. I think the greater moral hazard is in excessive pessimism or cynicism. It can lead to fatalism—the sense that humanity is screwed no matter what we do, so we may as well just enjoy ourselves now, not have children, and so on. And [it can lead] to radicalism—the idea that society is so corrupt, degenerate, and duped that anything would be better, so we should destroy our institutions in the hope that whatever would replace it is bound to be better. Burn the empire to the ground and hope that something better will rise out of the ashes! That is a dangerous belief. It’s what led to Nazism in Germany in the Weimar era. It is a moral hazard that we should strive to avoid.”

Mitch McConnell is one of Plato’s cave dwellers, and his worldview is leading us to the moral hazard that Pinker warns we should strive to avoid. The Republican Party is entirely comprised of cave dwellers - cave dwellers who know nothing, are undereducated, and not morally fit to lead. And its leading patron, Koch Industries, has carved this cave in which our Republican Party resides out of the earth that they are intent on destroying. Republicans, to a person, are leading us to a dystopian future where man no longer creates, no longer thinks, no longer is able to act independently. It is a future of chronic pestilence, unremediated by craven politicians, where man’s ability to act is subsumed by his overarching desire for comfort. They are collectively the incomplete humans who destroy the world in Mary Shelley’s dystopian 1826 novel, “The Last Man”. She writes: “…Behold the history of the Last Man” - as the last 4 survivors of the global plague that has ravaged earth, view their future from a glacial mountaintop.

In Greek Mythology, the Cumaean Sibyl was a prophetess who, when asked to foretell one’s future, wrote her predictions upon golden leaves and placed them outside at the mouth of her cave. If the supplicant failed to return once the leaves had been placed, her prophesies blew away on the wind.

So soon after WWII, we find ourselves, as a nation, struggling to find the Sibyl’s golden leaves that have scattered on the wind. But if we fail this time, there will be no Last Man; there will only be the cynicism that led to death and destruction. We will have lost too much, and no one will be left to reverse the chaos. No one will be left to tell us the future of our own history.